Dryden: Religio Laici

To conclude my brief series on Dryden, here’s Religio Laici. My Selected Poems only has an extract from this of the first 167 lines. The poem is essentially an argument for Religion over Reason. It was, I suspect, quite a counter-cultural poem. It was the Age of Reason and the Church of England was spending (wasting?) a great deal of its time in dialogue with a rapidly changing culture and felt the need to show how religious truths could be proved by human reason. Dryden wasn’t impressed by this:

Dim, as the borrow'd beams of moon and stars
To lonely, weary, wand'ring travellers,
Is reason to the soul; and as on high
Those rolling fires discover but the sky,
Not light us here; so reason's glimmering ray
Was lent not to assure our doubtful way,
But guide us upward to a better day.
And as those nightly tapers disappear
When day's bright lord ascends our hemisphere
So pale grows reason at religion's sight;
So dies, and so dissolves in supernatural light

When I first read this, I assumed this was a conservative stance. He is, after all, defending religion against the claims of human knowledge, and there is, clearly, a conservative strain in his ideas. However, in doing so, he was arguing against the accepted mode of thinking in his day, even within the church. So Dryden is both conservative and radical and the poem may have been an attempt to find out what he really thought rather than a setting-down of prior certainties. Many people write poetry to find out what they think - it's as good a reason as any. These days, when I hear of an anti-Christianity book or poem being described as ‘radical’ or ‘daring’ or even (laughably) ‘blasphemous’, I wonder why a stance that accords perfectly with contemporary intellectual/media opinion is considered at all radical. Today, it is far more radical to offer intelligent reflections that stem from belief in God, however tenuous or questioning, than from disbelief.

In any case, those opening lines offer a superb extended metaphor and you don’t need to agree with Dryden’s conclusions to appreciate that. Dryden’s couplets often constitute complete phrases, so when he uses enjambment (i.e. when one line spills over into the next without a syntactical break), you really notice it. Here, he delays ‘Is reason to the soul’ until the third line after the slow second line, which gives the clincher maximum impact. There’s a lot for contemporary poets to learn from Dryden, and the clever manipulation of syntax would be one area worth taking a close look at.

Dryden had his own assumptions, probably held without much question. For example, on the subject of the Bible, he writes:

Whence, but from Heav'n, could men unskill'd in arts,
In several ages born, in several parts,
Weave such agreeing truths?

I know some people can still talk away more or less every set of contradictory verses in the Bible, but I prefer to live with the contradictions and find them fruitful to explore. That is, in itself, a way of thinking popular with my era, as I’m well aware. We all live with assumptions, consciously and unconsciously, and may be confronted with them in reading Dryden’s poem. That’s got to be a good thing.

Dryden: 'Sylvia the fair...'

Dryden likes his rhyming couplets and nearly all (or perhaps just ‘all’) his major poems seem to be written in the form. I read a section (167 lines) from Religio Laici, an interesting poem in many ways and I’ll try to say something about it soon, but it was something of a relief – after all this Religion and Reason – to find a short poem about a young woman.

A New Song: ‘Sylvia the fair’ may (almost) be written in couplets, but the anapaestic rhythm fairly drives the verse along. Poor Sylvia:

…had heard of a pleasure, and something she guessed
By the towsing and tumbling and touching her breast:
She saw the men eager, but was at a loss
What they meant by their sighing and kissing so close

Despite the country being full of Christians, they can’t come to the young virgin’s aid. Not even the parson and priest seem able to instruct her and the politicians are helpless. Fun stuff!

Finally Cupid comes along and, well, he:

…showed her his arrow, and bid her not fear,
For the pain was no more than a maiden may bear

Of course, Dryden doesn’t go into the consequences of the discovery, whether she became pregnant and ended up being thrown out the village – nothing like that. He stops with the discovery. As a poem, it’s full of rhythmic and verbal energy, and highly memorable. He calls it a song and I’m sure it would work to music. I wonder if Dryden ever sang it.

