John Donne and contemporary poetry : essays and poems 978-3-319-55300-9, 3319553003, 978-3-319-55299-6

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xiii
Introduction: Listening for, Looking for Donne (Judith Scherer Herz)....Pages 1-7
The History of the Donne and Contemporary Poetry Project (Heather Dubrow)....Pages 9-14
On the Road with Donne: An Idiosyncratic Pilgrimage (Carl Phillips)....Pages 15-27
Per Fretum Febris: The Diseased Body in John Donne and Brett Foster (Kimberly Johnson)....Pages 29-46
Seven Poems (Kimberly Johnson)....Pages 47-53
The Plexiglass Wall and the Vital Verb (Molly Peacock)....Pages 55-60
Reading Donne: A Sentimental Journey (Jonathan F S Post)....Pages 61-73
Sonnets 1–14 (Katie Ford)....Pages 75-83
What’s Done Is Donne and How Can I Find God Now: Poems from The Volcano Sequence (Alicia Ostriker)....Pages 85-101
Epithalamia and Aubades (Heather Dubrow)....Pages 103-108
Bird of Fire; The Double Death of Orpheus: Poems from The Ground (Rowan Ricardo Phillips)....Pages 109-112
Poems: The Sunne Rising, Felinity (Stephen Burt)....Pages 113-115
Poem: Musing (Stephen Yenser)....Pages 117-121
Heaney, Donne, and the Boldness of Love (Sean H. McDowell)....Pages 123-144
Quiver, Chatter, Purple Jinx: On Donne, Translation, and the Psalms (Mark Dow)....Pages 145-169
Donne and the Reign of Figures (Calvin Bedient)....Pages 171-195
Turn, Return, Revolve: John Donne’s Kinetic Poetics (Joseph Campana)....Pages 197-215
Back Matter ....Pages 217-221

Citation preview

JOHN DONNE AND CONTEMPORARY POETRY Essays and Poems

edited by

Judith Scherer Herz

John Donne and Contemporary Poetry

Judith Scherer Herz Editor

John Donne and Contemporary Poetry Essays and Poems

Editor Judith Scherer Herz Concordia University Montreal, QC Canada

ISBN 978-3-319-55299-6 ISBN 978-3-319-55300-9  (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-55300-9 Library of Congress Control Number: 2017937709 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit: Getty Images/nicoolay Printed on acid-free paper This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To the members of the John Donne Society “zealously my Muse doth all salute thee.” for “your integritie, friendship, and confidence.”

Contents

Introduction: Listening for, Looking for Donne  1 Judith Scherer Herz The History of the Donne and Contemporary Poetry Project  9 Heather Dubrow On the Road with Donne: An Idiosyncratic Pilgrimage  15 Carl Phillips Per Fretum Febris: The Diseased Body in John Donne and Brett Foster  29 Kimberly Johnson Seven Poems  47 Kimberly Johnson The Plexiglass Wall and the Vital Verb  55 Molly Peacock Reading Donne: A Sentimental Journey  61 Jonathan F.S. Post

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Sonnets 1–14  75 Katie Ford What’s Done Is Donne and How Can I Find God Now: Poems from The Volcano Sequence  85 Alicia Ostriker Epithalamia and Aubades  103 Heather Dubrow Bird of Fire; The Double Death of Orpheus: Poems from The Ground  109 Rowan Ricardo Phillips Poems: The Sunne Rising, Felinity  113 Stephen Burt Poem: Musing  117 Stephen Yenser Heaney, Donne, and the Boldness of Love  123 Sean H. McDowell Quiver, Chatter, Purple Jinx: On Donne, Translation, and the Psalms  145 Mark Dow Donne and the Reign of Figures  171 Calvin Bedient Turn, Return, Revolve: John Donne’s Kinetic Poetics  197 Joseph Campana Index

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Editor

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Contributors

About the Editor Judith Scherer Herz  is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Concordia University, Montreal, Canada. She has published essays on Donne, Milton, Shakespeare, and other early modern writers, including two on Donne and twentieth- and twenty-first-century poetry. She has also written on Bloomsbury writers, including several books on E.M. Forster, as well as articles on Forster and on Leonard Woolf.

Contributors Calvin Bedient  is Professor Emeritus in the English Department at the University of California. He is the author of four collections of poetry (Candy Necklace, The Violence of the Morning, Days of Unwilling, and The Multiple) and of five books of criticism (Architects of the Self, Eight Contemporary Poets, He Do the Police in Different Voices: The Waste Land and its Protagonist, In the Heart’s Last Kingdom: Robert Penn Warren’s Major Poetry, and The Yeats Brothers and Modernism’s Love of Motion). His reviews and essays have appeared in many magazines. He is the publisher and coeditor of Lana Turner: A Journal of Poetry and Opinion. Stephen Burt (also Steph or Stephanie) is Professor of English at Harvard and the author of several books of poetry and literary criticism, among them THE POEM IS YOU: Sixty Contemporary American ix

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Poems and How to Read Them (Harvard UP, 2016), Belmont: Poems (2013), Parallel Play (2006). A new book of poems will appear from Graywolf in 2017. Joseph Campana is a poet, arts critic, and scholar of Renaissance literature at Rice University. He is the author of The Pain of Reformation: Spenser, Vulnerability, and the Ethics of Masculinity (2012), and two collections of poetry, The Book of Faces (Graywolf, 2005) and Natural Selections (2012), which received the Iowa Poetry Prize. Current projects include a study of Shakespeare’s children called The Child’s Two Bodies and a collection of poems called The Book of Life. Mark Dow has had poems and nonfiction in Agni, Blackbox Manifold, Country Music Poetry, The New York Times, Paris Review, PN Review, SLAM! Wrestling, Wave Composition, Word for/Word, and elsewhere. His translations have appeared in Conjunctions, Exchanges, and Green Integer Review. His 2015 chapbook “Feedback” and Other Conversation Poems is at Mudlark: An Electronic Journal of Poetry and Poetics. He is the author of American Gulag: Inside U.S. Immigration Prisons (California, 2004) and coeditor with David R. Dow of Machinery of Death: The Reality of America's Death Penalty Regime (Routledge, 2002). Heather Dubrow  is currently the John D. Boyd, SJ, Chair in the Poetic Imagination at Fordham University. Among the institutions at which she taught previously are Carleton College and the University of WisconsinMadison. Her publications include seven single-authored books (most recently Deixis in Early Modern English Lyric: Unsettling Spatial Anchors Like “Here,” “This,” “Come” [Palgrave-Macmillan, 2015]), a coedited collection of essays, and an edition of As You Like It, as well as a collection of her own poetry entitled Forms and Hollows and two chapbooks. She also publishes essays on pedagogy and higher education. Katie Ford is the author of Deposition, Colosseum, and Blood Lyrics, which was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize and the Rilke Prize. Colosseum was named among the “Best Books of 2008” by Publishers Weekly and the Virginia Quarterly Review and led to a Lannan Literary Fellowship and the Larry Levis Prize. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, The Paris Review, The American Poetry Review, and The Norton Introduction to Literature. Her fourth book is forthcoming from Graywolf Press is 2018. Ford is Professor of Creative

Editor and Contributors

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Writing at the University of California, Riverside, where she directs the MFA Program. Kimberly Johnson is Professor of English at BYU, where she teaches Renaissance literature and creative writing. Her books include the poetry collections Uncommon Prayer and A Metaphorical God, translations from ancient Greek and Latin poetry, and the critical study Made Flesh: Sacrament and Poetics in Post-Reformation England. With Jay Hopler she edited Before the Door of God: An Anthology of Devotional Poetry. Sean H. McDowell is Director of University Honors and Associate Professor of English, Creative Writing, and Film Studies at Seattle University. He has published a variety of essays on Donne, Shakespeare, George Herbert, Richard Crashaw, Henry Vaughan, Andrew Marvell, and others, including Irish poets Tony Curtis and Seamus Heaney. A textual editor and commentary editor for The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne, he also serves as the Executive Director of the John Donne Society and is the editor of John Donne Journal: Studies in the Age of Donne. His most recent poems have appeared in Clover, a literary rag; Vine Leaves; and Scintilla. Alicia Ostriker is Professor Emerita, Rutgers University. She is a poet and critic, winner of a National Jewish Book Award, twice a National Book Award finalist, author of 15 collections of poetry, most recently The Book of Seventy and The Old Woman, the Tulip, and the Dog. As a critic, she is the author of Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women’s Poetry in America, and other books on poetry and on the Bible. Molly Peacock is a widely anthologized international poet published leading literary journals in the USA, UK, and Canada, as well as in the Oxford Book of American Poetry. She is the author of seven collections of poetry, including The Analyst, The Second Blush, and Cornucopia: New and Selected Poems. Passionate about bringing poetry to a wider public, she helped create Poetry in Motion on New York City’s subways and buses and inaugurated The Best Canadian Poetry series. She is also the author of the noted biography The Paper Garden: Mrs. Delany Begins Her Life’s Work at 72, as well as the memoir, Paradise, Piece by Piece. Peacock also wrote and performed “The Shimmering Verge,” a onewoman theater piece in poems.

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Carl Phillips is the author of 12 books of poetry, most recently Reconnaissance (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), winner of the 2016 PEN Center USA Literary Award for Poetry. His books of prose are The Art of Daring: Risk, Restlessness, Imagination and Coin of the Realm: Essays on the Life and Art of Poetry (Graywolf 2004 and 2014, respectively). He has also translated Sophocles’ Philoctetes (Oxford, 2004). Phillips is Professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis. Rowan Ricardo Phillips is the author of two volumes of poetry: The Ground (2012) and Heaven (2015), as well as the critical volume When Blackness Rhymes with Blackness (2010). He translated, from the Catalan, Salvador Espriu’s story collection Ariadne in the Grotesque Labyrinth (2012). He is the recipient of the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award, the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award for Poetry, a Whiting Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Poetry. Jonathan F. S. Post  is Distinguished Professor of English, UCLA. His books include A Thickness of Particulars: The Poetry of Anthony Hecht (Oxford, 2015), The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare’s Poetry (Oxford 2013; 2016), Green Thoughts, Green Shades: Essays by Contemporary Poets on the Early Modern Lyric (University of California Press, 2002), English Lyric Poetry: The Early Seventeenth Century (Routledge 1999; 2002), and Henry Vaughan: The Unfolding Vision (Princeton, 1982). He is currently writing A Very Short Introduction to Shakespeare’s Poems (Oxford). Stephen Yenser has published The Fire in All Things (LSU), which won the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets, Blue Guide (University of Chicago), and most recently Stone Fruit (Waywiser). In addition to these volumes of poems, he has written three critical books, the latest of which is A Boundless Field (University of Michigan Poets on Poetry), and is coeditor of James Merrill’s work, including Merrill’s Collected Poems, the Selected Poems, and the Selected Letters (the last in progress). He is also editing a new edition of Merrill’s The Book of Ephraim. He is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at UCLA and Curator of the Hammer Museum Poetry Series.

List of Figures

Per Fretum Febris: The Diseased Body in John Donne and Brett Foster Fig. 1 Portrait of John Donne, from the frontispiece to Deaths Duell, or, A Consolation to the Soule, against the Dying Life, and Living Death of the Body Deliuered in a Sermon at White-Hall before the Kings Maiestie, in the Beginning of Lent, 163032 Quiver, Chatter, Purple Jinx: On Donne, Translation, and the Psalms Fig. 1 Psalms 102: 8–9

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Introduction: Listening for, Looking for Donne Judith Scherer Herz

“Itch (The Flea’s Retort),” a poem by the British poet Alan Jenkins in a recent issue of The New Yorker, begins, “It must have been their first time—first shared bed,/A hotel off 42nd Street, so sleazy” and continues with those innocent young lovers scratching their itch until they untangle to find there was a very different itch to scratch “where scratching was no fun.” But the culprit, unlike Donne’s flea, has the last word; this flea survives to tell the tale.1 Of course, playing with an earlier poem has a long history. Donne did it in “The Baite,” overwriting Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd” as well as Raleigh’s more skeptical “The Nymph’s Reply.” Among contemporary poets, such talking back to or taking on other poets is certainly not confined to Donne. Another British poet, Alice Oswald, does it with Homer, Marvell, John Clare, and Ted Hughes among others, as Dan Chiasson has shown.2 Indeed, poets do it all the time, sometimes even lifting their poems out of another poet’s, as Jan Bervin does in Nets, her poems materializing out of the dimmed text of Shakespeare’s sonnets or Ronald Johnson’s Radi Os emerging from blanked out spaces in Paradise Lost. But the Donne connections, resonances, and surprise appearances explored and illustrated here, fleas not withstanding, are for the most part of a different order. For the working assumption behind this volume

J.S. Herz (*)  Concordia University, Montreal, Canada © The Author(s) 2017 J. Herz (ed.), John Donne and Contemporary Poetry, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-55300-9_1

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is that John Donne’s writing, both prose and poetry, has seeped into the language, the imagination, and the multiple ways of figuring and configuring experience and desire, both erotic and spiritual, of numerous twentieth- and twenty-first-century writers. What is it about his words, about his poetics that evoke this felt presence even when he is not specifically cited or even alluded to? These questions echo through the poems and essays that follow. It is an echoing and a conversation that began at least as early as 1907 with Rupert Brooke, soon to be called “our Donne redivus” by a reviewer of his 1911 Poems, writing in his letters about his reading of Donne and beginning to write in what he understood as the Donne manner. Of course, there were other poets also reading Donne in the 1896 Chambers and then the 1912 Grierson editions. Like Brooke, Wilfred Owen and Edgell Rickword carried Donne’s poems to war but read them and wrote through them far more profoundly than Brooke had. And there is Hart Crane who described what he wanted to accomplish as a poet using Donne’s “The Expiration” as his example: it is “‘an interior form’ … that is so thorough and intense as to dye the words themselves with a peculiarity of meaning,” pointing to his “Black Tambourine,” as his attempt at doing this.3 In the mid-twentieth century, various critics such as Josephine Miles, George Williamson, and Arthur Clements traced multiple pathways to locate their version of Donne. William Empson not only did this in his critical writing but also listened to Donne in his own poetry. Of course, there is always T.S. Eliot to contend with in this transmission history and what he did or didn’t do for Donne’s modern fortunes. However, some exceptions aside, Eliot never really “wrote Donne.” There have also been poets from other languages and literary traditions who read and translated Donne, and then gave him a voice in their own poetry. Joseph Brodsky and Yehuda Amichai offer fine examples of this, illustrating what the Canadian poets Doug Beardsley and Al Purdy described in The Man Who Outlived Himself (2000) as “blood transfusions from Donne to us.”4 There they talk about Donne’s poems and follow these conversations with their own poems—responses to the elegies as well as their poems to Anne Moore. Sometimes this transfusion occurs with Donne’s very own words, as in Paul Muldoon’s “Sillyhow Stride, a double elegy for Warren Zevon, the singer-songwriter whom Muldoon collaborated with on “My Ride’s Here” (words from that song are in this poem, too) and for Muldoon’s own sister. Many of the lines, whole lines and half lines, are Donne’s, but they become part of Muldoon’s poem as

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they move to the sounds of a rock guitar and a stride piano in this musical offering of Donne to Zevon. The poem may have a “Lycidas” substructure but it also has a language and a response to language that belong to Donne. There have been multiple likenesses and uses of Donne over these 100-plus years—Adrienne Rich’s “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning” confronting and negating Donne’s, Mark Jarman’s Unholy Sonnets, Dylan’s “Sister” and Donne’s “The Canonization” to take three very different examples among many others. Thinking about, illustrating, and participating in this encounter is what happens in the following pages. Here the listeners are nearly all poets, whether they offer poems or essays (and in two instances both), and many are critics and scholars. The opening essay by Heather Dubrow (“The History of the Donne and Contemporary Poetry Project”), whose poems also appear here (“Epithalamia and Aubades”) and who has been an important instigator and facilitator of this volume, is on the Donne and Contemporary Poetry Project. She describes the events she coordinated at Fordham University in New York and related events elsewhere in which poets of our moment read their own poetry that in different ways responded to Donne’s. Her essay also thinks about university and department structures, and why it is necessary to create connections between the creative and the “academic.” Carl Phillips, who is both poet and academic, offers an excellent example of this bridging (“On the Road with Donne: An Idiosyncratic Pilgrimage”). His essay is a wandering, a pilgrimage through and to Donne’s sonnets, a space he calls a “region of unlikeness … the territory of the Holy Sonnets.” Lines and stanzas of poetry move through the essay, echoing and extending the argument. Much of Phillips’s poetry has a Donnean undertow or echo. It is audible in Riding Westward and in many of the poems in From the Devotions. The poems are attuned to Donne’s meditative mode and his language. It is not his own body that is scrutinized in the poem that gives the book its name but it is a poetry of embodiment, written by a poet who “thinks of writing as prayer.” Donne’s Devotions upon Emergent Occasions offer the crucial text for Kimberly Johnson’s essay (“Per Fretum Febris: The Diseased Body in John Donne and Brett Foster”) on Donne and Brett Foster, as she shows how Foster read his own dying body through Donne’s meditations and argues that embodiment becomes the mechanism by which we are recognizable to one another, by which we become both knowable and meaningful. We follow Foster as he allows himself “to swirl a

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little in my own emergent occasion.” His text and Donne’s, including “A Hymn to God my God in my Sickness” are played off one another, demonstrating in each a process of interconnectedness that allows for a version of transcendence. Several of Kimberly Johnson’s own poems that appear in this volume (“Seven Poems”) also involve scrutiny of the body, but not in extremis, even as they begin with a sonnet, “The Story of My Calamities,” and continue with, for example, odes to her appendix and to her epistiotomy. Others imagine other Donne occasions— Good Friday, St. Lucy’s Day—but with very different casts of characters, spiritual landscapes, and modes of address. But beneath them all is her request: “My Lord my flesh/your tablet make.” Sickness also lies behind and beneath Molly Peacock’s double offering (“The Plexiglass Wall and the Vital Verb”), a poem whose prose accompaniment is the left hand to the music the right hand makes. As one reads one does not at first encounter a story of disease nor sense a Donne presence, but both gradually become visible through the remarkable image of the poem’s title, the plexiglas wall. Her discussion of the “vital verb,” which follows the poem, offers an important entry into Donne’s poetics as well as George Herbert’s, both of whom are inside this poem as well as deep within the author’s writing life. George Herbert, John Donne and illness: these also offer the ground for Jonathan Post’s essay (“Reading Donne: A Sentimental Journey”). He traces his journey from student to literary scholar, starting with his immersion in Vaughan and Herbert and, in the years following, the twentieth-century poets who read them deeply. He came to Donne when thinking and writing about mid-century poetry, later writing on Donne and Anthony Hecht, for example. His contribution here focuses in part on Donne’s importance for the Australian poets A.D. Hope and Stephen Edgar, developing a detailed reading of Edgar’s “Nocturnal” (2008). It is a subtle and moving poem that reconfigures Donne’s “A Nocturnal on Saint Lucy’s Day” as Edgar mourns the death of his partner. This reading brings the essay back to the time when illness entered his own home. He describes finding necessary comfort in Donne—not in the Donne who wrote of and on his sick body, but Donne the love poet whose poems “carry us towards the object of desire.” If for Carl Phillips poetry is like prayer, for Katie Ford, the relationship to poetic form is one of supplication. In her 14 sonnets (“Poems: Sonnets 1–14”) linked as a corona, part of the poet’s life, figured in objects, in memories, and in discussions with the self is called up,

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confronted: “theologies lay and stretch me on the rack.” God is addressed, “have a little warmth on me,” but there is no easy resolution, just the continuing exploration/supplication. As it did for Donne, the sonnet offers a useful space for such probings. Indeed, having found such recourse/resource in the sonnet form, Ford is promising many more. Alicia Ostriker’s set of 15 poems (“What’s Done Is Donne, and How Can I Find God Now?”), drawn from her book The Volcano Sequence, also seeks God, but as Jewish, feminist, and woman. The poem “psalm” opens the sequence, but she says there that she “will not play the harp/ for your pleasure,” and there are three psalms near the close where she continues to “hurl the letters of your name/onto every page.” God’s wonders have, as their counterpoint, such questions as: “so where in hell/are you now?” She searches for the shekinah, the feminine aspect of divinity, who may be in “exile” or an “amnesiac.” Believing, but…, she tries “to invent new forms of holiness” and comes up with more questions. What about judgment? Do we really believe? The terms of the questions, the contexts and occasions vary, but “body and spirit are undivided and flesh is …holy,” very like Donne. There are many other kinds of Donnean explorations and adaptations in the poems appearing here. Heather Dubrow’s “Four Aubades” (“Epithalamia and Aubades”) is a group of poems that could be called “A Wedding Poem and an Aubade,” each with its later refiguring. They engage Donne’s grammar, his syntax (“disjunctive conjunction”), and his word play. The second pair, turning “Aubade for our Late Afternoon” into “Aubade for our Early Evening,” is a more complete transformation of the earlier poem. Here Donne’s voice is close to the poet’s ear as she writes back to her own stories and thinks about what the Donne presence means to her. Just as a phoenix makes an appearance in Heather Dubrow’s poems, it also flies through Rowan Ricardo Phillips’s “Bird of Fire” (“Bird of Fire; The Double Death of Orpheus: Poems from The Ground”). Here it becomes in part a metonymy for the making of poetry: “I chased the verb with the bird that always lives.” And in “The Double Death of Orpheus,” Donne’s compass offers another way to learn from the poet: how he could make a “ridiculous,” an unexpected word work. What the compass image did for Donne, the allusion does for Phillips. There’s no direct talking to or taking on of Donne in his poems as he emphasizes in his comments, but Donne is there. I sense him beneath several of the poems in Heaven (2015), in “Measure for Measure,” for example: “But

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death measures us, with a noun’s contempt/For our Imagination.” It’s a presence that isn’t so much seen or heard as felt. Two poets whose contributions offer both direct and indirect conversations with Donne are Stephen Burt and Stephen Yenser. Burt’s “The Sunne Rising” (“Poems: The Sunne Rising, Felinity”) reads and answers Donne’s poem with a contemporary, less sunny version of lovers together, where compromise and imperfect knowledge of the other may confound the belief that this moment will be forever, a possibility that Donne’s poem both does and doesn’t allow. “Felinity” engages/rewrites a Baudelaire poem (“Le Chat”) rather than one by Donne, but it also contains his thinking about Donne’s lovers in its human/cat pairing. Each knows the other, but keeps something to the self as indeed Baudelaire’s cat is both imagined (“dans ma cervelle”) and really a cat. We imagine our partners as well as know them. Indirection would also describe Yenser’s “Musing” (“Poem: Musing”), a poem of punning and word play, including the title, which would have delighted Donne, who could conceal a smile within a solemnity and find the ribald, well, nearly everywhere. In this poem, words emerge from other words just as the poem emerges in part from its epigraph from Donne’s “Elegy XIX,” an association both made and then further explicated, bringing much of what poets do into sharp focus. The commentary that follows the poem offers a mini essay on the omnipresence of Donne in Yenser’s own poetry and in American poetry from Bishop to the present. An essay that puts Donne in direct contact with a twentieth-century poet is Sean McDowell’s “Heaney, Donne, and the Boldness of Love,” but not in pursuit of influence. Rather, it pairs the poets to investigate how Heaney’s poems work, making Donne’s writing a useful handbook for reading another. Heaney certainly read Donne, but he did not imitate or echo so much as find in different poems “landscapes” to help shape his own path. That said, McDowell argues, there are still moments when one is aware of the earlier poet, as in the title “Valediction” of one of Heaney’s poems, or in similar uses of language and metaphor in others. Mark Dow’s essay, “Quiver, Chatter, Purple Jinx: On Donne, Translation, and the Psalms” does not pair Donne with any poet or poets. Donne is largely a marginal presence here, although the detailed reading of his poem on the Sidneian psalms gives Dow the occasion to offer a poet’s perspective on the act of translation, as he follows psalm translations through centuries and traditions, investigating the ways a text can be arranged, rearranged, and remade so that the “original” is

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there chiefly in the remaking. It thus offers a very useful way to consider the question of influence, what it means for one poet to think about, to “use” another. Like Carl Phillip’s essay, this piece could also be called a “spiritual pilgrimage.” Calvin Bedient (“Donne and the Reign of Figures”), writing from the perspective of a poet, considers how Donne’s words and stanzas work. His essay examines the differences between Donne’s poetics and that of modern and contemporary poets, even those who may seem or on occasion sound like him. For the crucial difference is that Donne worked within the ruling assumptions both social and literary of his time, but he made what was transmitted seem like discoveries. The essay examines voice, stanza formation, and image figures in an analysis that offers ways to read forward from Donne to the present. Joseph Campana’s contribution (“Turn, Return, Revolve: John Donne’s Kinetic Poetics”) also offers a poet’s reading of another poet as it explores turning, understood both as trope in poetry and as conversion in Donne’s life. Arguing that Donne’s poetics derives from a kinetics of motion, the essay moves between various figurings of converson as literally a turning both toward and away. Such turning is understood as an ethical action in both the love poetry and the religious poetry. The essays and poems gathered here reveal the presence and importance of Donne for other poets even when no Donne and Poet X parallel is made. His voice may or may not be in a poet’s ear, although it is often in the poet’s soundscape. Donne is part of our literary culture, of our language. How can he be understood the better to be used? In different ways, all the contributions here speak either directly or indirectly to this question.

Notes 1. The New Yorker, October 26, 2016. 2. The New Yorker, September 12, 2016. 3. Crane to William Wright, October 17, 1921, The Letters of Hart Crane, 1916–1932, Brom Weber (ed.) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965), p. 67. 4. Doug Beardsley and Al Purdy, The Man Who Outlived Himself (British Columbia: Harbour Publishing, 2000), p. 63.

The History of the Donne and Contemporary Poetry Project Heather Dubrow

Henry Donne, who died in prison after harboring a priest, might well have been pleased that the Donne and Contemporary Poetry project originated at and was frequently co-organized by that Jesuit institution, Fordham University. On the other hand, Henry Donne’s brother, the author of Ignatius his Conclave, is likely to have considered this link to the Society of Jesus applying wormwood to the otherwise happy tale of how later poets responded to his work. In any event, whatever its origins, the project blossomed into a national one—or, rather, as the contributions of the Canadian who edited this volume and the English musicians and scholars who set Donne poems for one of its events indicate, an international one. It came to encompass three distinctive but related poetry readings in New York City, events at the 2014 annual meeting of the John Donne Society in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and now culminates in this collection. In thus expanding, the series has involved a range of institutions, organizations, and perspectives. The first of the readings, held at the New York Public Library on June 20, 2013 and entitled “John Donne, Re-done,” featured three poets, Timothy Donnelly, Phillis Levin, and me. In addition, the actress Helen Cespedes, whose resume features major roles in many off-Broadway plays, regional productions, and television and film work, as well as

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understudy in a Broadway play, performed several Donne poems. On November 21, 2013, Barnard College broadened the project to explore how poets of our own era have responded to the impact of early modern poetry in general, as well as that of Donne in particular. Kimberly Johnson and Carl Phillips presented their work, and the Barnard event also honored the distinguished Renaissance scholar Anne Prescott, a past president of the John Donne Society. Postponed because of snow in February 2014, the contribution to the series organized by Fordham’s Poets Out Loud was rescheduled for October 22 of that year. Having read in the New York Public Library version of Donne and Contemporary Poetry, Timothy Donnelly participated at Fordham as well. The evening also featured Nigel Smith’s musical performances of two of Donne’s poems, which had been set by Smith and the composer Andrew Lovett. Smith is a distinguished scholar of early modern literature, notably the writings of Andrew Marvell, and also a cofounder with the poet Paul Muldoon of the rock band Rackett and its successor, Wayside Shrines. The 29th Annual John Donne Society Conference, held in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on February 20–22, 2014, opened on Linda Gregerson’s address, “Feeling Thinking: Donne and the Contemporary Lyric.” A distinguished contemporary poet who draws on a range of models, Gregerson has also published influential scholarly work on early modern poetry. The poetry reading at the conference that evening included three poets who had participated in previous events—Linda Gregerson, Kimberly Johnson, and me—as well as Joseph Campana and Katie Ford. In the final session of the conference, “Closing the Frame: John Donne and Contemporary Poetry,” the poets joined together in a panel discussion. Most of the writers at these events wear two hats, poet and critic, engaging with Donne when donning both types of headgear. Levin, for example, represents him extensively in the important anthology she edited, The Penguin Book of the Sonnet. And many of the participants are in dialogue with Donne’s contemporaries as well, sometimes making it tricky to distinguish, for example, the influence of Donne’s and Herbert’s characteristic reversals. Indeed, in his recent poetry collection, The Book of Faces, Campana riffs on the usual acknowledgments page by following the familiar “For making this book possible, special thanks to” with a list that enumerates not only his colleagues and members of his

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biological family but also an extended family of Herbert, Spenser, Surrey, and Wyatt. Some of the most familiar Donnean characteristics do recur frequently in poetry by the participants in the series alerting us to questions that Judith Herz has explored in her essays. Disparates are indeed by violence yoked together. Thus in the title of one of Donnelly’s collections, Cloud Corporation, “cloud” suggests the ethereal, the numinous, the floating, while “corporation” invokes the all-too-subterranean world of business chicanery, of politics in many guises. And in the work of these poets we repeatedly encounter abrupt shifts and reversals—in language, in subject matter, in tone, in sound effects, in apparently clear and closural judgments—that in numerous instances recall Donne. Yet, to be sure, the Donnean genes in the DNA represented in this project manifest themselves in distinctive ways. Gregerson, for example, achieves her unmistakable conversational voice in part through direct address and inclusion of the names of “real” people, including her immediate family, and in part through line length. Similarly, the wry humor that recurs in many of these poems takes idiosyncratic forms. Witness, for example, Ford’s word play in her title Deposition and elsewhere; Johnson’s own title, “A Nocturnall upon Saint Chuck Yaeger’s Day,” and her poem on her appendectomy; and Levin’s splendid evocations of parable, fable, and fantasy. And Phillips astutely observes in George Herbert “a degree of earnestness that I find in the work of no other seventeenth-century poet”; certainly neither the playfulness that has sometimes been described as a sine qua non of poetry nor the impact of that master and slave of play John Donne is absent from Phillips’ own work, and yet it leans towards that degree of earnestness.1 Even this brief overview of the events in the Donne and Contemporary Poetry Project (perhaps “projects” more aptly expresses the variety) demonstrates a range of potentialities, some already realized, for dovetailing early modern poetry and contemporary poetry and criticism, thus aptly introducing the essays in this volume that do so as well. As my brief references to participants in the project have indicated, many poets today, including leaders in the field, speak to, with, and against early modern poetry in general and often Donne in particular. In fact, the focus of the Donne and Contemporary Poetry Project was partly anticipated by a volume edited by Jonathan F.S. Post back in 2002 entitled Green Thoughts, Green Shades: Essays by Contemporary Poets on the Early Modern Lyric. Academics often stage similar conversations in their classrooms; I have, for example, taught “Good Friday, 1613.

12  H. Dubrow

Riding Westward” in conjunction with twenty-first century versions of it. Widespread reservations about periodization and the survey courses it facilitates may well further encourage such pedagogy. The links between early modern poetry and today’s writings, then, have hardly been neglected. But if that glass is half full, it is half empty as well—and suffering new cracks and new leaks in the academy today. Although my delight in both the work of Donne and current developments in poetry encouraged me to initiate the Donne and Contemporary Poetry Project, doing so was also a response to certain unremitting and as yet unresolved problems—an attempt to bridge divides that, like the crack in that half-empty glass, may well be widening. These issues assume distinctive forms in different institutions, and some problems may be more intense in the USA today than elsewhere in the Anglo-American academy, but recurrent patterns do emerge. First, witness the separation between those engaged with more contemporary texts and those studying the centuries tellingly coagulated into “early literature” by our students. Increasing specialization in graduate programs, impelled in part by a partly justified distrust of the “coverage” model and in part by an understandable agenda of limiting time to degree, means that those studying twentieth- and twenty-first-century texts are less likely than in earlier decades to know or care about what was written earlier. Symmetrically, students of the medieval and early modern periods may well be less informed about and less interested in modernist, postmodernist, and contemporary literature, perhaps partly from resentment of the increasingly central role of the later periods in many departments. Similarly, too many faculty members in creative writing programs replicate the dismissal or ignorance of the literature of previous centuries, encouraging their students to read mainly or only what is hot off the presses. The uncritical celebration of innovation can have these and other destructive consequences. Rowan Ricardo Phillips, another contributor to this volume (“Bird of Fire; The Double Death of Orpheus: Poems from The Ground”), firmly advises his fellow poets: Innovation is the red herring of poetic ambition. If innovation happens and holds up, the poets of the future will know it. But as you can’t anticipate the poets who will come after you, you shouldn’t ignore the poets who came before you. In their own way, they have already written what you want to write. And in your own way, you are presently the poet of the future. Therefore, treat the past as you would want the poets of the future to treat your poetry when it is the past.2

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The price exacted by the self-serving blinders that block our vision of connections between Donne and later writers is typically a sorry loss of critical judgment. Studies of recent sonnets often say in virtually so many words that the sonnet was a static, rigid form until the modern period. Similarly, a recent article on pastoral declared that until very recently it celebrated uncomplicated bucolic bliss; more somber views of the pastoral world, its author maintains, are the product and preserve of very recent writers, whose work he terms “post-pastoral.” The noise you heard as you read that summary was such post-pastoral poets as Virgil and Spenser turning over in their graves. Also troubling, though more longstanding, is the divide in the cultures of many departments between creative writers and literature professors. Admittedly, in the past decade or two the career path of combining work as a creative writer and scholar, exemplified, as I have already indicated, by many participants in the Donne and Contemporary Poetry Project, seems to have become more common—as well as more acceptable—in many quarters. And the increasing demand for writers with Ph.D.s (a tendency that raises many issues outside the scope of this essay) may prove both cause and effect of that increasing acceptability. But mutual distrust and disdain are still common in the cultures of many departments and are likely to remain so. The financial stringencies that so many universities face may well exacerbate this like so many other problems: throughout the academy, competition for scarce resources fuels other types of professional competition and the backbiting that typically accompanies it. But many either/or schemas (studying and teaching earlier or contemporary literature, publishing scholarly articles or poems, adopting models of periodization or undermining them, etc.) can be transformed into both/and. The John Donne and Contemporary Poetry Project in general and this book in particular address and aim to give legs to that transformation. And, speaking of those appendages, in so doing we also hope to ensure that these pairs of apparent alternatives come to resemble, yes, the legs of stiff twin compasses.

Notes 1. Carl Phillips, “Anomaly, Conundrum, Thy-Will-Be Done: On the Poetry of George Herbert,” Green Thoughts, Green Shades: Essays by Contemporary Poets on the Early Modern Lyric, Jonathan F.S. Post (ed.) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), p. 137.

14  H. Dubrow 2. Rowan Ricardo Phillips, “On the Notions of Innovation and Influence,” http://www.fsgworkinprogress.com/2016/04/on-the-notions-of-innovation-and-influence/.

On the Road with Donne: An Idiosyncratic Pilgrimage Carl Phillips

“As due by many titles, I resign/Myself to thee, O God…” So begins the first of Donne’s Holy Sonnets and yet from the start of this sequence, Donne displays, if not an uneasy relationship, then a ­decidedly uneasy-making relationship to the God to whom he professes to be resigned. Consider the argument of sonnet 1: As due by many titles, I resign Myself to thee, O God: First I was made By thee, and for thee, and when I was decay’d Thy blood bought that, the which before was thine. I am thy son, made with thyself to shine, Thy servant, whose pains thou hast still repaid, Thy sheep, thine image; and (til I betray’d Myself) a temple of thy spirit divine. Why doth the devil then usurp in me? Why doth he steal, nay ravish, that’s thy right? Except thou rise, and for thine own work fight, Oh I shall soon despair, when I do see That thou lov’st mankind well, yet wilt not choose me, And Satan hates me, yet is loath to lose me.1

C. Phillips (*)  Washington University, St. Louis, USA © The Author(s) 2017 J. Herz (ed.), John Donne and Contemporary Poetry, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-55300-9_3

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The octave states clearly enough the speaker’s subservience and ­indebtedness to God for the grace “bought” for humankind by Christ’s crucifixion. It also states that he has, in betraying himself, lost his standing as a divine temple. All of this makes the questions at lines 9 and 10 purely rhetorical: the speaker himself is to blame. And yet the poem’s final quartet suggests that it’s ultimately God’s fault, not the speaker’s: (1) God fails to fight for the speaker; (2) God risks seeming hypocritical, loving “mankind Well, yet wilt not choose me”; (3) and even worse, by implication, Satan does a better job of holding onto the speaker than God does, though Satan’s love for the speaker is less than God’s. This is clever arguing, to be sure—a form of sophistry. How different is it, though, from blasphemy in a sixteenth-century Christian context? Though Donne eventually converted to the Church of England, he was raised Catholic, a religion in which, to be baptized, one had to swear among other things to resist the “glamour of Evil.” But more often than not, throughout the Holy Sonnets Donne seems to be fascinated by the glamour of evil insofar as he flirts with blasphemy at the levels, variously, of argumentation, syntax, grammar, and prosodic virtuosity. * Shadows. Shadows everywhere. Though what I want, I think, is mercy—preferably not by that name.

* In sonnet 4, Donne pitches his own fate against that of the “numberless infinities/Of souls”—namely, the already dead. Having summoned them to arise from death, he switches gears at line 9. Here is the poem’s final sestet: But let them sleep, Lord, and me mourn a space;   For if above all these my sins abound, ‘Tis late to ask abundance of thy grace when we are there: Here on this lowly ground, Teach me how to repent, for that’s as good As if thou hads’t seal’d my pardon with thy blood.

There’s a level of solipsism here: never mind all of them, Lord, pay ­attention to me. And it has an effect on how I read the imperative mood

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as it gets used after this line. The imperative dominates the entire sonnet, from the poem’s opening command to the angels to blow their trumpets, to the aforementioned command to the dead that they arise. At line 9, Donne would seem to intend that other use of the imperative, that of prayer, inasmuch as he’s addressing God, before whom one would presume humility is required, especially from a speaker who would learn to be penitent. But because of its having been used strictly for command up to this point, and because we have seen the hubris of a speaker who thinks his own case should outweigh all others, the imperative is more ambiguous in its tone. Prayer or command? Sacred or profane? Perhaps the ambiguity is deliberate, allowing us to see a speaker in flux, as it were, between the sacred and profane; in asking to be taught to repent, he acknowledges he hasn’t yet, any possible hubris and/blasphemy becoming thereby excusable—yes? Or is that only how I am reading this, and, if so, then why? Where am I? * My fears—when I have fears— are of how long I shall be, falling, and in my at last resting how indistinguishable, inasmuch as they are countless, sire, all the unglittering other dropped stones.

* If there’s a particular place in which the Holy Sonnets dwell, it would seem to be that region of unlikeness of which Augustine speaks when, in his Confessions, he understands how lost he is. To inhabit the region of unlikeness is to be far from God, to have chosen to understand (or try to) the ways of the world not through Christ’s example (imitatio Christi) but via the impulse toward empirical thinking that is both the gift and the burden of being human; the result is a form of spiritual exile characterized by disorientation, for one has strayed from the correct path. If this region of unlikeness is in fact the territory of the Holy Sonnets it makes sense that the sonnets would constantly evince a spiritual

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restlessness, an inability to refrain from questioning God’s ways, and to argue for a reformation of those ways. We could say that the ability to reason is what gets Donne in trouble—the attempt to rationalize one’s own behavior and to make God’s ways square with one’s own understanding are both examples of the governing weather, in this case intellectually, of the region of unlikeness: disorientation. And yet if all is God given—reason included—how can reason be wrong? Is the asking of this question, itself, an instance of disoriented thinking? Isn’t it? Donne is hardly alone when it comes to this line of thought, though. George Herbert’s poem “Love (III)”2 comes to mind, where the speaker feels unworthy to look upon God (“Love,” here): I the unkind, ungrateful? Ah my dear, I cannot look on thee. Love took my hand, and smiling did reply, Who made the eyes but I? Truth Lord, but I have marred them: let my shame Go where it doth deserve. And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame?

(ll. 9–15)

If God made the eyes, then presumably they are sacred, any misuse of them notwithstanding. Likewise, then—presumably—for Donne, when it comes to reason, something he addresses specifically in sonnet 5, whose octave reads thus: If poisonous minerals, and if that tree Whose fruit threw death on else immortal us, If lecherous goats, if serpents envious Cannot be damn’d, alas why should I be? Why should intent, or reason, born in me, Make sins else equal, in me more heinous? And mercy being easy and glorious To God, in his stern wrath why threatens he?                 (my italics)

Why, Donne asks, should I be damned for such things as lust and envy when goats and serpents—creatures without reason—“Cannot be damn’d?” To my mind, this is one of his less persuasive, more specious moments of argument, precisely because of his comparison of humans

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and animals that lack reason: it seems pretty clear that the possession of reason is exactly what makes mankind more culpable—we have the ability to know better when it comes to behavior. Meanwhile, though, as we saw earlier in sonnet 4, Donne risks a certain self-centeredness here. In sonnet 4, this was conveyed by weighing his case against those of all who have died before him, his case somehow weighing more. In sonnet 5, a bit more slyly, it happens at the level of prosody. Note, for example, how the “I” of line 4 is withheld until the very end of not only the question but also of the line. Given that the “I” is the subject of the question, and the only independent clause after a series of four subordinate “if” clauses, a lot of syntactic pressure builds up and is only released—resolved—by the emergence of the “I” and the main verb attached to it. Then self is thrown into greater relief both by being the resolution to the syntactic difficulty and by being positioned at the line’s end. The line position is reinforced, meanwhile, by the line that immediately follows, again ending with the self (“born in me”), the “in me” then recurring quickly again—anaphora—in the line immediately following. That’s a lot of showcasing of the self. And that’s what belies the supposed sincerity of the question that occurs at line 9—the volta so often, in these sonnets, the place where the speaker makes a show at least of repentance for what’s been said earlier, though repentance can look suspiciously like backtracking, at times: But who am I that dare dispute with thee O God?

Do we really believe this? Do I? Why don’t I? Why don’t I want to? * Back to the quadruple “if” clause that opens sonnet 5. I’ve mentioned the sense of relief that is experienced when the subject and main verb of the sentence are at last delivered to us. What’s felt is the simultaneous frustrating and fueling of our desire to make grammatical and syntactic sense of the sentence—satisfaction gets held off until the very end. If this sounds erotic, yes, I mean it to; it coincides with what I’ve long called an erotics of syntax, whereby syntax enacts sexual foreplay, its transition to actual sex, and the linguistic release whose equivalent is orgasm. To delay is to stall the delivery of orgasm. Why shouldn’t the erotic figure here,

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in a sequence of sonnets that we have seen are willing to risk, at best, a blurring of the sacred and profane, and at worst, blasphemy, if it is blasphemy to question, rather than justify—to wax Miltonic—“God’s ways to man?” As well, though, we might say that to stall is to delay deliverance— deliverance in the sense of rescue from harm, from sin, something that Donne repeatedly asks for in the Holy Sonnets Impute me righteous, thus purg’d of evil (3, l. 13) Teach me how to repent (4, l. 13) Repair me now, for now mine end doth haste (13, l. 2) And burn me, O God, with a fiery zeal Of thee and thy house, which doth in eating heal (15, ll. 13–14)

In the tension between a desire, in words at least, for deliverance and  the stalling of delivery, syntactically, lies the psychological heart of the sensibility behind the Holy Sonnets By the time Augustine speaks of the region of unlikeness, he’s ready to take leave of it; Donne seems more inclined to reside there, in a space equivalent to the one where Augustine once asked that he be delivered from sexual desire—but not yet (Confessions VIII, vii). * Maybe just as the ability to reason can lead to blasphemous—because defiant and questioning—thinking, so can artistry, which always entails ambition, if only the ambition to make more of language than what it merely is. But of course, ambition is never far, as well, from pride, the distance between them roughly the same as between intelligence and cleverness. The conundrum for George Herbert, who has always struck me as more authentically committed to God, is that the desire to fashion, out of language, the most pleasing vessel (i.e., poem) for God is that it might look like showing off. For Donne, however, there more often seems a decided pleasure in seeing how close he can come to blasphemy in the name of art in presumed service to something higher. Sonnets 10 and 18 are the two more famously overt examples. On one hand, the speaker acknowledges being “betroth’d” to Satan, and on the other hand he asks for divorce—for a break in the supposed sacrament of marriage.

