ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

CAROLINE AMUSEMENTS
against a darkened landscape, runic testimonies to what “we up-rear,/Tho
kingdoms fal,” as he remarks in “The Pillar of Fame.”
Richard Lovelace, on the other hand, might well be regarded as the leader of
a second wave, 51 Or at least of a second ripple, since the spring that had nurtured
Carew’s hardbound muse—his proximity to Donne and Jonson—or Herrick’s
miniaturized artistry was only occasionally realized and then over a conceptually
narrower terrain, one to a large degree dictated by a combination of political
circumstances and genteel concerns, noble gestures and flourishes from “abroad.”
When Lovelace gives a version of Carew’s “Mediocritie in love rejected” in a
lyric entitled “A la Bourbon,” we know that craftsmanship is not of paramount
concern:
Divine Destroyer pitty me no more,
Or else more pitty me;
Give me more Love, Ah quickly give me more,
Or else more Cruelty!
For left thus as I am
My Heart is Ice and Flame;
And languishing thus I
Can neither Live nor Dye! 52
The relaxation in discipline has little in common with either Herrick’s delight
in disorder or Suckling’s calculated indifference.
Nonetheless, in the eyes of one near contemporary at least, Lovelace
seemed “a fair pretender to the Title of Poet.” 53 The phrase belongs to Milton’s
nephew, Edward Phillips, who goes on to say, after the fashion, how one may
discern in Lovelace “sometimes those sparks of a Poetic fire, which had they
been the main design, and not Parergon, in some work of Heroic argument,
might happily have blaz’d out into the perfection of sublime Poesy.” In the
reference to “some work of Heroic argument,” we can hear the ample voice of
the uncle speaking through the nephew; and Phillips might have been further
stirred toward a sympathetic reading of Lovelace because of Lovelace’s
friendship with Milton’s friend, Andrew Marvell, acknowledged in the
commendatory poem Marvell wrote for Lovelace’s first collection of poems,
Lucasta (1649). But there is also a ring of truth in the distinction Phillips
draws between poetic desire and fulfillment, between the aspirations for poetic
sublimity and the absence of heroic argument, for as much as lapses in craft
distinguish Lovelace from his Caroline contemporaries, so too does the reach
toward sublimity. Neither Carew, Herrick, nor Suckling could—or would—
have claimed so much for his muse.
Phillips might have arrived at so generously qualified a judgment by taking
any number of routes. Lovelace surely had an unusual ear and a good, though
sometimes quirky, grasp of phrasing that went beyond mere Cavalier
sprezzatura:
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