ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

PATRIOTIC AND POPULAR POETS
production of Guy of Warwick. There is only a little suspense within the
narrative; the tone is usually comic and the countryside described as usually only
too willing to welcome the traveler, who seems more often on a progress than a
pilgrimage. But in the later travels, especially those undertaken during the Civil
War and after, Taylor’s accounts acquire almost a mythic burden to them—the
kind of burden, in fact, a mythological poet like Milton can capture in speaking
of the good angels’ tireless dedication to the cause in the War in Heaven—when
he sets out on one of several journeys west, including one to Land’s End. Their
appeal has little to do with whether they are written in prose or verse, and they
are still undertaken with the purpose of getting money; but both the traveler
and the journey have come to acquire a symbolic dimension in the mind of its
author:
Like to the stone of Sisiphus, I roule
From place to place, through weather faire and foule,
And yet I every day must wander still
To vent my Bookes, and father friends good will;
I must confesse this worke is frivalowse,
And he that (for it) daignes to give a lowse,
Doth give as much for’t as ’tis worth, I know;
Yet meerly merily I this jaunt did goe
In imitation of a mighty King,
Whose warlike acts, good fellowes often sing,
The King of France and twenty thousand men,
Went up the Hill, and so came downe agen.
So I this travell past, with cost and paine,
And (as I wisely went) came home againe.
In one of the few attempts to rescue Taylor from the oblivion into which he fell
as soon as he stopped writing, Robert Southey suggested that the Water-Poet
had been neglected partly because, in contrast to a poet like Herrick (whom
Southey regarded for the most part as “a coarse-minded and beastly writer”), he
never wrote any “anthology” poems. 65 This one might qualify, not, however,
because the verse is unusually meritorious, but because it captures so succinctly
the sense of endless movement (and exhaustion) that comes from, as it were,
flogging one’s wares, even if one is doing it as “his majesty’s” poet.
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