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Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend, But is captiv’d and proves weak or untrue. Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain. But am betroth’d unto your enemy: Divorce me, untie or break that knot again, Take me to you, imprison me, for I, Except you enthrall me, never shall be free, Nor ever chaste except you ravish me. (ll. 7–14)

Granted, perhaps Satan’s involvement renders void the usual notions of what a sacrament might be. But the speaker goes on to suggest, whether or not there’s a divorce, that God ravish him—a verb that’s been used earlier, in sonnet 1, to mean merely to steal or carry away, but the word retains its sexual connotation; and the combined contexts of force, marriage, chastity, and ravishing all the more contribute to this connotation. The speaker here has asked to be made new—as in chaste—and laments that his reason has proved untrue to its duties. But the speaker’s request to be ravished as a way of bringing about divorce or an untying of sacrament implies the desire to be untrue in a different way—that is, to his spouse. Marriage brought to divorce by rape, and the rapist God—is this, then, the road to chastity? And yet sometimes I think the blasphemy that Donne is flirting with here is less in the conflation of prayer and sexual overtones than in the suggestion that there is everywhere conundrum when it comes to God’s ways. Far from an imitatio Christi, it’s a questioning of, rather than an utter submission—resignation—to God. Sonnet 18 is a much calmer, quieter one than sonnet 10, seeming merely to ask Christ to show the speaker the true church (“dear Christ, thy spouse”), given how many versions of it, and of its origins, abound. But having made these requests, Donne pushes the conceit of Christ as husband and the church as spouse even further in the final quatrain: Betray, kind husband, thy spouse to our sights, And let mine amorous soul court they mild dove, Who is most true, and pleasing to thee, then When she’s embraced and open to most men.

The idea that the church is ultimately a welcoming institution, or should be, as opposed to a fractured and much-debated one is innocent enough.

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But the conceit makes it difficult not to see the church here being cast also as a prostitute, who is most true (again, chaste? True to her marriage?) when “she’s embraced and open to most men.” Open, as in sexually? And this is being requested of the husband—to serve, in effect, as procurer? Surely, Donne intends this doubleness in meaning, all the way down to his use of the verb “betray,” a word that can and does mean to reveal here, but we can hardly ignore the other connotation, that of treachery, a connotation that existed in Donne’s era as it does in ours. * Trust me. Trust me the way one animal trusts another.

When I suggest that Donne takes particular pleasure in the sexual overtones of the conceits deployed in sonnets 10 and 18, I’m no doubt remembering as well his earlier, more secular work, with its delight in the highly developed erotic conceit. But how much of my own sensibility resists a notion of holiness that has no more room for the body and its pleasures than for reason and its questions, reason whose governing mode, perforce, is a restlessness unceasing? Reason comes up twice in the Holy Sonnets—in sonnet 10 as the viceroy who has failed to defend the speaker, and in sonnet 5 as the one blamed for making sins in humans out of what in animals are instincts that go unjudged. And yet Donne notes (in sonnet 5) that reason is “born in me”—that is, is an inherent part of the self. To wish the power to reason away would not only be to reject one of God’s supposed gifts, as I’ve said earlier, but also to abandon the self. Yet isn’t the abandoning of self truly what it means to imitate Christ and in effect avoid the region of unlikeness? How can both be true? * Part of the dizzying effect of sonnet 10s ending, and what heightens the sense of conundrum, is that it pairs incongruities: freedom can exist only by our being enthralled, chastity only by being ravished. But another part is the use of chiasmus as a way of saying so. Except you enthrall me,

[I] never shall be free

Nor ever chaste,

except you ravish me.

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In isolation, the italicized phrases speak not only within their assigned lines but also across them. To be chaste can equal, then, not only to have been ravished, but to be free (of sin, in this case); likewise, one way to enthrall (which can lead to freedom) is to ravish. The rhetorical device of chiasmus reinforces—and complicates—the ties between the four phrases, and is all the more emphatic a close to the poem because it occurs in the final, Shakespearean rhymed couplet (as opposed to the Petrarchan couplets that have figured earlier). Chiasmus is used more subtly, but to more complex effect, in sonnet 7: Spit in my face, ye Jews, and pierce my side, Buffet, and scoff, scourge, and crucify me: For I have sinn’d, and sinn’d: and only he Who could do no iniquity hath died. But by my death cannot be satisfi’d My sins, which pass the Jews’ impiety: They kill’d once an inglorious man, but I Crucify him daily, being now glorified. Oh let me then his strange love still admire: Kings pardon, but he bore our punishment. And Jacob came cloth’d in vile harsh attire But to supplant and with gainful intent: God cloth’d himself in vile man’s flesh, that so He might be weak enough to suffer woe.

It’s important to note the sonic coupling of speaker and Christ early on, at lines 2–3: not just a sonic coupling, but a coupling in terms of position at the end of their respective lines. Donne suggests an equivalence, then, at the same time as he points out the difference between the two: Christ could “do no iniquity,” while the speaker has “sinn’d, and sinn’d.” Similarity becomes a means of disclosing difference—and by implication, a statement about how far the speaker is from any imitatio Christi. The chiasmus occurs, as if coincidentally, at the exact center of the poem, that hinge at lines 7 and 8: inglorious I Him glorified

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A few things can be understood here. I am inglorious, he is glorified. But I am mirrored as well, in him, so am I not glorified, and vice versa. Is there a way in which to think of him as inglorious? Or am I not mirrored in him but instead the opposite of Christ, even as ingloriousness is glory’s opposite? All of the above, I’d say, or at least all can be made to apply, thanks to chiasmus, which comes from the Greek chiazo, to make the letter chi—X; chi also, though, a common abbreviation for Christ, so chiasmus as a form of making a cross, the sign of Christ. The central positioning of this device in effect makes Christ the center and the pivot of the sonnet as a whole. The sonnet as an argument is structured by sacred gesture, even as at the heart of that gesture lies the kind of ambiguity, or room for doubt, that attends human reason. One last slippery area occurs here at the level of syntax. In the sentence that makes up lines 7–8, the immediate antecedent of “glorified” is “him,”—that is, Christ; but I find it easy to misread this at first, and to assign “glorified” to “I”—I, being glorified, crucify him daily—a reading that is reinforced by the proximity of “I” and “glorified” both in sharing the same line-end position and in appearing one atop the other. * Given the preponderance of conundrum in the Holy Sonnets I wonder if it’s worth questioning or pushing further what I’ve said about Donne’s seeming flirtation with blasphemy. Some part of me thinks that all of this could be the poet’s way of enacting what it means to have fallen far from God, to inhabit the region of unlikeness. That is, it’s all part of the artistry, and to read the Holy Sonnets is to experience for ourselves the confusion of thinking that can attend spiritual isolation. The risk to this kind of artistry is that the reader, in the course of participating in the experience, might well move from participation to agreement—as readers, we unite with the speaker in questioning God’s ways—that is, we become sinners ourselves—which is fine, if the result is we repent. But what if instead we tend to side with the speaker, at least in his assertion, by example, that he has every reason, and cannot help it, to question what he doesn’t understand? What is artistry if not also persuasion—an invitation to see the world anew, this time differently? What is the distance, though, between persuasion and how, for Donne’s speaker, Satan sways the would-be innocent from God? Does this make syntax, rhetoric, tropes, and so forth possible instruments among the devil’s tools? What’s the cost, for a poet, in handling them?

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* All but one of the Holy Sonnets are at some point apostrophes— direct addresses to an audience that varies: God, the speaker’s own soul, Death, the Jews, astronomers, Christ, even at one point “an ignorant horse,” “a bull and a boar.” And all of those sonnets employ at some point the hortatory or the imperative mood: let this be done, or—more emphatically—do this. The only exception is sonnet 19, the last in the sequence. Consistently declarative, stripped of apostrophe, of sophisticated devices like chiasmus, and the nimble arguments that fused wit and passion, this sonnet lacks the forceful sensibility of so many of the others, but in this way it seems all the more straightforward an assessment, a sobering one, of the self, and there’s a believable sincerity—a humbleness, even—that lies far from the false modesty to be found in the “But who am I that dare dispute with thee” encountered in sonnet 5. Here is sonnet 19: Oh, to vex me, contraries meet in one: Inconstancy unnaturally hath begot A constant habit; that when I would not I change in vows, and in devotion. As humorous is my contrition As my profane love, and as soon forgot: As riddlingly distemper’d, cold and hot, As praying, as mute; as infinite, as none. I durst not view heaven yesterday; and today In prayers and flattering speeches I court God: Tomorrow I quake with true fear of his rod. So my devout fits come and go away Like a fantastic ague: save that here Those are my best days, when I shake with fear.

The poem’s opening line announces the structure that will govern everything after it: the poem in its entirety is a sequence of opposites, reinforcing from line to line the degree to which the speaker is filled entirely with unending contradictions. This is not the resignation to God that opened the sequence, but a resignation to flaw, an inability to commit to spiritual devotion. Or perhaps a resignation to being unable to be other than who one is. Rather than asking why things are as they are, or asking that they be made different, this sonnet seems merely to say: this is how

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it is. There’s a loneliness to this sonnet—God is mentioned, but nowhere actually present (as an address to God might imply by making God an audience). This very loneliness, though, might well be Donne’s way of depicting a life outside of God—and by extension arguing for the need for God if there is to be any peace, any respite from the aforementioned contradictions that, because of their unendingness, mean there can be no rest, except in ceaseless restlessness. In Herbert’s poem “The Pulley,” restlessness is in a sense among God’s gifts—God withholds rest, For if I should (said he) Bestow this jewel also on my creature, He would adore my gifts instead of me, And rest in Nature, not the God of Nature: So both should losers be.         (ll. 11–15)

Without rest, there is only “repining restlessness,” God goes on to say, which has its uses for mankind: at least, If goodness lead him not, yet weariness May toss him to my breast.

(ll. 18–20)

In this sense, restlessness is more than a gift from God; it’s a rescuing force—a form, as it were, of grace, without which— Without which— * and, not of course in response, but as if so, the starlings lifting, unlifting, the black flash of them in the light reminding me of what I’d been told about the glamour of evil, in the light they were like that, in the shadow they became the other part, about resisting evil, as if resistance itself all this time had been but shadow, could be found that easily … What will you do? Is this how you’re going to live now? *

ON THE ROAD WITH DONNE: AN IDIOSYNCRATIC PILGRIMAGE 

27

Except thou rise, and for thine own work fight, Oh I shall soon despair

says Donne at the beginning of his sequence—but in the end, he doesn’t seem to despair, which is to lose hope, which is, as I understand it, a sin because it means having turned one’s faith from God—having turned one’s faith, not having lost it, as if something more willful were involved. If anything, sonnet 19 confesses to an absence of will, to being volitionless in the throes of “contraries.” It is hard to say where blame figures, if at all, in this situation. Surely Donne’s God should have the power to make it all better. On the other hand, perhaps it’s not enough to claim to have no ability—no will—to make an effort toward earning God’s assistance. But does not faith entail surrendering one’s will to the will of God? I’ve mentioned how the strategy of pitching opposites against one another throughout sonnet 19 suggests a kind of ongoing restlessness. At the same time, the fact that the prosodic strategy never varies can convey, simply at the level of prosody, a sense of stasis. We read about clashes of opposites, but how Donne describes what we read about never wavers. Stasis is the nature, of course, of surrender. When I look for any believable surrender in the Holy Sonnets at least to God as Donne has portrayed him, I don’t find it. But what if the sonnets have themselves been a pilgrimage all along, at the end of which Donne seems to have presented us with a less expected manifestation of God—God as restlessness itself? If that’s the case, need we ever have doubted our devotions? Now he is standing over me And now I have laid my body on his own

Notes 1. All citations for Donne are from John Donne’s Poetry, Donald R. Dickson (ed.) (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2007). 2. All citations for Herbert are from George Herbert and Henry Vaughan: A Critical Edition of the Major Works, Louis L. Martz (ed.) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).

Per Fretum Febris: The Diseased Body in John Donne and Brett Foster Kimberly Johnson

I have cut up mine own Anatomy, dissected myself, and they are gon to read upon me. (John Donne, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions1)

In the early winter of 1623, John Donne fell gravely ill. Though his precise diagnosis is lost to history, its details are not, for Donne spent the long period of his convalescence reflecting in characteristically granular detail upon his symptoms and meditating upon the mortal and spiritual disease that pervades human experience, using his own illness as a key into the precarious and contingent condition of humankind. Devotions upon Emergent Occasions is less medical documentary than metaphysical rumination; as each of its twenty-three devotions move sequentially through discrete stages of sickness, Donne’s prose pursues the spiritual implications of his body’s decline—and, in this instance, its surprise recovery. In the passage I’ve quoted as an epigraph to this essay, Donne

I express heartfelt thanks to Anise Foster and Jeffrey Galbraith for their permission to examine Brett Foster’s unpublished poems for this essay. I’m grateful to Brooke Conti and Jay Hopler for reading an earlier draft. I am fortunate indeed in each of these relationships. K. Johnson (*)  Brigham Young University, Provo, USA © The Author(s) 2017 J. Herz (ed.), John Donne and Contemporary Poetry, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-55300-9_4

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30  K. Johnson

explicitly links this repeated process of self-scrutiny and reflection to writing, comparing the flinchless acuity of his gaze simultaneously to the scalpel of his physician and to textual explication. In his emergent essays, Donne acknowledges the similarities between the corporeally invasive ministrations of his attending healer (/Healer) and the capacities of writing to splay the soul before a reader’s care.2 For all his surgical attentiveness to his illness, Donne’s meditations do not devolve so much into navel-gazing but rather develop a worldview that acknowledges what one person shares in common with others. Increasingly, as Donne contemplates his own body, his scrutiny alerts him to other bodies in all their glorious frailty, and forges a sense of interconnection to those around him. Donne’s anatomizing reveals to his understanding the inner workings of the self, such that his own condition becomes a lens through which he may view with sharper focus that which remains hidden in his fellows. As the essays progress, the painstaking analysis of medical details asserts the material vulnerability not just of Donne’s body but of each body, which realization provokes a recognition of the shared imperilment of all mortal bodies. This method fuses clear-eyed examination to a surprisingly heartfelt sensibility. This striking entwinedness of the intellect and the heart ultimately offers Donne, as I will argue here, a kind of transcendence. For the logic of Donne’s Devotions is that the rebellions of the flesh assert the urgency of the material, of the bodies we humans have in common. Embodiment becomes the mechanism by which we are recognizable to one another, by which we become both knowable and meaningful, and the examination of bodies results in an expansion of interpersonal knowing, of relationship. In other words, Devotions marshals a clear-eyed and calculating scrutiny as a method toward the development of a strain of human care in which the concerns and crises of the isolated self begin to extend beyond the self. That is to say, in Donne’s essays on his illness, it is the graphic details of the body that allow, finally, for love. The imbrication of dogged analysis and empathy on display in Donne’s Devotions is bequeathed as a striking heirloom in the late work of Brett Foster. A poet and scholar of Renaissance literature whose poetry collections include The Garbage Eater and Extravagant Rescues, Foster was diagnosed in the spring of 2014 with colon cancer.3 Over the period of his chemotherapy and until he succumbed to the disease in late 2015, he wrote poems at a feverish pace, fueled—as his poems themselves report—by the drugs of his treatment.4 Over the course of

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their composition, Foster moves through his own dauntless record of his body’s deterioration, and with the same particularized focus that characterizes Donne’s writings on the body in crisis. Foster’s late project was a new collection of poems called Sorrow’s Marrow, which, like Donne’s own composition in sickness, examines the grittiest details of each stage of sickness not merely to register his own response to his looming mortality but also to recognize and celebrate his deep connections with others. For Foster, as for Donne, it is the body in all its refractoriness of decline and betrayal that becomes a site of transcendence, for the body is the instrument by which human meaningfulness and relationship is made substantial and consequential. Foster’s late work sits provocatively alongside Donne’s Devotions, as in poem after poem he not only advertises his engagement with Donne’s work but helps to illuminate Donne’s own stakes in the triangulation of sickness, the body, and relationship. Reading Foster’s work helps to highlight in Donne’s work the investment in human connection that undergirds the earlier poet’s meditations on his illness. In this essay I hope to suggest not just that Foster’s work is marked by or modeled upon Donne’s concerns in a one-directional poetic inheritance, but that Foster’s vigorous engagement with Donne’s Devotions reveals what we might not otherwise have noticed in Donne’s work: the tender, sociable heart that swells inside Donne’s analytical selfanatomy. Foster was certainly not unaware of Donne’s literary corpus, nor of the experience of illness he shared with his seventeenth-century predecessor. As he writes in one poem, “As for me, I have attempted/to find out something about my suffering,/to swirl a little in my own emergent occasion.”5 Indeed, as if to cement the association beyond all speculation, Foster calls out Donne by name, and he finds particular sympathy with the earlier poet’s anticipatory relationship to his own death. For Foster, the touchstone image is the famous funerary portrait of Donne, completed in the last weeks of his life and included in the front matter of his last sermon, published a few weeks after his death in 1631 (see Fig. 1). Donne’s early biographer, Izaak Walton, immortalizes the tale of its making: Dr. Donne sent for a Carver to make for him in wood the figure of an Urn, giving him directions for the compasse and height of it, and to bring with it a board of the height of his body. These being got, and without delay a  choice Painter was in a readiness to draw his picture, which was taken

32  K. Johnson as followeth.— Severall Charcole-fires being first made in his large study, he brought with him into that place his winding-sheet in his hand, and having put off all his clothes, had this sheet put on him, and so tied with knots at his head and feet, and his hands so placed as dead bodies are usually fitted for the grave. Upon this Urn he thus stood with his eyes shut,

Fig. 1  Portrait of John Donne, from the frontispiece to Deaths Duell, or, A Consolation to the Soule, against the Dying Life, and Living Death of the Body Deliuered in a Sermon at White-Hall before the Kings Maiestie, in the Beginning of Lent, 1630 (London: Printed by B. Alsop and T. Fawcett for Benjamin Fisher, 1633)

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and so much of the sheet turned aside as might shew his lean, pale, and death-like face, which was purposely turned toward the East, from whence he expected the second coming of our Saviour. Thus he was drawn as his just height; and when the picture was fully finished, he caused it to be set by his bed-side, where it continued, and became his hourly object till his death.6

This fanciful, macabre image of Donne standing nearly naked atop an urn, to be carved into his own memento mori amd hung beside his bed for “hourly” contemplation until his death, emblematizes for Foster the work of attending in some aesthetic mode—a picture, a poem—to one’s own imminent demise. In a poem whose epigraph is lifted from Donne’s essays in sickness, Foster is prompted by a gift from a well-intentioned acquaintance to reflect upon Donne’s beshrouded image as an emblem for his own suspended self-scrutiny: On a Prayer Shawl and what marble is so precious? (John Donne, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions)

I remain grateful for the gift, for every little gift we’ve been given, by so many, in a needful time. But there’s almost something unintentionally criminal in this particular prayer shawl, pretty much appalling in its choice of thick black wool, with a somber grey tipping both ends like one’s once-youthful hair further blanching from the heap of treatments. I know it was well meant, but it seems larger now, pulling it from a top closet shelf, than when it was first presented, or maybe it’s a trick of perspective, and I have grown smaller. As the new year approaches, bears down (shall it be my last year?), I determine to wear it, even though the entire look of the thing inspires a grim chuckling on my part. I play my part. John Donne was a pre-endgame performative bastard, too, wore a head-to-toe shroud weeks before the death he fully knew was approaching. He had a penchant for writing about it, how it clouded every single one

34  K. Johnson of us, even at the beginning, womb-is-the-tomb, and so forth. If you want to get a good sense, a little mental picture, of me wearing this most ambiguous gift, then Google Dr. Donne’s little statue, easy to miss, but with a startling smile, even amid the grave clothes. It’s just off the main nave at St. Paul’s. Make no mistake, Google can show you only a digital approximation. It would be best for you to be taken there, to see the marble close up. See for yourself. Make something of it.

Foster’s reflection on the image of Donne’s “pre-endgame” performance of “the death/he fully knew was approaching” doesn’t just invoke the earlier poet’s flamboyant relationship to his imminent demise but also helps to frame the verbal description of Foster’s self-portrait as a preemptive memento mori. Foster describes the gift of the prayer shawl as “appalling,” a winking reference to the pall-cloth traditionally borne by select mourners at a funeral. The term pall originally referred to a cloth covering a coffin, and, though this word traces a different etymological lineage from the pale pallor that gives rise to the blanch of appall, Foster (in a distinctly Donnean move) fuses the two in his punning remark on the grayscale fading of his flesh and hair as a consequence of his treatment. He offers here a self-portrait notably similar to the “lean, pale, and death-like face” Walton describes of Donne’s final likeness. With his “once-youthful hair/further blanching from the heap of treatments” and his physical diminishment under his illness (“I have grown smaller”), Foster offers up his own self-portrait in a shroud, even determining to wear it. With its self-conscious nod to Donne, Foster’s poem recognizes itself as a funerary monument in words, an aesthetic suspension of the body in its decline so that it may be simultaneously preserved and mourned. In other words, it transforms a temporal process into an embodied phenomenon, an experiential site that allows perceptual engagement by another. This is precisely the implication of the last lines of Foster’s poem: its invitation to “See for yourself” is necessarily also an imperative to “Make something of it.” This directive interrupts the mortal abstraction of the self from historical entity to absent idea, reemphasizing the physical as the primary instrument of meaningfulness. It recognizes the aesthetic body as an object the perception of which is generative of meaning—in other words, is life. In another poem, Foster makes clear his sense of the poem as a verbal funerary monument by again comparing his poems to Donne’s shroud portrait, complaining:

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I’m growing tired of attiring myself in these premature and sable funeral shrouds, like a slowly dying John Donne shuffling around Wheaton in the turnip-shaped deathbed suit he began to wear too early.7

In Foster’s context, “these premature and sable/funeral shrouds” in which he slouches around his life are the very poems in which he records his experience of illness, their sable coloring expressing the graphic inkiness of the words on the page. Here, as in the poem on the prayer shawl, Foster appropriates Donne’s interest in monumenting himself into an object of contemplation, transforming the medium of the monument from graven image to linguistic representation. For both Donne and Foster, then, the urge to erect a tangible monument is consonant with a profound investment in the material. For all their respective pieties and priorities on spiritual things, each of these writers is urgently invested in the body. Donne contemplates his death as a physical event whose sheer physicality remains even in the face of his body’s dissolution. “I consider in my present state,” he writes, “not the haste, & the dispatch of the disease, in dissolving this body, so much, as the much more hast, & dispatch, which my God shal use, in recollecting and reuniting this dust again at the Resurrection.”8 Donne’s vision of death eventuates not in the obviation of bodily concerns but in their continuity. As he explains in a sermon delivered at Easter 1625, the body is sanctified by divine approbation: be content to wonder … That God would have such a care to dignifie, and to crown, and to associate to his own everlasting presence, the body of man … That God, all Spirit, served with spirits, associated to Spirits, should have such an affection, such a love to this body, this earthly body, deserves this wonder.”9

For Donne, the material body is no mere accident of the spirit, a glass through which to peer darkly at the more consequential and essential substance of spiritual existence. Rather, Donne seems always at pains to demonstrate both in his poetic method and in his prose explication that the flesh is in itself objectively significant, worthy of wonder and reverence for its own sake. The inherent meaningfulness of the physical stems in part, in Donne’s view, from its capacity to create and sustain relationality. That is to say,

36  K. Johnson

the body is a vehicle by which relationship is cultivated and sustained. Donne’s “Hymne to God my God, in my sicknesse” begins by suggesting this property of the physical self: Since I am comming to that Holy roome, Where, with thy Quire of Saints for evermore, I shall be made thy Musique; As I come I tune the Instrument here at the dore, And what I must doe then, thinke now before. Whilst my Physitians by their love are growne Cosmographers, and I their Mapp, who lie Flat on this bed, that by them may be showne That this is my South-west discoverie, Per fretum febris, by these streights to die, I joy, that in these straits I see my West

(1l. 1–11)10

As this poem anticipates its speaker’s coming death through sickness, a passage through the fretful straits of a fever, as Donne’s Latin “Per fretum febris” specifies, special mention is made of the actions of the “Physitians,” whose attendant ministrations around the sickbed are described by two fused metaphors. In the first, they are “Cosmographers,” charting the minutiae of the patient’s body in order to discover the causes and diagnose the progress of illness. And while critics have registered the metaphor’s palimpsesting of the body and the globe of the material world, most readers overlook the second metaphor in the poem’s sixth line.11 As the patient is spread out like an evening etherized upon a table, the doctors bend over his body with all the painstaking of mapmakers, but their motivation is less scientific in nature: “by their love” do they scrutinize, and by that love is the map of Donne’s frail frame revealed. The attentiveness of the physicians in Donne’s hymn occasions first an enlarged understanding of sickness and then—or rather, thereby—the metaphysical ruminations those details inspire. It is the care of Donne’s doctors that discloses his “South-west discovery,” the torrid fever of his ravaged frame through which he passes to gaze with a kind of wild surmise at his eschatological ends. The physicians are the speaker’s co-expeditionaries, and it is their care that opens up the vista of

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eternity, in which “death doth touch the Resurrection” (15). The map divulges the way, to be sure, but it is the surgeons’ “love” that creates the map. In this hymn, it is Donne’s body in extremis which serves as the “Instrument” that generates love. This same progression—from the details of bodily illness to love—is on display in Devotions. To emphasize the importance of the details of disease to understanding, Donne does not scruple to disclose the nittygritty of his bodily experience as part of his self-anatomy, “by what steps & degrees soever” are involved “in the dissolution of this body” (14). His catalogue of symptoms is far-ranging and unsparing: he experiences “shakings” and “flashes,” the “sodaine red waters” of bloody urine and “sodaine noises” of the bowel’s distempers (7). Moreover, “My body falls downe without pushing,” “the appetite is dull and desirelesse,” “the knees are sinking and strengthlesse” (11). He develops a fever, “having burnt up that bed, by these vehement heates, and washed that bed in these abundant sweats” (18). And, as the days drag on, he is “subject to the invasion of maligne and pestilent vapours” (60). At its climax, “this sicknesse declares it selfe by Spots, to be a malignant, and pestilentiall disease” (67), and Donne loses the daily “refreshing” of sleep: “why is done of the heavinesse of my heart, dispensed into mine Eie-lids, that they might fall as my heart doth?” (77–78). The steadfast fleshiness of his description articulates the particulars of the illness into apprehensibility; as Donne explains, such visceral specificity functions “to assist the sicknes, to antidate the sicknes, to make the sicknes the more irremediable, by sad apprehensions” (8). In other words, it is its embodied particularity that makes the disease both comprehensible and communicable (in the sense that it can be understood by others, not in the sense that others may catch it). The details of the disease provide touchstones for metaphoric meditation, each symptom prompting an elaboration into some aspect of humanity’s metaphysical malaise. But in addition to revealing the spiritual condition of humankind, the symptoms of Donne’s disease also serve as communicable signs. As he writes in the thirteenth meditation, “if there be a comfort in the declaration” of the gravity of his sickness by his symptoms, it is “that therby the Phisicians see more cleerely what to doe” (67). That is to say, it is the details of his disease that make him legible to others. Throughout Devotions, Donne’s documentary fuses the granular progression of his illness to his narrative of the attention and care of his doctors. The fourth section, in which “The Physician

38  K. Johnson

is sent for” (19), responds to the “fever” that “fillip[s] him downe … laying him flat upon his bed” (15).12 The sixth section reports that “The Phisician is afraid” (29) because, as the ensuing meditation suggests, of Donne’s “cold ayre” and “shivering” (30). In response to concerns that “There is a grouth of the Disease,” we are told in the seventh section’s English title that “The Phisician desires to have others joyned with him” (35). And after a deteriorating week during which, among other things, “I am not able to receive meate” (75) and Donne has seemed to experience failing vision (having “suffered some dimnesse”), the fourteenth section’s title gravely intones, “The Phisicians observe these accidents to have fallen upon the critical days” (71). As the sections move by declination from one set of symptoms to the grimmer next set, the particulars of the illness remain interconnected with the ministering considerations of the doctors. Indeed, Donne makes explicit the reciprocal relationship between his body in extremis and the devotion of his caretakers when he writes: “I observe the Phisician, with the same diligence, as hee the disease” (29). Like the fretum febris that transformed his doctors into loving cosmographers, Donne’s meticulous feebleness in Devotions produces a relationship: the body’s increasing legibility engenders care and concern in the observer even as Donne under the analytic gaze turns his attention back upon the physician who observes him. It is the embodied details of illness that first claim the attention and then, out of that attention, forge a relationship.13 The coincidence of close attention to the body and moral care that develops over the course of Devotions culminates, of course, in the reflective turn the project takes in its final movement. Beginning in ­ Sect. 16, Donne reports: “From the bels of the church adjoyning, I am daily remembred of my buriall in the funeralls of others” (81). In this meditation, Donne’s own illness brings him to an awareness of the precarious condition of his fellows. He asks: “Why might not I have beene that Man, that is carried to his grave now? … I may lacke much of the good parts of the meanest, but I lacke nothing of the mortality of the weakest … I was borne to as many infirmities as they” (82). As the bell that rings another person’s funeral service outside his window prompts contemplation of their shared mortality, Donne makes an unambiguous connection between his own weakened flesh and that of another. Again, his own symptoms serve as an object of contemplation and expansion: “Is not mine owne hollow voice, voice enough to pronounce [my connection to the dead one] to me?” (84). This recognition that the flesh

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is what binds one person to another leads Donne to his climactic meditation on the connectedness of all humanity: “All mankinde is of one Author, and is one volume,” he writes, and continues with perhaps his most famous assertion of relationship: No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee (87).

As Donne’s illness progresses, his symptoms inflame both the loving care of the healer and a reciprocal awareness of the infirmities of those around him. The act of interrogating and reflecting upon his own disease moves Donne into an awareness of each “peece” of humanity, each one’s peculiar and fleshly ailments an injury to the body of the whole. The work of self-anatomizing performed in Devotions leads, finally, not to a more involuted and self-concerned mode of engaging with the world but to a profound sympathy with other bodies, other infirmities. By framing the body as an object that can be scrutinized and interpreted, revealing the particulars of human experience to the understanding, Donne makes of his own diseased flesh an instrument that forges compassion. Given Foster’s sense of his own uncanny and, as he renders it at times, comic resemblance to Donne in decline, it is not surprising that his last collection follows the model of Devotions as Foster contemplates his illness and the course of his treatment. Indeed, Foster’s reading and appropriation of Devotions teases out the relational aspects of Donne’s essays. Foster’s late manuscript maps readily onto Donne’s meditations on his sickness in a number of ways: like Donne’s project, Foster’s poems move sequentially through time, addressing each new symptom and physical effect as it arises from diagnosis through chemotherapy through the acknowledgement of his approaching death. And, like Donne, Foster is unstinting in his willingness to anatomize, to catalogue the grittiest details of his body’s decline, exposing it as an object of contemplation and a vehicle for asserting human connection. As we have seen, Foster is self-conscious in his project’s overlaps with Donne, peppering his poems with references to the earlier poet. Above all these continuities, Foster’s careful reading of Donne helps to reveal the relational yearning at the

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heart of Donne’s documentary by bringing to the surface the arc of each project toward compassion. As Foster seizes upon and amplifies Donne’s anatomizing method, he clarifies the ways in which the physical body, even (or perhaps especially) in ruins, presents itself as an instrument for forging human connection. Foster charts the progress of his cancer with the same unbashful thoroughness that characterizes Donne’s report. Where Donne incorporates the color of his urine and his sudden bowel irritations into his metaphysical scheme, Foster takes care to catalogue “the liquid diet, the twisted/ bowel, the thirty pounds lost.”14 He offers prayers about “The carcinogenic self, gleeful/but cruel in its unhealthy glow,” wondering “if any freedom/is to be won from tumor, polyp, cyst.”15 He meditates on the apparatus of his treatment with great specificity, as in the opening lines of “The Port, As Seen Clearly in the Mirror for the First Time”: Sick, third nipple hard on the right of my upper chest. The nub without the IV needle now looks more at rest                                                 (1l. 1–6)

Foster reflects with embarrassment upon his “Chemo Brain” in a poem of that title, and records its effects on his memory and cognition in a number of other poems, just as he documents his motor deterioration as a result of his chemical bombardment, the struggle—both physical and emotional—that attends “squeezing contact-lens solution into the plastic container’s/cylinder.” “Shouldn’t it make me tender toward myself to see/my hand ostentatiously shaking as it grips the bottle?” he asks.16 And he carefully tracks the treatments: the Oxalypalatin, the Leucovorin, the Fluorouracil he both loathes and gleefully puns upon (“commonly called ‘5-FU’—really??”17). As in Donne’s Devotions, the metaphysical resonances of physical ailment are never far from Foster’s awareness. He muses about the spiritual utility of his disease, imagining “the diagnosis/being worth it, as if I were disciplining/hope itself.”18 In one long poem “For My Friends,” he sees himself in the paralytic lowered by his companions through a

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rooftile into “the healer’s own place” in Capernaum, as the story is told in Mark 2, and writes with appreciation: Just so you have lowered me into that room where a message is being heard, something about all things being restored, made new, and there I am, well-meaning interrupter, empowered by his well-meaning crew. And I can still feel your presence above me, the weight of me and your sustaining it, the rope digging into and burning your palms. Down here, I am unwavering in expectation for some remark about forgiveness, though I really don’t know what it will mean19

As Donne uses his illness as an aperture through which he may view the condition of his soul, which prompts him to reflect on questions of eschatology and salvation, and to posit spiritual cognates for the fine points of his physical ailment, so too does Foster spring from each observation about his growing impairment to consider the spiritual implications of his symptoms. With each progressive stage of his illness and its symptomatic development, Foster’s documentary reveals that, like Donne, he feels the flesh to be no mere accident of materiality but instead the consequential site in which the numinous may be apprehended. Likewise, the ministrations of Foster’s doctors serve to reveal his body, to make it communicable. It is through the perspective of the doctor that the numinous qualities of the self are disclosed, as in the opening lines of “Remarking on the Scar,” which narrates a follow-up appointment as an encounter that divulges more than just medical information: At the third follow-up appointment with the surgeon, he peeled away waning Steri-Strips from the two-inch incision. “That looks good,” he said, “although when there’s an issue deep in the abdomen it’s hard to know how it will go…                                                  We like to call it

42  K. Johnson the God Box, that area. It’s finally a mystery

(1l. 1–6, 11–12)

Through the attentive ministrations of the surgeon, Foster’s body becomes a mystery, and as the reference to deity makes clear, Foster uses this term not to denote something enigmatic but rather a μυστήριον— mystérion—a Greek term that indicates something known through revelation. The surgeon’s work reveals the spiritual substance inherent in the physical, which transforms his medical care into moral care. The moral valence of his relationship with his caregivers is reinforced by Foster’s record of watching his doctors as they watch him. He observes his “nuanced oncologist,” wanly reporting that “Today, she tells me that I should seize moments,/make family memories, ‘because, you know,/we are hoping for remission, and years/and years, but it could all be more limited.’”20 His nurses “take a minute at their station/to update one another on the fly.”21 He is watching them care for him, recording their actions, words, and response, caring for their ordained movements and tasks as they care for him in his treatment. Through all the potentially impersonal details of his medical regimen, Foster achieves human connection with his caregivers as both a means of understanding his own illness better and a consequence of his close study of them. His own illness occasions mutual observation and valuing, and culminates in mutual care. In light of the clear argumentative parallels between Donne’s work in his sickness and Foster’s, we should perhaps expect the affecting turn at the conclusion of Foster’s manuscript—though I would argue that Foster’s turn toward open relational concerns allows us to appreciate Donne’s. Sorrow’s Marrow ends its meditation on its author’s decline with a gesture that pivots, like Donne’s climactic change of perspective upon hearing church bells in Devotions, to the consideration of others. His disease serves not to isolate him from human connection but rather to demonstrate to him that, as he puts it in one of the last poems of the manuscript, “I am on the road of my belonging.”22 Accordingly, that poem is followed by “Finale,” addressed to his wife. In perhaps the least ironized, least philosophizing passage of the collection, Foster writes that “Primarily love’s company has exiled the sadness,/you, my three and more beloveds, accompanying me,” and he quotes Neruda at his conclusion, “‘It was beautiful to live/when you lived.’ No better words for us to live by,/or if need be, when time comes round, to leave by.”23

PER FRETUM FEBRIS: THE DISEASED BODY IN JOHN … 

43

After its prolonged survey of medications and time spent in the “chemo pod,” after its exacting catalogue of even the most embarrassing symptoms, Foster’s collection arrives at an affirmation of “love’s company,” which provocative term fuses the attentive companionship of human relation with love. This, for Foster, is where redemption resides. And, indeed, like Donne, whose essay project concludes with an awareness of the “fearefull danger of relapsing” (121), the happy ending of recovery does not govern the experience of the disease. Rather, for both writers, it is precisely the assurance of love’s company that makes living worthwhile and leaving bearable. It is love that gives ultimate meaning to the body, and it is the body that occasions the attentiveness of love. The concluding poem of Foster’s collection makes this logic overt. In it, he enacts the same attendance upon the bodily frailties of those around him that he has come to appreciate from others as his illness progresses. Reminders Overheard in line at a gate at DFW: If things don’t go smoothly when I get to Chicago, we’re going to need bail money, I’m just putting that out there. So many problems. So many problems other than mine. Everyone facing a problematic thing. So sit down, sorrow. Boarding the plane, I notice, since the cockpit’s open, two large bottled waters awaiting pilot and co-pilot. Everybody, even they, with selfsame humble, vulnerable, limited human bodies. Even they, titanic and aloft in their expertise. Hydrate, and carry on! May their fleshy selves also reach the end of this latest day. Fly well, and get me home, O captain!

44  K. Johnson

In this final poem, Foster arrives at a modern version of Donne’s bedridden epiphany of the church bells: “Never send to know for whom the water bottle waits; it waits for thee.” His position as a “humble, vulnerable, limited” human body has attuned him to the vulnerabilities of “Everybody,” each fleshy self brimful of need and marrowed with sorrow. The drama charted by his final sequence of poems is one in which the body is open to the scrutiny of others, attended to, and loved, which prompts the self’s response in reciprocity. The body in peril becomes an object of attention, and that attention fosters compassion in both the observer and, at last, the observed. The resulting sense of interconnectedness allows for a version of transcendence not deferred to some remove beyond the sphere of human perception but inherent in human relationship. The self transcends its meager, miscarrying limits through recognition and reflection in the other. “I have cut up mine own Anatomy,” writes Donne, “dissected myself, and they are gon to read upon me.” Among the relationships that Donne and Foster each cultivate over the course of their projects is the one between writer and reader. Though Donne complains about the solitude of his confinement, describing sickness as “an Outlawry, an Excommunication upon the patient” that even in the best circumstances “will weary friends at last” (25), nevertheless he maintains a constant communication with his reader. He anticipates his reader’s near-medical attentiveness, providing all his symptomatic minutiae as grist for the relationship. It is the explicit end of his self-anatomizing—the reader sharing in Donne’s fears and apprehensions, the vicissitudes of his infection and healing, and the apprehension of human interconnectedness—that his experience reveals. Donne offers his body as an object of contemplation not only for the figures that attend upon him within the text but also for the figures that attend upon him as a text. The self-consciousness of Donne’s prose sprawls him across the page, he the flat map and the reader his attentive physician provoked into love. As Donne’s reader, Foster exemplifies the kind of relationality and mutual discovery that Donne’s project suggests will attend upon close and attentive care. Adopting Donne’s method and clarifying Donne’s own investments for other readers, Foster’s poems pose themselves in perpetual apostrophe, transmitting to family, friends, God, Donne, and doctors alike “this soon-to-be/missing person’s missive.”24 His last manuscript makes unswerving contact with the second person pronoun, embracing the reader in the heartburn and nerve-numbness without ever forgetting

PER FRETUM FEBRIS: THE DISEASED BODY IN JOHN … 

45

the textual nature of his project. He makes of himself a map of disease and treatment in order to draw the reader into the minutest observations of his mortal hour. We are “gon read upon” both Donne and Foster, and that ongoing work of reading works as a stay against the ineluctable missing-ness of all persons. It is, finally, our mutual dependence upon one another for meaningfulness that undergirds Foster’s ars moriendi. This possibility of transcendence through relationality prompts Foster to give voice at last to the urgency of Donne’s project and his own: “If I have to go out, I am going to go out singing.”25

Notes

1. Meditation IX, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, Anthony Raspa (ed.) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 45–46. 2. For Devotions’ identification of sin with sickness and its conception of God as divine physician, see Jonathan Goldberg “An Understanding of Sickness in Donne’s Devotions,” (Renaissance Quarterly 24.4 [1971]), 507–517. 3. Each of these poetry collections is published by Northwestern University Press, in 2011 and 2017, respectively. By coincidence, the cause of Donne’s death was also colon cancer, though that was not the illness in response to which he composed Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions. 4.  “I’ve been acting odd/lately during treatment days—jumpy, addled,/ quick to anger, writing too many poems,/writing them with excessive, if thrilling, speed” (“What I Am Planning to Tell My Students,” 7–10). Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations from poems by Foster are from the collection Sorrow’s Marrow, a manuscript as yet unpublished. 5. Foster, “A Brief Riff, With a Phrase from Hart Crane,” 6–8. 6. Izaak Walton, The Life of John Donne, Dr. in Divinity, and Late Dean of Saint Pauls Church, London (London: Printed by J.G. for R. Marriot, 1658), 111–113. 7. Foster, “A Thank-You Note (3),” 30–34. 8. Donne, Expostulation II, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, 13. 9. Donne The Sermons of John Donne, 10 volumes, George Potter and Evelyn Simpson (eds.) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1953–1962), 6.265–266. 10. Throughout this essay, all references to Donne’s poetry are to The Divine Poems, Helen Gardner (ed.) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952). 11. See, for example, Jeanne Shami, “John Donne: Geography as Metaphor,” Geography and Literature: A Meeting of the Disciplines, William E. Mallory and Paul Simpson-Housley (eds.) (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1987), 161–167; Donald K. Anderson, Jr, “Donne’s ‘Hymne to

46  K. Johnson God my God, in My Sicknesse’ and the T-in-O Maps,” South Atlantic Quarterly 71.4 (1972), 465–472; Ladan Niayesh “‘All Flat Maps, and I Am One’: Cartographic References in the Poems of John Donne,” Études Épistémè 10 (2006), 43–52. 12. Though the English translations of the Latin section titles are Donne’s own, they are often not strictly literal translations of the Latin and indeed at times sidestep some of the ambiguities of the Latin titles. 13. And this relationship is both social and moral, for (as Goldberg notes) the person of the physician throughout Devotions is never separable from the healing ministrations of the divine, the text repeatedly expressing the necessity of casting oneself “whole, intirely upon the Phisician … that the power of the Lord, should be present to heale me” (22). 14. “Like Wild, Dying Horses,” 3–4. 15. “Prayer Before Reading St. Mark’s Gospel,” 3–4, 7–8. 16. “Hand Shaking, I Ponder a Hero from Greek Myth,” 10–12. 17. “Bad Puns,” 31. 18. “‘Today Is a Miraculous Day,’” 23–25. 19. “For My Friends,” 25–35. 20. “The Oncologist as Necromancer,” 23–26. 21. “Overheard Today,” 18–19. 22. “Driving Toward the Midwestern Hesperides,” 36. 23. “Finale,” 13–14, 60–62. 24. “Doubting the Signature,” 59–60. 25. Foster “Tongue Is the Pen,” (Image 86 [2015]: 99), 33.

Seven Poems Kimberly Johnson

The Story

of My

Calamities

Misit ad nos epistolas et totam scripturam, quibus nobis faceret amandi desiderium. (Augustine)

O God my God, would you were an Abelard bowing each long midnight in your close cell over paper, quilling so fervent strokes to tear the page My sister, my spouse. Would you brooded on the wide between us unmanned with love, and in a florid hand hatched assignations, which I in secret bosomed up, panting for the hour.  Constant then and sure I’d be, as heaven-centered as an astrolabe.  But I can’t fathom your love-letters:  libertine troth to the second-person plural, dry agàpe, and all your woo is Touch me not.  My Lord my flesh your tablet make.  Inscribe desire in me.



[ ]. Through weather.  Through weather’s declensions. Through spring’s steep degrees, through five shapes of snow, through the thunderhead’s sexual green

K. Johnson (*)  Brigham Young University, Provo, US © The Author(s) 2017 J. Herz (ed.), John Donne and Contemporary Poetry, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-55300-9_5

47

48  K. Johnson over green geometrical acreage, through every stormy declension of the heart I have cried your name.  It is a histrionic’s litany, recited from this, my usual station:  Unrequited. Where else such sighs and bluster, such tropics of squalling passion? * And what is wind but a dialect of longing?—:  the high pressure rushing to fill the low, the sky trying to slake its heats against the earth’s asymptotic cool, its somersaulting cools against the earth’s radiance.  All weather springs from currents of failed desire. No wonder the wind, when it says anything at all, howls. *

O fugitive God, my glorious jilt,

my heart has learned a tempest’s grammar in your pursuit. Listen:  it thunders up its truest, its most hopeless, prayers for you.

A Nocturnall

upon Saint

Here comes that sonic boom thumping at the chest like a kickdrum the first and final beat of a tune called Too Late. Ever too late the event reveals its narrative to the sense ever too slow on the uptake,

Chuck Yeager’s Day

SEVEN POEMS 

ever life hurtles heartbreak to heartbreak while I rattle around in its mach-cone trying to work out the ever-aftermath.

