ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

CAROLINE AMUSEMENTS
Corinna through her morning routine—is surely Herrick at his best; the effect is
one that could have been achieved only after a poet already had the example of
Jonson. And the pleasure taken in daily life in this passage, as well as the poet’s
pleasurable urgings, prepares the way for the poignant last stanza, when the carpe
diem note receives its sharpest—and subtlest—shadings:
Come, let us goe, while we are in our prime;
And take the harmlesse follie of the time.
We shall grow old apace, and die
Before we know our liberty.
Our life is short; and our dayes run
As fast away as do’s the Sunne:
And as a vapour, or a drop of raine
Once lost, can ne’r be found againe:
So when or you or I are made
A fable, song, or fleeting shade;
All love, all liking, all delight
Lies drown’d with us in endlesse night.
Then while time serves, and we are but decaying;
Come, my Corinna, come, let’s goe a Maying.
Although the sentiments expressed here about life’s evanescence are general
enough to coincide with the Scriptural readings found in the liturgy for that day,
Herrick’s seductive invitation runs counter to the spirit of these passages, and
can no more be “contained” by them than the poem can be fully explained by
recourse to the Laudian Proclamation for May. 49 Herrick’s age-old argument, rich
in echoes from classical as well as Scriptural sources, 50 reflective of poetry’s
modest memorializing powers, cares little for anything but the present: for briefly
arresting time in the name of “All love, all liking, all delight,” a phrase that
sweetens as it grows, counterpoising everything pleasurable in this life against
the emptiness of the next, and stealing between the “fleeting shade” of memory
and an “endlesse night” of pagan oblivion to make a hope of the final rhyme’s
dying fall. With sentiments like these, one can understand why Herrick never
made it big in the church.
Richard Lovelace (1618–57)
Carew, Suckling, and Herrick might well be thought of as a first wave of
Caroline poets. As lyricists who came of age while Charles was on the throne,
they reflected only indirectly on the political concerns either anticipating or
generated by the Civil War, and of these, Herrick alone lived through the Civil
War itself, indeed through the Interregnum and well into the Restoration. But
1648 effectively marks the date in which he spoke and then fell silent: his two
collections of verse, Hesperides and Noble Numbers, sit like small monuments
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