English 415: Seventeenth Century English Literature

		*Electronic Reserve Text: Ilona Bell"The Role of the Lady in Donne's Songs and Sonets"* Studies in English Literature 23 (1985) It has been said of Donne that "he was an egocentric sensualist who ignored the feelings of the woman," and despite arguments to the contrary, the charge lingers.' Many readers continue to believe that Donne "cannot see [the woman], does not apparently want to see her; for it is not of her that he writes, but of his relation to her; not of love but of himself loving."(2) Throughout this century most critics have read the Songs and Sonets more as an assertion of Donne's ego than a response to the lady's feelings, more as an expression of ideas he brings to the relationship than perceptions which emerge from it.(3) I offer a minority perspective, some speculations as to why Donne has been unjustly accused, and some arguments for granting Donne what he in fact achieves: an empathetic, imaginative, and varied response to the lady's point of view.
		--------- 1 Kenneth Muir, ed., Collected Poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1949), p. xxix. Joan Bennett, "The Love Poetry of John Donne," Seventeenth-Century Studies Presented to Sir Herbert Grierson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938), pp. 85-104, still provides the most compelling and sensible defense of Donne's attitude toward love and women, largely because she stresses the quality of the relation between the two lovers, but her position has not been universally accepted. Siivia Ruffo-Fiore, for example, in "Donne's Parody of the Petrarchan Lady," CLS 9.4 (December 1972) :392 407, is extremely harsh on the earthly woman's failure to live up to Donne's Petrarchan ideal. See also Iqbal Ahmad, "Woman in Donne's Love Poetry," Essays on John Donne: A Quater Centenary Tnbute, ed. Asloob Abroad Artsafti (Aligarb: Aligarh Muslim Univ., 1974). pp. 38-58, J. E. V. Crofts, "John Donne: A Reconsideration," John Donne: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Helen Gardner (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1962), p. 82. 3. The best response is J. B. Leishman, The Monarch of Wit, 7th edn. (London: Hutchinson, 1965), pp. 208- 25, but dismissive responses continue. Patrick Crutwell, for example, in "The Love Poetry of John Donne: Pealantique Weedes or Fresh Invention?" Metaphysical Poetry, ed. Malcolm Bradbury and David Palmet (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1971 ), p. 22, says "So much for the man: what of the woman? There is less to be said of her, since. ..all this poetry is composed exclusively, even domineeringly. from the viewpoint of the man. The woman is the partner in the sexual dance, and that is all she is." [114] Paradoxically, .Donne may have been ill-served on this issue both by the New Criticism and the biographical criticism it sought to supplant. When Sir Herbert Grierson first recommended Donne in 1921, he said that lithe central theme of [Donne's] poetry is ever his own intense personal moods, as a lover, a friend, an analyst of his own experiences worldly and religious" (my emphasis). In 1 937 J. E. V. Crofts observed that Donne is IISO conscious of himself [that] we are aware of him -the man speaking- in a manner and to a degree hardly to be paralleled in our reading of lyric poetry. (4) Certainly, intense self-consciousness is an essential element of Donne's genius, yet self-conscious ness can easily seem like self-absorption, an lIinclination to attitudes of with drawn egocentricity," a "nagging, nudging, quibbling stridency," and that is a serious limitation, as C. S. Lewis concluded: "Donne's poetry is too simple to satisfy. Its complexity is all on the surface --an intellectual and fully conscious complexity that we soon come to the end of. "(5) Ironically, Donne's poetry came to seem even more narrowly self-absorbed when critical attention shifted from the biographical identity of Donne the man to the dramatic "identity of the speaker" (the term is taken from that catechism of New Criticism, Understanding Poetry, by Brooks and Warren). The new critics posed endless questions about the speaker's tone, the speaker's choice of language, the speaker's complexly shifting, developing attitudes. As Leonard Unger concluded, Donne's "poetry and modern criticism both emphasize lithe conflict of attitudes within the mind of an individual"(6) Of course, New Criticism also stressed Donne's unusually concrete dramatic situations. Yet Donne's speaker seemed so brilliantly egocentric that the dramatic situations, the windows and curtains, the suns and ladies, only seemed to intensify the speaker's self-dramatizations and to provide a scene for his speculations.(7) As the speaker's erudite displays and internal conflicts grew, the lady disappeared further and further into the silence, an inanimate prop in the speaker's dramatic scene. --------------------------------- 4. Grierson, "Donne and Metaphysical Poetry, " John Donne's Poetry, ed. A. L. Clements (New York: Norton, 1966), p. 122; Crofts, p. 82. 5. Clay Hunt, Donne's Poetry: Essays in Literary Analysis (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1954), p. 176; Lewis, "Donne and 17th Century Love Poetry," John Donne's Poetry, p. 1 57. 6. Unger, Donne's Poetry and Modern Cn'ticism (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1950), p. 75. 7See Arnold Stein, John Donne's Lyrics: The Eloquence of Action (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1962), p. 166: "Certainly no other lyric poet has used the subject of his own mind so consistently as an object, as an end of art"; George Reuben Potter, "John Donne's Discovery of Himself," Univ. of California Publications in English (1934) 4: 3-23. Recent critical emphasis on the reader only strengthens Donne's solipsism; see Scott Wilson, "Process and Product: Reconstructing Donne's Penonae," SEL 20 (Winter 1980):91-103. [115] The most recent criticism of the Songs and Sonets has attempted to humanize Donne's soul, to emphasize feelings rather than intellect, psychology rather than philosophy.