ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

THE ONCE AND FUTURE POET
have appeared in almost any volume of Caroline poetry—but also those
involving rigorous acts of self-examination, as the first quatrain of Sonnet 7
partially suggests:
How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth,
Stol’n on his wing my three and twentieth year!
My hasting days fly on with full career,
But my late spring no bud or blossom show’th.
Early editors of Milton’s sonnets often supplied titles that made them even more
pointedly—and poignantly—immediate than the dramatized settings sometimes
warranted. (Warton’s title for this sonnet was “On his being arrived to the age
of 23.”) 19 It is easy to understand this editorializing desire, for Milton’s sonnets
stand apart from the earlier tradition of the English sonnet through the
conspicuous presence of autobiographical detail. This is not a birthday poem, as
Warton’s title might suggest, but the reference to “my three and twentieth year”
makes “Milton” the subject of the poem in a way utterly different from how
Shakespeare or even Donne represented the personal in their sonnets. Milton
ensures a sense of belatedness made only more acute by the vagueness of the
temporal reference. Personal as it is—and “my” is the governing pronoun at the
outset—this sonnet is not a threshold poem in the manner of the Nativity Ode.
Rather, it is about what comes after, or doesn’t, even though the seasons keep
changing.
And as the second quatrain makes clear, it is about the necessary fictions
people or poets create when feeling off-track:
Perhaps my semblance might deceive the truth,
That I to manhood am arriv’d so near,
And inward ripeness doth much less appear,
That some more timely-happy spirits endu’th.
This fanciful quatrain hardly resolves the anxieties of the first. It simply offers
an explanation for why Milton has no “bud” or “blossom” to show: he doesn’t
yet look old enough for “inward ripeness” to appear in the manner of some
more “timely-happy spirits”—often glossed as referring to Spenser or Milton’s
Cambridge contemporary, Thomas Randolph. Worth glossing too is “endu’th,”
a common early form for “endowed,” with perhaps a secondary sense of being
“invested” or clothed with honor, from the Latin induere, “to put on a
garment.” The stanza says nothing about what might happen to Milton in the
future, what “honors” or “garments” he might wear, what visible signs of
recognition he might win; and in saying nothing, it leaves the problem for the
sestet, where the topic of potentiality doesn’t simply remain unresolved but is
re-presented as remaining emphatically—one wants to say definitively—
“open.”
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