ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

FROM WROTH TO PHILIPS
World,” is followed by “Of many Worlds in this World,” and then, for good
measure, “A World in an Eare-Ring” and “Severall Worlds in Severall Circles.”
And so the poems often challenge the normal order of things:
Who knowes, but Fishes which swim in the Sea,
Can give a Reason, why so Salt it be?
And how it Ebbs and Flowes, perchance they can
Give Reasons, for which never yet could Man.
242
(“Of Fishes”)
Whether comparing the head to a barrel of wine or “similizing” fancy itself to a
gnat (and thereby in manner outdoing Donne’s flea), Cavendish doesn’t flinch
from treating most any subject in couplets: Lapland witches, dialogues between
birds, the brain, the agile movement of water, a landscape, melancholy. In some
regards the less consequential the topic the better, for what is weighty might only
shackle Cavendish’s “fancy,” might rob it of its eagle-like power, its quest for an
untrammeled purity:
But at all other things let Fancy flye,
And, like a Towring Eagle, mount the Skie.
Or like the Sun swiftly the World to round,
Or like pure Gold, which in the Earth is found.
But if a drossie wit, let’t buried be,
Under the Ruines of all Memory.
Hers is rhyme with a sweep here, the conjunctions releasing or returning image
upon image in the interest of developing crucial oppositions: a “drossie wit” lies
with memory and ruin—subjects we might associate with history and elegy—
while the “Fancy” flies high, untouched, uncontaminated by the contingent, the
immediate, the actual. It is as if Descartes reappeared as a female poet and said:
“Fancying therefore I am.”
It is also only a small step in Cavendish from the gendered notion of fancy as
female to an “aristocratic” view of poetry as an expression of nobility because it
is easy and free:
Give mee the Free, and Noble Stile,
Which seems uncurb’d, though it be wild:
Though It runs wild about, It care not where;
It shews more Courage, then It doth of Feare,
Give me a Stile that Nature frames, not Art:
For Art doth seem to take the Pedants part.
And that seems Noble, which is Easie, Free,
Not to be bound with ore-nice Pedantry.
(“The Claspe”)