(8) I hope to contribute to this effort, for I propose a revisionist reading which gives more attention to the lady's dynamic, suasive effect upon the speaker's own intense personal moods.(9) To my mind, what Donne and his speaker expressed most intensely was not egocentricity or intellectuality but empathy, a quality all-too-rarely considered by Donne's critics. Jonathan Culler's dynamic poetics of the lyric provides an apposite theoretical model, a helpful corrective to the emphases of New Criticism and biographical criticism. Culler argues that the lyric brings lIinto being a voice and a force addressed, and this requires us to consider the relationship from which the qualities of the voice and the force could be drawn and to give it a central place within the poem." In Donne's Songs and Sonets "the force addressed" is most often a woman. We should accordingly afford her and the relationship she brings into being a more "central place" in the poems.(11) In its simplest manifestations, this argument seems unexceptionable, given Donne's typical dramatic situations. After all, Donne was capable of writing "Break of Day" from the woman's perspective. And in "A Valediction: of weeping," when the lady's tears drown the speaker's carefully crafted metaphors, he instantly sacrifices his argument and tries another that reflects the lady's feelings more accurately and thus "quickly make[s] that, which was nothing, All." When the speaker is lying in bed trying to impress and flatter and entertain the lady, when he is setting out on a dangerous journey and the lady is objecting tearfully, when he is dreaming a passionate dream and the lady thoughtfully appears, we must perforce think of her --the force addressed --as a real character who plays an independent and influential, if tacit, role in Donne's dramas. These moments are striking and well-recognized, but I cite them to illustrate a less evident point: the lady's acknowledged actions are only the most extravagant reminders of the continuing and even more important implied reactions which give her and the speaker's ---------------------- 8. See especially essays in Just So Much Honor, ed. Peter Amadeus Fiore (University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1972), and Barbara Hardy, The Advantage of Lyric : Essays on Feeling in Poetry, ch. 2, "Thinking and Feeling in the Songs and Sonnets of John Donne" (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1977), pp. 18-32. 9. Silvia Ruffo-Fiore argues that Petrarch made Donne skeptical about the poet's capacity to understand the lady. 10. Culler, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1975), p. 166. By contrast, and typical of Donne's critics, Judah Stampfer, John Donne and the Metaphysical Gesture (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970), p. xv, thinks that "characters in lyric poems are embodied impulses. 'I'hey are what the speaker grasps of them." [116] relationship with her a distinct and crucial role in poem after poem.(12) Donne may have been egocentric and sensual, but. he did not ignore the feelings of the woman. Quite the contrary, I suggest: the unconventional brilliance of Donne's love poems arises (at least in part) from his unprecedented capacity to elicit and articulate and respond to the wom.an's point of view. (13) At first, in poems like "Goe, and catche a falling starrell or "Loves usury," empathy informs the witty, lusty braggadocio that enables the speaker to defend himself, to foresee and pre-empt rejection. But soon enough, empathy changes from a characteristic and discomfiting impulse to a deliberate and effxcacious rhetorical strategy. Ultimately, empathy defeats distrust .and becomes the passionately advocated and jealously protected ideal of liThe good-morrow,"" "The Anniversarie," "The Extasie," or "A Lecture upon the Shadow." Now and again, in moments of outrage and betrayal, empathy falters. Yet even when the speaker sounds most cold and vengeful, in "The Apparition" or "The Funerall," for example, his cajoling and persuasion continue, so instinctively does he perceive and appeal to the lady's point of view. Once we begin to recognize the speaker's consideration and the lady's influence; Donne's poems seem less like egocentric displays and more like attentive conversations, more like complexly shifting dialogues between man and woman than any lyric poems I know (discounting actual dialogues such as Sidney's or Marvell's). Because, Donne's attitude toward women has seemed so contradictory, critics have traditionally divided Donne's Songs and Sonets into two categories: witty, cavalier poems written by Donne, the cynical rake, lithe great visitor of ladies," and idealized poems of love, written by Donne, the man who subsequently fell in love with and married Ann More at such great personal sacrifice. -* But for me the issue is not whether Donne deprecates women, whether he idealizes the sex, or whether he abuses a string of women and exalts one. Try as he may to sound scornful and cavalier, regardless of what he may say at any given moment, whether he professes indifference or canonizes love, Donne is never, able to disregard the woman's point of view. The lady continues to --------------------------------- 12. Dwight Cathcart, in Doubting Conscience: Donne and the Poetry of Moral Argument (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1975), comes closest to my position; however, where I see empathy he sees an adversary relationship: lithe speaker characteristically finds himself besieged by the 'you' and responds aggressively.... These poems, as they are responses to some silent speaker, show themselves to disagree, even to disagree strong'y. There is a sense in these poems of the speaker saying, No, that is not it at al?' (p. 19). 