THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

in 1970), managed to work secretly for nine perilous years in England before his execution; his books circulated far
less secretly. The prose meditation, Marie Magdalens Funeral Teares, which was published in 1591, ran through
some seven further editions by 1636, and the two collections of verse, Saint Peters complaynt, with other Poems and
Moeoniae: or, Certaine excellent Poems and Spiritual Hymnes, both of which contain poems written during his threeyear
imprisonment, were printed in London in the year of his death. Southwell’s poems were respected both by
Roman Catholics and by Anglicans, the extraordinarily contrived Christmas meditation, ‘The Burning Babe’, being
particularly admired by Ben Jonson. Donne, the author of the scurrilous anti Jesuit tract Ignatius his Conclave of 1611
and who eight years later feared for his safety at the hands of ‘such adversaries, as I cannot blame for hating me’
when he travelled across Germany, was none the less influenced by the kind of meditative religious exercises
recommended to the faithful by the founder of the Society of Jesus. St Ignatius Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises had been
approved by the Pope in 1548 as a manual of systematic devotion which employed sense impressions, the imagination,
and the understanding as a means of prompting the spirit to consider the lapsed human and the glorious divine
condition. The Ignatian method was not unique (it drew on late medieval precedents and it was adapted by later
Spanish and French churchmen) but its currency was assured by the missionary and educational work undertaken by
the Jesuits. The fact that such regulated guides to meditation could be used privately meant that they appealed, with
varying
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degrees of excision, to secluded Recusants, devout Anglicans, and soul-searching Puritans alike.
A similar spiritual cross-fertilization is evident in the popularity of emblem books in seventeenth-century England.
The emblem consisted of three interrelated parts - a motto, a symbolic picture, and an exposition - each of which
suggested a different means of considering and apprehending a moral or religious idea. The form had had a certain
currency as a learned, and generally secular, educational device in the sixteenth century, but its renewed application
to private religious study and its intermixture of Latin motto, biblical quotation, engraved and ostensibly enigmatic
picture, and English poem made for a widespread influence which readily cut across confessional barriers. Francis
Quarles’s Emblemes, Divine and Morall (1635) proved to be the most popular book of verse of its age. Quarles (1592-
1644) and his engraver took and, where Protestant occasion demanded, adapted plates from Jesuit emblem books;
only the disappointingly pedestrian accompanying poems were original. Emblemes and its successor Hieroglyphicks
of the Life of Man (1638) demand that the reader interpret and gradually unwind an idea which is expressed
epigrammatically, visually, and poetically. ‘The embleme is but a silent parable’, Quarles insisted in his address to the
user of his books, and he goes on to suggest the importance of the linkage of word and picture: ‘Before the knowledge
of letters, God was knowne by Hieroglyphicks; And indeed, what are the Heavens, the Earth, nay every Creature, but
Hieroglyphicks and Emblemes of his Glory?’ The moral message is, however, predominantly one which stresses a
conventionally Christian contempt for the world (‘O what a crocodilian world is this | Compos’d of treach’ries, and
insnaring wiles’, ‘O whither will this mad-brain world at last | Be driven? Where will her restless wheels arrive?’),
and the pictures variously show children confusing a wasps’ nest for a beehive in a globe, fools sucking at a huge
earth-shaped breast, and a figure of vanity smoking a pipe while perched perilously on a tilting orb.
The intellectual demands made on a reader by an emblem book were paralleled by the wit, the imaginative
picturing, the compression, the often cryptic expression, the play of paradoxes, and the juxtapositions of metaphor in
the work of Donne and his immediate followers, the so-called ‘metaphysical poets’. The use of the term
‘metaphysical’ in this context was first given critical currency by Samuel Johnson in the eighteenth century and it
sprang from an unease, determined by ‘classical’ canons of taste, with the supposed contortions of the style and
imagery of Donne and Cowley. Johnson had a particular distaste for the far-fetched or strained ‘conceits’ (witty and
ingenious ideas) in which Donne’s poetry abounds. This prejudice against the distinct ‘metaphysical’ style had earlier
been shared by Quarles, who in 1629 complained of ‘the tyranny of strong lines, which ... are the meere itch of wit;
under the colour of which many have ventured ... to write non-sense’. The work of Donne’s friend, admirer, and
fellow-priest, George Herbert (1593-1633), possesses a restrained and contemplative rapture which is paralleled less
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the extravagances of southern European baroque art than by the often enigmatic understatement of the paintings of his
French contemporary, Georges de la Tour. Herbert’s own ‘itch of wit’ can none the less find its expression in playing
with the shapes and sounds of words: he puns in his title to ‘The Collar’ and with the name ‘Jesu’ in the poem of that
name; he teases letters in his ‘Anagram of the Virgin Marie’; in ‘Heaven’ he exploits echo-effects as delightedly as
did his Venetian musical contemporaries, and he gradually reduces words to form new ones in ‘Paradise’. His
relationship to the emblem book tradition is evident in his printing of certain of his poems as visual designs (the