ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

FROM WROTH TO PHILIPS
unfolds a miniature labyrinth of love, one in which admitted subordination
(“my love-rulde eye”) still asks to be distinguished from a posture of abject
dependency. The male lover who emerges in the latter portion of the poem is
associated with sight, the (implied) female speaker with “life.” He might give
life to her love, but she gives “content,” both peace and substance, to their
love. As the sonnet subscribes to the conventions of male—female hierarchy
in some ways—he is active, she is passive—so it also characteristically invites
us to value an interiority, a content, associated with the speaker: to grant
meaning and substance, in fact, to the “voice” doing the speaking in this
particular sonnet and, by implication, in the sequence at large.
Wroth’s many sonnets invite fine-tuned readings of this sort. The sensibility
registered here is conscious of its “worth”—the pun was not lost on Wroth’s
contemporaries—and yet part of the appeal of the sonnets is their slightly less
than “finished” feel: the greater latitude they allow for the process of exploring
the inner life of passion, the quieter, though no less deeply felt, ebb and flow of
emotions rather than the triumphant sounding of a monumental love:
My hart is lost, what can I now expect,
An ev’ning faire; after a drowsie day?
(Alas) fond phant’sie this is nott the way
To cure a morning hart, or salve neglect.
Were Wroth writing verse today, one suspects she would be an aficionado of the
half or slant rhyme, a practitioner of the art of imperfect closure that allows a
little more breathing room from the heat of passion, a little more space for
individual expression. Wroth’s most memorable lines, in fact, are given to
figuring the ebb and flow of eros in a context that also reminds us (as it perhaps
reminded her contemporaries) of her Sidneyan high-mindedness as both poet
and lover:
In this strang labourinth how shall I turne?
Wayes are on all sid[e]s while the way I miss:
If to the right hand, ther, in love I burne;
Lett mee goe forward, therin danger is;
If to the left, suspition hinders bliss,
Lett mee turne back, shame cries I ought returne
Nor fainte though crosses with my fortunes kiss;
Stand still is harder, although sure to mourne;
Thus lett mee take the right, or left hand way;
Goe forward, or stand still, or back retire;
I must these doubts indure with out allay
Or help, but traveile find for my best hire;
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