The Poetry of Prior by Matthew Prior

First published:Poems, 1709

Critical Evaluation:

Many of the poems of Matthew Prior are in the pastoral mode: the poet adopts the age-old pretense of being a shepherd who sings, with rustic honesty, of the fortunes and misfortunes of his love. The woman appears as reluctant shepherdess in the pastoral convention, and the poet as a lovesick swain. Such poems as “Love and Friendship: A Pastoral” invoke a vocabulary familiar to early eighteenth century poetry of this kind. The poem, like others by Prior and his contemporaries, begins with a description of the natural setting, the fields and skies of the rural landscape. A mood is the object of the description, and night is chosen as the fit time to discourse on love and hope. A great part of the poem is devoted to the “charms” of the lady—the rest to their effect on the imagination of the swain. Other minor poems, like “To a Lady,” attempt to reinvigorate the ancient poetic metaphor of love as war. The woman is the “victor” and the lover is the “slave.” The poem is, of course, an invitation to love; it finds its central expression when it describes the woman who “triumphs, when She seems to yield.”

The early poems of Prior have a large concentration of this courtly and pastoral type of art. “Celia to Damon” brings out once more the theme of love as a hopeless war, in which the lover is perpetually doomed to servitude and defeat. He describes the “Excess and Fury” of his love, and the beauty that confounds it. The tone of the poem, faithful to its models of hopeless and adoring passion, is intentionally pathetic. The great contrast the poem strives for is that between the humility of the lover and the “raging Love” and “swelling Seas of Rapture” in his soul. The lover assumes the familiar stance of the half-exalted and half-mad figure of romance. In response to worldly wisdom Prior’s “Imitation of Anacreon” states “Love shall be my endless Theme”—and he invites the critics and all other in the community of the sane and responsible to mind their own business while he goes happily to his fate.

Prior did not confine himself to such poetry, which is often imitative. His “An English Ballad” is both heroic and satirical; perhaps its most obvious theme is that of witty skepticism:

If Namur be compar’d to Troy;Then Britain’s Boys excell’d theGreeks:Their Siege did ten long Years employ:We’ve done our Bus’ness in tenWeeks.

The great political and military struggles between England and France, Greece and Troy, are set in the context of parody, a mode which expresses the feeling of the poet that these events are not altogether praiseworthy or even meaningful. The poem is in praise, ostensibly, of William of Orange, but the poem balances “Death, Pikes, Rocks, Arms, Bricks, and Fire” against the Lilliputian moral stature of the combatants. William, of course, comes off much better than his great rival, Louis XIV, but neither comes off very well in terms of the great idea of civilization which the poem raises. If Prior was a parodist of things political, he also was a parodist of matters amatory. Some of his better-known poems satirize the whole institution of love poetry and the courtly conventions to which it subscribed. “An English Padlock” and “Hans Carvel” are both intentionally indecent in that they express a thoroughly Augustan attitude toward romantic love. The first of these is not about pastoral lovers but about a jealous husband. The best way to handle a woman, Prior suggests in this poem, is not to write sonnets, nor is it to declare in limitless hyperbole the nature of one’s passion. It is rather to allow her to see the world in all its false beauty, and to sicken of the truth.

“Paulo Purganti” is another of the poems which attacks romance and puts disillusioned objectivity in its place. The importance of the piece is its explicit relationship to the hard insights of Wycherly and Congreve. Prior begins by noting that things true may not be things beautiful, or even things moral. This is a worldly poem defending things “Beyond the fix’d and settl’d Rules.” Pride is seen in its conflict with sex, and it is the latter that wins out. The woman is proud, the man is logical, but both pride and logic yield to the imperious instinct that denies all pretensions. The myth of human perfection dies hard. Prior returned to his deflating attack time after time. When he writes about the old story of the Greek gods visiting earth, it is not to expatiate on the piety of the old man and woman who are their hosts, but to reveal the cupidity and weakness of all men at all times. When he writes about learning, as in “Merry Andrew,” it is to point out that folly sometimes is better than wit. In short, Prior shares the insights of Pope and Swift into what has been called the human condition. He refuses to be deluded by conceptions of the ideal; he insists that reality is often disappointing.

