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KEtLYr KATHLEEN AGNES ... "AMONGST THE RED. THE WHITE .THE 6REEMHS WOMAN. NATURE. AND METAPHOR IN STUART,LOVE POETRY. THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY.< PH.D*. 197B

University Microfilms International 300 n . z e e b r o a d , a n n a r b o r , m i o b io b

@ Copyright

Kathleen Agnes Kelly

1978 "AMONGST THE RED, THE WHITE, THE GREEN"

WOMAN, NATURE, AND METAPHOR IN STUART LOVE POETRY

DISSERTATION

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for

the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate

School of The Ohio State University

By

Kathleen Agnes Kelly, B.A., M.A.

*****

The Ohio State University

1978

Reading Committee:

Robert C. Jones

Mildred B. Munday

Edwin W. Robbins

Edwin W. Robbins, Adviser

Department of English VITA

March 24, 1948 ...... B o m - Akron, Ohio

1970 ...... B.A., Saint Mary’s College, Notre Dame, Indiana

1970-1974 ...... University Fellow, Department of English, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio

1973...... M.A., The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio

1974-75 ...... Teaching Associate, Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio

1975-1977 ...... Lecturer, English Department, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio

1977-1978 ...... Instructor, Writing Workshop, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio

FIELDS OF STUDY

Major Field:

English Renaissance Literature

Minor Fields:

Modem Literature

Medieval Literature

The Epic

ii TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page VITA ...... ii

INTRODUCTION ...... 1

Chapter

I. MAGIC METAPHOR ...... 12

(i) Donne--"Communitie"; Lovelace— "The Scru- tinie"; Donne--"Elegie" (’Natures lay Ideot"), "Elegie: Loves Progress," "Elegie: Going toBed." 13

(ii) Carew--"The Spring"; Donne— "The Blossome," "Twicknara Garden"; Waller— "At Penshurst" ("While in the Park"), "To the Mutable Fair"; Marvell-- "Damon the Mower," "The Mower's Song," "The Mow­ er to the Glowworms," "The Nymph Complaining." 27

(iii) Donne--"Sapho to Philaenis"; Cowley-- "The Spring"; King--"The Exequy"; Donne— "A Noc- turnall," The First Anniversarie. 52

II. ANTHROPOMORPHIC METAPHOR ...... 71

(i) Lovelace— "Lucasta Weeping," "Ode. The Rose"; Waller--"Song" (J'Stay Phoebus, stay"). 72

(ii) Herrick--"To the Virgins," "Corinna's Going a Maying"; Waller--"Go, Lovely Rose!"; Lovelace— "To Amarantha, That she would dishevell her hair," "Love Made in the First Age"; Marvell--"Young Love,""To His Coy Mistress." 76

III. MYSTIC METAPHOR ...... 93

(i) Jonson— Charis ("Her Triumph"); Carew— "Song" ("Aske me no more"); Herrick--"To the Water Nymphs"; Cleveland--"Upon Phyllis Walking"; Waller— "At Penshurst" ("Had Sacharissa lived"); Marvell--"The Picture of Little T.C.," "Upon Ap­ pleton House." 94

L11 (ii) Donne--"The Good-morrow," "The Canoniza­ tion," "The Sunne Rising"; Waller--"On a Girdle"; Cowley--"The Soul"; Donne--"The Extasie," "Ele­ gie: His Parting from Her," "A Valediction of Weeping." 117

(iii) Lovelace--"Gratiana Dauncing and Singing"; Marvell— "The Fair Singer," "Mourning," "The Gal­ lery"; Milton--Comus, Paradise Lost. 127

IV. REJECTION OF METAPHOR...... 154

(i) Jonson--Charis ("Another Laydes exception," "Clayming a second kisse"); Carew--"To a Lady that Desired I would Love Her"; Suckling— "Son­ net I," "Sonnet II," "Upon My Lady Carlisle's Walking in Hampton Court Garden." 155

(ii) Fane--"My Happy Life"; Cowley--"Horat. Epodon.," "The Wish"; Marvell--"The Garden." 163

(iii) Marvell— "Eyes and Tears," "The Coronet." 177

CONCLUSION ...... 189

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 192

iv I have through every garden been, Amongst the red, the white, the green, And yet, from all the flowers I saw, No honey but these tears, could draw.

— Marvell

INTRODUCTION

For a lover to say he has been through every garden is, by

Marvell's time, to say a great deal, for they were a varied and num­ erous lot. He speaks of course symbolically, not just of gardens— though "the green" includes them and all relatives to the classical locus amoenus*— but also of love. The red and white have long been metonymies for the mistress, her rosy cheeks and lily skin symbols for beauty's passion and purity. The lover also says a great deal when he so closely identifies the mistress with the garden, for he is reminding us of the complicated matrix of experience involving lovers, women, and nature which had long been the subject of love poetry and which had become especially complicated in English Stuart poetry.

This study begins with the observation that in Stuart love poetry the mistress, while frequently associated with nature, never seems to have a stable relation with it. At times she will, for example, be considered nature’s inferior, unnatural and stiff in the ways of love. At other times she will seem equal to nature at its best,

1 beautiful surpassing art, yet unselfconscious, gracious, pure. At still other times she will be considered entirely superior to nature, the source and prototype of all nature's goods. The lover has an equally unstable relation, both with the mistress and with nature.

At times he might feel himself nature's superior, a lord over its beauty. Just as nature is, so might the mistress be his conquest, although with one icy stare she might subvert all his control.

At other times he might proclaim nature his friend and equal, and the mistress too, all together subject to the rule and ruin of time, pressed to seize the day. But nature's energies could overwhelm him. Perhaps miserable in love, he will be oppressed by nature's carefree spring. Woman, too, could overwhelm him; he, unrequited, might lose himself in grief, or, requited, lose himself in love.

At such times nature might ally with him or the mistress, or it might seem paltry and insignificant compared with her or with both of them.

In trying to find some pattern in these relations, it does little good to turn to the philosophic or ethical discussions of the day on women and nature, for they offer precisely the same indeter- minateness. Describing the Renaissance attitude toward nature, 2 Edward William Tayler finds a kind of continuum between two poles.

In the Pauline tradition, nature, as the instinctive and spontaneous, is considered to be corrupt and corrupting; it pulls man away from conscious reason down to the formless and inchoate. Nature was corrupted with the Fall and man's art must "repair the ruin" (Milton).

In the humanist tradition, on the other hand, nature is considered God's liber creatorum and the guide to "right reason." As such, nature's instinct and spontaneity signify God's art, the manifestation of the transcendent, the unspoiled, perfect communion between heaven and earth. Orthodox opinion finds a compromise, looking on nature as at once the mother of all the arts, their Nurse, but also as fallen, requiring the discipline of art and the gift of grace.

The neo-Platonic and Ifetrarchan traditions bequeath two equally distinct ways to consider woman. She is frequently identified with the order of nature, with the sensuous, the instinctive, and the spontaneous, representing the natural, generative principle on the human scale. And, as with nature, this could be either ominous or redeeming. On the one hand she might signify, like Eve and Circe, the irresistible temptress, seducing man away from his manliness, his reason, and his conscious powers. On the other hand she could signify, with the Blessed Virgin, the Celestial Venus, and the three

Graces, man's calling to a higher nature in love with the beautiful and the good. She would mediate for him between heaven and earth.

Once again orthodox opinion strikes a compromise. Insofar as she reflects the image of God, woman is worthy of love.3 The lover, overcome by the imago Dei, can lose himself in a furor amatorius, a voluntary and sublime death beginning in beauty and ending in pleasure, a furor which imitates the heavenly love of God who gave himself to the world.4 According to some, this beauty in woman may legitimately be loved both in body and soul.5 However, if woman is loved not for God's image but only for herself, the desire is sinful, whether it is her body that is desired in lust or her noble spirit in idolatry. In either case she distracts man from his path toward heavenly beauty and causes him to lose his reason in the false ecstasy of lustful or idolatrous passion.

The range of possibilities which philosophical and ethical schemes offer, then, gives us little more control over love poetry's man-woman-nature triangle than we had without it. Yet that is no doubt as it should be, for these lyrics were never intended to be read as treatises on values but as personal gestures. In his study of

Donne's poetry, Donald Guss makes this point clearly:

/Donne's/ poetry conveys attitudes, not concepts; and . . . it is action, not statement. Now, that language may be action is an idea widespread among semanticists and linguists, but too little discussed by critics. Fundamentally, it distin­ guishes between two uses of language: where what it says is important, language is statement; where what it does is impor­ tant, language is action. For example, "Good morning," "Thank you," and "How are you?" are verbal actions. So are oaths, toasts, and compliments. . . . In short, much language is a verbal 'equivalent of bowing, leering, kissing babies, or shaking a finger in admonition. Many sentences function pri­ marily to reveal their speakers' attitudes, and to affect their audiences. . . . Similarly, much lyric poetry is not statement but action, exploiting all the subtlety of language to strike a pose, or make a gesture. It is the verbal equivalent of throw­ ing a gauntlet, wiping a tear, clasping a hand, or offering a tender embrace.^

In other words, although philosophical and ethical schemes can tell us what may or may not be the "correct" thing to do in love, only the lover's attitude in response to his particular situation can determine how he describes the relations among himself, woman, and nature.

One primary means the lover has for expressing attitudes is to use metaphors comparing himself or his mistress with nature.

In doing so, he defines his attitude and thus in some way comes to terms with the situation love has precipitated upon him. That metaphors do define attitudes becomes clear in some literary

theorists' classification of metaphors.® Wellek and Warren's

account of this classification is particularly useful, dividing metaphors into those which animate, and those which de-animate magically or mystically:

Rhetoricians like Quintilian already make much of the distinction between the metaphor which animates the inanimate, and that which inanimates the animate; but they present the distinction as one between rhetorical devices. With Pongs /Das Bild in der Dichtung/, our second typologist, it becomes a grandiose contrast between polar attitudes— that of the mythic imagination, which projects personality upon the outer world of things, which animizes and animates nature, and the contrary type of imagination, which feels its ways into the alien, which de-animizes or unsubjectivizes itself. All the possibilities of figurative expression are exhausted by these two, the subjective and objective poles.

The first form /the subjective pole/ was called by Ruskin the 'pathetic fallacy'; if we think of it as being applied upward to God as well as downward to the tree and the stone, we may call it the anthropomorphic imagination.

At the objective pole, Wellek and Warren continue, Pongs distin­

guishes between magic and mystic metaphor:

Magical metaphor is interpreted after the fashion of the art historian Worringer, as an 'abstraction' from the world of nature. Worringer studied the arts of Egypt, Byzantium, Persia, arts which

reduce organic nature, including man, to linear-geometrical forms, and frequently abandon the organic world altogether for one of pure lines, forms and colours. . . . 0

With magic metaphor, the metaphor-maker removes objects from the

threatening flux of time and change. Magic, as Karl Vossler remarks,

"uses language as a tool and thereby seeks to bring as much as 1 1 possible, even God, under its control Mystic metaphor, while it also in some way takes the object out of its usual context of time and change, does so not in order to control the object but to make it an expressive symbol of a spiritual state. The image partakes of some eternal source of life, outside the ordinary world of time and change, and beyond under­ standing. It is a "symbol effected by a spiritual state; it is an expressive image not a causative image, and it is not necessary to the state: the same spiritual state can express itself in other symbols."-*-2 Vossler noted that

there is constant strife between magic, which uses language as a tool and thereby seeks to bring as much as possible, even God, under its control, and mysticism, which breaks, makes valueless, and rejects, all forms. ^

While the magician forces his own control on the world by de-animizing it, the mystic sees the world and himself eternized by a power outside his control and beyond his understanding.

With metaphor, then, a lover can animize the objective world, projecting his personality upon a familiar, habitable world; or he can de-animize the outer world, either to magically control alien powers, or to describe a mystic state effected by a power far greater than himself. But regardless of the type of metaphor he uses, whenever the lover makes a comparison with nature he is shaping, defining, asserting, or in some other way coming to terms with an attitude. To study the relation between the lover, woman, and nature, then, we might first group the lyrics according to the kind of metaphor used. And one thing we discover when we group lyrics this way is that certain situations consistently call for certain metaphors.

Thus Chapter I, "Magic Metaphor," discusses lovers in three situ­ ations: (i) betraying the mistress, for when he betrays her the lover must dehumanize her to extricate himself from her claims; (ii) com­ plaining for unrequited love, for to make the pain less he must either dehumanize the mistress into something less desirable or himself into something that cannot feel pain; and (iii) lamenting the mistress's absence or death, for with that loss the lover himself feels dehumanized. In Chapter II, "Anthropomorphic Meta­ phor,” either lovers are (i) persuading the mistress, telling her that she is just like nature and should act as freely, or they are (ii) complimenting her by showing her how she makes their world come alive. And in Chapter III, "Mystic Metaphor," lovers are

(i) praising the mistress by showing her mystic effect on themselves and nature, (ii) praising love by showing how superior love makes them to the entire world, or (iii) wondering whether women's mystic powers are all they are said to be. Finally, Chapter IV,

"Rejection of Metaphor," considers lovers who have given up making metaphors that transform their relations with woman and nature.

Either they (i) decide that the mistress's mystic powers truly reside only in their own poetry, or their own appetites; or they

(ii) reject her powers because she interferes with a satisfying re­ lation with nature itself; or they (iii) replace their relations with both her and nature by a relation with God. 8

While these chapters are not intended as an exhaustive classi­ fication of Stuart love lyrics referring to woman and nature, nevertheless most such poems fall into one of these categories.

Not all, however, fall neatly into those love situations--betrayal, complaint, lament, compliment, etc.--which I have chosen to discuss, and for the sake of clarity and length, many good lyrics have had to be excluded. Conversely, not all those lyrics that do involve the situations covered in these chapters necessarily use the type of metaphor— magic, anthropomorphic, or mystic— that the situation usually calls for. But these lyrics have been included, for they are often the most interesting poetry precisely because they play with conventional attitudes. Finally, not all poems use one kind of metaphor exclusively. Often a lyric describes the lover in the process of changing his attitude, say from that of a rebel to that of an obedient servant, or from a lover defeated by the mistress's absence to one victorious over time. The categories are justified precisely because they throw such movements into relief.

As these categories are not meant to exhaust Stuart love lyrics, neither are they meant to supersede other critics’ attempts to find pattern in their multiplicity. While no one has yet system­ atized the relations between man, woman, and nature in these lyrics, my study has naturally benefited a great deal from what has already been written, and it often reinforces others' findings. I will mention only the two studies which seem to me the most useful surveys of

Stuart lyrics. Readers of Earl Miner's work classifying Stuart poetry according to metaphysical, cavalier, and Restoration modes will note that lyrics dominated by magic metaphor here often fall into his category for the private or metaphysical mode, and lyrics dominated by anthropomorphic metaphor usually imply the cavalier or social 14 mode. The correlation is far enough from being neat and consis­ tent to make the idea of comparison intriguing. And readers of H. R.

Richmond’s The School of Love will see similarities here with the structure of his study} 5 Observing that classical, European, and

Stuart lyrics frequently deal with similar love situations— the first encounter, dreams of love, persuasions, laments, etc.--

Richmond studied each class of lyric to discover the "discreet yet important changes in standard patterns" that revealed for him an evolution in style and sensibility from classical through Stuart poetry. I would be very gratified indeed if the comparisons which my categories make possible are thought to reveal equally discreet yet important changes. 10

Notes to Introduction

1 For the history of the classical topos of the locus amoenus see Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953), pp. 195-200; and for a fine critical application see David Evett, " ’Paradice's Only Map’: The Topos of the Locus Amoenus and the Structure of Marvell’s Upon Appleton House," PMLA, 85 (1970), 504-513. To cite only a few of the best discussions of what connotations "the green" has collected, see A. Bartlett Giamatti, The Earthly Paradise and the Renaissance Epic (Princeton: Princeton U. P., 1966); Stanley Stewart, The Enclosed Garden: The Tradition and the Image in Seventeenth-Century Poetry (Madison: U. of Wisconsin Press, 1966); H/ugh/ M. Richmond, Renaissance Landscapes: English Lyrics in a_ European Tradition (The Hague: Mouton, 1973); Kitty W. Scoular, Natural Magic: Studies in the Presentation of Nature in English Poetry from Spenser to Marvell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965).

2 Edward William Tayler, Nature and Art in Renaissance Liter­ ature (New York: Columbia U. P., 1964), especially Chapter I, "Renaissance Uses of Nature and Art."

^ See N. J. C. Andreasen's account of the Renaissance's "official view as to what love should do" in John Donne: Conser­ vative Revolutionary (Princeton: Princeton U. P., 1967), Chapter II, "Varieties of Amatory Experience," pp. 21-77.

^ For the source of this neo-Platonic view of love see Marsilio Ficino, "Commentary on Plato's Symposium," trans. Sears Jayne, University of Missouri Studies, 19 (1944), especially "The Second Speech." To cite only the briefest accounts of neo-Platonic theory with pointed application to the mistress's role in love, see Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (New Haven: Yale U. P., 1958), pp. 39-56, and Frank Manley's Introduction to his edition, John Donne: The Anniversaries (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1963), especially pp. 20-40 on the Wisdom tradition.

5 For a summary of this controversy, see A. J. Smith, "The Metaphysic of Love," RES, 9 (1958), 362-375; and for the ambiguities it can create in poetry, see John Huntington, "Philosophical Seduc­ tion in Chapman, Davies and Donne," ELH, 44 (1977), 40-59.

^ John Donne, Petrarchist: Italianate Conceits and Love Theory in "The Songs and Sonets" (Detroit: Wayne State U. P., 1966), p. 109. 11 7 For an account of the English lyric's only gradual exploi­ tation of "a fundamental rapport between nature and the human spirit," see J. W. Lever, The Elizabethan Love Sonnet (1956; rpt. London: Methuen, 1966). g In the Introduction to A Grammar of Metaphor (London: Seeker and Warburg, 1970), Christine Brooke-Rose reviews theories of metaphor and their critical application, and suggests that apart from analyzing their grammar as she does, one might fruitfully analyze metaphor according to Quintilian's classification (sum­ marized by Wellek and Warren below).

® Rene Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature, 3rd ed. (1942; rpt. New York: Harcourt, Brace § World, 1956), p. 204.

10 Wellek and Warren, pp. 204-205, quoting Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy, trans. Michael Bullock (New York: Intemation U. P., 1953).

11 Wellek and Warren, p. 303, n. 46, quoting Vossler's The Spirit of Language in Civilization, trans. Oscar Oeser (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1932), p. 4.

12 Wellek and Warren, p. 205.

1^ Quoted by Wellek and Warren, p. 303, n. 46.

The Metaphysical Mode from Donne to Cowley (Princeton: Princeton U. P., 1969), The Cavalier Mode from Jonson to Cotton (1971), The Restoration Mode from Milton to Dryden (1974). Miner’s is the most recent and best in a long line of critical attempts to define the "schools" of seventeenth-century poetry.

1^ H/ugh/ M. Richmond, The School of Love: The Evolution of the Stuart Love Lyric (Princeton: Princeton U. P., 1964), p. 22. I. MAGIC METAPHOR

According to the art historian Wilhelm Worringer, magic metaphor abstracts from the world of nature and "reduces organic nature, including man, to linear-geometrical forms"; it removes the natural object from the threatening flux of time.'*' When the speakers of seventeenth-century love lyrics make metaphors with nature, they frequently make magic metaphors. They abstract the mistress or themselves from their human situation in order to gain control over threatening circumstances. They may not go so far as to make the mistress or themselves into "linear-geometrical" forms, but they do in some way reduce their human capacity--they dehumanize. The circumstances which require magic metaphor typically appear in

(i) the betrayal poem, (ii) the complaint, and (iii) the lament.

The circumstances that threaten the betrayer are the social norms which would condemn his betrayal. So he uses magic metaphor to deny the mistress's membership in the social world to which he owes obligations. He magically transforms her into a nut whose meat is to be eaten and whose shell discarded, or into a mine begging to be excavated. In such guise, she can make no claims on his sense of responsibility.

The speaker of the complaint confronts a woman who refuses her favors. To control this situation, he uses magic metaphor to do

12 13

two things. He uses it to try to convince himself that the mistress is not worth desiring--she is ice, a heart congealed,

the progeny of a cloven rock, but this gambit usually fails.

Then the lover may use magic metaphor to deny he desires. With

magic metaphor he can dehumanize himself, dividing himself from

his heart, or turning himself into stone. (The complainer does

have a third option, to try to convince the mistress she should

desire him, but for that see Chapter II, "Anthropomorphic Metaphor.")

The speaker in the lament believes from the start he is

dehumanized. He uses magic metaphor to describe his own death

caused by the absence of his beloved, to show that even inanimate

things are closer than he is to being alive and human. Yet in the

process of describing his own death, he discovers he has access to

a life and energy far superior to that of the world which defeats

him.

(i)

Magic metaphor is used by lovers to control threatening circum­

stances. It is odd, then, that we should begin the chapter with betray­

ers, the lovers seemingly the least threatened by circumstances. But on

the occasion of the poem the betrayer is confronting the society which

objects to his behavior. And since his object is not to alienate 14 the whole of society but to detach himself from only one member of it, namely the mistress, he turns to magic metaphor to prove he has not broken society’s rules. For by dehumanizing woman, he can deny his social obligation to her without denying society. This is not to suggest that the truth or falsehood of his logic much interests us

--we know the lover is a cad. What does appeal to us is the audacity with which he magically equivocates the problem away.

Donne's speaker in "Communitie" argues against constancy by confusing logical categories until women eventually get put into the same category with nutmeats:

Good wee must love, and must hate ill, For ill is ill, and good good still, But there are things indifferent, Which wee may neither hate, nor love, But one, and then another prove, As wee shall finde our fancy bent.

If then at first wise Nature had Made women either good or bad, Then some wee might hate, and some chuse, But since shee did them so create, That we may neither love, nor hate, Onely this rests, All, all may use.

If they were good it would be seene, Good is as visible as greene, And to all eyes it selfe betrayes: If they were bad, they could not last, Bad doth it selfe, and others wast, So, they deserve nor blame, nor praise.

But they are ours as fruits are ours, He that but tasts, he that devours, And he that leaves all, doth as well: Chang'd loves are but chang'd sorts of meat, And when hee hath the kernel1 eate, 2 Who doth not fling away the shell? This speaker seems to respect his audience's values well enough. He uses the language and premises of their own moral code, and he raises the crucial issue, the question of good and evil. The good and ill with which he begins certainly seems to be the same good and ill of which the theologian speaks in helping us to distinguish right from wrong. Yet once we accept his premises, he shamelessly equivocates.

First he assumes women are generically indifferent, rather than individually, according to time, place and circumstance. And then he 3 assumes that to "prove" women's goodness we must use them sexually.

In each case the speaker applies non-human terms to women. Whereas non-human "character" may be generically indifferent, and whereas to

"prove" inanimate things may mean to dissect or devour them, we may hardly assume so of a human being. His concluding analogy, "Chang'd loves are but chang'd sorts of meat," does little to persuade us to accept his behavior, but it does much to reveal his assumptions about women.

Whereas Donne's speaker addresses a general audience, the speaker in Lovelace's betrayal poem, "The Scrutinie," more audaciously works his casuistry on the betrayed woman herself. Here the task should be more difficult. He must prove to the one who will lose most from his action that he has done nothing wrong. And the situation itself is challenging--it is the morning after, traditionally when lovers reluctantly part, singing aubades that curse the sun's rising and vow true love. In place of an aubade, he must persuade his mistress to be glad she lost her maidenhead to a blackguard. Let us see how he does: 16

Why should you sweare I am forsworn, Since thine I vow'd to be? Lady it is already Mom, And 'twas last night I swore to thee That fond impossibility.

Have I not lov'd thee much and long, A tedious twelve houres space? I must all other Beauties wrong, And rob thee of a new imbrace; Could I still dote upon thy Face.

Not, but all joy in thy browne haire, By others may be found; But I must search the black and fair Like skilfull Minerallist's that sound For Treasure in un-plow'd-up ground.

Then, if when I have lov'd my round, Thou prov'st the pleasant she; With spoyles of meaner Beauties crown'd, I laden will r e t u m e to thee, Ev'n sated with Varietie.

Needless to say, the poem hardly succeeds as a persuasion; it entirely ignores its audience's feelings. Yet the speaker does seem to justify his behavior. He agrees with his mistress's premises: he did vow he would love her long. What he reveals now is his notion of a "vow"— "that fond impossibility"— and of what a long time really is--"a tedious twelve houres space." Clearly, according to him, he has not forsworn, and even if he had, to keep that vow would be a sin from which his mistress and all women would suffer:

I must all other Beauties wrong and rob thee of a new imbrace; Could I still dote upon thy Face. (8-10)

As if this equivocation were not enough, his third stanza exposes the crass assumption upon which his argument rests: woman contains a precious mineral; she should be excavated, mined and abandoned. 17

Yet even this assumption begins with the time-honored Petrarchan convention that beauty is like a jewel, precious and timeless. The speaker has simply ''logically" extended that comparison to justify behavior which completely reverses the Petrarchan attitude before beauty. If women are jewels, we should treat them as we do all other jewels, that is, we should go after as many as possible. The speaker's power with words enables him to transform the Petrarchan woman who requires devotion into the mine that can be plowed-up and left behind.

He can even transform a conditional promise to return, which might have been a belated concession to his mistress's humanity, into an incredible insult. If he returns, she will be honored that he comes "laden" with spoyles of meaner Beauties," that is, with an arm-long record of maidens he has duped just as he has duped her. Such consolation she might well do without.

In both poems, "Communitie" and "The Scrutinie," the lover uses the logic of the socially acceptable theologian or Petrarchan lover to persuade us to accept behavior that violates our social code.

The theologian's or Petrarchist’s sense of love is, in the course of his speech, magically turned into the speaker's own private defini­ tion of love, one that sees love as conquest and physical pleasure.

These magicians, at least in their own minds, succeed in conforming to society's rules while at the same time trampling on the actual intention behind those rules. While we cannot accept their callous behavior, we can take pleasure in the illusion of this private triumph over society's norms which their casuistry creates. 18

Not all lovers who de-humanize the mistress necessarily describe a betrayal of the mistress, for their magic may not be able to extend as far as they would like. In Donne's "Elegie" ( " N a t u r e s lay Ideot"), for example, the potential betrayer ends up being the betrayed.

Natures lay Ideot, I taught thee to love, And in that sophistrie, Oh, thou dost prove Too subtile: Foole, thou didst not understand The mystique language of the eye nor hand: Nor couldst thou judge the difference of the aire Of sighes, and say, this lies, this sounds despaire: Nor by the1 eyes water call a maladie Desperately hot, or changing feaverously. I had not taught thee then, the Alphabet Of flowers, how they devisefully being set And bound up, might with speechlesse secrecie Deliver arrands mutely,'and mutually. Remember since all thy words us'd to bee To every suitor; I_, 'if my friends agree. Since, houshold charmes, thy husbands name to teach, Were all the love trickes, that thy wit could reach; And since, an houres discourse could scarce have made One answer in thee, and that ill arraid In broken proverbs, and torne sentences. Thou art not by so many duties his, That from the'worlds Common having sever'd thee, Inlaid thee, neither to be seene, nor see, As mine: who have with amorous delicacies Refin'd thee'into a blis-full paradise. Thy graces and good words my creatures bee, I planted knowledge and lifes tree in thee, Which Oh, shall strangers taste? Must I alas Frame and enamel1 Plate, and drinke in glasse? Chafe waxe for others seales? breake a colts force And leave him then, beeing made a ready horse?

Yet even though she has betrayed him, the speaker still considers himself superior to the mistress. She is still de-humanized, though he did improve her from a "lay Ideot" and a piece of the common into enamelled Plate and a "ready horse." Even when the speaker seems to compliment the mistress by calling her a "blis-full paradise," it is not because he, as a human, feels overwhelmed by a superior presence, 19 but because he, as a god, is taking credit for her accomplishments and present ascendence. It is, in fact, the ability to maintain his

seemingly superior position over the mistress who has just betrayed him that impresses us about this speaker. He does not deny the facts and say that she is simply unworthy of his love now that he cannot have her exclusively. She is still a "blis-full paradise." Nor does he go

the opposite route and re-humanize her so that he can appeal to her

sense of loyalty and gratitude. He never requests her fealty. Instead, he still considers himself entirely superior to her and he accounts for his present defeat this way. It is not she who has betrayed him. She

is still a piece of china or a horse, capable neither of loyalty nor

of betrayal. What has defeated him are his competitors all around who have moved in on his territory and overtaken his magical creation. By

capturing his product they make his magic their servant and he must

admit this defeat. But she had nothing to do with it. She is still

the Ideot, albeit a well-trained one. In this case the magician made

the world what he wanted of it, but he did not foresee how appealing

his creation would be.

Common to all lovers who dehumanize the mistress is the sense that

woman represents a threat, an element in their world that can keep them

from what they want. In the case of "Communitie" and "The Scrutinie,"

the mistress threatened the lover's freedom to move on to other

mistresses. In "Elegie" ("Natures lay Ideot"), the mistress threatened

by choosing for herself someone other than the lover. In all cases the

lovers salvage their sense of dignity by magically dehumanizing woman

and thus eradicating the need to treat her as an equal. 20

Up to now we have looked at poems in which the lover is betray­ ing or has been betrayed, and is trying to extricate himself from his situation. Before we leave these magicians we should look at two poems in which the lover has not betrayed the mistress but is preparing to make love to her--Donne's "Elegie: Loves Progress" and "Elegie:

Going to bed." For in these poems, even before any betrayal, we see a lover use magic metaphor to remain free from any complicated entangle­ ments with or submission to the mistress's powers.

Donne's "Elegie: Loves Progress" satirically presents a libertine who not only argues against valuing virtue in women, but also, oddly enough, against erotic foreplay; he wants to get to the sexual point as efficiently as possible. There is no higher "end" in love, says this speaker, no Platonic or Petrarchan virtue in the love of the beautiful. The "true end" of love is the end closest to the

earth:

Who ever loves, if he do not propose The right true end of love, he's one that goes To sea for nothing but to make him sick

Perfection is in unitie: preferr One woman first, and then one thing in her. I, when I value gold, may think upon The ductilness, the application, The wholsomness, the ingenuitie, From rust, from soil, from fire ever free: But if I love it, 'tis because 'tis made By our new nature (Use) the soul of trade. All these in women we might think upon (If women had them) and yet love but one. Can men more injure women then to say They love them for that, by which they're not they? Makes virtue woman? must I cool my bloud Till I both be, and find one wise and good? May barren Angels love so. But if we Make love to woman; virtue is not she: 21

As beauty'is not nor wealth: He that strayes thus From her to hers, is more adulterous, Then if he took her maid. Search every sphear And firmament, our Cupid is not there: He's an infernal god and under ground, With Pluto dwells, where gold and fire abound; Men to such Gods, their sacrificing Coles Did not in Altars lay, but pits and holes: Although we see Celestial bodies move Above the earth, the earth we Till and love: So we her ayres contemplate, words and heart, And virtues; but we love the Centrique part. (1-3, 9-36)

Here the speaker attacks the neo-Platonic definition of woman's value and replaces it with his own. Since what is peculiar to women is not virtue or beauty but "the Centrique part," that is what men should value and love. This is a common enough anti-Petrarchan position

(though uncommonly argued), but Donne extends this speaker's callous­ ness a logical step further. If intercourse is the "true end" of love, the speaker says, why do we need even erotic foreplay?

