ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

CAROLINE AMUSEMENTS
“bachelormania” in turn shared by a number of mid-century poets and put to
the test by Marvell in “The Garden.”
All is meant to be good postprandial fare: “Jocond his Muse was; but his Life
was chaste” reads the harmless last line of Hesperides. But it is a fare made
poignant by touches of pathos throughout:
I have lost, and lately, these
Many dainty Mistresses:
Stately Julia, prime of all;
Sapho next, a principall:
Smooth Anthea, for a skin
White, and Heaven-like Chrystalline:
Sweet Electra, and the choice
Myrha, for the Lute, and Voice.
Next, Corinna, for her wit,
And the graceful use of it:
With Perilla: All are gone;
Onely Herrick’s left alone,
For to number sorrow by
Their departures hence, and die.
(“Upon the losse of his Mistresses”)
The fact that the loss has been confined to the “dainty” means, too, that the
idea of loss itself is never fully plumbed and also never fully expended. The
elegiac can keep being touched on, and can keep being touched up. A brother
dying, a father dead, Julia with a fever, the poet forever marking his departure:
Onely a little more
I have to write,
Then Ile give o’re,
And bid the world Good-night.
119
(“His Poetrie his Pillar”)
That sentiment occurs with more than nine hundred poems to go; if the
emotional reach were more dramatic, we would accuse Herrick of bad faith.
And the elegiac can itself be expanded, too, little by little: to incorporate,
for one thing, notions of exile. Hesperides is studded with political
commentary—brief allusions to the bad times, bits of advice relating to
governing—and over the course of the 1,130 poems Herrick’s concern with his
household, in its immediate and more extended forms, becomes a concern for
his homeland. The king who does not visit his grange nonetheless comes to
nearby Exeter and unfurls his banner (“To The King, Upon his coming with his
Army into the West”), as does his son some seven hundred poems later (“To
Prince Charles upon his coming to Exeter”). Conversely, the poet who likens