Study guide

Christ's Victorie and Triumph

by Giles Fletcher the Younger

Overview

Full title: Christs Victorie, and Triumph in Heaven, and Earth, over, and after Death
Author: Giles Fletcher the Younger (c. 1586–1623), fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, later rector of Alderton in Suffolk
Published: Cambridge, 1610, dedicated to Thomas Nevile, Master of Trinity; reprinted at Cambridge in 1632
Form: Eight-line stanzas rhyming ababbccc, the last line an alexandrine: Spenser's stanza with its ninth line removed and the closing couplet stretched into a triplet
Length: Four parts of between about fifty and eighty-five stanzas each; 268 stanzas in the text quoted here
Genre: Biblical narrative poem, sometimes called a brief or 'divine' epic, mixing allegory, Spenserian description, devotional lyric and lament
Subject: The redemption of mankind: the debate of Justice and Mercy before God, the Temptation in the wilderness, the Passion and burial, the Resurrection and Ascension
Chief models: The Gospels and Psalms; Spenser's Faerie Queene (Despair, the Bower of Bliss, Mammon's cave); the medieval allegory of the four daughters of God
Prefatory matter: A prose epistle 'To the Reader' defending sacred poetry, and commendatory verses including some by Phineas Fletcher (omitted from the text quoted here)
Text quoted: W. T. Brooke's modernised edition (1888); references give part and stanza, e.g. CVT 2.15

Context

Giles Fletcher the Younger was born about 1586, the son of Giles Fletcher the Elder, the diplomat who wrote Of the Russe Common Wealth (1591) and the sonnet sequence Licia (1593). His elder brother Phineas (1582–1650) wrote The Purple Island, and the dramatist John Fletcher, Beaumont's partner and Shakespeare's collaborator, was their cousin. Giles was educated at Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he took his BA in 1606 and stayed on as a fellow and college lecturer in Greek. His first published verses were a contribution to Sorrowes Joy (1603), the University's collection on the death of Elizabeth and the accession of James. In 1619 he took the degree of Bachelor of Divinity and left Cambridge for the parish of Alderton in Suffolk, where he died in 1623, the year his prose treatise The Reward of the Faithfull appeared (Kastor 1978) (Boas 1908).

Christs Victorie and Triumph was printed at Cambridge in 1610 and dedicated to Thomas Nevile, Master of Trinity. It was the work of a young man of about twenty-four, and it is his only long poem. It belongs to the wave of 'divine poetry' that swept England after Joshua Sylvester began to translate Du Bartas's biblical epic of the Creation: poets and preachers argued that the Muses should be turned from pagan love and fable to scriptural subjects (Campbell 1959). Fletcher's prose epistle 'To the Reader' (not included in the text quoted here) joins that argument. It answers those who thought verse an unfit vehicle for sacred things by appealing to the poetry of the Bible itself and to a line of Christian poets from late antiquity to his own day.

The poem's form and diction announce its master. Fletcher's stanza is Spenser's nine-line Faerie Queene stanza with one line removed: it rhymes ababbccc and, like Spenser's, it ends with a long six-foot line, the alexandrine. The vocabulary is full of Spenserian archaism ('ween', 'mote', 'ne', 'albe'), Spenserian coinages and compound words, and the second part borrows whole episodes from the Faerie Queene, once quoting Spenser verbatim. With Phineas, Fletcher became the chief of the poets later grouped as the 'Spenserians', the Jacobean writers who kept Spenser's pastoral and allegorical manner alive after his death in 1599 (Grundy 1969) (Cory 1912) (Hunter 1977).

The poem's four parts follow the work of redemption from eternity to eternity. Christ's Victory in Heaven sets the Fall before God's tribunal, where Justice demands punishment and Mercy pleads for man; Christ's Victory on Earth tells the Temptation in the wilderness as a Spenserian allegory; Christ's Triumph over Death narrates the Passion from Gethsemane to the burial; Christ's Triumph after Death celebrates the Resurrection, the Ascension and the joys of heaven. The scheme is that of the medieval 'Parliament of Heaven', in which the four daughters of God, Mercy, Truth, Justice and Peace, dispute man's fate before the Incarnation, but Fletcher makes it the frame of a complete Protestant poem on the Atonement (Traver 1907) (Chew 1947).

The poem's later fame rests heavily on Milton. Editors have long pointed to its traces in the Nativity Ode, written at Christmas 1629, and above all in Paradise Regained (1671), whose subject, Christ's victory over Satan in the wilderness, is Fletcher's second part. Milton never names Fletcher, so the case rests on parallels of incident and phrase, but they are many and close enough to persuade most scholars that he knew the poem well (Lewalski 1966) (Pope 1947) (Carey 1997). Read for itself, Christs Victorie and Triumph is one of the most ambitious religious poems of the Jacobean age: sensuous, paradoxical, often extravagant, and alive with a delight in verbal music that later readers have compared both to Spenser and to the baroque poets of the Continent (Bush 1962).

Plot overview

Part 1 opens with a statement of the whole subject, the birth and death of the eternal God made man, and an invocation. In a place beyond the stars Mercy raises her voice to save fallen man, but Justice, a stern virgin armed with scales and sword and attended by Famine, War, Sickness and Death, steps between her and God. Justice's long speech recites man's crimes, from Adam's fig leaves to the idolatry of the nations, and demands death. Heaven arms for vengeance. Then Mercy appears, described at length in her beauty and her embroidered robe of the world; she sends Peace to comfort Repentance, and pleads that the Son, made man, will undo what man has done. Her account of the Nativity melts God's thunder into tears, and the angels lay their weapons at her feet.

