ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

BEN JONSON AND THE ART OF INCLUSION
“To Penshurst” is probably the best thank-you note in English (and resisted
sometimes for being so). Praising the grounds and the house enables Jonson to
celebrate the Sidney family, to record his gratitude for their patronage and a visit,
itself memorably (and characteristically) recorded in a vignette near the center of
the poem where a hungry and self-conscious Jonson describes their hospitality as
such that it even allowed the well-fed poet to retire for the evening and momentarily
fantasize that he “reigned here.” But the poem also represents something of a
triumph of the pentameter line in the service of a wider social vision that values
modesty and generosity, order and liberality. “Penshurst” would not be “Penshurst”
if it were a foot shorter, that is, if the poem were written in the tetrameter couplets
that Marvell was to exploit so brilliantly in “Upon Appleton House.” Think of
what would happen to the familiar but authoritative opening of:
Thou art not, Penshurst, built to envious show
Of touch or marble, nor canst boast a row
Of polished pillars, or a roof of gold;
Thou hast no lantern whereof tales are told,
if it were written as follows:
Thou art not built to envious show
Of marble, nor canst boast a row
Of pillars, or a roof of gold,
No lantern whereof tales are told.
The latter, of course, is weak tea and most certainly not Jonson (nor Marvell,
for that matter); but it helps to show the uncanny link between the proper name
and the pentameter line in the poem, with “Penshurst” giving weight and ballast
to the opening line in much the same way that—to switch metaphors—a
keystone gives strength to the arch. And, of course, not only is the slimmed
down version without the substantive and adjectival heft of the original (soon
to be put to morally descriptive purpose by Jonson once we enter the estate),
but without the gaudy alliteration of “polished pillars,” it foregoes one of the
means that Jonson uses to distinguish Penshurst from what it is not: another
Jacobean prodigy like the enormously expensive house being constructed at
Hatfield by James’s unpopular treasurer, Robert Cecil.
To rewrite “Penshurst” in anything but pentameter is to see again the
understated art of the poem Jonson wrote. Veering at times toward the ludic, it
never abandons the leisurely, as Jonson’s rhymically varied, sure-footed couplets
convey us through the landscape, which is always paying honor to the family
Jonson is celebrating:
And if the high-swoll’n Medway fail thy dish,
Thou hast thy ponds that pay thee tribute fish:
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