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 />
He cast (of which we rather boast)<br />
The Gospels Pearl upon our Coast.<br />
And in these Rocks for us did frame<br />
A Temple, where to sound his Name.<br />
Oh let our Voice his Praise exalt,<br />
Till it arrive at Heavens Vault:<br />
Which thence (perhaps) rebounding, may<br />
Eccho beyond the Mexique Bay.<br />
Marvell speaks of “the Empire of the Ear” in “Musicks Empire.” Here in<br />
“Bermudas,” he imagines in small an empire of sound: the voice of the Puritan<br />
elect hoping their hymn of salvation and praise (the poem we have been<br />
overhearing) will spread throughout the New World. By encouraging us to<br />
view their song as an expression of their sense of election in this expanding<br />
context, Marvell also resituates the heroic internally—as Milton will later<br />
do—and perhaps, as Annabel Patterson has suggested, as part of an<br />
ideologically motivated “correction” of Edmund Waller’s sybaritic, mockheroic,<br />
royalist “Battle of the Summer Islands,” published in 1645. A carefully<br />
modulated modesty (the later parenthetical “perhaps” answering to the earlier<br />
parenthetical “boast”) and the elegant simplicity of Marvell’s octosyllabics<br />
together fine-tune our sense of the overblown in Waller’s mock-heroic poem.<br />
Marvell does so, too, while still maintaining, indeed subtly insisting on, the<br />
link between the “purity” of the lyric experience and the patriotic associations<br />
of the gospellers. In our final glimpse of them, what was earlier described as<br />
only “a small boat” is now “the English boat.” We also now understand, in one<br />
of Marvell’s richest reversals, that the purpose of their labor—their rowing—is<br />
not so much to move them with Draytonian gusto toward the New World as<br />
to “guide” them in their singing or rather their “Chime,” to use Marvell’s<br />
harmonically suggestive word. This faraway “ring” to the Puritan’s song might<br />
even have pleased Herbert, who spoke of hearing “Church-bels beyond the<br />
starres” in “Prayer [I].”<br />
In the ever-elastic physics of Marvell’s universe, sounds rebound within<br />
poems, across poems. Closer to home—to Marvell’s Hull, at least—lies “To his<br />
Coy Mistress,” the chime of the closing “sun/run” rhyme echoing in reverse the<br />
“run/sun” rhyme at the end of “On a Drop of Dew.” The difference is subtle, even<br />
precious, but the emphasis on mobility at the end of his great “carpe diem” poem<br />
suggests a wish on Marvell’s part not simply to outrun the sun as a sign of<br />
physical desire but also to outrun his many courtly contemporaries in this literary<br />
venture: to query the meaning of “seize” in “seize the day” by readmitting into<br />
the genre some of the original sexual energy from Catullus that got lost in<br />
translation. Milton, too, will later “seize” upon “seize” to describe, from Eve’s<br />
perspective, the original moment of wooing in Paradise Lost (4:488–9), and, in<br />
doing so, plant a suggestion of sexual desire that will ripple throughout the<br />
poem.<br />
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