ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

CAROLINE AMUSEMENTS
were frequently of the most incidental order. Thomas Randolph, a declared Son
of Ben, lamented the loss of his little finger in what we might call a parody of
imitative form (one line, he complains, is now a foot too short). Charles’s
favorite court poet, Thomas Carew, joined others in spotting a mole on his
mistress’s bosom; and following the way though (with the exception of the
extravagantly conceited John Cleveland) rarely the wit of Donne’s “The Flea,”
writers assembled errant bees, grasshoppers, and glowworms in collections that
now began to reflect a Baconian interest in the natural world—indeed, that
began to reflect the “collecting” habits going on at home and abroad in a culture
that was soon to witness the birth of the museum in Oxford in 1677. When
Thomas Stanley and Abraham Cowley published separate translations of
Anacreon around mid-century, the rage for the incidental had clearly achieved
canonical status, as Herrick’s Hesperides beautifully shows.
Virtuosic accomplishment was the order of the day, an order that even Milton
to some degree observed in Poems (1645), without, of course, fully obeying. And
yet, it is also a peculiar historical feature of the period that rarely have so many
poets produced more than a few poems worth admiring, and occasionally
imitating. Eliot made this point long ago when he retrieved Henry King’s “The
Exequy,” and though the particular features of Eliot’s argument are less
compelling today, the elegy, in its daring conceits and intimate tone, still
resonating with modern poets, stands as remarkable proof against King’s own
eulogistic claim that Donne was always “Beyond our loftyst flights.” 5 Indeed, we
need only remember that the elegantly plangent dirge by James Shirley (a minor
poet if there ever was one) beginning,
The glories of our blood and state
Are shadows, not substantial things;
There is no armor against fate;
Death lays his icy hand on kings;
Scepter and crown
Must tumble down,
And in the dust be equals made
With the poor crooked scythe and spade, 6
was omitted from Saintsbury’s three-volume Minor Caroline Poets (1905–21) to
realize how much easier it often is to talk about Caroline modes and moods than
it is to circumscribe the period’s poetic wealth or to single out simple details that
contribute to the success of an utterance like the one above. In the latter case,
for instance, Shirley’s “poor” is crucial to the adjustment away from Death’s “icy
hand” since it is with the wielders of scythes and spades and not with some
abstract emblem of death—like Time—that the heroic must sleep. And on a
smaller plane entirely typical of Caroline poetry, that adjustment is also crucial
if the dimeter rhyme of “Scepter and crown/Must tumble down” is to possess its
full human and historical force. As with so many poems of the period, it is
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