ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

FROM WROTH TO PHILIPS
As her prefatory remarks intimate, Collins composes verse in the manner of
someone coming to terms with her craft and finding pleasure in the act of
accomplishment. Her favorite stanzaic form, in fact, was rhyme royal, perhaps
because of its associations through King James with devotional poetry. But
Collins seems drawn to it also for the complicated structural and rhetorical
challenges it posed: the alternating then interlaced patterns of rhyme brought
to a conclusion, if not quite a close, with a final couplet, as in the following
example, chosen almost at random from among the 102 stanzas of rhyme royal
that make up the first two poems:
Now touching that I hasten to expresse
Concerning these, the ofspring of my mind,
Who though they here appeare in homly dresse
And as they are my works, I do not find
But ranked with others, they may go behind,
Yet for theyr matter, I suppose they bee
Not worthlesse quite, whilst they with Truth agree.
235
(ll. 78–84)
In part because Collins uses rhyme royal in two poems bearing titles more typical
of those found in prose—“The Preface” (not to be confused with her prefatory
address) and “The Discourse”—one senses here and elsewhere an “essay” being
turned or massaged into verse. We are also reminded, in her apology for the
appearance of her “ofspring” in “homly dress,” of Bradstreet and of the
comparable place the domestic holds in their conception of poetry. But the
differences are equally illuminating. Collins is everywhere more tentative about
her craft (“Now touching that,” “I do not find,” “I suppose they bee”) and
dependent upon an abstract notion of Truth as justification for deeming her
work “not worthlesse quite.” In this regard, although her verse (like this stanza)
is frequently autobiographical in orientation, her poetry is rarely personal in
Bradstreet’s sense. It is “the ofspring of my mind,” as she notes, not the “illformed
offspring of my feeble brain,” let alone the object of direct address (as in
“Thou ill-formed offspring of my feeble brain”). As the distinction between
“mind” and “brain” suggests (the one drawn from Neoplatonic lore, the other
from physical science), Collins’s poetry shows little of Bradstreet’s interest in the
graphic or the dramatic as responses to reality filtered through a strongly
gendered lens, one as aware of the body as the soul.
Collins’s ideal audience, rather, is one already conversant with the comforting
truths of Christianity:
You that indeared are to pietie
And of a gracious disposicion are,
Delighting greatly in sinceritie
As your respects to godly ones declare;