ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

CAROLINE AMUSEMENTS
Religion by Reason; fled overseas to Paris once his conspiratorial involvement in
the First Army Plot came to light; and died, unmarried, probably no later than
early 1642, from either a violent fever or suicide. “They that convers’d with him
alive,” runs the note to the reader of the 1646 Fragmenta Aurea, “will honour
these posthume Idea’s of their friend: And if any have liv’d in so much
darknesse, as not to have knowne so great an Ornament of our Age, by looking
upon these Remaines with Civility and Understanding, they may timely yet
repent, and be forgiven.” Fragmenta Aurea also included, for display, Suckling’s
“Letters to divers Eminent Personages.” 27
“So great an Ornament of our Age” might seem like a bizarre appellation for
Suckling, although perhaps no more bizarre than the occasional comparisons
made at the time between him and Sidney. (Suckling would seem to have had
almost nothing in common with Sidney except a literary sister and an extreme
case of sprezzatura.) But the emphasis on the reader’s “conversing” with
Suckling—on remembering his talk and him as a talker—points to the reason
why Suckling, “natural, easy Suckling” in Millamant’s phrase from Congreve’s
The Way of the World, was, almost more than any other Caroline poet, the
favorite of the Restoration. At the moment when Carew’s star was beginning to
fade—1671 marks the date of the last edition of his poems for more than one
hundred years—Suckling’s was on the rise; and it was so in part because Suckling
set his sights so low: at the point where poetry and gossip—a major constituent
of Restoration and eighteenth-century literature 28 —would seem to converge, but
not as in Donne, in the urban streetlife of London, or as in Wither, in the
rhyming journalese that comments on contemporary history, but in a setting that
still savored of the genteel. “They can produce nothing so courtly writ, or which
expresses so much the Conversation of a Gentleman, as Sir John Suckling,” spoke
Eugenius in Dryden’s 1667 Essay of Dramatic Poesy. 29 “They” were the poets of
the English past; and Suckling, who heads a list that includes Waller, Denham,
and Cowley, is called on to help mediate what has sometimes been regarded by
modern critics as “the burden of the past” felt by post-Renaissance English poets
beginning with Dryden and Congreve.
Suckling, naturally, had nothing so epochal in mind for himself. “Faith comes
by hearsay,” he remarked, proleptically, in “Upon St. Thomas his unbeliefe,” one
of his earliest poems. The ease of his verse has more to do with the way he “slides
off” the voices of the past and present, and changes gospel to gossip. This has
more to do with various acts of impersonation, with the nudge in the side, with
the casual extension of syntax, than with any desire to mold a specific literary
credo involving the proper relationship of sound to sense, rhyme to reason.
When, for instance, Suckling begins a song,
Out upon it, I have lov’d
Three whole days together;
And am like to love three more,
If it hold fair weather,
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