Dryden: Macflecknoe

Dryden’s MacFlecknoe would have been the literary romp of his day, a satire that makes today’s poetry wars look somewhat well-mannered. Wikipedia offers a very useful, short commentary on the poem’s background. The poem is essentially a satiric attack on a certain Thomas Shadwell, a poet and playwright, and a contemporary of Dryden with whom Dryden had various disagreements – mainly about poetry, although politics was also an issue. Shadwell may have seen himself as an heir to Ben Jonson, but wasn't anywhere near the same standard, and Dryden makes fun of his pretension (Dryden didn't seem to think much of Jonson, in any case).

These days, poets tend to carry out their arguments in prose, which is a loss for all of us, I think. Those who just want everyone to get along and stop fighting, laudable a notion as that may be, are trying to overturn what history has shown as inevitable, but Dryden’s approach at least has the merits of literary quality and entertainment for generations to come.

A minor poet (and priest), Robert Flecknoe, is characterised as a King of Nonsense looking for a successor and, according to Dryden, Shadwell is the ideal heir:

…'tis resolv'd; for nature pleads that he
Should only rule, who most resembles me:
Sh——, alone my perfect image bears,
Mature in dullness from his tender years.
Sh—— alone, of all my sons, is he
Who stands confirm'd in full stupidity.
The rest to some faint meaning make pretence,
But Sh—— never deviates into sense.
Some beams of wit on other souls may fall,
Strike through and make a lucid interval;
But Sh——'s genuine night admits no ray,
His rising fogs prevail upon the day:
Besides his goodly fabric fills the eye,
And seems design'd for thoughtless majesty

Don’t hold back, JD! I guess this poem is all most people will ever know of poor old Flecknoe and Shadwell. Towards the end comes a passage of biting satire, this time mocking Shadwell's writing:

With whate'er gall thou sett'st thy self to write,
Thy inoffensive satires never bite.
In thy felonious heart, though venom lies,
It does but touch thy Irish pen, and dies.
Thy genius calls thee not to purchase fame
In keen iambics, but mild anagram:
Leave writing plays, and choose for thy command
Some peaceful province in acrostic land.
There thou may’st wings display and altars raise,
And torture one poor word ten thousand ways.
Or if thou wouldst thy diff'rent talents suit,
Set thy own songs, and sing them to thy lute.

Just as well Dryden isn’t around today...

Dryden: Absalom and Achitophel

I started off my tour of Dryden by reading the 1031-line Absalom and Achitophel (Part 1), which I suppose might come under the category of ‘mock epic’. It tells how the nasty Achitophel influences Absalom to rebel against King David’s peaceful reign. Along the way are excursions into the nature of ambition and desire, the divine right (or otherwise) of kings, and the courage of the faithful remnant who stand by their king in times of trouble. The poem is written in rhyming couplets in iambic pentameter – impressive in itself, in a way. I guess few modern poets would fancy tackling something like this!

I enjoyed it to an extent, but I confess that I didn’t feel really gripped by it. There were a few tedious sections that were just too drawn out. On the other hand, the poem is sprinkled with pithy phrases:

Some truth there was, but dash’d and brew’d with lies,
To please the fools, and puzzle all the wise.
Succeeding times did equal folly call,
Believing nothing, or believing all.

and:

So easy still it proves in factious times
With public zeal to cancel private crimes.

I can why Pope drew aphoristic inspiration from Dryden and, although Pope probably hit the mark with greater consistency, Dryden’s efforts still impressed me. His characters, however, didn’t have the same impact as, say, Milton achieves in Paradise Lost. Dryden’s plotting Achitophel is no match for Milton’s Satan, and Absalom also seems pretty thin. On the other hand, the psychology of ambition and Absalom’s dilemma (his ambition versus his denial of it) is handled well and the philosophical tangents are quite interesting. Dryden also can’t match the complexity of Milton’s diction and syntax, but I guess Milton had the advantage of writing a supple blank verse which allowed for more expansive phrasing compared to Dryden’s tight rhymed couplets – two different aesthetics.

Dryden drips with irony and was clearly born to be a satirist. The poem clearly is as much about events surrounding his own king, Charles II, as the biblical King David. It’s a public poem, engaging with some of the key issues of his day. Dryden ironises to considerable effect and even more so in Macflecknoe, a lighter poem, which I probably enjoyed more and will come to next time.