Part 2 follows Mercy down to the wilderness, where Christ has fasted forty days among wild beasts that grow tame in his presence. An aged hermit approaches, praising him, and picking up a stone suggests that he can turn it into bread. The hermit is Satan in disguise; he leads Christ to the cave of Despair, then to the pinnacle of the Temple, where Presumption urges him to cast himself down, and at last to a mountain on which a garden of sensual and worldly delight springs up. There the enchantress Panglory sings Christ a song of seduction, offering love, wealth and the kingdoms of the world. He shatters her glasses; she and Satan fall back to hell, and angels bring him a banquet as nature sings his victory.

Part 3 turns from the brook of Eridan to the brook Kidron and the Passion. After a series of paradoxes on the God who dies, the poet follows Christ to Gethsemane, where he sweats blood in a freezing night while Satan sends his furies against his soul. Judas betrays him with a kiss; he is mocked, scourged and crowned with thorns; the crowd that cried 'Hosanna' cries 'Crucify'; and his death darkens the sun and shakes the earth. Judas, driven by conscience and taunted by Satan, hangs himself. Joseph of Arimathea takes down the body and, with the Virgin Mary and the other women about him, utters a long lament before the burial.

Part 4 begins on the third morning, as spring floods the world and the poet asks the earth, the river and the birds why they rejoice. Christ rises as judge of those who judged him, and later ascends on the wings of angels, welcomed by the patriarchs, prophets, saints, martyrs and virgins. A digression praises Britain as a halcyon's nest of peace under King James amid the wars of the Continent. The poem ends with a vision of the heavenly city and of God himself, whom words cannot describe, a salute to Phineas Fletcher as the poet of Christ's marriage to his Church, and a final confession that its own 'impotent words' are too weak for so great a sight.

Part by part

Part 1: Christ's Victory in Heaven

Stanzas 1–85

Summary

The poem announces its subject in a single long sentence of paradoxes: the birth of one who had no beginning, the death of one who could not die. After an invocation to the God who has lit 'this holy fire' in a once-dead heart, the poet asks the scriptures why Mercy should have pleaded for man. The scene is a heaven beyond the stars. As the ruin of the fallen world threatens to return it to chaos, Mercy begins to speak, but Justice throws herself between Mercy and God. She is a virgin of piercing sight who holds scales and a sword, attended by a procession of plagues led by Ignorance and closed by Death, and she leans on the stony tables of the Law. Her speech (17–39) indicts man: made in God's image, he murdered his own soul, hid from God in fig leaves, and turned to the worship of trees, beasts, planets, false gods and finally the devil. Every refuge he might seek, his wife, his strength, his gods, the sea, the night, will accuse him. Let mercy begin, she concludes, where justice ends.

The angels flame with zeal and God himself thunders. Then, like the sun emerging from an eclipse, Mercy reappears. The poet, confessing his weakness, describes her beauty in a long blazon (43–62): roses and lilies borrow their colour from her, angels hang on her words, her robe is embroidered with the whole created world, and David sings beneath her canopy. She looks down on Repentance, who sits blind with weeping in a briar arbour, supported by Faith, and sends Peace, Irene, to crown her. Mercy's speech (70–83) concedes man's guilt but turns the argument: the Son, now near akin to man, will slay man's foe and win back all he lost. She ends by telling the story of the Nativity, the angels' song, the silencing of the oracles, the Magi, the flight into Egypt, Simeon's canticle. God's thunder falls from his hand and melts into tears, the angels throw down their weapons, and Mercy turns her eyes to Palestine.

Analysis

Fletcher's model is the 'Parliament of Heaven', the medieval allegory, built on Psalm 85:10 ('Mercy and truth are met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other'), in which God's four daughters debate the fate of fallen man until the Son resolves their quarrel by offering to become man (Traver 1907) (Chew 1947). The opening stanzas allude to the same verse ('heaven and earth did kiss', 1.2), but Fletcher cuts the four disputants to two. Truth disappears, Peace is reduced to a messenger, and the whole debate becomes a contest of forensic speeches. Justice speaks like a prosecutor, and her case is never refuted. Mercy wins not by denying it but by announcing that the penalty will be paid. God the Father never speaks: the verdict is given by the thunder that drops 'From God's unwary arm' (1.84), an image that makes the reconciliation of attributes within God a drama in which nothing is said and everything is changed.

The part is also Fletcher's first display of Spenserian description. Justice's procession of plagues recalls the allegorical pageants of the Faerie Queene, and the blazon of Mercy, with its catalogue of cheeks, lips, breasts and garments, borrows the language of erotic praise for a figure of divine love. Many readers have found the shift jarring. Others see it as the poem's method: the same sensuous vocabulary will later describe Christ's body, Panglory's garden and heaven, and the reader must learn to tell its true objects from its false ones. The scene of Repentance, blind abroad but looking inward, held up by Faith, gives the allegory a personal and Protestant turn: before Mercy pleads for mankind, she stoops to a single penitent soul.

The obsequies of Him that could not die, And death of life, end of eternity, How worthily He died, that died unworthily;

CVT 1.1

The opening sets out the poem's master figure, paradox. The alexandrine turns on a pun: Christ died worthily, in a way worthy of praise, though he died unworthily, without deserving it.

