ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang
ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang
ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang
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ANDREW MARVELL<br />
the greatest minor poet in the English language.” The phrase belongs to Hugh<br />
Kenner, although the idea can be traced back to Eliot;7 and while I think it is<br />
risky to consider Marvell in any way a minor poet, especially in a book that has<br />
already reserved that laurel for Herrick and at a moment in our own history<br />
when that claim is being turned into a self-evident virtue, I think conjoining<br />
“greatest” with “minor” is just the kind of oxymoron that Marvell would have<br />
appreciated. It points to a composite of interests, indeed, to a “perspective,” that<br />
both partially aligns him with his Cavalier contemporaries and yet profoundly<br />
differentiates him as well.<br />
In this context, Marvell might be said to have made a virtue out of necessity,<br />
made “his destiny his choice,” in a way that would have been impossible for<br />
either a Drayton or Milton, to name two other “patriotic” poets. As a great<br />
lyricist, as perhaps the quintessence of what we mean by a lyricist of the<br />
Renaissance, whose graceful conclusion he is often thought to supply, Marvell is<br />
nearly unrivaled in the respect he shows for small objects that are the frequent<br />
subject of Caroline lyric poetry. This practice, this habit of seeing, carries over<br />
especially into his pastoral poetry, in which Marvell generally eschews the more<br />
prophetic strains of Spenserian pastoral, exploited by Drayton and Milton, in<br />
favor of emphasizing the special features of lyric, often at their most emotionally<br />
wrought and intellectually complicated: the long, psychologically riven, elegiac<br />
moment of the Nymph’s complaining for the death of her faun (in the poem<br />
with that title), for instance, or the plangent reflections of “The Mower’s Song,”<br />
which begins,<br />
My Mind was once the true survey<br />
Of all these Medows fresh and gay;<br />
And in the greenness of the Grass<br />
Did see its Hopes as in a Glass:<br />
When Juliana came, and She<br />
What I do to the Grass, does to my Thoughts and Me.<br />
But even at its most concentrated and isolated, lyric does not function in<br />
Marvell as a perfectly enclosed form. “The difference in scale between Marvell<br />
and, say Herrick—good as Herrick is—” writes Barbara Everett, “might be<br />
summarized as the greater openness of a Marvell lyric. It contains more of life; of<br />
the world; of its time.” 8 The Nymph’s complaint, as many have remarked, is<br />
initiated by “wanton troopers” who seem to have wandered into her intensely<br />
private pastoral domain from a nearby battle (the usage of “trooper” first became<br />
current in the early 1640s); and though no one has been able to produce a<br />
completely satisfying, extended allegorical reading of the poem, most readers<br />
register the belief that the lyric is also—whether through allusion or echo or a<br />
combination of the two—deeply interfused with history and politics.<br />
The same may be said for the mower poems. The mowers themselves don’t<br />
generally speak more than they mean and therefore “glance” at a larger political<br />
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