Malcolm Guite: Poet’s Corner

THERE’s something to be said for old poetry anthologies rather than new ones. To read them is to be freed from the confinements and narrow perspectives of contemporary taste, and to wonder a little in the larger and more accommodating apartments of our ancestors.

The classic The Oxford Book of English Verse, edited by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, is a case in point. Idling through its pages, I was struck again by how catholic his tastes were — catholic with both a small “c” and a capital! You have Milton and Herbert and Marvell, all on the Protestant side, but you also have the Catholic martyrs, the great Elizabethan recusants Thomas Campion and Robert Southwell.

I found myself dipping again into Southwell’s extraordinary poem “Of the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar”. Reading it has a special poignance; for it was to administer that sacrament that he risked his life, and for which he was tortured many times and eventually martyred.

The poem could not be published in England in his lifetime, but it was published in Douai in 1606, 11 years after his death. It soon made its way to England, where his literary influence was already immense. Shakespeare and Jonson were both great admirers and imitators of his literary craft. Indeed, when you see the concentration, compression, and sheer wit of that poem, its capacity for paradox and the evocation on mystery in deceptively simple English, you can see the influence on so many Elizabethan and Jacobean writers. Take, for example, this verse:

The God of Hosts in slender host doth dwell,
Yea, God and man with all to either due,
That God that rules the heavens and rifled hell,
That man whose death did us to life renew:
That God and man that is the angels’ bliss,
In form of bread and wine our nurture is.

There is so much going on here: the witty play on “God of Hosts” and the “host” in the sacrament, the extraordinary compression, without losing force or clarity, of the doctrines of Christ’s double nature and his presence in both natures in the sacrament, all concentrated in that second line — “Yea, God and man with all to either due” — and then the development from it in the next line of what those two natures, human and divine, mean for us, including the harrowing of hell: “That God that rules the heavens and rifled hell”; and the telling simplicity of the line on the atonement and promise of resurrection, almost all in words of one syllable: “That man whose death did us to life renew.”

In his day, he and the poets who loved his work were ranged on different sides of deadly controversy; but, in the anthology on my lap, they are bound together, mere pages apart, clearly belonging to one another and enriching a great collective tradition. I trust, too, that, in the greater library of heaven, they are ranging the rich rooms, together praising their Saviour with lines of even greater poetry.