With that the mighty thunder dropt away From God's unwary arm, now milder grown, And melted into tears;

CVT 1.84

God's verdict is given without a word. The weapon of Justice melts into tears, the sign of Mercy, so that the debate ends in a change within God rather than a defeat of one daughter by another.

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Part 2: Christ's Victory on Earth

Stanzas 1–65

Summary

Mercy descends with her graces into the wilderness, where Christ has wandered alone and fasting. The wild beasts that rush to devour him kneel and dance instead; the lion licks the dust from his feet, and the lamb stands by the tiger. The poet describes Christ lying on a hillock under a wild olive, his black curling hair and shining face, his cheeks like strawberries in milk, his single woollen garment and bare legs. After forty days an aged man approaches, leaning on a staff and muttering blessings: he seems a hermit on pilgrimage. He kneels, offers Christ his cell, and, picking up a stone, observes that Christ can make it bear corn. He is Satan in disguise. He leads Christ to the cave of Despair, a dark den hung with corpses where a haggard figure dreams of falling from heaven and creeps in terror of the furies. Christ refuses the offer of rest there, answering that he feeds on the food of Eden.

The two are swept to the pinnacle of the Temple, where Presumption has pitched her tent among the stars, painted by her maid Euelpis (Greek for 'good hope') and sprinkled with holy water. She asks whether Christ is the Son of God and urges him to throw himself down, showing angels ready to catch him; when he does not, she tumbles to the ground herself. Angels carry him to a snowy mountain that turns into a garden more lovely than Ida, Tempe or the garden of Adonis, shaped like a sleeping lady and crowned by the bower of Vain-delight. There, among drunken elms, a fountain where the enchantress Panglory bathes, beasts that were once men, and rooms of Bacchic revellers and naked ladies, Satan leads Christ upward past heaps of gold and the court of Ambition to Panglory's crystal throne. Holding a glass globe of the world, she sings him a song of love and the transience of beauty, offering everything if he will bend his knee. He scatters her charms and shatters her glasses; she and Satan plunge into hell. Angels bring Christ a heavenly banquet, and the valley rings with birdsong and echo.

Analysis

Fletcher follows Matthew's order of the three temptations (bread, Temple, mountain) and interprets them through a long tradition of exegesis. The first, to turn stones into bread, becomes a temptation to Despair, to distrust God's providence and give up; the second, to throw himself from the Temple, becomes Presumption, the opposite sin against hope; the third, the kingdoms of the world, becomes a single comprehensive temptation in which the pleasures of the senses, wealth, ambition and vainglory are all offered at once (Pope 1947). This last scene corresponds to the triad of 1 John 2:16, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes and the pride of life, which Renaissance writers often linked with the Temptation and with the flesh, the world and the devil (Cullen 1974).

The allegory is built from Spenser. The disguised tempter recalls Archimago, the false hermit of Faerie Queene I; the cave of Despair is taken from Book I, canto ix, and 2.23 quotes two of Spenser's lines outright; the gold, Ambition and Panglory's throne recall Mammon's cave and Philotime in Book II, canto vii; and the garden, with its fountain, beasts and carpe diem song, rewrites the Bower of Bliss of Book II, canto xii (Hamilton 1990) (Spenser 2001). The difference is in the hero. Guyon destroys the Bower by force; Fletcher's Christ simply refuses, and his victory is one of stillness and knowledge. That conception of heroism, the hero who conquers by not acting, is the most important thing Milton found here for Paradise Regained, along with details such as the tempter disguised as an old man and the angelic banquet after the victory (Lewalski 1966).

But Thou with corn canst make this stone to ear.

CVT 2.20

Satan's first temptation comes disguised as admiration. The hermit gathers a stone and hints at the miracle of Matthew 4:3 as if paying a compliment; 'ear' means to put forth ears of corn.

Come, come gather then the rose, Gather it, or it you lose.

CVT 2.61

Panglory's song turns the classical carpe diem, and the rose song of Spenser's Bower of Bliss, on the Son of God himself. Its short tetrameter lines break the stanza form, as if seduction had its own music.

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Part 3: Christ's Triumph over Death

Stanzas 1–67

Summary

The part opens with the image of the swan that sings its own dirge on the river Eridan, which must now yield to the brook Kidron, crossed by Christ on his way to Gethsemane. The poet meditates on the contradictions of the Passion: he looks for glory and finds misery, and he sets his own sacred song against the love poetry of 'giddy brains'. Christ is the true Orpheus who harrowed hell to recover his bride; the tree and garden of the Fall are answered by the tree and garden of redemption; the scholastics may dispute the will, but the Fall was a 'happy miss'. In Gethsemane, on a frosty night, Christ sweats blood while his disciples sleep. Satan rouses his furies with a speech of gloating, and spews poison and fiery serpents on Christ's soul, but Christ tears out their stings.

Judas betrays Christ with a kiss; servant, subject, pagan judge, Jew and Gentile join against him. Christ is spat on, scourged, given a reed for a sceptre and crowned with thorns, and the crowd that shouted 'Hosanna' now shouts 'Crucify'. At his death the heavens go black, the angels gaze in disbelief, Jordan overflows, the earth shakes, the dead rise, and the centurion confesses the Son of God. Judas, pursued by conscience like a bloodhound, seeks a rope; Satan taunts him that Justice still lives and that he cannot hope for mercy, and he hangs himself. The poet curses the place of his death and blesses the place of Christ's. Joseph of Arimathea takes down the body, with Nicodemus (the 'happy thief' who stole his salvation by night) and the Maries beside him, and laments over it to the Virgin. The mourners go home, leaving their souls at the grave, and the part closes with the nightingale and the lark as images of the Virgin's grief.

