Polemic and paradox in Robert Southwell's lyric poems

Criticism, Fall, 2003 by Sadia Abbas

The apology for Southwell's poetic style on grounds of his unfamiliarity with the tongue is perhaps least convincing. Southwell's tendency to use heavy alliteration, fourteeners, and versions of poulter's measure could, and I believe should, be as easily interpreted as evidence of his cultivation of a native, English, medieval style. The similarities between the style of Southwell's poems and the poems in Tottel's Miscellany (1557) and The Paradyse of Dainty Devices (1576) have been remarked and are clearly attributable to the tradition of sacred parody. (22) Brownlow seems right in suggesting that "the new Renaissance English style was too closely associated with either a protestant or a paganizing humanism for a recusant writer to adopt it, especially a Jesuit poet." (23)

Southwell appears to have chosen a vernacular, alliterative style not only as a repudiation of contemporary poetic practice but also because such a style makes a statement about continuity and patriotism.

If critics have been tempted to apologize for Southwell it is because, after Herbert, we are accustomed to the minimizing of accent and of overt rhymes; we have been wary of anything that smacks of ballad, that lacks Herbert's stylistic reserve or Jonson's classical restraint. We are suspicious of poetry so overtly rhetorical and didactic. Nor do we have much by way of a critical discourse that would allow for talk about the formal aspects of what can, on occasion, look like the drab style. Southwell's poems reveal how much the understanding of poems that fall under the "drab" rubric depend upon context and biography. It is the very spareness and the familiarity of some of the metaphors of a poem such as "Man's Civill Warre" that makes our explications particularly dependent upon contextual information.

An additional reason for a resistance to Southwell's style is that he can be remarkably abstract, sometimes so much so that his more intricate figures "can seem to come untethered from the reality they should stand for." (24) Such abstraction can be alienating and, given a residual bias in favor of concrete imagery, can make the poetry seem far less dense and rich than it is. Furthermore, Southwell is an argumentative and partisan poet. When combined with all the other factors that work against him, the argumentative aspects of his style can be even more alienating to readers. Southwell can be tactful, but his is a poetry of abundant, accented argument. As a result, his poems demand to be read as structures wherein the argumentative shifts are charted through each line. The structures of the poems themselves invite attention to their arguments.

It is also my intention, in this essay, to revive and expand an older critical interest in the concept and function of paradox. Critical work that seeks to bring together political and formal concerns engages the specificity of the poet's oeuvre and context and the history and theory of form. It is my hope that examining the dialectic between the specifics of Southwell's case and the necessary conceptual generality of the idea of paradox will fruitfully enlarge our understanding of both.


 

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