ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

PATRIOTIC AND POPULAR POETS
Elizabethan in the early years of the second decade, a nostalgia made acute by
the death of Prince Henry in 1612 (for many, including Browne, Henry was
perceived as the direct link to Elizabethan chivalry and maritime exploration)
and the subsequent marriage of Elizabeth to the Elector Palatine in 1613. But
Browne was still too much the gentleman amateur to do more than either
refine what he had already received or call for something he could only
intermittently produce.
In 1614, as part of the short-lived resurgence of pastoral, Browne “drove
forth” once again in a sort of generic stutter step with The Shepheard’s Pipe.
The seven eclogues, on diverse topics, seek to create a larger poetic moment
for their author and themselves by turning pastoral into a community mode as
Browne (Willy) incorporates his friends, George Wither (Roget) and
Christopher Brooke (Cutty), into several of the eclogues. There is also a small
attempt to resuscitate a native tradition of poetry: Browne translates the Tale
of Jonathas by Chaucer’s contemporary Thomas Hoccleve in the first eclogue,
and the third eclogue is meant to stir our sympathies for Old Neddy
(Drayton?), who because of deceit and treachery, finds a receptive audience
only in “The Farmer’s house”—hardly a Penshurst Place. But how significant
can the moment be or become when the poet urged to exchange the oaten
reed for a trumpet is Christopher Brooke? How deep is Browne’s commitment
to the native past when Skelton is summoned as the epitome of the bad poet
(Eclogue 1)? In the pastoral revival of 1613–16, it is surely possible to witness
its thinning as an imaginative resource, and the fact that Browne never
published the third part of Britannia’s Pastorals, with its trenchant criticisms of
the Spanish, 21 suggests how marginal the pastoral had become as a way of
voicing national themes. It could still serve as an opportunity for selfpresentation,
and Browne would be occasionally echoed by later regionalists
like the Welsh poet of the Usk, Henry Vaughan. But beyond that, Spenserian
pastoral, with its complex relation to national destiny, needed to be forgotten
before it could be fully reactivated, as Milton was to do beginning in 1629
with his ode “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity.”
Browne’s was a literary career—if “career” is even the right word—that
became increasingly less visible. Many of his later years were spent either at
Oxford or with the Herbert family at Wilton, the same location where Sidney
had composed portions of the New Arcadia in the 1580s. The latter was surely
an appropriate retreat for the poet who praised Drayton in Poly-Olbion by
associating him with “Immortall Sydney” and who also wrote one of the
century’s best epitaphs, if one reads only the first six lines, on Mary Sidney,
the Countess of Pembroke, who died in 1621:
Underneath this sable Herse
Lyes the subject of all verse:
Sydneys sister, Pembroke’s Mother:
Death, ere thou hast slaine another,
68