The Fly in Donne's "Canonization" Author(s): A. B. Chambers Source: The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Vol. 65, No. 2 (Apr., 1966), pp. 252-259 Published by: University of Illinois Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27714839 Accessed: 05-02-2017 22:08 UTC

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This content downloaded from 137.189.171.235 on Sun, 05 Feb 2017 22:08:23 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms THE FLY IN DONNE'S "CANONIZATION"

A. B. Chambers, University of Wisconsin

One of Donne's points in "The Canonization" appears to be that the world of love contains and thereby replaces all others. In the last stanza of the poem the lovers perceive within one another's eyes the world of "Countries, Townes, Courts" from which they had earlier withdrawn. They are also saints of love whose "legend" incorporates the literary world of "sonnets" and replaces the historical world of "Chronicle." And within them is to be found even the world of natural and unnatural science: they are compared to the phoenix, to an eagle and dove, and to a fly. The lovers, in short, exist in a universe fully complete, for they are all things to one another. Because that is the case, Donne can say: Call us what you will, wee are made such by love; Call her one, mee another flye, We'are Tapers too, and at our owne cost die, And wee in us find the'Eagle and the Dove. The Phoenix ridle hath more wit By us, we two being one, are it. So to one neutrall thing both sexes fit, Wee dye and rise the same, and prove Mysterious by this love.1 These "fantastic comparisons," as Cleanth Brooks calls them,2 appear to progress to a climax. A fly?the first ludicrous object the speaker can call to mind?leads by gradual steps to the phoenix, an image which manages to combine two of the earlier comparisons: "the phoenix is a bird," as Brooks puts it, "and like the tapers, it burns." It is also the creature which best seems to illumine the lovers' condition. Because there is but one representative of its kind, it is necessarily a hermaphroditic or "neutrall thing." It too is able to "dye and rise the same" from the ashes of its own cremation. And as a sometime symbol of the resurrected Christ, it suggests the canonized state which the lovers attain.3 For all of these reasons one rightly stresses the phoenix

1 The Poems of John Donne, ed. H. J. C. Grierson (Oxford, 1912). 2 Cleanth Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn (New York, n.d.), p. 15. ? John J. Carroll ("The Sun and the Lovers in 'To His Coy Mistress/ " MLN, Lxxrv [19591,4-7) documents the unnatural sdence of the phoenix by referring to Herod otus, Pliny, Ovid, Lactantius, and Milton. A relatively full discussion of the religious 252

This content downloaded from 137.189.171.235 on Sun, 05 Feb 2017 22:08:23 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms The Fly in Donne's "Canonization" 253

and its fabulous nature. Yet with a poet such as Donne it is always unwise to suppose that an image may be casually introduced?as the fly and eagle and dove appear to be?and in this case to think that only the phoenix is significant is not merely unsafe but demonstrably wrong. The truth of the matter is that, if read in terms of the same un natural science necessary to understand the phoenix, all of the crea tures mentioned in this stanza offer significant parallels to the lovers. The dove, for example, was conventionally regarded as the bird of Venus and as a symbol of conjugal love.4 It was also the bird of peace, here taming its proverbial opposite, the fierce eagle to which it here is mated.6 And the eagle itself parallels the lovers rather closely since it too was said to experience a kind of resurrection. According to the bestiaries, when afflicted with the infirmities of age, it first soared toward the sun to soften the wax which had sealed its eyes, then plunged below to a cleansing stream. From this trial of fire and water it arose not "the same" but renewed.6 Finally, there are the taper and the fly. Most obviously, they es tablish together still another set of opposites which in part resemble the lovers, each attracting and attracted by the other. A little addi tional information allows us to see that this attraction is potentially ambivalent. On the one hand, the candle and fly composed an emblem of the dangerous nature of pleasure or beauty. Camerarius' version identifies the taper as "voluptas," while Wither speaks of the "Fool ish-Fire" of "Beauties Flames."7 On the other hand, the fly's pursuit

