Description

"A Foure fould Meditation of the Foure Last Things" is a long Old English poem about Christian life by Robert Southwell, originally published in 1606. It consists of four parts: 1. Houre of Death, 2. Day of Judgement, 3. Paines of Hell, 4. Joyes of Heaven. Robert Southwell (c. 1561-1595), English Jesuit and poet was born in 1560/61. The Southwells were affiliated with many noble English families, and Robert's grandmother, Elizabeth Shelley, figures in the genealogy of Shelley the poet. Southwell's poetry is euphuistic in manner. But his frequent use of antithesis and paradox, the varied and fanciful imagery by which he realizes religious emotion, though they are indeed in accordance with the poetical conventions of his time, are also the unconstrained expression of an ardent and concentrated imagination. Ben Jonson told Drummond of Hawthornden that he would willingly have destroyed many of his own poems to be able to claim as his own Southwell's "Burning Babe," an extreme but beautiful example of his fantastic treatment of sacred subjects. Presented here as a fascinating facsimile in it's original Old English language and typesetting.