ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

For as a watch by art is wound
To motion, such was mine:
But never had Orinda found
A Soule till she found thine;
FROM WROTH TO PHILIPS
Which now inspires, cures and supply’s,
And guides my darken’d brest:
For thou art all that I can prize,
My Joy, my Life, my rest.
Nor Bridegroomes nor crown’d conqu’rour’s mirth
To mine compar’d can be:
They have but pieces of this Earth,
I’ve all the world in thee.
Then let our flame still light and shine,
(And no bold feare controule)
As inocent as our design,
Immortall as our Soule.
As Elaine Hobby has remarked, “the general terms of the poem are conventional,” 48
except perhaps for the boast differentiating the speaker’s mirth from that of the
conquering bridegroom, the pleasures of personal intimacy over the usual language
of heterosexual conquest. The difference is one that frequently animates Philips’s
verse at its most original. Donne’s hyperbolic (and now famous) claim in “The
Sunne Rising” that “She is all States, and all Princes, I,/ Nothing else is” reappears,
for instance, in “Friendship’s Mysterys, to my dearest Lucasia” as
We are our selves but by rebound
And all our titles shuffled so,
Both Princes, and both subjects too.
In finding a room of her own within the Donnean discourse of male heterosexual
love, Philips has shuffled more than titles. She has turned the amatory occasion—
disassembled its oracular components, as we might say today 49 —into an exploration
of mutuality, extinguishing in the process the vertiginous Donnean rhetoric of
“I,” “thou,” and “nothing” into a single, rebounding “we,” with neither person
possessing power over the other. Alongside “The Extasie” and its “dialogue of
one” lies, as it were, another language in Philips, a dialogue between equals:
And thus we can no absence know,
Nor shall we be confin’d;
Our active soules will dayly go
To learne each other’s mind.
249