ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

IRREMEDIABLY DONNE
He followes, overtakes, goes on the way,
Saying, ‘Him whom I last left, all repute
For his device, in hansoming a sute,
To judge of lace, pinke, panes, print, cut, and plight,
Of all the Court, to have the best conceit.’
(Satyre I, ll. 83–97)
This snippet of interpolated dialogue is taken from one of the more Horatian
satires in which the speaker, a naif of sorts, is accosted by a pretentious bore on
his walk through the city. (See Horace’s Satire I.9, “Ibam forte Via Sacra, sicut
meus est mos.”) Among other things, it is meant to convey the city’s seaminess:
its smells, its licentiousness, its strange sights, including the silly sartorial habits
of a stray fop. But it is also meant to convey the poet’s extraordinary agility, not
just in his momentary asides and triumphs over his boorish companion, but in
his thorough flouting of poetic convention: in the interpolated “dance” of
dialogue. Part of the challenge of this passage (and in Donne in general) is
simply keeping up with it; here the game involves seeing how many different
kinds of speech acts can be compressed into a short space. How far can poetry
go in the direction of gossipy prose before it is no longer verse? Where is the
vanishing point?
Jonson, of course, thought Donne deserved hanging for not properly counting
his accents, 20 a judgment not necessarily occasioned by the satires but certainly
appropriate to them. There is really nothing in the verse of the period to
compete either with the radically shifting point of view expressed in the quoted
passage or with the accentuation of the shifts through a relentless wrenching of
stress patterns. (The staccato of “To judge of lace, pinke, panes, print, cut, and
plight” is, metrically speaking, only slightly less daring than Milton’s more
famous “Rocks, Caves, Lakes, Fens, Bogs, Dens, and shades of death.”) But
Jonson’s wish to “hang” Donne for his metrical liberties seems appropriate in
another sense since it recognizes the potential iconoclasm in this verbal
“gesture.” Donne’s posture here as well as in the second and fourth satires is
consciously anti-courtly; and his best-known satire, the third, is at pains—and
perhaps considerable risk—to prize the mind that continually seeks after true
religion, that refuses to rest on the surface or to settle for one fashion or another,
even the fashion of scorning surfaces, and that questions the absolute authority
of kings: “men do not stand/In so’ill case here, that God hath with his hand/
Sign’d Kings blanck-charters to kill whom they hate” (III, ll. 89–91). 21 Whether
these gestures are more than gestures, that is, whether the authorizing of verse
satire in the late 1590s constitutes something more than a shift in generic
paradigms and is responsive to the larger issue of political succession, is difficult
to determine. But the fashion for verse satire, set in the more turbulent context
of the “war of the theaters,” a war that included the younger Jonson himself, was
certainly perceived by contemporary authorities as subversive. Even Hall’s
satires, toothless as they might have appeared to a zealous reformist like Milton,
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