ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

BEN JONSON AND THE ART OF INCLUSION
financial dependency on others, including the king, the recognition of his being
a lesser figure on one front helped also to create the conditions for his later
growth on another. Jonson’s Pindaric Ode, “To the Immortal Memory and
Friendship of That Noble Pair, Sir Lucius Cary and Sir H.Morison,” is very much
a late achievement, both within Jonson’s canon and in the history of its
reception. Indeed, were it not for the fact that it is still possible to find the poem
represented in teaching anthologies by only a single stanza, the amount of recent
criticism on the poem would seem to guarantee the ode the kind of canonical
stature Jonson so much desired.
From one perspective, the ode ought to be read as a powerful revision of the
poem to Shakespeare. Jonson’s spectacular division of himself in the famous
enjambment near the middle responds to the problematic act of “advancement”
in the earlier eulogy, with Jonson now imagining a portion of himself (“Ben”) as
already among the celebrated and transcendent dead and the poem, as “a bright
asterism,” playing a complex mediating role between heaven and earth. At the
same time, however, the decision to write not just an ode but a full-blown
Pindaric provides an allegory of a kind of Jonson’s waning authority. From the
time of his first attempt with the Pindaric ode—the exceptionally murky “Ode
to James, Earl of Desmond. Writ in Queen Elizabeth’s Time, Since Lost, and
Recovered”—Jonson had associated the genre not only with the high flight of
lyric but, as Desmond’s situation required, with an oppositional politics. Under
Elizabeth, the Earl had been in prison from 1579–1600, first in Dublin Castle,
then in the Tower of London; and in the ode, Jonson, whose attitude to
Elizabeth remains characteristically ambivalent, promises an imagined release:
Then shall my verses, like strong charms,
Break the knit circle of her stony arms
That hold[s] your spirit
And keeps your merit
Locked in her cold embraces.
48
(ll. 18–22)
Although both the situation and promise look forward to the use made of the
ode by Cavalier poets like Lovelace in “To Althea, from Prison,” Jonson’s
response here is resolutely iconoclastic, not elegantly transcendent; and when
he returned to Pindar some thirty years later, something he did only when he
was once more on the outskirts of power, the genre retained for him the same
militant associations.
Both the Cary-Morison ode and the ode on the failure of The New Inn were
written in 1629, with the Pindaric almost surely being the later of the two.
(Morison died in July or August of that year, whereas the debacle involving the
play belongs to February and March.) Whatever differences, moreover, that have
traditionally been perceived as distinguishing one kind of ode from another—
Jonson’s contemporary, Michael Drayton, for instance, associated Pindar with