Nor is the soul more worthy, or more fit _ For love, then this, as infinit as it /the Centrique part/. But in attaining this desired place How much they erre; that set out at the face! The hair a Forest is of Ambushes, Of springes, snares, fetters and manacles: The brow becalms us when 'tis smooth and plain, And when 'tis wrinckled, shipwracks us again. Smooth, 'tis a Paradice, where we would have Immortal stay, and wrinckles 'tis our grave. The Nose (like to the first Meridian) runs Not 'twixt an East and West, but 'twixt two suns; It leaves a Cheek, a rosie Hemisphere On either side, and then directs us where Upon the Islands fortunate we fall, Not faint Canaries, but Ambrosial1, Her swelling lips; To which when we are come, We anchor there, and think our selves at home, For they seem all: there Syrens songs, and there Wise Delphick Oracles do fill the ear; There in a Creek where chosen pearls do swell The Rhemora her cleaving tongue doth dwell . . . (37-58) 22

The speaker here expresses not simply his need to get to the orgasm without delay, but also his need to avoid any situation which he does not control: the forest of hair, the brow’s smooth paradise, the

Siren voice. Instead of being trapped by all these, he suggests the

"lower route":

When thou art there /that__is, shipwrecked "upon another Forest^/ consider what this chace Mispent by thy beginning at the face. Rather set out below; practice my Art, Some Symetry the foot hath with that part Which thou dost seek, and is thy Map for that Lovely enough to stop, but not stay at: Least subject to disguise and change it is.

Rich Nature hath in women wisely made Two purses, and their mouths aversely laid: They then, which to the lower tribute owe, That way which that Exchequer looks, must go: He which doth not, his error is as great, As who by Clyster gave the Stomack meat. (71-77, 91-96)

If the speaker had not already lost all authority for speaking on this subject when he equated women with gold, or when he rejected the higher route with its sensuous, erotic entanglement in love, he surely has lost it now, with his final, distasteful comparison. His outrageous rejection not just of women as human beings but even of women as sensu­ ous beings argues far more forcefully for the limitations of dehuman­ izing love than it ever could for his view of love.

But again, the lover's power with words and not his conclusions is the point here. Coarse and arrogant though he be, the speaker has defended his predatory appetites with "logical" argument, the tool we all might use to justify our own right behavior. Taken in by the 23 mechanics of logic, we are forced to follow his argument to its self- justifying conclusions.

The speaker in "Elegie: Love's Progress" is so far from being able to see women as human that there can be no question we reject his arguments, though he may make us follow them. The situation in Donne's

"Elegie: Going to Bed” is more complicated:

Come, Madam, come, all rest my powers defie, Until I labour, I in labour lie. The foe oft-times having the foe in sight, Is tir'd with standing though he never fight. Off with that girdle, like heavens Zone glittering, But a far fairer world incompassing. Unpin that spangled breastplate which you wear, That th'eyes of busie fooles may be stopt there. Unlace your self, for that harmonious chyme, Tells me from you, that now it is bed time. Off with that happy busk, which I envie, That still can be, and still can stand so nigh. Your gown going off, such beautious state reveals, As when from flowry meads th'hills shadowe steales. Off with that wyerie Coronet and shew The haiery Diadem which on you doth grow: Now off with those shooes, and then softly tread In this loves hallow'd temple, this soft bed. In such white robes, heaven's Angels us'd to be Receavd by men: thou Angel bringst with thee A heaven like Mahomets Paradice, and though 111 spirits walk in white, we easly know, By this these Angels from an evil sprite, Those set our hairs, but these our flesh upright. Licence my roaving hands, and let them go, Behind, before, above, between, below. 0 my America! my new-found-land, My kingdome, safeliest when with one man man'd, My Myne of precious stones: My Emperie, How blest am I in this discovering thee! To enter in these bonds, is to be free; Then where my hand is set, my seal shall be. Full nakedness! All joyes are due to thee, As souls unbodied, bodies uncloth'd must be, To taste whole joyes. Jems which you women use Are like Atlanta's balls, cast in mens views, That when a fools eye lighteth on a Jem, His earthly soul may covet theirs, not them: 24

Like pictures or like books gay coverings made For lay-men, are all women thus array'd. Themselves are mystick books, which only wee (Whom their imputed grace will dignifie) Must see reveal'd. Then since that I may know; As liberally, as to a Midwife shew Thy self: cast all, yea, this white lynnen hence, There is no pennance due to innocence: To teach thee I am naked first; why than What needst thou have more covering than a man?

Compared to him in "Elegie: Loves Progress," the speaker here seems almost compassionate. His description of the mistress sometimes suggests he could empathize with her and the world outside himself, because, reflected in her beauty, all seems benevolent, rich and beautiful:

Your gown going off, such beautious state reveals As when from flowry meads th'hills shadow steales.

0 m y America! my new-found-land.

To enter in these bonds, is to be free. (13-14, 27, 31)

Yet these metaphors are never allowed to control the poem, and the speaker never lets his entrance into these "bonds" mean much beyond the physical.^ She is an America, but not so wondrous that he can­ not possess and run it all, like a ship:

0 my America! my new-found-land, My kingdome, safeliest when with one man man'd. (27-28)

And he never makes any personal connections with the mistress.

Instead he glorifies love-making generically. Urging the mistress to get under the sheets, he comments:

111 spirits walk in white, we easly know, By this these Angels from an evil sprite, Those set our hairs, but these our flesh upright. (22-24) 25

The mistress is simply one of many spirits who inspire an erection,

not a particular woman. In almost the entire last stanza he cele­

brates nakedness in general, not this woman's nakedness. While the

speaker seems to have some sense of the power of love, he treats it

as a toy. The mistress is a mystic book, yes, but she is no sacred

mystery to him when he sees her revealed. In an odd simile, he be­

comes like a midwife observing her instrumentally. While this does

make his act seem morally neutral, it also makes the mistress into

a patient, an object for study.

The mistress's mysterious powers seem to last only until she

is opened, sealed, and covered:

To teach thee I am naked first; why than What needst thou have more coverning than a man? (47-48)

While the speaker does break into lyricism in isolated lines, the

final effect is cynical. At the end the lover sees love as the

seduction of beauty into the domain of his own ego rather than as

his identification with larger, mysterious forces beyond his control.

The entire address, in fact, seems as much calculated to shock us

with its morally neutral handling of a far from neutral subject

('There is no pennance due to innocence") as it is to celebrate going

to bed. Once again a speaker has tried to show us that what we might

consider wrong is really right.

In all of the above poems the speaker conquers the mysterious

flux of passionate desires by stabilizing it into a fomula. For

these speakers, Petrarchan and neo-Platonic traditions notwithstanding,

passion consists in the flesh raised up and fulfillment in the timely possession of the repository. Women in this formula are dehumanized and abstracted into manageable objects--nutmeats, jewels, gold, or mystic books— requiring no effort of the ego to engage itself in confusing entanglements. And the appeal of these speakers, while we ignore for the moment their dehumanizing positions, lies in their power to perform this magic abstraction in the teeth of the arguments against them. For however socially and sexually affronting their positions are, and however limiting psychically, theirs are bravado attempts at controlling the world and making it conform to their own desires. At least to a limited extent, they make nature yield her pleasures. Until we are all Zen masters, we must appreciate their audacity. Cii)

Our interest in the betrayers is primarily in the wit they use to manipulate the world for their own ends. We do not necessarily accept the definition of the world which that wit invents, but we do appreciate their inventiveness. Of course the betrayers can afford to define the world any way they please, since as long as they are successful lovers, no facts will leap up to contradict them. The betrayed mistresses cannot force them to be true. The speakers in the poems we are about to look at, namely the complaints, are in quite the opposite position. They have failed to get what they want-- the favors of their mistress--and they cannot stop wanting them.

Yet they too try to redefine their situation to bring it under con­ trol, and they too use magic metaphor to do it. But in these poems we are often as sympathetic with the lovers' feelings as we are intrigued by the wit they summon to manage their situation.

The lover will try to manage his situation by using magic meta­ phor either to dehumanize the mistress and thus make her seem undesir­ able, or to dehumanize himself and thus make himself no longer capable of desire. In the poetry of Donne, Waller, and Marvell which we will look at here, we will notice that Donne's speakers tend to desensitize themselves and try to forget the women who will not requite them. They reject the adoring Petrarchan attitude toward the mistress and redirect

27 28 their feelings. Waller's speakers are more conventionally devout.

They do vent their anger with the mistress, but they eventually resign themselves to adoring her beauty from the distance. Marvell's pastoral figures are made the most prostrate by love, never achieving any distance from their feelings, and they themselves become the meta­ phors for a pastoral harmony forever lost.

But before we examine these lovers' grief, we should first look at a poem which classicallydescribes the unrequited lover's initial shock, before he has tried to redefine his situation:

The Spring

Now that the winter's gone, the earth hath lost Her snow-white robes, and now no more the frost Candies the grasse, or castes an icie creame Upon the silver Lake or Chrystall streamer But the warme Sunne thawes the benummed Earth, And makes it tender, gives a sacred birth To the dead Swallow; wakes in hollow tree The drowzie Cuckow, and the Humble-Bee. Now doe a quire of chirping Minstrels bring In triumph to the world, the youthful Spring. The Vallies, hills, and woods, in rich araye, Welcome the comming of the long'd for May. Now all things smile; only my Love doth lowre: Nor hath the scalding Noon-day-Sunne the power, To melt that marble ice, which still doth hold Her heart congeald, and makes her pittie cold. The Oxe which lately did for shelter flie Into the stall, doth now securely lie In open fields; and love no more is made By the fire side; but in the cooler shade Amyntas now doth with his Cloris sleepe Under a Sycamure, and all things keepe Time with the season, only she doth carry June in her eyes, in her heart January.6 Thomas Carew

This speaker is at one with the natural world, all receptive to spring's influence, feeling the sap rise within. He wants to make 29

love and nothing about him suggests he is anything but entirely good,

entirely right, entirely deserving. This is initially the position

that all the unrequited lovers will be in. Their mistresses’ icy heart shocks them. Carew's poem does not go much further than to

describe that initial shock. The lover contrasts the thaw of the world with the mistress’s coldness, unable to decide what to make

of it. He vacillates between wanting to dehumanize her and wanting

to pity her because she is an innocent victim of a cruel power.

In his first twelve lines the speaker describes the sweet and

irresistible powers of spring. Before, all was candied, silvered,

and crystallized into motionlessness; now the sun releases the ice’s hold and engenders new life. It "thawes the benummed Earth," gives

"birth To the dead Swallow," "wakes . . . The drowzie cuckoo"(5-8).

All these are simply given new life, a gift of the sun. Their only

action is the spontaneous song or "rich araye" that welcomes spring.

How amazing, then, to discover one who resists this wonderful

gift: "Now all things smile; only my Love doth lowre" (13). The

speaker implies that she perversely rejects the sun; she lours at

it. But he does not sustain that judgment and next makes her look more like a victim than one who resists. She is held captive by ice

even the sun cannot melt:

Nor hath the scalding Noon-day-Sunne the power, To melt that marble ice, which still doth hold Her heart congeald, and makes her pittie cold. (14-16)

The speaker, it seems, cannot figure out how to judge her; he can­ not allow himself to dehumanize her into willfully cold marble, but 30 neither can he deny his own desire. He can only turn back to his

initial complaint: lines 17-24 essentially repeat lines 1-12.

Whereas he first showed how all motionless things were effortlessly warmed back to life by the sun, he now describes how the formerly

sheltered ox and fire-side lovers are now effortlessly cradled in

the open fields and shady undertrees. Again, the implication is

that anyone who would not lie in the grass must be making perverse

efforts to resist the season, and again the mistress could be the

cruel agent carrying ice in her heart:

and all things keepe Time with the season, only she doth carry June in her eyes, in her heart January. (22-24)

But did she create the ice, or is she stricken with it?

The ambiguity in the lover's judgment of his mistress illustrates how incomprehensible she seems to him and how unable he is to deny his own good desires. On the one hand she encourages him to keep time with the season, to believe the world feels with him: she has June in her

eyes and he is made tender under her influence. Yet she herself is not tender, apparently not susceptible to her own influence. She is both inspiringly natural and frustratingly unnatural. The lover is unable to define her metaphorically either as an inhuman glacier or as a captured innocent. He ends up completely immobilized, caught between June and January.

This speaker is unable to deal with the contradictions which

love has presented to him. He neither knows how to resist his own

feelings nor how to make the mistress respond. But his is only the 31 beginning of the lover’s response. Donne, Waller, and Marvell treat the more advanced stages of the complaint. Their speakers try to resolve the conflict between inner and outer worlds either by deny­ ing that the mistress is desirable or by denying their own desires.

The lover in Donne's "The Blossome" resolves this conflict by separating from himself that romantic part which confidently believes the outer world will eventually satisfy the heart's desire. What remains after the separation is a less tender but more realistic lover:

Little think'st thou, poore flower, Whom I have watch'd sixe or seaven dayes, And seene thy birth, and seene what every houre Gave to thy growth, thee to this height to raise, And now dost laugh and triumph on this bough, Little think'st thou That it will freeze anon, and that I shall To morrow finde thee falne, or not at all.

Little think'st thou poore heart That labour'st yet to nestle thee, And think'st by hovering here to get a part In a forbidden or forbidding tree, And hop'st her stiffenesse by long siege to bow: Little think'st thou, That thou to morrow, ere that Sunne doth wake, Must with this Sunne, and mee a journey take.

But thou which lov'st to bee Subtile to plague thy selfe, wilt say, Alas, if you must goe, what's that to mee? Here lyes my businesse, and here I will stay: You goe to friends, whose love and meanes present Various content To your eyes, eares, and tongue, and every part. If then your body goe, what need you'a heart?

Well then, stay here; but know, When thou hast stayd and done thy most; A naked thinking heart, that makes no show, Is to a woman, but a kinde of Ghost; How shall shee know my heart; or having none, Know thee for one? Practise may make her know some other part, But take my word, shee doth not know a Heart. 32

Meet me at London, then, Twenty dayes hence, and thou shalt see Mee fresher, and more fat, by being with men, Then if I had staid still with her and thee. For Gods sake, if you can, be you so too: I would give you There, to another friend, whom wee shall finde As glad to have my body, as my minde.

Unlike the lover in Carew's lament, this lover does not stand immobile, caught between the inner and outer worlds. To deal with the pain of unrequited love, he chooses to dehumanize himself by detaching that part of himself which hurts from the rejection— his heart. The less sentimental person can now admit the mistress refuses him and turn from her, though he cannot, as yet, do so very generously. For he also tries to deny that she is worth desiring. He dehumanizes her into a woman without a heart. She cannot, he says, recognize another fully human being when she sees one, however much she may be able to recognize a body:

How shall shee know my heart; or having none, Know thee for one? Practise may make her know some other part, But take my word, shee doth not know a Heart. (30-32)

That this is an unfair definition of the mistress becomes obvious when at the end he berates her for wanting only his mind, thus contradicting the earlier implication that she knows only men's physical parts.

But we indulge this unkind portrait of the lady because the lover's

integrity has gained our respect. His painful decision, perhaps cynical,

is on the whole realistic. He rejects the Petrarchan notion that love

can exist in minds without bodies because his own body denies it.

Stoically, he accepts the consequences of his realism and leaves his heart, hoping the separation is only temporary. But if the mistress has forced him to separate himself from his heart, he cannot restrain himself from denying that she has one either. With an icy glance back­ ward, he heads toward the city.

In "Twicknam Garden," Donne creates another lover unrequited because of his mistress's Platonic morals. Unlike the lover in

"The Blossome," however, this lover begins by seeming to respect the

lady's virtue, and rather than blaming all his troubles on her, he blames himself. He apparently is not so callous as to leave his heart and insult the mistress, making her into the sour grapes he cannot reach

Blasted with sighs, and surrounded with teares, Hither I come to seeke the spring, And at mine eyes, and at mine eares, Receive such balmes, as else cure every thing, But 0, selfe traytor, I do bring The spider love, which transubstantiates all, And can convert Manna to gall, And that this place may thoroughly be thought True Paradise, I have the serpent brought.

'Twere wholsomer for mee, that winter did Benight the glory of this place, And that a grave frost did forbid These trees to laugh and mocke mee to my face; But that I may not this disgrace Indure, nor leave this garden, Love let mee Some senslesse peece of this place bee; Make me a mandrake, so I may groane here, Or a stone fountaine weeping out my yeare.

The lover still believes the mistress is a mystic spring, and even though he is incapable of receiving its influence, he denies his first impulse to destroy "the glory of this place." Instead, since the garden will not satisfy his desires, he, in deference to its superior value, will try to satisfy the garden. He chivalrously denies his desire and becomes less than himself. But paradoxically, 34

that very willingness to be humble gives him new self-esteem. The

fountain, which in his humility he becomes, is the magic image of his own pure and honest desire. In the end, his sense of his own

righteousness overcomes his careful restraint:

Hither with christall vyals, lovers come, And take my teares, which are loves wine, And try your mistresse Teares at home, For all are false, that tast not just like mine; Alas, hearts do not in eyes shine, Nor can you more judge womans thoughts by teares, Then by her shadow, what she weares. 0 perverse sexe, where none is true but shee, Who's therefore true, because her truth kills mee.

As it turns out, he is not at all convinced of the mistress's mystic balms. He can only believe in the reality of his ardent desire. It

is not his spider love that disturbs the glory of the place; it is his mistress's perversely Platonic morals. Even though he has tried

gallantly to believe in the beauty of her virtue, he is the same

speaker as in "The Blossome," unable to suppress the obvious reality

of his passion. Despite his attempt to be noble, he ends up, like that other lover, dehumanizing the mistress into a spiteful perversion.

The lover dehumanizes the mistress, yet it is clear that his vision is distorted by desires turned resentful. His resentment makes the power of his feelings all the more convincing, and thus

Donne makes what might have been the conventional praise of a patron

into a convincing portrait of a strongly moved lover. Earl Miner says of the poem that

much of /the/ ingenious transformation of poetic situation stems from the peculiar social situation in which Donne found himself: he felt it necessary to pretend to be a suitor utterly and hopelessly dedicated to the Countess of Bedford, 35

even while social and other considerations demanded that he make plain that his suit be taken as no more than a general tribute. The final paradox makes this clear:

0 pervese sexe, where none is true but shee, Who's therefore true, because her truth kills mee. C26-27) Many an earlier poet writing much more simply in the Petrarchan mode to ladies of superior rank had faced Donne's problem and had found their solution in a mild neo-Platonism. In its very title, Drayton's Idea suggested the method: if one woos the Idea of beauty, one's aims are wholly innocent. In "Twicknam Garden," Donne's solution is to go down the scale of nature rather than up the Platonic ladder.7

Donne manages to be both an anti-Petrarchan, slightly cynical but very passionate lover, and at the same time a respectfully compli­ mentary one.

In contrast to Donne's lovers who end by letting passion's resentment insult the mistress, in his complaints Waller's lovers end with more humble Petrarchan respect, honoring the mistress's virtue and taking the fault for their pain upon themselves. Yet before

Waller's lovers position themselves at that respectful distance, they use magic metaphor to try to dramatically redefine their worlds. In

"At Penshurst" ("While in the Park I sing"), for example, the lover at first makes of himself that mystic spring that ordinarily is the mistress's province, and he makes the mistress into a cruel being of the wild who has usurped the name and estate of a distinguished family:

While in the park I sing, the listening deer Attend my passion, and forget to fear. When to the beeches I report my flame, They bow their heads, as if they felt the same. To gods appealing, when I reach their bowers With loud complaints, they answer me in showers. To thee a wild and cruel soul is given, More deaf than trees, and prouder than the heaven! Love's foe professed! why dost thou falsely feign 36

Thyself a Sidney? from which noble strain He sprung, that could so far exalt the name Of love, and warm our nation with his flame; That all we can of love, or high desire, Seems but the smoke of amorous Sidney's fire. Nor call her mother, who so well does prove One breast may hold both chastity and love. Never can she, that so exceeds the spring In joy and bounty, be supposed to bring One so destructive. To no human stock We owe this fierce unkindness, but the rock, That cloven rock produced thee, by whose side Nature, to recompense the fatal pride Of such stern beauty, placed those healing springs, Which not more help, than that destruction, brings. Thy heart no ruder than the rugged stone, I might, like Orpheus, with my numerous moan Melt to compassion;8 (1-27)

Like the lover in the last stanza of "Twicknam Garden," this lover believes in the mystic purity of his own desire regardless of the mistress's indifference: his eloquent passion charms the deer and brings stones to life. And he believes in the mistress's perversity: she was mothered by a rock and she is harder and colder than one.

Later, though, he does seem to realize the impotence of his own magic. His curses do not make the mistress any less desirable; they only make him feel more desperate:

now my traitorous song With thee conspires to do the singer wrong; While thus I suffer not myself to lose The memory of what augments my woes; But with my own breath still foment the fire, With flames as high as fancy can aspire! This last complaint the indulgent ears did pierce Of just Apollo, president of verse; Highly concerned that the muse should bring Damage to one whom he had taught to sing, Thus he advised me: "On yon aged tree Hang up thy lute, and hie thee to the sea, That there with wonders thy diverted mind Some truce, at least, may with this passion find." 37

Ah, cruel nymph! from whom her humble swain Flies for relief unto the raging main, And from the winds and tempests does expect A milder fate than from her cold neglect! Yet there he'll pray that the unkind may prove Blessed in her choice; and vows this endless love Springs from no hope of what she can confer, But from those gifts which heaven has heaped on her. (27-48)

Since his curses only reinforce his desperation, the lover will give up his song. Yet in this fine complication of the resentful lover's stance, Waller has his lover give up his curses in such a way that, in the process, the lover makes yet another addition to his credentials as a passionate lover--his love is so powerful that even Apollo is con­ cerned about its effects; and he adds another barb to his attack of the mistress--she is so cruel he must fly "for relief unto the rag­ ing main" (42).

After such strong testimony to the power of the lover's desire, the last four lines must be anti-climactic, perfunctory. Without any sign of his ever having gone to that "raging main," the lover generously compliments his mistress and controls his desires. Still, the advice to go to the winds and tempests for a cure is suggestive. The mage who had redefined the mistress into a perversely inhuman rock, now confronts an alien force he cannot magically redefine. The winds and tempests force him to see himself objectively, as something less than the center of the world. So displaced, he might well be able to acknowledge the mistress's integrity, as he does in his last lines.

The poem itself, however, does not describe this dislocation.

Instead the poem seems to presume the change of heart takes place somewhere between lines 44 and 45. As it is, the ending seems only an 38 obligatory blessing.

In "To the Mutable Fair," Waller subtly and much more convinc­ ingly accounts for a similar change in the lover's attitude. As in

"At Penshurst," the lover initially complains about the mistress, this time not for her coldness, but for being fickle. He tells her he will dehumanize himself into what she is: a flight dove, the changing sea, the wind, the clouds:

Here, Celia! for thy sake I part With all that grew so near my heart; The passion that I had for thee, The faith, the love, the constancy! And, that I may successful prove, Transform myself to what you love. Fool that I was! so much to prize Those simple virtues you despise; Fool! that with such dull arrows strove, Or hoped to reach a flying dove; For you, that are in motion still, Decline our force, and mock our skill; Who, like Don Quixote, do advance Against a windmill our vain lance. Now will I wander through the air, Mount, make a stoop at every fair; And, with a fancy unconfined (As lawless as the sea or wind) Pursue you wheresoe'er you fly, And with your various thoughts comply. The formal stars do travel so, As we their names and courses know; And he that on their changes looks, Would think them governed by our books; But never were the clouds reduced To any art; the motions used By those free vapours are so light, So frequent, that the conquered sight Despairs to find the rules that guide Those gilded shadows as they slide. (1-30)

After thus demonstrating how inconstant he feels she is, the

lover then takes his metaphors one step further and compares his

mistress to the nymphs chased by mythological gods. These women had 39 to protect themselves by turning into clouds, trees, rivers, or birds:

And therefore of the spacious air Jove's royal consort had the care; And by that power did once escape, Declining bold Ixion's rape; She, with her own resemblance, graced A shining cloud, which he embraced. Such was that image, so it smiled With seeming kindness, which beguiled Your Thyrsis lately, when he thought He had his fleeting Celia caught. 'Twas shaped like her, but, for the fair, He filled his arms with yielding air. A fate for which he grieves the less, Because the gods had like success; For in their story, one, we see, Pursues a nymph, and takes a tree; A second, with a lover's haste, Soon overtakes whom he had chased, But she that did a virgin seem, Possessed, appears a wandering stream; For his supposed love, a third Lays greedy hold upon a bird, And stands amazed to find his dear A wild inhabitant of the air. To these old tales such nymphs as you Give credit, and still make them new; The amorous now like wonders find In the swift changes of your mind. (31-58)

The lover tells us he makes these comparisons to grieve "the less/

Because the gods had like success"(43-44), but with these comparisons he introduces a new measure for judging the mistress and himself. As long as the mistress was a wind or cloud changing arbitrarily, we might sympathize with the constant lover. But the women in these tales do not change shapes arbitrarily; they change in self-defense, to protect their virginity. And the only constancy of the gods in these tales is the constancy of their lust. They are not pitiful victims of nature's whims. They are rapists. The lover describes "bold Ixion's" pursuit as a "rape," and another's assault he calls laying "greedy hold." Our 40 sympathy cannot but shift from the lover to the "inconstant” mistress.

What began as a slight to the mistress’s constancy has become a backhanded compliment to her virtue. Perhaps the lover has lost control of his metaphors and unwittingly casts himself as a villain.

But his urbane manner suggests he can control his allusions. He has playfully transformed a lover's uncivil, embittered resentment of his mistress into a civil compliment of her virtue. With his anger he has demonstrated the strength of his desire; now with anger's trans­ formation into compliment, he shows he is not passion's slave. His last stanza affirms his control:

But, Celia, if you apprehend The muse of your incensed friend, Nor would that he record your blame, And make it live, repeat the same; Again deceive him, and again, And then he swears he'll not complain; For still to be deluded so, Is all the pleasure lovers know; Who, like good falconers, take delight, Not in the quarry, but the flight. (59-68)

By likening his attitude toward the mistress's coyness to that of a falconer enjoying the falcon's flight, the lover has shown he can sustain the frustration of not being able to possess the mistress.

He has given up the magic metaphor which objectified the mistress into a worthless object, and instead he has tried to objectify himself. He becomes the player in a sport whose rules protect the freedom of the adversary, something he before was unable to do. And with such a metaphor he discovers an advantage to his position that makes it tolerable. At least the falcon does return to the falconer, and he can take pleasure observing from a distance its flight. The lover's 41 metaphor shows he has achieved the detachment to value that privilege and to sublimate the desires it does not satisfy.

Donne's complaints, as we have seen, work by convincing us of the lover's immediate desire: it is so strong that the lover finds any attempt to sublimate it in deference to Petrarchan codes futile and ridiculous. Although the mistress tells him he is undesirable, he redefines his situation so that she is undesirable--inhuman--and so that he is all vitality--he goes to London, or he becomes love's miracle-working fountain. The drama in Donne's poems thus comes from the lover's breaking out of the Petrarchan convention of love. In contrast, the drama in Waller's poems comes from the lover urbanely trying to reconcile himself to those conventions. He begins by using magic metaphor to redefine the mistress so that he can reject her, but he ends by redefining himself. He becomes an anonymous object buffeted by storms or a falconer distanced from but enjoying the falcon. With such images he objectifies himself and gains control of his desire.

In Marvell's complaints we shall see yet a third kind of lover-- a naive pastoral figure able neither to persuade himself to leave the mistress, nor able to sublimate his desire. Living in pastoral harmony, these lovers have never had to objectify the world or themselves, and they cannot treat the world metaphorically at all. When, by unrequited love, they are forced out of harmony with their world, they cannot create a new image of that world in order to control it. The only recourse they see is simply to put an end to their world. Unable magically to dehumanize the mistress or their desire, they end by 42

literally dehumanizing themselves: they commit suicide. These

lovers' naivete must be taken with a strong dose of irony, but

Marvell nevertheless does not entirely destroy our sympathy for

them. We are disturbed by that deep discontent which inevitably

interrupts the child-like integrity of these lovers' entirely subjec­

tive worlds, and the lovers come to represent a yearning for a return

to some primaeval harmony. From slightly different angles, three of

Marvell's mower poems and "The Nymph Complaining for the Death of her

Fawn" all elaborate this same problem.

In "Damon the Mower," Damon suffers love-sickness and his pastoral

world feels with him as he always assumed it had. But this time his

happiness does not consist in the natural world's sympathy. Instead,

that sympathy only exacerbates his sense of isolation:

Hark how the Mower Damon sung, With love of Juliana stung! While everything did seem to paint The scene more fit for his complaint. Like her fair eyes the day was fair, But scorching like his am'rous care. Sharp like his scythe his sorrow was, And withered like his hopes the grass.

'Oh what unusual heats are here, Which thus our sunburned meadows sear! The grasshopper its pipe gives o'er; And hamstringed frogs can dance no more. But in the brook the green frog wades; And grasshoppers seek out the shades. Only the snake, that kept within, Now glitters in its second skin.

'This heat the sun could never raise, Nor Dog Star so inflame the days. It from an higher beauty grow'th Which burns the fields and mower both: Which mads the dog, and makes the sun Hotter than his own Phaeton. Not July causeth these extremes, But Juliana's scorching beams. 43

’Tell me where I may pass the fires Of the hot day, or hot desires. To what cool cave shall I descend, Or to what gelid fountain bend? Alas! I look for ease in vain, When remedies themselves complain. No moisture but my tears do rest, Nor cold but in her icy breast.® (1-32)

The pastoral creatures find refuge from the heat in brooks and shades, but Damon is excluded from any such relief. Only the snake is happy in this heat, and that serpent of desire has caused Damon's fall from pastoral harmony. For Juliana's rejection of his suit has challenged his child-like assumption that he is the center of the world, and he is unable to act without that assumption:

'How long wilt thou, fair Shepherdess, Esteem me, and my presents less? To thee the harmless snake I bring, Disarmed of its teeth and sting; To thee chameleons, changing hue, And oak leaves tipped with honey dew. Yet thou, ungrateful, hast not sought Nor what they are, nor who them brought.

'I am the Mower Damon, known Through all the meadows I have mown. On me the morn her dew distills Before her darling daffodils. And, if at noon my toil me heat, The sun himself licks off my sweat. While, going home, the evening sweet In cowslip-water bathes my feet.

