ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

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