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