CAROLINE POETS.
It is difficult, or even impossible, to mark out the Caroline from the Jacobean poets, who, again, overlap with the Elizabethan poets. The chief schools of the Caroline poets were (1) the writers occupied mainly with holy things, such as Crashaw, Herbert, and Vaughan. Next (2) come the crowd of "gentlemen who wrote with ease," now and then triumphantly well, but often loosely and carelessly, such are Lovelace, Carew, Suckling, and minor names. Herrick stands by himself as a consummate lyrist, but his mood is often, though he was a parish priest, that of the gay cavalier. Marvell had many facets, and Milton, of course, is apart, a world of poetry in himself.
Crashaw.
Richard Crashaw, the son of a controversial Protestant preacher, was born in London, early in the second ten years of the seventeenth century. He went to the Charterhouse School and to Peterhouse in Cambridge, where he took his Master's degree in 1638. His earlier verses were Latin exercises. He was expelled from his Fellowship at Cambridge because he would, not take the Solemn League and Covenant, in 1644: that odd document was forced on men under "the new liberty". He had written a hymn to St. Theresa while still a Protestant; when he retired to France he became a Catholic. In 1646 the poet Cowley, his friend, found him in great poverty, and induced the almost equally poor exiled Queen of England to use her influence in his favour. He obtained a canonry at Loretto, where he died in 1649. His poems, sacred and secular, "Steps to the Temple," were published in 1646; another edition, with an interesting preface concerning his saintly life at Cambridge, is of 1648-1649.
Pope, at the age of 22, criticized Crashaw with much superiority; "he writ like a gentleman" (that is, like an amateur), not "to establish a reputation". What Pope did in his anxiety to establish a reputation was not done "like a gentleman". "Nothing regular or just can be expected from him," "no man can be a poet who writes for diversion only". Crashaw's pious outpourings were scarcely "writ for diversion," but things "just and regular" are not his chief care. A fiery vehemence, an overloaded ornament are his quality and his defect. For example in "The Weeper" (St. Mary Magdalen) he writes:—
Not in the Evening's eyes
When they red with weeping are
For the Sun that dies,
Sits Sorrow with a face so fair,
Nowhere but here did ever meet
Sweetness so sad, sadness so sweet.
Here he has his style in hand. But when he calls the Magdalen's tears
Ye simpering sons of those fair eyes
he has certainly found the most inappropriate epithet.
Many of his sacred poems are a kind of brief religious epigrams in four lines. His "Hymn of the Nativity" is a "fade" thing, compared with Milton's. In longer poems he uses rhymed decasyllabic couplets with some skill: "On a Prayer Book Sent to Mrs. M." is a good ode in the irregular verse and conceited manner of the time, but to speak of what Carew does speak of as Mrs. M.'s "heavenly armful" is to remind us of a letter of Robert Burns on a purely secular subject. Save for the Hymn to St. Theresa, with "That not Impossible She," "The Flaming Heart," and some pretty translations, Crashaw, like all the Cavalier poets except Carew, is usually on a low poetic level. But in the pieces mentioned, and above all towards the close of "The Flaming Heart,"