* To the palm that rests atop the trembling diaphragm, not to calm but to confirm the body’s record, all this shock and roar is a comfort. After such rough cleavings— molecule from molecule, the sound shorn back from the air and stacked upon itself— there should be noise. There should be a bombblast bellknocking bonejar of noise, a jolt to all wavelengths, a tremor through the pavement tripping car-alarms and dog-howls to the proof that something happened.

* Something happened. Something wider than the sky got broken, something faster than a word arrowed into it, and that damned and blessed sonic boom is rolling on past me drumming up the next dirge by the time I know to mourn whatever it was.

Goodfriday It is true:  the thunderhead hoists its wet anvil aloft. Swifts buckshot out before the downdraft. The basin gasps, sage exhales, smelling of iron. Westbound, the hightop two-lane wavers under early-season heat, asphalt takes the thinnest shine, first drops hiss. My truck blows a white wake through roadside weeds, radio snaps electrically.  It is true. But it is a horror.  It is a viper fanged, this verb

49

50  K. Johnson that forward thrusts the moment eternal, nails each thing to its present.  Truer still I should write the thunderhead converges, lifts, rides the steep low, butts the front range, bunches like shoved fabric, blisters, throws up lightning thirteen miles, lets down rain in ribs, bubbles under the afternoon… An endless poem of thunder.  But who can dwell with thunder?  The moment’s span would whelm the longest page, its magnitude of too much weight for me.  (The leader forks, drops, attracts the charge from earthward, the molten air expands, chills, slams shut, a riot of electrons…) But God, I love the verb.  I verb impenitent, luxuriant, altaring up truth for immortality, for the pleasure of unlikeness, the prick of unlikeness!  O happy deformation, spunky verb, I embrace you in my degradation, my shoddy embodiment making thunder endless:  impossible:  sublime.

Ode on My Appendix My old frivolity.  How I admired your gentle defiance in my side, your droll x-ray like a stuck-out tongue showed sinews fooled to welcome … what?  a tag-end, embroidery, a thing indifferent. So I believed.  But when you flare up, puckered heretic, my guts clench, bowels revolt, breath short:  you prove the searing center of my frail cosmology, my dearest intimate.  I pick wistful at the scar, each whipstitch tugs two grommets open in my belly.  In the body, in the body’s hot memory, in sickness and in health, there are no adiaphora.

SEVEN POEMS 

Ode on My Episiotomy Forget pearls, lace-edged kerchiefs, roomy pleats,— this is my most matronly adornment: stitches purling up the middle of me to shut my seam, the one that jagged gaped upon my fecund, unspeakable dark, my indecorum needled together with torquemadan efficiency. But O!  the dream of the dropped stitch!  the loophole through which that unruly within might thread, catch with a small snag, pull the fray, unknit the knots unnoticed, and undoily me. Don’t lock up the parlor yet; such pleasure in unraveling, I may take up the sharps and darn myself to ladylike again.

A Benediction: On the Tulpenwoede Seventeenth-Century Holland Blessed be the disease, the virus subtle plunging to the heart of every bulb to break as streaks and flames through the conservatory, waxy petals freaked with frantic pinks and periwinkles. Blessed be the rankle that stains its mosaic cell to cell, forcing through each blowsy stem-heavy bloom color undreamed by the feyest confectioner until the very air seems motley. Blessed the collectors infected by desire: how they want; how they lick their lips as if they would devour at the bud each sudden new original and its exponential next; how they settle for a name that they can hold between the teeth, biting down against this infinite variety. And blessed, O blessed all those names, all the neat rows of them in the ledger a dear anthology of failures: the Semper Fidelis

of

51

52  K. Johnson subsides to the Fidelis in a season, the Volition evolves into the Volitant. Blessed that rage to corner the rarest cultivar, to press tight as in a book each beauty made beautiful by its not enduring. Bookkeeper, I am your daughter, believing that by loving I could hold what I loved, forgetting that I loved because I couldn’t.

In a letter dated “Vigilia St. Tho. [20 December] 1614”—just over a month before he took orders in the Church of England—Donne explains to his friend Henry Goodyer that he is making but a few copies of the poems he has written, about which, he acknowledges, “I apprehend some incongruities in the resolution.” The incongruities to which he refers include the apparent disparity between the eroticism of his poems and the piety of his imminent ordination. “By this occasion,” he says, “I am made a Rhapsoder of mine owne rags” (in Edmund Gosse, Life and Letters of John Donne, 2 vols., [New York: Dodd, Mead: 1899]: 2.68). Donne reiterates his claim of a divide between his youthful indiscretions and his holy maturity in another letter to another friend, explaining that his prose meditation on suicide, called Biathanatos, was likewise a product of an unhallowed worldview now reformed: “it is a book written by Jack Donne and not by Dr. Donne” (2.124). I’ve never for a second believed Donne about this purported midlife volta. There is too much of the sacred in his so-called secular work, and too much that would raise eyebrows in his supposedly baptized verse and prose. Moreover, Donne’s poems, essays, and sermons display, from the early days to the end of his life, a thoroughgoing obsession with— or rather, love for—the body and the material world, resisting the transcendent urges of post Reformation piety. Donne adores the flesh—his own, others’, the incarnated God’s—and he adores the messy, blessed animal of mortal life. His care for the body extends beyond the grave, as his last sermon, known as Death’s Duell, demonstrates in its prolonged rumination on the meaningful, significant persistence of the flesh after death. For Donne, the spirit is inextricable from its bodily expression. Which is why, for all his protestation, I cannot be persuaded by his claims that he is forsaking the body with all its scandals, indignities, and pleasures, for the abstracted pursuits of dedicated spirituality. Instead: the seduction of Christ in the sonnet that begins, “What if this present were

SEVEN POEMS 

53

the worlds last night?” and know that Donne’s investments and method persist as they did “in my idolatrie.” Instead: his famous plea to the “three-person’d God” to “ravish mee.” These are the words of a poet for whom the exorbitant, outrageous body is where ecstasy inheres. It is here that I respond most deeply—most viscerally—to Donne’s work. My own poetry develops out of a conviction about materiality similar to what Donne’s own work displays. I go to poetry as an object that both reveals the material and is itself an artifact of the material. For me— and I think for Donne—poetry’s power does not consist, or does not consist solely, in its utility as a conduit or transmitter pointing endlessly and perhaps vainly to something else up in the vaporous realm of ideas, some other elsewhere that is imagined to be of primary importance as the here and now fades into irrelevance. Donne’s poetry is not a forever endeavor to compensate for the shortcomings of experience, nor is it an accessory to the “real meaning” which exists outside itself. Rather, Donne’s poetry valorizes the senses and the sensual and in so doing it honors the material for its own substantiality, its own meaningfulness. In other words, Donne’s poetry teaches me, as a reader and as a writer, to love the world.

The Plexiglass Wall and the Vital Verb Molly Peacock

After the Plexiglas wall slams down: Rain. Rain in the mind. Thinking feels like camping out. At least I grabbed matches and plastic sheets to pad the wet sod where I’ll pitch our tent. How far are we from our digital stove? Just a few feet away from the wall this time: I see right into our kitchen from this wilderness where nothing makes sense but the urge to lift the lid on my brainpan and plunge my hands into the gray juicy curds—got to think for both of us now! Over there, my laptop glows on our granite counter, and the dishwasher sloshes till the red “sanitized” is lit. But out here I throw slop beneath the pines as you lie on your camp cot, usurped by bacteria—more drug trial side effects. Fix lid back on skull. Make us a fire. Strike match after match. My brain breathes and seeks its secret child maneuver: Divide! Go back through the wall, then type, syncopating with microwave beeps, messages with plans in thrall to a future, brief, quick, forbidden

M. Peacock (*)  Toronto, Canada © The Author(s) 2017 J. Herz (ed.), John Donne and Contemporary Poetry, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-55300-9_6

55

56  M. Peacock as love letters—all the while keeping one eye on you trying to sleep as the rain turns to freezing pellets. So I grab my guilt, zap it into a quilt, find the spot to slip back through the glass, then tuck it on your cot: a blanket for a shivering man in the wild.

Donne

and the

Vital Verb

Emotions require motion. You can’t nail down the process of a feeling with nouns alone, however brilliantly chosen. Process entails movement, and that means verbs. But when I was twenty and beginning to write poetry very seriously, I was desperate for stability and convinced that permanence lay in nouns. What a surprise, then, that encountering Donne’s wildly emotional poetry offered me steadiness and firmness. Donne’s verbs both animate and suspend his hurricanes of feelings by touching them at every stage. Donne became my second literary uncle. The first was his contemporary fellow poet, the son of his patron Lady Magdalen, George Herbert. Reading Herbert was like plunging my hands through a nominative jewel chest. Because the world felt mutable and unstable to me, it was easy to concentrate on things or people or plants or places. But just as it was warmly accessible to name them, I could not take rain or a tent or a dishwasher as the subject of a poem. If you had said to me, write a poem about a quilt or a kitchen, I would have felt those things to be obstacles to the real poem. Not that I knew what the real poem was. George Herbert’s sonnet, “Prayer (I),” attempting to define the act of devotion, uses a plethora of nouns and not one verb in its thirteenand-a-half line introductory clause. The lines don’t predicate so much as define and list, surrounding the idea of prayer with whimsically profound instances of it (“Angels’ age,” “the bird of Paradise,” “the milky way.”)1 The sonnet exemplifies my first poetic preference: a poem that would stay still and name something so brilliantly and unusually that my thoughts about whatever it identified would be redefined. Another way to put it is: I wanted a poem as close to a painting as possible. If I could just get something to stay still, the room (well, the world) would stop whirling, and I’d know where I was. Yet crucially there is a verb-like construction in the last half of “Prayer (I)”’s last line, the past participle

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57

“understood.” Seeking to understand is one of the reasons poets write poems at all. Understanding requires animating activity—a verb at the end of it all. Discovering Donne’s syntactically opposing sonnet “Holy Sonnet 14: Batter My Heart, Three-Person’d God,” published posthumously in 1633, as was Herbert’s sonnet, revealed that playing poetry could be a frustrating and joyous sport, a way to process the experiences of life through a high level of almost physically acrobatic verbal activity. (“Batter my heart, three-person’d God, for you/As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;”).2 Even as, several centuries later, I focused on things—the stuff of images—it began to dawn on me that a “real” poem might come from the current of emotion that vibrates around things or circulates through them. The intensity of that circulation holds the contradictions that serve understanding. Although poets prefer to concentrate on lines rather than sentences, Donne’s poems force a poet to consider the sentence not only because there are so many verbs but also because the predication is complex enough to reverse itself: “for I,/Except you enthral me, never shall be free.” Donne’s poems open up syntax and demonstrate that predicates make subjects both mysterious and recognizable. (“That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend”.) His dazzling verbs allowed me to develop a way of writing poetry that tried to catch contrary emotional currents. Writing a poem became a way for me to figure out feelings both by naming them (à la Herbert) and by re-experiencing them through what they predicated, even though that was full of reversals and strange turns. Donne is not exactly sure of where he is going in “Batter My Heart.” (The only thing desperation is sure of is that a pressing need must be met.) His overwhelming need, like a rank 5 on the Hurricane Wind Scale, requires thirty verbs, one repeated: “Batter,” “knock,” “breathe,” “shine,” “seek,” “mend,” “break,” “blow,” “burn,” “make,” “labour,” “admit,” “defend,” “is captived,” “proves,” “love,” “would be loved,” “am betrothed,” “divorce,” “untie,” “break,” “take,” “imprison,” “enthral,” and the infamous “ravish.” There is only one central image in the poem: a town, “usurped” in line 5, although references spin out from that image. (“Prayer” has twenty images, by my count.) But Herbert’s poem already comprehends its subject in manifold manifestations from “Reversed thunder” to “A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear.”

58  M. Peacock

When my husband becomes ill (he is a nine-time cancer survivor), I am “usurped” by grief for the healthy man he was. A Donne-like state of desperate confusion sets in. If I’m to function, I must comprehend it—if not by naming it, at least by embodying it in an image. I turn first not to verbs but to a subject or a metaphor for a subject, somewhat the way Herbert does in “Prayer (I).” Prayer is “the Church’s banquet,” “the soul in paraphrase,” “The land of spices.” My twenty-first-century state of confusion is not exotic but synthetic. The metaphor I have for the separation between the states of illness and health is a Plexiglas wall. Not a glass wall, but something thick, see-through, not as lucid as glass, but not shatterable. On one side of the wall is my cherished, everyday domestic life (what Herbert might call “Heaven in ordinary”), with its routines of cooking and eating and sleeping in a nice big bed and answering emails that make a person feel like she is accomplishing something. But on the other side, where crises of illness descend, is a cold, clammy outdoor makeshift place, a state in which one fends off wilderness. It is no accident for this poet that illness and wilderness share a sound correspondence. States of being stay still, as the wall does. But emotions move. Though Herbert arrives to help me name that grief-like feeling—the Plexiglas wall—Donne arrives to help process the feeling. So, both “Prayer (I)” and “Batter My Heart” helped me write a new poem specifically for this volume: a double sonnet whose first stanza belongs to Herbert and last belongs to Donne. “The Plexiglas Wall” hasn’t yet endured the test of time, and it certainly isn’t as powerful as the two sonnets I’m thinking about, but I offer it in the midst of these thoughts about John Donne and the vital verb. For one of the very best reasons to write verse is to enter a great family of poets who, unlike biological families, speak back and forth to each other with compassion and complexity—and offer subtle solutions. Once I had envisioned the wall (Herbert) and the ability to pass through it (Donne), I could confront the conflicting feelings it engendered and admit their ambiguities. Coming around to all that took twenty drafts. The accompanying poem is draft 21. Donne is responsible for “slams,” “grabbed,” “plunge,” “glows,” “sloshes,” “throw,” “fix,” “make,” “strike,” “breathes,” “seeks,” “divide,” “go,” “keeping,” “trying,” “turn,” “grab,” “zap,” “find,” “slip” and “tuck,” twenty-two verbs including one (“grab”) repeated, as he did with “break.” But I was not thinking of literary ancestry when I wrote the first draft of the poem. All I could do was get down what it feels like to

THE PLEXIGLASS WALL AND THE VITAL VERB 

59

drop everything and take care of someone when that distant pledge of “in sickness and in health” materializes like sudden orange construction signs on a highway, even as you secretly don’t want to slow down and instead want to carry on with your own thoughts and life. The draft was full of frustration (Why hadn’t he just scheduled his illness and let me know, say, a few months in advance?) and betrayal (the fact that one person is healthy and one is not can feel unfaithful), not to mention fear and love. But in about thirty free-verse lines (awfully close to the twenty-eight needed for a double sonnet, which I didn’t discover till I went wrong at about draft 14, went back to the first and actually counted) I managed to get at the internal division that occurs when one of my husband’s cancer recurrences happens: I am both a first responder and a very reluctant child who just wants to keep playing. I divide in two, half of me mobilizing and half of me scampering back to my own mind, maintaining a self and a life with all its little interior private joys. Determining both how to help in an onslaught of need and how to maintain a self requires a profound spiritual and psychological reckoning. Sacrifice provokes this secular twenty-first-century wife to turn to poems that arise from intense religious questions and to dismantle them like clocks. Working this all out in twenty-eight (mostly) decasyllabic lines with an inserted scatter-pattern of rhyme was an unexpected consolation. Figuring things out in the basic metaphysical grammar of nouns and verbs showed me that my guilty process of dividing is, as a matter of fact, just the way I’ve saved myself over 25 years of this illness. (My adored husband, so experienced in the land of illness, has different strategies, and, as I write this, another recurrence is smoothing out.) There is a ghost lingering over these thoughts, that of the Donne scholar Arthur Clements, the editor of the Norton Critical Edition of John Donne (no longer available, Amazon tells me) and John Donne’s Poetry (1966). A class of only six people had elected to do his seventeenth-century metaphysical poetry course in the spring of 1968 at Binghamton University, 3 hours northwest of New York City. Clements’s deep and quiet enthusiasm led the handful of us around that seminar table deep into the metaphysical cave by studying, line by line (word by word, often), the poems of Herbert and Donne. (Clements also wrote Poetry of Contemplation: John Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, and the Modern Period (1990), then published two volumes of his own poems.) While Herbert gives my poem a title and its imagery, it is Donne who, through his verbs (five of which I have stolen with the blithe privilege

60  M. Peacock

of a self-proclaimed literary great-great-grandniece), helps me to elucidate psychological convolutions and transformations. He can empower, can inspire in a conflicted speaker the magic of zapping “guilt” into a “quilt.” Because his verbs preserve the integrity of human experience, they render the variety of human reactions (even the selfish ones that feel like illicit love letters) morally neutral. Their very motion contains the mysteries of love’s contradictory energy.

Notes 1.  George Herbert, “Prayer (I),” in George Herbert: The Complete English Works, Ann Pasternak Slater (ed.) (London: Everyman’s Library/David Campbell Publishers, 1995), p. 49. All subsequent quotations from this poem are from this edition on this page. 2. John Donne, “Holy Sonnet 14: Batter My Heart, Three-Person’d God,” John Donne: The Complete English Poems, A.J. Smith (ed.) (London: Penguin Classics, 1971; reprinted with corrections, London: Penguin, 1976), p. 314. All subsequent quotations from this poem are from this edition on this page.

Reading Donne: A Sentimental Journey Jonathan F. S. Post

In many respects I was a late-comer to Donne and even then of a narrow sort. True, Donne had been a centerpiece in David Sofield’s ambitious, hugely popular survey course in seventeenth-century literature which I took as an undergraduate at Amherst College in 1969, but that year and the following one when I graduated were difficult times to be a student. The Vietnam War, the social and pharmaceutical revolutions accompanying the war, and the violent mix of eruptions on campuses had made studying seem increasingly irrelevant. Indeed, “relevance” was a catchphrase of the academy then, like “safe space” and “trigger warnings” today, but with a different, indeed opposite, goal in mind. It was used largely to challenge, and diminish, any activity not immediately connected to politics and the war. “Cloister” was a bad word, right up there with “ivory tower.” “Chastity” was beyond the pale, being coddled unheard of. What I was less aware of at the time was the general decline in Donne’s critical fortunes. Amherst was a great place for reading poems, among colleges perhaps the nonpareil in this regard. Dickinson, Frost, Wilbur, and Merrill were all living presences, illustrious forebears, regardless of their actual dates, but, by the same logic, the Department of English was for the most part indifferent toward constructing broader, let alone historical, contexts for interpreting poetry, which meant, in Donne’s case, there was much talk of masks, personae, irony, unity, wit,

J.F.S. Post (*)  UCLA, Los Angeles, USA © The Author(s) 2017 J. Herz (ed.), John Donne and Contemporary Poetry, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-55300-9_7

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and the like. Some of this was pursued most fervently but not always perceptively by the students who had also, most successfully, mastered what turned out to be, although we didn’t know it, the last gasps of New Criticism. By chance, in a seminar on seventeenth-century love poetry featuring Donne, I read some poems by Henry Vaughan. Hardly a great love poet, Vaughan could be, in flashes, still a thrilling writer, someone whose imagination became fired, in part, because of the English Civil War, and perfectly okay to read even if you didn’t have a drop of Welsh blood in your veins. And Vaughan, it would turn out, became a way out of the dilemma posed by Donne and New Criticism in a manner that preserved the best part of both—Donne, that is, and the forms of attention to the text that New Criticism encouraged. There is a further twist that needs mentioning because it is often overlooked, especially by English academics, who regard the Episcopal Church as essentially an establishment institution, which, of course, it is in England. In the USA, however, in the Vietnam era, the church bearing the same name was often socially and politically liberal and, as part of an interfaith coalition, in a few chosen places, it was an important voice of opposition to the war. So it was quite easy, if you were of the left frame of mind, to view the Episcopal Church as an ally against the current political regime, with Richard Nixon as president, and to project that sympathy back onto the circumstances and situations involving the Church of England in Vaughan’s day, as both its expelled clergy and the poet of Silex Scintillans protested against the war and the church’s displacement by the Puritans from 1643 through to the end of the Interregnum. Add, with a dash of salt, the narrative sweep and anecdotal vigor associated with the work of the great Marxist historian Christopher Hill, then turn it upside down, and you knew, or thought you knew, suddenly what Vaughan was up against. It was easy to leave aside the poet’s already much-discussed debts to Hermeticism in scholarly venues and to view him drawn—as were many of us—to the twin poles of retreat and attack, retirement and involvement, the poet enacting without ever acquiring the taut equipoise between the two that distinguishes Andrew Marvell’s verse. And since Vaughan rarely rivaled Donne in craftsmanship, let alone scholastic rigor, it was hardly necessary to press for a strictly New Critical reading of his verse. That wasn’t where his power was located. From a literary perspective, all that needed to be accounted for—and it was a large “all”—was the place of George Herbert in his thinking.

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“All,” in fact, remained in place for a number of years for me. The often excellent scholarship on Herbert continued to offer an intellectual feast alongside the poetry, which seemed capable of ever finer nuances of meaning. At the same time, Elizabeth Bishop’s elevation to near sainthood among North American poets furthered Herbert’s image as a present-tense influence in the world of contemporary poetry. (Mary Jo Salter, now at Johns Hopkins University, is perhaps the most visible living descendent of both.) Herbert, and Vaughan, too, in my case, also helped to relax the New Critical grip on ironic readings. Both poets, of course, could be ironic, but you didn’t have to begin with the assumption that they were forever wearing a mask. Taxing as the concept is, devotional poets have to appear sincere. Try reading “Love III” or “The Night” ironically and see where it gets you. Jesus can be ironic, indeed fetchingly so—“who made the eyes but I”—but not the speaker, who is, at best, invitingly naive. As for “The Night,” to read the qualifying remark, “some say,” in the last stanza, for instance, as anything more than an aside, probably to Dionysius the Areopagite, is to ruin one of the more unforgettable images about divinity, in which God is said to possess “a deep but dazzling darkness.” With Herbert and Vaughan as partial guides, I was able to wend my way back to Donne in the early 1990s, somehow more open to his experiential side, less consumed by irony, and with a private pledge not to try to outwit the poet in the bluff manner of, say, John Carey. There was also the bittersweet but generally salutary recognition that the era of canonical Donne had, indeed, passed. Not that what Eliot said about Donne’s “sensuous apprehension of thought” wasn’t necessarily true, or that a thought to Donne wasn’t felt as “immediately as the odour of the rose,” but these suggestions, and others, were no longer defining critical observations that required pursuing and defending. Donne was just another poet. Readers and writers were free to explore other ideas and genres—the satires and elegies, in particular, then the sermons—rather than those favored by Eliot’s followers, and also to choose not to like some aspects of Donne and his verse. Another poet, yes: but also a hugely gifted one, who had left his mark, at one time or another, on many poets coming of age in the middle years of the twentieth century on both sides of the Atlantic and even “down under.” That was a topic, too, that could now be seen with greater clarity. Unless you were part of the Black Mountain School of poetry, it was difficult to altogether escape Donne’s influence in the United

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States. Early Allen Ginsberg began with Donne, as did Anthony Hecht and Adrienne Rich, an unlikely trio in almost every other regard.1 A less familiar genealogy (to North Americans) can also be traced in Australia. Readers of The Norton Anthology of Poetry (3rd edn, 1983; but not the 5th edn, 2005) will be familiar with A.D. Hope’s luxuriously post-coital “The Elegy: Variations on a Theme of the Seventeenth Century.” The scenic soundboard for Hope’s poem (“Madam, no More! The Time Has Come to Eat”) is Donne’s urgently masculine elegy beginning “Come, madam, come”; the “variations” are drawn mainly from Thomas Carew’s “A Rapture.” Although Hope’s gustatory wit and balanced couplets owe more to the eighteenth than the seventeenth century, the poem is a delightfully calculated, belated, epicurean swerve from the bold sexual and military conquest that makes Donne’s elegy so much a part of the Elizabethan 1590s. Perhaps less familiar to Donne scholars is the poetry of Hope’s fellow Australian, Stephen Edgar (b.1951–). Often recognized as Australian’s leading formal poet and much championed by Clive James and others for the perfection of his craft, Edgar is the author of more than half a dozen volumes of poems, many winning awards. His lengthy evolution as a poet—“my career has developed the way hedgehogs mate: slowly and with difficulty”2—passed through an early enthusiasm especially for Dylan Thomas, but also including Donne and Herbert, to arrive eventually at a less metrically knotty, generally smoother line than Donne often employed. In this, Edgar resembles Hope, with whom he is often compared. He also found further prosodic confirmation for this decision in the poetry of Hecht and Richard Wilbur, often cited among Edgar’s important models and sources of inspiration in the United States, and in Larkin in England. But Donne is a hard influence to shake, especially for a poet with a marked preference for closed forms and the challenges posed by complex stanzas. Along with the often admired and imitated “colloquial” voice, there is the frequently attractive look of Donne’s stanzas (“We’ll build in sonnets pretty rooms” (“The Canonization”)). Edgar’s version: I “like the idea of making a beautiful object out of words: a verbal sculpture and piece of verbal music.” As for the lure of form, Edgar observed, in a remark that bears quoting in full because of its explanatory care for the technical properties of verse,

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Well, there is the verbal music of rhyme and metre, and the larger-scale music of the periodicity of patterned stanzas. There is the rhetorical and architectural function of disposing and arranging the poem’s “argument” in stanza units. And just as there is a line-by-line play of end-stopping and enjambment, so with stanzas there can be a play of self-contained as against run-on stanzas. There is the mnemonic function. All of this can be subsumed in what I might call the apolaustic function: the sheer enjoyment value of all these combined strands. There is the counterpoint of natural speech rhythms laid over the metrical beat to create subtle rhythmical variations. There is the flow of grammar and syntax across the rigid grid of the metrical and rhyming pattern.

Many of these features are at work in a poem of his written some 40 years after first encountering Donne’s “A Nocturnal upon Saint Lucy’s Day” in A. Alvarez’s The Savage God (1972). Edgar penned, precisely, a “Nocturnal” of his own, which first appeared in Poetry in 2008, and was included in the Best Australian Poems for that year. (The poem was subsequently collected in History of the Day, 2009.) The title points to the common temporal circumstance connecting the two poems, a feature also born out in the meditative quality of each, in which the absence of an unnamed, intimate person, now dead, is recollected and mourned. In Edgar’s case, it was his partner, “Ann,” who died from cancer in 2002. The only person mentioned by name is that of their mutual friend, the poet Gwen Harwood, a reference that has led some reviewers to think, mistakenly, that the poem is an elegy to her. Whether Edgar’s unnamed “Ann” forms another, more subliminal link with Donne’s “Nocturnal,” sometimes read as an elegy for the unnamed person in his poem, his wife, Anne the latter poem is an exact, indeed spooky, reconfiguration of Donne’s stanza, in line length and rhyme scheme, and of the poem’s disposition into five stanzas. Like Donne’s poem it totals 45 lines. Here it is in full: It’s midnight now and sounds like midnight then, The words like distant stars that faintly grace The all-pervading dark of space, But not meant for the world of men. It’s not what we forget But what was never known we most regret Discovery of. Checking one last cassette Among my old unlabelled discards, few Of which reward the playing, I find you.

66  J.F.S. Post Some years after her death, but years ago, Hearing Gwen’s voice recite “Suburban Sonnet”, At first we could not focus on it, So jolted that the radio Should casually exhume From our shared memory the woman whom We knew and make her present in the room, As though in flesh, surprised to find that she Had earned this further immortality. Who ever thought they would not hear the dead? Who ever thought that they could quarantine Those who are not, who once had been? At that old station on North Head Inmates still tread the boards, Or something does; equipment there records The voices in the dormitories and wards, Although it’s years abandoned. Undeleted, What happened is embedded and repeated, Or so they say. And that would not faze you Who always claimed events could not escape Their scenes, recorded as on tape In matter and played back anew To anyone attuned To that stored energy, that psychic wound. You said you heard the presence which oppugned Your trespass on its lasting sole occasion In your lost house. I scarcely need persuasion, So simple is this case. Here in the dark I listen, tensing in distress, to each Uncertain fragment of your speech, Each desolate, half-drunk remark You uttered unaware That this cassette was running and would share Far in the useless future your despair With one who can do nothing but avow You spoke from midnight, and it’s midnight now.

On the page, the two poems are visually interchangeable, virtual ­ arallels, a point that only adds to the surprise when reviewers, as they p often do, pass over in silence the acknowledged debt to Donne. As in

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the case of Hope’s elegy, it would be difficult to be more explicit about a source poem. The connection is further cinched, if further cinching were necessary, in the presence of “midnight” in the first and last line of each poem. A missed connection but explicable perhaps because Edgar’s is also a quieter, far less rambunctious reworking of Donne than Hope’s poem: less a revision of, or response to, the original, less a breaking of the vessel in the Romantic or Miltonic sense, than an instance of a venerated, rarefied bottle being asked to absorb new wine. The frame is there in all its intricate features, not to be broken and remade but to house, visibly, an altogether different experience in space and time. In this regard, the frame serves, pointedly, as one of a number of ghosts in the poem—the points adding up to make a “ghostly stencil,” as Edgar said on another occasion. Cassettes belong to another era, as does Gwen Harwood and her unholy “Suburban Sonnet,” and the voiced-haunted allusion to “that old station on North Head,” where immigrants had to be quarantined for 40 days before entering Australia, gives an altogether different, antipodal twist to Edgar’s “Nocturnal.” (Edgar’s rather Donnean habit of placing individuals in rooms but against a wide backdrop of space and time has encouraged the adjective “metaphysical” to be used in conjunction with his verse.) The frame, in effect, serves as one kind of counterpoint operating in the poem. It invites a nearly endless landscape of comparisons and contrasts with Donne’s poem. One of the most conspicuous points of departure is sounded in the close of the discursive first stanza, surprising in its immediacy, “I found you,” and the subsequent, rather frightening, recognition of hearing what others say, or might say, about you. Edgar, wisely, doesn’t try to compete with the solemn dirge generated by Donne’s great ego but rather reverses the polarity of subject and object. Moments of closure and certainty belong to others: the end stopped “further immortality” associated with Harwood; the run-on line, and pause, of hesitation and uncertainty to the speaker; the relationship between the first two and the remaining three stanzas contributing to “the larger-scale music of the periodicity of patterned stanzas.” And yet, for all their differences, we register, in Edgar’s metaphysics of sound, a space for Donne to be there too. The “psychic wound” opened up in “A Nocturnal upon St. Lucie’s Day” plays through Edgar’s poem, through his thinking of others, until the final renunciation, so alike and so different (but also deeply touching) from Donne’s firm avowal, his stated vigil, as the speaker prepares towards the unnamed her and her “long night’s festival.”

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While “A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy’s Day” was gestating down under, my own experience as a reader of Donne, at its most intense in The Songs and Sonnets assumed new urgency from an altogether unexpected, nonacademic direction. In 1999 my wife was diagnosed with breast cancer. After a prolonged treatment of slash, poison, and burn (yes, it sounds like lines from “Batter My Heart Three-Person’d God”), she recovered, but the event was shocking and fearful; memories still linger. I had always assumed that Herbert was the poet to whom readers generally turned in times of trouble. If lyric is overheard utterance—which isn’t quite true, as I discovered, and keep rediscovering—it’s hard to imagine a more consoling, sympathetic voice, despite its occasionally troubled narratives of affliction. But it wasn’t Herbert I heard calling but Donne, and not the Donne infamously consumed by his own sickness, but the love poet, and, even more narrowly, the poet of “The Good-Morrow,” “A Valediction: Of Weeping,” and the not-so-holy sonnet containing the unforgettable, inward rhyming, iambic line composed largely of trochaic words (“a holy, thirsty, dropsy melts me yet”), the hungry sonnet beginning “Since she whom I loved.” Donne’s naked self-indulgence, his indulgence in and with another, was mine. About this time, I remember once talking with Richard Strier— arguing, really—about “The Canonization,” that New Critical touchstone, only to have all our differences suddenly melt away like snow in May when I said that, in contrast to “The Canonization,” “The GoodMorrow” was a poem I would kill for. That was the word—“kill”: the poem as a matter of life and death, which it had silently become for me. Richard immediately agreed. “The Good-Morrow” is a poem of great possibilities, a rush of love, suddenly existing between two people. So much gets said so quickly about love. The poem also had a further, earlier claim on me. It had served as my introduction to Donne as an undergraduate, where it appeared first in A.L. Clements’ 1966 Norton Critical Edition of Donne’s poetry. Years of teaching the poem has never worn it thin, nor has writing about it in conjunction with other aubades by modern and contemporary poets.3 But the return to it had a specific origin, a moment and now a memory attached to it. It was borderline elegiac, as aubades so often are. As for “A Valediction: Of Weeping,” although “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” is a textbook favorite in its cool handling of the ingenious compass conceit, “Of Weeping,” no less conceited, is the only one of Donne’s four valedictions in which the speaker directly addresses

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another person. “A Valediction: Of My Name, in the Window” wanders in and out of direct address in the manner of “idle talk,” as Donne notes at the end. But “A Valediction: Of Weeping” is a poem fully in the grip of saying good-bye, filled with water works of the most spectacular and personal order. In this regard, Eliot’s 1921 comments about the poem, always fascinating for what they do and don’t reveal, took on a new interest. He quotes only the second stanza, in support of the observation that in Donne “we find, instead of the mere explication of the content of a comparison, a development by rapid association of thought which requires considerable agility on the part of the reader”4: On a round ball A workman that hath copies by, can lay An Europe, Afrique, and an Asia, And quickly make that, which was nothing, All, So doth each teare, Which thee doth weare, A globe, yea, world by that impression grow, Till thy tears mixt with mine doe overflow This world, by waters sent from thee, my heaven dissolved so.

And then he adds: “Here we find at least two connexions which are not implicit in the first figure, but are forced upon it by the poet: from the geographer’s love to the tear, and the tear to the deluge.” Yes, so true on one level and so lacking on another. What happened to “the odour of the rose” that produced that final, extravagant, fourteen-syllable closing rhyme? Eliot was always about the poet extinguishing their personality, but especially in the year leading up to the publication of “The Waste Land” in 1922, in which there was the hope of finding only a little “drip” of water and even less domestic solace, as we now understand the biographical circumstances underlying the poem. Donne’s second stanza allows Eliot the opportunity to stand at a distance and point out the poet’s technique of figuration. But where would he have gone had he quoted the first stanza, with its abrupt, quietly terrifying beginning—terrifying, that is, in its emotional directness: Let me pour forth My tears before thy face whilst I stay here For thy face coins them, and thy stamp they bear; And by this mintage they are something worth.

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Or the final stanza, which starts, “O more than moon/Draw not up seas to drown me in thy sphere”? This is passion pitched well beyond the parched waters found in “The Waste Land”: “Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop.” And yet this flood of emotions is what “A Valediction” voices through, not despite, the complicated working out of its analogies. We do need to be agile readers of Donne’s imagery indeed, but of more than that as well, as the remainder of the opening stanza suggests, in its shifting line lengths and continuing insistence on the place and placing of personal pronouns: For thus they be Pregnant of thee; Fruits of much grief they are, emblems of more— When a tear falls, that thou falls which it bore, So though and I are nothing then, when on a diverse shore.5

The sonnet “Since She Whom I Lov’d” belongs to a small class of poems that succeed in spite of themselves. The argument is not just unpersuasive but spectacularly unpersuasive, deeply ambivalent about the subject of loss, as Achsah Guibbory has shown in a fine essay that doesn’t try simply to accommodate the early death of Anne More to modes of Christian typology or sacramental theology.6 Many Donne poems are amusing, sophistical squibs, ingenious attempts to outwit an imagined (often) female other such as “The Flea,” but not this one. It fails grandly, knowingly, completely at explaining why it is that God has a place in Donne’s life after the death of his wife. It is also a prosodic mess in places, but sometimes prosody, like art, isn’t everything. Or even pristine grammatical clarity. The precise sense of the opening lines is hard to parse but not the emotional freight they carry, no matter how hard the rest of the poem tries to lay the ghost of his dead wife to rest: Since she whom I loved hath paid her last debt To Nature, and to hers, and my good is dead, And her soul early into heaven ravished, Wholly on heavenly things my mind is set. Here the admiring her my mind did whet To seek thee, God; so streams do show the head; But though I have found thee, and thou my thirst hast fed, A holy thirsty dropsy melts me yet. But why should I beg more love, whenas thou

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Dost woo my soul, for hers offering all thine: And doest not only fear lest I allow My love to saints and angels, things divine, But in thy tender jealousy dost doubt Lest the world, flesh, yea, devil put thee out.

A note in The Norton Anthology of English Literature reminds us that “Donne’s wife died in 1617 at the age of thirty-three, having just given birth to her twelfth child.” Donne’s sonnet, the standard vehicle for expressions of both secular and divine love in the Renaissance, observes only, but carefully and tenderly, that “her soul early into heaven [was] ravished,” and then pursues an ingenious argument for why this might be the case: “she led me to you, God; I found you, but I don’t yet love you sufficiently which thus enables, requires, you to woo me more fervently, so you’re not really beaten out by the world, etc., and therefore a loser.” Surely the number thirty-three could have led a numerologist like Donne in another direction. As it is, though, it’s pretty blasphemous stuff, and one of the reasons why I think Jonson was right when he characterized Donne as “the first poet in the world in some things”—a love poet, where the mask doesn’t always fit perfectly.7 These three poems represent something like a little biographical story, replete with a beginning, middle, and end, and perhaps that was part of their unconscious appeal. (I would later be tempted into writing a small life of Donne for the Cambridge Companion series.)8 But their more immediate attraction lies elsewhere, in the appeal of lyric to voice, passions that are sometimes so acute and immediate that they are hard to put into words, especially your own words, and particularly if your own inclinations are studiously academic, as are those of many readers of Donne, including me. Or I should say lay elsewhere since my new thirst for this trio of poems was not abstracted from the world of time and care but grew from a specific event in it. “If a thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility”9; so an experience can modify our thoughts about Donne. And about George Herbert, too. Herbert was/is a great love poet as well, but it took someone like Elizabeth Bishop in “The Shampoo” to show how Herbertian “quickness” worked in this world in relation to another person, even if her lover, Lota Soares, is never mentioned by name in that poem.10 Of course, neither is Donne’s lover, unless her last name (More) is encrypted in the phrase “emblems of more” or, more dramatically, in the

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apostrophe, “O more than Moon,” that announces the final stanza. But it hardly matters. Apostrophe, since Quintilian, is a rhetorical term for vehemence, and it is used by poets to intensify feeling for the object of address, as Jonathan Culler reminds us in his recent book, The Theory of the Lyric. Culler goes on to say that apostrophe Makes its point by troping not on the meaning of a word but on the circuit of communication itself, foregrounding the fact that this is utterance of a special kind, marked as voicing (the gratuitous “O” that accompanies many apostrophes gives us pure voice) but not as mundane communication. In foregrounding the lyric as act of address, lifting it out of ordinary communicational contexts, apostrophes give us a ritualistic, hortatory act, a special sort of linguistic event in a lyric present.11

Culler is particularly interested in the use of the apostrophe in Romantic poetry, and in the process he quotes Geoffrey Hartman on Blake on the optative or imperative mood: “It evokes an epiphany so strongly as to carry the poet toward it.” I can think of few better explanations for how a Donne love poem works, carrying us along in its great wake toward the object of desire, however we choose to name it.

Notes





1. See the individual essays on each poet collected in John Donne Journal: Raymond-Jean Frontain (2007) “Registering Donne’s Voiceprint: Additional Reverberations,” John Donne Journal 26, 295–312; Jonathan F.S. Post (2007) “Donne, Discontinuity, and the Proto-Post Modern: The Case of Anthony Hecht,” John Donne Journal 26, 283–294; Helen B. Brooks (2007) “A ‘Re-Vision’ of Donne: Adrienne Rich’s ‘A Valediction Forbidding Mourning,’” John Donne Journal 26, 333–361. 2. The Chimaera 5 (February 2009). Interview with Paul Stevens; no page numbers. This and other references to Edgar’s writing can be found on his website (stephenedgar.com.au). I am grateful to Black Pepper Press, Melbourne, and Stephen Edgar for permission to reprint “Nocturnal” from History of the Day (Australia: Black Pepper, 2009). 3. See Post (2003) “‘The Good Morrow’ and the Modern Aubade: Some Impressions,” John Donne Journal, 22, 31–46. 4. Eliot, “The Metaphysical Poets,” T.S. Eliot: Selected Essays (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1960), p. 242. 5. Further quotations from Donne are taken from The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 8th edn, Volume B, Stephen Greenblatt (ed.) (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006).

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6. Guibbory, “Fear of ‘Loving More’: Death and the Loss of Sacramental Love,” John Donne’s “Desire of More”: The Subject of Anne More Donne in the Poetry of John Donne, M. Thomas Hester (ed.) (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1996), pp. 204–227, rpt in Guibbory, Returning to Donne (Burlington VT, Ashgate, 2015), pp. 143–164. 7. Ben Jonson, Ian Donaldson (ed.) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 596. 8. “Donne’s Life: A Sketch,” The Cambridge Companion to John Donne, Achsah Guibbory (ed.) (Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 1–22. 9. Eliot, p. 247. 10.  See the fine comments by Stephen Yenser in “‘Spontaneity’: Herbert’s Irruption in the Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop and James Merrill,” George Herbert’s Travels: International Print and Cultural Legacies, Christopher Hodgkins (ed.) (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2011), pp. 199–200. 11. Culler, Theory of the Lyric (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), p. 213. Culler’s chapter “Lyric Address” is a further workingout of his influential earlier essay on the subject of the apostrophe in Diacritics (1977).

Sonnets 1–14 Katie Ford

1 Empty with me, though here I am, I saw some soul set my meal with dream, then leave a gift for me: a ten-toothed comb to rake what’s dead from me until the comb’s carved medieval scene where bend two horses, water-consoled, adds to me the hope of that number. My own comb’s a lime-shined prairie with the grass of plastic acres. My carver never was? or must have roamed. All I ever wanted was the communal table, so I do love the steady hand that carved this other comb: the fence of the kingdom if turned tooth-side down. The kingdom does come. For me, this is how.

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76  K. Ford 2 A tiny kingdom came, so now I weigh and work the taxed fractions of how my soul’s paltry income might be counted in. Love isn’t mathematics? Oh yes it is. Do you think it’s a cold thing to say? And what do I know of math? I know more than I’ve said, I know nearly everything there is: I can add and divide and feel the abstraction subtracted. That’s as critically far as any math goes. My one hand tracing two horses is a relief geometry I can feel. Look at them: no auction block and not alone, not bit-yanked to the barrel in which drums the beast’s scared heart. I bid all on my comb horses. Of which I’m not a part.

3 I bid on two not up for tender at the kingdom’s comb fence. You’re Andalusions, I think … it’d hurt too much to give you names. Your eyes are soft to me of no choices, even as you bend to feed. So many foods to eat, and one is of affliction. I’ll know more by its end or grow so scarce of myself it won’t matter what bread did or couldn’t descend. I’d rather starve than eat alone the bread of heaven. So it’s true the kingdom knows me? It let me see these horses? There’s no proof besides the so-much-given: Animals that thirst, a river near horses. One looks up, the other drinks down. It’s reddish, this line of day: Sundown.

SONNETS 1–14 

4 I’m red with sundown. It makes me want to pull the comb through my hair. I hear the horses quiet at the river-handle. They’ve grown uneasy, shy, they’re scared. What creature could know what to say when asked, Can I drag you through me, just to feel? The poor horses can’t recoil, whinny, or move task to task. The question terrifies. I suppose it’s real. Still, can I—may I—drag you through me, little comb? Boxwood, fine-grained, ancient tool— can’t I be allowed to need you, too? Your history prescribes you a lasting need. My history’s all alone. I pick up the comb.

5 I pick up the comb, but don’t know where to start. A lonely life’s gone lonely everywhere, even how I plait my part. I suppose there’s no reason not to start at the scars— surgical, homemade—all of it goes under the rake. My skin’s no stony table; the kingdom’s not come here before. My hand grips— a mane, I think?—a flank’s accustomed cold. Is this a shank? a mouth? some teeth gone dank? I thought I’d feel something beside me to comb out the fright. I was right: Fright came, it turns on a crank.

77

78  K. Ford 6 I took the crank and said, fright, you’re mine, so dig from crown to belly. But a tooth caught a link of necklace—. This is true use: how a thing stays with your body pre-forged by some smith who never stayed to go. The comb drags my Eden-sore mind until even the God of it goes. Why is it the kingdom yesterday sat near and now asks excuse from my table? I know my brand of human: the kingdom only seems, and even that is rare. I define rare like this: It comes, then it’s gone, then it never was.