13. H. M. Richmond, "The Intangible Mistress," MP 56 (May 1959):217-23, argues that the aloof, unknowable mistress is a stock figure in Renaissance poetry. and he thinks Donne's mistress is no exception. , 14. See, for example, Theodore Redpath. The Songs and Sonets of John Donne (London: Methuen, 1956), pp. xxiii-xxiv; Crutwell. p. 21. [117] disturb and check and alter the speaker's assumptions, even when he cockily tries to denigrate her point of view. If Donne ever speaks as "an egocentric sensualist" surely it is in the poem entitled "The Indifferent." Just as the title warns, the speaker flaunts his callousness. "I can love her, and her, and you and you," he brags, as if all the lusty women in England were essentially indistinguishable and equally insignificant. Yet methinks the gentleman doth protest too much. In the second stanza this flippant cynicism becomes so patently hyperbolic and outrageous that it begins to sound less callous and more mischievous or teasing: Will no other vice content you? Wil it not serve your turn to do, as did your mothers? Or have you all old vices spent, and now would finde out others? (15) Like Hal and Falstaff in Eastcheap, the speaker clearly enjoys this traditional flyting: your mother is a. . . Yet the escalating insults and accumulating questions bespeak more wit and invention than conviction. (16) We should not be too surprised, therefore, to discover that the entire outburst may have been provoked by a specific woman whose threatened devotion has threatened the speaker's freedom: "Must I, who came to travaile thorow you, / Grow your fixt subject, because you are true?" Here the syntax and logic become suddenly, noticeably more complex, betraying emotional stress and serious concern that frivolity has failed to dispel. Must I grow your fixed subject? Why does the speaker feel compelled to ask? Surely, he is not as callous or indifferent as he has been pretending. Like many witty young men, the Indifferent enjoys boasting about his sexual exploits, but underneath it all, he is surpri'singly tender-hearted. At his wit's end, he finally turns to Venus, and it is only with the help of this traditional dea ex machina that the poem ends as lightly as it began, or almost as lightly, for the speaker's helplessness shows that he is drawn to take the woman's point of view more seriously than his rakish self-image allows him to admit. In the end, even the title suggests that "The Indifferent" is a persona, more temporary than "fixt." My theory about these poems of lusty frivolity is that again and again the speaker creates a swashbuckling self-image which he struggles to ------------------------------------------- 15. All quotations from Donne's poems are from The Poems of John Donne, ed. Herbert Crierson, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1912), 1. 16. Hunt and Cathcart both insist that the persona "speaks as a moral man." Catheart interprets the morality seriously: Hunt tips off the reader to lithe comedy of the dead-pan clowning" (p. 6). In contrast, Leishman, pp. 148 ff., sees "a witty and outrageous exaggeration appropriate to a kind of moral holiday." [118] perpetuate." "Song: Goe and catche a falling starre" expresses the classic attack on women as the fickle sex: "No where / Lives a woman true, and faire." Yet even as he affirms this cynical premise, the speaker betrays his own poignant wish that the conventional prejudice were not true: "Such a Pilgrimage were sweet," he confesses. In "Loves Usury" the speaker tries to strike a bargain with the God of love: if permitted to play the field while he is young, he will gladly play the devoted, suffering lover when he is old. Given the witty tone and the conventional mythology, one might expect this to be just one more Renaissance poem about Cupid's infamous power to strike man blind with love, but once again the real problem is not Cupid's dart but the speaker's inherent sensitivity: "Spare mee till then, I'll beare it, though she bee / One that loves mee." That pivotal phrase, "1'll beare it," betrays all the feelings the speaker has been trying to hide. The indifferent, the tough guy, the witty profligate, actually finds it difficult and painful to ignore the woman's feelings. Donne's most cynical poems are not attempts to seduce the lady, but attempts to escape once she (or is it he?) has been caught. It seems strangely apt that John Donne's name is Don Juan in reverse. "Womans constancy" is usually read as another, even more complexly ironic attack on woman's inconstancy.(18) Actually, it is just the opposite, just what the title says: a defense of woman's constancy, spoken, in fact, by a woman. The key to the dramatic situation is the phrase "vaine lunatique." The listener, the lunatic, must be a man because he is under the influence of the moon, Luna, who is traditionally female: alluring, changeable, always chaste. With more wit than witchcraft, the lady teaches this lunatic that he is not only under her influence; he is also under the influence of his limited conventional expectations about women, prejudices which he should learn to recognize and transcend. The catalogue of witty excuses she imagines he will say tomorrow, when he leaves, is at once a flattering tribute to the man's wit and a demonstration of her own cleverness. Behind the banter., however, lies a series of all-too-serious questions. The lady has granted the gentleman her ultimate favors for lIone whole day." Having presented herself as a ------------------------------------ 17. Where I see stress and conflict, most critics see extreme singlemindedness. Wilbur Sanders, John Donne's Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1971 ), p. 47, says that in poems like "The Indifferent," "The Apparition," and "Womans Constancy" the "unity is achieved by suppressing whole expressive registers of the human speaking voice." Virginia Woolf, The Second Common Reader (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1960), p. 23, comes closest to my sense of these poems: "Even while he was at his most fickle and gave fullest scope to his youthful lusts, Donne could predict the season of maturity when he would love differently." 18. I am grateful to John Shawcross for convincing me that the speaker is female. For a more conventional reading, see, for example, James Winny, A Preface to John Donne (London: Longman, 1970), pp. 120-22. Even if the speaker were male, I can see no reason to assume, as Sanders does, pp. 46-47, that the woman is a whore. [119] faithful soul, she suddenly begins to worry that the man professed his love only to coax her into bed. Knowing that she is not a virgin, will he now assume she is a whore? Because she is not chaste, will he think she cannot be true? If she is reserved, will he feel like one of many? But conversely, if she appears too faithful and devoted, will he be all the more eager to escape a commitment? For all these reasons, the lady faces a difficult situation. but she rises to the occasion. Her conclusion is at once a brilliant pre-emptive attack and a clever persuasive strategy: Vaine lunatique, against these scapes I could Dispute, and conquer, if I would, Which I abstaine to doe, For by tomorrow. I may thinke so too. The lady's witty tentativeness. neither desperately eager nor callously cavalier, challenges and mystifies simultaneously.
