ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

BEN JONSON AND THE ART OF INCLUSION
To show thou hast been long,
Not lived; for life doth her great actions spell
By what was done and wrought
In season, and so brought
To light: her measures are, how well
Each syllabe answered, and was formed, how fair;
These make the lines of life, and that’s her air.
The Turn
It is not growing like a tree
In bulk, doth make man better be;
Or standing long an oak, three hundred year,
To fall a log at last, dry, bald, and sere:
A lily of a day
Is fairer far, in May,
Although it fall and die that night;
It was the plant and flower of light.
In small proportions we just beauty see,
And in short measures life may perfect be.
“The Turn” here has always been admired, sometimes to the exclusion of the
rest of the poem and sometimes for the wrong reasons. It is undeniably judicious
in its phrasing. The precise whittling away of the ungainly beginning in order to
produce the line at the center neatly corresponds to the shift to praising small
things; and the sentiments that emerge draw on Biblical and classical precedents
in evaluating Morison’s accomplishment. (Good men “flourish as a lily” and
accomplish God’s commands “in due season,” writes Ecclesiasticus, while Seneca
observes, “just as one of small stature can be a perfect man, so a life of small
compass can be a perfect life.”) 37 But what is remarkable, I believe, about “The
Turn” is not simply its intricate allusions and mimetic quality but the pressure
the stanza is asked to bear within the consolatory arc of the elegy. “Lycidas,” a
no less artful poem, turns on a much vexed phrase that includes nothing less
than a reference to divine intervention: “Look homeward Angel now, and melt
with ruth:/And, O ye Dolphins, waft the hapless youth.” Jonson’s poem pivots
on its own axis. “In small proportions we just beauty see/ And in short measures
life may perfect be.” The full weight of the Pindaric seems momentarily to rest
on a single couplet, the “bravest” form of verse, as Drummond reported Jonson
saying.
I doubt whether any poet in the seventeenth century, even Milton, asks
more from his art than does Jonson at this moment. Perhaps it is too much.
But perhaps, too, the ultimate fascination of the Pindaric and of Jonson’s
career in general cannot be measured by the ideal of perfecting “small
proportions,” nor even in how these might “great actions spell,” as if poetry
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