'What, though the piping shepherd.stock The plains with an unnumbered flock, This scythe of mine discovers wide More ground than all his sheep do hide. With this the golden fleece I shear Of all these closes every year. And though in wool more poor than they, Yet am I richer far in hay. 44

’Nor am I so deformed to sight, If in my scythe I looked right; In which I see my picture done, As in a crescent moon the sun. The deathless fairies take me oft To lead them in their dances soft: And, when I tune myself to sing, About me they contract their ring.

'How happy might I still have mowed, Had not Love here his thistles sowed! But now I all the day complain, Joining my labor to my pain; And with my scythe cut down the grass, Yet still my grief is where it was: But, when the iron blunter grows, Sighing I whet my scythe and woes.'

While thus he threw his elbow round, Depopulating all the ground, And, with his whistling scythe, does cut Each stroke between the earth and root, The edged steel by careless chance Did into his own ankle glance; And there among the grass fell down, By his own scythe, the Mower mown.

'Alas!' said he, 'these hurts are slight To those that die by love's despite. With shepherd's-purse, and clown's-all-heal, The blood I staunch, and wound I seal. Only for him no cure is found, Whom Juliana’s eyes do wound. 'Tis death alone that this must do: For Death thou art a Mower too.' C33-88)

Juliana apparently thinks Damon and his entire world are trivial, especially compared with the world of the shepherd. Damon can neither accept Juliana's valuation nor reject it, since this "higher beauty" is obviously superior to his world. Unable to displace him­ self from the center of his world, and equally unable to forget

Juliana's superiority, Damon tries to destroy his world and then himself. In his misery the pastoral world still ministers to his 45 physical wounds ("with shepherd1s-purse, and clown's-all-heal"),

but now an unbridgeable chasm makes impossible its ministration

to his psychic wounds. At the end, his identification with death

seals the fate of the pastoral world's child-like egoism.

Damon is forced literally to dehumanize himself because he is

able to see fault neither in the beauty his heart desires nor in himself. While on the one hand we must look with irony on this pitifully naive figure proferring snakes and chameleons, on the

other hand we mourn with him the loss of his innocence. However

illusory that innocence, we sing his elegy to a harmony we all wish we could presume of our world.

"The Mower's Song" carries the same theme as "Damon the Mower," but more emblematically. Here the mower is forced to see from the beginning that not only Juliana, but even the world of nature is not

ruled by his internal world:

My mind was once the true survey Of all these meadows fresh and gay, And in the greenness of the grass Did see its hopes as in a glass; When Juliana came, and she What I do to the grass, does to my thoughts and me.

But these, while I with sorrow pine, Grew more luxuriant still and fine, That not one blade of grass you spied, But had a flower on either side; When Juliana came, and she What I do to the grass, does to my thoughts and me.

Unthankful meadows, could you so A fellowship so true forgo, And in your gaudy May-games meet, While I lay trodden under feet? When Juliana came, and she What I do to the grass, does to my thoughts and me. 46

But what you in compassion ought, Shall now by my revenge be wrought: And flow'rs, and grass, and I and all, Will in one common ruin fall. For Juliana comes, and she What I do to the grass, does to my thoughts and me.

And thus, ye meadows, which have been Companions of my thoughts more green, Shall now the heraldry become With which I shall adorn my tomb; For Juliana comes, and she What I do to the grass, does to my thoughts and me.

More deliberately than Damon, but with the same purpose, this mower is also "By his own scythe, the Mower mown." He sees no way to return to his former egocentric world and no life outside it. He can only resolve that:

flow'rs, and grass, and I and all, Will in one common ruin fall. (21- 22)

Ironically the pastoral harmony is regained at his death: as he dies, so does his green world.

Like Damon and the speaker of "The Mower's Song," the speaker in

"The Mower to the Glowworms" is unable to make sense of his world. He is alienated like the other mowers, but he is in more control of his misery, and his yearning for a lost harmony is less ironic than it is nostalgic:

Ye living lamps, by whose dear light The nightingale does sit so late, And studying all the summer night, Her matchless songs does meditate;

Ye country comets, that portend No war, nor prince's funeral, Shining unto no higher end Than to presage the grass's fall; 47

Ye glowworms, whose officious flame To wandering mowers shows the way, That in the night have lost their aim, And after foolish fires do stray;

Your courteous lights in vain you waste, Since Juliana here is come, For she my mind hath so displaced That I shall never find my home.

This mower is able to control his desires; at least he does not need to mow down the life around him because it cannot help him. Instead, he seems resigned to his separation from that simple world. His vocabulary shows he belongs to a new, more sophisticated world now, a world of more import than the meadow's. He understands "studying" and "meditation." He knows now of "wars" and "prince's funerals," and the use of "officious" pageantry. He seems sophisticated now; he has at least translated his experience into a metaphor that tells him his "mind" is displaced; he does not have to die physically. But he can create no other metaphors that will give him control of his situation. They cannot reestablish that lost harmony with the world which the glowworms invite him into. Nor can they define a new world, a maturer vision of completeness, to replace it. Pastoral man, man without grace, Marvell seems to suggest, is inconsolable.

As if to confirm that it is not a mistress who destroys pastoral harmony but the illusory nature of the harmony itself, Marvell gives us a pastoral complaint with a woman lover— "The Nymph Complaining for the Death of Her Fawn." Like the mowers in Marvell's other complaints, the nymph longs to reestablish a lost harmony with her pastoral world, and when she cannot, she is destroyed. Since, however, unlike the mowers she is a woman, Marvell has her take the traditional 48

lyric role and flee love rather than having her long for a lover who rejects her, as the male pastoral figures do. The disruption in her pastoral world is not, then, a beauty, not Juliana, but is an

aggressive power--"wanton troopers."

The fawn which the nymph's inconstant lover, Sylvio, has given her has been shot by troopers, and the nymph complains as it dies.

Sylvio had apparently declared his love to the nymph, and then left her (whether he left her a virgin or not is arguable^). Abandoned by Sylvio, the nymph transfers her affections to the fawn, which she prizes for its purity. The fawn is virginal almost to the point of masochistic exclusiveness:

Among the beds of lilies, I Have sought it oft, where it should lie; Yet could not, till itself would rise, Find it, although before mine eyes. For, in the flaxen lilies1 shade It like a bank of lilies laid. Upon the roses it would feed, Until its lips e'en seemed to bleed: And then to me 'twould boldly trip, And print those roses on my lip. But all its chief delight was still On roses thus itself to fill: And its pure virgin limbs to fold In whitest sheets of lilies cold. (77-90)

The cold, lily sheets suggest purity certainly, but also the winding sheets of the dead. Even the nymph seems to sense such exclusion may not be the natural state of things for long:

Had it lived long, I do not know Whether it too might have done so As Sylvio did: his gifts might be Perhaps as false or more than he. (47-50)

We are invited to ask how, precisely, the fawn could be "as false 0£ 49 more11 than Sylvio. Presumably the only betrayal the fawn is capable of is to quit his cold, lily bed and seek frisky does. If seeking sexual lovers is a worse betrayal than Sylvio's, perhaps Sylvio never used the nymph sexually. Judging from her adoration of the innocent fawn, Sylvio might well have left the nymph because she feared sex.

At any rate, the nymph seems much happier to be living with a child-animal than with a man. As Rosalie Colie points out,

the loss of the fawn means more to this girl than the loss of her lover; there is a certain comfort and relief manifest in the nymph's speaking of her life after Sylvio's defection. Then she was free to order her own life her own way--to make a boudoir, really, of her plot of ground; to bring up her pet, an undemanding creature who laid no tax on her real personality.H

With her fawn, the nymph still reigns over her pastoral world, wrapped in winding sheets though it is.

But ultimately, she cannot exclude the adult world of aggressions and desires. They intrude upon her world with force:

The wanton troopers riding by Have shot my fawn, and it will die. ( 1- 2)

It is as if the nymph, refusing to admit within herself any sexual desire or aggression, is forced by the external world to face them.

Just as in the mower poems, although the egocentric pastoral harmony seems to get destroyed by external forces (whether Juliana or the troopers), in fact the external forces only catalyze the destruction of a pastoral harmony that is essentially evanescent, perhaps illusory.

And just as the mowers could not live outside their pastoral world and died with the mown grass as their heraldry, so the nymph chooses death 50 rather than life separated from her reflection in the fawn:

Now my sweet fawn is vanished to Whither the swans and turtles go: In fair Elysium to endure, With milk-white lambs, and ermines pure. 0 do not run too fast: for I Will but bespeak thy grave, and die. First my unhappy statue shall Be cut in marble; and withal, Let it be weeping too— but there T h 1 engraver sure his art may spare, For I so truly thee bemoan, That I shall weep though I be stone: Until my tears (still dropping) wear My breast, themselves engraving there. There at my feet shalt thou be laid, Of purest alabaster made: For I would have thine image be White as I can, though not as thee. (105-122)

She freezes into marble, eternally embracing in the fawn the only image of herself she can conceive.

The lovers in Donne's and Waller's complaints use magic metaphor self-consciously. They dehumanize either themselves or their mistress to gain control of their situation. Donne's lovers try to control their desires by metaphorically reducing themselves to unfeeling things; they leave their hearts, or they become stone fountains.

Inevitably, though, they are convinced of the value of their desires and so dehumanize their mistresses. They make them into heartless, perverse creatures so that they can move on and find new mistresses.

Waller's lovers begin like Donne's. Convinced of the worth of their own desire, they metaphorically dehumanize their mistresses to demon­ strate their unfairness. But they realize their egocentricity and end by using metaphor to put themselves in their humble place. In contrast to Donne's and Waller's courtiers, Marvell's pastoral lovers are too unselfconscious to be able to use metaphor to redefine their situation. Instead of metaphorically dehumanizing the conflicting forces in their world, they literally dehumanize themselves. They die. In the irony of their death, Marvell makes the figures them­ selves our own magic metaphors to bring under control our self-deceptive longing for that pastoral harmony. (iii)

In section ii we have seen the lover in complaint poems tormented

by unrequited love. Love’s passion destroyed his harmony with an amen­

able world by making him desire something overwhelmingly good and then

not allowing him to have it. He had to destroy the promise of paradise

metaphorically, either by dehumanizing the mistress, or by dehumanizing

himself so that he might no longer desire. In examining the laments

that follow, we shall see that the lover's position is similar— he is

tormented by desire for a fulfillment which he can no longer have.

But unlike the lover of the complaint, who stands before paradise, this

lover has walked through paradise and stands on the other side. His

misery is caused not by an unfulfilled promise, but by a fulfilling

love cut short by death, distance, or time. This experience of para­

dise gives the lover resources which the lover of the complaint never had.

Initially the lover in the lament uses metaphor to show that he is

completely dehumanized by the beloved’s absence. The alien powers of

death, distance, or time have separated him from his beloved and thus

defeated him. They have magically bound his will and made him inanimate,

lifeless. He may contrast his lifelessness with the vitality of the world around him, or, using the conventional pathetic fallacy, he may

say that the world is made equally inanimate by these powers. But however he describes his grief at what he has lost, the very act of

describing that loss recalls him to his former strength. He begins

again to use metaphor not to describe himself as inanimate, but to 52 53 deanimate those powers which he had felt completely controlled by.

While the lovers in each of the following five laments all initially confront paralyzing circumstances, they finally recover their ability to infuse them with meaning.

In Donne’s epistle "Sapho to Philaenis," Sapho is made powerless by the absence of her lover. A poet, she can no longer make metaphors that embody her vision of the world because her vision is only

Philaenis, and the world has no reality that compares with her. The poet whose metaphors formerly defined her world is now unable to create anything:

Where is that holy fire, which Verse is said To have? is that inchanting force decai’d? Verse that drawes Natures workes, from Natures law, Thee, her best worke, to her worke cannot draw. Have my teares quench'd my old Poetique fire; Why quench'd they not as well, that of desire? Thoughts, my mindes creatures, often are with thee, But I, their maker, want their libertie. Onely thine image, in my heart, doth sit, But that is waxe, and fires environ it. My fires have driven, thine have drawne it hence; And I am rob'd of Picture, Heart, and Sense.

Thou are not soft, and cleare, and strait, and faire, As Down, as Stars, Cedars, and Lillies are, But thy right hand, and cheek, and eye, only Are like thy other hand, and cheek, and eye. (1-12, 21-24)

Unable to see any correspondence between inner and outer worlds, Sapho feels dehumanized, separated from all that was vital: "And I am rob'd of Picture, Heart and Sense" (12).

Yet in her zeal to show Philaenis that she is able to find nothing in the world equal to her— especially in "soft boy/s/"(31) and "harsh rough" men(38)--Sapho does find one likeness to the matchless Philaenis: 54

herself.

Betweene us all sweetnesse may be had; All, all that Nature yields, or Art can adde. My two lips, eyes, thighs, differ from thy two, But so, as thine from one another doe; And, oh, no more; the likenesse being such, Why should they not alike in all parts touch? Hand to strange hand, lippe to lippe none denies; Why should they brest to brest, or thighs to thighs? Likenesse begets such strange selfe flatterie, That touching my selfe, all seemes done to thee. My selfe I'embrace, and mine owne hands I kisse, And amorously thanke my selfe for this. Me, in my glasse, I call thee; But alas, When I would kisse, teares dimme mine eyes, and glasse. (43-56)

Although Sapho is frustrated with Narcissus' limitations, nevertheless

this discovery of a correspondence with Philaenis seems to reaffirm

her confidence in her own desirability. She turns from expressing

frustration and despair to blessing Philaenis:

So may thy cheekes red outweare scarlet dye, And their white, whitenesse of the Galaxy, So may thy mighty, 'amazing beauty move Envy'in all women, and in all men, love, And so be change, and sicknesse, farre from thee, As thou by comming neere, keep'st them from me. (59-64)

In the end, Sapho has regained some of her power and superiority over her world. At least she can once again make metaphors. She is able

to use the world of nature--its scarlet dye and white galaxy— to create metaphors that may change her circumstances. For instead of complaining

about her sufferings, she makes perhaps her most convincing plea for

Philaenis's return— convincing because it seems for a moment almost

disinterested, the purely generous praise of a talented admirer.

Although she seems hopeful, Sapho's confidence is not entirely

convincing at the end. Donne's aim seems more to shock us with his 55 unusual topic and to exploit the eroticism in lesbianism and female masturbation than to portray a lover coming to terms with grief, and this irony effects how seriously we can take Sapho's complaint.

Nevertheless, Sapho's movement from feeling entirely controlled by her circumstances to her final assertion of power in blessing Philaenis typifies the movement of the lament. The speakers in the following laments more convincingly assert their hope at the end, because they base that hope on a stronger and more secure experience of love.

Donne has Sapho begin her lament by cursing the futility of trying to find anything in nature comparable to Philaenis. She could have be­ gun more conventionally with the pathetic fallacy, saying that nature, too, languishes in the absence of the beloved. But Donne makes her a more realistic poet, and she never goes so far as to anthropomorphize nature. In "The Spring," Abraham Cowley's speaker would not be so realistic, but nature seems to be forcing him out of the pathetic fallacy. The world that formerly seemed to confirm his subjective feelings now contradicts him:

Though you be absent here, I needs must say The Trees as beauteous are, and flowers as gay As ever they were wont to be; Nay, the Birds rural musick too Is as melodious and free, As if they sung to pleasure you: I saw a Rose-Bud o'pe this morn; I'll swear The blushing Morning open'd not more fair.-*-2 (1-8)

The lover seems to be defeated by nature— it is as gay and free as he is melancholy and restrained. He is forced to recall former springs when times were more agreeable: 56

How could it be so fair, and you away? How could the Trees be beauteous, Flowers so gay? Could they remember but last year, How you did Them, They you delight, The sprouting leaves which saw you here, And call'd their Fellows to the sight, Would, looking round for the same sight in vain, Creep back into their silent Barks again.

Where ere you walk'd trees were as reverend made, As when of old Gods dwelt in every shade. Is't possible they should not know, What loss of honor they sustain, That thus they smile and flourish now, And still their former pride retain? Dull Creatures! 'tis not without Cause that she, Who fled the God of wit, was made a Tree.

In ancient times sure they much wiser were, When they rejoyc'd the Thracian verse to hear; In vain did Nature bid them stay, When Orpheus had his song begun, They call'd their wondring roots away, And bad them silent to him run. How would those learned trees have followed you? You would have drawn Them, and their Poet too. (9-32)

Nature used to be more sympathetic. Does nature's contradiction of his feelings now mean that he was wrong before, and that nature's

former sympathy was merely coincidence? Apparently not. The confi­ dence this lover has in his love enables him to say, in the face of nature's contradicting evidence, that he was not wrong. Instead of

finding fault in his view of nature, he finds fault in nature herself, in her "dull creatures!"

His strength in his love enables the lover to interpret nature's

contradiction of his feelings as only a seeming one. Nature does feel with the lover that the mistress is supreme; she simply responds differently: 57

But who can blame them now? for, since you're gone, ~ , They're here the only Faire, and Shine alone. You did their Natural Rights invade; Where ever you did walk or sit, The thickest Boughs could make no shade, Although the Sun had granted it: The fairest Flowers could please no more, neer you, Then Painted Flowers, set next to them, could do.

When e're then you come hither, that shall be The time, which this to others is, to Me. The little joys which here are now, The name of Punishments do bear; When by their sight they let us know How we depriv'd of greater are. 'Tis you the best of Seasons with you bring; This is for Beasts, and that for Men the Spring. (33-48)

In the end the apparent superiority nature held over the lover, making him feel lifeless in comparison with its gaiety, is redefined. The lover does not have to believe that nature ignores his sympathies. He only has to adjust his understanding of nature's correspondence slightly: nature feels the beloved's absence just as the lover does, but she res­ ponds less generously than he because she is happy to have eliminated some competition. The lover's own feelings are controlling the world, despite this apparent spring, and this spring is of no significance in comparison with the spring that will arrive with the lover's mistress.

The Lovers in "Sapho to Philaenis" and "The Spring" look forward to being reunited with the beloved, and their security and superiority in the face of the world's opposition is as strong as the confidence they have in the beloved's return. In the three laments that follow, we will see lovers grieve not for the absence of the beloved, but for her death. In such a situation the lover's sense of security in opposition to the world is much more hard won, if it is won at all. 58

The eerie and almost macabre effect of King's "The Exequy" results from the strange definition of power over his world which the lover ultimately creates. As in other laments, his metaphors at first describe his own feeling of defeat, his death. He does not compare or contrast his death with the vitality of nature as such, but rather with the source of nature's growth, the sun that brings all things to fruition. In contrast to the world's progress under the sun, his time moves backwards:

Nor wonder if my time go thus Backward and most preposterous; Thou hast benighted me, thy set This Eve of blackness did beget, Who was't my day, (though overcast Before thou had'st thy Noon-tide past) And I remember must in tears, Thou scarce had'st seen so many years As Day tells houres. By the cleer Sun My love and fortune first did run; But thou wilt never more appear Folded within my Hemisphear, Since both thy light and motion Like a fled Star is fall'n and gon, And twixt me and my soules dear wish An earth now interposed is, Which such a strange eclipse doth make As ne're was read in Almanake.13 (21-38)

The earth has defeated him by eclipsing his sun. Yet it is an eclipse, and he can foresee the time when the earth will once again let the sun shine:

Never shall I Be so much blest as to descry A glimpse of thee, till that day come Which shall the earth to cinders doome, And a fierce Feaver must calcine The body of this world like thine (My Little World!) that fit of fire Once off, our bodies shall aspire 59

To our soules bliss: then we shall rise, And view our selves with cleerer eyes In that calm Region, where no night Can hide us from each others sight. (49-60)

This recalling of the ultimate destruction of the earth which opposes him enables the speaker to repossess some of his own subjective power.

He at least is able to confront the fact that the earth took his beloved; and he has the strength not only to say that the earth took her, but also to yield the earth his treasure:

Mean time, thou hast her earth: much good May my harm do thee. Since it stood With Heavens will I might not call Her longer mine, I give thee all My short-liv'd right and interest In her, whom living I lov'd best: With a most free and bounteous grief, I give thee what I could not keep. Be kind to her, and prethee look Thou write into thy Dooms-day book Each parcell of this Rarity Which in thy Casket shrin'd doth ly: See that thou make thy reck'ning streight, And yield her back again by weight; For thou must audit on thy trust Each graine and atome of this dust, As thou wilt answer Him that lent, Not gave thee, my dear Monument. (61-78)

By transforming the earth into a kind of exchequer ("I give thee all/

My short-liv'd right and interest/ In her” ), the speaker is able to yield his beloved to the lord who lent her. The earth does have some power over him, but that power has limits, and he scolds it to be sure it renders up his beloved when its tenure ends.

Thus the lover meets with the objective fact of his wife's death, but it is a difficult victory ("I give thee what I could not keep").

The power he arrives at, finally, is only the power to look forward 60 to his own grave rather than backwards to hers. In the end he says his time does move forward, but compared with life's time, it is a mechanical progress:

'Tis true, with shame and grief I yield, Thou like the Vann first took'st the field, And gotten hast the victory In thus adventuring to dy Before me, whose more years might crave A just precedence in the grave. But heark! My pulse like a soft Drum Beats my approch, tells Thee I come; And slow howere my marches be, I shall at last sit down by Thee.

The thought of this bids me go on, And wait my dissolution With hope and comfort. Dear (forgive The crime) I am content to live Divided, with but half a heart, Till we shall meet and never part. (105-120)

Recognizing his grief has some limit, if only in death, the lover resolves to look forward to that end. He has gained that much control by admitting that he is at least half alive, "With but half a heart."

Nevertheless, such a half-life allows him to go on only in a mesmerized, automatic way. His ascendence over the alien power of death is just barely that; for he cannot really inform the time until his own death with meaning.

The speaker in Donne's "A Nocturnal1 on S. Lucies Day" ends with the same kind of tenuous hold on life as King's speaker does. Yet despite his inability to find much meaning in this life, the energy with which he asserts his superiority over ordinary life makes his hold on time seem more sure, if just as painfully won.

"A Noctumall" seems to begin with the traditional pathetic 61 fallacy of a world mourning with the lover:

Tis the yeares midnight, and it is the dayes, Lucies, who scarce seaven houres herself unmaskes, The Sunne is spent, and now his flasks Send forth light squibs, no constant rayes; The worlds whole sap is sunke: The general1 balme th'hydroptique earth hath drunk, Whither, as to the beds-feet, life is shrunke, Dead and enterr'd. Cl-8)

But surprisingly, this lover denies that any true sympathy from the world is possible:

Yet all these seeme to laugh, Compar'd with mee, who am their Epitaph. (8-9)

The world cannot comfort him because love long ago made him superior to it. Love completely detached him from the world and enclosed him in that private experience, so now that his beloved is dead the world cannot help him. Its sympathy only mocks him. The love that loosed him from the world now leaves him unconnected with anything. He is only a corpse:

Study me then, you who shall lovers bee At the next world, that is, at the next Spring: For I am every dead thing, In whom love wrought new Alchimie. For his art did expresse A quintessence even from nothingnesse, From dull privations, and leane emptinesse: He ruin'd mee, and I am re-begot Of absence, darknesse, death; things which are not.

All others, from all things, draw all that's good, Life, soule, forme, spirit, whence they beeing have; I, by loves limbecke, am the grave Of all, that's nothing. Oft a flood Have wee two wept, and so Drownd the whole world, us two; oft did we grow To be two Chaosses, when we did show Care to ought else; and often absences Withdrew our soules, and made us carcasses. 62

But I am by her death, (which word wrongs her) Of the first nothing, the Elixer grown; Were I a man, that I were one, I needs must know; I should preferre, If I were any beast, Some ends, some means; Yea plants, yea stones detest, And love; all, all some properties invest; If I an ordinary nothing were, As shadow,'a light, and body must be here. (10-36)

Having detached himself from the world, the lover now seems to wish he had never abandoned it. Now its beasts and stones seem better off than he is.

Yet in the process of describing his inconceivable misery, the speaker is rediscovering the power love gave him. Even in his negation he exalts in a superior negation. This assertion allows him not only to accept his inability to receive solace or sympathy from the world, but to relish the profundity of his detachment from it. In the second stanza we have seen the speaker express his feeling of defeat by con­ trasting his own death with spring's new lovers:

Study me then, you who shall lovers bee At the next world, that is, at the next Spring: For I am every dead thing . . . (10-12)

Now in the last stanza, the lovers whose powers he seemed to envy are carnally inferior:

But I am None; nor will my Sunne renew. You lovers, for whose sake, the lesser Sunne At this time to the Goat is runne To fetch new lust, and give it you, Enjoy your summer all. (37-41)

He is none, but he no longer envies the next spring, no longer prefers the life of the beast or stone to his own. These move by a "lesser 63

Sunne" and their love is lust, beastly as the goat's. He does not have his sun, but his sense of its superiority gives him the power to reject his own desire for oneness with the world. At the end he is able to want his separation from the world and to transform his non- being into something meaningful:

Since shee enjoyes her long nights festivall, Let mee prepare towards her, and let mee call This houre her Vigill, and her Eve, since this Both the yeares, and the dayes deep midnight is. (42-45)

His emptiness becomes a vigil. While it does not change his circum­ stances, this vigil does give those circumstances new meaning. Still

"none" as far as the world is concerned, he is able, with the word

"vigil," to rename that nothingness a capacity; he anticipates the time when he will be fulfilled in a way far superior to any fulfillment the world can offer.

Just as King's speaker reinterprets his backwards time into a forward progress, so Donne's speaker reinterprets his nothingness as a vigil. Both laments end with a somber conviction that waiting will bring victory. But whereas King's speaker marches mechanically to the grave, Donne's speaker makes the time before his death into something sacred, a vigil. This alliance with the holy calendar implies that the speaker recognizes he is a member of a community in rejecting the world as a thing without value, and so further supports his resolution.

Nevertheless, the consolation in both laments is hard won and strained, and depends entirely on the speaker's will to retain his new found conviction that he can create meaning in his life despite even death.

Different from the private struggle to accept death which we have 64 seen in "The Exequy" and "A Noctumall," Donne's The First Anniversarie:

An Anatomy of the World is a public lament, written some time after

Elizabeth Drury's death. But though he has a different purpose, the speaker in the anatomy makes use of the conventions of the private lament which we have seen above. He too describes feeling dehumanized by the death of the beloved and recovering from it.

The greatest difference between this lament and the previous ones is that the speaker begins already having overcome his sense of defeat at his beloved's death. His primary concern now is to convince the world that it, too, must recover from the beloved's death. Bur first it must realize it has died.

When Elizabeth died, the speaker says, not only he felt the loss, but so did the whole world:

When that Queene ended here her progresse time,

This world, in that great earth-quake languished; For in a common Bath of teares it bled, Which drew the strongest vitall spirits out. (7, 11-13)

This seems to be the conventional pathetic fallacy, the lover projecting his grief onto the natural world. Yet this lover has recovered from that first shock of Elizabeth's death and should be able to be more objective. He has! discovered that the life truly worth living still exists in the

love of vertue, and of good /which/ Reflects from her, on them which understood Her worth; And though she have shut in all day, The twi-light of her memory doth stay. C71-74)

Now he is not shocked at Elizabeth's death, but is shocked that, without 65 knowing it, the world has forgotten it has died. In other words, he does not regard the world's languishing at Elizabeth's death to be merely a projection of his own feelings, but something real. He has recovered from the shock of Elizabeth's death, and he wants to see the world recover too.

The speaker's primary job, then, is not to recover meaning for 14 himself, but to exhort the world to discover its meaning. And yet, much of the strength in his exhortation that the world recognize it is dead comes from his ability to recreate his own experience, his own lament, at Elizabeth's death. The world should see itself, he says, the way he saw it then. Thus The Anatomy uses the lament to exhort or persuade. It is this juxtaposition of exhortation and lament which produces the apparently confusing sense of time.'*''’

Critics have felt obliged to excuse what they see as Donne's continual lapse of memory. On the one hand he repeatedly laments that Elizabeth's death caused the death of the world:

But though it be too late to succour thee, Sicke World, yea dead, yea putrified, since shee Thy'intrinsique Balme, and thy preservative, Can never be renew'd, thou never live, I (since no man can make thee live) will trie, What we may gaine by thy Anatomy. (55-60)

On the other hand, as he describes the dead world, he describes it as if it has been dead since man's first fall, or even the angels':

How witty's ruine? how importunate Upon mankinde? It labour'd to frustrate Even Gods purpose; and made woman, sent For mans reliefe, cause of his languishment. They were to good ends, and they are so still, But accessory, and principall in ill. 66

For that first marriage was our funerall: One woman at one blow, then kill'd us all, And singly, one by one, they kill us now. (99-107)

Then, as mankinde, so is the worlds whole frame Quite out of joynt, almost created lame: For, before God had made up all the rest, Corruption entred, and deprav'd the best: It seis'd the Angels, and then first of all The world did in her Cradle take a fall, And turn'd her braines, and tooke a general1 maime Wronging each joynt of th'universal1 frame. (191-198)

But this apparent contradiction is easily explained if we consider the

first group of passages as the speaker's re-creation of the world's death as it appeared to him when Elizabeth died. As with the traditional private mourner using the pathetic fallacy, the world seemed to die when

the beloved died. But the speaker goes beyond saying that this is a

subjective view of the world. He says that the way the world appeared

to him then was, in fact, what the world has truly been since Adam.

Before Elizabeth's death, he was simply distracted from realizing the world's corruption because of her virtue. Her beauty gave heart and

life, and gilded into beauty, what was in truth an abhorrent carcass.

In the second group of passages, then, that carcass is revealed for what

it is and always has been. In this complicated permutation of the pathetic fallacy, Donne's speaker asks us to accept the subjective vision

of a lover mourning the loss of his beloved as the objectively true vision of our situation. We are all mourners who want to see a dead

world return to its first glory.

Thus Donne's speaker in The First Anniversarie does not use magic metaphor to describe his own defeat. He has already recovered from 67 that defeat and discovered the way to inform his life with meaning.

But he does use magic metaphor to describe mankind's defeat to itself, so that it may lament as he has done. He especially invites us to lament in the five refrains that begin with "Shee, shee is dead; shee's dead" and that all dehumanize or deanimate man and his world into "how poore a trifling thing"(184), "how lame a cripple" (238), "how ugly' a monster"(326), "how wan a Ghost"(370), or "how drie a Cinder"(428).

Mankind can recover itself and become superior to the world's corrup­ tion if it follows Elizabeth's example and thinks only of the higher world of heaven. The Second Anniversary gives a glimpse of what that higher world is like.

In all of the laments in this section, we see a lover initially controlled and dehumanized by the beloved's absence or death. His magic metaphors describe his life as impotent and purposeless, as a nothingness. But ultimately he recovers his power to inform life with meaning. He cannot change his circumstances, but he can change his interpretation of those circumstances to turn his defeat into victory. He ends by reasserting the superior power of his own love to outlast and overcome the powers of absence or death.

