Edmund Waller today is chiefly remembered for one of three things: his craven behavior in connection with the exposure of an abortive Royalist conspiracy, known as “Waller’s Plot”; his sharing with Sir John Denham the most precipitous collapse and lasting eclipse of the most celebrated contemporary reputation in the annals of English literature; or his poem “Go, Lovely Rose,” inevitably cited in practically every anthology as an example of the perfect Cavalier lyric. Paradoxically, however, Waller’s contemporaries and the critics of the 18th century who heaped praises on his poetic gifts never mention this poem. Instead, they admire and comment on the political panegyrics, poems of compliment to noblemen and great ladies, and the poetry of social occasions—the poems that to readers from the Romantic period until recently have seemed the least susceptible to resuscitation of all Waller’s literary efforts. In the last 30 years literary scholars have begun again to discover in Waller a significant transitional figure, and a subtle and skilled minor poet.

Edmund Waller was born on March 3, 1606 at the Manor-House, Coleshill (then in Hertfordshire, today in Buckinghamshire). He was baptized March 9, 1606 at the parish church in Amersham as the eldest son of Robert Waller and Anne Hampden Waller. His mother was the sister of John Hampden, the famous republican who vigorously opposed the royal prerogative in the Ship-Money Case. She was also a cousin by marriage to Oliver Cromwell. Important as these family connections were to be in Waller’s public career, even more decisive was the inheritance that came to him at the death of his father on August 26, 1616, when Edmund was 10 years old. Robert Waller’s death left his eldest son the heir to between 2,000 and 3,500 pounds a year, a significant fortune in those days. Moreover, his father’s departure from the scene left him to the guidance of his mother, by all accounts a formidable woman with a good head for business, who took a keen interest in her son’s success throughout her long life. Following preparation of varying quality from a series of schoolmasters, Waller was sent by his mother first to Eton College, and then up to Cambridge, where he was admitted as a fellow-commoner of King’s College on March 22, 1620. Apparently he did not take a degree. Despite the familiarity with the law Waller displays in his speeches, he specifically declared in Mr. Waller’s speech in Parliament (1641) that “it has not beene my happiness to have the Law a part of my breeding.” Edward Hyde, first Earl of Clarendon, later reported that Waller was “nursed in parliaments,” and although there is some uncertainty about which parliament was his first, Waller himself asserted that he first held a seat when he was only 16.

In his 26th year Waller materially advanced his fortunes by carrying off as his bride Anne Banks. The only daughter and heiress of a wealthy London citizen and mercer who had died on September 9, 1630, Anne was at the time of her marriage a ward of the Court of Aldermen. Gaining the girl and her fortune was a particularly impressive coup since, with the help of relatives who were citizens of London, Waller secured her hand without the permission of her guardians and initially against the pretensions of Mr. William Crofts, later Baron Crofts of Saxham, whose aspirations were backed by the royal court. Waller married Anne on July 5, 1631 at Saint Margaret’s, Westminster, and she was spirited out of the jurisdiction of the city authorities. To gain control of her fortune Waller faced a fine out of his wife’s portion imposed by the Court of Aldermen, and it was only through the favor and influence of King Charles I that he was able to retire securely with his prize to his house at Beaconsfield. It is characteristic of Waller’s whole career that although he had frustrated the plans of the Caroline court, not only did no permanent odium attach to him as a result, but he quickly secured royal favor in patching up the irregularity of his proceedings. In his study of Waller, Jack G. Gilbert suggests that, given the king’s desperate need of cash during this period, “there is a suspicion of some quid pro quo, but no helpful records remain.” Indeed, the 8,000 pounds that came to Waller as his wife’s portion, combined with his own considerable inheritance, pleasant manners, plausible conversation, and eloquence in Parliament made him a man whose acquaintance anyone, even a king, might be glad to make.

A son, born May 18, 1633, was later tutored by Thomas Hobbes and admitted to Lincoln’s Inn on June 15, 1648, but no further records concerning him have been found, and he does not seem to have lived to adulthood. Anne Banks Waller died giving birth to their second child, a daughter who was baptized on October 23, 1634. Waller did not remarry for nearly a decade, during which time Simonds D’Ewes recorded with an air of scandal in his parliamentary diary that Waller was “extremely addicted and given to the use of strange women” to such a degree that his complexion and countenance were altered by his dissipations.

Clarendon wrote that Waller, “at the age when other men used to give over writing verses, (for he was near thirty years of age when he first engaged himself in that exercise, at least that he was known to do so,) surprised the town with two or three pieces of that kind; as if a tenth muse had been newly born, to cherish drooping poetry.” Waller himself told John Aubrey that “when he was a brisque young sparke, and first studyed Poetry; methought, sayd he, I never sawe a good copie of English verses; they want smoothness; then I began to essay.” Though some of Waller’s poems have as their subjects things that happened in the late 1620s and early 1630s, they may have been written later, or reworked sometime after the event. Certainly Clarendon’s remarks imply that Waller did not cultivate the muse until after the death of his first wife, when he undertook a course of study guided by Dr. George Morley, who had studied at Christ Church, Oxford, and was afterward bishop of Winchester. Waller took Morley to live with him and oversee his reading at Beaconsfield. Morley was a member of the “college” of serious-minded intellectuals collected by Lucius Cary, Viscount Falkland, at his country house, Great Tew. According to Clarendon, it was Morley who introduced Waller into that company. Morley’s influence may be reflected in Waller’s cultivation of a cool, balanced Augustan classicism in virtually all his poetry. Whether Morley’s guidance simply heightened a temperamental affinity or formed the poet’s mind more decisively, the larger Great Tew influence shows itself in Waller’s consistent stance in favor of peace, moderation, tolerance, and programs of economic and intellectual improvement, no less than in his rational opposition to all radical innovations, whether from the left or the right, in society, church, or state.

Waller’s “essays” at verse may be categorized in three main groups: public panegyrics, poems of compliment to private individuals, and love lyrics. First in the early collections, and in the esteem of contemporaries, are the panegyrics, poems of compliment with a political or larger public aspect. The second category, poems of compliment addressed to nonroyal personages or private friends, includes commendatory verses for publications by other writers and occasional poems ranging from remarks on significant honors or trifling occurrences that befall the recipient to poems occasioned by illnesses, and from celebrations of marriages and births to funeral elegies and epistles of consolation. Lastly, the love lyrics embrace various Cavalier songs and the group of poems to “Sacharissa.”

