ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

PATRIOTIC AND POPULAR POETS
The popularity of Quarles’s Emblems belongs as much to the gentrification of
the fine arts in England as it does to the enduring enthusiasm for works of
devotional piety. In fact, the immediate personal inspiration behind the
Emblems—the individual whom Quarles, in a bow to the sister arts, credited as
having “put the Theorboe into my hand”—was none other than Edward
Benlowes, the wealthy and eccentric country gentleman from Brent Hall, Essex,
who was to take the art of the book to new and extravagant heights by
producing one of the century’s most lavishly illustrated texts in Theophila, or
Love’s Sacrifice (1652). 52 (The text includes illustrations by England’s first great
engraver, Francis Barlow.) In the late 1620s, this sometime poet and lifelong
patron of the arts made his grand tour of the Continent. Besides putting himself
in touch with much that was current in the arts in both the Netherlands and
Italy, he also encountered two recently published, skillfully engraved, Jesuit
emblem books: the Pia Desideria by Hermann Hugo (1624) and the Typus Mundi
(1627). These were to serve as Quarles’s sources.
In sharp contrast to Theophila, however, or even Wither’s Collection of
Emblems—both folio texts—Quarles’s book is conceived on a thoroughly
modest scale. If not the only reason, this is surely an important one for its
huge success. Whereas both Benlowes and Wither drew on the visual as a
partial sign of their desire to associate with high culture—whether conceived
in learnedly esoteric or courtly terms—and produced enormously expensive
texts, Quarles’s octavo is meant to be cradled in the hand, to be held by the
reader, who can readily take in both picture and text, placed as they are on
facing pages: it is a book designed, that is, to be used and not merely admired;
and it could be purchased for perhaps a little more than the price of a quart of
sack. 53 As for the book’s rationale (and by the early seventeenth century,
thanks largely to the work of Italian humanists like Alciati and Palazzi, there
was a significant body of material associated with emblems and related tropes
like enigmas, symbols, and devices), Quarles’s preface to the reader is
positively anti-Jonsonian in its general appeal: succinct, courteous, and
invitingly simple. It begins by rehearsing Simonides’s familiar argument that
painting is mute poetry; by the passage’s end, author and reader exist in a
happily reciprocal relationship.
An Embleme is but a silent Parable. Let not the tender Eye check, to
see the allusion to our blessed Savior figured in these Types. In holy
Scripture he is sometimes called a sower; sometimes, a Fisher,
sometimes a Physician. And why not presented so as well to the eye as
to the eare? Before the knowledge of letters God was known by
Hieroglyphicks: and, indeed, what are the Heavens, the Earth, nay every
Creature but Hieroglyphicks and Emblemes of His Glory? I have no more
to say. I wish thee as much pleasure in the reading, as I had in the
writing. Farewell, Reader.
(III, p. 45)
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