ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

IRREMEDIABLY DONNE
reluctantly acknowledged in the figure of the Blatant Beast careening among the
courteous in Book 6 of The Faerie Queene, published in 1596. And in the six
books that make up the Virgidemiarum, Hall seems even to provide a convenient
index for changing tastes. The first three books are designated, politely, as
“Tooth-lesse”; the last three are called “byting Satyres.”
But despite the bravado of the postscript, as well as the tonal shift between
the two parts and the real and constant use made of Roman models of satire,
Hall is in many ways only a transitional figure. He rejects romance as the proper
subject of poetry, but his verse is still studded with archaisms. In his own way,
his vision is nearly as nostalgic as Spenser’s: “Ye Antique Satyres, how I blesse
your daies,/That brook’d your bolder stile, their owne dispraise” (V, iii).
Although he has substituted individual satirical portraits for the legends of
British history, the legendary nonetheless continues on in the primarily
narrative, rather than dramatic, presentation of types. Hall’s is a poetry of the
heavily accented, regular, end-stopped pentameter line, a historically
fascinating though poetically uncertain blend of the medieval complaint and
the modernized urban muse. Years later, Milton was to seize on the
unacknowledged native origins of Hall’s satires when, in the charged polemical
context immediately preceding the Civil War, he unceremoniously referred the
Bishop to the earlier and better Piers Plowman. 17
With Donne, however, the newness of tart particularity is not advertised; it
is embodied. Or rather, it is advertised by being embodied, as Donne, with
characteristic diffidence over appearing in print, has left it to others to proclaim
his satires as the first “sustained ‘imitation’ of a Latin genre” in English. 18 Like
Hall, he found in the writings of Horace, Juvenal, and Persius a stylistic
alternative to the musicality of court verse; and like Hall, he seems to have
appreciated general differences among the models: Horace’s association with
urbane laughter and moderation, Juvenal’s with vituperation, and Persius’s with
moral seriousness and obscurity. 19 But in Donne, the medievalisms vanish; the
urban landscape takes over, and with it a new language emerges, perhaps
inspired by a visit to the theater but seemingly cut from the jagged edges of
reality itself:
Now leaps he upright, joggs me,’ and cryes, ‘Do’you see
Yonder well favour’d youth?’ ‘Which?’ ‘Oh, ’tis hee
That dances so divinely.’ ‘Oh,’ said I,
‘Stand still, must you dance here for company?’
Hee droopt, wee went, till one (which did excell
Th’ Indians, in drinking his Tobacco well)
Met us; they talk’d; I whisper’d, ‘Let us goe,
’T may be you smell him not, truely I doe.’
He heares not mee, but, on the other side
A many-colour’d Peacock having spide,
Leaves him and mee; I for my lost sheep stay;
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