The Columbia History of British Poetry (53 page)

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Authors: Carl Woodring,James Shapiro

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with heroic poetry. One is the claim to write with poetic authority. The conclusion of sonnet 45 shows that the "forcibleness or
energia
" of these poems turns persuasion of a mistress into an authoritative mode of self-presentation. The sonnet presents the irony, as Astrophel sees it, between Stella's failure to take pity on her woebegone lover and her shedding tears when she heard "a fable, which did show / Of lovers never known, a grievous case." The octave narrates the situation, and the sestet directly addresses Stella:
Alas, if Fancy drawn by imaged things,
Though false, yet with free scope more grace doth breed
Than servant's wrack, where new doubts honor brings;
Then think, my dear, that you in me do read
Of lover's ruin some sad tragedy:
I am not I, pity the tale of me.
There is more to this ending than the teasingly witty persuasion that the mistress can acknowledge her lover if she will pretend to ignore his actual social existence. The final line has a stronger force. With a definitively paradoxical formula, it is a self-declaration of alienation from self. In so presenting "the tale of me," Astrophel becomes not simply a courtly guise of Philip Sidney, but a representative lover. The very names Stella (Latin, star) and Astrophel (Greek, star-lover) suggest the potentialities of human nature that engage some of the most impressive sonnets (like 71, or 25, which tests a Platonic intuition that humans can view "those skies / Which inward sun to heroic mind displays"). In other poems Astrophel represents himself as not only similar to mythological demigods (Morpheus in sonnet 32 and, most remarkably, the moon, made masculine, in sonnet 31), but also as being, in his plight, the source of their meaning. A series of sonnets (3840) on the lover's sleeplessness is distinguished from other poets' performances on this theme by the feeling of moral and psychological consequence that comes from representating humanly definitive conflicts played out in the lover's psyche. In the poems just alluded to, the speaker tends to be larger than (courtly) life, but even the courtly Astrophel is consistently defiant, setting himself against the world, as he claims to weigh all issues of human conduct and value in the balance of his love.
The lover's represented presence, combined with its poetic and rhetorical brilliance, gave
Astrophel and Stella
its literary authority. Its posthumous publication in 1591 set off a vogue of sonneteering to
 
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which in some sense we owe Shakespeare's sonnets and Donne's love poems, in both of which the love lyric takes on heroic dimensionsin the range of realities engaged and in the lyric speaker's claimed adequacy to them.
Ben Jonson's poems are English examples of classical genres in which Spenser and Sidney did not writeepigrams, epistles, odes, epodes, lyrics (in the strict sense of poems to be sung), and elegies (poems in couplets, usually worldly treatments of love). These poems are gathered in three collections. The 1616 folio
Works
contains a book of
Epigrams
, which the author called "the ripest of my studies," and fifteen poems called
The Forest
, because
silva
(woods), among Latin authors, denoted a poetic miscellany. The same metaphor appears in
Underwood
("poems of later growth"), ninety poems published in the 1641
Works
, which Jonson was preparing at the time of his death. The poems reflect the two sides of Jonsonthe commitment to order and moral purity, on the one hand, and a fascination with appetite, physical turbulence, and performative virtuosity, on the otherthat are evident in his plays and in the main structural device of his masques, where idealized representations of the monarch and his court are set against the coarse disorderliness of the antimasque. Jonson's songs established for English verse a vein of rhythmic fluency and chaste diction that is epitomized by the ''Hymn to Diana" in
Cynthia's Revels
. At the other extreme, and equally Jonsonian, are the withering caricatures of his satiric epigrams and the vehement denunciations and inexhaustible comic catalogues of some of the longer poems.
It is not surprising that a turbulent spirit seeks out and affirms stability and order, but to write convincingly at both extremes is a major literary achievement. Equally impressive is the way Jonson's poetry, at its frequent best, avoids the moral rigidity and compulsive railing that one finds in a number of critic figures (clearly ironic self-portraits) in his plays.
One reason the poems are more flexibly alive than they can be made to seem is Jonson's sensitivity to what different genres call for and make possible. Epigrams and epistles give rise to satiric vehemence, songs call forth fluent loveliness. But the two elements can come together, as in the famous "Ode. To Himself," in which the brilliantly devised stanzamore elaborate than in songs, but still sustaining voiceaccommodates satiric awareness of the state of poetry, the self-reproach that comes from
 
