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Electronic Reserve Text: Women Among the Metaphysicals: A Case, Mostly, of Being Donne For by Janel Mueller (Modern Philology, November 1989) The so-called metaphysicals trace the origins of their label to an accusation Dryden leveled against Donne's poetic treatment of women. "Not only in his satires," said Dryden. "but in his amorous verses, where nature only should reign," Donne "affects the metaphysics." He "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."(2) How shall we evaluate this famous judgment passed by one major male poet of the seventeenth century on another, sixty years his senior? What, more generally, can we say of women as subjects of metaphysical poetry and as readers of it? |
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In Donne's prose and verse letters to the select women who figured both as subjects and readers of his poetry. we glimpse a dynamics of gender and power quite unlike the one Dryden posits. Crucial initiatives for the produc tion and reception of Donne's poetry rest with these women; they patronize him, not he them. Thus Donne writes to the cultivated Magdalen Herbert, entrusting "the inclosed Holy Hymns and Sonnets ... to your judgment, and to your protection too, if you think them worthy of it," since she has bestowed, he says, "all the good opinion" he enjoys.' At a later juncture Donne declares as follows of the countess of Bedford, to whom he addressed six of his most "metaphysical" poems. She "only hath power to cast the fetters of verse upon my free meditations." He reserves "for her delight (since she descends to them) ... not only all the verses, which I should make, but all the thoughts of womns worthiness. "I Later still, when Donne's complexly motivated Anniversary poems on Elizabeth Drury broke into print, the countess of Bedford and the countess of Salisbury were much displeased. They let Donne know this. He quickly bowed to the censures of his two patronesses. A verse letter to each records Donne's struggles to redirect rather than defend the hyperboles he had lavished on a mere slip of a girl. "I confesse," run his lines to Lady Bedford. "since I had never knowne/ Vertue or beautie, but as they are growne / In you, I should not thinke or say they shine, / (So as I have) in any other Mine. (5) ------------------------------------------------- [143]
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For express testimony
from a woman regarding the impact of this style of poetry, however,
we must look to later in the century and to an area of potential response
ignored altogether in Dryden's comments-that of sacred rather than amatory
subjects. This woman was a poet herself, who wrote under the name of
Orinda.5 Sometime before her death in 1664 at the age of thirty-two,
Katherine Philips addressed Henry Vaughan in a verse epistle that surveyed
and saluted his poetic development. Professing hope that her work would
mature as his had, she seeks to confirm in Vaughan a recognition she
has already reached as a reader and practitioner of his style: "From
the charming rigour thy muse brings I Learn there's no pleasure but
in serious things!'7 As we in turn will have occasion to confirm in
female readers-critics and one other poet- who have succeeded Orinda,
these ringing notes warn usefully against joining Dryden in too narrow
notions of how women might relate to or figure in "the metaphysics"
in verse. If he underestimated female capacities for response and judgment. Dryden nevertheless spoke accurately enough for his age in signaling its break with Donne's poetic sensibilities and practice Donne now stands in our eyes as the last English poet to sustain the force of the great, centuries-old Continental tradition of love lyrics that had celebrated femininity for offering the male peel a privileged access to ideality and divinity as well as a means of grounding his selfhood through intimacy with a person figured to and by this self as other.8 Among English metaphysicals, Richard Crashaw might at first seem a conspicuous exception to the foregoing generalization. In scaling the visionary and affective heights of his best known poetry, that addressed to women subjects, Crashaw works from a declared conviction that souls in female bodies and social positions, like Teresa of Avilla's are best situated to experience the onset of divine love and to surrender themselves to it. Again and again he urges his little coterie of Englishwomen toward the transcendent inward raptures that are the privilege and the secret of a bride of Christ. The most revelatory example in this vein, "To Resolution in Religion, & to render her selfe without further delay into the Communion of the Catholick Church." was addressed to Crashaw's patroness, the countess of Denbigh. Its octosyllabic couplets pant in serial entreaty: "Ah linger not, lov'd soul! a slow! And late consent was a long no,/ . . . Choose out that sure derisive dart/ Which has the Key of this close heart,/. . . /Unfold at length, unfold fair flowre! And use the season of love's showre,!. . ./. . . /0 dart of love! arrow of light!/ 0 happy you, if it hitt right.(9) Such elegant double entendres might pass among the small, self-exiled ---------------------------------------- (London, 1985), pp. 302-307. Subsequent quotations from Donne's poetry are taken from this text and cited by title and line numbers in my text. 6. Work in progress by Elizabeth H. Hageman documents a guarded, even derivative use of Donne's metaphysical conceits (compasses, exchanged hearts, etc.) in Orinda's lyrics celbrating women's relationship. By contrast, Hageman finds a much more individuated and self-authenticating female voice when Orinda the poet gives place to Katerhine Philips the letter-writer. These implications are developed in "Katherine Philips: Private Poetry and Public Letters" (paper presented at the Sixteenth-Century Studies Conference, St. Louis, October, 1988). 7. "To Mr Henry Vaughan Silurist on his Poems," lines 37-38 (Catherine Cole Mambretti, ed....Edition of the Poems of Katherine Philips [Ph. D. diss., University of Chicago, June 1979], p. . 8. Still authoritative discussions are offered by J. B. Broadbent in Poetic Love (London, 1964) and in N. J. C. Andreasen in John Donne: Conservative Revolutionary (Princeton, N.J., 1967). 9. "To the Noblest and best of Ladyes, the Countesse of Denbigh," lines 13, 14, 33,34, 43, 44, 49 J. Martin, ed., The Poems of Richard Crashaw, 2d ed. [Oxford, 1957], p. 237. [144] readership of two Paris editions, but the poem displayed too much erotic license to be suitable for London publication without toning-down and retitling as "A Letter from Mr. Crashaw to the Countess of Denbigh." On a biographical and poetic showing alike, Crashaw defines an idiosyncratic extreme in the adoption of Continental modes of sensibility. He finally corroborates far more than he defies the generalization that Donne was the last English poet of the metaphysics of heterosexual love.
