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Polemic and paradox in Robert Southwell's lyric poems
Criticism, Fall, 2003 by Sadia Abbas
All of "Man's Civill Warre" becomes an elaboration of the kind of figure (reflexive image, self-infolded simile--perhaps already formalized in the genre of the body and soul poem) Christopher Ricks has discussed in relation to Marvell in "Its Own Resemblance" and which William Keach has explained with regard to Percy Shelley. (40) Martz notes the foreshadowing in "Looke Home" of certain lines from Marvell's "The Garden." (41) Where Keach's discussion is primarily concerned with Shelley's interest in figuring "the operations of the human mind," Ricks makes the connection between self-infolded figures and civil wars. It is fortunate, then, that Southwell's most sustained elaboration of the self brings all these figures together.
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Southwell is frequently concerned "with imaging the operations of the human mind," but in this poem he alludes elliptically to the silent civil war in which the Catholics in late Elizabethan England were engaged. It is perhaps no accident that Southwell shares a Platonism with Shelley. Southwell's art, heavily didactic, unabashedly partisan, allows itself a recourse that Marvell's does not. For Marvell's is a lighter--not more frivolous, but certainly more well lit--wryer art. The potentially infinite regress of the operations of the human mind can be settled by Southwell with a stabilizing recourse to God, and it is perhaps to an analogous quality Ricks refers when he complains of Crashaw that "there is no haunting interminability" in him. (42) Southwell, too, is too rapt and in many ways too insistent. The compression of paradox in his verse functions in a manner similar to terza rima in Dante: it confers a settling shape on ineffability, allows language to gather up and tighten inconceivability. We shall see a version of this in our discussion of "The Nativitie of Christ" as well.
Ricks tells us: "The shortcircuited comparison is itself apt to civil war. It is not only a language for civil war (desolatingly two and one), but also, in its strange self, a civil war of language and of the imaginable." (43) He goes on to quote Keach: "Reflexive images call unusual attention to the act of mind they presuppose, an act of mind which combines a moment of analysis and division, in which an aspect is separated from the idea to which it belongs, and a moment of synthesis and reunion.... A reflexive image makes the reader aware of the mind's ability not only to perceive relationships but to create them in a context of unity and identity." (44)
And it is precisely this act of mind calling attention to and elaborating upon its own divisions that Southwell explicates in "Man's Civill Warre" in order to make the divisions of the self figure the divisions of the country conceived as a larger self and to mourn the peculiar closeness and desolating separation of civil war. The line that perhaps best encapsulates the reflexive aspect of "Man's Civill Warre" occurs in "At Home in Heaven": "O soule out of thy selfe seeke God alone." In "Man's Civill Warre" the figures of the division are stabilized to make them seem separate and independent entities, able to war, within the same structure, a formalization that has perhaps already taken place, as I suggested earlier, in the very conception of the body and soul poem.
