ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

FROM WROTH TO PHILIPS
For whose society you only care:
Dain to survay her works that worthlesse seem,
To such as honnest meanings dis-esteem.
236
(ll. 1–7)
This stanza appears at the beginning of “The Discourse,” a seven-hundred line
poem that outlines, in latitudinarian fashion, the principal experiences and
truths of Protestant theology: the personal need for saving grace, the primary
place of Scripture in the life of the Godly, a belief in the Trinity as well as the
Decalogue, and so forth. Collins’s most recent editor does suggest that these
widely held “truths” also do not preclude the possibility of a more individualistic
strain of worship since the value she places on the “rectified” mind illuminated
by grace can seem, at times, barely distinguishable from the “inner light” of
Quakerism. 31
Still, in Collins the observing of a particular brand of Christianity is also less
important than possessing a “gracious disposition…delighting greatly in
sincerity.” These are, for her, the defining features of the Godly, and the defining
characteristics of her ideal reader: someone who prizes the attempt more than
the result, the message more than the medium. As Helen Wilcox has remarked,
Collins is precisely the kind of poet implicitly encouraged by Herbert in “A true
Hymne” when he speaks of God as supplying the “want” if the verse be
“somewhat scant.” 32 The “want” is never in doubt. Collins writes with undiluted
respect for her subject, at times (to shift metaphors) simply restitching lines from
Scripture to make a new quilt of verse. This is one way to describe the “homly”
poetics involved in creating a stanza of rhyme royal for each of the ten
commandments in “The Discourse” (ll. 407–77); or the decision to conclude the
whole volume by weaving anew a verse paraphrase from that most familiar of
Biblical texts, “the twelvth Chapter of Ecclesiastes,” with its almond trees, silver
cords, and golden bowl; or the desire to introduce into a subtitle the notion of
“interlacing cordiall Comforts with fatherly Chastisments” in “A Song shewing
the Mercies of God.”
In an important sense with Collins, there is nothing new under the sun,
except the opportunity to make new patterns out of familiar truths for an
audience that, she believes, seeks comfort rather than surprise. Hence, the
proliferation of stanzaic experiments that make her look but rarely sound like
either Herbert or Vaughan (at least for more than a phrase or two). The
interlacing of cordial comforts into a song showing the mercies of God, for
instance, begins in the following manner:
As in the time of Winter
The Earth doth fruitlesse and barren lie,
Till the Sun his course doth run
Through Aries, Taurus, Gemini;
Then he repayres what Cold did decay,