		As "Woman's Constancy" demonstrates, fables about woman's inconstancy begin as man's defense against women and end as woman's defense against men. By grappling with all her imaginative and intellectual resources to foresee the man's point of view, the lady makes her own point of view all the more tantalizing and suasive. For all the cynical wit and perverse charm of these poems, John Donne, the great visitor of ladies, never becomes a thoroughly convincing rake precisely because he cannot ever completely ignore the woman's feelings. The real struggle is not between the speaker's promiscuity and the lady's fidelity, but between the speaker's public bravado and, the unacknowledged sensitivity which forces him, in the end, to seek protecuon against his own natural impulses. Not surprisingly, therefore, when he stops vaunting aloud, the scornful, lusty bachelor, assuming the persona of an indifferent, he becomes a fine lover: funny, flexible, attentive, tender, psychologically acute, and uncommonly empathetic. Perhaps the best place to see this transformation occurring is "The Sunne Rising." At the opening of the poem we are intensely aware of the man speaking, flamboyantly, insistently. The speaker is so brazen and assertive that the lady's thoughts and feelings seem all but irrelevant. The focus of attention--the force addressed--is not the lady but the sun. Still, the lady is very much present, as we learn in the second line, and the speaker challenges the sun as much for her sake as for his own: "Why dost thou thus, / Through windowes, and through curtaines call on us?" Most readers would agree that we must keep the lady in mind if we are to appreciate the speaker's performance.(19) For despite his grum- ------------------------- 19. Cathcart, pp. 29 30, 114-15, apparently does not. He is so convinced that Donne's inind is "of the sort which is interested in, is fertile of, primarily the doings of men," that he never pauses to consider the effect of the lady's presence. [120] bling. he is showing off, trying to impress her with his ingenuity and wit, calling the sun a "sawcy pedantique wretch" in order to exhibit his own saucy irreverence, defying the sun to proclaim and exalt his love. Since we can only deduce the lady's responses from the speaker's assertions, it is natural to assume that she languishes in a posture of uncritical, speechless admiration. Yet if we pause to ask how she has in fact responded, hovering between the lines we can discern a distinct point of view which has considerable influence on the speaker's argument. In trying to impress the lady, the speaker adjusts his argument to court her approval and address her reservations. Without radically altering the meaning of the poem, this suggests a m.ore concrete psychological motivation for the development of ideas and emotions within the poem. In the opening stanza the speaker's bravura becomes more and more extravagant until he finally claims that his love, all love, is absolutely impervious, nay superior, to the sun and the course of nature: "Love, all alike, no season knowes, nor clyme, / Nor houres. dayes, moneths, which are the rags of time" This generalization is grandly impressive and funny, but obviously untrue as the lady clearly knows for she has just watched him grousing at being awakened, tearning their peaceful slumbers into rags. Does her face express skepticism? I suspect so, for the speaker suddenly begins to watch her expression intently: I could eclipse and cloud [thy beams] with a winke / But that I woutct not rose her sight so long. "(20) Both as a challenge to the sun and a compliment to the lady, this is a marvellous and witty rhetorical move. Yet in asserting his power over the sun, the speaker acknowledges the lady's power over him, and it is not simply a question of her beauty, for if that were all he would not be afraid to blink: her eyes would shine forth more brightly after a moment's darkness. The speaker's eyes are fixed unflinchingly on the lady's, I think, because he is inordinately concerned with her response, determined to discover what she thinks about every word he utters. Now after trying to convince her that love is impervious to time, he suddenly admits that he/s affected by time: "If her eyes have not blinded thine, / Looke, and tomorrow late, tell mee" (my emphasis). The speaker completely reverses his argument, just as he is trying most blatantly to please the lady. Since compliment and correction are one thought, it seems clear that the speaker's new rhetorical strategy is ---------------------------------------- 20. Murray Roston, The Soul of Wit: A Study of John Donne (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), p. 15, is so prepared to disregard the lady that he misreads the lines: IIWhen the lover closes his eyes, the sun will indeed continue to shine for the rest of the world; but for him, the centre of his closed solipsistic universe, it has in fact ceased to exist. . . . To be noticed by the lover at all, the sun must rely on the beauty of the mistress, who alone entices him to open his eyes. There is an obvious humour of exaggeration here. but the deeper theme continues to stress the sanctity of the isolated. individual self." [121] calculated to win the lady's approval. I would go even further: I think he has altered his stance after watching her expression and discerning her doubts. In the third stanza