7 It comes, then it’s gone, then it never was. I didn’t think the kingdom was supposed to be like that. Theologies lay and stretch me on the rack. I didn’t think the kingdom should feel like that. I can only live through a glass darkly. Ask, it shall be given I can’t even try. Half ago my life I lifted up to the mountains. On a swim dock I sat dry as dry while in the water rose a ragged catfish, its mouth an open glass. Glassy water into glass-made mouth. None of my shape opens to none that would pass as ghost of a ghost of a right-hungry mouth. Theologies lay and stretch me on the rack. My desire’s all gone wrong. And starved. And strong.

SONNETS 1–14 

8 I think the tradition so stupid and wrong of mourners-for-hire (keeners who slap tambourines) just to stuff a sad scene. The more crammed the number, the more I see that single girl, right over there, hook over the grave of her own what-never-will-be. She’s not even come close. It’s all a big fat miss. She sits vigil there. I guess that’s what I’d call this. Why ever purchase more of herself— self after self to rip out her hair, a crowd thrashing its ribs over a grave’s dank must— I think grief’s worse struck against a single chest. I’ll retch now over my ground. Luckily nobody, not anybody’s, around.

9 Luckily nobody’s around to hear me get sick into the ground. This is how I pray to the saint of an impossible cause: I don’t call her name— my body does it all. Not a thing do I make up: there wasn’t any honey water, there wasn’t any priest. Believe in this: a shaking body, an indiscernible breeze. All day day says the kingdom doesn’t care. It’s just not there, or it leaves us so long I’ll have to forget the horses of the comb, forget they ever ran through my hair. Look at me looking at me look at carved things I wish I could be.

79

80  K. Ford 10 I wish I could leave me. I can’t even know if the horses are for me or of me, against me or in me, beside or despite me— are they gods or mangy beasts? were they bought by some empty patron buying life straight into me— I once said they were looking at me, but that may have been the sorry glance of a shun—. We love to read into animals, but they might not want anyone. They might not want anyone? Then where’s gone my kingdom—

11 Where’s gone my kingdom? God of my childhood, with your attendant monstrosities have a little warmth on me, bent and frozen. Hastily now and again it seems You can hear even the farmyard rats gnaw at cobs and whatever fresh dead’s around. Though it’s confusing to see the golden seaport alongside of that— well, such is the human eye that doesn’t get to choose unless it trains, and I wasn’t given the gift of exercise. I will not say You’ve given me a terrified silence, nor absence, nor presence, nor the sun gone red and down, whose going You can’t protect. Let me, dusky godsend, never believe You protect.

SONNETS 1–14 

12 It destroys us down here to believe You protect. What I mean is this: each day I receive and by moon night shines to erase. It gets dark in this world, how can I save what’s erased by day—? Body, the good, is porous: all comes along. I’d like even to say the body is for us: I downed once the sight of a man who swam out and in at the beach then read between swims on the sand clearly in repair from what was required of him. Fine, night: erase. But I’m still made by the sight of those swims.

13 By the sight of those swims I’ll be bound by this contract, even if it’s my sole eyes that sign. I’ve done worse, and it’s true, all on earth does fall through all. It’s the through that’s long. It’s the through that spills. O snow past my window now… show me, dear snow, how to make such symmetry, how to lock lock to lock so I feel the inside steady enough to believe love might come right here—

81

82  K. Ford 14 Right here, just as I’ve read it could be: Dead masters, come from my bedside table now— not so far away, you’re the particulate matter of me: I’m warm, can’t I can grasp…?— …Oh, I see. It’s your turn to sleep your words in me, and life has bodies here. One’s right over there— “I saw two,” the swimmer said to me— a mama whale offshore, her calf in need against her— “it gave me perspective.” But it didn’t, no it didn’t, I said. The beautiful alive doesn’t grant perspective. It grants desire.

My relationship to poetic form is one of supplication—a desperate state, a state of emotional and intellectual humility before shapelessness and chaos. Shapelessness and chaos are not synonymous to the void, lack, or nothingness. Creation myths consistently depict Chaos as teeming before artistry gives it order, even as the mind of the writer teems but doesn’t know what to do until, suddenly, it does, a form having arrived to answer its unknowing. Sounds, lines, turns, and containments fall down through the mind, and the mind, in turn, responds with what compels and troubles it, and those forces then compel and trouble the forms that offer themselves up to the mind of the poet. All is further compelled, all is further troubled. It’s troubling. And it’s compelling. I don’t know what I’d do without this mysterious alchemy. I neither obey nor disparage form. I beg for it. It is not strange to me, then, that in the year my marriage ended, I would try anything at all poetically. Nothing could be ruled out as tired, dead, worn out, or oldfashioned, even an archaic form practiced by the poets of the seventeenth century—the crown of sonnets, a corona, in which the last line of one sonnet becomes the first of the next. These became the links to replace my broken links, the ring to replace the ring. That was the form I would use, and, as companions, I would bring with me John Donne, Sylvia

SONNETS 1–14 

83

Plath, John Berryman, Emily Dickinson, George Meredith, a swimmer, two horses, a medieval comb, a denizen of seals, a diorama, a lord… and I can report that all of these made for good company, and, in the language of my tradition, communion. A crown ends at fourteen, but the form continued its yield, and is now forty-strong and the heart of my next book. John Donne was one of the first English poets to ask the sonnet to bear theological complexity and unrest, and, during a time of my own instability, I made the sonnet my steady home and—it is true, I’m not exaggerating—my ecstasy. *These poems were previously published in the American Poetry Review.

What’s Done Is Donne and How Can I Find God Now: Poems from The Volcano Sequence Alicia Ostriker

To seek God as a Jewish woman, an American and a feminist, in our secular age, cannot much resemble seeking God as a Roman Catholicturned-Anglican priest in seventeenth century England. And yet Donne was a poet whose spirituality spoke to me so clearly, so passionately, so intelligently, when I was an undergraduate reading him for the first time, that he was both irresistible and irreplaceable. I did not merely admire John Donne; I wanted to be him. Of course I also wanted to be John Keats, Gerard Manly Hopkins and W.H. Auden, but that is another ­matter. What thrilled me in Donne’s sacred poetry was (I recognize in retrospect) his unique blend of unlike qualities: urgent need, energetic reasoning, relentless self-examination, a capacity for bracing doubt and skepticism, a pleasure in language games, an acceptance of paradox, and perhaps most of all, an underlying eroticism carried over from his early days as the roguish rakehell love poet. Sonnet 14, “Batter my heart,” is the most famous and obvious example of this eroticism. We find it as well in his ongoing evocations of flesh, blood, sweat and tears, and in his startlingly amorous figurations of religion as female, in poems like

A. Ostriker (*)  Rutgers University, New Brunswick, USA © The Author(s) 2017 J. Herz (ed.), John Donne and Contemporary Poetry, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-55300-9_9

85

86  A. Ostriker

“Satire III” and Sonnet 18, where Christ is a “kind husband” who offers his “spouse” to others, and the poet finds her “most true and pleasing to thee then/When she’s embraced and open to most men.” The image of the beloved spouse is, of course, from the Song of Solomon, that sequence of love lyrics which Jewish and Christian traditions have interpreted as referring to God and the soul, God and the Church, God and the community of worshippers—and which human lovers have interpreted as referring to themselves. John Donne lived in an age when multiple faiths vied for the position of “true church,” and as a poet he makes the most of the doubt that accompanied such multiplicity. My own spiritual wrestling stems, rather, from my feminist rage at the tyrant warrior and judge known in the west as God the Father, my conviction that the repressed Goddess of prehistory awaits rebirth, and my simultaneous deep-rooted attachment to the King James Version (KJV) of the Jewish Bible.1 In this selection of poems from my book the volcano sequence, the most obvious link with John Donne is that I take God personally. Like Donne, I depend upon the scaffolding of scripture, while insisting on my own interpretations of it. I seek truth stubbornly and my invocation of female divinity–the Shekhinah is the female aspect of the divine One in Jewish mystical tradition—is essential to my quest. Equally essential is the insistence on God as Lover, lifted from the Song of Solomon. Hence the arc of the volcano sequence spans from anger at the tyrannical and violent “you” who dominates patriarchal religion and remains the model for violent masculinity in our world, to an erotic invocation of the Creator—gender unspecified— in which body and spirit are undivided and flesh is understood to be holy. A few notes, for those unacquainted with Hebrew. The Hebrew word for whore or harlot, K’dsha, shares a root with the word for holiness, kaddosh. The Hebrew word hevel, translated “vanity” in the opening of The Book of Ecclesiastes, actually means something more like vapor or mist, with the significance of transience. It is also the name of the first murder victim in the Bible, Abel, the doomed brother of Cain. Hamakom literally means “the place,” and is also one of the names for God. Ein sof, literally “without end” or infinite, is a kabbalistic name for God.

Psalm I am not lyric any more I will not play the harp for your pleasure

WHAT’S DONE IS DONNE, AND HOW CAN I FIND GOD NOW: POEMS … 

I will not make a joyful noise to you, neither will I lament for I know you drink lamentation, too, like wine so I dully repeat you hurt me I hate you I pull my eyes away from the hills I will not kill for you I will never love you again unless you ask me

* You have made everything wondrous after its kind the x molecule hooks the y molecule mountains rise with utmost gravity snow upon their shoulders a congress of crows circulates through the maize that grows sheeny through a breezeless morning the ribbed leaf a spot of scarlet floats on the shivering creek each single thing so excellent in form and action whether by chance by excitement by intention you draw along a dappled path the wren to her nest, the fledglings cry, the lions flow rhythmically toward the antelope, the butterfly flicks yellow wings, the galaxies

87

88  A. Ostriker propagate light in boundless curves past what exists as matter, as dust You have done enough, engineer how dare we ask you for justice

* Do not think I fail to remember you were right there clasping me when we danced without words commandments fear oh it was so good oh it was like melting oh it was like a rainbow so where in hell are you now you can tell I’m lonely

Dialogue I tried to invent new forms of holiness to console myself after the event at the mountain behold I put before you life and death therefore choose life I said but look at you look at the stiffness of your neck look at the desire of your heart to wreck everything with your harlotry

*

WHAT’S DONE IS DONNE, AND HOW CAN I FIND GOD NOW: POEMS … 

I am named k’dsha, harlot, whore, abomination while you are named kaddosh, holy, separate or apart terrified of the gulf into which we blindly reach do I not seek your face, you mine attempting to touch we destroy we break we are broken yet do we not share a root or a thread dear friend

* I said Let us reason together I said I hate your sacrifices I said feed the hungry I said clothe the naked I said do justice, love mercy, I said keep my law

* Dear one I believe someday we will show each other our bruises after this dialogue of the deaf but tell me, where it is written I found you in your blood, and I said, Live, who speaks to whom who forgives whom

Fire the Lord your God is a consuming fire the stories of the gods outshine the moon your story is darkness outshining the sun we hide our eyes because of your fire at the moment of the mountain let not God speak to us lest we die

89

90  A. Ostriker no wonder history gives us cities like widows sitting in their menstrual blood no wonder book of revelation surges up four horsemen orgy of vengeance after nonviolent gospels no wonder swarms christian soldiers burning libraries heretics no wonder chapel in Cuzco San Antonio striding upon the prone body of an indian no wonder imams cut hands off sinners no wonder the jewish lunatic murders worshipers in a place of reconciliation everybody trying to look goes blind

* One of these days oh one of these days will be a festival and a judgment and our enemies will be thrown into the pit while we rejoice and sing hymns Some people actually think this way

During the Bombing hevel may be translated vanity or mist or vapor it is evening it is morning one day like mist from ten thousand feet

of Kosovo

WHAT’S DONE IS DONNE, AND HOW CAN I FIND GOD NOW: POEMS … 

above the hills bombs fall like vapor the thin air is full of them roads crawl with tanks soldiers like mist tens of thousands of refugees cross the border like vapor from morning to dusk unmanned families like mist women in slippers children in bare feet like vapor carrying blankets suitcases of clothes like mist money ripped off by border guards not new under the sun not new on throbbing bluelit screen but the eye tires of seeing the ear of hearing oh we still prepare our feast of liberty and memory we remain your children and you, you— father of rain what are you thinking

* the spot of black paint in the gallon of white makes it whiter so the evil impulse is part of you for a reason what reason greater wilder holiness

*

91

92  A. Ostriker so perhaps you want us to understand it throbs also in you like leavening you want us to love that about you even if you pray that your attribute of mercy may overcome your attribute of wrath you want us always to love the evil also the death-wish also the bread of hate because we are your image confess you prize the cruel theater of it

*

Question and Answer the love of suffering the suffering of love that too is a spectacle to you or do you feel it too God, do you feel it too

* have you not guessed your desire is mine your pain is mine when the least portion of you suffers I curl wincing into myself like a sea-urchin a woman in hard labor or a struck dog, have you not been told the untreated wound of your love inflames me let me alone I will weep bitterly

WHAT’S DONE IS DONNE, AND HOW CAN I FIND GOD NOW: POEMS … 

what is worse than the contemptuous glance of one to whom you have given your soul

On a Good Day there is a bridge that spans the flood of spacetime pouring between your imperial palace and our poor tenements your domain, ha-makom, of purest illumination and our humble lives to what can we compare your word beloved it is like flying sparks running through the four worlds toward us, the reality cascades to intellect to feeling to flesh like a long distance call then we send the return message blessed be you blessed be you what delight between you and us

* the rest of the time what gnashing of teeth what slamming doors

*

93

94  A. Ostriker

The Shekhinah

as Exile

hidden one: when the temple fell when Jerusalem arose and fell and whenever we were persecuted and scattered by the nations, to follow us in pain and exile you folded wings patched coats survived working praying giving birth dragged mattresses pans in peasant carts swam across hard seas, sick and homesick landed in the golden land they called you greenhorn you danced in cafes you went in the factory bargained pushcart goods ice shoes Hester Street put makeup on threw away wig and you learned new languages now you speak everything lady, but part of you is earth part of you is wounds part of you is words and part is smoke because whoever was burned over there, you were burned you died forever with the sheep whoever survived, you speak in our tongues open your wings, instruct us say what we are do not confuse us with the sanhedrin of the loud speakers who have no ear for your voice but we who thirst for your new instructions, source of life come into our thoughts our mouth. Speak to us voice of the beloved help us say what we are say what we are to do

WHAT’S DONE IS DONNE, AND HOW CAN I FIND GOD NOW: POEMS … 

The Shekhinah



as Amnesiac

I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning before the earth was … when he prepared the heavens I was there … rejoicing always before him (Proverbs 8:23–30) then humanity named you wisdom monarchs ruled according to your counsel you prepared a table from which we ate you were above rubies and exalted like the palm tree or like the rose bushes in Jericho come on, surely by now you remember who you are you’re my mother my sisters my daughter you’re me we will have to struggle so hard to birth you this time the brain like a cervix

The Yearning



Not until the lower world was made perfect was the other world also made perfect … and it is thus the yearning from below which brings about the completion above. —The Zohar and so I am reading the zohar and they are so splendid these old rabbis in their splendor and their words are blazing light sparks gushing springs and their hopes are palaces pomegranate trees perfumes ascending glorious but as for me

95

96  A. Ostriker their gates stand closed fastened against me what must I do outside here shake the latches and wail, they are deaf mount a lawsuit against them, they are expert lawyers scratch my scabs go on a hunger strike forget it they own the cameras, oh my beloved how long before you tell them who I am

The Poet in Me Says I ask nothing for myself for myself I don’t care if you exist it’s material for art if not—well, it’s the others I worry about how will they live without you though friends explain to me Jews don’t have to believe in god for Jews, god is an option and my friend Karen remembers as a little girl studying Hebrew she inquired of her refugee tutor who stroked his beard and said in Yiddish “if there is a god, or if there isn’t a god, a Jew studies”—isn’t that a good story beloved, but the woman in me says that the poet lies the poet can afford to lie the woman stuck in her eyeballs handcuffed to the clock’s bullying hand

WHAT’S DONE IS DONNE, AND HOW CAN I FIND GOD NOW: POEMS … 

only lives once where are you damn you beloved where are you hiding this time, please come out she keeps crying she keeps looking

*

I Decide

to Call

You Being

a word with two contradictory meanings someone to wipe the blood and dirty tears away through boundless love someone able to punish listen wrestle like a person but larger and ein sof boundless being in the sense of pure existence remote abstraction more absolute than zero you exquisite joke you paradigm paradox you absent presence you good evil shredding the eye so that it can become a door you are inexplicable like a koan running uphill barefoot blowing the door down you complete nothing you perfect nothing

* everyone asks are you the father or the king or the mother or the snake but to me listen you are the hope of my heart you are the quarrel in my art

97

98  A. Ostriker you are the tangled quarrel in my art like a married pair who will go to their graves carrying resentments like suitcases of foreign coins you are the sex in my art whatever wants to faint under long kisses, whatever grapples flesh to flesh, the nipple that reaches, the tongue that spills

Psalm I endure impure periods when I cannot touch you or even look at you you are a storm I would be electrocuted by your approach then I feel some sort of angelic laughter like children behind a curtain come, I think you are at my fingertips my womb you are the wild driver of my vehicle the argument in my poem nothing between us only breath

Psalm Oh green green willow oh wonderfully red flower but I know the colors are not there —Ikkyu when I return to you wet from the bath throbbing through the change from absence to presence

WHAT’S DONE IS DONNE, AND HOW CAN I FIND GOD NOW: POEMS … 

from the mask to the face your eyes crystal for complexity and transparency the sky transparent crystal so my words my life pure again through the rain of impassioned phenomena who cares how it happens

Psalm my head is uncovered to my naked hair I am dressed immodestly my old body lacks teeth, lacks a breast still cherishes itself I eat what I want I am an animal of flesh as you know for you formed me in the womb and made my desires what they are I am waiting for you in a bed of pleasure

*

Psalm like a skin on milk I write to you

99

100  A. Ostriker I hurl the letters of your name onto every page, one and many I know you are reading over my shoulder look each of us possesses a book of life each attempts to read what the other has scripted in these almost illegible letters tipped by crowns what is the story we want to know

* would you turn off that faucet, I shout to my husband but to you I say: never turn it off

Seasonal when the full sun is on me this way I itch and am satisfied I take it in like a thirsty man drinking from his garden hose I take it in like a smiling woman receiving a man, and then when the golden leaves rush past me sometimes I jubilate like Abraham I am here for this I came

like Isaac I laugh trembling well at least I am alive and like Jacob I think in the spirit world they can never experience pleasure the way flesh can the body making love the body nursing a child

WHAT’S DONE IS DONNE, AND HOW CAN I FIND GOD NOW: POEMS … 

101

the body fighting playing basketball even when it sickens nursing its lesions it struggles to stay it clings to its bars everything else is theology and folly

Note 1. Prose discussions of these issues can be found in the following books of mine: Feminist Revision and the Bible: The Bucknell Lectures on Literary Theory (London and Cambridge, MA Blackwell, 1993); For the Love of God: The Bible as an Open Book (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007). See also The Nakedness of the Fathers: Biblical Visions and Revisions (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994), a combination of midrash and autobiography. The poems are from Alicia Ostriker (2002) The Volcano Sequence (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press), reprinted by permission of the author.

Epithalamia and Aubades Heather Dubrow

I can attribute—or some would advise me to substitute “blame”—the delight in word play and puns apparent in much of my work to a love affair with Donne that started in college and, unlike many of the love affairs he chronicles, “endure[d]/ Vicissitude, and season, as the grasse.”1 But the ways I have transformed earlier versions of two poems in recent years signal an intensified and more recent response to his work. Perhaps it isn’t surprising that my dialogue with the poet whose grammar pivots on the disjunctive conjunction and whose argumentation and meditation both delight in version and reversion, vision and revision, is manifest above all in the “but” and “yet” invoked when one reconceives an earlier poem. The version of “Here Comes the Bride” that first appeared in The Yale Review reads:                                         Here comes the bride Warning: scaffolding is alarmed Sign on building under construction

Look: the bridal gown is dyed to eggshell white the wedding scrapbook lies through its teeth about yesterday and tomorrow some stains even German washing machines give up on                 and trousseaus are nonstarters as scaffolding

H. Dubrow (*)  Fordham University, New York, USA © The Author(s) 2017 J. Herz (ed.), John Donne and Contemporary Poetry, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-55300-9_10

103

104  H. Dubrow skyhigh twin towers of tomorrow coupled like the figures on the cake and scaffolded with promise         I do I will                 I never will                                 again with scaffolds like those, who listens to the wind         babbling through the towers or to the rain         crying down those posted signs girders scaffolded with signed—         HARD HAT AREA REPORT UNSAFE CONDITIONS TO —warnings for those who could not read the alarming signs.2

A few years later, when very involved with the Donne and Contemporary Poetry Project, I returned to the poem and changed it in some apparently minor but not insignificant ways:                                         Here comes the bride Warning: scaffolding is alarmed Sign on building under construction

Look: the bridal gown is dyed to eggshell white the wedding scrapbook lies through its teeth about all those yesterdays and about tomorrow one cake’s poisoned flower is is another man’s meat Tide makes bruises bright something new, something blue? no need to borrow Listen: some stains even German washing machines give up on                 and trousseaus are nonstarters as scaffolding

EPITHALAMIA AND AUBADES 

105

skyhigh twin towers of tomorrow’s bliss coupled like the figures on the cake and scaffolded with promise the clouds’ master jeweler engraved in sand         I do I will                 I never will                                 again I’ll always try See the good fairies dancing in those magic rings bestowed in a sky blue bag from Tiffany. With scaffolds like those, who listens to the wind         babbling through the towers or to the rain         crying down those posted signs and who will heed girders scaffolded with signed—         HARD HAT AREA REPORT UNSAFE CONDITIONS TO —warnings for those who could not read the alarming signs.

The new pun on “magic rings” may again reflect my longstanding debt to Donne’s own word play—in any event, the new line “the clouds’ master jeweler engraved in sand” is as close to that contested concept, the metaphysical conceit, as anything I have written. And echoes of Donne shape the soundscape of this version with all its off rhymes and heterometrical lines. But I’m still not sure which version of the poem I prefer. Donne was also my demanding editor for a much more radical rewrite of another poem I had published earlier. The first version of this aubade appears in my chapbook collection Transformation and Repetition:

106  H. Dubrow                                 Aubade, for our Late Afternoon                                                For D.W.R. I muse that new love at our age is as improbable as a flowering cactus when I wake with you at dawn. Your breath perks and snuffles as you stir, like our old-fashioned coffee pot. (Anyone but a lover would say you snore                                         at dawn). The valley between your shoulder blades curves to cradle and warm my chin: irrefutable argument from design. Till you flip over                                         at dawn. Love is as familiar and unsettling as the mischievous games of menopause when I wake with you                                         at dawn.3

I’m sure that my work as a Donne scholar initially attracted me to the aubade genre (though I was of course familiar with other poets’ contributions to it); his influence here, however, seems limited to that initial attraction. But a funny thing happened some 15 years later in the course of my participation in the Donne and Contemporary Poetry Projects—the poem wanted to become at once a riff on its earlier incarnation and a radically different creature. Here is its metempsychosis:

Aubade for our Early Evening

Must business thee from hence remove? Donne, “Break of Day”

I muse that such love at our age is as improbable as a flowering cactus when my arthritic knees and leaping thoughts stir                         before you wake at dawn. Our annual physicals yield subprime mortgages, Time’s winged chariot enters the Indy 500.

EPITHALAMIA AND AUBADES 

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But I’ll attend to our sleepy smiles,                         not its failing brakes at dawn. The territory between your shoulder blades curves to cradle and protect the chin I’ll soon need to stick out at work.                         Surely it’s still dark, not dawn. The Times also crashes by our door, but let’s hear it for these instruments that link us here (though less frequently), not those new instruments devised by young bankers                         who embark for work way before dawn. We too must leave for the “real world”? But truth awakes in our private bedroom, not in private bankers’ lairs. Yet brokers afford pet phoenixes and feast on packaged larks: disjunctive conjunctions born at dawn.4

On the level of craft, I would trace the medial off rhymes and other aural effects in the final lines of each stanza to the engagement with sound that has intensified in my work since the earlier version of the poem, an engagement I attribute partly to my respect for many contemporary poets who are masters of sound, including some contributors to this collection, such as Kimberly Johnson. “Feast on packaged larks,” a phrase with which I had fun, gestures towards Donne’s delight in double meanings but also reminds me how often I have reread that feast of a poem, Jonson’s “Inviting a Friend to Supper.” Both literary interactions and political events impelled the other changes between the versions, I think; the two interact in ways that crystallize telling connections between Donne’s world and our own, despite my concerns about our students’ often uncritical emphasis on “relatability.” Donne’s voice was evidently in my ear in my added reference to phoenixes, his style on my brain in the allusion to “disjunctive conjunctions,” and his bawdiness in my blood in my raunchy joke about the instruments (interestingly, one colleague did not get the joke here, perhaps because he didn’t expect someone of my generation to be making it). But in awaking to the possibilities of this new aubade and in reviewing it now, I am also very aware that it is in dialogue with Donne the satirist as well as Donne the love poet. My play on the phrase “real world” and the distorted values behind it is in

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one sense a local allusion, translating into poetry an essay I published on the widespread and self-serving practice of using that term to distinguish the business world and the academy, always to the detriment of the latter. But from another perspective, my attack on Wall Street and the financial crisis it fostered surely responds not only to the citation in my epigraph but also to Donne’s recurrent preoccupation with the chicanery at court. Needless to say, the contrast between the two versions of my poem is impelled as well by my own aging (I once heard Seamus Heaney respond to a student’s “Can you ever write autobiography?” with a gentle but firm “Can you ever not write it”)—yet I hope the poem itself, though written by an older poet, is fresher in its later version.

Notes 1.  John Donne, “Loves Growth,” John Donne: The Elegies and the Songs and Sonnets, Helen Gardner (ed.) (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1965), pp. 3–4. 2.  Heather Dubrow (2014) “Here Comes the Bride,” The Yale Review 102:1, 101. 3. Heather Dubrow, “Aubade, for our Late Afternoon,” Transformation and Repetition (Nebraska: Main-Travelled Roads, 1997), p. 7. 4.  Heather Dubrow (2014/2015) “Aubade for Our Early Evening,” Packington Review 6, http://www.packingtownreview.com/issues/6/ Heather-Dubrow/Aubade-for-Our-Early-Evening.html#.VbuAPLVCmSo.

Bird of Fire; The Double Death of  Orpheus: Poems from The Ground Rowan Ricardo Phillips

Bird of Fire

E il suo Volo di fuoco m’accecò sull’altro

The blurred moon, blanched in the new evening sky, Amazed me as a child. How could it live At the same time as the sun, (Downstar I called it), captured by the melody That rang out from it, dusk-bright, like a phoenix Downed in civil twilight. The difference Between the two, I thought, was difference Itself: it made things real. But is the sky Real? Aren’t its blue moments, like the phoenix, Just the mind’s conjugations of “to live,” Or the brain’s long division of “to die”? Rouge le soir, bel espoir, sings the Downstar Down night’s starry throat, already elsewhere, Downstar No more, no longer the sweet difference Between real and dream I knew. I will die.

R.R. Phillips (*)  New York, USA © The Author(s) 2017 J. Herz (ed.), John Donne and Contemporary Poetry, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-55300-9_11

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110  R.R. Phillips I am not a dream. I am not quite real. I am a dream’s firm ground. And I live Because they are not what I am. Keep this Thought for me, Poetry, as the phoenix Seduces dreadnoughts to strum the Downstar To sleep, and the skyline’s lights begin to live Like notes in air; and in that difference, That sleight of sun, may night remake the torqued sky And distill dream and real from live and die. A red cloud, speckled like an amorphous die, Ferries the Internet’s dead. “Off to Phoenix!”; “TGIF!”; “Double Rainbow!”; “Nice sky Tonight!”; “Don’t let this get you down, Starr.” They speak, spammed or hacked, the indifference In that act excused in saying, “A guy’s got to live.” I chased the verb with the bird that always lives, Saddled on its nape as it dove to die, Its neck arched to the moon. Indifference Spread through its ash-blond body now phoenix No more, now part of the ground, now downed star. Its frame, first feathered by flames, flailed blue. Sky Swallowed the phoenix, seized round the Downstar, Sang sky down to the city, burned livid Until it didn’t, then praised the difference.

The Double Death

of Orpheus

Somewhere she’s repeeling apples, Repeeling apples and pinning them up again, Pinning them up again in their trees. They had nothing to do with Hell And everything to do with Hell. He thought he’d find her in Hell When she was actually interning in Heaven. She worked in all the departments there: Cloudkeeping, Front Desk, Reservations.

BIRD OF FIRE; THE DOUBLE DEATH OF ORPHEUS … 

The attempt on Heaven and its loss Of innocence made Heaven seem Less seedy. She loved sometimes To pick an apple straight from the tree on her Break. This was encouraged there: The good being encouraged to listen to their impulses, Carpe diem, etc. She’d move the blade across The round red surface of the fruit Like a sail navigating through a hell-spawned Sea as the sun dropped down to drink it. She turnered both the apple she turned And the turning slaver in his heart. He grew consumed with little things like this The second time he lost her. The first time Even gravity gave in as he descended the earth To find her. But then not even the power Of his strum shaking the ground Could stir him. To bring her back, don’t look back. It was more counsel than condition: To bring her back, don’t Look back. Hell loves to be taken literally. But could you blame him? Were there even double meanings back then When everything was meaning something For the first time? Maybe his art Just fooled his heart; Or maybe his screwed-up heart Just screwed up; Either way, He was done; His heart split and spun Like that ridiculous compass In Donne, And he’d never do her again.

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For as long as I can remember I have owned a thin volume of Donne’s poetry called The Love Poems of John Donne, published by Peter Pauper Press some time in the 1940s. It was once my uncle’s, my mother’s kid brother’s, and his books tended to eventually become mine. This one was no exception. Reading Donne so early in my life, when I had little interest in what a text might mean and favored the more visceral pleasures of the eye and ear, the puckish give and take a stretched figure plays out in the intuitive organs, I suspect the Donneness of Donne bled into me. I absorbed Donne like a plant’s cells absorb sunlight. And like a plant doesn’t look like the sun, my work looks little like Donne’s but is part of it. Thin with a stiff spine and barely as wide as a face, that first book of Donne’s I inherited felt in the hand like one of those ubiquitous Little Golden children’s books. Now, when I look for it among the phalanx of books on my shelves, it’s hard to find. I have to change my way of looking at things, like an archer searching the wall through the smoke for an arrowslit. Donne’s mazy and daedal conceits had the same feel for me as “Once upon a time”—which is to say that, as I grew older, I pushed more against Donne as I read him. The alchemy he championed was clearly bad science but as with Keats’s Cortez staring off into the Pacific, you learn to shrug and move on. Likewise, Donne’s famous compass in “Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” has gone from an instrument of great wonder and deep meaning to one of instructive overreach to now for me somewhere usefully in the middle. The word “ridiculous” has of course another more contemporary meaning beyond merely risible: it also means “unbelievably good” (kudos to the Oxford English Dictionary for noting it). Sometimes things are, as Run-D.M.C. put it, not bad meaning bad, but bad meaning good.1 Donne’s compass, a symbol of his skill as much as of his love, flitters between extremes. And in this sense it seemed the right idea at the right time for the end of my own poem, “The Double Death of Orpheus.” It wasn’t planned but rather just happened. It was— like the marriage in “Bird of Fire” of the phoenix in Donne’s epithalamion and Dante’s sestina of the Lady Pietra degli Scrogvini—a surge of the blood; an alchemy.

Note 1. “Peter Piper” from Raising Hell, studio album, 1986.

Poems: The Sunne Rising, Felinity Stephen Burt

The Sunne Rising awake awake diminishing shade on sheets sends lovers to their bailiwicks & children to their parents’ haunts & turns so many adults from when will you love me to when will you love me again maturity means a bed that is the reverse or revenge of the princess & the pea

S. Burt (*)  Harvard University, Cambridge, USA © The Author(s) 2017 J. Herz (ed.), John Donne and Contemporary Poetry, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-55300-9_12

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114  S. Burt when you dream I don’t know what you see in me

Felinity

after Baudelaire

The indifferent, the out-of-love, people so bored with their work That they can’t stop talking about it, the revved-up teens Unwilling to gaze out the window—none would spare A minute for the diffident, darkEared, wide-eyed cat blinking up out of her sleep as she cleans One more foreclaw and then hides her head in our chair. All cats are more rude To human beings than any human being Should be. A few like to be spanked. Some others dash off but go limp if you catch them fleeing, Then track us down after half-hearted attempts to hide And settle on us, as we sleep, just to keep themselves warm. They know that we know that they do not wish to be thanked. It is so easy not to do them harm.

Donne’s secular poetry of love, lust, and emotional attachment delights readers, confounds scholars, and drives critics to form quarreling camps, not least because it’s so obviously inconsistent with itself: it’s so easy to find casual, comic sexism (“Air and Angels”), lovelorn frustration (“Go and Catch a Falling Star”), self-deprecating wit mixed with Ovidian advice (“The Indifferent”) , apparently straightforward invitations to enjoy (elegy XIX), what look like episodes from a dramatic life story (elegy XVI), the all-consuming, body-and-soul devotion of satisfied lovers (“The Sun Rising”) or newlyweds (“The Anniversary”), lovers who are joined forever by the soul but not much by the body (“The Relic”), partings that look like sweet sorrow (the valedictions), and even what looks to us, perhaps anachronistically (though Empson would have

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advised us to read it just that way), as a full-throated defense of same-sex love (“Sappho to Philaenis”). It’s easy to think that this poet gives us everything about erotic pairbonds, about what we now call both lust and (for some of the word’s many meanings) love. But of course he can’t: no single poet can—what’s distinctive about Donne as love poet is the illusion that he comes close. One thing he does not give is the sense, or the fact, that when lovers stay together they, or we, have to compromise—that, as the sex advice writer and essayist Dan Savage likes to say, you never get The One; you get the .83 and round up. To fall in love is to feel you’ve found The One; to stay in love, to stay together, is to do the rounding, and admit the rounding error, and experience the doubts of adult life. “A Lecture upon the Shadow”—that strange and haunting poem of mansplaining and covert self-doubt—shows a poet who fears that such a compromise will not be possible, or not for him. Today we would call such sentiments—though sharply and beautifully expressed—“adolescent” (thus insulting a lot of teens). I wanted to respond to Donne’s powerful portraits of couples in love, portraits that seem to describe our own love lives today in ways that other Renaissance poets do not, and yet portraits that also embody toxic myths about erotic and romantic love—it has to be perfect; it can’t change; it can’t admit doubt. Rather than answer “A Lecture upon the Shadow” directly, I wanted to answer, instead, an even better (and more famous) poem by showing what happens before, and after, lovers who are imperfect adults wake up; we modern lovers, we modern spouses, wake up in a queen- or king-size bed we share with doubts, with selfdoubt, with just the distractions (especially if we have kids) that the Donne of “The Sun Rising” wants to rule out. And yet there is nowhere we’d rather be. As for “Felinity,” think of it as a meditation on difficulty, in poetry, in people, and in cats: it starts by reversing the meanings in the first lines from Baudelaire’s famous poem about cats, and then curls up around itself, a feline edition of “fancy’s maze and clue.”

Poem: Musing Stephen Yenser

Here is no penance, much less innocence. (Donne, Elegie XIX).

1. Dear Melissa—daughter of Deborah, Hebrew for bee, From dbr, linked to words for truth and word— Whose own name glows Translucently as honey, or the amber Embalming that famous Baltic bee Since fifty million years before Alexander Tried to have his corpse preserved in honey, Translucently as we say love Must glow, must glue, must be, Won’t you buzz me?

2. Because it’s all lubricity, As slickery Emerson puts it. Sleeping Beauty awake

S. Yenser (*)  University of California, Los Angeles, USA © The Author(s) 2017 J. Herz (ed.), John Donne and Contemporary Poetry, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-55300-9_13

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118  S. Yenser Is Slipping Booty is Nudis Verbis. Slips of the tongue Are sips of the truth, or nips, As your tipsy Thomas didn’t doubt. So, well, the tongue trips Between lips, skips To nibbles, leaps slopes, Lopes, loops Alps, Slops betwixt, Stoops to anything, Sloopsmooth and slaphappy, To hips, to lap, And, sapping itself, lapping Itself, licks slick The very apsis. But then the tongue’s an asp, An asp that lapses, Falls to the facile, So lisps and limps (However limpidly) To sleep at last.

3. (melismatic) melissa meliss ah listen to me listen new me a melamed listen a my list less meli alas than lisztian melos melis alias a lissome lass lest I be less be lost beeless a mull is a mull is a spicy thought see thought sigh and see spot spy seathoughts beethoughts with honey with moon honeymill honeymellow oenomel mell us melicious melissa 4. We need a dash—Dickinsonian?—of censorship— To cut—to lace—the Yensership. Let’s cut away. Let’s have our aches and Keats them too. We’ll bruise the sheets—and then we’ll shoot the breeze.

These rudderless ships in the sea of language, Shuddering rips in the wake of ancient songwage,

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Bees in a blow, only mean I long for you And make what beelines I can in the way of pleas.

(Stephen Yenser from Stone Fruit, Waywiser Press, 2016)

Donne’s Presence Near the end of his collection Fiction and the Figures of Life, in his essay “The Artist in Society,” William Gass sets down what he takes to be “virtues” that constitute desiderata to the artist qua artist but might cause him (or her, the passage’s gender bias notwithstanding) problems in society. The penultimate in his list, which culminates in “totality,” is “sensuality,” which perforce overlaps with other requirements, notably “presence” or “concentration.” “The artist is a lover,” Gass proposes, “and he must woo his medium till she opens to him; until the richness in her rises to the surface like a blush. Could we adore one another the way the poet adores his words or the painter his colors—what would be the astonishing result?”1 Gass gave his proposition memorable form in a superb short story “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country,” which features a poet, the first-person narrator, living alone in the Midwest, suffering the pains of withdrawal from love. The feelings suppressed in the poet’s barren social life press up everywhere in his story, in effect a notebook, the record of his quotidian routine and meditative escapes, and make for a tour de force of diction and rhetorical devices ranging from chiasmus and catachresis to rhyme and meter that fosters a rich hypogeal verbal life. A mainstay is equivocation, which appears first in the last word of the story’s title, “country.” The pun in the word’s first syllable goes back in our mother language forever and is a staple in seventeenth-century poetry, as in John Donne’s “The Good-Morrow,” an otherwise perfectly proper aubade, which slyly refers to the lovers’ lives before their relationship as a period when they “But sucked on country pleasures, childishly.”2 Famously a hard thinker, lured by theological intricacies and the “new philosophy,” Donne is also one of the great artistic paramours, in Gass’s sense. I am not sure that juncture is a coincidence, any more than it is that the words “work” and “orgy” both derive from the Proto-Indo-European etym erg-, which is also the seed of “energy.” T.S. Eliot notoriously tells us that sometime early in the seventeenth century a “dissociated sensibility set in,”

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a divorce in verse of thought from feeling, which afflicted literature in English until his own day, and if so, Donne, on the cusp of that dissociation, embodies a “unified sensibility,” to which the intellectual and the physical, the aesthetic and the erotic are as one. As Gass’s Rilkean speaker puts it, “Poetry, like love, is—in and out—a physical caress.” Or to cadge a figure from Galway Kinnell in the late twentieth century, Donne “understood/the unicorn’s phallus could have risen, after all,/directly out of thought itself.”3 Kinnell’s figure, a conceit, consists precisely in the coupling of dissimilar elements—elements as dissimilar as love-making and writing might seem—that staple of Donne and his cohort. Among the best-known examples in Donne’s love poems are such pairings, or rather pairs of pairings (fractals appear throughout), as the compass legs and the lovers in “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,” the beads of the lovers’ eyes threaded on “one double string” in “The Ecstasy,” and the fish and the lure and the romantic duo in “The Bait.” A condensed or telescoped version is the marvelous line, round as Giotto’s O, in “The Relic,” which describes the lock of the lover’s hair on the skeleton of the partner’s corpse: A bracelet of bright hair about the bone.

A proof that exactitude and extravagance can go hand in hand, the line is the lock. With its alliterated b, its bouchoreille acuity, its fulcrum of a spondee, and its reversible syntax (it also wants to read “About the bone a bracelet of bright hair”), along with its ghost of a pun on “brace,” it joins the lovers in life and death. The focus, the concentration, the logophilic attention to verbal detail is that of the artist as lover. When in “The Cross” Donne warns us to “correct” the “concupiscence of wit,” he knows whereof he speaks. The poem quoted in the epigraph to “Musing,” which transparently compares the partner and the muse, is of course Donne’s Elegie XIX. To his mistris going to bed in which the poet is an explorer of the new world, “America! my new-found-land.” Donne appears elsewhere in my volume Stone Fruit, but then he is everywhere in recent American poetry. Never mind the high modernists, who owe so much to him. An essay that someone should write would find this same poem, “Elegie XIX,” shadowing Elizabeth Bishop’s subdued love poem “A Cold Spring”; the motif of “all” in “Lovers’ Infiniteness” embedded in the conclusion to James Merrill’s metaphysically ingenious “Flèche d’Or”;

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allusions to “The Sun Rising” coloring both Bishop’s “Roosters” and Robert Lowell’s sharply divergent “Man and Wife’; “A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy’s Day” (where “The world’s whole sap is sunke”) inflecting the opening of Bishop’s “The End of March”; the “repurposing” of lines from the same poem structuring Alice Fulton’s luminous “A Lightenment on New Year’s Eve”; and florabundant other borrowings. Donne’s far from done and all about us. The reverberations go on and will go on.

Notes 1. John Donne, “The Good-Morrow,” Major Poets of the Earlier Seventeenth Century. Barbara K. Lewalski and Andrew J. Sabol (eds) (New York: The Odyssey Press, 1973), p. 21. 2. William Gass, Fiction and the Figures of Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970), p. 287. 3. Galway Kinnell, “The Call across the Valley of Not-Knowing,” The Book of Nightmares (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971).

Heaney, Donne, and the Boldness of Love Sean H. McDowell

As the publication of Dennis O’Driscoll’s Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney (2008) provided nearly unprecedented access to a major modern poet’s experience of his career, it also underscored the degree to which Heaney depended on the specific insights of other poets to guide his way in his poetic making and in his life as a poet.1 Just as a physicist or a philosopher will refer to ideas or theories in a shorthand of individual phrases—Hobbes’ pure state of nature, say, or the Big Bang—Heaney treated the words of fellow poets with a similar authority in conveying the true nature of art and experience. He retained from poems touchstones for how to learn, how to remember, how to pay attention, and how to live. For example, when speaking of his many literary pilgrimages, he turns naturally to Yeats: “I’d have thought the urge to go these places was common enough. A matter of dedicating, as Yeats says in one of his Coole Park poems, ‘a moment’s memory to [a] laurelled head.’”2 When asked to explain the apparent disjunction between the poems on sectarian violence in Field Work (1979) and his earlier description of that collection as a “door into the light,” he offers a list of similar touchstones: “Synge’s remark about style being the shock of new subject matter comes to mind. And Lowell’s line, ‘Why not say what happened?’ And Milosz’s respect for ‘one clear stanza.’”3 He speaks as if these precedents, taken together, helped shaped his artistic conception.

