ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

CAROLINE AMUSEMENTS
And always like the Sun his Subjects saw,
Did in his Robes Imperial and gold,
The basis of the doubtful Ladder hold.
O Charls! A nobler monument then that,
Which thou thine own Executor wert at.
Obscure as they are, these lines from his second poem to Peter Lely, commenting
in part on an unidentified painting by Titian, signal a poet who could not settle
for less than a heroic view of life but who also lacked, as Phillips said, a sense of
where to go in order to sustain his “argument.”
In this regard, the closing, lengthy satire on Sanazarro looks forward, in
formalistic and generic ways, to what literary historians are accustomed to regard
as a—or the—Restoration mode of poetry. But in one important sense at least,
the poem is deeply reactionary, deeply uncertain of its direction. The solution
Lovelace imagines to what he views as the current scene of literary barbarism—
“Goths in literature/Ploughman that would Parnassus new manure”—involves
another kind of fantasized imperium: that of reconstituting a new order of the
Sons of Ben, with Lovelace’s uncle, George Sandys, and Lucius Cary among the
tribe, and Jonson at its head:
Arise thou rev’rend shade, great Johnson rise!
Break through thy marble natural disguise;
Behold a mist of Insects, whose meer Breath,
Will melt thy hallow’d leaden house of Death.
However nostalgic Herrick was for the old order, his poetry draws strength from
a knowledge of its passing: “Ah Ben!/Say how or when.” In Lovelace, the change
irrevocably determined by the fall of the axe brought gradual bewilderment.
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