The lovers of the poems which use magic metaphor, metaphor that dehumanizes or de-animates, see themselves in a hostile, alien world.

The speaker in the betrayal poem must dehumanize the mistress in order to negate the force of society's norms against him. The speaker in the complaint must reconcile himself to unrequited love by dehuman­ izing the mistress and thus making her undesirable, or by deadening himself to his desires. And the speaker in the lament first describes his own feeling of being dehumanized by the beloved's absence; finally, though, he discovers that his own life is superior to an inhuman world.

In all these cases, the effect of the mistress (or her absence) on the

lover has been to force him to create barriers between himself and a hostile world. Like the mage, he tries to reduce hostile powers to

forms he can manipulate and control. In the following chapters we

shall see the lover using different metaphors— anthropomorphic and mystic metaphor--not to create barriers between himself and a hostile world, but to unite with something outside himself. He will describe worlds which are either alluring paradises he invites the mistress

into, or are the mistress's own mystic reality within which the lover would lose himself. 69

Notes to Chapter I

1 See reference to Worringer's Abstraktion und Einfuhling (Berlin, 1908; English tr., Abstraction and Empathy, New York, 1953) in Wellek and Warren, Theory of Literature, pp. 204-205.

^ John T. Shawcross, ed., The Complete Poetry of John Donne (Garden City: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1967). Subsequent references are to this edition.

See Andreasen John Donne, pp. 89-94, for a fuller analysis of the speaker's equivocation here.

^ C. H. Wilkinson, ed., The Poems of Richard Lovelace (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930). Subsequent references are to this edition.

^ Although the speaker compares the mistress to a "flowery mead" and to "America," that is, to non-human things, these are not magic metaphors; they do not represent things the lover controls or manipulates. Comparisons with non-human things that are overwhelming or fathomless are mystic metaphors suggesting that the lover is lost to forces outside his control. (See Chapter III for a fuller discussion of mystic metaphor.)

0 Rhodes Dunlap, ed., The Poems of Thomas Carew (1949; rpt. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957). Subsequent references are to this edition. 7 Metaphysical Mode, p. 56.

® G. T h o m Drury, ed., The Poems of Edmund Waller (London: Routledge 8 Sons, 1905). Subsequent references are to this edition. 9 Elizabeth Story Donno, ed., Andrew Marvell: The Complete English Poems (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1974). Subsequent references are to this edition.

I® For a fine discussion of this and the many other imponder­ ables of this poem, see Miner, Metaphysical Mode, pp. 246-71. 11 "M^ Ecchoing Song": Andrew Marvell's Poetry of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton U. P., 1970), p. 131. 12 A. R. Waller, ed., Abraham Cowley: Poems (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1905) . Subsequent references are to this or the companion volume, Abraham Cowley: Essays, Plays and Sundry Verses (1906). 70 1 ^ Richard S. Sylvester, ed., The Anchor Anthology of Seven- teenth - Century Verse, II (Garden City: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1969), pp. 325-29.

For this reason, Barbara Lewalski, in Donne's Anniversaries and Poetry of Praise (Princeton: Princeton U. P., 1974), p. 236, defines the speaker's role as "public celebrant and teacher (anatomist)." But she claims this role excludes the role of Petrarchan lover and mourner which 0. B. Hardison, Jr. identified in The Enduring Monument: A Study of the Idea of Praise in Renaissance Literary Theory and Practice (1962; rpt. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1973), p. 163. I propose below that in order to make his point, this teacher/anatomist recalls his private, Petrarchan lament to the public. 15 See, for example, Louis Martz, The Poetry of Meditation (New Haven: Yale U. P., 1954), p. 229: "A central inconsistency . . .defeats all Donne's efforts to bring its diverse material under control"; or Miner in Metaphysical Mode, pp. 63-66, who tries to account for the confusing sense of time by identifying Elizabeth Drury as the "formal cause" for the earth's decay, thus making chronology Irrelevant; even though the world's consumption began long before Elizabeth, with the fall, Miner tells us, "it did not much matter to Donne that one part of his praise should be that her death should be made the cause of 'This great consumption' (19) of the world." II. ANTHROPOMORPHIC METAPHOR

We have been looking at lovers who use magic metaphor to dehu­ manize and control hostile powers, or to describe their own defeat by such powers. Fortunately, not all lovers face such difficulties.

Some look forward to satisfaction with the beloved and view the world as a more friendly place. Poems in which these lovers speak are dominated by the animism of the anthropomorphic, or humanizing, metaphor. According to Wellek and Warren, anthropologists finding animism in primitive cultures have said that this kind of imagina­ tion "seeks to reach, propitiate, persuade, unite with personalized spirits." Rather than "stud/yang/ the laws of power exerted by things" as mages do, these lovers "project personality upon the outer world of things," animizing and animating nature.*

We have seen something of this imagination in Chapter I, particu­ larly in complaints and laments, but always in the process of being thwarted. For example, the mind of Marvell’s Mower "was once the true survey/ Of all these meadows fresh and gay," but since Juliana came, the correspondence between inner and outer worlds has been destroyed.

The lover of Cowley's "The Spring" opens his lament surprised at the spring’s gaiety in the face of his own melancholy. And in Donne's

"A Nocturnal1," the mourner takes no consolation from an apparently sympathetic world, for "all these seeme to laugh,/Compar'd with mee, who am their Epitaph." In contrast, the lovers in poems dominated by

71 72 anthropomorphic metaphor imagine the mistress and the world agreeing with their desires, and describe a humanized and gratifying world.

The circumstances which allow such a feeling are usually found in 2 two kinds of poems, (i) compliments to the mistress and (ii) persuasions. Often in compliments, the lover wants to show the mistress that her effect is so absolute that all the world feels for her as he does. What interests us is how cleverly he reinterprets ordinary phenomena to be able to show that things do indeed love his mistress. In persuasion poems, circumstances are more demanding.

Here the lover uses humanizing metaphors not to describe how grati­ fied he feels--he has not yet had satisfaction from the mistress-- but to convince the mistress how gratified they both would feel, should she only consent. To get her to consent sooner rather than

later, he must also show that while the world invites this communion,

it soon takes it away.

(i)

In Chapter I we saw lovers in betrayals and complaints dehuman­

izing the mistress in order to disassociate themselves from her. The

lovers in compliments, on the other hand, use humanizing metaphors because they want to effect just the opposite relation. They -humanize nature to make it a surrogate for themselves, showing how inspired

their own world has become under the mistress's influence. Using nature

as mediator, the lover here tries to unite himself with the mistress. 73

These compliments challenge the lover to convince the mistress that the ordinary world does indeed adore her. He is constrained by the facts of a world which is not generally thought to adore people, and so he must use his wit to reinterpret what those facts ordinarily mean. Thus Lovelace's lover in "Lucasta Weeping" and "Ode. The Rose," for example, never strays from the facts of what the sun or a morn­ ing rose does, but he sees different meanings in their behavior.

In "Lucasta Weeping," nothing extraordinary happens when the sun is clouded over by rain, but the sun's motivations are quite extra­ ordinary:

Lucasta wept, and still the bright Inamour'd God of Day, With his soft Handkercher of Light, Kist the wet Pearles away.

But when her Teares his heate or'e came, In Cloudes he quensht his Beames, And griev'd, wept out his Eye of Flame, So drowned her sad Streames.

At this she smil'd, when straight the Sun Cleer'd, with her kinde desires; And by her eyes Reflection, Kindled againe his Fires.

Because of Lucasta, the lover now lives in a mythical world as dependent on her benevolence as he is. Since she can see her effect on the sun, she can easily imagine her effect on him. Thus the compli­ ment serves to put the mistress in touch with the lover.

Perhaps more interestingly, in "Ode. The Rose" the lover pretends to have a moment of trouble ascribing his own feelings to ordinary

things, in this case a rose. But although the rose's behavior slightly 74 taxes his understanding, ultimately his belief in a world enamored of ■ his mistress is never shaken. For the first five stanzas the lover urges the rose to hasten to Lucasta's bedroom:

Sweet serene skye-1ike Flower, Haste to adorn her Bower: From thy long clowdy bed, Shoot forth thy damaske head.

New-startled blush of Flora.' The griefe of pale Aurora, Who will contest no more; Haste, haste, to strowe her floore.

Vermilion Ball that's given From lip to lip in Heaven: Loves Couches cover-led: Haste, haste, to make her bed.

Dear Offspring of pleas'd Venus, And Jollie, plumpe Silenus; Haste, haste, to decke the hair Of th' only, sweetly Faire.

See! rosie is her Bower, Her floore is all this Flower; Her Bed a Rosie nest By a Bed of Roses prest.

At the end, though, the rose will not comply:

But early as she dresses, Why fly you her bright Tresses?

Far from questioning the power of his beloved's beauty to inspire the rose as it has inspired him, however, the lover merely modifies his understanding of the rose's love:

But early as she dresses, Why fly you her bright Tresses? Ah.1 I have found I feare; Because her Cheekes are neere.

The rose thus still admires the mistress, but it is so overcome by the mistress's superiority to its own beauty that it cannot tolerate her 75 presence. In this neat ending, the lover not only accounts for why the rose is not hastening to the mistress’s bower; he also transfers to the mistress all his compliments of the rose.

Edmund Waller’s "Song" ("Stay, Phoebus! stay") even more convincingly demonstrates the world’s love for the mistress, for he more carefully adheres to the facts of the world. There are no roses hastening or flying; there is only the regular motion of the sun:

Stay, Phoebus! stay; The world to which you fly so fast, Conveying day From us to them, can pay your haste With no such object, nor salute your rise, With no such wonder as De Momay's eyes.

Well does this prove The error of those antique books, Which made you move About the world; her charming looks Would fix your beams, and make it ever day, Did not the rolling earth snatch her away.

At first the facts of the world seem to contradict the lover's subjec­ tive feelings. For him all that is important is his mistress, yet the sun seems to think otherwise as it passes her over. But the lover's mythologizing powers overcome these apparently adverse facts. The sun, he sees, i£ fixed to De Momay, only the earth moves her out of its reach. In an exceptionally neat way, this explanation of the sun's true situation corresponds to Copernicus's revolution. Even astronomy confirms the supremacy of the lover’s subjective world. (ii)

The conceits in these compliments can be entertaining, but they can also become overly sweet, having no constraints but to show that the world adores the mistress. The lover in persuasion poems, which also use anthropomorphic metaphor, operates under more severe constraints. He must convince the mistress that of all the things she can do for herself, dallying with him now is the very best thing she can do. Characteristically, he humanizes the world, usually a garden world, to show how carelessly it enjoys itself; by thus human­ izing the world he suggests to the mistress that she is not much different from the garden, and ought herself to be so enjoying, so careless and free. This is, after all, her only chance, for just as the garden world will die, so will she. The persuasion poems of

Herrick, Waller and Lovelace all employ some version of this argument, and so it is with surprise that we meet Marvell's persuading lovers who emphatically reject the garden world as their model.

Herrick's "To the Virgins, to make much of Time" is the classic persuasion poem that humanizes nature in order to convince women they are like the rose that must be gathered in its prime:

Gather ye Rose-buds while ye may, Old Time is still a flying: And this same flower that smiles today, To morrow will be dying.

76 77

The glorious Lamp of Heaven, the Sun, The higher he's a getting; The sooner will his Race be run, And neerer he's to Setting

That Age is best, which is the first, When Youth and Blood are warmer; But being spent, the worse, and worst Times, still succeed the former.

Then be not coy, but use your time; And while ye may, goe marry: For having lost but once your prime, You may for ever tarry.3

Like the roses, the virgins "to morrow will be dying" and so they ought at least to be smiling today, to stop being coy, and to go marry. The speaker humanizes the world to make the virgins see its likeness with themselves; and also, perhaps, to make them more gratifying to himself--he could be interested in gathering a rose on his own.

But not necessarily. He is, after all, only urging them to marry. And one of the strong points of his argument is the ethos he creates, his authority as a wise man who has seen much and knows what is valuable. He knows, for example, that "That Age is best, which is the first,/When Youth and Blood are warmer." Perhaps he is himself experiencing the "worse and worst times" that succeed the former. At any rate, he does not speak as one who has only his own interests at heart, as one who egocentrically believes the world, and these virgins in particular, were created to please him. Rather, he speaks as if he has the virgins' interests at heart; they must recognize that they will not flourish long, so that they can truly enjoy what life does offer. And herein lies the poignancy of his appeal. For in order to persuade the virgins to live carelessly free with the roses now, he ends up conducting a meditation on the greatest care in the world--death. It hardly seems likely that he will be cavorting with these virgins in such a melancholy. And the virgins too, while perhaps convinced they ought no longer to remain coy, are equally brought into this meditation on the dissolution of all joy. In asking the virgins to see how like they are to the roses, he has also made them aware of how greatly they differ— for unlike the roses, they know they will die. The smiling rose has become a memento mori.

"To the Virgins" humanizes the world to make the virgins see that they are like the garden and should live as unself-consciously.

But to get them to see this, the speaker has had to make them most conscious of their own deaths. In "Corinna's going a Maying," Herrick also creates the image of a humanized world and recalls death, but here the spring rite provides some relief from death's tragedy. For in this rite not only is Corinna asked to act naturally, but nature is made to act artfully, in accordance with human law.

The humanized world which the lover calls Corinna into is not opposed to her arts and coyness, but only to her sloth. Rather than being careless and unself-conscious, nature is as careful to sanctify and ritualize its spring festivities as any mistress careful of her honor could wish. Thus "Each Flower has wept, and bow'd toward the

East" (7), and the "Birds have Mattens seyd,/ And sung their thankfull

Hymnes " (10-11). When Corinna is asked "To come forth, like the Spring­ time, fresh and greene," she is not so much supposed to put aside her 79 arts and rituals as to allow nature to be artful for her:

Rise; and put on your Foliage, and be seene To come forth, like the Spring-time, fresh and green; And sweet as Flora. Take no care For Jewels for you Gowne, or Haire: Feare not; the leaves will strew Gemms in abundance upon you: Besides, the childhood of the Day has kept, Against you come, some Orient Pearls unwept. (15-22)

In the entire Maying celebration art and nature interchange their roles. The works of men are indistinguishable from nature's:

Marke How each field turns a street; each street a Parke Made green, and trimm'd with trees: see how Devotion gives each House a Bough, Or Branch: Each Porch, each doore, ere this, An Arke a Tabernacle is Made up of white-thom neatly enterwove; As if here were those cooler shades of love. (29-36)

Nature's spring, it seems, would not even have begun had not there been man's law, "The Proclamation made for May"(40). There is no 4 contradiction here between nature's urges and moral law. Those who

"have wept, and woo'd, and plighted Troth" are the same who "/choose/ their Priest"(49-50). The laws circumscribe the celebration, but they do not inhibit it. Protected by law and bound to nature, the lovers feel free.

Only in the fifth stanza are the constraints on the celebration revealed:

Come, let us goe, while we are in our prime; And take the harmlesse follie of the time. We shall grow old apace, and die Before we know our liberty. Our life is short; and our dayes run As fast away as do's the Sunne: And as a vapour, or a drop of raine Once lost, can ne'r be found againe: 80

So when or you or I are made A fable, song, or fleeting shade; All love, all liking, all delight Lies drown'd with us in endlesse night. Then while time serves, and we are but decaying; Come, my Corinna, come, let’s go a Maying.

Surely this somber reflection can only dampen the spirit of celebration.

Yet while this reminder of our mortality creates a breach between us and careless nature, it mends that breach even as it is created. For this recognition of death leads us to ritualize and celebrate the spring. The proclamation forces the speaker and Corinna to live their lives in tune with the season, as fully and exuberantly as possible.

In that celebration, the individual not only experiences his own sensa­ tions, but ritually he shares all experience. When the speaker says,

All love, all liking, all delight Lies drown'd with us in endlesse night, he means not only that they will no longer be able to experience the world, but also that they have experienced the world entirely in this celebration. The ritual releases them into a sympathetic experience with all things and they become that paradox--self-consciously natural. They die knowing they have tasted all of life.

The humanized world in Herrick's poems is not informed by pure egoism and sensuality. Herrick's is a qualified Dionysian world, as

Thomas Whitaker has demonstrated, in which the object of the desire is often refined and distanced to intensify the sense of beauty, as if joy were bidding adieu. This distancing frames the transient beauty into a permanent vision. "Where /Herrick's egocentric 'love' for his mistresses/ approaches profundity it does so . . . through exploring the individual's awareness of the flux of the time world, 81 and the counter-balancing stasis of art, of the ideal, of death.

Edmund Waller creates a similar effect, intensifying the object of beauty by framing it just before it dissolves, in his persuasion poem, "Go, Lovely Rose!" Here the lover humanizes a rose to argue with his mistress that she must put off her coyness. In that mission, the single rose comes to represent all joys, which are but brief:

Go, lovely Rose! Tell her that wastes her time and me That now she knows, When I resemble her to thee, How sweet and fair she seems to be.

Tell her that's young And shuns to have her graces spied, That hadst thou sprung In deserts, where no men abide, Thou must have uncommended died.

Small is the worth Of beauty from the light retired; Bid her come forth, Suffer herself to be desired, And not blush so to be admired.

Then die! that she The common fate of all things rare May read in thee; How small a part of time they share, That are so wondrous sweet and fair!

As with Herrick's appeals, Waller’s lover does not seem to be

interested only in his own pleasure. The usual persuader's wish to enjoy the mistress becomes a request that the mistress simply appear, to

Suffer herself to be desired, And not blush so to be admired.

This lover seems to have no desire to possess or ravage the beauty nature presents him. He enjoys it from a distance, observing it with a melancholy detachment, deriving his pleasure simply from discovering and commending as much beauty as possible. He argues that his mistress, by shunning "to have her graces spied," cheats not only him, but society in general, of a rare pleasure. And she cheats herself too, of the pleasure of being commended by that same society. If not out of the desire to be commended, at least out of kindness, she ought to step forth and grant this pleasure to everyone.

Like Herrick's lovers, then, Waller's lover humanizes the rose not to demonstrate that the mistress was created just to please him, but to show her that if she does not allow herself to be celebrated, she will lose precious joys. Yet this rose is not exactly like

Herrick's wild rosebuds either. Waller's is a cultivated rose that appeals to the mistress's sense of community. Society all suffers together from conditions that require a "common fate /for/ all things rare." Together, though, society can cultivate and share its pleasures commending and recommending whatever may be "so wondrous sweet and fair

Itself a cultivated pleasure, the rose invites its mistress into commu­ nion with a society that will respect and appreciate her worth.

In his persuasion poems "To Amarantha, That she would dishevel1 her hair" and "Love Made in the First Age: To Chloris," Richard

Lovelace's speakers at first seem to espouse that selfish egoism care­ less of the mistress's well-being which Herrick's and Waller's lovers so carefully avoid. But each poem in the end discovers a sensitivity-- one tragic, the other comic--to pleasure's transience and the community that recognition creates. In his song "To Amarantha," for example,

Lovelace makes a delicate connection between a sensual naturalism 83

and an artful self-consciousness:

Amarantha sweet and fair, Ah brade no more that shining haire! As my curious hand or eye, Hovering round thee let it flye.

Let it fly as unconfin'd As it's calm Ravisher, the winde; Who hath left his darling th'East, To wanton o'er that spicy neast.

Ev’ry Tresse must be confest But neatly tangled at the best; Like a Clue of golden thread, Most excellently ravelled.

Doe not then wind up that light In Ribands, and o'er-cloud in Night; Like the Sun in's early ray, But shake your head and scatter day.

See, 'tis broke! Within this Grove, The Bower, and the walkes of Love, Weary lye we downe and rest, And Fanne each others panting breast.

Heere we'l strippe and coole our fire In Creame below, in milk-baths higher: And when all Well's are drawne dry, I'le drink a teare out of thine eye.

Which our very Joyes shall leave That sorrowes thus we can deceive; Or our very sorrowes weepe, That joyes so ripe, so little keepe.

As in other persuasions, the speaker wants his coy mistress unre­ strained and integral to a humanized world which gratifies his desires.

Her hair should be like his own "curious hand or eye,/Hovering round thee," or like the wind which ravishes and wantons as he would, or

like the tangled thread of golden sun, as free and without rule as he would be. In the fifth stanza she even becomes totally identified with nature; she is "this Grove/The Bower, and the walkes of Love" 84 within which they become absorbed by a world completely sensual.

In the end, however, the lover qualifies his sensualism:

And when all Well's are drawne dry, I'll drink a teare out of thine eye.

Which our very Joyes shall leave That sorrowes thus we can deceive; Or our very sorrowes weepe, That joyes so ripe, so little keepe.

The lover realizes his unconfined joy lasts only for a moment. Or perhaps it never exists truly unconfined. For the tear which is the sign of pure joy's existence is also the sign of its obliteration.

With this tear Lovelace suggests not simply that sorrow must follow joy, the usual argument that time is short so use it fully, but that joy and sorrow are present simultaneously. Paradoxically, in the joy of ecstasy one is as aware of ecstasy's transience as he is trans­ ported out of time by that ecstasy. The sensual, humanized world is fully appreciated only from the distance created by the knowledge that it is momentary.

Again in "Love Made in the First Age: To Chloris" Lovelace's speaker begins by arguing that his mistress should act free and un­ confined, and should allow him to do as well. In this case, though, the lover places much greater faith in a sensual world. Apparently

Chloris prefers to be wooed with fine compliments and languorous conversation, and turns a deaf ear to the speaker's forthright requests for her favors. He, in turn, complains that "In the Nativity of time" the entire world was as compliant with everyone as he is asking Chloris to be with him, and they were much better for it. It is not just a private pleasure he argues for, but his cultural heritage! 85

In the Nativity of time, Chloris! it was not thought a Crime In direct Hebrew for to woe. Now wee make Love, as all on fire, Ring Retrograde our lowd Desire, And Court in English Backward too.

Thrice happy was that golden Age When Complement was constru'd Rage, And fine words in the Center hid; When cursed No stain'd no Maids Blisse, And all discourse was summ'd in Yes, And Nought forbad, but to forbid. ( 1- 12)

The lover's defense, as in other persuasions, is to ally himself with a humanized nature which, were its example followed as in the golden age, would make the arts of love superfluous, nay degenerate. In the golden age, sensual experience was all. Not only did plums fall in the lap, but the galaxies draped one's body:

Lasses like Autumne Plums did drop, And Lads, indifferently did crop A Flower, and a Maiden-head.

Thus did they live: Thus did they love, Repeating only joyes Above; And Angels were, but with Cloaths on, Which they would put off cheerfully, To bathe them in the Galaxie, Then gird them with the Heavenly Zone. (17-19, 49-54)

Such is the world his mistress refuses. The lover seems to think she and the world were made to swaddle him in a luxurious sensualism.

But if the speaker is lost in his own sensualism, Lovelace is not. In the last stanza he has his speaker carry his egoism to its logical conclusion:

Now, CHLORIS! miserably crave, The offer'd blisse you would not have; Which evermore I must deny, Whilst ravish'd with these Noble Dreams, And crowned with mine own soft Beams, Injoying of my self I lye. C55-60)

In this comic climax, the lover's imaginary, amorous world satisfies his desires so completely he has no need even of the mistress he was persuading. His egoism makes even her superfluous. But it also reveals what a dream this humanized, sensual world really is. With this comic-ironic ending Lovelace emphatically detaches us from his speaker and mocks his desires.

Of the persuasion poems we have looked at, all begin with some vision of a humanized world which woman is invited into— a world of blooming roses and May festivals, or quiet groves and golden ages-- in good "come live with me" fashion. And almost all point out that the mistress is allowed access to this sensuously beautiful life only briefly. Thus for most persuaders the ideal world is a life in harmony with a nature sexually green and gratifying. The mistress is perverse to remain artfully coy when she could lose herself in nature's sensations. In some sense all these poems urge the mistress to give herself to an all-loving nature, that she may be truly free for the brief time alloted to her.

After such encomiums to nature, Andrew Marvell's persuasion poems come as a shock. For both "Young Love" and "To his Coy Mistress" urge love in opposition to nature. Instead of using anthropomorphic meta­ phor to humanize the natural world and urge the mistress to be like nature, he opposes her to it. He enjoins her almost to grab and throttle nature so that it will yield up its treasures. Although the 87

speakers and the circumstances differ widely in the two poems, both

similarly oppose the mistress to nature.

In "Young Love" the speaker addresses a child, a "little infant," urging her to love him even though she is still "green":

Come, little infant, love me now, While thine unsuspected years Clear thine aged father's brow From cold jealousy and fears.

Pretty, surely, 'twere to see By young love old time beguiled, While our sportings are as free As the nurse's with the child.

Common beauties stay fifteen; Such as yours should swifter move, Whose fair blossoms are too green Yet for lust, but not for love.

Love as much the snowy lamb, Or the wanton kid, does prize, As the lusty bull or ram, For his morning sacrifice.

Now then love me: time may take Thee before thy time away: Of this need we'll virtue make, And learn love before we may.

So we win of doubtful fate; And, if good she to us meant, We that good shall antedate, Or, if ill, that ill prevent.

Thus as kingdoms, frustrating Other titles to their crown, In the cradle crown their king, So all foreign claims to drown;

So, to make all rivals vain, Now I crown thee with my love: Crown me with thy love again, And we both shall monarchs prove.

Instead of nature’s representing what is good and fulfilling, for this

lover nature's processes mean only threatening and alien forces. Should 88 this "little infant" ripen in nature's time, it will, according to him, mean only a father's "cold jealousy and fears," a "lusty bull" of passion, and a "doubtful," possibly "ill" fate. Love, it seems, does not humanize the natural world and make it more inviting; rather, it monstrously demands sacrifices. To make that sacrifice as clean and neat as possible, the lover would like to sport with an infant, to avoid the morass of entanglements sex between equals demands.

Needless to say, the speaker's "persuasion" is less persuading than alarming. Even if this infant had any notion what "love" and

"sportings" he had in mind, his arguments do not make them sound very good. She will be made into a "wanton kid" for sacrifice, or into a child king in the midst of civil wars. But of course she has no such notion. Precisely because she cannot meet him equally, he has chosen to "persuade" her. In so doing, he nullifies the demands on him love would make.

In examining this lover's argument, we are more interested in what it reveals about human pathology than we are in the argument itself. Although Marvell's speaker in "To His Coy Mistress" also opposes himself to nature, he does not so lose his authority. For he rejects nature not out of fear for passion's engagement, but out of an anxiousness for as much engagement as possible. For this lover, nature is not too rich with strange and threatening fruits, but is instead so miserly that she must be roughly forced to yield.

Nature gives up willingly only a centuries-maturing "vegetable love" which the lady seems to languidly enjoy, but which to the lover is deadly: 89

Had we but world enough, and time, This coyness, Lady, were no crime. We would sit down, and think which way To walk, and pass our long love’s day. Thou by the Indian Ganges' side Shouldst rubies find: I by the tide Of Humber would complain. I would Love you ten years before the flood: And you should, if you please, refuse Till the conversion of the Jews. My vegetable love should grow Vaster than empires, and more slow. An hundred years should go to praise Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze. Two hundred to adore each breast: But thirty thousand to the rest. An age at least to every part, And the last age should show your heart: For, Lady, you deserve this state; Nor would I love at lower rate. But at my back I always hear Time’s winged chariot hurrying near: And yonder all before us lie Deserts of vast eternity. Thy beauty shall no more be found; Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound My echoing song: then worms shall try That long-preserved virginity: And your quaint honor turn to dust; And into ashes all my lust. The grave's a fine and private place, But none, I think, do there embrace. (1-32)

The usual paradises that persuading speakers imagine--with limpid brooks and garden bowers humanized to minister at the rites of love-- to this speaker only distract from the real business of love (that it is a business he allows in his wry way when he would not "love at lower rate"). For him nature is far too slow a-Maying and in no way reflects or anticipates human desires. Instead of a rich and fruitful bower, or a vast empire of "vegetable" roses to be gathered, he thinks only of "Deserts of vast eternity."

This lover does not concentrate on describing for his mistress the brief but luxurious time nature allows them, but rather on convinc­

ing her that nature "allows" them nothing; she must be seized and forced

Now, therefore, while the youthful hew^ Sits on they skin like morning dew, And while thy willing soul transpires At every pore with instant fires, Now let us sport us while we may; And now, like amorous birds of prey, Rather at once our time devour, Than languish in his slow-chapped power. Let us roll all our strength, and all Our sweetness, up into one ball: And tear our pleasures with rough strife, Thorough the iron gates of life. Thus, though we cannot make our sun Stand still, yet we will make him run. (33-46)

Far from ministering to them, nature is an enemy that must be devoured.

Instead of being ruled by nature's sun, then, they replace her sun with

their own ball, within which all they can possibly experience is rolled.

This totality of experience breaks the iron barriers of nature and nature's time and privately defeats her world.

Thus Marvell's lover represents the cycle of nature and the act

of sex not in natural or human terms, but in the inanimate image of

"iron gates" through which pleasures must be torn. If, as Rosalie

Colie has said of "To his Coy Mistress," "after this, very little new 7 can be said in terms of carpe diem," it is because the diem, or day,

itself has been reduced and devoured. As with "Young Love," once

again in contrast to the persuasion convention, Marvell has his

speaker de-animate or make monstrous, rather than anthropomorphize,

nature. Even the lovers are dehumanized into "amorous birds of prey."

The world is not a sensual garden but a mechanical enemy, and what is

left to enjoy is only a brief, though deliriously absorbing, battle 91 with it.

Despite Marvell's iron gates, however, most lovers persuading their mistresses to enjoy imagine a humanized nature that affirms their desire and enhances its satisfaction. Unlike the users of magic metaphor who must dehumanize to control alien forces, these lovers, and the lovers in the compliments before them, live in an anthropomorphized world that entirely corresponds to their wishes.

In the following chapter we will move out of this humanized world, not back into a hostile and alien world, but up into a world informed by a mystic power that takes the lover out of himself and puts him in touch with the causes of things. 92

Notes to Chapter II

1 Wellek and Warren, Theory of Literature, pp. 204-205.

^ This is not to say that most compliments use anthro­ pomorphic metaphor. We will see more in Chapter III using mystic metaphor. 3 J. Max Patrick, ed., The Complete Poetry of Robert Herrick (1963; rpt. New York: Norton, 1968). Subsequent references are to this edition.

4 See H. R. Swardson, Poetry and the Fountain of Light: Obser­ vations on the Conflict between Christian and Classical Traditions in Seventeenth-Century Poetry (Columbia: U. of Missouri Press, 1962), p. 59, who observes the following: "At the same time the poem works against the narrowly pious attitude in Christian­ ity, it makes some use of the undeniable wisdom in the Christian order of life, including its action within some lawful boundary and recognizing considerations that are entirely foreign to the classical carpe diem statement."

^ "Herrick and the Fruits of the Garden," ELH, 22 (1955), 24-25.

