PHILIP EDWARDS

Who Wrote The Passionate Man’s Pilgrimage?

The Passionate man’s Pilgrimage, supposed to be written by one at the point of death.

Giue me my Scallop shell of quiet, My staffe of Faith to walke vpon, My Scrip of Ioy, Immortal1 diet, My bottle of saluation: My Gowne of Glory, hopes true gage, And thus Ile take my pilgrimage.

Blood must be my bodies balmer, No other balme will there be giuen Whilst my soule like a white Palmer Trauels to the land of heauen, Ouer the siluer mountaines, Where spring the Nectar fountaines: And there Ile kisse The Bowle of blisse, And drinke my eternal1 fill On euery milken hill. My soule will be a drie before, But after it, will nere thirst more.

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And by the happie blisfull way

That haue shooke off their gownes of clay, And goe appareld fresh like mee. Ile bring them first To slake their thirst,

More peaceful1 Pilgrims I shall see, 20

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English Literary Renaissance And then to tast those Nectar suckets At the cleare wells Where swectnes dwells, Drawne vp by Saints in Christall buckets.

And when our bottles and all we, Are fild with imniortalitie: Then the holy paths weele trauell Strewde with Rubies thicke as grauell, Seelings of Diamonds, Saphire floores, High wallcs of Coral1 and Pearle Bowres.

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From thence to heauens Bribeles hall Where no corrupted voyces brall, No Conscience molten into gold, Nor forg’d accusers bought and sold, No cause deferd, nor vaine spent Iorney,

Who pleades for all without degrees, And he hath Angells, but no fees.

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For there Christ is the Kings Atturney: 40

When the grand twelue million Iury, of our sinnes and sinful1 fury,

Christ pleadcs his death, and then we liue, Be thou my speaker taintles pleader, Vnblotted Lawyer, true proceeder, Thou mouest saluation euen for almes: Not with a bribed Lawyers palmes.

Gainst our soules blacke verdicts giue, 45

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And this is my eternal1 plea, To him that made Heauen, Earth and Sea, Seeing my flesh must die so soone, And want a head to dine next noone, Iust at the stroke when my vaines start and spred Set on my soule an euerlasting head. Then am I readie like a palmer fit, To tread those blest paths which before I writ.

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Philip Edwards 85

VERY 0 NE who knows English poetry knows the beautiful opening and bizarre cnding of “The Passionate Man’s Pilgrim- age,” a poem first published in 1604 as an anonymous afterpiece

to Daiphantus, a tedious poem by “An. SC.”~ Since 1651 it has appearcd in all the printed collections of Sir Walter Ralegh’s poems and was “canon- ized” in Miss A. M. C. Latham’s standard edition of Ralegh‘s poetry in 1929. It is still normally attributed to Ralegh,2 although doubts about the authorship have been expressed over many years. As long ago as 1805, when discussing the poem in his review of Cayley’s life of Ralegh in The Annual Review (vol. 4, p. 483), Robert Southey wrote, “It is not in his usual style, and we should almost doubt its authenticity, yet there is a troubled wildness of thought and expression which may be admitted as strong external evidences in its favour.” Justifiably dissatisfied with his reasoning, Southey returned to the poem in Omniana, 1812 (vol. 1, pp. 94-99): “Ralegh would not have written in that strain of piety. I believe it to be a catholic poem, and the production of one of the many good, but dangerous men who suffered in those days for a religion which it was impossible to tolerate. Is it by Robert Southwell the Jesuit? a writer of no ordinary powers; yet he was too pure a writer to have made the miserable pun upon angels. . . . That it is catholic, however, I consider as beyond a doubt.’’

