ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

PATRIOTIC AND POPULAR POETS
Never more let holy Dee
O’re other Rivers brave,
Or boast how (in his jollitie)
Kings row’d upon his wave.
But silent be, and ever know
That Neptune for my Fare would row. 19
With such sweet sounds—and the lyric is sung by a shepherd timing it with his
oar (in anticipation of Marvell’s gospel voyagers in “Bermudas”)—it is only right
that one of the few lyrics added to the 1614 edition of Englands Helicon (1600)
would be his (“Thirsis’ Praise of His Mistress”).
What distinguishes Browne, however, from other turn of the century
pastoralists like the immensely prolific Nicholas Breton is the “higher strain”
found in Britannia. (Alastair Fowler speaks of the inspiration Browne discovered
in Virgil’s Georgics.) 20 We do not automatically have to subscribe to the long
tradition, dating back to the eighteenth century, that Milton owned and heavily
marked up a copy of the poem to sense a poet capable of some graver or greater
subject. Without ever being an historical poem, Britannia’s Pastorals is a poem
that keeps opening out into history: sometimes to lament the nation’s fortunes
(he interpolates the elegy on the death of Prince Henry into the end of the first
book); sometimes to satirize, in prophetic fashion, the country’s ills and its poor
leadership on both foreign and domestic fronts (the Cave of Famine represents,
in this regard, a significant adjustment away from Spenser’s Cave of Mammon);
and occasionally to deliver short stretches of pure, unbridled patriotism that
reveal a poet of significant imaginative reach:
Haile, thou my native soile! thou blessed plot
Whose equall all the world affordeth not!
Shew me who can so many crystall Rils,
Such sweet-cloath’d Vallies or aspiring Hils:
Such Wood-ground, Pastures, Quarries, welthy Mines:
Such Rocks in whom the Diamond fairely shines:
And if the earth can shew the like agen,
Yet will she faile in her Sea-ruling men.
67
(II, 43)
As Browne’s contemporaries recognized—and the first two editions included
commendatory poems by no fewer than twenty-six authors, mostly from the Inns
of Court and Exeter College, Oxford—Britannia’s Pastorals was a poem that
promised much. “Drive forth thy Flock, young Pastor, to that Plaine,/Where our
old Shepheards wont their flocks to feed,” is how Drayton expressed his hopes
for a pastoral renaissance (I, 7).
But promise in this case did not lead to fulfillment. The enthusiastic
sendoff by a coterie audience points to the power of nostalgia for things