ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

PATRIOTIC AND POPULAR POETS
straighter version of Donne’s knotty and reflexive “A Hymn to God the Father.”
(In 1629, the Dean of St. Paul’s was now fully on the scene, approaching canonical
status and, like Sidney, good fare for imitation.) The third and last stanza of “The
Author’s Dream” reads as if Quarles were trying to release what Coleridge later
thought of in Donne as “meaning’s press and screw.” As happens over and over in
his poetry, Quarles eschews metaphor in favor of simile, the imaginatively daring
in favor of the predictably timid, the unique experience of a particular identity in
favor of general equation that underscores a common (and usually commonplace)
attitude. In Quarles, there is nothing special in a name:
My sinnes are like the Starres within the skies,
In view, in number even as bright, as great:
In this they differ: These doe set and rise:
But ah! my sinnes doe rise, but never set.
Shine, Sunne of glory, and my sinnes are gone
Like twinckling Starres before the rising Sunne.
78
(III, p. 285)
At the same time, however, Quarles’s aversion to “strong lines” does not mean
his poetry is altogether without substance or art. His conscious moralizing even
in Argalus and Parthenia gives a certain pith and drama—or rather melodrama—
to his verse, and his poetry is rhetorically knowing in a way that Wither’s rarely
is. An admittedly formulaic passage like the following, for instance, is not
intellectually demanding. It matters little whether one understands the allusion
to Erra Pater, the supposed author of A Prognostycacion for Ever (1563), but
neither is it dull:
Have you beheld when fresh Aurora’s eye
Sends forth her early beames, and by and by
Withdrawes the glory of her face, and shrowds
Her cheekes behind a ruddy maske of clouds,
Which, who beleeve in Erra Pater, say
Presages winde, and blustry stormes that day,
Such were Partheniaes’ lookes; in whose faire face,
Roses and Lillies, late had equall place.
But now, twixt mayden bashfulnesse, and spleene,
Roses appear’d, and Lillies were not scene:
She paus’d a while, till at the last, she breakes
Her long kept angry silence, thus; and speakes.
(III, p. 243)
The passage has a quick and easy pace, something essential for a successful
narrative poem in the exuberant manner of Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, and
it certainly attempts to be highly sensuous. Like a good deal of Quarles,