Robert Southwell’s ‘A Vale of Tears’ as a Critique of Pastoral Poetry

Abstract

Robert Southwell’s ‘A Vale of Tears’ as a Critique of Pastoral Poetry Gary Bouchard Though he was canonised as a Roman Catholic saint in 1970, the place of Robert Southwell (1561–95) in the English literary canon could have been characterised, until recently, as obscure and fragile. Now, four and a quarter centuries after his capture and eventual public execution atTyburn, Southwell, the Jesuit poet and polemicist hunted by Queen Elizabeth’s pursuivants as her most troublesome enemy, has emerged from the shadows. Oxford University Press’s recent commitment to the project of bringing forth a comprehensive scholarly edition of his works is the culmination of more than two decades of scholarship, a scholarship that has steadily elevated Southwell’s prestige by affording his poetry and prose the attention it has long deserved.1 The recent depiction of the youthful, clandestine priest as an integral character in the life of young William Shakespeare in the television mini-series ‘Will’2 has ushered his name into the realm of popular culture, so that from the pages of scholarly journals to the world of television entertainment, Robert Southwell now enjoys a visibility he has not known since the prolific postmortem publication of his works in the immediate aftermath of his execution in 1595.3 This rise to prominence necessitates, among other things, a reconsideration of how Southwell’s poetry should be represented. Presently, his most famous poem, ‘The Burning Babe’ is the anchor holding his place on one thin page of ever-widening compilations like The Norton Anthology. This peculiar Christmas poem, which features a floating and speaking Christ child addressing a startled narrator on Christmas Eve, and which may well have been the source of the infant apparition in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, is a poem of great originality and merit. It is typically more off-putting than appealing to undergraduates however, who may not share Ben Jonson’s admiration for the poem.4 Among poems that might stand along with ‘The Burning Babe’, or even take its place in the scarce real estate of anthology pages, many would recommend Southwell’s powerful personal meditation, ‘A Vale of Tears’. Studies • volume 107 • number 425 28 Apart from other considerations, it is the only poem that originates from and depicts an actual landscape from the poet’s life, and in it he recollects and depicts this landscape in imagery that is stirring in both its literal and metaphorical qualities. While the poem arrives somewhat predictably at a self-reprimanding call to penance in its final three stanzas, the sublimity of the fifteen meditative stanzas that bring the poet to this climax are not only as fine as anything Southwell ever composed, but are, as Frank Brownlow, among others, has observed, ‘quite unlike anything else to be found in Elizabethan poetry’.5 Besides adding my own voice to those who admire the remarkable and haunting qualities of ‘The Vale’, I wish to make the case that the poem also succeeds as a striking representation of Southwell’s project of sacred parody by providing a stern counterpoise to the classical pastoral loci made popular by Edmund Spenser and others. Before examining the poem as a deliberate parody of English pastoral poetry, I must first recall what Southwell’s project of sacred parody was and what he aimed to accomplish with it. As a clandestine Jesuit priest performing mission work in his native England, Southwell was impressively prolific during the less than six years before his capture, utilising the underground printing press he established with his Jesuit colleague Henry Garnet to publish a variety of sermons, polemics, epistles and poems. As Scott Pilarz has recently reminded readers, Southwell’s literary endeavours were inseparable from and subordinate to his primary mission of consoling Catholics and winning stray sheep back into the Roman Catholic fold. This mission included the project of curbing the pagan excesses contained in the literature to which English souls had been exposed. Southwell thus set about using his literary talents to craft verse which would serve two purposes. First and foremost, these poems would edify his readers, providing them with religious consolation, inspiration and instruction. Second, they would serve as moral correctives and...