ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

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