Today’s Poem: A Dirge

John Webster’s mad song of wrens and wolves

Frederic Remington, Moonlight, Wolf, c. 1904 (Wikimedia Commons)

“Call for the robin redbreast, and the wren,” John Webster (c. 1578–c. 1632) writes in the final act of his 1612 revenge tragedy, The White Devil — for “with leaves and flowers” these birds will lightly cover “The friendless bodies of unburied men.”

The friendless bodies of unburied men. That’s about as good as pentameter gets in English: memorable and disturbing, both dulled with melancholy like the muffled drums of a death march and sharp as a knife. It comes in a ten-line passage sung by Cornelia, mother of the chief protagonists of Webster’s play, mad with grief for her children.

We might set Cornelia’s dirge beside a mention of birds in The Duchess of Malfi, Webster’s other famous tragedy. “Hark, now everything is still, / The screech-owl and the whistler shrill,” an assassin calmly explains before he murders the duchess. “’Tis now full tide ’tween night and day, / End your groan and come away.”

Together these passages remind us of why T.S. Eliot (1888–1965) kept Webster among the furniture of his mind. Eliot gestures toward the conclusion of Cornelia’s dirge in the first part of The Waste Land, and he alludes to The White Devil again in the fifth part. But it’s in his 1918 poem “Whispers of Immortality” that the modern poet put his most famous description of the Jacobean playwright. Webster, Eliot says, was “much possessed by death” — for he could see “the skull beneath the skin.”

Henry Keen’s endpaper to a 1930 edition of John Webster’s tragedies (Wikimedia Commons)

In his own time, Webster was probably best known for his comedies and his collaborations with the likes of Michael Drayton, Thomas Dekker, Thomas Middleton, William Rowley, John Ford, John Fletcher, Phillip Massinger, and Thomas Heywood: nearly a compendium of playwrights of the era. It was only in the twentieth century (beginning with a legendary 1920 production of The White Devil at Cambridge University) that Webster’s tragedies would gain broader critical appreciation.

In pentameter (as befits a noblewoman) interspersed with tetrameter (as befits her singing in her madness), the dirge-like passage in Webster’s play is a nature song. It explains that gentle robins and wrens will cover over an abandoned corpse — while “The ant, the field-mouse, and the mole” will “rear him hillocks that shall keep him warm.”

But nature is no more wholly kind than human beings — and if you want a powerful pentameter couplet, try this: “But keep the wolf far thence, that’s foe to men, / For with his nails he’ll dig them up again.”

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A Dirge

by John Webster

Call for the robin redbreast, and the wren,
Since o’er shady groves they hover,
And with leaves and flowers do cover
The friendless bodies of unburied men.
Call unto his funeral dole
The ant, the field-mouse, and the mole,
To rear him hillocks that shall keep him warm,
And (when gay tombs are robb’d) sustain no harm;
But keep the wolf far thence, that’s foe to men,
For with his nails he’ll dig them up again.

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