The Challenges of Orpheus

by Heather Dubrow

  My recurrent emphasis on the guilt suggested by these tropes is not intended to deny the association of other literary forms with guilt—prose romances were often seen as frivolous, drama was demonized as ungodly in Puritan and other insistently godly tracts, and so on—but in the instance of lyric, such concerns are distinctive in their sources and workings. The connection between lyric and erotic poetry is one source of that distinctiveness, but by no means the only one; for, although versions of lyric celebrating heroes and the divine were generally exempt from the criticisms leveled at verses about love, important exceptions do arise. Moreover, guilt about lyric is more than a commentary on illicit desire, partly because the denigrations of lyric poetry encompass so much besides its raw material (even in its rawest versions, like the erotica of the minor poet Barnabe Barnes).

  To begin with, lyric, like other forms of poetry, is frequently figured and configured in the early modern period through the etymological root of verse, versus, whose principal meanings include “turning.” The term is applied in that era to many types of poetry, but readers were surely especially aware of its relevance to lyric: whether or not stanzas structure a particular text, in the instance of lyric the resonances of versus are intensified because the strophe, a word based on the Greek for “turning,” is often seen as a fundamental unit of lyric. The etymological link between lyric and that turning thus carries with it a range of important consequences, not least its implications for guilt, for gendering, and for materiality.

  Modern critics have repeatedly and richly commented on the implications of versus, though they have neglected some of its consequences for materiality in particular. Northrop Frye, for example, relates the turning back he associates with verse to its discontinuity; he establishes a provocatively revisionist rebuttal to notions of the lyric as an organic, perfectly polished unit, although he neglects the early modern connections between stanzas and stability that I will explore in Chapter 4.20 In effect positing lyric as a version of fort-da, his emphasis on turning back helps to explain the paradigmatic status of Petrarch’s anniversary poems. Arguably, too, his tantalizingly brief comments on links between the lyric and irony can be explicated through their shared commitment to turning.21 Implicitly exploring the etymology that impels Frye, Barbara Johnson mimetically observes that “verse …is an enactment of the alternative as law and of law as alternative.”22 In comparing lyric to a walk, the poet A. R. Ammons observes that “the turns and returns or implied returns give shape to the walk and to the poem.”23 And another poet, Heather McHugh, whose own lyrics involve splendid turns and twists in tone, demonstrates how in Thomas Wyatt’s “They fle from me”—that accusing confession and confessional accusation of all sorts of turning—“a verse is turned.”24 Different though they are in other respects, these comments by twentieth- and twenty-first-century critics crystallize the paradoxical valences of turning for early modern poets.

  The connections among lyric, turning, and versus, and especially that paradox, were crucial to the development of early modern poetry, as the frequency with which poetry is called “verse” would suggest. Shakespeare uses “poesy” only five times and “poem” once, while “verse” and its cognates appear no fewer than fifty-three times in his canon.25 Even Herrick, who refers to “lyric” more than some poets do, seems to use the term interchangeably with “verse” in the poem entitled “To the King” that begins, “If when these Lyricks.”26

  Some early modern poems make their identification with certain meanings of versus explicit. From the translation of the Latin into anglicized headings of “turn” and “counter-turn” to the shifts between addressees to the many types of turning enacted verbally (“Alas, but Morison fell young: / Hee never fell, thou fall’st, my tongue” [43–44]), Ben Jonson’s “To the Immortall Memorie, and Friendship of that Noble Paire, Sir Lucius Cary, and Sir H. Morison” in effect rings the changes on the word in question.27 In so doing, Jonson establishes several types of dialogue—between stanzas, between divergent opinions, between sides of the observer—that call into question the association of lyric with the monological, an issue explored in Chapter 2 below. More to the point here, reading Jonson suggests that the linkage between lyric and turning is among the many reasons the Pindaric ode achieves exemplary status in the early modern period.

