ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

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