The Columbia History of British Poetry (55 page)

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Page 229
Lyric Poetry from Donne to Philips
Richard Strier
The story of the English lyric in the seventeenth century is the story of the coming of age of a literary form. Our modern concept of the lyric, of the (relatively) short, primarily non-narrative poem, was invented in seventeenth-century England. We take the lyric to be the "normal" or normative form that poetry takesit essentially defines our notion of poetrybut this is a relatively recent phenomenon. For the classical and medieval worlds, poetry meant something longer and primarily narrative epic, brief epic, romance, or tale. If there was a hierarchy of genres, epic was at the top of it; lyric poetry was a "minor" form. In the Renaissance this hierarchy still obtained. Petrarch certainly thought his
Africa
, a Virgilian epic in Latin on Scipio Africanus, a more "important" work than his famous sonnets. Spenser certainly thought
The Faerie Queene
more definitive of his status as a ''major" poet than the
Four Hymnes
or the
Amoretti
. There were "major" lyrics, like odes or canzones, but these could still not make a poet "major." And lyrics in the Renaissance were not primarily what we call lyric poemsthey were songs (meant to be sung with accompaniment) or they were parts of sequences. Pastorals were often parts of sequences, and most of all, the sonnet, the most distinctive Renaissance lyric form, was typically composed in sequences or cycles.
The stand-alone lyric not meant to be sung and not part of a sequence is an invention of the seventeenth centuryor perhaps, as with so many things, a reinvention of a Roman mode. The key new phenomenon is the title. This is truly new. Classical lyrics did not have titles; Renaissance sonnets do not have titles. Tottel's famous miscel-
 
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lany
Songes and Sonnettes
(1557)presented poems with titles, but these were editorial rather than authorial, and they were descriptions rather than titles: "The Lover Bewaileth the Absence of his Beloved," and so on. This feature of lyric poetry that we take for grantedthat poems have titles (or are marked as "untitled" when they don't)seems to have been invented in England in the first part of the seventeenth century. George Herbert's
The Temple
(1633) is the first modern collection of lyrics. Each poem has a title, not merely a description or designation, given to it by the author, often a title so witty or oblique that it could have been given to the poem only by the author.
And what do titles signify? First of all, they signify the full and final commitment of the lyric to print culture. Titles are part of the world of print. Second, they signify the sense of the lyric as a full and complete work in itself. Coincident with thisperhaps identical with itthey signify the lyric as a genre to which a major poet could be fully and exclusively committed. Again, Herbert is the clearest case, but his achievement would not have been possible without the powerful figures of John Donne and Ben Jonson behind him. These three figuresDonne, Jonson, and Herbertdominate the field of the English lyric from the beginning of the seventeenth century to the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 after the triumphs and failures of the English revolution. These three poets were not only masters in themselves but were instantly recognized as such and proved to be fruitful and highly usable models for writers of the lyric in English for the next fifty years. The literary culture of England was ready for the emergence of the lyric in the different modes that these three poets represent.
Donne and the New Love Lyric
Perhaps the first thing to say about John Donne is that he was not a professional poet. He was, however, a professional intellectual. Writing poetry, for him, was not merely (as it might have been for Sir Philip Sidney) a gentlemanly accomplishment and recreation. It was a way for Donne to show his wit, his skill, his learning, his rhetorical command. It was a way of showing himself to be one of the brightest of the bright young lawyers at Lincoln's Inn seeking positions in the employ of one of the great councillors or noblemen. Donne did not publish his poemsthat would have been vulgar and misleading (suggesting that
 