In my book on Ralegh‘s writings in 1953: I argued that on every count -diction, imagery, wit, rhythm, tone, and religious feeling-the poem was most unlikely to be Ralcgh’s. I have been supportcd by Pierre Lefranc, in his encyclopedic Sir Walter Ralegh: Ecrivain,4 who has added to the debate the all-important evidence provided by a frcsh examination of the manuscripts in which the poem appears. I have independcntly investigated these manuscripts and confirm his conclusion that they all date from after

I. DAIPHANTVS, / OR / The Passions of Loue. / Comicall to Reade, / But Tragical to Act: / As full of Wit, as Experience. / B y An. Sc. Gcntleman. / F u e h quemfaciunt aliena pericula cartuin [sic]. / Wherevnto is added, / Thepassionate mans Pilgrimage. / [device] / LONDON / Printed by T. C. for William Cotton: And are to be sold / at his Shop neare Ludgate. 1604. (The poem as it appears on the preceding pages has been edited by the present writer from the Bodleian copy.) 2. E.g., Rosemond Tuve, Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery (Chicago, 1947), p. 308;

Helen Gardner, ed., T h e Metaphysical Poets (Harmondsworth, 1957), pp. 23, 31; G. A. Wilkcs, in Nufes and Queries, 202 (July-Dec. 1957), 335-36; Robert Nye, A Choice ofsir Walter Ralegh’s Verse (London, 1972), p. 18; and S. J. Greenblatt, Sir Walter Ralegli: T h e Renaissance Man and His Roles (New Haven and London, 1973), pp. 122-25.

3. Sir Walter Ralegh (London, 1953), pp. 93-96. 4. (Paris, 1968), pp. 84-85.

86 English Literary Renaissance Ralegh’s death in 1618, and that between the printing of the poem in 1604 and 1618 no one ascribed the poem to him.

The most interesting of the manuscripts, and probably the earliest extant (though it does not derive its text directly from Daiphantus), seems to have been compiled between 1626 and 1629 (Bodleian MS. Eng.Hist. c.272). The poem is headed, “verses written by S r Walter Raleigh in the gatehouse att westmr the evening before he died.” The belief that the poem belongs to the period of Ralegh’s exccution is basic to the manu- script tradition. We know that this is untenable; the poem had been in print for fourteen years when Ralegh dicd. Once it was known that the poem had appeared in the 1604 Daiphantus, the presumed date of the poem7s composition was shifted back to the period between November 17,1603, when Ralegh was sentenced to death for treason, and December 10, 1603, when he was reprieved and sent to his long incarceration in the Tower. Yet the attribution of the seventeenth-century manuscripts, which is the only external evidence of Ralegh‘s authorship, arose from the asso- ciation of the poem with his execution in 1618. Once the prop of that attribution is removed, there is nothing lcft to push the poem in Ralegh’s direction, except he that was one of the comparatively few poets con- demned to be executed at this period. No one has seriously thought or claimed that the poem is in Ralegh’s known style: the enumeration of parallels in the first six lines is a device hc had a fondness for, but so had most of the poets of his day.

No doubt an admirer of Ralegh’s remarked that “The Passionate Man’s Pilgrimage” was movingly appropriate to his hero’s last hours, and before long (in this time when, as Lefranc remarks,5 Ralegh’s popularity in- creased so much) everyone was copying the verses into his commonplace book as the very poem Ralegh wrote before he died. To put it less fiction- ally, the manuscript evidence for Ralegh’s authorship is late and practically worthless, and the internal evidence is non-existent. Those who would wish the poem to be Ralegh‘s must start to look afresh for evidence. But, for the good of poetry, it is a gain to detach Ralegh from the poem. His supposed authorship has made such a biographical event of the poem, so overshadowed it, that it has never been able to speak for itself. It is strange that there has been no thorough study of the poem,6 but it is probably true that serious criticism can only begin when the poem is

5. Lefranc, Sir Walter Ralegh: lh iuain, p. 84. 6. The most interesting brief study is by Peter Ure, “Two Elizabethan Poets: Daniel and

Ralegh,” in The Age of Shakespeare, ed. B. Ford (Harmondsworth, igss), pp. 142-44.