S.H. McDowell (*)  Seattle University, Seattle, USA © The Author(s) 2017 J. Herz (ed.), John Donne and Contemporary Poetry, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-55300-9_14

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Heaney also speaks of the work of others in the same fashion. In Spelling it Out, the 2009 publication of a speech made to honor Brian Friel on the occasion of Friel’s eightieth birthday, he encapsulates the playwright’s work through a small collection of literary descriptors culled from diverse sources: No contemporary playwright has a greater lexical range or relish than Friel, no cast of characters is more endowed with original speech. There is fecundity and felicity and at the same time a forensic vigilance in everything he writes, a Shakespearean rough magic which does not preclude Beckettian fine-tuning. There is what Robert Frost calls “the wonder of supply,” the more-than-enoughness which distinguishes the great ones, a scale that runs from the demotic to the rhapsodic, as capable of mocking wit as elegiac wisdom or lyric fantasy. He is a type of Keatsian “chameleon poet” as well as a Joycean forger of conscience.4

Each of these descriptors captures a single, precise distinction, so that the accumulation creates a particularity of reference that is especially communicative. Heaney thought about literature in no small part through the insights of other writers, which became for him a series of truths accurately describing real-life phenomena. What he observes about Ted Hughes applied equally well to him: his “conversation was full of poets from every time and place, all very real to him, and whoever he talked about would attain a terrific new solidity.”5 This habit of thinking in terms of other writers, of treating literature as a source of wisdom for explaining the large and the small, placed him in excellent company. W. B. Yeats, another poet who often thought in terms of literary touchstones, was especially fascinated by the artistry and individual contributions of Early Modern English poets. For him, Spenser, Jonson, and Donne not only furnished sturdy examples of artistic integrity for which he felt an intimate kinship but also shared a “tradition that drew uncommon strength and substance—i.e., images—from the well of the Anima Mundi.”6 Spenser provided a host of symbols and images to which Yeats returned throughout his writing life, right up until the time of “The Municipal Gallery Re-visited.” Jonson, in addition to informing the development of his plays, also suggested to Yeats the compositional habit of starting the process of writing poems with prose sketches, which he then shaped into finished poems, sometimes over a period of years.7 He knew whole passages of Donne by heart, was friends with

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Herbert Grierson during the period when Grierson was editing his landmark 1912 edition of Donne, and undertook what Wayne K. Chapman describes as a “series of imitative exercises after his marriage in 1917.”8 From the 1890s onward, Yeats repeatedly turned to the style and major images of specific poems and passages to create new work. Indeed, so heavy and noticeable was the Early Modern influence during his middle period that by the time of the composition of Responsibilities (1914), “Elizabethan” became a pejorative term that Ezra Pound occasionally used to deride ornamental excesses during the winters of 1913–1916, when he and Yeats lived and worked together at Stone Cottage on the edge of Ashdown Forest in Sussex, as if the influence of the earlier poets had to be kept at bay with a charm.9 Heaney’s engagements with the work of the seventeenth-century metaphysical poets are also well-attested, both by his own report and to a lesser extent by critics. In the early 1960s, as he began writing poetry in earnest and embarked on his teaching career, he more seriously studied the work of several influential canonical writers than during his own student days. In 1975, when he taught as a lecturer in English at Carysfort College of Education in Dublin, he lectured on the metaphysical poets and credited especially Andrew Marvell with showing him the power of the “plain style” of traditional meter: he began “discovering that element of ‘tough reasonableness’ that Eliot spoke of in Marvell,” and “had this sudden powerful admiration for Marvell’s ‘Horatian Ode’ and his very strange piece ‘The Nymph Complaining for the Death of her Fawn.’”10 On several notable occasions in his critical writings, he touts George Herbert as the true poet of integrity, wholly committed to the demands of his art and therefore capable of withstanding the distorting influences (political, social, or otherwise) that might compromise artistic vision. For Heaney, “Herbert surrendered himself to a framework of belief and an instituted religion; but in his case, it happened that his personality was structured in such a way that he could dwell in amity with doctrine, writing poetry which was intellectually pure, emotionally robust, and entirely authentic.”11 Herbert’s example offers a “redress of poetry” to those who would argue that poetry is insufficient to make a difference in our politically charged world: “even the most imposed-upon colonial would discern in the clear element of Herbert’s poetry a true paradigm of the shape of things, psychologically, politically, metaphorically and, if one wants to proceed that far, metaphysically.”12 Herbert’s work “is an example of that fully realized poetry I have attempted to define, a poetry where the coordinates of the imagined thing

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correspond to and allow us to contemplate the complex burden of our own experience.” So consistent and assiduous is Heaney’s endorsement of Herbert that one fully expects to be able to root out the tall tops of the Herbertian phrase in Heaney’s own poems, a task for someone else, perhaps, at another time. And what of Donne, that figurehead of the so-called metaphysical mode? Touchstones from Donne’s writings do not appear in Heaney’s interviews and essays with the same frequency as those of Marvell or Herbert, or of the more recent poets Wordsworth, Yeats, and Czeslaw Milosz. Yet some Donne references appear at various junctures throughout his career, and in these instances we see that Donne offered Heaney important insights into the condition of loving. The tenth “Glanmore Sonnet” from Field Work (1979) recalls the physical disposition of lovers in “The Exstasie” (“we were laid out/Laid breathing effigies on a raised ground,” ll. 6–7).13 That Heaney was mindful of Donne’s singular contributions as a love poet is attested in the choices made in the assembly of the poetry anthologies he edited with Ted Hughes: he and Hughes eschewed Donne’s religious verse but did include “The Baite” in The Rattle Bag (1982) and “A Valediction forbidding mourning” in its sequel, The School Bag (1997).14 Heaney invokes Donne when describing Hughes: he “also had what John Donne called an hypdroptical ­immoderate desire for learning.”15 (298). In “Chanson d’Aventure,” a poem from his last collection, Human Chain (2010), Heaney returns to “The Ecstasy,” this time to speak of “love on hold, body and soul apart” (l. 12) as he lay in a speeding ambulance and held his wife’s hand during the immediate aftermath of the stroke he suffered in 2006.16 Heaney did not answer, rewrite or substantially appropriate Donne’s poems in the manner of, say, Paul Muldoon or Geoffrey Hill. But in a few cases the presence of certain Donne poems can be felt more in the approach to a specific experience within the domain of love than in direct reference. And when this occurs, one cannot say that Heaney imitates Donne or is even influenced by Donne’s point of view. Instead, the Donne poem acts as a fixed, assumed feature on the landscape that shapes Heaney’s path, in much the same way that a natural barrier—a river, say, or a canyon or a mountain—influences the way a road might be built over, around, or through it. Donne’s status as landmark is suggested on those few occasions in the essays when Heaney invokes his name, along with those of other canonical writers, as an indexing reference point for major literary developments. Thus, when speaking of

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J. M. Synge’s The Aran Islands, Donne becomes a landmark in the history of English style: Synge’s development of a local idiom may have looked like “an attempt to refresh the language of English literature, one of those periodic returns to the spoken idiom which Donne and Dryden and Wordsworth had initiated in their times, and which T. S. Eliot would set in motion shortly after Synge’s own death.”17 When speaking of Thomas Kinsella’s “Interlude,” the Donnean landmark, along with a few others, lies in the territory of the epigrammatic: “The formal ancestry of ‘Interlude’ may include the Auden of ‘Death of a Tyrant’ and the epigrammatic side of Pope and Donne and Jonson.”18 Such references clearly posit Donne as a landscape feature to be reckoned with, here from the safe distance of a literary horizon; but Heaney negotiates Donne from much closer distances as well. A case in point, “Valediction,” from Death of a Naturalist (1966), draws significant energy from its title, which implicitly hearkens to “A Valediction forbidding mourning,” one of the Donne poems Heaney and Hughes later anthologized. While Donne certainly did not invent the valediction as poetic kind (four examples is hardly enough to corner a poetic market), any English speaker educated in the canon as it was understood in the 1950s and 1960s would have been hard pressed not to think of Donne’s legendary poem when confronted with “Valediction” as a title, especially when Heaney does not modify it like the Donne headings do (i.e., “A Valediction forbidding mourning,” “. . . of ­weeping,” “. . . of the booke,” and “. . . of my name in a window”).19 The single word‚ “Valediction‚” is left to ping the reader’s memory entirely on its own. The poetic situation of this poem also resonates: not the farewell of two lovers all-too-easily parted by the coming of day or the end of some social occasion, these two share a house, and their parting is significant enough, in both time and distance, for the “Lady’s” absence to create an “emptiness” that “has hurt/All thought” (ll. 3–5). As with “Valediction forbidding mourning,” this parting comes across as a dire event in need of being addressed. Yet the lines just quoted signal the first of several key departures from Donne. In this case, the Lady, not the male speaker, has left home. She is the traveler away on some unspecified business, a shift in the gendering of agency. Furthermore, there is some slippage between the title and the ensuing poem. The implied gesture of a valediction poem is to bid farewell at the time of parting, the poem itself often some attempt to resolve or control the usually unpleasant effects

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of the impending absence. Yet this parting already has transpired. The speaker now attempts to explain his turbulent state, presumably to demonstrate his affection for his love or perhaps even implicitly argue for her swift return. The ensuing description of interior tumult depends on a prior assumption of harmony, an assumption consistent with Donne’s poem, which figures harmony first as the mild passing from life to death of “virtuous men” (ll. 1–4), then in the serene “trepidation” of the Ptolemaic spheres (ll. 11–12), and culminating in the compass conceit and the perfect circle (itself the perfect shape in Renaissance thought) made whole through the firmness of Donne’s lady’s love (ll. 25–36).20 All these images depend on notions of balance, the basis of mutual, soulful love. Heaney, too, assumes balance to be the necessary condition of love, the means by which time normally passes easily: In your presence Time rode easy, anchored On a smile; but absence Rocked love’s balance, unmoored The days. They buck and bound Across the calendar, Pitched from the quiet sound Of your flower-tender Voice. (ll. 5–13)

The Donnean grounds for consolation—that soulful bond attenuated but not broken like “gold to ayery thinnesse beat” (l. 24)—fails to accord with the pain of the present circumstances. Elsewhere, in a later poem, as noted previously, Heaney depends on another of Donne’s articulations of soulful connection in his recall of “The Extasie” during the ambulance ride in “Chanson d’Aventure.” But not here. Here, need dictates the expression of rootlessness in the face of absence. As is common with Heaney, experience is grounded in precise physical detail. Time rides “easy” because of the reassurance of his love’s anchoring “smile.” Without her “flower-tender/Voice,” the days “buck and bound/Across the calendar” presumably without stopping. The loss of her physical presence induces this chaos. Here, perhaps, there might seem an answering contradiction with Donne’s poem, for, in two of its most famous stanzas, Donne sharply contrasts the soulful lovers (the speaker and his love) with genital lovers wholly invested in the physical:

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Dull sublunary lovers love     (Whose soule is sense) cannot admit Absence, because it doth remove     Those things which elemented it. But we by’a love, so much refin’d,     That our selves know not what it is, Inter-assured of the mind,     Care lesse, eyes, lips, and hands to misse. (ll. 13–20)

Is Heaney implicitly pressuring Donne’s distinction here? Perhaps. But his dependence on the physical presence of his beloved also accords with Donne’s refusal elsewhere in the songs and sonnets (and also implicitly in the ensuing compass metaphor) to define soulful love as divorced from sex. What would Donne have said if he had been the one left behind? Regardless, Heaney, having invoked Donnean notions of harmony (through “Valediction” and “balance”), refashions an earlier Petrarchan idiom of loss at sea as more fit to convey the truth of the speaker’s perceptions. Rather than figure himself as a tossed ship à la Petrarch and later Wyatt, however, Heaney describes his days as “unmoored.” It is in this sense that he is “at sea” (l. 14), trapped in a self-mutiny, until she returns and in so doing “resume[s] command” of his time (l. 15). This Lady is not the cruel mistress withholding the guiding stars of her eyes; rather, she is simply away, and without her, profound disharmony has ensued. Neither Donne nor Petrarch, Heaney nonetheless finds his way through this poem via some guiding landmarks from each, thereby establishing his own course the way any poet should. Such direct engagements with specific Donne poems are rare, however. One cannot rightly call Heaney the love poet an imitator of Donne, nor can we call him an imitator of anyone else. Here, as elsewhere, he remains very much his own person with a distinctive angle of vision and an individual voice. Furthermore, if we understand the Donnean voiceprint strictly in terms of allusion, echo, or other intertextual engagement, or more broadly as “trying on [Donne’s] language and looking inside his imagination,” in the words of Judith Scherer Herz, we would have to concede that Donne’s voiceprint registers only quietly in the Heaney corpus overall.21 “Valediction,” the Glanmore Sonnets, and “Chanson d’Aventure” represent a small percentage of his love poetry. Most of the time, Heaney’s

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love poems do not make overt or implied references to Donne. Finally, the scope of each poet’s exploration of love differs markedly. Donne’s love poems together offer a sustained meditation on the many facets of desire and loving, both in the particular case and in a general sense; Heaney’s were written over a much longer timespan (almost fifty years) but center principally on one relationship. In the elegies and songs and sonnets, Donne covers a wide range of experiences and situations within the overarching conditions of lust and love. He explores them sometimes through various personae (e.g., the rake, the unrequited lover, the other woman, and Sappho) and sometimes tantalizingly in his own person. By contrast, while Heaney occasionally employs amorous love as a metaphor—for instance, to describe the way sea and land try to “possess” each other in the early poem, “Lovers on Aran”22—most often his love poems concern his courtship and marriage to Marie Heaney (née Devlin). They issue from and appeal to specific biographical circumstances, the kind we might crave to know in Donne’s case but probably never will. Nevertheless, despite these qualifiers and beyond the touchstone appearances of Donne so far referenced, we can discern less poemspecific grounds for resemblances between the two poets—not a later poet intertextually dialoguing with a notable precursor, but two poets using language in similar ways when working within a similar subject matter. When writing about love, the two poets employ some of the same techniques. One therefore can detect in some Heaney poems what seems a Donnean boldness, rendered through similarities of approach. The remainder of this essay will coax Heaney’s Donnean boldness into the light by exploring three of these techniques: a tendency to begin love poems in an abrupt, surprising fashion; a tendency to construct metaphysical conceits and striking, unforeseen comparisons; and a tendency to dramatically shift directions within a poem toward the conveyance of a precise, often unexpected insight about love. These three techniques, I submit, contribute to the Donnean feel of some of Heaney’s love poems. Whether Heaney consciously learned them from Donne is anyone’s guess. But reading Heaney’s love poems alongside Donne’s songs and sonnets reveals an unanticipated and intriguing similarity in how the two poets present the honest boldness of love. Boldness, as a concept, mattered greatly to the courtier and c­oterie poets in the English Renaissance because it was one way in which a poet could generate energia, that literary quality suggestive of the energy or urgency of life. The presence of energia gradually became

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seen as fundamental in the success of a poem. Its absence could be a ­contributing factor to a poem’s collapse into doggerel. Long an important principle in classical rhetoric, energia received important emphasis in the example and critical thought of Sir Philip Sidney. In the famous reference to energia in his An Apology for Poetry (c. 1579), Sidney implicitly links it to his definition of “songs and sonnets” as a poetic kind and denounces those poets who have forgotten or insufficiently understood the importance of appealing to the passions of readers: Other sorts of poetry almost have we none, but that lyrical kind of songs and sonnets: which, Lord, if He gave us so good minds, how well it might be employed, and with how heavenly fruit, both private and public, in singing the praises of the immortal beauty, the immortal goodness of that God who giveth us hands to write and wits to conceive; of which we might well want words, but never matter; of which we could turn our eyes to nothing but we should ever have new budding occasions. But truly many of such writings as come under the banner of unresistable love, if I were a mistress, would never persuade me they were in love; so coldly they apply fiery speeches, as men that had rather read lovers’ writings, and so caught up certain swelling phrases, which hang together, like a man which once told me the wind was at north-west and by south, because he would be sure to name winds enough, than that in truth they feel these passions, which easily (as I think) may be bewrayed by that same forcibleness or energia (as the Greeks call it) of the writer. But let this be a sufficient though short note, that we miss the right use of the material point of poesy.23

For a poem to succeed, it must capture and convey the passion(s) motivating its content. Love poems, for example, fail when their “fiery speeches” are applied “coldly.” Any poems fail when the poet’s relishing of his own words and knowledge severs the necessary connection with the underlying emotion that should be an integral part of the poem’s invention. Passion, in this understanding, the fuel for energia, must come from the poet, who uses it for inspiration as well as for representation. Energia, then, is both a matter of underlying idea and of style. It cannot be relegated to one or the other but belongs to both.24 It must be part of the poet’s conception and compositional process. Elizabethans found Sidney’s example so compelling because the energia in his writings greatly enhanced the verisimilitude of his rendering of psychological states. For example, John Hoskyns, himself a wit of

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note, created an instruction manual, Directions for Speech and Style, for an unnamed young gentleman using almost exclusively quotations from Sidney’s prose and poetry as his examples of literary excellence. John Donne, a friend of Hoskyns as a fellow Inns of Court man, shared this admiration and as Roger Kuin has recently shown, succeeded in capturing a Sidnean energia in his own poems.25 The passionate character of Donne’s verse is hardly a new subject. But most relevant here is how in his love poems especially he frequently sought to create energia from his opening lines. More often than not in the songs and sonnets, his beginnings contain a “forcibleness” that demands our attention and concentration right from the first words. Here are a few representative examples: He is starke mad, who ever says, That he hath been in love an houre, Yet not that love so soone decayes, But that it can tenne in less space devour; (“The broken heart,” ll. 1–4) When I dyed last, and, Deare, I dye As often as from thee I goe, Though it be but an houre agoe, And Lovers houres be full eternity, (“The Legacie,” ll. 1–4) When by thy scorne, O murdresse, I am dead, And that thou thinkst thee free From all solicitation from mee, Then shall my ghost come to thy bed, (“The Apparition,” ll. 1–4) Now thou hast lov’d me one whole day, To morrow when thou leav’st, what wilt thou say? Wilt thou then Antedate some new made vow? Or say that now We are not just those persons, which we were? (“Woman’s constancy,” ll. 1–5)

Busie old foole, unruly Sunne, Why dost thou thus,

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Through windows, and through curtaines call on us? Must to thy motions lovers seasons run? (“The Sunne Rising,” ll. 1–4) If yet I have not all thy love, Deare, I shall never have it all, I cannot breath one other sigh, to move; Nor can intreat one other tear to fall. (“Loves infiniteness,” ll. 1–4)

Aside from “The Apparition” and “The Sunne Rising,” two of Donne’s most frequently taught poems, I have steered clear of the usual suspects to make the simple point that Donne’s energetic openings are everywhere in these love poems. Held in the suspense of the speaker’s immediately identifiable emotional state, many readers of poetry would be hard pressed not to keep reading after encountering these openings. But passion is not the only factor here: these openings additionally plunge us into an already fully developed situation, often but not always a conversation (or at least one side of one), that we then experience first-hand. The plunge becomes an essential means by which we come to know the speaker’s passion. A similar kind of boldness, predicated on the immediacy of a situation rapidly conjured, attends Heaney’s love poems as well. Heaney was well aware of English Renaissance critical discussions about energia, including Sidney’s Apologie. In the early essay, “Feeling into Words,” one of the best accounts of the development of a poet’s voice that I know of, Heaney quotes Sidney’s description of the ancient Roman definition of the poet as Vates.26 In Stepping Stones, interviewer Dennis O’Driscoll asks about Sidnean energia directly during a discussion of the Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid: “Forcibleness” is a quality you have attributed to Hugh MacDiarmid and also to Christopher Marlowe. Do you see “forcibleness”—Sir Philip Sidney’s translation of the Greek Energeia—as a litmus test of true poetry? It’s certainly what sets the seal of inevitability on much of the best writing. It’s “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower”. The attribute that makes you feel the lines have been decreed, that there has been no fussy picking and choosing of words but instead a surge of utterance.27

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Like Donne, Heaney the love poet often creates this “surge of utterance” with his first words, setting in motion an energy capable of snaring and keeping a reader’s attention: Love, I shall perfect for you the child Who diligently potters in my brain Digging with heavy spade till sods were piled Or puddling through muck in a deep drain. (“Poem,” ll. 1–4) Her scarf a la Bardot, In suede flats for the walk, She came with me one evening For air and friendly talk. (“Twice Shy,” ll. 1–4) I am afraid. Sound has stopped in the day And the images reel over And over. Why all those tears, The wild grief on his face Outside the taxi? (“Wedding Day,” ll. 1–6) Was it wind off the dumps or something in the heat dogging us, the summer gone sour, a fouled nest incubating somewhere? Whose fault, I wondered, inquisitor of the possessed air… (“Summer Home,” ll. 1–6) After the sudden outburst and the squalls I hooped you with my arms and remembered that what could be contained inside this caliper embrace

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the Dutch called bosom; (“Polder,” ll. 1–5) The white toweling bathrobe ungirdled, the hair still wet, first coldness of the underbreast like a ciborium in the palm. (“La Toilette,” ll. 1–4) There we were in the vaulted tunnel running, You in your going-away coat speeding ahead And me, me then like a fleet god gaining Upon you before you turned to a reed Or some new white flower japped with crimson … (“The Underground,” ll. 1–5)28

In each case, the opening lines establish the emotional territory of the ensuing poem as well as its immediate situation, either directly (e.g., “There we were in the vaulted tunnel running,” a literal description of “The Underground”) or metaphorically (e.g., “After the sudden outburst and the squalls,” suggestions of argument). Because they perform their work swiftly and forcefully, the lines carry that sense of inevitability to which Heaney alludes, that sense of being “decreed.” While Heaney might be right in suggesting that “forcibleness” attends “much of the best writing,” at least since the Early Modern poets, the high premium both Donne and Heaney placed on locating it from the start of their love poems lends their work a strength not always present in the work of their contemporaries. One also can discern similarities in their approach to the architecture of individual love poems. Donne’s metaphysical conceits are surely the one hallmark no undergraduate facing him in a British survey course can escape, just as Samuel Johnson’s famous description of “metaphysical wit” (“The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together”) may well be the only Johnsonian excerpt many an undergraduate will encounter. “The Baite,” “The Flea,” “The Canonization,” “A Valediction forbidding mourning”—all seize on the opportunities new and startling comparisons create for description and explication, as Donne seeks to put his immediate addressee (usually his mistress) and

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his implied readers (members of his various coteries) into a new relationship with the subject at hand (sex, love, grief at parting). Entire poems depend on such opportunities for definition. Heaney’s love poems also hinge on extended comparisons for definition. “The Underground,” for example, the beginning of which was just quoted, conveys the remembered exhilaration of a moment during the Heaneys’ honeymoon through three comparisons. In the first, Heaney likens his pursuit of his new bride through the vaulted tunnel to a classical deity’s chase of some gorgeous, virtuous nymph. He is like Pan after Syrinx before the water nymphs turn her into a reed to keep her out of his hands. Perhaps fearful that his luck cannot hold, that she will be turned into “some new white flower japped with crimson” (l. 5), he nevertheless feels powerful and potent in this extraordinary rush for the train, so much so, in fact, that the memory of this moment lingers. Here a second comparison enters the poem, the fairytale Hansel and Gretel, as we discover the earlier description was simply the speaker’s memory. Once again on the same London Underground years later, he remembers how the buttons flew off her coat. Now he collects them in his memory, like Hansel, “[r]etracing the path back” but in a place that seems colder and with a mindset more seemingly fragile: a draughty lamplit station After the trains have gone, the wet track Bared and tensed as I am, all attention For your step following and damned if I look back. (ll. 13–16)

The last line returns to classical myth, but one myth with much different implications, Orpheus’s rescue of Eurydice from the underworld. No longer potent like a god, the speaker now remembers the very human poetsinger whose mistake ends up costing him the company of his beloved. While none of these comparisons is especially “metaphysical” in the sense normally associated with Donne (though the likening of spilled buttons to fairytale breadcrumbs is novel enough), some of Heaney’s other extended conceits are much closer to the mark. That Heaney realized what this mark was is attested in his own description of the treatment of sexuality in “Undine,” from Door Into the Dark (1969): “. . . I’d still stand by ‘Undine,’” he explains, “farm drainage and burgeoning sexuality yoked by violence—literary violence, that is—together.”29 Mindful of the Johnsonian description as well as the Donnean example, Heaney

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constructs his own metaphysical conceits with like skill. In “Scaffolding,” from Death of a Naturalist, his meditations on his hopes and perceptions of his then new marriage lead him to figure himself and his wife as masons embarked on the construction of a new stone building. As masons verify the solidity of their scaffolding before they can attend to the serious work (they must “Make sure that planks won’t slip at busy points/Secure all ladders, tighten bolted joints,” 3–4), so the Heaneys have taken like care in constructing their marriage. This comparison enables Heaney to offer reassurance about the inevitable changes inherent in any well-founded, long-term relationship: So if, my dear, there sometimes seem to be Old bridges breaking between you and me, Never fear. We may let the scaffolds fall, Confident that we have built our wall. (ll. 7–10)

The comparison structures the entire poem. “Scaffolding” is reminiscent of an older aesthetic in another sense, too: unlike much of Heaney’s other work, which is rooted in the visceral details of everyday life, such details emerge here firmly within the boundaries of analogy, as they would in a Donne or Herbert poem—an analogy not predicated on a particular time and place but somehow universally true. Two of Heaney’s most famous love poems, “The Otter” and “The Skunk,” also rely on metaphysical conceits, this time involving animals as a way into sensuality.30 Neither animal, by itself, conjures associations with amorousness for most people. But in Heaney’s hands, each comparison renders something exquisite about the nature of everyday desires. In “The Otter,” the beloved’s dive and swim in the wavering light of Tuscany arrest the speaker’s attention: I loved your wet head and smashing crawl, Your fine swimmer’s back and shoulders Surfacing and surfacing again This year and every year since. I sat dry-throated on the warm stones. (ll. 4–9)

This description is brilliant because it applies equally well to both a human swimmer and an otter, the latter introduced by the poem’s title.

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In fact, if it were not for the direct address (“When you plunged,” l. 1, and “your head,” l. 4), a reader might think the swimmer actually is an otter, and even in this case the poet could be addressing an animal. The relationship between tenor and vehicle is not clarified until the fourth stanza, specifically lines 14 and following: “When I hold you now/We are close and deep/As the atmosphere on water” (ll. 14–16). The average person would not be holding an otter. And yet the comparison unlocks a surprising sensuality, as the poet’s conceit turns his hands into the water that loves to cover the otter’s “lithe” body: My two hands are plumbed water. You are my palpable, lithe Otter of memory In the pool of the moment, Turning to swim on your back, Each silent, thigh shaking kick Re-tilting the light, Heaving the cool at your neck. (ll. 17–24)

Suddenly, woman-as-otter captures, with a Donne-like precision, the poet’s admiration for his beloved’s body as well as the intensity of his desire for her. We see a beloved’s beauty through her lover’s eyes. In “The Skunk,” a recollection of an evening when Heaney was house-sitting for Mark and Ruth Schorer in North Berkeley while teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, the actual non-human animal appears right from the start: Up, black, striped and damasked like the chasuble At a funeral mass, the skunk’s tail Paraded the skunk. Night after night I expected her like a visitor. (ll. 1–4)

The ensuing poem is one new whole made from a collision of associations, as the skunk’s nightly visitation connects in the poet’s mind with the ordinary action of his wife rooting through a bottom drawer for a nightgown. During the skunk’s remembered visitations, Heaney had been writing “Love-letters again, broaching the word ‘wife’/Like a

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stored cask, as if its slender vowel/Had mutated into the night earth and air/Of California” (ll. 10–13). Whether it was the love letter writing or the “intent and glamorous/Ordinary, mysterious” skunk’s proud parading (ll. 18–19) or both together, Heaney recalls the innate sensuality of that episode as he watches his wife ready herself for bed: It all came back to me last night, stirred By the sootfall of your things at bedtime, Your head-down, tail-up hunt in the bottom drawer For the black plunge-line nightdress. (ll. 21–24)

And so skunk finds connection with the “black plunge-line nightdress” by the end. Helen Vendler cites this poem, along with others in Field Work, as examples of Heaney’s “capacity for detachment” in the service of capturing accurately the everyday: “The deadpan observation—skunk’s tail; damasked striped chasuble; wife’s head-down, tail-up stance; black nightdress—mixes levels and usages with an outsider’s indifference to the decorum that a culture imposes on its members.”31 Yet such apparent indifference might well be a prerequisite for a metaphysical conceit, in that it is the operative force in the “violence” of yoking together ideas hitherto considered unlike. Here the association memorably captures the latent eroticism of an ordinary moment. It is a Donne-like gesture delivered through a distinctly Heaney vocabulary. The last technique I perceive as shared by Donne’s and Heaney’s love poems pertains to how both poets occasionally end poems: by abruptly changing directions to record some precise insight about the nature of love, desire, or relationships. The best example in Donne occurs in “The Indifferent,” that outrageous defense of the rake’s indiscriminate and insatiable pursuit of just about any woman. After cataloguing the many kinds of women he can love and challenging the resistance of those who would insist on constancy (ll. 1–18), the rakish speaker ends with Venus’s reported verdict on faithful women, the speaker’s assumed interlocutors: Venus heard me sigh this song, And by Love’s sweetest part, Variety, she swore, She heard not this till now; and that it should be so no more. She went, examin’d, and return’d ere long, And said, alas, Some two or three Poore Heretiques in love there bee,

140  S.H. McDowell Which think to stablish dangerous constancie. But I have told them, since you will be true, You shall be true to them, who’are false to you. (ll. 19–27)

Unlike many other Early Modern English poets, Donne delivers his comparatively few classical references almost always in a tongue-in-cheek fashion. Here, Venus, who likes to swear, “Variety!”, seems much in keeping with Donne’s norm. And her appearance also accords with the tenor of the rest of the poem, this “song” the outrageous speaker “sigh[s].” But the last two lines stage a surprising turn. When Venus sentences the faithful lovers to a special kind of misery (“since you will be true/You shall be true to them, who’are false to you”), Donne draws attention to a recurring real-life scenario with the arena of human desire: why is it that those who are the most invested in the prospect of being faithful fall so hard and so easily for the most unfaithful, those who would be the worst possible fits for them? When undergraduates encounter this poem, most credit it with an uncanny contemporary currency. Most recognize immediately the character types and the situation as familiar in the current dating scene. Through an unexpected change in direction, Donne surprises us with a serious truth. A similar phenomenon sometimes occurs when Heaney meditates on areas of love or desire not exclusively tied to his relationship with his wife. In “Mother of the Groom,”32 for example, one of several poems assaying the whirl of emotions associated with his wedding and its immediate aftermath, Heaney imagines how the proceedings must appear to his mother. The poem begins with the memory of her son as an infant taking a bath, then shifts to the welcoming of a new daughter through marriage and how her son’s change in status is akin to his slipping “her soapy hold” (l. 8). But then, in the final stanza, Heaney shifts the focus away from the son’s loss: Once soap would ease off The wedding ring That’s bedded forever now In her clapping hand. (ll. 9–12)

This sudden turn to the embedded ring transitions the poem from a concentration on loss to an epigrammatic commentary on the durability of marriage over time, an inevitability within the life of the traditional family, as if to say, “This loss, too, shall pass.”

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In another example, “The Guttural Muse,” from Field Work, Heaney’s observations of a “young crowd” (ll. 5) leaving a discotheque give rise to an unforeseen conclusion about growing older. The speaker, presumably in his hotel room for the night, observes this crowd from his window. He enjoys listening to their voices, which “rose up thick and comforting/As oily bubbles the feeding tench sent up/That evening at dusk” (ll. 6–8). But then, when he watches the ensuing courtship of a girl in the parking lot, a new thought occurs: A girl in a white dress Was being courted out among the cars: As her voice swarmed and puddled into laughs I felt like some old pike all badged with sores Wanting to swim in touch with soft-mouthed life. (ll. 11–15)

The poem ends with this sharp, uncomfortable contrast between the young people and the older speaker, which draws our attention to his nostalgic desire for the simpler, seemingly irrecoverable pleasures of youth, an unlooked for truth about the ramifications of aging. The epigrammatic turn in this poem, like that of Donne’s “The Indifferent,” provides a ready way for Heaney to record a small resonant truth in a short space without the need for excessive elaboration. For Donne and for Heaney, poetry existed within its own order, an order of language that also functioned as a way of knowing and a way of becoming known. Poets are mindful of this order to a degree and in some ways scholars sometimes are not. They often think of predecessors not just as precursors ensconced in time but also as contemporaries sharing an investment in capturing the essence of experience in words. While the many examples I have quoted illustrate that Donne and Heaney possessed highly distinctive voices, a kinship nonetheless exists in how they used their voices to speak about love. As a way of conveying the urgencies of love, both created a “forcibleness” deriving, at least in part, from the skillful use of some of the same literary tools.

Notes

1. Stepping Stones (London: Faber and Faber, 2008). 2. Ibid., pp. 251–252. 3. Ibid., p. 210. 4. Spelling It Out (Loughcrew, County Meath, Ireland: Gallery Books, 2009), p. 12.

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5. Ibid., p. 298. 6. Wayne K. Chapman, Yeats and English Renaissance Literature (New York: Macmillan, 1991), p. 69. 7. Yeats’ habit of starting with prose drafts is well known. Here, for example, is the sketch that started the process of writing “Words,” published in The Green Helmet and Other Poems (1910): “Today the thought came to me that P. I. A. L. [Maud Gonne] never really understands my plans, or motives, or ideas. Then came the thought, what matter? How much of the best have I done and still do is but an attempt to explain myself to her? If she understood, I should lack a reason for writing, and one can never have too many reasons for doing what is so labourious.” This passage, along with the succeeding drafts, is reprinted in Curtis B. Bradford’s Yeats at Work (New York: The Ecco Press, 1978), p. 45. Yeats wrote this sketch on January 22, 1909, and then began revisions later that day and the next. Bradford gives an astute account of Yeats’ compositional process, both in the abridged Ecco Press edition of Yeats at Work as well as in the original 1965 edition published by Southern Illinois University Press. See also Jon Stallworthy, Between the Lines: Yeats’s Poetry in the Making (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965). 8. Chapman, p. 143. 9.  For an account of their time together, see James Logenbach, Stone Cottage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). 10. Stepping Stones, pp. 448, 193. 11. The Government of the Tongue (New York: The Noonday Press, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1988), p. 97. This quotation comes from the title essay, “The Government of the Tongue” first delivered as the first of the T.S. Eliot Memorial Lectures in October 1986 at Eliot College, University of Kent, UK. 12.  The Redress of Poetry (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995), pp. 9–10. This remark came from the title essay, first delivered as one of his lectures as Oxford Professor of Poetry in 1989, then printed as a pamphlet by Oxford University Press in 1990, before being gathered into the aforementioned book. 13.  For more on this connection, see Donald W. Rude (2003) “Seamus Heaney and John Donne: An Echo of ‘The Ecstasy,’” John Donne Journal: Studies in the Age of Donne 22, 255–257. 14. Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney (eds), The Rattle Bag (London: Faber and Faber, 1982) and The School Bag (London: Faber and Faber, 1997). 15. Stepping Stones, p. 298. 16. Human Chain (London: Faber and Faber, 2010). Heaney recounts the episode in Stepping Stones, pp. 461–464. For more on the intertextual connections of this poem, see my (2011) “Making the Present Speak:

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‘The Exstasie’ Behind Seamus Heaney’s ‘Chanson d’Aventure,’” John Donne Journal: Studies in the Age of Donne 30, 195–209. 17. “Earning a Rhyme,” Finders Keepers: Selected Prose, 1971–2001 (London: Faber & Faber, 2002), pp. 59–60. 18.  “The Place of Writing,” Finders Keepers: Selected Prose, 1971–2001 (London: Faber & Faber, 2002), p. 241. 19.  As with most of Donne’s other poems, the authorial authenticity of the titles of the four valedictions cannot be certain. In the case of “Valediction: Of the Booke,” the title could well be authorial in that it appears in the Group 1, Group 2, and Group 3 manuscripts, as well as in several of the manuscripts traditionally associated with Group 3. It seems to have been associated with the poem from the beginning of its circulation—or at least the evidence does not argue the contrary. In the case of “A Valediction: Of Weeping,” however, the case is less clear. The Group 1 manuscripts print simply “A Valediction” without modification; the Group 2 manuscripts print “Valediction: Of weeping” without the initial article; the Group 3 manuscripts replace weeping with “teares”; and the manuscripts associated with Group 3 print “weeping” or “tears,” depending on which word they received. This variety of titling, located in several distinct transmission streams, argues against Donne’s direct authorship. A similar situation attends “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning”: the Group 1 manuscripts simply call it “A Valediction”; several of the Group 2 manuscripts (the associated pairs, CT1-B7 and DT1-H4, along with WN1) print “Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,” while two others (TT1 and TT2) print “Elegie”; the Group 3 manuscripts print “Vpon the Parting from His Mistresse”; and the manuscripts associated with Group 3 sample freely from these options, while one, VA2, calls the poem “To His Loue upon His Departare fro Hir.” Regardless of who titled these poems originally, however, the majority of the earliest manuscript witnesses modify “Valediction” in some way to distinguish the ensuing poem from others of this kind. 20. These and all subsequent quotations of Donne’s songs and sonnets come from The Complete Poetry of John Donne, John T. Shawcross (ed.) (New York: Doubleday/Anchor Books, 1967). 21. Herz (2001) “Under the Sign of Donne,” Criticism 43.1, 31. 22. From Death of a Naturalist. 23.  An Apology for Poetry, Forrest G. Robinson (ed.) (Indianapolis: BobbsMerrill Educational Publishing, 1970), pp. 80–81. 24. Older Sidney scholarship, in my view, at times tries too hard to relegate energia to one or the other of the parts of rhetoric. Forrest G. Robinson, for example, resists Neil L. Rudenstine’s insistence in Sidney’s Poetic Development (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967) that energia

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depends on the poet’s success in his “effort to discover forms at every level of language—rhythm, sound, syntax, rhetoric, stanza, genre—forms which draw their energies from a writer’s strong feelings and release them with such force as to move, convince, and teach (in the broadest sense) an audience” (Rudenstine, pp. 159–160) on the grounds that this conception casts “a romantic coloring over Sidney’s more or less neoclassical aesthetic” (Robinson, p. 131). Robinson would treat energia as more purely conceptual and suggest that it “should not be so closely associated with the verbal and technical aspects of poetry” (p. 132). See Robinson, The Shape of Things Known: Sidney’s Apology in Its Philosophical Tradition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972) for his full discussion. Yet such a separation between idea and elocution seems to run against Sidney’s thought in this passage and elsewhere in Apology. 25. Kuin (2013) presented his ideas on this subject in two separate lectures, “Sustainable Energy: Donne, Sidney, and The Netherlands” presented at the 27th Annual John Donne Conference in Leiden in the summer of 2012, and “Donnergy: The Brat, The Dean, and Renewable Energy,” his plenary address at the 28th Annual John Donne Conference in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in February, 2013. A revised and expanded version of both of these essays can be found as “Sustainable Energy: Philip Sidney and John Donne,” John Donne Journal: Studies in the Age of Donne 33, 63–93. 26. Heaney, Preoccupations Selected Prose, 1968–1978 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980), p. 48. 27.  Stepping Stones, pp. 365–366. 28. “Poem” and “Twice Shy” appeared in Death of a Naturalist (London: Faber and Faber, 1966); “Wedding Day” and “Summer Home” in Wintering Out (London: Faber and Faber, 1972); “Polder” in Field Work (London: Faber and Faber, 1979); and “La Toilette” and “The Underground” in Station Island (London: Faber and Faber, 1984). 29.  Stepping Stones, p. 312. 30. Both poems appear together in Field Work. 31.  Seamus Heaney (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 70. 32.  Wintering Out (London: Faber and Faber, 1972).

Quiver, Chatter, Purple Jinx: On Donne, Translation, and the Psalms Mark Dow

In the Anchor Bible annotation to Psalm 102: 7–8, Mitchell Dahood argues that most translators have missed the parallel structure of the verse: I stay awake and have become like a sparrow, like a chatterer on the roof all day long.

The New King James Version (KJV) is typical: “I lie awake, and am like a sparrow alone on the housetop.” According to Dahood, who was a Jesuit philologist, the Hebrew bōdēd, while usually read as an adjective meaning “alone,” is in fact a noun in apposition to “sparrow.” He continues: “That bōdēd, ‘chatterer,’ aptly describes a bird is sustained by the analogy of English ‘chatterer,’ any of several passerine birds having a chattering cry, as certain waxwings and cotingas. Whether this [Hebrew] root bdd relates to [the Ugaritic root] ‘to sing,’ is uncertain.”1 Oddly, Dahood says nothing about going along with so many translators since Wycliffe in rendering the common Hebrew word for “bird” as “sparrow” in the first part of the verse. On the subway I stopped reading Dahood’s notes to listen to a teenage couple sitting to my right. They were speaking Dominican Spanish, which is fast. Then I became aware of the men standing in front of me,

M. Dow (*)  Houston, USA © The Author(s) 2017 J. Herz (ed.), John Donne and Contemporary Poetry, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-55300-9_15

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speaking Chinese (I’m not sure which dialect). Two women to my left, from Mali, were speaking French and perhaps Bambara (I asked, but there was some confusion). Words, in my imagination, floated in the space of a loose circle we all formed. The words were physical, if intangible, objects. Of course I experienced the talk around me in this way because I didn’t understand it, or, in the case of the fast Spanish, experienced it as foreign. “Moses alone shall come near unto the LORD … neither shall the people go up with him … Moses came and told the people all the words of the LORD … Moses wrote all the words of the LORD” (Exodus 24: 2–4). The knot of restricted access and a hierarchy of interpretation are there at the founding. Moses—traditionally the Jews’ first teacher—is the intermediary between Yahweh and the Children of Israel. In one of the devotions, John Donne alludes to this guarded entryway: “My God, my God, thy blessed servant Augustine begged of thee that Moses might come and tell him what he meant by some places of Genesis; may I have leave to ask of that Spirit that writ that book, why, when David…”— and here Donne delves into questions about plot details and David’s thoughts. Augustine asked for Moses, and Donne asks for permission to ask the “Spirit that writ that book” to fill in the gaps. I’m not sure if the distance built in at Mt. Sinai between “book” and reader is widened or collapsed here. “Incommensurability,” however, might be a better term than “distance,” since the encounter is the moment of finite meeting infinite, a problem Jewish Christians “solved” with the story of God’s son or wordmade-flesh, and which Donne, like Kabbalists and neo-Platonists, sees in the geometrical terms to which his imagination always returns. Here is the opening of his “Upon the Translation of the Psalms by Sir Philip Sidney, and the Countess of Pembroke, His Sister”:      Eternal God, for whom who ever dare      Seek new expressions, do the circle swear,      And thrust into strait corners of poor wit      Thee, who art cornerless and infinite—

Donne knows he is forcing the “cornerless” and “infinite” into the rectilinear rhyming couplets. The momentary box-breaking enjambments of “dare/Seek” and “thrust …/Thee” prove the point by their heavyhandedness.

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My high-school poetry textbook was called Sound and Sense; presumably it taught that these are distinct but interdependent. It’s hard to believe I might have felt otherwise if I had been taught differently, but that’s how education works. Of course, I hadn’t yet heard of the New Critics, or known that there were any old critics. When I was at Yale in the 1980s, the New Critics were old but still going strong. Cleanth Brooks gave a talk on Faulkner, and Robert Penn Warren, one of my first poet-heroes, gave a reading. Harold Bloom, before relaxing into an armchair beside the lectern with a snifter of brandy, introduced his friend by declaiming that only in the late work had Warren come out of Eliot’s shadow. Delmore Schwartz’s 1938 comment in an essay on R.P. Blackmur still seems relevant: “That form and content are inseparable is a dogma which all modern critics accept, contradict in practice, and never elucidate.”2 Some 300 years before the birth of Christ, rabbis had the Hebrew Bible translated into Greek to keep it accessible to the shifting vernacular of the Jews. One rabbinic criticism of the Septuagint invokes the ultimate falsification: “Seventy elders wrote the whole Torah in Greek for King Ptolemy, and that day was as ominous for Israel as the day whereon the Israelites made the Golden Calf, for the Torah could not be adequately translated.”3 On the other hand, “according to an ancient rabbinic interpretation, Joshua had the Torah engraved upon the stones of the altar (Joshua 8:32) not in the original Hebrew alone, but in all the languages of mankind.”4 That interpretation is a stretch, since the cited verse says simply that Joshua wrote down a copy of the “Torah [law] of Moses,” but maybe any repetition or copying is a translation. In 1618, Donne told congregants at Lincoln’s Inn that the Psalms were his favorite part of the Old Testament because they are poems: “such a form as is both curious, and requires diligence in the making, and then when it is made, can have nothing, no syllable taken from it, nor added to it.” That seems to be a strong case against translation, but it, too, works both ways: “Therefore is God’s will delivered to us in Psalms, that we might have it the more cheerfully, and that we might have it the more certainly … The whole work is the lesse subject to falsification, either by subtraction or addition.”5 At New Haven’s Haskins Labs in the 1950s and 1960s, linguist Alvin Liberman and his colleagues were studying the sounds of speech.6 They wanted to distill those aspects of the acoustic signal—the “cues,” as distinguished from the “noise”—which needed to be reproduced for machine-generated or “synthetic speech.” The goal wasn’t for the

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machine to fool a listener into believing it was a person, but to generate understandable speech sounds so that blind people could “read.” Siri was a half-century away. I was lucky enough to take a class with Liberman; his focus on the biological basis of our perception and production of language was an approach that had been missing from my literature classes. It would become a touchstone for me as I sat in graduate classes at the University of California, Irvine, a few years later, where young readers were deep in a muddle called “theory,” being trained to talk about language as if it had nothing to do with what they were doing in those very moments: talking because they knew they could be understood. Liberman liked to tell the story of a professional Russian-English interpreter who, on a job, without realizing it, began repeating Russian sentences in Russian instead of translating them. Liberman’s point was that the brain could make this mistake because the principal task of language was still taking place. In 2013‚ former United Nations interpreter Lynn Visson wrote about an episode strikingly similar to the one Liberman had recounted: On one occasion I had to interpret for more than two and a half hours at a round of high-level negotiations. While absolutely convinced I was interpreting into English, I had in fact been repeating in Russian every word the speaker said, blissfully unaware of this because I was mentally interpreting into English—to an audience of one, myself.7

I wrote Visson to ask if she was the interpreter in Liberman’s anecdote of 30 years earlier. She wasn’t: Re the “translating Russian into Russian” incident—I am sure that this was a coincidence, Liberman’s citing such an example. I did that at closed negotiations on the Georgia-Abkhazia issue in Geneva, some time in the mid 90’s, with only a few representatives from the UN, Russian, Georgian and Abkhaz delegations present. I was the only interpreter; there was no press and no publicity. But Liberman’s citing such an incident proves my point—that the interpreter’s brain short-circuits at some point, and Liberman is totally right re the major argument that language conveys meaning and thus allows the brain to “forget” its error. I would have sworn in court that I was interpreting into English, because I had the English interpretation in my mind. But that interpretation simply wasn’t jumping to the final part of the circuit, of physically going from Russian

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into English. And this kind of thing has happened to several of my colleagues after too many hours of work interpreting in two directions.

