'The Worldly Wisdom of the Foolish Man'

 My ignorance often burns holes in my pride, turning self-congratulation into embarrassment. A reader asks for my opinion of the English poet Francis Quarles. Friday was the 434th anniversary of his baptism, meaning this younger contemporary of Shakespeare was likely born two or three days earlier. I remembered almost nothing about Quarles. Even a minor poet deserves better. 

I consulted a book Helen Pinkerton recommended to me long ago, Louis L. Martz’s The Meditative Poem: An Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Verse (1963). The volume complements Martz’s The Poetry of Meditation: A Study in English Religious Literature of the Seventeenth Century (1954). Helen encountered the latter book in the 1950s as a grad student. Quarles is best remembered for his Emblems (1634). Martz includes Emblem VII from Book 2:

 

“The world’s a Floore, whose swelling heapes retaine

The mingled wages of the Ploughmans toyle;

The world’s a Heape, whose yet unwinnowed graine

Is lodg’d with chaffe and buried in her soyle;

All things are mixt; theu usefull with the vaine;  

The good with bad; the noble with the vile;

The world’s an Ark, wherein things pure and grosse

Present their lossefull gaine, and gainfull losse,

Where ev’ry dram of Gold containes a pound of drosse.”

 

Martz notes that “Floore” is a threshing floor; “soyle” is dirty or waste matter, and “Ark” refers to a chest or coffer. Emblem entered English from Latin in the fifteenth century and meant “a drawing or picture expressing a moral fable or allegory; a fable or allegory such as might be expressed pictorially.” The OED cites the first sentence of Quarles’ “To the Reader” in Emblems:

 

“An Emblem is but a silent parable: Let not the tender eye check, to see the allusion to our blessed SAVIOUR figured in these types. In holy Scripture he is sometimes called a Sower; sometimes a Fisher; sometimes a Physician; And why not presented so as well to the eye as to the ear? Before the knowledge of letters, God was known by hieroglyphics. And indeed what are the Heavens, the earth, nay, every creature, but Hieroglyphics and Emblems of his glory? I have no more to say; I wish thee as much pleasure in the reading, as I had in writing. Farewell, Reader.”

 

The dedication and many of Quarles poems suggest a gracious, down-to-earth quality. His first readers would understand the harvesting of grain both as Biblical allegory and from a way of life rooted in agriculture. Each Emblem is a paraphrase from scripture. There’s little reaching after dazzling conceits. As Quarles says, “I wish thee as much pleasure in the reading, as I had in writing,” and for once the sentiment is convincing. Martz includes six other selections from Emblems, including this:

 

“The worldly wisdom of the foolish man

Is like a Sive, that does alone retaine

The grosser substance of the worthlesse Bran;

But thou, my soule, let thy brave thoughts disdaine

So coarse a purchace: O, be thou a Fan

To purge the Chaffe, and keep the winnow’d Graine;

Make cleane thy thoughts, and dress thy mixt desires;

Thou art heav’ns Tasker, and thy GOD requires

The purest of thy Floore, as well as of thy fires.”

 

Thanks to the reader who asked about Quarles. In Martz’s anthology, he comes between George Herbert and John Milton, greater poets, but Quarles has his reewards. “I wish thee as much pleasure in the reading, as I had in writing."