Philip Edwards 87 not constricted as Ralegh’s authorship must constrict it. I have no alterna- tive author to put forward in Ralegh’s place, but I shall argue that a close examination of the poem sets us looking in one of two directions- neither of them pointing towards Ralegh.

To begin at the beginning,7 the words beneath the title are of great importance: “supposed to be written by one at the point of death.” If these words are editorial, they imply simply a conjecture that this anonymous poem was written by a man awaiting his death. But it is a very different matter if the words are from the author or someone in the author’s confidence, for then the word “suppose” takes on its stronger meaning of an act of deliberate pretence: the poet has imagined himself to be a man writing “at the point of death.” We have to bear in mind the possibility that the poem was written in order to simulate the experience it describes rather than in the shadow of any real scaffold.

If the sub-title of the poem presents us with a first fundamental choice of ways, the metre of the poem presents us with a second. The metre is extremely irregular, but it is elaborate in its irregularity. It begins with two six-line octosyllabic stanzas, rhyming ababcc. Then follow (11. 13-1 8) three rhyming couplets, the first with four syllables to a line, the second with six, and the third with eight. Lines 19-28 are a sort of variation on the initial six-line stanza. We have an octosyllabic quatrain, abab, but the final “couplet” (11. 2s and 29, rhyming suckets/buckets) is broken up by two four-syllable couplets. At 1. 29 there is a very distinct change; the next twenty-six lines (up to 1. 54) are octosyllabic rhyming couplets. The last four lines change again, this time to decasyllabic couplets.

Such a non-repetitive pattern over fifty-eight lines seems very unusual. “Kubla Khan” is perhaps the nearest equivalent though Francis Thompson has similar oddities. There are elements of an ode and elements of a canzone, but the poem is neither the one nor the other. The question we ask is whether we are faced here with an artless innocence or considerable sophistication. This question will, like the first (whether or not the poet was actually awaiting execution), repeat itself throughout a study of the poem.

7. To begin really at the beginning, it is worth asking what the relation might be between the apt title “The Passionate Man’s Pilgrimage” (“passionate” having to do with suffering, or at least strong emotion) and the most inappropriate title of that magpie collection put out by Jaggard, The Passionate Pilgrim, the first datable edition of which is 1599. O f the earlier edition, only a fragment remains. Could the poem we are discussing conceivably have been a part of that missing first edition? It would at least explain Jaggard’s title.

88 Eng 1 is h Literary Renaissance The poem has four parts: the dressing of the spiritual pilgrim (11. 1-6);

the journey to heaven conceived as a pilgrimage (11. 7-34); divine judg- ment pictured as a court of law; and a plea to God in a wry conceit con- cerning the moment of execution. Each of these parts has its problems, and there is a further problem in the linking of the parts.

Perhaps the most striking feature of the conceit of the pilgrimage is that this time-honored image of the Christian journey has been transferred from life to death. Normally the pilgrim moves through the difficulties of life towards death, his goal. So it is in a fifteenth-century sermon:

And each good Christian man ought to be a pilgrim going into heavenly Jerusalem. . . . The pilgrim shall array himself, and then he ought first to make himself be marked with the cross, as men be wont that shall pass to the holy land. . . . Afterward, the pilgrim shall have a staff, a sclavin [mantle] and a scrip.8

So it is also, to choose an example nearer the poem’s time, in Herrick’s poem “On himselfe:”

Here down my wearyed limbs Ile lay; My Pilgrims staffe; my weed of gray: My Palmers hat; my Scallops shell; My Crosse; my Cord; and all farewell. For having now my journey done, (Just at the setting of the Sun) Here I have found a Chamber fit, (God and good friends be thankt for it).