Classification by purpose and type of occasion seems more satisfactory for Waller than an attempt to impose formalistic generic categories. Waller’s habitual social manner tends to smooth away formal generic distinctions such as epigram, elegy, epistle, and song. The panegyrics aspire to a higher style, but the plain, urbane style of polished, sophisticated polite discourse often associated with Horatian epistles is Waller’s characteristic manner in most of his productions. Irony and a fondness for a neat turn are frequently cultivated, but they are as likely to appear in a song as in a poem that looks formally more like a Jonsonian epigram. The writer of the anonymous life for the 1711 edition of Waller’s poems describes the poet’s range and concerns aptly: “Mr. Waller was not for things of Toil or Breath. He imitated the Noble Wits of the Ancients, Tibullus, Ovid, and others, who wrote for the Entertainment of Themselves, their Mistresses, and their Friends, which included the Great and the Fair.”

Lines concluding “The Story of Phoebus and Daphne, Applied” assert that Waller’s reputation as a poet was first made by the poems of courtship that he addressed to Lady Dorothy Sidney, under the name of “Sacharissa.” Sacharissa certainly ranked among “the Great and Fair.” Her father was Robert Sidney, second Earl of Leicester, one of the greatest peers of the realm. Her mother was Lady Dorothy Percy, daughter of Sir Henry Percy, ninth Earl of Northumberland, who was confined to the Tower on suspicion of complicity in the Gunpowder Plot. Other members of Sacharissa’s old and distinguished maternal Percy clan were recipients of poetic praise from Waller during the last half of the decade. On her father’s side, Lady Dorothy’s great-uncle was the famous Sir Philip Sidney. Waller refers specifically to Sidney’s Arcadia (1590) in one of the 16 Sacharissa poems; in two others he invokes Sidney’s name and nobility, and in the last poem of the series, in mock exasperation and despair, he charges that Sacharissa’s imperviousness to love and poetry deny her participation in Sir Philip’s lineage. Sacharissa’s connection with the author of the admired prose romance elicits many comparisons between nature and art suggested by Sir Philip Sidney’s personal genius and hereditary nobility. All of Waller’s explicit references to Sidney are to Arcadia, but implicitly behind the whole project of the Sacharissa poems lies the first great English sonnet cycle of the Renaissance, Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella (1591), which likewise celebrated an unsuccessful lover’s aspiration. In the Sacharissa poems, the poet establishes himself in the line of descent from the great relative of his indifferent mistress. Waller maintains that his claim to descent is better than hers because it is validated both by his poetry and by his devotion to love.

Perhaps the most complex and perfectly achieved of the Sacharissa poems, “The Story of Phoebus and Daphne, Applied,” makes explicit the compensatory reward of fame for the artful, but unsuccessful, lover:

Yet what he sung in his immortal strain,

Though unsuccessful, was not sung in vain;

All, but the nymph that should redress his wrong,

Attend his passion, and approve his song.

Like Phoebus thus, acquiring unsought praise,

He catched at love, and filled his arm with bays.

The versification and rhetoric here show at its best the art that won Waller adulation as a poet. Limpid smoothness and a graceful forward movement of the lines are achieved through careful deployment of mainly one-syllable nouns modified by words of rarely more than three syllables; the lines pivot neatly on the balance point of the caesura; sound and sense alike work parallelism, repetition, and contrast: “Yet what he sung”—“was not sung”; “Attend--passion, approve--song”; qualification and paradox are strategically inserted: “Though unsuccessful--was not in vain”; “All, but the nymph, ... Attend ... approve”; “acquiring unsought praise”; “He catched at x, and filled with y.” This is not vatic poetry, or confessional meditation, or the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; as trifles are made precious, caught in pieces of amber, so Waller’s verse civilizes and preserves the conflicts and games played out in human social interaction. What rejected lover would not relish being able to say what Waller says here to the disdainful object of his quest? Who could have found the device to say it so aptly and fully, without sounding smug, or bitter, or as if he were speaking a little too loudly, and with too much emphasis, just to show how well things really were with him?

Waller concluded this episode in the second of his two poems titled “At Penshurst.” He exclaims (now in the first person) over Sacharissa’s un-Sidneian imperviousness to love and poetry—poetry which makes him, the Orphic singer, the cynosure of the listening deer and the central focusing point giving order to the surrounding woods (as she, in her beauty, had been in the first “At Penshurst”). In a striking recognition of the actual psychological pattern of Petrarchan poetry, the suffering lover has replaced the coveted object of his desire at the center of the poetic world he created; but she is still unmoved by love or song, Orphic though it may be. Waller extricates himself from his erotic impasse by having his versified laments provoke the intervention of Apollo, who here, as in John Milton’s Lycidas (1637), invades the poem to resolve the troubled poet with his authoritative words. In this case the words come in the form of advice to hang up the lute, go to sea, and divert the mind with wonders. Waller’s good nature, so amply displayed in his graceful abandonment of his poetic suit, owes not a little to his vanity; he thought so well of himself and was so well satisfied with the returns on his investments of every sort in the world’s markets that, at this stage at least, being a good and graceful loser was easy for him, because in his own eyes he was not a loser at all.

Waller himself asserts in “The Story of Phoebus and Daphne, Applied” that his courtship of Dorothy Sidney brought him recognition as a poet. That recognition came about this time is confirmed by mention of him in Sir John Suckling’s “Session of the Poets” (1637). His poetic gifts were also recognized in solicited contributions of verse to Jonsonus Virbius (1638), the collection of tributes to Ben Jonson that opens with a poem from Viscount Falkland, and commendatory verses for the Paraphrase Upon the Divine Poems published in 1638 by George Sandys, also of the Great Tew circle. All three instances of Waller’s recognition as a poet share connections to Falkland’s circle, suggesting that entrée into that group was at least as important as the famous courtship of Sacharissa in the sudden publicity given to his poetic gifts in the later 1630s.

When, years later, his Sacharissa, now dowager countess of Sunderland, asked Waller when he would write such beautiful verse to her again, the poet answered, in a reply worthy of Restoration comedy if not of his famous gallantry, “When, Madam, your Ladyship is as young and handsome again.” If under the pretty compliments and graceful mythological “applications,” Waller’s love poems and lyrics are often surprisingly characterized by just such a wry, unillusioned awareness of the way of the world, his Royalist panegyrics in contrast achieve a kind of apotheosis of idealism and incarnate virtue that is scarcely ever violated by the brutal facts of the-way-things-are. “Of the Danger his Majesty (being Prince) escaped in the road at St. Andero” turns a retrospectively minor incident from Charles I’s abortive courtship of the Infanta of Spain while Prince of Wales into a miniature heroic poem of 170 lines, imbedding a historical romance complimenting Henrietta Maria, who became the Infanta’s replacement in Charles’s state-marriage project. The slender plot of this occasion affords Waller the opportunity to celebrate both his royal master and Charles’s consort in language gracefully lifted and adapted from Torquato Tasso, Claudian, Ovid, Virgil, and Homer, and in a series of mythological allusions virtually all of which would be available to the least learned of his courtly audience.

