ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

IRREMEDIABLY DONNE
inaugurate the newer fashions of verse that were emerging in the mid-1590s and
were associated especially with urban reality: satire, epigram, elegy, and the verse
epistle. It is surely right to put Donne in the company of the new breed of
authors that chose to “discover” these demonstrably Roman genres, authors like
Thomas Lodge, John Marston, Joseph Hall, John Davies, and Ben Jonson. But
with the exception of Jonson, it was only Donne who was able to redetermine
the expansive energies of his predecessors into a radically different idiom.
Donne established in England the “lyric of insistent talk,” 14 and he did so on
something approaching a grand scale. Although there had been earlier
examples of courtly poetry moving in the direction of speech, most notably in
the “manly” lyrics of Sir Thomas Wyatt, who had also experimented with
Horatian satire, no poet had so charged verse with the searching, colloquial
immediacy that Donne brought to all his poetry, whether it was the early satires
and elegies, the Anniversaries, the more private love poetry of the Songs and
Sonnets, the still more private devotional poems, the verse epistles, or the
divine hymns. The claim, “I sing not, Siren-like, to tempt; for I/Am harsh” 15
becomes, in Donne, the standard by which he insists that we judge the poetic.
The registers of speech, not song, are what the poet puts in motion with his
opening utterances: “Sir; though (I thanke God for it) I do hate/Perfectly all
this towne,” “I wonder by my troth, what thou and I/Did, till we lov’d?” Or,
“Marke but this flea, and mark in this,/How little that which thou deny’st me
is.” Or, “Stand still, and I will read to thee/A Lecture, Love, in loves
philosophy.” And again, and perhaps most famously: “For Godsake hold your
tongue, and let me love.”
How deeply Donne’s imagination was affected by the quotidian in all its
mutability, how deeply he pursued the prosaic in verse can be partially glimpsed
by reading any one of his satires, generally thought to be among his earliest
poems, against those of another late Elizabethan, Joseph Hall. Hall was born
within two years of Donne, in 1574. Like Donne, though more quickly, he was
to find preferment in the church, eventually succeeding in his unusually full life
to the bishoprics of Exeter and then Norwich, before being sequestered by the
Puritans in the Civil War. Much earlier, though, he had presented himself to
the public as the “first English Satirist” with the publication of Virgidemiarum
(A Harvest of Rods) in 1598. Hall was attempting to capitalize on the new
fashion for strong lines, and in A Post-script to the Reader he defended his bristly
project: “It is not for every one to rellish a true and naturall Satyre, being of it
selfe besides the native and in-bred bitternes and tartnes of particulers, both hard
of conceipt, and harsh of stile, and therefore cannot but be unpleasing both to
the unskilfull, and over Musicall eare, the one being affected with onely a
shallow and easie matter, the other with a smoth and currant disposition.” 16
Toughness of thought and feigned irascibility, “hard of conceipt [idea], and harsh
of stile”: this was the new image of a generation of malcontents who seemed to
follow the disgruntled Jaques out of the Elizabethan forest to challenge its
woodnotes wild, its pastoralizing, courtly forms: a cultural shift that Spenser, too,
5