ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

PATRIOTIC AND POPULAR POETS
his French queen might have wished to purge the Jacobean court of its notorious
excesses, they were probably not ready to hear, along with Nymphidia, the kind
of pulpit-pounding denunciations Drayton leveled against the “Sons of Belial”
in The Moon-Calfe, written perhaps under James but first published in 1627.
Drayton’s “conscience,” Fuller notes, had “always the command of his fancy.” 7
Not surprisingly, Drayton’s best moments as a poet rarely involve fine
psychological, emotional, or social discriminations, qualities we associate
particularly with either a Donne or Jonson. His special penchant was for the
rugged and the heroic, even the primitive. “Since there’s no help, come let us
kiss and part,” his most frequently anthologized poem, testifies to both his
unusual resolve as a poet (it is the reward of years of working with the sonnet)
and his ability to present, in remarkably precise and direct language
reminiscent of Wyatt, a fully persuasive posture of resolution and
independence—at least until the beginning of the sestet, when the posture
suddenly and melodramatically expires with a deliberate flourish of passionate
abstractions:
Since ther’s no helpe, Come let us kisse and part,
Nay, I have done: you get no more of Me,
And I am glad, yea glad withall my heart,
That thus so cleanly, I my Selfe can free,
Shake hands for ever, Cancell all our Vowes,
And when We meet at any time againe,
Be it not scene in either of our Browes,
That We one jot of former Love reteyne;
Now at the last gaspe, of Loves latest Breath,
When his Pulse fayling, Passion speechlesse lies,
When Faith is kneeling by his bed of Death,
And Innocence is closing up his Eyes,
Now if thou would’st, when all have given him over,
From Death to Life, thou might’st him yet recover.
59
(II, 341)
Not published until 1619 as part of Idea, this sonnet is generally assumed to
epitomize the virtues of Drayton’s revisionary habits, and so it does. One has
only to read through his effete first attempt at the sonnet form in the 1594 Ideas
Mirrour (bearing the French subtitle “Amours in Quatorzains” no less) to realize
how much paring and cutting has gone into producing the spare, high drama of
the later version, a toughening that reflects a general shift away from the florid
toward the epigrammatic that was part of the complex exchange in literary
values and taste that marked the 1590s. (Drayton’s early sonnets were
themselves the objects of attack by satirists.) But however thorough the purge—
and the weak final rhyme is perhaps all that remains of the “sonneteer” of the
1590s—Drayton’s revisions stop short of providing a radical critique of the genre