Polemic and paradox in Robert Southwell's lyric poems

Criticism, Fall, 2003 by Sadia Abbas

In a letter to his father urging him to embrace Catholicism, Southwell writes: "he may be a father to the soul that is a son to the body, and requite the benefit of his temporal life by reviving his parent from a spiritual death." (12) Southwell allegorizes these variations on the theme of bodies and souls in "Man's Civill Warre," which belongs to the subgenre of the body-and-soul poem but whose meaning is activated and layered by these implicit political and religious associations. I shall return to a discussion of "Man's Civill Warre" later in the essay.

Southwell's agumentative skills are very much in evidence in the first passage quoted from An Humble Supplication, as they are indeed throughout the piece. Without denying that he considers the saving of souls crucial, Southwell keeps his argument both precise and moving. He does not attack the Queen but rather acknowledges, a few lines later, that Elizabeth would be the highest "gayne of [their] deare purchase." If Catholic priests and Jesuits (the specific target of the proclamation) are to be martyred--as they expected to be even prior to it--the blood spilled as a result of Elizabeth's laws would be well worth it, if she too were to become a Catholic. Catholic blood would be the currency of this purchase of Elizabeth's redemption. The sacramental status granted to martyred Catholic blood here is of a piece with Southwell's frequent equation of Catholic suffering and sacrifice with Christ's redemptive blood.

In An Epistle of Comfort--which is meant, as its title suggests, to provide solace to English Catholics--Southwell insists that his readers should draw comfort from the fact "that we are moved to suffer Tribulation willingly, both by the precedent of Christ and the title of a Christian." (13) It is a felicity of language that "Christian" contains "Christ," one, moreover, that is bound to appeal to the poet for whom imitatio Christi has a literal and terrible resonance.

As F. W. Brownlow remarks in his compelling and powerful study of Southwell: "the world in which the Incarnation is the central event is a world of figures, correspondences, symmetries, antitheses, and paradoxes, all wrought by God as artificer in the medium of life through the agency of time, grace, and nature." (14) In this world of correspondences and analogies, the suffering of Christ demands a similar, consciously analogic, sacrifice.

Secularizing the charge against the priests was intended to deny English Catholics the grounds of their Christian faith. Southwell is rhetorically sophisticated and insistent--though not unique--in asserting the religious component of Jesuit activity, almost as insistent, in fact, as the proclamation is on the political treachery of the Jesuits. He goes on to say, with a trace of bitterness, "but though they that hunt this fault in us, might best be their own prey (our Faith being the strongest ground of true and naturall fidelity) yet must we only be accounted unnaturall." Again, Southwell puts philosophical pressure on the government's argument: it is indeed the grounds of loyalty they are debating, but how should they decide where their loyalties ought to lie? This, Brownlow eloquently suggests, is the question posed by Southwell's career: "To whom, or what, and on what terms, and with what possible mitigations, is loyalty owed?" (15) The charge of betrayal that sits at the center of the accusation of treason allows Southwell to introduce the question of natural fidelity. Southwell drily reminds his Protestant opponents that, given their emphasis on justification by faith alone, they should be sympathetic to the attempt of English Catholics to keep theirs.