ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

FROM WROTH TO PHILIPS
Nay, should we never meet to sence,
Our soules would hold intelligence.
(“To Mrs. Mary Awbrey at parting”)
Philips was clearly not viewed by her established male contemporaries as unusual
in voicing her affections for other women, as varied as these expressions were.
(Along with celebrating the mutual pleasures of friendship, Philips also defended
her female friends from slander, mourned their passing, commemorated the
occasion of their marriages with marked ambivalence, and expressed injury when
she felt slighted.) Her royalist friend, Sir Charles Cotteral, for instance, speaks
only with praise when, in the preface to the authorized version of her Poems
(1667), he remarks that “we might well have call’d her the English Sappho, she
of all the female Poets of former Ages, being for her Verses and her Vertues both,
the most highly to be valued” (p. 23). The language of Neoplatonic love is
discreet by its nature: the pseudonyms, the assumed names of Orinda’s principal
female friends, Rosania (for Mary Aubrey) and Lucasia (for Anne Owens), allow
a space for eros to be lightly encoded and explored and yet also erased. Think
how different the poem “To my excellent Lucasia” quoted above would sound
had Philips not written the final quatrain of the poem, with its deliberate
Neoplatonizing. To conclude with “I’ve all the world in thee” would
unequivocally write the language of same-sex passion on to the female body. But,
culturally speaking, this version was not permissible in the narrow social sense,
as Fadiman suggests, and perhaps, in a broader way, was not yet even thinkable. 50
“Orinda” remains “Orinda” and not Sappho.
A full exploration of Philips’s writings helps to illuminate the dynamics of
female friendship amid the intricately constructed world of royalist politics,
especially as the Restoration evolved. 51 All early editions, for instance, begin
with the contentious poem “Upon the double murther of K.Charles, in answer
to a libellous rime made by V.P,” and then proceed with another ten poems
expressing her unswerving loyalism to the crown, the most engaged being “On
the 3d September 1651,” which addresses the royalist defeat at Worcester and,
for readers of Milton at least, draws the startling parallel between the fortunes
of the king and those of Samson. But to look deep into the Restoration is also
to begin to beg the comparison of Philips with Aphra Behn, England’s first
professional female writer, and to go beyond the boundaries of what is possible
in a single chapter. So with a glance backward to the epigraph to this chapter, I
want to conclude this survey with a less well-known poem by a female poet
whose surviving output is too small to accord her a place in most modern
discussions of women’s poetry; and yet, as with Moulsworth’s, one wishes for
more.
The poem, by the royalist Anne King, deserves attention precisely because it
is characteristic of the kind of verse written by an educated woman in the early
seventeenth century, in this case some time during the 1650s. Never intended
for publication, it is a study in female modesty, and yet it also describes, in its
250