ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

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