ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

FROM WROTH TO PHILIPS
sufficient command of couplets, a woman of active purpose, answering to the
needs of her particular community through skills typically accorded her sex:
writing and drawing (talents Dryden would praise to the rooftops in his 1685
Pindaric ode to Anne Killegrew, “Excellent in the Two Sister-arts of Poesy and
Painting”). Here the community involved the sequestered circle associated with
Bishop King and his family during the interregnum, one that included, for a
time, John Hales, the learned churchman, diplomat, and scholar, whom
Clarendon hauntingly called “the most separated from the worlde of any man
then livinge.” 52 As recounted by Walton, Hales was to have had his picture made
but was forced to leave the exiled community before it happened, and he died
shortly thereafter. Responding to this lack, Anne King produced a drawing, an
excellent likeness according to Walton, which has not survived, and this verse
apology:
Though by a Sodaine and unfeard surprise,
thou lately taken wast from thy friends eies:
Even in that instant, when they had design’d
to keipe thee, by thy picture still in minde:
least thou like others lost in deths dark night
shouldst stealing hence vanish quite out of sight;
I did contend with greater zeale then Art,
This shadow of my phancie to impart:
which all shood pardon, when they understand
the lines were figur’d by a womans hand,
who had noe copy to be guided by
but Hales imprinted on her memory.
Thus ill cut Brasses serve uppon a grave,
Which less resemblance of the persons have. 53
As a political and cultural document, the poem records the story of Hales’s
sudden departure: what his disappearance meant to his immediate community,
with their fear that, without his picture, he would join the nameless many and
be altogether lost to “deths dark night.” It also tells a counter-story of sorts, of
the balancing act Anne King plays within her community, and within the poem.
Her own emergence as speaking subject near the middle of the poem helps to
redress the void left by Hales. “I did contend with greater zeale then Art,/This
shadow of my phancie to impart.” King is not a Herculean Milton seeking, like
Jove’s great son, to rescue the dead from the grave, but she is also not without a
“zeale” of her own. And while the appearance of her contending self is quickly
tempered by the reference to her woman’s hand, it is no small thing (although
not quite as huge a thing as it would be with Margaret Cavendish) that the
picture is a work produced from memory. For if “a dim view of women’s powers
of memory” was often the message inculcated in the official instructional
literature of the Renaissance 54 , memory in this poem is a sign of “mind”—of
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