The moral of the story, Liberman used to say, is that meaning is paraphrase. Donne and the Countess of Pembroke called the Sidneian Psalmes “translations,” but scholars have called them “paraphrase,” “metrical paraphrase,” and even “metaphrase.” When the target language is “divine,” whatever that means, maybe nothing can get lost. Maybe that’s part of the attraction of believing in God: There is no utterance, there are no words, whose sound goes unheard.

Scholar Nahum Sarna quotes that Jewish Publication Society (JPS) translation of Psalm 19:3, then several pages later, without comment, he gives the verse this way: There is no speech There are no words, Their voices are unheard.8

Often, in intimate or especially significant conversation, we say, as we’re saying something, that the words don’t quite convey what we want to say. You know what I mean. But we also feel that those we’re closest to—spouse, sibling, friend, parent, lover, maybe any good listener—will know what we mean even if we’ve said it imperfectly. Something along those lines seems to be part of the translator’s apologia in many editions of the Psalms,9 and in many of the Psalms themselves. You discern my thoughts from afar… There is not a word on my tongue but that you, O Lord, know it well. (Psalms 139, JPS) In Mary, Countess of Pembroke’s version:

…

No lesse thou notest when I rise: Yea closest closett of my thought Hath open windowes to thine eyes

150  M. Dow Not yongest thought in me doth grow, No not one word I cast to talk, But yet unutt’red thou dost know.

A commentary on these verses by the thirteenth-century Rabbi David Kimhi of Provence conveys the anxiety of being shut in “the closest closett of thought,” of wanting to be seen into, even more than the psalm itself does: The word is not yet on my tongue—I have not begun to speak—but thou, Lord, knowest it all: that is to say, the complete word which I wish to speak …As I am about to give expression to some idea, thou already knowest my thought. And even though I cannot express in speech the thought (which I wish to express), yet thou knowest what I wish to express, though I do not know—and this, despite the fact that I have been pondering it.10

Re-Revealing Several years ago I was reading a Baudelaire prose poem aloud to a friend who doesn’t read any poetry except Bob Dylan lyrics. I had been comparing translations; this one was by Michael Hamburger.11 It was fluid, but its vernacular was from another place and time‚ England in the 1940s. As I read, standing outside a Manhattan diner, I found I had to improvise certain small changes (adding contractions, for example) to make it sound as if I was talking—which I was. Donne preaches that we need new sermons because the “custome and formality” of the ones we already have are an impediment.12 Translators’ prefaces to the Psalms tend to include some version of Donne’s claim, which is essentially what Eliot said to explain why we’re moved by poems in our vernacular more than by the oldies. Maybe, accuracy aside, new translations are not just permitted but are necessary, and not just from Hebrew or Aramaic to Greek, but from seventeenth-century English to today’s. In 1647, Puritan clergyman John Cotton defended the singing of Psalms by making an analogy to translation: Since God hath commanded us to sing Psalmes and Hymnes and spirituall Songs, and amongst others, those of David: and yet withall hath hid from us the Hebrew Tunes, and the musicall Accents wherewith the Psalmes of David were wont to be sung. It must needs be that the Lord alloweth us

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to sing them in any such grave, and solemne, and plaine Tunes as do fitly suite the gravitie of the matter, the solemnitie of Gods worship, and the capacitie of a plaine People…13

Cotton adds, in response to the objection that translation of scripture is a “poetical” gift and not a “spiritual” one: “It might as well be said, the translating of the Hebrew scriptures into English, is not a Spirituall gift but a Grammaticall, or Rhetoricall gift. Whatsoever the art or skill be, Grammaticall, Rhetoricall, Poeticall, they are all of them Gifts of God.” Not only may the Psalms be translated and sung, Cotton writes, even women and “carnall men” may sing them—and all may do so “in meter devised by men.” Donne, too, has it both ways again. Only God’s words will do, but the copies and translations are also God’s. In a twist, it’s the interpreters and copyists of God’s words who create the two-way communication, by virtue of having to translate God’s metaphors. God, says Donne (to God), is “direct” and “literal” and “plain”—and also “figurative” and “metaphorical.” How often, how much more often, doth thy Son call himself a way, and a light, and a gate, and a vine, and bread, than the Son of God, or of man? How much oftener doth he exhibit a metaphorical Christ, than a real, a literal? This hath occasioned thine ancient servants, whose delight it was to write after thy copy, to proceed the same way in their expositions of the Scriptures, and in their composing both of public liturgies and of private prayers to thee, to make their accesses to thee in such a kind of language as thou wast pleased to speak to them, in a figurative, in a metaphorical language…14

Translation is metaphor; both are a “carrying across” or “carrying over” (Oxford English Dictionary). Donne can still rhetorically ask: “What words but thine can express the inexpressible texture and composition of the word?” In Hebrew the Psalms are called tehillim,15 from the word for “shine” or “praise,” although this wasn’t their title until long after they were written, a process spanning some seven centuries and an unknown number of authors. David Rosenberg, among others, reminds us that the Psalms were chanted on the Temple steps to the accompaniment of flute and lyre. The Greek root of psalmos means “quiver,” “twitch,” or “twang,” as of a string instrument (Oxford English Dictionary).

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Sir Philip Sidney translated the first forty-three of the 150 Psalms. His sister Mary, Countess of Pembroke, revised his work and translated the remainder between 1593 and 1600.16 Her title page stakes its claim: “Psalmes of David, translated into divers and sundry kinds of verse, more rare and excellent for the method and varietie than ever yet hath been done in English.” What Donne tagged “Sidneian Psalmes” were well known among contemporary poets and “were probably sung occasionally in private devotions.”17 They were not printed, however, until 1823, and in an edition of 200 copies; the “Advertisement” to that edition reports that one handwritten manuscript of the poems was preserved when it was “bought … among other broken books to putt up Coffee pouder.”18 In his poem praising the new translations, Donne maps out the transmission process. He clearly enjoys the architecture of argument, saying of one particular sermon’s topic, as he preaches it, that it “extends it self in many branches.”19 In “Upon the Translation,” layers of metaphor yield a flowchart of bifurcations; I had to draw a diagram to follow them. To begin with, God’s spirit was “cloven” or split (an allusion to the requirement of a cloven hoof for an animal to be kosher?) when it fell on David, who sang of the “highest matter” and did so in the “noblest form.” The spirit was “cleft” and then “perform[ed] … again.” The newest performers are another pair, Sidney and his sister, later compared to Moses and Miriam, who echo the first cleaving in a double pair, showing us what to do and how to do it, why to sing and how to do so. I assume that Donne is riffing on the Countess’s own conceit in her dedicatory poem to Sir Philip. The Countess writes: “to thee alone’s addres’t/this coupled worke, by double int’rest thine.” Donne writes: … as thy blessed spirit fell upon These Psalms’ first author in a cloven tongue; (For ‘twas a double power by which he sung The highest matter in the noblest form;) So thou hast cleft that spirit, to perform That work again, and shed it, here, upon Two, by their bloods, and by thy spirit one; A brother and a sister, made by thee The organ, where thou art the harmony.

The logic of geometry then gets hard to follow as Donne tries to make it work in Christian threes. Even in the confusion, these possibilities are

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apparent: heavenly songs which men cannot hear; church songs which angels do hear; music of the spheres which has no words; and the organist (Christ) who brings us (the instrument) into tune with God: Make all this all, three choirs, heaven, earth, and spheres; The first, heaven, hath a song, but no man hears, The spheres have music, but they have no tongue, Their harmony is rather danced than sung; But our third choir, to which the first gives ear, (For, angels learn by what the Church does here) This choir hath all. The organist is he Who hath tuned God and man, the organ we…

The clearer pairings and paired contrasts return. Heaven’s music flows to David, David gives it to the Jews, his successors “re-reveal” with new clothing: the Psalms are “well-attired abroad” but not “here,” not until now. The Countess writes that her own muse dared to “combine” itself with her brother’s, just as what is “mortal” combines itself with what is “divine.” Her connection to Sir Philip, through this project, is a version of God’s putting-on-the-flesh as Christ. This conceit can make Jews uncomfortable, and there is controversy among Psalms scholars about whether the language of the Hebrew suggests belief in an afterlife. It’s hard to see how anyone can deny that it does, though that’s not the same as saying with Donne and others that the key to unlocking the Psalms is precisely the recognition that they are about Christ. To put it another way, the metaphor of God-made-flesh is perfectly in keeping with the essential paradoxes here; Jewish mystics asked continuously how the infinite could take finite form. (It does confound me, though, that so many millions of people over so many thousands of years have “believed” this particular version of the metaphor as historical fact.) The countess  writes that the earthly garments of the verse forms are “superficial [at]tire/by thee [her brother’s spirit] put on.” Their goal is “to praise, not to aspire/To, those high Tons, so in themselves adorned/which Angells sing in their celestial Quire,/and all of tongues with soule and voice admire…” Clothing, in these images, does not hide naked bodies but lets us see what is otherwise invisible. This metaphor begins to seem inevitable, which might suggest something fundamental about human knowledge and perception. Emily Dickinson had a similar conception but a very different sense of what the

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clothing does. She warned her correspondent Thomas Higginson that she wasn’t sure if the poems she was mailing to him were different from the ones she had already sent (or, she might have meant, different from each other). It’s not that she couldn’t remember. Rather, “While my thought is undressed, I can make the distinction; but when I put them [the poems] in the gown, they look alike and numb.”20 The thirteenthcentury Zohar, principal work of Jewish mysticism, assumes the clothing metaphor to be implicit in an image from the Psalms: “Israel here below is balanced by the angels on high, of whom it [the Torah] says: ‘who makest thy angels into winds [or spirits]’ (Psalms 104:4). For the angels in descending on earth put on themselves earthly garments, as otherwise they could not stay in this world, nor could the world endure them … Thus had the Torah not clothed herself in garments of this world the world could not endure it … Whoever looks upon that garment as being the Torah itself, woe to that man—such a one will have no portion in the next world.”21 In Donne’s poem, when time ends, we return to an ur-language, or to something prior to that, maybe music; we’ll sing our parts in the harmonious whole until we get there. So though some have, some may some psalms translate, We thy Sidneian Psalms shall celebrate, And, till we come th’ extemporal song to sing, (Learned the first hour, that we see the King, Who hath translated those translators) may These their sweet learned labours, all the way Be as our tuning…

At the end of the diagramming, there is a sense of words leaving off where never-ending music starts. Can “triangulating” by reading multiple translations and commentaries when one doesn’t have access to the language of an original—and this seems to have been the Sidneys’ method—allow one to hear the resonance of the original? The Countess distinguishes the new translations from the angels’ heavenly songs, and Donne seems to say that when we “see the King” for ourselves we will sing the “extemporal song.” Is it outside of time because it’s eternal, “timeless”? Or is it free from the musical constraints by which we “keep time”? These seem to be one and the same. Incredibly, this song will also be God’s back-formation of the various translations we’ve

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been using down on earth. He will “translate the translators,” maybe not into language but back out of it again. The competing versions of the Psalms, says Donne, are time-bound. For now they will guide us and bridge the gap: Be as our tuning, that when hence we part, We may fall in with them, and sing our part.

In this closing couplet, does “part” rhyme with “part”? Some prosodists call this “identical rhyme,” but some say it’s repetition rather than rhyme. Something is repeated, but since the first “part” is a verb and the second “part” a noun, are they the same word? And even if they are the “same word,” don’t they constitute two separate iterations or instances of it? They’re separate because they are separated in time. But if “part” and “part” were spoken simultaneously, would they rhyme? Or would they be, from the perspective of the listener, a single duet? When we were kids, my brothers and I had a game. In the course of conversation, if two of us unintentionally said the same thing at the same time, we would instantly race to say “Jinx!” If we both said “jinx” simultaneously (which was likely), we’d follow quickly with “purple jinx,” and then “dot.” There would be a repeated, rapid-fire duet of “jinx purple jinx dot!” until someone was quicker. The loser had to be quiet until someone said his name. As much as I hate to spoil the fun from adulthood, it was as if we’d discovered a wormhole in the flow of language-time. I don’t recall learning how to play this game. We knew intuitively what stopped the flow (two speaking together without intending to); what the consequences were (exile); and how one could return (the magic of one’s name being said). Maybe the compromise between identity and simultaneity—“part” and “part”—is harmony: “A brother and sister, made by Thee/The organ, where thou art the harmony.” In Meditation XVIII, a few sentences before the famous “for whom the bell tolls” passage, Donne uses translation as a metaphor for the change from life to death. The resurrection he envisions is a permanent simultaneity, and his bookish parable is straight out of Borges: When one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language … God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness; some by war, some by justice; but God’s hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all

156  M. Dow our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another.

Out in the Open Eliot Weinberger’s harsh review of Robert Alter’s translations begins with a list of two dozen common English phrases that come from Psalms. But the Psalms aren’t just everywhere in the language; once I started paying attention, they seemed to be scattered everywhere, period. On the bulletin board outside the elevator that my gym shares with a synagogue, a flyer decorated with a colorful picture of King David playing the harp announces a weekly study session: “The Psalms: Songs of Comfort and Praise.” Across Eastern Parkway at the Brooklyn Public Library, a fellow patron noticed the books in front of me, smiled, and said, simply, “Psalms!” Another day a patron asked for a “pensive” version of the Psalms; the librarian took this to mean he wanted commentary with them. I checked out poet David Slavitt’s intentionally nursery-rhymey “renditions,” as he calls them22: O Lord, I call on You by day and through the night. Hear what I say. Let my groans and prayers arise to you. Give ear to one who dies…

Downstairs in the library auditorium, a free concert by the Brooklyn Art Song Society included Arthur Honegger’s “Mimaamaquim” (1947), a version of Psalm 130 (the title is the Psalm’s opening in Hebrew, “out of the depths”). In the same auditorium a few weeks earlier, I’d heard composer-cellist Robert Een perform “Psalm Quest,” which he describes as “the inadvertent result of my failed attempt to set one of the Psalms of King David to music.” The piece was sandwiched between “Kamakura Dream,” about a thirteenth-century Japanese Buddha, and “Subtle Electric Fire,” an allusion to Whitman. Times have changed since the Psalms were the “sole musical form of recreation”23 allowed here, but they haven’t changed completely. On a friend’s coffee table there was an “Artscroll” edition of the Psalms—large print and bilingual with a “patented interlinear format.” The rabbi-editors explain in the preface that the usual practice of printing the translation on the opposite page, or in a facing column, results in a

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“tug of war between the desire for comprehension and the need not to interrupt the recitation, especially if one is praying with the congregation.” But there are additional challenges to an interlinear English translation of Hebrew. First, Hebrew script is right-to-left: “The eye is confused, as it were, like an American stepping off a curb in England and instantly looking to his left, while traffic speeds toward him from the right.” The second problem is that word order within the two languages is so different. The editors have addressed this problem with a format that demands additional eye movement, in increments of tracking that do not reach all the way to the margins, but do require “leap-frogging” back over what one has already read in the English (see Fig. 1). The system of arrows tells the reader’s eyes which way to go. The reader trying to follow both Hebrew and English has to reconfigure the act of reading, but the rabbi-editors have provided the prompts. Medieval Latin psalters were used not just for liturgy but to teach children how to read in the first place,24 though the rabbis of the Artscroll edition note that it “is geared to the ‘sayer’ rather than the student.”

Fig. 1  Psalms 102: 8–9 (Reproduced from the ArtScroll Schottenstein Edition Interlinear Tehillim, with permission of the copyright/patent holders, ArtScroll/ Mesorah Publications, Ltd.)

They kept appearing. On the subway, a man who introduced himself as Bongo (originally from Baltimore) sat on a milk crate and played a djembe while preaching a “drum culture lesson” that mentioned Bob Marley, Congo Square, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., the Kennedys, and the Hebrews. Bongo talked about strangers “singing the Lord’s song while in captivity,” and then he sang. Then he said he’d been singing Psalm 137 (“By the Rivers of Babylon”) with some of Psalm 19 (“Let the Words of My Mouth and the Meditation of My Heart”) spliced in.

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On the back of a magazine copy of a botanical drawing I’d clipped (by David Smith-Harrison of a royal palm), I found an article in which Czeslaw Milosz discusses his translations of the Psalms into Polish. [I] had to struggle with two rivals: a powerful music coming from the pen of an anonymous monk of the fifteenth century, and the faithful but less vigorous lines by Izaak Cylkow, a rabbi of one of the Warsaw synagogues, marked by the style from the end of the nineteenth century.”

Milosz learned Hebrew as an adult because he didn’t want to translate from the Latin as so many European Bible translators have done.25 On a flight from New York to Houston, I looked up from Nicholson Baker’s The Anthologist. The poet-protagonist obsessed with rhyme has just had a vision of Edgar Allen Poe at a laundromat in Marseilles (“I said, Holy shit, Ed, ‘The Raven.’ Great title. What’s it about?”). The elderly Indian woman next to me, after three hours of staring and dozing, took a Bible from her purse, unzipped its leather cover, and opened to Psalm 63. The text was in Malayalam, which I cannot read or understand—or reliably check for errors here26:

The script would be pure drawing, except that I know it says something. “My mouth doth praise Thee with joyful lips … For Thou hast been my help, and in the shadow of Thy wings do I rejoice” (63:6, 8). The woman turned to Matthew 5, where the margins were filled with penciled check marks. “Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid.” The Pilgrims brought psalters with them, of course. A contemporary record of a 1620 going-away party from Holland mentions the “‘singing of Psalms, making joyful melody in our hearts as well as with the voice.’”27 The pairing of “heart” and “voice” recurs among theologians; as far as I can tell, it’s based on 2 Chronicles 29:31: “Hezekiah the king and the princes commanded the Levites to sing praise unto the Lord with the words of David, and of Asaph the seer. And they sang praises with gladness” (KJV). “Practically all tunes” for the praises sung in English at the time were in ballad meter, Waldo Pratt writes. The

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pilgrims, however, brought the more varied translations of one Henry Ainsworth, “now mostly remembered because of his Hebrew learning.” The Ainsworth Psalms were, as the title page announces, “Englished both in Prose and Metre,” and with musical notation. Twenty years later, in 1640, the Puritans’ Bay Psalm Book preface mentions “the difficulty of Ainsworths tunes,” along with “corruptions in our common psalme books,” as reasons for a new translation.28 The Bay Psalm Book was the first book printed in the Colonies—after the Freeman’s Oath (a broadside) and an almanac pamphlet—on a press brought over from England.29 “The Psalms are now presented in their natural form wherein the flow and rhythm of the thought dictates the arrangement of the lines.”30 This sounds like an allusion to biblical parallelism, which has been called “thought rhyme” (New Grove Dictionary)—a term used by Mabel Loomis Todd, without reference to the Bible, to describe Emily Dickinson’s technique31—though, as noted, some think the KJV translators didn’t understand the parallelism.32 Like Pelican in wilderness, like Owle in desart so am I: I watch, & like a sparrow am on house top solitarily.

In 1718, Cotton Mather explained the necessity for his new Psalterium Americanum: it must be affirmed, that [previous translations] leave out a vast heap of those rich things, which the Holy Spirit of God speaks in the Original Hebrew; and that they put in as large an heap of poor Things, which are intirely their own. All this has been meerly for the sake of preserving the Clink of the Rhime.33

In Houston, next to my parents’ TV, on a stack of CDs, was a pocketsize bilingual Book of Psalms with a hinged, metal ornamental cover. It had been a bar mitzvah gift to me from my mother’s cousins in Israel. No translator is named (Tel-Aviv: Sinai Publishing, 1965), but the awkward parenthetical is his: “I watch, and I am become a (night-) bird sitting alone upon the housetop.” Down the hall in my father’s library, I came across Nahum Sarna’s commentary on the Psalms. Its cover shows an illuminated page from the thirteenth-century North French Hebrew

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Miscellany in the British Library, the painting of King David that’s on the Brooklyn Union Temple flyer. David the psalmist “is his owne Library, he studyes himselfe,” says Donne. But how does he make his findings known? In a sermon about Christ and free will, Donne is also thinking about introspection and how it evolves into communication: “the first internall motions of his [David’s] heart” and then “the first externall motions of his sorrow are knowne to God.”34      I am benumbed and sore crushed; I groan by reason of the moaning of my heart.      Lord, all my desire is before Thee; and my sighing is not hid from Thee.      (Psalms 38: 9–10; Dahood)

He knows it all before we put it in the open, but we still do so. In lines that remind me of a prison chaplain’s versions which I picked up in high school (Treat Me Cool, Lord: Prayers—Devotions—Litanies, as Prepared by Some of God’s Bad-Tempered Angels with Busted Halos, with the Help of Carl F. Burke), the Countess puts it like this: “Lord before thee I do lay/What I pray.” Prayer, says Maryland Presbyterian pastor Eugene H. Petersen, is “the means by which we get everything in our lives out in the open before God.” Petersen writes that “this prayer book”—his version of Psalms, published in a Billy Graham Evangelistic Association special edition—“gives us a language adequate for responding to the God who speaks to us.”35      Bilious and bloated, they gas      “God is gone.”…      God sticks his head out of heaven.      He looks around.      He’s looking for someone not stupid… (Psalms 53)

Petersen’s Psalm 102 provides a slightly less extreme example: “Pay attention! This is a cry for help!/And hurry—this can’t wait!” But is Robert Alter’s really so much better? “Incline Your ear to me./On the day I call, quickly answer me.” Petersen again: “In English translation, the psalms often sound smooth and polished, sonorous with Elizabethan rhythms and diction. As literature, they are beyond compare. But as prayer … these translations miss something”36—though I think Alter’s

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version suffers as translation, too, stuck in, rather than being energized by, its effort to sound both old and new. In the dedicatory poem to her brother, the Countess asks to be excused if she has been presumptuous in completing his work; if she was overzealous, it was out of “Love which hath never done,/Nor can enough in world of words unfold.” Even in the dense cluster of barely differentiated phonemes, she’s an open book—but the book can’t contain her ongoing love. When an ex-girlfriend’s mother died, my own mother sent me a message, via email, to pass along: When I was a practicing therapist, one of the things we were trained to do with someone who had lost a family member with whom they had not had a good relationship and had never dealt with—or if they had broken up with a girlfriend or boyfriend and hadn’t felt closure—we would suggest that the person write a letter and share all the feelings and thoughts they had not done in person. It is amazing how much doing this helps someone achieve closure.

I’ve written a few such unsent letters myself and felt this. But in what sense is a letter which is never meant to be sent, or a poem to someone who is dead, to the one addressed? Who is talking and to whom? These questions may only be implicit, but they permeate the Psalms and, it sometimes seems to me, the whole of lyric poetry in English. By my count, all but six of the Psalms refer explicitly to the acts of talking, singing, asking, answering, listening, pronouncing, praising, promising, decreeing, or the like; and even the exceptions are still titled as songs (in the JPS Hebrew-English numbering: 23, 121, 125, 127, 128, and 134). Most are directed toward God— but often only in part. And often within a Psalm the pronouns shift from second to third person, or the other way around; Donne’s poem does this, too. One scholar who examined Pembroke’s Psalms for evidence of her knowledge of Hebrew (and decided it was minimal) writes that the Countess “smoothes … out” these shifts so that God is usually the only one addressed, “without any other audience or speaker in view.”37 David Rosenberg, commenting on his own remarkable translations in A Literary Bible, writes: I imagine ancient prayer—in terms of the book of Psalms, but also psalms that are rephrased in other books—as idealized speaking on a cosmic stage, out into the realm of eternity. It requires a literary trade-off for poets: you

162  M. Dow don’t write letters home to your parents in verse, yet in this instance— verse as prayer—you speak as if to a spiritual parent.38

(I think I did send a few letters home in verse when I was in college, but that’s probably beside the point.) Rosenberg is also compelled by another, simultaneous version of the process, “a scene of writing where the poet is alone with his interior voice.”39 It was the Sidneian Psalmes, in their sophistication and play, which first provoked Rosenberg, when he was in college, to “reencounter” the Hebrew Bible. Here is one of the few Sidneian versions in ballad meter (Psalm 19):      There is no speach, nor language, which           Is soe of skill bereaved,      But of the skies the teaching cries,           They have heard and conceaved.      There be no eyne, but read the line           From soe faire booke proceeding:      Their wordes be sett in letters greate           For ev’ry bodies reading.

And here is part of Rosenberg’s version, especially difficult to excerpt because of the unfolding syntax and lack of punctuation, folding his sense of his own translator’s voice into the tune of David: a community as it hears the right words creating time the space of the sky the face of the nearest star […] then rises above the horizon growing in our awareness of the embrace of inspiration we feel as we turn toward the warmth

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starting at the edge of the sky to come over us like a secret love we wait for love we can’t hide our deepest self-image from […] words my Lord writes shine opening me to witness myself

Kierkegaard, too, writes about the “cosmic stage,” trying to work out the relation of inner to outer voice, and of speaker to receiver. In a dizzying parable, he describes a scenario in which a stage actor delivers lines after the prompter whispers them. “No one is so foolish as to regard the prompter as more important than the actor,” Kierkegaard deadpans. Then he writes that in the “spiritual” as opposed to the “aesthetic” realm (always the two sides of his dilemma), “the speaker is the prompter” and “the stage is eternity”: “The speaker whispers the word to the listeners. But the main concern is earnestness: that the listeners by themselves, with themselves, and to themselves, in the silence before God, may speak with the help of this address”—that is, the very devotional address Kierkegaard is delivering on the page, and which perhaps (since in a preface he recommends we read aloud) the reader hears in his own voice. “As soon as God is present, each man in the presence of God has the task of paying attention to himself”40—Donne’s David in the library of himself. In case it’s not already obvious, I don’t understand the staying power and popularity of the Psalms. If I had more than very basic Hebrew, I might appreciate them as poems; if I were religious, maybe I would appreciate them as prayers. But maybe I’m trying too hard, and neither understanding nor belief is necessary. Psalm 1 mentions a man who (in the usual translation) “meditates” on God’s teachings day and night. “Meditate” suggests silence. According to Sarna, this is a mistranslation of the Hebrew root-word (hgh), which “carries a decidedly oral nuance … The verbal form is used [elsewhere] for the moaning of a dove, and the growl of a lion; it takes as its subject the mouth, the tongue, and the palate. The action of the verb obviously has an acoustical effect because the throat can be its instrument.”41

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Augustine, too, preached about this Psalm. He read it, according to his translator Edmund Hill, in “a rather slavish Latin translation of a rather slavish Greek translation of a Hebrew original that was often corrupt, especially in the psalms.”42 Through all of that, Augustine seems to have been trying to work out the relationships between song, understanding, and piety: “Men teach jackdaws, jays, parrots and other birds to sing and make sounds which they don’t understand. But man himself has been allowed the privilege by God of understanding what he sings.”43 On the other hand, as James Winn in his exhilarating scholarship quotes Oliver Strunk’s translation of the fourth-century St. John Chrysostom: ‘Even though the meaning of the words be unknown to you, teach your mouth to utter them meanwhile. For the tongue is made holy by the words when they are uttered with a ready and eager mind … Nor will anyone, in such singing, be blamed if he be weakened by old age, or young, or have a harsh voice, or no knowledge at all of numbers [i.e., meter (Winn’s note)]. What is here sought for is a sober mind, an awakened intelligence, a contrite heart, sound reason, and clear conscience. If having these you have entered into God’s sacred choir, you may stand beside David himself.’44

But if sung words are at the upper level, so to speak, of communication, where are the groaning and sobbing, the non-linguistic, or the pre-linguistic? Researchers have played recordings of seals, bats, and humans for white-tailed deer and found “that acoustic traits of infant distress vocalizations that are essential for a response by caregivers, and a caregiver’s sensitivity to these acoustic traits, may be shared across diverse mammals.”45 Daniel Berrigan, in a note on his versions of the Psalms, compares God’s listening to that of the parent who hears the baby crying when no one else does.46 In the nineteenth century, William Gardiner wrote musical transcriptions of children’s crying.47 Nicholson Baker’s fictional poet reminds us of the rhythmic insistence of sobbing and even scans it. In “An Elegy upon the Death of Mistress Boulstred,” Donne writes:      Language thou art too narrow, and too weak      To ease us now; great sorrow cannot speak;      If we could sigh out accents, and weep words,      Grief wears, and lessens, that tears breath affords.

The melodies of newborn crying might be influenced by prosodic ­features of the predominant language being spoken outside the womb.

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Researchers have compared “melody contour” in French and German babies; the “music” of speech “is well-preserved across the abdominal barrier, whereas phonetic aspects of speech are disrupted.”48 Semantic meaning, of course, is beside the point. And Robert Frost could recognize iambic English through a wall, although “content” was blurred. Maybe the modernist and subsequent emphasis on—and, inevitably, mannerism and gimmick of—bringing together “high” and “low” language is a version of earlier attempts to make language fit patterns of meter and rhyme, which means organizing it according to qualities that appear naturally. We’re trying to connect music and non-music into one harmonious something. We talk and sing, pray and cry—sometimes to others, sometimes to ourselves. Often we have something to say. Most of the time we just want to be heard.

Notes I am very grateful to my friend Kevin Pask of Concordia University, and to my uncle Daniel Musher, for their comments and insights; the many errors are my own. Thanks also to Michael Schmidt, who published a brief excerpt from this chapter in PN Review 42:6 (July/August 2016). 1. The Anchor Bible: Psalms I, II, and III. Introductions, translation and notes by Mitchell Dahood, S.J. (New York: The Anchor Bible, 1970). This quotation is from Vol. III, 13. 2.  Delmore Schwartz, “The Critical Method of R.P Blackmur,” Poetry 53:1 (October 1938). An exception (enlightening in any case) might be Jerome Mazzaro, Transformations in the Renaissance English Lyric (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970). 3. Sefer Torah: Seven Minor Treatises, trans. Michael Higger (New York: Bloch Publishing Company, 1930), pp. 6, 10. Thanks to my brother Leon Wiener Dow for sending me to this. 4.  Mechon Mamre, preface to Jewish Publication Society’s 1917 edition of the Hebrew Bible in English, http://www.mechonmamre.org/p/pt/jps1917.htm. 5. Sermon No. 1, The Sermons of John Donne, Vol. II, George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson (eds) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1955), p. 49. 6. See, for example, Alvin M. Liberman, “Some Results of Research on Speech Perception,” The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

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29:1 (January 1957), 117–123; Michael Studdert-Kennedy, “Speech Perception, Status Report on Speech Research” (New Haven, CT: Haskins Laboratories, 1974), http://www.haskins.yale. edu/sr/SR039/SR039_01.pdf. 7.  Lynn Visson, “Diary,” London Review of Books 35:21 (7 November 2013), p. 39. 8. Nahum Sarna, Songs of the Heart: An Introduction to the Book of Psalms (New York: Schocken Books, 1993), pp. 71, 79. 9.  In addition to those mentioned, see Pamela Greenberg, The Complete Psalms: The Book of Prayer Songs in a New Translation, foreword by Susannah Heschel (New York: Bloomsbury, 2010). See also Gershom Scholem, “At the Completion of Buber’s Translation of the Bible,” The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality (New York: Schocken Books, 1971). 10. David Kimhi, The Commentary of Rabbi David Kimhi on Psalms CXX–CL, Joshua Baker and Ernest W. Nicholson (eds and trans) (Cambridge University Press, 1973), p. 91. 11. Footnote in literary-translation history: In 2005, 2 years before Hamburger died, I wrote to ask him whether “easier” should read “less easy” in this sentence: “No doubt it will be easier for you to understand it than for me to explain it to you” (“Il vous sera sans doute moins facile de le comprendre qu’à moi de vous l’expliquer”). (“The Eyes of the Poor”; Les Yeux des Pauvres). Hamburger wrote back from Suffolk: “I’ve checked the French text and my first publication of the translation (1946), done when I was 20 and serving in the army as an infantryman. What is astonishing is that in all this time—more than 60 years—no one pointed out the error.” City Lights made the correction when they next reprinted the book, in 2013. Hamburger had written: “I am 81 now, and my eyesight is failing with cataracts and glaucoma.” He asked me also to contact composer John Adams, who was planning to set some of the translations to music, though Hamburger wrote in a subsequent letter: “I can’t imagine how anything like an opera could be made out of prose poems by Baudelaire.” I must have addressed him as “Professor Hamburger,” because after his signature he added, “I’m not a professor now, only a poet.” See Charles Baudelaire, Twenty Prose Poems, trans. Michael Hamburger (San Francisco; City Lights Books, 1988).

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12. Sermon No. 1, The Sermons of John Donne, Vol. II, George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson (eds) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1955), p. 66. 13. John Cotton, Singing of Songs a Gospel-Ordinance (London, 1647), pp. 56–57. See also Russell Stutler, “Several Ways to Sing the Psalms,” Stutler CC http://www.stutler.cc/russ/sing_psalms. html; Music for the Church of God http://www.cgmusic.org/ library/psaltamerican.htm. 14.  Donne, Expostulation XIX, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions and Seuerall Steps in my Sicknes (London, 1624). 15.  See, for example, Nahum M. Sarna, et al. “Psalms, Book of,” Encyclopaedia Judaica. Michael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik (eds), 2nd edn, Vol. 16 (Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2007), pp. 663–683. Gale Virtual Reference Library, http://go. galegroup.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CCX2587516160&v=2.1 &u=imcpl1111&it=r&p=GVRL&sw=w&asid=465ec8278b2a0 8c7f4760295468bad57. 16. J.C.A. Rathmell (ed.), The Psalms of Sir Philip Sidney and The Countess of Pembroke (New York: New York University Press, 1963), p. 11. 17. Ibid., p. 27. 18. Sir Philip Sidney and the Countess of Pembroke, The Psalmes of David (London: Chiswick Press, 1823), p. 7, https://archive. org/details/psalmesofdavidtr00sidnuoft. See also Richard Todd, “So Well Attyr’d Abroad: A Background to the Sidney-Pembroke Psalter and Its Implications for the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 29:1 (spring 1987), 74–93; Margaret P. Hannay, “Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke (1561–1621),” The Sidney Homepage (Cambridge: University of Cambridge), http://www. english.cam.ac.uk/sidney/pembroke_biography.htm. 19. Sermon No. 1, The Sermons of John Donne, Vol. II, George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson (eds) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1955), p. 54. 20. Quoted in Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “Emily Dickinson’s Letters,” The Atlantic Monthly (October 1891), https://www. theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1891/10/emily-dickinsonsletters/306524/

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21. The Zohar, Vol. 5, trans. Harry Sperling and Maurice Simon (New York: The Soncino Press, 1984), Section 3:152a, p. 211. 22. David Slavitt, Sixty-One Psalms of David (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), Psalms 88, 80. 23.  “Psalmody, British and North American,” The Harvard Dictionary of Music, Don Michael Randel (ed.) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), p. 688. 24.  Koert van der Horst, William Noel, and Wilhelmina C.M. Wüstefeld, The Utrecht Psalter in Medieval Art: Picturing the Psalms of David (Netherlands: HES Publishers BV; London: Harvey Miller Publishers, 1996), p. 36. 25. Czeslaw Milosz, [Untitled], in “A Symposium on Translation,” The Threepenny Review 70 (summer 1997), 10. Milosz, “My Biblical Translations,” Society of Biblical Literature Forum, http://www.sbl-site.org/publications/article.aspx?ArticleId=72. 26. Psalms—Mayalayam Bible. http://southindia.bibleportals. org/?q=bible/1/PS/63. 27. Edward Winslow’s Hypocrisie Unmasked, quoted in Waldo Selden Pratt, The Music of the Pilgrims: A Description of the Psalm-Book Brought to Plymouth in 1620 (New York: Russell and Russell, 1921, 1971), p. 6. 28. The Bay Psalm Book: A Facsimile Reprint of the First Edition of 1640 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1912; 1956), n.p. 29. The Book of Psalms (New York: Stephen Daye, 1944), n.p.; Zoltán Haraszti, The Enigma of the Bay Psalm Book (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), pp. 78–79. 30. The Book of Psalms (New York: Stephen Daye, 1944), n.p. 31. Mabel Loomis Todd, Preface to Emily Dickinson, Poems: Second Series (Boston, MA: Roberts Brothers, 1891), p. 7. 32.  Robert O. Evans, “Parallelism,” Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, Alex Preminger (ed.) (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), p. 599. 33. Zoltán Haraszti, The Enigma of the Bay Psalm Book (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), pp. 29–30. 34. Sermon No. 6, The Sermons of John Donne, Vol. II, George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson (eds) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1955), p. 145. 35.  Eugene H. Petersen, Psalms (Colorado Springs: Navpress Publishing Group, 1994), p. 4.

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36.  Ibid., p. 94. See also Robert Alter, The Book of Psalms: A Translation with Commentary (New York: Norton, 2007). 37. Melody D. Knowles, “‘Now English Denizend, though Hebrew Borne’: Did Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pemroke, Read Hebrew?” Studies in Philology 109:3 (spring 2012), p. 286. 38. David Rosenberg, A Literary Bible: An Original Translation (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2009), pp. 670–671. 39. David Rosenberg, A Life in a Poem: Memoir of a Rebellious Bible Translator, 8 (unpublished manuscript). See also Sydneyann Binion, “Higher Biblical Criticism: A Conversation with David Rosenberg,” Molossus (4 January 2010), http://www.molossus. co/interview/higher-biblical-criticism-a-co12nversation-withdavid-rosenberg/. 40. Søren Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing, trans. Douglas V. Steere (New York: Harper and Row, 1956), pp. 181– 182. 41. Sarna, Songs of the Heart: An Introduction to the Book of Psalms, p. 38. 42. Augustine, Nine Sermons of Saint Augustine on the Psalms, trans. Edmund Hill (New York: P.J. Kenedy & Sons, 1958), p. 27. 43. Ibid., p. 34. 44. James Anderson Winn, Unsuspected Eloquence: A History of the Relations between Poetry and Music (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), p. 37. 45. Susan Lingle and Tobias Riede, “Deer Mothers Are Sensitive to Infant Distress Vocalizations of Diverse Mammalian Species,” The American Naturalist 184: 4 (October 2014), pp. 510–522. 46. Daniel Berrigan, Uncommon Prayer: A Book of Psalms (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1978), p. 47. 47.  Paul Collins, “Sobbing Children and Singing Shillings: The Extraordinary Musical Transcriptions of William Gardiner,” The Believer 64 (July/August 2009), pp. 30–32. 48.  Birgit Mampe, Angela D. Friederici, et al. (2009) “Newborns’ Cry Melody is Shaped by Their Native Language,” Current Biology 19 (December 15), 1994–1997.

Donne and the Reign of Figures Calvin Bedient

The huge difference between John Donne and modern American poets from, say, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath to John Ashbery and Jorie Graham—to limit the choice to a manageable number—is that the Americans write on the edge of nothing, dumbfounded by a dimensionless inexistence, out of which, physicists say, electrons leap orbit randomly and only for an infinitesimal instant, whereas Donne enjoyed and made the most of his age’s major screens and veils: good meters, good love, and above all great faith in a languaged God. He wrote in a completely different conceptual framework of the world from the latest one, one without quarks and neutrinos and constant fluctuations of elemental particles in a virtually endless sea, with galaxies like wave-sloshes and the complete identification of space with gravity and quanta. Looking back on Donne’s work, a contemporary poet may be struck by how thoroughly and ingeniously it is consumed by various kinds of figure, violations of or excesses over discursive order, including the major figure-illusion of a speaker, like a fire that leaves no writerly ash. He was the perfection of the age’s positivity with regard to rhetoric, versification, hyperbole, lyricism’s emotional continuity, the expression of amatory ardor (coming from Ovid), and idealized love (derived from Europe in the twelfth century), and, further, of a God of love (the gift of Paul). There was no direction in which Donne could turn without bumping into undeconstructed ideal forms of thought, feeling, and relation.

