Today’s Poem: The Enchantment

Remembering the Restoration poet-dramatist Thomas Otway

Dorset Garden Theatre, engraving by William Dolle, 1673 (Wikimedia Commons)

Thomas Otway (1652–1685), whose March 3 birthday we belatedly note, did not exactly flourish in the Restoration period. That is, the theater, his chief artistic medium, did flourish in the Restoration period. Otway, a vicar’s son unattracted by the prospect of holy order, thought that since the theater was flourishing, he might flourish in it. Following a single abysmal, stage-fright-crippled turn as an actor, he turned his hand to playwriting. And he did, in fact, write a few plays that flourished. As a measure, consider this: His 1680 play, The History and Fall of Caius Marius outperformed Romeo and Juliet, not only in the year of its debut at the Dorset Garden Theatre in London, but for most of the next century. Two other plays, The Orphan and Venice Preserv’d, remained in consistent production into the nineteenth century before fading into obscurity. 

Thomas Otway as rendered in tempera by William Blake, circa 1800 (Wikimedia Commons)

But despite these dramatic successes, Otway himself did not flourish. His muse and love interest, the actress Elizabeth Barry, happily played leading parts in his dramas, but had no intention of abandoning her lover, John Wilmot, the second Earl of Rochester (1647–1680), for Otway. A turn of military service, undertaken to mend his broken heart and compensated with worthless scrip, left him still brokenhearted, but also broke. Apocryphally, at least, he is said to have died at the age of thirty-three by choking on a bun, bought with money a pitying passerby had given him, on learning who he was. Whether this version of his passing is accurate or not, it illustrates the truth of a life petering out too pathetically and too soon. Like that life, today’s poem is a brief one: three tetrameter abab quatrains, here and gone. Like its author, this speaker is a beggar. Falling under the enchantment of love, he can only entreat its object to pity him. 

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The Enchantment

by Thomas Otway

I did but look and love awhile,
 ’Twas but for one half-hour;
Then to resist I had no will,
  And now I have no power.

To sigh and wish is all my ease;
  Sighs which do heat impart
Enough to melt the coldest ice,
  Yet cannot warm your heart.

O would your pity give my heart
  One corner of your breast,
’Twould learn of yours the winning art,
  And quickly steal the rest.

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