ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

PATRIOTIC AND POPULAR POETS
the great Elizabethan cartographer, Christopher Saxton, and the author’s
indefatigable commitment to the device of prosopopoeia (in the poem, the
landscape is represented as doing most of the talking): all help to make Poly-
Olbion into something more than the vast sum of its many parts, although just
what that something is continues to be a matter of scholarly headscratching.
(The most persuasive and sympathetic reading of late connects the poem’s
pervasive regionalism to debates over the legal and political origins of England
prompted by the possible annexation of Scotland under James.) 12 Indeed, its
untraversable pathways would seem to underlie Jonson’s tongue-in-cheek
praise of Drayton’s “universal circumduction” in the odd poem he wrote for
the 1627 publication of The Battle of Agincourt. “Circumduction” meant both
“round about” and, in legal parlance, “annulling” or “canceling.”
Certainly, its roundaboutness has made Poly-Olbion difficult to read except
piece by piece, locale by locale, and then not always with pleasure. Sir Thomas
Browne, who was not one to be easily intimidated by arcane matter, thought the
verse “smooth” and the sea nymph’s song in the second page worth quoting to his
son who was setting out to Jersey. 13 Pope was characteristically less generous in his
praise of Drayton (“a very mediocre poet”), but significantly indebted in “Windsor
Forest” to portions of the poem (songs XIII, XV, and xvii); 14 and modern critics,
looking for an entry into the poem, often choose to concentrate on the section
describing the poet’s native Warwickshire (again, song xiii). But the difficulty the
poem presents is that it really does not make much difference where one begins: it
all begins to sound alike. As a polyphonic hymn to the particular, there is no
“plot” to Poly-Olbion, other than to stage singing matches in praise of each region
for its local attributes, antiquities, and wonders; but the more individualized the
specific locale, the more it also seems to resemble other locales in its celebration
of wonders and curiosities. Every region, in effect, makes a bid to be exceptional
in a poem whose “long verses”—to adopt Jonson’s stigmatizing description of
them—gradually insist on sameness, that “all local claims are equal—not that
they are identical or interchangeable, but that each particular pride of place must
concede that its own sovereignty coexists with many others, and may indeed, in
time, become transformed into another.” 15 One has only to read the portion on
the Peake district to see the poetic consequences of Drayton’s syncretist habits
mightily at work. What he gives up in height, he gains in length:
Yet for her Caves, and Holes, Peake onely not excells,
But that I can againe produce those wondrous Wells
Of Buckston, as I have, that most delicious Fount,
Which men the second Bath of England doe account,
Which in the primer raignes, when first this well began
To have her vertues knowne unto the blest Saint Anne,
Was consecrated then, which the same temper hath,
As that most daintie Spring, which at the famous Bath,
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