ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

PATRIOTIC AND POPULAR POETS
And with that contentment cheer me,
As if half the world did hear me.
72
(II, 27–8)
It might seem a large step between Lamb’s acutely registered praise of Wither,
made in connection with Fair Virtue, as the first English poet to celebrate the
power of poetry “at home,” and Jonson’s scornful representation of Wither in
Time Vindicated as the poet-hero of the barely literate, but both critics are
responding to the same feature in Wither: the free-born, self-generated and
generating element in his verse. It feels fully home-spun, not just native, a
response to the personal moment, not a product of tradition: “If I please I’ll end
it here;/If I list I’ll sing this year.” From the perspective of a Romantic who was
pre-eminently an essayist, Wither’s loose poetics, his run-on line, signaled his
independence and originality. 31 But from the point of view of a Neoclassicist like
Jonson, the absence of the well-licked line could spell anarchy of sorts, especially
when the subject matter was of the kind to appeal immediately to a popular
audience, as both Abuses Script and Whipt and the Motto obviously were.
However rebellious or libertine Donne might appear to the modern reader, he
could never have said, as Jonson imagined Wither saying, “A pudding-wife, that
would despise the Times/ Hath utter’d frequent pen’worths, through my rimes.” 32
Early Wither was a poet who could write both up and down the social register,
for kings as well as commoners, as the royal imprimatur Cum Privilegio Regis
Regali on the title page of the Hymns and Songs of the Church, a text for the
ordinary reader, makes clear.
After 1623, however, Wither increasingly conceived of his audience in largely
popular terms and his own role as that of preacher or prophet. (The transition is
sharply marked by the publication of his Juvenilia in 1622.) To some degree, his
shift from a predominantly courtly to a religious poet corresponds to the elevated
status of the devotional lyric that began under James, and hence in Wither to an
elevation of the pastoralist to the psalmist, with an increased emphasis on the
virtues of the plain style—an emphasis on matter over manner. In 1632 Wither
published his translation of The Psalms of David. In further didactic works like A
Collection of Emblemes, Ancient and Moderne (1635) and Hallelujah, or Britain’s
Second Remembrancer (1641), a volume of hymns and songs apparently inspired
by the recent examples of Herbert, Sandys, and Quarles but still ultimately modeled
on the Sternhold and Hopkins Psalter, Wither sought consciously and with some
success to make a virtue out of “affected plainness.” A poem like the “Hymn LXXII,
For Deliverance from Public Sickness”—one of Wither’s favorite themes—still
commands attention for its stark, concentrated passion:
Lord! when a nation Thee offends,
And when Thou wouldst correct their lands,
An army still on Thee attends,
To execute Thy just commands;