The very interesting parallel of the equipping of the pilgrim which Southey quotes from the translation of Louis Richeome’s Le jdlerin de Lovette (originally published in 1604) is also very much the pilgrimage-in- life: “Our Pilgrim . . . shall attire his soul to the likeness of his body. For his hat he shall take the assistance of God; his shooes shall be the mortifi- cation of his affections; patience shall be his mantle, or leether cloake; . . . contemplation and meditation shall be his bag and bottle; the love of the crosse his pilgrime’s staff; faith, charity, and good workes, shall be his purse and 111011ey.”9

The dress of our pilgrim, however, though it includes faith and hope, is the quiet of the soul after the turmoil of life, and the joy and glory of the liberated soul. The ‘‘Gowne of Glory” is pointedly contrasted with “gownes of clay” (11.21). All the effort and error which we associate with

8. G. R. Owst, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England, rev. ed. (Oxford, 1961), p. 104

9. Omniana, pp. 96-97. (spelling modernized).

Philip Edwards 89 allegorical pilgrimages have gone: the journey is one of total happiness to the “Bowle of blisse.” It is true that one can meet poems of this time in which the aridity of life’s pilgrimage is contrasted with the sweetness of the journey to heaven. Herbert’s “The Pilgrimage” is such a poem, and so is the related poem of Vaughan’s,‘ ‘Regeneration.”lo In Herbert, the vision of the posthumous journey occupies only the last of the six stanzas.

M y hill was further: so I flung away, Yet heard a crie

Just as I went, None goes that way And lives: If that be all, said I,

After so foul a journey death is fair,

Neither Herbert nor Vaughan gives such emphasis to the soul’s journey as a quest or pilgrimage. What seems to have happened in “The Passionate Man’s Pilgrimage” is that a pilgrimage has been blended with the much older tradition of the journey of the soul into a paradise beyond the con- fines of this world, where there are always found gardens, fountains, palaces, jewels, and crystal.11 The conceit of a pilgrimage is justified in that there is a journey to a sacred well beyond the mountains; this well is un- equivocally the water of eternal life mentioned in John 5.14 (Geneva version): “Whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him, shall never more be a thirst” (cf. 1.18). Apart from this, the idea of pilgrimage is not important; the Song of Songs (“a fountain of gardens, a well of living waters”) and Revelation too are probably rather distantly present in a conventional delineation of spiritual bliss in terms of silver, milk, nectar, crystal, and pearl. By accident or design the poet has contrived a major shift in the use of the traditional pilgrimage motif.

There is much less to say about the law-court imagery which follows on the consummation of the pilgrimage. Miss Latham has made the impor- tant point that this section is a general arraignment of faulty human justice” and that the emphasis on bribery “does not seem a very apt com- ment upon Ralegh’s own case.”12 Indeed, 1. 39, “No cause deferd, nor vaine spent Iorney,” must refer to civil actions, and 1. 41, “Who pleades for all without degrees,” (that is, without taking into account gradations of rank) is the murmur of the poor and lowly. The particular stress, as Miss Latham says, is against mercenary lawyers. At the same time, the accused

10. I am grateful to Professor Muriel Bradbrook for the suggestion about Vaughan. 11. See H. R. Patch, T h e Other World (Cambridge, Mass., 1950), p. 3. 12. A. M. C. Latham, ed., Sir Walter Ralegh: Selected Prose and Poetry (London, 1965),

And but a chair.

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90 English Literary Renaissance is on trial for his life (1. 46). There is, therefore, a certain vagueness here, which may once again raise the question whether the poem is a simulation or a direct experience.

The last section of the poem brings us to the reality of the scaffold, and the last two lines curiously return us to the beginning of the poem: “Then am I readie like a palmer fit, / To tread those blest paths which before I writ.” This circularity forces the reader, if he has not done so already, to ask questions about the narrative of the poem.

