My Favourite Stanza of Poetry

I've long considered this my favourite stanza in all of poetry:

Stone walls do not a prison make,

Nor Iron bars a Cage;

Minds innocent and quiet take

That for an Hermitage.

If I have freedom in my love,

And in my soul am free,

Angels alone, that soar above,

Enjoy such liberty.

It comes, of course, from To Althea, from Prison by Richard Lovelace. The whole poem is excellent but the last verse (which this is) raises it to a much higher level.

I even like the scansion of "an hermitage", which in my mind I always pronounce just as it's pronounced today. Whether it was pronounced differently in Lovelace's day, whether the last syllable was stressed, I don't know.

I think the beauty of the verse is beyond analysis. The parallelism of the first two lines, the timelessness of the imagery, the distinctly masculine gentleness of the whole thing...that's all a part of it. "Angel" is one of my very words in the language, and it's the focal point of the whole stanza, and thus the whole poem. I think the last line of a poem should "soar", should raise our thoughts and spirits to the heights, and it quite literally soars in this case.

The whole stanza is so beautifully crafted that there's no suggestion of artifice or of effort, it seems like an organic whole. Every word seems to follow every word with something close to inevitability.

And yet...even after such analysis, the brilliance of the stanza remains undiminished and unexplained. You could say all these things of many other stanzas of poetry, and yet this one seems to have something that surpasses any other-- for me, anyway.

By the way, I lied a little at the start of this poem. I haven't quite considered this my definitive favourite stanza of all time. For years, I've said it's a toss-up between this one and the following stanza from "The Walrus and the Carpenter" by Lewis Carroll. There was always an element of striving after comic effect in this, though, with the contrast between the two. (Not that anybody "in real life" shows any interest in anything I have to say about poetry, anyway. I needn't have bothered.) But today I've decided that Lovelace trumps Carroll, though I still love the Carroll stanza:

The time has come,' the Walrus said,

      To talk of many things:

Of shoes — and ships — and sealing-wax —

      Of cabbages — and kings —

And why the sea is boiling hot —

      And whether pigs have wings.'

(Incidentally, I think the line "why the sea is boiling hot" is a brilliant prophetic satire of most social and political discourse today, especially in the mainstream media-- long earnest discussions that take as their assumption something that isn't true, that is observably untrue, that is ludicrously and patently untrue.)