ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

CAROLINE AMUSEMENTS
It is easy to recognize in this prayer a defense of perfume and incense and to
posit a noxious reception by Puritans, but it would be also a shame to limit a
poem obsessed with its own flirtatious lyricism to a polemical context. The
“charm” of Herrick’s verse is precisely that it can trifle with solemnities—even
solemnities associated, in this case, with “old Religions sake”—in the name of
poetry. It can, in short, be a little bit political without becoming frantic or
repressive. If a “book of sports”—and some of the poems reflect satirically on
rural life in the manner of Dutch caricaturists like Jan Steen—it is written in
the lower case by an author whose name rhymes with lyric, not Laud.
The problems with reading Herrick too defensively become especially acute
with an invitational poem like “Corinna’s going a Maying,” Herrick’s gorgeous
and much anthologized Mayday celebration. As Leah Marcus among others
has pointed out, the poem specifically alludes to “The Proclamation made for
May,” the kind of festive celebration identified in The Book of Sports, which
Laud sought to enforce in the 1630s; and the allusion resonates, like
liquefaction, with contemporary political significance. But how much is
another question. It is doubtful whether Laud himself would have approved of
the deeply imagined, pagan nature of Herrick’s carpe diem poem, with its
repeated enjoinders for Corinna to run off to the woods, its playful reversals of
Christian notions of sin, its keen celebration of the present moment for
“harmlesse follie,” its indifference to the Christian afterlife. As a poem made
in part smoother by Jonson’s loose translation of Catullus’s “Vivamus, mea
Lesbia” into “Come my Celia, let us prove,” the lyric is wonderfully alive to
surface detail, as Herrick extends the range of reference well beyond the
courtly to include the rustic chiding of “Get up, sweet-Slug-a-bed” and a
Botticelli-like celebration of Corinna as Flora:
Rise; and put on your Foliage, and be scene
To come forth, like the Spring-time, fresh and greene;
And sweet as Flora. Take no care
For Jewels for your Gowne, or Haire:
Feare not; the leaves will strew
Gemms in abundance upon you:
Besides, the childhood of the Day has kept,
Against you come, some Orient Pearls unwept:
Come, and receive them while the light
Hangs on the Dew-locks of the night:
And Titan on the Eastern hill
Retires himselfe, or else stands still
Till you come forth. Wash, dresse, be brief in praying:
Few Beads are best, when once we goe a Maying.
The casual assimilation of the classical and the colloquial, the majestic and the
immediate—Titan on the eastern hill retiring while the speaker hurriedly directs
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