METAPHYSICALS AND BAROQUE
7
Pope. The rococo was a gayer, a more suave, baroque in which the
heavier accents disappeared amid decorative intricacies. The rococo
was an attenuated and brittle baroque. The baroque unity of effect
by which everything was subordinated to one or two irresistible ef–
fects, relaxed into an engaging and fragile variety of detail. Yet the
rococo did not disintegrate into the details that composed it, for
(here is a point of consequence in literature-the poetry of Pope,
for example) whereas the baroque had exploited every possible incon–
gruity, the rococo painting, architecture, verse, and prose was one of
"fitness," "taste," and "true wit." The sense of congruity and conso–
nance was the sense by which the baroque was transformed into
the rococo.
In poetry, the transition was evident in the movement from
Donne to the Cavaliers, Waller, and Pope. During this progress the
contradictory impulses of Donne began to clash more superficially;
"wit" became increasingly external, a matter only of verbal distortion
and opposition rather than of internal cleavage.
As
has been said,
the impulses began to run parallel, and cleverness became largely
an adjustment of language.
Take, for example, the wrenching antitheses of love and death,
flesh and spirit, in Donne's
The Relique:
When my grave is broke up againe
Some second ghest to entertaine,
(For graves have learn'd that woman-head
To be to more than one a bed)
And he that digs it, spies
A bracelet of bright haire about the bone,
Will he not let us alone,
And thinke that here a loving couple lies,
Who thought that this device might be some way
To make their soules, at the last busie day,
Meet at this grave, and make a little stay?
There was an abundance of verbal distortion in Donne, but the
oppositions . were for the I11Pst part deeply internal; the trifling be–
trayed a complexity of attitudes. Compare with this inward com–
plexity the wit of Waller's
On a Girdle:
It is my Heaven's extreamest spheare,
The pale which held the lovely Deare,
