ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

CAROLINE AMUSEMENTS
Suckling even seems indifferent about that most masculinist of aristocratic
assumptions, continuing the genealogical line: “But since there are enough/
Born to the drudgery, what need we plough?” The debonair wave seems
exactly right. Procreative sex, like difficult poetry, is just too much work to be
enjoyable:
Fruition’s dull, and spoils the Play much more
Than if one read or knew the plot before:
’Tis expectation makes a blessing dear:
It were not heaven, if we knew what it were.
109
(“Against Fruition”)
And in all of these situations, too, we are most struck by Suckling the talker,
the amusing and sometimes shocking conversationalist, the raconteur: “J.S.” in
dialogue with “T.C.,” in the case of “Upon My Lady Carliles Walking in
Hampton Gardens,” a poem whose principal energies, like those underlying
much of Suckling’s verse, derive in part from a larger courtly dialogue between
platonic and antiplatonic strains.
Suckling’s best known and much imitated “A Sessions of the Poets,” in fact,
is a series of set-ups:
A sessions was held the other day
And Apollo himself was at it (they say);
The laurel that had been so long reserved,
Was now to be given to him best deserved.
The “poets” come to town like country gulls (“’Twas strange to see how they
flocked together”), pure grist for Suckling’s anecdotal mill, with the bastardized
bob-and-wheel quatrains churning out caricature after caricature. First
wineladen Jonson appears proclaiming his “Works,” then Carew, “hard-bound”
(constipated) muse and all, and many lesser lights, although not necessarily so
in their own day. But Suckling’s intentions are clearly comical, not canonical:
Will Davenant, ashamed of a foolish mischance
That he had got lately travelling in France,
Modestly hoped the handsomeness of’s Muse
Might any deformity about him excuse.
And
Surely the Company would have been content,
If they could have found any President [precedent];
But in all their Records, either in Verse or Prose,
There was not one Laureate without a nose.
All but one makes a bid for the laurel crown: