ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

FROM WROTH TO PHILIPS
connections, and it concludes with a separately paginated sonnet sequence,
Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, Wroth’s best known group of poems that also survives
in a slightly longer and different arrangement in another manuscript.
If being a Sidney shaped Mary Wroth’s poetic identity, and if, in turn, being
seen by her contemporaries as one “in whom her Uncle’s noble Veine renewes”—
to borrow Joshua Sylvester’s phrase—helped to enhance her place at James’s
court and to sustain her in her later exile from it, her verse has notable attributes
of its own. Her sonnets are more inward and reflective than her uncle’s, less
given to dramatic and rhetorical playfulness, less consciously inventive with
respect to other sonneteers, more autumnal or nocturnal in mood. (The last
mentioned quality has received special emphasis in feminist readings of her
poetry.) 12 Wroth is an exacting prosodist, but rarely do the stress patterns
underscore the kind of extravagant emotionality so often encountered in Sidney.
Nor does she seek to overwhelm by acts of technical virtuosity that, at one level,
are meant to work their charms on the desired subject of address.
What has especially attracted readers of late, rather, is the recognition that
the sonnets give expression to the woman’s part in the Petrarchan scheme of
wooing; sometimes they are even credited with no less an accomplishment than
the invention of a female subjectivity. 13 Although Wroth’s contemporaries
seemed not to have been struck by this particular feature of her verse, Pamphilia
to Amphilanthus has the distinction of being the first sonnet sequence in English
to give voice to a woman’s predicament in what had been until then a male
literary domain:
Am I thus conquer’d? have I lost the powers
That to withstand, which joy’s to ruin mee?
Must I bee still while itt my strength devowres
And captive leads mee prisoner, bound, unfree? 14
The familiar Petrarchan quandary of feeling helpless in love reverberates, in this
instance, with an additional note of vexation and frustration, of the speaker’s
feeling doubly bound by Cupid and by convention:
Love first shall leave mens phant’sies to them free,
Desire shall quench loves flames, spring hate sweet showres,
Love shall loose all his darts, have sight, and see
His shame, and wishings hinder happy howres.
And doubly annoyed, as woman and lover, over her servility:
Why should wee nott loves purblind charmes resist?
Must wee bee servile, doing what hee list?
Noe, seeke some hoste to harbour thee: I fly
Thy babish trickes, and freedome doe profess;
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