ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

PATRIOTIC AND POPULAR POETS
absorbed into and played off against low forms or popular topics. When, for
instance, he published his pamphlet poem A Dogge of Warre (FW, II: 364), he
prefaced it with the remark that he was not going to write in the usual heroic or
iambic meter—“I deale with no such Traffique”—and then urges his reader to
be content with sapphics, no less. But this turns out to be a false promise
(presumably generated by the joke that Sappho was wedded to the waterman
named Phaon referred to in his Motto (FW, I: 215)) when he writes the poem in
“doggerall rhyme” (the pun is typically Taylor’s) in response to an apparently
higher law of decorum.
Here and elsewhere, the game in part is for his presumably motley audience
to watch the Water Poet appropriate sophisticated forms for his own lowly
purpose—to watch him bring into the common realm what is usually regarded
as being the exclusive property of the sophisticated and learned. Hence, Taylor
gives us many parodies and mock encomia—praises of Hemp-seed and clean
linen—in turning an Erasmian tradition with purported antecedents in Homer
and Virgil in a direction that might appeal to drapers and clothiers. He even
drags the idea of the book itself into the streets (he likens it to both a whore
and a thief in works with these titles) but does so without registering a jot of
Jonsonian outrage over its becoming common property. The sculler might have
read his Homer or Ovid, and he certainly attempted a purple passage or two,
often of a storm scene, but he never sought to erase from his work (as Spenser,
Jonson, and Drayton did), the signs associating him with trade. As he notes in
his Motto, when he heard the muses sing, it was while rowing on the Thames.
If one strand of Taylor’s art anchors him in the popular and propels him
toward parody and travesty, the other binds him firmly to king and country.
(However “carnivalesque” some of his poetry might seem, Taylor was entirely
respectful of hierarchy.) If he conceived of himself as a “popular” poet in more
particular terms than any of the other authors discussed in this chapter and on a
grander scale than any other rhymester in the early seventeenth century, he also
conceived of the country, England and Scotland, in more particular terms too.
A great deal of Taylor’s writings—prose and verse alike and sometimes a
mixture of each—falls into the general category of travel narratives, that
vaguely conceived and variously executed genre which had been recently
reinvigorated by voyages to the New World and the increasingly frequent grand
tour of the Continent made by well-to-do Englishmen of the early seventeenth
century. Witty and eccentric, Coryat’s Crudities played especially to the latter
crowd, as did later, domestic versions of travel given by Richard Brathwait
(Barnabees Journall, in both English and Latin) and Richard Corbett (Iter
Boreale). The frequent reprinting throughout the century of George Sandys’s
Relation of a Journey begun in 1610 containing a description of the Turkish Empire
etc. testifies further to a more general lure of the exotic that Richard Hakluyt
had helped to initiate at the end of the sixteenth century in his Principall
Navigations (1589).
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