ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

CAROLINE AMUSEMENTS
And spite of this cold Time and frozen Fate
Thaw us a warme seate to our rest.
7
Our sacred harthes shall burne eternally
As Vestall Flames, the North-wind, he
Shall strike his frost-stretch’d Winges, dissolve and flye
This Aetna in Epitome.
8
Dropping December shall come weeping in,
Bewayle th’usurping of his Raigne;
But when in show’rs of old Greeke we beginne,
Shall crie, he hath his Crowne again!
9
Night as cleare Hesper shall our Tapers whip
From the light Casements where we play,
And the darke Hagge from her black mantle strip,
And sticke there everlasting Day.
10
Thus richer then untempted Kings are we,
That asking nothing, nothing need:
Though Lord of all what Seas imbrace; yet he
That wants himselfe, is poore indeed.
Along with some marvelous aural effects, what is striking about the poem is
the sense of manifest control: the “poize” (l.19) exhibited by Lovelace, even in
the way he enjambs that word against the more turbulent threat of “flouds,”
and so memorably represented at the outset in the image of the grasshopper
swinging upon “some well-filled Oaten Beard,” poised for a fall that
nonetheless does not happen for several more stanzas, and then when it does,
occurs with a classicizing elegance that Marvell must have admired: “But ah
the Sickle! Golden Eares are Croppt.” (If it could be shown that this poem
was, in fact, written after the decapitation of the king, then Lovelace’s “poize”
must be seen as even more remarkable and more Marvellian, and the
relationship between this ode and Marvell’s “Horatian Ode” more interesting
still.) As potentially apocalyptic as the image of the sickle is, it appears within
a parable of the Fall as imagined from the perspective of someone who still
believes he has a home, a place of retreat. “And what sithes spar’d, Winds
shave off quite”: this is a line written by a poet looking from the inside out,
the melodious control verifying the comfort found in friendship and further
illuminated in the pun on “harthes,” a word that links the “Genuine Summer
in each others breast” with their imagined Roman surroundings. As critics
have observed, the image of the “sacred harthes” could have come from
Herrick, except that it has more defensive bite.
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