Obsequies of the Lord Harrington, Brother to the Countess of Bedford

Obsequies of the Lord Harrington, Brother to the

The poem opens as an address by the speaker to the departed soul of the young Lord Harrington, invoking him as a "fair soul" who was harmony even before infusion into the body and who now plays a part in God's great organ, the whole created sphere. The speaker asks that if any way is pervious between heaven and earth, and if the dead can know the actions and affections of the living, the soul should see and take joy that the speaker has grown good enough to study him, refining his own mind through meditation upon him and thereby making this earthly place a map of heaven and himself a map of Harrington. The speaker describes writing at midnight, when all rest, when labourers, clients awaiting tomorrow's hearing, and a condemned man practising dying through sleep are all stilled. At this midnight the soul sees the speaker, and when the sun of contemplation rises the whole world grows transparent, so that the speaker sees through all things, church and state, by seeing Harrington, and by that same light discerns himself, the hardest object to see. God is the true glass through which all is seen, since God is the being of all things, but the deeds of good men serve as lesser glasses or "trunks" that bring virtue nearer in proportion for human sight. The speaker then wonders where to fix his thoughts among Harrington's deeds, since virtue is fluid and cannot be arrested for contemplation any more than the body's changing humours or a drop of water in a moving stream can be fixed and named, though the fact that a virtuous man existed remains. Just as separated bodies of those who fed on one another's flesh will be perfectly restored at the resurrection because God knows where every atom lies, so a complete knowledge could sort Harrington's virtues into names and ranks, but the speaker declines to divide what grew as one entireness, arguing that virtue considered as a single point is more honourable than the same virtue divided into a million parts. Because fate did not grant Harrington length of years to display each virtue in its season, he was compelled to be his own epitome, exhibiting in few years what long chronicles show over lifetimes, as an angel's instantaneous flight is later understood by us as having touched every point between heaven and earth, and as a practiced reader takes in a whole word without spelling each letter, so short-lived good men are known not virtue by virtue but as a single compound good. The speaker laments that such men, sent as balm to calm the world's tempest, die before their deeds can be diffused to give others life. He questions why the soul's circle of life should close its ends, birth and death, so quickly, when one foot of its compass remained fixed in heaven while the other might have paced securely through every path of the world. He notes that though all circles share roundness and endlessness, only great circles serve as a scale for measuring the sun's real effect upon the earth; so, though Harrington's brief life expresses in itself the whole pattern of living and dying well, it could not serve as the scale by which to measure and cure the encroaching infirmities of age — hot ambitions, irreligion's ice, zeal's agues, and hydroptic avarice — since he did not live to set remedies for these as he had, by his death, failed to give medicine for age's specific ills. Using the image of small pocket-clocks whose wheels, hands, and spring can fall into disorder if not properly wound or set, the speaker observes that youth is easiest destroyed by following either every impulse or none; and as an error in a great steeple clock, relied upon by a whole town, does more harm than a fault in a private pocket-watch, so the faults of age matter more because children, servants, and the state depend on them. He asks why Harrington, who had so true a soul, a clock so exact it might have governed the sun itself, and who received daily instruction from God that could never be disordered, did not remain to serve as a general sundial setting the standard for everyone, and why he consented to this "not miracle, but prodigy" in which virtue's flood, which began with his youth, ebbed out far faster than it had flowed in, until all was suddenly sunk in the whirlpool of death. The speaker admits he would not even name death, except that Harrington has made death, otherwise a desert, into a court; good company is now found only by entering a grave, and cities seem mere anthills of labourers toiling for children, house, and food, while churchyards are the true cities where the best concourse gathers, forming the holy suburbs from which God's city, New Jerusalem, extends its utmost gates. At that gate, the speaker says, Harrington's soul begins its triumph; but invoking the license by which onlookers at a Roman triumph might speak freely against the one triumphing, the speaker expresses his grief without intending to diminish that triumph. He argues that by law none are admitted to triumph until they have won victory as magistrates, and that although Harrington had conquered his own youthful affections, heat of desire, and cold of ignorance, he had not yet advanced against the "foreign enemies" of envy and popular acclamation, so his war was merely civil or defensive, not the kind for which triumph is due, since dominion must be enlarged, not merely preserved. The speaker asks why Harrington should triumph now, when heaven gained no more by taking him than it already possessed in him during life, and why, though he was to deliver up to God the state of his own soul and body, he did not stay to enlarge God's kingdom by making others do as he did. The speaker questions whether Harrington's territory was truly no larger than himself, answering that every exemplary man's charge is the whole world, joined in commission with tutelar angels sent to each person, so that the soul left behind a diocese now exposed to imminent commotion. Yet he checks himself, noting that while men might jest at the individual who triumphs, they may not question the authority that granted the triumph, so, moved by reverential anger, he dares to write against the untimely abandonment while not daring to dispute the sovereign prerogative that dispensed with nature's laws against early triumphs. He concludes that it was fitter that all other men should lack Harrington than that Harrington should lack his triumph. The speaker notes that, unlike Saxon wives or French soldarii who died with their dead, or Alexander's excess of grief for a friend, present custom forbids such testimonies of love; instead he asks the soul to accept the sacrifice of having his grief-cast Muse interred in Harrington's grave, a Muse that, being cast behindhand by grief as great as Harrington's worth, has now spoken, and spoken her last.

