ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

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