Unless we reckon
as integrally with their poetic absence as with their poetic presence,
we may settle for a description that falls short as an explanation.
If we immerse ourselves only in the ranging themes and tonalities that
are Donne's great achievement in love poetry, we will be tempted to
conclude that he exhausted the potentialities of women as subjects for
the metaphysical style and that his successors reacted by turning in
other directions. But if we attend, in these successors of Donne, to
experiments with other than overtly female constructions of a poetic
presence that empowers and validates lyric expression, we will be compelled
to attribute more significance to their shift from secular to sacred
love themes. Although Donne himself initiated this shift, he does not
cast it as a choice between opposed poetic kinds. Later metaphysicals,
however-Herbert in the youthful sonnets 'My God, where is that ancient
heat" and "Sure Lord, there is enough in thee," Vaughan
in the prose preface and dedicatory verses of Silex Scintillans, and
Marvell in "The Coronet"-repudiate secular ends when they
profess sacred ones. By virtue of chronology and the primacy he accords to female presence, Donne makes the first and longest claims on our attention. As we turn in that direction, we find Dryden, a poet looking closely at another poet's practice, again at our elbow. He points out that Donne, as he "affects the metaphysics," sweeps over the boundary between satire and amorous address and makes it of no account. Dryden's telling observation alerts us to what we soon identify as a constitutive feature-the seriousness of the subjectivity that utters itself into being in Donne's verse. His poetic discourse is represented as springing from so deeply within the speaker's psyche that the discourse is always for and about that psyche. We owe to women critics of our century some now-classic appreciations of the nuances of thought and feeling that Donne's male discoursers manage to articulate.(10) Self-exploratory and -------------------------------- 10. [145]
self-revealing
in equal measure. the speaker in poem after poem pronounces on the nature
of love. Yet in reflecting on the union he seeks or finds or spurns
with a female counterpart, the speaker continues to register the reaches
and boundaries of his own gendered consciousness, his identity as a
man. Newer feminist readings have begun to show how these speakers'
unwittingly negative aspects of self-disclosure can repay close study."
Donne acutely delineates a whole range of male attitudinizing about
love. Fear of a possibly lasting relationship in "The Indifferent"
prompts the fantasy of a Venusian edict against "dangerous constancie"
(line 25). Phallic posturings and revulsions belie the speaker's world-weariness
in "Loves Alchymie"
and "Farewell to Love." Bravado fails to mask longing for
a beloved never or only fleetingly possessed in "The Apparition"
and "The Curse." A revealing turn at the end of "The
Extasie" converts praise of a perfect mutuality with a woman to
instruction for a male overhearer: "Let him still marke us, he
shall see! Small change, when we'are to bodies gone" (lines 75-76).
The arrogance of a man who thinks his woman his property is shaken to
very different depths in different contexts. "1 planted knowledge
and lifes tree in thee,/ Which Oh, shall strangers taste?" laments
the speaker of "Natures lay ldeot"(Elegie 7, lines 26-27).
Struggling to confront the prospect of his beloved's death, the speaker
of "A Feaver" dissolves his claim in paradoxically sudden
and complete self-abandon: "1 had rather owner bee / Of thee one
houre. than all else ever" ("A Feaver," lines 27-28).
In remarking how
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." Dryden rightly realizes that it is
the speaker's play of mind-not social contexts, norms, and practices-that
determines the roles of the women in Donne's verse. We ourselves note
that whatever place Donne's lovers find or make for their love requires
them to oppose the world and its concerns ("The Sunne Rising."
"The Canonization") or to keep the love secret from a world
that if sure to misunderstand ("The Undertaking"). Given the
period standards set by the developed realism of the Jacobean theater,
Donne, who has so often been termed "dramatic," can so qualify
at best in his versifying of speech to reveal the shifts and nuances
of a single sensibility, but not in dialogue or full delineation of
character. Compared with earlier Renaissance love poetry, Donne's is
also odd in eschewing pictorialism and other sensuous effects to convey
the allure of a woman's body to it male speaker. Not only must readers
of Donne forgo expectations of catching much of the flavor of a woman's
personality, they must also learn to "Care lesse, eyes, lips, hands
to misse" ("A Valediction forbidding Mourning," line
20). Women remain highly subjectivized presences in this highly subjectivized
poetry; as such, as Ilona Bell explains, they prove indispensable to
the poetry and to the identities of the discoursing males who are its
mouthpieces.12 Women serve these males' psyches to "ballast"-the
verb from "Aire and Angels" (line 15)-and limit what is other
than the self, what is otherwise finally the vastness of the world.
