ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

CAROLINE AMUSEMENTS
time’s passing. All things have not, like the ladies of yesteryear, melted away
with the snow. In Carew’s response, beauty has its elemental origins in a lady
who is, at once, their preserver and their generator: their author, as Hollander
notes, but also their final resting place. If we read the 1640 printed text,
moreover, against the several extant versions of the song, probably earlier drafts
as Carew’s editor suggests, 23 we can measure even more exactly the originary
value Carew places on his mistress as a storehouse of beauty. The revisions are
done not merely to make the already aureate even more resplendent. To
exchange, as Carew does, “damask” for “fading” (as in “When June is past, the
fading rose”), “dark” for “dead” (of night), and “lies” for “dyes” (as in the final
line “And in your fragrant bosome dyes”) is to raise the epistemological stakes a
few notches, to heighten the worth of the question that is not supposed to be
asked; and in doing so to deepen the mystery surrounding the object of Carew’s
praise and the subject of beauty itself: its association with beginnings and
endings, with the place of ultimate rest, with even the potential source of
regeneration. As the “answer” poems to Carew’s answer suggest, the only way
forward is downward—toward parody.
John Suckling (1609–42?)
With a poet of Carew’s talent, questions almost always arise as to why he did
not write a “major” poem, and there are nearly as many answers given as there
are theories of inspiration. (Carew has anticipated most in his “Answer” to
Townsend.) With John Suckling, it is significant that the question does not even
arise. Some fourteen or fifteen years younger than Carew, Suckling (whose name
derives from “socage,” denoting a person holding an estate by “terms of the
plow”) 24 was, in many regards, the Caroline Oscar Wilde: 25 a flamboyant
personality and a brilliant conversationalist, although hardly an “aesthete,” as
we shall see. Suckling, wrote Aubrey, was “the greatest gallant of his time, and
the greatest Gamester, both for Bowling and Cards, so that no Shopkeeper would
trust him for 6d, as today, for instance, he might, by winning, be worth 200
pounds, and the next day he might not be worth half so much, or perhaps
sometimes be minus nihilo.” 26
Here today, gone tomorrow: so, too, with Suckling, the author of, among
other things, two poems entitled “Against Fruition.” He was probably dead at
thirty-two: “Obyt anno attatis sue 28,” reads the slightly erroneous inscription
above the Marshall engraving of Suckling, in turn set within a sumptuous laurel
wreath, that accompanied the first edition of his writings in 1646 entitled
Fragmenta Aurea (golden fragments) and augmented in 1659 with The Last
Remaines. During his short life, Suckling had posed for Van Dyck in full Caroline
dress—with a copy of the Shakespeare folio opened to Hamlet, no less. He had
wooed for money and lost; been a soldier at home and abroad; written plays (four
in all); scuffled at the theater with the likes of Sir John Digby, brother to that
“absolutely, complete Gentleman,” Sir Kenelm Digby; penned a brief Account of
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