The elevation of his subject in apt mythological applications and witty compliment was a task Waller evidently found congenial from the beginning of his poetic career. His first known publication had been a Latin epigram, “To the King, On His Return From Scotland,” which appeared in Rex Redux, a Cambridge collection congratulating Charles on his return from his coronation as king of Scotland at Edinburgh in 1633. Even in this slight effort, Waller’s characteristic manner is evident: balance, antithesis, witty paradox, an appeal to admiration or wonder (the characteristic baroque aesthetic), and, finally, an ironic questioning of the reader’s assumptions and acceptance of received notions. In translation it declares,

Wandering from his wonted seats, attended

with an unarmed troop of followers,

And bearing a single crown, Behold!

King Charles returns, circled

with two diadems at once:

Where naked pomp yields these things,

what will arms give?

To the final question, which rhetorically seems to confirm the superior power and worth of “arms” to “naked pomp,” a thoughtful answer might be, “what more could they give (that a beneficent and paternal monarch would wish to take)? What use of arms against a brother nation?” The pacific subtext is perfectly in keeping with Waller’s views throughout his long career, despite the fact that panegyric must often celebrate martial glory. A champion of Britain’s naval might, Waller obviously preferred that his country’s fleet should cow potential antagonists without the necessity of actual engagements. The only warfare he seems to have contemplated with unmixed enthusiasm, anachronistic as it may seem, was a crusade against the Turkish infidels.

During the 1630s Waller presumably wrote and polished his other political panegyrics commemorating and moralizing contemporary events of the reign of Charles I. “Of His Majesty’s receiving the news of the Duke of Buckingham’s death,” “Of Salle,” “To the King, on his navy,” and “Upon His Majesty’s repairing of Paul’s” comprise Waller’s contributions to Caroline Royalist panegyric. The occasion of the first mentioned was Charles’s reception of the news that his favorite and friend, George Villiers, first Duke of Buckingham, had been murdered by the knife of an assassin on August 23, 1628. The news was brought to the king while he was attending Morning Prayer, and he famously refrained from any reaction or show of emotion until the service was over, when he retired to his chamber and wept bitterly. Two notable conceits mark Waller’s commemoration of this display of heroic self-control. One, an allusion to a famous classical painting outdone by the king’s real-life self-possession, embodies the heightened connoisseurship and awareness of the visual arts and architecture of the Stuart court, both of which figure in many other poems early and late in Waller’s career. The other is a device complimenting Charles by awarding him an oxymoronic combination of virtues within one person that virtually identifies him with divinity: the poem in fact asserts that Charles’s behavior transcends the ancient pagan conceptions of the divine.

In a similar way, the poem in praise of Charles’s fleet engages in a glorification of military power that would delight the most chauvinistic advocate of English mastery of the sea, but the power and force praised are subordinated to peaceful ends: the suppression of piracy and the brutal rule that “Ships heretofore in seas like fishes sped, / The mighty still upon the smaller fed.” God allows Charles such invincible power because his piety and virtue assure that he will not misuse it.

Perhaps more flawed than either of the preceding panegyrics, but also more influential, was Waller’s poem “Upon His Majesty’s repairing of Paul’s.” In Harmony from Discords (1968), Brendan O. Hehir credits the influence of this poem in particular on the most famous topographical poem of the 17th century, Sir John Denham’s Cooper’s Hill (1642). Waller makes Charles’s continuation of his father’s project to repair, restore, and beautify the dilapidated structure of the cathedral in London an emblem of restoration and reformation of the church as an institution. However, it is a singular feature of the poem that, while the substance of its praise is couched in terms of concrete architectural accomplishments, most of the specific concrete detail in the poem consists of illustrative allusions, comparisons, images, and conceits, and the action of the king is presented either as an act of mind, or a kind of magnetic attraction that draws others to do what he conceives and wills. The reader is made to see vividly Amphion’s music causing the stones of Thebes to leap into place, Saint Paul shaking off the poisonous viper (an allusion to Acts), the aged oak relieved of the clinging ivy, the queen of Sheba moved to admiration of Solomon’s magnanimity and greatness figured in his fleet and temple, and Laomedon building the walls of Troy with the divine help of Neptune and Apollo; but in the poem’s 64 lines, only three architectural facts about the actual building of Saint Paul’s Cathedral are mentioned. The whole project is characterized, vaguely, by “beauty”: this reconstruction with stones and mortar is but

an earnest of his grand design,

To frame no new church, but the old refine;

Which, spouse-like, may with comely grace command,

More than by force of argument or hand.

For doubtful reason few can apprehend,

And war brings ruin where it should amend;

But beauty, with a bloodless conquest, finds

A welcome sovereignty in rudest minds.

These lines articulate Waller’s ethos as well as any he ever penned, speaking for his irenicism, his advocacy of a path of moderation, defending old tradition and established, civilized values, and identifying beauty with the good.

Such values faced hard going in the 1640s. From the opening skirmishes of the Long Parliament through his appeal for his life after the discovery of what has since been known as Waller’s Plot, the poet’s political position has seemed a mystery to some, a contradiction to others. His kinship to John Hampden, republican hero of resistance to the royal prerogative in the Ship-Money Case, as well as his position as a wealthy grandee and a member of Parliament, placed him in the center of the national crisis. Moderate though his views and instincts were, it was not a role from which he shrank. In the positions he adopted and the actions he undertook as a member of the Long Parliament, the pressures and interests of family, wealth, and status are easily traced. Waller sat for Amersham in both the Short Parliament (met April 13, 1640, dissolved before the end of May, the first Parliament to be held in eleven years), and the Long (met for the first time November 3, 1640). From the outset he participated vigorously in the attack on high-handed exercise of the royal prerogative. In July 1641 he delivered to the House of Lords the impeachment of Sir Francis Crawley, justice of the court of common pleas who in 1636 had been one of the twelve judges to endorse King Charles’s right to levy ship-money throughout England and had joined in sentencing Waller’s cousin John Hampden for his resistance to the ship-money as an illegal tax. Classically eloquent, full of apt illustrations from Roman history, patriotic scorn, and righteous indignation, Mr. Waller’s speech in Parliament was reported to have sold 20,000 copies in one day.

No friend to novel High Church views espoused by Laudian clerical meddlers in affairs of state, Waller steadfastly opposed radical innovation in the church, let alone in the social, political, and economic order; but he wished to reform the abuses of the ecclesiastical establishment, not root out the hierarchy. Waller’s positions were essentially moderate, centrist positions: he feared popular agitation, and the central recurring theme in the speeches and fragments of parliamentary discourse that have survived is the defense of the traditional order, and of the liberties and property of the subject. Increasing polarization of factions and the logic of events left no space in the middle for the moderate to work; like Hyde and Viscount Falkland, Waller—having started out to curb the threat represented by the arbitrary power of the king’s advisers, Thomas Wentworth, first Earl of Strafford, and Archbishop William Laud—found that John Pym and the high-flying partisans of parliamentary privilege and reform had become the real danger to the ancient constitution as he envisioned it.

