Study guide
The Divine Weeks (La Sepmaine)
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Overview
- Author
- Guillaume de Salluste, seigneur Du Bartas (1544–1590), a Huguenot gentleman of Gascony, soldier and diplomat in the service of Henri de Navarre
- French poem
- La Sepmaine, ou Creation du monde (Paris, 1578): seven 'Days' retelling the six days of Creation and the Sabbath, in rhyming alexandrine couplets; some thirty editions appeared within about six years
- The sequel
- La Seconde Semaine, a sacred history from Eden onward planned in seven Days of four parts each; the first two Days appeared in 1584, further parts after the poet's death (the 'Suites', 1603). It was never finished
- Translator
- Josuah Sylvester (1563–1618), merchant, secretary to the Merchant Adventurers at Middelburg at his death
- English editions
- Bartas: His Devine Weekes and Workes (1605, dated 1605; complete 1608), dedicated to James I; collected folio 1611, many editions to 1641
- English verse
- Rhyming iambic pentameter couplets, which expand the French freely: Sylvester adds compliments to English poets and to the royal family, and multiplies compound epithets
- Genre
- Hexaemeron (a poem on the six days of Creation) joined to an encyclopaedic didactic poem and, in the Second Week, a scriptural epic of sacred history
- Sources
- Genesis and the rest of Scripture; the Church Fathers' hexaemeral sermons (Basil, Ambrose); Pliny's Natural History and Renaissance natural philosophy
- This text
- The 1611 folio (EEBO-TCP), original spelling. Line numbers here are counted within each Day or Part from the first verse line after Sylvester's Argument, and may differ slightly from Snyder's edition
- Afterlife
- One of the most read long poems in seventeenth-century England; read by Spenser's successors, by Milton and by Anne Bradstreet; mocked by Dryden in 1681 and little read in the eighteenth century
Context
Guillaume de Salluste was born in 1544 at Montfort, near Auch in Gascony, the son of a family recently ennobled by trade; he took his title from the small estate of Bartas. He was a Protestant, served Henri de Navarre (the future Henri IV) as soldier and diplomat, and visited the court of James VI in Scotland in 1587. His first collection, La Muse Chrestiene (1574), contained the biblical epic Judit and L'Uranie, a short poem in which Urania, the Muse of astronomy, appears to the poet and urges him to give up profane love poetry for sacred subjects. That programme governs everything he wrote afterwards. He died in 1590 (Pellissier 1883) (Dauphiné 1983).
La Sepmaine, ou Creation du monde (1578) retells the first chapter of Genesis in seven books or 'Days', some 6,500 alexandrines in rhyming couplets. Each Day treats what God made on that day of the week, and each becomes the occasion for a survey of what was then known about it: the elements and the weather, the seas and the minerals, the stars, fishes and birds, beasts and the human body and soul. The model is the hexaemeron, the Christian commentary on the six days of Creation that goes back to the sermons of Basil of Caesarea and Ambrose of Milan, which had long mixed scriptural exposition with natural history and moral instruction (Robbins 1912) (Williams 1948). Du Bartas turned that tradition into a vernacular poem for a Protestant readership, and it was a sensation: around thirty editions appeared within six years, and learned commentaries were printed to explain its science (Holmes 1935) (Du Bartas 1981).
He then began a much larger poem, La Seconde Semaine, which was to tell the history of the world from Adam to the Last Judgement in seven Days, each in four parts: Adam, Noah, Abraham, David, the Captivity, the Messiah and the eternal Sabbath. The first two Days appeared in 1584; parts of the Third and Fourth were printed after his death. The plan was never finished, and Sylvester's text marks the point where the Third Day breaks off its account of the patriarchs (Du Bartas 1991).
In Britain the poem had an unusually royal welcome. James VI translated L'Uranie into Scots verse in his Essayes of a Prentise (1584), and Du Bartas returned the compliment by translating James's Lepanto into French (James VI and I 1955). Thomas Hudson translated Judit at the king's request, and several English versions of parts of the Weeks circulated before Josuah Sylvester published Bartas: His Devine Weekes and Workes in 1605, dedicated to James, now king of England; the complete version followed in 1608 and the collected folio, from which this text is taken, in 1611 (Ashton 1908) (Du Bartas 1979). Sylvester rendered the alexandrines in English heroic couplets, expanding as he went, and the book was reprinted until 1641 (Auger 2019).
Sylvester's Du Bartas was one of the books that formed English poetic taste in the early seventeenth century. Readers admired its learning, its piety and its abundance of compound epithets and coined words, and the French poet was praised as a model of the Christian poet who had turned the Muse from love to God (Prescott 1978) (Campbell 1959). Its later reputation fell as fast as it had risen: in 1681 Dryden quoted a passage of Sylvester's winter description as an example of the bombast he had once admired as a boy. The poem now matters chiefly as a source and context for the sacred poetry of the period, above all Paradise Lost, and as a monument of Renaissance encyclopaedic poetry (Taylor 1934) (Lewalski 1985).
Plot overview
The First Week follows the order of Genesis 1. The First Day invokes God, denies that the world is eternal or the work of chance, describes the formless matter of Chaos, the creation of light and the fall of the rebel angels. The Second Day attacks wanton poets and then treats the four elements, the regions of the air and the meteors (winds, comets, thunder), and the heavens with the waters above them. The Third Day separates sea and land and surveys seas, springs, metals, plants, gems and the lodestone, ending in praise of the country life. The Fourth Day describes the fixed stars, the planets and the zodiac, rejects the Copernican motion of the earth, and celebrates the sun and moon.
The Fifth Day fills the waters with fishes and the air with birds, with many marvellous anecdotes (Arion and the dolphin, the Phoenix). The Sixth Day creates the beasts and finally man, the 'little world', whose body and soul are anatomised at length; Eve is made from Adam's rib. On the Seventh Day God, like a painter admiring his finished landscape, surveys his work; the poet explains the providence that sustains it and the proper use of the Sabbath.
The Second Week turns from nature to history. Its First Day tells of Eden, the temptation and fall, the curse on creation that brings disease, war and famine (the Furies), and the first human inventions after the expulsion, from fire to the forge and music, together with Cain's murder of Abel. The Second Day tells of Noah's Ark and the Flood, Nimrod and the confusion of tongues at Babel, the peopling of the earth by Noah's sons, and the pillars of Seth, on which the sciences were preserved.
The Third Day follows Abraham's calling and the sacrifice of Isaac, then Moses, the Exodus and the Law, and Joshua's conquest of Canaan through to the Judges and the demand for a king. The Fourth Day tells of Saul and David, Solomon and the Temple, the division of the kingdom under Rehoboam and Jeroboam with the prophets Elijah and Elisha, and the decline of both kingdoms down to the Babylonian captivity. The poem closes, unfinished, with an exhortation to the pilgrimage towards the heavenly city.
Part by part
Part 1: The First Day
1–836
Summary
The poem opens with an invocation to God, guide of the stars and tamer of the ocean, asking that the poet may sing 'the WORLD'S renowned BIRTH' and inherit, like Elisha, the spirit of his master. The world, he argues, is neither eternal nor the product of chance, as Democritus taught: it was made from nothing, at the instant when time began, by the same decree that will one day end it. Before creation God was alone, 'all in all'; to the scoffing atheist who asks what God did before the world, the poet answers that he was building hell for such questioners. After a warning to his Muse not to sound the depths of the Trinity, he describes the world as God's visible robe, a school, a stage and 'a Book in Folio' in which every creature is a page.
God made the world from nothing, not on an earlier model. The first matter was Chaos, a 'formless Form', over which the Spirit brooded like a hen on her eggs. The poet refutes the plurality of worlds and the void, describes the end of the world by fire and the Last Judgement, and rebukes those who calculate its date. God then creates light ('Be there Light') and divides it from darkness, and the poet praises night as the time of rest. The Day ends with the angels: the rebellion and fall of the proud spirits under their prince, the wiles of Satan, and the ministries of the good angels who guard the elect.
Analysis
The First Day sets out the theological foundations of the whole poem. Creation from nothing, the beginning of time with the world, and the refutation of Aristotle's eternal universe and of Epicurean chance were standard topics of the hexaemeral commentaries since Basil and Augustine, and Du Bartas versifies them as a polemic against the 'atheists' of his own day (Robbins 1912) (Williams 1948). The image of the world as a book written by God, legible without learned languages, expresses the Protestant confidence that the book of nature, like Scripture, speaks to all.
The description of Chaos and the brooding Spirit is one of the passages most often compared with Paradise Lost. Milton's invocation, where the Spirit 'Dove-like satst brooding on the vast Abyss', and his account in Book 7 of the Spirit's 'brooding wings' over the deep, draw on the same interpretation of Genesis 1:2, which Du Bartas makes vivid with his hen simile; whether Milton took it from Sylvester or from the commentaries is exactly the kind of question Taylor's study raised (Taylor 1934) (Milton 1998). The fall of the angels, told briefly here, Milton expanded into the war in heaven.
That first World (yet) was a most formless Form, A confus'd Heap, a Chaos most deform, A Gulf of Gulfs, a Body ill compact, An vgly medly, where all difference lackt:
Chaos described by a string of paradoxes and appositions, a hallmark of Du Bartas's style.
Euen in such sort seemed the Spirit Eternall To brood vpon this Gulf; with care paternall Quickning the Parts, inspiring power in each, From so foul Lees, so fair a World to fetch.
The Spirit brooding over the waters, compared to a hen on her eggs. Compare Paradise Lost 1.21 and 7.235.
Part 2: The Second Day
1–1294
Summary
The Second Day opens with an attack on learned poets who use their gifts to make vice attractive, turning Hecuba into Helen and making blind Cupid a god; the poet vows to write only 'Verse that a Virgine without blush may read'. He then treats the four elements, which arose from Chaos: their qualities and mixtures, their correspondence with the four humours of the body, and the diseases caused when one prevails. Nothing is made of nothing in the natural order, he argues, and matter, like wax under the seal, takes endless forms without increase or loss. The elements are assigned their places, earth at the centre and fire above, joined like dancers in a ring.
The poet rides his Muse into the three regions of the air, and explains mists, dew, rain, snow and hail, the winds, lightning and thunder, comets and other meteors, rainbows and multiple suns, many of them read as divine warnings. Sylvester adds a long admonition to England to repent before it falls. The Day closes with the heavens: whether they are made of a fifth essence, as Aristotle held, or of the elements, how many spheres there are, and how there can be 'waters above the firmament', which the poet defends against critics and connects with the Flood.
