ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

CAROLINE AMUSEMENTS
As Lovelace makes clear in “Love made in the first Age: To Chloris,” wooing is
not merely a thing of the past, something about which to become nostalgic. The
dream of a sexual golden age is material for a vengefully comic act of self-abuse
along the exaggerated lines of Marvell’s narcissistic mower or, in his escapist
desires, the speaker of “Upon Appleton House”:
Now, Chloris! miserably crave,
The offer’d blisse you would not have;
Which evermore I must deny,
Whilst ravish’d with these Noble Dreams,
And crowned with mine own soft Beams,
Injoying of my self I lye.
Here and elsewhere, the perspective ventured is meant to shock. (Is self-crowning
too, one wonders, a delayed response to the current situation of political
impotence?) It is not designed, as in Marvell, to facilitate continual musings on
the subject of retirement; and nature, too, like Chloris, is often represented as
decidedly cruel—a place in which the falcon and the crane are at war (“The
Falcon”), and the fly, a “small type of great ones,” must face the hungry spider; a
place in which the sentiments in “A loose Sarabande” seem a necessary
consequence of the complete rupture of hierarchy, not just the product of a bad
night:
See all the World how’t staggers,
More ugly drunk then we,
As if far gone in daggers,
And blood it seem’d to be:
We drink our glass of Roses,
Which nought but sweets discloses,
Then in our Loyal Chamber,
Refresh us with Loves Amber.
The second Lucasta has its own bleak integrity: “’Twas a blith Prince exchang’d
five hundred Crowns/For a fair Turnip; Dig, Dig on, O Clowns!” We are not far
from the dark wit of the gravedigger scene from Hamlet in these opening lines
from “On Sanazar’s being honoured with six hundred Duckets by the Clarissimi of
Venice.” And as with the first volume, the wit finds its most concentrated form
in the use of an Aesopic fable: the same fable in fact, but now with mocking
attention to the hardworking, niggardly ant who refuses to give the grasshopper
any of his store.
Forbear thou great good Husband, little Ant;
A little respite from thy flood of sweat;
Thou, thine own Horse and Cart, under this Plant
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