---------------------------------
11. 12.
[146] In Donne the female
other begins to contribute crucially to male fixes and selfhood when
a speaker registers the onset of desire. This cognizance of specifically
sexual attraction impresses a man with his own lack as well as his longing
to conjoin to himself all that a given woman has and is. "But this,"
exclaims the speaker of "The good-morrow," "all pleasures
fancies bee/ If ever any beauty I did see,/ Which I desir'd, and got,
'twas but a dreame of thee" (lines 5-7). To the extent that such
desire acknowledges and yearns toward value in its object, it manifests
itself as love. By casting desire and love as physical
operations actually endured, Donne invigorates stock tropes like the
incising of the beloved's image with some new poetic life-as, for example,
in "The Dampe," where an autopsy ordered after the speaker's
mysteriously sudden death "Will have me cut up to survay each part"
and will finde your Picture in my heart" (lines 3-4). Donne also
outgoes every precedent but Spenser's in focusing a number of his lyrics
on fulfilled rather than thwarted love, as Lu Emily Pearson was quick
to note early in this century's critical vogue of the metaphysicals.II
But even Spenser does not prepare us to encounter the Donnean male speaker
who discourses analytically in these lyrics on the joys of fully reciprocated
sexual love to his female counterpart. The yield is an astonishingly
exact articulation of what man in Western culture has tended to make
of woman and of himself in relation to her. (14) We find that the
onset of love unsettles and even shatters a man by destroying all illusion
that he can live in self-containment and self-sufficiency; instead.
he discovers that he is contingent, vulnerable, without a center. "What
did become / Of my heart, when I first saw thee? / I brought a heart
into the roome, / But from the roome, I carried none with mee,"
marvels the speaker of "The Broken Heart"(lines 17-20). Especially
disorienting are the concurrent demands that flesh and spirit make.
for a man cannot sustain an axiomatic Christian subordination of his
body to his soul when he is in love and feels "mixt of all stuffes,
paining soule, or sense" ("Loves Growth," line 9) + Yet
if love is to be, as it is in Donne, the most sublime of human experiences,
it must accommodate the "affection:;" and "faculties"
of "sense" as well as "pure ...soules," since both
are tied in "that subtile knot" of our ensouled bodies ("The
Extasie," lines 64-66). Once love overwhelms the Donnean male with
the complexity and uniqueness of being human, he seeks to reconstitute
his identity by obtaining the loving recognition of (he woman who is
the object of his love: "So thy love may be my loves spheare"
("Aire and Angels," line 25). Insofar as Donne's speakers
associate the full mutuality of this human recognition with heterosexual
intercourse freely undertaken and enjoyed, they rather strikingly represent
the man and the woman as equals in love: "So, to one neutrall thing
both sexes fit" ("The Canonization," line 25); "Let
us possesse one world, each hath one, and is one" ('The Good-morrow,"
line 14). The spiritual counterpart of this equality is the gaze enacted in "The Extasie" and invoked in a number of other lyrics. As the lovers draw dose together, face to face, and see themselves reflected in the pupils of one another's eyes, one subjectivity ------------------------------------------ 13. 14. [147] fixes and gives
back another subjectivity to itself." In this connection, Aristotle's
doctrine that a substance resists change and annihilation through the
equal mixture of its elements acquires an emotional and intellectual
resonance that brings poetic discourse to a genuinely "metaphysical"
level. This doctrine provides the backdrop and perhaps also the stimulus
for Donne's remarkable group of lyrics on leave-taking, the event that
best verifies because it most severely tests mutuality based in heterosexual
love. Of this group, however. only "A Valediction forbidding Mourning"
and "A Valediction of Weeping" come close to striking a balance
between the forces of the lovers' subjectivities." By contrast,
the male speaker of "Sweetest love, I do not go" lapses into
self regard--"'tis best, /To use my selfe in jest / Thus"
(lines 6-7)--thus revealing at the critical moment of parting how tenuous
an achievement this sexual equality is, how fearsome its counterpulls
are. Finally significant are the very few settings Donne offers for
his representations of sexual equality. They are limited to the "little
roome" that becomes "an every where" or to the "Pregnant
banke," a kind of Renaissance lovers' lane ('The Good-morrow,"
line 11; "The Extasie," line 2) it seems literally inconceivable
that such equality might hold elsewhere than in the most intimate aspects
of the man's and woman's love. |
