Poem of the Day: ‘On Change of Weather’

Last year, a young couple renovating their flat in the Micklegate section of York, England, uncovered a series of rare wall paintings dating from the seventeenth century. Their Georgian building, constructed around a section of old wall just inside the city’s medieval wall, had inadvertently preserved frescoed illustrations inspired by a work entitled “Emblems, Divine and Moral.” First published in 1634, “Emblems” was in its time the best-known work of the poet, courtier, and Anglican ecclesial amanuensis Francis Quarles (1592–1644). Quarles’s timeline crosses those of other poets whose work has appeared in this space: the Cavaliers John Suckling, Richard Lovelace, and Robert Herrick, the Metaphysicals George Herbert and Henry Vaughan. Quarles’s own life reflects an odd admixture of both these poetic schools. Educated at Cambridge, he had entered Lincoln’s Inn to study the law when he was made cupbearer to the Princess Elizabeth, daughter of King James I, on her marriage to Frederick V of the Electoral Palatinate. He spent some years on the Continent in that role, later becoming secretary to the Anglican Archbishop of Armagh, a patristics scholar. This latter position seems to have suited Quarles’s poetic temperament. On returning to England in 1633, he plunged himself into preparations for his “Emblems,” which appeared the next year. The book, whose poems offer elaborate paraphrases of Scripture and various Church Fathers, met with popular success, obviously radiating from London at least as far as York. The author’s contemporaries, however, were scathing. Such couplets as “The world’s a popular disease, that reigns/ Within the froward heart and frantic brains” seem almost calculated to drive a poet like Suckling to a frenzy of derision: “He that makes God speak so big in’s poetry.” Almost a century later, Quarles, with his “Emblems,” remained a figure of mockery, earning a few lines in the “Dunciad” of Alexander Pope (1688–1744), who at least liked the illustrations. “Where the pictures for the page atone,/ And Quarles is saved by beauties not his own.” But as today’s Poem of the Day suggests, Quarles possessed a few modest beauties of his own. “On Change of Weather” makes an interesting bracket with Tuesday’s poem by the twentieth-century poet Claude McKay, also almost but not exactly a sonnet, in which external weather inspires internal resonances in the soul. Occasionally, in these six rhymed iambic-pentameter couplets addressed to God, Quarles gives way to an impulse to moralize. Adversity is good for us, declares the penultimate couplet. Still, the last line lands pleasingly with its note of grave humility: “We know not what to have, nor how to ask.” On Change of Weatherby Francis QuarlesAnd were it for thy profit, to obtainAll sunshine? No vicissitude of rain?Think’st thou that thy laborious plough requiresNot winter frosts as well as summer fires?There must be both: sometimes these hearts of oursMust have the sweet, the seasonable showersOf tears; sometimes the frost of chill despairMakes our desired sunshine seem more fair;Weathers that most oppose the flesh and bloodAre such as help to make our harvest good.We may not choose, great God: it is thy task;We know not what to have, nor how to ask.___________________________________________With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past and the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.

Poem of the Day: ‘On Change of Weather’

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