English Literature

The Poetry of Abraham Cowley by David Trotter

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By David Trotter

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II It is because these codes change that we do not read a love-lyric by Donne in the same way as we read a love-lyric by Samuel Daniel. Sonnet 9 of Delia and 'The Flea' both position lover and mistress; both communicate about their own communications, guiding us to an inter-pretation; but these (meta)communications differ, each one producing a different relation between lover and mistress, a different kind of 'message'. The sonnet-cycles of the 1590s placed the mistress in a position of dominance by defining her as the locus of paradox, as sonnet 60 of Astrophil and Stella demonstrates: my good Angell guides me to the place, Where all my good I do in Stella see, That heav'n ofjoyes throwes onely downe on me Thundred disdaines and lightnings of disgrace: But when the ruggedst step of Fortune's race WHEN The Lyrics 25 Makes me fall from her sight, then sweetly she With words, wherein the Muses' treasure be, Shewes love and pi tie to my absent case.

The speaker wriggles out of despondency by a piece of rather uninteresting sophistry, but one is left feeling that this is a poem about the sudden failure of a convention which everyone had assumed would function automatically, if not always to good effect. I think that in 'Her Name' and in 'Her Unbelief' Cowley is pondering his own inability to write Elizabethan lyrics, lyrics which would unashamedly print out a collective memory instead of delivering the lover up to wry solitariness. But he also felt, perhaps more strongly, the appeal of that alternative frame of reference implied by Donne's rakish lyrics, by 'The Will' or 'The Flea'.

This remark signals the emergence of a new code which trades on its own excess, producing poems to be enjoyed for their extravagance, their breaking of bounds, rather than for their conveniency. There had of course been among Donne's immediate predecessors poets whose work revealed a sufficiently 'ridling humour', a preoccupation with the refinements of wit: Sidney, The Lyrics 29 Greville, Chapman. But Donne establishes wit as the major frame of reference for his secular poetry. His more rakish lyrics, which had the greater influence on subsequent poets, advertise themselves as witty exercises.

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