ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

FROM WROTH TO PHILIPS
Butt O my hurt, makes my lost hart confess
I love, and must: So farwell liberty.
But she is also unable to imagine for very long, or very emphatically, another
alternative to her circumstances. Her flight is a brief and airy trespass, her return
a muted and dutiful concession. In her desire to seek out some other “hoste,” we
are reminded of Herbert in “The Collar,” but without the anger and snap.
“Predicament,” in fact, seems to be the right word to describe the kind of
emotional and circumstantial complexity revealed in a sonnet like this, one that
perhaps helps to explain why a contemporary like Jonson might proclaim
Wroth’s artistry rather than her originality. As a number of modern readers have
suggested, the sonnets do not assert a strongly eroticized female point of view to
match or to rival the kind of rhetorical flourishings exhibited by male wooers. 15
There are no blazons, no attempts at seductive persuasion, no groveling at the
feet of the beloved in Pamphilia to Amphilanthus. As her sonnet beginning “Like
to the Indians, scorched with the Sun” suggests, Wroth’s speaker bears “the
marke of Cupids might”—the stigmata of eros—inwardly, “in hart as they in
skin” bear the mark of Phoebus’s light. And as these sonnets further illustrate,
Wroth’s poems frequently reaffirm the value of constancy: from a pledge of
ceaseless “offrings to love while I Live,” to the plain-speaking resolve of “I love,
and must.”
Indeed, more often than not we are struck by the frequent removal, not the
reversal, of the usually explicit gender markings in this genre, as Wroth makes
Pamphilia’s own subjectivity, not Amphilanthus, the object of her focus, her
pursuit. Pamphilia can flee—into the self (how is my situation comparable to
that of a dark-skinned Indian whose part I once played in Jonson’s 1606 Mosque
of Blackness?); or into darkness, in the poem beginning:
Truly poore Night thou wellcome art to mee
I love thee better in this sad attire
Then that which raiseth some mens phant’sies higher
Like painted outsid[e]s which foule inward bee.
She regards herself not as a galley charged with forgetfulness but as
a ship, on Goodwines cast by wind,
The more she strives, more deepe in sand is prest
Till she bee lost; so am I, in this kind
Sunk, and devour’d, and swallow’d by unrest.
But what she never does is pursue Amphilanthus: the Duchess of Malfi she is
not. One might say, as Jonson implies, that courtly decorum, especially of a high
Sidneyan order, does not permit Wroth to be the aggressor, a Daphne chasing
Apollo; that image might too readily become material for male erotic fantasy, as
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