King and No King: "The Exequy" as an Antebellum Poem

Abstract

Diana E. Henderson King and No King: 'The Exequy" as an Antebellum Poem Why, asks a friend, attempt tetrameter? Because it once was noble, yet Capers before the proud pentameter, Tyrant of English. I regret To see this marvelous swift meter Demean its heritage, and peter Into mere Hudibrastic tricks, Unapostolic knacks and knicks. But why take all this quite so badly? I would not, had I world and time To wait for reason, rhythm, rhyme To reassert themselves, but sadly The time is not remote when I Will not be here to wait. That's why. — Vikram Seth, The Golden Gate1 Have you studied with any care Bishop King in Saintsbury's collection? He seems to me one of the finest and I have long desired to write a short paper about him. — T.S. Eliot2 Early in the twentieth century, the ingenious morbidity of Henry King led to his critical resurrection. The first in a series of editions of his complete poems appeared the same year that the Great War began, and T.S. Eliot's placement of King among "The Metaphysical Poets" guaranteed his inclusion in the New Critical canon. Foremost among the poems lauded was "The Exequy," King's exquisite tetrameter 58Diana E. Henderson elegy for his young wife. By the 1960s, it had become so revered that Ronald Berman hesitated to approach it analytically, even as he remarked upon its status as one of the five "great" English elegies, alongside those by Milton, Gray, Shelley, and Tennyson. It was not ever thus. In the nineteenth century, as Berman himself chronicles, King's more generalized poems of lamentation, "Sic Vita" and "The Dirge," were far more often anthologized.3 In King's own day, his elegiac tributes for public figures such as Prince Henry, Walter Ralegh, and King Charles I and for poets such as Donne and Jonson, his versification of the Psalms, and his sermons were all of equal or greater note than this more intimate and domestic elegy. During the eighteenth century, moreover, King's entire corpus fell into almost complete obscurity. As Vikram Seth reminds us, poetic fashions change. Given formalism's lost ascendancy within the academy, and the lost nobility of tetrameter — pace Seth's witty rearguard action — what will be the future fate of "The Exequy"? By reexamining this New Critical chestnut with the benefit of some recent critical paradigms and historical studies, I suggest why this verse — if not its tetrameter form — might be worth reconsideration, in time not so remote. Twentieth-century approaches have tended to view "The Exequy" through the lenses of genre criticism (the elegy) or historical formalism (metaphysical poetry and imagery), or as a poem sui generis? Each method has its truth and merits, for this is an unusual and metaphysical elegy. Yet a paradox lurks here: when the poem has been located historically, it has been regarded as typical of larger poetic and rhetorical movements; when closely analyzed, it is praised for its atypicality, differentiated from King's other poetry and from elegies. How can such an unusual poem be so typical, and vice versa? The answer lies, in part, in the ways history and gender have been addressed only superficially in close readings of "The Exequy." I wish to recontextualize this poem by situating King within the Jacobean social structures that encouraged its composition, and by placing it in relation to King's later, seemingly disconnected elegies for Charles I. First I juxtapose recent analysis of the elegy's masculine agenda with Debora Shuger's suggestion that seventeenth-centurypatriarchy could be perceived as beneficent and nurturing; this latter way of understanding the world informed and in a sense allowed King's creation of "The Exequy."5 Then I consider how his quite differently toned, rage-filled elegies for King Charles testify to the shattering of those structures (though not King's faith in them). In so doing, I hope to "The Exequy" as an Antebellum Poem59 show how King's marital elegy captures a distinctively pre-Civil War Stuart "settlement" in verse: a fragile triumph before new political and conceptual models destroyed King's peace and his happy position as loving son and natural...