[print edition page number: 85]
Lady Anne Southwell
All Married Men Desire to Have Good Wives (1626)
All married men desire to have good wives,
But few give good example by their lives.
They are our head;[1] they would have us their heels.[2]
This makes the good wife kick; the good man reels.
When God brought Eve to Adam for a bride, 5
The text[3] says she was ta’en from out man’s side,
A symbol of that side whose sacred blood
Flowed for his spouse, the Church’s saving good.[4]
This is a mystery, perhaps too deep
For blockish Adam that was fallen asleep. [86] 10
An Elegy Written by the Lady A.S. to the Countess of Londonderry (1626)[5]
Since thou, fair soul, art warbling to a sphere[6]
From whose resultances[7] these quickened were;
Since thou hast laid that downy couch[8] aside
Of lilies, violets, and roseal[9] pride
And locked in marble chests that tapestry 5
That did adorn the world’s epitome[10]
So safe that doubt itself can never think
Fortune or fate hath power to make a chink;
Since thou for state hath raised thy state so far,
To a large heaven from a vault circular;[11] 10
Because the thronging[12] virtues in thy breast
Could not have room enough in such a chest;
What need hast thou these blotted lines should tell
Souls must again take rise from whence they fell,
From Paradise, and that this earth’s dark womb 15
Is but a wardrobe till the day of doom
To keep those worms that on her bosom bred,
Till time and death be both extermined?[13]
Yet in thy passage, fair soul, let me know
What things thou saw’st in rising from below. [87] 20
Whether that Cynthia,[14] regent of the flood,
Within her orb admit of mortal brood?
Whether the twelve signs serve the sun for state,[15]
Or else confine him to the zodiac?
And force him retrograde to be the nurse 25
(Who circularly glides his oblique course)
Of Alma Mater,[16] or unfreeze the womb
Of Madam Tellus,[17] which else proves a tomb?
Whether the stars be knobs upon the spheres,
Or shreds compos’d of Phoebus’ golden hairs? 30
Or whether th’air be as a cloudy sieve,
The stars be holes through which the good souls drive? [18]
Whether that Saturn that the six out tops[19]
Sit ever eating of the brats of Ops,
Whose jealousy is like a sea of gall 35
Unto his own proves periodical?[20]
But as a gliding star who falls to earth
Or lovers’ thoughts, so souls ascend their birth,
Which makes me think that thine had no one notion
Of those true elements, by whose true motion 40
All things have life and death. But if thine eyne[21]
Should fix a while upon the crystalline,[22]
Thy hungry eye, that never could before [88]
See but by faith and faithfully adore,
Should stay to mark the threefold hierarchy,[23] 45
Differing in state, not in felicity,
How they in order ’bout[24] Jehovah move,
In several offices, but with one love,
And from his hand do hand in hand come down,
Till the last hand do heads of mortals crown. 50
Fain would I know from some that have been there
What state or shape celestial bodies bear!
For man to heaven hath thrown a waxen ball,
In which he thinks h’hath[25] got true forms[26] of all,
And, from the forge house of his fantasy, 55
He creates new and spins out destiny.
And thus these proud worms, wrapped in loathsome rags,
Shut heaven’s Idea[27] up in leathern bags.[28]
Now since in heaven are many ladies more
That blind devotion[29] busily implore, 60
Good Lady, friend, or rather lovely Dame,
If you be gone from out this clayey frame,
Tell what you know, whether th’saints[30] adoration
Will stoop to think on dusty procreation,
And, if they will not, they are fools (pardie)[31] 65
That pray to them and rob the trinity.
The angels joy in our good conversation,
Yet see us not, but by reverberation.[32]
And if they could, you saints as clear eyes have,
If down you look to earth, then to the grave, [89] 70
’Tis but a landskip[33] more to look to hell.
In viewing it, what strange things may you tell!
From out that sulphurous and bitumnous[34] lake,
Where Pluto[35] doth his tilt and tourney[36] make,
Where the Elysium and their purgatory 75
Stand like two suburbs by a promontory.[37]
Poets and popelings[38] are equipollent,[39]
Both makers are of gods of like descent:
Poets make blind gods who with willows beats them;
Popelings make hosts of gods, and ever eats them.[40] 80
But let them both, poets and popelings, pass.
Who deals too much with either is an ass.
Charon[41] conduct them as they have devised.
The fall of angels must not be disguised.
