ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

CAROLINE AMUSEMENTS
to transform brittleness into resistance through the benefits of fellowship and the
creativity reckoned on such occasions. “Golden Eares” have been cropped, but
that is not the full story. The epic reach of the penultimate line plays wistfully
with what was and what might be, “Though Lord of all what Seas imbrace”—
Britain. But the new music is to be of a different sound, one responsive to the
needs of the self, especially the royalist self, at mid-century: “yet he/That wants
himselfe, is poore indeed.”
To set Lovelace’s second volume of verse, the more somberly entitled Lucasta:
Posthumous Poems (1659), against the first is both to understand some of the
problems of being a Cavalier poet after the execution of Charles—of continuing
to fashion a royalist self by either climbing, like Lucasta, to the highest point on
a white hill or turning inward in the midst of “Dropping December”—and to
realize retrospectively Phillips’s point about the disjunction in Lovelace between
poetic fire and heroic design. If the Grasshopper ode redefines the kingly by
pointing to an internalized heroics of Horatian play, the second volume points
in more troubled ways to the illusory presence of the high mode as a form of
representation itself. Instead of retirement, we get restlessness; instead of song,
we get satire: a shift in generic emphasis that has encouraged critics to see in
Lovelace an anticipation of some of the concerns of Dryden and Pope. However
this may be and however much Lovelace’s own personal misfortunes underlie
this transition—and until more evidence to the contrary is discovered than that
produced by Wilkinson, I am inclined to believe Wood’s melancholic account
that “after the Murther of K. Ch. I, Lovelace was set at liberty, and having by
this time consumed all his Estate, grew very melancholy, (which brought him at
length into a Consumption) became very poor in body and purse, was the object
of charity, went in ragged Cloaths (whereas when he was in his glory he wore
Cloth of gold and silver) and mostly lodged in obscure and dirty places” 61 —the
prevailing mood of the 1659 Lucasta is one of disenchantment and dark threats,
Democritean pathos and poignantly desperate reprisals.
There are no Altheas to celebrate, no stones walls to transcend, and Lucasta
herself (like England) seems alien from the outset. “Her Reserved looks” is the
title of the first poem; the second, “Lucasta laughing,” strikes a more unsettling
note:
Heark how she laughs aloud,
Although the world put on its shrowd;
Wept at by the fantastick Crowd,
Who cry, One drop let fall
From her, might save the Universal Ball.
She laughs again
At our ridiculous pain;
And at our merry misery
She laughs until she cry.
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