ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

FROM WROTH TO PHILIPS
Yet that which most my troubled sence doth move
Is to leave all, and take the thread of love.
Jonson very likely had in mind this and the following thirteen sonnets that form
“A crowne of Sonetts dedicated to Love” when he invokes the image of a crown
to begin his epigram “To Mary, Lady Wroth”:
How well, fair crown of your fair sex, might he
That but the twilight of your sprite did see,
And noted for what flesh such souls were framed,
Know you to be a Sidney, though unnamed.
And just as likely, Jonson implies, the reader years hence will know her as a
Sidney for her “crown” even if she herself remains unnamed. In the intricate
weavings of the coronal form, we trace her lineage—her uncle included one
example in The Old Arcadia—and perhaps her ambition to complete a sequence
whose complicated artistry baffled her father. (Sir Robert Sidney managed to
complete drafts of only four out of a probable thirteen poems.) 17 And in
celebrating constancy as the highest rung in the Neoplatonic ladder of love, as
happens most emphatically (and appropriately) in the crown of sonnets, Wroth
locates herself squarely within a Sidneyan tradition of the idealizing court poet,
whose skills are valued precisely because he (and now she) can feign notable
images of virtue for others to emulate. As for the idea of the labyrinth of love
quoted above, Wroth leaves her individual signature in the turns and
counterturns of phrase and argument. Hesitant and yet resolute, she is more the
Daedalian artist working out her amatory predicament than a female Theseus
relying on her wits to escape love’s clutches: a modest Britomart not too bold
and yet, notwithstanding love’s manifold trials, willing to embrace love’s
experience and “turn” it into verse.
Aemilia Lanyer, by contrast, is neither Daedalus nor Britomart. Until
recently, in fact, what fame this daughter of a Venetian-born musician and his
common-law wife possessed rested on A.L.Rowse’s questionable nomination of
her for the role of the “dark lady” in Shakespeare’s sonnets. The evidence for
the attribution is slim at best, but the association hints (darkly) at one of the
major differences between Wroth and Lanyer. Although their paths must have
crossed at court, the particular literary traditions and models open to Wroth
were less accessible, although not quite closed, to Lanyer, who could claim only
a marginal, not a lineal, connection to nobility. But claim it she did. Salve Deus
Rex Judaeorum (1611), a slender quarto of 110 pages, is Lanyer’s only publication
and a chief source of the little we know about her, but it speaks volumes about
Lanyer’s desire to use poetry to create a place for herself and for women in the
highly stratified, gender-conscious world of Jacobean society.
Here, for example, is the spacious opening stanza from the first of no less than
ten dedicatory addresses (excluding her general preface “To the Vertuous
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