  But in Latin versus can also suggest the turning of a plow, an association that may be reinforced by the visual effect of lines, notably in Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie, where semicircles link rhyming lines. Might not Ovid’s reference to the abandonment of agriculture that accompanied Orpheus’s death (“vacuousque iacent dispersa per agros / sarculaque rastrique graves longique ligones” [“Scattered through the deserted fields lay hoes, long mattocks and heavy grubbing-tools”], Metamorphoses XI.35–36) hint at these connections between poetry and agriculture?28 To be sure, this georgic analogue is relevant to epic as well as lyric, as Spenser demonstrates through his punning agricultural metaphors—reminding us again that some usages examined in this chapter do not belong to lyric to the exclusion of other poetry. The canto that traces Calidore’s flirtation with pastoral opens on a love affair with georgic expressed through a series of rhetorical turns that are again mimetic:

  Now turne againe my teme thou iolly swayne,

  Backe to the furrow which I lately left;

  I lately left a furrow, one or twayne

  Vnplough’d.

  (VI.ix.1)29

  But given how lyric poetry relies on repetitive patternings such as the rhyme schemes of, say, sestinas or rondeaux, the association of turning with that mode in particular would also have been powerful.

  In addition to these overt engagements with the meanings of versus, early modern poets were, I maintain, preoccupied with an etymological tension that intensifies and is itself activated and intensified by the guilt one encounters in a range of guises when examining the figurative language describing lyric.30 On the one hand, the Oxford English Dictionary records several contemporary meanings of “turn” that involve trickery and malformation: “to give a curved or crooked form to; to bend or twist” and, more specifically, “to bend back (the edge of a sharp instrument) so as to make it useless for cutting.”31 Again, these troubling associations could adhere to other forms of poetry; but they were particularly resonant to readers and writers of lyric poetry, given their intense anxieties about the powerful dangers of that siren song—a melody whose suasive force could turn a ship from its course and twist the values of both listener and speaker, proving its power by destroying theirs. Moreover, in sonnets whose volta introduces a movement towards or intensification of a morally or intellectually dubious position, such as Astrophil and Stella 76, among a host of other examples, the dangers of turning are enacted semantically and signaled structurally. Thus this trope, like so many others, signals the potential guilt of the poet—and hints at connections between turning and queering.

  Yet the terminology in question itself involves a turning that mimes literary critics’ turn towards the material: early modern poets, unlike most of their twentieth- and twenty-first-century critics, were no less aware of a second series of resonances, which variously intensified and counterbalanced the negative associations of versus. Lathe work was often described as turning, and Jacobean furniture in particular is proudly festooned with its results—low relief turned columns on chests, chairs with turned backs and struts, and so on. Such work obviously testifies to the agency of the maker, but that agency could be used towards beneficent or evil ends. On the one hand, this type of turning suggests not crookedness but graceful roundness, not deformation but skilled formation, not suspect craftiness but appealing craft. Hence it might recall the well-wrought plot of a sustained narrative; and, given the preoccupation with the craft of rhyme and meter in lyric, these connotations were surely also resonant to those crafting or reading the well-wrought rhyme scheme of, say, a crown of sonnets or a sestina. Yet on the other hand, influenced in particular by Flemish craftsmen, E
nglish furniture makers often used the lathe to fashion grotesque figures, distorted bodies that might recall the fear that, if lyric could calm beasts as myths of Orpheus suggest, it could also, Circe-like, turn readers and writers into them.

  Moreover, as Henry Turner has cogently pointed out, certain meanings of “turn” link the creation of verse, that pursuit of the gentleman-amateur, with artisanal activities.32 This introduces another paradox into that kaleidoscope of paradox gender. On the one hand, the allusion to artisans implicitly connects poetry with a largely masculine sphere. But on the other, transgressions of gender and of status may be closely related, as students of Shakespeare’s sonnets know well, and arguably the possibility that writing poetry renders one déclassé activates the fear, to which I will return shortly, that it also renders one effeminate or even female. These putative links between turning out lyric poetry and turning the struts of chairs are subterranean, with no overt allusions supporting them. They are, however, buttressed by the other connections between art and artisanal practices that Turner has demonstrated and by those encountered in my discussion of stanzas in Chapter 4. Might these traces of a connection between verse and the pursuits of artisans have been activated by the social connotations of publication, hence further intensifying the distrust of print?