Waller split with Pym’s leadership over the bill of attainder against Strafford, for which he was favorably noticed by friends of the king; but he was disciplined by the House of Commons on November 5, 1641 for comparing Pym’s counsel to Parliament to Strafford’s advice to the king. Whether or not he sent the king “a thousand broad pieces,” as alleged, when the king raised his standard at Nottingham, Waller continued to speak “upon all occasions with great sharpness and freedom” “against the sense and proceedings of the House,” according to Clarendon. After the parliamentary defeat at Edgehill, the Commons made Waller one of the parliamentary commissioners to treat with the king in February 1643. Within a few months, however, Waller was involved as a central figure, not in an official negotiation for peace, but a conspiracy.

It is impossible to trace the inception of what has come to be known as Waller’s Plot. On the mildest construction, the plot aimed simply to collect an influential and numerous party in the two houses and the city who would effectually resist arbitrary taxation and other measures in support of the war effort by Parliament, orchestrate focused verbal opposition, and effect a peaceful settlement, with restoration of the Crown and Crown rights. Waller was collecting names of the favorably disposed from parliamentary members; Nathaniel Tomkins, his brother-in-law, was performing the same function among the citizens. Other principals included Richard Chaloner, Tomkins’s friend, and Chaloner’s acquaintances, Algernon Percy, tenth Earl of Northumberland, and Jerome Weston, second Earl of Portland, and Lord Edward Conway and some of his noble connections. Waller was the chief conduit through which information traveled back and forth between the king and his advisers, notably Hyde and Falkland, in Oxford, and the plotters in London. However, eventual arrangements looked much more like plans for a coup de main than the scheme just outlined. On May 29, 1643 the London conspirators felt that they had their men and their plans in order. According to the modern editor of the poems, George Thorn-Drury, Waller drew up a declaration of the conspirators’ cause, which was to be printed and posted, proclaiming that the rising was “to maintain the true reformed Protestant Religion against all Papists and Sectaries, the Laws of the Land, Privilege of Parliament, and Liberty of the Subject, and to oppose all illegal Taxations, Assessments, and the like.” However, various indiscretions and leaks from those concerned in the plot had come to the attention of the authorities in London, and brought Waller and Tomkins under scrutiny. Pym took steps to get the whole story, then set about exposing the plot in the most sensational and alarming manner he could contrive, to be sure of winning over a frightened public.

Waller and Tomkins were arrested the night of May 31, 1643. The upshot of a committee investigation was Pym’s initiative on June 6 recommending that everyone in the government and clergy be made to swear to the Solemn League and Covenant. This loyalty oath in effect served as a Rubicon which, once passed, allowed no turning back from the divisive course of civil war and forced moderates in public positions to align themselves with the extremists or be branded themselves as seditious, factious subverters of the Protestant religion and English liberties. In a word, the outcome of the Royalist plot in which Waller had become involved assured that the kind of moderation and opposition to extreme courses he had always hitherto espoused would be made an impossible stance for any public man.

What promises or threats were presented to Waller by his interrogators we cannot know. Clarendon, Percival Stockdale, and Samuel Johnson are all as severe as the sternest moralist could wish in their judgments on Waller’s behavior. It was his betrayal of others who were complicit that provokes the strongest terms of reprobation. Tomkins and Chaloner, after trial by a military tribunal, were executed, hanged on July 5 in front of their own doors, Tomkins at the Holborn end of Fetter Lane, Chaloner in Cornhill. Tomkins, particularly, is recorded as having died with firmness and courage. The day before Tomkins and Chaloner were executed, Waller himself was brought before the bar of the House of Commons to say what he could in his own defense before being expelled from Parliament (the privileges of which protected him against prosecution while he was still a member) and remanded to a court-martial. In his apologia, Waller groveled and appealed to his judges’ interests in not setting too disgraceful and dangerous a precedent in the punishment of one of their own. He also attempted to save himself by hypocritically submitting to the spiritual assistance of nonconformist ministers, whose very language he in part adopted in his confession, and for whose “ghostly assistance” he appealed also by considerable presents and gifts. The leading members of the house were similarly solicited. Aubrey recorded that “He ... sold his Estate in Bedfordshire, about 1300 pounds per annum, to Dr. Wright, M.D., for about 10,000 pounds (much under value) which was procured in 24 hours time or els he had been hanged: With which money he Bribed the whole House, which was the first time a house of Commons was ever bribed.” Whether Waller actually bought the judgment of his peers for such staggering amounts, or not, his contemporaries apparently thought he had. Certainly Parliament was in great need of the money to recruit new troops. What Waller undeniably did buy—whether with his pathetic eloquence, his tactics of delay, his friends, or ready cash—was time, and thus eventually his life: after several preparations for court-martial, followed by interruptions and delay, finally, on September 23, 1644, a petition is recorded from “Edm. Waller, prisoner in the Tower” hoping that the house will accept his offer of payment of a fine of ten thousand pounds and banishment from the realm. This was the judgment in fact finally handed down on November 4, 1644, giving Waller 28 days from November 6 to leave England, not to return on pain of such punishment as both houses of Parliament should think fit. Thus ended the episode that, more than any other in his life, has caused posterity to heed his former friend Clarendon’s coldly damning summation of his character: Waller “preserved and won his life from those who were most resolved to take it, and in an occasion in which he ought to have been ambitious to have lost it.”