As ’tis not tyranny, but loving pity 85
That kings build prisons in a populous city,
So the next way to fright us back to good
Is to discuss the pains of Stygian flood.[42]
In Eve’s disdainéd nature we are base,
And whips persuade us more than love or grace, 90
So that if heaven should take away this rod,
God would hate us, and we should not love God.
For as affliction in a full-fed state,
Like vinegar in sauces, do awake
Dull appetites and makes men feed the better, 95
So when a lethargy our brains doth fetter,
The only way to rouse again our wits [90]
Is when the surgeon’s chiefest tool is whips.
Brass hath a cozening[43] face and looks like gold,
But where the touchstone comes it cannot hold.[44] 100
That son of ours doth best deserve our rent
That doth with patience bear our chastisement.
Each titmouse[45] can salute the lusty spring
And wear it out with jolly reveling,
But your pure white and vestal[46] clothed swan 105
Sings at her death and never sings but then.[47]
O noble minded bird, I envy thee,
For thou hast stolen this high born note from me.
But as the prophet at his master’s feet
When he ascended up the welkin[48] fleet 110
Watched for his cloak,[49] so every bird and beast
When princely Adam tumbled from the nest
Catched from his knowing soul some quality
And humbly kept it to re-edify[50]
Their quondam[51] king. And now, man goes to school, 115
To every pismire[52] that proclaims him fool.
But stay my wandering thoughts! Alas, where made I
In speaking to a dead, a senseless Lady?
You ink and paper be her passing bell;
The sexton[53] to her knell be Anne Southwell. 120
- They are our head: St. Paul’s infamously misogynistic insistence, repeated in the letters attributed to him. “But I will that ye know, that Christ is the head of every man: and the man is the woman’s head: and God is Christ’s head” (1 Cor. 11:3, KJV). “For the husband is the wife’s head, even as Christ is the head of the Church . . .” (Eph. 5:23, KJV). ↵
- their heels: probably a conceit formed from interpretations of the curse God places on the Serpent in Genesis 3:15 (KJV). The passage, called protevangelium by the Protestant reformers, was thought to be a prophecy foreshadowing the coming of Christ as described in the Gospels. “I will also put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed. He shall bruise thine head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.” The comparison between women, as the daughters of Eve, and the “heel” not only reinforces the man as the head, but also relates women reductively to their reproductive roles. The diminution and subordination of women in the salvation narrative, but even more in their daily lives as a result, “makes the good wife kick.” ↵
- the text: Gen. 2:21–22. ↵
- A symbol . . . saving good: After his death, Christ was wounded in the side by a Roman centurion in the Gospel of John 19:34; the flow of blood and water from the wound was interpreted as a miracle by Origen, St. Thomas Aquinas, Cornelius a Lapide, and others. The Church was commonly represented as the spouse or bride of Christ following the tradition that interpreted the Song of Solomon as an allegory of the love of Christ for the Church. Cf. Lucy Hutchinson, Order and Disorder, 3.457–76, also in this volume, in which the creation of Eve parallels the creation of the Church. ↵
- Countess of Londonderry: Cicely MacWilliams, married to Sir Thomas Ridgway, who became the Earl of Londonderry in 1622. This poem is a mock elegy, in that the speaker merely assumes (at times playfully) that her friend has died. ↵
- warbling to a sphere: The ancient theory of the celestial spheres, still influential in early modern astronomy, held that stars, planets, and other heavenly bodies are embedded within a series of concentric spheres that revolve around the earth (in the Ptolemaic, geocentric model) or, later, around the sun (in the Copernican, heliocentric model). According to Pythagoras’s doctrine of the music of the spheres, the movements and vibrations (“warbling”) of the celestial bodies made a kind of music that was not audible to humans, but rather based on mathematical proportion and harmony. Here, the speaker imagines that the Countess has ascended to the heavens and thus has become a part of their celestial music or movement. ↵
- resultances: reflections or emanations. Events in the outermost celestial spheres were understood to affect the movement and activity in all subordinate spheres. ↵
- downy couch: earthly dwelling ↵
- roseal: formed of roses; rose-colored ↵
- the world’s epitome: According to the seventeenth-century concepts of the macrocosm and the microcosm, the human soul contained in miniature (that is, literally epitomized) the entire world. ↵
- vault circular: the sky ↵
- thronging: assembled or pressed together ↵
- extermined: exterminated ↵
- Cynthia: epithet of the Greek goddess of the moon, Artemis ↵