^ Donno’s edition of Marvell ends this line with "glue," but I prefer the traditional resolution to this famous crux. For an authority for "hew," see Hugh MacDonald, ed., The Poems of Andrew Marvell (London: Routledge § Kegan Paul, 1952).

^ "My Ecchoing Song," p. 60. III. MYSTIC METAPHOR

Ever since the Italian stiInovisti inverted religious praise

into praise of woman, the mystic powers of woman and love have been the province of the love lyric.* The religious mystic's

experiences of "the immanence of the temporal in the eternal,

and of the eternal in the temporal," of "the obliteration of the distinction between subject and object, worshipper and wor­

shipped," and of the ability to see "into the life of things"2 become descriptions of the lover's experience with woman.

The mystic lover discovers a new harmony and control over his world, but it is not the harmony of the anthropomorphizer who sees himself in all things. Nor is it the control of the mage who de-animates in order to remove experience from the flux of time. Instead, the lover is in harmony with the world because he has discovered a source of order outside of himself.

He has discovered in woman the secret causes of things. She

sums up within herself all the gratifying experiences in the world which he had thought fragmented and lost. Woman connects him with the fullness of a reality beyond his own subjective time and beyond his controlling reason.

This experience means either that the world and he become united in a larger reality, or that the world becomes irrelevant

93 in comparison with the reality the lover has discovered at its

source. Either woman redeems all sensuous experience or,

in comparison with her, the sensuous world itself becomes trivial

Whether nature is redeemed or rejected by the lover depends

on the way he defines his experience with woman. Two kinds of

lyrics traditionally define woman in nature’s terms— the blason

and the ’’promenade poeitf'— and in them nature usually takes on new significance because of woman's presence. But in another

definition of love, that especially characteristic of Donne's poems, the source of the extraordinary effects of love is not

fixed in woman's beauty. With few exceptions Donne's poems

reject the world as in any way comparable to his experience of

love, and they exalt the private world over the common one.

And finally, a third group of poems describes the mystic effect

of woman's love ambiguously. In these poems the world of woman's beauty and mystic powers does not necessarily force the lover to

see into the center of things as much as it forces him into a vortex in which he could lose hold of all.

Ci)

One way poets describe the mystic harmony woman creates within the lover is to compare his experience of her with nature’ beauties to demonstrate that she is the epitome of nature and as 95

such, gathers together and harmonizes his whole history of experi­

ence. Two traditions in the lyric, the blason or catalogue

comparing the mistress’s beauties to the most beautiful things

in nature, and the "promenade" poems describing her walk through

a garden,^ use nature both to describe the mistress’s beauty and

to demonstrate its mystic effect on the lover and his relation to

the world.

In perhaps one of his more perfunctory moments, Edmund Spenser praised his beloved with this blason in sonnet 64 of Amoretti:

Her lips did smell lyke unto gillyflowers; Her ruddy cheekes lyke unto roses red; Her snowy browes lyke budded bellamoures; Her lovely eyes lyke pincks but newly spred; Her goodly bosome lyke a strawberry bed; Her neck lyke to a bounch of cullambynes . . . (5-10)

The piling up of flower upon flower can in its abundance perhaps

express the incomparable richness of woman's beauty, but as

Spenser uses them, the flowers are tied by simile so tightly to

the mistress's specific features that he conveys no sense of the

limitlessness of her beauty nor of any transcendent experience

she imparts to the lover. What the Stuart lyricists Jonson and

Carew did with this convention was to expand the comparisons out

of the one-to-one correspondence of the simile to show not simply

that woman was like nature, but that she "comprized" it. She

may even influence its being as much as she influences the lover.

In his second stanza of "Her Triumph" (from A Celebration of

Charis) Ben Jonson enumerates the mistress's beauties sometimes 96 with comparisons, but not comparisons with specific sensuous objects in nature:

Doe but looke on her eyes, they doe light All that Loves world compriseth! Doe but looke on her Haire, it is bright As Loves starre when it risethl Doe but marke her forhead’s smoother Then words that sooth her I And from her arched browes, such a grace Sheds it selfe through the face, As alone there triumphs to the life All the Gaine, all the Good, of the Elements strife.

The mistress is not like particular objects of nature but like the guiding powers behind it: Love’s light, Love’s star, soothing powers, and the harmony in the elements’ strife. The enumeration loses the sensuous immediacy of Spenser’s blason, but it gains by resonating with the almost mystical effect of her beauty. Jonson may be de-emphasizing the sensuous effects because of the rhetor?! ical occasion— a verse-compliment to a patroness. As Anne Ferry says of the first two stanzas of "Her Triumph":

His praise of the lady in the first stanza is . . . that of an artist who portrays and interprets a figure, general­ ized and even mythologized by his language, embodying moral and aesthetic values to which "all hearts doe duty". . . . /In the second stanza/ although she is brought nearer so that we may observe her features* these are generalized by the poet's hyperbolic comparisons.®

In the third stanza, however, the speaker changes with his accent into a naive Northcountryman, seemingly in order to allow

Jonson to make those sensuous comparisons with nature the blason allows, without violating the honor due a patroness: 97

Have you seene but a bright Lillie grow, Before rude hands have touch'd it? Ha' you mark'd but the fall o' the Snow Before the soyle hath smutch'd it? Ha1 you felt the wooll of Bever? Or Swans Downe ever? Or have smelt o 1 the bud o' the Brier? Or the Nard in the fire? Or have tasted the bag of the Bee? 0 so white I 0 so soft! 0 so sweet is she!

Unlike Spenser's lover, the speaker here does not catalogue woman's features one by one and find the object in nature that looks most like each. Instead he compares his experience of her beauty's qualities--white, soft, sweet— with his experiences of those qualities in nature. Rather than accenting the objects in nature, he emphasizes his own experience of things, suggested both by the rhetorical question which asks us to remember the experience--

"Have you seene"— and by the way he places the objects referred to in time--a bright lily "before rude hands have touch'd it," the snow "before the soyle hath smutch’d it," have you ever (im­ plied) felt or smelled or tasted these things. This woman captures for him all his experiences of nature's sensuous beauties which have been "soyled" or "smutch’d." She contains all that is rare and she brings back to life, or re-animates and gathers together those experiences. What had before been a fleeting, or uncontrol­ lable flux of experience is in her captured and contained.

Through this pastoral figure Jonson is able to include a sensuous response to his lady's beauty, yet one whose passions are controlled by the distance separating him from the aristocratic mistress. 98

In his second stanza Jonson generalizes about his mistress's mystic influence on the entire world. In the third, under the guise of a pastoral figure, he more specifically describes her sensuous affect on him in such a way as to express his new found sense of the center of his experience in this woman. These two modes— the mystic and the sensuous--which Jonson uses separately in two stanzas, Carew combines into one mode and creates a blason so successful as to transcend the convention itself. In his "Song"

("Aske me no more") Carew's speaker describes the mistress's general influence on the world through specific, sensuous examples, and through them demonstrates that she retrieves all the experiences of beauty and harmony he had thought forever lost:

Aske me no more where Jove bestowes, When June is past, the fading rose: For in your beauties orient deepe, These flowers as in their causes, sleepe.

Aske me no more whither doth stray, The golden Atomes of the day: For in pure love heaven did prepare Those powders to inrich your haire.

Aske me no more whether doth hast, The Nightingale when May is past: For in your sweet dividing throat, She winters and keepes warme her note.

Aske me no more where those starres light, That downewards fall in dead of night: For in your eyes they sit, and there, Fixed become as in their sphere.

Aske me no more if East or West, The Phenix builds her spicy nest: For unto you at last shee flies, And in your fragrant bosome dyes. It is not simply, as with Spenser's poem, that her blushes

are as beautifully colored as the rose's, nor simply, as with Jonson, that they shed an abstract "grace" which influences our world.

Instead, her blushes are actually the haven for the fading rose;

they turn the rose's apparent death into sleep, so that our

experience of the rose is eternized in our experience of the woman.

This happens not because the lover believes the world of nature

is impelled to respond to the mistress anthropomorphically, feel­

ing as he does. Rather, nature's activities are peculiar to

itself— the rose and nightingale "winter" in her, stars are fixed in spheres, and the phoenix dies to be reborn. All these are na­ ture's hidden actions, when she is out of sight, so that the speaker's claims need not even be considered metaphors at all. All beautiful things in nature which before seemed to move according to incom­ prehensible and emotionally alien laws, now become comprehensible in themselves. His pleasure in them is no longer cut short by their fading or falling away; he now knows where they are always acces­ sible.

The speaker's sudden discovery of the secret causes of nature’s beauties is also the discovery of his own source. For the phoenix, as the traditional symbol of lovers' dying to themselves to be reborn in the beloved, suggests the analogy between the lover and nature. Just as nature's phenomena find rest from the arbitrary flux of the world in the mistress's beauty, so does the lover.

Thus Carew's "Song" transcends the blason's traditional starting 100 point. There is no longer the separation of woman and nature which Spenser's similes attempted to bridge, nor the separation between the lover and nature's sensuous immediacy which Jonson's generalizations required. Nature simultaneously reflects the woman's beauties and the lover's response to them; and, as the intermediary between man and woman, nature, which in its ceaseless ruin had seemed to the lover forever separate, is redeemed.

In referring to the nymphs' ruby lips and white skin, Robert

Herrick's "To the Water Nymphs, drinking at the Fountain" recalls the blason to express the sense of energy and richness woman im­ parts to the lover's experience:

Reach, with your whiter hands, to me, Some Christall of the Spring; And I, about the Cup shall see Fresh Lillies flourishing.

Or else sweet Nimphs do you but this; To'th'Glasse your lips encline; And I shall see by that one kisse, The Water turn'd to Wine.

As in Carew's'Aske me no More," here there are not two separate worlds— woman and nature— which, in the usual blason, the lover would make comparisons between. But unlike Carew's poem which discovers the source of nature in woman, here the two worlds are completely conflated and inseparable, as white hands and fresh lillies, lips and wine become each other. The nymphs' beauty and innocence transform the lover's ordinary act of receiving drink into a sacred rite. The act integrates a common experience with the eternal spring of the nymphs' white purity and in that way 101 experience is redeemed; the water becomes wine.

Like Carew and Jonson's blasons then, Herrick's shows woman redeeming the lover's experience by removing it from the flux of time; yet in Herrick's poem the redemption itself seems transient.

For while Jonson and Carew address particular women, Herrick ad­ dresses pastoral water nymphs who more generally represent feminine innocence. As pastoral figures the water nymphs gain in what they can symbolize of feminine beauty, for the poet is not tied to any need for verisimilitude, but also as pastoral figures they are apt to vanish quickly. Thus while the water nymphs give the speaker a glimpse of the flux of experience arrested and made sacred, they also represent the brevity of that revela­ tion. The sudden revelation of arresting beauty and purity is itself the experience of a moment, which too can disappear.

Nevertheless such a mystic experience leaves an after-image to affect ordinary life.

In the blason, as we have seen, Jonson, Carew and Herrick move away from depicting the interaction between woman and nature in the simile, which shows a simple correspondence between nature and woman, or in the anthropomorphic metaphor which shows nature responding to woman like a lover. Instead woman and nature inter­ act mystically in such a way that woman redeems nature and all the lover's experience. These same movements away from simile and simple anthropomorphism occur in what H. R. Richmond has called the "promenade poem." According to Richmond, this poem focuses 102 nature

on the triumphant beauty of the mistress. In its earliest form the allusion /to Nature/ was no flattery of woman but a tribute to the fertilizing principle. The birth of Aphrodite is thus described in Hesiod's Theogony:

S’ e/817alSotr) K a X r j #eos, dpcjil Be 770117

T T O crcrlvv it o paSivoicriv de^ero • ( i, 194) (And came forth an awful and lovely goddess, and grass grew up about her beneath her shapely feet.)

. . . As similitudes between the Christian God and the poet's chaste mistress declined into metaphor (and hence into blasphemy) about Petrarch's time, the attribution of the fertilizing, harmonizing powers of the pagan goddess to a woman again becomes conventional. . . . The fullest expansion of the motif came in the "prome­ nade poem," whose movement is hinted at in Hesiod's lines. The divinity, now become the poet's mistress, walks through her garden or a landscape, spreading her beneficent influence everywhere. ^

What in Hesiod was an "objective" account of nature receiving life from the mythical goddess's transcendent powers became, in praises of a human mistress, subjective, anthropomorphic metaphors in which nature comes to life to adore the mistress's beauty.

John Cleveland's "Upon Phyllis Walking in a Morning before Sun- rising" illustrates this convention:

The Trees, like Yeomen of the Guard (Serving her more for Pomp than Ward) Rank'd on each side, with Loyal Duty, Weav'd Branches to inclose her Beauty. The Plants, whose Luxury was lopp'd, Or Age with Crutches underpropp'd, (Whose wooden Carkases were grown To be but Coffins of their own) Revive, and at her general Dole Each receives his Ancient Soul. The winged Choristers began To chirp their Mattins, and the Fan Of whistling Winds like Organs play'd, Until their Voluntaries made 103

The wakened Earth in Odors rise To be her Morning Sacrifice.** (5-20)

Out of respect for the mistress, nature responds devotionally and implicitly represents the lover's attitude.

In their promenade poems, Edmund Waller and, much more so,

Andrew Marvell push beyond the bounds of this anthropomorphizing convention as they attempt to make more realistic or objective their claims for the mistress’s mystic powers over nature and themselves. In "At Penshurst" ("Had Sacharissa lived") Waller includes the usual anthropomorphic response of nature to Sacharissa’s beauty:

If she_sit down,_with tops all towards her bowed, They /the plants/ round about her into arbours crowd; Or if she walk, in even ranks they stand, Like some well-marshalled and obsequious band. (13-16)

And in his anthropomorphism he even expects nature to carry a literal message to his mistress:

Ye lofty beeches, tell this matchless dame, That if together ye fed all one flame, It could not equalize the hundredth part Of what her eyes have kindled in my heart! (21-24)

But the reason for the garden’s response to Sacharissa is not simply the traditional one, that her beauty strikes awe in it.

Instead Waller makes Sacharissa a moral force— she is the source of a humanistic peace and order which civilizes an otherwise inhuman world: 104

Had Sacharissa lived when mortals made Choice of their deities, this sacred shade Had held an altar to her power, that gave The peace and glory which these alleys have; Embroidered so with flowers where she stood, That it became a garden of a wood. Her presence has such more than human grace, That it can civilize the rudest place; And beauty too, and order, can impart, Where nature ne'er intended it, nor art. ( 1-10)

What Richmond has said of Marvell's Maria in "Upon Appleton House"

is suggested in this earlier poem of Waller's:

Earlier Renaissance "promenade poems" had made the relationship one of incidental respect on the part of nature. Marvell, however fanciful his nominal intention, still manages to suggest that the lady is a necessary principle for the survival of nature in its present form. But there is a significant difference between the mode of domination he suggests and those of the classical poets. To Hesiod and Lucretius the principles in Aphrodite and Venus were transcendent ones, or at least superior to the regulation of the human mind. In Marvell the principles inherent in Maria’s nature are much more human ones, and their subject is less nature as a whole than man's share of it in gardens and carefully cultivated landscapes. Nature is seen to be subject, at least in the gardens, to aesthetic and ethical values, and in this sense there is no metaphor involved in making Maria the genius of these gardens. From so hap­ pily endowed a personality as she possesses, the human mind derives its examples for action not only in general but in the development of the English landscape, which by the seventeenth century is as much under human discipline as any other area of man's acitivity. Thus the treatment of Maria as an archetype for nature is the humanist equi­ valent to the natural principle of fertility concealed behind the figures of the goddesses of Hesiod and Lucretius.

With Sacharissa (and, as we shall see, with Maria) the stilnovisti tenet that love ennobles the soul is transmuted into love ennobling nature itself; the gardens reflect the mistress's ennobling effect on her admirers who in turn create the gardens. When

Waller locates the source of nature's laws and harmonies in 105

Sacharissa, he makes her the mother of both nature and the arts.

Thus in Waller's promenade poem nature is not there simply

to show that Sacharissa is the best flower among flowers,nor to demonstrate his own admiration. Her mystic powers over nature reveal that she embodies the principles of beauty, order, and peace usually only obscurely accessible to civilization. She gives the lover a glimpse of his intrinsic harmony with all things in

an ordered world.

Waller's poem suggests such an ordered world, but beyond the first ten lines of the poem he reverts to the simple anthro­ pomorphism of earlier lyrics and loses the authority of less

subjective metaphors. In contrast, once Andrew Marvell employs the motif connecting woman and nature, specifically in "The Picture of Little T.C. in a Prospect of Flowers" and "Upon Appleton

House: To My Lord Fairfax," he explores its implications seemingly without attenuating with subjectivism the relation between woman and nature.

Perhaps to reflect more realistically his relation to the young daughters of the patrons for whom he writes, Marvell qualifies the subjective stance of the impassioned poet-lover whose world is animated and transformed by his mistress. In

"The Picture of Little T.C.," for example, while Marvell places his mistress, like Sacharissa, in a garden which is ordered by her mystic powers, he concentrates much more on the activities of the mistress than of the plants, and consequently hardly 106

needs the anthropomorphic metaphor:

See with what simplicity This nymph begins her golden days! In the green grass she loves to lie, And there with her fair aspect tames The wilder flowers, and gives them names: But only with the roses plays; And them does tell What colour best becomes them, and what smell.

Marvell's speaker seems to accept the convention that what the mistress does to the garden is also done to the lover, for he

sees in her mastery over the plants a hint of her future mastery

over men:

Who can foretell for what high cause This Darling of the Gods was bom! Yet this is she whose chaster laws The wanton Love shall one day fear, And, under her command severe, See his bow broke and ensigns tom. Happy, who can Appease this virtuous enemy of man!

But in stanza three the speaker takes literally the convention that

the gardens represent the lover's interaction with woman; he

assumes gardens can lovingly interact with the mistress as well

as lovers can. And so to avoid the wounds of human love and

still not leave loving, he implores:

0, then let me in time compound, And parley with those conquering eyes; Ere they have tried their force to wound, Ere, with their glancing wheels, they drive In triumph over hearts that strive, And them that yield but more despise. Let me be laid, Where I may see thy glories from some shade.

He will passively "be laid" in the shade and parley with her in a

garden love rather than be involved in a human love that can 107 wound. If the garden represents the lover, as conventional meta­ phor suggests, he will become the garden to love and thus separate himself from real lovers. The garden thus no longer represents the lover; the lover becomes the garden.

A similar un-metaphoring occurs in stanza four when flowers, which are ordinarily used to demonstrate that the mistress compels adoration, are here used as a means to give T.C. moral advice:

Meantime, whilst every verdant thing Itself does at thy beauty charm, Reform the errors of the spring; Make that the tulips may have share Of sweetness, seeing they are fair; And roses of their thorns disarm: But most procure That violets may a longer age endure.

The speaker takes T.C.'s mastery over nature as no metaphor for her moral and aesthetic ascendance but as her literal duty, and advises her how she ought to dispose things. This advice for reforming the spring is thus really advice for her own life. For if flowers behave a certain way it is because she is their example. She must be sweet as she is fair, be disarmed of thorns or passions, and long retain the modesty which violets represent.

In the last stanza Marvell, again exploring the conventions of the promenade, demonstrates on what T.C.'s mystic powers rely.

It is not, he suggests, her own beauty which civilizes nature, but her total harmony with nature's laws. She is superior to the spring only because she is in touch with its source. But if she should break nature's rules she, the master, becomes the sub j ect: But, 0 young beauty of the woods, Whom Nature courts with fruits and flowers, Gather the flowers, but spare the buds; Lest Flora angry at thy crime, To kill her infants in their prime, Do quickly make the example yours; And, ere we see, Nip in the blossom all our hopes and thee. 11 With an ending more conventionally appropriate to a carpe diem than a promenade, Marvell shows T.C., again in the spirit of advice, that it is as much a crime to seize the day prematurely as it is to miss it entirely. If T.C. gathers her own rose before it blossoms, she loses all her primacy and all her potential.

Thus in "T.C." Marvell extends the promenade conventions to test their limits— if nature represents the lover, he, the lover, will try to become nature; if woman is responsible for nature, than she must be instructed by nature's errors; and if she is at the source of nature's harmonies, she will be displaced from that source for any disruption of the natural order. By taking the poetic figures of the promenade literally, as objective reality rather than as subjective visions, Marvell thus adapts the promenade conventions to his purpose of praising lovingly yet dispassionately and with counsel.

As Marvell's last stanza makes clear, T.C. conquers, or will conquer, lovers only because she is in harmony with nature's laws.

Paradoxically she who is nature's prototype is also nature's flower and as such, is subject to its laws. Marvell thereby defines a more complicated interrelationship between woman, nature, and the lover than we have yet seen. While she seems to possess mystic powers, those harmonizing powers never make her completely

superior to nature and they never entirely remove her or the poet-

lover from the contingencies of time. Marvell explores these

same contingencies in a much more elaborate way in "Upon Appleton

House."

In "Upon Appleton House" Mary Fairfax's promenade is actually

one promenade among many. For it is the speaker himself who

begins the walk through the Fairfax estate before Mary ever

appears, and as he walks, he reveals through the lives of the lord

Fairfax, the nuns, the mowers, himself, and finally Maria, various

interrelations with nature.

The poem begins with the estate house itself, a model for

the interaction between man's art and nature as, in the house,

the two terms seem interchangeable. The house's structure is so

like nature it comes alive:

Yet thus the laden house does sweat, And scarce endures the Master great: But where he comes the swelling hall Stirs, and the square grows spherical. £9-52)

This house thus actually becomes a thing of nature. The measure

of art is the degree to which it serves most like nature, like

the houses of

The low-roofed tortoises /who/ dwell In cases fit of tortoise-shell. ( 13-14)

With this prototype in mind, the speaker begins his walk to ex­ plain "The progress of this house's fate"(84). 110

In his article on "Appleton House," David Evett demonstrates the various relations between man and nature the speaker's walk reveals.^ The subtle nuns of the convent wall out nature, or destroy it, as "through the mortal fruit /they/ boil/ The sugar's uncorrupting oil"(173-4). The lord Fairfax methodizes nature in his garden, but the wall of vigilance still separates them. In the meadows nature threatens with its fantastic fecundity and man is bloodied in subduing it. With the floods we see the double vision of Eden and a slaughterhouse. From the flood the speaker flies to the woods and discovers a pastoral harmony in which there are no barriers between man and nature as nature masters this

Adamic slave; he finds a kind of integrity in his uncritical response to the natural world. But he is also "a prisoner of his own released sensuous imagination," and in the mirror of the river he is no longer sure of anything's identity:

See in what wanton harmless folds It everywhere the meadow holds; And its yet muddy back doth lick, Till as a crystal mirror slick; Where all things gaze themselves, and doubt If they be in it or without. And for his shade which therein shines, Narcissus-like, the sun too pines. (633-640)

For, as Evett reads the poem, the woods' sensuous gratification conduces only to egoism unless it is animated by something feminine, wise, and good. Maria's power derives from her sex, wisdom, and a generous and numinous purity. Ill

Now, after this succession of less satisfying interactions with nature, Maria appears in the landscape and supplies a vision

of a relation with nature that requires neither that one artfully pervert or discipline nature, nor that nature vitiate man’s

energy. Instead, Maria's heavenly energies create a voluntary discipline in nature which arrests the flux of time:

See how loose Nature, in respect To her, itself doth recollect; And everything so whisht and fine, Starts forthwith to its bonne mine. The sun himself, of her aware, Seems to descend with greater care; And lest she see him go to bed, In blushing clouds conceals his head.

. . . by her flames, in heaven tried, Nature is wholly vitrified.

’Tis she that to these gardens gave That wondrous beauty which they have; She straightness on the woods bestows; To her the meadow sweetness owes; Nothing could make the river be So crystal pure but only she; She yet more pure, sweet, straight, and fair, Than gardens, woods, meads, rivers are. ( 657-64, 687-96)

Nature here is not forced unnaturally by an alien power to produce,

as the nuns want, "the sugar's uncorrupting oil." It does so

seemingly of its own accord, "vitrified" in awe of one who in her purity and grace contains all that they are. And this is not the

static narcissism of the river reflecting back the sun and confus­

ing all identities; rather, she reflects what generates a new and purer vitality: 112

Therefore what first she on them spent, They gratefully again present: The meadow, carpets where to tread; The garden, flow'rs to crown her head; And for a glass, the limpid brook, Where she may all her beauties look; But, since she would not have them seen, The wood about her draws a screen. (697-704)

What makes Maria’s rapport with nature more fertile and genera­ tive is that she is not the final source of value. Instead, she draws the energy which she imparts to nature, and which nature reflects back to her, from a "higher" source:

For she, to higher beauties raised, Disdains to be for lesser praised. She counts her beauty to converse In all the languages as hers; Nor yet in those herself employs But for the wisdom, not the noise; Nor yet that wisdom would affect, But as 'tis heaven’s dialect. (705-712)

All the forms of communion with nature, or "languages," which others at Appleton tried to develop through art, Maria seems to know naturally. The nuns arrested nature only by destroying it first; she makes it yield willingly. Fairfax's martial discipline, which controlled the selfish excesses of human nature, is made superfluous with Maria's purity. The meadow's violent give-and-take with the mowers here becomes a willing concord. The sense of wholeness the speaker found by identifying with the woods, Maria finds with­ out losing her identity and vitality. All this because Maria knows "heaven's dialect," the wisdom at the source of all the harmony this world might enjoy. 113

Thus Maria is not so much the root of the landscape's beauties as she is the mediator between them and their mystical source out­

side of time. This is why Richmond can consider the anthropomorphic behavior of nature as "no metaphor.For the true source of beauty is the heaven outside of time with which Maria speaks. Maria

is a conduit for the intercourse between Heaven and the elements, a noiseless vessel for the language of the two realms.

Much of her power within the world comes, then, from her being a pure vessel which can transfer the best elements of each, uniting them in herself. And so the emphasis in her character

is on a kind of discipline that, in its purity, excludes, as yet, any definite or particular direction for her own life. Like the Virgin, she herself remains detached from any self-gratifying intercourse with the world to be a conduit for the divine:

This 'tis to have been from the first In a domestic heaven nursed, Under the discipline severe Of Fairfax, and the starry Vere; Where not one object can come nigh But pure, and spotless as the eye; And goodness doth itself entail On females, if there want a male. (721-28)

Yet once Marvell presents us with this vision of a timeless rapport among all things, he returns immediately to time. He weaves into his image the reality that Maria is bound to lose that youthful purity and innocence. As she is the vessel that now brings harmony into the world, she will soon be the vessel that contains the heir to this very particular estate: 114

Hence she with graces more divine Supplies beyond her sex the line; And like a sprig of mistletoe On the Fairfacian oak doth grow; Whence, for some universal good, The priest shall cut the sacred bud, While her glad parents most rejoice, And make their destiny their choice. (737-44)

This innocent and pure bud cannot remain so. She must eventually play a specific role in the realm of time.

Yet in the interim, before the bud is cut, the estate has in Maria the example of a timeless beauty that is the proto­ type for all the beauties of the world; it can become the ideal of the human city which the world has lost track of:

Meantime ye fields, springs, bushes, flowers,

Employ the means you have by her, And in your kind yourselves prefer; That, as all virgins she precedes, So you all woods, streams, gardens, meads.

For you Thessalian Tempe's seat Shall now be scorned as obsolete; Aranjuez, as less, disdained; The Bel-Retiro as constrained; But name not the Idalian grove— For 'twas the seat of wanton love— Much less the dead's Elysian Fields Yet nor to them your beauty yields.

'Tis not, what once it was, the world, But a rude heap together hurled, All negligently overthrown, Gulfs, deserts, precipices, stone. Your lesser world contains the same, But in more decent order tame; You, heaven's center, Nature's lap. And paradise's only map. (745, 749-68) 115

The interrelation between Maria and the landscape provides this

"lover" with a vision of harmony, a perfect relation between man’s arts inspired by Heaven's grace and nature’s life, a relation which

creates a retreat from the ruin of the world:

But now the salmon-fisher moist Their leathern boats begin to hoist, And, like Antipodes in shoes, Have shod their heads in their canoes. How tortoise-like, but not so slow, These rational amphibii go! Let's in: for the dark hemisphere Does now like one of them appear. (769-76)

The speaker withdraws into the restorative protection of Appleton

House.

Appleton does not transform the world. The foreboding of a dark hemisphere moving blindly, like the Antipodes, is not obliterated. But Appleton does provide a momentary refuge from the chaos of time, so that these "rational amphibii" which are men, may gain access again to that vision of harmony according to which tomorrow they must try to bring order into that dark chaos.

In both the blason and promenade poems woman gives the lover a vision of the world harmonized and arrested from the ruin of time.

She contains within herself the source of all the value in the speaker's experience of the world. As long as she is identified as its source, the world of nature becomes for the speaker composed and infinitely vital. He comprehends life more deeply because she is there. 116

Such poems make the idea of beauty much more complex than what can be expressed by simile with roses and lilies or by the hyperbole which anthropomorphizes the world. Instead, the mistress's beauty is experienced as an active power deriving life from some transcen­ dent source. Yet while these descriptions of woman's beauty communicate its mystic power, often they impose a distance between the lover -and the mistress. The speaker describes her beauty as if he were watching her from afar, overwhelmed. This distance is convenient, perhaps, for poems of praise in which the poet must take the rhetorical position of a worshipful subject. Nature and the lover are both subsumed into the larger reality of woman's beauty. Other poems, however, attempt to convey the experience of an immediate, ecstatic, gratifying love. (ii)

In some love lyrics which describe the mystic effect woman has on the lover, the source of that mystic experience is not rooted in woman's beauty which subjects the world and the lover to its larger reality. Notably in John Donne's serious love poetry, the experience of love does not so much begin in woman's beauty as it comes from a shared experience which transports both the lover and the beloved above the world. The world, excluded as it is from participating in this love, becomes dead and lifeless, and the lovers become sovereigns over their new world. In de-emphasizing the sovereignty of woman, these poems emphasize the mutuality in love.

Ignoring descriptions of the mistress's beauty, which seem necessarily to evoke an appealing pastoral world that the mistress's beauty heightens, Donne's lover tries to express the experience of love as a radical rejection of all previous relations with the world. Much of the originality in Donne's lyrics comes from the relentlessness with which he pursues the motif that love for woman makes all else trivial. Donald Guss, whose work places Donne solidly within the Petrarchan tradition, isolates Donne's original contribution to Renaissance love theory in his attributing all Being to love— outside of love

"nothing else is," and in his unique position that the world

117 does not support love but opposes it.** This cultivated opposi­

tion between the ecstatic private world and the contemptible

public one is central to Donne's work and a distinguishing

feature of the metaphysical style.

