ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

PATRIOTIC AND POPULAR POETS
on Thames Isis (1632), dedicated as it is to Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel
and Surrey, and other members of the privy council and “commissioners for the
navigation and fishing of the famous Rivers of Thames and Medway”; but it is
hard not to be impressed by the latter’s sturdy ecological sense and concern over
the economic life of the country and countryside:
Shall Thames be barr’d its course with stops and locks,
With Mils, and hils, with gravell beds, and rocks:
With weares, and weeds, and forced Ilands made,
To spoile a publike for a private Trade?
(Taylor on Thames his, in W, I: 26)
This is Poly-Olbion with a fully Baconian slant to it—a vision of England
potentially unified not by articulating a common ancestral myth but through a
pragmatic effort to clean up its waterways:
In common reason, all men must agree
That if the river were made cleane and free,
One Barge, with eight poore mens industrious paines,
Would carry more than forty carts or waines.
And every waine to draw them horses five,
And each two men or boyes to guide or drive,
Charge of an hundred horse and 80 men
With eight mens labour would be served then,
Thus men would be employed, and horse preserv’d,
And all the Countrey at cheape rates be serv’d.
At the same time, however, it would be a desperate act of literary criticism to
set a very high mark on any of Taylor’s writings, however direct and pleasantly
earthy many of them are. If the travel narratives remain his most appealing
works, it is partly because, as Samuel Johnson noted in another context and with
a different emphasis, 62 traveling performs a valuable regulating service on the
imagination. The general shapelessness of so much of Taylor’s writing, purposeful
in the hands of great satirists like Burton or Swift, rarely seems more than the
product of failing to exercise any restraint on speech; and Taylor is not, like
Burton, a brilliant talker. (Aubrey remarked that “his conversation was
incomparable for three or four morning’s draughts. But afterwards you were
entertained with crambe bis cocta.”) 63 But in the travel narratives, the appeal is
archetypal, the effect on the reader is almost mythic. 64 The hero sets forth (and
by advertising the journey in advance in which certain conditions had to be met
and obstacles overcome, Taylor cast himself in that role); he encounters various
trials along the road, which often consist of his winning over strangers; and he
returns, ideally to meet generous compensation from his sponsors, and often with
a symbolic allusion to something happening in London, like his attending a
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