The reader needs to be told no more in commendation of these Poems, than that they are Mr. Waller’s; a name that carries everything in it either great or graceful in poetry. He was, indeed, the parent of English verse, and the first that showed us our tongue had beauty and numbers in it.
FRANCIS ATTERBURY: ‘Preface to the Second Part of Mr. Waller’s Poems, Printed in the Year 1690’
Educated at Eton and King’s College, Cambridge, Waller entered Parliament as a member of the opposition. Having married a rich heiress, who died in 1634, he became a Royalist and was heavily involved in the plot to seize London for Charles I: he was captured, imprisoned, fined and eventually banished. After making his peace with Cromwell, he was once more restored to favour. Though Waller is rather unfairly remembered for a single lyric (‘Go lovely Rose’), he was a poet much admired by many of his contemporaries, including Dryden, who writes in the Preface to The Rival Ladies (1664) that the ‘excellence and dignity’ of rhyme were ‘never fully known till Mr. Waller; he first made writing easily an art […]’. That is partly the problem: the facility with which he wrote verse eventually tells against him, although there are images of arresting originality, such as these wonderful lines from ‘Of the Last Verses in the Book’: ‘The soul’s dark cottage, battered and decayed,/Lets in new light through chinks that time has made.’ Too much of Waller’s output is made up of occasional poems in the sycophantic manner of many a Poet Laureate, mirrored in such unwieldy titles as ‘Of the danger His Majesty (being Prince) escaped on the road at Santander’, ‘Of tea, commended by Her Majesty’, ‘A panegyric to my Lord Protector’ and so on. But there are many gems among his love poetry addressed to Sacharissa – the Lady Dorothy Sidney, whom he courted unsuccessfully after the death of his first wife. His appreciation of the art of song is shown in one of his Commendatory Poems: ‘To Mr Henry Lawes, who had then newly set a Song of mine in the Year 1635’, which ends:
That not a Syllable is lost;
The Writer’s and the Setter’s, Skill
At once the Ravished Ears do fill.
Let those which only warble long,
And gargle in their Throats a Song,
Content themselves with UT, RE, MI:
Let Words and Sense be set by thee.
It is not that I love you less,
Than when before your Feet I lay:
But to prevent the sad encrease
Of hopeless Love, I keep away.
In vain (alas!), for every thing
Which I have known belong to you,
Your Form does to my Fancy bring,
And make my old Wounds bleed anew.
Whom the Spring from the New Sun,
Already has a Fever got,
Too late begins those Shafts to shun,
Which Phoebus thro’ his Veins has Shot;
Too late he wou’d the Pain assuage,
And to thick Shadows does retire;
About with him he bears the Rage,
And in his tainted Blood the Fire.
But vow’d I have, and never must
Your banish’d Servant trouble you:
For if I break, you may mistrust
The Vow I made to Love you too.
Go lovely Rose,
Tell her that wastes her time and me,
That now she knows,
When I resemble her to thee,
How sweet and fair she seems to be.
Tell her that’s Young,
And shuns to have her Graces spy’d,
That hadst thou sprung
In Desarts, where no Men abide,
Thou must have uncommended dy’d.
Small is the worth
Of Beauty from the Light retir’d;
Bid her come forth,
Suffer her self to be desir’d,
And not blush so to be admir’d.
Then Die, that she
The common Fate of all things rare
May read in thee:
How small a part of time they share,
That are so wondrous Sweet and Fair.
(Holloway, White)