ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

CAROLINE AMUSEMENTS
cause of the English Civil War, but the distance registered here between urban
poet and rustic speaker, elite and popular culture, the distance between
Suckling’s notion of a ballad and Drayton’s, is striking.
Her fingers were so small, the Ring
Would not stay on which they did bring,
It was too wide [by] a Peck:
And to say truth (for out it must)
It lookt like the great Collar (just)
About our young Colts neck.
Her feet beneath her petticoat
Like little mice stole in and out,
As if they feared the light;
But oh! she dances such a way,
No sun upon an Easter day
Is half so fine a sight.
The jokes just don’t seem very funny, despite the colloquializing “wots” and
parenthetical nudges. Suckling made his niche as a versifying poet by playing
himself off against Caroline high culture, with its aureate phrases and elaborate
poses. But the game of caricature does not work the other way around, not at
least when the speaker proclaims himself to be one of them.
Robert Herrick (1591–1674)
Robert Herrick, by contrast, wished to belong fully, not just politically, to the
ancien régime. Born into a family of goldsmiths and later apprenticed to one,
then educated at Cambridge before being ordained a priest and settling down
as a parson in Devon (only to be later ejected from his living during the Civil
War), he found it difficult to be anything but revering: of English customs and
rustic charms, of proverbs and tag ends of speech, of sack, ceremony, and the
country life (particularly its flora), of friends, of his household, of his king, and
most of all, of poetry: poetry as it descended to him from classical lyricists like
“Anacreon” (in one of Henri Estienne’s frequently reprinted editions of the
Carminum), 32 Horace, Martial, and Tibullus; as it appeared in contemporaries
like Drayton and Jonson (“Saint Ben”); and even, or rather, especially as it
was written by “Robert” or, as he further naturalized it, “Robin” Herrick
himself.
Herrick packed all these sentiments and then some into the 1,130 poems that
make up his Hesperides, an often beautiful but also baffling collection of lyrics
and epigrams: beautiful because few poets in English have seemed to be so
triumphantly and naturally lyrical as Herrick, whose name, he reminds us, even
rhymes with lyric; but baffling, too, because despite Herrick’s profound concern
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