ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang
ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang
ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang
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BEN JONSON AND THE ART OF INCLUSION<br />
Where, one may ask, does it acquire its resonances, its weight and authority<br />
of speech, its ripeness? Surely part comes from little effects, like Jonson’s<br />
judicious maneuvering with enjambment and medial pauses, his constant but<br />
varied markings that prevent couplets from jingling and draw the sense out, as<br />
in “to whom I owe/all that I am in arts.” The reach across the line ending is a<br />
crucial indicator of the vastness of his debt to Camden, a debt re-emphasized<br />
and remeasured in the echoing rumination, “all that I know,” and then refigured<br />
on a national scale, “to whom my country owes/The great renown and name<br />
wherewith she goes.” And in line with this observation, much, too, is owing to<br />
the actual placement of words, especially (as is often the case with Jonson), the<br />
last word, in this instance, “piety.” With its fine Virgilian shadings, sustained by<br />
the perfectly managed imperfect closure of half rhyme, it rescues the convoluted<br />
glibness of the preceding line (“Many of thine this better could than I”) and asks<br />
us to imagine a fully Roman backdrop to the poem, one that gathers past and<br />
present into its folds in the Aeneas-like vision of the individual sacrificing<br />
himself for his country. The act of homage is not simply between pupil and<br />
teacher; it is cast in a familiar language that belongs to each but that also asks<br />
to be seen as a common language, a language that binds Camden, poet, country,<br />
and history together.<br />
But even these qualities, though they point to it, do not quite explain (or<br />
explain away) the mastery here, for mastery is surely the ultimate effect the poem<br />
seeks to convey: the sense of Camden as the absolute authority in his field and<br />
Jonson, notwithstanding his deft touches of modesty, the comparable master,<br />
judge, and teacher in his; the one, an historian who helped to rediscover Britain<br />
for his countrymen by recovering the many place names that combine to form<br />
Britannia (1586), the other, a poet who, through the precise use of diction and<br />
syntax, “discovers” the particular features of Camden, charts his moral and<br />
intellectual geography, his “reverend head,” and articulates a new standard of<br />
praise in doing so. However flattering the portrait might be, the great illusion<br />
Jonson presents is the illusion of immediate truthfulness. Camden is not part of<br />
a Spenserian allegory; he does not belong in some remote, courtly fairy land,<br />
vaguely related to a legendary British history. Nor is he part of an elaborate<br />
Donnean panegyric. Heroic in his vocation, Camden belongs fully to the<br />
present.<br />
Names and places<br />
To be mythologized as one’s self, moreover, as an individual (as, in this case,<br />
“William Camden”) on the basis of one’s merit rather than one’s social position<br />
alone, and at a particular moment in history when, because of the<br />
unprecedented inflation of honors that began under James, having a title did not<br />
necessarily mean being worthy in any other than a financial sense; to be<br />
celebrated, furthermore, by a poet who knows all the rules of the game (how<br />
nothing is that?) and yet still comes across as both discriminating and sincere:<br />
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