ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

CAROLINE AMUSEMENTS
If Herrick plays wantonly with our perceptions here, he consciously thought
of this activity as one of art’s little (or great?) pleasures. His celebrated rewriting
of Jonson’s “classic” statement of “sweet neglect” in “Still to be neat” creates a
space for eccentricity—for “a wild civility” in poetry:
A sweet disorder in the dresse
Kindles in clothes a wantonnesse:
A Lawne about the shoulders thrown
Into a fine distraction:
An erring Lace, which here and there
Enthralls the Crimson Stomacher:
A Cuff neglectfull, and thereby
Ribbands to flow confusedly:
A winning wave (deserving Note)
In the tempestuous petticote:
A carelesse shooe-string, in whose tye
I see a wilde civility:
Doe more bewitch me, then when Art
Is too precise in every part.
117
(“Delight in Disorder”)
What poet until Herrick had ever been ravished by a shoestring? (In this
respect, Castiglione’s courtier is a little disappointing since his attention is
drawn only to the more usual velvet stockings and dainty shoes.) 43 And it is
this exaggerated, quirky posture that keeps being rewritten in Hesperides: in
the surprisingly blunt erotic fantasy of “The Vine,” in the mock grandiose
farewell and welcome to sack, in the bursts of passion that snake skimpily
down the page, in the humorously inflated notion that poets—especially
Caroline poets—are supposed to worship ladies (Herrick has more than fifty
poems to Julia alone), and in his occasionally bizarre diction—Herrick’s
belief that producing a momentary “delight in disorder” had a lexical
dimension.
On this last point, Herrick’s celebrated poem “Upon Julia’s Clothes” only
does more exactingly what a great many of the lyrics seek to do; it drops an
unusual word (usually Latinate) into a commonplace description that sets off a
ripple effect of suggestiveness within the text:
When as in silks my Julia goes,
Then, then (me thinks) how sweetly flowes
That liquefaction of her clothes.
Next, when I cast mine eyes and see
That brave Vibration each way free;
O how that glittering taketh me!