Aside from a handful of occasional pieces, Waller’s poems first found their way into print during his exile. Four editions came out in 1645. The first edition, published by Thomas Walkley, was unauthorized and solely the result of Walkley’s enterprising attempt to cash in on the notoriety of the recent parliamentary orator, principal in a state trial, and exile. Walkley’s title, The Workes of Edmond Waller Esquire, Lately a Member of the Honourable House of Commons, In this present Parliament, certainly seems to promise something more germane to current affairs than the title of Poems, &c., adopted by Humphrey Moseley in the subsequent editions of 1645. Walkley’s edition does include three previously printed parliamentary speeches, which the second Moseley edition omits. In any case, even had Waller been in England at the time, he would have thought that offering his own works like a common hack to a printer, as opposed to circulating them among his friends and acquaintances in manuscript, would compromise his social standing. Moreover, the considerable body of Royalist panegyric included would have done him no good with the currently ascendent party, though it might have gone some way toward redeeming him with the party he had renounced and condemned at his trial. Apparently Waller from exile or his representatives on the scene pressured Walkley, for he surrendered the unsold sheets of his edition to Humphrey Moseley, who immediately republished the very sheets printed by Walkley, uncorrected, with an entirely new title, two inserted leaves comprising new poems not in Walkley’s collection, and two leaves with a table of contents, as well as “An Advertisement to the Reader” warning that this edition corrects “an adulterate Copy, surreptitiously and illegally imprinted to the derogation of the Author, and the abuse of the Buyer.” Moseley also added in his edition a dedication “To my Lady,” which creates the impression that his text comes directly from a manuscript prepared by the poet for the unnamed lady. This edition by Moseley sold out immediately, and he set up another edition, omitting the speeches in Parliament and correcting the worst and most obvious printer’s errors from the edition inherited from Walkley. When this sold out, Moseley produced still another edition within the year 1645, with changed format and style, reduced page size, and including the speeches again. The warning to the reader was also retained, with the result that it now applied to Moseley’s own previous editions. It is worth reflecting on the impression that this publication would have made on the reading public. However disgraceful and cringing the poet’s behavior in the effort to save his life might appear, the image of Waller as a man who had cultivated the arts of civilized life, who had revered his king and queen, and who had suffered for his loyalty and commitments can only have been enhanced by the wide circulation of his poems so soon after he played so principal a role in the Royalist plot that bears his name.

Waller’s exile, as Gilbert has remarked, “was perhaps more an inconvenience than an ordeal.” Sometime before Waller left England, he had remarried, taking as his bride Mary Bresse, from a family of Thame, in Oxfordshire. He spent much of his time in Rouen, Normandy, where his daughter Margaret was born. She was his favorite daughter and became his amanuensis when grown. Only scattered vignettes survive from this period. Two letters remain to witness the correspondence between Waller and Thomas Hobbes. Waller offered to translate into English Hobbes’s De Cive (1642; translated, 1651), with which he was much impressed, but according to Aubrey, he asked Hobbes to make a trial of it first, and having seen Hobbes’s translation, “would not meddle with it, for that nobody els could doe it so well.” In 1646, leaving his wife in France, Waller traveled through Italy and Switzerland with John Evelyn, the connoisseur and diarist. At some time before 1658 he produced a loose translation of lines 455 to 585 of book 4 of the Aeneid, completing or perfecting the work begun by his friend from Great Tew, “Little Sid” (Sidney Godolphin), another casualty of the Civil War. The translation was published by Humphrey Moseley in 1658 as The Passion of Dido for Æneas. As it is Imcomparably exprest in the Fourth Book of Virgil. It was reprinted in 1679.

By the end of 1649 Waller and his wife had settled in Paris, where, in contrast to the poverty and distress of most of the Royalist exiles, he reportedly kept the most sumptuous table among the English exiles after Henry Jermyn, who was Henrietta Maria’s de facto prime minister and favorite. Aubrey reports Waller’s assertion that he had dined with Pierre Gassendi and René Descartes, as well as Hobbes, at the table of the “Lord Marquisse of Newcastle,” William Cavendish, who was, on Waller’s testimony, patron to all three. Waller had taken his new wife’s jewels into exile and sold them off to support his by no means abstemious lifestyle, which brought him to the point that, he joked to friends and acquaintances, “he was at last come to the Rump Jewel.” Machinery was set in motion (it is not clear exactly how; early biographers asserted that his sister’s husband, Col. Adrian Scroope, interceded for him with Cromwell), and on November 27, 1651 the House of Commons responded to “the humble petition of Edmond Waller” by revoking his sentence of banishment and ordering a pardon to be prepared for him. On January 13, 1652 he took his leave of Evelyn in Paris, and by August, living on his diminished fortune in a house he built at Hall-barn, he was settled back near his mother, who continued to live at Beaconsfield until her death in April of 1653. Waller’s depleted resources, according to Stockdale, still produced fifteen hundred pounds a year. He ingratiated himself with his distant kinsman, the lord protector, writing in 1652, the year of his return to England, perhaps his best political poem, A Panegyrick to My Lord Protector, of the present greatness and joynt interest of His Highness, and this nation (1655), a production which has given his subsequent biographers, mostly orthodox Royalists, considerable trouble and indignation, as they must allow the poetic art while condemning the sentiments. Waller seems to have sincerely admired the protector’s abilities and character.

In addition to the Panegyrick to My Lord Protector, Waller wrote two other poems voicing views favorable to the protector’s government, or promoting his success and greatness: “Of a War with Spain, and a Fight at Sea,” and Upon the Late Storme and of the death of His Highnesse ensuing the same (1658), an elegy on the death of Cromwell. All three were suppressed in editions of Waller’s works published after the Restoration. All three also share with several of the poems written before the fall of the monarchy and with speeches delivered throughout Waller’s parliamentary career a highly developed interest in England’s sea power as the chief means to her greatness. Perhaps in recognition of this interest, Waller was appointed one of the commissioners for trade in December 1655. His Panegyrick to My Lord Protector articulates an essentially Hobbesian political philosophy, in which Cromwell’s sovereignty is justified, not by abstract right, but by the interest of all the ruled in the suppression of anarchy and civil war. Waller blandly adopts some of the standard tropes of prerevolutionary Royalist panegyric, including the oxymoronic union of opposites in the character of the ruler, and finally borrows the analogy with Augustus which had been so dear to the Stuart kings earlier in the century:

As the vexed world, to find repose, at last

Itself into Augustus’ arms did cast;

So England now does, with like toil oppressed,

Her weary head upon your bosom rest.

When he turns to direct narration of a battle-piece, in “Of a War with Spain, and a Fight at Sea,” Waller celebrates virtue, love, courage, and generosity of spirit in friend and foe alike and deplores the human cost of war, as emphasized by the title of the broadside version, A Lamentable Narration of the sad Disaster of a great part of the Spanish Plate-Fleet that perished neare St. Lucas (dated in manuscript on the title page “April 13, 1658”). The poem is most memorable for the way the baroque excess, with which the deaths of the enemy marquis (Don Francisco Lopez de Zuniga, Marquis de Baydes) and his wife are described, is balanced by the homely moralization occasioned by the pity their deaths and their children’s fate evoke in their enemies. It was reprinted, incorrectly described as “that never till now published & incomparable Poem of the English Virgil of our times, Mr. Edmund Waller,” in Samuel Carrington’s History of the Life and Death of his most Serene Highness, Oliver, Late Lord Protector, in 1659.