In "The Good-morrow," for example, woman causes the lover

to believe that the world he knew, which he used to think

gave him pleasure or a notion of beauty, was nothing but a vulgar illusion. Woman does not reform this world into a pas­

toral harmony but instead causes a new, antithetical world to be created. Underscoring the radical nature of this experi­

ence, Donne uses no appealing pastoral or sensuous imagery which might be common to both worlds. Instead the new world

is described mainly by negative definition and all sensuous

imagery is replaced by abstractions or denigrating references to previous experiences:

I wonder by my troth, what thou, and I Did, till we lov'd? were we not wean’d till then? But suck'd on countrey pleasures, childishly? Or snorted we in the’seaven sleepers den? T'was so; But this, all pleasures fancies bee. If ever any beauty I did see, Which I desir'd, and got, t'was but a dreame of thee. (1-7)

Until now the world was a "countrey" place of blind and narrow pleasure, a den of sleep, a hemisphere only of "sharpe North" and "declining West " (18). Now he escapes that world as

love, all love of other sights controules, And makes one little roome, an every where. ( 10- 11) 119

That "roome" is not the sensuous world of the soft, sweet, and fair but the world of a profound security.

In "The Canonization" Donne's lovers again make a world for themselves which excludes all past experience, be it of

"Countries, Townes, /o t T Courts"(44). They can see in that former world only court parasites, merchants, plagues, warring soldiers and litigious men. They contain their own source of life, their own "natural" cycle, as

Wee dye and rise the same, and prove Mysterious by this love. £6-27)

In "The Sunne Rising" Donne makes perhaps his most audacious , attack on the pastoral model of the world that he proves trivial by his love. The natural cycle of "houres, dayes, moneths," become for him "the rags of time"(10). But most subversively, the sun, that archetype of the benevolent grace in the orderly cycle of the natural world, becomes a "Busie old fool," a "Sawcy pedantique wretch"(1-5). The world the sun rules is one of

"Late school boyes," "sowre prentices," and "countrey ants"(6-8).

It is not, however, that the beloved's beauty outshines the sun. The speaker does ask the sun to compare his love with

"th'India's of spice and Myne"(17), but those are about as sensuous as his images for her become. She makes the sun seem paltry not because of extraordinary beauty but because she is his love:

She'is all States, and all Princes, I, Nothing else is. (21-22) 120

Perhaps it is the security of this love which allows the speaker the generosity finally to consider the sun not so much an intrusive old fool as a weary, pitiable one to whom he condescends:

Thine age askes ease, and since thy duties bee To warme the world, that's done in warming us. Shine here to us, and thou art every where; This bed thy center is, these walls, thy spheare. (27-30)

It is no longer the sun who renews the world; it is the lovers who renew the sun.

Both Edmund Waller and Abraham Cowley made use of Donne's motif that love for woman makes all else trivial, but they return the focus of the poem to the mistress's sovereignty. Their concern is not to insult the entire world which has become categorically paltry compared with their love. In other words, they do not oppose their own world to the real one. They simply assert, more politely, that the real world is insignificant to them. In "On a Girdle," for example, Waller's speaker expresses the power of love this way:

That which her slender waist confined, Shall now my joyful temples bind; No monarch but would give his crown, His arms might do what this has done.

It was my heaven's extremest sphere, The pale which held that lovely deer. My joy, my grief, my hope, my love, Did all within this circle move!

A narrow compass! and yet there Dwelt all that's good, and all that's fair; Give me but what this ribband bound, Take all the rest the sun goes round. This lover is not asserting that "She is all States, and all

Princes, I;" he says only that

No monarch but would give his crown, His arms might do what this has done.

It is not that other states no longer exist because of their love; it is just that they are not quite as valuable. The world the speaker rejects is not necessarily sleepy or plagued or a pedantic wretch; it is just not so important to the lover as his mistress is. It is as if woman gives the lover a choice between two worlds and he chooses the one that is better. With

Donne, on the other hand, there is only one world, which he and the beloved create together.

Cowley's "The Soul" also focuses on the mistress, trying to express how trivial the world has become because of her:

If mine Eyes do e're declare They have seen a second thing that's fair; Or Ears, that they have Musick found, Besides thy Voice, in any Sound; If my Tast do ever meet, After thy Kiss, with ought that's sweet; If my 'abused Touch allow Ought to be smooth, or soft, but You; If, what seasonable Springs, Or the Eastern Summer brings, Do my Smell perswade at all, Ought Perfume, but thy Breath to call; If all my senses Objects be Not contracted into Thee, And so through Thee more pow'rful pass, As Beams do through a Burning-Glass; If all things that in Nature are Either soft, or sweet, or fair, Be not in Thee so 'Epitomiz'd, That nought material's not compriz'd; May I as worthless seem to Thee As all, but Thou, appears to Me. (1-22) 122

Cowley’s speaker claims all sensuous experience is worthless

compared with his mistress, but he does not claim that such

experience in itself is transcended by the experience of love.

As long as the lover focuses on the woman's superiority over

the sensuous world, he does not express his own transcendence

of all past worldly experience such that a new, entirely different

and unprecedented world is created.

But Donne's serious love poetry does define love in such

a way that it transcends even sensuous experience, and Donne's

lovers make good rhetorical use of this definition. In "The

Extasie," for example, the speaker uses it to prove sexual love

is not less pure than "Platonic" love, simply because the body

is irrelevant to love. It makes little difference to the lovers

one way or the other. Yet while love is essentially indifferent to sex, the "abler soul"(43] which love creates owes a favor to the bodies that provided the occasion for its coming into being:

This Extasie doth unperplex (We said) and tell us what we love, Wee see by this, it was not sexe, Wee see, we saw not what did move:

Wee then, who are this new soule, know, Of what we are compos'd, and made, For, thTAtomies of which we grow, Are soules, whom no change can invade.

But 0 alas, so long, so farre Our bodies why doe wee forbeare? They'are ours, though they'are not wee, Wee are The'intelligences, they the spheares. We owe them thankes, because they thus, Did us, to us, at first convay, Yeelded their forces, sense, to us, Nor are drosse to us, but allay. (29-32, 45-56)

Thus to quiet his mistress's fears that sexual love is imperfect or impermissible, Donne's speaker shows that the ordinary material world is of no significance except perhaps to give testimony to the existence of the new world created by love:

To'our bodies tu m e wee then, that so Weake men on love reveal'd may looke; Loves mysteries in soules doe grow, But yet the body is his booke. (69-72)

This definition of love as beyond sense is also a reassuring definition to refer to in order to allay a beloved's grief at part­ ing. In a traditional valediction the lover might stress that time and space cannot defeat his love by reassuring his mistress that she will never be forgotten. Thus Donne's "Elegie:

His Parting from Her" claims that the very world Fortune uses to separate them he will use to defeat Fortune:

I will not look upon the quickning Sun, But straight her beauty to my sense shall run; The ayre shall note her soft, the fire most pure; Water suggest her clear, and the earth sure; Time shall not lose our passages; the Spring How fresh our love was in the beginning; The Summer how it ripen's in the eare; And Autumn, what our golden harvests were. _ The Winter I'll not think on to spite thee /Fortune/, But count it a lost season, so shall shee. (73-82)

The very world which separates them is also the repository of their experience. But if love is defined as creating a new world 124 completely other from this one, with no connections with the world of sense, then the argument of the valediction can change.

For if bodies are inessential to love, then their absence should not disturb love. So the speaker argues in "A Valediction For­ bidding Mourning":

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.

Our two soules therefore, which are one, Though I must goe, endure not yet A breach, but an expansion, Like gold to ayery thinnesse beate. (13-24)

The mystic gold which the lovers have become can be expanded endlessly without losing its integrity.

Lovelace uses a similar argument to forestall Lucasta's parting tears in "To Lucasta. Going beyond the Seas":

Though Seas and Land betwixt us both, Our Faith and Troth, Like separated soules, All time and space controules: Above the highest sphere we meet Unseene, unknowne, and greet as Angels greet. (13-18)

Their love makes them angels, outside the realms of time and space, so they need not be concerned if their bodies are separated.

These lovers argue that because their love is superior to the world, it will go unaffected by the world's separation of their 125 bodies. Donne's "A Valediction of Weeping" takes this argument one step further. Here the speaker urges his mistress to forbear grieving since because they are superior to the world, her sighs and tears will influence the world to behave in the same way:

0 more then Moone, Draw not up seas to drowne me in thy spheare, Weepe me not dead, in thine armes, but forbeare To teach the sea, what it may doe too soone; Let not the winde Example finde, To doe me more harme, then it purposeth; Since thou and I sigh one anothers breath, Who e'r sighes most, is cruellest, and hasts the others death. (19-27)

Not only is her grief unnecessary, he argues; it does him harm.

Thus the lover manages not only to encourage her by saying that their love is more important and potent than any power in the world, but also to let her see that her grief makes his parting more difficult. If she is kind to him in controlling her grief, so the world will be less threatening.

Whether Donne's speakers define their love in order to celebrate it, to justify sex, or to allay the beloved’s grief at parting, they all claim that their experience with woman has created a completely new world over and against the old. Love gives them no vision of the old world made new and harmonized, but of a new, mystic world entirely transcending all former experience. Rather than woman's offering the lover a healing vision of the ultimate harmony of things, woman creates a huge 126 distance separating the lover from his old world, now completely insignificant. On the other hand, there is no distance between woman and the lover; the lover speaks for the beloved's love as much as he does for his own.

Thus far in the poems which describe woman's mystic power, the speaker has either concentrated on describing her beauty and the overwhelming sense of harmony with all things which that beauty gives him a vision of— she stops time and crystallizes nature's purest beauties--or, as in Donne's poems, he describes his own response to the experience of woman's love--love puts them both beyond the reach of space and time. A third set of poems which describe woman's mystic powers also concern themselves with the vision of harmony woman invites the lover into, but they also reveal a lover so overwhelmed by desire to possess that world that he loses control of himself. Woman enslaves him; she de-animates him by making him will-less. If in Carew's "Song" ("Aske me no more') the phoenix represents the lover who dies to his old self to be reborn in the beloved, in these poems the lover knows only that he dies to himself. He may desire the transcendent experience of mutual love, but it is out of his reach. (iii)

One distinguishing feature of those poems in which the lover

feels captured and out of control because of woman’s mystic pow­

ers is that he invariably perceives the mistress as artful.

Whereas the mistress in other poems has been praised for her

superior naturalness, here the lover concentrates on her mystic arts. To describe her arts as so powerful that they overcome all men is one approach to praising a mistress, but the lover here also seems most concerned to find reasons, perhaps excuses, for submitting to the passions she bestirs in him. If he demon­ strates she has captured him with unfathomable arts, a lover shows he had no choice but to yield.

One kind of poem which focuses especially on the mistress’s artfulness is what might be called the "double-beauty" poem.

Such poems describe two features or graces of the mistress which, in combination, create an irrestible force. Lovelace's

"Gratiana Dauncing and Singing" praises Gratiana's performance partly by describing how she enslaves all the men watching her.

But Marvell's "The Fair Singer" more carefully focuses on the speaker whom the mistress enslaves, and he makes us wonder what to think of this passion she arouses.

Marvell's poem seems to question the value of passionate submission to the mistress's overwhelming beauties, a question 127 he reworks in a very different kind of poem, "The Gallery," and a question which Milton much more extensively examines in

Comus and Paradise Lost. In these poems the passionate ecstasy and sense of harmony woman’s mystic powers seem to create is made suspect.

Lovelace's "Gratiana Dauncing and Singing" praises a mistress performance by likening her movements and song to the motions and music of the spheres, and to the gods, Apollo for art, the

Graces for naturalness:

See! with what constant Motion Even, and glorious, as the Sunne, Gratiana steeres that Noble Frame, Soft as her breast, sweet as her voice That gave each winding Law and poize, And swifter than the wings of Fame.

So did she move; so did she sing Like the Harmonious spheres that bring Unto their Rounds their musick's aid; Which she performed such a way, As all t h ’ inamor’d world will say The Graces danced, and Apollo play'd. (1-6, 19-24)

Her song perfects her dance so that her motion's force is directed and ordered into a natural form.

These same arts which recreate the perfection of the spheres and draw sound and motion into harmony also draw lovers in

Each step trod out a Lovers thought And the Ambitious hopes he brought, Chain'd to her brave feet with such arts, Such sweet command, and gentle awe, As when she ceas’d, we sighing saw The floore lay pav'd with broken hearts. (13-18) 129

All things are gathered into her perfection. However, when the music stops the lovers are destroyed; "The floore lay pav'd with broken hearts." The taste of that sweet harmony has left the lovers forever discomposed. Gratiana has turned them into shards.

When the lovers can participate vicariously in Gratiana's arts they are ecstatic; but when she removes herself, they become lifeless, inanimate. Of course, Lovelace introduces the lovers only to illustrate Gratiana's powers and to suggest the speaker's own response to her beauty; we are not meant to grieve at their loss of control nor to accuse her arts of evil purpose. If the lover cannot permanently enter that mystic world the woman creates, he may be discomposed, but he has at least had the vision, and the poem concentrates on the wonder of that vision..

Other poems, however, seem to want to question or qualify the definition of that experience which poems like Lovelace's describe. By focusing on the lover's feelings and then suspecting those feelings, both Marvell and Milton greatly qualify the mystic powers of beauty that purportedly draw all things into a greater harmony.

For example, while "The Fair Singer" describes the ineluctable power of the mistress's double beauty, just as Lovelace's "Gratiana" had, Marvell's poem concentrates on the speaker's justifying his own inability to escape. He tries so hard to justify his own seduction that the emphasis shifts away from the mistress's power and toward the lover's lack of it: 130

To make a final conquest of all me, Love did compose so sweet an enemy, In whom both beauties to my death agree, Joining themselves in fatal harmony; That while she with her eyes my heart does bind, She with her voice might captivate my mind.

I could have fled from one but singly fair: My disentangled soul itself might save, Breaking the curled trammels of her hair; But how should I avoid to be her slave, Whose subtile art invisibly can wreathe My fetters of the very air I breathe?

It had been easy fighting in some plain, Where victory might hang in equal choice, But all resistance against her is vain, Who has the advantage both of eyes and voice, And all my forces needs must be undone, She having gained both the wind and sun.

Despite his resistance, this lover tells us, he was fatally trapped and conquered. For this mistress had the advantage not only of nature— her lovely eyes and curled hair--but of the "subtile

art" of song. This art was the invincible element, for it captivates his mind invisibly:

But how should I avoid to be her slave, Whose subtile art invisibly can wreathe My fetters of the very air I breathe? (10-12)

Her arts drew him into her fatal harmonies, and he is unmanned, enchanted.

Marvell's speaker almost protests too much. The composed

intricacy of his argument suggests a speaker very much in con­ trol of his mind and not, as he claims, captivated. It is al­ most as if he wills his own will-lessness and the fair singer merely provides the occasion. We are led to resist the argument 131

for its casuistry. As Rosalie Colie remarks, "by their sheer

accumulation, the extravagant cliches point to their own non­

sense. And yet we are almost lulled into approving this

state of lassitude by the soothing rhythm of the verse. The

speaker's unforced parallelisms, long stanzaic sentences, and

neat reasoning for the susceptibility of eye and ear carry us

through the argument inevitably, ourselves unresisting and will-

less. We may not be convinced he was entirely overcome simply

by the fair singer, but we may well be convinced, at least

for the moment, of the pleasure in abandoning ourselves to

desire, of letting our forces be undone and giving over the

battle.

Nevertheless, however appealing this lover's ecstasy, the

poem's extravagance suggests that it is more self-induced

than not and that there is no mystic power justifying his loss

of control. His very protestations that it is not his fault he gave in suggest that it is indeed a fault. The speaker retains

some authority for the power of his argument and the appeal of

his desire, but we suspect his ecstasy.

A trace of this same ambivalence toward the speaker is

created in another of Marvell's poems, "Mourning." Only here

the speaker is much more obviously self-deluded. Trying to

counteract the arguments of those who call Clora's tears false,

the speaker inadvertently makes a better argument against her

than for her: Yet some affirm, pretending art, Her eyes have so her bosom drowned, Only to soften near her heart A place to fix another wound.

And, while vain pomp does her restrain Within her solitary bow'r, She courts herself in am’rous rain; Herself both Danae and the show'r.

Nay, others, bolder, hence esteem Joy now so much her master grown, That whatsoever does but seem Like grief, is from her windows thrown.

Nor that she pays, while she survives, To her dead love this tribute due, But casts abroad these donatives, At the installing of a new. (13-28)

The arguments he would contradict are far more convincing than

his own contradiction. And yet, for the expression of a dream,

his is captivating:

How wide they dream! The Indian slaves That sink for pearl through seas profound Would find her tears yet deeper waves And not of one the bottom sound. (29-32)

But regardless of this beautiful thought, in the context of

the poem the speaker is foolishly credulous. In spite of the more convincing arguments exposing his mistress's hypocrisy, he is unwilling to abandon his desire to lose himself in that profound sea. Such an illusion, Marvell suggests, makes us more lost than we would like to be.

In both "The Fair Singer" and in "Mourning" Marvell makes

the old Petrarchan figures which describe woman's captivating, mystic arts into fictions invented by lovers enraptured with an 133

idea of love whose reality is suspect. For them, the idea of love

as a mystic transcendence of self is only their justification

for the loss of self-control in a pleasing state of will-lessness.

While it may be pleasant, it is not profound; woman has not

sounded these depths. She is only the lover's own invention.

In "The Gallery" Marvell again questions woman's so-called mystic powers, not only by suggesting they are fictions, but

also by making mystic ecstasy as it is conventionally expressed

seem undesirable. The woman whose beauty captivates or overpow­

ers is unattractive, and the woman who simply incarnates an un-

threatening, unenveloping beauty seems an impossible vision,

a nostalgic creation.

The gallery is the speaker's attempt to bring under control,

or "frame," his various experiences of the mistress:

Clora come view my soul, and tell Whether I have contrived it well. Now all its several lodgings lie Composed into one gallery; And the great arras-hangings, made Of various faces, by are laid; That, for all furniture, you'll find Only your picture in my mind.

Here thou art painted in the dress Of an inhuman murderess; Examining upon our hearts Thy fertile shop of cruel arts: Engines more keen than ever yet Adorned a tyrant's cabinet; Of which the most tormenting are Black eyes, red lips, and curled hair.

But, on the other side, th' art drawn Like to Aurora in the dawn; When in the East- she slumbering lies, And stretches out her milky thighs; While all the morning choir does sing, And manna falls, and roses spring; And, at thy feet, the wooing doves Sit perfecting their harmless loves.

Like an enchantress here thou show'st Vexing thy restless lover's ghost; And, by a light obscure, dost rave Over his entrails, in the cave; Divining thence, with horrid care, How long thou shalt continue fair; And fwhen informed) them throwfst away, To be the greedy vulture's prey.

But, against that, thou sit'st a float Like Venus in her pearly boat. The halcyons, calming all that's nigh, Betwixt the air and water fly; Or, if some rolling wave appears, A mass of Ambergris it bears. Nor blows more wind than what may well Convoy the perfume to the smell.

These pictures and a thousand more Of thee my gallery do store In all the forms thou canst invent Either to please me, or torment: For thou alone to people me, Art grown a numerous colony; And a collection choicer far Than or Whitehall's, or Mantua's were.

But, of these pictures and the rest, That at the entrance likes me best: Where the same posture, and the look Remains, with which I first was took: A tender shepherdess, whose hair Hangs loosely playing in the air, Transplanting flowers from the green hill, To crown her head, and bosom fill.

Two of the speaker's pictures of Clora depict her as art­

fully manipulating the powers of nature for perverse ends. She

is "an inhuman murderess" or "an enchantress." It is easy to

see why the speaker wants to frame., or control, that kind of power over himself. Clora here gives him no genuine ecstasy, 135 but only a torturous helplessness. She takes him out of himself, but not into an ecstasy; rather, she turns him into a murdered corpse or a dissected animal. But oddly enough, these portraits are opposite two which seem to be traditionally the most appealing portraits of woman's mystic powers. As Aurora or Venus, Clora commands all of nature— she makes manna fall and roses spring, and waves bear her ambergris. Apparently this is not nature's forced obeisance but her willing compliance, stemming from a life-giving relation with the goddess. Here she is the traditional source of mystic ecstasy, the lover and all nature finding their source in the mistress's fecund beauty.

And yet the speaker dismisses these portraits as readily as the others by contrasting them all equally with the last portrait which "likes me best." He prefers no powerful goddess, no matter how ill- or well-intentioned, but the "tender shepherdess" who has no preternatural powers to take the lover out of himself.

Instead, she seems neither less nor more than unselfconscious nature. Nature (the wind here) plays with her, "whose hair/

Hangs loosely playing in the air," and she with nature, "Trans­ planting flowers from the green hill,/ To crown her head, and bosom fill." Rather than an overpowering ecstasy, this speaker wants a kind of primitive, unselfconscious narcissism— no distinction between himself and a receptive, tender world. H. R. Swardson's thesis that Marvell's nature is almost pre-sexual, that his sense of bodily innocence works against the erotic tradition as much 136

1 7 as it does the religious, is underscored here, where Marvell

seems to consciously reject the erotic tradition. He agrees that

the distinction between worshipper and worshipped should be

obliterated, but not in the ecstasy of sexual love; rather, in

this child-like integration with nature, an integration prior to

the passions and subsequent needs for control and discipline, before

the awareness of a separation between self and other.

In his introductory stanza Marvell's speaker invites Clora

to

come view my soul, and tell Whether I have contrived it well. Now all its several lodgings lie Composed into one gallery.

The speaker's composure suggests careful self-control. As he

points out each painting in an orderly way, one after the other,

he seems successfully to have contained Clora's powers over him,

to have "contrived" or "composed" and thus mastered them. But

the last picture, which is really the first in the gallery and

which the poem does not move away from, betrays his powerless­

ness more than his composure. The frame here serves to preserve

the memory of something lost to both Clora and himself. Having

perceived her in all those goddess-like ways since their first

encounter, the speaker can never see her again as at that first

moment. The portrait united Clora with the flowers of nature,

but the flowers live only briefly, the seemingly timeless moment

of self-forgetfulness destroyed by time.

i 137

In "The Gallery," then, Marvell rejects the sensuality that

causes the lover to become will-less, trapped by his own passions

and woman's manipulation of them. He rejects the separation passion forces him to admit between himself and the world, a

separation he does not see the ecstasy of love transcending,

except in a nostaligic, pre-sexual vision of self-forgetfulness.

In Comus and Paradise Lost, Milton also rejects passion, although

emphatically not because he longs for a lost innocence, a primi­ tive, child-like harmony with the world. The "innocence" he

envisions is the maturity of virtue, although it too may sometimes

seem as remote and unreachable as Marvell's gentle shepherdess.

Both Comus and Paradise Lost address the question of whether woman's transfixing beauty brings the lover into genuine harmony with the world so that he loses his self-conscious separation

from it, or whether she simply seduces him into the self-forget­

fulness of a sensual stupor. In the first scene of Comus this

ambiguity in woman's powers is presented. Comus hears the Lady's

song and compares it to the powerful songs he has heard before:

Can any mortal mixture of Earth's mold Breathe such Divine enchanting ravishment? Sure something holy lodges in that breast, And with these raptures moves the vocal air To testify his hidd'n residence; How sweetly did they float upon the wings Of silence, through the empty-vaulted night. At every fall soothing the Raven down Of darkness till it smil'd: I have oft heard My mother Circe with the Sirens three, Amidst the flow'ry-kirl'd Naiades, Culling their Potent herbs and baleful drugs, Who as they sung, would take the prison'd soul, And lap it in Elysium; Scylla wept, 138

And chid her barking waves into attention, And fell Charybdis murmur’d soft applause: Yet they in pleasing slumber lull’d the sense, And in sweet madness robb’d it of itself, But such a sacred and home-felt delight, Such sober certainty of waking bliss, I never heard till now. (244-64)

Circe and the Sirens emprison the soul j u s t as Marvell's

Clora murders or enchants them, as his fair singer entangles them, and as Lovelace's Gratiana enchains them. Any love which causes the lover to lose himself, any which " l u l l / V the sense,/ And in

sweet madness rob£s_7 it of itself" is the ancestor to Comus and his potion which turns men into beasts ("Soon as the Potion works, their human count'nance,/ Th'express resemblance of the gods, is chang'd/ Into some brutish form of Wolf, or Bear,/

Or Ounce, or Tiger, Hog, or bearded Goat,"--68-70). Such mistresses use their own natural powers, their beauty's "Potent herbs and baleful drugs"(255), to draw the lover into being less than himself. The lover dies to himself not to be reborn, neo-Platoni-

ically, into beauty, but to become desensitized in a stupor; the world is not contained by the lover but is reduced to the lover's

sensuality. Thus Milton, as did Marvell, rejects the metaphors of ec­

stasy which require that the lover lose himself. But in its place he puts something perhaps more enigmatic than Marvell's primitive

accord with the world.

For Milton does allow the effect of the Lady's song to be called a ravishment, but, paradoxically, a sober and asexual one.

She is not innocent because she is completely natural and artless. 139

Instead, she knows the art of suing "innocent nature"(762) and living "according to her sober laws"(766). While Comus seems master of the Forest and controls all, the Lady, in the end, knows more than he does of nature's laws. According to her Attendant

Spirit, the ecstasy of love, as represented by Venus and Adonis in the Heavens' Garden of Hesperus, can be reached through virtue:

Mortals that would follow me, Love virtue, she alone is free, She can teach you how to climb Higher than the Sphery chime; Or if Virtue feeble were, Heav'n itself would stoop to her. (1018-1023)

The ecstasy that the Sirens offer may seem to be a freedom because the soul loses itself, and with that, seemingly, all its limitations. But such "freedom" is really a trap, like

Comus's "venom'd seat/ Smear'd with gums of glutinous heat" (916-17).

Milton creates in the Lady an emblem for the way to freedom, to the heavens. She is a model of temperance and self-control, and the ravishment she affords is sober. Nevertheless, she is only just initiated into the world of passions and as yet experiences no attraction, no genuine temptation that mixes the promise of ecstasy with the complications of egoism or narcissism.

She is not so artless as Marvell's shepherdess, but neither is she as initiated as Marvell's speaker in "The Gallery" who tasted the promise of ecstasy in that first vision and nostalgically longs for its simplicity. The Lady's song, which might be called art, is never described as art, and the Lady herself denies it was sung with "skill":

Not any boast of skill, but extreme shift How to regain my sever'd company, Compell'd me to awake the courteous Echo To give me answer from her mossy Couch. (273-276)

It is as if she can use nature instrumentally, that is, artfully, because she is wholly natural.

In Comus Milton neatly separates the two kinds of ravishment woman affords: the sober ravishment of the Lady, or the enslaving ravishment of the Sirens' song or of Comus's potion. In Paradise

Lost much of the sense of tragedy is created precisely because these two possibilities for ravishment are brought together in

Eve, and are not easily distinguishable.

Like many mistresses of the love lyrics, Eve is described in the language of passion, the language that endows her with powers that animate nature and that make it more alive and commensurate with our own feelings, our desire for the eternal spring. When she visits the fruits and flowers,

they at her coming sprung And toucht by her fair tendance gladlier grew. (VIII, 46-47)

Even immediately before she meets the serpent she compels nature to cloud her in fragrance and light, so that Satan has a hard time seeing her:

Eve separate he spies, Veil'd in a Cloud of Fragrance, where she stood; Half spi'd, so thick the Roses bushing round About her glowed. (IX, 424-427) 141

Even the description of her effect on Raphael uses the love lyric conventions. As she left Raphael and Adam's conversation,

With Goddess-like demeanor forth she went;

And from about her shot Darts of desire Into all Eyes to wish her still in sight. CVIII, 59, 62-3)

But perhaps the strongest evidence that Eve's beauty is to be

Identified with overwhelming powers is Satan's reaction when he discovers her:

Her every Air Of gesture or least action overaw'd His Malice, and with rapine sweet bereav'd His fierceness of the fierce intent it brought: That space the Evil one abstracted stood From his own evil, and for the time remain'd Stupidly good, of enmity disarm'd Of guile, of hate, of envy, of revenge. (IX, 459-66)

In the lyric tradition we have seen this motif of the deathless awe woman inspires in nature, where nature is a surrogate for the lover's entrancement under the spell of her beauty, used to justify the lover's subjection to her beauty. John F. Knott, Jr. has said that her "instinctive sympathy with nature . . . seems both the proof and the source of innocence.Surely it seems justifiable to be subjected to the laws of such innocence and purity, to be overwhelmed by such powers for the good as can para­

lyze Satan. Adam reasons so when he explains his response to Eve:

When I approach Her loveliness, so absolute she seems And in herself complete, so well to know Her own, that what she wills to do or say, Seems wisest, virtuousest, discreetest, best; 142

All higher knowledge in her presence falls Degraded, Wisdom in discourse with her Loses discount'nanc't, and like folly shows; Authority and Reason on her wait, As one intended first, not after made Occasionally; and to consummate all, Greatness of mind and nobleness thir seat Build in her loveliest, and create an awe About her, as a guard Angelic plac't. (VIII, 546-59)

Adam had worried earlier that Nature had perhaps bestowed on

Eve

Too much of Ornament, in outward show Elaborate, of inward less exact For well I understand in the prime end Of Nature her th’ inferior, in the mind And inward Faculties, (VIII, 538-42)

Nevertheless, "greatness of mind and nobleness" are not ornaments but "inward faculties" which create the awe about her.

Eve's beauty is, in fact, explicitly connected with the neo-Platonic metaphysics of love, in which context beauty's ravishment is the means to heaven. In his article "Milton’s

Eve and the Neoplatonic Graces," Purvis E. Boyette explains the implications of that connection, beginning with the narrator’s description of Eve in VIII, 59-61:

With Goddess-like demeanor forth she went; Not unattended, for on her as Queen A pomp of winning Graces waited still.

Milton's allusion to the Graces, Boyette says, embraces large neo-Platonic themes. The Graces are the daughters of Venus and represent the three phases of divine love: beauty, desire,. and joy. According to Ficino, "Amor igitur in voluptatem a pulchri- tudine desinit"— Love starts from Beauty and ends in Joy. And 143 according to Plato in the Symposium, "Love is Desire aroused by

Beauty." Boyette continues:

Without Beauty as the innervating principle, Desire is never more than animal passion; it is never true Love. At the same time, passion is a necessary element in love if it is to be other than an abstract entity. Amor, there­ fore, mediates between the contraries Pulchritudo and Voluptas. Love is the middle term of an equation that turns Beauty into Joy. Or said another way: romantic love, sanctified by Divine Reason, points the way to beatitude. Since Milton identifies Eve with Venus, we have good authority for regarding the three Graces as descriptive of the power of love in woman. The Neoplatonic sequence seems implicit in Satan's envious praise of Eve as

fair, divinely fair, fit Love for Gods, Not terrible, though terror be in Love And beauty. (IX, 489-491)

. . . The Graces may be interpreted, therefore, as an inconographic gloss on the love Eve gives to Adam, inspired by the beauty of God in her, so that together in the joy of 'nuptial league' they may return to the one source of being. Expressing the qualities of both the earthly and heavenly Venuses, Eve's love is the power that transforms Beauty into Joy and enables man to ascend to God. . . . She offers him . . . the experience not only of himself as a man but the experience of God, for romantic love is the sign of divine love. The love Eve offers Adam is literally the invocation of life, the inspiration to a creative union that will issue in 'multitudes' (IV, 474). . . . In the experience of human love, Adam discovers the way to beatitude and, in the desire to procreate the impulse to transcendence. Adam follows Eve into disobedi­ ence because he is reluctant to turn away ijrom what God has given him as a vehicle of revelation.

