ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

FROM WROTH TO PHILIPS
happens near the end of Carew’s “A Rapture.” Nor does Wroth regard her
circumstances in any sustained sense as typically or representatively female. In
her frequently anthologized sonnet, “When every one to pleasing pastime hies,”
it is the aristocratic activity at a country estate, not her sex, that provides the
standards for establishing an even more aristocratic conception of the “self,” as
the first quatrain makes clear:
When every one to pleasing pastime hies
Some hunt, some hauke, some play, while some delight
In sweet discourse, and musique showes joys might
Yet I my thoughts doe farr above thes prise.
Wroth’s is, in short, an art of the finely “spun” sentiment—to borrow a
resonantly gendered image for writing verse from Urania 16 —that often comes
trailing clouds of Sidneyan glory:
You blessed starrs which doe heavns glory show,
And att your brightnes makes our eyes admire
Yett envy nott though I on earth beelow
Injoy a sight which moves in mee more fire;
I doe confess such beauty breeds desire,
You shine, and cleerest light on us beestow,
Yett doth a sight on earth more warmth inspire
Into my loving soule, his grace to knowe;
Cleere, bright, and shining as you are, is this
Light of my joye, fixt stedfast nor will move
His light from mee, nor I chang from his love,
But still increase as th’eith [the height] of all my bliss.
His sight gives lyfe unto my love-rulde eyes
My love content because in his, love lies.
The difference between the first and second quatrains is one of degree not
kind, a shift in emphasis that allows for both a greater clarification and an
intensification of the effects of eros: “I doe confess such beauty breeds desire,”
says the star-gazing speaker, putting on her Astrophelian hat. And yet it is
important to note that however warm the heart has become and whatever
erotic intimations are ignited by her “confession,” the emerging distinction
between celestial beauty and earthly passion does not mean, for Wroth, that
the body will become the book. In the concluding sestet, Wroth swerves away
from this Donnean possibility in favor of defining a more delicate
interweaving between the lovers that underscores a dynamic mutuality based
on constancy. As happens elsewhere in the sonnet sequence, the couplet
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