the speaker makes an even clearer effort to adjust his argument to allay her reservations. The process begins with another grand claim: "She'is all States, and all Princes, I, / Nothing else is." This is meant to be impressive, but it is outrageous, and worse yet, tactless. As my contemporary female students point out, it is not very flattering to be told that one is a passive, inanimate state ruled by a man." Apparently, the Renaissance lady had her doubts, too, for'the speaker immediately. corrects the slight: "Princes doe but play us," he adds. This not only resuscitates the external world, but it also gives the lady equal: power and status, which has the effect of chastening the speaker's egocentricity. The result is a discernible and significant shift in the balance of power. The speaker has been trying to impress the lady with his power and verbal ingenuity, with idealized generalizations about the transcendence of his love, with extravagant declarations of his admiration for her. Now suddenly he is less anxious to assert himself and more eager to demonstrate his attentiveness to others, including that busy old fool, the sun: "Thine age askes ease... Shine here to us." Surely this expression of kindness and concern is meant for the lady's hearing; and to roy mind, it is the speaker's most impressive and effective profession yet, for it proves that despite his self-assertions, he can be courteous, gentle, responsive, and remarkably empathetic. (22) And that change in tone occurs in poem after poem, in "The good-morrow," for example, where the speaker also grows increasingly sensitive to the lady's point of view. At the outset, the speaker expresses a desire to exchange intimacies: "I wonder by my troth, what thou, and I / Did, till we lov'd?" Yet his playful vision of sucking on cunt-ry pleasures childishly, his coarse tall tales about snorting communally in the seven sleepers' den, his masculine boasting about other beauties he Iiaiesir'd, and got," all suggest that he is more anxious to create an outrageous, witty myth about his former sexual exploits than to discover how the lady feels at present.(23) Even when he pauses to pay a generous, courtly compliment, --------------------------------------------------- 21. Wilbur Sanders, p. 74. notes the problem "'Where does the real woman come into the picture?' one will grumble at such moments. 'Why is it that she is the States and Donne the Princes. and not the other way round?'"--yet fails to see that the speaker recognizes and answers these very questions. 22.Sanders comes closest to my sense of the conclusion when he says about "Sweetest Love," "there is also the sense one gets that his voice has had to develop a whole new expressive register to deal with his acute consciousness of the woman's presence" (p. 11). I do not agree with Elizabeth Pomeroy's conclusion, "Donne's Sunne Rising." Explicator 27 (September 1968): item 4, that the poeln ends as a "serious validation of subjective reality." 23. As Stein notes. p. 70, "the past may be thought insulting." [122] he cannot stop boasting about himself and his conquests. Like the Indifferent, he seems highly self-absorbed, and for a moment we may again wonder whether he is an egocentric sensualist who ignores the feelings of the woman. Yet the great bursts of playful exuberance, the shockingly colloquial, unrefined language, all suggest an underlying intimacy and trust; and that emerges much more strongly in the second stanza: And now good morrow to our waking soules, Which watch not one another out of feare; For love, all love of other sights controules. Suddenly the speaker seems highly conscious of the lady's feelings, conscious that from her point of view jokes about other lovers may be more threatening than amusing. Now he goes out of his way to clarify his earlier comment: "all love of other sights controules" recalls and permanently dismisses "any beauty I did see." In an effort to counter his previous obliviousness, to allay any fears he may have unwittingly provoked, the speaker makes a serious effort to credit and understand the lady's point of view: "Let us possesse one world, each hath one, and is one." This metaphor acknowledges the lady's independence and equality. Moreover, as in "The Sunne Rising," the speaker has begun to watch her very closely, trying to discern her point of view; and his attention is rewarded with a plain, heartfelt expression: "My face in thine eye, thine in mine appeares, / And true plaine hearts doe in the faces rest." This simple, straightforward profession of mutual openness and trust seems absolutely compelling(24) but the speaker is still careful to distinguish between mine and thine, still wary of assuming a unity of thought and feeling: "Where can we finde two better hemispheares / Without sharpe North, without declining West?" Clay Hunt argues that this image is a "symbol of the sympathetic fusion of the lovers into a single self-contained entity,"(25) but I think it deliberately acknowledges and maintains their two distinct perspectives: two hemispheres may inhabit the same globe, but there are oceans of distance and difference between them. The speaker is making every effort to bring the lady and himself closer together, but he is still chastened by his self-centeredness, still wary of the negative feelings he has just provoked. In conclusion, therefore, he announces that he is no longer willing to force her feelings into his image: --------------------------------- 24. Here the critics all seem to agree. For two examples of many see David Daiches, "A Reading of the Good-Morrow,"Just So Much Honor, p. 184, : and N. J. C. Andreason, John Donne: Conservative Revolutionary (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1967), p. 217. 25. Hunt, p. 61. [123] What ever dyes, was not mixt equally; If our two loves be one, or, thou and I Love so alike, that none doe slacken, none can die. These lines have troubled many readers and critics, especially those who wish the poem to culminate in a perfect spiritual union.