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it ("Where dost thou careless lie," it begins), and the moral and artistic quickening of the spirit that leads to the final resolve to "sing high and aloof, / Safe from the wolf's black jaw, and the dull ass's hoof." Convincing though they are in context, these lines may also suggest that the sense of life in Jonson's poetry depends on impulses to self-protection and rejection. But it is remarkable how responsive Jonson's verse is to its own conditions and those of the processes of judging one's self and the world.
If the relative fixity of an ode encourages celebrating sharp differences between "minds that are great and free" and the "chattering [mag]pies" of print and stage, the couplets of Jonson's epistles, elegies, and epigrams bring out the activity of discrimination. ''To Penshurst" (the country house of Sidney's family) begins:
Thou art not, Penshurst, built to envious show
    Of touch or marble, nor canst boast a row
Of polished pillars, or a roof of gold;
    Thou hast no lantern whereof tales are told,
Of stair, or courts; but stand'st an ancient pile,
    And these grudged at, art reverenced the while.
As compared to the couplets of Dryden and Pope, the other great English neoclassical satirists, Jonson's are less closed and less given to neat symmetry. His sentences continue across line and couplet endings, to give the effect of a mind that notices details and imagines the motives of a situation. The sense of stable assertion in the last line quoted comes from a grammar that acknowledges the potential moral mobility of an observer and thus discriminates between two kinds of admiration and their objects.
Jonson's emphasis on moral discrimination and judgment follows from his refusal, despite impulses to remain "high and aloof," to consider himself exempt from the human condition. The satirist and his readers are to be esteemed precisely because, "living where the matter is bred," they have the strength to value poems about human frailties. (The quoted phrase is from epigram 94, "To Lucy, Countess of Bedford [Jonson's patron], with Mr. Donne's Satires.") Even a poem that is styled a farewell "To the World" (
Forest
4), is firm about the conditions of its gesture:
But what we are born for we must bear:
    Our frail condition it is such
That, what to all may happen here,
    If't chance to me, I must not grutch.
 
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Else I my state should much mistake,
    To harbor a divided thought
From all my kind; that, for my sake,
    There should a miracle be wrought.
This humanism, however austere, underlies the continuity of Jonson's poetry with Spenser's and Sidney's. In writing his epigrams, a type of poem thought to be "bold, licentious, full of gall" (epigram 2), Jonson gave unprecedented prominence to poems praising noble (often in both senses) individuals. The characteristic vein is represented by his hailing William Roe as an embodiment of "that good Aeneas, passed through fire" (epigram 128) and his tribute to William Camden, the great scholar and Jonson's old teacher, as the one "to whom I owe / All that I am in arts, all that I know" (epigram 14). The
Epigrams
are thus not only a collection of satirical portraits (e.g., ''On Court-Worm," "On Poet-Ape," "To Fine Lady Would-be") but equally importantly a gallery of contemporary heroes and heroines. The famous poem on Shakespeare, written for the First Folio edition of his plays (1623), is of a piece with these heroic epigrams. In all of them it is crucial to Jonson that the figures he praises are actual living persons. As he says in the great Pindaric ode, "To the Immortal Memory and Friendship of That Noble Pair, Sir Lucius Cary and Sir H. Morison":
You lived to be the great surnames
And titles by which all made claims
Unto the virtue. Nothing perfect done
But as a Cary, or a Morison.
Sharing the view that literary heroes are moral examples, Jonson inverts Sidney's argument that fictional figures are the more efficacious examples. Jonson's heroes are sustained not (like Spenser's) by the cosmos so much as by their human fellowsthe circle of those who recognize and bear witness to nobility of spirit. Hence Jonson is a great poet both of the conditions of readingthe links of understanding between writer and audienceand of friendship, the like-mindedness that brings us together in shared trust and (as the food-and wine-laden epigram 101, "Inviting a Friend to Supper," shows) shared pleasures.
Jonson's idealizing realism, which led him to replace the fictional heroes of traditional epic with his living contemporaries, informs his self-presentation in poetry. Spenser's and Sidney's personae, Colin

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