On September 3, 1658, in actuality the third day after the great storm his elegists took according to the pathetic fallacy as nature’s lament for the passing of so great a man, the lord protector died. Waller’s poem on the occasion, Upon the Late Storme and of the death of His Highnesse ensuing the same, was “Printed for H.H.” as a broadside in 1658 and as one of Three poems Upon the Death of his late Highnesse Oliver Lord Protector of England, Scotland, & Ireland, printed by William Wilson in 1659. The other contributors to the latter publication were John Dryden and Thomas Sprat, who was later historian of the Royal Society. In Waller’s poem Cromwell’s end is compared to that of Romulus, the founder of Rome; the trees of his funeral pyre and glory of his deeds suggest Hercules. The highest praise is given to Cromwell’s expansion of English power through the command of the ocean, and his uniting of Britons to direct their warlike energies on foreign foes:

The ocean, which so long our hopes confined,

Could give no limits to his vaster mind;

Our bounds’ enlargement was his latest toil,

Nor hath he left us prisoners to our isle;

Under the tropic is our language spoke,

And part of Flanders hath received our yoke.

From civil broils he did us disengage,

Found nobler objects for our martial rage;

And with wise conduct, to his country showed

Their ancient way of conquering abroad.

The protector’s death precipitated a succession crisis: no adequate mechanism for the transition in power had been devised by the Protectorate. Cromwell’s mantle was wishfully handed down to his son, Richard, anyway, but “Tumbledown Dick” proved quite inadequate to the task, and resigned. With enthusiastic demonstrations of relief, the nation threw itself at the feet of Charles II, who landed at Dover on May 25, 1660, brought back by the army led by Gen. George Monck. Waller, like Dryden, who had also lamented the death of the lord protector, hastened into print a poem, To the King, upon His Majesties happy return (1660). An altogether slighter poem than Waller’s efforts for the lord protector, this piece occasioned the most famous witty reply of Waller’s career. When Charles twitted Waller on having written for him a poem much inferior to his panegyric for the usurper, Waller replied without hesitation, “Poets, Sire, succeed better in fiction than in truth.”

As usual, Waller landed on his feet, for his conversation and pleasing manners ingratiated him in the Carolean court, a society of wits and elegant ladies who imagined themselves as embodying the pinnacle of polish, elegance, and style. According to the anonymous 1711 “Account of the Life and Writings,” Waller dabbled in writing for the theater, and “had a hand in the Rehearsal with Mr. Clifford, Mr. Cowley, and some other Wits” at a stage in its development when it was conceived as a mock commentary on several plays, before Buckingham turned it into a burlesque play itself (1672). Waller particularly valued Pierre Corneille’s plays, joining Charles Sackville and others in translating Corneille’s Mort de Pompée (1642) as Pompey the Great (1664).

The 1664 edition of Poems, &c., which claims to be the first authorized edition, closed with two lines from Horace’s epistles voicing Waller’s intention to hang up his harp and devote his life solely to serious matters. Nevertheless, as his 18th-century editor Elijah Fenton puts it, “he soon relaps’d into poetry” and continued to write verse to the end of his life. Workmanlike but uninspiring occasional pieces make up the bulk of the later compositions, and the graceful Cavalier love lyrics almost entirely disappear (appropriately enough, in Waller’s sense of decorum, for a poet nearing 60). Two poems written after the Restoration, however, deserve a place among Waller’s best panegyrics. One, On the Park at St. Jamese’s (1660), is a skillful instance of the topographic poem. In 1665 Waller set about the other, a composition of his own in a new genre he had commended in 1658, in lines “To His Worthy Friend, Sir Thos. Higgons, upon the Translation of ‘The Venetian Triumph.’” These were commendatory verses to an English rendering of the poem by Giovanni Francesco Busenello purporting to direct the painter Pietro Liberi in executing a panoramic heroic portrayal of the Venetians’ recent naval victory over the Turks. Waller’s effort in this genre was Instructions to a painter, for the drawing of a picture of the state and posture of the English forces at sea (1665). Through the neglect or ineptitude of James, Duke of York, who failed to follow up the success at Lowestoft commemorated in the 1666 edition of the poem, the fruits of victory were lost. Events following the battle exposed both the poor maintenance and preparation of the English fleet and leadership that was incompetent or worse. More even than most panegyrics, Waller’s Instructions to a painter was clearly seen as having excluded and glossed over facts that did not fit its vividly described heroic vision—as having succeeded “better in fiction than in truth.” Consequently, the poem proved a fruitful provocation of imitations, the majority of them satiric, of which Andrew Marvell wrote the best, The last Instructions to a Painter. What this particular episode tells about the fate of the poet as Pollyanna may, like Waller’s choice of “Sacharissa” to designate his poetic mistress, reveal a major problem in his poetic achievement. The very politeness, the persistent optimism and unfailing pleasantness that we are told characterized his conversation and social manner ultimately weaken the picture of the world he presents in his verse.

Such considerations did nothing to abate Waller’s popularity with his contemporaries. His Poems, &c., went through ten editions by the end of the century. The second part of Mr. Waller’s poems was published twice in 1690 and then incorporated in editions of Poems, &. in 1705, 1711, 1712, and 1722. Divine Poems came out in 1685. Meanwhile, the poet was elected a member of the newly formed Royal Society and dabbled as a gentleman dilettante in questions concerning the habits of toads, the infections of sage, the growth in his beech woods, verjuice as a sauce, and the sound and heat of a candle burning in the socket of an iron candlestick. After the plague in 1665, however, Waller’s connection with the society was negligible, and he was probably retained on the books as a member simply because of his wealth, court connections, and prominence as a poet and member of Parliament.

After the Restoration, Waller once again served in the House of Commons, representing Hastings in the Long Parliament of Charles II (1661 to 1679), remaining a member until the time of his death. He delighted in adopting the role of Nestor, lecturing his younger colleagues on the customs, rules, and practices of the house, and recalling for their edification instructive instances from his experiences before the revolution. The Whig bishop Gilbert Burnet in his History of My Own Times (1724, 1734) reported that “Waller was the delight of the House: and even at eighty he said the liveliest things of any among them.” Burnet added, “He was only concerned to say that which should make him applauded. But he never laid the business of the House to heart, being a vain and empty, tho’ a witty, man.” Nevertheless, Burnet does implicitly include Waller among “the chief men who preserved the nation from a very deceitful and practising court, and from a corrupt House of Commons.” Waller persistently spoke on religious affairs in favor of toleration, unity, and moderation, the old broad church principles of Great Tew. He particularly defended toleration of the Quakers, a sect which was the object of much fear and persecution at the time. In secular affairs he urged the king to rely on Parliament and Englishmen to concentrate on government, the fleet, and trade. He served after the Restoration on the Councils of Trade and Foreign Plantations, but failed in his pursuit of the provostship of Eton College, for which he appealed to royal favor when it became vacant in 1665. Clarendon, who was keeper of the Great Seal, refused to put the seal to the grant, on the grounds that the provost of Eton had to be in holy orders. Waller repaid his fellow alumnus of Falkland’s “college” at Great Tew by taking a leading part in the impeachment of Chancellor Clarendon in the late summer and fall of 1667.

