ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

CAROLINE AMUSEMENTS
The wiser world doth greater Thee confesse
Then all men else, then Thy selfe onely lesse.
The assessment, with its compact, subtle qualification at the end, seems
nearly perfect. Great as he is, only Jonson would call himself greater than
the wiser world, and in doing so he manifests the self-love that also limits
his judgment.
The poems to Donne and Jonson show Carew at his most serious. As for
pleasure, here is Carew operating within the suave confines of the courtly lyric:
Give me more love, or more disdaine;
The Torrid, or the frozen Zone,
Bring equall ease unto my paine;
The temperate affords me none:
Either extreame, of love, or hate,
Is sweeter than a calme estate.
Give me a storme; if it be love,
Like Danae in that golden showre
I swimme in pleasure; if it prove
Disdaine, that torrent will devoure
My Vulture-hopes; and he’s possest
Of Heaven, that’s but from Hell releast:
Then crowne my joyes, or cure my paine;
Give me more love, or more disdaine.
The theme of “Mediocritie in love rejected” is not quite the commonplace of
amatory poetry that we are sometimes told, at least not until Carew worked out
the parallels and antitheses so explicitly and was later echoed by more minor
Caroline songsters like Sidney Godolphin. The emphasis in Petrarch’s “Ite, caldi
sospiri, al freddo core” (“Go, hot sighs, to her cold heart”) is resolutely plaintive.
That of Jonson in “The Dreame” (“Or Scorn, or pity on me take”) is on the
disturbance love has suddenly created in the heart of the speaker and on the
poet’s need to make a “true relation” of it, that is, on the speech performance
itself. (Jonson seems fully aware that he might be playing the part of the fool in
Donne’s “The Triple Fool.”)
The brilliance of Carew’s song lies in a different direction—in the diffident
balancing act itself: the coolly measured alternatives neatly chiseled in language
Jonson surely would have admired. Where a Donne would have tipped his anti-
Petrarchan hand at the end, moreover, by graveling the lady because she might
finally choose to remain indifferent to his ploys, Carew merely (and deftly) ends
where he begins, by posing the alternatives once again: “Give me more love, or
more disdain.” “Glittering Icicles” is how one nineteenth-century reader
described Carew’s poetry. 13 But that description isn’t altogether accurate either.
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