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 />
page out of the male practice of writing patronage verse as a way of climbing<br />
the social ladder at court, and there is an element of ludic ingenuity in making<br />
this material go as far as it can. But Salve Deus is not A Tale of a Tub or Coriat’s<br />
Crudities. In keeping with the decorum of her main subject, Lanyer treats her<br />
commendatory material seriously, even reverently, inviting each of her potential<br />
patronesses to become a participant in a communal “feast” by sharing<br />
imaginatively in the Sacrifice, and insisting, all the while, on the special<br />
symmetry between the subject at the center—Jesus—and the female subjects on<br />
the margins, the women in the Bible and their latter-day reflections in Jacobean<br />
England. For however noble the latter are—and Lanyer thinks of her poetry as a<br />
“mirror” in which the inward, not the outward, beauty of each woman is on<br />
display—the women are also revealed as sharing a common bond not just in<br />
Jesus but also in Eve: the gender-specific sign of their subordinate place in the<br />
patriarchal world of Jacobean society.<br />
Along with praise, in short, goes complaint—with a capital C (as in Daniel’s<br />
Complaint of Rosamond). These two sides of an already antiquated “mirror”<br />
tradition were more associated, appropriately, with poetry written under the<br />
female Elizabeth (whose passing is nostalgically recalled at the outset of the<br />
Passion sequence) than with verse written under James. And if one side allows a<br />
class-conscious Lanyer to magnify her individual subjects in a way that respects<br />
social and class difference, that respects rank, in other words, as a valued<br />
category within English society, the other encourages a gender-conscious Lanyer<br />
to shrink the space that separates her from her patroness by emphasizing the<br />
common ground between them. Whatever their social and economic differences,<br />
they are fellow laborers in an essentially male vineyard. As Lanyer’s remarks to<br />
Queene Anne suggest in a stanza that also alludes to “Faire Eves Apologie,” these<br />
potentially conflicting demands can produce a text as complicated as Wroth’s<br />
but for different reasons:<br />
Behold, great Queene, Faire Eves Apologie,<br />
Which I have writ in honour of your sexe,<br />
And do referre unto your Majestie,<br />
To judge if it agree not with the Text:<br />
And if it doe, why are poore Women blam’d,<br />
Or by more faultie Men so much defam’d?<br />
A respect for rank and propriety requires that Lanyer observe an (unnatural)<br />
distinction in the pronouns in the second line. To have said “our sexe” rather<br />
than “your sexe,” in the context of honoring the queen, would have seemed<br />
too familiar; it would have risked undermining the very structure supporting<br />
the queen’s authority upon which Lanyer depends for her own authority. And<br />
yet, as Lanyer goes on to suggest, if in exercising her Minerva-like role as<br />
judge, the queen agrees with Lanyer’s interpretation of “the Text,” she would<br />
then validate not just the truth of the author’s “complaint” but the unspoken<br />
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