Analysis

This is the most devotional part of the poem, and its principal figure is the antithesis. Fletcher sets Eden against Gethsemane, the tree of the Fall against the cross, Adam against Christ (3.13–15), and he pursues the theological paradox of the two natures, God who cannot die dying in his manhood, man who cannot rise rising by the Godhead (3.5). These are the commonplaces of patristic and medieval typology, but Fletcher drives them with an insistent rhetoric of balanced lines and reversals. The doctrine is plainly Protestant: 'If any strength we have, it is to ill; / But all the good is God's' (3.12) and the brisk dismissal of the 'thorny schools' (3.11) side with the Reformed theology of grace against scholastic debate over the will.

Fletcher's Judas episode (40–51) balances the Satan of Part 2. As Christ refused Despair in the wilderness, Judas yields to it, and Satan's taunt, 'Knowest thou not Justice lives in heaven' (3.45), turns the argument of Part 1 against him: he has heard only the speech of Justice and not that of Mercy. Joseph's lament, by contrast, is a set piece of Passion devotion, close to the Latin and vernacular planctus in which the mourners address the dead body. The closing similes of Philomel and the lark move from epic to elegy, and the 'gate of heaven' in Christ's wounded side (3.58) anticipates the language of baroque devotion to the wounds that critics have compared to Crashaw (Bush 1962) (Martz 1954).

A tree was first the instrument of strife, Where Eve to sin her soul did prostitute; A tree is now the instrument of life,

CVT 3.13

A classic piece of typology: the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is answered by the cross, also called a tree. The stanza ends with the paradox of 'the Physician' who 'dies to make the patient live'.

And now, "Away with Him — away!" they cry, And nothing can be heard, but "Crucify!"

CVT 3.32

The turn of the crowd from the Hosanna of Palm Sunday to the cry for crucifixion is staged through the repeated phrase 'It was but now', a figure of the 'Frail multitude' and its 'giddy law'.

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Part 4: Christ's Triumph after Death

Stanzas 1–51

Summary

On the third morning the world wakes into spring: lambs frolic, swallows return, violets and primroses flame in the woods. The poet questions earth, trees, the river Jordan, the sun, the birds and the flowers, and answers himself: they are all hastening to their Saviour's triumph. Christ rises, now judge of those who judged him, worshipped by angels where he was mocked, clothed in flame where his garment was dipped in blood, as the morning star springs up from the sea. Later he ascends, carried by a globe of angels while the disciples gaze after him like the guardians of the Trojan boy Ganymede, and the angelic chorus sings the words of Psalm 24, 'Lift up your heads, O ye gates'. Patriarchs, prophets, saints, martyrs and virgins lead him into 'the courts of day'.

The poet then turns to his own island: Britain rides like a halcyon's nest on stormy waters while France, Spain and the Low Countries are torn by war, and he praises King James, father of Prince Henry, as the earthly image of the Prince of Peace, asking pardon for the comparison. From the beauties of the created world he reasons upwards to the glories of heaven: eternal spring, rivers of milk, wine and honey, a city of diamonds on a sea of glass, and at its centre God, the 'Idea Beatifical', described only by contradictions, all eye and all ear, moving all and unmoved. The saints rest there, David sings new psalms, and Christ appears with his bride, Egliset, the Church. Fletcher leaves the song of that marriage to 'Thyrsilis', the Kentish poet who sang of Eclecta, and confesses that his own young Muse, hidden by the banks of the Cam, cannot attempt it. The last stanza, in a chain of repeated words, admits the failure of 'Impotent words' before the infinite.

Analysis

The last part reverses the movement of the third: lament becomes triumph, winter becomes spring, and the poet's questions to nature (4.4–7) answer the cosmic mourning of the Crucifixion. The Ascension is a classical triumph: Christ leads the powers of hell captive, as in Ephesians 4:8, and is crowned with olive in place of thorns. Fletcher's description of heaven draws on Revelation 21–22 and on the negative theology that speaks of God only by denial and paradox (4.39–42); its climax is the Beatific Vision, the sight of God promised to the blessed. The final stanzas return to the problem with which the poem opened, how a 'worm' can speak of divine things, and end not with a conclusion but with an admission of defeat built, characteristically, out of rhetorical virtuosity.

The two digressions place the poem in its world. The praise of James (4.21–26) as a king of peace, the 'Stewart' (Stuart and steward) of the Prince of Peace, shows how a young Cambridge poet sought favour, and it ties Fletcher to the Protestant patriotism of the Spenserians, though in a courtly rather than oppositional key (Norbrook 2002) (O'Callaghan 2000). The tribute to 'Thyrsilis' (4.49–50) is usually read as a compliment to Phineas Fletcher, whose pastoral name was Thyrsil and whose Purple Island, not printed until 1633, closes with the marriage of Eclecta; if so, it shows the brothers' poems circulating together in Cambridge long before publication (Langdale 1937) (Kastor 1978). The modest image of the Muse hiding by 'old Camus' flaggy banks' makes the poem, in the end, a university poem, aware of its youth and of the greater poets it follows.

Our Britain Island, like the weedy nest Of true halcyon, on the waves doth ride,

CVT 4.21

The halcyon was believed to calm the sea while it nested. The image turns the poem from heaven to Jacobean politics, presenting James's peace as an earthly reflection of the peace won by Christ.

Impotent words, weak lines, that strive in vain — In vain, alas! to tell so heavenly sight, —

CVT 4.51

The last stanza links each line to the next by repeating its final word ('vain', 'sight', 'feign', 'might', 'Infinite', 'Light'), a figure called anadiplosis, so that the confession of failure is itself a display of art.

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Characters

Heaven

Christ: The Son of God made man, the hero of all four parts, although he speaks little. In Part 1 he is the subject of Mercy's plea; in Part 2 he is a figure of innocent beauty who defeats Satan by refusal and patience rather than force; in Part 3 he suffers in both natures; in Part 4 he rises and ascends as conqueror and bridegroom. Fletcher describes him in the language of love poetry, insisting that the true object of desire is divine.
God the Father: The judge before whom Justice and Mercy plead. He never speaks: his anger is expressed in thunder and his forgiveness in the thunder's melting into tears. In Part 4 he appears as the 'Idea Beatifical', the unseen centre of heaven described only through paradox and negation.
Mercy: One of the daughters of God, the advocate of fallen man and the presiding figure of Part 1. Her beauty is described at great length, her robe embroidered with the whole created world. She pleads that the Son will undo man's ruin, and then descends to watch over Christ in the wilderness.
Justice: Mercy's sister, a stern virgin with scales and a sword, attended by plagues, sickness, war and death and leaning on the tables of the Law. She is not evil: her prosecution of man is true, and the poem's theology requires that her claim be satisfied, not set aside.
Repentance, Faith and Irene: Allegorical figures in Part 1. Repentance, blind with weeping and dressed in sackcloth, sits in an arbour of briars; Faith, who can move mountains, holds her up; Irene (Greek for peace) is sent by Mercy to crown her with olive. Peace thus survives from the four daughters of God as Mercy's messenger.
The angels: They arm for vengeance after Justice's speech and lay down their weapons after Mercy's, catch and carry Christ in the Temptation, bring him a banquet after his victory, gaze in disbelief at the Crucifixion, and bear him to heaven at the Ascension.

Satan and the temptations

Satan: The 'old serpent', who in Part 2 appears as an aged hermit leaning on a staff and leads Christ to Despair, Presumption and Panglory. In Part 3 he unleashes his furies on Christ in Gethsemane and drives Judas to suicide with a speech that uses the argument of Justice. He is defeated, characteristically, by being beguiled 'with his own guile' (3.15).
Despair: A haggard figure in a cave hung with corpses, who dreams of falling from heaven into hell and creeps in terror of the furies. He is taken from Spenser's Despair (Faerie Queene I.ix) and represents the temptation to distrust God's care.
Presumption and Euelpis: Presumption keeps her tent of false light above the Temple, in love with her own face, and urges Christ to cast himself down; when he refuses she falls herself. Her maid Euelpis, 'good hope' in Greek, paints her face and carries an anchor that rests on air rather than rock: hope without foundation.
Panglory (Pangloretta): The enchantress of the third temptation, 'all-glory', who reigns over a garden of sensual pleasure, avarice and ambition from a throne of crystal. She holds a glass globe of the world that is as fragile as a soap bubble and sings Christ a seductive song. She is modelled on Spenser's Acrasia and Philotime, and she flees to hell with Satan when Christ shatters her glasses.
Ambition and Vain-delight: Figures of Panglory's realm: Vain-delight's bower crowns the garden shaped like a sleeping lady, and Ambition sits enthroned over a hundred crowned kings. With the rooms of drinkers, lovers and misers they give allegorical form to the pleasures of the flesh and the glories of the world.

Others

Judas: The betrayer, whose kiss is 'more deadly than the sting of snakes'. In Fletcher's longest invented episode he is pursued by conscience, mocked by Satan with the claim that Justice leaves him no hope, and hangs himself. He is the counter-example to Christ's resistance to Despair.
Joseph of Arimathea: The 'Arimathean swain' who takes the body from the cross and gives it his own tomb. He speaks the long lament of Part 3 (55–64), addressed first to the Virgin and then to the dead Christ.
The Virgin Mary: She appears in Part 1 in the story of the Nativity and in Part 3 among the mourners at the burial, where the poet addresses her grief, 'every nail that pierced His hand', and compares her to the nightingale and the lark.
Peter, Simeon and other biblical figures: Peter sleeps in Gethsemane and denies his master; Simeon, Anna and John the Baptist greet the infant Christ in Mercy's speech; the centurion confesses the Son of God at the Crucifixion; David sings in heaven. Nicodemus appears as the 'happy thief' who stole his salvation by night.
Egliset and Thyrsilis: Egliset (from the Greek ecclesia) is the Church, Christ's bride, at the close of Part 4. Thyrsilis, 'the Kentish lad' who sang of Eclecta's marriage, is usually identified with the poet's brother Phineas Fletcher, born in Kent, whose pastoral name was Thyrsil.
King James: Praised in Part 4 as the 'Picture of Peace' and father of Prince Henry, whose kingdom rests in peace while the Continent is at war. The poet carefully presents him as an earthly image of the heavenly Prince of Peace.

Themes

Justice and mercy

The poem is built on the problem of how God can be both just and merciful. Justice's case in Part 1 is true: man deserves death, and every means of escape condemns him. Mercy does not answer by denying it but by proposing that the debt be paid by the Son, who is God and man. The rest of the poem shows the payment: the Temptation, in which Christ succeeds where Adam failed, and the Passion, in which he suffers the penalty.

