King Charles Remembers His Poets
KING:
Well I remember when the sage John Donne,
doctor of poets and prophet among priests,
preached to me—my first sermon heard as King,
my holy sire fresh-buried. Oh, my young heart
grieved, but my brain, in a frenzy of arrangements—
the funeral, wedding, coronation, all
sacraments compacted in a prince’s gasp—
spun almost too fast for grief, though filial love
to out-hamlet Hamlet smoldered in my heart.
This ache, this anxious clangor of plots and plans
stilled at that Doctor’s voice—as subtle music
visited my soul; tenor and counterpoint
plain and ornate, steady and nimble-stepping,
danced in divisions in his double voice
above the unheard, harmonious, constant bass
of reason, slow and vigilant as the spheres.
“If foundations be destroyed,” —aye, that was his text—
“what can the righteous do?” How vexed a riddle
the psalmist leaves for us who grieve to solve;
the poet spoke for his present, but prophetically
touching all time, is present in these our tumults.
Aye—what can the righteous do, when done is done?
I pray for the poets; ye poets, pray for me.
More I remember, of noble makers of verse:
Sir John Suckling, brave knight, who with fideous zeal
organized men to break Strafford from the Tower—
his action failed; but verse is action in words,
the shapeless air impressed with a seal of power.
He died in Paris a fleeing man and poor,
but his loves secure him a place. Let those who know
his salt, his vigor, pray God that his soul live,
and love forgive what frailties beset his end.
Others yet live—Herrick, whose honeyed verse
sang in our Christmas, Circumcision, Twelfth Night,
swaddled my firstborn in a pastoral song
and hailed my fleeting triumphs, has now brought forth
his book into these throes, thinking to die
(perhaps) in this tumult, or tame it with tunefulness.
Long may he live, and see his place restored,
when all places are—when mine is taken above.
Lovelace (well-loved) languishes, pent in prison;
Davenant, melodious warrior, waits in Paris;
Montrose, that lion, already crouches to spring;
and Crashaw walks his shattered road to Rome.
Wherever caged, wherever lifted up,
in earth and in heaven, my soul will pray for the poets;
in earth and in heaven, ye poets, pray for me.
First published in SKCM News, the newsletter of the Society of King Charles the Martyr: American Region, an Anglo-Catholic devotional society. The poem is spoken by King Charles I of England and of Scots, in the years between his capture and imprisonment by the forces of Oliver Cromwell and his quasi-judicial murder in 1649.