Ter Tria (review)

According to the publisher, the nine religious poems that make up Ter Tria (3 × 3 = 9) constitute a neglected masterpiece, are a very significant addition to seventeenth-century devotional verse in English, and will appeal to anyone interested in devotional verse or seventeenth-century Irish literature and politics. The onus is therefore on the editor to explicate the text for this wide readership. The interdisciplinary nature of this editorial duty is defined by the biblical origin of the subject matter, the Greek and Latin literature in which the Irish puritan poet Faithful Teate was steeped, the vibrancy of the English of the period, and the complex and violent religious and political circumstances at the time of the work's publication in 1658.

The text of Ter Tria itself is a delight to read. The poet's enthusiasm for wordplay and his exuberant use of both learned and colloquial language show he was an optimist, despite the real and repeated hardships in his personal and professional life. His belief in the primacy of faith over reason underpins his theological and literary efforts, a point well made by the editor in her observations on his love of classical literature and by the poet himself in the poem "Faith." A lightness of touch is in evidence throughout the work that belies the heated nature of the academic and theological debates of the time and facilitates the reader's progress through the nine poems on Father, Son, Spirit, Faith, Hope, Love, Prayer, Hearing, and Meditation. The environmentally-minded modern reader may also well appreciate the ergonomics of Teate's Divine ecology in "Father" : "Thy Providence makes Clouds feed th' Earth with Rain: / Th' Earth feed the Plant; / Plant, th' Animal: / So there's no want, / Nor wast at All. / Then th' Earth with Vapours feeds the Clouds again" (ll. 555–60).

Overall this is a very readable and useful edition. It is therefore unfortunate that the following negative observations must be made. Insufficient time was devoted to proofreading: for example, the text should state "Printed in England" (4); "had given" (10); "places where" (36); "cannot" (148). Although the text of the poems themselves is very accurate when compared to the very legible originals available on EEBO, line 5 on page 4 should read "And may not I oblige," as per the editions of 1658, 1669, and 1699. The English translation of the Latin dedication (39) is very inaccurate and awash with misidentified cases: e.g. "cultori" is in the dative case, not the genitive (line 6); and the expansion of the title in the last line is not correct, perhaps due to another proofreading error. More seriously, in the third line of the dedication the editor appears not to have recognized the very common abbreviation q; ("and" ), clearly visible in all editions, and has transcribed this as "-q," which does not make any sense. Moreover, puns which depend on the reader's knowledge of Latin are not always explicated in the footnotes: e.g., "Currant" (40) and "Confectionary" (50). Other vocabulary, such as "provant" (186), should also arguably have been glossed. In addition, there is inconsistency in the explanation of Greek technical terms: note 12 (197) explains "antiperistasis" but there is no corresponding note on prolepsis (247). There is also a lack of clarity in the explanation of the derivation of Ecclesiastes (40, n. 5). The editor states that "Ecclesiastes takes its name from the Hebrew word for 'preacher.'" It would have been more accurate and more helpful to the Greekless reader to say that Ecclesiastes is the Greek equivalent of the Hebrew word for teacher, qoheleth. The edition would have benefited from a thematic index so that the reader could compare the various instances of recurring images. A select bibliography would also have been more helpful than the citation method employed. Biblical quotations are sometimes printed in full in the footnotes (cf. 120, nn. 243–44), but this should have been standard practice in a work...