ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

CAROLINE AMUSEMENTS
Queen heaped favours on Carew.” 16 Artfulness, in the Caroline court, had its
rewards.
Perhaps too many: Carew has never been entirely free of charges of decadence
of one kind or another. Initially, at least, these were levied by moralizing, anticourtly
contemporaries (perhaps George Wither) who were offended by the
presumed illicit sexuality expressed in “The Rapture,” Carew’s most notorious
libertine poem. (It was not admitted into the Norton Anthology of English
Literature until the fourth edition.) As the author of the 1646 Assises Holden in
Parnassus remarked, indicating the foreign nature of Carew’s corruption, “this
fellow/In Helicon had reared the first Burdello”; 17 and, indeed, in Carew’s
“Neroesque” fantasy spun in part from Donne’s Elegy 19, with appropriate
strands twisted out of Spenser (“Be bold and wise”), artfulness is all, even
perhaps a knowledge of the (porno)graphic arts, as has been recently urged.18
Carew is nothing if not a connoisseur of poses:
The Roman Lucrece there, reades the divine
Lecture of Loves great master, Aretine,
And knowes as well as Lais, how to move
Her plyant body in the act of love.
To quench the burning Ravisher, she hurles
Her limbs into a thousand winding curles,
And studies artful postures.
The enjambments involving “move” and “hurles” are neatly calculated to
emphasize the sway of bodily pliancy itself. And in his marvelously intricate
reversal of the old Apollo/Daphne myth, we can readily understand why from
Wither to Courthope male critics have nervously chosen to brand Carew’s art
“effeminate” and why, at the same time, it has not been embraced by feminists
either:
Daphne hath broke her barke, and that swift foot,
Which th’angry Gods had fastned with a root
To the fixt earth, doth now unfetter’d run,
To meet th’embraces of the youthfull Sun:
She hangs upon him, like his Delphique Lyre,
Her kisses blow the old, and breath new fire:
Full of her God, she sings inspired Layes,
Sweet odes of love, such as deserve the Bayes,
Which she her selfe was.
As Daphne’s seductively creative meeting with Apollo illustrates, Carew
preferred making love to making war; or better yet, he preferred to celebrate the
intertwining of Eros and art rather than to record the loud bellow of the drum,
as he makes clear in his lengthy response to Aurelian Townsend, where he
100