The pilgrimage begins after death. I am postponing discussion of the important couplet of 11. 7-8, but there is no doubt that the moment when his blood is shed is the moment when his soul’s pilgrimage begins. The purpose of the journey is to attain immortality by drinking the waters of life: by tasting these waters the pilgrims “Are fild with immortalitie” (1. 30). Yet the pilgrim is dressed in immortality in the first lines of the poem, with his scrip ofjoy and gown of glory. Not only that, but, when the pilgrims, filled with immortality, proceed along the jeweled paths of heaven to the “Bribeles hall” (1. 35), they are still souls uwuitingjudgmmt. “Christ pleades his death, and then we liue” (1. 46) is not to be taken as a thing achieved but as a prospect, for the plea to Christ has not been answered by 1. 50.

In the final section, eternal life is pleaded for at the very moment of death (“Iust at the stroke . . .”). And it is when the speaker has been granted immortality (“an euerlasting head”) that he proposes to set out on the pilgrimage which is to achieve immortality! In the chronology of the poem, therefore, we might say that immortal life is conferred on three separate occasions. The answer is that the poem does not, as it appears to do, present us with a single time-sequence. Its theology would be non- sensical. (It was ordinarily taught, if we want to talk of time-schemes, that the soul went instantaneously to judgment at the moment of death.) “The Passionate Man’s Pilgrimage” puts into the narrative of a single journey sevcral distinct poetic conceptions of the entry into blessedness which might well have formed themselves into distinct poems. In the first, eternal life is presented in terms of a pilgrim’s accoutrements. In the second, it is figured by the drinking of the waters of a holy well at the end of a pilgrim- age. In the third, it is figured by an acquittal or pardon in a court of law. In the fourth, we have a device of identification to make a contrast be- tween physical and spiritual (compare the opposition of gowns of clay and gowns of glory). The body’s head, which is cut 06 is thought to be re- placed by an everlasting head.

Philip Edwards 91 When the reader sees the organization of the poem as an amalgam of

this kind, he may reflect that in some ways the division of the separate conceits marks also separate stylistic ventures. Each conceit has generated a different kind of poetic energy. There is a difference between the initial imperative and the succeeding journey, and between both of those and the rather more labored law-court imagery. The ending stands vigorously on its own.

So much for structure. Without attempting any conclusions, I should like to go on to the very difficult question of the religion of the poem. Is it a Catholic poem? The answer might come at once, “It is not Catholic enough.” There is a sort of Counter-Reformation air about it, but little that is specifically or strikingly Catholic. Protestant poetical devotion could quite cheerfully flow into the lush imagery evinced in our poem. Here is Giles Fletcher describing the bosom of Mercy in stanza 50 of “Christ’s Victory in Heaven” (1610):

Those snowie mountelets, through which doe creepe The milkie riuers, that ar inly bred In siluer cisternes, and theniselues do shed

To wearie trauailers, in heat of day To quench their fierie thrist, and to allay

With dropping nectar floods, the furie of their way.

And here is an extract from his vision of the heavenly city from stanza 38 of “Christ’s Triumph after Death”:

About the holy citie rowles a flood Of moulten chrystall, like a sea of glasse; On which weake streame a strong foundation stood: Of liuing diamounds the building was, That all things else, besides itselfe, did passe:

Her streetes, instead of stones, the starres did paue, And little pearles, for dust, it seem’d to haue;

On which soft-streaming manna, like pure snowe, did waue.13

On the one hand, therefore, the picturesque imagery is no more exclu- sively Catholic than the conceit of the pilgrim itself. Yet we may reflect, especially considering such images as pilgrims kissing the bowl of bliss (11. 13-24) and saints drawing up the water of life for the thirsty souls of the dead (11. 27-28), that for a Protestant to write so would mean a fairly determined adoption of a mode of writing that would come more nat-

13. Giles Fletcher, Complete Poems, ed. Grosart (London, 1876), pp. 146, 237-38,

92 English Literary Renaissance urally to one brought up in the old faith. The poem is more non-Protestant than it is non-Catholic.