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Thus, what Natalie Davis remarks of Renaissance culture at large applies as well in Donne's poetry generally to confront the fact of sexual difference is to engage with issues of dominance and subordination, for there seems to be no other reason for the difference to exist." Donne's many cynical and libertine speakers enact their conviction of male superiority, whether or not they finally undercut themselves in what they say. But the lyrics of reciprocated love also inscribe at key points the prevailing asymmetry of outlook and sexual role that casts the male as the persuader and possessor, the female as the persuaded and the possessed: "She's all States, and all Princes. I / Nothing else is" ("The Sunne Rising," lines 21-22). To his personal credit, Donne lends no credence to essentialist views of sexual difference, for his poetry is unmarked by their major premise-that a woman's capacity to bear children defines her and her relation to a man. Yet, conditioned as Donne was to think by the norms for education and conduct in his patriarchal society, he could scarcely at all imagine or figure his analytical, ratiocinative verse as anything but a male prerogative: "my words masculine perswasive force" ("Elegie: On his Mistris," line 4)." Even in the poems that figure amorous equality, the male act of representation-"this dialogue of one"-reinscribes the inequality or the sexes ("The Extasie." line 74). Virginia Woolf registers as much in her equivocal ---------------------------------- 15. 16. 17. 18. [148] tribute to Donne's
"power of suddenly surprising and subjugating the reader."'9
Indeed the most conspicuous constant in Donne's verse is the monopoly
on discourse enjoyed and exercised by male figures--an aspect of the
"phallocentrism" whose "command" of "literary
history" is at issue for feminist critics."' Within the cultural
mainstream-ours no less than Donne's-this monopoly acquires even further
valency from the intense, nuanced subjectivities ascribed to these male
speakers and the sturdiness of their characterization as active heterosexuals.)" In the Holy Sonnets it proves continuously troubling for the male speaking-figure to do without heterosexual love as a model for ideality. He pursues his self-explorations alone. They leave him overwhelmed with his sins, which he sometimes expressly equates with his former active sexuality now branded as "Idolatry" ("0 might those sighes and teares." lines 5-6; "What if this present," line 9). Fear rather than Love of God predominates in the Holy Sonnets, where the speaker strains to place this irrepressible reflex in a positive light: "Those are my best dayes, when I shake with feare" ("Oh. to vex me," line 14).23 Fear persists in the late "A Hymne to God the Father." although there the speaker regards it negatively: "I have a sinne of feare"(line 13). Deprived of the resources of human intersubjectivity, he continually appears at a loss for ways to relate to God as the sole divine Other. Infrequent direct address in very general terms like "God" and "Lord" compounds with expressions of insecurity or bewilderment as this male speaker seeks engagement with his male God. -------------------------------------- 20. 21. 22. 23. [149] What options existed
for models of personal relationship in the genre of religious lyric?
Not the model of single-sex, specifically male friendship that inform
Donne's verse letters to male friends, because there could be no sec
ond-self or alter-ego relation between the human and the divine in the
Christian orthodoxies within which Donne confined his choice of religion."
The fatherson model carried full biblical and theological sanction,
but it is remarkable how rarely and how indirectly the Donnean speaker
uses it. Tenaciously figuring his maleness as adult manhood he evinces
the residual force of the sexualized model for love in Donne's religious
poetry. Such a speaker cannot posit himself as a child. However, the
most strenuous ingenuity proves incapable of adapting the sexualized
model to the divine-human relationship without forfeiting the qualities
that make this model so valuable and appealing in Donne's secular love
poems. This speaker's two experiments along this line produce the "Tearful
accommodations" of a God who expresses love through torture, rape,
and bondage in "Batter my heart" and a spouse who fulfills
her role by behaving like a whore in "Show me deare Christ.""
By contrast, moreover, with their analytic and elucidating functions
in the secular love poems, the paradoxes of Donne's religious lyrics
remain either paradoxical or blunt to theological commonplace in such
characteristic instances as "Thy Makers maker, and thy Fathers
mother," "Therfore that he may raise the Lord throws down"
("La Corona. Annunciation," line 12; "Hymne to God my
God, in my Sicknesse," line 30). ------------------------------------------ 24. 25. 26. 27. [150] chalk the fact
up as a vestige of Marian devotion, it is surely noteworthy that, on
the evidence of this poetry, the Donnean male speaker can love a woman
much more easily than he can God in a dominating role. Most interesting
of all are the reflections offered on femininity. They complete what
the love poetry leaves implicit or undeveloped in the Donnean representation
of woman as they push to a vanishing point in her the distinction between
the human and the divine. The verse letters
go far beyond the love poetry in ascribing to feminine otherness a sweeping
ethical force. The judging role of the women in the love poetry is typically
confined to the specifics of the argument which the speaker is making
about his or their love-for example. in "The Flea" or in "A
Valediction of my Name, in the Window." In the verse letters we
gain a deepened sense of what the male self seeks in a female other:
not just to be acknowledged but also to be wholly ratified by her. The
patroness occupies a privileged position in his construction of the
world. Her outlook, unclouded (in his casting of the matter) by masculine
pursuits and preoccupations, can uniquely reach a true appraisal of
his character, his enterprises, and even the quality of his reasoning.
