ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

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