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 />
So the Soul, that Drop, that Ray<br />
Of the clear Fountain of Eternal Day,<br />
Could it within the humane flow’r be seen,<br />
Remembring still its former height,<br />
Shuns the sweat leaves and blossoms green;<br />
And, recollecting its own Light,<br />
Does, in its pure and circling thoughts, express<br />
The greater Heaven in an Heaven less.<br />
Whereas Vaughan writes as a disenchanted visionary of the episcopal<br />
church, hoping in the “weaker glories” of “some gilded Cloud, or flowre,” to<br />
spy “Some shadows of eternity,” Marvell invites a concentration on the tiny<br />
so intent that he takes us to the vanishing point of vision itself—“Could it<br />
within the humane flow’r be seen”—then carries us through to the other<br />
side, in which the small suddenly becomes tall, a circling thought an image<br />
of heaven itself, and then further outward, on our way toward imagining a<br />
heavenly return almost as hugely triumphant as Cromwell’s in the “Horatian<br />
Ode.” With an exit that is more like an exodus, as the allusion to the<br />
manna of Exodus 16:21 happily indicates, Marvell concludes his musings<br />
with a note of eager spiritual militancy. And with it, all the pent-up,<br />
“congeal’d” energy of the poem is exquisitely released in the penultimate<br />
line through the strong enjambment on “run” that helps further animate the<br />
emphatic “glories” of the last line:<br />
Such did the Manna’s sacred Dew destil;<br />
White, and intire, though congeal’d and chill.<br />
Congeal’d on Earth: but does, dissolving, run<br />
Into the Glories of th’ Almighty Sun.<br />
In “On a Drop of Dew,” the little globe and the global, the precious and the<br />
penultimate are yoked together in a manner that is characteristic of Marvell at<br />
his most “conceited” or emblematic; and in a way that is further characteristic<br />
of his thinking, the terms in which these different scales are expressed here have<br />
a tendency to spiral outwards and beget others: the difference between stasis and<br />
mobility, for instance, or between retreat and involvement, between selfreflection<br />
and self-immolation, between courtly and Puritan. And these<br />
differences in turn, or rather Marvell’s perspective on these differences, reappear<br />
sometimes in highly refracted form in poem after poem. As Richard Poirier has<br />
observed in another context, “a poem ‘gives you somewhere to go from,’ not<br />
something on which to repose.” 13 If size is often a matter of perspective in<br />
Marvell, breadth is a feature of the rebound.<br />
The exit which is an exodus in “On a Drop of Dew,” for instance, leads in<br />
many directions. On the farthest horizon, imaginatively and geographically, lies<br />
the beautiful gospel song of “Bermudas,” which begins in telescopic fashion:<br />
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