ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang
ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang
ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang
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PATRIOTIC AND POPULAR POETS<br />
As Wither understood but failed to enact, emblems were a way of appealing to<br />
“the common reader.” Enigmas, by contrast, wrote Henri Estienne in a passage<br />
that calls to mind important differences between Donne and Quarles, “may very<br />
well be used at merryments and in Princes Courts,” but emblems ought to<br />
“declare the matter more plainly.” 54<br />
The matter plainly declared is divine worship. The five books, essentially<br />
stitched together from the Typus Mundi (largely underlying Books I and II) and<br />
the Pia Desideria (Books III–V), 55 unite illustrated text, Biblical inscription,<br />
poetry, relevant quotations from the Fathers, and a four-line epigram—always in<br />
that order—to give a collaborate perspective on a familiar topos: the fall of man,<br />
Job suffering, Paul in prison, the soul anticipating its welcome by the New<br />
Jerusalem, and so on. The most significant alteration Quarles performed on the<br />
originals, whittling down the patristic commentary, gives the lyric—and hence<br />
the individual, private experience—greater prominence. The shift is<br />
appropriately Protestant, but the private utterance is also itself framed and<br />
thereby partly contained by a generalizing epigram. On doctrinal and artistic<br />
grounds, the emblems were intended to appeal to a wide audience.<br />
Pope thought, rather nastily in The Dunciad, that “the pictures for the page<br />
attone/And Quarles is sav’d by Beauties not his own”; 56 and few critics have<br />
since seriously attempted to challenge this view of the verse. Coleridge made a<br />
half-hearted stab at doing so, and in his still “standard” edition Grosart made a<br />
full but finally ineffective lunge by constantly comparing Quarles to Milton,<br />
Wordsworth, and Tennyson. Grosart was even sufficiently persuaded by Quarles’s<br />
lyrical qualities that he saw no need to re-create the original engraving for the<br />
poems but printed instead the mawkish illustrations by Charles Bennett and<br />
W.Harry Rogers. He then proceeded to sever completely the relationship<br />
between visual and verbal texts by placing the engravings as a group after the<br />
poems.<br />
However well intended, Grosart’s editorial decision points unwittingly to the<br />
truth of Pope’s quip: that the poems need the engravings if they are to be<br />
enjoyed at all. But there is a further truth, I think, beyond observing the essential<br />
dependency of text upon image, one that helps to account for the special<br />
distinction of Quarles’s book, regardless of whether it serves to explain its<br />
original popularity. Through a variety of allusive techniques within the verse,<br />
Quarles insists that we have the illustrations in front of us while reading the<br />
poetry. As a recent critic has argued with considerable acuity, the poems are<br />
constantly dramatizing issues having to do with vision, even sometimes pointing<br />
to the deceptive and potentially idolatrous nature of sight itself and the dangers<br />
graven images might pose to the Protestant reader. 57<br />
Whether or not Quarles is as puritanical as this line of argument suggests is<br />
open to debate; if so, it would surely lend a further level of irony to Pope’s notion<br />
of the word being saved by the picture. But it does point to the integral and<br />
generative relationship between image and text beyond the didactic function the<br />
poems perform when they gloss a given illustration. An occasionally<br />
81