ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

CAROLINE AMUSEMENTS
or thematic order. 38 (As has been richly documented, Herrick, of course, was a
royalist.) But whether Herrick will ever answer to modernist worries about his
artistic stature (or to the larger question about the status of art in modern
society) is doubtful, especially since he seems to have positively luxuriated in
his modest role as a latecomer:
Ah Ben!
Say how, or when
Shall we thy Guests
Meet at those Lyrick Feasts,
Made at the Sun,
The Dog, the triple Tunne?
Where we such clusters had,
As made us nobly wild, not mad;
And yet each Verse of thine
Out-did the meate, out-did the frolick wine.
My Ben
Or come agen:
Or send to us,
Thy wits great over-plus;
But teach us yet
Wisely to husband it;
Lest we that Tallent spend:
And having once brought to an end
That precious stock; the store
Of such a wit the world sho’d have no more.
(“An Ode for him”)
In an important sense, Herrick is designating here a poetry of leftovers, the
“overplus” of someone else’s wit; but we should recognize too that the excess,
the extra, does not come without a sense of obligation attached to it, without
identifying a sense of purpose for the recipient. Herrick’s little parable of poetic
talent performs a slight revision on Matthew; the good servant here husbands
wisely, seeing that the “precious stock” is limited and therefore that the
consequences of overspending are the same as not spending at all. Either way
the store more than diminishes; it disappears. But Herrick’s economizing does
not rule out the possibility of abundance—indeed, we might think of this ode as
visually a little corpulent—but abundance itself ought to be seen in light of its
smaller constituents, as in the example of a volume that consists of more than a
thousand particles.
Hence the presence in Hesperides of what Alastair Fowler has termed
“microphilia,” 39 Herrick’s fetish for small things: fairies and household gods, bits
of clothing, daffodils, lilies in crystals, flies in amber, wisps of women (Julia,
113