ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang
ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang
ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang
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CAROLINE AMUSEMENTS<br />
For however brilliant the surface, something also opens up in the momentary<br />
extension of the simile and the relaxed space it creates in the poem: “If it be<br />
love,/Like Danae in that golden showre/I swimme in pleasure.” For a moment<br />
Carew imagines—and his original courtly audience is encouraged to imagine—<br />
surrendering to sexual passion in a way that, however un-Petrarchan each might<br />
be, neither Jonson nor Donne (even in the Elegies) ever could.<br />
With a performance like this one, it is easy to see why a contemporary could<br />
observe that Carew’s “Sonnets were more in request than any poet’s of his time, that<br />
is between 1630 & 1640.” 14 The studied poise was perfectly suited to a court audience,<br />
some of whose members were learning to pose for Van Dyck, and even perhaps to<br />
think of themselves in a slightly classicized setting. (The much celebrated Lucy,<br />
Countess of Carlisle, whom Carew addressed in “A New-Years Sacrifice,” had her<br />
portrait painted no fewer than four times by Van Dyck; in company with the Caroline<br />
dramatist, Thomas Killigrew, Carew is the possible subject of another Van Dyck.)<br />
And the significant place Carew allots in his verse to scene-painting of one kind or<br />
another gives it an added touch of finish. Whether describing nature or art, as seen<br />
in the change of seasons in “The Spring” or a musical performance in “Caelia Singing,”<br />
or giving one of his many accounts of female beauty, Carew’s is a poetry of high<br />
craftsmanship—“mannerist,” as one critic suggests, 15 but distinguishable at the very<br />
least from that of a Quarles because of the serious attention given to surface. Exactness<br />
of phrasing, the careful elaboration of a conceit often found in Donne with a touch<br />
more delicate than Jonson’s, is Carew’s special trademark:<br />
This silken wreath, which circles in mine arme,<br />
Is but an Emblem of that mystique charme,<br />
Wherewith the magique of your beauties binds<br />
My captive soule, and round about it winds<br />
Fetters of lasting love; This hath entwind<br />
My flesh alone, That hath empalde my mind:<br />
Time may weare out These soft weak bands; but Those<br />
Strong chaines of brasse, Fate shall not discompose.<br />
This holy relique may preserve my wrist,<br />
But my whole frame doth by That power subsist…<br />
And so “Upon a Ribbon” unwinds. A near “still life” in verse generated by a<br />
line from Donne’s “The Funerall” (“That subtile wreath of haire, which crownes<br />
my arme”), it impresses precisely because the poet, who seems to know all the<br />
moves in advance, executes the turns so perfectly. We might well find it difficult<br />
in this context to dismiss as inauthentic a contemporary anecdote involving<br />
Carew (even if on the same page occurs the statement that “Milton, the poet,<br />
died a Papist”): “Queen Henrietta Maria—Thomas Carew, Gentleman of the<br />
Privy Chamber, going to light King Charles into her chamber, saw Jermyn Lord<br />
St. Albans with his arm round her neck;—he stumbled and put out the light;—<br />
Jermyn escaped; Carew never told the King, and the King never knew it. The<br />
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