ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

IRREMEDIABLY DONNE
between, below,” we might be tempted to say.) Whatever moral or political value
we assign to the speaker (and recent critics emphasizing only the colonizing urges
of the poet usually forget that Donne’s final gesture of authority is made
“deshabille”), the poem is a triumph of licence. It is a boundary stretcher: generic,
geographical, and sexual. And in these dilations, it testifies to a powerful fantasy
of the male English Renaissance: the yearning for more that is Donne’s and his
era’s, a desire perhaps best epitomized in the poem’s concluding line: “Why than/
What need’st thou have more covering than a man,” as if man could cover
everything. When Marvell begins his great poem more than fifty years later with
the haunting line “Had we but world enough and time,” we know that the bloom
of exploration is partly off the rose. Three hundred years later, in 1955, when the
Australian poet A.D. Hope writes a poem called “The Elegy, Variations on a Theme
of the Seventeenth Century,” the suave, Augustan tone and elegiac shadows of
that poem’s post-coital, post-colonial setting place Donne’s in another era
altogether.
In important ways, the stylistic and rhetorical battles waged in the Satires
and Elegies were won in the Songs and Sonnets and in the divine poems,
particularly the hymns. That, at least, has been the judgment of most
modern readers from Eliot onwards. We do not have to accept the view that
Eliot was being only self-serving in pressing the case for Donne’s
“undissociated sensibility” to recognize that Donne’s genius was for
argument, especially arguing himself into and out of small corners and tight
places, for generating bold leaps of thought that seem only the more
spectacular because of the apparent constraints of the topic. In a broad
sense, this kind of formal athleticism is going on throughout the Songs and
Sonnets when love poetry is suddenly made to “entertain” new, often
marginalized perspectives: the poet writing from the point of view of a
sexually active woman in “Breake of Day” and “Confined Love” (women
were generally imagined as speakers of laments only), or from beyond the
grave in “The Legacie,” “The Dampe,” and “The Relique” (rather than
merely claiming to be killed by his mistress). Donne’s persona can be a
tortured Petrarchist triply vexed by his own “whining Poetry” (“The Triple
Foole”), a possibly seedy scholastic explicating the apparent difference
between men and women (“Aire and Angels”), or a Mark Antony incarnate:
“She’is all States, and all Princes, I” (“The Sunne Rising”).
But this athletic activity is also going on within the poetry. “The Flea,” placed
first in the 1635 edition, has long seemed vintage Donne because the corner out
of which he writes seems doubly barred. What does one say about a flea as a
subject for erotic poetry, first of all? And what does one say when a rage for flea
poetry in the early 1580s has already produced “a collection of over fifty poems
on fleas in French, Spanish, Italian, Latin, and Greek”? 27 Jonson, by way of
calling attention to the decorum required in writing about small things—in this
case an epitaph commemorating a girl bearing only a first name—remarked
“Wouldst thou hear what man can say/In a little”; and his poem on “Elizabeth,
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