values of the bird is given by Henry Hawkins (?) (Partheneia sacra [Rouen, 1633], pp. 162-66). 4 Juan Eusebius of Nuremberg, Historia naturae (Antwerp, 1635), p. 7. 6 Theodore Redpath (ed., The Songs and Sonets [London, 1959], p. 19) cites several examples of the eagle and dove in opposition. See also Ulysses Aldrovandus, Ornitho logiae (Bologna, 1599), 1, 39; and compare Donne, Sermons, ed. G. R. Potter and E. M. Simpson (Berkeley, 1953-62), vm, 123: "I shall see God as a Dove with an Olive Branch (peace to my soul) or as an Eagle, a vulture to prey." 6 The basic text for the resurrected eagle is the medieval "Physiologus." See The Bestiary, ed. and tr. T. H. White (New York, i960), p. 105. 7 Joachim Camerarius, Symbolorum ?* emblematum . . . centuria tertia (Nuremberg and Frankfurt?, 1596), p. 97; George Wither, A Collection of Emblems (London, 1635), p. 40. See also Jean Boissard, Emblematum liber (Metis, 1588), pp. 58-59, and A Die tionary of Proberbs;ed. M. P. Tilley (Ann Arbor, 1950), entry F394. Professor G. Blake more Evans, reading this article in manuscript, very kindly called my attention to the presence of this theme in poems by Jonson, Carew, Cleveland, and Cartwright, all of whom wrote lyrics about the destruction of some small insect in the radiance of a lady's eye; see Professor Evans' note on Cartwright's "The Gnat," in The Plays and Poems of William Cartwright (Madison, 1951), p. 706. Clay Hunt (Donne's Poetry: Essays in Literary Analysis [New Haven, 1954], p. 76) refers to the fly as "a standard example of both ephemerality and unbridled sexuality."

This content downloaded from 137.189.171.235 on Sun, 05 Feb 2017 22:08:23 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 254 Chambers might be interpreted far more favorably. Thomas Moffett's Theater of Insects provides an instructive example: "The light, like Truth, he doth exceedingly re Joyce in, and doth behave himself honestly therein and civilly. Yea the Fly doth so covet the light, that many times . . . he loseth his life for his pains."8 With at least one of these interpreta tions Donne was clearly familiar; he alludes to it in the sixth elegy: the tapers beamie eye Amorously twinkling, beckens the giddie flie Yet burnes his wings. And both interpretations, one notices, are relevant to "The Canoniza tion." The lover is frankly rebellious in his pursuit of what the adver sarius has argued to be a "Foolish-Fire," and the counterargument is that pursuit of beauty leads not merely to truth but to sainthood. Even the sexual death which these saints experience is rather muscid, since one reason why the fly became an amorous emblem was its no torious sexual habits. "Learned Pennius," Moffett tells us, "caught two Flyes in the Act, and shut them up in a box, and the next day found them together still in the same posture." There is, Moffett con cludes, almost "no end of their Venery." The taper and fly thus provide rather specific comments upon the human condition described in this stanza, and the final suggestion is that the fly?like the phoenix?can and must "die" a fiery death. If the analogy is to hold true, then the fly ought also to "rise the same," and thanks to a peculiar fact of unnatural science it can. So far as I have been able to discover, it was .?Elian who first recorded the fact and Pliny who probably made it popular; but, once established, it ap peared in unexpected places.9 In an Exposition of the Symbole or Creede of the Apostles, William Perkins comes finally to an account of the Creed's eleventh article: "I believe ... in the resurrection of the body." One of the reasons for Perkins' belief turns out to be the fact that even "flyes, which haue lyen dead in the winter season, in the spring, by vertue of the sunnes heate, reuiue again."10 Perhaps Per

8 Thomas Mof?ett, The Theater of Insects or of Lesser Living Creatures (London, 1658), p. 931 (a translation of Insectorum sive minorum animalium theatrum [London, 1634], P- 55). 9 .?Elian, De natura animalium, II.29; Pliny, Historia naturalis, XI.36. See also Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae, XII.8; Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum naturale (Strass burg, ?i48i), XXI.cxliii; John Maplet, A Greene Forest (London, 1657), pp. 86-87; Thomas Lupton, A Thousand Notable Things (London, 1627), p. 206. 10 William Perkins, Exposition of the Symbole or Creede of the Apostles (London, 1616), p. 458.