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he wanted to be an "author")but his poems circulated very widely in manuscript.
Everyone who was anyone with an interest in literature in London in the 1590s knew that Donne was an accomplished writer of unusual and striking poems, a formidable "wit." Donne's poems were self-display and self-advertisement, but they were also more than that, and any account that does not attempt to suggest this "more" is as misleading as an account that overly idealizes the poems and treats Donne as an ''author." Donne was a serious intellectual as well as a professional one. The pressure of intellectionof a complex, skeptical, probing, intelligenceis one of the most distinctive features of Donne's verse. This pressure penetrates the surface and is felt in the structure of even his lightest and slightest pieces.
Donne's earliest poetic endeavors included small "books" of satires and elegies as well as individual lyrics for friends to copy out. The choice of these forms, elegy and satire, is highly significant. It used to be said that Donne rejected models, but the truth is that he caused a revolution in poetry not by rejecting models but by changing them. He rejected Renaissance models, especially Petrarch, and imitated the Ovid of the elegiesurbane, detached, humorous, "low"rather than the Ovid of the
Metamorphoses
narrative, mythological, and "high."
From the beginning of his poetic career, Donne was writing a kind of antipoetry. When he began writing poetry in the 1590s, the sonnet boom (following the publication of
Astrophil and Stella
) was at its peak. Donne wrote satires. He may not be the first writer of Horatian verse satire in English (there is some dispute about this), but he is certainly among the first. His persona in the satires is probably much like his historical personan intellectual struggling to maintain detachment from a compromised and engulfing political and social world. In the first of the satires, Donne addresses a "fondling motley humorist"a foolish, unstable typewhom Donne follows, "against my conscience" into the street. The poem manifests Donne's characteristic techniquesbold, colloquial address, metrical roughness, striking phrases. Most of all, it manifests the complex drama of the Donnean lyric, where the speaker's attitudes as well as those of his interlocutor are being interrogated.
The greatest of the five satires is the third. This poem confronts the central concern of sixteenth-century Europe, the division of the Church into competing churches; it shows the seriousness of the witty young Donne, the man who was born into an intensely Roman
 
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Catholic family but found himself impellednot just pragmaticallyto review his options. He knew about religious principles and religious resistance, but he had decided by the time of this poem (ca. 1595) that for him the key principle was the integrity of the individual conscience. It was in the name of this that he was willing to resist earthly authority, whether secular or "sacred." The major thrust of the poem is to defend religious/intellectual seeking"To stand inquiring right, is not to stray," Donne insists. The only kind of obedience that one can give to an earthly power"A Philip, or a Gregory, / A Harry, or a Martin''is limited obedience: "That thou mayest rightly obey power, her bounds know." The writer of this poem, the young John Donne, is not about to accept anything on authority.
It would be surprising to find Donne taking a less probing and skeptical view of the erotic life than he does of power, or religion. He is equally unconventional in this realm, though he does not seek simply to shock the respectable and the "high-minded." The elegies are as formally and culturally daring as the satiresthey are another form, unusual in English, adopted from Roman poetryand they manifest an even wider range of tones than do the satires. A "mere" rhetorical exercise like "The Comparison" takes on real poetic power in its remarkably precise and detailed evocations of harsh versus tender lovemaking.
"The Bracelet" is a jeu d'esprit, a mock lament over "the losse of his Mistresses Chaine, for which he made satisfaction," but it is also something like a sustained defense of "worldliness." It is a meditation on goldnot only as a symbolic or physical or metaphysical substance, but as money. At its most interesting, the poem accepts a world in which gold "provides / All things," including friends and his mistress's love: "Thou wilt love me lesse when they are gone." Donne is trying to fully inhabitwith clear eyes but little bitternessa nontranscendental world, a world fully defined by social realities.
Donne does this again in "Loves Progresse," the most "outrageous" of the elegies (not licensed for publication until 1669), in which he argues for a strongly genital focus in male heterosexual love. Gold returns. Donne distinguishes between abstractly "valuing" gold"from rust, from soil, from fire ever free"and loving it because "'tis made / By our new nature (Use) the soul of trade." Love exists in the realm of the social, the nontranscendental"Although we see Celestial Bodies move / Above the earth, the earth we till and love." In his other great
 