By John Donne · First published 1633 · Genre: Elegiac Poetry, Metaphysical Poetry, Devotional Poetry · 3,247 words

First lines

Fair soul, which wast, not only as all souls be, / Then when thou wast infusèd, harmony, / But didst continue so; and now dost bear / A part in God's great organ, this whole sphere; / If looking up to God, or down to us, / Thou find that any way is pervious / 'Twixt heaven and earth, and that men's actions do / Come to your knowledge, and affections too, / See, and with joy, me to that good degree / Of goodness grown, that I can study thee, / And by these meditations refined, / Can unapparel and enlarge my mind, / And so can make, by this soft ecstasy, / This place a map of heaven, myself of thee. / Thou seest me here at midnight; now all rest; / Times dead-low water, when all minds divest / Tomorrow's business; when the labourers have / Such rest in bed, that their last churchyard grave, / Subject to change, will scarce be a type of this; / Now, when the client, whose last hearing is / Tomorrow, sleeps; when the condemned man, / Who, when he opes his eyes, must shut them then / Again by death, although sad watch he keep, / Doth practice dying by a little sleep; / Thou at this midnight seest me, and as soon / As that sun rises to me, midnight's noon, / All the world grows transparent, and I see / Through all, both church and state, in seeing thee; / And I discern by favour of this light, / Myself, the hardest object of the sight. / God is the glass; as thou, when thou dost see / Him Who sees all, seest all concerning thee; / So, yet unglorified, I comprehend / All, in these mirrors of thy ways and end. / Though God be our true glass, through which we see / All, since the being of all things is He, / Yet are the trunks which do to us derive / Things, in proportion, fit by perspective, / Deeds of good men; for by their being here, / Virtues, indeed remote, seem to be near. / But where can I affirm, or where arrest / My thoughts on his deeds? which shall I call best? / For fluid virtue cannot be looked on, / Nor can endure a contemplation. / As bodies change, and as I do not wear / Those spirits, humours, blood I did last year, / And, as if on a stream I fix mine eye, / That drop, which I looked on, is presently / Push'd with more waters from my sight, and gone; / So in this sea of virtues, can no one / Be insisted on; virtues as rivers pass, / Yet still remains that virtuous man there was. / And as if man feed on man's flesh, and so / Part of his body to another owe, / Yet at the last two perfect bodies rise, / Because God knows where every atom lies; / So, if one knowledge were made of all those, / Who knew his minutes well, he might dispose / His virtues into names and ranks; but I / Should injure nature, virtue, and destiny, / Should I divide and discontinue so / Virtue, which did in one entireness grow. / For as he that should say spirits are framed / Of all the purest parts that can be named, / Honours not spirits half so much as he / Which says they have no parts, but simple be; / So is 't of virtue, for a point and one / Are much entirer than a million. / And had fate meant to have had his virtues told, / It would have let him live to have been old; / So then that virtue in season, and then this, / We might have seen, and said, that now he is / Witty, now wise, now temperate, now just. / In good short lives, virtues are fain to thrust, / And to be sure betimes to get a place, / When they would exercise, lack time and space. / So was it in this person, forced to be, / For lack of time, his own epitome; / So to exhibit in few years as much / As all the long-breathed chronicles can touch. / As when an angel down from heaven doth fly, / Our quick thought cannot keep him company; / We cannot think, "Now he is at the sun, / Now through the moon, now he through th' air doth run"; / Yet when he's come, we know he did repair / To all 'twixt heaven and earth, sun, moon, and air. / And as this angel