This content downloaded from 137.189.171.235 on Sun, 05 Feb 2017 22:08:23 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms The Fly in Donne's "Canonization" 255 kins recalled that Cardano had also cited the fly to prove the possi bility of resurrection.11 Or perhaps he had observed, as Moffett had, that one can "take off the head of a Fly, yet the rest of his body will have life in it, yea it will run, leap, and seem as it were to breath. Yea when it is dead and drowned, with the warmth of the sun and a few ashes cast upon it, it will live again, being as it were anew made, . . . verifying the opinion of Plato concerning the immortality of the soul." Clearly, the fly was resurrectable and nearly as fit as the phoenix for religious use. Some flies, moreover, were said to possess another quality quite rightly described by Ulysses Aldrovandus as "worthy of admiration."12 Large flies or dog-flies, it seems, "are bisexual, like the child of Hermes and Aphrodite, who had two natures and double beauty."13 Flies, then, not only "die and rise the same"; they also constitute a thing to which "both sexes fit." Like Donne's love, they are mysterious. The hermaphroditic and resurrectable fly?a creation, like the phoenix, of unnatural science?is clearly relevant to "The Canoniza tion." It was not, however, the only sort of fly which Donne might have known. In the first place, the fly appears to have been the pro verbial example of insignificance. "I will stop talking," Lucian says, "for fear you may think that, as the saying goes, I am making an ele phant out of a fly." Lucian's point, of course, is that the elephant has already been made, for this is the final sentence of an essay in praise of the fly, an essay considerably longer than one would have thought possible. Lucian's ironically fitting conclusion is thus "A Prouerbe aptly vsed," according to John Bar et's later discussion, "when as any man doth either through eloquence of his tongue in speaking, or pen in writing, make a great protestation of a thing of little weight."14 The "great protestation," as I shall show, is more important than it prob ably seems, but there are other relevant connotations to be noticed first. One of them arises from a line in the Iliad. Faced with a difficult situation in the seventeenth book, Menelaus stands irresolute until Pallas Athena places in his heart "the courage of the fly."15 Even

11 Cardano, De subtilitate, in Opera omnia (Lyons, 1663), in, 519. 12 Ulysses Aldrovandus, De animalibus insectis (Bologna, 1602), p. 354. Moffett, re cording the same fact, reports it as "most worthy of admiration." 13 Quoted by Aldrovandus and Moffett from Lucian, "In Praise of the Fly" (printed in Vol. 1 of the Loeb Works). 14 John Baret, An Alvearie (1581), quoted by Tilley, entry F398. Iliad,XVll.57o.

This content downloaded from 137.189.171.235 on Sun, 05 Feb 2017 22:08:23 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 256 Chambers

