ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang
ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang
ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang
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THE ONCE AND FUTURE POET<br />
of sexual perversion and executed, that it is easy to forget how well Milton<br />
turned the occasion to his advantage as a virtuoso literary adventure. 24 Before<br />
tackling the project, he had been, as we have seen, a conscientious praiser of<br />
Shakespeare in his epigram appended to the Second Folio. He had also been an<br />
enthusiastic disciple of the lyrical Spenser in the Nativity Ode and an elegant<br />
heir to Jonson on several notable occasions. But in the masque, Milton puts on<br />
something like a collective mantle of early modern English poetry by writing a<br />
Shakespearean-styled drama in a favorite Jonsonian genre on that most<br />
Spenserian of topics—chastity. If there were any lingering concerns on Milton’s<br />
part over his “inward ripeness,” these anxieties are fully addressed—and<br />
exorcised—in this work.<br />
We might think of A Mask, in fact, as a place where the impending occasion<br />
itself must have served as a spur to poetic maturity, where the performed nature<br />
of the text held forth the possibility of Milton’s showing in front of others the<br />
blossoms of his “late spring.” No literary work of his, certainly none so far<br />
attempted, demanded greater sensitivity to immediate external circumstances—<br />
to the expectations of aristocratic entertainment: in this case, involving the<br />
three Egerton children, Alice (age 15) and her two younger brothers, John (age<br />
11) and Thomas (age 9); to the specifics of the Ludlow locale, with its limited<br />
staging possibilities but rich mythological and pastoral associations on the banks<br />
of the Severn River between England and Wales; and to complications inherent<br />
in collaborating harmoniously with another talented artist. Yet no work to date<br />
furnished Milton with so large and potentially varied a canvas for<br />
experimentation and expression. Song, dialogue, declamation, stichomythia,<br />
incantation: the masque is a genre in which formal variety, rather than dramatic<br />
action, is the chief means of providing pace and pleasure, and Milton’s is among<br />
the most formally resourceful of all masques, a genuine rival to Jonson’s in this<br />
regard. As the other Johnson remarked, “a work more truly poetical is rarely<br />
found.” 25 (In this respect, Carew’s elaborate Coelum Britanicum, which Milton<br />
no doubt knew since the Egerton brothers had danced in it the previous year,<br />
seems practically flat-footed by comparison.)<br />
For his audience, Milton provides not just the usual mix of narrative and<br />
lyrical modes but a wide offering of speaking parts, ranging from the octosyllabic<br />
rounds of Comus and his crew to the calculated flexibility of his principal verbal<br />
medium, blank verse—perhaps the surest of the many signs of his Shakespearean<br />
footing. (The Tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream are the plays most<br />
frequently echoed.) Except for the river goddess Sabrina, everyone, from the<br />
younger brother to the Attendant Spirit, makes use of a pentameter line that<br />
can move from the spaciously oracular, as spoken at the outset by Lawes (playing<br />
the part of the descending Attendant Spirit):<br />
Before the starry threshold of Jove’s Court<br />
My mansion is, where those immortal shapes<br />
Of bright aerial Spirits live inspher’d<br />
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