(26) Scholarly explication helps, but not sufficiently. What is really at issue is the nature of the relationship between the two lovers. In the context of the preceding stanzas, the mixture of qualification and assurance is dramatically apt and emotionally encouraging. The speaker hopes their loves will become one, but he knows that mutual rapprochement depends on true and equal mingling of two distinct perspectives. The lady must learn to accept his lapses, and he must learn to be more sensitive to her fears and feelings. And so he will, he promises and demonstrates-for he makes no conclusions. Like the preceding question, this conditional formulation allows her to choose whether their desires wi]1 coalesce or whether they will remain separate but equal partners in love. Yet the speaker cannot resist one final plea: she can test the equality of their love, he suggests, punning in the last line, by the quality of their physical relationship: if "thou and I / Love so alike, that none doe slacken, none can die." If his sensitivity to her, and hers to him, has increased, then neither will slacken until they are both ready to die, to reach a climax together. On that basis the speaker ventures to suggest (drawing on the alternative meaning of die) that their love will remain vital as long as she desires and gets as much as he. At once jovial and serious, this punning conclusion shows that the speaker who once sucked on cuntry pleasures childishly has discovered that mutual enduring love offers even greater pleasures, both sexual and spiritual. What precisely does it mean, then, in a lyric poem spoken by a man to articulate and integrate the woman's point of view? This is the way -------------------------------------------------------- 26. There seem to be two principal responses. One group of critics. typified by Hunt, p. 64, insists that their love has produced a union so complete that their separate identities have merged into one another. Myril Jones, "Donne's "The Good-Morrow, '" Explicator 33 (January 1975): item 37, proves mathematically that lithe two mysteriously turn out to be one"; And reason says they attain the "self-immolating charity" of neo-Platonic love. The second response acknowledges the tentativeness of the syntax. Here the interpretations vary widely. Stein, pp. 73 and 76, notes the "tentativeness of two possible conclusions, both based upon an if," yet concludes "they are one and they do love alike. They have been mixed equally." ; Redpath. p. xxxvi, says "This uncertainty should, I believe, be regarded as the sign of an honest attempt not to exaggerate about the relationship of love, while at the same time recognizing its power." Sanders, pp. 67-68, is the bleakest: "the unresolved nature of the final stanza proceeds from the fact that. somewhere in the course of it. Donne loses the burning awareness of the woman's presence which makes the first two so potent; and he is left, consequently. with a lapful of doubt, and misgivings, trying to piece them, together into the required affirmation, and failing." [124] Donne explains the process in "A Valediction: of my name, in the window": 'Tis much that Glasse should bee As all confessing, and through-shine as I, Tis more, that it shewes thee to thee, And cleare reflects thee to thine eye. But all such rules, loves magique can undoe, Here you see mee, and I am you. Donne strives to make the speaker's words as all confessing" and transparent as glass so that the lady can see his heart as she sees his face. At the same time, he strives even "more" to achieve a clear, undistorted picture of the lady so that they can both see her as she sees herself. And that is a highly original aspiration for a Renaissance poet, unknown to most of Donne's predecessors, to Wyatt or Sidney, for example. Donne is insistent; he pauses to stress and clarify the point: 'Tis mote,/ /that it/shewes thee/to thee, And cleare/reflects/thee to/thine eye. As the words and rhythms both demonstrate, Donne has dedicated and actually subordinated his poetry to the lady's vision of herself. For both Donne and the lady, the result is a magical multiplication of erapathetic understanding which produces true intimacy: "and I am you." This window, like the scientific formula in "The good-morrow" and the princely cooperation in "The Sunne Rising," proves that Donne's love is clearest when it is most many-minded, when it faces rather than represses the similarities and differences between the man's and the lady's point of view. If love's magic can finally "undoe" the difference between I and thee, it is only after the lovers have seen each other as clearly as they have seen themselves. And that brings us to "The Extasie," a poem which has defied our categories perhaps more than any other: is the speaker describing a moment of spiritual transcendence, or is he cleverly using the language of spiritual love to advance his all-too-earthy seduction?(27) --------------------------------------------- 27. There have been too many interpretations of this poem even to list. Still basic to understanding the major points of contention are: Pierre Legouis, Donne the Craftsman (Paris: Didier, 199.8), pp. 61-69; A.J. Smith. "The Metaphysic of Love," RES 9 (November 1958): 369- 75; Helen Gardner. "The Argument about 'The Extasie,'" Elizabethan and Jacobean Studies Presented to F. P. Wilson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), pp. 279-806; Merritt Hughes, "The Lineage of 'The Extasie,'" MLR 27 (January 1989.): 1-5, and "Some of Donne's 'Ecstasies,'" PM LA 75 (December 1960): 50918; Barbara Lewalski, "A Donnean Perspective on 'The Extasie,'" ELN 10,4 (June 1975): 258-62. [124] I have no doubt that the "Extasie" describes the tirst sexual encounter between the man and the woman. The evidence seems incontrovertible: the passionate, sweaty palms; the assertion that their physical attraction first brought them together; the pregnant comment that lias yet" the union of hands and eyes Ilwas all our propagation"; the final assertion that their minds and souls have already merged and their bodies are to follow. At the same time, I think "The Extasie" isa most unlikely seduction poem, first, because it is told in the past tense, and second because its IIdialogue of one" is never