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نصيطوووه
From : http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/s...htm#carewThere are of course many non-aggressive poems on standard themes among Carew's works. Carew, like Donne, often played at creating strikingly original compliments. 'Ask me no more where Jove bestowes' is perhaps the most beautiful song of its period. Few poets have ever created such purely lyrical lines where the logic of analogy is so completely compressed that the statements are untranslatable into prose paraphrase. The lyrical songs, however, are the minor side of Carew. Carew is too realistic, and perhaps too self-protective, to make many flights into irrational beauty. But the lyric poems do reveal an intense emotional warmth which Carew otherwise keeps under control, and which would seem to explain his need to establish clear, secure personal relationships. Carew's poetry deals with the side of reality that is often hidden from public discussion: sexual appetites, the desire to dominate over others, the need for warmth and security, and the need to protect oneself against harm. While these are usually thought of as psychological drives, we are often aware of their existence; our social values recognize a delicate system of checks and balances in the give and take between people. Manners are the common means to legislate over this potential battlefield. However, manners are too slipshod to rule over all areas of society where clashes between personalities occur. Individuals or social groups often manage to appropriate manners for their own use, and then injustice occurs. What was meant to be flexible becomes rigid; what was meant to give rights leads to serfdom. The great themes of literature often derive from this border area between social values and psychological needs. In the modern novel there is a constant search for some superior organization of personality which will enable us to respond to this personal side of reality. Lawrence's novels record, when he is not being self-willed and didactic, a constant oscillation between the assertion of the ego, with its desire to be independent, and the search for warmth and security, which results from the weakening of the ego and its fusion with others. While Lawrence was unable to solve this problem, he had a heightened awareness that both the constant assertion of personality and the annihilation of individuality lead to psychic sickness. Nor is the concern with the proper relationship of individuals to others a peculiarly modern literary theme. The supposed immorality of Restoration comedy derives from its naked acceptance of the view that man is appetitive matter in motion seeking satisfactions. It proposes as morally superior the man who clearly understands human nature, and who manages to control it to his own advantage.7 The heroes and heroines of Restoration comedy continually seek to discover what others are really like so that they may live on rational terms with them. This is the theme of The Man of Mode and the significance of the brilliant proviso scene in The Way of the World. The 'honesty' of Wycherley is that he refuses to play the game and insists upon a more rigorous moral code. The attitude of Restoration comedy has its origins in the wit of Carew. Carew's achievement is to have created a social pose of urbane worldliness which opens communication between the sexes but which threatens retaliation if one is injured. It is a means of mastering reality so that one may live within society without being a dupe or a cad. Essentially this is a problem of love. Since courtship is a matter of personal relations, it provides us with a microcosm of the tensions between the individual and society. In love we desire union with another person, by which we may feel at once secure in our giving and taking of affections, and yet self-sufficient in the completeness of our personality in relation to the external world. There is, however, a masochistic perversion of this in which, through self-hate, the ego is totally extinguished. There is also an aggressive attitude in which the ego is never extinguished, but attempts to appropriate or possess others without returning affection.8 Courtship creates both possibilities at once: the overly compliant person who sacrifices his identity to become part of the other's narcissistic universe. While Carew's poems may seem to injure others, they are actually attempts to correct the unequal relationship implicit within the petrarchan rhetoric of courtship. If Carew's poems do not speak, as some of Donne's do, of a fusion of personalities, they at least have the value of creating situations where the fullness of love is possible. It is a razor-sharp position from which slight deviations can result in a disagreeable toughness. However, there is in Carew's best poetry a rich awareness of the complexity of our relations with others. I think that I can illustrate the many dimensions of Carew's awareness by using Sir John Suckling as a foil. I have no wish to devalue Suckling; in an age of excellent poets he is superior to most. However, Suckling has less insight into the complexities of life; he reduces a valuable part of existence to a few simple ideas. In 'Of thee (kind boy)' the themes are that man is merely appetite and that beauty is relative. Love is a pleasing folly ('Make me but mad enough') and a product of the fancy (''tis love in love that makes the sport'). Even Suckling's libertinism is grossly literal (''tis the appetite Makes eating a delight'), and lacks the intense philosophical scepticism that makes Rochester an important poet. Suckling's talent is in his technique. He is a master of the manipulation of syllabic rhythms, the use of tonal modulation within a poem, and the modification of rhyme patterns. However, he never comes to grips with the substance of reality. Carew's poems are less simple, and describe life's essential battles. In a sense each of Carew's poems has a double existence: there is the poetry of the brilliantly finished surface of the poem itself; and there is the poetry of Carew's attempt to impose a civilized order upon the desperate chaos of man's inner realities. Notes1F. R. Leavis, Revaluation (1936), p. 16. 2See S. Freud, Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, transl. J. Strachey (1960), pp. 140-58. Since I am concerned with the social purpose of Carew's poetry, my essay ignores the sadistic element that Freud finds in aggressive wit. 3Four of the seven love lyrics which represent Carew in Grierson's ****************physical Lyrics and Poems are aggressive or threatening. In the Oxford Book of Seventeenth Century Verse, seven out of nine love poems are aggressive. I include among these 'Good Counsell to a Young Maid', which is a warning against mistaking man's sexual desires for love. The proportion is somewhat less in Carew's total works; but I am concerned with the attitude behind Carew's best poems. 4Donne's 'Elegie XIX', lines 40-6. Also see Clay Hunt, Donne's Poetry, New Haven (1954), pp. 18-21. 5All quotations of Carew are from The Poems of Thomas Carew, ed. R. Dunlap, Oxford (1949). 6See Hunt, pp. 44-50. 7Recent studies that take this point of view include N. N. Holland, The First Modern Comedies, Cambridge, Mass. (1959); and D. Underwood, Etherege and the Seventeenth-Century Comedy of Manners, New Haven (1957). 8A useful discussion of this is N. O. Brown, Life Against Death, New York (1959), pp. 40-54.Source: Bruce King, "The Strategy of Carew's Wit," in A Review of English Literature, Vol. 5, No. 3, July, 1964, pp. 42-51.
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