Poetry of Carew by Thomas Carew
Thomas Carew (1595-1640) was a prominent English poet during the court of Charles I, known for his engaging and polished verses. He stands alongside other notable Cavalier poets like John Suckling and Richard Lovelace, focusing primarily on love lyrics and songs that celebrate beauty and romance. Carew's poetry harmonizes the classical clarity of Ben Jonson with the intellectual wit of John Donne, employing traditional Renaissance imagery and themes, such as the transient nature of beauty and the influence of classical deities.
One of his most celebrated poems, "Ask Me No More," exemplifies his ability to transform conventional motifs into fresh expressions of admiration. Carew often reflects on love with a blend of elegance and cynicism, adopting a variety of styles and stanza forms. His works also include thoughtful elegies and long verse epistles that explore philosophical themes, showcasing his versatility as a poet. While some critiques suggest his poetry lacks the emotional or intellectual depth found in Donne's work, Carew remains a significant figure in early 17th-century English literature, reflecting the cultural influences of his time and the artistry of courtly life.
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Poetry of Carew by Thomas Carew
First published:Coelum Britannicum, 1634; Poems, 1640
Type of work: Poetry
The Work:
Thomas Carew unites, with more success than any of his contemporary poets at the court of Charles I, the classical clarity of Ben Jonson with the intellectual wit of John Donne; at his best he produced work worthy of both his masters, and almost all of his poems are polished and entertaining. Like the other best-known Cavalier poets, Sir John Suckling, Richard Lovelace, Thomas Randolph, and William Davenant, he devoted much of his attention to the song and the love lyric, complimenting real or imaginary ladies. Few poems of this type are lovelier than Carew’s “Ask Me No More”:
Aske me no more where Jove bestowes,
The images of the fading rose, the golden atoms, and the phoenix are the traditional ones of Renaissance love poetry, made fresh by the purity of Carew’s diction, and they combine to form a tribute that, in effect, transcends the compliment of a single lover to a particular lady and becomes a tribute to all beauty.
Like Ben Jonson, Carew builds much of his love poetry on the imagery and the themes of the Greek and Roman lyric poets. Classical deities, especially Cupid, find their way into many of his poems, and countless of his verses are variations on the familiar “carpe diem” theme of Horace, the notion expressed so well by Robert Herrick in his “Gather Ye Rosebuds While Ye May.” Typical of Carew’s treatment of the transience of beauty are these lines from one of his longer works, “To A. L., Persuasions to Love”:
For that lovely face will faile
While the language and imagery of Carew’s love poems, his skill at handling a variety of stanza forms, and the melodious quality of his verses, which were often sung, reveal his place as one of the “Sons of Ben,” he adopts in many of his lyrics the cynical tone and, occasionally, the bizarre imagery of Donne’s early works. He borrows the Metaphysical poets’ practice of speaking of love in terms of religion, commerce, or geography, and he uses the device skillfully; however, his language almost always seems derivative, whereas that of Donne impresses the reader as revelation of new and vital relationships. The song “To my inconstant Mistress” shows Carew’s use of a theological vocabulary to speak of his lady:
When thou, poore excommunicate
Carew’s court poetry is witty, elegant, and amusing, but it very rarely, even at its most sensual, conveys anything of the emotional or intellectual power of Donne’s work. It is in this sense typical of the writing of the Caroline poets, who were, like their French contemporaries, the precieux, generally concerned with form rather than with the expression of either ideas or feelings. (The presence of Charles I’s queen, Henrietta Maria, sister of Louis XIII, at the English court ensured some influence of contemporary French culture on English writers.) Even the highly erotic “A Rapture,” a glorification of physical love, is so metaphorical in its language that it evokes little sense of real passion.
Carew was, on occasion, capable of breaking out of the conventional bonds of his generation, and he reveals an unexpected strength in his brilliant elegy on Donne, in which he follows his predecessor’s techniques closely in paying tribute to him. At the very beginning of the poem, Carew imitates Donne’s abrupt, terse style and his strikingly original imagery. He asks why the age has offered no epitaph for one of its great men:
Can we not force from widdowed Poetry,
Carew captures much of the spirit of Donne’s achievement in his reference to “the flame/ Of thy brave Soule, that shot such heat and light,/ As burnt our earth, and made our darknesse bright.” The disparate images that follow, related to the themes of gardening, the payment of debts, mining, and harvesting, are fused into a whole through the logical coherence of Carew’s comments on Donne’s genius and originality. Even here, however, Carew shows his allegiance to a dual tradition, concluding with a Jonsonian epitaph:
Here lies a King, that rul’d as hee thought fit
Carew’s contrasting styles could scarcely be seen more clearly than by comparing the poem on Donne with the simple “Epitaph on the Lady Mary Villers,” a lyric much like many of Jonson’s elegies:
This little Vault, this narrow roome,
Carew here draws skillfully on the classical tradition for the reference to Cupid and for the brevity and conciseness of his form. His handling of the tetrameter line is, throughout his works, masterful, and he achieves an elegiac spirit almost as moving in its simplicity as Jonson’s epitaph on “Elizabeth, L. H.”: “Under-neath this stone doth lye/ As much beautie, as could dye.”
