ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

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