ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

CAROLINE AMUSEMENTS
Suckling next was call’d, but did not appear,
But straight one whispered Apollo in’s ear,
That of all men living he cared not for’t,
He loved not the Muses so well as his sport.
The loose syntax and casual rhymes are part of the undoing here. (Suckling’s
trick is partly to remove the heavily invested caesura Jonson put into the English
line, and he is almost as good as Molière’s Célimène at opening and shutting
doors.) It also seems just right that not only should Suckling signal his presence
in the poem and thereby mark his absence at the sessions (improving upon the
inevitably fashionable guest who comes late to a party) but also that his absence
should itself be marked by the buzz of gossip. At this session, busyness and the
business of poetry are two sides of the same coin and not even Apollo, it turns
out, is above taking a bribe. He bequeaths the laurel crown to the Alderman,
with a single, vatically deflationary phrase: “’twas the best signe/Of good store
of wit to have a good store of coyne.”
As a prototype of sorts for The Dunciad, “A Sessions” helps to explain why
Suckling remained popular throughout the eighteenth century. Without ever
doing very much, he seems to have anticipated, in remarkable ways, a number
of significant stylistic and intellectual trends that became prominent in the
Restoration, including, in his frequent use of the image of man as a clock, a
Hobbesian materialism. But it is important to emphasize that the marginal
posture represented in his verse was still a courtly one. Suckling was the enfant
terrible of an increasingly narrow circle and limited to a great degree by the few
attitudes he chose to subvert. When it came to imagining what went on
elsewhere—in the country, for instance—he was hardly more persuasive than
Alceste, as his “Ballad upon a Wedding” makes clear.
This, Suckling’s other generic innovation, has been much admired. Even so
notably “radical” a critic as Hazlitt liked the ballad’s “voluptuous delicacy of the
sentiments and luxuriant richness of the images” and its “Shakespearean grace.” 31
But the poem has not been happily received in all quarters, and mainly because
its rusticity seems of the most suspicious sort: that contrived by one court wit
for the amusement of another, West Country accent and all.
I tell thee, Dick, where I have been,
Where I the rarest things have seen,
Oh, things without compare!
Such sights again cannot be found
In any place on English ground,
Be it at Wake, or Fair.
The poem need not necessarily remind us why theories involving the
polarization between “court” and “country” as well as Marxist accounts of
incipient class struggle have been offered as alternative explanations for the
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