The theme returns at the poem's darkest point. Judas hears only the voice of Justice ('Justice lives in heaven', 3.45) and despairs; Repentance, in Part 1, is held up by Faith and crowned by Peace. The contrast between them turns an allegory of attributes in God into a lesson about the soul: the sinner who knows only the law is lost, the sinner who trusts mercy is saved.

Paradox and the Incarnation

For Fletcher the central fact of Christianity is a contradiction that language can only point at: the Infinite 'far greater grew / By growing less', the child 'so young' is 'so old', the Conqueror is slain. The poem is full of such paradoxes, built through antithesis, chiasmus and wordplay. They are not ornaments: they express the doctrine of the two natures in one person, which no single statement can contain.

The paradoxes reach their extreme in the description of God in Part 4, who 'hath no eyes to see, nor ears to hear, / Yet sees and hears'. Here the rhetoric of contradiction becomes the way of negation, the theology that speaks of God only by saying what he is not.

Heroism redefined

Christ's victories are won without weapons. In the wilderness, 'What arms for Innocence, but innocence?' (2.3); against Despair, Presumption and Panglory he wins by refusing; in Gethsemane he stands like a rock against the waves. The poem's heroic vocabulary of victory, triumph, spoils and armour describes a hero whose strength is obedience and patience.

This redefinition, the 'better fortitude / Of Patience and Heroic Martyrdom' as Milton would later call it in Paradise Lost, is what makes the poem matter in the history of English epic. It shows a Spenserian poet already moving from the knight who fights to the Son who endures (Lewalski 1966).

Earthly and heavenly love

Fletcher writes of divine love in the language of human desire. Mercy, Christ and the Church are described with the roses, lilies and sweet wounds of Petrarchan poetry, while Panglory's garden offers love of a different kind. The reader is asked to distinguish the true object of these words from the false.

The poet makes the contrast explicit when he tells the 'giddy brains' of the love poets that their 'songs exceed your matter' while his matter will make his song divine (3.6). The claim echoes the arguments of the divine poetry movement, which sought to redirect the Muses to sacred subjects (Campbell 1959).

The limits of poetry

Again and again the poet confesses that his subject exceeds him: a worm cannot climb to heaven, frail colours cannot paint Mercy's face, and 'Impotent words, weak lines' cannot tell the joys of heaven. These modesty formulas are conventional, but they are also part of the poem's theology: the poem fails before its object as reason fails before the Incarnation.

The poem's final stanzas leave the highest song, the marriage of Christ and his Church, to another poet, and the young Muse hides by the Cam. Fletcher presents himself as a beginner in a line of sacred poets, and this self-portrait helped later readers see him as a link between Spenser and Milton.

Motifs

Antithesis and chiasmus

Balanced oppositions and crossed patterns ('That bloody man to save, man's Saviour shed His blood', 'we sought Thee to kill, and Thou soughtst us to save') run through every part, turning the paradoxes of the faith into the music of the verse.

Allegorical processions and houses

Justice's train of plagues, the cave of Despair, Presumption's tent, Panglory's garden and palace, and the parade of saints at the Ascension come from the pageants and allegorical houses of the Faerie Queene.

Gardens

Eden, Panglory's 'false Eden', Gethsemane, the garden of the sepulchre and the eternal spring of heaven form a sequence: the garden of the Fall is undone in the garden of the Passion and restored in paradise.

Sun and cloud

Mercy emerges from Justice's cloud like the sun from an eclipse; the sun hides at the Crucifixion; Christ rises like the morning star and outshines the sun at the Ascension. Light is the poem's sign of divinity.

Questions and apostrophes

The poet constantly questions and addresses his subjects: the scriptures, Mercy, Christ, the flowers, the river, the soul. The device gives the narrative the intimacy of devotional lyric.

Song and music

The swan's dirge, Orpheus, David's harp, Panglory's wooing song, the angels' hymns and the nightingale's lament set true music against false and make the poem's own song part of its subject.

Symbols

Scales and sword

The attributes of Justice in Part 1, and with them the stony tables of the Law: they stand for the strict reckoning of man's guilt.

The glass globe

Panglory's hollow globe, painted with the world and compared to a child's soap bubble, symbolises the emptiness and fragility of worldly glory. Christ shatters it with her 'optic glasses'.

The tree

The tree of Eden, the 'withered tree' on which Judas hangs, and the cross: one wood brings death, another death and despair, the third life.

The swan

The swan that sings at its death opens Part 3 as an image of Christ going 'singing' to his grave, and also of the poet whose song is his offering.

The halcyon's nest

Britain as a halcyon's nest floating calm on stormy seas: the peace of James's kingdom as an image of the peace of heaven.

The rose

Mercy's cheeks, Christ's wounds, Panglory's 'virgin rose' and the unfading flowers of heaven: the rose carries both sacred and sensual meanings, and the poem asks which is true.

Critical debates

The 'Spenserian school'

Literary historians have long grouped the Fletchers with Michael Drayton, William Browne, George Wither and others as 'Spenserians', poets who kept alive Spenser's stanza, pastoral and allegory in the reign of James. Herbert Cory's early study made the Fletchers the central link between Spenser and Milton, and Joan Grundy's The Spenserian Poets gave the group its classic account, describing a shared manner of fluent, musical and often idealising verse set against the wit of Donne and the classicism of Jonson (Cory 1912) (Grundy 1969).

