ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

CAROLINE AMUSEMENTS
his return to sack to an Odyssean homecoming (in “The Welcome to Sack”)
broods over his sense of placelessness when he is expelled from Devon, a
brooding that deeply qualifies, as a recent critic has noted, 45 the pleasures that
might be assumed to accompany a return to one’s birthplace:
London my home is: though by hard fate sent
Into a long and irksome banishment;
Yet since cal’d back; henceforward let me be,
O native countrey, repossest by thee!
For, rather then I’le to the West return,
I’le beg of thee first here to have mine Urn.
Weak I am grown, and must in short time fall;
Give thou my sacred Reliques Buriall.
(“His returne to London”)
Herrick’s anxiety is different from that of the refugee’s, for his fear is that the
once familiar has become strange—London, too, was in the hands of the
Puritans—and there are no other ports of call. In a sense, the counter-plot, as
Claude Summers designates the poem’s layered irony, hinges on the possibility
of a double betrayal, a double plot by history, as the poet who worries elsewhere
about being abandoned by daffodils and damsels now worries about being
abandoned by his mother country.
* * *
Herrick’s concern for homeland becomes, at its deepest, braided into a concern
for the mythic and pagan origins of England and for the old rituals that he sees
as permeating and sustaining English life: celebrations of rural harvests (“The
Hock-cart”), ceremonies at Christmas, May-pole and May Day dances, and the
like. These qualities have long been considered among the most original and
attractive features of Hesperides, but their full cultural import is difficult to assess.
Although powerful arguments have been made to equate Herrick’s
mythologizing with Archbishop Laud’s program for ritualizing religious worship
in England as a further response to Puritan attacks on ceremony, the scheme is
not without its problems when applied to a lyricist like Herrick. 46 For one thing,
it assumes that policies generated out of the Star Chamber were immediately and
cleanly adopted in the rural parts of England, as if it were impossible to continue
to celebrate pastimes without ultimately using them for politically oppressive
purposes. But the example of Drayton should remind us that not everyone who
celebrated English customs and faery lore was necessarily doing so in support of
the established ruling powers; and Drayton was a far more politically motivated
poet than Herrick.
Neither is it clear that Herrick was as loyal a Laudian as is sometimes
assumed. Even if we discount the tantalizing allegation made by Laud’s secretary,
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