The Challenges of Orpheus

by Heather Dubrow

  But those ambivalences and many other implications of associating lyric and air also assume forms that are culturally specific, though not unique to early modern England. The destructive impact of wind on stone would have been more evident to inhabitants of that culture than to twentieth- and twenty-first-century Americans living in milieux where buildings are more likely to be torn down than worn down and where many cemeteries, like the towns that house them, are too recent to manifest those effects. Above all, in a culture repeatedly threatened by that terrorist the plague, widely believed to be disseminated through the atmosphere, air could suggest not insubstantiality and insignificance but rather a medium with active, threatening power. Thus lyric is again associated with both agency and its absence. Stressing the extraordinary potency of air, the seventeenth-century Scottish doctor John Makluire observes:

  it passeth so quickly through the body, that it printeth presently the qualities wherewith it is indued in the parts of the same, and therefore there is nothing able to change more shortly the body than it.… A good air …revives the spirits, purifieth the blood, procureth appetite.… A contaminate aire with filthy exhalations, arysing from standing waters, dead carcases, middings, gutters, closets, and the filth of the streets, (all which if any where are to bee found heere, which argueth a great oversight of the magistrats, bringeth a great hurt to the inhabitants, and a great good to the Physicians, Apothecaries, and bel-man) corrupteth the spirits, and humors, and engendereth often a deadly contagion or pest.49

  Similarly, in a letter to his friend Henry Goodyer, John Donne attributes his illness to the “raw vapors” from a vault beneath his study.50 Another aperçu of Wallace Stevens, “Thought is an infection,” implies some of the threats that he elsewhere more explicitly associates with poetry, but the links specifically among air, song, and illness were far more characteristic of the early modern than the modern period.51 In troping drama in terms of disease in general and plague in particular, anti-theatrical tracts remind us that the association of lyric with that dread malady should be seen in terms of the broader fear that art itself involves contamination. At the same time, the unstable meanings of “air” demonstrate that in the instance of lyric in particular, that fear was complicated by distinctive ambivalences.

  Many of these suggestions about air were intensified in the seventeenth century by the widespread interest in vitalism. Astutely traced by John Rogers, this movement attributed agency to objects in the physical world.52 Lyric, then, would be interpreted in relation to the agency of a pneumatic force, an energy that could variously suggest an attractive liveliness or a threatening potency. The association of lyric with persuasion poems substantiates this reading and the perils it potentially involves. At the same time that vitalism emphasizes the power of air, the link between breath and the gendered instability of both male and female voices—a mutability whose attendant anxieties have been powerfully analyzed by Gina Bloom—renders the medium in question threatening in another way as well.53 In short, as a version of air and its avatars of breath and wind, lyric is at once insignificant, volatile, and potent. Associated with the originary breath of God, it can both create and destroy, thus again inviting the writer or would-be writer to experience both pride and guilt; and in its admixture of creation and destruction, weakness and threatening strength, the term “air” arguably also recalls cultural stereotypes of the feminine.

  In addition to the linkages with turning and with air, in the early modern period lyric is repeatedly connected to childhood and childishness. Certain instances, to be sure, exemplify the clichéd troping of artistic works as progeny, or the commonplace condescension towards writers, or both, and thus are specific to neither lyric nor the English Renaissance. But in relation to lyric in particular the image acquires many additional resonances, some of which I scrutinized above. It embeds the paradoxical swerve between seeing writing as source of and threat to agency: the parent literally brings the child into being, and yet any parent knows that this hardly guarantees obedience. Similarly, whereas other eras also connect lyric and childhood (the eighteenth-century writer Joseph Trapp feels obliged to attack those “who look upon it as a trifling Amusement, an Exercise for Boys,” and Margaret Atwood reports that her brother denigrated the publication of her first significant collection of poetry by saying it was the sort of thing he used to do when he was younger), certain implications are more common in the Renaissance than in later eras.54 In particular, given the rates of infant and childhood mortality (a plague bill may simply substitute “infant” for the more precise causes of death listed for other decedents, thus demonstrating how unremarkable such losses were seen to be), seeing lyric as a child would thus at once associate it with promise and with a sense of fragility—that is, with the risk of promise truncated, denied. One should recall that Orpheus loses his wife twice, once on their wedding day.

