ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

THE ONCE AND FUTURE POET
are not of the court, pastoral without being provincial, rooted in Protestant
fervor and classical mythology alike: the work of Joanni Miltoni Londinensi who
is also at home when abroad. The earliest are probably the paraphrases of the
two psalms, written around 1623, when Donne was composing several of his
hymns and Wither was publishing his translation of the psalter; the latest are
several of the “occasional” sonnets, with their Civil War settings and allusions.
At the very least, the fluid and spacious chronology makes impossible a single
capsule view of the author, as does the range of subject matter and genre. If
Spenser is an important influence in the early verse, he is hardly Milton’s sole
literary companion, a point made both with regard to individual poems selected
for inclusion and within some of the poems themselves, like those remarkable
twin surveys of (among other things) the poetic landscape placed midway
through the English verse: “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso.” As the scholarly
literature on Milton amply indicates, there is, in the early poems, a Jonsonian
Milton, especially in the finely chiseled, decorously respectful “Epitaph on the
Marchioness of Winchester,” which begins:
This rich Marble doth inter
The honor’d Wife of Winchester,
A Viscount’s daughter, an Earl’s heir
Besides what her virtues fair
Addes to her noble birth,
More than she could own from Earth.
There is a Shakespearean Milton, most evident in the sixteen-line epigram he
supplied for the Second Folio (1630), indicative already of Milton’s fascination
with the affective power of the book:
Thou in our wonder and astonishment
Hast built thyself a livelong Monument.
There is a Petrarchan Milton, capable of even writing in the original Italian:
Donna leggiadra, il cui bel nome onora
L’erbosa val di Reno, e il nobil varco
(Gentle and beautiful Lady, whose fair name
honors the verdant valley of Reno and the glorious ford).
There is a pastoralist of the English country-side in the manner of William
Browne:
Hard by, a Cottage chimney smokes,
From betwixt two aged Oaks,
Where Corydon and Thyrsis met,
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