Later scholars have asked what held the group together. David Norbrook and Michelle O'Callaghan read the Jacobean Spenserians politically, as poets of a militant Protestant and often oppositional patriotism; O'Callaghan's study concentrates on the circle of Browne and Wither after 1612 (Norbrook 2002) (O'Callaghan 2000). Giles Fletcher fits uneasily: his poem is Spenserian in form and Protestant in doctrine, but his praise of James's peace is courtly rather than critical. Whether 'Spenserian' names a school, a style or a politics remains open (Hunter 1977).

Fletcher and Paradise Regained

Fletcher's second part is the most extended earlier English poem on the Temptation in the wilderness, and the parallels with Paradise Regained are many: Satan disguised as an old man, the temptation of the stones offered as concern for Christ's hunger, the pinnacle and the kingdoms, and a heavenly banquet brought by angels after the victory. Barbara Lewalski placed both poems in a tradition of 'brief epic' modelled on the Book of Job, and Elizabeth Pope traced the exegetical tradition of the temptations that both poets drew on (Lewalski 1966) (Pope 1947).

The differences are as instructive as the debts. Fletcher follows Matthew's order, ending with the kingdoms; Milton follows Luke's, ending with the pinnacle, where Christ's standing reveals his identity. Fletcher's tempters are allegorical figures in a Spenserian landscape; Milton's are arguments in a debate. Fletcher's Christ is described in sensuous detail; Milton's is almost all mind. Some critics see Fletcher as Milton's model, others as a foil that Milton deliberately revised (Lewalski 1966) (Carey 1997).

Milton's knowledge of the poem

Milton never mentions Giles Fletcher, so his knowledge of the poem must be inferred. The evidence includes the Nativity Ode, whose silencing of the pagan oracles recalls Fletcher's 'The cursed oracles were stricken dumb' (1.82), and many smaller verbal echoes collected by Milton's editors (Carey 1997). Dryden reported that Milton called Spenser his 'original', and the Fletchers have often been seen as the route by which Spenser's manner reached the young Milton at Cambridge (Cory 1912) (Bush 1962).

Scholars differ on how far the parallels prove direct borrowing. Many images, such as the silencing of the oracles, are commonplaces of patristic and Renaissance tradition, and both poets drew on the same exegesis. Most specialists nevertheless accept that Milton knew Christs Victorie and Triumph, a Cambridge poem reprinted at Cambridge in 1632, the year Milton took his MA there, and that its Temptation episode was one of the models he weighed for Paradise Regained (Lewalski 1966) (Kastor 1978).

The four daughters of God

The debate of Justice and Mercy descends from a medieval allegory based on Psalm 85:10, developed in Latin sermons and treatises, in Grosseteste's Chasteau d'Amour, in the Meditationes vitae Christi and in English drama. Hope Traver traced its many versions, and Samuel Chew followed the iconography of the 'virtues reconciled' into the Renaissance (Traver 1907) (Chew 1947).

Critics have asked what Fletcher does with the tradition. He reduces the four daughters to two, removes Truth, makes Peace a minor messenger, keeps God silent and leaves the Son's offer to be reported by Mercy. The result is less a reconciliation of equals than a courtroom drama in which Justice's case is admitted and then satisfied. Some read this as a Protestant tightening of the allegory around the doctrine of satisfaction; it also anticipates the dialogue in heaven of Paradise Lost, Book 3, where Milton drops the allegorical daughters altogether.

Baroque sensuousness and Protestant poetics

Fletcher's lush descriptions of Mercy and of Christ's body, his conceits and paradoxes, and his devotion to the wounds of the Passion have led critics to call the poem 'baroque' and to compare it with Crashaw and the Italian poets of the Counter-Reformation. Douglas Bush's survey of the period gives a balanced account of both its extravagance and its lyrical power (Bush 1962).

Such comparisons raise a question about sources. Louis Martz traced much seventeenth-century religious poetry to Catholic methods of meditation, while Barbara Lewalski argued for a distinctively Protestant poetics grounded in the Bible, its genres and its typology (Martz 1954) (Lewalski 1979). Fletcher's poem sits on the line: its theology of grace is Reformed, its typology biblical, but its sensuous imagination and its scenes of tears and wounds belong to a European devotional culture that crossed confessional boundaries.

The theology of the Atonement

The poem dramatises a theory of the Atonement. In Part 1 the sin of man is a debt that Justice demands and man cannot pay ('If all must pay that which all cannot pay', 1.74), and Mercy's solution is that the Son, made man, will pay it. This is the satisfaction theory associated with Anselm, sharpened in Reformed theology into the idea that Christ bore the penalty of sin in man's place: 'No sins He had, yet all our sins He bare' (3.25).

But the poem also gives great weight to Christ's victory over Satan in the Temptation and over death and hell in the Resurrection, the older picture of Christ as conqueror that the title's 'victory' and 'triumph' announce. Critics differ over whether the two models are reconciled. One answer is the poem's structure: the first two parts show Christ's obedience in heaven and on earth, the last two his suffering and triumph, so that satisfaction and victory become stages of one work (Kastor 1978) (Lewalski 1966).

Imitation, borrowing and originality

Fletcher's debts to Spenser are open and extensive: the stanza, the diction, the cave of Despair, the Bower of Bliss, Mammon's cave and Philotime, and two lines quoted verbatim at 2.23. Earlier critics sometimes treated the poem as derivative, a brilliant pastiche by a disciple. Others have seen the borrowing as a deliberate act of Christian rewriting: Fletcher moves Spenser's moral allegory into the life of Christ, and lets the episodes of the Faerie Queene become the temptations that Christ, unlike Spenser's knights, overcomes without help (Grundy 1969) (Hamilton 1990).

