ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

PATRIOTIC AND POPULAR POETS
anthologized poem, for instance, like the one on the lines from Job 14:13 (“O
that Thou wouldst hide me in the grave, that Thou wouldst keep me in secret
until Thy wrath be past!”) seems as much interested in expressing a sense of the
experience conveyed in the illustration as it does in providing the appropriate
moral. Both engraving and verse keenly register a dramatized moment of
spiritual anxiety and fear that is neither present in the Scriptural gloss nor
registered so emphatically in the original Latin verse in the Pia Desidera:
O Whither shall I fly? what path untrod
Shall I seek out to escape the flaming rod
Of my offended, of my angry God?
Where shall I sojourn? what kind sea will hide
My head from Thunder? where shall I abide
Untill his flames be quench’d or laid aside?
82
(III, p. 75)
And Quarles’s best-known emblem poem, “Will’t ne’r be morning”, is finely
adjusted to capture, and to improve upon, the central experience represented in
Marshall’s crude picture—the quiet of nocturnal prayer:
Will’t ne’r be morning? Will that promis’d light
Ne’r break, and clear these clouds of night?
Sweet Phospher, bring the day,
Whose conqu’ring ray
May chase these fogs; Sweet Phospher, bring the day.
(III, p. 55)
In sharp contrast to Wither yet again, whose response to the excellent
engravings by Crispin van Pass is strictly utilitarian, Quarles shows signs of
worrying over aesthetic detail in his verse: of trying to establish in the poetry a
tone and mood appropriate to the pictures, of trying not to set the pen at odds
with the pencil in the manner of the usual paragone between poet and painter
so common in the seventeenth century, but to strike a chord between the two
in the interest of aiding worship. In this regard, perhaps the most unusual feature
of the Emblems is not Quarles’s commonplace definition of the emblem itself as
a “silent parable,” but the eerie way picture and poem dovetail to form a
“speaking picture.” To meditate, for instance, on the virgins depicted in the
engraving at the beginning of the fifth book is to mark a threshold separating
viewer from illustration, to observe the mystery of silence imposed by the icon
(Fig. 2). But to read the accompanying poem, even if it is not great verse, is to
cross the threshold of silence and to enter abruptly into the religious scene itself,
now as one of its participants: