ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

FROM WROTH TO PHILIPS
Drawing superfluous moistures away,
And by his luster, together with showers,
The Earth becoms fruitful & plesant with flowers
That what in winter seemed dead
There by the Sun is life discovered.
(“A Song shewing the Mercies of God to his people”)
Herbert, too, begins a poem with an unrhymed first line (“Joseph’s Coat”), and
Collins’s experimentation with line length and rhyme—internal rhyme is almost
signatorial with her—shows sophistication beyond what one meets in the
popular Sternhold and Hopkins translation of the Psalter. And thematically, the
subject of natural and spiritual regeneration lies at, or near, the center of
Vaughan’s poetry. But to note these similarities is also to notice how quickly she
veers away from either Vaughan’s radical sublimity or what Helen Vendler calls
Herbert’s “named emotionalities”: 33 grief, love, joy, and so on. As the above
stanza suggests, Collins is interested in presenting patterns of continuity, not in
expressing “private ejaculations,” to quote from the subtitle that appears on both
men’s volumes.
In making these observations, I am not suggesting that Collins be held to
a standard of verse that only Herbert can achieve, but I am suggesting that
she saw her poetry as purposefully decorative and general rather than
original and personal in spirit. Most of her images, metaphors, and themes
belong to the common stock-in-trade of religious discourse, and precisely
because of their familiarity, they serve as signs of her sincerity, including
even her sometimes awkward grappling with form. In a sense, the
experiments, noticeable as they are, remain the generic products of a poet
for whom there is no room for guile. With poems as simply titled and
constructed as “Another Song exciting to spirituall Mirth,” no one endeared
to piety is in danger of being led astray:
The Winter being over
In order comes the Spring,
Which doth green Hearbs discover
And cause the Birds to sing;
The Night also expired,
Then comes the Morning bright,
Which is so much desired
By all that love the Light;
This may learn
Them that mourn
To put their Griefe to flight.
The Spring succeedeth Winter,
And Day must follow Night.
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