ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

CAROLINE AMUSEMENTS
For however brilliant the surface, something also opens up in the momentary
extension of the simile and the relaxed space it creates in the poem: “If it be
love,/Like Danae in that golden showre/I swimme in pleasure.” For a moment
Carew imagines—and his original courtly audience is encouraged to imagine—
surrendering to sexual passion in a way that, however un-Petrarchan each might
be, neither Jonson nor Donne (even in the Elegies) ever could.
With a performance like this one, it is easy to see why a contemporary could
observe that Carew’s “Sonnets were more in request than any poet’s of his time, that
is between 1630 & 1640.” 14 The studied poise was perfectly suited to a court audience,
some of whose members were learning to pose for Van Dyck, and even perhaps to
think of themselves in a slightly classicized setting. (The much celebrated Lucy,
Countess of Carlisle, whom Carew addressed in “A New-Years Sacrifice,” had her
portrait painted no fewer than four times by Van Dyck; in company with the Caroline
dramatist, Thomas Killigrew, Carew is the possible subject of another Van Dyck.)
And the significant place Carew allots in his verse to scene-painting of one kind or
another gives it an added touch of finish. Whether describing nature or art, as seen
in the change of seasons in “The Spring” or a musical performance in “Caelia Singing,”
or giving one of his many accounts of female beauty, Carew’s is a poetry of high
craftsmanship—“mannerist,” as one critic suggests, 15 but distinguishable at the very
least from that of a Quarles because of the serious attention given to surface. Exactness
of phrasing, the careful elaboration of a conceit often found in Donne with a touch
more delicate than Jonson’s, is Carew’s special trademark:
This silken wreath, which circles in mine arme,
Is but an Emblem of that mystique charme,
Wherewith the magique of your beauties binds
My captive soule, and round about it winds
Fetters of lasting love; This hath entwind
My flesh alone, That hath empalde my mind:
Time may weare out These soft weak bands; but Those
Strong chaines of brasse, Fate shall not discompose.
This holy relique may preserve my wrist,
But my whole frame doth by That power subsist…
And so “Upon a Ribbon” unwinds. A near “still life” in verse generated by a
line from Donne’s “The Funerall” (“That subtile wreath of haire, which crownes
my arme”), it impresses precisely because the poet, who seems to know all the
moves in advance, executes the turns so perfectly. We might well find it difficult
in this context to dismiss as inauthentic a contemporary anecdote involving
Carew (even if on the same page occurs the statement that “Milton, the poet,
died a Papist”): “Queen Henrietta Maria—Thomas Carew, Gentleman of the
Privy Chamber, going to light King Charles into her chamber, saw Jermyn Lord
St. Albans with his arm round her neck;—he stumbled and put out the light;—
Jermyn escaped; Carew never told the King, and the King never knew it. The
99