ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

PATRIOTIC AND POPULAR POETS
now set against the demands for accurate representation: “for, he, that honestly
one work, would do,/Must not, the same time, be imploy’d on two.”
Francis Quarles (1592–1644)
Wither’s name and Francis Quarles’s have been coupled at least since Anthony
à Wood’s misleading remark that these two “Puritanical Poets” were especially
patronized by the Earl of Essex, Robert Devereux, only son of the beheaded earl
and the eventual commander of the Parliament forces in the Civil War. 43 How
much a patron Essex was to either poet is a matter of considerable uncertainty.
Only Wither in Campo-Musae (1643) dedicated a work to the earl, and
according to the Dictionary of National Biography, Quarles died supporting the
crown, but it is easy to see superficial resemblances between the two men. Both
were Protestant sympathizers, with associations with the Palatine court of
Elizabeth and Frederick; both were admirers of Drayton—Aubrey attributed the
verses on Drayton’s monument in Westminster Abbey to Quarles, “his great
Freind”; 44 both wrote much didactic poetry of a narrowly pietistic sort; both
tapped into the new vogue for emblem poetry and brought out separate volumes
in the same year, 1635; and both were remarkably popular although for very
different reasons. If Wither’s fame is inseparable from his notoriety—his knack
at making “George Wither” into a public event and capitalizing on, to the point
of parody, seventeenth-century notions of authorship—Quarles’s success
stemmed from precisely the opposite effect: from his willingness to efface himself
before the authority of others. “He faithfully discharged the place of cup-bearer
to the Queen of Bohemia,” wrote his wife, Ursula, in a brief memoir attached to
his posthumously published Solomon’s Recantation (1645), and the image of
Quarles as a faithful cup-bearer is a telling one. For although he was to hold
other employment—he served for a time in Ireland as a secretary to Archbishop
Ussher, and later he inherited the post, held separately by Jonson and
Middleton, of “Chronologer” to the City of London—he was as a poet
constantly going to the well and making even more palatable what was already
fully respectable, if not always familiar, to most English readers of the early
seventeenth century. Quarles was the paraphraser par excellence of his time.
Versifying exemplary “histories” from the Old Testament was how Quarles
began, and his thirst for reproducing canonical texts—whether sacred or
secular—was never really quenched. By the time of his death in 1645, in fact,
he had rendered into workable couplets the heroical exploits of Jonah (A Feast
for Wormes, 1621), Esther (1621), Job (1624), and Samson (1630), interlining
the arguments of each with meditations suitable to an educated Protestant
audience—Quarles was to supply a commendatory poem to Thomas Hyne’s
1641 translation of The Life and Death of Dr. Martin Luther—and spiced with
topical allusions, usually of a moderately conservative sort. To these Biblically
centered efforts, he added versified paraphrases from Jeremiah (Sions Elegies,
1624) and Solomon (Sions Sonets, 1625). He also experimented with some of
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