Parenthetical numerical references are to the lines of the poem. Endnotes are in brackets.
A purely libertine poem is possible, but it must be very short. [1] With even modest amplitude, the complexities, ambiguities, ambivalences, and mysteries of Eros will almost inevitably emerge, often with little regard for the author’s conscious intention. The libertinism of Thomas Carew’s “A Rapture,” which attracted opprobrium as well as readers since its composition, is justified by an argument for enthusiastic utopian free love, yet the poem is laced with contradictions. Its joyful sensual hedonism is broken by nastiness and self-doubt, and the females who appear at times as independent sexual agents seem at others mere passive commodities. Such incongruities are part of the very structure of the poem which mixes literary genres in a continual play with reader expectations. [2]
Carew embodied the Cavalier values expressed in the carpe diem poems of Herrick, Suckling, and Lovelace. [3] He was himself a courtier, holding offices such as server or “taster in ordinary” to the king, though his behavior was not shaped by a wish to avoid scandal. His reputation as a rake and a wit was well enough, but his excesses went beyond those typical of the privileged of the day. Thoughts of reform may well have come to him once his health was failing. The Earl of Clarendon noted that "after fifty years of life spent with less severity and exactness than it ought to have been, he died with the greatest remorse for that licence.” [4]
However that may be, “A Rapture” seems at first glance an assertive defense of free love. It is difficult to mistake the antinomianism of some of Carew’s lines.
All things are lawful there, that may delight
Nature or unrestrained appetite ;
(111-112)
We only sin when Love's rites are not done.
(114)
His claim is not merely that all is permitted; he further insists that bliss and blessedness are certain to result. This is the central significance of the equation between sexual experience and paradise, figured as a blissful shore (9), a heavenly spot occupied by “blest shades” (24), where choirs sing paeans to the “deity of love” (47); love makes, in fact, Elysium (2 and 110). The woman is as enthusiastic as the man; she is, after all “free” (20 and 150), they both have “necks unyoked.” (151). He refers to “our joys” (147) as wholly mutual. He uses political language, saying that he can enjoy her body because he is “enfranchised.” (29), that those who accept conventional morality are slaves to a tyrant (144) who has usurped (150) the place that should belong to Beauty and Nature (26).
The liberty and equality of the couple is problematized, however, by the poet’s imagery. All the elaborately pretty accoutrements of the locus amoenus cannot conceal the fact that the lady is most passive. She is an ivory carving (30), a thing of snow (28, 72) and gold (28). It may be commonplace to call one’s beloved a “treasure” (32, 56), but Carew’s financial language goes further. She is a “mine” (33), potential children are “coinage” (35), the regrets of those who had been modest become their payment of “double rent” to “Love's exchequer” (146).
He manages even a few acrobatic image systems in which the female is twice passive. She is the sea (81) and yet she is also the harbor (87), while he, the ship, moves through both. In another passage women are at first flowers, rose, violet, and others (63-64) visited by the active male bee and then Celia is the beehive to which the active bee returns (78).
Mythological references allow writers to introduce complexes of narrative, often elaborated in meaning by a history of usage, with a single word. Carew’s are curiously at cross purposes with the trajectory of his argument. [5] He cites Danae, Daphne, and Lucrece as though they were women who notoriously enjoyed passionate love, though all were raped while seeking to avoid sexual contact, as well as Penelope, legendary for fidelity to her long-absent husband, and Laura, Petrarch’s highly idealized love. The inevitable effect of these references, after an initial quizzical surprise, is to undermine Carew’s contention that sex makes all things well.
The conclusion of the poem undercuts the ostensible theme most dramatically. Though “Honour” and morality in various forms had been ridiculed at the outset as a bugaboo and imposter one might readily ignore. The malevolent giant returns however (154 ff.), reminding Carew that he would be honor-bound under certain circumstances to fight a duel, despite the disapproval of the church. Here he does not question social convention, but assumes he would have no choice but to ignore Christian teaching in favor of his culture’s expectations. With suddenness and drama he equates that dilemma with his lady’s free sexual practice, calling her by the same name the most conservative prig might use: “whore” (166). The reader must feel very far indeed from Elysium. [6]
Surely it is unlikely that the author is clumsily attempting Celia’s seduction while unaware of the ambiguities, nor does it work as a cynical display of self-interest whose very incongruities make it the more amusing. One doubts that Carew is simply confused, except in the sense that we all are confused. Surely each of the positions suggested by the poem has a sort of truth. Doubtless Carew did fantasize at times that he might occupy a prelapsarian paradise with unlimited orgasms for all, while on other occasions he felt the notoriety that reminded him he did not live in Elysium. He may well have felt respect and concern for the wishes of one woman at one time, while thoughtlessly wishing to take possession of another. His jumble of literary genres and his self-defeating use of allusion are among the signs that he was well aware of his own contradictions. Not knowing what else to make of them, he made a nicely turned poem.
1. The same is true of a poem of unadulterated "romantic" love.
2. A critic has delineated the role of “pastoral, Ovidian epyllion, carpe diem seduction lyric, [and] elegiac couplets.” See Laura Alexander Linker’s “Goblins of Desire: Carew's Libertine Women in ‘A Rapture’" CEA Critic vol. 69, no. 3 (spring and summer 2007), pp. 1-12.
3. Metaphysicals and cavaliers were not always as clearly distinguished in life as in reductive histories. Donne, from whom Carew borrowed much, was court preacher to Charles I during Carew’s service there and Carew had earlier spent time in the service of Baron Herbert of Cherbury, George Herbert’s brother. His use of the name Celia and his smooth and melodious lines suggest affinities with Jonson and the Cavaliers, while his use of elegiac and heroic couplets foreshadows neo-Classicism. “A Rapture” is most clearly influenced by Volpone III, ii and Donne’s Elegy XIX.
4. Earl of Clarendon, Life and Continuation.
5. The point is thoroughly developed in Laura Alexander Linker’s excellent essay cited in note 2.
6. Moderns would be even more outraged to read Carew’s “The Second Rapture” in which he declares that wealth, honor, family, long life, all are mere “shadows of felicity” when compared with a “wench about thirteen,” though, to be sure, she should be already experienced, “Already voted to the queen/
Of lust and lovers.”
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