ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

PATRIOTIC AND POPULAR POETS
Yea, famine, sickness, fire, and sword,
Stand ready to fulfil Thy word.
And here among us for our sin,
A strong infection lately reign’d:
Whose rage hath so malignant been,
As that it could not be restrain’d
By any care, or art of our,
Or by a less than heavenly power. 33
Famine, sickness, fire, and sword: these were also the principal subjects of
Wither’s later poetry. Beginning with Britain’s Remembrancer (1628), Wither
gave his earlier satiric persona a prophetic strain and made England increasingly
his theme, not the England of Drayton’s Poly-Olbion, however, an England of
past and potentially future heroic deeds, but an England of the present racked
by disease. While Drayton was still trying to encourage the gentry once more
into the breach in The Battle of Agincourt (1627), Wither was reminding England
of the recent ravages of the 1625 plague (in which some 41,000 perished) by
becoming its voice of conscience:
Yea, mark, mark London, and confesse with me,
That God hath justly, thus afflicted thee,
And that in ev’ry point this Plague hath been
According to the nature of thy sin.
In thy prosperity, such was thy pride
That thou the Countries plainnesse didst deride
Thy wanton children would oft straggle out,
At honest husbandman to jeere and flout.
Their homely garments, did offend thine eyes:
They did their rurall Dialects despise. 34
As the quotation suggests, Wither’s six-canto Jeremiad is never theologically or
stylistically subtle. “In plaine expressions, and in words, that show/We love not,
in affected paths, to goe” 35 might well serve as the motto of this and much of his
later writings. And, indeed, it is the unaffected paths that make portions of
Britain’s Remembrancer still worth remembering—its low Dantesque moments in
which the voices generally excluded from modern appreciations of seventeenthcentury
poetry make their appearance:
Of these, and of their households, daily dy’d
Twice more then did of all sorts else beside;
An hungry Poverty (without reliefes)
Did much inrage and [multiply] their griefes.
The Rich could flye; or, if they staid, they had
Such meanes that their disease the lesse was made,
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