ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

CAROLINE AMUSEMENTS
“Have we no voice, no tune?” The answer can only be “yes”—a complex blend
of Donne and Jonson, with a crowning touch of Stuart absolutism.
The poem to Jonson is decidedly less revering. “Great Donne” has been
replaced by “deare Ben” and the poem is concerned with another issue involving
literary inheritance and poetic responsibility: not generational belatedness but
the right to differ with a parent, especially with a parent who has behaved badly
in public. Carew reminds his audience, both Jonson and his followers, that
imitation need not require servility, a point demonstrated with elegant tact and
precision:
Tis true (deare Ben:) thy just chastizing hand
Hath fixt upon the sotted Age a brand
To their swolne pride, and empty scribbling due,
It can nor judge, nor write, and yet ’tis true
Thy commique Muse from the exalted line
Toucht by thy Alchymist, doth since decline
From that her Zenith, and foretells a red
And blushing evening, when she goes to bed,
Yet such, as shall out-shine the glimmering light
With which all stars shall guild the following night.
“’Tis true…and yet…[and] yet”: the ease with which Carew spells out his
difference here must have appeared a little unnerving to Jonson, whose career is
summed up by someone who has clearly mastered the form that Jonson himself
was responsible for establishing when he addressed other authors. (Carew
understands exactly how to maneuver the caesura and how to enjamb so that
his line, even if more regular than Jonson’s, is never predictable.) In a bid for an
authority comparable to Jonson’s, Carew further anchors his judicious phrasing
and the right to differ (as well as to differentiate) in Anglo-Saxon law itself:
but if thou bind
By Citie-custome, or by Gavell-kind,
In equall shares thy love on all thy race,
We may distinguish of their sexe, and place;
Though one hand form them, & though one brain strike
Soules into all, they are not all alike.
Carew also delivers a concluding verdict as tough-minded (and Jonsonian) as
any great poet would ever wish to receive from an admirer:
Thy labour’d workes shall live, when Time devoures
Th’abortive off-spring of their hastie houres.
Thou are not of their ranke, the quarrell lyes
Within thine own Virge, then let this suffice,
97