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elegy about sex, "Going to Bed," Donne presents the physical as equivalent to, or a form of, the transcendental.
Ultimately, however, Donne's importance as a poet rests on the volume of lyric poems known (from the 1635, second edition) as the "Songs and Sonets." This is an odd title for the volume, since it suggests familiarity. The printer is harking back to Tottel's volume at the start of the Elizabethan period, but the Donne collection contains no sonnets and only two songs (one of them very peculiar). As one would expect from the satires and elegies, many of the "Songs and Sonets" are cynical about love and the erotic life, but, as one would also expect, this cynicism is often subjected to scrutiny.
"Communitie" is a consciously "libertine" poem. It arguesDonne as a young lawyer and rhetorician loves to arguethat all males may, indeed must, treat all women in the same wayas undifferentiated objects to be used. The key argument is that this is logically required; since women are "things indifferent,'' men must have a detached attitude toward them (this is very much a world of gendered "us" and "them")"we may neither love, nor hate." The final stanza, however, unbalances the poem. Instead of praise of intelligent discrimination, we are told that "he that devours" and "he that leaves all" both proceed as properly as "he that but tastes." Abstinence and excess are suddenly possibilities. Libertine equilibrium seems hard to maintain. The final lines give up all pretense of equilibrium and become a defense of "devouring." The poem is fully aware of its instabilities, which become its subject. This happens repeatedly in the "libertine" and cynical "Songs and Sonets."
"The Indifferent" again dramatizes the difficulty of detachment as the speaker, who begins by parading his "indifference" progressively grows more vehement in his rejection of being emotionally "bound." His great fear is of making himself vulnerable. In "Womans constancy" the speaker avoids vulnerability through a preemptive strike against a betrayal he has no reason to expect. It is not clear which is greatestthe speaker's contempt for (and fear of) rhetoric, women, or himself. "Loves diet" shows the way in which misogyny functions as a defense. The speaker attains his much sought after indifference through devaluing everything he is tempted to cherish in the woman with whom he is involved.
These poems reveal cynicism as well as manifesting it; they show the pressures that shape it and that it fails to contain. The extraordinary thing, however, is not that Donne wrote these poems; one might have
 
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predicted their attitudes, maybe even their brilliance, from the Satires and Elegies. What is extraordinary is that Donne wrote a large handful of poems that magnificently represent what we normally mean by lovemutual, assured, exclusive, passionate, consummated, and committed. Donne was one of the creators of this conception. When he gave up the ideal of indifference and invulnerability, he came upon this other ideal. That this possibility could existand that he could experience itstruck him as little short of miraculous. His greatest love poems are filled with wonder and delight at the way in which shared and consummated love creates the experience of transcendence within the material world. "The good-morrow" seems to present this conception "dawning" on the speaker. Through contemplating the meaning of consummation, of mutuality, and of sincerity, a strange possibility occurs to Donne (or his "speaker"). He recalls a premise of Aristotelian physics"Whatever dyes, was not mixt equally." Equality raises the possibility of permanence.
In another morning poem, "The Sunne Rising," Donne more militantly asserts the exemption of this one thingmutually shared lovefrom the most basic rule that governs the universe, the rule of change: "Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clyme, / Nor howres, dayes, moneths, which are the rags of time." It is no accident that many years later in his life, after he had taken orders in the Church of England, Donne said of the mercy of God: "The names of first or last derogate from it, for first and last are but ragges of time."
Donne knew exactly what he was doing in these poems. Celebration, for him, did not require any suspension of his critical faculties or of the kinds of awareness embodied in the "cynical" poems. "The good-morrow" knows that the two lovers could be watching each other intently out of fear of betrayal. "The Sunne Rising" knows that its hyperboles are so outrageous as to call attention to their (literal) falsity. But capturing an emotional, not a literal, truth was the point. "A Lecture upon the Shadow" seems to bring cynicism right into the heart of the love experience. This poem uses noon rather than dawn as its moment. Noon becomes a metaphor of total candor"a brave clearenesse'' between the lovers. Any hint of falsity will create a shadowor rather, it will bring on total darkness since, in the realm of love, "his first minute, after noone, is night." This sounds horribly pessimistic, but the point, as in "The good-morrow," is that love, unlike the sun and the earth, can continue "growing, or full constant."

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