Analysis
The opening condemnation of erotic poetry repeats the programme of L'Uranie and makes the Weeks a deliberate alternative to the Petrarchan and Ovidian verse of the Pléiade. This was the aspect of Du Bartas that English Protestant readers most admired: here was a poet of the first rank who had sworn to write only sacred verse (Campbell 1959) (Prescott 1978).
The rest of the Day is a versified meteorology and cosmology, much of it derived from Aristotle's Meteorologica and from Pliny, but subordinated to theology: meteors are natural effects, yet also signs of God's anger. On disputed questions, such as the matter of the heavens, the poet weighs both opinions and declines to decide, a sceptical caution about human knowledge that coexists with his encyclopaedic appetite (Schmidt 1938). The warnings to England show how freely Sylvester applied the poem to his own nation.
Therefore, for my part, I haue vow'd to Heav'n Such wit and learning as my God hath giv'n; To write, to th' honour of my Maker dread, Verse that a Virgine without blush may read.
The poet's vow of chaste and sacred poetry, a key text for the Protestant poetics of the period.
Me thinks I hear, when I doo hear it Thunder, The voice that brings Swayns vp, and Caesars vnder: By that Towr-tearing stroak, I vnderstand Th' vndaunted strength of the Diuine right hand:
Thunder as natural effect and as the voice of God, who raises the humble and brings down rulers.
Part 3: The Third Day
1–1174
Summary
The Muse descends from the air to earth and sea. God gathers the waters and gives the sea its bounds; the poet discusses the shapes of seas, their use as frontiers and highways, the great rivers of the world (to which Sylvester adds the Medway, Thames and other English rivers, with a tribute to Sidney at Penshurst), the water cycle, the tides and the saltness of the sea. A catalogue of marvellous springs and healing waters follows, from Ammon's fountain to the baths of the Pyrenees, and Sylvester adds a digression on the Lambourn in Berkshire.
Earth and water make one sphere at the centre of the universe, round, as the circumnavigators prove, and unmoving. Compared with the heavens the earth is a point, so that a conqueror who owned it all would gain 'A Nit, a Nothing'. God commands the earth to bring forth trees, fruits, flowers and herbs, and the poet catalogues medicinal plants and poisons, crops, metals and gems, and the marvels of the lodestone and the compass. The Day ends with a hymn to the Earth and a celebration of the country life, free from court, law and flattery; Sylvester closes with a prayer to retire to Berkshire, unless his king should call him.
Analysis
The Third Day shows how the poem combines natural history and moral satire. The smallness of the earth seen from the heavens, an ancient commonplace from Cicero's Dream of Scipio, becomes an argument against ambition and avarice, and the praise of country life recalls Virgil's Georgics and Horace's Beatus ille. Even the wonders of springs and stones are read as signs of God's power working through nature (Schmidt 1938).
This Day also contains some of Sylvester's most extensive additions: the English rivers, the lament for Sidney, the Lambourn digression and the compliments to Elizabeth and James. They show the translator turning a French poem into an English one, and treating his original as a frame into which he could insert his own patriotic and personal material. Modern editors have been able to separate these additions from the French text, but early readers often took the whole for Du Bartas (Du Bartas 1979) (Auger 2019).
Our siluer Medway, (which doth deep indent The Flowrie Medowes of My natiue KENT; Still sadly weeping (vnder Pensherst walls) Th' Arcadian Cygnet's bleeding Funerals)
One of Sylvester's additions: the Medway at Penshurst still mourns Sir Philip Sidney, author of the Arcadia.
All-hail fair Earth, bearer of Towns and Towrs, Of Men, Gold, Grain, Physik, and Fruits, and Flowrs, Fair, firm, and fruitfull, various, patient, sweet, Sumptuously cloathed in a Mantle meet
The hymn to the Earth, an accumulation of nouns and epithets typical of the Weeks.
Part 4: The Fourth Day
1–850
Summary
The poet asks to be carried through the spheres in Elijah's fiery chariot. He disclaims any thirst for fame, and Sylvester presents himself as the moon reflecting the light of 'great du BARTAS'. God adorns the heavens with stars, made from the light of the first day; they are fixed in turning spheres and do not, as some philosophers held, eat and drink. The poet then refutes those who think the earth turns daily, with the arguments of the arrow shot upright, the stone thrown on a ship and the birds, and dismisses Copernicus, who makes the sun the centre, as a paradox not worth pursuing.
He describes the starry firmament spreading its eyes like a peacock's tail, the forty-eight constellations and the twelve signs of the zodiac, then the seven planets in their spheres. The stars have real influence on earthly things under God's providence, but the poet rejects Stoic fatalism. The sun is celebrated as king, heart of the world and bridegroom, whose yearly course makes the seasons, and the moon as sovereign of the seas, with her phases and eclipses, including the darkness at the Crucifixion. The Day ends with the sun's miracles, the dial of Hezekiah and the long day of Joshua.
Analysis
The rejection of Copernicus is the passage of the Weeks most often cited in histories of science. Du Bartas knew the heliocentric hypothesis, summarised it correctly (the 'three-fold motion' of the earth) and dismissed it with the physical objections common before Galileo. His position is the ordinary learned one of the 1570s, but placed in a popular poem it made the Ptolemaic cosmos familiar to a wide readership (Schmidt 1938). Milton, writing after Galileo, has Raphael leave the choice between the systems open in Paradise Lost 8, a deliberate contrast with the confidence of the Fourth Day (Milton 1998).
The praise of the sun shows the poem's political imagination: the sun is a king on progress, attended by the planets as princes, a ruler who is not flattered and does not neglect his realm. Sylvester's additions turn the comparison towards English history (Edward II and Richard II as failed kings). Note that in this text the Fourth Day breaks off after Joshua's miracle without the formal closing couplet that ends the other Days.
Arm'd with these reasons, 'twere superfluous T' assail the reasons of Copernicus; Who, to salve better, of the Stars th' appearance, Vnto the Earth a three-fold motion warrants:
Copernicus named and dismissed. 'To salve the appearances' was the technical phrase for explaining the observed motions of the planets.
Euen as a Peacock, prickt with loues desire, To woo his Mistress, strowting stately by her, Spreads round the rich pride of his pompous vail, His azure wings and starry-golden tail,
The night sky compared to a peacock displaying its tail: an extended homely simile of the kind Du Bartas favours.
Part 5: The Fifth Day
1–1088
Summary
God fills the waters with fish and the air with birds. The sea, the poet observes, contains a counterpart of everything on land and in the sky, even a mitred bishop and a cowled friar, and the tools of every craft. He describes the variety of sea creatures, whales like floating islands, the migrations of salmon and sturgeon, and the 'manners' of fish: the faithful and the adulterous, the cunning cramp-fish that numbs the angler, the cuttle that hides in its ink, and the fish that help their captured friends, models of a friendship that shames men. The tale of Arion, saved by a dolphin charmed by his music, is told at length.
The poet then turns to the birds. The Phoenix, dying in its nest of spices and reborn as its own heir, is a figure of death in Adam and life in Christ. The nightingale's song surpasses all human music; the parrot, birds of prey, the griffin guarding gold, the swan, the halcyon, the stork and the pelican (a type of Christ) follow, with the bees as a model commonwealth and the silkworm. The Day ends with the story of a maiden of Sestos and the tame eagle that leapt into her funeral pyre.
Analysis
The Fifth Day is the most purely delightful part of the poem and the one that most clearly shows its debt to Pliny's Natural History, Aelian and the bestiaries. Du Bartas does not distinguish observation from legend: the Phoenix and the barnacle goose stand beside the salmon and the crane. The marvels are not curiosities for their own sake but evidence of God's ingenuity, and many carry an explicit moral or allegorical meaning, as the Phoenix and the pelican point to Christ (Schmidt 1938) (Williams 1948).
The Arion episode, a set piece about the power of music to tame nature, connects the natural history with the poem's reflection on poetry. Like Orpheus, Arion shows what sacred song might do; the poet repeatedly hopes that his own verse will wake his 'drowsy' readers. Milton's account of the fifth day in Paradise Lost 7 compresses the same creatures into a few dozen lines, choosing a handful of vivid images where Du Bartas offers hundreds (Taylor 1934).
Seas haue (as wel as Skies) Sun, Moon, and Stars: (As well as Aire) Swallows, and Rooks, and Stares:
The sea as a mirror of the whole creation, named after starfish, sunfish and flying fish. 'Stares' are starlings.
End-less by'r End, eternall by her Toomb; While, by a prosperous Death, she doth becom (Among the cinders of her sacred Fire) Her own selfs Heir, Nurse, Nurseling, Dam, and Sire:
The Phoenix, a traditional emblem of resurrection, in a cascade of paradoxes.
Part 6: The Sixth Day
1–1122
Summary
The poet invites all pilgrims of this world to admire God's works and brings the land animals onto his stage: the elephant and its fight with the dragon, the rhinoceros, the camel, the horse and the dog, and a host of fierce and venomous beasts. Why did God make harmful creatures? Because man's sin broke the peace of Eden; yet God gave man wit to master them and set the creatures against each other, so that their good outweighs their harm. The lion is honoured with the story of the slave who drew a thorn from its paw and was later spared by it in the Roman arena.
Last comes man, the 'little world' and epitome of the universe, made last as a host prepares his guest's room. God takes counsel, forms Adam from earth with an upright face turned to heaven, and the poet anatomises the body from head to foot, praising speech and the hands, and then the soul, breathed from God, with its memory, reason and power to rise above the world. Human arts, from Zeuxis' grapes to Archimedes' sphere and mechanical birds, show the soul's god-like invention. Eve is made from Adam's rib while he sleeps, so like him that lover and beloved can hardly be told apart, and the Day ends with the praise of marriage and the generation of all creatures.
Analysis
The creation of man is the climax of the First Week, and the idea of man as microcosm organises it: the body is a little world containing all the elements, a 'Map' of the great one, and its anatomy is described with the same encyclopaedic wonder as the heavens. The praise of human ingenuity, culminating in automata and mechanical models of the cosmos, gives the passage a Renaissance confidence in art and invention that sits alongside the poem's insistence on human sin (Schmidt 1938) (Dauphiné 1983).