What for me demonstrates that Southey must be right to think the poet a Catholic is this couplet: “Blood must be my bodies balmer, / No other balme will there be giuen” (11. 7-8). We expect at this point a parallel between the blessing a pilgrim received at the outset of his journcy and something at the moment of death which is the start of the poet’s soul- pilgrimage. Though there must be a thought of the eucharist, I no longer think (as I did in 1953) that the conceit is basically eucharistic. A pilgrim, as the sermon quoted carlicr indicates, might “be marked with the cross.’’ The work “balnier” (which is not known to the OED outside this poem) almost certainly has to do with anointment: “balm” is familiar to us as holy oil from Richard 11: “Not all the water in the rough rude sea / Can wash the balm off from an anointed king.” At this moment of the pocm, three things seem to fuse in the poet’s mind: first, the blessing a pilgrim receives; secondly, the anointment which a dying person might receive in the sacrament of extreme unction; thirdly, the thought of his own blood- stained corpse.

I don’t think that the line “No other balme will there be giuen” has much point unless one sees it as the poet imagining his own body among contemptuous executioners of another faith, denied its last rites, un- housel’d, disappointed, unancl’d,” anointed only with its own blood. What force the word “there” has! It is thus that the scaffold is introduced in the poem, placing the vile scene so perfectly, and giving such feeling to the release of the soul from this horror to travel “like a white palmer” to heaven. Poetically speaking, I think that these lines must have an author who believed in extreme unction.

If we are in the presence of a Catholic at the turn of the sixteenth ccn- tury and the shadow of a martyrdom, it is mere honesty to point out that 1. 5 5 , “Iust at the stroke when my vaincs start and spred,” might appear a technical oddity, since condemned rccusants did not receive the honor of execution; as traitors, they were hanged, drawn, and quartered, and only then were their heads struck OK Still, the head was struck off, and theo- retically the victim was to be still alive at this point. Southwell’s execu- tioners in 1595 were merciful to him, but decapitation was meant to bc the final nionicnt of life.

The very popular work OfPrayer and Meditation by Luis de Granada says, “The consideration of death is very profitable for manic purposes. . . . It shalbe verie expedient for vs to die oftentimes in our life, that we maie

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Philip Edwards 93 die well at the verie time of our death.”l4 It is only natural that in English recusant poetry of the late sixteenth century the spiritual exercise of poetic meditation on the moment of death should concentrate on a martyr’s death. In poems of this kind we find, as in “The Passionate Man’s Pilgrimage,” that the violence of death is dwelt on to give force to the paradox of the peace and bliss which the violence leads to, and that blessedness is normally pictured in New Jerusalem imagery.

There are two poems by Robert Southwell, “Decease Release” and “I die without desert,” which are meditations on a martyr’s death.15 The first is written as though spoken by one who has already died for the faith; the second by one about to die for the faith. It is fairly argued that the first relates to Mary Queen of Scots; the second is more doubtfully related to Philip Howard, Earl of Arundel, who from 1586 until Southwell’s own death was awaiting an execution which never came.16 The first poem is the more impressive, and the one which seems to me directly relevant to the spirit of our poem. The dead queen speaks of herself as pounded spice, and a lopped and headless tree.

Gods spice I was and pounding was my due, In fadinge breath my incense savored best, Death was the meane my kymell to renewe, By loppinge shott I upp to heavenly rest.

My skaffold was the bedd where ease I founde, The blocke a pillowe of Eternal1 reste, My hedman cast me in a blisfull swounde, His axe cutt off my cares from combred breste.

Rue not my death, rejoyce at my repose, It was no death to me but to my woe, The budd was opened to lett out the Rose, The cheynes unloos’d to lett the captive goe.

In L. I. Guiney’s Recusunt Poets there is an anonymous poem called Calvary Mount, from which I take this extract of realistic contemplation of pro- jected torture and execution.17 (Incidentally, the poet starts by wishing he were a pilgrim to go to the sacred mount of Calvary.)

