ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

CAROLINE AMUSEMENTS
refuses to comply with Townsend’s request for an elegy commemorating the
death of the Protestant Swedish king Gustavus Adolphus. Drayton, were he still
alive, yes, but Carew most certainly not. He greets the request as if struggling
with a hangover:
Why dost thou sound, my deare Aurelian,
In so shrill accents, from thy Barbican,
A loude allarum to my drowsie eyes,
Bidding them wake in teares and Elegies
For mightie Swedens fall? Alas! how may
My Lyrique feet, that of the smooth soft way
Of Love, and Beautie, onely know the tread.
One purpose of the courtly poet, in Carew’s view and developed in the
remainder of the poem, was to celebrate the court, however narrowly it
construed itself; even, if necessary, to defend its insular policies, however much
this action has disappointed some of Carew’s modern readers. 19 Later, Carew’s
anti-imperializing, sybaritic sentiments would lead him to praise, after Charles’s
disastrous attempt to tame the Scots in 1639,
the temperate ayre of Wrest
Where I no more with raging stormes opprest,
Weare the cold nights out by the bankes of Tweed,
On the bleake Mountains, where fierce tempests breed,
And everlasting Winter dwells.
Had Carew’s desire to make everything artful—even when claiming to be
celebrating nature—not issued from a deeper concern for stasis (in his revision
of the Daphne/Apollo myth, the two impulses seem mutually defining), we
might think his poems to be too many beads of amber. (A great many Caroline
poems do not escape this fate.) But with Carew, waywardness is a way of being,
a poignant and at times powerful counterpoint to the predictable. His
celebrations of art and artifice are almost always set against a wider horizon of
loss and disorder: “the temperate ayre of Wrest,” with its obvious pun, against
“everlasting winter”; the idealized landscape of the female body in “The Rapture”
against the double standard of sexual practices at court (of which Carew himself
is not free); or the light in “To Saxham” perceived from afar, in which “Those
cheerful beames send forth their light,/To all that wander in the night.” Carew
is rarely as settled or cozy as Herrick, nor is he ever led to rage against the night,
which is one way of characterizing his limitations. But the note of potential
vulnerability and exile that runs, for instance, through “To Saxham” profoundly
differentiates the poem from its Jonsonian model. The abundance of Penshurst
is seen largely, strenuously, from within its secure walls. By contrast, Saxham is
more a hospice for the poor, a refuge for people who are otherwise beyond the
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