- for state: in the interest of dignity and order ↵
- Alma Mater: Latin for “nourishing mother” and a Roman title for the mother goddess, here meaning mother earth ↵
- Madam Tellus: Roman goddess of the earth ↵
- Whether the starts . . . drive: these lines allude to seventeenth-century debates about astronomy. Essentially, the speaker asks whether the stars are fixed “knobs” set permanently in their celestial spheres or whether they are made up of particles similar to solar rays (Phoebus’ golden hairs), or, alternately, whether they are holes in the firmament that allow the light of the heaven to pass through. ↵
- six out tops: Saturn was understood in the period to be the seventh and last planet, thus it “out tops” the sixth planet, Jupiter. See also n. 16. ↵
- Whether that Saturn . . . periodical: According to Roman mythology, because of a prophesy that decreed that he would be deposed by one of his children, Saturn (the god of agriculture) decided to devour each of his children as soon as his wife Ops gave birth to them. The sixth child (Jupiter) was protected because Ops substituted a large stone that Saturn swallowed instead. Eventually Jupiter would lead a war against his father and gain the throne (thus “out topping” Saturn). ↵
- eyne: eye ↵
- crystalline: Heaven which, according to the Ptolemaic astronomical system, was a sphere supposed to exist between the primum mobile (the outermost sphere revolving around the earth) and the firmament. ↵
- threefold hierarchy: According to Christian theologians, the angels were divided into three hierarchies organized into nine choirs. They ranged from the Seraphim at the highest point in the order, to Angels and Archangels — who were most closely associated with the human world — at the bottom. ↵
- ’bout: about, here meaning around ↵
- h’hath: he hath ↵
- forms: images, impressions ↵
- heaven’s Idea: According to the Platonic theory of forms, “forms” (line 54) or “Ideas” were the archetypal and purest representations of things in the material world, which were merely shadows of these forms. Southwell here adopts this theory to a Christian context, as did many Neoplatonists in the early modern period. ↵
- leathern bags: leather bags, i.e. books ↵
- blind devotion: here (and in the following lines) meaning devotion to the Catholic saints as opposed to direct devotion to God. By praying to saints, Catholics thus “rob the trinity” (line 66). ↵
- th’saints: the saints ↵
- pardie: certainly, without a doubt ↵
- reverberation: reflection ↵
- landskip: landscape ↵
- bitumnous: a shortened form of the word “bituminous,” which means consisting of tar or pitch. ↵
- Pluto: the Roman god of the underworld ↵
- tilt and tourney: ceremonial violence or military tournament ↵
- Where . . . promontory: According to Greek and Roman mythology, Elysium was a section located on the outskirts of the underworld where the souls of the virtuous found final rest. Purgatory in Catholic theology was a place of purification of sins, physically located between heaven and hell. ↵
- popelings: adherent followers of the Pope (i.e. Roman Catholics) ↵
- equipollent: possessed of equal power or authority; equivalent ↵
- Popelings . . . eats them: Protestants often ridiculed the Catholic theory of transubstantiation and the “real presence” of God in the Mass as a form of cannibalism. The “hosts” are the consecrated wafers consumed in communion. ↵
- Charon: In Greek mythology, the ferryman who transported the recent dead across the river Styx to Hades. ↵
- pains of Stygian flood: that is, the torments of the river Styx or the underworld more generally ↵
- cozening: fraudulent or deceptive ↵
- where the touchstone . . . hold: when brass is held up to the touchstone (a quartz or jasper stone used to test the quality of gold and silver alloys) it will be proven to be brass rather than genuine gold. ↵
- titmouse: a small, active songbird common in England ↵
- vestal: chaste, pure. In ancient Rome, the Vestal virgins were the holy priests of the goddess of the hearth Vesta and were sworn to celibacy. ↵
- swan . . . but then: It the seventeenth century it was generally believed that swans were mute during their life, but would sing at the moment of their death (thus the phrase “swan song”). ↵
- welkin: sky ↵
- But as the prophet . . . cloak: According to 2 Kings 2:1–12, the prophet Elijah did not die, but was taken up to heaven in a chariot of fire. As he ascended, his cloak fell down, which his son Elisha retrieved. ↵
- re-edify: reestablish or restore ↵
- quondam: former ↵
- pismire: ant; Cf. Proverbs 6:6 (KJV): “Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise.” The Geneva Bible reads “pismire” here instead of “ant.” ↵
- sexton: the church officer who had the duty of ringing the church bells (including the death knell when someone died) and digging graves ↵