articulated. It is hard to imagine a man manipul- tting a woman with words, if the words are never uttered. In fact, these two qualities, the full-fiedged memory and the silence, recollected and verbalized in retrospect, make The Extasie" less dra-matic and less persuasive (though nonetheless convincing) than almost any other of the Songs and Sonets. If "The Extasie" is neither a poem of seduction nor a poem of spiritual purity, what is it? Exactly what the title suggests: a moment of transcen-dent joy, remembered as an ideal precisely because it was that unique occasion when the speaker and the lady found themselves in total harmony, thinking and wishing for precisely the same thing. The poem has to be told in the past tense, because the experience was ineffable. For once, the speaker was not trying to persuade her to see the situation from his viewpoint, and she was not resisting, feeling he had failed to consider or understand her viewpoint. The day-long meditation, the absolute silence, the complete communion, all made that kind of verbal jousting un necessary. Since their minds and souls had momentarily become one, it only seemed natural-- and they both felt this, independently and simultaneously-that this intimacy should extend to their bodies.(28) That, the speaker insists quite rightly, is not a seduction .but an ecstasy which "interinanimates," both sexually and emotionally, For what else is a "dialogue of one" but a miracle --a dialogue of the pair as one --which: silently transcends the normal limits of human communication and personal difference?(29) This merging of individual identity, this mutual feeling that "I am you," this exaltation of body and grounding of spirit, is what the speaker ----------------------------- 28. At this point Legouis, p. 68, stresses IIwhat the man has won and the: woman lost." That is precisely what the poem loses when we read it as a seduction poem. ,.., 29. Not all critics would agree. A. J. Smith sees the "dialogue of one" as a weak joke"; Andreason thinks it reveals Donne's irony: and exposes the blindness of the lovers' casuistry. Charles Mitchell. in "Donne's 'The Extasie': Love's Sublime Knot," SEL 8 (Winter 1968): 91-101, all but equates "the dialogue of love between man and woman" with lithe speaker talking to himself." To my mind, that equation is precisely where so much Donne t'riticism goes wrong. Re.hi. Graziani, II John: Donne's 'The Extauie,' and Ecstasy." RES 19 (May 1968): 121- 36, concludes that lithe dialogue of one is probably Donne's own invention." I find that the most telling remark of all. [125] desires but never so fully attains in poem after poem: "The good-morrow," "Lovers infiniteness," "The Flea," "A Valediction: of the booke." On most of these occasions the speaker has to settle for a clear understanding of two distinct points of view, mixed equally but not permanently or indistinguishably. Empathy is one thing; agreement is quite another, as "The Dreame" illustrates most dramatically. Like "The good-morrow" and "The Sunne Rising," "The Dreame" is a poem about awakening, but it is not an aubade, for the speaker has been sleeping alone and dreaming of the lady. Just when his dream is about to reach its climax, she appears: Yet I thought thee (For thou lovest truth) an Angell, at first sight, But when I saw thou sawest my heart, And knew'st my thoughts, beyond an Angels art, When thou knew'st what I dreamt, when thou knew'st when Excesse of joy would wake me, and cam'st then, I must confesse, it could not chnse but bee Prophane, to thinke thee any thing but thee. Obviously delighted by her unbelievably perfect timing, the speaker interprets her appearance as a sign of just how fully and miraculously she has grown to understand his thoughts. Recalling his first impression of her as an angel, he jokes--and he has good reason, since the dream is obviously sexual--that it would be profane to think of her now as anything but a woman. Despite its intent, the joke is more complimentary than salacious. Since angels cannot know men's thoughts, it is a mark of just how far their understanding has developed that the speaker does in fact prefer and value her capacity to divine and satisfy his less angelic and more human thoughts. Yet for all the speaker's witty suasion, after appearing so opportunely, the lady departs prematurely, proving that even empathy has its limits: there are some rules which love's magic cannot undo. The most chilling example, of the power and limits of empathy is "The Apparition, " a terrifying little revenge drama, complete with ghost, flickering taper, and "cold quicksilver sweat. "( The speaker insists that his :love is spent," but his vision of being murdered by the lady's scorn, suggests that his imagination is still intensely, passionately engaged, and the poem is clearly an attempt to keep the lady's imagination equally ---------------------------------------- 30. This poem has provoked the most scathing critiques of Donne's lady. For example, C. William Miller and Dan S. Norton, Explicator 4 (February' 1946): item 24, assume the lady becomes a "used prostitute" riddled with syphilis, and William Everson, Explicator 4 (June 1946): item 56, concludes "her degradation is complete." Stanley Freeman, Explicator 30 ; (October 1971), item 15, is kinder: he thinks the speaker hopes to "intimidate the lady into loving him" by playing on "her feminine fear and contrariness. " [126] engaged. The speaker's scenario demonstrates his continuing capacity to imagine, to the minutest detail, how the lady feels. If she rejects him, he warns, she will be exposed and treated as a "fain'd vestall." As a result, he predicts, she will be isolated, humiliated, and rebuffed by subsequent lovers: And he, whose thou art then, be.ing tyr'd before, Will, if thou stirre, or pinch to wake him, thinke Thou call'st for more, And in false sleepe will from thee shrinke. Unlike the speaker, these less attentive lovers, neither willing nor able to empathize, will mistakenly think she merely calls for renewed sexual attention; he alone knows that what she really wants and needs most is understanding. The speaker wants the lady to keep