Polemic and paradox in Robert Southwell's lyric poems

Criticism, Fall, 2003 by Sadia Abbas

The sixth stanza draws together the problems set up in the previous ones; and the tensions are presented with exquisite deftness. If in the fifth stanza we see Southwell's ability to make compact clauses do hard, argumentative work, in the sixth we see him using paradox to great, poignant, and characteristically compact effect. The first surprise in the stanza is that discord is to be sought. It takes a moment to realize that it is a good thing that "diverse bents breed civil fray." Lament strains against the embedded exhortation. Not just a denial of the senses as vehicles for the body's appetites, the stanza is also a repudiation of the common sense that civil war is to be avoided at all costs. Alliteration intensifies the tension, as the double hardness of c's ("crave's consent") modulates into the sibilance of "soule to sence." The second syllable of "consent" foreshadows "sence," continuing the play with (near) internal rhymes. One has to read the first two lines of the stanza slowly, as the rhyme and stanzaic structure, which hurry us along, work in tension with the phonetic elements, which demand to be pronounced with care. "Yet diverse bents breed civil fray" is hard to read, and its formal drama matches the contrary tugs of which it speaks. Again the alliteration is not just ornamental. The juxtaposition of "bents" and "breeds" is hard on the tongue. "Bents" is so heavily accented that it tenses the caesura.

"Or truce of halves the whole betray" concentrates the poem into its motivating and frightening irony: terrible though it is that the self must turn on itself, peace in this case would only destroy all the elements at war. The line has a hauntingly lingering tone, which comes from the length of the vowels in "truce," "halves," and "whole." "Betray" rhymes very closely with "fray," formally reinforcing the theme of closeness at odds with itself, suggesting also that betrayal is an inevitable consequence of civil fray.

In the first stanza of his parody of Edward Dyer's "A Fancy," Southwell makes four very careful changes:

   Hee that his mirth hath loste,
   Whose comfort is dismaid,
   Whose hope is vaine, whose faith is scornd,
   Whose trust is all betraid

   (Dyer, "A Fancy," 1-4)

   Hee that his mirth hath lost,
   Whose comfort is to rue,
   Whose hope is fallen, whose faith is cras'de,
   Whose trust is found untrue.
   (Southwell, "A Phansie turned to a Sinner's Complaint," 1-4)

In the third line Southwell substitutes "fallen" for "vaine" and "cras'de" for "scorn'd." Even more interesting is the pointed substitution of the rhyme "rue" / "untrue" for "dismaid" / "betraid." The presence of "rue" in "untrue" would have appealed to a poet of Southwell's microcosmic bent, and his choice suggests that he was a careful and aware rhymer.

Where the end of the sixth stanza of "Man's Civill Warre" concentrates the poem into its central dilemma, the seventh draws outward and again expands on the strife the poem is about. "O cruell fight" governs both "where fighting frend / With love doth kill a favoring foe" and "where peace with sense is warre with God, / And self-delight the seed of woe." The cruel paradox is precisely that friends must fight each other. In this topsy-turvy world, friends fight and "kill with love"--in an ironically literal repositioning of a conceit from love poetry--foes favor, peace is war, delight is woe. Everything is inverted. Southwell's paradoxes are appropriate to this war which isn't. "Favoring foe" and "fighting friend" are in keeping with the paradoxes the poem has set up, but the exchange is explained in the third line of the stanza: "where peace with sense is war with God." An amity between the various aspects of the self can only sever the self from God, and this is the betrayal that bans the "truce of halves." We have already been prepared for this overriding connection by the third stanza: "inward eie" looks upward to "heavenly sights."