To a Fair Lady, Playing With a Snake
Strange! that such horror and such grace
Should dwell together in one place;
A fury’s arm, an angel’s face!
’Tis innocence and youth which makes
In Chloris’ fancy such mistakes
To start at love, and play with snakes.
By this and by her coldness barr’d,
Her servants have a task too hard:
The tyrant has a double guard!
Thrice happy snake! that in her sleeve
May boldly creep; we dare not give
Our thoughts so unconfin’d a leave.
Contented in that nest of snow
He lies, as he his bliss did know
And ’to the wood no more would go.
Take heed, fair Eve! you do not make
Another tempter of the Snake:
A marble one so warm’d would speak.
EDMUND WALLER
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Edmund Waller, 1606-1687, was a politician as well as a poet: he entered parliament at the age of 16, according to some accounts, and soon gained recognition as an outstanding orator. Loyalty was not his strong suit, as one of his keenest early critics, Samuel Johnson, observed: “It is not possible to read, without some contempt and indignation, poems of the same author, ascribing the highest degree of ‘power and piety’ to Charles I, then transferring the same ‘power and piety’ to Oliver Cromwell; now inviting Oliver to take the Crown, and then congratulating Charles II on his recovered right.”
Waller had been involved in a conspiracy to restore Charles I to power in London. He narrowly escaped execution when the plot was uncovered: bribery, the betrayal of friends and the sheer eloquence of his confession are thought to have saved him. He had an easy exile, and re-entered parliament on his return. He lived till the age of 86, finally consolidating his literary career with a series of Divine Poems, once again rousing the disapproval of Dr Johnson, who disliked the genre, perhaps, more than the execution.
Waller is best known to today’s readers for the lyric, Go, lovely Rose. I have often wondered if he wrote anything as good. Looking through the collection here, I was interested to see several poems opening with the same rhythmic and rhetorical pattern: Stay, Phoebus! Stay, Say, lovely Dream! and Peace, babbling Muse! I’m not sure that they are equal to Go, lovely Rose, but then I found it difficult to read them objectively and not hear awkward echoes of the poem that had first engrained itself on my memory.
However, there’s plenty to enjoy in Waller’s deft, playful courtship poems. While not a particularly musical poem, the crisp tetrameter tercets of To a Fair Lady, Playing with a Snake move with a swift, fluent step and pleasant cadence. Johnson was probably right in finding smoothness rather than strength in Waller’s verse. The style is ideal for this kind of slight, entertaining – and satisfyingly allusive – courtly pastoral.
Waller’s awareness of the phallic symbolism of snakes flickers at the edges of the poem. The tone is far from salacious and where that flickering is brightest, as in the second stanza, plainly ironical. It’s obvious that Chloris, far from being as innocent and silly as he depicts her, is eminently wise in her response: “To start at love, and play with snakes.” But the author enjoys confusing the two activities. The dangers of the creature itself are deliberately, humorously exaggerated – “horror”, “A fury’s arm”. As Chloris pretends to be alarmed by love, so it seems the poet pretends to be alarmed by an evidently amiable snake. Perhaps it’s hinted that pretending to be alarmed by love is another way in which Chloris plays with snakes?
We know the identity of some of Waller’s poetic addressees: Sacharissa, for instance, was his name for Dorothea Sidney, grand-niece of Philip and Mary Sidney, whom he courted unsuccessfully. But I don’t think anyone has discovered the identity of Chloris. She appears in a number of his poems, and perhaps represents a number of young ladies, fanciful or fancied, behind her generic pastoral name.
In stanza three, the reference to “her servants” suggests, whether in sincerity or flattery, that the young woman has a retinue of suitors at her command. She rebuffs their attentions, but has an extra weapon besides the stereotypical “coldness”: the terrible creature she has made her pet. The snake could represent another, rival human lover, but it seems unlikely that it’s entirely symbolic or allegorical. Waller is a poet who responds to occasions: he watches young women weaving, or hears them sing or play the lute, and his Muse is stirred. I suspect that “Chloris” really did surprise her suitor by taming a snake. The snake is seen to “boldly creep” along her sleeve, and that oxymoron suggests observation and not only wordplay.
One of Waller’s charms is that he doesn’t take himself too seriously. The role of rejected lover, in this poem and elsewhere, is played with wry humour. His sensuality is shot through with a certain aesthetic disinterest. The whiteness of Chloris’s skin is delicately evoked in “nest of snow”, complementing the earlier evocation of her chilliness. That tactile play of cold and hot is nicely done, and successfully refreshes some very familiar Petrarchan metaphors. Waller is, of course, obliged to mention Eve and the biblical serpent, but the touch is still light, and his idea of a second temptation pleasantly non-doctrinal. At the same time, the jocular moral warning (note the characteristic apostrophe of “Take heed, fair Eve!”) is followed by a powerful, Pygmalion-like, imagined moment, when marble becomes warm, and the Snake empowered to speak. I hope, if the poem’s tale is a true one, that Chloris lived happily ever after in alliance with nothing worse than a grass-snake. Johnson would probably have thought a snake in the grass an appropriate subject for the morally dodgy but undoubtedly talented and smooth-tongued Waller.