ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

THE ONCE AND FUTURE POET
irregular rhymes, each driven by its own emotive logic. The “uncouth Swain”
may get formally identified at the end, but he has been with us all along.
Asymmetries, imbalances, weirdly dark ambiguities—what are we to make of
the river “Deva” being described as spreading her “wizard stream”?—sharp
disconnections (“But O the heavy change”; “Alas”), forced resumptions
(“Return Alpheus, the dread voice is past”), a radically foreclosed ending before
the poem has ended, and, of course, the many questions raised within the poem
that are never answered: all of these aspects of the poem get pushed to the limit
but only to be exhausted, not resolved. “Lycidas” is a song, a monody, without a
Sabrina. No chaste figure can be elegantly summoned to smooth over the many
rough edges in the poem or liberate the innocent. But it is not a poem without
faith and hope, although charting the passage from lament to affirmation will
probably always elude the best critical efforts because Milton represents the
process of transformation itself as something of a mystery, a matter for poetry,
not logic or rhetoric alone, to express. 36 In the great return of pastoral in the
longest section of the poem, the speaker, in effect, pours out his heart and ends
with a prayer for help, like the Lady, except in “Lycidas” prayer does not come
to “the uncouth Swain” with the first motions of a “startled” thought, or a
second or third for that matter, either in this passage or the poem at large. (He
is “uncouth,” but not unregenerate.) The passage must be quoted in full since
what is important is not just where this speaker, much chastened by the sound
of the “dread voice,” begins, but where he ends:
Return Alpheus, the dread voice is past
That shrunk thy streams; Return Sicilian Muse,
And call the Vales, and bid them hither cast
Their Bells and Flowrets of a thousand hues.
Ye valleys low where the mild whispers use
Of shades and wanton winds and gushing brooks,
On whose fresh lap the swart Star sparely looks.
Throw hither all your quaint enamell’d eyes,
That on the green turf suck the honied showers,
And purple all the ground with vernal flowers.
Bring the rathe Primrose that forsaken dies,
The tufted Crow-toe, and pale Jessamine,
The white Pink, and the Pansy freakt with jet,
The glowing Violet,
The Musk-rose, and the well-attir’d Woodbine,
With Cowslips wan that hang the pensive head,
And every flower that sad embroidery wears:
Bid Amaranthus all his beauty shed,
And Daffadillies fill their cups with tears,
To strew the Laureate Hearse where Lycid lies.
For so to interpose a little ease,
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