ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

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