SOURCE: Caro, Robert B. “William Alabaster: Rhetor, Meditator, Devotional Poet—II: Alabaster's Meditative Sonnets.” Recusant History 19, no. 2 (October 1988): 155-70.

In the following essay, Caro examines the style of Alabaster's meditative sonnets and demonstrates how they anticipate subsequent developments in the rhetorical and meditative traditions.

As we approach Alabaster's sonnets¹ our expectation is enhanced not by the promise of poetic greatness but by the prospect of exploring pure instances of the kind of poetry born in the convergence of rhetoric and meditation. We will focus first on a sequence of sonnets remarkable for their rhetorical techniques; then we will consider a group of sonnets each of which has meditation as its subject. In all the poems, however, it will be apparent that Alabaster as poet is simultaneously rhetor and meditator.

In the corpus of Alabaster's sonnets there is a sequence of fifteen poems on the Incarnation (nos. ‘53’-‘67’) which...