Male Friendship

In Pulter’s account, Lucas and Lisle were, above all, “unparalleled friends.” We might then connect the poem to others about the love between male friends, and the capacity of such love to both sweeten life and survive death. The first poem here is contemporary to Pulter’s and also by a Royalist writer, Robert Herrick. The second is by Wilfred Owen, who wrote about World War I, and died in action a week before the war ended (in 1918).

Robert Herrick
His age, dedicated to his peculiar friend, M. John Wickes, under the name of Posthumus

Ah Posthumus! our years hence fly,
And leave no sound. Nor piety,
Or prayers, or vow
Can keep the wrinkle from the brow:
But we must on,
As fate does lead or draw us. None,
None, Posthumus, could ere decline
The doom of cruel Proserpine.*
*i.e., death

The pleasing wife, the house, the ground,
Must all be left, no one plant found
To follow thee,
Save only the cursed cypress tree.
A merry mind
Looks forward, scorns what’s left behind.
Let's live, my Wickes, then, while we may,
And here enjoy our holiday.

We’ve seen the past best times, and these
Will ne’er return. We see the seas,
And moons to wane,
But they fill up their ebbs again.
But vanished man,
Like to a lily lost, ne’er can,
Ne’er can repullulate,* or bring
*bud again
His days to see a second spring.

But on we must, and thither tend,
Where Anchus and rich Tullus* blend
*ancient Roman kings, long dead
Their sacred seed.
Thus has infernal Jove decreed;
We must be made,
Ere long a song, ere long a shade.
Why then, since life to us is short,
Let’s make it full up by our sport.

Crown we our heads with roses then,
And ’noint with Tyrian balm, for when
We two are dead,
The world with us is buried.
Then live we free
As is the air, and let us be
Our own fair wind, and mark each one
Day with the white and lucky stone.*
*mark a day as especially lucky (Catullus)

We are not poor, although we have
No roofs of cedar, nor our brave
Baiæ,* nor keep
*Roman resort
Account of such a flock of sheep;
Nor bullocks fed
To lard the shambles;* barbels** bred
*slaughterhouse **fish
To kiss our hands; nor do we wish
For Pollio’s lampreys* in our dish.
*eels supposedly fed human flesh

If we can meet and so confer
Both by a shining salt-cellar,
And have our roof,
Although not arched, yet weatherproof,
And ceiling free
From that cheap candle bawdery,*
*dirt from candle smoke
We’ll eat our bean with that full mirth
As we were lords of all the earth.

Well then, on what seas we are tossed,
Our comfort is, we can’t be lost.
Let the winds drive
Our bark,* yet she will keep alive
*small ship
Amidst the deeps.
’Tis constancy, my Wickes, which keeps
The pinnace up, which, though she errs
I’ th’ seas, she saves her passengers.

Say, we must part—sweet mercy bless
Us both i’ th’ sea, camp, wilderness;
Can we so far
Stray to become less circular
Than we are now?
No, no, that self-same heart, that vow
Which made us one, shall ne’er undo,
Or ravel so to make us two.

Live in thy peace. As for myself,
When I am bruised on the shelf
Of time, and show
My locks behung with frost and snow;
When with the rheum,*
*runny nose and eyes
The cough, the phthisic,* I consume
*lung disease
Unto an almost nothing; then
The ages fled I’ll call again,

And with a tear compare these last
Lame and bad times with those are past;
While Baucis by,
My old lean wife, shall kiss it dry.
And so we’ll sit
By th’ fire, foretelling snow and sleet,
And weather by our aches, grown
Now old enough to be our own

True calendars, as puss’s ear
Washed o’er’s to tell what change is near.
Then to assuage
The gripings of the chine* by age,
*back
I’ll call my young
Iulus* to sing such a song
*Aeneas’s son in Virgil’s Aeneid
I made upon my Julia’s* breast;
*ref. to Herrick’s earlier poems
And of her blush at such a feast.

Then shall he read that flower of mine,
Enclosed within a crystal shrine;
A primrose next;
A piece, then, of a higher text,
For to beget
In me a more transcendent heat
Than that insinuating fire,
Which crept into each aged sire,

When the fair Helen, from her eyes,
Shot forth her loving sorceries;
At which I’ll rear
Mine aged limbs above my chair,
And, hearing it,
Flutter and crow as in a fit
Of fresh concupiscence, and cry:
“No lust there’s like to poetry.”

Thus, frantic, crazy man, God wot,
I’ll call to mind things half-forgot,
And oft between
Repeat the times that I have seen!
Thus ripe with tears,
And twisting my Iulus’ hairs,
Doting, I’ll weep and say, in truth,
Baucis, these were my sins of youth.

Then next I’Il cause my hopeful lad,
If a wild apple can be had,
To crown the hearth,
Lar* thus conspiring with our mirth;
*Roman household god
Then to infuse
Our browner ale into the cruse,*
*drinking cup
Which, sweetly spiced, we’ll first carouse
Unto the genius of the house.

Then the next health to friends of mine,
Loving the brave Burgundian wine,
High sons of pith,
Whose fortunes I have frolicked with;
Such as could well
Bear up the magic bough and spell,
And dancing ’bout the mystic thyrse,*
*spear carried by Bacchus and his followers
Give up the just applause to verse.

To those, and then again to thee,
We’ll drink, my Wickes, until we be
Plump as the cherry,
Though not so fresh, yet full as merry
As the cricket,
The untamed heifer, or the pricket,
Until our tongues shall tell our ears,
We're younger by a score of years.

Thus, till we see the fire less shine
From th’ embers than the kitling’s eyne,*
*kitten’s eyes
We'll still sit up,
Sphering about the wassail-cup
To all those times
Which gave me honor for my rhymes.
The coal once spent, we'll then to bed,
Far more than night-bewearied.

Robert Herrick, Hesperides: Or, The Works Both Humane and Divine of Robert Herrick Esq. (London, 1648), sigs. L4v-L7r.

Wilfred Owen, With an Identity Disc

If ever I dreamed of my dead name
High in the heart of London, unsurpassed
By Time for ever, and the Fugitive, Fame,
There seeking a long sanctuary at last,

I better that; and recollect with shame
How once I longed to hide it from life’s heats
Under those holy cypresses, the same
That shade always the quiet place of Keats,

Now rather thank I God there is no risk
Of gravers scoring it with florid screed,
But let my death be memoried on this disc.
Wear it, sweet friend. Inscribe no date nor deed.
But may thy heart-beat kiss it night and day,
Until the name grow vague and wear away.

Wilfred Owen, “With an Identity Disc” (March 23, 1917). From The First World War Poetry Digital Archive, University of Oxford; © The British Library / The Wilfred Owen Literary Estate.