ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang
ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang
ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang
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CAROLINE AMUSEMENTS<br />
So that th’ amazed world shall, henceforth finde<br />
None but my Lilly ever drew a Minde.<br />
(“To my Worthy Friend Mr. Peter Lilly”)<br />
With a poet of Lovelace’s self-conscious versatility, however, the risk is one of<br />
competing surfaces, or rather of competing interests that can prevent an idiom<br />
from developing that is distinctly his: a bit of this, a bit of that—some shocking<br />
images and conceits reminiscent of Donne, some distantly Jonsonian<br />
commendatory epistles (even an epithalamion of sorts in “Amyntor’s Grove”),<br />
an array of Continental motifs popular among later Caroline poets, a turn in his<br />
later verse to retreat, satire, and mockery. Of the Caroline poets discussed in this<br />
chapter, it is easy to regard Lovelace as the least in control of his muse, the least<br />
capable of assimilating the different poetic strains swirling about the 1640s and<br />
1650s, and consequently, too, the least appreciated.<br />
But if he differs from Carew, Suckling, and Herrick in this regard, his poetry<br />
is also more profoundly (and problematically) royalist. And with this distinction<br />
in mind, I believe it is possible to take Phillips’s view of Lovelace “as a fair<br />
pretender” in another, perhaps more fruitful direction, one Phillips probably did<br />
not consciously intend but that a full reading of Lovelace’s two collections<br />
encourages. The first volume of Lucasta (1649), like Lovelace’s greatest poem,<br />
urges that we subscribe to the high, compensatory value of art, especially the art<br />
of the lyric as it weaves victory out of defeat, whether by singing to an Althea<br />
from prison, to a Lucasta from beyond the seas, or by calling Lucasta from<br />
retirement (in the poem with that title), calling, that is, in the sense of a<br />
powerful controlling speech act: “See! She obeys! by all obeyed thus;/No storms,<br />
heats, Colds, no soules contentious,/Nor Civill War is found—I mean, to us.” In<br />
the wake of the royalist defeat, poetry itself, in the high ceremonial forms of<br />
“Epodes, Odes, Sonnets, Songs”—to quote from the 1649 title page—becomes a<br />
“fair pretender,” a fair substitute for loss. And the poem that concentrates this<br />
experience in its most distilled form is “The Grasshopper Ode: To my Noble<br />
Friend, Mr. Charles Cotton”—a miniature Paradise Lost (and found).<br />
That poem inevitably calls to mind other mid-century reworkings of<br />
Anacreon’s “grasshopper” by Abraham Cowley and Thomas Stanley, but the<br />
comparison is of a limited kind. The happy insect reported by Anacreon and<br />
his translators has, in more ways than one, been fully seasoned by Lovelace.<br />
The blending involves a generic upgrading of Anacreon by Horace and<br />
perhaps Pindar as recollected by Jonson in the Cary-Morison ode. And it<br />
includes a deepening of the mood of festive drinking often found in Anacreon<br />
(and celebrated by Cowley and Stanley in their grasshopper poems) by<br />
commemorating an ideal of friendship, made emphatic, as Earl Miner has<br />
remarked, 57 in the shift of address exactly midway through the poem. Here<br />
that ideal assumes—as it does not, say, in Herrick—the broader, oppositional<br />
significance Jonson attached to it in his Pindaric Ode, except that the<br />
“opposition” now no longer involves a “throng” of lesser wits but a newly<br />
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