On the death of his second wife, who was buried on May 2, 1677 at Beaconsfield, Waller retired from society to his house at Hall-barn for a time, disconsolate, and would not even receive his great friend Saint-Evremond; but he soon returned to his accustomed roles as gracious host and favorite guest. When James II succeeded his brother, Charles II, Waller continued to enjoy the royal presence, and wrote two panegyric poems, “A Presage of the Ruin of the Turkish Empire. Presented to His Majesty on his Birthday” and “To His Majesty, upon his Motto, Beati Pacifici, occasioned by the taking of Buda, 1686,” in both of which he urges James to use the warlike virtues he demonstrated as duke of York to unite the European Christian powers, end internecine strife, and launch a crusade to free Greece and the Holy Land from the Ottoman yoke. It would appear that Edward Fairfax’s Jerusalem Delivered (1600) influenced his ideas, as well as his versification. He was probably aware of the negotiations that resulted in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, bringing in William of Orange as king, with Mary, James’s sister, as joint ruler. However, having learned well the lesson of Waller’s Plot, the aged poet is reported to have warned his people to have nothing to do with the plots and plans until the prince of Orange had actually landed in England. His purported advice about when to declare one’s change of allegiance was successfully followed by his son and heir.

In his last years Waller spent more and more time among the woods and prospects of his property in Buckinghamshire. Past age 80, his thoughts turned more and more to pious reflections. In an era characterized by Dryden as “lubrique and adult’rate,” Waller’s poetry had been throughout unusually chaste and decorous. Knightly Chetwood, in his “Life of Virgil,” which prefixed Dryden’s translation of Virgil’s works (1697), cites Virgil’s belief that poetry should teach virtue, and parallels “the Principle too of our Excellent Mr. Waller, who us’d to say that he wou’d raze any Line out of his Poems, which did not imply some Motive to Virtue.” Waller resolved, however, that the last activity of his pen should be explicitly pious, and produced six cantos “Of Divine Love” and two “Of Divine Poesy,” in addition to two poems occasioned by a verse paraphrase of the Lord’s Prayer written by his neighbor, Anne Wharton, and the pious sentiments recorded in “Of the Last Verses in the Book.” These efforts occasioned Dr. Samuel Johnson’s strictures in The Lives of the English Poets (1779–1781) that “poetical devotion cannot often please.” Nevertheless, one or two passages from the lines written by the octogenarian poet have continued to be quoted with particular approval by his commentators. Especially fine is the conceit in “Of the Last Verses,” in which Waller looks forward to his bodily dissolution:

Clouds of affection from our younger eyes

Conceal that emptiness which age descries.

The soul’s dark cottage, battered and decayed,

Lets in new light through chinks that time has made;

Stronger by weakness, wiser men become,

As they draw near to their eternal home.

Leaving the old, both worlds at once they view,

That stand upon the threshold of the new.

Waller had bought a small house at Coleshill, his birthplace, in the hope of dying there; according to Thorn-Drury, he said, “A stagge, when he is hunted, and neer spent, always returns home.” In the summer of 1687, finding his legs beginning to swell, he sought out Sir Charles Scarborough, the king’s physician. Informed, “Why sir, your blood will run no longer,” Waller reportedly repeated some lines out of Virgil suitable to the situation, and went home to Hall-barn to die. He received the sacrament surrounded by his children, and died on October 21, 1687; he was buried in Beaconsfield churchyard. Saint-Evremond, Sir Robert Cotton, Sir Thomas Higgons, Aphra Behn, George Granville, Thomas Rymer, and others contributed to Poems to the Memory of That Incomparable Poet Edmond Waller, a memorial volume published in 1688; Rymer wrote the Latin epitaph for the monument erected in 1700 in Beaconsfield, placing Waller “easily first among the poets of his day.”

Aubrey had called Waller “one of the first refiners of our English language and Poetrey.” The high opinion of Waller’s importance continued for over half a century after his death. The fashionable men and women of mode depicted in the Restoration plays of Sir George Etherege and William Congreve quote Waller with fluent ease; Dryden habitually praised Waller’s “sweetness” as his defining characteristic and remarked that “he first made writing easily an art”; he further asserted that the great Elizabethans could show “nothing so even, sweet, and flowing, as Mr. Waller,” and added, “unless he had written, none of us could write.” Alexander Pope repeated Dryden’s characterization of Waller as “even, sweet, and flowing,” and Denham as “majestic” and “correct” when he praised “the easy vigor of a line, / Where Denham’s strength and Waller’s sweetness join.” The author of the anonymous life published in 1711 declared that “Mr. Waller was certainly the Father of our English Versification.” Johnson pronounced less sweepingly that “it cannot be denied that he added something to our elegance of diction, and something to our propriety of thought.” Later critics took these judges at their word, and when the neatness and artifice of the neoclassical couplet fell into disfavor, Waller’s stock, too, fell. Later 19th-century literary scholars spent a good deal of time trying to make out just exactly what Waller’s contribution to the development of the heroic couplet had been, an enterprise that has continued into our own day.

Clearly pentameter couplets, even some closed pentameter couplets, had been written in English back to Geoffrey Chaucer’s time. Ben Jonson had a marked predilection for rhymed couplets, and Sir John Beaumont, George Sandys, and Waller’s declared model and inspiration, Fairfax’s Jerusalem Delivered, had all used closed couplets that were occasionally as metrically correct, balanced, and pointed as Waller’s. In fact, Waller’s contribution was not strictly a refinement of prosody in isolation from rhetoric, but rather smoothness of number combined with simplicity, clarity, and neatness of diction, and a rhetorical economy that highlighted emphasis, wit, and a peculiar combination of poignancy and irony. His early admirers often cite the propriety of his diction, and mention more frequently than any other rhetorical feature of his verse his adept use of the “turn,” a term that, as used by Waller and his contemporaries, seems to cover a range of tropes and figures, from antimetabole through ploce and polyptoton to a broader identification of a “turn” with a “trope”—a figure that changes the meaning of a word and appeals not only to the ear, but also to the intellect. What distinguishes Waller and evoked the praise of his contemporaries and successors is the way all the elements in his poetry cohere: he avoids the vulgar as well as the pedantic or arcane; his allusions, comparisons, and mythopoesis are invariably familiar but apt and uniformly elevating; and he balances with grace and neatness the gallantry of his address in his lyrics. Finally central to the tone of his verse is an objectivity, conveyed in his cool mastery of all these elements, that may shade into a slight hint of irony.