For readers of Milton the Sixth Day invites close comparison with Paradise Lost 7 and 8: the creation of the beasts rising from the earth, man made upright to 'correspond with Heav'n', and the creation of Eve from the sleeping Adam's side. Taylor collected many verbal parallels here, but the shared material comes from Genesis and the commentaries, and the differences are as telling as the likenesses: Milton gives Adam his own narrative of Eve's creation and his own response to it (Taylor 1934) (Evans 1968).
Ther is no Theam more plentifull to sean, Then is the glorious goodly Frame of MAN: For in Man's self is Fire, Aire, Earth, and Sea; Man's (in a word) the World's Epitomé
Man as microcosm, containing the four elements of the great world.
Source of all ioyes? sweet Hee-Shee-Coupled-One, Thy sacred Birth I neuer think vpon, But (rauisht) I admire how God did then Make Two of One, and One of Two again.
The marriage of Adam and Eve, with one of the compound coinages typical of Sylvester.
Part 7: The Seventh Day
1–742
Summary
The Seventh Day opens with an extended simile: a painter who has finished a landscape forgets his labour and gazes greedily on every detail of his picture, its lamb and wood, its gunner and ploughmen and spinning shepherdess. So God, having finished 'the Table fair' of the universe in six days, rests on the seventh to admire himself in all his works, and the poet surveys with him the seas, the elements, the spheres, the herbs and the birds. God's rest is not idleness: the poet attacks Epicurus and those who imagine a God who made the world and left it to run, and expounds a providence that sustains and governs everything, using even Satan as its executioner and turning the crimes of Joseph's brothers or of Judas to good ends.
Providence is defended against the objection that the wicked prosper: affliction is the discipline of a father, physician or schoolmaster. The poet then explains the Sabbath, a day of rest from covetous labour, of public worship and of meditation, and a figure of the eternal rest. Inviting the reader to sit beside him, he reads nature as a 'dumb Doctor' and a book of moral lessons: stars, metals and plants, bees, eagles, doves and the spider all teach duties to kings, pastors, husbands, wives and children. The Muse at last drops anchor, having 'row'd sufficient, for a Sabbath Day'.
Analysis
The painter simile is one of the most admired passages of the poem, and a statement of its aesthetic. God is an artist, the world is a picture full of 'various, rich, and rare' detail, and the proper response to it is the same delighted contemplation that the poem has tried to provoke for six days. The divine rest of Genesis 2 becomes an act of looking, and the poem's encyclopaedic catalogues are justified as a way of sharing God's pleasure in his work (Prescott 1978).
The second half turns the 'book of the creatures' into ethics. This is a Protestant version of an old idea: nature is a second scripture, legible to everyone, which confirms the written Word without replacing it. The moral lessons drawn from animals come largely from Pliny and the bestiary tradition, but they are now arranged as instruction for the estates of a Christian commonwealth (Lewalski 1979) (Williams 1948). Milton's account of the seventh day in Paradise Lost 7, where the Creator returns in triumph and surveys his work 'how good, how fair', handles the same moment in a very different, choric manner (Milton 1998).
Hauing with pain-less pain, and care-less care, In These Six Days, finisht the Table fair And infinite of th' Vniuersall Ball, Resteth This Day, t' admire himself in All:
The application of the painter simile. 'Table' is a painted panel: the universe as God's picture.
Com (Reader) sit, com sit thee down by mee; Think with my thoughts, and see what I doo see: Hear this dumb Doctor, study in this Book, Where day and night thou mai'st at pleasure look,
Nature as a silent teacher and a book: the poem's moral method in four lines.
Part 8: Eden
1–764
Summary
The Second Week begins with a new invocation and a vast programme: the story of God's Church and the deeds of kings, from the first Sabbath to the Day of Doom. Sylvester inserts an appeal to English poets, Spenser (the 'Elfine Oracle'), Daniel and a 'new Naso' (Drayton), to turn their gifts from Ovidian love to sacred subjects. Eden is then described as far more wonderful than any pagan Elysium: an earthly garden of endless spring in which God himself walks as gardener. The poet insists that it was a real place, discusses where it lay and how its four rivers can be identified, and supposes the Flood has since altered it.
The two trees are explained: the Tree of Life, superior to every pagan elixir, and the Tree of Knowledge, a sign and seal of God's lordship. Adam's knowledge was infused, not acquired, and his work in the garden was a pleasure; in a homely simile he is compared to a country boor seeing London for the first time. God grants Adam Eden in the language of feudal tenure, with the one tree as his rent, and Adam vows obedience. After a tour of Eden's marvels the poet checks his Muse from 'curious' questions about life before the Fall, and ends by explaining death as the effect of sin: man was created able not to die, and after his sin he cannot avoid death.
Analysis
The opening is a manifesto for the whole Second Week, and Sylvester's insertion makes it a manifesto for English poetry too. The call to Spenser, Daniel and Drayton to 'sacre' their gifts to God extends Du Bartas's programme of converting the Muse, first set out in L'Uranie, to the English poets of the 1590s. It is one of the clearest examples of the translator adapting the poem to its new audience (Du Bartas 1979) (Prescott 1978).
The insistence that Eden was a real place, and the refusal of 'curious' speculation, place Du Bartas within the literal exegesis favoured by Protestant commentators on Genesis (Williams 1948) (Evans 1968). The feudal metaphor of the covenant, with God as 'Lord Paramount' and Adam as his liegeman, and the doctrine that Adam was created 'Immortall then, and mortall' are close to the theological framework of Paradise Lost, where Raphael's account of Adam's condition and the prohibition as 'sole pledge' of obedience develop the same ideas at much greater length (Taylor 1934) (Lewalski 1985).
Where God himself (as Gardner) treads the allies, With Trees and Corn couers the hills and vallies,
God as the gardener of Eden, walking its alleys.
Immortall then, and mortall, man was made; Mortall he liv'd, and did immortall vade:
Adam's created condition: able to die and able not to die. 'Vade' means 'fade, pass away'.
Part 9: The Imposture
1–646
Summary
The poet asks for wings to fly from heaven to hell and fears that the story of Adam's fall, a commonplace of every sermon, will weary his readers. Satan, the 'Hell's Prince', is described as a being tormented by hatred, pride and envy who can tolerate no one greater, equal or lesser than himself. Because pure spirits cannot speak, and because Eve would flee from him in his own shape, he chooses a body; he considers various animals and settles on the serpent, then still upright and brilliantly coloured. The poet weighs whether Satan made an illusion, an airy body or used the real serpent, and concludes that he worked through the real creature.
Satan attacks the weakest point, the woman. The serpent asks Eve whether God forbids all the fruits; she answers that only one tree is forbidden, already 'brooding' a curious wish; the serpent promises that the fruit will make them equal to God and immortal. Eve hesitates ('She would, she would not') and eats; with her smiles and witty speech she persuades Adam, who eats without a word. Their eyes are opened, they cover themselves and hide; God questions them, Adam blames Eve and Eve the serpent, and God pronounces sentence on serpent, woman and man, including the promise that the woman's seed will bruise the serpent's head. The poet defends God's justice, explains original sin, and celebrates the Fall as the occasion of greater good. Adam and Eve are expelled, and a seraph with a flaming sword guards the gate.
Analysis
For readers of Milton this is the most important part of the Second Week, and the differences are as instructive as the likenesses. Du Bartas gives Satan no speech of his own, no council and no soliloquy: he is a theological problem, analysed by the narrator, rather than a dramatic character. The temptation follows Genesis closely, with additions from the commentary tradition (why the serpent, how a spirit can speak), and Adam falls almost silently, drawn by Eve's charm. Milton's Satan, his serpent's long rhetorical speech and Adam's deliberate choice 'not deceav'd' are the measure of how far Paradise Lost transformed its sources (Evans 1968) (Kastor 1974).
The theodicy that follows is a compact version of the arguments Milton's God and narrator develop: free will, the justice of the sentence, and the paradox of the fortunate fall, by which the sin brought praise to God, bliss to man and shame to Satan through Christ (Lewalski 1985). Sylvester's contribution is again local and topical: he compares the exiles' grief to that of the Spaniards expelled from Cadiz by Essex in 1596, an event after Du Bartas's death (Du Bartas 1979).
She would, she would not; glad, sad; coms, and goes: And long she marts about a Match of Woes:
Eve's hesitation before eating, in antitheses typical of the style. 'Marts' means 'bargains'.
Cunningly adding her quaint smiling glances, Her witty speech, and pretty countenances, She so preuails, that her blind Lord at last, A morsell of the sharp-sweet fruit doth taste.
Adam's fall, told in four lines. Contrast Paradise Lost 9.896–999, where Adam deliberates and chooses.
Part 10: The Furies
1–804
Summary
'This's not the World', the poet cries as he looks at the fallen creation: it is only the grave of the first world. Before the Fall all things were tuned in sympathy like a well-strung lute; Adam, the chief string, put everything out of tune, and the creatures and elements now war against man. Fire, flood and earthquake turn on him, the earth brings forth thistles and poisonous plants, the metals tempt his avarice, and even the smallest fly rebels against its former king.
God then summons from hell three Furies: Dearth, War and Sickness. Sickness leads her troops against every part of the body in turn, in a long medical catalogue of diseases from the head to the skin, and the poet breaks off to recall his own fever, which tormented him for four years. Then come the diseases of the soul, the passions of Sorrow, Joy, Fear and Desire with their followers, more dangerous because they disguise vice as virtue. The part ends with a satire on courtiers and bullies and a prayer that swords may be beaten into ploughshares.
Analysis
The idea that the Fall disordered the whole creation, and not only human nature, is developed here with the poem's characteristic mixture of theology and natural philosophy. The image of creation as a lute, whose harmony depends on the sympathies between things, comes from Renaissance natural magic; the Fall breaks the network of sympathy and replaces it with antipathy. The medical catalogue is the most encyclopaedic passage of the Second Week, a versified pathology arranged as a military muster (Schmidt 1938).
The personified Furies show the poem's allegorical habit, which later English poets took up: the troops of diseases recall the allegorical processions of Spenser and anticipate the catalogue of maladies that Michael shows Adam in the lazar-house of Paradise Lost 11 (Taylor 1934) (Milton 1998). The poet's personal complaint about his fever is a reminder that the Weeks were written by a busy and often ill soldier-diplomat.