14. From the English edition (Paris, 1582), pp. 185v, 189. 15. The Poems ofRobert Southwell, ed. J. H. McDonald and N. P. Brown (Oxford,

16. Ibid., p. Ixxx. 17. Louise Imogen Guiney, Recusant Poets (New York, 1939). pp. 274-75.

1967), PP. 47, 48.

94 Elzglish Literary Renaissance Noe rope nor cruell tortour then should cause my minde to faile, Nor lewde device of wicked men should cause my corage quaile; On racke in tower let me be lead, let Joynts at large be stretched; Let me abyde each cruell braid till blood frome vaines be fetched.

Let me be fdslie condemned, let Sherife on me take charge; With boes and billes let me be led, least I escape at large; Let me from prison passe away on hurdle hard to lye; To Tyburne drawne without Delay, in tormentes there to Dye;

O London, let my quarters stand upon thy gates to drye, And let them beare the world in hand I did for treason dye, Let croes and kytes my carkas eate, let ravens their portion have, Least afterwardes my frendes intreate to lay my corpes in grave.

Sweet Jesu, if it be thy will, unto my plaintes attend; Grant grace I may continue still thy servant to the end. Grant blessed lord, grant saviour swcete, grant Jesu kinge of blisse, That in thy love I live and dye; sweete Jew, grant me this.

My third poem is attributed on very good grounds to Henry Walpole. Walpole was present in 1581 at Edmund Campion’s execution at Tyburn, and Campion’s blood was spattered on his clothes. Twelve years later, now a trained Jesuit priest, he landed on the east coast but was almost immediately captured. He was imprisoned at York and tortured, and later tried and executed. This was 1595. Between sentence and execution, Miss Guiney says, he “spent what time they left to him in prayer, and in the writing of verses, though his maimed hands could scarce hold a pen.”lS “A Prisoner’s Song: the description of the heavenly Jerusalem” is a poem based on St. Peter Damian’s “Ad perennis vitae fontem.” In these extracts the imagery is very reminiscent of “The Passionate Man’s Pilgrimage.”

My thirstie soulc Desyres her Drought At heavenlie fountains to refreshe,

My prisoned mynd would faine be out Of chaines and fetters of the flesh.

The walls of Jasper stone be built,

The streetes and houses paved and guilt Most rich and faire that ever was;

With gould more cleare then Christall glasse. . . . . .

18. Guiney, p. 256.

Philip Edwards Her inward Chambers of Delight

Be Decte with pearle and pretious stone . . . . . . . .

Triumphant marters you may heare

And noble Citicens ever weare Recount their dangers which doe cease,

Their happie gownes ofjoy and peace.19

95

Given poems like these, I have no doubt that “The Passionate Man’s Pilgrimage” belongs to the poetry of Catholic England at the end of the sixteenth century, a poetry created by and among men who actually suf- fered the death their poems often described. But perhaps the basic problem which I have been pointing towards remains unsolved. The poem is extraordinarily moving, and we are particularly moved by the simplicity, honesty, and fervor of the speaker. These qualities come over to us partly from the naivete of the poem, the plain roughness of its craftsmanship, the quaintness of its wit.

And when our bottles and a!l we, Are fild with immortalitie: Then the holy paths weele trauell Strewde with Rubies thicke as grauell. (ll. 29-32)

But how could anyone so naive, so child-like, create so complete and perfect a picture of innocence and courage? We have not only to question whether the poem was by one who was really under the shadow of the scaffold or one who only imagined himself to be, but whether the whole personality of the victim and the touching simplicity of his faith and his poetry were not deliberate creations.

If we were looking for a more sophisticated poet for whom a martyr’s crown might be a romantic but somewhat distant possibility, a man with a histrionic trait who might enter with enthusiasm into the persona of the simple Catholic poet, one might suggest that the Suffolk apostate William Alabaster was the author. He wrote a Latin epic and the Latin tragedy Roxana; it was after going on the Cadiz voyage as chaplain to the Earl of Essex in 1596 that he was converted to Catholicism. At Rome, he an- nounced his intention to give his life “at Tyborne, for testimony of the Catholique truth.”20 When arrested on his way back to England he

19. Guiney, pp. 259-62. I have made some alterations to the punctuation and initial

20. The Sonnets of William Alabaster, ed. G. M. Story and Helen Gardner (London, 1959), capitals, and one or two minor spelling corrections.

p. xvii.