thinking about the fact that he is still thinking about her with an uncanny ability to foresee and understand her feelings.sa Thus he deliberately withholds his final threat in order to make a continuing claim on her imagination: "What I will say / I will not tell thee now, / Lest that preserve thee." If the lady's threatened rejection has made the speaker momentarily vituperative, his erapathetic imagination makes his threatened revenge terrifyingly, persistently, persuasive. Jonathan Culler's emphasis on lithe force addressed" could not be more apt, for Donne's poems are less dramatic self-assertions of the man speaking than dramatic discoveries of the speaker learning to recognize and accommodate the power of the force addressed. Donne's lyric imagination enables him to discover that the ideal is "a dialogue of one" --that ecstatic moment when a genuine exchange of opinion proves that Hour loves are one." But he also discovers that there is no point pretending or insisting that two people's thoughts are "alike" if one person is silently doubting or disapproving.(32) Again and again, the lady's critical presence (critical in both senses) encourages the speaker to recognize his own pretences, to perceive the tender impulses hiding beneath his cynical bravado, to face the concrete realities which even his -------------------------------------------- 31 From this basic fact, Stampfer, p. xvi. reaches quite the opposite conclusion: ln Donne's 'Apparition.' the speaker describes some woman; she exists, but only as he grasps her." 32. This has rarely been seen as a virtue by Donne's critics. A more common feeling is described by Helen Gardner, John Donne: the Elegies and The Songs and Sonnets (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), p. xxx: "the union of lovers is an end in itself in Donne's poems. needing no justification and reaching to nothing beyond itself to have imagined and given supreme expression to the bliss of fulfillment, and to the discovery of the safety th at there is in love given and returned, is Donne's greateat glory as a love-poet. See also Pam Ulrey, "The 'One' in Donne's Poetry," RenP (1958-60):76-83. [127] grandest rhetoric can not extenuate. He, in turn, teaches her to appreciate just how unique is his understanding of her. Donne's predecessors, Wyatt, Spenser, Shakespeare, wrote great love poetry, but they scanted the woman's point of view. Wyatt finds the woman alternately passionate and heartless, and at the best, ungraspable: "and wild for to hold." He writes poem after poem which fails to engage the lady directly, and when he finally does speak, he is more anxious to bemoan his suffering than to elicit her point of view. Astrophel is increasingly frank about his own motives and desires, but Stella remains as much a mysterious ideal to him as she does to us. No writer, certainly no male writer, has ever captured the woman's point of view more brilliantly than Shakespeare did, in his plays, but in the sonnets the dark lady never emerges from obscurity. She remains awful and available. In Donne's love poems the lady's eyes may blind the sun or blot out the rest of the world, but they do not blind the speaker. If anything, they enable him to see himself and the lady more clearly: If thou, to be so scene, beest loath, By Sunne, or Moone, thou darkest both, And if my selfe have leave to see, I need not their light, having thee. Donne rarely describes the lady's person, but he does watch her expression. He seizes the moment when "true plaine hearts doe in the faces rest," and he also notices when "hearts do not in eyes shine." Again and again, Donne sees, as Wyatt and Sidney cannot, exactly what the lady in his poems is thinking about and wishing and fearing. Donne shows a negative capability, an instinctive empathy for the lady, which I think remains unrivalled by any Renaissance lyric poet. If Donne were a lesser or a less imaginative poet, his continual probing of the woman's point of view would be more predictable and less nourishing. But Donne was unconventional and restless by nature. By listening to and responding to the lady, he discovers that "Loves sweetest Part, Variety," was not to be found in conventional postures of love or conventional expectations of ladies, but in that "dialogue of one" or two, that "new made Idiome," which seeks communion but is continually prepared to recognize disjunction. Perhaps, it would be appropriate to conclude where so many essays about Donne and women begin, with Dryden's famous remark that Donne "perplexes the minds of the fair sex with nice speculations of philosophy, when he should engage their hearts, and entertain them with the softnesses of love. "(33) Dare I suggest that the opposite is more nearly true: that Donne has perplexed the minds of both sexes with ----------------------------------------- 33. Quoted in John Donne's Poetry, p. 106. [128] brilliant speculations about women which might have engaged their minds and hearts had they not preferred to be entertained by the abstruse speculations of philosophy or the "softnesses of love." Unlike his Petrarchan predecessors, when Donne writes of love he writes not of imagined love or exalted beauty but of loving and being loved, at times, of hating and being hated, not of ladies seen and admired from a distance but of a lady who is highly present, loving and criticizing, judging as well as admiring. Virginia Woolf once said that Middlemarch was the first novel written for adults. I think Donne's Songs and Sonets are the first Renaissance love poems written for adults, loving and emphathetic enough to grant the man's and the woman's point of view equal credence. It seems appropriate, therefore, that Virginia Woolf was the first and almost the last critic I have found who actually pauses to describe the lady in Donne's poems: "she was brown but she was also fair; she was solitary but also sociable; she was rustic yet also fond of citiy life; she was skeptical yet devout, emotional but reserved--in short she was as various and complex as Donne: himself. "(34) -------------------------------------------- 34. Woolf, 32. See also Iqbal Ahmad, esp. p. 57.