ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

FROM WROTH TO PHILIPS
barely figure into Cavendish’s verse. Even the elegies appearing in “A Register
of Mournfull Verses” have an aura of unreality about them. We know too, for
example, that she read Donne because she quotes a line of his in “Of Light, and
Sight,” but the allusion is conspicuous for its rarity; and while readers have long
felt a link with Milton’s Poems, at least with “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso” (no
doubt because of their fanciful projections of mental states), these connections
do not so much deepen as disappear upon close inspection. In the company of
her other half, Cavendish belongs to a literary circle of two, or perhaps one, as
the poem written by her husband for the engraved frontispiece to her
Philosophical and Physical Opinions (1655) suggests.
The frontispiece portrait shows Margaret Cavendish in a private drawing
room, at a table with a pen for writing and a servant’s bell to ring, and facing
outwards, being crowned by putti carrying laurels, but also separated from the
viewer because of a sturdy railing interposed between her and us (Fig. 4). In the
manner of describing an enigma, the poem reads:
Studious She is all Alone
Most visitants, when She has none,
Her Library on which She looks
It is her Head, her Thoughts her Books.
Scorninge dead Ashes without fire
For her owne Flames doe her Inspire.
As Gallagher has remarked, the utter solitude is strikingly—and I would add
teasingly—different from traditional ways of representing female privacy and
subjectivity (p. 30); for if the poem initially presents her looking outward on to
a library which occupies the place of the viewer, the poem also quickly dissolves
this connection—this “voyage” into the world, as Hobbes might say—by turning
the library into her head, books into her thoughts. In this illusory exchange,
Cavendish is suddenly represented not as the product of her reading in the
manner, say, of Anne Clifford in the Clifford “Great Picture.” She simply sits,
hand not touching pen, staring outward, “herself being all she seeks.”
Whereas the sometimes cross-dressing Cavendish is self-consciously
inimitable (and for that reason exerted little influence on later authors),
Katherine Philips is everywhere more user-friendly and influential, replete with
her own “school” of followers, as Marilyn Williamson has noted. 44 Philips writes
comfortably within already well-established categories of seventeenth-century
verse. The familiar verse epistle is her favorite form, although she also practiced
other lyrical modes in favor around mid-century—songs, dialogues, and epitaphs,
for instance—and wrote on the high-minded subjects long considered
appropriate to poetry: love, honor, loyalty, friendship, and so forth. Almost every
one of her 130 or so poems comes bearing the tell-tale preposition “to” or “on”
(or “upon”) in the title. In pointed contrast to Cavendish, poetry that was not
about an event or addressed to someone was almost unthinkable to Philips; and
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