in an instant knows, / And yet we know, this sudden knowledge grows / By quick amassing several forms of things, / Which he successively to order brings, / When they, whose slow-paced lame thoughts cannot go / So fast as he, think that he doth not so. / Just as a perfect reader doth not dwell / On every syllable, nor stay to spell, / Yet without doubt he doth distinctly see, / And lay together every A and B; / So, in short-lived good men, is not understood / Each several virtue, but the compound good; / For they all virtue's paths in that pace tread, / As angels go, and know, and as men read. / O, why should then these men, these lumps of balm, / Sent hither the world's tempest to becalm, / Before by deeds they are diffused and spread, / And so make us alive, themselves be dead? / O soul, O circle, why so quickly be / Thy ends, thy birth and death closed up in thee? / Since one foot of thy compass still was placed / In heaven, the other might securely have paced, / In the most large extent, through every path / Which the whole world or man th' abridgment hath. / Thou know'st that though the tropic circles have / -Yea, and those small ones which the Poles engrave- / All the same roundness, evenness, and all / The endlessness of th' equinoctial; / Yet, when we come to measure distances, / How here, how there, the sun affected is, / When he doth faintly work, and when prevail, / Only great circles, then, can be our scale. / So though thy circle to thyself express / All, tending to thy endless happiness, / And we by our good use of it may try, / Both how to live well, young, and how to die; / Yet since we must be old, and age endures / His torrid zone at court, and calentures / Of hot ambitions, irreligion's ice, / Zeal's agues, and hydroptic avarice / -Infirmities, which need the scale of truth, / As well as lust and ignorance of youth- / Why didst thou not for these give medicines too, / And by thy doing set us what to do? / Though as small pocket-clocks, whose every wheel / Doth each mismotion and distemper feel, / Whose hands get shaking palsies, and whose string / (His sinews) slackens, and whose soul, the spring, / Expires, or languishes; whose pulse, the fly, / Either beats not, or beats unevenly; / Whose voice, the bell, doth rattle or grow dumb, / Or idle as men which to their last hours are come, / If these clocks be not wound, or be wound still, / Or be not set, or set at every will; / So youth is easiest to destruction, / If then we follow all, or follow none. / Yet, as in great clocks which in steeples chime, / Placed to inform whole towns to employ their time, / An error doth more harm, being general, / When small clocks' faults only on the wearer fall; / So work the faults of age, on which the eye / Of children, servants, or the state rely. / Why wouldst not thou, then, which hadst such a soul, / A clock so true, as might the sun control, / And daily hadst from Him, who gave it thee, / Instructions, such as it could never be / Disorder'd, stay here, as a general / And great sundial, to have set us all? / O, why wouldest thou be an instrument / To this unnatural course, or why consent / To this, not miracle, but prodigy, / That when the ebbs longer than flowings be, / Virtue, whose flood did with thy youth begin, / Should so much faster ebb out, than flow in? / Though her flood were blown in by thy first breath, / All is at once sunk in the whirlpool death. / Which word I would not name, but that I see / Death, else a desert, grown a court by thee. / Now I am sure that if a man would have / Good company, his entry is a grave. / Methinks all cities, now, but anthills be, / Where, when the several labourers I see, / For children, house, provision taking pain, / They're all but ants, carrying eggs, straw, and grain. / And churchyards are our cities, unto which / The most repair, that are in goodness rich. / There is the best concourse and confluence, / There are the holy suburbs, and from thence / Begins God's