ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

BEN JONSON AND THE ART OF INCLUSION
Each that draws is a swan or a dove,
And well the car Love guideth.
As she goes, all hearts do duty
Unto her beauty;
And enamoured, do wish, so they might
But enjoy such a sight,
That they still were to run by her side,
Through swords, through seas, whither she would ride.
The inspiration for representing Charis riding triumphantly in a chariot—with
the pun suggesting the inevitable appropriateness of the seat—is surely owing to
Jonson’s work with the masque. (The 1608 Haddington masque is usually cited.)
But the stanza also pays homage in a different direction. “Spenser, in affecting
the ancients, writ no language; yet I would have him read for his matter.” 33 The
double-edged nature of Jonson’s famous comment in Discoveries is borne out in
the celebration here, with the Spenserian notes recollected from “An Hymne in
Honour of Love” (“Thou art his god, thou art his mightie guyde…/Through seas,
through flames, through thousand swords and speares”), though in a finer key—
more fully modern, intricate, and triumphant sounding, as if Jonson were writing
a Spenserian Alexandrine but in only nine syllables: “That they still were to run
by her side,/Through swords, through seas, whither she would ride.” The final
triumph in this section, however, belongs even more definitively to Jonson, and
not merely because it initially appeared in one of his plays (The Devil is an Ass).
When has a catalogue of the senses been more exquisitely presented and to the
one sense not represented in the stanza: the ear?
Have you seen but a bright lily grow,
Before rude hands have touched it?
Have you marked but the fall o’ the snow,
Before the soil hath smutched it?
Have you felt the wool o’ the beaver?
Or swan’s down ever?
Or have smelled o’the bud o’ the briar?
Or the nard i’ the fire?
Or have tasted the bag o’ the bee?
O so white! O so soft! O so sweet is she!
47
(ll. 21–30)
Suckling’s parody of the stanza in his play, The Sad One, makes explicit how
another review of the senses can only produce crudeness. In Charis, a jovial
ripeness is all.
Or nearly all: the other principal reason against discounting Jonson’s later
poetry is its significant “growth” in the nearly opposite direction. Although a
number of poems in The Underwood describe an author painfully aware of his