ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

THE ONCE AND FUTURE POET
sagacious Wither might have admired. Milton had only to add to the headnote
to “Lycidas” the phrase, “and by occasion foretells the ruin of our Corrupted
Clergy then in their height,” to make a poem originally written and published
in 1637 seem more pointed and relevant in 1645, more uncanny and prescient,
both as a political statement and as a work of art. And even if it is difficult to
prove that Lovelace’s Grasshopper Ode forms a specific response to Milton’s
Nativity Ode by putting the pagan back into Christmas, Milton’s poem,
although written in 1629, could easily be read in 1645 as a commentary on,
almost a brief history of, the conflicts between Puritans and Laudians, conflicts
in which the episcopal clergy had been routed from their offices like the pagan
deities in Milton’s poem. By 1645, the kingly babe that Milton celebrates in the
Nativity Ode—muscular, militant, surrounded by bright-harnessed guardian
angels—would not be readily confused with the effete monarch still sitting on
the English throne but unable to do anything about the doomed fate of his
Archbishop preparing to be executed on January 8, 1645.
In the context of the rapidly unfolding events beginning in the late 1630s and
continuing through the 1640s, it is hardly surprising that Herbert should occupy
little or no place in the mind of a controversialist who spoke of himself in The
Reason of Church Government (1642) as having been “church-outed by the
Prelates.” 2 On whatever side Herbert might have eventually landed in the great
debates of the 1640s—he died six months before Laud was made Archbishop in
1633—at a superficial level, at least, The Temple had been conscripted by
Laudians in the late 1630s. Christopher Harvey’s pale but partisan “imitation,”
entitled The Synagogue: Or, The Shadow of The Temple, appeared in 1641 and was
frequently bound with Herbert’s poems in later editions. And the high-church
Crashaw was soon to publish his Steps to the Temple in 1646 (also brought out by
Moseley in conjunction with Delights of the Muses). But it is the case, too, that had
the younger Milton read Herbert even while at Cambridge—they missed
overlapping by a little more than a year—he would not have found Herbert a
congenial poetic model. Diction sometimes as spare as a stone, stanzas of dazzling
intricacy and wit, a conception of subjectivity that finds fulfillment (and
stability) only in God, and a view of worship that stresses the centrality of the
Eucharist: these are primary religious and aesthetic values for Herbert but not for
the later poet who, according to his own testimony in Poems, “at fifteen years old”
paraphrased two Psalms (114 and 136), and, in the process of paraphrasing, recast
a phrase from the authorized version like “Ye mountains that ye skipped like rams,
and ye little hills, like lambs” as “the high, huge-bellied Mountains skip like
Rams/Amongst their Ewes, the little Hills like Lambs.”
It is not simply that the youthful, adjectival excess, the verbal expansion so
characteristic of Milton’s thinking more generally, would have burst the
rhetorical seams of The Temple. Very little here would have fit into Herbert’s
decorous house: neither the superscription identifying the author’s age at the
time of composition, nor the subject of the Psalm itself celebrating Israel’s
triumphant deliverance out of Egypt (Herbert, characteristically, chose to
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