ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

CAROLINE AMUSEMENTS
Thy spacious tent, fan thy prodigious heat;
Down with thy double load of that one grain;
It is a Granarie for all thy Train.
The whittling away of the hyperbolic in the first line strikes me as Lovelace at
his near best in this volume; he performs as a kind of grim reaper whose
prodigious humor stands in evident contrast to the ant’s parsimonious behavior.
And the taunting continues, as Lovelace develops a brief but pointed anti-
Puritan fable centering on the demise of festivity during the Interregnum, a
common royalist complaint during the period, and replete with darker
apocalyptic ironies involving the fate of hoarders:
Look up then miserable Ant, and spie
Thy fatal foes, for breaking of her Law,
Hov’ring above thee, Madam, Margaret Pie,
And her fierce Servant, Meagre, Sir John Daw:
Thy Self and Storehouse now they do store up,
And thy whole Harvest too within their Crop.
But the poem also indicates some of the larger problems Lovelace faced in this
second volume, and they involve issues of audience. In “The Ant,” as with the
other insect poems in the second volume, there is, in contrast to the
Grasshopper Ode, no other community, no “genuine summer,” no fellowship
imagined by the poet, no sense really of a sustaining social order behind or
beyond the poem—a point brought home on a larger scale in the belabored
celebration of the marriage of Charles Cotton to Isabella Hutchinson (“The
Triumphs of Philamore and Amoret”). With some poets of the period—and for
different reasons both Milton and Vaughan come to mind—the experience of
solitude was highly productive, an occasion for recasting the authorial self into
an altogether different mode: the blind bard of Paradise Lost or the Job-like
Singer of divine hymns in Silex Scintillans. But in the case of later Lovelace, it is
impossible, I think, not to feel that the experience of displacement was only
partially productive. It brought a new emphasis to his poetry, not a new
determination of the poet’s responsibilities, and the darker emphases only
inscribe more deeply Lovelace’s sense of isolation and his longing for a new
Imperium:
Where then when all the world pays its respect,
Lies our transalpine barbarous Neglect?
When the chast hands of pow’rful Titian,
Had drawn the Scourges of our God and Man,
And now the top of th’ Altar did ascend,
To crown the heav’nly piece with a bright end;
Whilst he who to seven Languages gave Law,
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