ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

FROM WROTH TO PHILIPS
The worldly Bradstreet never got beyond the Fourth Monarchy.
But there is also little that is usual about this self-described female prophet,
who begins The Cry of a Stone (1654), the work from which these verses are
quoted, as follows:
I am Anna Trapnel, the daughter of William Trapnel, Shipwright, who
lived in Poplar, in Stepney Parish; my father and mother living and
dying in the profession of the Lord Jesus; my mother died nine years
ago, the last words she uttered upon her death-bed, were these to the
Lord for her daughter. Lord! Double thy spirit upon my child; These
words she uttered with much eagerness three times, and spoke no
more.
(p. 3)
Not three-times married but three-times called, Trapnel places herself within a
strong matrilinear tradition. She acknowledges receiving a mother’s blessing as
Elisha received his from Elijah in 2 Kings 9: “I pray thee, let a double portion of
thy spirit be upon me.” And the blessing she receives points to the manifestly
oral nature of her own performance: indeed, to her own prophetic authority.
Trapnel is not a women writing of divinest things, seeking, as Lanyer did, to
insert a feminist defense of Eve into the received tradition of the Fall. She is a
woman in whom Scripture speaks, “a voyce within a voyce,” as she remarks at
one point in The Cry of a Stone (p. 42), and the object of her prophetic
utterances is more sweepingly apocalyptic. Whether in prose or verse, she urges
England’s total spiritual renovation, which Fifth Monarchists believed was to
conclude with the Second Coming of Jesus and the Rule of the Saints.
To a modern reader, of course, indeed to any one who did not witness the
original twelve days during which an undernourished Trapnel uttered prayers
and songs outside of Whitehall, “speaking every day, sometimes two, three, four
and five hours together,” as reported by “the Relator,” the printed page is bound
to seem a poor substitute for the actual performance. This is especially true with
the verse, which is meant to be heard, not read, where its winnowing themes
might get replicated in the rushing sounds of speech—the prophetic winds, as it
were of God,
That shall enter in,
Into their Pallaces great,
A blustring Wind from the great God,
A whirlwind that’s compleat.
That will tear them up by the roots,
And cast them on the ground,
Where they no greeness shall have here,
No sap shall be there found.
233