'Tis but a Dungeon and a dreadfull Caue, Of that First World the miserable graue.
The fallen world described as the tomb of the first creation.
But Adam, being chief of all the strings Of this large Lute, o're-retched, quickly brings All out of tune: and now, for melody
Creation as a musical instrument, untuned by sin.
Part 11: The Handi-Crafts
1–774
Summary
The part opens with a hymn to Peace, 'unseen in France this many a yeer', and a prayer that the French king, his brother and the king of Navarre be called fathers of their country; the English text adds praise of Elizabeth. The exiled Adam and Eve, like disgraced courtiers, learn from Need, 'Arts antient Dame': they gather food, dress in leaves, feathers and sheepskins, and shelter in caves and huts. Fire is discovered when the wind sets trees alight; later Adam strikes flints and Eve blows the dry leaves into flame. The poet's famous winter description, ridiculed by Dryden, belongs to this part.
Cain and Abel are born; Cain invents the plough, God accepts Abel's offering and refuses Cain's, and Cain kills his brother with a huge stone. Restless with guilt, Cain tames and rides the first horse and builds a fortified town. Tubal-cain discovers iron and the smith's tools, and Jubal makes the first lute from a tortoise shell. Adam teaches Seth, and in a prophetic trance foresees the six ages of history from Noah to the Messiah and the final Sabbath, then the sins of Lamech, the rapture of Enoch, the giants and the coming of the Flood.
Analysis
The 'Handi-Crafts' (Du Bartas's Les Artifices) is a poem about the origin of civilisation, drawn from Genesis 4 and from the classical myths of the invention of the arts. It makes need and guilt, not divine gift, the source of human technology, and gives the inventions to Cain's line: the horse, the city and iron belong to the murderer and his descendants. The pattern, in which the arts of civilisation grow out of the Fall and are morally ambiguous, recurs in Paradise Lost 11, where Michael shows Adam the inventors of metallurgy and music in the tents of Cain's descendants (Evans 1968) (Milton 1998).
Adam's prophecy of history arranged in six 'days' explains the plan of the Second Week itself, which was to follow the same ages, so that the poem prophesies its own structure. The opening hymn to peace belongs to the French civil wars of the 1580s; Sylvester's additions turn it towards England (Du Bartas 1991). The winter lines, with their 'perriwig' for snow on the woods, became for Dryden the type of bad taste, yet they show how Sylvester's coinages aimed at vividness and wit (Dryden 1900).
But, when the Winters keener breath began To crystallize the Baltike Ocean, To glaze the Lakes, and bridle-vp the Floods, And perriwig with wooll the bald-pate Woods;
The lines Dryden quoted in 1681 (in a slightly different form) as the 'fustian' he had admired as a boy.
Fift Element, of Instruments the haft, The Tool of Tools, and hand of Handy-Craft.
The apostrophe to iron, the instrument of all the other arts.
Part 12: The Arke
1–616
Summary
The Second Day opens with the poet's complaint that troubled times, cares, sickness, losses and lawsuits have driven him from the mount 'Where sweet Vrania sitteth to indite'; he prays that God will not take away his spirit. The sentence on Adam takes effect in the Flood. Noah builds the Ark and brings into it his family and a pair of every creature, encouraging his children with the assurance of God's mercy. His son Cham, an atheist, mocks his father's fears, calls God a tyrant and butcher, and explains the Flood by natural causes.
Noah answers in a long theological speech: God is the perfect circle whose centre is everywhere, is spoken of in human terms only by accommodation, and punishes as a physician or judge, not as a tyrant. The waters rise and fall; the raven and the dove are sent out, and Noah greets the olive branch. After the sacrifice God blesses Noah, forbids the eating of blood, and sets the rainbow in the clouds as a pledge. Noah plants a vine and is drunk; Cham mocks his father's nakedness while Sem and Japhet cover him, and Noah curses Canaan. The part ends with an attack on drunkenness.
Analysis
The debate between Cham and Noah is a Renaissance debate between naturalist scepticism and providence. Cham's arguments, that the Flood had natural causes and that a punishing God is a tyrant, are the arguments of the 'atheists' whom Du Bartas attacks throughout the Weeks; Noah's reply draws on the scholastic and Neoplatonic definitions of God (the infinite circle) and on the doctrine of accommodation. The scene shows the poem's habit of dramatising theological controversy as dialogue.
The complaint at the opening and the invocation of Urania link the Second Week to Du Bartas's earlier L'Uranie, and the figure of Urania as the Muse of sacred poetry passed from him to English writers (Campbell 1959). Milton's invocation of Urania at the start of Paradise Lost 7, 'the meaning, not the Name I call', and the Flood narrative of Book 11 both stand in this tradition (Milton 1998).
And if now, banisht from the learned Fount, And cast down head-long from the lofty Mount Where sweet Vrania sitteth to indite, Mine humbled Muse flag in a lowely flight;
Urania as the Muse of the poem's sacred inspiration; the poet fears his flight has fallen.
I (God be prays'd) knowe that the perfect CIRCLE Whose Center's every-where, of all his circle Exceeds the circuit; I conceiue aright
Noah uses the medieval definition of God as a circle whose centre is everywhere and circumference nowhere.
Part 13: Babylon
1–700
Summary
The part opens by contrasting peoples blessed with good princes and those ruled by tyrants, who shun parliaments and devour their subjects. Nimrod rises from a youthful bully among shepherds to a hunter of beasts and then of men, and usurps the first monarchy. He urges the people to build a city and a tower that will save them from any new flood and make their names eternal. The work spreads like fire in a forest; God, looking down on these 'dust-spawn, feeble, Dwarfs', confounds their speech, and the builders' misunderstandings ('Bring me a trowel', and the workman hands a brick) break up the work.
The poet laments the loss of the one universal language, which now makes learning a lifetime's labour, and argues that Hebrew, the language of Adam's naming, deserves the 'right of Eldership'. He discusses how languages change through trade, coinage and use. In a dream he sees pillars on which stand the great writers of each tongue: Moses and David for Hebrew, Homer and Plato for Greek, Cicero and Virgil for Latin, then Italian, Arabic, Spanish, French (Marot, Ronsard and Du Plessis-Mornay) and English, sustained by More, Bacon and Sidney, with a tribute to Queen Elizabeth.
Analysis
Babel gives Du Bartas the occasion for a short history and theory of language, one of the most original passages of the poem. The argument for Hebrew as the first tongue was widely held, and the account of linguistic change, in which usage rules a language 'blinde, vnbridled', reflects the sixteenth-century debates about the dignity of the vernaculars to which the Pléiade had contributed. The gallery of writers is a vernacular canon assembled by a French Protestant, generous to Catholic Ronsard and to Italy and Spain.
The English section, naming Sir Thomas More, Francis Bacon and Sidney, belongs to Du Bartas's own text and was much quoted in England as foreign recognition of English letters; the English version develops the tribute to the queen at length. Nimrod's tyranny, set against the opening praise of parliaments, gives the episode a political edge that English readers would also recognise (Ashton 1908) (Prescott 1978).
'Tis counterfeit: and ouer euery shoar The confus'd fall of Babel yet doth roar.
Every present language is a debased coin of the lost original speech.
Our English Tongue three famous Knights sustain; Moore, Bacone, Sidney: of which, former twain
The pillar of English: More and Bacon, both Lord Chancellors, and Sidney.
Part 14: The Colonies
1–853
Summary
Comparing himself to Drake discovering new lands, the poet follows the dispersal of the builders of Babel. God divides the earth among Noah's sons, Asia to Sem, Africa to Cham and Europe to Japheth, and the poet traces the nations descended from each, refusing the forged genealogies of the pseudo-Berosus. Antiquity is a dark wood, and he will follow Moses. The arts spread outwards from Mesopotamia like ripples from a stone thrown into a pond, through the empires of the East and West.
He asks where the inhabitants of the New World came from, rejects spontaneous generation, and proposes earlier voyages by storm or exile; there follows a catalogue of American places. The fertility of nations, their migrations and invasions, and the characters of peoples (northern strength, southern wit, and the stereotypes of German, Italian, French and Spaniard) are explained as part of God's plan, which makes trade and exchange bind the world together. Sylvester then adds a long praise of England, her defences, her wool and tin, and the Stuart succession, and a call to repentance for the plague.
Analysis
The Colonies is a versified universal geography and ethnography, based on the Table of Nations in Genesis 10 and on the cosmographies of the sixteenth century. Its question about the origins of the American peoples was a live one, since Scripture traced all humanity to Noah, and Du Bartas's answer, that they descend from early voyagers, is a characteristic attempt to reconcile new knowledge with sacred history (Schmidt 1938).
The theory of national characters and of a 'mutuall Counter-change' by which every land supplies another's wants presents the diversity of the world as providential. Sylvester's English ending shows the translation at its most patriotic: the praise of Albion, the welcome of the Stuarts and the prayer for James and his son are inserted where Du Bartas had praised France (Du Bartas 1979).
For, as a stone, that midst a Pond yee fling, About his fall first forms a little ring,
The diffusion of the arts from their centre in Babylon, in a simile Du Bartas extends over several couplets.
And All's but an Exchange, where (brieflie) no-man Keeps ought, as priuate. Trade makes all things common.
The world as a market, an image of providential exchange (and of London's Royal Exchange).
Part 15: The Columnes
1–780
Summary
After invoking God and Urania, the poet shows the patriarch Heber and his son Phalec discovering two ancient pillars, one of stone and one of brick. Heber explains that they were raised by the children of Seth, who knew that God would destroy the world twice, by flood and by fire, and inscribed the sciences on them to preserve them. Inside the stone pillar four maidens represent the mathematical arts. Arithmetic shows the virtues of the numbers from one to ten; Geometry shows the figures and solids, and Heber prophesies future inventions: mills, cannon, printing, clocks, even men flying across the seas.
Astronomy is explained with the armillary sphere and the celestial globe; Heber gives natural reasons for the signs of the zodiac, and then imagines the constellations renamed after biblical figures, which the poet offers as recreation, not doctrine. Heber teaches the motions of the planets and traces the transmission of astronomy from the Hebrews to the Chaldeans, Egyptians, Greeks, Arabs and Europeans. The fourth sister, Music, reveals the harmony of creation and the powers of music over body and soul. Heber is interrupted when the accursed Canaan passes by, and the poet pauses.
