ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

BEN JONSON AND THE ART OF INCLUSION
precedents for each in English and on the Continent, but by the time Jonson
finished writing they had become his special property although in remarkably
different ways. By contrast, his one designated attempt at writing a sonnet (to
Sidney’s niece, the poet Mary Wroth) is clearly an attempt. (I mention
“designated” because scholarly sleuthing will eventually uncover five other
sonnets in the canon.) 15 The poem is so deliberately and comically left-footed,
rhyming “poet” with “show it,” “know it,” and “owe it” for starters—Jonson used
nearly the identical scheme in the burlesque on “Sir William Burlase, The
Painter to the Poet”—that its placement next to “A Fit of Rhyme against
Rhyme” can hardly be accidental. It is, in kind, an “anti-sonnet,” 16 though the
poem manages to smooth out in the sestet in part as a graceful gesture signaling
Mary Wroth’s apparently beneficial influence: her worth. But one also suspects
that however much we might think of this poem as a partial anticipation of
Hudibras, Jonson’s own pride as a poet would never allow him to appear only in
a comical light. Even if he disliked the Procrustean constrictions imposed by the
sonnet—Drummond reported Jonson’s cursing Petrarch for “redacting verses to
sonnets, which he said were like that tyrant’s bed” 17 —he was too much the
master of forms ever to be fully its victim. Hence in the next poem we get the
formal paradox fully sounded of writing a fit of rhyme against rhyme.
Jonson’s “fits” of stanzaic complexity, though done often with virtuosic grace
in the later poetry (“My Picture Left in Scotland,” “The Hour-Glass,” “A
Celebration of Charis, Her Triumph”) when the established poet was clearly
willing to play the courtier, are exceptions that seem designed to help prove the
Jonsonian “rule” on another front: that couplets are “the bravest sort of verses,
especially when they are broken, like hexameters; and that cross-rhymes and
stanzas—because the purpose would lead [the poet] beyond eight lines to
conclude—were all forced.” Jonson was speaking here specifically about heroic
poetry in the double context of his own “intention to perfect an epic poem,
entitled Heroologia, of the worthies of his country roused by fame” 18 and of the
long-standing Renaissance controversy over the propriety of rhyme in verse that
had been recently rekindled in the dispute between the Latinizing Campion and
the patriotic Daniel. But the general point is not lost, even if both Heroologia
and Jonson’s discourse, in which he (predictably) disagreed with both Campion
and Daniel, were among the works that perished when his library burned in
1623. For the pressure of the couplet pervades his poetry from beginning to end.
“He detesteth,” reported Drummond in 1619, “all other rhymes.” 19
The Epigrams, in fact, the first collection of poetry a reader of the folio meets
(or is it confronts?), is virtually a tour de force of the form. Cut and chiseled into
a variety of lengths ranging from two to 196 lines (the majority are of a blocklike,
twelve-line length), all but nine of the 133 poems are in couplets. A look,
moreover, at one of Jonson’s contemporaries like Everard Guilpen—one could
make a similar point with Sir John Davies’s Epigrammes (1599)—will quickly
disabuse us of the belief that books of epigrams published at the turn of the
seventeenth century were necessarily concise or what we think of as
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