ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

BEN JONSON AND THE ART OF INCLUSION
Fat, aged carps, that run into thy net;
And pikes, now weary their own kind to eat,
As loath the second draught or cast to stay,
Officiously, at first, themselves betray;
Bright eels, that emulate them, and leap on land
Before the fisher, or into his hand.
Then hath thy orchard fruit, thy garden flowers,
Fresh as the air and new as are the hours:
The early cherry, with the later plum,
Fig, grape and quince, each in his time doth come;
The blushing apricot and woolly peach
Hang on thy walls, that every child may reach.
40
(ll. 31–41)
We do not need to trim these verses to see that to change the line is to change
the place, and to change the place is to begin to spoil the estate. In Penshurst
place, everything in its time doth come: the “blushing apricot and woolly
peach,” the farmer and the clown, the poet and the king, lord, lady, and
children, as the poem goes on to reveal through a vision of household economy
that includes some modestly politicized court critique. 27 Jonson’s is a
conservative view of the social order, but the vision is not a static one, with the
poet simply reciting a catalog of riches. Nor is it without warmth. “What (great,
I will not say, but) sudden cheer” (l. 82) is Jonson’s carefully modulated phrasing
used to describe the hospitality exhibited by Barbara Gamage when she
welcomes the king. In the face of authority, this ideal of controlled spontaneity
is also what best characterizes the movement of the poem: the Jonsonian line,
as it were, celebrating the Sidneyan line, and yet maintaining a dignified
distance on the object of praise. Indeed, so exemplary of cultural “life” in
England is Penshurst, says Jonson in closing, that any attempt by others to
“proportion thee” (and the poem, as we have seen) will be destructive of the
original; a deviation from a perfect living mean:
Now, Penshurst, they that will proportion thee
With other edifices, when they see
Those proud, ambitious heaps, and nothing else,
May say, their lords have built, but thy lord dwells.
Jonson on Shakespeare
(ll. 99–102)
To speak of Jonson in “To Penshurst” as fully transporting a classical ideal of
moderation on to English soil—to identify him, in other words, as a
Neoclassicist—is not to suggest that the act of transposing, of receiving,
assimilating, and revaluing the significant prestige attached to antiquity was