Analysis
The legend of the pillars of Seth comes from Josephus's Antiquities, and it allows Du Bartas to claim that the sciences began with the patriarchs and were preserved through the Flood. The part is a compressed encyclopaedia of the quadrivium, the four mathematical arts of the medieval curriculum, set inside a biblical frame. Its prophecy of printing and flight expresses a confidence in human invention that sits easily with the poem's piety (Schmidt 1938).
The proposal to rename the constellations after biblical figures, and the careful disclaimer that follows, show both the attraction and the danger that pagan learning held for a Protestant poet. This part closes the Second Day, and its broken-off ending ('Bartas swift pause' in Sylvester's Argument) marks the limit of what Du Bartas published in 1584.
Heer-by, the PRINTER, in one day shall rid More Books, then yerst a thousand Wrighters did.
Heber prophesies the invention of printing, the technology that spread the Weeks themselves.
Th' Almighty-most, when first his Ordinance Appointed Earth to Rest, and Heav'n to Dance.
Music as the principle of creation: the still earth and the dancing heavens of the Ptolemaic universe.
Part 16: The Vocation
1–1462
Summary
The Third Day, devoted to Abraham, opens with the Muse released into an open plain, and with an address to James VI as the poet-king who has made the poet famous. Idolatry has spread even among the descendants of Shem in Chaldea, and God calls Abram to leave his homeland. In a soliloquy Abram takes leave of the place of his birth and resolves to follow God, for 'Who lodge with God can never House-less be'. He travels to Canaan and parts from Lot, who chooses Sodom.
Four kings make war on Sodom and carry off Lot. Abram arms his servants, and an angel brings Sleep from his cave in the far north to overcome the enemy, whom Abram's men slaughter in the night. Melchizedek blesses Abram, and God makes his covenant, promising Isaac and a seed as many as the stars. Two angels come to Sodom; the townsmen besiege Lot's house, the angels blind them, and fire and brimstone destroy the cities. Lot's wife is turned to salt, and the part ends with his daughters' incest.
Analysis
The Vocation shows the Second Week becoming an epic of war and wonder. The night battle against the four kings, with the allegorical Cave of Sleep, borrows the machinery of classical and Italian epic (Ovid's House of Sleep, the night raids of Virgil and Ariosto) for a biblical subject, as later sacred epics would do on a larger scale (Lewalski 1979). Abram's departure from Chaldea is presented as the model of faith, the first link in the sacred history of the Church.
The address to James at the opening, thanking the poet-king for having made the poet famous, reflects Du Bartas's own debt to the translator of L'Uranie. The destruction of Sodom is told with the poem's usual relish for grotesque detail, and the typological habit of reading Old Testament events as figures of Christ, visible in the covenant and the blessing of Melchizedek, organises the whole Day.
But, for all Reasons, Faith suffizeth me. Who lodge with God can never House-less be.
Abram's resolution to leave his homeland at God's call.
To th' vtmost Ocean's vtmost sand and shelf; I'll give him Heav'n, I'll give him even my Self.
God's covenant promise, culminating in the gift of himself.
Part 17: The Fathers
1–519
Summary
This short part is devoted to the sacrifice of Isaac. The poet praises Isaac's godly upbringing and Abram's tender love for him, and distinguishes Satan's temptations from God's trials, which are sent only to the proven. God commands Abram to sacrifice his son. Abram collapses, and in a long soliloquy struggles with the contradiction between the command and God's promise of descendants through Isaac, before concluding that God can do all things and that faith must overrule affection.
On the third day of their journey Isaac asks where the lamb is; at the altar, bound, he asks his father what he has done, then accepts his death and comforts Abram. As Abram raises the knife, a voice stays his hand and a ram is substituted. The poet challenges the pagans to produce any equal example of obedience and reads Isaac as a type of Christ, both carrying the wood of their sacrifice. Sylvester's Argument notes that the other patriarchs would have followed had the author lived.
Analysis
The Fathers is the most intensely dramatic part of the Second Week. Abram's soliloquy stages the conflict between reason and faith that Protestant theology found in Genesis 22, and resolves it in the formula that God values the willing heart ('th' Affection, for the Action', as the Argument puts it). The tenderness of the dialogue between father and son, unusual in the poem, shows Du Bartas's skill in pathos as well as in description.
The typology of Isaac and Christ was ancient, but the poem's emphasis on faith overruling the evidence of reason fits the Reformed theology of its author. This is also the point where Du Bartas's plan for the Third Day was left incomplete: Jacob and Joseph were never written, and the history jumps to Moses (Du Bartas 1991).
Thou shak'st his Iustice. This is certain (too) God can do all, saue that he will not doo.
Abram resolves his doubt by appeal to God's omnipotence and will.
Father, said Isaac, Father, Father deer (What? do you turn away, as loth to hear?)
Isaac at the altar, in one of the poem's most moving speeches.
Part 18: The Law
1–1488
Summary
The poet raises his 'Stentorian Song' above the noise of war in France. Envy, from her palace in the Pyrenees, hears of Israel's growth in Egypt and incites Pharaoh, who enslaves the Hebrews and orders their male children drowned. Moses is saved in a rush basket, raised at court, kills an Egyptian and flees. From the burning bush, a figure of the Church that suffers but is not consumed, God names himself 'I AM I that I am' and sends him with Aaron to Pharaoh, who replies with a tyrant's speech. Moses' rod devours the magicians' serpents, and the ten plagues follow, with a digression on the Nile and Egypt's rainless climate.
After the Passover, read as a type of Christ, Israel leaves Egypt, and the Red Sea stands up in two walls of glass and drowns Pharaoh's army. In the desert come manna (allegorised as Christ), the quails and the water from the rock. At Sinai God gives the Law amid thunder; the poet praises it as the most enduring of all codes and confesses his own breaches of each commandment. The golden calf, the strange fire of Nadab and Abihu, and Korah's rebellion are told; then the poet passes over Moses' later wars and ends with his blessings, curses and dying song.
Analysis
The Law is the longest part of the Second Week and has the most continuous epic narrative. Allegorical figures such as Envy and her palace, borrowed from Ovid's House of Envy, set the action in motion, and the plagues and the crossing of the Red Sea give scope for spectacle. Pharaoh's speech on how to oppress a people is a portrait of tyranny that Du Bartas's Protestant readers would have applied to their own persecutors.
Theologically the part follows the Reformed distinction between the Law, which reveals sin, and grace, which saves from it. The poet's personal confession under each commandment turns narrative into devotion, as Protestant poetics prescribed (Lewalski 1979). Milton's brief summary of the Exodus in Paradise Lost 12 covers much of the same ground in a few dozen lines, and also reads it typologically (Milton 1998).
I AM I that I am, in me, for me, by me: All Beings els Be not (or else vn-selfly be)
God names himself from the burning bush (Exodus 3:14); all other being depends on his.
Two Walls of Glass, built with a word alone, Afrik and Asia to con-ioyn in one?
The Red Sea parted, as a highway joining two continents.
Part 19: The Captaines
1–1294
Summary
The fourth part of the Third Day sings of the 'Captaines' of Israel after Moses. Joshua, raised by merit rather than favour, leads the host across the Jordan, whose river-god pours back his own stream. Jericho falls at the silent procession of the Ark; Achan's theft causes defeat at Ai until he is punished and the town taken by ambush; the Gibeonites win a treaty by deceit. At Gibeon God sends hail on the Amorites and Joshua commands the sun and moon to stand still, while Nature herself complains to God that a mortal should command the heavens.
After Joshua the people relapse, and the Judges follow: Adoni-bezek, mutilated, warns kings by his own fate; Shamgar fights with an ox-goad; Deborah gives Barak a shield engraved with Israel's later battles (Gideon, Jephthah's daughter, Samson), and Jael kills Sisera. In Samuel's old age an assembly debates the best form of government, democracy, aristocracy and monarchy each finding a speaker, until the people cry for a king and Saul is anointed despite Samuel's warning. The part ends with a long English thanksgiving for the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot of 1605.
Analysis
The debate on constitutions is one of the most interesting passages of the Second Week. A Huguenot poet writing during the French wars of religion, when Protestant theorists were arguing about resistance to kings, stages three opinions and gives monarchy the last word, while Samuel's warning about royal tyranny remains in the reader's ear. The scriptural history becomes a book of political counsel, and the address to the republics of Switzerland, Geneva, Ragusa and Venice shows the poet thinking of contemporary Europe.
The ending shows Sylvester at his most visible. The analogy of a lawyer's rise from student to Lord Chancellor at the start and the thanksgiving for the deliverance from the Powder Plot at the close are English additions, which fit the translation into Jacobean public life: the escape of King, Peers and 'Publik-weal' in 1605 is set beside the deliverance of the three children from the fiery furnace (Du Bartas 1979) (Auger 2019).
Beam of th' Eternall, daies bright Champion, Spiall of Nature, O all-seeing Sun, Stay, stand thou still, stand still in Gabaon; And thou, O Moon i' th' vale of Aialon,
Joshua's command to the sun (Joshua 10:12), expanded into a rhetorical apostrophe. For Du Bartas the miracle also proves that the sun, not the earth, moves.
While yet he spake, the People loudly cri'd, A KING, a KING; wee'll have a KING for Guide.
The people interrupt Samuel's warning (1 Samuel 8). The capitals are typical of the folio's emphatic printing.
Part 20: The Tropheis
1–1355
Summary
The Fourth Day, devoted to David, begins with the poet's prayer for David's 'Harp-strings, not his Bowe-strings'. Goliath, described piece by piece from helmet to shield, challenges Israel; Saul offers his daughter to any champion; David refuses Saul's armour and kills the giant with his sling. At court David's music soothes Saul's melancholy, which prompts a short treatise on the power of music over the soul; then Saul's envy drives David into exile, where he spares Saul in the cave. Saul consults the witch of Endor, and the narrator discusses at length whether the figure raised is Samuel or a diabolical counterfeit; Saul dies by his own hand.
David reigns, and the poet declares his virtues too many to number. The Muse praises the Psalms as the summit of sacred eloquence, reserved for kings, and the praise passes to James VI on the banks of the Forth, David's interpreter in his own age. Then comes David's sin: he sees Bathsheba bathing, has Uriah killed, and is condemned by Nathan's parable of the poor man's lamb. Plague follows; David repents, and the part ends in a prayer for repentance that becomes an English prayer against plague and popish plots.
