ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

FROM WROTH TO PHILIPS
For Collins, apart from the spiritual disconsolation endured by those who have
forgotten God’s “gracious Promise” that “He doth not leave nor forsake them”
(Heb. 13:5), and for whose explicit benefit and comfort she offers her songs and
meditations, the only real danger to be confronted comes from the ungodly. In
“A Song composed in time of the Civill Warre, when the wicked did much
insult over the godly” and in its sequel, “Another Song,” the vocal distance
between Trapnel and Collins shrinks considerably, as the latter trades in her
“homely” muse for the more impassioned utterances of prophecy:
Therefore who can, and will not speak
Betimes in Truths defence,
Seeing her Foes their malice wreak,
And some with smooth pretence
And colours which although they glose
Yet being not ingraind,
In time they shall their luster lose
As cloth most foully staind.
238
(ll. 17–24)
In contrast to Trapnel, however, it is not easy to align Collins with a particular
political party in these two most political of her poems. She can sound at times
like a royalist sympathizing for those whose lands were sequestered, or at least
like an anti-Parliamentarian critical of the Oath of Allegiance; but she also
borrows freely from the apocalyptic language more readily associated with radical
Protestantism. 34 I am not sure it is possible to pin her down exactly here, in part
because we lack a precise date for these poems in a period when dates are
extremely important, but mainly because speaking in defense of Truth takes her
outside of discrete political categories into the more open arena of Biblical
prophecy. Just as Collins never defines the Godly in terms other than those who
are endeared to piety, so the “wicked” are known largely through their perverse
behavior. What remains crucial in her work, as in Milton’s, is that the elect are
“most severely try’d,” as she says at the end of “A Song composed in time of the
Civill Warre,” and, as she says in the sequel, that “from those storms hath God
preserved/A people to record his praise” (ll. 57–8). On the basis of the
information in these poems, we are free to think of these “Saints” as Puritans or
Protestants or, simply, “the Godly elect”: the “endeared” who endured.
Margaret Lucas Cavendish (1623–73) and Katharine Philips
(1632–64)
As exceptional as Trapnel and Collins were in venturing into print, scholars are
discovering that they represent only a small portion of the women who wrote
devotional verse in the seventeenth century. There is little danger, however, of