ABSTRACT
We will be able to relish the intriguing compound that is Jonson’s praise more fully if we have a clearer sense of the meaning of another metaphorical concept, complementary to the turn, that gives the poems of praise much of their distinctive force: the stand. For this evocative word suggests several interrelated kinds of prominence that virtue achieves. In poem after poem Jonson shows his subjects variously thrusting up to stand like outcroppings of the Golden Age; looming like survivals or restorations of antique structures and images; encompassing, and sometimes assuming to the eye, upright shapes that represent inner form; or, finally, metamorphosed into straight trees rooted firmly in the English soil. Moreover, more than one of these senses of “stand” are sometimes simultaneously present in the same poem, so that their rich connotations of continuity, commemorative power, preeminence, monumentality, and moral uprightness are experienced as a single powerful blend difficult to analyze.
