Call for the Robin-redbreast
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 raise him hillocks that shall keep him warm,
And (when gay tombs are robbed) sustain no harm;
But keep the wolf far thence, that's foe to men,
For with his nails he'll dig them up again.
Even today, as creatures of the enlightenment, coolly unsentimental about the facts of death and decay, we may still be upset by the notion of a deceased person being left exposed to view, uncared for, with no formal rite of mourning. On some unshakeable level, we see the safety of the body as some kind of guarantee that the soul or spirit will lie easy.
Even if we don't believe that human personality transcends the grave, we still appreciate the sentiment behind the words "rest in peace". We appreciate that ignoring or insulting the dead is an act of barbarism counter to the standards of civilization.
In this extract from John Webster's revenge tragedy "The White Devil," the character Cornelia delivers a dirge or funeral lament for her son Marcello, stabbed by his own brother. She cries out to nature to respond to the tragic event of his death. In her imagination, the chirpy, twig-bearing robin, so familiar to us from Christmas card images, becomes a pallbearer, along with the small, commonplace wren.
Hovering over "shady groves" the birds seem, momentarily, to be as sinister as they are comforting. Yet she implores them to dispense the charity of which humans seem incapable, and cover the body with "leaves and flowers." Sweetly, silently, nature absorbs us all back into its heart.
The image of "the friendless bodies of unburied men" evokes in us the fear of confronting our final moment with no one to comfort us. The words make me think of those periodic stories about elderly people who have been found in their armchairs, the television still on, after months have gone by without a flicker of interest from the outside world; or I think of the unknown soldier.
The speaker's reiteration of "call" sounds like a death knell, compounding the heavy mood of the "funeral dole". The sense of "dole" descends from the Latin dolor, which survives in English today, meaning sad or melancholy. (In the same sense as Webster, Sylvia Plath refers in one of her poems to "dolorous bells".)
The speaker turns from the creatures of the air, to those of the earth: "the ant, the field mouse and the mole". Notice how by referring to them in the singular, Webster grants these animals a sober, archetypal quality that carefully steers the poem away from the unintentionally comic. Nature should conspire to grant a man dignity in his final defeat, not to humiliate and mock him. The "hillocks" around him should keep him warm. In this description, he is like a sleeping prince in a fairy-tale or legend, though unlike King Arthur never to return.
Quiet forgetfulness is preferable to being consigned to "gay" or gaudy tombs waiting to be broken into and looted. These lines remind me of the jungle of graves in Kensal Green cemetery in London, where Victorian follies with weeping angels, sphinxes, columns and caryatids rub up against mere slabs in the ground.
Curiously, some of the most accomplished people have the least remarkable graves. The engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel, for instance, shares a simple white stone with members of his family. It's the now obscure aristocrats and bankers who saw fit to celebrate themselves with monuments where the birds have indeed left their mark, though not in the sense that Webster describes.
In the concluding couplet, just as the scene in the poem gets too cosy, Webster brings us up short. The predatory wolf is on the prowl, somewhere on the fringes of every resting place. How easily we can see and hear his "nails" scraping the earth, unceremoniously turfing a body out from the grave with Gothic glee.
At this point, the elegant pacing of the poem, tied together unobtrusively by rhyme, is shattered by the harsh and almost slangy phrase "dig them up again," conjuring up in sound the wolf's act of desecration. The lines have the quality of a truism, like "If you can't beat'em, join'em," leaving us to ponder the two faces of nature: the nurturing and the deadly. A downward grin of amused stoicism rather than a self-pitying tear appears to be the final and wisest response to our lot.
John Webster (1580-1634) was an English Jacobean dramatist, a late contemporary of William Shakespeare.
Christopher Nield is a poet living in London.
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