ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

BEN JONSON AND THE ART OF INCLUSION
Possessed with holy rage
To see that bright eternal day,
Of which we priests and poets say
Such truths as we expect for happy men;
And there he lives with memory, and Ben
The Stand
Jonson, who sung this of him, ere he went
Himself to rest,
Or taste a part of that full joy he meant
To have expressed
In this bright asterism;
Where it were friendship’s schism
(Were not his Lucius long with us to tarry)
To separate these twi
Lights, the Dioscuri;
And keep the one half from his Harry.
But fate doth so alternate the design,
Whilst that in heaven, this light on earth must shine.
This portion of the poem has been interpreted so often of late that it is tempting
to see the giant enjambment as an intentional rupture—a sign in which the
signifying poet opens himself up for interpretation, halves himself, as it were, for
inspection, and in doing so controls the interpretive act. No matter how we read
the poem, we are aware of “Ben Jonson,” in some relation to the author,
powerfully turning our thoughts. But a reading of this kind would be merely
acrobatic—indeed, in the same way that Jonson’s attempt to recuperate his
authority would be only a grand “act”—if we were not meant to see the leap
itself rooted in the poem’s argument and the beliefs and creed at the center of
Jonson’s art. In the stanza that concludes at the exact center of the poem, we
are asked to witness the author taking a stand against himself that is also, by the
end of the stanza, a stand for himself, for everything he has stood for as a poet:
exactness of phrasing, decorum, the essential connection of art to life; a stand,
moreover, that turns the subsequent stanza (“The Turn”) into both a celebration
and an embodiment of that ideal:
The Stand
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;
Repeat of things a throng,
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