Prior’s lengthy “Alma,” written while he was in prison after the fall of the Tory party in 1714, is a sardonic and skeptical review of human history. It begins by stating that the soul has been located by various philosophers in different places, but that it may best be known by the actions it motivates. The animating spirit of man, Prior suggests, enters the body “at the Toes” and then “mounts by just Degrees.” The “system” thus described is a parody of philosophy, but it is a useful device to explain Prior’s principal point: man begins in mere motion, then feels the effects of emotion as he grows older, and finally, when Alma nears the brain, he learns intelligence. Most men, Prior suggests, never attain the final stage, for Alma never visits their minds. His historical examples are many and comical. One is the hero of the Trojan War:

In scornful Sloth Achilles slept;And for his Wench, like Tall-Boy,wept:Nor would return to War and Slaughter;’Till They brought back the Parson’sDaughter.

He then ranges from ancient to modern history, explaining with mock-seriousness how men as different as Mark Antony, Edward IV, and Henry IV were all united by their failure to allow Alma to get past their hearts.

Successive cantos of the poem describe all human folly as the consequence of the natural journey of Alma being interrupted and her powers diverted to serve a single function. The glutton confines the human spirit to his gullet; the lover confines his soul and mind to the senses; even the artist imprisons Alma to serve his “Fancy or Desire.” All these corruptions, Prior sums up, “Have got the better of his Mind.” The confirmed huntsman will be blind to all things else in life; the girl who thinks of nothing but dancing will become an old woman ridiculous in the same affectation; the man whose Alma “Slip’d up too soon into his Tongue” will never let that weapon lie still. The poem concludes with a moral familiar to the reader of Alexander Pope: the man of full mental and moral development must allow mind and body, emotion and intelligence, their limited domination.

Prior’s longest consideration of the state of man is his poem “Solomon on the Vanity of the World.” The poem is divided into three parts: knowledge, pleasure, and power. In the first part Solomon convenes the wise men of his kingdom in order to find out the nature of happiness. A dialogue ensues in which he and the wise men discuss all of nature, from vegetative to human life. This discussion leads only to bewildering dilemmas and not to any solutions. No man at the court can satisfactorily explain the physical laws of nature; on the contrary, they reveal only their own ignorance and pride. Solomon concludes this first part by scornfully dismissing them and remarking on “How narrow Limits were to Wisdom giv’n.” In the next part of the poem the king asks whether wealth can in fact give happiness, and he considers the principal means whereby men hope to capture happiness in physical objects. He states that he too has tried to make happiness the consequence of material joys, but that he has failed. He has tried luxurious palaces, gardens, feasts, and even works of art, yet none of these was able to give him a pleasure greater than the passing moment. Neither in music nor in dance could he discern any power of lasting pleasure. Disappointed in all these, and especially in love, the king concludes that he must explore not the exterior of all things but the interior of his own mind. The second book ends with a farewell to useless wealth and to both “Lust and Love.” The third begins by admitting that, because of the nature of the flesh itself, there is no real prospect of lasting happiness. The end of all things, Prior says, may be more desirable than the continual and futile search for joy. In short, his central character says, “Who breathes, must suffer; and who thinks, must mourn.”

Prior began in pastoral poetry and very quickly wrote the kind of satirical and moralistic verse made popular by Alexander Pope. He became essentially a parodist, interested in the great disparities between the ideal and the actual. As his long poems “Alma” and “Solomon” indicate, he had his share of the satirist’s pessimism. Yet he was not a negative thinker; the ending of “Solomon” is especially interesting for the manner in which the “various doubts” of its protagonist are dispelled. In the moral and religious life, and particularly in the enactment of biblical wisdom, Prior suggests that there is a possibility of human fulfillment. Like Pope and Swift, he furnishes a moral standard by which his satire must be measured.