ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

CAROLINE AMUSEMENTS
it is difficult not to smile over the ballet-like plummet into the commonplace in
the fourth line, a comic release that would be slightly less amusing (and complex
too) if we were not meant to hear, somewhere in the background, the muffled
wit of Donne’s urgent “Now thou hast lov’d me one whole day,/ Tomorrow when
thou leav’st, what wilt thou say.” Donne’s hard-driven line seems almost
sentimental next to Suckling’s calculated wave of indifference in the off-hand
rhyme of “together” and “weather,” despite the fact that it is Suckling, not
Donne, who proves on this occasion to be less of a rake.
But Donne, or for that matter Jonson, is hardly essential to Suckling’s poetry in
the way that each is to Carew’s. (Drayton would have been altogether beyond the
pale.) When Carew writes, he writes, as Leavis emphasized, in a direct line of wit;
indeed, as someone central to the formation of the line itself. 30 When Suckling
writes, it is from the margins, as someone who has overheard much but who refuses
to authorize any special school or tradition, not even one of his own. His game—
and it is difficult not to use this metaphor in speaking about his poetry—is to offer
something else, a frank behind-the-scenes glimpse of the great, a Lucy, Countess
of Carlisle, walking in Hampton Court gardens in the poem of that title:
’Troth in her face I could descry
No danger, no divinity.
But since the pillars were so good
On which the lovely fountain stood,
Being once come so near, I think
I should have ventur’d hard to drink.
Or of the not-so-great:
Wat Montague now stood forth to his tryal,
And did not so much as suspect a denial;
Wise Apollo then asked him first of all
If he understood his own Pastoral.
For
If he could do it, ’twould plainly appear
He understood more than any man there,
And did merit the Bayes above all the rest,
But the Monsieur was modest, and silence confest.
(“A Sessions of the Poets”)
Or it is to take that most traditional of subjects among court poets—love—and
give it a demystifying twist, as if the speaker were the very incarnation of
indifference and not merely playing the part in the hope of winning the “lady”:
Of thee (kind boy) I ask no red and white
to make up my delight,
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