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