ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

CAROLINE AMUSEMENTS
There your sad thoughts with joy and wonder fill,
And see Seas calme as Earth, Earth as your Will.
And scattered among his verse, especially in the second volume entitled Lucasta:
Posthume Poems (1659), a number of poems take the Caroline fetish for small
things in an overtly political direction. Without being fully Aesopian, these
suggest that Lovelace’s emphasis on ants and snails in the latter collection marks
a further turn toward a genre already coded as subversive—Aesop himself was a
slave—and exploited as such by fellow royalists like John Ogilby in his 1651
edition of The Fables of Aesop Paraphras’d in Verse. 55
A willingness to spot diamonds in the rough—and few poets in the
seventeenth century are as syntactically convoluted as Lovelace—and an
interest in drawing connections between Lovelace and a major poet like
Marvell, who seems to have made sustained imaginative works out of
possibilities barely glimpsed by Lovelace, are necessary responses to his verse. So,
too, is recognizing Lovelace as the epitome of the Cavalier poet: a third
generation soldier (his grandfather had been knighted by Essex for his efforts in
the Irish campaign, his father by James) and loyalist virtuoso whose knowledge
of the sister arts—to say nothing about his quasi-scientific interest in natural
lore—seemed an inevitable extension of his royalist sympathies. Van Dyck’s
pupil and successor at Charles’s court, Peter Lely, was an intimate friend of
Lovelace; both were admitted to the Freedom of the Painter’s Company in 1647.
Allusions to Italian masters like Raphael, Giorgione, and Titian dot the canvass
of his writings. On several occasions, furthermore, Lovelace’s special interest in
the visual arts, besides helping to account for a hypertrophied use of imagery,
shows him equating a royalist politics with an aesthetic “naturalism.” In a poem
that has earned the right to be called the most intensely conceived ecphrastic
analysis of a painting so far produced in England, 56 the sympathetic assessment
by painter and poet emerges as the only legitimate response to the current
political situation. After twenty lines describing the clouded fortunes of Charles
and the brave sufferings shared by the son, Lovelace insists on the acute
naturalism of Lely’s art, the graceful and mysterious connection between the
painter and the royal sitters:
Not as of old, when a rough hand did speake
A strong Aspect, and a faire face, a weake;
When only a black beard cried Villaine, and
By Hieroglyphicks we could understand;
When Chrystall typified in a white spot,
And the bright Ruby was but one red blot;
Thou doest the things Orientally the same,
Not only paintst its colour, but its flame:
Thou sorrow canst designe without a teare,
And with the Man his very Hope or Feare;
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