ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang
ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang
ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang
You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles
YUMPU automatically turns print PDFs into web optimized ePapers that Google loves.
PATRIOTIC AND POPULAR POETS<br />
absorbed into and played off against low forms or popular topics. When, for<br />
instance, he published his pamphlet poem A Dogge of Warre (FW, II: 364), he<br />
prefaced it with the remark that he was not going to write in the usual heroic or<br />
iambic meter—“I deale with no such Traffique”—and then urges his reader to<br />
be content with sapphics, no less. But this turns out to be a false promise<br />
(presumably generated by the joke that Sappho was wedded to the waterman<br />
named Phaon referred to in his Motto (FW, I: 215)) when he writes the poem in<br />
“doggerall rhyme” (the pun is typically Taylor’s) in response to an apparently<br />
higher law of decorum.<br />
Here and elsewhere, the game in part is for his presumably motley audience<br />
to watch the Water Poet appropriate sophisticated forms for his own lowly<br />
purpose—to watch him bring into the common realm what is usually regarded<br />
as being the exclusive property of the sophisticated and learned. Hence, Taylor<br />
gives us many parodies and mock encomia—praises of Hemp-seed and clean<br />
linen—in turning an Erasmian tradition with purported antecedents in Homer<br />
and Virgil in a direction that might appeal to drapers and clothiers. He even<br />
drags the idea of the book itself into the streets (he likens it to both a whore<br />
and a thief in works with these titles) but does so without registering a jot of<br />
Jonsonian outrage over its becoming common property. The sculler might have<br />
read his Homer or Ovid, and he certainly attempted a purple passage or two,<br />
often of a storm scene, but he never sought to erase from his work (as Spenser,<br />
Jonson, and Drayton did), the signs associating him with trade. As he notes in<br />
his Motto, when he heard the muses sing, it was while rowing on the Thames.<br />
If one strand of Taylor’s art anchors him in the popular and propels him<br />
toward parody and travesty, the other binds him firmly to king and country.<br />
(However “carnivalesque” some of his poetry might seem, Taylor was entirely<br />
respectful of hierarchy.) If he conceived of himself as a “popular” poet in more<br />
particular terms than any of the other authors discussed in this chapter and on a<br />
grander scale than any other rhymester in the early seventeenth century, he also<br />
conceived of the country, England and Scotland, in more particular terms too.<br />
A great deal of Taylor’s writings—prose and verse alike and sometimes a<br />
mixture of each—falls into the general category of travel narratives, that<br />
vaguely conceived and variously executed genre which had been recently<br />
reinvigorated by voyages to the New World and the increasingly frequent grand<br />
tour of the Continent made by well-to-do Englishmen of the early seventeenth<br />
century. Witty and eccentric, Coryat’s Crudities played especially to the latter<br />
crowd, as did later, domestic versions of travel given by Richard Brathwait<br />
(Barnabees Journall, in both English and Latin) and Richard Corbett (Iter<br />
Boreale). The frequent reprinting throughout the century of George Sandys’s<br />
Relation of a Journey begun in 1610 containing a description of the Turkish Empire<br />
etc. testifies further to a more general lure of the exotic that Richard Hakluyt<br />
had helped to initiate at the end of the sixteenth century in his Principall<br />
Navigations (1589).<br />
87