Polemic and paradox in Robert Southwell's lyric poems

Criticism, Fall, 2003 by Sadia Abbas

Southwell turns the suffering of English Catholics into a cause of celebration--however ironic and inverted--and into a cautionary reminder that Catholics are not, as the title of the chapter suggests, out of the devil's power. As a result of their suffering they ought to be less likely to become spiritually complacent.

This somewhat gloomy reassurance is part of the tradition of the literature of consolation. (37) The double figuration of the soul as a ship and of the ship as a commonwealth--which thus has some sovereign claim against the claims of the actual state--repoliticizes the Christian valuation of tribulation. For South-well, the nautical metaphor comes with ideological and sociopolitical freight.

The Platonism of the poem turns it inward in the third stanza ("When inward eie to heavenly sights / Doth draw my longing harts desire"). The inward concentration combines with an upward pull; and one visualizes the kind of rapture one sees on the faces of figures in Mannerist painting.

The opposition the fourth stanza sets up between saint and shrine appears, for a moment, to concede the tension that is part of the iconoclastic challenge, which is also taken on by the Council of Trent's Decree on the "Invocation of Saints":

   the honour which is shown [saints] is referred to the prototypes
   which they represent, so that by means of the image which we kiss
   and before which we uncover the head and prostrate ourselves, we
   adore Christ and venerate the saints whose likeness they bear,

not because

   any divinity or virtue is believed to be in them by reason of
   which they are to be venerated, or that something is to be asked
   of them, or that trust is to be placed in image, as was done ...
   by the Gentiles who place their trust in images. (38)

It goes on to say:

   great profit is derived from holy images ... because through the
   saints the miracles of God and salutary examples are set before the
   eyes of the faithful, so that they may give God thanks for those
   things, may fashion their own life and conduct in imitation of the
   saints and be moved to adore and love God and cultivate piety. (39)

Southwell's Platonism in this poem is partly justified by the decree itself with its talk of "prototypes." He distills the essential parts of the decree into the last two lines of the stanza ("Though wisdome wooe me to the saint / Yet sense would win me to the shrine") while giving the confused believer the benefit of the confusion: the attraction of the shrine is what makes us human, but wisdom will, or more properly ought to, mediate, by helping us distinguish intercession from idolatry, thing from image, by urging us to emulate the saint rather than venerate the image, indeed, by making it possible for the inward eye to apprehend the essence of divinity and of saintliness.

Two triangular relations are set up with argumentative clarity in the fifth stanza: one among reason, fancy, and will, the other among the senses, virtue, and wit. Each set of two lines can almost be diagrammed into a triangle. "Where reason loathes, there fancie loves, / And overrules the captive will" yields the opposing pulls of reason and fancy upon the will. "Foes senses are to vertues lore, / They draw the wit their wish to fill" sets up the tugs of the senses and virtue upon the wit. The phonetic closeness of "loathes" and "loves" reinforces the closeness of the forces at war and the difficulty of establishing the sovereignty of reason and virtue.