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| Photograph by Lumiere Volunteer, Britain; volunteer copyright |
In 1561, English Catholics set up a college, called the Catholic Mission at Douai, France. Here priests were trained to mission in England. In this climate of fear of religious persecution, the best of what little Marian poetry appears to have survived from the era was composed by one who was tortured thirteen times before being hanged and quartered at Tyburn in 1595. He was the Douai-trained Jesuit priest Robert Southwell (1561-1595) whom Sampson (1970:160) calls "the only poet of the age (who was) in essence a religious poet" and who used the poetic and metrical fashions of his era as well as earthy language in order to express his spiritual beliefs.
Two strong features marking Southwell's Marian poetry are his ability to encapsulate great ideas in a few simple words and his use of juxtaposition, contrasting the human virtues of simplicity, courtesy, humility and realism with spirituality in his very human depiction of the Blessed Virgin. Practicality mixed with tender humous is the keynote of his poem New Heaven, New Warre, where he addresses the heavenly chorus of angels, as he speaks of the Baby's hunger, saying to Raphael:
Come Raphaell, this Babe must eate,
Provide our little Tobie meate.
(11-12)
He describes the Baby's feeding at His mother's breast in realistic, almost earthy terms:
the same you saw in heavenly seate
is he that now sucks Maries teate.
There is a truth contained in the simple couplet: that, in His zeal for the redemption of humanity, the King of Heaven was prepared to undergo the full human experience from birth to grave. It is Southwell's talent to use an immediate reality to reflect a supernatural truth. "This attempt to express the eternal through the imagery of the temporal", writes Sansom (17) :160), "is not repugnant to the practice of his Church, which has always sanctioned material representations of the immaterial."
While counselling his reader not to waigh Christ's mother's poore attire (15) in the poem New Prince, new pompe, Southwell, expressing himself colloquially, by implication contrasts Mary's earthly poerty with the ternal abundance lavished on her.
In his poem The Virgine Maries conception, the poet affirms the Catholic Church's teaching on the Immaculate Conception - widely accepted by Catholics of his time though it only became a point of dogma in the nineteenth century. In the first line of this delicate extended metaphor, Southwell explains the conception of Mary in the words: Our second Eve puts on her mortall shroude (1). Contrast is put to striking effect in the words:
Her being now beings, who ere she end,
shall bring the good that shall our ill amend
(5-6)
Mary's conception in the womb of her own mother marks the preparation for the coming of the Messiah, as it marks the time when earth breeds a heaven, for Gods new dwelling place (2). This conception has taken place in the normal way: Of man and wife this babe was bred in grace (18). However, Grace (God) and Nature (humanity) . . . die their force unite/to make this babe the summe of all their best (7/8). Christ will be the product of the fusion of God and humanity and Mary is the being God will use to achieve this fusion. She has to be conceived without sin four only weights bred without fault are namde (13). In this context, the word weights could be taken as a pun on wights (creatures).
Thoug Mary was weighed and not found wanting by God, Southwell could here be ointing out that she was at the same time a wight, and as such entirely dependent on the power of God. Lest the joint doctrines of Mary's virginal motherhood and the Immaculate Conception should still be considered obscure, the poet dismisses any lingering doubts concerning them in a decisive concluding couplet which, like the closure of the sonnet, endeavours to sum up succinctly the point he has striven to make in his preamble:
Wife without touch of man Christs mother was
Of man and wife this babe was bred in grace.
(17-18)
In Her Nativity, Southwell employs the imagery of the heavenly bodies of stars and sun to denote the birth of the woman who in turn will give birth to the Light, of whom the Evangelist John will write: "God is light, in Him there is no darkness" (1:5). The poet equates Mary's confinement in the womb as a preparation for her own birth and that of her Son in turn with joy in
. . . the rising of our Orient starre
that shal bring forth the Sunne that lent her light.
(1-2)
She will bring peace when giving birth to Christ, the Prince of Peace, and soone rebate (dull_ the edge of Sathans spight (4). Another explanation for the use of rebate and spight in this instance could be the idea of paying back. Satan's "spite" in corrupting Adam and Eve will be paid back by Christ - evil being trumped by good. In the same poem Southwell continues the metaphor of Elias little cloude first used by him to describe Mary in The Virgine Maries Conception. He states that the patriarchs and prophets of the Old Testament were the flowers culled and distilled by time into the little cloud as showers
whose gratuitous drops the world with joy shall fill,
whose moisture suppleth every soule with grace
(10-11)
and in so doing revivifies the dying race of Adam. Suppleth can be seen not only as an expression for "supplies" but likewise for "making supple" or rendering pliant man's obdurate soul. Metaphors aboud in his descriptions of Mary as God's royall throne (13) on earth, the cloth from which His Mortal Body is to be cut and the quarry from which Christ, the Cornerstone, will be cut. Though mary's body is a fruitful soul, it is free from mortall seede (16) so that her virginal integrity is not broken by her conception of the Son of God. Like The Virgin Maries Conception, the poem concludes with an encapsulating couplet:
For heavenly flowre shee is the Jesse rod,
The child of man, the parent of a God.
(17-18)
Dr Luky Whittle
Edited by Catherine Nicolette
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