ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

THE ONCE AND FUTURE POET
the Bridgewater family through the elevated figure of Sabrina herself, “Sprung
of old Anchises’ line.”
Still, the masque is more than a summary performance by a young poet. The
heart of the work belongs to the measure-for-measure combat between the
chaste Lady and the lecherous Comus: the “Tragical part,” to invoke Sir Henry
Wotton’s description of the non-lyrical material. By “Tragical,” Wotton probably
meant, more specifically, the serious matter carried by the dramatic action, all
conducted in blank verse: the attempt on the Lady’s virginity by Comus, first by
persuasion, then by force; and the related quasi-philosophical debates spoken,
at some remove, by the two brothers on the subject of chastity in its manifold—
and frequently heroic—representations, and the subsequent redirection of these
airy debates by the Attendant Spirit in the context of the immediate,
threatening situation. (By the middle of the masque, things have become dark
indeed: the formerly festive Comus and his howling crew are now characterized
by the Spirit as “Doing abhorred rites to Hecate/In their obscured haunts of
inmost bow’rs” (ll. 535–6).)
Serious as it is, the conflict between good and evil at the moral center of the
masque, of course, is not fully tragic in the sense that term will come to have
when Milton dramatizes the fall of mankind in Paradise Lost, Book 9.
(Throughout the masque, the Lady is protected by the Attendant Spirit.) But
dramatizing conflict is still a crucial portion of Milton’s “reformation” of the
genre, to borrow David Norbrook’s useful term for differentiating Milton’s use
of the form from the many masques produced at the Stuart court, whose purpose
it often was to celebrate the ease with which the forces of evil—frequently
represented as forces of social disturbance—were overcome by the mere
appearance of a ruling authority. 27 Indeed, not just conflict but escalating scales
of opposition lie at the dramatic center of Milton’s work. As Comus readily
exceeds, in scope and capacity, his English prototype and namesake in Jonson’s
Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue (1618), so the Lady is more than the usual chaste
heroine celebrated in the court masque. 28 The one is a Circean sorcerer, whose
roots go back to Homer; the other is a genuine heir to Spenser’s Britomart, for
whom the word, rather than the sword, is the strongest weapon. In the course of
the dramatic action, and in the process of Milton’s revising the masque for
publication, moreover, both roles also expand in their symbolic and political
significance. Comus is darkly sinister, a primitive enchanter, but also something
of a Caroline libertine versed in the ways of the world: hurling his “dazzling
Spells into the spongy air” (l. 154), he can change quickly into a suitor in
shepherd’s clothing. The Lady, in spite of the supreme value she places on
chastity, on her own moral rectitude, is an impassioned defender of charity
toward others: an aristocrat opposed to “lewdly-pampered Luxury,” who views
nature as a “good cateress” and thinks, indeed prays, in Lear-like fashion, for
moderation in diet as a means for “Nature’s full blessings” to be “well dispens’t/
In unsuperfluous even proportion” (ll. 772–3). And if Comus has a touch of the
recusant about him, suddenly surfacing in the Welsh woods after “Roving the
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