ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

CAROLINE AMUSEMENTS
Anthea, Sappho), himself, his pets, his maid—what we often think of as the
bric-à-brac of daily life, even the making of poetry itself:
More discontents I never had
Since I was born, then here;
Where I have been, and still am sad,
In this dull Devon-shire:
Yet justly too I must confesse;
I ne’r invented such
Ennobled numbers for the Presse,
Then where I loath’d so much.
114
(“Discontents in Devon”)
I doubt whether anyone would confuse this lyric with a poem of Drayton’s like
“An Ode Written in the Peake,” even though both poets are concerned with
the relationship between a specific locale and poetic inspiration. But I doubt,
too, whether anyone would regret the redirection for very long. Herrick has fully
domesticated his subject, has shifted the emphasis toward the commonplace, the
manageable emotion: “Where I have been, and still am sad.” At the very least,
Drayton would have reversed the last two lines so the emotional trajectory
would have concluded with the ennobling of numbers. But Herrick is, above all,
a poet of sentiment, a poet of the familiar, not a poet of the sublime, or in his
case, what would have been the hierophantic overreach. However “enchanting,”
his are poems to be sung or heard after supper, by the hearth (“When he would
have his verses read”).
As with place, so with time and the theme of “Times trans-shifting” signaled
in “The Argument of his Book.” The poet who sets a high price on the familiar
naturally laments change of any sort, but especially change that involves the
customary.
Faire Daffadills, we weep to see
You haste away so soone:
As yet the early-rising Sun
Has not attain’d his Noone.
Stay, stay,
Until the hasting day
Has run
But to the Even-song;
And, having pray’d together, we
Will goe with you along.
We have short time to stay, as you,
We have as short a Spring;
As quick a growth to meet Decay,