ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

PATRIOTIC AND POPULAR POETS
William Browne (1590/1?–1643/5?) and George Wither
(1588–1667)
Drayton was too consciously respectful of the English literary traditions ever to
imagine originating and sealing a tribe of poets about him in the manner of
Jonson, even if he had had anything like the latter’s personal and poetic
power. All the same he became, by accident as well as design, both mentor
and magnet for a succeeding generation of writers who, though conversant
with courtly traditions, were, like Drayton, never of the court and thought the
proper subject of poetry was the larger matter of the “country,” in both the
pastoral and political sense of the word. Of these—and the group would
include Abraham Holland, the son of the great Elizabethan translator,
Philemon Holland—the most interesting are William Browne and George
Wither. Both expressed their allegiance to Drayton by being among the very
few to supply commendatory poems for the second part of Poly-Olbion in
1622. (In turn, Drayton commiserated with Browne about the world being
“All arsey varsey” in a late verse epistle where he criticizes the sudden rise of
the undeserved (III, 209).) But the story of Browne’s and Wither’s affiliation
goes back at least ten years earlier when both poets, born in rural England
fairly late in Elizabeth’s reign (Wither in Hampshire in 1588, Browne in
Devonshire in 1591) and having attended Oxford, came on the literary scene
with elegies to Prince Henry, who had died suddenly in November, 1612. This
act alone hardly separated them from the many who mourned the death of
England’s first heir to the throne in some eighty years; their subsequent
publications, however, did.
Browne’s Britannia’s Pastoral (Book I, 1613; II, 1616; a third book lay in
manuscript until 1851) is the most sustained attempt to write a version of
Spenserian epic romance in the early part of the seventeenth century. To a
small degree, the poem draws on Drayton’s version of Spenser in Poly-Olbion,
that is, the dynastic poet who celebrates Britain’s mythic past and its
legendary founder, Brute, and some of its actual heroes of the more recent,
Elizabethan present, especially those associated with great maritime exploits
such as Sir Francis Drake and Sir Richard Grenville. (Hailing from Devon,
Browne was especially partial to Drake.) To a much greater extent he
exploited other recognizably Spenserian devices: archaic diction, pictorial
imagery, allegory, romantic episodes in a landscape that can be alternately
comforting and threatening. But in Browne, the epic vision has been folded
fully within the pastoral, at least with regard to the action or plot. There is no
presiding figure, no Gloriana, toward which all things point; there is no hero
on a quest, no gentleman to be fashioned into a knight. Browne’s skills,
particularly in the first two books, are essentially those of a lyricist, a Colin
Clout of the Tavy River who has mastered a number of shorter forms.
Anagrams, elegies, echo poems, singing contests, topographical description—
he occasionally produces them with anthology-like elegance:
66