ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

PATRIOTIC AND POPULAR POETS
stanza, Drayton more often stumbles than soars.) But if he is rarely more than a
fledgling Neoclassicist in this volume, the reason in part is simply that his voice
took its greatest energies from below, from his native soil and the popular themes
associated with it. In recasting himself as one of the old Bards of Britain, whose
principal concern, like Sidney’s “blind crowder,” was to stir the hearts of his fellow
countrymen, Drayton wrote some of his most persuasive verse.
“To the Virginian Voyage,” “The Ballad of Agincourt” (dedicated “to the
Cambro-Britans”), and “An Ode Written in the Peake” are decidedly patriotic,
fully imagined addresses, and among his best known poems. The first, prompted
by the 1606 patent that authorized further explorations of the New World and
led to the founding of Jamestown, celebrates a wished-for return to the seafaring
exploits under Elizabeth; urges, in fact, a rereading of “industrious HAKLUIT”
and, along with offering the usual material enticements “to get the Pearle and
Gold,” shows an exuberant familiarity with reported “golden age” flora and fauna
including the “use-full Sassafras.” The abbreviated line and occasionally inverted
syntax seem part and parcel of the bard’s rough voice and rude style:
You brave Heroique Minds,
Worthy your Countries Name,
That Honour still pursue,
Goe, and subdue,
Whilst loyt’ring Hinds
Lurke here at home, with shame.
61
(II, 363)
As the reference in the first line of the poem to “You brave Heroique Minds”
suggests, Drayton is less interested in inspiring others to bring home booty from
abroad than he is in figuring anew British identity as a feature of going forth
and subduing. The same might be said of the poem commemorating that most
heroic of English battles and kings, Henry V’s victory over the French at
Agincourt. It makes use of all the resources of the popular ballad—simple plot,
plain diction, grand action, famous names—in an effort to make the legendary
past bear intensely, and critically, on the present. 10 The poem concludes with a
question-begging apostrophe that is also the volume’s last word:
Upon Saint CRISPIN’S day
Fought was this Noble Fray,
Which Fame did not delay,
To England to carry;
O, when shall English Men
With such Acts fill a Pen,
Or England breed againe,
Such a King HARRY?
(II, 378)