ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

CAROLINE AMUSEMENTS
To spell out more exactly the difference with Herrick is to see where
Lovelace’s ode begins to engage another poem that appeared in public for the
first time in the mid-1640s—Milton’s ode “On the Morning of Christ’s
Nativity.” Albeit in a more modest way, Lovelace’s poem returns the pagan
deities banished by Milton; and it does so by calling attention to another kind
of “new music,” this made out of “show’rs of old Greeke” rather than prophetic
or angelic song, and delivered not as inspired utterance but as communal pledge,
one that simultaneously fuses the natural and the political order, religion and
royalism:
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!
As with the season, so with the king: both shall recover their crowns in this
month of miracles because of the genuine summer of “harthes” that burn with
eternal loyalty. So incandescent, in fact, is the warm light emanating from
communal play and mutual pledge that in the penultimate stanza of the poem
even the Night Hag, about whom Herrick writes as part of the inevitable and
unalterably dark mythos of Nature, 60 can be stripped of her “black mantle” and
made into “everlasting Day”—stripped but not disenchanted, transformed not
silenced. And though an immediate engagement with another Miltonic
work—Areopagitica—cannot be asserted with any more certainty, the closing
sentiments of Lovelace’s ode take the issue of temptation and trial, central to
that pamphlet and to Milton’s writing in general, and turn it into a proof of
the necessary benefits of seasoning, in all that word has come to imply in the
poem:
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.
“Poize” of the sort exemplified by the Grasshopper Ode helps to explain why
this poem has been central to modern definitions of Cavalier verse. But we
should emphasize, too, how this poem implicitly counters the pejorative sense
of a word whose meaning, in Lovelace’s day as well as ours, is associated with
the off-hand gesture—the wave of the hand and the tipped glass so familiar to
us from the Dutch painter, Frans Hals. Indifference has a small place in this
poem. The note that sticks finally in the ear is not that of the solitary
grasshopper “Drunke ev’ry night with a Delicious teare,” however memorable
such a line might be, but that of the moralist who measures the slight slip from
“grass” to “glass” (as in Isaiah’s “all flesh is grass”), and in the process manages
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