Waller was quite conscious of the nature, purposes and functions, and effects of art, even when ostensibly writing about something else. He has several poems that address the art of poetry specifically, which, taken together, provide a clearer picture of his own conception of his enterprise. In both Henry Lawes and “Upon the Earl of Roscommon’s Translation of Horace,” Waller asserts that harmonious sound is central to the ability of poetry to move its audience. Thus the music of poetry is inextricably intertwined with its power to persuade and instruct in virtue, as the myths of Orpheus and Amphion attest. Orphic song is not lightly achieved, as Waller’s “Prologue to the Maid’s Tragedy” (1690) reiterates. When he calls there for “patience ... to cultivate our thoughts,” Waller preaches what was apparently his own practice of laborious polishing. The air of spontaneous facility about Waller’s verse would seem to have been the effect of effort, conscious art, and the studious application of censoring judgment. In “Upon the Earl of Roscommon’s Translation of Horace,” Waller cautions that

Though poets may of inspiration boast,

Their rage, ill-governed, in the clouds is lost.

He that proportioned wonders can disclose,

At once his fancy and his judgment shows.

Chaste moral writing we may learn from hence,

Neglect of which no wit can recompense.

The poet’s commitment to the labor of perfecting his medium and polishing his performance is particularly affecting in view of his skeptical awareness, not perhaps of shifts in taste, but of linguistic change, which erodes that very medium. In his lines “Of English Verse,” he shares the anxiety of Dryden over the lack of fixity in English, and the rapid linguistic change in the living language that defaces the poet’s meaning:

But who can hope his lines should long

Last in a daily changing tongue?

While they are new, envy prevails;

And as that dies, our language fails.

.............................

Poets that lasting marble seek,

Must carve in Latin, or in Greek;

We write in sand, our language grows,

And, like the tide, our work o’erflows.

The reader familiar with both the Cavalier and the Metaphysical verse of Waller’s immediate predecessors and near contemporaries will still find pleasure in recognizing familiar themes and conventions handled always in Waller’s particularly polite, elegant, smooth, and coolly distant manner. Waller’s economy and felicity in rhyming create the simplicity and directness of “Go, Lovely Rose!,” which surely must be one of the most subdued evocations of the carpe diem theme from the period. The poem, articulating a situation from courtship or seduction, paradoxically achieves an almost perfect impersonality:

Small is the worth

Of beauty from the light retired;

Bid her come forth,

Suffer herself to be desired,

And not blush so to be admired.

The rueful recognition of “How small a part of time they share / That are so wondrous sweet and fair!” applies pressure only to come forth and be the cynosure of admiring eyes, not specifically to accept a lover’s importunity. A similar sense of the evanescence of youth and beauty, the changeability of the heart’s affections, and the imperative to seize the present moment informs the more direct invitation “To Phyllis,” which urges that even if youth and beauty would stay, “Love hath wings, and will away.” Such mutability, indeed, is not unmixed with blessings for the experienced lover and his no less veteran mistress; ask no questions about those loved yesterday or what tomorrow may bring, “For the joys we now may prove, / Take advice of present love.” Among Waller’s other Caroline lyrics, “To a Very Young Lady” (“To my young Lady Lucy Sidney” in the 1645 edition) may be compared to Marvell’s “To Little T.C., in a Prospect of Flowers” or “Young Love” for the central conceit (Waller’s poem turns on the expression of abstract ideas and relationships, Marvell’s on more concrete, specific images and conceits). Waller’s “A la Malade,” to a lady in ill health, is less frigid in its conceits than Thomas Carew’s “Upon the Sickness of E.S.,” and in its last 10 lines it achieves an extraordinary mingling of delicacy, voyeurism, desolation, and spiritual exaltation at the near approach of death.

Other lyrics that gracefully address conventional themes include “To a Lady in a Garden” (“To a Lady in retirement” in the 1645 edition), which is closer to Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” than most Waller lyrics, but still lacks both the wildly farfetched imaginative reach of the former’s opening conceits, and the emotional urgency and violence of its climactic appeal; and “For Drinking of Healths,” a decidedly well-bred and decorous championing of old social tradition in comparison to Robert Herrick’s and Jonson’s light-hearted poems on sack (Waller was reportedly a teetotaler). Also suggesting models and inspiration like Herrick’s are two lyrics often favorably cited even by those Romantic and Victorian critics who severely deprecate Waller: “On a Girdle” and “Behold the Brand of Beauty Tossed.” The first belongs among poems celebrating an object or intimate article of apparel belonging to the beloved; in Waller’s changes of his verbs from the present tense to the past in revising from the 1645 edition, he subtly shifts the implied context to suggest a celebration of the trophy of an achieved conquest. In the second, Waller displays much more metrical variety and virtuosity than usual in a form that recalls some of Jonson’s stanzaic experiments, such as “A Celebration of Charis: 4. Her Triumph” or his “Song. ‘Slow, slow, fresh fount.’”

In “An apology for having loved before,” Waller builds his poem on a smoothly polished elaboration of an apology John Donne made “To the Countess of Salisbury” for having perhaps praised other potential patronesses in language much resembling what he then applied to her. In his “Song: Stay, Phoebus, Stay,” Waller’s clinching argument for the lady being the only thing worth looking at under the sun impresses into service the Copernican theory, though Waller’s handling of this characteristically “Metaphysical” conceit is so smooth and polished and translucent that few reading it would think of Donne, much less John Cleveland. If one characteristic of Metaphysical poetry is the display of wit in definition and dialectic, the poem “To Amoret: ‘Fair! that you may truly know’” affords as elegantly discriminated and aptly illustrated a definition of the kinds of love a man may owe two different women as may be found among the poems of the period. Waller’s “Epitaph on the Lady Sedley” is a perfect Jonsonian commemoration of a virtuous exemplar. In an occasional piece like “The Fall,” Waller ventures just to the boundary of the risqué, but is not so ill-bred as to follow Carew, Richard Lovelace, or Sir John Suckling and venture over; of poems such as “Of a Tree Cut in Paper” or “To a Lady, from whom he received a silver pen,” occasioned by the trivial events of social intercourse, the reader can judge whether or not such memorialization of the mundane and trifling is or is not an appropriate province for poetry—though a knowledge of the concerns of some contemporary verse may make one less inclined to enter fully into Johnson’s high-serious censure that “of these petty compositions, neither the beauties or faults deserve much attention,” or that in the love poetry, “little things are made too important,” so that “such books ... may be considered as shewing the world under a false appearance.”

If Waller shows the world under a false appearance, it is owing to his relentless determination to employ his muse in the praise of virtue, beauty, and nobility, and in the glorification of the interests and endeavors of his nation. While his elegant compliments are sometimes tinged with the irony of disillusioned worldliness and his generally upbeat tone not seldom modulates into a sweet melancholy, for him the proper function of poetry was praise, not blame.

The Muses’ friend, unto himself severe,

With silent pity looks on all that err;

But where a brave, a public action shines,

That he rewards with his immortal lines.

Whether it be in council or in fight,

His country’s honour is his chief delight;