ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

PATRIOTIC AND POPULAR POETS
Taylor’s travel narratives divide roughly into two kinds. Some, like Sir
Gregory Nonsense, His Newes from No Place (1622), are purely fantastic—a
gallimaufry of nonsequiturs that, like anamorphic paintings popular in the day
(or, more appropriately, the rhymes of Edward Lear, which they are sometimes
said to anticipate), are meant to amuse by consciously distorting our
perspective:
It was in June the eight and thirtieth day,
That I imbarked was on Highgate Hill,
After discourteous friendly taking leave:
Of my young Father Madge and Mother John.
88
(FW, I: 161)
Others are more deliberately “realistic,” although a work like A Voyage in a
Paper-boat from London to Quinborough shows him exploiting the gray area
between these modes. In their own way, the poems are as self-consciously
ephemeral as nonsense verse:
A Pamphlet (Reader,) from the Presse is hurld,
That hath not many fellowes in the world:
The manner’s common, though the matter’s shallow,
And ’tis all true, which makes it want a fellow.
(Tailor’s Travels to Prague in Bohemia in FW, III: 574)
Of this kind, the great majority involve his many jaunts around England—
something that presumably would appeal to the local and less affluent reader:
his Pennilesse Pilgrimage to Scotland (1618), A Very Merrie Wherrie-Fery Voyage,
or Yorke for my Money (1622), Tailor on Thames Isis (1632), and Part of This
Summers Travel (1639)—to name only those published before the outbreak of
the Civil War.
These are very much steak-and-kidney-pie accounts of Britain, close-up
reports of food and drink, spiced with the occasional anecdote and recorded
acts of hospitality. However much Taylor was enabled in these literary
ventures by the works of Camden, Speed, Holinshed, and Drayton—“his
painfull Polyolbyon,/Whose fame shall live, despight oblivion” (in Thames Isis,
he gives explicit credit to them as his guides)—his focus is on the immediate
and real, not the mythic or legendary: taverns and their signs, like the
Saracen’s head at Whetstone or the Nobody in the Barbican; names of friends
visited and made, from joiners like John Piddack in Lichfield to the Laird of
Gasford in Scotland (Pennilesse Pilgrimage); customs, proverbs, and stories
related to specific locales.
Taylor’s travel narratives teem with people, not nymphs or vistas. On
occasion, they also deliver a refreshingly practical perspective on seventeenthcentury
life. No one would want to exchange Spenser’s Prothalamion for Taylor