‘The burning Babe’ is probably the only poem most readers will know of Robert Southwell’s. I recall reading it as a child; it seemed pleasantly atmospheric to a childish imagination, the holy Babe appearing like a bright bauble against the dark of a snowy English Christmas evening. It is homely, yet cryptic in the Elizabethan style, and blessedly short, a silly sentimental thing that manages, apparently on these merits, to make its way into most anthologies of the English poetic canon. It came as something of a shock to me as an undergraduate to learn that Ben Jonson, with his...

Rome was the centre of Southwell’s world. Here his writing matured and took on its colours and textures; but, whatever his immature expectations, he soon found that Rome was not Paradise. Beauties it may have owned, but angers and enmities abounded, too, in the city built among the ruins of an earthly empire whose language was its most lasting monument, and the lingua of Southwell’s college years. Southwell’s Latin poetry has had little airing to date, but it expresses the texture and tone of that whole experience. Latin, or the experience of Rome itself, formed Southwell’s idiolect, his personal dialect,...

In Southwell’s Latin poem on the Assumption of the Virgin, Gabriel appears in the court presided over by God to speak for the Virgin against the powers of the Underworld. The counsel for the prosecution, Death, enraged by Christ’s usurpation of her rule over humanity, is described in horrid detail, her mellifluous speech in stark contrast to her physical foulness. Gabriel, on the other hand, is only message: his words speak for him, he is little else but Word.² Hidden or obscured within Southwell’s poem are truths about Truth, about his Church, and about Southwell himself. If the nature of...

The opening prayer of the IgnatianSpiritual Exercisesbegan ‘O good Jesus hear me; Within thy wounds hide me’.² Southwell’s training had been designed to fit him for a vocation that promised to realise to the full the imaginary sharing of Christ’s agonies encouraged in theExercises. After 1586, Southwell’s writing is full of that new understanding. In the days immediately before entry into England, he had written of his fears about what lay ahead. He acknowledged Acquaviva’s comparison between the missioners and sacrificial lambs, going open-eyed to his death, and asking for prayers to help him ‘play His part’...

Entering England in 1586, Southwell had met with communities feeling the loss of old, familiar agencies, the active interventions once supplied by prayer now less able to offer comfort in the daily battle against doubt and anxiety. He may have arrived to take the angel’s part but he was also trained in suiting his imagery to the immediate situation, and angelic agency and how he offers it up to his English readers is a case in point; Gabriel could come as himself to a Virgin freely submissive to the will of God, but Raphael had to bring help in disguise....

English courtly poetry had entered the 1580s in somewhat wintry condition. Spenser’sShepheardes Calenderbegan with January’s ‘frostie ground’ and ‘frosen trees’, reflecting, in pastoral fashion, the ‘carefull case’ of the rustic lyricist-protagonist, the ‘barrein ground, whome winters wrath hath wasted’ being ‘made a myrrhour, to behold [his] plight’. Tottel’sMiscellany, the pattern book for courtly poets, also began with a winter poem by the noble Howard in which the poet describes himself frozen with sorrow despite the springing season.² All for love unreturned, or hope blighted.

Southwell would say that this was an accurate reflection of England’s fallen state....

Two years into the English mission, as the two Jesuits struggled to contain the multiple hopes and agendas of the English with whom they came into contact whilst never losing sight of the orders of their superiors, something changed which left them strung uncomfortably between two polarities. After the attempt on England of the Armada in 1588, the courtly Heywoodian compromise became an impossibility. On 5 November, as if to underline the alteration, Persons was put in charge not only of Englishmen supporting the Spanish forces in the Low Countries but of the Jesuits working in England too: he was...

Southwell could be forgiven for thinking that appeals to other English poets to better their aims were not having much immediate effect. There was a new literary interest in the idea of England/Albion and its poets, and Sidney’s translations of Christian works were in print, but so were his lovesick sonnets, and it was not a Catholic England being envisaged by the poets, not even in some cases a moral one. Southwell had vocalised aspects of his ministry through Peter, Magdalen, Joseph, and David; the voices of the executed Scottish Queen and English Fortuna had been ventriloquised to address those...

How can one individual exist in both flame and stream? Those aspects of Southwell’s life and work visited by this book, the importation in metaphor of sacred imagery and sacraments, his pedagogic use of the reader’s poetic apprehension, and those all-informing paradoxes of violent care and self preserving self-destruction, as disparate as they seem, all fold together in the person of Southwell himself, and in the last physical act of his life. Southwell’s ministry, his correspondence, his sermons, his poetry were all predicated upon his wish to be dissolved in Christ. From the private self-identifications with Christ crucified of his...