city, New Jerusalem, / Which doth extend her utmost gates to them. / At that gate, then, triumphant soul, dost thou / Begin thy triumph. But since laws allow, / That at the triumph day the people may / All that they will 'gainst the triumpher say, / Let me here use that freedom, and express / My grief, though not to make thy triumph less. / By law to triumphs none admitted be, / Till they as magistrates get victory. / Though then to thy force all youth's foes did yield, / Yet till fit time had wrought thee to that field, / To which thy rank in this state destined thee, / That there thy counsels might get victory, / And so in that capacity remove / All jealousies 'twixt prince and subjects' love, / Thou couldst no title to this triumph have; / Thou didst intrude on death, usurp a grave. / Then, though victoriously, thou hadst fought as yet / But with thine own affections, with the heat / Of youth's desires, and colds of ignorance, / But till thou shouldst successfully advance / Thine arms 'gainst foreign enemies, which are / Both envy, and acclamation popular / -For both these engines equally defeat, / Though by a divers mine, those which are great- / Till then thy war was but a civil war, / For which to triumph none admitted are; / No more are they who, though with good success, / In a defensive war their power express. / Before men triumph, the dominion / Must be enlarged, and not preserved alone. / Why shouldst thou, then, whose battles were to win / Thyself from those straits nature put thee in, / And to deliver up to God that state, / Of which He gave thee the vicariate, / Which is thy soul and body, as entire / As he who takes indentures doth require; / But didst not stay to enlarge His kingdom too, / By making others, what thou didst, to do; / Why shouldst thou triumph now, when heaven no more / Hath got by getting thee, than it had before; / For heaven and thou, e'en when thou livedst here, / Of one another in possession were. / But this from triumph most disables thee, / That that place which is conquered must be / Left safe from present war, and likely doubt / Of imminent commotions to break out; / And hath he left us so? or can it be / His territory was no more than he? / No, we were all his charge; the diocese / Of every exemplar man the whole world is; / And he was joined in commission / With tutelar angels, sent to everyone. / But though this freedom to upbraid and chide / Him who triumph'd were lawful, it was tied / With this, that it might never reference have / Unto the senate, who this triumph gave; / Men might at Pompey jest, but they might not / At that authority by which he got / Leave to triumph, before by age he might; / So though, triumphant soul, I dare to write, / Moved with a reverential anger, thus, / That thou so early wouldst abandon us; / Yet I am far from daring to dispute / With that great sovereignty, whose absolute / Prerogative hath thus dispensed with thee, / 'Gainst nature's laws, which just impugners be / Of early triumphs; and I, though with pain, / Lessen our loss, to magnify thy gain / Of triumph, when I say, it was more fit / That all men should lack thee, than thou lack it. / Though then in our time be not suffered / That testimony of love unto the dead, / To die with them, and in their graves be hid, / As Saxon wives, and French soldarii did; / And though in no degree I can express / Grief in great Alexander's great excess, / Who at his friend's death made whole towns divest / Their walls and bulwarks, which became them best; / Do not, fair soul, this sacrifice refuse, / That in thy grave I do inter my Muse, / Which, by my grief, great as thy worth, being cast / Behindhand, yet hath spoke, and spoke her last.

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elegy · funeral-poetry · commemorative · metaphysical-poetry · baroque · occasional-poetry · 17th-century · English-literature · mourning · tribute · death · nobility

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