ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

CAROLINE AMUSEMENTS
Carew’s response is less certain, more fully ambivalent than Herbert’s, but it
does have its own peculiar integrity, for the pursuit of mortal beauty never
proceeded on a more oracular, mesmerizing level in the seventeenth century
than in his celebrated song “Aske me no more.” How could an author who
repeats with exquisite variation the plaintive request, “aske me no more,” and
responds with ever increasing desire, imagine the turn to religious verse to be
anything but a turn away from “the verdant bay” to “the dry leavelesse Trunke
on Golgotha”:
Aske me no more where Jove bestowes,
When June is past, the fading rose:
For in your beauties orient deepe,
These flowers as in their causes, sleepe.
Aske me no more wh[i]ther doth stray,
The Golden Atomes of the day:
For in pure love heaven did prepare
Those powders to inrich your haire.
Aske me no more wh[i]ther doth hast,
The Nightingale when May is past:
For in your sweet dividing throat,
She winters and keepes warme her note.
Aske me no more where those starres light,
That downewards fall in dead of night:
For in your eyes they sit, and there,
Fixe become as in their sphere.
Aske me no more if East or West,
The Phenix builds her spicy nest:
For unto you at last shee flies,
And in your fragrant bosome dyes.
If Carew will always be remembered as a poet who gave renewed expression to
the voice of physical desire, who saw his later identity as a poet largely
constituted in this light (and that is one way of reading the poem to Sandys), it
is so in part because this song seems to be a definitive act, a last word on the
subject of beauty itself. Whether or not this lyric marks an end to a tradition of
Petrarchan love poetry in English—Tennyson has an answer poem of sorts in
“The Princess”—it presumes to exhaust its subject. All the conceits of
Petrarchan poetry are here, as John Hollander has pointed out in a remarkable
reading of the poem: rosy cheeks, sunny hair, starry eyes, sweet voice, and
fragrant bosom. 22 But these are now exotically crossed with the ubi sunt tradition,
and the crossing produces its own ripe answer, different from either the
Petrarchist’s celebration of ideal beauty or the lover’s sweet melancholy over
104