In his "An Hymne in Honor of Beautie," Spenser makes a sim­ ilar point about beauty's role. Here he explains that beauty has such great power precisely because it is not mere outward show, but reflects an inner reality: Beautie is not, as fond men misdeerae, An outward shew of things that onley seeme.

So every spirit, as it is most pure, And hath in it the more of heavenly light, So it the fairer body doth procure To habit in, and it more fairely dight With chearefull grace and amiable sight. For of the soule the bodie forme doth take: For soule is forme, and doth the bodie make. (90-91, 127-33)

In such a context, Raphael's response to Adam seems far wide of the mark. He warns Adam not to attribute

overmuch to things Less excellent, as thou thyself perceiv'st. For what admir'st thou, what transports thee so, An outside? fair no doubt, and worthy well Thy cherishing, thy honoring, and thy love, Not thy subjection: weigh with her thyself; Then value: Oft-times nothing profits more Than self-esteem, grounded on just and right Well manag’d; of that skill the more thou know'st, The more she will acknowledge thee her Head, And to realities yield all her shows; Made so adorn for thy delight the more, So awful, that with honor thou may'st love Thy mate, who sees when thou art seen least wise.

What higher in her society thou find'st Attractive, human, rational, love still. (VIII, 565-76, 586-

Woman's beauty here is described as a false fairness, merely an appearance, a "show" that must yield to manly "realities."

What is human and rational must somehow be distinguished from what is beautiful.

Yet in the context of the neo-Platonic lyric descriptions of Eve, we have no way of separating the so-called outward show from the human and rational. And the pastoral lyric tradition, 145 from which the descriptions of Eve's accord with nature derives, is just as misleading. According to Edward Tayler, in the pastoral tradition nature had come to represent, metaphorically, an unfallen harmony with God, a religious perfection. ^ It meant automatically a world which preserved some communication between heaven and earth— the original, unspoiled transcendent. As medieval allegory influenced the conception of nature, nature came to be considered the revelation of the order of the universe, the work of God, the artist. Human art, which depends on reason and rules, can only counterfeit the operations of God.

In this tradition, reason became a necessity primarily "to repair the ruin of the first Fall." And so any woman described as seeming so naturally complete and perfect as Eve should automat­ ically be considered superior to Adam, whose chief virtue is his reason. Though Raphael calls Adam inwardly more perfect because he is reasonable and judicious, the pastoral tradition tells us that in the Golden Age reason and judgment were unneces­ sary in communications between heaven and earth. Art could only corrupt the pristine integrity of nature. Nature, and here Eve is its archetype, is superior to art.

Through Raphael, then, Milton is challenging or refining both the neo-Platonic and pastoral conceptions of beauty. He challenges the neo-Platonic conception that love of beauty is a rapture that leads to joy by rejecting the language of passion.

There must be no overcoming; the lover does not die to himself 146 to be reborn in the beloved. Raphael clearly disapproves of

Adam's description of his love for Eve:

transported I behold, Transported touch; here passion first I felt, Commotion strange, in all enjoyments else Superior and unmov'd, here only weak Against the charm of Beauty's powerful glance. CVIII, 529-33)

Adam says he feels transported, as if a power outside of himself lifted him out of his own control. Like the love lyrics describing woman's powers to chain or enslave her lover ("Gratiana

Dauncing and Singing," "The Fair Singer," and "The Gallery") Adam describes his passion as the feeling of being carried out of himself, and of being powerless to resist. Raphael's warning against the validity of this notion of passion shows that Milton's concept of passion differs from that of his poetic predecessors.

George L. Dillon describes a shift in the seventeenth-century theory and language of passion, from the Elizabethan conception to the Restoration's scientific one.22 The Elizabethans represented passions as virtually autonomous, not in our control C"Love bids me speak"), such that they might "overthrow the sovereignty of

Reason." Their metaphors ascribe agency and causation to the passions, such that they do things independent of the self and are thus easily personified. This language used to describe the passions reflects the medieval theory that the passions arose from the animal soul, made up of vapors and intermediate between the corporeal soul of the body and the spiritual soul of the mind and reason. The later seventeenth-century psychology thoroughly separated the soul from the body. Dillon demonstrates the effect this theory had on the language of passions by comparing neo-classical revisions of Shakespeare with his original language. In the revisions passions lose their autonomy— "thick-coming fancies" become "disturbing fancies"; and they become possessed by or located in the individual rather than being referred to as free agents--"My dull braine was wrought with things forgotten"

(the agent is unidentified and unlocated) becomes, "I was reflec­ ting on past transactions." As Dillon notes, when passions are conceived of as beyond the individual's control, they can easily be seen as tragic and fatal forces. But once these powers are located within characters, the characters must be held accountable for their energies.

Precisely what Raphael emphasizes to Adam is that he is not transported by any outside agent. Adam himself allows that the "commotion strange" comes from within himself: "here passion first I_ felt." And Raphael urges him to see that this feeling is no power outside of his control. Nothing in the sense of touch, he says, is "worthy to subdue/ The Soul of Man, or passion in him move"(VIII, 584-85). When Adam is tempted, he is not overpowered by a great force, but is only "fondly overcome with Female charm"(IX, 999). Compared with the fatal force of passions in

Elizabethan language, how limp a nudge this seems to be. 148

Not only does Milton vitiate the fatal powers of passions; with

Adam’s fall he explicitly denies the neo-Platonic notion that lovers die to themselves and are reborn more perfect in the beloved. Adam's justification for his choice to make Death his consort, as it is already Eve's, is that: >

I feel The Bond of Nature draw me to my own, My own in thee, for what thou art is mine; Our State cannot be sever'd, we are one, One Flesh; to lose thee were to lose myself. (IX, 955-59)

The context dramatically proves this assumption false. Also proven false is the neo-Platonic assumption that woman's beauty is an emblem of an instinctive harmony with nature superior to reason, that she is a goddess redeeming nature from death. Satan tempts her thus:

Queen of this Universe, do not believe Those rigid threats of Death; ye shall not Die. (IX, 684-85)

The moment she believes this is so, death enters the world.

For despite the pastoral harmony between Eve and nature,

Milton's Eden is not entirely pastoral. Nature's adoration of

Eve is not a surrogate for the lover, nor an accurate reflection of her state of innocence and purity. Milton's Eden is not a pastoral world; instead it defines an unbridgeable gap between nature and man. Man is morally accountable; nature never is.

Thus although Eve has all the trappings of the neo-Platonic mistress, she is not one. For she does not just seem goddess-like, and nature does not just seem to adore her because her beauty 149 moves our minds so. That is the vision of woman in the love lyric where we hear the speaker's words with the knowledge of their subjectivity. But the narrator of Paradise Lost speaks not as a 23 lover but as an historian. Eve really is goddess-like, with preternatural powers and a preternatural innocence. She does not just seem that way to a lover. And in Eden nature really does respond animatedly to human beings. It is no pathetic fallacy on the part of the poet-lover. Thus it is not a sign of her absolute and overpowering innocence that the natural world re­ sponds to Eve; it is not, as in the love lyrics, a sign of a superior harmony with the world. As yet it is "unearned" adoration, a gift of harmony which eventually Eve, and Adam, must consciously reason about. They learn that they are not "naturally" good, and that will and instinct may contradict reason and the divine order.

They must choose to conform their own desires to the established order.

After the Fall there is still a correspondence between Adam and Eve and nature, but it is a correspondence of discord:

They sat them down to weep, nor only Tears Rain'd at thir Eyes, but high Winds worse within Began to rise, high Passions, Anger, Hate, Mistrust, Suspicion, Discord, and shook sore Thir inward State of Mind, calm Region once And full of Peace, now toss't and turbulent. (IX, 1121-26)

Again we note that the passions do not seem to originate from some place outside the self. They are clearly located within. Without, however, there is equal turbulence: Th' inclement Seasons, Rain, Ice, Hail, and Snow, Which now the Sky with various Face begins To show us in this Mountain, while the Winds Blow moist and keen, shattering the graceful locks Of these fair spreading Trees. (X, 1063-67)

After the fall there are no goddesses who can create an Edenic harmony with the outside world. John Knott describes the fate of the pastoral world thus:

In Paradise Lost Milton destroyed the illusion of an inviolable pastoral world; Adam's fading roses suggest not only Eve's alienation from nature, but the inability of nature to withstand the presence of sin. . . . The movement of the poem from apparently secure bliss into sin and disorder demonstrates that grace must originate outside the natural world; consolation and redemption can come only from above, through the agency of Christ. The only valid, or stable, pastoral vision is one based upon the union of the redeemed Christ with God in heaven, seen as a reconstituted Arcadia with God enthroned in its Center.24

In section (i) we have looked at blason and promenade poems which, using metaphors to describe woman's powers over nature, celebrated beauty's mystic powers, powers that seem to lift the lover into a pastoral, timeless world of order and harmony.

And in fii) we have looked at Donne's poems which, using metaphors that attribute all Being to love, celebrate the mystic powers of a love that has created an utterly new life for the two lovers.

In section (iii) we see these two visions of pastoral and ecstatic love highly qualified. In "The Fair Singer" and "Mourning,"

Marvell turns our attention away from the attempt to describe the powers of beauty, and focuses instead on the susceptibility of the lover to delude himself with the very metaphors other poems have used to celebrate love. These speakers seem affected by beauty's ineluctable powers primarily because they want to believe such powers exist. And the speaker of "The Gallery" celebrates a kind of pre-sexual harmony with nature which seems to want to escape sexual love and its powerful entanglements entirely.

In Cornus Milton suggests there is a sober ravishment beauty can work upon the soul, but, paradoxically, it is a non-sexual

"ravishment" that leads the soul to sober self-possession. And in Paradise Lost Milton clearly rejects the pastoral and neo-Platonic metaphors for beauty which had described its power to take the soul out of itself. In Paradise Lost, to be enraptured by passion is not to become united with a harmony larger than oneself; it is, rather, to admit sin and death into the world.

Marvell, by subtle psychological irony, and Milton, by linking beauty with the First Fall, have thus qualified the neo-Platonic and Petrarchan ideal of beauty's mystic powers as the lyric had described it. In Chapter IV we shall see three other categories of poems which explicitly reject this ideal and the metaphors it inspired. 152

Notes to Chapter III

1 See Hardison, The Enduring Monument, pp. 97-98, for a dis­ cussion of the evolution of secular lyrics of praise out of hymns and psalms, even before the stil novo. 2 Itrat-Husain, The Mystical Element in the Metaphysical Poets of the Seventeenth Century (London: Oliver 8 Boyd, 1948), pp. 19-36. 3 Richmond in The School of Love, pp. 162-168, gives the name to this genre of lyric. 4 R. E. Neil Dodge, ed., The Complete Poetical Works of Spenser (1908; rpt. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1936). Subsequent reference is to this edition.

^ William B. Hunter, Jr., ed., The Complete Poetry of Ben Jonson (1963; rpt. New York: Norton, 1968).

^ Anne Ferry, A11 in War with Time: Love Poetry of Shakespeare, Donne, Jonson, Marvell (Cambridge: Harvard U. P., 1975), pp. 131-132. 7 Richmond, School of Love, pp. 161-163.

8 Sylvester, The Anchor Anthology, pp. 514-15.

® Richmond, School of Love, pp. 166-167.

Giamatti, in The Earthly Paradise, pp. 47-48, n. 49, cites the primary classical examples for the image of the girl as a flower among flowers and says that Marvell’s Mary Fairfax takes the image to its greatest extreme: "She goes from Nature's finest example to its prototype."

H Colie's chapter, "Carpe Diem Poems," in "My Ecchoing Song," pp. 52-56, examines Marvell's use of the carpe diem motif in this and other poems.

12 "'Paradice's Only Map'," PMLA, 85 (1970), 504-513.

13 See Richmond quote above, p. 103.

14 Guss, John Donne, pp. 151-52 and 162. 153

See Miner, "The Private Mode,” in The Metaphysical Mode pp. 3-47.

16 "My Ecchoing Song,11 p. 44.

Swardson, Poetry, pp. 83-103.

Merritt Y. Hughes, ed., John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose (New York: Odyssey Press, 1957). Subsequent references are to this edition. 19 Milton's Pastoral Vision: An Approach to Paradise Lost (Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1971), p. 112.

'^Milton's Eve and the Neoplatonic Graces," Renaissance Quarterly, 20 (1967), 341-344.

^1 Tayler, Nature and Art, "The Medieval Contribution," pp. 72-101. 22 "The Seventeenth-Century Shift in the Theory and Language of Passion," Language and Style, 4 (1971), 131-143. 23 What Tayler says of the Medieval depictions of Eden holds true of Milton's: for the Middle Ages, "to indulge in the pathetic fallacy was to depict with verisimilitude man's pre- lapsarian condition" (Nature and Art, p. 172).

^ Milton's Pastoral Vision, pp. 122-23. IV. REJECTION OF METAPHOR

In Chapters I, II, and III we have been looking at poems whose narrators use metaphors to describe a transformed world.

In I, the speaker transforms an alien power like a woman into

an inanimate thing so that he can control her. In II, he trans­

forms the entire world into the image of his own wish fulfillment to entice woman to enter. In III, instead of transforming, he

is transformed by a woman whose mystic powers overwhelm him.

There is yet a final category of love poems dealing with woman and metaphor, poems whose speakers do not set out to transform or be transformed by woman at all. Instead, these narrators expose what they see as the subjectivity and distortion in all attempts to transform or to be transformed by woman. One set of poems (i) within this category claims that woman's mystic powers to transform the world do not really exist.

Either her powers are the invention of the poet-lover, or they are merely a fashionable illusion which has lost its currency.

Another set of poems (ii) within this category derives from the

Horatian "happy man" tradition. Here the would-be lover turns away from what he sees as the distorted world of passion; he substitutes a more sober alliance not with woman, but with all the world outside himself. Finally (iii), in much seventeenth- century sacred poetry, the transforming powers which woman's 155

love promises are found to reside not only outside of woman and

the lover, but outside of the world itself.

(i)

In his sacred epic we have seen Milton suggest that woman’s beauty does not possess powers overwhelmingly beyond the lover's

control. Writing in a more profane Petrarchan tradition,* Jonson,

Carew, and Suckling suggest that powers lie not at all in woman’s beauty but in their own verse, or more cynically yet, in their

appetites.

In the whole of A Celebration of Charis, Jonson counterpoints the ideal, suave poet-lover with his own ungainly physical self.

But he does not suffer from his satire alone. At the very end he also suggests that even noble women who appear to be ideal beauties have, lurking beneath their surfaces, very common physical desires. In fact, the last lyric piece in the Celebration—

"Another Ladyes exception present at the hearing"— ends with a lady's clarifying her preferences in men:

What you please, you parts may call, 'Tis one good part I'Id lie withal1. (7-8)

But much before this tenth lyric piece Jonson has suggested that the ideal mistress is not all she seems. Her beauty and mystic

charms may in truth be ephemeral illusions, gifts from the poet to 156 the admired. In "Clayming a second kisse by Desert" the poet-lover claims to have earned Charis's favors because he has himself, through his verse, brought into being an image of her as the only fair:

CHaris guesse, and doe not misse, Since I drew a Morning kisse From your lips, and suck'd an ayre Thence, as sweet, as you are faire, What my Muse and I have done: Whether we have lost, or wonne, If by us, the oddes were laid, That the Bride (allow'd a Maid) Look'd not halfe so fresh, and faire, With th' advantage of her haire, And her Jewels, to the view Of th' Assembly, as did you! Or, that did you sit, or walke, You were more the eye, and talke Of the Court, to day, then all Else that glister'd in White-hall; So, as those that had your sight, Wisht the Bride were chang'd to night, And did think, such Rites were due To no other Grace but you! Or, if you did move to night In the Daunces, with what spight Of your peeres, you were beheld, That at every motion sweld So to see a Lady tread, As might all the Graces lead, And was worthy (being so seene) To be envi'd of the Queene. Or if you would yet have stay'd Whether any would up-braid To himself his losse of Time; Or have charg'd his sight of Crime, To have left all sight for you: Guesse of these, which is true; And, if such a verse as this, May not claime another kisse.

The poet and not the lady herself is responsible for the goddess that "might all the Graces lead." It is not the goddess which inspires the poetry, but the poetry which creates the goddess. At least the exigencies of the poet's physical desires have led him 157

to assert it is so, that he might seem more deserving.

A similar quid pro quo is demanded by the speaker in Carew's

"To a Lady that Desired I would Love Her." If she genuinely wants

him to woo her, he argues, she must use her creative powers for

him:

Each pettie beautie can disdaine, and I Spight of your hate Without your leave can see, and dye; Dispence a nobler Fate, 'Tis easie to destroy, you may create. (6- 10)

These creative powers are, of course, simply her sexual favors,

which inspire the real creator, the poet-lover himself.

I'le make your eyes like morning Suns appeare, As milde, and faire; Your brow as Crystall smooth, and cleare, And your dishevell'd hayre Shall flow like a calme Region of the Ayre.

Rich Natures store, (which is the Poets Treasure) I'le spend, to dresse Your beauties, if your mine of Pleasure In equall thankfulnesse You but unlocke, so we each other blesse. (25-34)

In both Jonson's and Carew's poems the speakers grant the woman

some rudimentary beauty, but not beauty's power to call the

Graces from the heavens or to make the sun appear. These are

gifts bestowed only by the poet, for which the mistress owes

gratitude. In thus exploiting the separation between the poet's

creation and the reality it is based on, these poets deny the metaphysical, transforming powers of beauty and claim them for

themselves. 158

In "Sonnet I" John Suckling's speaker is ostensibly more humble in his denial that beauty has great powers. He compares the Petrarchan definition of beauty with his own experience of it and finds the definition wanting:

Do'st see how unregarded now that piece of beauty passes? There was a time when I did vow to that alone; but mark the fate of faces: That red and white works now no more on me Then if it could not charm or I not see.

And yet the face continues good, and I have still desires, Am still the self same flesh and blood, as apt to melt and suffer from those fires; Oh! some kind power unriddle where it lies, Whether my heart be faulty, or her eyes?

She every day her Man does kill, and I as often die; Neither her power then, nor my will can question'd be, what is the mystery? Sure Beauties Empires, like to greater States Have certain periods set, and hidden fates.

He seems fair-minded enough. When the definition does not cor­ respond to his experience, he assumes that it might well be his fault:

Oh! some kind power unriddle where it lies, Whether my heart be faulty, or her eyes? (13-14)

Yet he can find no fault in either. Still, he does not jump to conclusions. He does not debunk the Petrarchan definition but humbly submits to the mystery:

Sure Beauties Empires, like to greater States Have certain periods set, and hidden fates. 159

Yet though he seems fair-minded, the fault is not with the definition but with him. He is incapable of grasping the mystery of beauty’s powers in neo-Platonic terms because for him beauty is a physical thing which is distributed in certain "pieces." It is not surpris­ ing, then,to see the humble empiricist of "Sonnet I" become the sarcastic skeptic of "Sonnet II."

Rather than claiming that beauty’s empire is limited, as in "Sonnet I," the speaker here denies that beauty has an empire at all:

Of thee (kind boy) I ask no red and white to make up my delight, no odd becomming graces, Black eyes, or little know-not-whats, in faces; Make me but mad enough, give me good store Of Love, of her I Court, I ask no more, 'Tis love in love that makes the sport.

There’s no such thing as that we beauty call, it is meer cousenage all; for though some long ago Like't certain colours mingled so and so, That doth not tie me now from chusing new, If I a fancy take To black and blue, That fancy doth it beauty make.

Tis not the meat, but 'tis the appetite makes eating a delight, and if I like one dish More then another, that a Pheasant is; What in our watches, that in us is found, So to the height and nick We up be wound, No matter by what hand or trick.

This speaker allows that something causes a madness that takes him out of himself. But is has nothing to do with beauty's transcendent harmonies, for there is no such thing as a spiritual beauty. This speaker thus goes one step beyond the poet-lover who claims his words create the power of his mistress's beauty by defining her image in the eye of the beholder. Instead this speaker claims it is his flesh alone which is the source of power

'"tis the appetite." The only unknown for him is the knowledge of just when he will be made "but mad enough," and that depends on his own physiology, not on any harmony in the universe.

Lest there be any doubt that Suckling is taking on the neo-

Platonic notions of the spirituality of love, his "Upon My

Lady Carlisle's Walking in Hampton Court Garden" makes explicit the confrontation between the idealizing poet-lover (in the per­ son of Thomas Carew) and his own, more carnal version of love:

Thom. Didst thou not find the place inspir’d And flow'rs, as if they had desir'd No other Sun, start from their beds, And for a sight steal out their heads? Heard'st thou not musick when she talk't And didst not find that as she walkt She threw rare perfumes all about, Such as bean-blossoms newly out, Or chafed spices give?—

J.S. I must confesse those perfumes (Tom) I did not smell; nor found that from Her passing by, aught sprung up new: The flow'rs had all their birth from you; For I pass't o'er the self same walk, And did not find one single stalk Of any thing that was to bring This unknown after after-spring.

Thom. Dull and insensible, could'st see A thing so near a Deity Move up and down, and feel no change?

J.S. None, and so great, were alike strange; I had my Thoughts, but not your way, All are not born (Sir) to the Bay; 161

Alas! Tom, I am flesh and blood, And was consulting how I could In spite of masks and hoods descry The parts deni'd unto the eye; I was undoing all she wore, And had she walked but one turn more, Eve in her first state had not been More naked, or more plainly seen. Cl—31)

Tom sees woman's beauty as a mystic power which makes the inanimate come to life and, if we may take the garden as the lover's surro­ gate, which puts the lover in touch with a higher source of life than he has known. J. S., on the other hand, cannot see any of this spiritual power. He is interested in the flesh and blood.

But he does at first seem to allow that perhaps Tom has some higher sensibility he himself has not been gifted with: "All are not b o m CSir) to the Bay" (a remark obviously ironic, given the author of this poem, but never mind that for the moment).

J. S. seems to be allowing that there might be such a reality as

Tom sees, and even though he is not the least interested in it, it is not he who damns the neo-Platonic definition of beauty for good. In fact, J. S.'s counterpoint to Tom could make J. S. look to the reader all the more limited, and Tom all the more gifted in his ability to see into beauty's heart.

But Suckling's Tom, as it turns out, is no defender of the idea of beauty. Instead, he agrees with J. S. on the essential reality they are witnessing, as the last stanza reveals:

Thom. 'T was well for thee she left the place, For there's great danger in that face; But had'st thou view'd her legg and thigh, And upon that discovery 162

Search'd after parts that are more dear, (As Fancy seldom stops so near) No time or age had ever seen So lost a thing as thou hadst been. (32-39)

Tom's vision of beauty's spiritual powers, it appears, is a cre­

ation of his own fantasy, designed primarily to sublimate the physical desires beauty arouses. Apparently having experienced the consequences of a too explicit erotic imagination, having

"lost" himself to physical desires, he has decided to divert his

imaginative energies into creations less realistic and therefore more controllable. Woman’s true powers, thus, work primarily on his body, not his soul, and the defender of neo-Platonic

idealism turns out, unwittingly, to be its opponent. In these cynically Petrarchan poems we have seen the speakers

deny woman's mystic powers either by attributing them to their

own verse, or by identifying them solely with the power to arouse physical appetites. In another kind of lyric, that in the tradi­ tion of the Horatian Ode on a happy life, woman's mystic powers

are again denied. Here, though, the object is not to reduce

her powers to arousing physical sensations, but to heighten

and sanctify the pleasures man can take from all that nature

offers, not just from women. In this context woman does not

invite man into a new world that rejects or transforms the old.

Instead, if she is allowed in his world at all, she is one

facet of the happy life which bounteous nature has bestowed upon him. The ideal happy man may love woman, but not passionately.

Passion must never displace him from his reasonable self. Thus

if woman is to be included in this world at all, it must be only as a rustic milkmaid seen in the distance, or as a wife whose comeliness is irrelevant compared with her loyalty and good housekeeping.

Mildmay Fane's commendation of country life in "My Happy

Life: To a Friend," contains the standard elements which consti- 7 tute the classical otium of the golden age. Cooled by soft breezes off rippling brooks and "Arm'd Capapee with Innocence"(16), 163 164

the speaker enjoys the birds and beasts of the country, and also

the women:

And when the Western Skie with red Roses bestrews the Day-star’s bed, The wholsom Maid comes out to Milk In russet-coats, but skin like Silk; Which, though the Sun and Air dies brown, Will yeeld to none of all the Town For softness, and her breath’s sweet smell Doth all the new-milcht Kie excell: She knows no rotten teeth, nor hair Bought, or Complexion t'make her fair, But is her own fair wind and dress, Not envying Citie's happiness: Yet as she would extend some pitty To the drain'd Neat, she frames a ditty Which doth inchant the beast, untill It patiently lets her Paile fill; This doth the babbling Eccho catch And so at length to me't doth reach. Straight roused up, I verdict pass. Concluding from this bonny Lass And the Birds' strains, 'tis hard to say Which taught Notes first, or she, or they. Thus ravish'd, as the night draws on Its sable Curtain, in I'm gon.^ (127-150)

The milkmaid's beauty and song are charming, but not in a way which arouses desire. (Saying she does not have rotten teeth is hardly a seductive description.) She only adds to the speaker's

sense of his own completeness. In this world no emptiness precedes fulfillment; there is only fulfillment itself. The

speaker need make no demands on the world but only remain passively

receptive to it. His description of his wife reinforces his

security and satisfaction. She is not beautiful and seductive

but rather is stable, constant, and orderly. When he returns

home, 165

There I embrace and kiss my Spouse, Who, like the Vesta to the house, A Sullibub prepares to show By care and love what I must owe. (157-60)

In Abraham Cowley's "Horat. Epodon.: Beautus ille qui procul, etc.,” the milkmaid and the loyal wife are combined into one as the speaker enumerates all those things of the country that enable him to be completely self-sufficient. In fact, the freedom from encountering passion seems the paramount freedom for the speaker. Having described the refreshing toils of his life as pruner, herdsman, and hunter, he exclaims:

This is the life from all misfortunes free, From thee the Great one, Tyrant Love, from Thee; And if a chaste and clean, though homely wife Be added to the blessings of this Life, Such as the antient Sun-burnt Sabins were, Such as Apulia, frugal still, does bear, Who makes her Children and the house her care, And joyfully the work of Life does share, Nor thinks herself too noble or too fine To pin the sheepfold or to milch the Kine, Who waits at door against her Husband come From rural duties, late, and wearied home, Where she receives him with a kind embrace, A chearful Fire, and a more chearful Face: And fills the Boul up to her homely Lord, And with domestique plenty loads the board. (43-58)

The sense is that life without a woman would be fair enough, but that with one it would be more friendly, comfortable, and com­ plete. In either case, however, no passions must disturb the rural tranquility. No metaphoric transformations endow woman with mystic powers; she is only like other good people, like the

Sabines for example, possibly heroic, but not overwhelming. 166

In another of his Horatian poems, "The Wish," Cowley conveys a similar attitude toward passion, but not so consistently. The speaker begins by claiming he must escape

The Crowd, and Buz, and Murmurings Of this great Hive, the City. (7-8)

He would have, instead, the country life and its delicious solitude, though he would not have it entirely alone:

Ah, yet, e'er I descend to th' Grave May I a small House, and large Garden have! And a few Friends, and many Books, both true, Both wise, and both delightful too! And since Love ne'er will from me flee, A Mistress moderately fair, And good as Guardian-Angels are, Only belov’d, and loving me!

Oh, Fountains, when in you shall I My self, eas’d of unpeaceful thoughts, espy? Oh Fields! Oh Woods! when, when shall I be made The happy Tenant of your shade? Here's the Spring-head of Pleasures flood; Where all the Riches lie, and that she Has coyn'd and stampt for good.

Pride and Ambition here, Only in far fetcht Metaphors appear; Here nought but winds can hurtful Murmurs scatter, And nought but Eccho flatter. The Gods, when they descended, hither From Heav'en did always chuse their way; And therefore we may boldly say, That 'tis the way too thither.

How happy here should I, And one dear She live, and embracing dy? She who is all the world, and can exclude In desarts Solitude. I should have then this for only fear, Lest men, when they my pleaures see, Should hither throng to live like me, And so make a City here. 167

Here Cowley clearly banishes some passions from the country

("Pride and Ambition") but not the passion of love. He would

rather have no need for love at all; but since nature seems to have made it necessary, "Since Love ne'er will from me flee," he would have this passion satisfied as completely and carefully

as possible. He would have a mistress "who is all the world and

can exclude/ In desarts Solitude," though she must be only

"moderately fair," presumably to ensure she is "Only belov'd

and loving me!"

But as the speaker thus provides for himself, he introduces

a perplexing contradiction. The stanzas separating our intro­

duction to his mistress from his conclusion in which he exclaims,

How happy here should I, And one dear She live, and embracing dy? (33-34)

are interrupted by two stanzas which describe a world that is

desirable primarily because it is removed from all human company:

"Here /Tn fields and woods/ 's the Spring-head of Pleasures

flood;/ Where all the Riches lie. ..." He describes here an

ecstatic communion with nature, but a communion which his affections

for his mistress seem to make superfluous. For she, if she is

truly "all the world," must make the speaker's harmony with nature a far lesser harmony by comparison. On the other hand, nature offers him pleasures and rest which a passion for woman must intrude upon, as he rightly senses when he suggests he would

rather have love flee from him completely to begin with. But 168

by thus trying to imagine a world which satisfies all of his desires, he makes the expression of each satisfaction less con­ vincing.

As Cowley's "The Wish" suggests, the Horatian self-sufficient man ravished by nature has trouble in the earlier seventeenth

century displacing the ecstatic lover as the dominant lyric theme.

In tracing the development of the Horatian theme, Maren-Sofie

R/stvig notes that it was not until the Horatian theme of the

Happy Husbandman merged with the religious figure of the Serene

Contemplator that the Horatian theme became firmly established:

Through their amalgamation with the theme of solitary contemplation, the beatus ille-themes experienced a marked increase in popularity. The passion for solitary meditation, which was one of the basic religious trends in the first half of the seventeenth century, served as a catalyst to hasten the complete assimilation of the classical ideas concerning the happy and obscure country life. From this time on the theme of solitude became so firmly linked to the beatus ille-themes that we must begin to use the more inclusive term of the theme of retirement. . . . The highest peak occurred in the years from 1645 to 1655, . . .but in the poetry of Denham and Waller, Milton and Habington, the theme of retirement gained its first distinctive honours.^

While R^stvig demonstrates the amalgamation of the melancholy religious meditator with the Horatian happy man, she does not deal with the contribution to, or perhaps the intrusion upon, the

Horatian theme made by the love lyric tradition. For, the mystic relation love automatically implies in seventeenth-century lyrics

intrudes upon the Happy Husbandman's solitary communion with nature. This is the contradiction we see in Cowley’s poem. And it is in this light that we must approach Marvell's "The Garden," 169 for unlike the speakers of other poems glorifying the rural con- templator, who try to integrate the experience of beauty with rural contemplation, Marvell's speaker is continually opposing sexual love to the love for nature itself. As H. M. Richmond says of the controversial eighth stanza:

After a Place so pure, and sweet, What other help could yet be meet!

