Robert Southwell was a Jesuit priest in a time and a place when Jesuit priests were not welcome: Elizabethan England. The law was that no priest who had entered into Holy Orders after the ascension of Elizabeth to the throne could stay in Britain longer than forty days or else he would be subject to the death penalty. Southwell asked to be sent to England anyway. After six years of going from house to house administering the sacraments, he was arrested, tortured, and eventually after three more years in prison, tried and hanged. He probably wrote much of his poetry in prison, and it was published after his death. This poem about the vicissitudes of life may have given him hope or not, as he waited in the Tower for Elizabeth’s judges to decide his fate. He does know Who is ultimately in control, writing that “God tempereth all.”
Times Go by Turns
By Robert Southwell
THE lopped tree in time may grow again,
Most naked plants renew both fruit and flower;
The sorriest wight may find release of pain,
The driest soil suck in some moistening shower.
Times go by turns, and chances change by course,
From foul to fair, from better hap to worse.
The sea of Fortune doth not ever flow,
She draws her favours to the lowest ebb.
Her tides hath equal times to come and go,
Her loom doth weave the fine and coarsest web.
No joy so great but runneth to an end,
No hap so hard but may in fine amend.
Not always fall of leaf, nor ever spring,
No endless night, yet not eternal day;
The saddest birds a season find to sing,
The roughest storm a calm may soon allay.
Thus, with succeeding turns, God tempereth all,
That man may hope to rise, yet fear to fall.
A chance may win that by mischance was lost;
The net, that holds no great, takes little fish;
In some things all, in all things none are crossed;
Few all they need, but none have all they wish.
Unmeddled joys here to no man befall;
Who least, hath some; who most, hath never all.
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Times go by turns, and chances change by course,
From foul to fair, from better hap to worse.
Such great lines. I love that the poem is, in large part, a metaphor for the religious situation in England in his time, and a message to engender hope in the reader that religious tolerance (or perhaps a resurgence of Catholicism) would come around sometime. It’s a nice lesson on the haves and have-nots, too. Thanks for sharing it.
What a faith and what a life. The poem says it all.
Southwell was never allowed to write in prison but once, when he wrote to Sir Robert Cecil I think it was, admitting his priesthood and asking to be tried. The government would never have allowed him pen and paper knowing that he had written an expose of the government’s involvement in the Babington Plot.
Much older research about St. Robert Southwell is inaccurate and based on very old “information.” Scholars need to take care in choosing their sources.
Dr. Mary O’Donnell, Ph.D.
Author or â€Quam Oblationem’: The Act Of Sacrifice In The Poetry
Of Saint Robert Southwell.”