"Death the Leveller" by James Shirley

This year's Halloween Subcast episode looks at James Shirley's meditation on Death.  I hope you love it!

Transcript

Halloween greetings to all the spooks and goblins out there!  I’ve got a little bonus episode for all of you to mark the occasion.  I very nearly said a “little treat for you,” but please note how I deftly avoided a pandering holiday pun.  I do loathe those: stores that offer “spooktacular savings” on bad chocolate or that booshie cafe that invites you to take a “coffin break” with their pumpkin spiced dishwater.  We should ban such punography.

Well, glad I avoided that little pitfall.  The poem I’ve chosen for this year’s Halloween show is James Shirley’s “Death the Leveller,” also sometimes called “The Triumph of Death.”  It’s not a Halloween poem as such, but it is a timely meditation on the end that awaits us all.

Shirley was an English poet and playwright of the early-to-mid-17th century. After studying at Oxford and Cambridge, he became an Anglican clergyman, but he converted to Catholicism and, thus, to unemployment.  Schoolmastering was one way of putting bread on the board as was turning his pen to the theatre.  But the English Civil War put a stop to pleasant afternoons at playhouses in 1642.  He continued teaching while his writing turned more toward lyric poetry.  The restoration of the monarchy in 1660 did not restore his dramatic fortunes and in 1666, as a result of injuries sustained in the Great Fire of London, James Shirley died.

His poem however, lives on.  Here is “Death the Leveller”:

The glories of our blood and state

 Are shadows, not substantial things;

There is no armour against Fate;

 Death lays his icy hand on kings:

       Sceptre and Crown

       Must tumble down,

 And in the dust be equal made

With the poor crookèd scythe and spade.

Some men with swords may reap the field,

 And plant fresh laurels where they kill:

But their strong nerves at last must yield;

 They tame but one another still:

       Early or late

       They stoop to fate,

And must give up their murmuring breath

When they, pale captives, creep to death.

The garlands wither on your brow,

 Then boast no more your mighty deeds!

Upon Death’s purple altar now

 See where the victor-victim bleeds.

       Your heads must come

       To the cold tomb:

Only the actions of the just

Smell sweet and blossom in their dust.

Of course, many writers and poets ruminate on the nature and inevitability of death – as a topic it probably comes second only to love.  But the particular idea of death as the ultimate democrat becomes conspicuously popular in the 17th century.  Shirley’s poem is notable for its directness, its simple and unadorned style.  He gives us three stanzas in which an octosyllabic line dominates with a variable iambic and trochaic rhythm.  Each stanza begins with 4 octosyllabic lines that alternately rhyme – almost like a ballad stanza – followed by two dimeter lines (4 syllables each) and concludes with an octosyllabic couplet.  The effect of such a structure is one of build-up, abrupt release, then settling – the poem pulses, it has a dynamism – almost breathes.  Inhale and exhale.  I’m reminded of the medieval bob-and-wheel stanza in poems like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

There is an obvious elegiac quality to the poem, too – but rather than lamen at the transitoriness of earthly wealth and glory, Shirley’s speaker seems almost content that it should be so.  There is an implied condemnation of power.  He opens by asserting that the glories of our blood and state are insubstantial, unreal.  “Blood” initially may be read as “family line” or “aristocratic lineage,” but when understood in the context of the following stanzas, also as the blood of warfare and conquest.  A personified Death lays his icy hands even on kings.  The first dimeter “bob,” if we want to call it that, metonymically reduces the monarch to the dust in which the sexton’s tools make him equal to all other corpses.  This is Hamlet speaking to Horatio at the open grave, noting that Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar came to the same end as a beggar.

I really like the first two lines of the second stanza: “Some men with swords may reap the field, / And plant fresh laurels where they kill.” If you’re getting Old Testament vibes here, you’re right.  There’s an ironic inversion of the verse from The Book of Isaiah, chapter 2, verse 4, which reads: “they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks.”  But in Shirley, it is the weapons of war that do the sowing and the reaping – the laurels planted in the blood-soaked field are metonyms for glory and victory after the practice of the Classical world.  Of course, that victory, too, is evanescent for they, murmuring and pale, must creep to the grave eventually.  The laurels wither and grow dry and – king or champion – he is merely the “victor-victim.”  Isn’t that great?  The sound effect is nice: alliterative, balanced.  And the idea that the great figures of history are both the conqueror and the conquered is concisely encapsulated in this little hyphenated phrase.  “Victim” of death, surely, of Fate, yes.  But also of one’s own folly?  One’s refusal to recognize the banality of our humanity?  Maybe.

Shirley finishes off with a rather boilerplate reminder that only the good and just enjoy a kind of immortality – their actions blossom in the dust.  Lovely little resurrection image, perhaps, maybe a bit of “pay it forward,” who can say?  But this is the part that I wonder if it undercuts the presumed universality of Shirley’s thesis.  I mean, in the first line, he uses the plural pronoun “our” when referring to blood and glories, and at this point, “our” seems to mean “all of us.”  But the preponderance of the poem seems a chastisement to those who place their faith in a hubristic earthly fame.  By the end of the poem, I think “our” means “the just” – those who realize that worldly ambition is fleeting and whose good works bring new life.  Death may level social ranks, but not moral ones.

One final note about the title before I send you off to your apple-bobbing: it has significant resonance for its time.  A 21st century reader sees “Death the Leveller” and reckons much as Hamlet does: yep, we’re all food for worms.  But a Leveller to the 17th century audience had the piquant aroma of radical politics.  The Levellers were a political movement during the English Civil War of the 1640s that advocated for radical social, political, and economic reforms such as popular sovereignty, universal male suffrage, and equality before the law. Obviously, their influence was strongest among the merchant and artisan classes who resented monopolies, taxation policies favoring the wealthy, and enclosure: the concentration of land and power.  Read against the backdrop of its times, Shirley’s poem becomes less Hamlet’s philosophical musings on death and more a revolutionary condemnation of political and economic privilege.