C. Bedient (*)  University of California, Los Angeles, California, USA © The Author(s) 2017 J. Herz (ed.), John Donne and Contemporary Poetry, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-55300-9_16

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Art led the way to both natural happiness and devotional fervor. Good forms, myth, scripture, rhythm—as everyone knows, these provided a substratum of meaning to the members of the community under Queen Elizabeth, then under King James. The Catholics were persecuted, but by the faithful who thought they had the wrong faith. A want of faith was not the problem. Not the problem it is for poets today. With the acidification of poetry brought about by the history of deconstruction, of which Nietzsche, Rimbaud, Freud, Dada, and Surrealism were among the early figures and episodes, the assumption of universality inherent in philosophy vanished. Deleuze and Badiou have recovered it, in vitalism and mathematics, respectively, but without the incense of idealism. Atmosphere has disappeared from ideas. It has had to be got up by each poet, as by a generator kept in the basement in case of a general failure of power. Figure and desire no longer connived to pair satisfyingly. Rather, as Lyotard notes in Discourse, Figure, “violence belongs to the depth of language.” In particular, the violence of the figure tries to restore the inexhaustible thickness of reference.1 (It was already so in Rimbaud.) From what deficit? From the nothingness (the no-things, the unrecognizable) concealed by signs and signifieds. Absence. Lack. In part because “our origin is an absence of origin.”2 It is in primal terror, Lyotard observes, that desire unfolds its figures. (“Primal terror” is in relevant but unfundamental use a name for losing one’s balance because of a defective inner ear.) As Hemingway and Wallace Stevens, among others, were to expose, we are no longer protected, and as it were produced, by the old nobilities, we walk in their graveyard. “The function of the artist,” Lyotard noted in Driftworks, is “no longer to produce good forms, new good forms, but on the contrary to deconstruct them systematically and accelerate their obsolescence.”3 Deconstructive activity attacks the signifying organization of things, to the point that “what pleases us now is what disconcerts us, and in this sense we are really in Freud’s ‘death drive.’”4 Demythification has become an endless task, a permanent revolution. Each poet carries an ax. Celan used his to break the ice ceiling of language even to the point of deconstructing a phrase down to its three vowels before the reader’s very eyes:                         Deepinthesnow                                         Intheno,                                                 I—e—o.5

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There is no resemblance between the books of faith written by George Herbert, Richard Crashaw, Henry Vaughan, and Thomas Traherne, not to overlook Milton, and Celan’s output, which aches to “fling out the word-/moon” and, in a bond “with the persecuted,” take “the up-tackng ferry” in “the vertical, narrow day gorge.”6 Celan’s figures are one of a kind; they are not inheritances, cultural transmissions, like Donne’s— though in his songs, Donne knew what to do to make the transmitted feel like his own discoveries. Ashbery writes in constant apology for writing at all, given the disruption of realist and biological space and the end of American promise. Like Donne, he’s a performer, an entertainer, but he’s bounced around by turbulences and is given to randomness, which is the chief work of the death-drive. Plath is a loud cry in her poems, a strident voice, and thereby closer than the other three poets to Donne’s most singular achievement, a theater of speech; but in her destruction of God/the father she, too, destroys the very foundation for rules, not least for a woman’s behavior. Count me not genteel when I rage for connection, rage to be gone. The emotional understanding of the modern American poets is a complement to the intellectual understanding of a constitutional “lack” in the human being as theorized by Nietzsche, Freud, Lacan, and Lyotard, among others. By comparison the American public is, as it were, centuries behind in its dependence on conventional sentiments and beliefs to see them through. The familiar complaint that modern poetry fails to engage the common reader comes from the same undeconstructed sphere, which the emotionally intelligent no longer feel honest in inhabiting. Donne, of course, does not resemble these American poets, anymore than he resembles Pound, Eliot, or Stevens. For he wrote a poetry that consolidated (precisely) the “ruling” assumptions of his time, at the antipode of the modern poets who, in their disruption of verbal and sometimes logical fabric, of sensory and scenic space, are left with mostly “unconscious space,” like Pollock’s drip paintings, from which they rise, as best they can, dripping the colors of the death-drive. Donne was gifted by his era, a gift he deftly seized upon, with various kinds of figure, role, and form that gave him great confidence and joy in creativity, and a sense of consolidation with his community. Leaving aside his satires, he was, to begin with, the poet as idealizing lover (with fashionable cynical flips into deconstructing such love), then the poet of idealizing worship—the more easily so because the two roles were

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familiar in the poetry of the age. In the main, the songs were keeled in the promise of resolution, as when in the tonal system of music the ear of memory, as Lyotard remarks, when it hears a dissonant chord or the dominant chord, “anticipates the path to be followed across sound space so as to reach the goal.”7 The songs have a minimum of dissonance; their very complaints are poses. The Holy Sonnets are very much more awash in unresolved turmoil, but, even so, they assume an unquestioned theology, a totality, and are secured by good form, if full-to-bursting with anxiety. By contrast, most modernist work, after Stevens and Williams, ends when still in the shock or misery of dissonance and without a “path” on which to continue. Writing as a lover, of course, wasn’t de rigueur at the time, nor was writing as a worshipper. But unlike, say, George Herbert and Shakespeare, Donne was exceptional if not unique in adopting both platforms, both idealistic, neither of them profane. The two themes shared an amatory transcendence of “Dull sublunary sense” and an identification of the same with the other in a loving bond. (It is this common core of the work that qualifies T.S. Eliot’s stress on Donne’s mobility of mind in deploying diverse ideas.) In both roles, Donne had the task of persuading the addressee into a satisfying union, even a unity, and accepting his assurances of sincerity and devotion. As Celan has it, “the One secret/ mixes in with the word, forever.” The secret, Donne knew, is love. To love is to give oneself to what is similar in a theoretical common identity. As Kristeva puts it in Tales of Love when conveying Thomas Aquinas’s thought, “I am to the extent that I am loved, therefore I love in order to be.”8 Of course, Donne could never be the equal of God as he could reasonably claim to be of a woman, nor could he entirely convince himself that he was pure enough to receive God’s acceptance. In his Holy Sonnets as in his Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, he’s forced into far more intense supplications and expostulations than in the songs, even driven to appeals to be battered, a painfully masochistic position. Donne is above all the writer as speaker. He steps forward almost all the way into actual speech. The very man himself, so it seems, is projected onto and back from the page. And he “speaks” the more confidently and with the more gusto because he knows he has an audience, that he will be understood (first, it is true, by a select circle of friends of the art, but potentially by a much wider audience). Donne’s speaking presence—the illusion of it, its figure—is holographic, individual in its force, tangy in its inflections. He doesn’t speak for all, which would

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be deadening; he speaks for, and as, John Donne, a real or supposed John Donne, like a character in one of Shakespeare’s plays. He doesn’t wind up his poems as if they were music boxes and leave them behind to be played by others. They only work if the reader hallucinates a real speaker, who, ipso facto, is brought to life again. Donne speaks in them in a peculiar tone of renewable immediacy. It is as if he had just spontaneously broken his silence, surprising even himself. In his songs and valedictions his voice is as natural and idiomatic as his formal versification and the degree of elevation proper to poetry allow, whereas in his elegies, under the pressure of stacks of couplets, couplets like little frames that through commas or enjambment may be open at the bottom, his language is somewhat cramped; it suffers from the lack of the continuous character of his stanza-figures (of which more later), stanzas across whose strings a bright-voiced bow is smoothly drawn. Donne benefited more than other poets from the fact that his age was the first great age of English drama. Ironically, Shakespeare, the father of scores of sharply individualized dramatic speakers, adopts in his sonnets a voice so refined that it registers as contemplative and self-subdued (only recall the tone of “Was it the proud full sail of his great verse,/Bound for the prize of all-too-precious you”). The sonnets are marvelous in all sorts of ways, but not in a dramatically quickened voice (or not often at all), an as-it-were bare naked voice, not a dramatistic voice spiced by oaths or projected at the pitch of a cry—unlike, say, Hamlet’s “O that this too too sallied flesh would melt.” Donne, on the other hand, who didn’t write plays, speaks dramatically in his songs and sonnets, with a quicksilver mind and limber tongue, at varying dramatic intensities, even in the midst of rigorously reasoning and songful poetry. He inherited from the drama of his time a license to speak in poetry as an individual intent on a goal, or loudly stricken with emotion, in a come breathe with me voice. The trope that lifts and lights up the page is that of a speaker formed as such only for the occasion and in the shape of the poem, in the moment of turning it out. Just so, as Julia Kristeva takes note in Tales of Love, the jouissance of the troubadour is that of one “who speaks the amatory sharing of his ideal. The troubadour’s bliss is ‘performative,’ it resides in the signifier based on the mesura that is mindful of the ‘lovers’ good’ … as much as the harmony of his song”9—an elaboration that applies to a number of Donne’s own songs. Gusto, then, marks the poems, a strong mind in lucid audibility, making a figure of its own presence, a figure tonal, argumentative, and

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rhythmic. There is strong music from accent and pitch, a vocal delivery framed to be heard for its own exact sensuous and idiomatic sake. “Batter my heart, three-person’d God”—try not to hear that! Donne’s speech is often deed, urgently purposive. Donne casts the “speaker,” as we find it convenient to say nowadays, as exactly that, a speaker, and not via dramatic ventriloquism, but, as near as we can tell, in propria persona. Which is not at all to claim that the poems are not often, if not always, in imagined voice-positions, with arguments made up for the occasion. It is only to say that they all bear Donne’s peculiar mix of passion and wit, a tonal signature running across a range of emotions. “Speaking” in verse, as in prose (think of those immediate addresses to God in Devotions, those “vocal” expostulations), has of course many possible textures and shades. Shakepeare’s plays are collectively a vast compendium of them. But in the relatively undramatic field of the lyric, a speaker in high relief is rare. Those (or that which) we commonly call “the speaker” in a poem more commonly reports past real or imagined experience, absent a present urgency, a living pulse. The would-be speech-effect may be stiff, as in Ben Jonson’s lines, “To draw no envy (Shakespeare) on thy name/Am I thus ample to thy book and fame.” “Speakers” range from bookish to Donne’s teacherlyto-importunate petitions, here in the live feed of the court/chamber of the poem. “Mark but this flea, and mark in this” is an instant localization, here and now, of an object, a situation, an addressee who, for the moment, effectively includes the reader. Again, “Oh, stay, three lives in one flea spare” is an importunate act of dissuasion. “I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I/Did, till we loved?”: the colloquial address immediatizes the words, removing them from the autumnal composure of most writing, whether poetry or prose; and so on with “Go, and catch a falling star,” “Busy old fool, unruly sun,” “For God’s sake hold your tongue, and let me love,” “Spit in my face, you Jews,” all of them vital sparkles in the stream of discourse. Again, they are as singular to Donne as a fingerprint: “that’s Donne, it can only be Donne.” Obviously, a dramatic instinct led to these enlivenments, as did (but this is to say almost the same thing) a close, sensual, lingual intimacy with the life and impact possible to words, especially idioms. Words were for Donne erotic implements, tongues. If Donne qua singer must wrap himself up in meters (not that he would object to that), let them form a “meter-making argument,” in Emerson’s famous phrase, and not a kiss to the metrical tradition. Meter

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in the songs is light and flexible. The Holy Sonnets, in some contrast, drive meter in the direction of grief, self-accusation, and God. They strain after salvation: ‘Tears in his eyes quench the amazing light,/Blood fills his frowns, which from his pierced head fell,/And can that tongue adjudge thee unto hell…” Donne sticks to the English form with its three quatrains and concluding couplet—a form that “suits our headlong and masterful tongue better than the drawn-out dying of the sestet,” George Saintsbury noted in A History of English Prosody10—and numbers the sonnets as a sign of their union and similarity. The performance is at once fiercer and more in line with expectable form than the songs are. Certainly it is often dramatic: “Death be not proud, though some have called thee/Mighty and dreadful.” It thinks aloud through its problems. The lyrical songs contrast with the somewhat bookish quality of, for instance and appropriately, “A Valediction: Of the Booke,” a quality prompted by the check on exuberance proper to a valediction—though until its close the poem is less a farewell than a forecast of how “posterity” will admire the lovers if she, the “dear love,” writes a book about their love (“this all-graved tome/In cypher write, or new made idiom”). Even so, because it is a poem by Donne, there is already a spark of speech in the introductory line: “I’ll tell thee now (dear love) what thou shalt do/To anger destiny, as she doth us.” The seal on the written quality of the poem is the alexandrine that concludes each nine-line stanza. For the most part, the language in the songs is, as the genre requires, not over-learned but plain and crisp, free of Latinate ponderosity, polysyllabic scribble. The lisping th’s and hissing st’s and other laborious suffixes of Middle English, as it trailed into the Elizabethan age, are to the modern ear the only heavinesses. Donne’s lyric instinct is to avoid the unresonant sound of “doth” (just glimpsed above in “as she doth us” in “The Valediction: Of the Booke”) in sensitive opening stanzas. One appears in the second line of “The Sun Rising,” “Why dost thou thus,” but it helps muscle the expostulation by contributing its explosive thick-tongued monosyllable to the petulance of “dost thou thus.” Though “doth” shows up in the third line of “Love’s Growth,” the poem is more a disquisition on love than a passionate address. Donne also makes sparing use, at the outset of the songs, of the hissing, spitting dental “st” suffix, a sound made by pointing and then retracting the tongue, as in “shouldst” and “left’st” and “saw’st” in the second stanza of “The Sun Rising,” and the “be’est” and “find’st” reserved until the second stanza in “Go and Catch a Falling Star,” and “Whilst” in the

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second stanza in “Air and Angels,” and so on. The major exception is “The Blossom,” where, tauntingly, “-st” purposefully sticks out in the sharp-tongued clause “Little think’st thou,” which opens the poem and is thrice repeated. “Doth,” to return to it, also appears in the second line of another valediction, the somewhat weary-toned “A Valediction: Of my Name, in the Window.” The initial focus is on the window glass and there is accordingly no ardor of address, only a declaration: “My name engraved herein,/Doth contribute to my firmness to this glass.” The now obsolete, simple literalness of “through-shine” in the second stanza is a decidedly writerly compound, if delicious. When the beloved emerges in the poem as more than an eye, after the line “Thine eye will give [the glass] price enough”, and is addressed tenderly, what follows is a plain-spoken line of monosyllables: “Here you see me, and I am you,” very Donnian. The first stanza of “The Dream” has “waked’st” and “brok’st” and the even uglier “continued’st” and “thought’st,” and the second stanza piles up their like—“saw’st” in the first line, “”knew’st” in the next, “knew’st” twice in the next, and then, in the third, “cam’st,” and “deal’st” and “cam’st.” Vocal sonority (never strong in the poem, and regularized by the decasyllables) thus spits itself away. By contrast, “Love’s Deity,” which also consists of three stanzas of decasyllables, contains not a single “-st” and the difference is wonderful. (The King James Bible, free of the artificial pressures of meter, is happier in its hangover suffixes, such as eth in “She dwelleth and abideth on the rock,” (Job 39:28). Biblical “saith” is nothing choked.) All the same, Donne is unequaled in projecting speech that has dated very little. Besides, the force of it makes the reader his contemporary. This rhetorical achievement, which overrides rhetoric, is all the more remarkable considering the intelligent density of much of the “talk,” the strong and busy thinking in it, the many conceptions and frequent turns. In my judgment, the combination is not always completely successful. One of the knottiest poems is the beautifully titled “Air and Angels.” The poem opens with a paradox stated in limber “spoken” language: Twice or thrice had I loved thee, Before I knew thy face or name11

“Air and Angels” is based on the unearned vast store of “knowledge” about angels in Christian discourse, for which Thomas Aquinas set the

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terms reflected here. Though angels have no material substance, according to this theological discourse, they can take on bodies made of air. Donne pays the beloved the highest possible compliment in the Catholic framework of the created order of beings: she is an angel, a being without corporeity but, as Aquinas allows, capable of appearing in a location. There came a time when the speaker, having arrived at where she was, saw nothing at first, or, rather, saw a “ lovely glorious nothing.” So far, a triumph of “spoken” lyricism. But from thence the poem becomes involved in tortured English and thick, intricate reasoning, which not even an angel could hold still to listen to; it becomes discourse, and to the point that the conclusion is a generalization, not an intimate address: “Just such disparity/As is ‘twixt air and angels’ purity/Twixt women’s love and men’s will ever be.” The angel is effectively banished from the immediate location. At this point she has no ears to hear. The topic is too arcane for the sensual speaker in Donne to run with. The order of “talk” and writing is reversed in the great somber poem “A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy’s Day, Being the Shortest Day.” The first stanza is a morbid statement, a piece of writing (but what a remarkable piece):                 ‘Tis the year’s midnight, and it is the day’s,                  Lucy’s, who scarce seven hours herself unmasks,                       The sun is spent, and now his flasks                       Send forth light squibs, no constant rays…

—there is an affecting exhalation of sibilance in this composed sound of a melancholy reckoning. The pattern of inside rhymes (“unmasks,” “flasks”) cupped by outside rhymes (“day’s,” “rays”) has here a formal sound, as of something that has come to a standstill and can’t get away from itself. The wonderful phrase “light squibs” (stars like firecrackers, feebly emitting light) is also writerly. The genius in the painful emotional contraction in the poem of “the next world” into “the next spring” and in the heartbreaking “I am every dead thing” is that of immediate selfwitness, not of a spoken address. But later comes “Oft a flood/Have we two wept, and so/Drowned the whole world, us two,” where speech awakens, especially in “us two,” a rupture of the cold efficiency of writing. Again, “Were I a man, that I were one,/I needs must know” ruffles the formal composition. A great glacier-gloom somehow allows for sparks of speech here and there, something more intense than a squib. Modern free verse poets have nothing like this piercing solemnity, which

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is made possible, in part, by the straitening aspect of meter and rhyme combined with a direct, inspired, unsparing simplicity of diction. Not even great metrical Yeats surpasses it. With respect to rhetorical theater, Donne’s prose should not be overlooked. Although Death’s Duel with its droning Latinate polysyllables, its underlying sapping and fatal illness, is a mere shadow of Donne’s peculiar force and far from theater, there is a marked theatrical aspect to Devotions. Indeed, in his preface to the Vintage Spiritual Classics edition of Donne’s Devotions and Death’s Duel, Andrew Motion observes that “Devotions, like all [Donne’s] greatest writing, are a performance … Donne’s sickbed is a stage …We admire the patient as if we were looking at him across footlights.”12 I feel less of a spectatorial separation from the sentences in Devotions than that, but the sentences are certainly syntax unfurled, flares to attract God’s attention, as well as ways to satisfy the desire to write virtuosically. Penned in a period of hellish recurring fever, a Sisyphean disease of multiple relapses, they are now and again, not surprisingly, speech-intensified (“I limit not, I condition not, I choose not, I wish not”13), as well as a continual address to “God, O my God.” Such statements as “These heats, O Lord, which thou hast brought upon this body are but thy chafing of the wax, that thou mightest seal me to thee: these spots are but the letters in which thou has written thine own name and conveyed thyself to me, etc.,”14 are rollingly and dashingly composed. They are what they are because, to breathe the atmosphere of hope in his double crisis of body and conscience, Donne required the open “air” of language, its capacity for being expansive as well as emphatic, its fertility with conceptions; he needed more and still more of its air. And not least the sentences are what they are because—he could not help it—he was a maestro of syntax that rides on waves of metaphor and, not infrequently, paradox, as in “I am dead, I was born dead, and from the first laying of these mud walls in my conception, they have moldered away, and the whole course of life is but an active death.”15 Here, the showman is typically subdued to the sinner unfolding his disenchantment with natural happiness, but not by much: the glory of language is in its folds. The opportunity for verbal virtuosity was Donne’s heaven, and not so very profane a heaven, since, after all, what is the world in all its energy and multiplicity if not a virtuoso performance? A “Book,” Donne called it. “O My God (ever constant to thine own ways), thou hast proceeded openly, intelligibly, manifestly by the book. From thy first book, the

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book of life, never shut to thee, but never thoroughly open to us”; and in “the book of nature”; and in “the Scriptures, where thou hadst written all in the Old, and then lightedst us a candle to read it by in the New Testament…”16 God, too, is an author. What a pleasure to flow and overflow in an inspired agility of mind, each moment of expression a further discovery, an opening up. At the same time that the discourse is (despite the author’s conviction of unworthiness) a narcissistic bliss, “one’s own” in Thomistic parlance, it is directed to God as well as to the author’s own ear, and meant to be “ours together.” I shall turn from the topic of Donne’s verbal gusto for another almost inexhaustible topic, his stanzas as figures of feeling and motion. As a poet of his era (principally the first two decades of the seventeenth century), he had not only the happiness of knowing that his roles—his dramatic roles as a speaker-writer—would be met with recognition and approval by the educated class, but the pleasure of inventing new stanza formations, an activity that was rife in the age of popular “songs” performed with a lute, whose considerable and often novel variety of stanzashapes, however, when looked at in Elizabethan songbooks, do not rival Donne’s in felicity. The four exemplary American poets I have named are less happy in their moment, having been swept into the current of the deconstruction of “good forms,” such forms as Emily Dickinson (not without delicious contrariness) and Robert Frost could still make something of. Hart Crane’s lyrical eloquence created the illusion that he was in the lineage of set meter and rhyme even when he wasn’t. Eliot echoed old metrical forms in invisible quotations marks, historicizing and destabilizing them. William Carlos Williams, the chief rebel in that generation, rejected the old forms as “fascistic.” Meter was gradually quashed, the art of the stanza left the safety zone. By the time Robert Lowell took up the sonnet form with a hand shaking from illness of mind, it was essentially all over. “Sometimes, my mind is a rocked and dangerous bell …/Something inhuman always rising in me.” The ganglia of Lowell’s shattering bouts of manic depression webbed his sense of history with disaster. It is a sense shared by Plath, Ashbery, and Graham. Their common view is summed up by Derrida’s statement in 1968 that the future can now “only be anticipated in the form of an absolute danger.” Exhausting, unraveling, compounded personal and historical despair resulted in Lowell’s interior shredding of the fourteen-line sonnet form

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in History and other late volumes, and the shattering of the mise-en-scène. Plath still preserved the mise-en-scène, the screen of storied representation, but alternately electrified it with mania and dragged it into depression. In “Europe” and other of his early poems, Ashbery shattered sense itself. And Jorie Graham has almost desperately adopted very long lines, like so many operating tables, rejecting rhyme and regular rhythm as she struggles to find a justification of life and searches for evidence that it is possible, in any case, to live in time, as opposed to being constantly unselved by it. Roughly speaking, what Arthur Henry Hallam called “those different powers of poetic disposition, the energies of Sensitive, of Reflective, of Passionate Emotion,” were respectively distributed to Lowell, Graham, and Plath. “In former times,” Hallam continued in his prescient essay “On Some of the Characteristics of Modern Poetry” (1831), these powers were intermingled, but there arose “a violent and unusual action in the several component functions, each for itself, all striving to reproduce the regular power which the whole had once enjoyed”; “the whole system no longer worked harmoniously.”17 In a narrower perspective, T.S. Eliot made something of the same observation when he noted that, unlike modern poets, Donne had a mind that could “smell its thoughts as immediately as the odor of a rose.”18 Donne, his work often “whole” and “harmonious,” was, I say again, greatly facilitated by his era’s devotion to good forms. His military service abroad, his participation in wars of empire, didn’t break his nerve. He appears not to have thought the less of history for it (whereas Shakespeare was very much impressed with the evils of war). Donne’s buoyancy was in fact hard to strike down, until fevers did it, and even then he was roused to passion in appealing to God for a restoration of both body and soul. Donne had a genius for creating stanzas that are independent shapes of feeling. Saintsbury notes of “Go and Catch a Falling Star” that “nowhere shall we find a happier combination … from the rocking trochees of the sestet to the sudden spondees of the ‘bob’ and the iambic close”; and he praises the “entirely new music” of the poem’s “marvelously sustained six-line stanza (6, 10, 8, 8, 10, 6 ababcc).”19 But even Donne’s sixanes vary in combinations of line length, and what is marvelous is the inspired variety of all his stanza-forms, their right forms for their emotional content, their particular tone; or so they make one feel. Donne was a poet, as it were, of the stanza, the living stanza. Donne’s stanza-creations are not baking pans, not stale familiar forms, but, rather, refreshed or nonce libidinal and musical figures, vital in

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the instancy of their motions. The speech-effects in the songs and sonnets would be almost as nothing if it weren’t for the rhythm-figures that inform the voice, hence the ear, and give a limber body to the affect. The through-flowing rhythms of the poems respond as much to contingency, and to the speaker’s dramatic stance, and to the poem’s designation (its thematic cast), as to their own form, and constitute a sensory mobile space. They are not a meaning; they are gestural. The line “Go, and catch a falling star” opens an altogether novel affective experience, as a figure of a slight adrenalin charge in challenging its audience to search high and low to find “a woman true, and fair.” The comma after “Go,” though it may be a punctuation tic of the time, makes of “Go” the lighting of a fuse; Go, you have your challenge, the impossible is open before you. This opening line has an altogether different sound from the first line of, for instance, “Woman’s Constancy”: “Now hast thou loved me one whole day,” which, with only one additional syllable, sounds laboriously longer, thanks in part to the slowing, disgruntled row of stresses, the stiff-neck monosyllables. “Go, and catch a falling star” has also an altogether different sound from the marching boast of another first line, “I have done one braver thing,” and from the regretful hesitation of “If yet I have not all thy love,” as also from the self-rebuke in the middle pair of stresses in “I am two fools, I know” and the buzzy objection, “Busy old fool, unruly sun,” and so on. Yet each opening is struck clean off and is instantly captivating, perfect in its way. How sensitive Donne’s lines are to his feelings, above all to a feelingcharged speech, and how varied that feeling is, that just-now-conceived feeling, that dramatic instinct for an immediately telling tone and rhythm. Compare George Herbert, whose occasional speech-aliveness tends to come in embedded quotations—for instance, “‘You just sit down,’ says Love, ‘and taste my meat’:/So I did sit and eat” (“Love III”) . The couplets that accumulate in Donne’s elegies—for example, “Whoever loves, if he do not propose/The right true end of love, he’s one that goes”—are often too mindful of their duty to rhyme to attain to theater, with, however, a very great exception in elegy XI, “On His Mistress,” where the speaker’s young mistress is cautioned not to disclose their “long-hid” love when he travels abroad: Nor praise, nor dispraise me, nor bless nor curse Openly love’s force; nor in bed fright thy nurse With midnight’s startings, crying out, “Oh, oh Nurse, O my love is slain; I saw him go

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O’er the white Alps, alone; I saw him, I, Assailed, fight, taken, stabbed, bleed, fall, and die.”

Here, the rhyme, as a blanket pattern, goes into the shadows, stunningly subdued by the dialogue. The perfectly hit-off dramatic moment turns the “o” sounds into virtual moans and cries; and the brilliantly placed terminal “I,” which cynicism might attribute to the need for a rhyme with “die,” is a self-stabbing acknowledgement of the injustice she feels that she, who cares more for him than for all the world, should see him thus, murderously assailed. And, yes, the form prompts the doubling of “Oh” to complete the pentameter line, but how powerful it is; it electrifies the lines with the young woman’s extreme distress, which the speaker flatters and alarms himself to picture, and even more to hear. In the songs, Donne’s stanzas are shaped to figure forth a certain speaking stance or horseshoe throw of desire, making them figures of feeling, as a musical phrase is a figure. It is not that the birth of a stanza from emotion is new; for it is (at least it used to be) expected of poetry. William Hazlitt: “there are, no doubt, certain thoughts that lead to certain tones of voice, or modulations of sound, and change ‘the words of Mercury into the songs of Apollo.”20 The “adaptation of the movement of sound and rhythm to the subject” and the emotion it evokes is the rule. But Donne is a finer artist than most in the emotional cast of the stanza as such. His stanza-motions largely, but not entirely, avoid not only couplets but boxy quatrain-stanzas in short lines with abab rhyme, such as those in “The Undertaking,”                         I have done one braver thing                           Than all the Worthies did,                         And yet a braver thence doth spring,                            which is, to keep that hid

where the effect is witty, not affectual, and again in “The Fever,” which is affecting:                         Oh do not die, for I shall hate                           All women so, when thou art gone,                         that thee I will not celebrate,                              When I remember, thou wast one

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In this last, however, the sentiment doesn’t altogether escape seeming potted, though the illusion of a real address is sustained at least through the vigorously stressed “All women so.” But the exquisite “The Ecstasy” is in the same form—or, rather, it flows through the same form, stirring it up in its progress:                         Where, like a pillow on a bed,                            A pregnant bank swelled up, to rest                         The violet’s reclining head,                              Sat we two one another’s best

This is a perfect triumph of the form. The periodic sentence concludes in satisfying coincidence with the last line—sits down, as it were, at the point of “Sat we two, one another’s best.” The sentence swells up in expectancy of its eventual delivery, then rests. The rhyme is the opposite of monotonous; fittingly, it lulls, it purrs. Long i doesn’t occur until it can recur almost at once, recline on itself in echo: “The violet’s reclining head.” The accomplishment is the greater in that the lines are eights, not tens, an increased challenge to keeping the rhyme from being tough as mortar. As for the quatrains in “The Bait,” in eights rhyming aabb, they succeed because of the light, sportive quality of the writing. And the quatrains in “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,” off to a brisk start with an unbroken first line, “As virtuous men pass mildly away,” are effectively double, the sense coming in successive pairs of stanzas, keeping the poem moving. Usually, Donne invents a voice-amenable and affect-bearing form for each of his ideational and dramatic situations, sensitively adjusting the lengths of the lines where advantageous. For example, the stanza in “Go and Catch a Falling Star” begins with four sevens, rhyming abab, then broadens into two rhyming eights, and then contracts into two rhyming twos, which further rhyme with the final line of eight syllables. Given its tone, the poem cannot support the relative gravity of the pentameter; it has no call or space for an expansive feeling. The metrical pattern is as inconstant as the women the poem complains about. By contrast, the great pentameter line, “And now good morrow to our waking souls,” which begins the second stanza of “The Good Morrow,” enjoys a broad curve of feeling; it has the sound of a huge welcome, a grateful arrival, a much needed relief after the agitated, often-interrupted lines in the first stanza. It seems internally larger than

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the other decasyllabic lines in the same poem, and even than the alexandrine that concludes each of the three stanzas. The line “And true plain hearts do in the faces rest” is also gratefully empathic, free of caesuras; but in this instance the trio of stresses, “true plain hearts,” is followed by a stressed “do” and the effect is not wide open, but nailing. The three successive stresses in “now good morrow” are a superlative example of sound illuminating and amplifying feeling. The vocalic step down of the “o” from “now” to “good” to “mor-” is upended by a final long “o,” and in sympathy a sight rhyme unites “now” and “morrow.” What could be called the theme of “The Good Morrow” is pointed up by the line “And makes one little room, an everywhere;” it requires of the stanza-shape that it be as a room of ample size (here, decasyllables do nicely), without sharp corners, even if, characteristically, Donne uses caesuras in a number of the lines to add renewed impetus in midstream, mark phases in a process (e.g., “If ever any beauty I did see,/Which I desired, and got,’twas but a dream of thee”), or set off units in the architecture of the sense (“And makes one little room, an everywhere”). Among the many notable stanza-motions is the one that opens “The Sun Rising,” where, after the two initial punchy short lines, “Busy old fool, unruly sun,/Why dost thou thus,” it quiets down to less vehement pentameters: “Through windows, and through curtains call on us?/Must to thy motions lovers’ seasons run”; then, lest the pentameters sacrifice too much energy, they in turn give way to two eights. These last recall the protestive first line, also an eight, as the apostrophe to the sun is renewed: “Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide/Lake schoolboys, and sour prentices.” The stanza then swings back to two tens: “Go tell courthuntsmen, that the King will ride,/Call country ants to harvest offices.” And these are followed by two more tens in a triumphant concluding couplet, which, set as it is to the left of most of the lines above it, has an importantly long look and for the ear is dragged out by terminal nasals (“clime,” “time”) and one of Donne’s frequently recurring monosyllabic, dicing tropes of the list (lists consisting of multiple nouns or verbs, his knack for them bested only, if bested flamboyantly, by Gerard Manley Hopkins): “Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clime,/Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.” The couplet is syntactically whole in itself, unlike the preceding eight lines, which spill into two sentences. And this strong effect is repeated at the conclusions of the other two stanzas as well, though in the final one, calmness having been achieved, every pair of lines ends with a period, except for one semicolon.

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The three stanzas of “The Indifferent,” a show-off performance in favor of sexual promiscuity, set a new pattern by spreading to a couplet of twelves in lines 2 and 3, “Her whom abundance melts, and her whom want betrays/Her who loves loneness best, and her who masks and plays,” the better to suggest that the voluble speaker is breathlessly contemplating a rich field of female abundance, and is indifferent as to choice. The other singular thing in the make-up of “The Indifferent” is the weaving into its texture of the words “you” and “true” throughout, as if in an imperfectly suppressed temptation to succumb, after all, to a particular “you.” I will move on from the topic of fresh stanza-formations, though it has hardly been exhausted, to a third kind of figure, after voice and stanza—namely the image-figure, singling out the major type: comparisons (analogies, metaphors, and similes). Houses, stages, kingdoms, farms, hills, rivers, seas, countries, continents the earth in Donne’s poetry “honks with metaphors,” to borrow a phrase from Osip Mandelstam. For Donne, metaphors are not ornaments, but the very axis of his thought. He did not fail to make the most of the fact that metaphors mimic love: the figure itself is amatory: in it, similarity is pressed toward identification, even as it creates the mental ecstasy of vacillating and vibrating between two different things. In Donne’s work, the ardor of both sexual love and devotional love continually opens spaces for expansive comparative figures, two-in-one images. His imagination did not have to change its habits, its loves, in turning from one subject to the other. To begin with the religious comparisons: when Donne turns, desperately, to Christian religious verse, he is the more emboldened to be figurative because God, as he observed in Devotions, is “a figurative, metaphorical God,” and not in word only, but in his works: “The style of thy works, the phrase of thine actions, is metaphorical. The institution of the whole worship in the old law was a continual allegory; types and figures overspread all.” And not just the “old law” is figural. This naturally expansive and uniting God is by his very nature a God in whose words there is such a height of figures, such voyages, such peregrinations to fetch remote and precious metaphors, such extensions, such spreadings, such curtains of allegories, such third heavens of hyperboles, so harmonious elocutions, so retired and so reserved expressions, so commanding persuasions, so persuading commandments, such sinews even

188  C. Bedient in thy milk, and such things in thy words, as all profane authors seem of the seed of the serpent that creeps, thou art the Dove that flies.21

The whole sentence (and not only what I have quoted of it) displays a remarkable imitative ardor, has all the enumerative, “spreading” magnificence possible to a sentence and indeed to a list—for here Donne’s fondness for listing parts and aspects meets with a great and worthy subject. The style ranges all the way from “plain sense” to the unsurpassable boldness of the preternatural metaphor “such sinews even in thy milk” and, after that final comma splice, the metaphor “thou art the Dove that flies,” which all but literally flies off from “the serpent that creeps.” It is a sentence that will not be a common “torn” sentence (elegy XII) that resists its own death as it addresses a deathless and unbroken God. (It flies right over the placing of “that” before “as” [“as all profane authors”] that would make it more correct, but not better.) Effectively, the sentence itself is a metaphor for the overflowing gifts and abundance of God’s creative generosity in stimulating the imagination through his figurative world and words. God’s is, then, the original imagination, and He is the first and of course finest maker of phrases, the supreme tropologist. And much as God is an author, “all mankind is one author, and is one volume.”22 What unites the two major divisions of Donne’s amatory writing— natural and devotional—is a figure-making Eros. Donne is like “medieval man,” who, in Kristeva’s view, “cannot write without loving.” 23 His amatory figures are justly celebrated as among the most ingenious in English literature. The historically late American poets Lowell and Plath were also gifted at creating images that dazzle in their exteriorizations of emotion and the sensory. Plath’s figures, in particular, have a stunning effect; her very terror of existing without paternal protection drove her to fashion furnished caves of comparisons, literally so in “Nick and the Candlestick.” But like Graham and Ashbery, Plath and Lowell were unnerved writers, and regularly produced disconcerting images. They are much nearer to the riven Donne of Devotions than of the songs, but lack Donne’s saving credence in a deity, the love Donne gave to the anchor and height of an ideal father. Donne, at least, was still able to love love and delighted to find fresh metaphors for the natural union of souls—an erotic activity extravagantly demonstrated in the biblical Song of Songs. Love is never quite of and on the ground. Like the Dove in the sentence quoted from Devotions, it’s a

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flyer. In Devotions, Donne writes that “a man, that is a world, is all the things in the world,” a metaphor that makes metaphorization as natural to “a man” as breathing is. A man has, as a person-world, an imaginative everywhereness. Since all things in the world are as yet unharmonized in him, they are ripe, a kit, for mutual figurations. The telescoping of signifieds figured by metaphors can also be found in some of Donne’s paradoxes (e.g., “she I, I she”). In particular, love “makes one little room an everywhere.” It melds together two worlds, or four: each “lover hath one, and is one.” ‘‘Here you see me, and I am you.” Not only expansion, then, but contraction, too, is an essential dynamic of love, as of metaphor, and acts as a slip-through, a mixing alembic. Even hyperbole—in its Greek meaning “a throwing beyond,” a definition akin to that of metaphor (metapherein = to transport)—can be happy in “impossible” contractions: “All kings in one bed lay.” Hyperbolically, the lover who sails for his mistress’ “India, in that way/Shall at her fair Atlantic navel stay” (elegy XIII). The earth’s geography is here contracted into one woman’s body, while, conversely, her body is transformed into a vast anatomical realm. Exaggerations are of course native to love, which in its first ardor lacks measure. Rhyme figures into the dynamic of an erotic (harmonious) closingtogether. An auditory subclass of simile, it trades in soft differences. Famous for their wit, ingenuity, and feeling, a few of Donne’s comparisons are bravura performances. They not only illustrate the contentions of the poems; they dare to be a controlled extravagance, they obtrude their improbability, which, however, the poet’s cleverness works to deny. Their self-pleasing wit is entertaining as a triumphant move in a game. Many of Donne’s poems read above all as arguments enhanced in small or in large by figural illustrations. But extended comparisons (a staple of the standard definition of “metaphysical poetry”) are less frequent in the poems than one might seem to remember—this last because, when they stand out, they are stunning. They are as flesh to the poem’s thought, they have a great force of persuasion. In them, a thought stands up in glory, no longer lost among grasshoppers. But somewhat remarkably, Donne’s strongest figures, with the famous exception of the flea (which, so John Carey notes in his edition of The Major Works, was a motif popular in Europe in the sixteenth century24), point us not to the living world but to the elements (seas, earth) and common material things: rooms, buildings, gold, threads—palpable inanimate materials that you could almost reach out and touch. For

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instance, the sweet invisible union of two souls in “The Ecstasy” is figured in a material way, by eye-beams threading the eyes. Donne is here citing the extramission theory that rays originate in the eyes, which can be traced back to Alcmaeon of Croton’s theory that there is fire in the brain, as seen when a blow is delivered to the head. Well and good. But threads? The figure uncomfortably violates the sensitive organic process of seeing and all but violently sews the lovers’ eyes together; I flinch at it, but not so Donne, whose flesh-empathy is not particularly strong. After all, he finds it fitting to compare a soul-union to a mechanical drawing tool, a compass, and also to “gold to airy thinness beat.” His soul was part mineral. But it was not entirely proof against the horror of nothingness that infects the modern poets I have named. It is staggering to find him saying, in decomposing slippery punctuation in “A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy’s Day,” that love’s “art did express/A quintessence even from nothingness,/From dull privations, and lean emptiness/He ruined me, and I am re-begot/Of absence, darkness, death; things which are not.” To find him thus as stripped down as Robert Lowell is in “The Skunk” (where he says “I myself am hell;/nobody’s here—”) is, as I say, stunning. It is as brave and piercing a statement as any made by Shakespeare’s Hamlet It is quite as if all the wealth of happy representation and the validity of the invisible elsewhere in Donne’s work were merely the illusions of desire, a paper wall, as indeed one line of modern theory from Nietzsche to Freud and Lacan maintain is so. This is the theory that has led to art that, as Lyotard puts it, “endures the anguish of maintaining reality in a state of suspicion.”25 But in the great poem “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,” Donne is still far from that kind of collapse of illusion. Love is figured in hard materials. The ravishing simile “Like gold to airy thinness beat” cannot make anyone wince at the body’s capacity for pain, even if it harbors, perhaps subconsciously, an acknowledgment that the physical separation of the lovers (one of them in Europe, the other in England) would be a beating. Such sensitivity is distracted by the rich glowing beauty of the mineral, and the image and idea of extreme ductility, stretched into a state that is the next thing to atmospheric light, virtually at the edge of the incorporate angels. The mundane if smartly compelling figure of the draughtsman’s compass that takes up and climaxes the poem in the final four stanzas is similarly lacking in the capacity for sensate feeling, and similarly dismissive of

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a “breach” in physical continuity. If the two legs of the compass could feel anything in common, it would merely be the sensation of being attached near the top. The figure appears straightforward, and effectively is so, but if you stop to think about it, you find complications. It succeeds through sheer bravura, not in the flawless logic of its application. Here are the last three stanzas, prefaced by the stanza that prepares for them.                         Our two souls therefore, which are one,                           Though I must go, endure not yet                         A breach, but an expansion,                           Like gold to airy thinness beat.                         If they be two, they are two so,                           As stiff twin compasses are two,                         Thy soul the fixed foot, makes no show                           To move, but doth, if th’other do.                         And though it in the centre sit,                            Yet when the other far doth roam,                         It leans, and hearkens after it,                           And grows erect, as that comes home.                         So wilt though be to me, who must                           Like th’ other foot, obliquely run;                         Thy firmness makes my circle just,                            And makes me end, where I begun.

The mechanical attachment of the two “compasses” (a term that counter-thematically points to the actual plurality of the compass legs, while supplying a syllable needed for the line count) represents a sturdy transmaterial bond; fair enough. But it is only the planted fixed foot that allows for the true completion of the circle by the roaming foot. This asymmetry of function implicitly honors the young woman’s perfect constancy and admits that the encircling leg, the speaker’s, in its slide and glissando, is more inclined to wander, as indeed it does. Are the two souls, then, not “mixed equally” (“The Good Morrow”)? The fixed foot, in leaning after the other, maintains their unity. While the other

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foot is drawing, the fixed foot is the draw. But it cannot be closed upon by the roaming foot so long as the circle is being made, a circle that must be completed because its symbolism of wholeness is essential to the argument. The stay-at-home foot will make any movement on the part of the attached other foot an apparent evidence of faithfulness—that is, so long as the drawing does not stop. In Devotions, Donne thinks about a compass as he addresses God: And he that would describe a circle in paper, if he have brought that circle within one inch of finishing, yet if he remove his compass he cannot make it up a perfect circle except he fall to work again, to find out the same center, so, though setting that foot of my compass upon thee, I have gone so far as to the consideration of myself, yet if I depart from thee, my center, all is imperfect.26

Here there is a misalliance between departing from the center—a linear breach of union—and pausing before resuming the circle (“except he fall to work again”), a temporary rebellion against it, an estrangement. It is the same complication of faithful center versus a faithful roaming return to its circumferential starting point as in “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning.” Maintaining the circle of devotion despite interruptions would be parallel to a good sentence, which, Donne remarks in Death’s Duel, is periodical: “As the first part of a sentence pieces well with the last, and never respects, never hearkens after the parenthesis that comes between, so doth a good life flow.”27 The sentences in the final stanzas of “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” have the flow of “good” sentences that completely avoid the temptation to stray, inasmuch as, regardless of the typical little thought-twitches of the commas, they are not distracted from their aim by parentheses. More, the quatrains of the three final stanzas fall into pairs of two-line, essentially complete statements, not unlike the pairing and twinning of the compass feet. In the analogy, the travelling foot doesn’t even start out from the fixed foot, except by inference that the compass was closed up to begin with; it is at one and the same distance at the end as at the beginning. That it should complete the circle is a triumph only because the circle is an obvious, traditional figure of unbroken symmetry and wholeness,

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equidistant at all points from its center. Standard symbolism thus comes into underwrite the theme of a faithful union. The circle-figure itself deviates from the original two-in-one union-figure, and, if it were not for its independent symbolic role, it would be anticlimactic relative to the physical closing up of the compass, which Donne, avoiding ­patness, doesn’t picture. This duality in the compass figure, a figural two-in-one, is similar to the contrast of the three-dimensional compass with the twodimensional circle—spatial figures that are more divergent than complementary, respectively opening up first a vertical plane and then a horizontal plane without a rupture in continuity. Considering that the prolonged comparison descends to a mechanical device, it is marvelously engrossing and finally moving, engrossing and moving not least because the trope is an astonishingly bold performance, a poetic first. It’s a rare pleasure to see it carried through triumphantly to the end; a credit more to an exceptionally confident and competent ingenuity than to insight. To demonstrate the dynamic of an invisible and virtually mystical union with a mechanical procedure—as engineering enters metaphysics—marks a new limit of trusting in both analysis and sensory experience to express a spiritual ideal. But the comparison is simultaneously a coda and a climax: a “coda” in that the rarefied nature of the love has already been evoked in the earlier stanzas, not least in the lines “we by a love, so much refined/That ourselves know not what it is.” The main work is done before the extended comparison begins. It commences a figural show that assumes mystery but lives and unfolds as a lucid analytical demonstration. What fullness! A metaphysical sky spreads around the early stanzas, and then a profane tool and profane drawing paper are brought in to complete the poem, made to feel essential to it. The image of drawing a perfect circle, never mind that the circle in question is not the poem, is exquisitely closural. This is poetry that evokes more than philosophy can but also trades in the beckoning pictures of spatial materiality, figured optical space, the thickness of the sensuous. It does not cut up the place of life into incompatible parts. It is in that sense whole, as poetry in English no longer is and may never be again.

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Notes













1. Jean-Françoise Lyotard, Discourse, Figure, trans. Antony Hudek, Mary Lydon, and John Mowitt (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), p. 8. 2. Jean-Françoise Lyotard, Driftworks, Roger McKeon (ed.) (Semiotext(e), 1984). 3. Ibid., p. 27. 4. Ibid., p. 32. 5. Paul Celan, Corona: Selected Poems of Paul Celan, trans. by Susan H. Gillespie (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill of Barrytown, 2013). 6.  Ibid., pp. 101, 103, 105. 7.  Driftworks, p. 96. 8. Julia Kristeva, Tales of Love, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), p. 171. 9. Ibid., p. 184. 10. George Saintsbury, A History of English Prosody: From the Twelfth Century to the Present Day, Vol. 2, (London: Macmillan, 1908), p. 146. 11. The source of the texts of Donne’s poems quoted in this essay is John Donne—The Major Works John Carey (ed.) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). 12. Andrew Motion, “Preface to the Vintage Spiritual Classics Edition” of John Donne, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions and Death’s Duel, with The Life of Dr. John Donne by Izaak Walton (?Location?: Vintage, 1999), p. xiv. 13. Ibid., p. 82. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid., p. 114. 16. Ibid., pp. 55–56. 17.  Arthur Henry Hallam, “On Some of the Characteristics of Modern Poetry,” Victorian Poetry and Poetics, G. Robert Strange (ed.) (Houghton Mifflin, 1959), p. 806. 18. T.S. Eliot, “The Metaphysical Poets,” Selected Essays (Faber and Faber, 1958), 287. 19. Ibid., pp. 163–164. Saintsbury called Donne “a great experimenter in prosody” (161). 20. William Hazlitt, “On Poetry in General,” Selected Writings, Jon Cook (ed.) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 321. 21. Devotions, pp. 118–119. 22. Ibid.

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23. Ibid., p. 170. 24. Ibid., p. 438, n. 89. 25. Jean-Françoise Lyotard. 26.  Devotions, p. 128. 27.  Deaths Duel, p. 169.

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Turn, Return, Revolve: John Donne’s Kinetic Poetics Joseph Campana

Tides turn and people face us. It is easy to imagine facing greater powers (a maker, the music) just as it is easy to anticipate, with dread, some final turn of the screw. Turning and facing are gestures that might be emotional or ethical, physical or spiritual, and they can be, quite powerfully, poetic as well. Many sonnets famously turn at the volta before ringing to a conclusion. In a marvelous essay in Green Thoughts, Green Shades, Peter Sacks finds, in the sonnet tradition, a veritable gallery of faces central to the operation and the potency of those memorable engines of thought.1 While a few sonnets will strut and fret across the stage of this essay, my star performer will be John Donne, a poet of turning and facing. In all likelihood Donne’s most quoted poem, at least by poets, is that holy sonnet of nearly unmatched fervor—“Batter My Heart”—which in the end cries out for a violent ravishment by divinity. For many this serves as the battle cry of poetic passion, the “break, blow, burn” of a poem hitting like an emphatic fist might strike the chest in some great barbaric yawp of emphasis. My interest in Donne certainly resides in the physicality of his poetry. In fact, I would say he is a poet for whom the kinetic is central, vital, and essential. Donne is a poet who turns and faces. At times this means he is a poet that turns away so as not to face— a muse, a lover, a deity. At other times he turns, returns, and revolves,

J. Campana (*)  Rice University, Houston, USA © The Author(s) 2017 J. Herz (ed.), John Donne and Contemporary Poetry, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-55300-9_17

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surveying the poetic universe that shadows and provides shape to the physical cosmos. After all, the term for a range of literary devices— trope—also means to turn or to twist, to direct or to change. The history of poetry is an archive of possibility, a repository of solutions to problems poets still face. How do we turn? How do we face? How do we wield language to make contact with both the seen and the unseen worlds in which we dwell? Some poets we visit regularly. Shakespeare’s ubiquity defies sense making. His appeal not only to contemporary poets but to filmmakers, gamers, and salt-and-pepper-shaker makers is simple to observe but difficult, though not impossible, to explain with any specificity. How much less invoked by contemporary poets or readers is Philip Sidney, even though he remains one of the most technically accomplished poets ever to put pen to page. Similarly, Edmund Spenser hovers like a shade in some graveyard of the language’s past. His perfection of Chaucerian drag in alexandrine stanzas elicited from Ben Jonson, mere decades after Spenser’s death, the judgment that the great poet of The Faerie Queene “in affecting the Ancients writ no language.”2 While some poets have worked assiduously in the wake of Spenser, he remains, for the most part, quaintly distant and largely unread, although his presence in Irish poetry looms larger than one might expect.3 Even his fellow epic universe-builder, John Milton, seems relatively untroubled in contemporary poetry, though Geoffrey Hill proves a powerful exception.4 John Donne may lack the ubiquity of a Shakespeare but how easily he is invoked. “Batter my heart!” a teacher of mine once cried, nearly thumping her chest with the primal force of that barbaric yawp to punctuate a claim about what she felt was lacking from the scene of contemporary poetry (and the poems in that particular workshop) was an element of passion. Oddly enough, passion, at least to my ears, echoes persistently, almost cacophonously, in the annals of the now. Intensity we seem to have aplenty, if not the rigorous daring or the precarious risk-taking of Donne. What I want to suggest here is that, passion and rigor aside, Donne teaches us not to batter our hearts but to turn. That enticing and ever-elusive retroactive moniker “metaphysical,” which has described the poetry of Donne and some of his contemporaries ever since John Dryden and Samuel Johnson deployed the term as a slight, has always been best used to describe the wrenching incongruities of metaphor. Those metaphysical metaphors, sometimes gathered into conceits, bear witness to a palpable and sometimes paradoxical intermingling of physicality and abstraction. Thus, as the world turns, so does the body.

