ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

BEN JONSON AND THE ART OF INCLUSION
rather than restricting, qualities might seem strange at first to modern readers
who look back at Jonson from a distant, post-Augustan prospect that has
come to place special value on free verse. But the desire for greater personal
expressiveness is part of the rationale underlying Jonson’s criticisms of crossrhymes
and stanzas as forcing the author’s purpose. In these distinctly
Elizabethan forms, the thought does not appear natural, plain, or downright,
especially when set against the urbane ruminations of a Horace. It does not
appear to be one’s own, in the richly complicated sense in Jonson in which
ownership and originality, possessing property, especially literary property, and
individual identity, are mutually defining activities. Taking over the couplet
was clearly one way for a poet to say “here is my place,” both within the
individual poem and in literary history. 23
We can see a number of these characteristic Jonsonian features uniting in a
fully meditated epigram like “To William Camden.” The poem appears
fourteenth in the collection, but in the mini-canon of poems written to “real”
people (as opposed to fictional types and declared non-entities like “Sir Annual
Tilter” and “Brain-Hardy”), it comes second, after the poem “To King James,”
Jonson’s other “head”:
Camden, most reverend head, to whom I owe
All that I am in arts, all that I know,
(How nothing’s that?) to whom my country owes
The great renown and name wherewith she goes;
Than thee the age sees not that thing more grave,
More high, more holy, that she more would crave.
What name, what skill, what faith hast thou in things!
What sight in searching the most antique springs!
What weight, and what authority in thy speech!
Man scarce can make that doubt, but thou canst teach.
Pardon free truth, and let thy modesty,
Which conquers all, be once overcome by thee.
Many of thine this better could than I;
But for their powers accept my piety.
The poem might be read as a discreet revision of that other kind of poem also in
fourteen lines, the sonnet. Instead of neat divisions appearing between quatrains
or between the octave and sestet, shifts usually signaling significant alterations
in thought, tone, and emotional range, the epigram progresses forward in
carefully measured increments, with the couplets firmly overriding these
traditional formal divisions. The triple symmetries of “what name,” “what sight,”
“what weight” in lines 7–9, in fact, ensure that no break or even significant
pause happens at this juncture in the poem. The act of homage simply
continues—as if Jonson were making one long bow—although the poem finally
does not feel simple.
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