Thus an epistle to the countess of Bedford begins: "Madame, I You
have refin'd mee, and to worthyest things / ...now I see I Rarenesse,
or use, not nature value brings"(lines 1-3). In exerting this higher
power over the speaker's life, the patroness quickly assumes the aspect
of divinity: "Divinity, that's you"("Reason is our Soules
left hand," line 2). |
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In another epistle
to the countess of Bedford, her matchless understanding and practice
of virtue are credited to her gender as Donne ingeniously applies pseudologic
to establish the sexual double standard as an ethical standard possessed
of redoubled force. Since she is a moral agent gendered female, Lady
Bedford always has her "honour" to maintain. Her high attainment
of goodness results from knowing, as only a lady can, how to unite prudential
worldly considerations with heavenly concerns: "Discretion is a
wisemans Soule, and so I Religion is a Christians. and you know / How
these are one" ("Honour is so sublime perfection." lines
10-42). An epistle to the countess of Huntington also equates her femininity
with divinity while disclosing the speaker's adroit manipulation of
gender roles and positions. Because Lady Huntington has accepted the
(subordinating) involvement with a man that gives her "a wifes
and mothers name," she can be trusted not to establish norms inimical
to the male speaker: "Vertue having made you vertue. 'is fame!
T'adhere in these names, her and you to show" ("Man to Gods
image, Eve, to mans was made," lines 29. 31-32). Against this quite innovative backdrop of associations of ideality with the lives and persons of mature married women, the turn to a virgin's body and soul as the locus of all the world's value in The Anniversaries both looks and is more conventional. We do not have to agree with Ben Jonson that the poems should have been more conventional still, that if they "had been written of the Virgin Marie" they "had been something." For there is nothing in the poetic transmutation of the fifteen-year-old Elizabeth Drury in The Anniversaries that does not tally with traditional attributes of the Virgin at the same age, the age she was supposed to have borne Christ, except for the bearing of Christ. Donne more than makes good any potential deficit in his subject by assimilating the attributes of Christ as well as Mary to what he told Jonson was "the idea of a Woman, and not as she was."(28) --------------------------------------------------------- 28. [151] The apotheosis
of femininity as divinity in the English Renaissance, these poems demonstrate
the heights to which male idealization and imagination can rise when
the female other is postulated purely as a blank counter. "Her
death did wound, and lame thee than," says the Speaker of "The
First Anniversary," addressing the world-"and than! Thou mightst
have better spar'd the Sunne, or Man" (lines 25-26). Donne understood
Well enough the wire-drawn extremities to which he had pursued virtue
in female guise in his Anniversaries to see that any defense of them
would have to be staked in the world-realizing capacities of the mind-the
precincts, from first to last, of all the metaphysicals. In specifically
staking out those precincts by demonstrating the centrality of gender
relations to the constitution of the mind's capacities,(29) Donne has
as strong a claim as he ever did to be considered the definitive poet
or the English style that takes its name from his defining practices.
As I view subsequent
developments bearing on the representation of women in the metaphysical
style, they run, in outline, like this. The Donnean male discourser
of love is put on the shelf, within the easy and often enervated reach
of rehandlings by Cavalier poets.(30) Using tactics the opposite of
Donne's, Crashaw attempts to reconfigure intense subjectivity and sensualized
love. While Donne always keeps his male speaker and his female subject
distinct, Crashaw merges them to produce a hybrid consciousness, a supersensibiliy
that must remain a merely imaginary ideal deprived of physical realization.
Androgyny proves a useful referent in two recent psychoanalytic interpretations
by women critics.(31) The poetic means Crashaw evolves for, so to speak,
entering his speaker into his female subject are those of quasi-narrative
lyric: this speaker alone knows and can tell the story of this female's
heart, better even than herself, since his narrative stance is outside
and his emotional place within. Although lyric is readily enough recognized
as a subjective mode, narrative is expected to deal in events and actions.
Thus Crashaw continues to be faulted for sensationalism by readers who
fail to remark how he subsumes narrative in lyric, confounding the self-other
distinction and scoring the visionary, surreal effects on which he places
such a premium in "Sainte Mary Magdalene, or the Weeper" and
other characteristic poems. Perhaps Marvell passes judgment on Crashaw as well as on a female subject when he employs quasi-narrative lyric in "The Nymph complaining for the death of her Faun" to study the deathlike narcissism into which one feminine consciousness poignantly withdraws from masculine aggression .(32) Death works just as compellingly though otherwise very differently on the psyche of the male speaker of "To his Coy Mistress," whose brief for active sexuality ends in a most un-Donnean [152] confounding of
lust and love. In "The Definition of love," no leave-taking
but an unspecified obstacle as strong as death blocks consummation while
simultaneously empowering the most metaphysical certainties to find
expression in a Marvellian speaker: "Therefore the Love which us
doth bind, /... /Is the Conjunction of the Mind. / And Opposition of
the Stars."(33) On the whole. sexual love and femininity require
drastic subliming after the precedents of Donne's verse letters to patronesses
and the Anniversaries before Marvell can invest any female figure
with earthly hope and joy. His own analogues of this poetic process
yield the respective projections of Maria Fairfax's chaste marital sexuality
in "Upon Appleton House" and of virginal innocence in "Young
Love" and "The Picture of little T. C. in a Prospect of Flowers."