against the kind of background already described, this line is likely to surprise, for the fly is no obvious example of courage. Some of Homer's readers therefore decided that a mistake had been made. George Chapman's solution to the problem was the simplest: he supposed that the line was ironic and that Menelaus found in his heart not fortitude but fear.16 Archbishop Eustathius had earlier suggested that the word "courage" (Saperos) was in fact a scribal error for the word "temerity" (Op?aos), and he seems to have been followed in this matter by Lau rentius Valla, whose Greek text reads "courage," but whose Latin translation reads "prudent audacity."17 Most interesting of all is the interpretation supplied by Erasmus' Adagia. Following his usual cus tom, Erasmus prints the Greek text, in this case preserving the word "courage," and then gives a Latin translation which indicates that "force" or "vigor" is being attributed to the fly. Yet the brief discus sion which precedes the quotation informs us that Homer's line illus trates the fly's proverbial improbitas?its depravity or shamelessness.18 What Erasmus points to is that all these men were probably swayed by a symbolism popularly supposed to have existed even in Egyptian times. Horapollo said that the fly was an ancient hieroglyph for "impudence" (?ra/i?r^ra), and for Renaissance readers iElian seemed to confirm the interpretation by calling the fly the "most dar ing" (dpaavTarris) of creatures.19 "Most daring" is also the adjective applied to the fly by Philo Judaeus, who adds an interesting detail. It is the dog-fly which he discusses, and he tells us that it combines both the daring of the fly and the shamelessness of the dog.20 For the Greeks all dogs appear to have been shameless, a fact evidenced by their word "impudent as a dog" (icvvoBaparjs). But the most shameless dogs of all were the notorious Cynics?so called, of course, from the Greek word for dog (k?w). These facts alone are probably enough to explain Origen's comparison of all Cynics to dog-flies and his condem nation of both for licentious and shameless impudence, but Origen may also have taken a hint from the fact that one Cynic had even

16 Chapman's Homer, ed. Allardyce Nicoll (London, 1957), 1, 370. 17 The views of Eustathius and others are reported by Spondanus in Homeri quae extant omnia . . . cum , . . commentariis (Basil, 1606), 1, 329. For Valla, see Homeri . . . Ilias per Laurentium Vallen . . . traduc?a (Brescia, 1497), sig. L4V. 18 Erasmus, Opera omnia (Leyden, 1703), 11, 920-21. 19 Horapollo, Hieroglyphica, ed. Leemans (Amsterdam, 1835), p. 51; iElian, II.29. See also Valeriano, Hieroglyphica (Lyons, 1626), pp. 268-69, an(l Andreae Alciati Emblemata cum commentariis (Padua, 1661), p. 693. 20 Philo Judaeus, De vita Mosis, 1.130.

This content downloaded from 137.189.171.235 on Sun, 05 Feb 2017 22:08:23 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms The Fly in Donne's "Canonization" 257 been nicknamed the "dog-fly."21 Origen's comparison was later used by Vives to illuminate Augustine's hostile remarks about Cynics in The City of God,22 but Augustine himself found a different use for the fly. He tells of how a subtle Manichee led an unwary Christian into heresy by means of a fly and of how the flylike heretic thus joined the party of Beelzebub, the lord of flies.23 Daring, impudence, Cynicism, heresy?these, then, are the quali ties conventionally attributed to the fly, and taken together they probably explain one final fact of literary history. While these various flies were all well enough known, the most famous of them was the subject of that "great protestation" already mentioned?Lucian's essay "In Praise of the Fly." It is now possible to see why that should have been the case. Lucian's essay is unserious, of course. It is a nota ble example of the paradox, of what the seventeenth century called the "defense of contraries": a deliberate defense of the wrong or un popular side. There were many such paradoxes in classical times, and more than a few?like Lucian's essay?took the form of a mock-en comium. What exalted Lucian's effort above the rest was the fact that his subject and his genre were so much alike. Audacious impudence? a "great protestation of a thing of little weight"?was the signal quality of each. Lucian's paradoxical fly therefore became famous when many of his other mock-encomiums did not. It was paid even the tribute of imitation?at least three other encomiums of the fly were subsequently written24?and it was regularly referred to when the subject of paradox arose. Castiglione, for example, mentions those men "so wittie and eloquent, that thei have not wanted matter to make a booke in praise of a fly."25 Gabriel Harvey adopted a very different attitude toward such matters, but he too indicates the popu larity of the subject by referring to those "silly . . . fellowes that com mended . . . the fly."26 The strongest example, however, again is sup

