ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

PATRIOTIC AND POPULAR POETS
You holy Virgins, that so oft surround
The citie’s Saphire walls; whose snowy feet
Measure the pearly paths of sacred ground,
And trace the new Jerus’lem’s Jasper street;
Ah, you whose care-forsaken hearts are crown’d
With your best wishes; that enjoy the sweet
Of all your hopes; If e’r you chance to spie
My absent Love, O tell him that I lie
Deep-wounded with the flames that furnac’d from his eye.
(III, p. 90)
Plaintive and sweetly effete, the voice is not one we can listen to for long, even
if it is energized by the closing alexandrine and the slightly unusual use of
“furnace” as a transitive verb (this usage was briefly in vogue in the early
seventeenth century); and in its characteristic appeal to sentiment rather than
argument, one can see Quarles’s limitations. When not paraphrasing others, he
was paraphrasing himself, modulating only the phrase and accent as he went.
But there is still the slightly mysterious shock at the outset that comes from our
sense of being suddenly drawn into a drama greater than any poet’s making. The
appeal is immediate, if not lasting, enabled in part by the illustrated engraving
and by the paradoxically simple fact that Quarles is not himself a poet of strong
lines.
John Taylor (1580–1653)
An altogether more roguish spirit belonged to John Taylor, the Water Poet, who
from Jonson’s lofty perspective seemed the very epitome of the popular poet. “If
it were put to the question of the water-rhymer’s works against Spenser’s,” wrote
Jonson with evident distaste in The Discoveries, “I doubt not but [Taylor’s] would
find more suffrages.” 58 For almost every one of his more than forty years as an
“author,” Taylor had something in the public eye; and usually more than one
piece at that, whether prose or verse: “thumb” Bibles, epigrams, satires, nonsense
verse, first-person travel accounts, lowbrow encomia like “The Praise of Hempseed,”
reports of strange wonders, biographies (the Virgin Mary and Thomas
Parr, “the old, old, very old man” from Shropshire, are among his subjects),
pamphlets against cursing, guidebooks to London taverns, the odd elegy
including one to Jonson, “A Memoriall of All the English Monarchs” with
woodcuts of each, a tiny version of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs measuring four
centimeters, and so on, including a host of royalist writings during the Civil
War—one involving a full-scale repudiation of George Wither. At mid-career
when, like Jonson, he brought out a Folio edition of his Works, his writings
already numbered “sixty-three”—something announced with comic exactitude
on the title page, as if quantity alone were now the principal determiner of an
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