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 />
That Jonson should choose to write this poem seems, in retrospect, almost<br />
inevitable. He had already explored the subject of hospitality on a more limited<br />
scale in “Inviting a Friend to Supper”—if indeed it predates “To Penshurst”; and<br />
as someone who provided entertainments for the wealthy, he was familiar with<br />
country estates, their symbolic value as expressions of power and munificence as<br />
well as their practical workings, the general system of economy that put food<br />
onto the table and into the mouths of host and guest alike, although sometimes<br />
in different amounts and servings. 25 That Jonson should choose to celebrate the<br />
Sidney household seems also right. England’s first defender of poetry and<br />
Neoclassicism, the courtier, soldier, scholar, and his descendants were still very<br />
much in the public eye in the first decade of the seventeenth century, especially<br />
among those concerned with literary traditions and dependent upon patronage<br />
for support, a category that obviously included Jonson. With its twin dedications<br />
to Sidney’s nephew, William Herbert (Catiline and The Epigrams), and niece,<br />
Mary Wroth (The Alchemist), the folio announces up front, in fact, what the<br />
poems in The Forest and most elaborately “To Penshurst” reveal in more detail<br />
in private: how deeply ensconced their author was in the Sidney household. And<br />
yet for all its apparent predictability (and our sense of inevitability is perhaps<br />
only increased if we recall that Jonson’s father reportedly lost “all his estate<br />
under Queen Mary”), “To Penshurst” was also, if not the first, certainly the most<br />
influential country house poem in English and much imitated thereafter. 26<br />
So familiar has the poem become to readers of English verse that it is also easy<br />
to forget that the poem represents a novel solution to a specifically English—<br />
indeed Jacobean—literary problem with powerful social implications. “To<br />
Penshurst” extends the patronage poem beyond the narrow boundaries of the<br />
epigram; and it does so, moreover, without simply returning to the Spenserian<br />
formula of writing an extended allegory, an “endlesse worke” of “mirrors more<br />
than one” set in a distant landscape that ultimately celebrated the queen on the<br />
throne. For his solution, Jonson went his usual route: to the past. Three epigrams<br />
by Martial help to create the substructure of the poem: IX, 61, beginning “In<br />
Tartesiacis domus est notissima terris” (a house renowned stands in the land of<br />
Tartessus); X, 30, “O Temperatae dulce Formiae litus” (O temperate Formiae,<br />
darling shore!); and most significantly III, 58, “Baiana nostri villa, Basse, Faustini”<br />
(The Baian villa, Bassus, of our friend Faustinus). Details from each as well as the<br />
general notion of celebrating a particular, historical place clearly influence Jonson’s<br />
vision; but finally what is so impressive about “To Penshurst” is how fully it escapes<br />
its literary roots in the past; how thoroughly it transplants a classical ideal onto<br />
English soil. “To Penshurst” is not the Baian villa updated; it represents, without<br />
an ounce of nostalgia, an idealized view of English society, from toe to top, from<br />
peasant to king, all paying tribute, even along with the “fat aged carp” in the<br />
pond, to the beneficence of the Sidney family, a beneficence, moreover, represented<br />
as anchored in nature itself. So thoroughly translated is the classical past that it<br />
seems merely accidental for the sum of Martial’s three epigrams to equal exactly<br />
the number of lines of Jonson’s poem.<br />
38