The Columbia History of British Poetry (76 page)

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Authors: Carl Woodring,James Shapiro

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Page 321
and wander about in the night world. Carter, like Ann Finch before her, picks up some of Milton's sensuous, appealing images and turns them to another use. The Night World becomes the good place, the good time. Folly, sin, and error are to be associated with the day. The "blaze of day" is too muchmore glaring than useful. Woman does not err, but becomes more truly wise and virtuous by the freedom given her (herself a "solitary bird") to commune with nature herself and divine wisdom in the shade and stillness.
Divine Wisdom in Carter's piece is figured in pagan wise as a goddess, as Pallas Athena, but the tone and images surrounding this goddess subtly conflate her with Diana, the chaste goddess of the moon, a more feminine principle than Athenian Pallas. Pallas is, indeed, metamorphosed yet again into a kind of hearth goddess: "Thine are Retirement's silent joys, / And all the sweet, engaging tyes / Of still, domestic life." The hearth is not, however, a conventionalized hearththere are no references to husband, children, family, but merely to peace. It must be admitted that the poem is interesting rather for what it attempts than for what it achieves: it is a stiff little piece with effective moments that merit it a place in any anthology of "retirement poetry" of the eighteenth century. And there is a good deal of what may be called "retirement poetry"poetry that primarily emphasizes the ''Relief " from glaring day, from the wearing blaze of the social and the public life.
Perhaps no taste produced more minor poems in the period than this taste for poems of retirement. One of the best known was
The Choice
(1700), by John Pomfret, a clergyman in Bedfordshire, who anticipated the taste of the age to come in his detailed, self-centered, and specifically materialistic view of the ideal life, as well as in his proclaimed taste for retreat from the hurly-burly. If heaven gave him a choice of "Method how to live," he would spend his hours in "blessed Ease and Satisfaction."
   Near some fair Town I'd have a private Seat,
Built Uniform, not little, not too great:
Better, if on a rising Ground it stood,
Fields on this side, on that a Neighb'ring Wood.
It shou'd within no other Things contain,
But what are Useful, Necessary, Plain:
Methinks, 'tis Nauseous, and I'd ne'er endure
The needless Pomp of gawdy Furniture.  (112)
 
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Pomfret's ideal, like many such retirement ideals, harks back to Horace and his self-representation both in the
Odes
and the
Satires
(we can catch here, among other things, thin echoes of the
Persicos odi
). This one poem won Pomfret a (small) place in Johnson's Lives of the Poets, and it is Johnson who tells us that Pomfret was once denied preferment in the Church because of "a malicious interpretation of some passages in his Choice; from which it was inferred, that he considered happiness as more likely to be found in the company of a mistress than of a wife." So difficult it is for a Bedfordshire clergyman to live according toor even to imagine himself inthe Horatian ideal. Johnson adds that the objection was easily obliterated: "for it had happened to Pomfret as to all other men who plan schemes of life; he had departed from his purpose, and was then married." If it seems odd that Johnson should take the jocular ideas of the speaker in a poem as representing a serious scheme of life of the actual poet himself, we can see the extent to which the eighteenth-century readers preferred their poems to have a decided and believable autobiographical content, a preference markedly emphasized during the literary period covered roughly in historical terms by the reign of George II (17271760).
Matthew Green in
The Spleen
(1737) turns some of the retirement tropes into a recipe to cure melancholy. The same poet had already endorsed the "L'Allegro" view in a slightly earlier poem repudiating the philosophic and spiritual retirement prescribed by the Quakers. Green rehearses the view that "The world can't hear the small still voice, / Such is its bustle and its noise," but only to deny in the end, if not all value to
contemptus mundi
, at least the possibility of ever living in that manner. William Cowper offers what might be called the apotheosis of the busy retirement poem in
The Task
. He speaks of himself impressively as fated to loneliness, "the stricken deer that left the herd / Long since"; even though Christ withdrew the nearly fatal arrows, the suffering solitary retires from the world: ''in remote / And silent woods I wander, far from those / My former partners of the peopled scene" (III.108119). Yet the lonely retirement becomes almost as cosy and crowded as that imagined by Matthew Green in
The Spleen
, a poem in which "Contentment" modulates into multiplying possessiveness.
Cowper as the stricken deer once fled "to seek a tranquil death in dis-
 
