ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

Whilst from off the waters fleet
Thus I set my printless feet
O’er the Cowslip’s Velvet head,
That bends not as I tread;
Gentle swain at thy request
I am here.
THE ONCE AND FUTURE POET
179
(ll. 890–901)
Part of Milton’s artistry in the masque is to connect these brief arias to larger
thematic concerns articulated elsewhere in the drama. The Lady’s song, for
instance, while admitting her vulnerability at one level—the Attendant Spirit
will refer later to her as “O poor hapless Nightingale” (l. 566)—affirms her
strength at another. As a Reformation heroine in the process of emerging before
our eyes—“Some Virgin sure,” to borrow Comus’s phrase for her in a way he
doesn’t altogether intend—her song is a demonstration of her “new enliv’n’d
spirits” (l. 228), a way to signal the sureness of her faith in her own key. Indeed,
even Comus, like Satan standing “stupidly good” in front of a beautiful and
innocent Eve (Paradise Lost 9:465), is momentarily moved by the higher strain
he hears, although his use of the equivocal “ravishment” in the compliment
indicates, too, the downward descent of his own thoughts and actions:
Can any mortal mixture of Earth’s mold
Breathe such Divine enchanting ravishment?
Sure something holy lodges in that breast.
(ll. 244–6)
As for Sabrina’s song, it stands as climactic proof that a power greater than
Comus can be unlocked “if she be right invok’t in warbled Song.” For all its
pastoral decoration, the simple conclusion, “Gentle swain at thy request/I am
here,” reverberates widely at this moment in the masque, and also in Milton; for
not only does her answering song point to a more decorous—and harmonious—
way of defeating the enchanter than the brothers could accomplish with their
old-style heroics even with the help of a magical root, the so-called but much
disputed “Haemony.” It also validates the carefully orchestrated Spenserian
moment that precedes Sabrina’s appearance. The Attendant Spirit knows of the
“gentle nymph” because of lore he learned from “Meliboeus old,”—“The soothest
Shepherd that e’er pip’t on plains” (ll. 822–3)—usually taken as a reference to
Spenser. Through Milton and the collaboration with Lawes, through, in other
words, a fusion of verse and voice, the Bridgewater court is a place where
Spenserian pastoral romance comes alive, where it can continue into the
present. As Angus Fletcher has argued, echoing is a richly complicated device
in the masque. 26 It is a way of conferring continuity at both the syntactic and
symbolic level; and here, in the context of the Welsh setting, it helps form a
link with a poetic past every bit as noble as the one Milton is constructing for