ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang
ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang
ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang
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FROM WROTH TO PHILIPS<br />
Yet that which most my troubled sence doth move<br />
Is to leave all, and take the thread of love.<br />
Jonson very likely had in mind this and the following thirteen sonnets that form<br />
“A crowne of Sonetts dedicated to Love” when he invokes the image of a crown<br />
to begin his epigram “To Mary, Lady Wroth”:<br />
How well, fair crown of your fair sex, might he<br />
That but the twilight of your sprite did see,<br />
And noted for what flesh such souls were framed,<br />
Know you to be a Sidney, though unnamed.<br />
And just as likely, Jonson implies, the reader years hence will know her as a<br />
Sidney for her “crown” even if she herself remains unnamed. In the intricate<br />
weavings of the coronal form, we trace her lineage—her uncle included one<br />
example in The Old Arcadia—and perhaps her ambition to complete a sequence<br />
whose complicated artistry baffled her father. (Sir Robert Sidney managed to<br />
complete drafts of only four out of a probable thirteen poems.) 17 And in<br />
celebrating constancy as the highest rung in the Neoplatonic ladder of love, as<br />
happens most emphatically (and appropriately) in the crown of sonnets, Wroth<br />
locates herself squarely within a Sidneyan tradition of the idealizing court poet,<br />
whose skills are valued precisely because he (and now she) can feign notable<br />
images of virtue for others to emulate. As for the idea of the labyrinth of love<br />
quoted above, Wroth leaves her individual signature in the turns and<br />
counterturns of phrase and argument. Hesitant and yet resolute, she is more the<br />
Daedalian artist working out her amatory predicament than a female Theseus<br />
relying on her wits to escape love’s clutches: a modest Britomart not too bold<br />
and yet, notwithstanding love’s manifold trials, willing to embrace love’s<br />
experience and “turn” it into verse.<br />
Aemilia Lanyer, by contrast, is neither Daedalus nor Britomart. Until<br />
recently, in fact, what fame this daughter of a Venetian-born musician and his<br />
common-law wife possessed rested on A.L.Rowse’s questionable nomination of<br />
her for the role of the “dark lady” in Shakespeare’s sonnets. The evidence for<br />
the attribution is slim at best, but the association hints (darkly) at one of the<br />
major differences between Wroth and Lanyer. Although their paths must have<br />
crossed at court, the particular literary traditions and models open to Wroth<br />
were less accessible, although not quite closed, to Lanyer, who could claim only<br />
a marginal, not a lineal, connection to nobility. But claim it she did. Salve Deus<br />
Rex Judaeorum (1611), a slender quarto of 110 pages, is Lanyer’s only publication<br />
and a chief source of the little we know about her, but it speaks volumes about<br />
Lanyer’s desire to use poetry to create a place for herself and for women in the<br />
highly stratified, gender-conscious world of Jacobean society.<br />
Here, for example, is the spacious opening stanza from the first of no less than<br />
ten dedicatory addresses (excluding her general preface “To the Vertuous<br />
219