ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

THE ONCE AND FUTURE POET
There is more wizardry in the delphic responses, almost amounting to a
conspiracy of silence, that the poet meets when interrogating the dark forces
surrounding King’s death:
He ask’d the Waves, and ask’d the Felon winds,
What hard mishap hath doom’d this gentle swain?
And question’d every gust of rugged wings
That blows from off each beaked Promontory.
They knew not of his story.
183
(ll. 91–5)
And there is more wizardry still in the “dread voice” of St. Peter denouncing,
through the arresting figure of the “Blind mouths,” the false preachers who
continue to “creep and intrude and climb in the fold” (l. 115), while heaven
does nothing to protect the good minister or feed the “hungry sheep”:
Blind mouths! that scarce themselves know how to hold
A Sheep-hook, or have learn’d aught else the least
That to the faithful Herdman’s art belongs!
What recks it them? What need they? They are sped;
And when they list, their lean and flashy songs
Grate on their scrannel Pipes of wretched straw.
(ll. 119–24)
And as “Lycidas” involves a greater reckoning of the “Tragical” in the
inexplicable death of Edward King, so it produces a countervailing stress on the
poet not to get lost in the night and on the medium of irregularly rhymed blank
verse to explore and to exorcise the demons of doubt. “A thousand fantasies/
Begin to throng into my memory/Of calling shapes and beck’ning shadows dire,”
remarks the Lady in A Mask (ll. 205–7). These fantasies are quickly quieted in
the name of “pure-ey’d Faith,” “white-handed Hope,” and the “unblemish’t form
of Chastity,” even if Comus continues to roam the woods. But in “Lycidas,”
chastity as a governing psychological condition, as an “unblemish’t form” and
unifying frame of reference, is already lost at the outset—a violation of
innocence sounded in the violence of a poet’s initial, and initiating, metaphors
for writing:
Yet once more, O ye Laurels, and once more
Ye Myrtles brown, with Ivy never sere,
I come to pluck your Berries harsh and crude,
And with forc’d fingers rude,
Shatter your leaves before the mellowing year.