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