Analysis
The title 'Tropheis' names David's victories, but the poem's real interest is in David as poet. The praise of the Psalms joins two of Du Bartas's central concerns: the superiority of sacred over profane verse, and the dignity of the king-poet. The compliment to James, himself a translator of the Psalms and of Du Bartas, is built into the French poem, where the Scottish king is presented as David's successor; Sylvester enlarges it with Scottish rivers and lochs (Prescott 1978).
The episode at Endor shows the poem's habit of stopping the narrative to settle a theological question. Protestant commentators generally held that the apparition was a devil in Samuel's shape, and the poet weighs the possibilities in the manner of a commentary on 1 Samuel 28 (Williams 1948). The Bathsheba episode, with its lingering description of the bath followed by Nathan's sharp sentence, dramatises the moral the poem draws from David: even the best king is frail, and repentance is the only remedy.
Vouch safe mee yet his Verse, and (Lord) I craue Let me his Harp-strings, not his Bowe-strings haue;
The poet asks to inherit David's poetry rather than his military glory: the programme of sacred verse in one couplet.
Touch not these sacred stops, these silver strings: This Kingly Harp is only meet for Kings.
The Psalms are reserved for royal hands, which prepares the turn to James VI.
Part 21: The Magnificence
1–1416
Summary
The poet first compares himself, chained to his long task, with the witty writers of sonnets and epigrams. The dying David then instructs Solomon in kingship: beware flatterers, rule yourself, keep faith, do justice to great and small alike, and beware women. At Gibeon Solomon sees four ladies, Glory, Wealth, Health and Wisdom, and chooses Wisdom, whereupon God grants him the others too. His knowledge of nature is surveyed, and his judgement between the two mothers who claim one child is told with full speeches for each woman.
Solomon's marriage to Pharaoh's daughter is told as an allegorical romance, with Cupids shooting the couple in a garden of Love and a wedding masque in which the planets dance. After a paraphrase of the Song of Songs the Temple is built and described, and its three parts are allegorised as the Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes and Proverbs. The Queen of Sheba comes to test Solomon with riddles, and he argues for the one God against idolatry. Her praise of Solomon then becomes an address to the 'Scotish King', whose fame drew her (and the poet) across the sea.
Analysis
This is the most courtly part of the poem. David's counsel to Solomon is a mirror for princes, and the visit of the Queen of Sheba becomes a figure for Du Bartas's own visit to James VI in 1587: as she came to hear Solomon's wisdom, so the French poet came to the learned Scottish king (Dauphiné 1983) (Auger 2019). The wedding masque, with the planets as dancers, shows the poet's taste for allegorical spectacle, and the poem openly worries whether pagan figures like Hymen belong in a Christian poem.
The Temple passage connects with the architectural description that runs through the whole work, from God as architect of the world to Solomon as builder of his house. Allegorising its three parts as the three books attributed to Solomon is typical of the poem's method, in which every material splendour points to a spiritual reading.
Spare not the Great; neither despise the Small: Let not thy Lawes be like the Spiders Caul, Where little Flyes are caught and kild; but great Passe at their pleasure, and pull-down the Net.
David's counsel on justice uses an ancient proverb about laws as spider's webs, attributed to Anacharsis.
So may I say, even so (ô SCOTISH King) Thy winged Fame, which far and wide doth ring, From th' edge of Spain hath made me venturously To crosse the Seas thy Britain's end to see:
The Queen of Sheba's words become the poet's compliment to James VI, recalling Du Bartas's journey to Scotland.
Part 22: The Schisme
1–1072
Summary
The poet opens with a prayer about civil war in his own France, asking that the lawful heir not be kept from his throne. At Shechem the tribes offer Rehoboam the crown on conditions; the elders counsel mildness, telling him that kings are made for subjects, but he follows his young flatterers and threatens to scourge the people. Ten tribes revolt under Jeroboam, who sets up golden calves at Dan and Bethel; a prophet's curse withers his hand. The kings of Judah and Israel follow, down to Ahab and Jezebel.
Elijah proclaims a drought, described in a catalogue of dried rivers, raises the widow's son at Zarephath, defeats the priests of Baal on Carmel and is carried to heaven while Elisha cries out after him. Elisha's miracles follow. In the siege of Samaria a mother tells the king how she and another woman agreed to eat their children, and the Syrian army flees in panic from an imagined host. The part closes with Jonah, the storm, the great fish, and the repentance of Nineveh, in which Repentance, Prayer, Fasting and Faith appear as persons pleading before God.
Analysis
The opening prayer reads the division of Israel through the French wars of religion. The 'lawfull Heir' who must not be driven from his throne points to the succession crisis of the 1580s, when Henri de Navarre, Du Bartas's master, was the Protestant heir to the French crown. The elders' maxim that God made kings for subjects is a commonplace of the political writing of the Huguenot party, but the poem's quarrel is with tyranny and division, not with monarchy itself (Dauphiné 1983).
Much of the part is made of sharply drawn set pieces: the drought, the contest on Carmel, the mother's speech in the famine, the storm in the Jonah story. Here the poem works most like a biblical epic, with speeches, similes and dramatic reversals, and its moral is the power of repentance, which saves even Nineveh.
God hath not made, say they (iumping together) Subiects for Kings, but Kings for Subiects rather:
The elders' counsel to Rehoboam, a political maxim in miniature ('iumping together' means 'agreeing').
That swilling swallow'd Ionas in her womb, A living Corps laid in a living Toomb.
Jonah in the fish, a paradox typical of the poem's antithetical style.
Part 23: The Decay
1–1250
Summary
An apostrophe to Ambition, 'Tinder-box of War', introduces the decline of both kingdoms. Jehu destroys the house of Ahab and has Jezebel, painted and jewelled, thrown from her window; a digression satirises women's cosmetics. Israel's kings murder one another until the ten tribes are deported to Assyria. A fable of the bat that sided with both birds and beasts attacks religious time-servers. In Judah Athaliah murders the royal seed, but Joash is hidden and crowned; Hezekiah reforms worship, breaks the brazen serpent, defies Sennacherib's envoy and is delivered when an angel destroys the Assyrian host. In his illness the shadow on the dial goes back as a sign of his recovery.
Nebuchadnezzar besieges Jerusalem, and the siege is told with mines, counter-mines and siege towers. The city and the Temple fall, the captive king's daughters and wives lament, his sons are killed before his eyes and he is blinded, and he warns tyrants against tempting heaven. The poem ends with a prayer for the British kings, James, Prince Henry and the Stuart line, and for a safe pilgrimage to the heavenly Jerusalem.
Analysis
The last surviving part brings the history to the Babylonian captivity, which was to have been the subject of the Fifth Day. The siege of Jerusalem is told in the language of sixteenth-century warfare, as the Jericho episode earlier contrasted the miraculous fall of walls with bombards and mines: the poet's sacred history is always also contemporary. The fable of the bat, aimed at 'Prince-Protestants, Prince-Catholiks', makes the political point that neutrality in religion is treachery.
Because the Second Week is unfinished, the closing prayer has to serve as an ending for the whole work. It turns from the earthly kingdom destroyed by sin to the heavenly city described in Revelation 21, so that the history of Israel becomes a figure of the Christian pilgrimage. The prayer for James and Prince Henry, who died in 1612, dates and localises Sylvester's version (Du Bartas 1979).
HVff-pufft AMBITION, Tinder-box of WAR, Down-fall of Angels, Adam's murderer,
A typical opening apostrophe, built of compound epithets and appositions; Ambition links the fall of the angels, the Fall of man and the fall of kingdoms.
The Sun he loses, and an end-les night Beclowds for euer his twin-balled sight: He sees no more, but feels the woes he bears; And now for crystall, weeps he crimsin tears.
The blinding of the captive king (Zedekiah, 2 Kings 25:7).
Characters
Creator and creatures
- God
- The Creator, Trinity and lord of history, who makes the world from nothing in six days and rests to admire it on the seventh. The poem presents him as architect, painter, gardener and king, and insists on a providence that sustains and governs every event; in the Second Week he speaks as judge of Adam, covenant partner of Noah and Abraham, and lawgiver at Sinai.
- The Spirit
- The Holy Spirit, who broods over the Chaos like a hen on her eggs and quickens the formless matter (First Day). The poet also invokes the Spirit as the source of his own inspiration, the true sacred Muse.
- The angels
- Created on the First Day (the poet discusses whether before or with the light). Some fell through pride under their prince; the rest remain in grace as ministers of God and guardians of the elect, appearing throughout sacred history from Hagar to the Resurrection. A seraph guards Eden after the expulsion.
- Satan
- The fallen 'Prince of Darknes', moved by pride, hatred and envy, who uses the serpent's body to deceive Eve. Unlike Milton's Satan he has no speeches or council: the poet analyses his methods and motives as a theological problem, and shows him throughout as God's unwilling executioner.
- The creatures
- The elements, stars, plants and animals of the First Week, from the lodestone to the Phoenix, the dolphin, the nightingale and the elephant. They are described for their marvels and read as moral lessons in the 'book' of nature, and after the Fall they rebel against man.
Human figures
- Adam
- The first man, the 'little world', made last of the creatures from earth and the divine breath. In Eden he holds the garden from God like a feudal tenant and enjoys infused knowledge; he falls almost silently, persuaded by Eve, blames her before God, and after the expulsion learns the arts of survival and prophesies the ages of history to Seth.
- Eve
- Made from Adam's rib while he sleeps, so like him that lover and beloved can hardly be told apart. The serpent approaches her as the 'weaker' party; she hesitates, eats, and wins Adam with her smiles. After the Fall she shares the hardships of exile and blows the first fire into flame.
- Cain and Abel
- The sons of Adam. Cain, the tiller, kills his brother with a stone out of envy when God accepts Abel's offering; restless with guilt he tames the first horse and founds the first city, and his descendants invent iron and music.
- Noah and Cham
- Noah builds the Ark, debates with his atheist son Cham about God's justice, and receives the covenant of the rainbow; drunk, he is mocked by Cham, and curses Canaan. Cham speaks for the naturalist scepticism the poem opposes.
- Nimrod
- The first tyrant, hunter of men and builder of Babel, whose ambition God punishes by confusing the languages.
