"To Althea, From Prison"

Join us for Poetry Aloud (Friday podcasts) this summer, when Dr. Esolen will continue to read Huckleberry Finn, chapter by chapter.

Dear readers, you’ve certainly noticed by now that I’m a great admirer of the poetry of John Milton, which we’ve featured here at Word and Song several times, including in this passage in which Satan tries to pretend that Hell is a very very very fine house, and not a prison whence there is no real escape, because wherever he goes, he brings Hell with him and about him, “nor from thence / One step no more than from himself can fly / By change of place.” Yes, I admire Milton immensely, but I think if I were a young man in his time I would have taken the Royalist side, or at least that’s what I feel now; there always was something barbaric about Cromwell’s New Model Army, efficient, indomitably courageous, and destructive of anything that did not meet their pure standards — including utterly priceless art, true folk art too, the stained glass windows that had graced English churches since the Middle Ages. The discipline of a crack fighting force, and the passions of a mob: not a happy combination.

But the author of our Poem of the Week, Richard Lovelace, was a staunch supporter of the King (Charles I), and he paid for it dearly, sent twice to prison, serving as a soldier for many years, and impoverishing himself in the cause. For him it wasn’t just a matter of ideas. He was devoted to Charles, who had given him the office of “Gentleman Waiter” when he was just a 13 year old boy. Lovelace died in 1657, three years before Charles’ son (Charles II) would be restored to the throne, and some months before his fortieth birthday. He had to scramble always to make ends meet, writing to make a scanty living after he had sold his ancestral estates. Our poem “To Althea, from Prison” was probably written in 1642, when Lovelace, age 23, was sent to jail not for any crime, but for presenting Parliament with a petition, signed by thousands of the commons in Kent, beseeching them to restore to the King his royal rights as commander in chief of the army and the navy.

I think you can judge the tenor of this petition from the following complaint, accurate as to the facts, however we may interpret them: “The Petitioners and other his Majesty’s good subjects (who out of a true sense of the distraction and ruin the Commonwealth must speedily fall into through these distempers, have prepared sober and moderate petitions and animadversions for the peace of the kingdom) have been discountenanced, censured, and imprisoned in a lawless arbitrary way, when no offense hath been committed by them, of which the law hath taken notice.”

Just as wickedness forges its own manacles and claps them on, so, Lovelace suggests, is innocence unfettered and free. The most famous line in the poem declares, boldly, that “Stone walls do not a prison make.” That doesn’t mean that Lovelace engages in any easy philosophizing. We are to imagine him, in this poem, being visited in prison by the woman he loves, to whom he gives the name Althea. Their love is true, and so long as it is true, and so long as their minds are innocent, only the angels above enjoy such freedom, such liberty.

There are four stanzas in the poem, and in the second and third, Lovelace asks us to consider the freedom he no longer enjoys, or the freedom he longs to enjoy again, as when he and Althea are among people enjoying a great celebration, drinking wine and crowning their brows with roses, or as when he shall be restored to liberty to sing again of his beloved King’s majesty, mercy, and glory. But in the fourth stanza, we return to the small cell, which is not so small after all, because in it dwells a mind that is calm and free in the knowledge of its innocence. Lovelace ends each of the first three stanzas by saying that some creature or being is not as free as he is or would be, not the fabled “gods that wanton in the air,” not “fishes that tipple in the sea,” not “winds that curl the flood,” that is, winds that blow over the wide ocean and whip it up into waves. But in the fourth and final stanza, he turns to a solemn and sublime image: that of the “angels above,” who do know and enjoy such liberty as he enjoys — they, and they alone. “Maestro!” I applaud.

““Saint Paul in Prison,” Gustave Doré. Public Domain.

One final note: Dr. John Wilson, also a royalist, set Lovelace’s poem to music, to be sung by three voices. You can find the score here, on page 18, in the key of G# — that’s what Wilson says it’s in, according to the table of contents. And for some more enjoyment, to all you out there who can make out the old staves and notes: he also set to music Ariel's song, which we featured here last week; that’s on page 14, and it’s also in G#. Imagine, people actually wrote poems that other people put to music and still other people, all over the country, would sing.

When Love with unconfined wings
   Hovers within my gates,
And my divine Althea brings
   To whisper at the grates;
When I lie tangled in her hair
   And fettered in her eye,
The gods that wanton in the air
   Know no such liberty.

When flowing cups run swiftly round
   With no allaying Thames, [water]
Our careless heads with roses bound,
   Our hearts with loyal flames;
When thirsty grief in wine we steep,
   When healths and draughts go free,
Fishes that tipple in the deep
   Know no such liberty.

When, like committed linnets, I
   With shriller throat shall sing
The sweetness, mercy, majesty,
   And glories of my King;
When I shall voice aloud how good
   He is, how great should be,
Enlarged winds that curl the flood
   Know no such liberty.

Stone walls do not a prison make,
   Nor iron bars a cage:
Minds innocent and quiet take
   That for an hermitage.
If I have freedom in my love,
   And in my soul am free,
Angels alone, that soar above,
   Enjoy such liberty.