The question matters for the poem's place in literary history. If Fletcher is merely imitating, he is a footnote between Spenser and Milton; if he is transforming, his poem is itself an argument about how the romance epic can be made sacred, an argument that Milton would take further (Cory 1912) (Kastor 1978).

Key passages

How God and man did both embrace each other, Met in one Person, heaven and earth did kiss;

The narrator · CVT 1.2

The Incarnation is described with the image of Psalm 85:10, where righteousness and peace kiss. The verse that underlies the allegory of the four daughters of God is here applied to the union of the two natures in Christ.

But if Thy mercy needs must spare her friends, Let mercy there begin, where justice ends.

Justice · CVT 1.39

The close of Justice's speech concedes that mercy may exist but only after justice has been satisfied. The poem's solution will take her at her word: justice is fully satisfied in the death of the Son.

See how small room my infant Lord doth take, Whom all the world is not enough to hold!

Mercy · CVT 1.79

Mercy's account of the Nativity turns on the paradox of the infinite God held in a child's body, a commonplace of Christmas poetry that Milton's Nativity Ode would develop.

What arms for Innocence, but innocence?

The narrator · CVT 2.3

The wild beasts cannot harm the defenceless Christ. The line states the poem's idea of heroism: the Son conquers not with weapons but with what he is.

But, were she not in a fool's paradise, She might have seen more reason to despair:

The narrator · CVT 2.33

Presumption, who trusts God's favour without ground, is the mirror image of Despair. The wordplay on 'paradise' places her false heaven among the 'false Edens' of the second part.

But He her charms dispersed into wind, And her of insolence admonished, And all her optic glasses shattered.

The narrator · CVT 2.63

The climax of the Temptation is told in three brisk lines. After stanzas of lavish description and a long song, Christ's refusal is quick and complete; the shattered glasses expose Panglory's world as an illusion.

And God, that could not die, in Manhood dies, That we in both might live by that sweet sacrifice.

The narrator · CVT 3.5

The doctrine of the two natures in a nutshell: Christ dies as man and rises as God, so that humanity may live by both. The alexandrine draws the argument together.

Himself he flies to lose, and follows for to find.

The narrator, of Judas · CVT 3.41

Judas's guilty conscience is a hound that cannot be escaped, since he carries it with him. The line's paradox shows despair as a self-defeating flight.

Strange conquest, where the Conqueror must die, And He is slain that wins the victory!

The narrator · CVT 3.52

The paradox of the poem's title: the 'victory' and 'triumph' of Christ are won by his defeat and death.

That hath no eyes to see, nor ears to hear, Yet sees and hears, and is all eye, all ear;

The narrator · CVT 4.39

God in heaven is described by paradox and negation, the language of mystical theology. Having described everything else with sensuous detail, the poem can describe God only by contradiction.

Questions for study

Why does Fletcher reduce the four daughters of God to two, Justice and Mercy?
Consider what becomes of Truth and Peace, the forensic form of the speeches, and the doctrine that justice must be satisfied rather than overruled.
Is Justice a villain in Part 1?
Look at the truth of her charges, the honour paid to her in 1.10–16, and the fact that Mercy never refutes her.
How does Fletcher interpret the three temptations of Christ?
Despair, Presumption and Panglory; the order of Matthew; the triad of the flesh, the world and the pride of life.
What does Fletcher take from Spenser, and what does he change?
Compare Despair, Archimago, Mammon's cave and the Bower of Bliss with Fletcher's episodes, and Guyon's violence with Christ's refusal.
Why does Fletcher describe Mercy and Christ in the language of love poetry?
Think about the blazon, the 'giddy brains' of 3.6, Panglory's song, and the difference between true and false objects of desire.
How does paradox work in the poem?
Find examples in 1.1, 1.79, 3.5, 3.13 and 4.39, and ask what doctrine each expresses.
What is the function of the Judas episode in Part 3?
Compare Judas with Christ facing Despair in Part 2 and with Repentance in Part 1; note Satan's use of Justice's argument.
Why does the poem turn to King James and Britain in Part 4?
Consider the halcyon image, the pun on 'Stewart', patronage, and the relation between earthly and heavenly peace.
What might Milton have learned from this poem for Paradise Regained?
The hero who conquers by refusing, the disguised tempter, the angelic banquet; and also the differences of order, method and style.
How does the poem end, and why might it end that way?
Look at the tribute to Thyrsilis, the Muse by the Cam, and the anadiplosis of the last stanza.

Christ's Victorie and Triumph

Overview

Context

Plot overview

Part by part

Part 1: Christ's Victory in Heaven

Summary

Analysis

Part 2: Christ's Victory on Earth

Summary

Analysis

Part 3: Christ's Triumph over Death

Summary

Analysis

Part 4: Christ's Triumph after Death

Summary

Analysis

Characters

Heaven

Satan and the temptations

Others

Themes

Justice and mercy

Paradox and the Incarnation

Heroism redefined

Earthly and heavenly love

The limits of poetry

Motifs

Antithesis and chiasmus

Allegorical processions and houses

Gardens

Sun and cloud

Questions and apostrophes

Song and music

Symbols

Scales and sword

The glass globe

The tree

The swan

The halcyon's nest

The rose

Critical debates

The 'Spenserian school'

Fletcher and Paradise Regained

Milton's knowledge of the poem

The four daughters of God

Baroque sensuousness and Protestant poetics

The theology of the Atonement

Imitation, borrowing and originality

Key passages

Questions for study

Further reading