ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

ANDREW MARVELL
literary genres: epigram, of course, but now with a thematic focus on “size” that
connects poet and patron and speaks to Fairfax’s architectural, moral, and
political circumstances:
Humility alone designs
Those short but admirable Lines,
By which, ungirt and unconstrain’d,
Things greater are in less contain’d.
One meets as well epic-romance of a wry quixotic kind, now in the general
service of the Protestant reformation (stanzas 12–35); a courtly masque (stanzas
66–8); panegryic (stanzas 83–91); Horatian retreat with a serio-comic religious
note enabled in part by a familiarity with the Polish Jesuit Casimir Sarbiewski
(stanzas 71–5); even perhaps a little touch of night music from Milton’s “Il
Penseroso” (stanzas 65–6): “The Nightingale does here make choice/To sing the
Tryals of her Voice…But I have for my Musick found/A Sadder, yet more
pleasing Sound.”
Whatever their precise literary origins, moreover, these different forms are
also seen as perfectly congruent with one another (making “a light Mosaick”) and
happily naturalized; as much an expression of a patriotic conscience as the fabric
of the house itself as described in the poem’s opening couplet: “Within this sober
Frame expect/Work of no Forrain Architect.” In another way, too, we might
regard these literary topoi as grounded in English soil and a further compliment
to Fairfax even if he has disappointed his country. Many of the key texts
associated with these different genres were housed on the estate itself, in the
library at Bolton Percy, or the parish church of Nun Appleton, as Hilton Kelliher
has shown. 31 And, of course, near the exact center of the poem is the evocation
of a poet patriotic to the core:
Oh Thou, that dear and happy Isle
The Garden of the World ere while,
Thou Paradise of four Seas,
Which Heaven planted us to please,
But, to exclude the World, did guard
With watry if not flaming Sword;
What luckless Apple did we tast,
To make us Mortal, and The[e] Wast.
Unhappy! shall we never more
That sweet Militia restore,
When Gardens only had their Towrs,
And all the Garrisons were Flowrs,
When Roses only Arms might bear,
And Men did rosie Garlands wear?
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