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And as the body turns with it turns a universe of spheres and influences. But even in an age of the New Science, the fundamental kinetics of Donne’s poetry cannot be understood without reference to another kind of turning, a turning and twisting of conscience in the cauldron of religious tension. Turning, that is to say, is also conversion. * What does it mean to turn? Traveling on the road to Damascus, Saul of Tarsus, soon to be the apostle Paul, saw a light, heard a voice, went blind, and thereby underwent perhaps the most famous, perhaps the most paradigmatic, experience of Christian conversion: 1. And Saul yet breathing out threatnings & slaughter against the disciples of the Lord, went vnto the high Priest, 2. And desired of him letters to Damascus, to the Synagogues, that if hee found any of this way, whether they were men or women, hee might bring them bound vnto Hierusalem. 3. And as he iourneyed he came neere Damascus, and suddenly there shined round about him a light from heauen. 4. And he fel to the earth, and heard a voice saying vnto him, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me? 5. And he said, Who art thou Lord? And the Lord said, I am Iesus whom thou persecutest: It is hard for thee to kicke against the prickes. 6. And he trembling and astonished, said, Lord, what wilt thou haue mee to doe? And the Lord said vnto him, Arise, and goe into the citie, and it shall be told thee what thou must doe. 7. And the men which iourneyed with him, stood speechlesse, hearing a voice, but seeing no man. 8. And Saul arose from the earth, and when his eyes were opened, he saw no man: but they led him by the hand, and brought him into Damascus. 9. And he was three dayes without sight, and neither did eate, nor drinke. (Acts 9: 1–9 KJV, 1611)

The conversion that will result in a change of attitude for one previously “breathing out threatnings & slaughter against the disciples of the Lord”

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emphasizes a moment of illumination and a moment of being hailed or called. Saul sees and then hears. The resulting sensory overstimulation is followed by sensory deprivation: “And he was three dayes without sight, and neither did eate, nor drinke.” Paul’s conversion was frequently represented by Renaissance artists. In “The Conversion of Saul,” Michelangelo depicted, in near technicolor splendor, a prone Saul holding up an arm as if to block the extraordinary beam emitted by the hand of God, who reaches down from His cloudy environs amidst a host of angels. Caravaggio at least twice depicted the same conversion scene in stark chiaroscuro contrast to the hyperilluminated Michelangelo. In The Conversion of Saint Paul, a grizzled, nearly naked Saul kneels, his hands over his eyes as if to block the light washing over his body. In Conversion on the Way to Damascus, a handsome young Saul lies on his back, his eyes closed, his arms flung out wide in an ecstatic openness to the illuminating light from above that suffuses his prone body. He is unaware, perhaps blissfully so, of the groom holding his horse or the horse’s hoof precariously held up over his body. From opposite ends of a spectrum of light and obscurity, Michelangelo and Caravaggio meet in the middle to affirm conversion’s experience of nearly obliterating epiphany. A spectacular display of light or darkness and an irresistible voice result in a change of heart and mind. St. Augustine’s famous conversion came in the wake of a small voice calling to him to “Come and read,” but ultimately he conveys the consequences of that voice in a potently dramatic and lyrical fashion and in one of the most famous passages from Confessions: I have learnt to love you late, Beauty at once so ancient and so new! I have learnt to love you late! You were within me, and I was in the world outside myself. I searched for you outside myself and, disfigured as I was, I fell upon the lovely things of your creation. You were with me, but I was not with you. The beautiful things of this world kept me far from you and yet, if they had not been in you, they would have had no being at all. You called me; you cried aloud to me; you broke my barrier of deafness. You shone upon me; your radiance enveloped me; you put my blindness to flight. You shed your fragrance about me; I drew breath and now I gasp for your sweet odour. I tasted you, and now I hunger and thirst for you. You touched me, and I am inflamed with love of your peace. Confessions 10.275

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Spiritual truth calls and deafens, illuminates and blinds, floods the senses with overwhelming experiences that are visual, auditory, olfactory, tactile, and even gustatory. In spite of the dramatic intensity of these iconic moments, conversion may or may not constitute a singular moment. As Karl F. Morrison argues, Conversion was normally understood as a continuous process … with a beginning development, and end. Thus the idea that the conversion of Paul was a gradual process of adoption, or transformation, ending with the redemption of the body … was characteristic. In fact, all of life, rightly lived, was conversion. Conversion was thought to change the entire direction of human existence itself from a movement toward the grave into a transit toward endless life.6

Conversion might be the dramatic coming into knowledge of the truth of Christ, complete with spectacular sensory effects, as in the cases of Saul and Augustine. It might also be the gradual unfolding of the truth of an already-Christian life on the journey from birth to death. In addition, spectacular if dubious representations of conversion to Christianity by Jews and Turks abound in the era of John Donne. Yet so many more believers, in Donne’s England especially, would have dealt with a differently scaled if no less fiercely contested, set of transformations across confessional identities, theological positions, and institutional affiliations with the Catholic, Reformed, or Anglican faiths. Michael Questier emphasizes the range of experiences that might constitute conversion in Renaissance England: The kaleidoscopic entirety of the conversion experience—intellectual satisfaction with a newly discovered doctrinal synthesis, liberation from a disappointing ecclesiastical or political environment, the sensation of God’s judgments for sin, the salve of the Gospel after the hammer of the law, the agonies and ecstasies of repentance—all could be comprehended within the rejection or embrace of the Church of Rome. Of course, conversion in the realm of grace was not itself dependent on an exchange of ecclesiastical allegiance, or even an awareness of the polemical issues involved. Conversion reliant on the activity of grace—in regeneration, repentance and sanctification—is at the centre of all Christian life, and thus a necessity for all the Church’s members.7

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Donne lived out biographically the contradictions of life in the wake of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, as well as the tumult that accompanied England’s complex relationship to religious transformations of the age. He was born Catholic, descended from Catholic martyr and humanist icon Thomas More, watched his brother Henry die in prison for sheltering a Catholic priest, and left university before taking his degree to avoid the Oath of Supremacy. But Donne converted to Anglicanism, advocated Roman Catholics take the Oath of Allegiance in the polemical Pseudo-Martyr, and eventually took up a prominent position in the Church of England. Understandably, the complex circumstances of Donne’s biography have produced myriad interpretations of how conversion and confessional identity impact his poetry. John Carey established the rather dramatic view of Donne not as a convert but as an apostate: “The first thing to remember about Donne is that he was born a Catholic; the second that he betrayed his faith.”8 The era of religious strife into which Donne was born left him with an awful choice, Carey argues: The dilemma that faced him was acute. If he remained true to his Faith, his chances of preferment and success in the world would be curtailed. Further, the efforts of the Jesuits, with whom his family was inextricably connected, would make it difficult to remain neutral … If, on the other hand, he became an apostate, the result confidently predicted by the Church was so hideous that most people have, since Donne’s day, simply refused to believe in it any more. But for his generation eternal damnation was no myth.9

The resulting poetics is one of crisis, one of great fervor: “No one before Donne had written English verse in which the pressures of passionate speech could be retained with such unhindered power.”10 Many, of course, have dissented from Carey’s singular view but, as Aschah Guibbory has argued, the question of apostasy or conversion has great import for how we understand Donne.11 Moreover, she points out, for those for whom “conversion” provides a defining feature of Donne’s career and literary output, that word meant many different things for his readers: conversion from Catholic to Anglican, from a profane poet to a sacred sermonizer, or from husband to widower. Conversion, for Donne’s readers, has raised questions about his confessional identity, his career ambitions, and, more recently in Molly

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Murray’s account, experimentation with literary form.12 But here I want to suggest that we take Donne’s relationship to conversion more literally as a turning. While his poetry is full of passionate pyrotechnics— especially in the Holy Sonnets—he rarely presents the perfect portrait of the convert who experiences the shuddering awe of illumination as Saul and Augustine did. His account of his own conversion in Pseudo-Martyr emphasizes a kind of caution and deliberation few might associate with Donne’s poems: I used no inordinate hast, nor precipitation in binding my conscience to any local Religion. I had longer worke to doe then many other men; for I was first to blot out, certaine impressions of the Romane religion, and to wrastle both against the examples and against the reasons, by which some hold was taken; and some anticipations early layde upon my conscience, both by Persons who by nature had a power and superiority over my will. And others who by their learning and good life, seem’d to me justly to claime an interest for the guiding, and rectifying of mine understanding in these matters.13

No battering of the heart happens here but, rather, the evidence of gradual erosion accumulates, like that caused by a small and steady drip of water on a rock for years at a time. The hallmarks of Donne’s conversion include a deliberate and deliberative contemplation of intellectual positions, a slow sifting of matters of conscience, and a lengthy debate with others. Brooke Conti notes the peculiarly undramatic and un-narrated, in her term, “disnarrative,” nature of confessions of faith and depictions of conversion in Donne’s era, “produced by a conflict between what the author wishes to say and what he can say.”14 Conversion seems, then, not a subject that led Donne to the heights of writerly passion even in an age in which the consequences of t­heological opinions and for confessions of faith could be extreme. What might this imply for Donne’s poetry, which seems similarly scarce with respect to passionate moments of conversion? To take a page from Kimberly Johnson, we should be wary of the temptation, one to which scholars have frequently succumbed, to read through poetic language and form in search of “the transparency of semantic content.”15 Thus, for Johnson, Donne is not a poet whose poems simply transmit biographical content or theological positions but, for the purposes of her analysis, a sacramental poetics, “not a referential tool but a presencing machine,

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working to accomplish a pleroma of substance itself.”16 Metaphor is matter, conceit is concrete. The Donne I wish to explore is not the sacramental Donne that Johnson eloquently limns but, rather, the one whose concrete poetics derive from a kinetics of motion. Angus Fletcher suggests that the transformations of knowledge and science in Donne’s England produce a literary tradition particularly attuned to motion, contemplation of which constituted part of “one main crisis of knowledge and perception and indeed cognition generally: the desire to find a true there of the chief condition that makes our world what it is—namely, the transitional search for a correct theory of motion.”17 Under the auspices of this analysis, Fletcher describes Donne as a poet “perturbed by speed” and obsessed with change, in support of which position he cites Donne’s 1626 sermon delivered at the funeral of Aston Cockayne.18 There he notes that “the Earth it selfe is in Motion” and thus “nothing upon Earth is permanent.”19 Certainly, it is no surprise, then, to see change and death loom large in Donne’s poetry. But I want to explore here a different concern with motion for a poet, like Donne, for whom turning is an essential gesture and one from which passion and electricity arise. As I suggested earlier, in the presence of the physicality of Donne’s kinetics, poetry accomplishes some of its fundamental functions. We understand poetry through tropes because we understand the poem and its elements as things that turn, like the green leaves of a plant bend to seek the light of the sun. More specific poetic forms, like the Petrarchan sonnet, involve a structural moment of turning, the volta after which a poem pivots. While Donne was not stranger to tropes or voltas, his poems make literal and physical turns that not only tap into the physics of motion in the age of the New Science but also embody and act out what philosophers and critics sometimes refer to as an ethical turn. Emmanuel Levinas has notably and influentially conceived of the human face, the act of facing an other, and the resulting face-to-face relationship, as the cornerstone of all ethics. “The face,” he writes, “opens the primordial discourse whose first word is obligation.”20 As such, access to the face is straightaway ethical … There is first the very uprightness of the face, its upright exposure, without defense. The skin of the face is that which stays most naked, most destitute. It is the most naked, though with a decent nudity. It is the most destitute also: there is an essential poverty in the face; the proof of this is that one tries to mask this poverty by putting on poses, by taking on a countenance.21

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In turning to face or turning away—to and from the sun, to and from the beloved, and even to and from God—Donne and other Renaissance poets teach us not only how poetry moves but, more powerfully, what it is to be impoverished, naked, intimately exposed before those to whom the poet longs to turn.22 * How does Donne turn? Heliotropic might be one way to describe how poets have turned to the sun, most often to greet it, which is why the sweet and joyful but also sometimes plangent aubade endures. We might describe Donne’s poetry as heliotropic if he did not so perversely and insistently turn away. In his witty inversion of the aubade, he wishes to bid good night to the sun and dwell in the luscious dark with his beloved. “Break of Day” is nothing less than an impassioned cry of resentment: ’Tis true, ’tis day: what though it be? Oh, wilt thou rise from me? Why should we rise because ’tis light? Did we lie down because ’twas night?23

It is perhaps too easy to see in such moments the extension of the brash “Jack” Donne, the poet eager to shatter the mellifluous silver tones of his poetic forbears. Scholars have mitigated such overly Manichean readings, which tend to construe him not only as markedly separate from the literary tradition but also as a poet at first irreligious and then later strikingly religious. Still, Donne does strike out on his own singular path. Such gestures are also gestures of turning, turning away from the hypnotic sounds of a dominant aesthetic. But here Donne also reveals himself to be more the poet who resents being forced to turn from the beloved as he turns toward the sun and all it implies about the waking day. Although he does not luxuriate in the glories of the night, darkness has its advantages. “Light hath no tongue, but is all eye,” he tells us. Day is full of hours of surveillance, and, just like Las Vegas, what happens in the night stays in the night. The worst sin, in “The Sun Rising,” is to let such solar preoccupations—business in its various forms— remove the lover from the scene of love. “Busy old fool, unruly Sun,” Donne famously cries, “Why dost thou thus/Through window and through curtains call on us?” Left alone, the lovers make a world (“She’s all states, and all princes I;/Nothing else is”), especially when the sun

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favors, rather than interrupts, the lovers. At such a time, “the world’s contracted thus” to include only their union: “Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere:/This bed thy centre is, these walls, thy sphere.” Created in these anti-aubades is protected space created by lovers turning to one another, as in “The Good Morrow,” where love makes a little room an everywhere. Let sea-discov’rers to new worlds have gone; Let maps to others, worlds on worlds have shown; Let us possess our world: each hath one, and is one.

For Donne there is world-generating power to focused attention. In turning away from the public world, away from the sun, the lovers build a discrete universe: call it a stanza or a room or a cosmos. Something special happens when two lovers turn toward one another in the exposed inner sanctum created by a bed in a room. A naked moment between these lovers makes a world to which Donne wishes to return again and again so, in the course of his turnings, he can survey the private universe the lovers create, revolving around the axis of devotion they together create. Although “The Good Morrow” spares the sun any resentment or opprobrium, it witnesses the world-making power of two lovers turning toward one another: My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears, And plain, true hearts do in the faces rest. Where can we find two fitter hemispheres Without sharp North, without declining West?

Together the lovers are “hemispheres.” Together the lovers face and resist not the sun but the battering winds of the outside world. They make a world themselves in facing one another. Thus the poet turns, turns to face, returns to an ideal union, and revolves about the axis of the universe created by turning and facing. In so doing, he suffers a naked exposure to something outside and from which he seeks shelter, an exposure without which, it becomes clear, there can be no turn. * What is it to be naked? That ever-more cringe-inducing barometer of the public weal, reality TV, can’t get enough naked flesh of late. Take the survivalist competition, Naked and Afraid, which lands one man

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and one woman (unbeknownst to one another before the filming of the show), naked and in some inhospitable terrain, generally with only a knife and a flint. Early on, a critical ritual is enforced as strangers strip in front of one another before entering, sometimes hand in hand, a deadly garden. How Promethean the endeavor, how Edenic the setting— assuming these latter-day Adams and Eves survive three weeks of food and water shortages, extreme heat and cold, flora and fauna, including, notably, snakes. Here, to be naked is to be brute, cowering, and exposed, stripped of the cocoons of civilization. How easy to answer the question “What is it to be naked?” when Eden rears its head. John Milton’s Adam and Eve draw Satan’s gaze as he scans “all kind/Of living creatures” (4: 286–287) in Eden and finally finds “Two far nobler shape erect and tall,/Godlike erect, with native honour clad/In naked majesty seemed lords of all” (4: 288–290).24 Before the great lapse, to be naked is to be noble, majestic, forthright. It is to present to the created world an image of humanity upright with respect to morality and with respect to other species. Later, to be naked is to be devastated by shame when “innocence, that as a veil/Had shadowed them from knowing ill, was gone” (9: 1054–1055). To be “naked” is to be “left to guilty shame” (531) and thus “destitute and bare/Of all thir vertue” (9: 1062–1063), but also open to “foul concupiscence” (9.1078). Thoughts of Eden then evoke a saturated palette from the shameful to the shameless, the latter alone ranging from innocent to brazen. Shame, which Adam refers to as “the last of evils” and which some describe as “the painful feeling of exposed vulnerability,” has been of great interest to a range of scholars in and beyond Renaissance studies. 25 Some  argue for the centrality of shame to understanding the pivotal literary moment at the turn of the seventeenth century, when Spenser and Donne were tantalizingly proximate if stylistically variant poets. In a major re-evaluation of the literature of Spenser’s age, Georgia Brown has argued that “Shame is not only produced by late Elizabethan culture, it actually produces late Elizabethan literary culture.”26 Shame is an affect of turning away from a perceived external authority but also a turning inward to gnaw on one’s own social injury. What was shame to Spenser and Donne? Does it connect them and how does it help us understand Donne as a poet of turning? The shame of nakedness focuses attention on trope—that turning or twisting of poetry—and on what it means to turn, to turn to face or to turn away. Shame is a paradigmatic affect motivating a fundamental movement in poetry—the

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turn—and as such one way to understand Donne who is even more intelligible in conversations with those who precede and succeed him in the literary tradition, Edmund Spenser and John Milton. These poets are not merely figures participating in a culture of shame or in a literary culture produced by the shame of publication. Nor are they merely figures who define and describe shame as an early modern passion, though all of these assertions possess a certain truth. They are also figures who exhibit an identifiable kinetics that ties physical movement to poetic gesture. Shame provokes us to turn away or to turn inward; shamelessness is an opening outward: in the absence of the consequences of exposure, in aggressive display, or as, a literal ethical turn. Many forms of shame animate Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, pulsing through its precincts and galvanizing members of the body poetic, which twitch and leap in response. Two particular instances, ripe with the shame of sex and emasculation, veritably frame the poem. Take Redcrosse Knight, early in the Legend of Holiness, whose dalliance with Duessa leaves him defenseless and at the mercy of the giant Orgoglio. Let us pass by his sexual indiscretions and consider instead his imprisonment and rescue at the hands of Una and Redcrosse. In a dark dungeon they find him but first hear his “hollow, dreary murmuring voice” as he begs for death.27 The compromised Redcrosse provokes in Arthur both pity and “trembling horror” at the spectacle of emasculated knighthood, which elicits a violent martial response of indignation that motivates a forceful rescue. First revealed by his dolorous cries, Redcrosse is announced by scent, the “filthie banefull smell.” And here is Redcrosse’s no less unappealing visual presence: His sad dull eyes deepe sunck in hollow pits, Could not endure th’vnwonted sunne to view; His bare thin cheekes for want of better bits, And empty sides deceiued of their dew, Could make a stony hart his hap to rew; His rawbone armes, whose mighty brawned bowrs Were wont to riue steele plates, and helmets hew, Were cleane consum’d, and all his vitall powres Decayd, and all his flesh shronk vp like withered flowres. (1.8:38–41)

This aversive portrait of the tortured knight more than flirts with a central problem in Spenser’s moment—what to do with the derogated body

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of Christ in an age wracked by the after-effects of the Reformation. But observe here the closing simile. The vital powers have fled and the flesh has wasted away, has “shronk vp like withered flowres.” In their different ways—Arthur with indignant force and Una with the maternal care of the mother church—the rescuers try to turn toward the foul and wasted body of Redcrosse as it vividly recedes from view in a depiction emphasized by grotesque detail. The body, a withered flower, turns inward and away. Shame recedes from pain and emasculation, here, or, late in The Faerie Queene, from the gravitational pull of lust, which of course precipitated Redcrosse’s descent. Late, in the Legend of Courtesy, the lady Serena becomes perhaps the paradigmatic figure of shame in the FQ as she is captured by a band of wild men equally prone to concupiscence as cannibalism. In a vicious literalization of the blazon, the cannibals strip Serena bare, “first they spoile her of her iewels deare,/And afterwards of all her rich array … Now being naked, to their sordid eyes/The goodly treasures of nature appeare: Which as they view with lustfull fantasyes/ Each wisheth to himself, and to the rest enuyes” (6.8:41). Later, after Sir Calepine chases the savages away, he finds Serena equally “fearing death, and next to death the lacke/Of clothes to couer, what they ought by kind.” She lapses into ashamed silence at being exposed to the lust of others, which triggers an “inward shame of her vncomely case.” Her nakedness is not merely the result of vicious predation but is itself shameful: “though the night did couer her disgrace,/Yet she in so vnwomanly a mood,/Would not bewray the state in which she stood.” She stays all night long, naked and afraid, but also silent and ashamed. “Inward shame”: the turning away, a turning toward darkness as if to hide in it. To be uncased is to have revealed the shame associated with the hidden, with the flesh, especially female flash, in the early modern imaginary. In Spenser, shame provokes a turn—an inward turn, a turn away— preferring darkness to exposure, even the darkness of the imagined interior of the body. Even as Donne prefers the privacy of a bedroom to the rude light of the busy sun, he turns toward, turns outward even, when he seems to be turning away, which is a consequence of a kind of shamelessness. It is no controversy at all to imagine Donne as quite casually shameless, confirmation of which appears easily in his simultaneously famous and infamous “To His Mistress Going to Bed,” a poem that, however seductive, offers us equal reasons to be skeptical of the undressing of a women in a poem as the Serena episode in The Faerie Queene. But what interests me here is not the poem’s sly and seductive aggression

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in stripping away layers of clothing but rather a tone of supplication hiding behind a series of instructional and imperative assertions. Supplication is intertwined with nakedness: “Full nakedness, all joys are due to thee:/As souls unbodied, bodies unclothed must be/To taste whole joys.” It is to be supposed, perhaps, that this rapacious speaker eschews, only barely, the cannibal’s lust for ultimate corporeal exposure, and yet there is not a little spiritual blackmail in the notion that clothes are to be shucked, like bodies, to make possible a union always hovering on the edge of dissolution (as in “The Relic”). And why not be naked, the way a soul is naked of its body after death? After all, “there is no penance, much less innocence!” Nakedness might be Edenic, Donne hopes, or at least he hopes a woman might buy that particular line. And, after all, Donne instructs his flowery alter-ego in “The Blossom” that “A naked-thinking heart that makes no show/Is to a woman but a kind of ghost.” Without the willingness to create a spectacle of the self, innocence means little. Of course, the invocation of innocence introduces the poem’s second moment of supplication: “To teach thee, I am naked first: Why than,/What need’st thou have more cov’ring than a man?” What is predictable in these lines I concede, most especially the casual misogyny of conceiving of the bare, essential, and honest human as male while women serve as covered complements whose clothing is not, as Spenser’s Serena might suggest, a token of female modesty but rather a signature of falsehood. In Donne’s “The Damp,” the woman’s nakedness is not a deception but rather a sign of her prowess in amorous conquest: “Naked you’ve odds enough of any man.” Certainly, we can also assume that when Donne asserts his own nakedness, there is a particular and particularly pointed aspect of his naked anatomy he has in mind. But let us imagine, because we can imagine, that secreted beneath the bravado and the cynical armatures and armaments of erotic poetry, Donne is naked and afraid, afraid because hopeful. The poet strips as well, and his survival depends on a kind of acknowledgement. This brings us back to the spectacle of the crucified Christ, that ur-body of derogated and naked flesh, in Donne’s “Good Friday: Made as I was Riding Westward that Day,” a quintessential poem of his kinetic gesture, which is to turn and face. Already the title places us in time and space and motion all at once. Be it intellectual or physical movement, the kinetic is paramount. For Donne, the great terror and hope of mortal existence is its decay. It terrifies with the specter of death but holds out the hope of the life beyond, which can be reached only by following the

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body’s natural course through death and decay to the hope of new heaven and new earth. Of course, it isn’t just Donne’s body: everything’s falling apart as he puts it in the First Anniversary, as so many have quoted: “All coherence gone.” Yet the center is not wholly lost in “Good Friday”: Hence is’t, that I am carryed t’wards the West This day, when my Soules forme bends t’wards the East. There I should see a sun by rising set, And by that setting endless day beget; But that Christ on this cross, did rise and fall, Sinne had eternally benighted all.

The punished flesh of Christ orients Donne, as if it is the magnetic pole  around which a planet wobbles. Devilish as Donne is in his erotic poems, here he is stalwart in the face of terror. He admits how much he prefers riding west when the rising Easter sun would put him face to face with a suffering divinity: Yet dare I’almost be glad I do not see That spectacle of too much weight for me. Who sees God’s face, that is self life, must die; What a death were it then to see God die!

The terrifying wounds, so comforting in ages past, are part of a brave new world. The planet has gotten larger—new objects in the heaven, new continents in the so-called West. Christ spins the globe on an invisible rod extending through his wounds. Donne focuses our attention on the fact that he tries to ride away from this scene of world-breaking anguish. As he does so, he imagines the iconic Christ looking back: “and thou look’st t’wards me,/O Saviour, as thou hang’st upon the tree.” There are reasons to turn away, to not face divinity: out of respect, for fear of destruction, or to play the part of the schoolboy waiting to be punished: “I turn my back to thee, but to receive/Corrections.” This John Donne is hopeful in spite of the agony and the fear. Hope lies in punishment. If he is “worth thine anger,” then perhaps there is a way of being seared by life so as to “Burn off my rusts, and my deformity.” Then, Donne would be recognizable: “Restore thine image so much by thy grace,/That thou may’st know mee, and I’ll turne my face.” Donne can imagine turning back when he is once again pure and therefore sure his love will be reciprocated. At least, that is his hope.

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Reciprocity: the most painful, the most elusive, the most powerful fantasy we associate with love as opposed to desire, which endlessly spins its wheels in longing. Can we love without even the faintest hope of reciprocity? What if our love is not returned and what if the stakes are higher than in ordinary matters of love or sex? Is the failure of reciprocity—as an experience, as a notion—bound to a feeling of shame? Of shame, Gerhart Piers and Milton B. Singer argue: “Shame does not mean to be ashamed of loving, say on account of exposing or surrendering the body … but to be ashamed that love is not complete, that … there is still something inimical in oneself which keeps love from reaching completing and perfection.” The prospect of such potent love sets us in motion, sets whole poems in motion. Certainly, it had that effect on Donne. The temptation to turn away is strong. Like Spenser, we might be tempted to turn away. Spenser and Donne’s inheritor, Milton, was a poet all too eager to turn away from the spectacle of broken divinity, of God in pain—that is, the figure of the crucified Christ—as is evident in the utter awkwardness of his attempts to depict the suffering Christ. “Upon the Circumcision” offers a weirdly saccharine avoidance of suffering flesh of the first moment of pain in Christ’s life, while “Upon the Passion,” which should have dealt directly with Christ’s suffering and death on the cross, oddly avoids the subject before failing to come to completion. In this case, reciprocity involving such a powerful experience of suffering seems too much to bear. In the hope of love, Donne turns, returns, revolves. If love requires reciprocity, it requires turning to another in a naked state to risk radical exposure. And to make a final turn here, we might return to that overcited example of Donne’s passion as a poet, “Batter My Heart.” This is a poem that ends with a shocking moment of exposure as the speaker courts his own violation, ravishment being the only way he imagines being true: Take me to you, imprison me, for I, Except you enthral me, never shall be free, Nor ever chaste except you ravish me.

Before we reach this moment, there is substantial and sonorous action.  But for all the impressive breaking, blowing, and burning, for all the passionate knocking, breathing, and shining, a quieter moment always catches my attention. Donne admits his failings, that he is “like an usurped town,” but fails to admit the conquering divinity as his reason

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fails. In spite of this he says: “Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain.” Even in a corpus of intentionally rough, rude, and complexly rhythmic poetry, this line seems to me the hardest to scan in the poem as the a reader follows the vowel sounds from “dearly” to “I love you.” Say it three or five or ten times quickly: “Dearly I love you.” At best there is a queasy elision, the awkwardness of which sets up the impossible subsequent demand, “and would be loved fain.” The speaker wants to be loved, wants reciprocity with what is beyond him, which is an especially tall order when even perfect reciprocal love between humans seems so fleeting and so vulnerable. How perfect and perfectly unsurprising—even after centuries of amorous love sonnets. The most tongue-tied moment is the one in which the speaker turns to try to say, “I love you.”

Notes





1. Peter Sacks, “The Face of the Sonnet: Wyatt and Some Features of the Early Tradition,” Green Thoughts, Green Shades: Essays by Contemporary Poets on the Early Modern Lyric, Jonathan F.S. Post (ed.) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), pp. 17–40. 2. Ben Jonson, Timber: or, Discoveries, Ralph S. Walker (ed.) (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1953), p. 38. 3.  See particularly David Gardiner, “Befitting Emblems of Adversity”: A Modern Irish View of Edmund Spenser from W.B. Yeats to the Present (Omaha, NE: Creighton University Press, 2001); Jane Grogan, “Spenser’s Lost Children.” Spenser Studies: A Renaissance Poetry Annual 28 (2013), 1–54. On Spenser and modern poetry, see Joseph Loewenstein, “The Poets’’s Poet’s Poet: James Merrill’s Spenser Lectures,” Spenser Studies: A Renaissance Poetry Annual 28 (2013), 65–82; William Blissett, “‘Who Knows Not Colin Clout?’: Spenser and the Poets of the Mid-Twentieth Century,” Spenser Studies: A Renaissance Poetry Annual 28 (2013), 55–64. 4. See particularly Geoffrey Hill’s Scenes from Comus (2005) and A Treatise of Civil Power (2007). 5. Augustine, Confessions, trans. R.S. Pine-Coffin (New York: Penguin, 1961), pp. 231–232. 6.  Karl F. Morrison, Understanding Conversion (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1992), p. xii. 7. Michael C. Questier, Conversion, Politics, and Religion in England, 1580– 1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 40. 8. John Carey, John Donne: Life, Mind, and Art (London: Faber and Faber, 2008), p. 15.

214  J. Campana 9. Ibid., p. 25. 10. Ibid., p. 27. 11. Achsah Guibbory, “Donne and Apostasy,” The Oxford Handbook of John Donne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 12.  On conversion and literary form, see Molly Murray, The Poetics of Conversion in Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 13. John Donne, Pseudo-Martyr, Anthony Raspa (ed.) (Montreal: McGillQueen’s University Press, 1993), p. 13. 14. Brooke Conti, Confessions of Faith in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), p. 51. 15. Kimberly Johnson, Made Flesh: Sacrament and Poetics in Post-Reformation England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), p. 89. 16. Ibid., p. 90. 17. Angus Fletcher, Time, Space, and Motion in the Age of Shakespeare (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), p. 10. 18. Ibid., p. 113. 19. Ibid., p. 115. 20. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquense University Press, 1969), p. 201. 21. Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, trans. Phillipe Nemo (Pittsburgh: Duquense University Press, 1969), pp. 85–86. 22. More recently, scholars have turned to the figure of the face as a way of understanding not only ethical relationships between humans but ethical relationships between humans and other creatures, a subject Levinas was much less interested in. See Erica Fudge, “The Human Face of Early Modern England.” Angelaki 16.1 (2011), 97–110; Laurie Shannon, The Accommodated Animal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). 23. All references are to John Donne, The Complete Poems of John Donne, Robin Robbins (ed.) (Harlow: Pearson, 2008). 24.  All references (to book and line) are to John Milton, Paradise Lost, Alastair Fowler (ed.), 2nd edn (London: Longman, 2007). 25. Joseph Adamson and Hilary Clark, “Introduction: Shame, Affect, and Writing,” Scenes of Shame: Psychoanalysis, Shame, and Writing, Joseph Adamson and Hilary Clark (eds) (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), p. 28. Critical genealogies of the import of shame, concerned with the cultural and historical modalities of that affect, often begin with Ruth Benedict’s formative The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, which divided East and West into cultures of shame and guilt, respectively, which is to say cultures of external and internal mechanisms of moral monitoring. Bernard Williams extended this insight historically, arguing for the appearance of a transition from shame to guilt

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in fifth-century Greece. More recently, Ruth Leys reconsiders guilt and shame in the context of trauma studies in From Guilt to Shame: Auschwitz and After (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). Looming large in recent conversation has been a return to the works of Sylvan Tompkins, Shame and Its Sisters: A Sylvan Tompkins Reader, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank (eds) (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995); on shame and sexuality by Michael Warner, The Trouble with Normal (New York: Free Press, 1999); Kathryn Bond Stockton, Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame: Where “Black” Meets “Queer” (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006); Heather Love, Feeling Backwards: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), among others. 26. Georgia Brown, Redefining Elizabethan Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 5. Shame has been no stranger to the study of early modernity since the pioneering work of Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978). On more recent work on shame and Renaissance literature and culture, see particularly Gail Paster, The Body Embarrassed Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993); Ewan Fernie, Shame in Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 2002). 27. All references (to book, canto, stanza) are to Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, A. C. Hamilton (ed.), 2nd edn (London: Longman, 2007).

Index

A Alter, Robert, 156, 159, 160, 169 Alvarez, A., 65 Amichai, Yehuda, 2 The Anchor Bible Psalms I, II, III, 165 Anderson, Jr., Donald K., 45 Ashberry, John, 171, 173 Auden, W.H., 85 Augustine, 17, 20, 47, 146, 164, 200, 201, 203 Confessions, 17, 20, 200, 203 B Barnard College, 10 Baudelaire, Charles “le Chat”, 6 The Bay Psalm Book, 159, 168 Beardsley, Doug, 2 Berrigan, Daniel, 164 Berryman, John, 83 Bervin, Jan, 1 Nets, 1 Bible‚ Acts, 9, 199 Bishop, Elizabeth, 63, 71, 120

“Shampoo”, 71 The Book of Psalms, 161, 166, 168, 169 Brodsky, Joseph, 2 Brooke, Rupert, 2 Brooks, Helen, 72 Brown, Georgia, 207 C Campana, Joseph, 7, 10 Caravaggio, 200 Carew, Thomas, 64 “The Rapture”, 64 Carey, John, 63, 189, 202 Celan, Paul, 172, 194 Cespedes, Helen, 9 Chapman, Wayne, 125, 142 Chiasson, Don, 1 Clements, Arthur, 2, 59, 68 Conti, Brooke, 29 Cotton, John, 150, 167 Crane, Hart, 2, 181 Crashaw, Richard, 173 Culler, Jonathan, 72

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 J. Herz (ed.), John Donne and Contemporary Poetry, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-55300-9

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218  Index D Dahood, Mitchell, 145, 165 Dante, 112 Derrida‚ Jacques, 181 Dickinson, Emily, 83, 153, 159, 181 Donne, John, 2, 4, 9, 11, 29, 32, 45, 58, 59, 61, 82, 83, 85, 86, 104, 112, 119, 121, 126, 132, 143, 171, 175, 197, 198, 201 Aire and Angels, 114, 178 The Anniversary, 114 The Apparition, 132, 133 The Baite, 1, 126, 135 Biathanatos, 52 The Blossom, 178, 210 Break of Day, 205 The Canonization, 3, 64, 68, 135 The Cross, 120, 212 The Damp, 210 Death’s Duell, 32 Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, 3, 29-45, 174, 180 The Dream, 51, 178 The Ecstasy, 120, 126, 185, 190 Elegy 11 “On his Mistress”, 183 Elegy 12 “On his Picture”, 188 Elegy XIX/8 “To his Mistress going to Bed”, 6, 120 The Expiration, 2 First Anniversary, 211 The Flea, 1, 70, 135, 189 Go and catch a falling star, 114, 176, 177, 182, 183, 185 Good Friday Riding Westward, 12, 210 The Good Morrow, 185, 186, 191, 206 Holy Sonnets, 3, 15–17, 20, 22, 24, 25, 27, 174, 177 Hymn to God my God in my Sicknesse, 4, 36 The Indifferent, 114, 139, 141, 187

A Lecture Upon the Shadow, 115 Loves Deity, 178 A Nocturnal Upon St. Lucy’s Day, 4, 65, 67, 68, 121, 179, 190 Pseudo-Martyr, 202, 203 The Relic, 114, 120, 210 Sappho to Philaenis, 115, 130 Satire III, 85 The Sermons of John Donne 10 vols., 45, 63 The Songs and Sonnets, 68, 183 The Sun Rising, 114, 115, 121, 177, 186, 205 The Undertaking, 184 A Valediction of the Booke, 143, 177 A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning, 68, 185 A Valediction: Of My Name in the Window, 69, 127, 178 A Valediction: Of Weeping, 69 Womans Constancy, 132, 183 Donne, Anne More, 2, 65, 70 Donne, Henry, 9 Donnelly, Timothy, 9, 10 “Cloud Corporation”, 11 Dylan, Bob, 3 E Edgar, Stanley, 4, 64 History of the Day, 65 “Nocturnal”, 4, 65, 67 Eliot, T.S., 2, 119, 127, 174, 182 “The Metaphysical Poets", 125 “The Waste Land", 69, 70 Empson, William, 2 F Fletcher, Angus, 204 Fordham University, 3, 9

Index

Ford, Katie, 4, 10, 75 Foster, Brett, 3, 29, 30 Extravagant Rescues, 30 The Garbage Eater, 30 Sorrows Morrow, 31, 42, 45 Friel, Brian, 124 Frontain, Raymond-Jean, 72 Frost, Robert, 124, 165, 181 G Gardiner, David, 213 Gass, William, 119, 121 Ginsberg, Alan, 64 Goldberg, Jonathan, 45 Goodyer, Henry, 52 Gosse, Edmund, 52 Graham, Jorie, 171, 182 Greenberg, Pamela, 166 Gregerson, Linda, 10 Guibbory, Achsah, 70, 202 The Cambridge Companion to John Donne, 73 Returning to Donne, 73 H Hallam, Arthur Henry, 182 Hamburger, Michael, 150, 166 Hannay, Margaret, 167 Haraszti, Zoltán, 168 Hartmann, Geoffrey, 72 Hazlitt, William, 184 Heaney, Seamus, 108, 123 Death of a Naturalist, 127, 137, 143, 144 Door into the Dark, 136 Field Work, 123, 126, 139, 141, 144 Finders Keepers, 143 The Government of the Tongue, 142 The Green Helmet and other Poems, 142

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Human Chain, 126 Preoccupations, 144 Spelling it Out, 124 Stepping Stones, 123, 133 The Redress of Poetry, 142 Wintering Out, 144 Hecht, Anthony, 4, 64 Herbert, George, 4, 11, 18, 20, 56, 59, 62, 71, 173, 174, 183 “Love III”, 63, 183 “The Night”, 63 “Prayer I”, 56, 58 “The Pulley”, 26 Herz, Judith Scherer, 11, 129 Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, 167 Hill, Christopher, 62 Hill, Geoffrey, 126, 198 Hope, A.D., 4, 64 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 85, 186 Hoskyns, John, 131 Hughes, Ted, 1, 124, 126 J James, Clive, 64 Jarman, Mark, 3 Jenkins, Alan, 1 John Donne and Contemporary Poetry Project, 9–11, 13, 106 John Donne Society, 9, 10 Johnson, Kimberly, 3, 4, 10, 29, 107, 203 Johnson, Ronald, 1 Radi Os, 1 Johnson, Samuel, 135, 198 Jonson, Ben, 176 “Inviting a Friend to Supper”, 107 Timber, 213 K Keats, John, 85 Kierkegaard, Søren, 169

220  Index Kimhi, David, 150, 166 Kinnell, Galway, 120, 121 Kinsella, Thomas, 127 Knowles, Melody, 169 Kristeva, Julia, 174, 175 Kuin, Roger, 132 L Larkin, Philip, 64 Levinas, Emmanuel, 204 Levin, Phillis, 9 Liberman, Alvin M., 165 Logenbach, James, 142 Lowell, Robert, 121, 123, 171, 181, 190 Lyotard, Jean-Françoise, 172, 194 M MacDiarmid, Hugh, 133 Mandelstam, Osip, 187 Marlowe, Christopher, 133 Marvell, Andrew, 10, 62 “Horatian Ode Upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland”, 125 “The Nymph Complaining for the Death of her Fawn”, 125 Mazzaro, Jerome, 165 Mechon Mamre, 165 Meredith, George, 83 Merrill, James, 120 Miles‚ Josephine, 2 Michelangelo, 200 Milosz, Czeslaw, 126, 158 Milton, John, 198, 207, 208, 212 “Lycidas”, 3 Paradise Lost, 1, 207-208 “Upon the Circumcision”, 212 “Upon the Passion”, 212 More, Thomas, 202

Morrison, Karl F., 201 Motion, Andrew, 180 Muldoon, Paul, 2, 10, 126 “Sillyhow Stride”, 2 Murray, Molly, 202 N New Criticism, The, 62, 147 O O’Driscoll, Dennis, 123, 133 Oswald, Alice, 1 Owen, Wilfred, 2 P Paul, Saint, 200 Peterson, Eugene, 160 Phillios, Rowan Ricado, 5, 12, 109 Heaven, 5 “On the Notions of Imagination and Influence”, 14 Phillips, Carl, 3, 4, 7, 10, 11, 13, 15 Riding Westward, 3 From the Devotions, 3 Plath, Sylvia, 171 Post, Jonathan, 4, 11 Green Thoughts, Green Shades, 11, 197 Post, Jonathan in Guibbory, Cambridge Companion, 71 Pound, Ezra, 125 Psalms—Mayalayam Bible, 168 Purdy, Al, 2 Q Questier, Michael, 201

Index

R Raleigh, Sir Walter, 1 Raspa, Anthony, 45, 214 Rich, Adrienne, 3, 64 Rickword, Edgell, 2 Rosenberg, David, 151, 161 Rude, Donald, 142 S Sacks, Peter, 197 Saintsbury, George, 177 Salter, Mary Jo, 63 Sarna, Nahum, 149, 159 Savage, Dan, 115 Scholem, Gershom, 166 Schwartz, Delmore, 147, 165 Scofield, David, 61 Sefer Torah: Seven Minor Treatises, 165 Shakespeare, 1, 23, 174–176, 182, 190, 198 Hamlet, 175, 190 Shami, Jeanne, 45 Sidneian Psalms, 6, 154, 162 Sidney, Sir Philip An Apology for Poetry, 131 Sir Philips Sidney and the Countess of Pembroke, The Psalmes of David, 146, 167 Slavitt, David, 156 Smith, Nigel, 10 Spenser, Edmund, 208, 213 The Fairie Queene, 208, 209, 215 Stevens, Paul, 72 Strier, Richard, 68 Studdert-Kennedy, Michael, 166 Surrey, Henry Howard, Earl of, 11 Synge, J.M., 127

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T Thomas, Dylan, 64 Todd, Richard, 167 Traherne, Thomas, 173 U The Utrecht Psalter in Medieval Art: Picturing the Psalms of David, 168 V Vaughan, Henry, 4, 62-63, 173 Vendler, Helen, 139 Visson, Lynn, 148, 166 W Walton, Isaak, 31 Wilbur, Richard, 64 Williams, William Carlos, 181 Williamson‚ George, 2 Winn, James Anderson, 169 Winslow, Edward, 168 Wyatt, Thomas, 11, 129 Y Yeats W.B., 124 Yenser, Stephen, 6, 73 Z Zevon, Warren, 2 The Zohar, 95, 168