ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

IRREMEDIABLY DONNE
possible within a courtly poem—a compromising situation that even a court
poet like Spenser felt 22 —but also worked to constrain the significance of the
individual lyric encounter by frequently placing it within a sequence or cycle of
other poems, one that ended either “happily” (Amoretti) or, as is more often
the case, with the poet graveled.
In Donne’s love poetry, the principal point of reference is always “I,” as in “I
can love both faire and browne,” not she is “both faire and browne.” A simple
comparison of the sonnets of Spenser and Sidney with those of Donne shows
how reluctant they were to begin a poem with an authorizing first-person
pronoun. But Donne’s “I” is also never stable (as in, again, “I can love both faire
and browne” [my italics]). Nor is the “I” part of a continuous sequence: the
“order” of the Songs and Sonnets as first published in 1633 and then rearranged
and identified as a group in 1635 is editorially determined, as is the case with
the Elegies, and nothing survives in the manuscripts to indicate a preferred
placement by Donne. And, of course, the poetic forms in the Songs and Sonnets
are extraordinarily varied, each seemingly invented for the specific experience.
Donne’s love poetry consequently asks us to imagine a fuller range of attitudes
and expressions than previous amatory verse had acknowledged. But even this
way of conceiving the poems on a behavioral spectrum seems inadequate: partly
because the pressure on the reader in moving from poem to poem is to
reconceive anew not just the “situation” but the speaker himself, or more
exactly, his and sometimes (as in “Sapho to Philaenis”) 23 her character as defined
in relation to a shifting and no longer idealized “other”; and partly because the
pressure of Donne’s dramatizing intelligence—his relentless arguing, his
penchant for graphic detail, his hyperbolic imagination—demands an altogether
more strenuous kind of involvement than is usually requested by the sonneteer.
The poet of “insistent talk” always threatens to overwhelm all but the most
entrenched reader.
This is especially true of the elegies, that genre of erotic love poetry stemming
from Tibullus, Propertius, and Ovid and misdescribed by George Puttenham, the
courtly rhetorician, in the Arte of English Poesie (1589) as “certain piteous verse”
in which lovers “sought the favor of faire Ladies, and coveted to bemone their
estates at large & the perplexities of love.” 24 Puttenham was perpetuating a
notion of the love elegy as erroneously described by Horace in the Ars Poetica
(ll. 75–8), a definition that also later failed to distinguish it adequately from the
Petrarchan poem; and the blurring continues into the early 1590s when the
elegy became a popular genre and the term first began to appear on the title
pages of amorous verse, though always in the company of the sonnet and always,
in order of appearance, subordinated to it, as is suggested by the title of Thomas
Lodge’s Phillis: Honoured with Pastorell Sonnets, Elegies, and amorous delights
(1593). 25
Donne, however, seems to have conceived of the genre as an opportunity to
drive a wedge between these two kinds of amatory experiences and their
discursive models. His elegies have nothing to do with “pastorall sonnets,” even
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