ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

BEN JONSON AND THE ART OF INCLUSION
did not know Pindar in Greek could have recognized certain stylistic features
that commentators had often remarked: his brilliant opening figures (imitated
by Jonson in the opening “Infant of Saguntum”), his abrupt shifts in subject, his
sudden leaps to the sublime,” 35 as well as more generalized resemblances like the
choral form of the strophes, designated by Jonson as “The Turn,” “The Counter-
Turn,” and “The Stand,” and the use of the ode to commemorate victories by
noble warriors and athletes. If Jonson was beginning to hark back to Elizabethan
times in the theater when he wrote The New Inn 36 —and part of what lies behind
Jonson’s rage in “Come, leave the loathed stage” is surely the humiliation of
having capitulated to popular taste and failed—the Cary-Morison ode insists
that he be judged by other standards altogether. This is not a poem for “My
Meere English Censurers.”
The 128-line ode combines and heightens most of the features we generally
think of as characteristically Jonsonian. In well-filed lines that insist on the
essential relatedness of art and life, Jonson celebrates the immortal values of
poetry and friendship. But under the reactive pressure of the commemorative
occasion, these features achieve a new level of significance. There is a great deal
of “Ben Jonson” in the poem, a Jonson for whom the brave infant of Saguntum
(who at the sight of Hannibal razing the town returned to his mother’s womb)
represents a tempting alternative to the horrors of life. (It is difficult to imagine
Jonson earlier entertaining a notion of childhood retreat in precisely this
manner.) And the “stirrer” who did nothing but “die late” (with the pun on
“dilate”) represents another unacceptable version of life that was obviously
worrying the poet, a version that becomes more painfully self-referential in the
charge:
Go now, and tell out days summed up with fears;
And make them years;
Produce thy mass of miseries on the stage,
To swell thine age.
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(ll. 53–6)
Both of these alternatives are invoked by Jonson to serve as foils for Morison,
who died young at age 21. But they also represent challenges reckoned by the
poet himself, who is as much at the center of this poem as either Cary or
Morison:
The Counter-Turn
Call, noble Lucius, then for wine,
And let thy looks with gladness shine;
Accept this garland, plant it on thy head;
And think, nay know, thy Morison’s not dead.
He leaped the present age,