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Polemic and paradox in Robert Southwell's lyric poems

Criticism, Fall, 2003 by Sadia Abbas

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In Southwell's "Nativitie" beasts eat hay and become men, and so the eating is literal, but both the eater and the eaten are other than themselves--man because his sin has already transformed him from his potential good self into a beast, and God because he is incarnated as man and, in the poem, further transformed into hay. It is this complicated dance between the literal and the metaphorical which makes the poem so powerful. Hay is ephemeral and transient and flesh is weak. Hay both eats and is eaten, is simultaneously agent and object. The poem is imagistically reticent about God the infant, as it is evasively suggestive about the eating of God. The act of beasts eating hay is presented as merely natural. The stanza toys with the brutal potency of Christ's suffering in the two lines: "Now God is flesh, and lies in Manger prest: / As haye, the brutest sinner to refresh." The colon after "prest" and the comma after "hay" generate an effect close to that of an enjambment, and simultaneously emphasize and bracket the horror of the image. We know already from line twenty that the circular reminder ("As hay") is not argumentatively necessary. It does, however, intensify and contain the rawness of the image. Southwell flirts with the bloody potential of the image and then moves on, with a punctuated stumble, to the point of Christ's nativity.

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The stanza continues the poem's play with the withholding of images. We are given an illusion of visualness by the recurrence of "behold" earlier in the poem and by the evocation of the manger in this stanza. However, even when we think we get a picture ("Now God is flesh") we are actually getting the idea of Christ (God made flesh).

If, as Colie suggests, "The logos is the idea of all ideas, implying all other ideas, an idea in its essence paradoxical, reflexive, at once active and passive, sufficient to itself and creative of other modes," it is not outrageous that a poem structured around the Incarnation should be able to transform itself: first, to figure a polemic about the Eucharist, and then again to encode an injunction to Catholics to honor the sacrament of the Mass. (65)

The world in which the logos is the one and the many, and where God is seen as supreme artificer, is a world where it is the poet's duty to employ every linguistic turn, exploit every semantic possibility in order to render visible correspondences between the suffering of Catholics, the suffering of Christ, the art of the poet, and the artifice of God--to reveal, in essence, the Word in the world, and, of course, the world in the Word. Southwell's habits of complex abstraction are sanctioned by the idea of the logos as the "idea of all ideas."

It is the very abstractness of religious ideas and the generality of the patterns of paradox that make them so habitable by English Catholic experience. The content of a Christianity that is structured around the sacrifice of man (albeit also God) resonated with the Jesuit mission. A religion that could present its Messiah as saying the words quoted in the passage below not only allowed, but rather demanded, a political struggle where the country had to be saved from itself by the intervention of the Jesuit apostolate:

Polemic and paradox in Robert Southwell's lyric poems

Criticism, Fall, 2003 by Sadia Abbas

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