ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

FROM WROTH TO PHILIPS
one of the consequences of her gender-inclusive social vision is her acceptability
by both male and female readers. In a sense, she is “incomparable” precisely
because she is comparable to what had been and was being written in the
dominant tradition. She can sound like the Donne of (among other poems) “A
Valediction, Forbidding Mourning”:
And as when one foot does stand fast,
And t’other circles seeks to cast,
The steddy part does regulate
And make the wanderer’s motion streight:
So friends are onely Two in this,
T’ reclaime each other when they misse:
For whose’re will grossely fall,
Can never be a friend at all.
(“Friendship in Emblem, or the Seale, to my dearest Lucasia”) 45
She mastered the Jonsonian couplet, both tetrameter,
Here what remaines of him does ly,
Who was the world’s epitomy,
(“Engraved on Mr. John Collyer’s Tomb stone at Beddington”)
and pentameter:
Though you (Great Sir) be Heaven’s immediate Care,
Who shew’d your Danger, and then broke the Snare;
And our first Gratitude to that be due,
Yet there is much that must be pay’d to you.
(“To my Lord Duke of Ormond, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland”)
She had songs set by Henry Lawes (“Friendship’s Mysterys” among others) and
complimented the composer in turn (“To the truly noble Mr. Henry Lawes”).
She was one of fifty-four (and the only woman) to have a commendatory poem
included in the 1651 edition of Cartwright’s Plays and Poems. She praised
Vaughan on his poems, and received two back in turn, including an elegy. She
could strike a chivalric pose, like Lovelace, in “To My Lady Elizabeth Boyle,
Singing”:
Your voice, which can in moving strains
Teach beauty to the blind,
Confines me yet in Stronger chains,
By being soft and kind.
247
(ll. 13–16)