21 Origen, In Exodum homil?a, IV (PG, xn, 322). For the Cynic's nickname, see Donald R. Dudley, A History of Cynicism (London, 1937), p. 146. Dudley, quoting a scholiast on Aristotle, lists four reasons why Cynics were called dogs (p. 5). 22 Augustine, The Citie of God: With the Learned Comments of. . . Vives, tr. J. H., 2nd ed. (London, 1620), p. 707. 23 Augustine, Tractates in Joannis Evangelium, 1.14 {PL, xxxv, 1386). 24 The authors were Michael Psellus, Joannes Tzetzes, and Franciscus Scribianus; see Henry K. Miller, "The Paradoxical Encomium," MP, un (1956), 150, 152. 25 Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, tr. Thomas Hoby, Tudor Translations (London, 1900), p. 123; quoted by Miller, p. 154. 26 The Works of Gabriel Harvey, ed. Alexander B. Grosart (1884), n, 244-45; quoted by Miller, p. 156, n. 65.

This content downloaded from 137.189.171.235 on Sun, 05 Feb 2017 22:08:23 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 258 Chambers plied by Erasmus. Passing over those other paradoxical works of Lucian which he himself had translated, Erasmus chose to mention only the essay on the fly as one of the precedents for his own paradoxi cal Praise of Folly.27 These "heresies of paradox," as Dr. Johnson calls them,28 provide the final reason for the fly's appearance in "The Canonization." For the poem as a whole is clearly a defense of contraries as paradoxical as Donne's own Paradoxes and Problems or as the Praise of Folly which Donne there mentions.29 This statement is most obviously true in that the poem celebrates a self-conferred canonization which wittily inverts normal views of sainthood. Each lover acts as the other's "hermitage"; sexual miracles attest to the validity of their claim to the canon; and they shall later intercede with that unnamed deity "above" in behalf of the laity who invoke them. Such a canonization, clearly, is as heretical as Augustine's lord of the flies could desire. In addition, these attitudes are notably Cynical, whether one understands by that term the licentious and flylike philosophers condemned by Origen or that nearly saintlike Cynic extolled by Epictetus for an austere rejec tion of artificial shows like "Countries, Townes, Courts."30 And cer tainly "The Canonization," even from its opening line?"For God sake hold your tongue"?is as audaciously and daringly impudent as any poem or fly could be. The uses of the fly are therefore rather complex, for the insect functions in "The Canonization" in at least three different ways. As an object of monumental insignificance, it marks a specific turning point in the poetic logic of Donne's argument: "Call us what you will" ?even a fly. As a creation of unnatural science, it closely corresponds to the hermaphroditic and resurrectable nature of Donne's love. As an image of audacious paradox, it serves to define the tone and technique and meaning of the poem at large. Or rather, the phoenix and the fly define these things. There is a seriousness to Donne's attitude, as, in

27 Erasmus mentions Lucian's essay in the epistle to More, prefatory to Moriae encomium. It is worth noting that Erasmus suffered ecclesiastical attack for his "Lu cianism"; see C. R. Thompson, The Translations of Lttcian by Erasmus and St. Thomas More (Ithaca, 1940), pp. 44-47. 28 Works (Oxford, 1825), v, 103; quoted by Miller, p. 159, n. 83. 29 See the tenth of the Paradoxes. 30 Epictetus, III.22. If the saintlike Cynic is thought of, then another relevant fact may be that the Cynic Peregrinus compared his self-cremation to that of the phoenix (Dudley, p. 180).

This content downloaded from 137.189.171.235 on Sun, 05 Feb 2017 22:08:23 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms The Fly in Donne's "Canonization" 259 deed, there was to many a paradox. Cicero's Paradoxes of the Stoics shows most clearly, perhaps, that while paradoxes always take the unorthodox position, they need not take the wrong one, for in Cicero's case, the paradoxes seriously argue for moral virtue. And the ultimate ends, if not the means, of Lucian and Erasmus were serious too. In the case of "The Canonization," Donne's serious attitude is strongly sug gested by the fact that prominently placed in the central line of the poem's central stanza is a legendary and sacred bird. But there is also an oblique and paradoxical approach to seriousness, an attitude most strongly suggested not by the phoenix but by a creature more impu dent and less divine.

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