Sometimes I find myself ploughing through old books to remind myself that poetry is a chain. It grows out of what has gone before and doesn’t just suddenly end and begin again. I first came across Richard Lovelace’s ‘To Althea From Prison’ when it was turned into a lovely song by Fairport Convention for their album Nine, released fifty years ago. I believe it was Dave Swarbrick who adapted the poem, which was written when Lovelace was in jail during the English Civil War. Quite rightly, Swarbrick deleted the third verse, which is a devotional grovel to King Charles I, but the rest works beautifully as both a straightforward love poem and a soaringly defiant message to his jailers. The climactic, in my opinion stunning and inspirational last verse has been quoted repeatedly over the years, but the full amended version is as follows, for those who don’t know it:
When Love with unconfined wings
Hovers within my gates
And my divine Althea brings
To whisper at the grates;
When I lie tangled in her hair
And fetter’d to her eye
The gods that wanton in the air
Know no such liberty.
When flowing cups run swiftly round
With no allaying Thames,
Our careless heads with roses bound
Our hearts with loyal flames;
When thirsty grief in wine we steep,
When healths and draughts go free
Fishes that tipple in the deep
Know no such liberty.
Stone walls do not a prison make
Nor iron bars a cage;
Minds innocent and quiet take
That for an hermitage;
If I have freedom in my love
And in my soul am free
Angels alone that soar above
Enjoy such liberty.
I didn’t really study Lovelace’s poetry until the second half of the 1970s when I spent hours in the library of the University of Birmingham delving into the work of all manner of obscure poets long-dead and mostly forgotten (and often ignoring the set syllabus). I found To Althea From Prison to be the most satisfactory of Lovelace’s poems, though he seemed capable of finding lines or couplets that moved me – as in another poem from jail, The Vintage To The Dungeon, which he imagines as a song with two separates choruses. The first carries an understanding of the depression that comes with being locked away.
Besides your pinion’d arms you’ll find
Grief too can manacle the mind.
The second and final chorus is a encouragement to conquer confinement by finding joy however you can.
Triumph in your bonds and pains
And dance to th’ music of your chains.
As with many of the Royalist poets of that turbulent century, Lovelace stands for courtly chivalry in the romantic tradition. I would guess that most of us now might dismiss that sort of stuff as banal posing, even allowing for the possibility that, given his circumstances, it’s entirely understandable that he might hope his verses in praise of this or that lady or gentleman might lead to his release. His attempt to court favour included one called ‘To My Worthy Friend, Mr Peter Lely, On That Excellent Picture Of His Majesty And The Duke Of York, Drawn By Him At Hampton Court’. No doubt he felt it worth a shot to praise Lely, the Dutch-born court painter, for his wonderful portrait of the king and his son, the duke. He also fitted his poems to the conceits of the time. Frankly, some of it’s just grimacingly bad but we are all products of our age.
Yet in ‘To Althea From Prison’ in particular and some other nuggets – some people really like To Lucasta, Going to the Wars – lines here and there, I would argue that Lovelace finds such stunning clarity and control of sound, rhythm and rhyme that so many better known poets have not been able to match.
Lovelace was born in 1618 during the reign of James I, was described by one scholar as ‘one of the chief ornaments of the Court’ (of Charles I), but was also, it seems, a soldier in the king’s army, before being imprisoned in the early 1640s. When he was released, he fled the country, but on his return was locked up again between 1647 and 1649, following the execution of the king. He seemed to spend the rest of his life in obscurity and poverty in London, keeping his head down but at least keeping his head, until his death in 1657 before the end of Oliver Cromwell’s Puritan ‘interregnum’.. One critic suggested Lovelace ‘perished miserably’.
He will have had no idea that four centuries after his short life, his poems would still be read and analysed. I think most of us bashing away at what passes for our craft today might settle for that.
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