ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

IRREMEDIABLY DONNE
L.H.” is a model of compression. Donne’s response, on this occasion as well as
others (see, especially, The First and Second Anniversaries, which Jonson thought
“profane and full of blasphemies”), 28 is to see how much one can say. In the space
of twenty-seven lines, he makes his flea an emblem of sexual tumescence, of the
marriage bed, of marriage itself, and of martyrdom: it is killed by the lady
between the second and third stanzas (one is tempted to say acts). And finally
(though one hesitates to say “finally”), it is an emblem of the honor that the
lady will lose in giving herself to the speaker. “The Flea” is not a model of
compression only; it is a model of expansion and compression, collapsing with a
bang of the fist and concluding where so many of the love poems conclude: with
a persuasion to love.
With a poetry of this kind of explosive wit, there is always the danger of
under- or overvaluing its effects. Some of the poems seem little more than
sophistical squibs, syntactically complicated pirouettes, that disappear from
memory once figured out. (Nothing has so worked against Donne as the modern
assumption that everything he wrote is canonical.) And the desire to outwit the
imagined females who serve as “objects” of address, to have the final, sometimes
nasty last word, as in the concluding dig at the end of “Loves Alchemie”—“Hope
not for minde in women”—shows a misogynist Donne participating fully in the
culture’s stereotypical attitudes toward women. (The best response to these
moments may be simply to admit into this “dialogue of one” a later female poet
like Edna St. Vincent Millay who, in a sonnet like “I, being born a woman,”
clearly and coolly expresses her fatigue with the whole idea of being ardently
wooed.) 29 But it is not easy to forget—and surely this is a motivating concern as
well as a professed problem for the “devout” Donne—a great number of the
lyrics, which seem to have been written with the intention of commemorating a
private moment of two-as-one by turning it into an occasion that extends into
the farthest reaches of the universe. Chatty, rustic immediacy in “The Goodmorrow,”
for instance, is made to include a vision of love that “all love of other
sights controules,” right down, one feels, to the last, splendidly measured
alexandrine in each stanza:
And now good morrow to our waking soules,
Which watch not one another out of feare;
For love, all love of other sights controules,
And makes one little roome, an every where.
Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone,
Let Maps to others, worlds on worlds have showne,
Let us possesse our world, each hath one, and is one.
13
(ll. 8–14)
In a similar vein, “The Sunne Rising” presents the lovers in bed on the morning
after, the poet wrestling with the daybreak until the moment of his heroically
generous compromise: