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Sir Walter Raleigh (1552/54-1618)
The hyphenated man. During his life he played so many roles, that at the end he was able to look back and see it as a series of performances. It’s perhaps ironic that while his date of birth may be disputed, the place time and manner of his dying could probably be noted exactly.
Even his execution had elements of performance.
Andrew Marvell (1621-1678)
Student: Sir! Is he trying to get her clothes off….?
Me: ….
Student: It’s not gonna work is it?
If it’s not surprising that so many English poems seem to have a speaker, usually male, addressing someone, usually female, and trying to get them to undress, what is remarkable is how many of those speakers are doomed to failure if the poem is all they’ve got.
And this is one of the most famous examples. Was any woman ever seduced by being told; ‘You’ll be dead soon, in the grave, and the worms will be chomping on those body parts I’m currently obsessed by. So get your clothes off’?
Which should make people stop and realise that rather than an imagined speech, this is a rhetorical exercise. It moves very logically in three parts: If… However…Therefore. This is a poet giving a virtuoso performance. Creating brilliant phrases, memorable images, but not creating a speech that could be delivered to a human being to bring about a desired outcome.
However, even as a rhetorical exercise, it’s disturbing. It’s like a clever joke that has gone sour. If you pay attention, not only do the images seem inappropriate or disturbing, the ‘therefore’ seems to have slipped ….the poem begins with : ‘I want you’ as its purpose, but by the end the speaker’s purpose is to cheat time and his mistress is just a means to that end.
Marvell’s biographer could find no evidence for a mistress. Make of that what you will.
John Milton (1608-1674)
This is the third of three readings from ‘Paradise Lost’.
This is from Book Twelve, line 624 ff. It’s the end of the poem.
Although Adam and Eve are expelled from Paradise, they turn towards their future and the world is, literally, ‘all before them’. Although this is their punishment, it doesn’t sound like it. True they are banned from Paradise, but the poem escapes the theology and it sounds more like the start of a magnificent shred adventure, or the early days of a marriage.
And that’s enough Miton for a while.
John Milton (1608-1674)
This is the second of three readings from ‘Paradise Lost’.
This is from Book Nine, line 421 ff
Satan has escaped from Hell and found Adam and Eve. In this extract he finds Eve alone in the Garden. The extract includes one of my favourite moments in English Poetry (I have many favourite moments) when Satan is made ‘Stupidly good’ by the sight of Eve.
It also contains some fine examples of the unusual way in which Milton dealt with English Syntax. Here’s one sentence:
He sought them both, but wished his hap might find
Eve Separate: he wished, but not with hope
Of what so seldom chanced, when to his wish
Beyond his hope, Eve separate he spies,
Veiled in a cloud of fragrance, where she stood
Half Spied, so thick the roses bushing round
About her glowed, oft stooping to support
Each flow’r of slender stalk, whose head though gay
Carnation, purple, azure, or specked with gold,
Hung drooping unsustained: them she upstays
Gently with myrtle band, mindless the while,
Herself, though fairest unsupported flow’r
From her best prop so far, and storm so nigh.’
If you’re reading Paradise Lost, for the first time you need to be patient. The syntax does become familiar and the poem is worth the effort it requires.
John Milton (1608-1674)
This is the first of three readings from ‘Paradise Lost’.
This is from Book One, lines 242-270
The story begins with the fallen angels in Hell. In this brief excerpt Satan has emerged from the lake of fire into which he was cast down. He steps on to dry land, and surveying hell, his prison and the proof of his defeat, rebrands it as his kingdom: ‘What matter where, if I be still the same?’.
There are so many ways in which you could write a history of English poetry. You could study left handed poets throughout history, which would make your selection of poems easy as it wouldn’t matter if they were good poems as long as their authors were left handed*.
Or you could study it as the history of a practice, with significant practitioners and products. You’d have to consider why some were highly praised, and some forgotten, you’d have to look at who decided what was good, but in such a history Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’ is an essential work of English Poetry.
You may find his God repellent and very tedious and you may object to Milton’s theology or his views on marriage. You will struggle at times with his diction and his syntax. You might agree with Samuel Johnson that “Paradise Lost is one of the books which the reader admires and lays down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is’. But I think Johnson was wrong when he continued: ‘Its perusal is a duty rather than a pleasure’.
It is a magnificent work. Milton’s Satan is one of the great characters in English Literature and the poem Is veined with great and memorable passages. if you read it aloud, you can not only hear Shakespeare in the background, but you can also hear Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’. A history of poetry as practice would consider poets reading poets, poems responding to poems. The way a sound is taken up and passed on.
*replace ‘left handed poets’ with any group of your choice.
John Dryden (1631-1700)
Dryden’s poetry sits uncomfortably between the ease of the Renaissance and the familiarity of the Romantics. Like Pope he was a superb poet, a master of the heroic couplet, like Pope and Swift a master of the devestating put down, and like Pope brevity was not his strong point.
But here he is laying into Thomas Shadwell, crowning him the King of Dullness. You have to go along for the ride. Some of the names will be unfamilair, some of the references will be lost, but the overall drive of the satire should be obvious adn enjoyable.
It’s a long piece to read. And though I’ve tried to do it justice I’m not sure I have. The best Dryden I’ve heard is in the film ‘England My England’ where whoever plays him does a superb job of reading the poems.
There is also a minor technical problem. All the versions of the Poem I have seen name Dryden’s victim Sh-. I tried reading it like this but it didn’t work so Shadwell is named.
This is taken from ‘Selected Poetry and Prose of John Dryden’ edited by Earl Milner.