ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

CAROLINE AMUSEMENTS
altogether the metrically mesmerizing, utterly fanciful effects of the following
stanza, usually attributed to the royalist poet, John Cleveland:
Mysticall Grammer of amorous glances,
Feeling of pulses, the Physicke of Love,
Rhetoricall courtings, and Musicall Dances;
Numbring of kisses Arithmeticke prove.
Eyes like Astronomy,
Streight limbs Geometry,
In her arts ingeny
Never Marke Anthony
Dallied more wantonly
With the faire Egyptian Queen. 3
Everything shimmers and sways here, touched with a sense of the exotic, the
erotic. From the dancing dactylic meter, to the suave reach into the trivium and
quadrivium for amatory analogies, to the climactic trumping of Anthony and
Cleopatra (the sudden shift to anapestic meter in the last line places a further
stress on the “fairness” of the “Egyptian Queen”)—this is a poem that “courts”
its own fantastic grammar, that seems to have little reason to exist beyond airing
its alluring rhythms, its “amorous glances.” “Never Marke Anthony/ Dallied
more wantonly” than the author of these lines, so the poem seems to say, and
points in a direction much explored of late by New Historicists: the centrality
of the trivial—or the trifle—to the conception of the aristocratic self in late
Renaissance England. 4 It is also difficult to imagine this poem belonging to
another moment in literary history. The combative, amatory heroics of Donne—
“She” is all States, and all Princes, I”—are readily assumed; so too is Donne’s
fusion of scholastic discourse with images of physical love. And lying
immediately behind the discovery of double and quadruple dactyls are Jonson’s
prosodic experiments, most notably those in “A Celebration of Charis.” The
poem is surely an afterglow, as Hazlitt would say, but it is also a triumph of the
fancy and written, we might add, when passions were not yet tempered in
advance by ideal notions of verbal fluidity and witty repartee.
To shift from the world of either a Taylor or a Wither to the world
circumscribing “Never Marke Anthony” is to move from the rough-hewn to the
finely polished, from the country to the court. It is to mark a return, too, to the
traditions and genres favored by Donne and Jonson, but with a difference.
Amatory poems and verse epistles abound, as do epigrams, epitaphs, and brief
translations from classical authors, especially those of late antiquity; and no poet
worth his salt was without a song. But the range of the Caroline lyricist (and
there were many) was distinctly narrower, decidedly less ambitious, both enabled
and yet contained by the genteel culture for which dallying wantonly with
words—and women—was almost de rigueur. One book, or at most two, was
usually all that appeared by a given author—often posthumously—and the topics
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