Free A Little History of Literature by John Sutherland Page B

thought. The conceits are packed in together, like sardines in a tin. His death will be a voyage of exploration; he will join the great seagoing voyagers on this last journey of his life. His physicians – soon to get to work on the autopsy – will find his dead body to be a map of where he is going, just as cosmographers discover the universe. Where is he going? West, into the cold dark night of the grave. But he has to pass through the east and the hot straits of his fatal fever ( per fretum febris ) to get there. Walton records that his friend ‘was so far from fearing Death, which to others is the King of Terrors, that he longed for the day of his dissolution’. One can only hope the Almighty admires fine poetry as much as we do.
    For those who find the complexity of Donne too rich a brew to swallow comfortably, there is simpler poetry to be found in the work of his fellow Metaphysical, George Herbert (1593–1633). Like Donne, Herbert was a clergyman – but not a high dignitary of the church. He was a country parson, and wrote a manual on how such lowly clergymen should carry out their duties. He also wrote exquisitely ‘plain’ verse. The following is the opening verse from his poem ‘Virtue’:
    Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright,
The bridall of the earth and skie:
The dew shall weep thy fall to night;
For thou must die.

    The ‘conceit’, or central idea, here is that nightfall is a forecast of our death. The secondary idea, that night is the ‘child’ or offspring of the earth and sky (in the dark, they meet, seamlessly, at the horizon to produce it), is beautifully original. But look at how simple thelanguage is – every word is a monosyllable, apart from ‘bridall’ (a pun: it means bridle, as in what joins two horses in harness, and bridal, as in marriage).
    Has complex verse ever been made out of simpler – and in Donne's case, ‘low’ – materials? Eliot was right. This is poetry that breaks all the rules – and is the greater for it.

CHAPTER 10

    Nations Rise

    M ILTON AND S PENSER

    During the forty-five years of the reign of Queen Elizabeth I – ‘good Queen Bess’ – there is a new ‘feel’ to literature: a growth of national pride and bursting confidence. England felt a certain ‘greatness’ in itself – a greatness, daring spirits might think, equal to that of ancient Rome. It expressed itself through literature in two ways: writing about England and writing in English, appropriating, where required, the literary forms of other supremely great nations and their literatures. Put another way, nationalism takes centre-stage.
    The first great English poem about England is Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene of 1590–96. It was composed during Elizabeth's mature years and is dedicated to her. Spenser was a courtier, a soldier, and a high-stakes political player, as well as a poet. He was not a professional writer. His pen was never Spenser's main source of income (although it could win him patrons who would bring him money) and it was not his main ambition in life to be a great figure in English literature. Ironically, that is precisely what he was destined to become.
    Edmund Spenser ( c . 1552–99) was born the son of prosperous cloth maker, in the rising middle classes, and educated at Cambridge University. His early career was as a colonial administrator in Ireland where his principal duty was to enforce martial law, root out troublemakers, and put down rebellion. He did this efficiently and often brutally. As a reward the Queen gave him an Irish estate.
    Spenser was an ambitious man. He wanted more than Elizabeth had given him. And it was to further his ambitions, and to flatter her, that he conceived The Faerie Queene . The poem was prefaced by a letter to Sir Walter Raleigh who was pleasing their monarch in a different way, by making Britannia ruler of the waves.
    The Faerie Queene won Spenser a small pension but not, alas, the great favours he craved. Subsequently his