Page 323
tant shades" but now his distant shades are lively and organized, a piece of day work:
Friends, books, a garden, and perhaps his pen,
Delightful industry enjoyed at home,
And nature in her cultivated trim
Dressed to his taste, inviting him abroad
Can he want occupation who has these?
                                                   (III.355359)
Cowper's object in
The Task
might be said to be the sane reunion of day world and night worldbut he avoids any of the horror of deep night. The phrase he uses to describe the winter garden of the green-house is a telling oxymoron: the flowers, he says, "form one social shade" (586). Diversity becomes unity, even as the oxymoron's order claims
society
for
shade
, and rescues "shade" from loneliness or dangerously intense self-communing.
When real retirement approaches, many poets express a fear of being too much alone, and begin to repopulate their imagined solitude with friends and to vary it with activities. As soon as retirement during the day is imagined, it becomes, apparently, almost impossible to imagine it as truly retired. Only the Night World allows the serene leisure of solitude, the freedom from demands. This was an era in which the idea of the personal self, the "subject," was undergoing tremendous emphasis and change, as shown in Felicity Nussbaum's
The Autobiographical Subject
(1989). The idea of the personal self, of subjectivity, of individuality was gaining new significances, even new identity. The individual self was a matter of great importance in politics and economic ideology (among other things). Yet at the same time as the idea of the strong individual with a sentient if often inarticulate inner self is created, recreated, and emphasized, there is an increase in tension between the pulls of the public and the private. For is not the "self" molded by society?or should it not be? To escape from society might be to transgress against the self, to elude one's proper molding and useful formation. That way madness lies. "Be not solitary; be not idle," Johnson warns. At the same time, satirists, divines, philosophers, and poets were all concerned with the vacuous follies of social life, the impediments placed in the way of individual thought, self-recreation, and spiritual refreshment and growth.
 
Page 324
If not all comic authors of the period were as ready as Sterne to pursue the
private
to the
privates
Uncle Toby posted home from the bowling green "to enjoy this self-same thing in private;I say in private"the best writers were acutely aware of the conflict between private and public, including the tendency of the private to become public as soon as it is looked at. Comic poets create speakers who show that they know that any speaking out of private desires entails the creation of a persona for public use.
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in a light poem entitled "The Lover: A Ballad" (written 17211725, published 1747) creates an intelligent and witty persona, a highly sexed but fastidious young woman who describes the ideal lover she is looking for. He must be neither pedant, rake, nor fop, he must have good sense and good nature (those constant prescriptions for
women
), and he must understand the difference between private and public. He must not give their relationship away by any signs in company:
In public, preserve the Decorums are just,
And shew in his Eyes he is true to his trust;
Then rarely approach, and respectfully Bow,
Yet not fulsomely pert, nor yet foppishly low.
But when the long hours of Public are past,
And we meet with champaign and a Chicken at last,
May every fond Pleasure that hour endear;
Be banish'd afar both Discretion and Fear.
Forgetting or scorning the Airs of the Croud,
He may cease to be formal and I to be proud.
This kind of poem could probably be written only by a member of the aristocracy, like Lady Mary, for the aristocracy understands, and has long understood, the necessary public affectations and restraints which make court life possible and give rise to an etiquette that must govern the conduct of any affair, including a sexual affair. Lady Mary dares to assert the assumption of a public personalityat a time when most of her fellow-poets, male and female are assuming "sincerity" as well as "originality." She knows that the social self must be all surface. There is even a pleasure in the masquerade, the secretion of the hidden truth during "the long hours of Public." She makes
Public
a substantive, an entity rather than a modifying adjective. What characterizes "public" as a section of life is spectatorshipthe eye of lovers and watchers is cen-

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