ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

FROM WROTH TO PHILIPS
She owned a copy of Suckling’s Fragmenta Aurea, quoted Herrick in passing, 46
and even attempted one of the earliest imitations of a Cowley “Pindaric” in “An
ode upon retirement, made upon occasion of Mr. Cowley’s on that subject.”
To describe Philips, even briefly, in light of her imitative versatility is to
notice that she is singularly adroit among seventeenth-century female poets in
assimilating—and centering herself within—those genres most prized by the
dispersed court culture of the middle years of the seventeenth century; and in
choosing to translate Corneille’s Pompey at the beginning of the Restoration, she
showed herself equally in step with the turn toward Neoclassicism under Charles
II. It is also to note, moreover, that while Philips’s emergence in print was
ultimately framed and to a great degree controlled by men (like that of most
women poets of this period), her ability to interpolate into her verse the
conventional forms of male utterance helped to assure her a degree of
acceptability within the dominant culture that no other female poet had yet
experienced. Writing to people of both sexes, she spoke, as it were, “their”
language: the established “poetic” language of the day.
But with a twist, as recent criticism has increasingly sought to underscore.
Whether Philips should be regarded as the author of “‘closet’ lesbian verse” or as
a pre-eminent example in the seventeenth century of a female poet dilating on
the traditional subject of “romantic friendship,” 47 she is a liminal figure in the
history of same-sex love and stands alone among poets in this chapter in directing
much amatory verse to specific female friends. Perhaps more than any other poetry
of the period, Philips’s reminds us that amatory and amicable are cognates, the
meaning of one experience crossing over and illuminating the other, as in the
following opening lines from “On Rosania’s Apostacy, and Lucasia’s Friendship”:
Great Soul of Friendship, whither art thou fled?
Where dost thou now chuse to repose thy head?
Is this friend to friend or lover to lover? Or take one of her most frequently
anthologized lyrics, the precisely dated “To My excellent Lucasia, on our
friendship. 17th. July 1651,” which is short enough to quote in full. The initial
choice of “live” for “love” in the first line keeps the mode of address decorous
without altogether eliminating a sense of passion between friends:
I did not live untill this time
Crown’d my felicity,
When I could say without a crime,
I am not Thine, but Thee.
This Carkasse breath’d, and walk’d, and slept,
So that the world believ’d
There was a soule the motions kept;
But they were all deceiv’d.
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