ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

PATRIOTIC AND POPULAR POETS
in the manner of Donne. The drama is stark but still Petrarchan—evidence of a
better poet for sure, but one born too deeply in the reign of Elizabeth to give
over his roots completely.
Drayton’s most innovative and interesting single collection of verse marks his
conservative, syncretistic habits from a different angle. His odes are usually
regarded as having a significant, though slightly suspect, place in histories of the
genre: significant because their publication in 1606 as part of Poems Lyricke and
Pastorall (they came to have their own title page in 1619) allows them some
claim as the first “genuine” odes in English, but suspect because Drayton
obviously did not reconceive the genre with a Jonsonian emphasis on recovering
the original in all its formal, classical purity. 8 However this may be—and one
feels the prescriptive weight of Jonson in these histories—Drayton was working
a different, more popular vein than Jonson, one distinctly reminiscent of Sidney
in The Defense of Poesie when that poet notoriously confessed his own
“barbarousness” by praising “the old song of Percy and Douglas,” the ballad of
Chevy Chase, and placing it in the company of Pindar:
I never heard the old song of Percy and Douglas that I found not my
heart moved more than with a trumpet; and yet is it sung but by some
blind crowder [fiddler], with no rougher voice than rude style; which,
being so evil apparelled in the dust and cobwebs of that uncivil age,
what would it work trimmed in the gorgeous eloquence of Pindar? 9
Sidney’s praise of the popular ballad is thoroughly aristocratic and clearly done
with the purpose of defending the lyric against Puritan attacks on poetry for its
supposed enervating effects, but it also justifies linking, if not equating, the
ballad with the ode, the low with the high, the native with the imported. Both
were heroic songs of old, twin forms of patriotic lore.
Drayton’s odes were conceived in a Sidneyan light. They stress the continuity
between classical and native traditions, an attitude made explicit in the modestly
learned preface to the reader in which Drayton identifies the specific attributes of
the ode associated with its various practitioners—Pindar, Anacreon, and Horace—
which he, in turn, associates with the medieval ballad as practiced by “our Chaucer”
and reincarnated by himself in the “old English Garbe” of “The Ballad of Agincourt”
(II, 345–46). That generically inclusive vision is further emphasized in the historical
sweep of the introductory ode “To Himselfe, and the Harpe,” as well as in the
volume as a whole. Both become progressively more British: in the description of
the “skilfull Bard” who plays the harp; in the gradual concentration on decidedly
English subjects (Drayton even includes “A Skeltoniad”); and in the final mutation
of the ode into the ballad that marks the end of the collection.
Drayton’s scheme is hardly that of a purist, and he readily admits in the preface
that he barely attempted the “high dialect” of Pindar. Whatever features we might
designate as most Horatian or Anacreontic had also to await a later generation
of poets before they were to be fully “Englished.” (In his use of the short-line
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