Edmund Waller's Sacred Poems

At seventy-nine, Edmund Waller published the slim volume Divine Poems (1685). Augmented with a summary statement “Of the Last Verses in the Book,” these fruits of his late rebirth as a sacred poet crowned the final collected edition of his works printed during his lifetime (1686). But the bulk of this volume still reflected how worldly concerns had dominated his long career. “Go, Lovely Rose” (1645) and A Panegyric to My Lord Protector (1655) are merely the most well known of his many poems praising beautiful women or powerful men. ¹

Judging Waller’s “poetical devotion” a representative failure, Dr. Samuel Johnson explained that “The ideas of Christian Theology are too simple for eloquence, too sacred for fiction, and too majestick for ornament; to recommend them by tropes and figures is to magnify by a concave mirror the sidereal hemisphere.” ² These strictures pay Waller’s sacred verses the highest compliment they have ever received. In contrast, Waller’s foremost recent explicators see Divine Poems as representing only their own mediocrity. Jack G. Gilbert considers them evidence “that it was not possible for Waller in his late seventies to write such poetry well”; Warren L. Chernaik similarly pronounces them “indifferent as poetry.” ³ But these commentators both make an exception not made by Johnson when they admire “Of the Last Verses.” Gerald Hammond also praises the poem, as exemplifying “the glorious imprecisions which make the seventeenth-century lyric so distinctive.” ⁴ Though Chernaik and Gilbert both attempt to see Waller whole, neither addresses the apparent paradox that they admire “Of the Last Verses,” but not the “Last Verses” themselves. Hammond leaves unexplained another apparent paradox: that “Of the Last Verses” typifies “glorious imprecisions,” even though he twice calls attention to the accuracy of its diction. ⁵ He adds further “imprecisions” of his own when he thereby introduces his study of “English Poets and Poems, 1616–1660” with a representative text written a quarter of a century after the Restoration.

My own reading of the poem attempts to shed new light on it by respecting its chronology and returning it to its original contexts. Though the poem constitutes “the Last Verses in the Book,” it also testifies on behalf of (and demands to be read in relation to) those preceding “Last Verses.” In addition, and precisely because “Of the Last Verses” implies so sharp a distinction between Waller’s final poems and those composed during the many years beforehand, we need to assess how his prior verses compare with his “Last.” But, in retrieving the original context of his devotional poems, we should also look beyond his own oeuvre. Ambiguities play in and around all of his late poems as products of a culture both united and divided by a conflict between mutually sustaining extremes of piety and impiety. This essay therefore attempts the kind of interpretation recommended by Richard Strier when he renews the case for a broadly Empsonian model of reading—one both paying attention to “particular, historically conditioned indeterminacies” and resisting “any sort of approach to texts that knows in advance what they must be doing or saying.” ⁶

What “Of the Last Verses” must be doing or saying may seem self-evident from its melodious cadences:

When we for age could neither read nor write, The subject made us able to indite; The soul, with nobler resolutions decked, The body stooping, does herself erect. No mortal parts are requisite to raise Her that, unbodied, can her Maker praise.    The seas are quiet when the winds give o’er; So, calm are we when passions are no more! For then we know how vain it was to boast Of fleeting things, so certain to be lost. Clouds of affection from our younger eyes Conceal that emptiness which age descries.    The soul’s dark cottage, battered and decayed, Lets in new light through chinks that time has made; Stronger by weakness, wiser men become, As they draw near to their eternal home. Leaving the old, both worlds at once they view, That stand upon the threshold of the new. ⁷

Sustaining the tranquil mood...