ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

THE ONCE AND FUTURE POET
Let our frail thoughts dally with false surmise.
Ay Me! Whilst thee the shores and sounding Seas
Wash far away, where’er thy bones are hurl’d,
Whether beyond the stormy Hebrides,
Where thou perhaps under the whelming tide
Visit’st the bottom of the monstrous world;
Or whether thou to our moist vows denied,
Sleep’st by the fable of Bellerus old,
Where the great vision of the guarded Mount
Looks toward Namancos and Bayona’s hold;
Look homeward Angel now, and melt with ruth:
And, O ye Dolphins, waft the hapless youth.
Viewed in its full arc, the point of this passage does not seem to be, as Stanley
Fish suggests, that the speaker begins yet again only in order to “sing the same
old song: Ay me, alas, what am I to do? What’s the use? it’s all so unfair.” 37
Rather, it would seem to be that in spite of, or rather because of beginning again,
or perhaps for no logically causal reason, beginning again as he does, he
nonetheless ends up some place entirely new in the poem: with an invocation
or a prayer for help, not to Sabrina but to a guardian Angel all the same. The
passage challenges our understanding of just how such transformations happen,
in this case to the grieving swain, who is now represented in the process of
somehow bottoming out in his sorrows. We can stop the process at any particular
point and ask, for instance, how psychologically important is it for him finally
to confront the empty coffin for the first time in the poem? Or what is the value
won from “dally[ing] with [a] false surmise”? From strewing the “Laureate Hearse”
with all those sensuously described flowers (in a passage much revised in the
Trinity manuscript)? How much consolation should be wrung from “the great
vision of the guarded Mount,” St. Michael, the dragon-slaying Watchman of
England near Land’s End in Cornwall looking out at Spain? How much pathos
to “ruth”? How much evocative power ascribed to the amplified “whethers” and
“wheres,” the descent to the bottom of the sea and the reascent and the gradual
relinquishing of grief? How much the whole stormy scene is meant to recall the
familiar episode in St. Matthew (14:22–33), soon to be alluded to by Milton in
the vision of Jesus walking on the water, but glossed in the Genevan version as
“Peter’s Weake Faith”: “But when he saw the wind boisterous, he was afraid; and
beginning to sink, he cried, saying, Lord, save me. And immediately Jesus
stretched forth his hand, and caught him, and said unto him O thou of little
faith, wherefore didst thou doubt?” (30–1). But happen the transformation does
(as it will happen to a fallen Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost when they “repair”
to where they were judged guilty in order to begin the lengthy process of
“repairing” themselves; the puns are Milton’s and part of the deep fabric of
regeneration in that poem.) In the resurgence of patterns coinciding with the
moment of renewed energy, we are asked to witness the emergence of hope
187