In addition to the love songs and elegies that make up the majority of Carew’s poems, he wrote several long verse epistles, modeled on those of Horace and Jonson’s imitations of them. These works foreshadow the long reflective poems of the neoclassic age; written in heroic couplets, they are meditative, philosophical, and occasionally satirical, essentially conversations in verse. In one of these epistles, addressed “To Ben Jonson, upon Occasion of his Ode of Defiance annext to his Play of the New Inne,” Carew mildly and sympathetically chides his aging master for allowing the strictures of contemporary critics to move him; although Jonson may have created all his works, like children, with equal love, onlookers “may distinguish of their sexe, and place”:
Let others glut on the extorted praise
The epistle to Aurelian Townshend, a minor poet who had addressed to Carew verses requesting him to write an elegy on the recently deceased king of Sweden, Gustavus Adolphus, a powerful military commander, gives interesting insight into Carew’s sense of his function as a poet. He is no chronicler of heroic deeds:
But these are subjects proper to our clyme
Revels and pastoral poetry are the most suitable for him and Townshend, not the chronicles of heroes; he seems to have had no sense that the “halcyon dayes” were soon to draw to a bloody close.
Carew’s epistles cover a variety of subjects. As a court poet he often wrote verses welcoming courtiers who had returned from abroad, congratulating members of the royal family on their birthdays or on the births of their children, and commending the plays and poems of his friends as they appeared before the public. His style varied with the subject matter, shifting from Jonsonian clarity and straightforwardness to the intricate vocabulary of the followers of Donne. The latter mode predominates in lines such as the following, from the epistle “To my worthy friend Master George Sands, on his translation of the Psalmes”:
I Presse not to the Quire, nor dare I greet
Carew’s most extended work is his masque, Coelum Britannicum, presented at Whitehall in 1634. The intellectual content of this work far surpasses that of the other Caroline masques, in which theme and dialogue were generally sacrificed to elaborate dances and complex stage effects. For the subject of the masque and for the content of most of the prose passages Carew drew on the work of the late sixteenth century Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno. The plot concerns a revolution on Mount Olympus; the gods have been so moved by the virtue of the English monarchs that they have resolved to reform, and all the constellations, which represent the old morality, have been banished from the sky. Momus and Mercury, given the task of choosing worthy figures to replace them, listen to the claims of several bizarre figures: Wealth, Poverty, Fortune, and Pleasure. Each of these professes to be the most influential force in determining human actions. The masque ends with an elaborate pageant glorifying the virtues of King Charles and Henrietta Maria; the monarch and his courtiers, dressed as British heroes, take their places in the heavens as the new constellations.
Carew was probably the ablest of all the Cavalier poets. He shows, in flashes, an intellectual depth and a control of language that suggest his potential greatness. His poetic output was limited, however, partly by his own preference for the exciting life of the court and partly by the poetic fashions of his day. He seems to have lacked that spark of genius that can transform conventions and the techniques of others into great original work.
Bibliography
Barbour, Reid. “’Wee, of th’ adult’rate mixture not complaine’: Thomas Carew and Poetic Hybridity.” John Donne Journal 7, no. 1 (1988): 92-113. Examines such characteristic qualities of Carew’s poetry as doubts about the value of lyric love poems, ambivalence about investing the poet’s personality in enduring matters such as letters, and attempts to find a form to accommodate and synthesize these ambivalences. Shows precedents for these tendencies and traces them in several of Carew’s poems.
Corns, Thomas N., ed. The Cambridge Companion to English Poetry, Donne to Marvell. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Collection of essays includes examinations of common characteristics of sixteenth and seventeenth century poetry, such as its treatment of politics, religion, and gender. Also addressed are the works of individual poets, including Corns’s essay “Thomas Carew, Sir John Suckling, and Richard Lovelace.”
Doelman, James. “The Statues in Carew’s To G. N., From Wrest: Other Possibilities.” English Language Notes 43, no. 2 (December, 2005): 47-50. Provides a contextual analysis of the poem.
Low, Anthony. “Thomas Carew: Patronage, Family, and New-Model Love.” In Renaissance Discourses of Desire, edited by Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993. Discusses the unconventional absence of Petrarchism in Carew’s love poetry. Traces Carew’s life circumstances and demonstrates that his failure to secure traditional patronage forced him into rebellion and a reworking of conceptions of love in economic terms.
Parker, Michael P. “Diamond’s Dust: Carew, King, and the Legacy of Donne.” In The Eagle and the Dove: Reassessing John Donne, edited by Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1986. Focuses on Carew’s elegy on John Donne, exploring how succeeding generations of poets reconciled the two sides of Donne’s personality. Follows Carew’s argument in his elegy and shows that Carew synthesizes Donne’s biography through paradox using Donne’s own poetic methods.
Ray, Robert H. “The Admiration of Sir Philip Sidney by Lovelace and Carew: New Seventeenth-Century Allusions.” ANQ 18, no. 1 (Winter, 2005): 18-21. Describes the influence of Sir Philip Sidney on the poetry of Carew and Richard Lovelace.
Sadler, Lynn. Thomas Carew. Boston: Twayne, 1979. Offers a good basic introduction to all aspects of Carew’s life and writings. Tackles the problem of categorizing Carew and focuses on the secular nature of the poems. Includes close readings of individual poems.
Semler, L. E. The English Mannerist Poets and the Visual Arts. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1998. Explores the relationship between the English mannerist poets and the visual arts in England and the Continent, establishing common characteristics of style. Chapter 4 is devoted to an analysis of Carew’s poetry.