ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

CAROLINE AMUSEMENTS
pale, as Carew adjusts his angle of vision to include a range of terms otherwise
excluded from Jonson’s poem:
thy gates have bin
Made onely to let strangers in;
Untaught to shut, they do not feare
To stand wide open all the year;
Carelesse who enters, for they know,
Thou never didst deserve a foe;
And as for theeves, thy bountie’s such,
They cannot steale, thou giv’st so much.
“Strangers,” “foe,” “theeves”: Carew’s discursive modulations can probably be
traced to worsening economic conditions during James’s later years and the
evident failure of the Elizabethan Poor Laws to provide adequate relief for the
many who “wander in the night.” 20 But the difference is temperamental as well.
The sexual libertine was also the potential exile, spiritually and therefore
culturally, a point given legendary significance by contemporary interest in
Carew on his deathbed. Izaak Walton insisted that because of his licentious ways,
Carew was refused the final sacraments, while Clarendon, evading the issue of
last rites, reported more happily that Carew “died with the greatest Remorse for
that Licence, and with the greatest Manifestation of Christianity, that his best
Friends could desire.” 21
Which of these reports is closer to the truth is impossible to determine, and
in a late verse epistle entitled “To my worthy friend Master Geo. Sands, on his
translation of the Psalmes,” Carew would seem to have authorized both
interpretations. The poem has obvious revisionist affinities to Donne’s “A Hymn
to God, My God in My Sickness,” insisting, as it does, on the space separating
the poet from “thy holy room” and on the possibility of making a potential virtue
out of an evident necessity:
I presse not to the Quire, nor dare I greet
The holy place with my unhallowed feet;
My unwasht Muse, polutes not things Divine,
Nor mingles her prophaner notes with thine;
Here, humbly at the porch she listning stayes,
And with glad eares sucks in thy sacred layes.
So, devout penitents of Old were wont,
Some without dore, and some beneath the Font,
To stand and heare the Churches Liturgies,
Yet not assist the solemne exercise.
Carew is conspicuously an auditor, not a singer here, but the reflective capacity
of the verse epistle also gives him room to consider subjects otherwise
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