ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

IRREMEDIABLY DONNE
Thine age askes ease, and since thy duties bee
To warme the world, that’s done in warming us.
Shine here to us, and thou art every where;
This bed thy center is, these walls, thy spheare.
And in “The Anniversarie,” celebrated commitment sounds throughout, from
the resonant crescendo of:
All Kings, and all their favorites,
All glory’of honors, beauties, wits,
The Sun it selfe, which makes times, as they passe,
Is elder by a yeare, now, then it was
When thou and I first one another saw:
All other things, to their destruction draw,
Only our love hath no decay;
to the regally punctuated pledge at the end:
Let us love nobly, and live, and adde againe
Yeares and yeares unto yeares, till we attaine
To write threescore: this is the second of our raigne.
14
(ll. 1–7)
Making “one little room, an everywhere,” claiming “This bed thy center is, these
walls, thy spheare,” constantly placing love above the social hierarchy: this
august, expansive, and authoritative idiom marks the high flight of Donne’s love
poetry, a flight controlled by rigorous argument and sometimes interpreted by
biographical critics as either the cause of, or compensation for, the career
actually sacrificed by his clandestine marriage. The preferred alternative depends
on whether one wants to emphasize the romantic or conservative temper of
Donne’s mind; but given the problem of dating many of the lyrics with any
certainty, either view can become dangerously circular when pressed very hard.
It also goes without saying that the transcendental claims being made for a love
that includes sexuality provide a significant revision of the Petrarchan,
Neoplatonic tradition. Both “aubades” and “The Anniversarie” celebrate
mutuality in the present—a pervasive intertwining of “I” and “thou” into a
persuasive “us”—and consciously set that experience against “the rags of time,”
as Donne asks his audience to imagine the possibility of a momentous victory
within a moment of human love.
By the same token, parting in Donne is never simply sweet sorrow, even in
the unusually tender song “Sweetest love, I do not goe.” The four valedictions
and the magnificently dour “A Nocturnall upon S.Lucies Day” take a minor
mode within the amatory tradition—the occasion of parting—and orchestrate
it into a major strain in the Songs and Sonnets. It simply will not do, for instance,