ABSTRACT
Faced with the unutterable, the melancholic poet records a dislike of having sung. How, George Wither's speaker asks, can he “elect a style” that is—to voice Milton's similar concern—“answerable”? The question is prompted by a ubiquitous refrain of lyric: if only. Of course, longing for greater eloquence is hardly unique to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poetry. We nonetheless misread these lines if we assume, as is all too easy within a post-Romantic paradigm, that the longing to “imitate that fatall note” necessarily expresses a desire to sing as naturally as the bird. I want to suggest that this reading is based on two anachronistic assumptions: first, that the early modern poet aspires to authentic self-expression; and second, that the bird the poet would imitate is an organic one.