So audacious an attack had never appeared in sentimental secular lyricism before: all non-clerical writers (and many ecclesiastical ones too) had assumed that the consummation of rural peace was a sexual one or at least a communion of souls.°

Marvell consciously displaces ecstatic sexual love with an ecstatic love for nature. Only in this context does the eighth stanza of "The Garden," which so displeases Earl Miner and for which

Rdstvig can find no precedent, make sense. But we anticipate ourselves.

Like Fane's and Cowley's Happy Husbandmen, Marvell's speaker in '.'The Garden" rejects the city for rural solitude:

How vainly men themselves amaze To win the palm, the oak, or bays, And their uncessant labours see Crowned from some single herb or tree, Whose short and narrow verged shade Does prudently their toils upbraid, While all flow’rs and all trees do close To weave the garlands of repose.

Fair Quiet, have I found thee here, And Innocence, thy sister dear I Mistaken long, I sought you then In busy companies of men. Your sacred plants, if here below, Only among the plants will grow. Society is all but rude, To this delicious solitude. Marvell's speaker, however, does not abandon passion and desire which the Happy Husbandman sees as threats to his tranquility.

Instead, he only abandons the specific object of passion— woman- and replaces her with nature itself. Whereas the traditional lyric formula makes the object of desire--woman— the epitome of nature, Marvell makes nature itself the object of desire:

No white nor red was ever seen So am'rous as this lovely green. Fond lovers, cruel as their flame, Cut in these trees their mistress' name. Little, alas, they know, or heed, How far these beauties hers exceed! Fair Trees! wheres'e'er your barks I wound, No name shall but your own be found.

When we have run our passion's heat, Love hither makes his best retreat. The gods, that mortal beauty chase, Still in a tree did end their race. Apollo hunted Daphne so, Only that she might laurel grow. And Pan did after Syrinx speed, Not as a nymph, but for a reed. (17-32)

Only when the lover gives up pursuing love's traditional object can he actually have what love seemed to promise him— passion's fulfillment:

What wondrous life is this I lead! Ripe apples drop about my head; The luscious clusters of the vine Upon my mouth do crush their wine; The nectarine, and curious peach, Into my hands themselves do reach; Stumbling on melons, as I pass, Ensnared with flowers, I fall on grass. (33-40)

Thus the garden first obliterates any opposition between sensual desires and the world which grants them. The world 171 anticipates every desire so that no discord exists between the body and the world. This liberation from sensual constraints in turn liberates the mind normally preoccupied with the external world:

Meanwhile the mind, from pleasure less, Withdraws into its happiness: The mind, that ocean where each kind Does straight its own resemblance find, Yet it creates, transcending these, Far other worlds, and other seas, Annihilating all that’s made To a green thought in a green shade. (41-48)

The mind, used to treating its images of the external world accord­ ing to the external world's rules, is now freed to play with images and their relations, and from these it creates new images and new relations, infinite possibilities. In this flux, no

"thing" can be said to exist. All is annihilated, sacrificed to thought, a process as living and green as nature's own, pro­ ceeding in the shade or freedom provided by nature's largesse.

The body feels no limits, nor the mind. And the soul too is released:

Here at the fountain's sliding foot, Or at some fruit-tree's mossy root, Casting the body's vest aside, My soul into the boughs does glide: There like a bird it sits, and sings, Then whets, and combs its silver wings; And, till prepared for longer flight, Waves in its plumes the various light. (49-56)

The self-conscious vanity with which men sought to "themselves amaze" here has been transformed into wholly unself-conscious, 172 effortless preening, pure pleasure in an exercise which prepares for some higher purpose and which yet seems to create neither impatience, nor competitiveness, nor yearning. There is only a self-satisfied, unconscious pleasure in being. The soul has become a thing of beauty, the object it had desired to possess all along.

The soul's beauty was created by its own natural, unself- conscious joy in being; it is the kind of beauty for which woman has so often been the symbol. To possess it the soul had first to give up the search for it. Now, all light— the red, the white, the green— waves in these plumes.

This preening, though, cannot go on forever. For while in stanza seven the speaker experiences the boundlessness of his solitary soul, stanza eight shows that such an experience can occur only in the context of a society which ultimately must be re­ turned to:

Such was the happy Garden-state, While man there walked without a mate: After a place so pure, and sweet, What other help could yet be meet! But 'twas beyond a mortal’s share To wander solitary there: Two paradises 'twere in one To live in Paradise alone. (57-64) The speaker's ironic misogyny makes clear how emphatically this ecstasy excludes the traditional consummation in sexual love, but it also, ironically, shows how foolish it is to think that solitude ever completely displaces the satisfactions of society. For in the very act of celebrating the ecstasy, the speaker recalls for 173 us how ultimately dissatisfied we are alone, as Adam exemplified.

It is true, as H. M. Richmond has pointed out,® that stanza eight overtly attacks sentimental secular lyricism; yet its irony is

also an implicit attack on the speaker's own sentimental solitary

lyricism. As Rosalie Colie explains:

In stanza 8 the tone shifts again, as the poet begins to emerge into an ironical objectivity, from the selfless and self-coivfirming ecstasy of the preceding stanzeL. Once more /as with the tradition of Apollo and Pan/ the faux-naif re-interprets a great tradition, this time of Genesis itself, in support of his paradoxical defense of solitude...... Paradoxy makes fun of traditions; the most brilliant paradoxes often turn out to defend the traditions they seem to mock, as in fact this poem does. The Biblical parody, topsy-turviness, and silliness of stanza 8 relies /.sic/ on the knowledge of every man, woman, and child that Adam did not have Eve thrust upon him, but chose to give existence to her, with the results known to every mortal in Christendom. Our realization that from Adam Eve was made, also does no harm to the meta- morphic stress of this poem, in which one image turns into another, one genre into another, one stage of life and of understanding into another.®

The irony of stanza eight thus pulls the lover down from

his self-sufficiency, and in his final stanza he looks more ob­

jectively at his garden world:

How well the skillful gardener drew Of flowers and herbs this dial new, Where from above the milder sun Does through a fragrant zodiac run; And, as it works, the industrious bee Computes its time as well as we. How could such sweet and wholesome hours Be reckoned but with herbs and flowers I (65-72)

He has returned to the world where time and becoming are ines­

capable. But his green world has given him a new way of seeing it, under a "milder sun." For now he sees in the garden that the vision of time as a natural, unself-conscious process can be imposed upon clock time, the time of a self-conscious subject facing an alien, objective world. The opportunity for this vision is created, however, by the "skillful" gardener. Ironi­ cally, the vision of unself-conscious experience can be captured and removed from the ruin of time only by one's becoming that active, objectifying manipulator of nature, the gardener. And thus we are back to the "busy companies of men" who encourage such skills as the gardener's, who reward with "the palm, the oak, or bays" those who try to realize a private vision in the external worldi

So the poem comes full circle. The speaker's attempt to remove himself from society and to become one with the beauty and innocence and pleasure of all natural life has made him depend on the skillful men who provide him the occasion for his ecstasy. For while he is unable to sustain his ecstasy for very long, the vision of the world it has afforded is embodied in the skillfully created garden. This garden's existence depends both on the values of conscious life, that is, the skilled man's deliberating, analytic power over nature, and on the values of unconscious life, the undeliberate life of nature.

The only way to provoke the unself-conscious ecstasy is, para­ doxically, to remove ourselves from the ecstasy and skillfully create an image of it to which we can return. 175

In "The Garden," we have seen Marvell hold that the ecstasy which love poems had been celebrating for years has nothing speci­ fically to do with woman's beauty, which so often had been said to epitomize nature; rather, nature itself is the source of transcendence. When he chased Daphne, Apollo really wanted a tree after all. Marvell thus reverses the traditional metaphor comparing woman to nature, which celebrated woman as the source of all the good that passionate sexuality promises but never seems to deliver. Nature satisfies human sexuality with a polymorphous, pre-sexual love. By defining nature in this way,

Marvell rejects passionate sexual love which poems in the happy man tradition had been so careful to exclude from their rural retreats. But he does not, as they seemed required to do, reject ecstasy, or passion, itself. Instead, he allows it in his garden by transforming it, by redefining it. The garden provides that transcendence of the subject-object dualism for which passionate love of woman had always been celebrated.

First, the garden ecstasy redefines and purifies the sexual ecstasy. And then the poem makes clear that the garden is not

"the" happy life; the ordinary world always surrounding the garden is implicitly acknowledged, and that ordinary world includes the passion Adam felt for Eve. That garden is never considered a life of its own; instead it is an experience which exists within the complicated life in community. The garden only momentarily separates us from the community, purging and transforming the ordinary restlessness and desire which moves with us in daily life. Ciii)

In "The Garden," Marvell "unmetaphored" the traditional object of desire in the lyric. Whereas before, woman as the flower among flowers begot passion, now the flowers and trees and woods themselves beget passion, not a sexual passion that excludes the world, but a passionate rapport with the world itself. Woman's mystic, transform­ ing powers have been replaced by the powers of nature. In this section we shall see that several religious lyrics similarly consciously replace the object of the lyricist's passion and redefine its nature. But unlike the Horatian poems, the religious lyrics retain woman's place as the epitome of nature, as the sum and store of the world's pleasures.

This comparison, however, far from being meant to give her honor, is meant to show her unworthiness. For both she and nature are seen as false, as deceitful bearers of empty promises. In these poems woman's and nature's transforming powers are rejected; they are replaced by the redemptive powers of God.

In Poetry and the Fountain of Light, H. R. Swardson discusses several seventeenth-century poets who reject the classical lyric tradi­ tion and try to discover or invent the Christian lyric.In doing so, either these poets create lyrics in which the narrator disparages the use to which metaphor has traditionally been put— describing the world's pleasures--and claim metaphor's powers exclusively for describing God's

177 178 powers; or they try to turn away from metaphor entirely. Swardson's discussion of this rejection is full and rich, and here I wish only to remark that in very many of the lyrics he uses to demonstrate the rejection of the classical tradition, that tradition is symbolized by the mistresses and garden retreats of the love lyrics. These religious poets explicitly deny any reality to the mystic powers or sensuous delights that love lyrics have traditionally claimed for woman and nature. In the first of Herbert’s Sonnets to his mother, for example, mistresses become worthless objects for metaphors of praise when they are compared with God:

My God, where is that ancient heat toward thee, Wherewith whole showls of Martyrs once did burn, Besides their other flames? Doth Poetry Wear Venus Livery? only serve her turn? Why are not Sonnets made of thee? and layes Upon thine Altar Burnt? Cannot thy love Heighten a spirit to sound out thy praise As well as any she? Cannot thy Dove Out-strip their Cupid easily in flight? Or, since thy wayes are deep, and still the same, Will not a verse run smooth that bears thy name? Why doth that fire, which by thy power and might Each breast does feel, no braver fuel choose Than that, which one day Worms may chance refuse?**

Barnabe Barnes' stanza, cited by Swardson, calls his former poetic efforts lustful cries to mere mortal beauties. He replaces Venus's sparrow of inspiration with a supernatural muse:

No more lewde laies of lighter loves I sing, Nor teach my lustfull Muse abus’d to flie With sparrowes plumes, and for compassion crie To mortall beauties, which no succour bring. But my Muse, fethered with an angel’s wing, Divinely mounts aloft unto the skie, Where her Love's subjects with my hopes doe lie.

Often, as Swardson notes, the whole love lyric tradition can be 179 condensed into one image and replaced. That image may be, for example, the bower of love. In Henry Vaughan’s Mount of Olives, the shady grove that was the birthplace of love and poetry becomes an idol, distracting the poet from his true source of inspiration:

Sweete, sacred hill! on whose fair brow My Savior sate, shall I allow Language to love And idolize some shade or grove, Neglecting thee? . . .

But thou sleep’st in a deepe neglect, Untouch’t by any; and what need The sheep bleat thee a silly lay, That heard1st both reed And sheepward play? Yet if poets mind thee well, They shall find thou art their hill, And fountaine too . . .

What Swardson calls "one of the most powerfully evocative" of the images for the conflict between the classical and religious lyric tradi­ tions is that which contrasts the laureate crown, or crown of bays, with the crown of thorns:

In Donne's La Corona the speaker makes a ’crown of prayer and praise' for God, then asks

But doe not, with a vile crowne of fraile bayes, Reward my muses white sincerity, But what thy thorny crowne gain'd, that give mee, A crowne of Glory, which doth flower alwayes.

. . . Carew, in one of the periodic repentant moments of the love poets, uses the same contrast in the poem noted earlier, To . . . George Sandys . . . On His Translation of the Psalms:

Then I no more shall court the verdant bay, But the dry leafless trunk on Golgotha, And rather strive to gain from thence one thorn, Than all the flourishing wreaths by laureates worn.

This declaration, even in the contrast it insists upon, reveals a kind of submerged recognition of qualities on the side of the 180

'bay' that appeal to the poet. It is 'verdant', suggesting that for the poet its world is fertile, productive, natural, while the alternative, though the true object of man's striv­ ing, is dry and leafless. We can, surprisingly enough, observe this subtle recognition of mixed values in Henry Vaughan. His poem quoted above, Idle Verse, concludes as follows:

Twist not my Cypresse with your Bays, Or Roses with my Yewgh.

Go, go, seek out some greener thing; It snows and freezeth here; Let Nightingales attend the spring; Winter is all my year.

This recognizes the association of nature and classicism in secular poetry and realizes the quality of its attraction in 'nightingales' and 'greater things', rejecting it, of course, for a sterner world of moral decision.

As Swardson notes, then, the verses of Herbert, Barnes, and Donne reveal a speaker who has already discovered a world of richer rewards than the traditional lyric's sensuous rewards, its "sugred sin."

Their effect depends on the contrast with which they describe the two worlds— the lyric poet's conventional world of beautiful Laura's and green laurels offers no transformation, only a "vile crowne of fraile bayes"; in contrast, the spiritual world's "thorny crown" paradoxically satisfies the senses in some more ultimate way; it "doth flower always." These speakers, having discovered the source of true value, reject the old world as vile and replace it with a spiritual world where woman and nature have no powers whatever.

But as Swardson has noted, Vaughan's and Carew's verses do not so oppose this world with the divine world. These speakers choose the "dry, leafless trunk on Golgotha" and the "Cypresse" and "Yewgh," but they feel full well how attractive "verdant bays" and "nightingales" can be. They 181 choose the spiritual world without denying that the world they reject is sweet. Swardson finds Marvell's "On a Drop of Dew" especially sensitive to the sensuous world which the soul ultimately rejects.

The poem, according to Swardson,

does full justice to the world of natural beauty. In the single fundamental metaphor on which the poem is built, the drop of dew figuring the soul, the vehicle, the dew-drop, is exploited lovingly for all its natural beauty, 'Shed from the Bosom of the Morn/Into the blow­ ing Roses,' at the same time that it yearns for its home in the sky. The soul that slights the world slights a sweet world:

So the Soul, that Drop, that Ray Of the clear Fountain of Eternal Day Could it within the humane flow'r be seen, Remembring still its former height, Shuns the sweet leaves and blossoms green; And, recollecting its own Light, Does, in its pure and circling thoughts, express The greater Heaven in an Heaven less.13

Nevertheless, regardless how tenderly they do it, these poets still reject the sensuous world,particularly of women and nature, and see it as a distraction from their real goal. There are two poems, however, that accord to woman and nature a slightly more positive role in their lovers'movement toward enlightenment. The speakers in both Marvell's

"Eyes and Tears" and "The Coronet," while they ultimately reject it, nevertheless depend upon the sensuous experience of this world to bring them toward God. In both cases they seem to spiral toward God, alter­ nately pulled by the world on one side, and then by God on the other.

The world seems as necessary to this dynamic as God does.

In "Eyes and Tears" the speaker celebrates his movement toward

God that is paradoxically encouraged by his attraction to what seems to opoose Him. The poem consists of a series of non-dramatic emblems 182

of the paradox it describes, each emblem revealing a different facet

of the conceit that eyes truly "see" only when they are blinded by

tears. The effort of the speaker's unfolding meditation is to bring

us to that same recognition. The first six stanzas describe the

recognition that the world only falsely promises us all that is fair;

tears are welcomed as the sign that we see the truth of the world's

vanity:

How wisely Nature did decree, With the same eyes to weep and see! That, having viewed the object vain, They might be ready to complain.

Thus, since the self-deluding sight, In a false angle takes each height, These tears, which better measure all, Like watry lines and plummets fall.

Two tears, which Sorrow long did weigh Within the scales of either eye, And then paid out in equal poise, Are the true price of all my joys.

What in the world most fair appears, Yea, even laughter, turns to tears: And all the jewels which we prize, Melt in these pendants of the eyes.

I have through every garden been, Amongst the red, the white, the green, And yet, from all the flowers I saw, No honey, but these tears could draw.

So the all-seeing sun each day Distills the world with chemic ray, But finds the essence only show'rs, . Which straight in pity back he pours. (1-24)

"The red, the white, the green" of stanza five are, of course, the symbols for coy mistresses and pastoral retreats. They promise harmony with nature, sexual fulfillment, and ecstasy in the abolition 183 of subject-object dualism. But their promise is vain. And yet the speaker considers us blessed to be so deceived:

Yet happy they whom grief doth bless, That weep the more, and see the less: And, to preserve their sight more true, Bathe still their eyes in their own dew. (25-28)

By making us desire and then disappointing us, the world gives us the opportunity to see a sight more true. Only when blinded by tears do we have the capacity to see truly. It is the sight that Magdalen saw:

So Magdalen, in tears more wise Dissolved those captivating eyes, Whose liquid chains could flowing meet To fetter her Redeemer's feet. (29-32)

The tears of our disappointment are the very means of our satisfaction.

What we lose in our disappointment is only the capacity to deceive our­ selves by thinking the red and white and green can satisfy us. Tears that may initially be self-pitying become tears of penitence, as we regret ever having seen nature distortedly, thinking it made to con­ form to our desires. So Magdalen's captivating eyes, which once led so many into believing she was their heart's desire, become the emblem 14 for her penitence. In turn, her tears become her means of "captivating” her heart's desire: her "liquid chains /do7 flowing meet/To fetter her

Redeemer's feet."

In the final stanza, the speaker celebrates this paradox by enjoining his own eyes continually to weep so that they might continually see:

Thus let your streams o'erflow your springs, Till eyes and tears be the same things: And each the other's difference bears; These weeping eyes, those seeing tears. (53-56) 184

With eyes that cannot see for their tears, and tears that can see more clearly than eyes, we have the final paradox: what the world promises to be most fair does indeed bring us joy, because its false fairness brings us to see what is truly fair, and that brings us all the joy we had wished for. Thus "the red, the white, the green," are the occasions for the happy fall.

In "Eyes and Tears," the red, the white, the green play a "positive" role in the Christian's salvation simply because they do not contain the

"honey" that their looks promise. Disappointment leads the Christian to salvation. Now the responsibility for this disappointment is laid not only at the feet of the world's red, white and green, but also at the feet of the Christian. Nature and the mistress are the "objects vain," but the Christian sees from "false angles," with a "self-deluding sight."

We shall see that in Marvell's "The Coronet," the Christian's relation with the mistress and nature again leads him to turn to salvation, but here the source of corruption is more subtly circumscribed within the

Christian himself.

In "Eyes and Tears," the speaker sees both the frustration of his desire and his redemption in one paradoxical instant: weeping eyes are seeing tears. In "The Coronet," on the other hand, the movement is cyclical, and consequently, more dramatic. The speaker begins by recognizing he has wronged his savior. He has apparently already known the gifts of redemption and now tries to repent his wrong:

When for the thorns with which I long, too long, With many a piercing wound, 185

My Savior’s head have crowned, I seek with garlands to redress that wrong: Through every garden, every mead, I gather flowers (my fruits are only flowers), Dismantling all the fragrant towers That once adorned my shepherdess’s head. ( 1- 8)

Once again, as in "Eyes and Tears," the sign of the Christian's penitence is the emblem of his former engagement with the world.

For Magdalen it was her captivating eyes; for this speaker it is the flowers of the garden he wove in garlands for his mistress.

When the speaker recognizes his sin, his first reaction is to reject the shepherdess entirely, and to perform his adorning talents for his savior. But rejecting the mistress is not the heart of the solution:

And now when I have summed up all my store, Thinking (so I myself deceive) So rich a chaplet thence to weave As never yet the King of Glory wore: Alas I find the serpent old That, twining in his speckled breast, About the flowers disguised does fold, With wreaths of fame and interest. Ah, foolish man, that wouldst debase with them, And mortal glory, Heaven’s diadem! (9-18)

It is not the object of passion, of metaphor and poetry, which wounds the savior. It is the nature of the passion itself, whose gifts are woven with fame and interest. Extracting the self-interest from the gift is necessary, yet it seems impossible, for it requires separating the artist from his art:

But Thou who only couldst the serpent tame, Either his slippery knots at once untie: And disentangle all his winding snare; Or shatter too with him my curious frame, And let these wither, so that he may die, Though set with skill and chosen out with care: That they, while Thou on both their spoils dost tread, May crown thy feet, that could not crown thy head. (19-26)

The destroyed art lies at the Redeemer's feet, but not like Magdalen's tears, artlessly given. The speaker cannot act without art, without self-interest, and so he can only offer works he knows are defiled-- garlands wreathed with fame and interest. Yet he must offer something

He asks the Savior to accept at least his recognition that they are defiled— he offers them to the Savior to be destroyed. His only hope is that the garland proffered will be the instrument of his redemption in its rejection. In its rejection he is forced to see his dependence on the Savior. This experience does not enable him to make the next garland entirely pure (he "seek/17 with garlands to redress that wrong in a continuous present); inevitably he repeats the same errors. And yet it is also true that the continual recognition and humbling which this experience brings, is purifying. The self-interest in the poet and the garland is momentarily destroyed, and this death crowns

Christ's feet.

Several of the religious lyrics which attack the secular use of metaphor exult in discovering how truly worthless the world is, and how foolish was the poet who wasted talent only to "dresse and trim our shame," only to receive a "vile crowne of fraile bayes." Other lyrics reject secular laurels and choose the crown of thorns, but they see that they reject not a vile bay but a verdant one. Finally,

Marvell's "Eyes and Tears" and "The Coronet" seem to recognize a 187 necessary dialectic between the world and the Christian soul. Unlike the virgin drop of dew which "shuns" the sweet world, the eyes that tear and, more especially, the poet who weaves his mistress’s coronet, seem to recognize that it is only through exchanges with the world, through desiring and expecting from it, that the soul discovers its true depth, its genuine thirst.

All of the poems we have looked at in this chapter want, for very different reasons, to dethrone feminine Beauty. They may replace her with the poet's ingenuity or the libertine's appetite; or with the idyllic world of nature; or with God. But in all cases these lyrics look back, from disillusioned or re-educated perspectives, at an old treasure now deemed at best tarnished, at worst deceitful and corrupting. 188

Notes to Chapter IV

For an excellent account of the development and variety of the Petrarchan tradition, see Guss, John Donne, Chapters 1-3. 2 Thomas Clayton, ed., The Works of Sir John Suckling: The Non-Dramatic Works (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971). Subsequent references are to this edition. 3 See Patrick Cullen, Spenser, Marvell, and Renaissance Pas­ toral (Cambridge: Harvard U. P., 1970), pp. 157-159, for his discussion of classical otium in the context of Marvell's "The Garden." 4 Robin Skelton, ed., The Cavalier Poets (New York: Oxford U. P., 1970), pp. 142-146.

^ Maren-Sofie R^stvig, The Happy Man: Studies in the Meta­ morphoses of a Classical Ideal 1600-1700, Oslo Studies in English, No. 2 (Oslo: Akademisk Forlag, and Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1954), p. 174.

^ H/ugh/ M. Richmond, Renaissance Landscapes, p. 113. 7 Miner, The Metaphysical Mode, pp. 89-90; R^stvig, The Happy Man, pp. 256-61, as noted by Miner, p. 90. g See p. 168 above. 9 "My Ecchoing Song," pp. 166-167.

Poetry , passim.

Herbert's poetry, and Barnes's and Vaughan's below, is quoted from Swardson, Poetry,-pp. 64-66. 12 Poetry, pp. 66-67. 13 Poetry, pp. 92-93.

^ Swardson points this out in his discussion of "The Coronet," which is a similarly emblematic poem (Poetry, pp. 87-88). CONCLUSION

If there is one thing above all else that categorizing poetry according to metaphor and situation reveals, it has to be the incredible restlessness in the poetic conventions of the Stuart period. No fixed or hierarchical relation among lover, woman, and nature emerges because every powerful expression which might suggest such an alignment is subsequently overtaken and reworked.

If convention has it that the mistress is a mystic jewel or mine of precious gold, one of Donne's or Lovelace's sex-hungry lovers will magically plow her up. If the unrequited or lamenting lover conventionally is mocked by a lovely spring, a self-righteous

Donnean lover will scoff and go back to the city; a more tolerant lover of Cowley's will merely dismiss the spring as witless; and a Marvellian naif will be so inconsolably overtaken by his own self-pity that we can no longer take him seriously. If conventional mistresses are persuaded to become the blooming, fertile (and perhaps fertilized) roses of an anthropomorphized garden, Waller's,

Herrick's, and Lovelace's lovers will have them blooming tearfully, and Marvell's will metamorphose them into sharp-beaked carnivores.

If convention says mistresses are pretty as roses and lilies,

Carew's and Marvell's lovers will make their mistresses roses' mystic essences and the roses surrogate lovers, though Marvell's lover always senses that even these prototypical roses can be cut. 189 But perhaps, a Marvellian lover wonders nostalgically, we have made too much of our mistresses. With Eve, Milton shows us that mistresses are not unfailing goddesses, but mortal as you and I , and Jonson's and Suckling's lovers go further, revealing these goddesses to be mere illusions created by poetry or appe­ tites. Yet another of Marvell's lovers goes furthest, denying the need for any mistress in such sensuous gardens as we can have without them. Other lovers, turned religious, will say that neither mistresses, nor gardens, nor any part of the sensuous world they represent, is worth any of our transforming energies.

These energies should be saved for sacred things.

Marvell's poetry is often said, and I think rightly, to have exhausted the great lyric conventions of his period.* If this is indeed so, it is in large part because before he had use of them, the conventions were well-exercised already. 191

Note to Conclusion

* See Colie, "M^ Ecchoing Song": Andrew Marvell's Poetry of Criticism, Whose title suggests her thesis that Marvell's lyrics critically expose lyric conventions; and Ferry, All in War, p. 257: "Marvell's own love poems are among the causes for the virtual disappearance of the eternizing conceit from English poetry. They mark the end of a period in literary history as well, perhaps, as in his own poetic development." BIBLIOGRAPHY

Editions used for Quotations

Carew The Poems of Thomas Carew. Ed. Rhodes Dunlap. 1949; rpt. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957.

Cleveland The Anchor Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Verse. Ed. Richard S. Sylvester. Garden City: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1969. II.

Cowley Abraham Cowley: Poems. Ed. A. R. Waller. Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1905. Abraham Cowley: Essays, Plays and Sundry Verses. Ed. A. R. Waller. Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1906.

Donne The Complete Poetry of John Donne. Ed. John T. Shawcross. Garden City: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1967.

Fane The Cavalier Poets. Ed. Robin Skelton. New York: Oxford U. P., 1970.

Herrick The Complete Poetry of Robert Herrick. Ed. J. Max Patrick. 1963; rpt. New York: Norton, 1968.

Jonson The Complete Poetry of Ben Jonson. Ed. William B. Hunter, Jr. 1963; rpt. New York: Norton, 1968.

King The Anchor Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Verse. Ed. Richard S. Sylvester. Garden City: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1969. II.

Lovelace The Poems of Richard Lovelace. Ed. C. H. Wilkinson. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930.

Marvell Andrew Marvell: The Complete English Poems. Ed. Elizabeth Story Donno. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1974. 192 193

Milton John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose. Ed. Merritt Y. Hughes. New York: Odyssey Press, 1957.

Spenser The Complete Poetical Works of Spenser. Ed. R. E. Neil Dodge. 1908; rpt. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1936.

Suckling The Works of Sir John Suckling: The Non-Dramatic Works. Ed. Thomas Clayton. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971.

Waller The Poems of Edmund Waller. Ed. G. Thorn Drury. London: Routledge § Sons, 1905.

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Berthoff, Ann E. The Resolved Soul: A Study of Marvell's Major Poems. Princeton: Princeton U. P., 1970.

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Bredvold, Louis I. "The Naturalism of Donne in Relation to Some Renaissance Traditions." JEGP, 22 (1923), 471-502.

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Bush, Douglas. English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century: 1600-1660. New York, 1945. 194 Chemaik, Warren L. The Poetry of Limitation: A Study of Edmund Waller. New Haven: Yale U. P., 1968.

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Colie, Rosalie L. "'All in Peeces1: Problems of Interpretation in Donne's Anniversary Poems." Just So Much Honor: Essays Commemorating the Four-Hundreth Anniversary of the Birth of John Donne. Ed. Peter Amadeus Fiore. University Park: Penn. State U. P., 1972, 189-218.

------"My Ecchoing Song": Andrew Marvell's Poetry of Criticism. Princeton: Princeton U. P., 1970.

Comito, Terry. "The Lady in a Landscape and the Poetics of Eliza­ bethan Pastoral." UTQ, 41 (1972), 200-218.

Cullen, Patrick. Spenser, Marvell, and Renaissance Pastoral. Cambridge: Harvard U. P., 1970.

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Evett, David. "'Paradice's Only Map': The Topos of the Locus Amoenus and the Structure of Marvell's Upon Appleton House." PMLA, 85 (1970), 504-513.

Ferry, Anne. All in War with Time: Love Poetry of Shakespeare, Donne, Jonson, Marvell. Cambridge: Harvard U. P., 1975.

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Martz, Louis L. Poetry of Meditation: A Study in English Religious Literature of the Seventeenth Century. New Haven: Yale U. P., 1954.

------The Wit of Love: Donne, Carew, Crashaw, Marvell. Notre Dame: U. of Notre Dame Press, 1969.

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------The Metaphysical Mode from Donne to Cowley. Princeton: Princeton U. P., 1969

------The Restoration Mode from Milton to Dryden. Princeton: Princeton U. P., 1974. 197

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