POETRY NEWSLETTER June 14th 2021

 

I thought I'd begin with a portrait of Barbara Villiers, the favourite and startlingly not coy mistress of Charles 11. John Evelyn the diarist (who had the great misfortunate to rent his house to Peter the Great) described her as "the curse of the nation". The Bishop of Salisbury wrote that she was "a woman of great beauty, enormously vivacious and ravenous; foolish but imperious" and Samuel Pepys said that "I can never enough admire her beauty". (Pepys was for a time her next door neighbour). She lived an extraordinary life and while Charles  took other mistresses he had a special affection for Barbara. 

Barbara too saw no reason to remain faithful and took a string of lovers including playwrights, circus performers and John Churchill, later Duke of Marlborough, who Charles discovered in Barbara’s bed. She made sure that she flaunted the wealth that the king  gave her and would  go to the theatre adorned in jewels worth £30,000 and thought nothing of losing that amount gambling, confident the King would pay her debts. She and Charles had six children, all given the surname Fitzroy, in acknowledgement of the kings paternity. She is generally accepted as the most influential Royal mistress in history. Her position coincided with the birth of broadsheet newspapers, who delighted in her scandalous behaviour.

I shall add a final topical note, by including an extract from Pepys diary which he wrote at the height of an outbreak of plague "… something put my last night’s dream into my head, which I think is the best I ever was dreamed – which was, that I had my Lady Castlemayne (Barbara Villiers title) in my armes and was admitted to use all the dalliance I desired with her, and then dreamed that this could not be awake but that it was only a dream. But that since it was a dream and that I took so much real pleasure in it, what a happy thing it would be, if when we are in our graves (as Shakespeare resembles it), we could dream, and dream but such dreams as this – that then we should not need to be fearful of death as we are in this plague-time."

As far as I am aware, no one ever wrote a poem about her.

ANDREW MARVELL

The Poetry Foundation informs me that Carpe Diem poems are indeed a literary genre, 

"Carpe diem

In Latin, “Seize the day.” The fleeting nature of life and the need to embrace its pleasures constitute a frequent theme of love poems; examples include Andrew Marvell’s To His Coy Mistress and Robert Herrick’s To the Virgins to Make Much of time."

The latter poem is probably also known to group members as "Gather ye rose buds while ye may" and may be familiar as a song which the composer William Lawes set to music. I have a memory of hearing it sung at school. Below is a link to the singer Anna Dennis performing with the Early English ensemble Voices of Music playing on original instruments.

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1jw-5D_rG4

I also found this Course Description 

"The theme of love as resistance to authority that we see in Western literature from Ovid through Shakespeare is both transformed and amplified in the lyric poetry of such seventeenth-century figures as John Donne, Robert Herrick, Ben Jonson, and Andrew Marvell. In work that seems filled with a sense of the fragility and shortness of life, these writers, each in his or her own way, contribute to an ethos that has come to be known by the name carpe diem, a phrase that comes from the Latin poet Horace, who in Ode, I. xi, tells his mistress Leuconoe that life is short, so they must "seize the day," for they do not know if there will be a tomorrow. Horace’s line—carpe diem quam nimium credula postero: Seize the day, trusting as little in the next as possible—tells Leuconoe, and all who have followed since, to live now, and love now, because each second of scruple, doubt, and delay brings men and women closer to a death that is non-negotiable, non-delayable, and everlasting. In poetry, and in life, the idea of death becomes love’s greatest ally in its battle against the demands of authority, convention, and law. The time to love is now, this poetry seems to say, because there is plenty of time to be obedient after death."

It helpfully explains the Horace origin, but it seems a very wide genre. I am also intrigued by his use of "each in his or her own way". I am not clear if this is resolutely non binary (it appears to be a 2020 course ) or I've missed something about the poets/dramatists he mentions.

MARVELL IN LONDON
Marvell has some connections with London. 

