ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

FROM WROTH TO PHILIPS
Thinking that Food, and Nourishment so good,
And Appetite, that feeds on Flesh, and Blood.
And so the poem continues, coursing its way through the “sport” of hunting.
Cavendish’s are obviously not the finely wrought perceptions (and ironies) of
Marvell’s “The Nymph complaining for the death of her Faun.” The perspective
here is not psychological and allegorical but moral, uncomplicated in the
extreme, but in its expressed outrage also illustrating why Woolf might have
found “the passion of poetry” beating in Cavendish’s breast.
Still, fancy is a paradoxical figure for inspiration, as Cavendish no doubt
understood. In what could almost serve as a gloss on her verse, Cavendish’s
contemporary and acquaintance, Thomas Hobbes, remarked to Davenant that
although fancy “seemeth to fly from one Indies to the other, and from heaven to
earth, and to penetrate into the hardest matter and obscurest places, into the
future and into herself, and all this in a point of time; the voyage is not very
great, herself being all she seeks.” Almost everything but the Indies seems to find
its way into the pages of Poems and Fancies. Indeed, the 210 or so pages make
the book substantially longer than any earlier volume of poetry published by a
woman, and the cook’s tour through the natural world shows Cavendish
entering into a domain as masculine as the hunt. In this, fancy is a great enabler
of expression. The constant attention to “similizing” becomes a way for
Cavendish to find her own angle into a traditionally male subject, as Bronwen
Price has explained. 43 And it also fuels the light, playful, rustic entertainment
within that most traditional of English subjects, fairy folklore associated with the
countryside. In “The Pastime of the Queen of Fairies, when she comes upon the
Earth out of the Center,” Cavendish, in fact, can sound like Jonson or Herrick,
to say nothing about Shakespeare and Milton; but her lyrical pursuit of the
fanciful also reflects an independent, feminized, aristocratic sensibility, as the
opening lines suggest:
This lovely sweet, and beauteous Fairy Queen,
Begins to rise, when Vespers Star is seen.
For she is kin unto the god of Night,
So to Diana, and the stars so bright.
And so to all the rest in some degrees,
Yet not so neer relation as to these.
As for Apollo, she disclaims him quite,
And swears she nere will come within his light.
But the mind that ventures in many directions, touching on many topics,
refusing to be pedantic, also risks making fanciful thought its solitary subject,
whether by actively pursuing the chimeras of fairy lore or by quietly glossing over
the knotty character of personal or literary history. Books, people, events—
things that might roughen the verse, making it more a part of lived experience,
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