With time, however. Marvell's adult male speakers develop closer affinities
with the discoursers in "The Storme," "The Calme,"
and Donne's retires than with those of the Songs and Sonnets and the
later poems on female subjects. Marvell's career as a metaphysical poet
exactly reverses the direction of Donne's. The case of Herbert
is far more complex, subtle, and influential. His almost exclusive subject
is the one Donne almost fails to treat poetically--the love between
God and the soul. While Herbert's lyrics sustain the Donnean conviction
that the : ways of love are fundamentally at odds with the ways of the
world, Herbert works out the implications very differently, as Margaret
Blanchard has shown.(34) The otherness of God's Kingdom requires what
never happens in Donne-a total recasting of the poetic speaker's identity
that forces the self to become an other. This momentous development
proves catalytic for the future course of the meta-physical style, and
Leah Marcus's acute study probes the historical, ideological, and temperamental
factors that made the child the model of this process for several poets.(35)
Femininity, as a consequence, goes underground as a poetic subject. The sequencing of The Temple reveals the salient steps for Herbert. A parodic residue of the Donnean discourser, the worldly-wise courtier of "The Church-porch" finds his "braverie" and bravado set at naught by the love evinced in Christ's passion- a love that accosts and envelops him as soon as he passes the threshold of 'The Church." As such lyrics as "The Thanksgiving," "The Reprisall," and "Affliction [I]" declare, there is no masculine competing with such love or even reciprocating it. One can only be overcome: "I will no more advise"; "There is no articling with thee."(36) For recasting the self as an other Jacob presented Herbert with a congenial biblical type The speaker of the lyrics evolves two principal identities from the germ of Jacob's experience and growth in faith: that of a servant learning obedience to a master's will and that of a son at the mercy of a stern but loving father. The one involves statusleveling, becoming God's "man" in the special sense of a serving-mall-, the other involves gender-leveling, becoming an innocent neuter, ------------------------------------- 33. 34. 35. 36. [153] a "child."
Both dismantle and supplant the worldly-wise courtier of "The Church-porch,"
though scattered traces of him persist in the "honest man"
of "Constancie," the Stoic of "Content," and the
apparently sanctified man of the world who speaks "The Pearl." The two identities,
servant of God and child of God, fuse in the Herbertian speaker's repudiation
of adult male sexuality.(37) Harsh on love for women-who art "that
dust" prompting "usurping lust" in "Love [1. 111"
and "this woman-kinde, which 1 can wink / Into a blacknesse and
distaste" in "Home" (lines 39-40)-the speaker intimates
his carnal past in rueful reworkings of erotic motifs. "Sighs and
Grones" resounds with Donnean self-recriminations: "I have
deserv'd that an Egyp-tian night / Should thicken all my powers; because
my lust Hath still sow'd fig-leaves to exclude thy light" (lines
14-16).(38) Pursuing the implications of these thematics, Elizabeth
Stambler has argued for locating the unity of The Temple in/, the systematic
redefining of desire, denial, discipline, and purification that is detailed
when Herbert's God replaces Dante's Beatrice, Petrarch's Laura, and
Sidney's Stella as a poetic love object .(39) Working out another aspect
of female representation, Heather Asals has detected a human prototype
for the allegorical mother-figure of "The British Church"
in the virtuous
Magdalen Herbert whom Donne and Herbert lauded." On the whole,
however, female subjects scarcely figure in Herbert's lyrics, though
a place is made for "Marie Magdalene," since divine love redeems
her involvement in lust. Nonetheless, a
clear poetic economy of compensation operates in The Temple. If Herbert's
speaker's understanding of the ascendancy of sacred over profane love
displaces women as subjects, the values ascribed to women by male idealization
is preserved through transfer to other subjects. One such prominent
subject is Christ, who assimilates nurturant female functions symbolically
in his spear-pierced side that runs blood and water ("The Sacrifice,"
"The Agonie") and sacramentally in the ministration of the
elements ("H. Baptisme [I]," "The H. Communion [I]").
