Belongingness With the Supernatural In the Early Modern Poems

state had declined: contemporary, educated disbelief or at best scepticism is reflected in his verse; there he mentions the gods, in short, because Augustus wanted traditional religious belief to be revived. The other side of the debate maintains that such a view offers an inaccurate perception of religious belief and practice in the time of Augustus and, as a result, if Horace mentions the gods then one cannot assert he does that as a doubter or unbeliever. We present no view on the debate since it lies outside the scope of this study; nevertheless, the debate touches on the issue of how the supernatural is evoked and used by Jonson’s Horatian speaker in the lines quoted above. [8] See Karl Galinsky, Augustan Culture: An Interpretive Introduction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), especially at page 16. Subsequently that work is cited as Galinsky. [9] See A. D. Cousins’ discussion of Upon Appleton House with reference to the country house poem as bringing those elements together (in The Political Identity of Andrew Marvell, eds idem and Conal Condren [Aldershot: Ashgate, 1990], pages 53-54). Cf. R. C. Davis’s Utopia and the Ideal Society: A Study of English Utopian Writing 1516-1700 (1981; rpt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), especially at pages 11-40. See also McBride, Country House Discourse, page 160. [10] The often-made point, following Raymond Williams, is that the poem renders labour invisible. But Jonson’s speaker is amplifying the numen of the Sidneys and thus not seeking, as if through a conjurer’s illusion, to make the actual disappear; rather, he evidently compels the reader to perceive the Sidneys at the level of myth and thereby he creates--in rhetorical terms--fabula: “a poet’s tale, acted for the most part, by gods and men” as Hoskins put it (see Lee A. Sonnino, A Handbook to Sixteenth-Century Rhetoric [London: Routledge, 1968], at page 98). Jonson’s speaker plays, in other words, with the “as if” of hyperbole (dementiens)--a familiar tactic in Donne’s amatory lyrics. [11] We mean numen to signify Jonson’s blurring the line between the notions of “divine sway” and “the will, might, authority of powerful persons”--to supply relevant glossings offered by Lewis and Short. [12] Cf. Galinsky: “Similarly, the link between auctoritas and the principes viri, the eminent citizens of the state, is attested frequently and was easily transferable to the princeps Augustus” (ibid.). [13] One might suggest that Jonson’s speaker implies Wroth to have a self-congratulatory, lambent dullness. Parfitt, “The Poetry of Thomas Carew,” Renaissance and Modern Studies, 12 (1968), 56-67. [15] “Much in little” was an early modern commonplace; but “much [that is] sweet in little” seems more appropriate here and to be, in effect, Carew’s version of the phrase. Hence it forms part of his disrupting notions such as concordia discors (a discordant concord), gravitas (a weighty sobriety of manner), and auctoritas (“might, power, authority, reputation, dignity, influence, weight,” as Lewis and Short gloss it). [16] A “pleasant place,” that is to say, an ideal environment. [17] For an ideologically focused reading of the poem, which is certainly interesting and valuable but does not pay close attention to the rhetorical duplicities of the text, see McBride’s Country House Discourse, pages 114-116. [18] Again. But then, one might ask, what outside royalty--and most of its courtiers--is? [19] Although what he says might, in fact (and we anticipate a little here), be taken to indicate Carew’s spiritual bankruptcy, it does not automatically imply the spiritual bankruptcy of the estate in question and (or) of the country house genre. On the other hand, it would be reasonable to ask how those could be clearly distinguished. [20] Jenkins, in his Feigned Commonwealths, in fact sees the episode as a “parody of transubstantiation [which] converts Laudian, high Anglican ceremonies into the economic basis of the estate [ . . . , ]” (page 79). [21] Among the more useful discussions of Herrick are the following: A. Leigh Deneef, “This Poetic Liturgie”: Robert Herrick’s Ceremonial Mode (Durham: Duke University Press, 1974); Leah S. Marcus, The Politics of Mirth: Jonson, Herrick, Milton, Marvell, and the Defense of Old Holiday Pastimes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); Anne Baynes Coiro, Robert Herrick’s “Hesperides” and the Epigram Book Tradition (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988). See also Corns, as cited above, at pages 171-182. [22] As Cousins has observed, Appleton House manifests caritas and civilitas in accord with the Penshurst paradigm.