ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang
ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang
ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang
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PATRIOTIC AND POPULAR POETS<br />
Is by the Crosse enstild, whose fame I much preferre,<br />
In that I doe compare my daintiest Spring to her.<br />
(Song XXVI, ll. 453–62)<br />
In the flow of hexameters, the English countryside is awash in particulars that<br />
defy time and space: one “bath” calls up a “second,” which recalls the consecration<br />
of the first by “the blest Saint Anne” and then invites a further comparison of<br />
sorts with “that most daintie Spring.” One can understand why Selden, although<br />
never more needed, annotated only the first part of the poem.<br />
An author less committed to an heroic vision of poetry and the poet might<br />
well have closed shop with Poly-Olbion. The publishers of the first part, in<br />
fact, attempted to do just that to Drayton when they refused to bring out the<br />
second installment. 16 But with Drayton, the will to continue to write was itself<br />
material for legends or lampoons, as the remarks of contemporaries diversely<br />
testify; and if in his final years he consciously limited the scope of his muse, he<br />
was still capable of unfurling the banner when the moment seemed right, as it<br />
apparently did in the early years of Charles’s reign when preparations for war<br />
with both Spain and France occurred on a scale unknown since Elizabeth. In<br />
1627, the year of Buckingham’s disastrous assault on La Rochelle, Drayton’s<br />
recuperative powers as well as his rekindled patriotism were again fully on<br />
display in a 2500-line epic version of The Battle of Agincourt. The collection in<br />
which it appeared was dedicated to “those Noblest of Gentlemen, of these<br />
Renowned Kingdomes of Great Britaine: who in these declining times, have<br />
yet in your brave bosomes the sparkes of that sprightly fire, of your couragious<br />
Ancestors” (III, 2), and along with the jingoistic gore of the title poem—the<br />
French come off very badly—the volume included a mixture of consciously<br />
folksy Elizabethan poetry (Nymphidia, the Court of Fayrie pulls heavily on<br />
Shakespeare) with more up-to-date verse epistles that reveal a poet out of<br />
sorts with the previous king’s attitude of military and maritime caution. Three<br />
years later, with the political climate significantly quieter, Drayton, at sixtyeight,<br />
published his final collection, The Muses Elizium (1630), a partial<br />
concession to the Caroline habit of pastoral refinement that, in its delicate<br />
spinning, anticipates Herrick and Marvell more than it recollects Spenser.<br />
There is not much to say about these ten wistful “Nymphalls,” Drayton’s<br />
coinage for “A meeting or Feast of Nymphs” (Poly-Olbion, XX, 4); but<br />
C.S.Lewis’s remark that “nothing more Golden had ever been produced. They<br />
teach nothing, assert nothing, depict almost nothing” 17 needs to be updated to<br />
include the possibility that they were originally written for a performance for<br />
the Sackville family at Knole. Drayton had dedicated The Muses Elizium to the<br />
4th Earl of Dorset—the great-grandson of the author of Gorbudoc—and<br />
included verse paraphrases from the Bible for his wife, Mary, Countess of<br />
Dorset, who was soon to be responsible for the monument of Drayton in<br />
Westminster Abbey. 18 A court culture harking back to Elizabeth had caught up<br />
to Drayton at last.<br />
65