96 English Literary Renaissance showed lcss courage and talked very freely, getting away with imprison- ment only. By 1614 he was a Protestant once more, vicar of Therfield in Hertfordshire, and chaplain to King James.

Thc poetic meditations of Alabastcr’s Catholic years are well known from their inclusion by Louise Guiney in her anthology of recusant poctry and by Louis Martz in his collection, The Meditative Poem, as well as from the edition by G. M. Story and Helcn Gardner. His poems are a strange blend of homcliness and sophistication, and, with his love of the emblem, some sort of poetic case might be made for him:

My tongue shall be my pen, mine eyes shall rain Tears for my ink, the place where I was cured Shall be my book.21

But one’s being rebels against it. To identify the author with someone who fits the bill so well as Alabaster does is to be aware that “The Passionate Man’s Pilgrimage” is not a feigning in the sense that someone is inventing a simple hcavenly pilgrim and decking him out with a poetic style to match. If he had the motive, a supreme poet and dramatist might carry it off, but the feeling of the poem’s genuineness is too great to suppose that a mid- dling poet likc Alabaster could manufacture it, and the work is patently not what he would write for himsclf in his own style.22

The idea that the poem is entirely a simulation must, I think, be rejected, although it means accepting that the man who began his poem “Giue me my Scallop shell of quiet” could end it with “Then am I ready, like a palmer fit, / To tread those blest paths which before I writ.” To accept this is to acknowlcdge that the felicities of the poem do not so much stand against the homeliness and occasional crudeness as rise from them. The scallop shell of quiet is alongside the perfunctoriness of “hopes true gage”; the pilgrims “That haue shooke off their gownes of clay / And goe appareld fresh like mee” (11.21-22) are perhaps all one to the poet with the saints hauling away at those crystal buckets (1. 28). It is, admittedly, dig- cult to see how anyone who could create the image of wanting a head to dine next noon (1. 54) could also pun on the angels and fees (1.42). Yet, to reflect on this extraordinary couplet,

Seeing my flesh must die so soone, And want a liead to dine next noone,

21. Ibid., p. 13, “The Sponge.” 22. If the poem were to be seen as a dramatic monologue rather than as a “personal”

poem, Raleigh would of course be among the poets eligible to have written it.

Philip Edwards 97 is surely to realize that in some ways it does share the homeliness, the ingenuousness, of so much else in the poem, as well as the sense of a certain effort in the rhymes.

I should doubt that the poem was written by a man condemned to death. It seems to me much more a spiritual exercise. A Catholic of whom perhaps there is nothing else to know may, from some suggestion in a Spanish or Italian poem or devotional work, have begun his poetic medi- tation, and his imagination may have been so kindled by the vision of the scaffold that he has achieved the quite extraordinary radiance which a more practiced and learned poet (like Alabaster) could never achieve. If I am right, then the curious metre is home-made, artless not artfu1,23 and the poet never indeed realized how daring his use of the pilgrimage motif was, or how shaky his narrative made his theology.

The search for a named author for this poem could consume more time than anyone has to spare. Yet the sense of person in the poem is all- important. It was the sheer irrelevance of Ralegh the man to this poem which years ago made me doubt the ascription. One would very much like to know whether the shadowy figure one has been led by the poem to see as its author could be given flesh. It is not merely a question of satisfy- ing one’s curiosity; it would also help to give a little light in the great darkness of the relation between a man and the poem he writes.

UNIVERSITY OF ESSEX

23. It will be recognized that the poem might have been pruned of some Catholic senti- ment and imagery when it was first printed, and that such excisions would obviously affect the metrical scheme.