  Another implication of the connection between poetic and artisanal turning is that the text is a product created through the execution of an activity. The poet becomes a Maker in a very literal and mundane sense. This emphasis on the materialist status of lyric supports an argument I will examine in more detail in Chapter 3, Mary Thomas Crane’s revisionist interpretation of theatrical performance as a kind of execution or making that did not necessarily imply deceit.33 Associating lyric with artisanal practices like crafting furniture thus signals yet another tension: the very activity that Platonism links to the uncontrolled seizures of furor is connected instead to conscious and deliberate activity, in a sense replicating and extending the conflict between certain Platonic and Aristotelian models of art. In short, the paradoxical resonances of turning gloss lyric as both an achievement that may generate respect and delight and as a trick that may generate fear and guilt, as a powerful aesthetic endeavor and as a material and artisanal activity cognate to such quotidian pursuits as plowing fields or making chairs, and as the site of process and movement.

  These associations of turning emerge from other tropes as well; many further resonances of versus, such as the linkage of lyric to both the insubstantial and the material, are also significant in those figures. In deploying them, early modern texts and their readers sometimes simply draw on preexisting connotations and denotations but sometimes more actively participate in definitions and descriptions of lyric through the terms they associate with it. Such processes are interactive and dynamic, the meanings of those terms shaping the conceptions of those who deploy them while that deployment also encourages the poets in question, other poets, and their readers to meditate on the associations of these resonant terms.

  On the most obvious level, calling a poem an “air” differs from the figurative practices discussed elsewhere in this section in that it literally establishes the text as a song, sometimes, though not invariably, a light one. Presumed and pursued by critics of lyric, the connections between the two arts of music and literature have informed numerous analyses of poetry, such as the suggestion that the eighteen lines of George Herbert’s “Easter” are a hieroglyph for the double strings of a nine-course lute and the hypothesis that Wyatt wrote his psalms to be sung.34

  Yet, as my Introduction suggested, the process of tracing the connections between poetry and music suggested by the usage of “air” involves many ambiguities and controversies, even tempests. Musicologists disagree on whether these links are typically analogies or more concrete connections.35 Some posit direct influences, citing Petrarchism as a source for a growing expressiveness and metaphysical complexity as an incentive to the development of recitative. Other scholars, however, issue caveats about these and similar links; in one of the most judicious discussions of the issue, David Lindley seconds John Hollander’s emphasis on the separation between the two in the early modern period and declares that “the two systems are independent and distinct.”36 Debates also surround arguments about the relationship within particular poems, such as whether the monody or madrigal is the principal musical influence on “Lycidas.” John Stevens cogently reminds us that for all our assertions of connections between music and poetry, it is hard to be sure which poems were actually written for music.37

  Despite these and many other uncertainties about how music and poetry were related in the early modern period, however, it is clear that poets and other members of their culture, including those who often assigned titles to poets’ writings, want to emphasize that relationship and that they do so in part through linguistic usages. “Song” and “hymn” often appear in the titles of poems that may or may not have been sung. In his magisterial study of music in the period, John Hollander points out that Herbert often uses “sing” for “pray”; and Patrick Cheney has cogently demonstrated how often Shakespeare associated song and lyric, citing particularly compelling evidence of their visual similarity in books.38 The myths of Orpheus, Arion, and the sirens, analyzed above, also recur with telling frequency. To the reasons for and effects of this putative linkage between these arts I will return at several points during this study, but at this juncture a few can be sketched. Emphasized by the movement of musical humanism, the expressive powers of music become tied to those of poetry, intensifying the sense of its potency. As Thomas Ravenscroft puts it in his 1614 treatise, music can provide “both a relish, and a beauty” to poetry.39 Similarly, the curative power of music, celebrated by Plato, among many others, adheres to poetry as well.

