ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

PATRIOTIC AND POPULAR POETS
The unspoken answer for Drayton, as for many English Protestants in 1606, lay
not with the present king but with his son, another “Harry”: the chivalric Prince
Henry (to whom the first part of Poly-Olbion is dedicated). And the third ode or
ballad might well be the most satisfying regional poem written in English before
Denham’s “Cooper’s Hill” (1642). Despite the “breeme Winters scathes”
(“breeme” was a characteristically Spenserian use of the northern dialect for
“bitter” or “chilly”), the poet shows not the slightest remorse for his absence
from London, the court, and “the Princely Thames”:
Though in the utmost Peake,
A while we doe remaine,
Amongst the Mountaines bleake
Expos’d to Sleet and Raine,
No Sport our Houres shall breake,
To exercise our Vaine.
What though bright PHOEBUS Beames
Refresh the Southerne Ground,
And though the Princely Thames
With beautious Nymphs abound,
And by old Camber’s streames
Be many Wonders found;
Yet many Rivers cleare
Here glide in Silver Swathes,
And what of all most deare,
Buckston’s delicious Bathes,
Strong Ale and Noble Cheare,
T’asswage breeme Winters scathes.
62
(II, 365)
“Strong Ale and Noble Cheare” by “Buckston’s delicious Bathes”: the difference
between drinking in Drayton and in Jonson points up precise differences
between them as poets. In Jonson, the “we” is always a particular “you” and “I”:
a Cary or a Morison, a member of the Sidney family, or at its most indefinite, “a
friend” who shares similar culinary and literary interests with the poet, an “I”
who is or pretends to be always the same “Ben Jonson.” Jonson’s poetry, at its
very best, manages to convey a subtle regard for the complexities involved in
social interchange at many levels. In Drayton, the “we” is a collective “we,”
rarely specifically identified and, as in this instance, often thoroughly
subordinated to the landscape of England, with its customs and natural
“wonders.” His subjects almost always border on the mythic, his persons are
personifications. At its best, Drayton’s poetry manages to convey a sense of
gusto, a sense of the heart fully stirred by its native subject: