ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

CAROLINE AMUSEMENTS
with ceremony in its many forms, it is still nearly impossible to determine how
“seriously” we are meant to take him as a poet:
Give me a Cell
To dwell
Where no foot hath
A path:
There will I spend
And end
My wearied yeares
In Teares.
112
(“His Wish to privacie”) 33
Even by the nugatory standards of much Caroline verse, this poem—and there
are literally hundreds like it in Hesperides—is something of a collector’s item,
(In fact, the Kentucky publisher Robert Earth has made a souvenir postcard of
this poem.) Too slight for a Carew, too sentimental for a Suckling, too slender
for even the “Anacreontic” Stanley, it seems to survive as a vestige of the
monastic spirit itself, a twenty-three word prayer rendered into rhyming dimeter
and monometer lines: a curiosity of sorts, as if Herrick had jotted it down in an
off moment and then quietly disregarded his own wish for privacy.
Given Herrick’s generous sense of inclusiveness—and there are another three
hundred or so poems in the accompanying, less celebrated Noble Numbers—it is
hardly surprising that sorting the wheat from the chaff in Hesperides has been a
major critical operation at least since the end of the nineteenth century, when
Swinburne proclaimed Herrick the greatest songwriter in English and thereby
implicitly excluded much that did not fall under this rubric. 34 (The numerous
contemporary musical settings of his lyrics, which exceed those of other poets of
his generation by a significant margin, would seem to bear out Swinburne’s
judgment.) 35 Herrick’s most recent editor, in fact, surmised that had the poet
published some 150 of his best poems only and done so in the early 1630s, then
he might have “laid the foundations for a reputation that would have grown as
three or four other volumes appeared at intervals.” 36 Which 150 poems he does
not say; only a few are specified by title. But the drift of the argument is clear,
and it does not rely on exact numbers in any case: if Herrick had played his cards
better, he could have been a major poet. He could have been a contender, a bit
more like Milton.
The notion of Herrick as a “major” poet is an intriguing one and not limited
to an editor’s amusing fancy that someday a “New Hesperides” might be found.
Eliot, too, wrestled with the problem in his own way, initially denying a sense of
“continuous conscious purpose” in Herrick’s poems only to relent a few sentences
later by admitting, “still, there is something more in the whole than in the
parts.” 37 And a number of recent scholars have attempted to define that
“something” by assigning to Hesperides a conscious design, usually of a political