ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

FROM WROTH TO PHILIPS
So much for the value of “sweet neglect” as articulated by Jonson in “Still to be
neat” and further refined by Herrick in “Delight in Disorder.” The spouse of one
of England’s most celebrated horsemen has decisively abandoned the court for
the country, the “sweet” for the “complete” neglect of art, the “loosely flowing”
for the “uncurb’d” and the “wild”: what she calls the pedantic in favor of the
courageous. One need only turn the page, moreover, to discover examples of the
link between female fancy and noble country courage. Cavendish offers two
poems on that most aristocratic of male topics, the hunt, but written from a
perspective that also undoes the hunt as a celebrated masculine ritual.
“The Hunting of the Hare” may well be Cavendish’s most interesting poem.
It is certainly one of her most vigorously written, with the sympathy between
the poet and “Poor Wat” reminding us that the Duchess of Newcastle was in the
vanguard of those in the seventeenth century challenging an older
anthropocentric view of nature. 42 (“The Hunting of the Stag” seems more
formulaic and, after Denham’s “Coopers Hill,” predictably allegorical.) Right
from the beginning in “The Hunting of the Hare,” Cavendish succeeds at
making us see the world from Wat’s perspective:
Betwixt two Ridges of Plowd-land, lay Wat,
Pressing his Body close to earth lay squat.
His Nose upon his two Fore-feet close lies,
Glaring obliquely with his great gray Eyes.
His Head he alwaies sets against the Wind;
If turne his Taile his Haires blow up behind:
Which he too cold will grow, but he is wise,
And keepes his Coat still downe, so warm he lies.
The portrait is quickly drawn, the bold sketching more important than the fine
detail; but a picture quickly emerges of Wat as more than a wood-cut for an
Aesopian fable (“so warm he lies”), and we begin to see the hunt from the eyes
of the hunted and our identification as part of a larger dramatic strategy to
expose the ritual of the event for what to Cavendish it is: sensational, cruel,
barbaric. After being chased for some sixty lines, Wat is caught:
For why, the Dogs so neere his Heeles did get,
That they their sharp Teeth in his Breech did set.
Then tumbling downe, did fall with weeping Eyes,
Gives up his Ghost, and thus poore Wat he dies.
Men hooping loud, such Acclamations make,
As if the Devill they did Prisoner take.
When they do but a shiftlesse creature kill;
To hunt, there needs no Valiant Souldiers skill.
But Man doth think that Exercise, and Toile,
To keep their Health, is best, which makes most spoile.
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