ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

BEN JONSON AND THE ART OF INCLUSION
this is the promise so many of the poems hold out. This is especially so in The
Epigrams, that “theater” or “gallery” of nobles and knaves in which Jonson asks
us to know good by knowing evil: to reckon the true from the false, the
substantial from the airy, the established from the arrivistes, the Sir John Roes,
John Donnes, and Lucy Harringtons, from the Don Surlys, poet-apes, and Lady
Would-be’s, the Ben Jonsons from the John Weevers. Jonson’s is not, in the
poetry at least, a complicating or even a complicated moral vision, as Milton’s
is. But it is deeply held, layered by years of reading the classics in a Christian
setting, particularly the writings of the Stoic philosophers, Cicero and Seneca,
with their emphasis on cultivating the self; and as a number of critics have
recently stressed, it is fully responsive to the complex pressures of Jacobean
culture, pressures of patronage that could make a poet, dependent on those
whom he praised, even regard his muse on occasion as a mere prostitute (“To
My Muse”).
In this “theater” or “gallery”—and Jonson uses both dramatic and pictorial
metaphors to describe his book—the epigrams to fools ask that we see them as
such at the outset (and even from a distance because of the titles) and then mark
off the boundaries separating them from the living, with compass-like firmness.
Typical is the brilliant trifle, with its hobbled and disabling title, “On Something
that Walks Somewhere”:
At court I met it, in clothes brave enough
To be a courtier, and looks grave enough
To seem a statesman. As I near it came,
It made me a great face; I asked the name;
A lord, it cried, buried in flesh and blood,
And such from whom let no man hope least good,
For I will do none; and as little ill,
For I will dare none. Good lord, walk dead still.
“Walk dead still”: Jonson’s fools are all of one kind—spiritual somnambulists
buried in flesh and blood and without a personal identity. Like Lieutenant
Shift or Don Surly they move and talk as if on automatic pilot, repeating
tag ends of speech, blurting out oaths, until Jonson turns off the switch. Or
they metamorphose, like Court-Worm, but are never seen to move up the
chain of being to where they might possess an individual identity, a specific
name. When he chooses, Jonson can be crushingly off-handed, as in this
thoroughly unsentimentalized rendition of the sic vitae trope:
All men are worms: but this no man. In silk
’Twas brought to court first wrapped, and white as milk;
Where afterwards it grew a butterfly,
Which was a caterpillar. So ’twill die.
35