ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

FROM WROTH TO PHILIPS
Another Auncient storie doth betoken
thatt seldome comes A Better; whie should I
Then putt my Widowehood in jeopardy?
The Virgins life is gold, as Clarks us tell
The Widowes silvar, I love silvar well.
232
(ll. 103–10)
Yes, a fourth knot, another husband, could spell trouble. According to the
proverb in Ecclesiastes 4:12 noted in the margin, “a threefold cord is not
quickly broken,” a saying that is further reinforced and yet also not perfectly
clinched by another proverb: that “seldom comes the better.” Seldom is not
quite never. If this were Donne writing, we would be quick to honor the
slight equivocation here and the force of the subsequent question, and
perhaps, too, the repetition of “silvar” in the final line as a sign that she is
hardly to be had for the asking, which does not quite mean that she would
refuse all offers.
An Collins’s Divine Songs and Meditacions (1653) and Anna
Trapnel’s The Cry of a Stone (1654)
Motherhood, widowhood, marriage: these “worldly” matters all but disappear or
are radically refigured in the poetry of the reclusive An Collins and the Fifth
Monarchist Anna Trapnel, two of the many women energized at mid-century by
England’s great political and religious upheavals, viewed from afar by Bradstreet
and perhaps not at all by Moulsworth. 28 Collins’s Divine Songs and Meditacions
(1653) has the distinction of being the only collection of devotional poetry
published by a woman in the early seventeenth century after the manner of Herbert.
Trapnel, by contrast, is barely a poet at all in the usual sense. Her verses are of one
kind, spiritual songs or hymns sung in emphatically simple ballad stanzas:
Oh he has said that he will reign,
Therefore Rulers shall flye,
Oh he hath said that he’l cast out
The fourth great Monarchy.
Oh he will shew unto the pure,
And such that are upright,
To manifest to these proud Walls,
That now to you are in sight.
O therefore Clergy, and you State,
Nothing at all you shall,
When that the Lord Christ he doth speak,
You utterly shall fall.