"The Bag" probably constitutes the high point of this feminization
of Christ, who speaks thus: "That I shall minde what you impart,
I Look, you may put it very neare my heart. I Or if hereafter any of
my friends I Will use me in this kinde, the door/ Shall still be open"
(lines 35-39)." Stars, precious stones, birds, and flowers and
trees in their seasonal cycles make up another intermittent set of poetic
subjects by which values like purity, beauty, spirituality, and the
capacity for new life find representation in The Temple without benefit
of female subjects-for example, in "Mattens," "Employment
[I, 11 ],""The Starre," "Life," "The Flower." ---------------------- 37. 38. 39 40. 41. [154] It is important,
however, to be clear about the gender vacuum in which such idealization
is overtly conducted in Herbert. Lyrics like "Mattens," "Employment
[I]." and "The Starre" do not project conventional feminine
qualities onto natural objects by utilizing longstanding cultural associations
of woman with nature." With' the striking exception of "Vanitie
[1 ]" where a voyeuristic astronomer "views" and 'knoweth"
the "full-ey'd aspects, and secret glances" of the heavenly
bodies, and a 'subtil" chemist "can devest / And strip the
creature naked +' (lines 4-5, 7, 15-16) -nature subjectivized by the
Herbertian speaker must also be nature desexualized. Only thus can it
serve as an ideal though nontranscendent other by which the self mirrors
to itself the new identity for which it longs. To figure the shaping
of a new identity, Herbert relies far more crucially on images of childhood
than of nature. The verse design of "Faith" undertakes a metaphysical
demonstration of what it means to be born again. This lyric modu-lates
fluidly from the identity of the adult Herbertian speaker to that of
a child speaker placed with the Babe in the manger--"Faith makes
me any thing," "Faith puts me there with him"-before
returning to generalize on age- and status-leveling: "by Faith
all arms are of a length; I One size doth all conditions fit"(lines
17, 23, 27-28). By an extremely bold and visionary stroke, Herbert brings
this child speaker into being as a function of his adult speaker in
order to model regeneration by divine love in Scriptural terms: "Me
thoughts I heard one the other quite easily in The Temple. In the child
this negation of sexuality takes the explicit positive form of carnal
innocence: "The growth of flesh is but a blister; / Childhood is
health" ("H. Baptisme [Ill. "lines 14-15). A number of poems--"Easter," "Christmas," "An Offering"--exhibit an interesting compound form in which an opening in adult meditative verse modulates into childlikeness as a means of religious and lyric intensification. While both aspects of the Herbertian speaker's identity carry their associated poetic, a good deal more critical attention has been devoted to lyrics that articulate the adult's plain-style principles than to those that exemplify the child's plainstyle practices on which the adult's principles are based. The nursery rhyme aids recognition of the cluster of verse features that typify Herbertian childlikeness: simplicity of concept, diction, and image; brevity of line length; emphatic, even reiterated rhymes; and a fondness for refrains and onomastics. The child speaker's plain style is on view throughout "Antiphon [I]," "Trinitie Sunday," and "Jesu," and it serves the adult speaker as a norm for composition in a number of lyrics including "Antiphon [1 I],"'Mattens" and "Even-song," "Heaven," "Praise [1, 11]." The adult speaker theorizes the child's model in "The Forerunners": "I passe not, I, what of the rest become, / So Thou art still my God, be out of fear. / He will be pleased with that dittie; / And if I please him. I write fine and wittie" (lines 9-12). The dual identities of the Herbertian speaker-desexualized adult and child-internalize the human dimensions of the self-other relationship such as these figure in The Temple. Together ----------------------------------------- 42. [155] they form the complex
psyche of a sell undergoing regeneration, whose only other, finally,
is God. |
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Happy those early
dayes! when I My Conscience with
a sinfull sound, A sevrall sinne
to ev'ry sence, Bright shoots of
everlastingnesse. The staple of Vaughan's
verse is an adult speaker seeking self-effacement and escape in an idealized
and desexualized natural world that encompasses a much greater store
of metaphysical significance than Herbert's had. Nature's metaphysical
dimensions are attested in a wealth of major lyrics including "The
Showre," "The Morning-watch." "Rom. Cap. 8. Ver.
19," "Repentance," 'Cockcrowing." "The Water-fall."
"Heark!" exclaims the speaker of "The Morningwatch."
"In what Rings, /And Hymning Circulations the quick world / Awakes,
and sings; I The rising winds, / And falling springs. / Birds, beasts,
all things / Adore him in their kinds. /... Prayer is / The world in
tune" (lines 9-15. 18-19). Regaining its traditional aspect as
the book of the creatures, the natural World merges with the Bible to
comprise a rich sphere of interdependent meanings for Vaughan. Thus
the settings on which his speaker reflects to find and know himself--in
such characteristic lyrics as "Mans Fall. and Recovery." "Vanity
of Spirit." 'Corruption," and "Faith"-may gradate
fluidly from envisioned landscapes to biblical locales and back again. ------------------------------------ 43. [156] Since; too, the
Bible sanctions a spiritualized sexuality at certain junctures, : i.
Vaughan's adult speaker. unlike Herbert's, may occasionally feminize
his soul's love-longing for union with Christ or figure his identity
as one of the wise virgins of the Gospel parable "The Lampe,"
"The Dawning") or as the bride of Canticles ("The World,"
"Mount of Olives [11 ]). When he does so, however, it is without
the slightest hint of Crashaw's ecstasy and arousal. Vaughan securely
anchors his lyrics within the narrative framework of his source passages
and their traditional allegorical readings. In "The Dawning"
the use of common measure, the meter of church hymns. works additionally
to control any tendency toward eroticized spirituality: O at what time
soever thou And chief acquaintance
be above; In which thy sell wil be the Sun. Thou'It find me drest and on my way, Watching the Break
of thy great day. [Lines 26-27, 43-48] It falls, in consequence,
to Traherne to develop the Herbertian child speaker into a primary vehicle
of the ideality and transcendence that continue to prompt applications
of the metaphysical style. Both in the prose Third Cen tury and in a
series of major lyrics ("The Salutation," "Wonder,"
"Eden," "Innocence," "The Rapture." 'The
Approach." "Speed." "An Infant-Ey," "Return."
