ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

CAROLINE AMUSEMENTS
I cannot tell who loves the Skeleton
Of a poor Marmoset, nought but boan, boan.
Give me a nakednesse with her cloath’s on.
(“La Bella Bona Roba”)
Even if the rough bravado here no longer seems quite so modern as it did to a
previous generation of readers often taking their cue from Donne, the jaunty
repetition of “boan, boan” neatly pinpoints the grisly image of the marmoset
and sets up a paradox to be reworked in the remaining four stanzas that does
shock. And though Lovelace will probably always be better remembered for
uttering high-arching, (now) proverbial sentiments like “I could not Love thee
(Deare) so much,/Loved I not Honour more” (“To Lucasta, Going to the
Warres”), or “Stone Walls doe not a Prison make,/Nor Iron bars a Cage” (“To
Althea, from Prison”), he also had a knack at capturing and fixing a lyric
moment at its fullest:
See! with what constant Motion
Even, and glorious, as the Sunne,
Gratiana steeres that Noble Frame,
Soft as her breast, sweet as her voyce
That gave each winding Law and poyze,
And swifter then the wings of Fame.
(“Gratiana dauncing and singing”)
In a gesture like this, it is difficult not to think of the real sympathy that must
have existed between Lovelace and Marvell, especially the Marvell of “Upon a
Drop of Dew” or “A Picture of Little T.C. in a Prospect of Flowers.”
At the same time, Lovelace (again like Marvell) found the pastoral mode
a congenial way of writing about political circumstances—whether by using
amatory figures like Lucasta or Amarantha (the latter in a poem bearing this
title has been seen recently as a partial source for “Upon Appleton
House,” 54 although an equally strong case can be made for its influence on
Marvell’s “Nymph Complaining for the Death of Her Faun”), or by
employing emblems taken from nature, especially from the insect world. In
“Calling Lucasta from her Retirement,” for instance, Lucasta, like Marvell’s
Juliana, possesses apocalyptic power, although of a more comforting sort
(especially to displaced royalists) in her capacity as a figure representing
ultimate Truth:
Sacred Lucasta like the pow’rfull ray
Of Heavenly Truth passe this Cimmerian way,
Whilst all the Standards of your beames display.
Arise and climbe our whitest highest Hill,
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