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William Alabaster: Rhetor, Meditator, Devotional Poet—II

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 September 2015

Robert V. Caro S.J.
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Extract

As we approach Alabaster's sonnets’ our expectation is enhanced not by the promise of poetic greatness but by the prospect of exploring pure instances of the kind of poetry born in the convergence of rhetoric and meditation. We will focus first on a sequence of sonnets remarkable for their rhetorical techniques; then we will consider a group of sonnets each of which has meditation as its subject. In all the poems, however, it will be apparent that Alabaster as poet is simultaneously rhetor and meditator.

Type
Research Article
Information
British Catholic History , Volume 19 , Issue 2 , October 1988 , pp. 155 - 170
Copyright
Copyright © Catholic Record Society 1988

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References

Notes

1 The argument corresponds to that developed in the Ignatian Contemplation to Attain the Love of God; see note 34 to part 1 of this article

2

Like as thy winged spirits always stand,
Before thy presence with defixed eye,
The becks attending of thy majesty
Whether you give them charge of Christian land,
To help the Church to get the upper hand,
Or else to break the heads of heresy,
And scatter them in their apostasy,
Or gainst the Turkish swads’ to make a stand;
So do thy saints expect thy motion,
In what religious work thou wilt bestow them,
Whether in faith or in devotion,
Or exercise of hope, for thou dost know them;
In faith, in hope, and love they will attend thee,
Lo here I am, lord, whither wilt thou send me? (40)

* Swad: a sixteenth-century term of abuse meaning, e.g., ‘lout’ (O.E.D).

3 S.E. [95].

4 S.E. [97].

5 John, J. English, S.J., Spiritual Freedom (Gueiph, 1973), p. 109.Google Scholar

6 Cf. the opening lines of Donne's ‘Goodfriday, 1613’: ‘Let mans Soule be a Spheare, and then, in this,/The intelligence that moves, devotion … ’ in The Complete Poetry of John Donne, ed. John, T. Shawcross (Garden City, 1967), p. 366.Google Scholar

7 S.E. [48].

8 S.E. [55].

9 S.E. [195].

10 S.E. [316].