ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

FROM WROTH TO PHILIPS
In the transcribed text, what does capture our attention, however, is not so much
the surviving verse (powerful though it is in short blasts, it becomes quickly
repetitious) as the image of the speaker “related” to us—of the trancelike
Trapnel, especially as she shifts registers:
besides her own word, the effects of a spirit caught up in the Visions of
God, did abundantly appear in the fixedness, and immoveableness of
her speech in prayer, but more especially in her songs: notwithstanding
the distractions among the people occasioned by rude spirits, that
unawares crept in, which was observed by many who heard her, who
seemed to us to be as one whose ears and eyes were locked up, that all
was to her as a perfect silence.
(p. 14)
In the transition into print, singing is what gets lost; but the notion of speech
escalating into song still plays a crucial (and disturbing) 29 role in authorizing
Trapnel’s own wide-angled visionary critiques of Cromwellian England. For in
song the voice is at its most sharply pitched and prophetic: at its most
“enlarged,” to use the verb form of a word (“enlargement”) repeated by the
“relator,” a word that, in religious parlance, had recently acquired the meaning
of liberty as an “absence of constraint.” (According to the OED, the first such
usage occurs in 1648.)
For her repeated acts of prophesying, Trapnel was branded a slut, a Ranter,
and a vagabond—all charges she denied. On a journey to Cornwall, she also
found herself in trouble with the authorities, and her subsequent arrest, trial, and
imprisonment in Bridewell form the subject of her Report and Plea (1654), a
narrative told with a novelist’s attention to the quotidian and a martyr’s eye
toward sufferings. Nothing so dramatic or high-pitched can be found in An
Collins, whose constrained lyricism is a far cry from Trapnel’s verse in almost
every respect: conscientiously formal, doctrinally informed, indebted for
inspiration more to the psalter than to the Book of Revelation. As she lets on
in her prefatory address “To the Reader,” she discovered her voice not through
anything so emphatically charged as receiving a mother’s dying blessing. She
found it through the practice of writing poetry:
I inform you that by divine Providence, I have been restrained from
bodily employments, suting with my disposicion, which enforced me to
a retired Course of life; Wherin it pleased God to give me such
inlargednesse of mind, and activity of spirit, so that this seeming
desolate condicion, proved to me most delightfull: To be breif, I became
affected to Poetry, insomuch that I proceeded to practice the same; and
though the helps I had therein were small, yet the thing it self appeared
unto me so amiable, as that it enflamed my faculties, to put forth
themselvs, in a practise so pleasing. 30
234