ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang
ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang
ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang
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CAROLINE AMUSEMENTS<br />
“Liquefaction” does not so much serve to crystallize a particular meaning (in the<br />
manner of a mot juste) as to catalyze a response in the speaker, amplified and<br />
retuned in “brave vibration,” that only further accentuates the mysterious effect<br />
of Julia’s shimmering silk. Part of the success of “liquefaction,” too, is that<br />
Herrick’s use of the word—the context in which he sets it—does not require<br />
that we choose between its material and spiritual significance, but that we see<br />
them as somehow connected. “Sweetly flowes” suggests we emphasize the watery<br />
nature of Julia’s silk; but the ecstatic response by the speaker—“O how that<br />
glittering taketh me!”—keeps the spiritual association of the word in play, one<br />
that, in the hands of a Christian Neoplatonist like Sir Thomas Browne at the<br />
end of Urn-Burial, would be tilted fully toward the transcendental (“and if any<br />
have been so happy as truly to understand Christian annihilation, extasis,<br />
exolution [exhalation], liquefaction…”) 44 but that in Herrick remains preeminently<br />
a source of a “wilde civility.”<br />
From “liquefaction,” it is possible to move to other startling words that seek<br />
to set off the usual from the unusual: coinages like “circum-crost” and<br />
“circumspangle” (neither is listed in the OED, in contrast to the apparently more<br />
common “circumspacious” that Herrick uses elsewhere); diminutives like<br />
“rubulet” for a little ruby and “thronelet”—in the company of “refulgent,” no<br />
less (in both instances, Herrick’s is the only usage cited in the OED); rare and<br />
now obsolete words like “regrediance” (regression), “repullation” (bud or sprout<br />
again), or the more earthy “bowzing” and “cup-shot” (to denote different stages<br />
of intoxication.) Most of the effects are brief, but occasionally the resonances<br />
are of a more complicated kind:<br />
Go I must; when I am gone,<br />
Write but this upon my Stone;<br />
Chaste I liv’d, without a wife,<br />
That’s the Story of my life.<br />
Strewings need none, every flower<br />
Is in this word, Batchelour.<br />
118<br />
(“To his Tomb-maker”)<br />
Herrick presumably means for us not just to smile over his act of compressing<br />
the meaning of his life into a single word (and therefore to outdo his<br />
prospective tomb maker who is represented as requiring a full couplet) but<br />
also to see in the word and its rhyming pun on flower/flour the happy<br />
hominess of his existence. By way of a false etymology, Herrick points to his<br />
bachelorhood as the very bread of life, even containing all its flowers and<br />
responsible for producing Hesperides itself. (From the middle ages through the<br />
seventeenth century, “batch” was associated with baking bread.) The joke,<br />
moreover, seems to be one he shared with his royalist patron, Mildmay Fane,<br />
the Earl of Westmoreland, who wrote in Otia Sacra (1648), “Those blest with<br />
the true batch [bread] of life may ever rest so satisfied,” an attitude toward