'Teares breake off my Verse': The Virgilian Incompleteness of Abraham Cowley's The Civil War

Abraham Cowley's reverence for Virgil went far beyond the usual limits of indebtedness to an illustrious forebear.¹ It manifested itself in, among other things, frequent consultation of the Sortes Virgilianae, the practice of selecting at random a passage from Virgil's works in order to take advice or reveal the future. John Aubrey tells us that in December 1648, while Charles I was imprisoned at Carisbrooke awaiting trial, Cowley was in Paris with the Prince of Wales. When the Prince suggested that they play cards to 'diverte his sad thoughts', Cowley instead produced acopy of Virgil from his pocket, and encouraged him to stick in a pinat random. The lines the prince selected – from Dido's curse in the fourth book of the Aeneid (IV. 614–20) – seemed to predict his father's imminent deposition and death. Cowley's ex tempore translation of the passage survives:

By a bold people's stubborn arms opprest, Forced to forsake the land he once possess't, Torn from his dearest sonne, let him in vaine Seeke help, and see his friends unjustly slain. Let him to base unequal termes submit, In hope to save his crown, yet loose both it And life at once, untimely let him dy, And on an open stage unburied ly.²

Few would think of answering a request for jolly diversion with so grisly a prediction. But as well as revealing Cowley's insensitivity, the account (whether or not we choose to believe it) indicates the extent of his personal identification with Virgil. Even in an age when Virgil's position as 'prince of poets' was unassailable, Aubrey thinks it worth remarking that Cowley 'always had a Virgil in his pocket'. (Equally revealing is the fact that the eighteen-year-old Prince of Wales, and future Charles II, 'understood not Latin well'.)³

It is almost impossible to overstate the cultural reach of Virgil in the seventeenth century, but his work must have taken on a special significance during the civil wars of the 1640s and 1650s. The Aeneid is – readers have instinctively felt, and continue to feel – a poem of civil war. Written in the immediate aftermath of several decades of internal conflict at Rome, it is inevitably read in the context of the wars which preceded its composition. We don't have to be committed to finding 'further voices' in the poem – opposed to the central, public voice of empire and pietas – in order to find it concerned with internecine conflict. There are proleptic allusions to the wars of the first century BC: the close resemblance between Priam's death in Book II and that of Pompey on the Egyptian shore in 42 BC provides a good example of this.⁴ There are reflections on the horrific nature of civil war in general: there is, for example, a striking similarity between descriptions of Aeneas and Turnus throughout the poem, culminating in the troubling conclusion to their final duel, Turnus being dispatched in terms identical to those with which Aeneas is introduced.⁵ And the wars in which Aeneas participates in the second half of the poem are, to a certain extent, civil wars: battles between the two tribes who were to make up the population of Rome, Trojans and Rutulians.

The subject of this paper is Cowley's unfinished epic poem The Civil War, in which the events of the English civil war are recounted in a style redolent of Virgilian epic. Cowley began working on the poem early in 1643, and wrote more or less contemporaneously with the events described, versifying reports of battles as they reached him in Oxford. An ardent Royalist himself, he was especially dependent on the heavily partisan pamphlet Mercurius Aulicus. The poem was abandoned late in 1643 after the Battle of Newbury, when the tide turned against the King. Cowley thought he had consigned it to oblivion, and in the preface to his collected Poems (which was published in 1656) he explains that he burnt it because 'it is so uncustomary, as to become almost...