ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

BEN JONSON AND THE ART OF INCLUSION
“epigrammatic.” Less than half of Guilpen’s sixty-nine epigrams are in couplets.
Many are simply cross-rhymed stanzas. Jonson’s, on the other hand, seem fully
written, doubly set down. If in their weightiness they inevitably call to mind the
poet’s early apprenticeship as a bricklayer, they also seem designed to recollect
their formal origins as inscriptions. The meticulously observed pauses, for
instance, of his opening address to the reader, “Pray thee take care, that tak’st
my book in hand,/To read it well; that is, to understand,” 20 help to mark a close
that is absolutely essential to the measured note of moral authority that Jonson
sought to reinstill in a genre too often praised then (as well as now) with regard
to either its pointed wit only—its salt—or else thought of, as was the case with
Davies, almost exclusively in conjunction with knock-about-town trivia like
“Buckministers Almanacke.” 21
This situation differs only slightly from that in his other collections. Although
containing far fewer poems—a total of fifteen—The Forest is generically and
formally more diverse, something we might expect from a volume whose title
has been seen as consciously alluding to the sylva tradition descending from
Statius, in which different kinds of matter are deliberately crowded into a single
volume. 22 And as a feature of its variety, Jonson unveils a surprising array of
speakers and situations, modes and moods: from the epigrammatic confession of
a poet too old to love in a romantic way, to more weighty moral epistles; from
slender songs of seduction to women, to impressively severe acts of female
ventriloquism; from epode to ode to psalm. But for all its metrical and modal
variety—and few poems in English successfully employ a more sophisticated
rhyme scheme than “Drink to me only with thine eyes,” Jonson’s much
anthologized nugget extracted from Philostratus—the controlling form remains
the couplet. In all but three poems, it is the chosen rhyme scheme. Whether
appearing in the suave octosyllabics of “Come My Celia” or the more sedate
pentameters of “To Penshurst” and “To Heaven” (the two “framing” poems of
the volume), the couplet shores up The Forest, helping to differentiate its timber
from the many flowers of dainty device produced by Jonson’s “amateur”
contemporaries and pastoralizing forebears. Much the same might be said of its
cousin, The Underwood, Jonson’s largest and most generically diverse collection
of poetry, which he was apparently getting ready to publish as part of a second
folio at the time of his death in 1637. The couplet gradually exerts its pressure,
reappearing even where we might least expect it, in the great Pindaric Ode: “To
the Immortal Memory and Friendship of That Noble Pair, Sir Lucius Cary and
Sir H.Morison.”
In a sense, Jonson’s decisive preference for this form might be seen as his
version of Donne’s “masculine, persuasive force.” It was a way to give his
poetry a kind of architectural solidity without necessarily hampering the
movement of thought: a way to write works—finished products—without
denying the workings of the mind, the performative aspect of the utterance; a
way to be, in effect, both formal and familiar, a poet of the printed page and
of the parlor. To speak of the couplet in light of its potentially liberating,
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