- Heber and Phalec
- Patriarchs who discover the pillars of Seth; Heber explains the mathematical arts inscribed on them to his son, in a dialogue that turns the Second Day into an encyclopaedia of the sciences.
- Abraham
- Called from Chaldea, he leaves his homeland in faith, rescues Lot in a night battle, receives the covenant and, in the most dramatic part of the poem, prepares to sacrifice Isaac, his faith overruling his reason and affection.
- Moses
- Saved from the Nile, called from the burning bush, he confronts Pharaoh, leads Israel through the Red Sea and receives the Law on Sinai; his dying song closes 'The Law'.
- Joshua and the Judges
- Joshua conquers Canaan and stops the sun at Gibeon; after him come Shamgar, Deborah, Barak and Jael, and finally Samuel, who reluctantly anoints Saul when the people demand a king.
- David
- Shepherd, giant-killer, king, sinner and penitent, celebrated above all as the poet of the Psalms. His 'Harp-strings', not his 'Bowe-strings', are what the poet asks to inherit, and he is the model held up to James VI.
- Solomon
- David's son, who chooses Wisdom, judges between the two mothers, marries Pharaoh's daughter, builds the Temple and is visited by the Queen of Sheba. 'The Magnificence' presents him as the ideal learned king.
- The kings of Israel and Judah
- Rehoboam and Jeroboam, Ahab and Jezebel, Jehu, Athaliah, Joash, Hezekiah and the last king of Judah, whose stories in the last two parts show the decline of the kingdom through tyranny, idolatry and division, with the prophets Elijah, Elisha, Jonah and Isaiah as God's witnesses.
Others
- The poet
- The narrating voice, which prays, digresses, warns the reader, reins in its Muse and comments on its own task. In Sylvester's version it is a double voice: Du Bartas's persona and the translator's, who adds English places, compliments and complaints and calls the French poet 'Deer Bartas'.
- Urania
- The Muse of astronomy, whom Du Bartas made the Muse of Christian poetry in L'Uranie. She is invoked in the Second Week as the patron of the poet's sacred flight; Milton's Urania in Paradise Lost 7 descends from her.
- James VI and I
- King of Scots and then of England, translator of L'Uranie and the poem's royal patron, praised in the French as a new David and Solomon and, much more often, in Sylvester's additions.
- The allegorical figures
- Personifications such as the Furies Dearth, War and Sickness, Envy in her palace, Sleep in his cave, Nature complaining to God, and Repentance, Prayer, Fasting and Faith pleading for Nineveh.
Themes
The book of nature
The First Week rests on the idea that the created world is a second scripture, 'a Book in Folio' in which every creature is a page. Reading it requires no learned languages, only the 'spectacles of faith'. The encyclopaedic catalogues of elements, stars, plants and animals are therefore not digressions but acts of devotion: to know the world in detail is to know its author.
The idea had a long medieval history, but the Protestant emphasis on the plain reading of Scripture gave it new force. The Seventh Day turns the book into a manual of ethics, in which each creature teaches a duty, and much later English poetry of meditation on the creatures draws on this habit of reading nature (Lewalski 1979).
Sacred poetry against profane
From L'Uranie onwards Du Bartas presented himself as the poet who had turned from love to God, and the Weeks repeatedly attack poets who make vice attractive. The vow to write verse 'that a Virgine without blush may read' and the call (in Sylvester's version) to Spenser, Daniel and Drayton to dedicate their talents to sacred subjects made the poem a programme for a reformed literature.
This programme was the main reason for the poem's success with Protestant readers in France, Scotland and England, and it shaped the idea of the Christian poet that Milton inherited, while Milton's own invocation of a heavenly Muse in Paradise Lost tried to surpass it (Campbell 1959) (Lewalski 1985).
Providence
God not only made the world but sustains and governs it at every moment, using even Satan and the crimes of men for his purposes. The Seventh Day defends this providence against Epicurean indifference and against the objection that the wicked prosper; the Second Week then shows it at work in history, punishing tyrants and preserving the Church through floods, captivities and wars.
The theme has a political dimension. Written during the French wars of religion, the poem reads Israel's history as a figure of the Protestant Church under persecution, and Sylvester applies it in turn to England's deliverance from the Armada and the Gunpowder Plot.
Man as microcosm
Man is made last, as the epitome of the creation, containing fire, air, earth and water, and his body and soul are described with the same wonder as the heavens. His inventions, from painting to mechanical models of the universe, show the soul's likeness to its creator.
Yet the Second Week shows the microcosm disordered by sin: Adam, the chief string of the world's lute, puts the whole creation out of tune, and his descendants turn their arts to violence and pride. The poem's humanism and its Calvinist sense of sin are held together rather than reconciled.
Kingship and tyranny
The poem is full of kings: the sun as king of the heavens, Nimrod the first tyrant, David and Solomon as ideal rulers, Rehoboam and Ahab as warnings. The debate on forms of government in 'The Captaines' and the elders' maxim that kings are made for subjects show a Huguenot interest in the limits of royal power, while the poem's praise of good monarchs remains constant.
In England the theme was turned towards the Stuarts. James VI's patronage, the comparison of James with David and Solomon, and Sylvester's dedications and additions made the translation something like an official poem of the new reign (Auger 2019).
Knowledge and its limits
Du Bartas is an encyclopaedic poet who wants to include everything known, yet he constantly reins in his Muse from 'curious' questions: the Trinity, what God did before creation, the details of life in Eden. On disputed scientific questions he often presents both views and leaves the matter to God.
This combination of appetite and restraint is characteristic of Renaissance Christian learning, and it anticipates Raphael's advice to Adam in Paradise Lost 8 to be 'lowly wise' (Milton 1998).
Motifs
The six days and the week of history
The structure of Genesis 1 organises both poems: the First Week follows the six days of creation and the Sabbath, and the Second Week was to follow seven ages of world history, so that the shape of the creation week becomes the shape of time itself.
Invocations and restraint of the Muse
Almost every Day opens with a prayer and contains moments where the poet checks his Muse ('Soft, soft, my Muse') or likens his poem to a voyage that must drop anchor. The poem constantly reflects on its own ambition.
Catalogues
Lists of rivers, stars, plants, fishes, diseases, nations and writers are the poem's basic unit. They show the plenitude of creation and were what early readers most admired and later readers most disliked.
Homely similes
Cosmic events are explained by everyday comparisons: the Spirit as a brooding hen, the stars as a peacock's tail, the world as a market, God as a painter or a carpenter. The juxtaposition of high subject and low image is a deliberate didactic method.
Compound epithets
Hyphenated coinages such as 'star-glistring', 'Hee-Shee-Coupled-One' and 'Tinder-box of WAR' come partly from Du Bartas's French and partly from Sylvester's own delight in the device, and they became a fashion in English verse.
Symbols
The book
The world as a book written by God, read beside Scripture: the governing image of the First Week.
The painter's picture
God contemplating his finished work like a painter admiring a landscape (Seventh Day): creation as art and the poem as a copy of it.
The lute
The harmony of creation, tuned before the Fall and untuned by Adam's sin; music also appears as Jubal's invention, David's harp and the fourth of the mathematical arts.
The Phoenix
Dying and reborn from its own ashes, an emblem of death in Adam and life in Christ.
Babel
The tower of human pride and the origin of the diversity of languages, which makes all present speech a 'counterfeit' coin.
Critical debates
Protestant poetics and the sacred epic
Barbara Lewalski's account of a Protestant poetics in seventeenth-century England, grounded in the Bible's own genres and in a habit of applying Scripture to the self, gave Du Bartas a central place among the models for English religious verse. His programme of turning poetry from love to God, and his figure of Urania as the Christian Muse, were taken up by English writers from the 1580s onwards, as Lily Campbell showed in her study of 'divine poetry' (Lewalski 1979) (Campbell 1959).
In her study of the genres of Paradise Lost Lewalski also treated the hexaemeral poem as one of the forms Milton absorbed, and Du Bartas as the most influential modern example. Scholars debate whether the Weeks should be called an epic at all: the First Week is didactic and encyclopaedic rather than narrative, while the Second moves towards biblical epic, and its incompleteness left the form open for later poets (Lewalski 1985) (Prescott 1978).
Du Bartas and Milton
That Milton read Sylvester's Du Bartas in his youth has long been assumed; Charles Dunster argued for it in 1800, and George Coffin Taylor's Milton's Use of Du Bartas (1934) assembled hundreds of parallels to argue that Paradise Lost owes far more to the Weeks than to any other modern poem. The parallels include the brooding Spirit, the description of the creatures, the Muse Urania, the fortunate fall and many turns of phrase (Taylor 1934).
Later scholars have been more cautious. Arnold Williams and J. M. Evans showed that much of the shared material belongs to the common tradition of commentary on Genesis, which both poets drew on independently, and Grant McColley placed Milton among a wide range of sources. The present consensus is that Milton knew the Weeks well and sometimes echoes them, but that direct borrowing is harder to prove than Taylor thought, and that the differences, above all in the treatment of Satan and of Adam's choice, matter more than the likenesses (Williams 1948) (Evans 1968) (McColley 1940) (Milton 1998).
Science and wonder
The Weeks are a major document of sixteenth-century 'scientific poetry', the French tradition studied by Albert-Marie Schmidt, in which poets versified cosmology, natural history and medicine. Du Bartas draws on Aristotle, Pliny and modern encyclopaedias, and does not separate observation from legend; the purpose of knowledge is wonder at the Creator (Schmidt 1938).
Modern readers often single out his rejection of Copernicus in the Fourth Day. In context it is the ordinary learned opinion of the 1570s, presented with real knowledge of the hypothesis; what is distinctive is the poem's role in making the Ptolemaic universe vivid for a vast readership, at the moment when that universe was about to be overturned. The French commentaries printed with the Sepmaine show how seriously its science was taken (Holmes 1935) (Dauphiné 1983).
Translation and amplification
Sylvester's version is considerably longer than the French. He expands phrases, adds compound epithets and inserts whole passages of English matter: rivers and places in Kent and Berkshire, tributes to Sidney, Spenser and Daniel, praise of Elizabeth and James, the Armada, Essex at Cadiz, the Gunpowder Plot and the plague. Susan Snyder's edition, which marks these additions, made it possible to see the translation as a distinct English poem (Du Bartas 1979).
