ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

THE ONCE AND FUTURE POET
did not at the time anywhere exist in English, among the poems done by
competent technical poets, another poem so willful and illegal in form as this
one.” 34 Henry Lawes, playing the part of “Thyrsis,” still belongs to the decorous
world of Renaissance court pastoral, in which aristocrats dress up as shepherds.
Milton, in “Lycidas,” does not. Or, more precisely, that world gets recollected
early on in the poem—with “old Damaetas” now substituting for “Meliboeus
old”—but only to be left behind:
Together both, ere the high Lawns appear’d
Under the opening eyelids of the morn,
We drove afield, and both together heard
What time the Gray-fly winds her sultry horn,
Batt’ning our flocks with the fresh dews of night,
Oft till the Star that rose, at Ev’ning, bright
Toward Heav’n’s descent had slop’d his westering wheel.
Meanwhile the Rural ditties were not mute,
Temper’d to th’Oaten Flute;
Rough Satyrs danc’d, and Fauns with clov’n heel
From the glad sound would not be absent long,
And old Damaetas lov’d to hear our song.
(ll. 25–36)
Rhyme here signals closure of a different kind than in the “two-handed” passage
above. It signals the longing of pastoral song as the only music and ideal symbol
for the companionship between shepherds, a desire both subtly emphasized and
undone by the great refrain from Spenser’s Prothalamion that haunts this verse
paragraph (“Against the Brydale day, which is not long:/Sweete Themmes runne
softly, till I end my Song”), and by the huge misrhyme that accompanies the
sharp turn of thought when we leave this paragraph and go on to the next: “But
O the heavy change, now thou art gone.” “Gone” is a great near miss in more
than one sense. The sudden dissonance, the “heavy change,” reminds us of the
generic setting for the poem, of the larger frame around the song, of the other
“strains” that run against it: “In this Monody the Author bewails a learned
Friend, unfortunately drown’d in his Passage from Chester on the Irish Seas,
1637.” “Monody” takes us back to tragedy and the single voice of lamentation,
and the notion of “bewailing” only further emphasizes the potential for an
outpouring of grief not to be constrained by the classical ideal of strophes “being
repeated without variation.” 35 Of the eleven verse paragraphs that make up
“Lycidas,” in fact, only two are the same length (ll. 1–14, and ll. 50–63); and
the experiences presented in each, the one an invocation to the muse, the other
recounting a sense of despair over the mother muse abandoning her son,
Orpheus, are almost symmetrically opposite in meaning. Otherwise, the verse
paragraphs range from ten lines (ll. 15–24) to thirty-three (ll. 132–64), each
further distinguished from another by the odd placement of a short line and
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