ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang
ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang
ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang
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CAROLINE AMUSEMENTS<br />
time’s passing. All things have not, like the ladies of yesteryear, melted away<br />
with the snow. In Carew’s response, beauty has its elemental origins in a lady<br />
who is, at once, their preserver and their generator: their author, as Hollander<br />
notes, but also their final resting place. If we read the 1640 printed text,<br />
moreover, against the several extant versions of the song, probably earlier drafts<br />
as Carew’s editor suggests, 23 we can measure even more exactly the originary<br />
value Carew places on his mistress as a storehouse of beauty. The revisions are<br />
done not merely to make the already aureate even more resplendent. To<br />
exchange, as Carew does, “damask” for “fading” (as in “When June is past, the<br />
fading rose”), “dark” for “dead” (of night), and “lies” for “dyes” (as in the final<br />
line “And in your fragrant bosome dyes”) is to raise the epistemological stakes a<br />
few notches, to heighten the worth of the question that is not supposed to be<br />
asked; and in doing so to deepen the mystery surrounding the object of Carew’s<br />
praise and the subject of beauty itself: its association with beginnings and<br />
endings, with the place of ultimate rest, with even the potential source of<br />
regeneration. As the “answer” poems to Carew’s answer suggest, the only way<br />
forward is downward—toward parody.<br />
John Suckling (1609–42?)<br />
With a poet of Carew’s talent, questions almost always arise as to why he did<br />
not write a “major” poem, and there are nearly as many answers given as there<br />
are theories of inspiration. (Carew has anticipated most in his “Answer” to<br />
Townsend.) With John Suckling, it is significant that the question does not even<br />
arise. Some fourteen or fifteen years younger than Carew, Suckling (whose name<br />
derives from “socage,” denoting a person holding an estate by “terms of the<br />
plow”) 24 was, in many regards, the Caroline Oscar Wilde: 25 a flamboyant<br />
personality and a brilliant conversationalist, although hardly an “aesthete,” as<br />
we shall see. Suckling, wrote Aubrey, was “the greatest gallant of his time, and<br />
the greatest Gamester, both for Bowling and Cards, so that no Shopkeeper would<br />
trust him for 6d, as today, for instance, he might, by winning, be worth 200<br />
pounds, and the next day he might not be worth half so much, or perhaps<br />
sometimes be minus nihilo.” 26<br />
Here today, gone tomorrow: so, too, with Suckling, the author of, among<br />
other things, two poems entitled “Against Fruition.” He was probably dead at<br />
thirty-two: “Obyt anno attatis sue 28,” reads the slightly erroneous inscription<br />
above the Marshall engraving of Suckling, in turn set within a sumptuous laurel<br />
wreath, that accompanied the first edition of his writings in 1646 entitled<br />
Fragmenta Aurea (golden fragments) and augmented in 1659 with The Last<br />
Remaines. During his short life, Suckling had posed for Van Dyck in full Caroline<br />
dress—with a copy of the Shakespeare folio opened to Hamlet, no less. He had<br />
wooed for money and lost; been a soldier at home and abroad; written plays (four<br />
in all); scuffled at the theater with the likes of Sir John Digby, brother to that<br />
“absolutely, complete Gentleman,” Sir Kenelm Digby; penned a brief Account of<br />
105