"Christendom," 'Right Apprehension" "Shadows in
the Water," "Sight"), ideality becomes incar-nate in
the body of the child speaker, who is almost erotically self-cognizant
in this regard. "These little Limmes. / These Eys and Hands which
here I find. /These rosie Cheeks wherwith my Life begins." exclaims
the child of"The Salutation," while the child of "Wonder"
rejoins, "How like an Angel came I down! / ... / A Native Health
and Innocence I Within my Bones did grow, / And while my coo did all
his Glories shew, / I fel a Vigour in my Sence / That was all SPIRIT.
Empathy, however, stands in for sexuality as the means of the child's
self-transcendence in Traherne. "I within did flow / With Seas
of Life, like Wine; / I nothing in the World did know, / But'twas Divine"
("Wonder," lines 21-24). "The first Effects of Lov /
My first Enjoyments upon Earth did prov; / And were so great, and so
Divine. so Pure; / So fair and Sweet, / So True; when 1 did meet / Them
here at first, they did my Soul allure," adds the speaker of "Eden"
(lines 41-46). What is ultimately important about this child speaker, however, emerges from its still longer-range role in the subsequent history of intersecting representations of poetic subjectivity and femininity-a role I can only gesture at here. Beginning with the Songs of Innocence and Experience and continuing in "The Everlasting Gospel" and "For the Sexes: The Gates of Paradise," the child speaker's open sensibility and ostensible artlessness work to sustain William Blake on his way to revolutionary articulations of sexual freedom and equality. But for my present purposes the most ------------------------------------------------- 44. [157] vital role played
by the child speaker lies in the compositional model that it offered
as a point of departure to a poet who .more than any other except Donne
faithfully followed the metaphysical muse. "(45)This poet is, at
long last, another woman-not Orinda. but Emily Dickinson. Judith Banzer first
assembled direct and indirect evidence for the case crediting Dickinson
with knowledge, in particular, of Herbert and Vaughan. Reconfiguring
these predecessors' poetic development in her own, the early Dickinson
seems closest to Vaughan in her recourse to natural-even semibiblical-settings
and objects as vehicles for her metaphysical insights and stirrings.
"I have
a Bird in spring" analogizes thus from the departure of the spring
robin: 'That Bird of mine I Though flown- / Learned beyond the sea /
Melody new for me / ... Fast in a safer hand / Held in a truer land
/ Are mine- / And though they now depart, / Tell I my doubting heart/They're
thine."" Dated circa 1859, early in Dickinson's great productive
period, "Cocoon above! Cocoon below!" recaptures the duality
of focus by which Vaughan had telescoped divine significance into a
natural object and afforded. his pure because desexualized speaker a
concurrent knowledge of self and world: "A hour in Chrysaiis to
pass, I Then gay above receding grass! A Butterfly to go! / A moment
to interrogate, / Then wiser than a 'Surrogate,' / The Universe to know!"
(lines 7-14). However, as Dickinson begins to avail herself of the poetic
resources and the radical newness associated with Herbertian childlikeness,
her voice and identity steadily increase in originality and expressive
power: One Year ago -
jots what? Was't Glory? That - will do - Spell slower - Glory - . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . If to be "Elder"
- mean most pain - As old as thee
- how soon? Let me - choose! The self-characterizing 'little Girl" who speaks "Good Morning - Midnight -" likewise takes leave of life. But this time she is a resistant ward who ventures resistance through coyness: "Sunshine was a sweet place - / I like to stay - /But ------------------------------- 45. 46. 47. [158] Morn - didn't wane
me - now - / So - Goodnight - Day ! ... / You - are not so fair - Midnight
- / I chose - Day -" (lines 8,13-14). Rapidly enlarging upon this feminine lyric consciousness, Dickinson at the height of her genius rivals Donne's achievement by creating an adult female speaker who includes girlishness among her manifold tonalities. In this period-between 1862 and 1865-Dickinson moves beyond all male precursors herself into being as a woman poet: "It would never be Common - more - I said - / Difference had begun - /-.. /) put my pleasure all abroad - / I dealt a word of Gold / To every creature - that I met - / And Dowered - all the World -"(lines 1-2, 17- , 20). "It was given to me by the Gods -" further dila tes on the critical
self-' registration of difference by which poetic genius comes, in Dickinson,
to affirm its gendering female: It was given to me by the Gods - When I war a little Girl - I kept it in my
Hand - For fear it would
be gone - And wrestled with
a smile. Rich! 'Twas Myself - was rich - The difference
- made me bold - [Lines 1-2. 5-9, 12-13. 161. 48 Thus to have transcended, as Dickinson did, the division between woman's other and the self as peel is a true metaphysical turn in its own right. The turn constituted by her mastery of the mode provides, in its turn. an apt ending for this summary account of the not inconsiderable, though convoluted, fortunes of women-as sub-jects, readers, and finally as poetsamong the metaphysicals. University of Chicago |
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| 48. For sensitive feminist discussion of Dickinson's poetry see Eleanor Wilner.'The poetics of Emily Dickinson." ELH 38 (1973): 116-51; Cristianne Miller. Emily Dickinson, "A Poet's Grammer (Cambridge. Marr.. 1987), pp. 154-116; and Joyce Carol Oates, 'Soul at the white Heat: The Romance of Emily Dickinson's poetry." Critical Inquiry 13 (1987): 806-21. |
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