ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

CAROLINE AMUSEMENTS
metrically monotonous—“slight things do lightly please,” as a glance at the first
half of the poem suggests:
Though Clock,
To tell how night drawes hence, I’ve none,
A Cock,
I have, to sing how day drawes on.
I have
A maid (my Prew) by good luck sent,
To save
That little, Fates me gave or lent.
A Hen
I keep, which creeking day by day,
Tells when
She goes her long white egg to lay.
A goose
I have, which, with a jealous eare,
Lets loose
Her tongue, to tell what danger’s neare.
(“His Grange, or private wealth”)
But once “honest ordinariness” gives “charm,” it ceases to be “ordinary” in a
meaningful sense. Or to put the matter another way: the ordinary and the unusual,
the familiar and the peculiar (a favorite word with Herrick), are reciprocal activities
in Hesperides, together constituting a basic impulse, one even inscribed in the way
the gorgeously resonant title—with its rich mythological connotations, it has
tempted more than one critic into allegorizing the meaning of the collection 42 —
applies to a volume of poems equally concerned with incidentals:
I saw a Flie within a Beade
Of Amber cleanly buried:
The Urne was little, but the room
More rich than Cleopatra’s Tombe.
116
(“The Amber Bead”)
Herrick’s reworking of a familiar trope in Martial (IV, 32, 59; VI, 15) helps to
make this point. A fly might be of little significance, but how it is set, how it is
framed, can tell an altogether different story. In Herrick, moreover, there is a
kind of trompe l’oeil effect lacking in Martial because he makes the matter of
perception an issue in the poem from the beginning and because he asks us to
think of “clean” and “rich” as belonging, in this instance, to the same category
of experience. There is, too, the possibility of a third dimension here: that the
room in which the fly in amber is viewed—a favorite object in Wunderkammer
(“wonder cabinets”) of the period—is also made richer because of its presence.