ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

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