ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

THE ONCE AND FUTURE POET
As for Comus, his later fictional reworkings—all variations on the double
nature of his sorcery—help to make the point that in the masque he is
more than simply a “foil” for the Lady or the Egerton family more generally.
It is more accurate, in terms of the genre, to think of Comus as the leader
of an anti-masque who will not be readily dispelled: a master of illusion,
who can be only momentarily demystified. “She fables not,” Comus’s
response to her denunciation, is but a temporary step backward for him,
almost an involuntary reaction that testifies to the power of the Lady’s
“sacred vehemence” at this particular moment. But a longer view of the
action reminds us that to resist his wiles completely, it takes a Lady of
Pauline proportions, a magical root called “Haemony,” whose precise
allegorical function has proven to be especially elusive, and a nymph drawn
from the nearby Severn to perform a purification ritual that serves to release
the Lady from the strange gummy seat to which she is stuck. It takes a
strenuous effort, in other words, and though the victory is not illusory, it is
also not absolute. Comus escapes from the immediate precincts, only, as it
were, to prepare for longer flights in the future.
* * *
But not in “Lycidas,” at least he does not appear as a single identifiable presence
or counterforce to goodness. The connections between the masque and the
pastoral elegy are of a more abstract kind. Wizardry continues but now as a
pervasive feature of reality as seen through the eyes of the mourning elegist—in
the apparent deviousness of nature and poetry for refusing to offer either help or
consolation to one of its own:
Where were ye Nymphs when the remorseless deep
Clos’d o’er the head of your lov’d Lycidas?
For neither were ye playing on the steep,
Where your old Bards, the famous Druids, lie,
Nor on the shaggy top of Mona high,
Nor yet where Deva spreads her wizard stream:
Ay me, I fondly dream!
Had ye been there—for what could that have done?
What could the Muse herself that Orpheus bore,
The Muse herself, for her enchanting son,
Whom Universal nature did lament,
When by the rout that made the hideous roar,
His gory visage down the stream was sent,
Down the swift Hebrus to the Lesbian shore?
182
(ll. 50–63)