Scholars disagree on how to judge this. Earlier critics such as Ashton saw Sylvester as a diffuse and sometimes clumsy amplifier; more recent work by Anne Lake Prescott and Peter Auger treats him as an adapter who naturalised a foreign Protestant poem, made it a book of the Jacobean court, and shaped the way English and Scottish readers received Du Bartas (Ashton 1908) (Prescott 1978) (Auger 2019).
Reputation's rise and fall
In the generation after 1605 Sylvester's Du Bartas was one of the most admired books in English; its ingenious epithets were imitated and it was quoted in sermons and commonplace books. By the Restoration taste had changed. In the dedication of The Spanish Friar (1681) Dryden recalled that as a boy he had thought Sylvester superior to Spenser, and quoted the winter lines from 'The Handi-Crafts' as an example of the bombast that had once dazzled him (Dryden 1900).
The poem never recovered its English popularity, and in France too Du Bartas was neglected after the classical age, though Goethe defended him. Modern scholarship has restored him as a major Renaissance poet, but debate continues over whether his style, so admired in its time, can be enjoyed today or only understood historically (Pellissier 1883) (Dauphiné 1983) (Pouey-Mounou 2021).
Bradstreet and the colonial reception
Anne Bradstreet's poems, published in London as The Tenth Muse (1650), include an elegy 'In Honour of Du Bartas' and a set of long didactic poems on the four elements, humours, ages and seasons whose method and manner owe much to the Weeks; her 'Four Monarchies' draws chiefly on Ralegh's History of the World but continues the same tradition of versified sacred and universal history (Bradstreet 1967).
Her case shows that Du Bartas's influence crossed the Atlantic with the Puritan settlers, for whom a learned, encyclopaedic and strictly Protestant poem was an ideal model. Critics have debated whether her early poems are mere imitation or a deliberate apprenticeship to the most respectable model available to a woman poet (Auger 2019).
The royal connection
James VI's translation of L'Uranie (1584), Du Bartas's visit to Scotland in 1587 and his French version of James's Lepanto created an exchange between a French Protestant poet and a Scottish king who wished to be known as a poet. The praise of James in the Second Week belongs to this relationship (James VI and I 1955).
When James became king of England in 1603, the connection gave the English translation a court setting: Sylvester dedicated the Weeks to him and filled them with compliments to the Stuarts. Peter Auger's study of Du Bartas in England and Scotland reads the reception as a story of literary politics as much as of taste (Auger 2019).
Key passages
THou, glorious Guide of Heav'ns star-glistring motion, Thou, thou (true Neptune) Tamer of the Ocean,
The opening invocation addresses God with the titles of pagan deities (Neptune), corrected by the word 'true'. Christian poetry takes over the forms of classical poetry and claims their truth for itself. The compound 'star-glistring' is typical of Sylvester's diction.
The World's a Book in Folio, printed all With God's great Works in letters Capitall: Each Creature is a Page; and each Effect, Afaire Character, void of all defect.
The governing image of the First Week: the creation as a printed book, legible to all. The image of a folio is apt for a poem that was itself issued as a great folio. (The run-together 'Afaire' is the edition's.)
That first World (yet) was a most formless Form, A confus'd Heap, a Chaos most deform, A Gulf of Gulfs, a Body ill compact, An vgly medly, where all difference lackt:
Chaos is defined by paradox ('formless Form') and by the absence of difference: creation, in the poem's account, is the making of distinctions. Compare Milton's 'vast immeasurable Abyss' in Paradise Lost 7.
Therefore, for my part, I haue vow'd to Heav'n Such wit and learning as my God hath giv'n; To write, to th' honour of my Maker dread, Verse that a Virgine without blush may read.
The vow of chaste and sacred verse, which made Du Bartas the model of the Christian poet for Protestant England. It answers the erotic poetry the poet has just condemned.
Arm'd with these reasons, 'twere superfluous T' assail the reasons of Copernicus; Who, to salve better, of the Stars th' appearance, Vnto the Earth a three-fold motion warrants:
The poem's dismissal of heliocentrism, after physical arguments against the earth's motion. It shows both the poet's knowledge of the new astronomy and his confidence in the traditional cosmos.
Ther is no Theam more plentifull to sean, Then is the glorious goodly Frame of MAN: For in Man's self is Fire, Aire, Earth, and Sea; Man's (in a word) the World's Epitomé
Man as the microcosm or 'little world', containing all the elements of the great one. The Sixth Day then anatomises him as thoroughly as the poem has described the universe.
THe cunning Painter, that with curious care, Limning a Land-scape, various, rich, and rare,
The opening of the famous simile of God as a painter admiring his finished work, which turns the Sabbath rest into contemplation and justifies the poem's own delight in detail.
Cunningly adding her quaint smiling glances, Her witty speech, and pretty countenances, She so preuails, that her blind Lord at last, A morsell of the sharp-sweet fruit doth taste.
Adam's fall is told in four lines, as a seduction by Eve's charm. The brevity and the absence of any choice by Adam are a useful contrast with Paradise Lost 9, where Adam falls 'not deceav'd' but out of love.
But, when the Winters keener breath began To crystallize the Baltike Ocean, To glaze the Lakes, and bridle-vp the Floods, And perriwig with wooll the bald-pate Woods;
The lines Dryden quoted as the 'fustian' he had admired in boyhood. They show the wit of Sylvester's metaphors (snow as a wig on the bald winter trees) and why later taste found them grotesque.
Vouch safe mee yet his Verse, and (Lord) I craue Let me his Harp-strings, not his Bowe-strings haue;
The poet asks to inherit David's poetry rather than his military glory. David, the royal psalmist, is the poem's ideal of the sacred poet, and a model for James VI.
Questions for study
Why does Du Bartas give so much space to natural history in a poem about the Creation?
Think about the 'book of nature', the hexaemeral tradition of Basil and Ambrose, and the moral lessons of the Seventh Day.
How does the poem present the relation between sacred and profane poetry?
Consider the opening of the Second Day, L'Uranie, the call to Spenser and Daniel in 'Eden', and the praise of David's harp.
What does the painter simile at the start of the Seventh Day suggest about God, the world and the poem itself?
Compare the detail of the painting with the catalogues of the previous Days.
Compare the temptation and fall in 'The Imposture' with Paradise Lost 9. What does each poet emphasise?
Look at Satan's role, the serpent's speeches, Eve's hesitation and Adam's silence or choice.
How does Du Bartas deal with the scientific controversies of his time, such as the motion of the earth or the matter of the heavens?
Read the Copernicus passage in the Fourth Day and the discussion of the heavens at the end of the Second Day.
In what ways is Sylvester's version an English poem rather than simply a translation?
Find the passages about Kent and Berkshire, Sidney, Elizabeth, James, Cadiz and the Gunpowder Plot.
What view of kingship emerges from the Second Week?
Consider Nimrod, the debate in 'The Captaines', David's counsel to Solomon, and the elders' advice to Rehoboam.
Why might the Weeks have been so popular in early seventeenth-century England, and why did they lose favour?
Think about Protestant taste, the royal connection, the encyclopaedic method, and Dryden's judgement in 1681.
How does the Second Week use typology to connect Old Testament history with Christ?
Look at Isaac, the Passover, the manna and the closing prayer for the heavenly Jerusalem.
What is the role of allegorical figures (the Furies, Envy, Sleep, Nature) in a poem that insists on the literal truth of Scripture?
Ask whether they explain, dramatise or decorate the biblical narrative.
Further reading
- Ashton, H. Du Bartas en Angleterre. Paris: Émile Larose, 1908.
- Auger, Peter. Du Bartas' Legacy in England and Scotland. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019.
- Bradstreet, Anne. The Works of Anne Bradstreet. Ed. Jeannine Hensley. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1967.
- Campbell, Lily B. Divine Poetry and Drama in Sixteenth-Century England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959.
- Dauphiné, James. Guillaume de Saluste Du Bartas, poète scientifique. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1983.
- Dryden, John. Essays of John Dryden. Ed. W. P. Ker. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1900.
- Du Bartas, Guillaume de Saluste. La Seconde Semaine (1584). Ed. Yvonne Bellenger and others. 2 vols. Paris: Société des Textes Français Modernes, 1991–92.
- Du Bartas, Guillaume de Saluste. La Sepmaine (texte de 1581). Ed. Yvonne Bellenger. Paris: Nizet, 1981.
- Du Bartas, Guillaume de Saluste. The Divine Weeks and Works of Guillaume de Saluste Sieur du Bartas. Trans. Josuah Sylvester. Ed. Susan Snyder. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979.
- Evans, J. M. Paradise Lost and the Genesis Tradition. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968.
- Holmes, Urban Tigner, Jr., John Coriden Lyons and Robert White Linker, eds. The Works of Guillaume de Salluste Sieur Du Bartas: A Critical Edition with Introduction, Commentary, and Variants. 3 vols. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1935–40.
- James VI and I. The Poems of James VI of Scotland. Ed. James Craigie. 2 vols. Scottish Text Society. Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1955–58.
- Kastor, Frank S. Milton and the Literary Satan. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1974.
- Lewalski, Barbara Kiefer. Paradise Lost and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985.
- Lewalski, Barbara Kiefer. Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979.
- McColley, Grant. Paradise Lost: An Account of Its Growth and Major Origins. Chicago: Packard, 1940.
- Milton, John. Paradise Lost. Ed. Alastair Fowler. 2nd edn. Harlow: Longman, 1998.
- Pellissier, Georges. La Vie et les œuvres de Du Bartas. Paris: Hachette, 1883.
- Pouey-Mounou, Anne-Pascale, and Paul J. Smith, eds. Ronsard and Du Bartas in Early Modern Europe. Leiden: Brill, 2021.
- Prescott, Anne Lake. French Poets and the English Renaissance: Studies in Fame and Transformation. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978.
- Robbins, Frank Egleston. The Hexaemeral Literature: A Study of the Greek and Latin Commentaries on Genesis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1912.
- Schmidt, Albert-Marie. La Poésie scientifique en France au seizième siècle. Paris: Albin Michel, 1938.
- Taylor, George Coffin. Milton's Use of Du Bartas. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1934.
- Williams, Arnold. The Common Expositor: An Account of the Commentaries on Genesis, 1527–1633. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1948.
Written by the Poetry Codex editors. Updated 2026-10-19.