ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang
ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang
ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang
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This while we are abroad,<br />
Shall we not touch our Lyre?<br />
Shall we not sing an Ode?<br />
Shall that holy Fire,<br />
In us that strongly glow’d,<br />
In this cold Ayre expire?<br />
PATRIOTIC AND POPULAR POETS<br />
63<br />
(II, 365)<br />
Love of land and country was never taken to greater lengths than in Poly-Olbion<br />
(1612, 1622). Drayton’s “Herculean labor” and great debacle—the second and<br />
final installment in 1622 was ruefully dedicated “To Any that Will Read It,” a<br />
challenge that remains rarely answered today—was intended to fuse Spenser<br />
with Camden, a general interest in pastoral mythology with a specific concern<br />
for historical detail, legendary and factual alike—all done in alexandrines that<br />
total nearly 15,000 lines (14,716 to be exact, though many have thought it<br />
longer, including Henry Hallam who fostered the still current rumor that it is<br />
around 30,000). 11 Drayton’s organizing strategy, such as it is, follows Camden’s<br />
in Britannia by giving precedence to individual regions, corresponding in many<br />
cases to individual counties, although the patriotic sweep of British history is<br />
preserved, at least in the first part, by beginning in the west with Cornwall and<br />
the legend of Brute and working toward an eventual celebration in the<br />
seventeenth song of England’s most recent monarch, Elizabeth. (James is<br />
conspicuous by his absence from the roll call.) The second part concentrates on<br />
the east and north of England. A promise to explore Scotland in a third<br />
installment was never realized.<br />
Drayton was not the first to call on the muse to deliver a capsule view of<br />
England in verse. He was succeeded—and partially inspired—by the all-butforgotten<br />
William Warner whose popular Albions England (1586, books 1–6;<br />
1596, 7–12; 1602, 13) uses a not-so-trim mixture of prose and verse<br />
(fourteeners) to detail a largely classicized history of Britain. (Apart from its<br />
stated impatience in 1586 with Elizabethan habits of “running on the letter,”<br />
the work is of interest for revealing through the additions an evolving sense of<br />
national consciousness.) And there was also Thomas Churchyard’s popular<br />
The Worthies of Wales (1586), with its partial celebration of the British<br />
landscape. Nor was Drayton’s the last travelogue of its time: Milton’s<br />
landscape-happy “L’Allegro” is a neater but not-so-distant offshoot. But Poly-<br />
Olbion will always be the great curiosity of chorographical poems and not<br />
merely because of its matter—its “intermixture of the most Remarkable<br />
Stories, Antiquities, Wonders, Rarities, Pleasures, and Commodities” with the<br />
more usual topographical reports. Its epic scale (the work initially appeared as<br />
a folio), sumptuous title page (Albion is presented as the most fertile and<br />
beautiful of women), elaborate notes to the first part by the learned<br />
antiquarian, John Selden (they make E.K.’s gloss of The Shepheardes Calendar<br />
seem like schoolboy scribblings), engraved maps of the individual regions by