ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang
ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang
ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang
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FROM WROTH TO PHILIPS<br />
Thinking that Food, and Nourishment so good,<br />
And Appetite, that feeds on Flesh, and Blood.<br />
And so the poem continues, coursing its way through the “sport” of hunting.<br />
Cavendish’s are obviously not the finely wrought perceptions (and ironies) of<br />
Marvell’s “The Nymph complaining for the death of her Faun.” The perspective<br />
here is not psychological and allegorical but moral, uncomplicated in the<br />
extreme, but in its expressed outrage also illustrating why Woolf might have<br />
found “the passion of poetry” beating in Cavendish’s breast.<br />
Still, fancy is a paradoxical figure for inspiration, as Cavendish no doubt<br />
understood. In what could almost serve as a gloss on her verse, Cavendish’s<br />
contemporary and acquaintance, Thomas Hobbes, remarked to Davenant that<br />
although fancy “seemeth to fly from one Indies to the other, and from heaven to<br />
earth, and to penetrate into the hardest matter and obscurest places, into the<br />
future and into herself, and all this in a point of time; the voyage is not very<br />
great, herself being all she seeks.” Almost everything but the Indies seems to find<br />
its way into the pages of Poems and Fancies. Indeed, the 210 or so pages make<br />
the book substantially longer than any earlier volume of poetry published by a<br />
woman, and the cook’s tour through the natural world shows Cavendish<br />
entering into a domain as masculine as the hunt. In this, fancy is a great enabler<br />
of expression. The constant attention to “similizing” becomes a way for<br />
Cavendish to find her own angle into a traditionally male subject, as Bronwen<br />
Price has explained. 43 And it also fuels the light, playful, rustic entertainment<br />
within that most traditional of English subjects, fairy folklore associated with the<br />
countryside. In “The Pastime of the Queen of Fairies, when she comes upon the<br />
Earth out of the Center,” Cavendish, in fact, can sound like Jonson or Herrick,<br />
to say nothing about Shakespeare and Milton; but her lyrical pursuit of the<br />
fanciful also reflects an independent, feminized, aristocratic sensibility, as the<br />
opening lines suggest:<br />
This lovely sweet, and beauteous Fairy Queen,<br />
Begins to rise, when Vespers Star is seen.<br />
For she is kin unto the god of Night,<br />
So to Diana, and the stars so bright.<br />
And so to all the rest in some degrees,<br />
Yet not so neer relation as to these.<br />
As for Apollo, she disclaims him quite,<br />
And swears she nere will come within his light.<br />
But the mind that ventures in many directions, touching on many topics,<br />
refusing to be pedantic, also risks making fanciful thought its solitary subject,<br />
whether by actively pursuing the chimeras of fairy lore or by quietly glossing over<br />
the knotty character of personal or literary history. Books, people, events—<br />
things that might roughen the verse, making it more a part of lived experience,<br />
244