WATERLOW PARK

He spent some time living in a cottage on Highgate Hill in north London (From 1659 until his death in 1678, Marvell was serving as London agent for the Hull Trinity House, a shipmasters' Guild ) where his time in the area is recorded by a bronze plaque that bears the following inscription:

"Four feet below this spot is the stone step, formerly the entrance to the cottage in which lived Andrew Marvell, poet, wit, and satirist; colleague with John Milton in the foreign or Latin secretaryship during the Commonwealth; and for about twenty years M.P. for Hull. Born at Winestead, Yorkshire, 31st March, 1621, died in London, 18th August, 1678, and buried in the church of St. Giles-in-the-Fields. This memorial is placed here by the London County Council, December, 1898." A floral sundial in nearby Lauderdale House bears an inscription quoting lines from his poem The Garden.

Here is a brief description 

"Waterlow Park opened to the public on 24 October 1891. It was on the former lands of four private estates dating from C16th - C18th, which were amalgamated when they were purchased by Sir Sydney Waterlow: Lauderdale House, Hertford House, Elm(s) Court and Andrew Marvell's cottage. A fifth house, Fairseat, was also part of Waterlow's estate and was where he lived. James Pennethorne, who designed Victoria and Battersea Parks (q.q.v.) lived at Elm(s) Court from 1842-64. The cottage where poet Andrew Marvell (1621-78) lived was to the north of the park near Lauderdale House, a plaque recording the site was erected by the LCC in 1899. Waterlow demolished Elms Court and Andrew Marvell's cottage soon after he purchased the land in 1865, his intention being to create a single park of the combined grounds."

It is a very beautiful park, just down the hill from the Highgate graveyards and I highly recommend walking there.

ST GILES IN THE FIELDS 

Marvell was buried in the church of St Giles in the Fields in central London. His monument, erected by his grateful Hull constituents, bears the following inscription:

"Near this place lyeth the body of Andrew Marvell, Esq. a man so endowed by Nature, so improved by Education, Study, and Travel, so consummated by Experience, that, joining the peculiar graces of Wit and Learning, with a singular penetration and strength of judgment; and exercising all these in the whole course of his life, with an unutterable steadiness in the ways of Virtue, he became the ornament and example of his age, beloved by good men, feared by bad, admired by all, though imitated by few; and scarce paralleled by any. But a Tombstone can neither contain his character, nor is Marble necessary to transmit it to posterity; it is engraved in the minds of this generation, and will be always legible in his inimitable writings, nevertheless. He having served twenty years successfully in Parliament, and that with such Wisdom, Dexterity, and Courage, as becomes a true Patriot, the town of Kingston-upon-Hull, from whence he was deputed to that Assembly, lamenting in his death the public loss, have erected this Monument of their Grief and their Gratitude, 1688."

Below is the statue of Marvell that his constituents erected in Hull.

Below is a link to a brief biography of the poet written in the late 17th Century. I particularly enjoy the sentence that describes his death "Marvell died on 16 August, 1678 of tertian ague, and the malpractice of the attending physician"

http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/marvell/marvbio.htm

EXTRA POEM

I've chosen a poem by John Donne- that shabby paperback of The Metaphysical Poets made me long to read him. This is, in my opinion a flawless love poem.

THE SUN RISING

Busy old fool, unruly sun,

Why dost thou thus,

Through windows, and through curtains call on us?

Must to thy motions lovers' seasons run?

Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide

Late school boys and sour prentices,

Go tell court huntsmen that the king will ride,

Call country ants to harvest offices,

Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime,

Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.

 

Thy beams, so reverend and strong

Why shouldst thou think?

I could eclipse and cloud them with a wink,

But that I would not lose her sight so long;

If her eyes have not blinded thine,

Look, and tomorrow late, tell me,

Whether both th' Indias of spice and mine

Be where thou leftst them, or lie here with me.

Ask for those kings whom thou saw'st yesterday,

And thou shalt hear, All here in one bed lay.

 

She's all states, and all princes, I,

Nothing else is.

Princes do but play us; compared to this,

All honour's mimic, all wealth alchemy.

Thou, sun, art half as happy as we,

In that the world's contracted thus.

Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be

To warm the world, that's done in warming us.

Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere;

This bed thy centre is, these walls, thy sphere.

John Donne

FINALLY

I hope everyone thrives. Janet is bringing Wednesday's poem.

Best Wishes, Elizabeth