  At the same time, however, the status of music in the early modern period both intensified the guilt adhering to lyric and provided opportunities for negotiating it.40 To begin with, comparable dangers, especially seduction, were associated with both arts; prostitutes, Linda Phyllis Austern has demonstrated, were often being described in musical terms by the middle of the seventeenth century.41 Yet music offered analogues to and evidence for a recurrent drive to counter reservations about poesy by sharply distinguishing Good and Evil Lyric. Renaissance poets were aware that, much as Sidney so sedulously distinguishes moral lyric from its evil twin, so classical texts repeatedly contrast the music of stringed instruments with that of wind instruments, a pattern traced with particular acuity by John Hollander.42 Indeed, in classical Greece the flute in particular was often associated with slave girls; Othered through this and other means, it was seen as not-male and not-Greek. In vase paintings, the faces and mouths of those female slaves are often distorted.43 As we have seen, a similar contrast impels the narrative of Orpheus’s death at the hands—and through the musical instruments—of the maenads. Such contrasts were to recur in the many texts of the English and continental Renaissance that represented the lute, lyre, and harp as virtuous instruments. And the distinction in question was also intensified and updated by an analogous contemporary one: the putative divide between the chastity of homophonic settings and the sensuality and unintelligibility of polyphonic Bad Girls.

  Like so many other dichotomies related to lyric, however, this one would break down. On the one hand, even types of music subject to moral disapprobation were, under other circumstances, respected and celebrated; the father of John Milton, after all, composed polyphony. And, on the other hand, types and instruments generally classified as virtuous were sometimes represented as more dubious. The musicologist Matthew Spring comments tellingly on the broken string in Holbein’s “Ambassadors”; Carla Zecher catalogues the French texts that link the lute to prostitutes; while in England, Spring reminds us, lutes were associated both with erotic poetry and with the psalms.44 Conversely, although wind instruments were often disdained, even demonized, some were associated with the glories of royal music, thus again demonstrating the
instabilities that were both source and symptom of the divide between Good and Evil Lyric.

  Although I have been focusing mainly on how “air” may signal literal, direct connections with music, it is no accident that I am exploring that usage in a section on tropes: often, rather than suggesting that a lyric is an actual song, the term invites attention to the consequences of seeing lyric as related to song, as songlike. Discussing Catullus’s preoccupation with talk, William Fitzgerald demonstrates that the poet is not merely concerned to elevate that practice into something more serious but also to investigate speech, showing how it works in general.45 As a number of passages in subsequent chapters, such as my commentary on Donne’s “Triple Foole,” demonstrate, the usage of “air” raises similarly broad questions about song and its sibling lyric.

  In addition to introducing all these musical associations, however, the word “air” puns on one of the four elements, thus bringing to bear an additional series of suggestive connotations no less contradictory than those attached to “turn.” To begin with, “air” may suggest something insubstantial, without agency, tying in with the notion of lyric as the purview of women and children and recalling from another perspective its link to passively received inspiration. Herrick hints at this reading when, in “The Argument of his Book,” he promises, “I sing of Dewes … I sing / The court of Mab” (7, 11–12); other lines in that extraordinary poem, of course, represent the succeeding lyrics very differently. Mutable and moveable, “air” also draws attention to the transformative qualities of lyric.

  The linkage of poetry in general or lyric itself with air in its several forms is not, of course, unique to the early modern period. Troubadour poets refer to breath; their Romantic counterparts often connect inspiration to the wind. Generalizing about poetry rather than lyric in particular, Wallace Stevens’s lines “Poetry is a finikin thing of air / That lives uncertainly and not for long / Yet radiantly beyond much lustier blurs” (“Like Decorations in a Nigger Cemetery,” 68–70) show no less ambivalence than the Renaissance texts I have been exploring.46 In his suggestive though controversial study Toy Medium, Daniel Tiffany adduces this and many other passages to argue for transhistorical connections among toys, meteors, weather, and poetry.47 Those connections, like so much else about lyric, are best, indeed brilliantly, explicated by Susan Stewart, who observes, “wind and water are the great forces of wearing away and wearing down, but as they are eroding elements they are also inspiring elements,” thus adding further ambivalences and paradoxes to those catalogued above.48