ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

IRREMEDIABLY DONNE
were considered sufficiently dangerous to warrant censoring in 1599. Along with
Marston’s satires, Marlowe’s Ovid, and Davies’s epigrams, the extant copies were
called in to be burnt.
Amorous Donne: the elegies and the songs and sonnets
To most modern readers, however, the “essential Donne” is not the Donne of
the satires, with their often bulky topicality and grotesque gesturing—“Thus He
with home-meats tries me; I belch, spue, spit,/Looke pale, and sickly, like a
Patient” (IV, 108–10)—but the amatory and devotional Donne: the Donne who
seemingly stemmed the Petrarchan tide in England, who re-wrote Sidney and
“got,” more often than not, the food of desire; and the Donne who anticipated
George Herbert by making religious verse not just an acceptable part of the
canon of seventeenth-century poetry but a central constituent of it. Donne the
priest and Donne the love poet: these were the initial images projected in the
respective engravings of each of the first two editions. But even so, we ought to
remember that at least one later author, Alexander Pope, thought the satires and
verse epistles to be Donne’s “best” productions, and though it is easy to account
for this preference on personal and historical grounds, it reminds us that the
satirical in Donne was not a surface interest. Not only were the five satires
apparently made ready as a kind of “book” to be passed along to that favorite
patroness of Jacobean poets, Lucy Harrington, Countess of Bedford, sometime
around 1607, with a covering poem by Jonson, but the anatomizing habits, the
demystified view of language, the authorial bravado, the keenly realized vision
of corruption, all are at the core of all of Donne’s poetry, secular and religious
alike. The satirist who dissects court and city in the 1590s anatomizes the world
in the The First and Second Anniversaries in 1611 and 1612. And in the 1620s,
he presents his body as yet another site for the scalpel, this time bearing witness
to the hand of God. There are important shifts in Donne’s poetry, shifts dictated
in part by circumstances, but Donne never departed from a language spiked with
the bits and pieces of human speech.
What Donne did for love poetry was give it a complicating significance. This
meant not simply providing a critique of Petrarchan clichés, as in “The
Canonization,” or articulating an anachronistic view of innocence (“Love’s not
so pure, and abstract, as they use/To say, which have no Mistresse but their
Muse” (“Loves Growth”)), or even boasting that “I can love both faire and
browne” (“The Indifferent”) instead of the usual “faire” or “browne.” By the early
1590s, these “anti-Petrarchan” responses were already part of the stock in trade
of English Petrarchists. It meant, rather, re-imagining for a private audience the
situation of amatory verse itself, which Donne accomplished through one simple
but comprehensive and destabilizing move: by wresting from the female the kind
of autonomy and referential control she “possessed” in the Petrarchan system (to
say nothing about her actual presence on the English throne). The real as well
as imagined hierarchy not only exercised severe limits on the kinds of address
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