  The term “numbers” is frequently, though not exclusively, applied to lyrics; Donne, for example, declares, “Griefe brought to numbers cannot be so fierce” (“The Triple Foole,” 10), while Herrick opens his “Ode of the Birth of our Saviour,” “In Numbers, and but these few, / I sing Thy Birth, Oh JESU!,” and his religious verse is entitled, His Noble Numbers.55 This usage also is not, of course, unique to early modern lyric—“Yet I number him in the song” (35) William Butler Yeats writes in “Easter, 1916”—but the astronomical and spiritual associations of the term are more common to the period on which this book focuses than to many others.56 Compressed within this commonplace usage are a celebration of verse, a more pragmatic vision of it, and yet again implications of distrust. As Plato’s Timaeus famously reminds us, heavenly harmony was often seen in musical terms. That harmony was more directly related to lyric by the Pythagorean belief, recorded in Quintilian I.x.12, that the principles on which the universe is based were also used in the construction of the lyre.57 Although John Hollander has demonstrated a movement in the course of the early modern period away from this celestial model, like the movement away from hagiography it was neither consistent nor steady in its trajectory.58 At the same time, “numbers” suggests the treatises on arithmetic and mathematics that were so popular in the period, again substantiating Turner’s emphasis on the debt of early modern aesthetics to artisanal treatises. Although he focuses on drama, what Turner terms “practical knowledge” shapes early modern lyric as well, as subsequent chapters will demonstrate.59 But if the association with numbers encompasses the heavenly and the artisanal, it also carries with it more disturbing associations, thus again demonstrating the paradoxical valuations of lyric expressed through its tropes. Throughout her recent study Shakespeare and the Mismeasure of Man, Paula Blank documents how frequently measurement was seen as unreliable in early modern England; that era, she demonstrates, often represents numerical systems as deceptive, an argument that may once more remind us that, in making chairs and making interpretations, to turn is often to twist.60

  “Happy ye leaves,” the first poem of Amoretti opens, thus exemplifying yet another figure for lyric. Spenser has much company in his deployment of this botanical trope, which offers further evidence of the association of lyric with evanescence and fragility, meanings famously invoked when Milton describes the fallen angels as the autumnal detritus of trees. The association of lyric and leaves suggests that the poet creates not a monument more lasting than brass but a fragile and potentially brittle object liable to blowing away or crumbling, and the figure again calls into question the agency and potency of the writer. But if the leaves in question may be transparent, the language used to evoke them is not, for the association between pages and leaves also involves the restoration of power: whoever turns the leaves exercises some control over them; the poem becomes a manageable object, one that can be held within hands. Of course, its writer may turn the leaves, but generally the person who does so is a reader, and so the trope primarily plays down the power of the author even while vesting it in the reader, precisely the maneuver Spenser performs, or at
least pretends to perform, in that opening sonnet of Amoretti, a poem examined in more detail in my analysis of lyric audiences. This figure anticipates, then, the tensions I will explore in the chapter on the dynamic relationships between writer and audience, especially the contestations for agency created by early modern conditions of production, both scribal and print.

  Two related tropes, among the most revealing of all the figures associated with lyric, are also, as it were, rooted in gardening. First, poems are often compared to flowers. Playing on John Bodenham’s own title, Bel-vedere, or The Garden of the Muses, a poem addressed to him in England’s Helicon, declares, “in the Muses Garden, gathering flowres, / Thou mad’st a Nosegay, as was never sweeter.”61 That master punster Sidney thus accuses his rivals and alter egos: “And everie floure, not sweet perhaps, which growes / Neare therabout, into your Poesie wring” (Astrophil and Stella 15.3–4). Although flowers may of course be perennials (as Herrick reminds us in “To the Lady Crew”), the primary thrust of this trope is again towards the evanescence of beauty, while the carpe florem tradition also hints at connections between poetry and the rhetorics of seduction.

  Especially revealing, however, are the recurrent images of bouquets, suggested by the poem to Bodenham and so many other instances, and especially the application of the multivalent term “posy” for them. Demonstrating contemporary awareness of this wordplay, George Gascoigne entitled his collection, published in 1573, A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, while the revised version that appeared two years later is called The Posies of G. Gascoigne. The first volume establishes Gascoigne as a shape-shifting trickster who delights in assigning the authorship of his texts to others; despite—and more to the point because of—the way the second volume attempts to establish itself as a palinode for the amorality of its predecessor, a substitution of coming clean for posturing, its author’s delight in game-playing encourages the speculation that its title puns on “poses.”

  But the usage in question has resonances relevant to other writers as well: in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, “posy” itself could refer to poetry in general, to a bouquet, or to an emblem or inscription.62 Imputedly a short, discrete poem, lyric is thus associated with a group of poems, a linkage that would have seemed particularly apt to a culture accustomed to the circulation of manuscripts, the juxtaposition of apparently disparate texts in a commonplace book, and, of course, the print publication of groups of poems, most notably sonnet cycles (which could themselves culminate in a complaint, another type of grouping) and pastorals. To the implications of such groupings for the unit of lyric I will return in Chapter 4. One type of grouping in particular intensifies the ambivalences packed into the association of lyric with “air” and exemplifies the paradoxes lyric so often involves: carried to ward off the plague, posies of flowers were hence both an index of and antidote to illness.63

  “Poesy” also recalls the carpe florem tradition, again connecting this usage with lyric in particular and in turn associating lyric with another type of illness—that is, the madness of love—and with the languages of seduction. And with the targets of seduction as well: such references link poesy to female beauty and the possibility of poetic and sexual appropriations of it, as Rachel Blau du Plessis reminds us.64 In a sense these associations transfer fragility from the poem about her to the lady herself. She is damned if she does and damned if she doesn’t, on the one hand liable to wither if she does not yield to her lover’s entreaty, but on the other liable to be plucked and thus destroyed if she agrees. (To return to those fallen leaves, Shakespeare’s “Lover’s Complaint” refers to the “lettice of sear’d age” [14] of its fallen speaker.65) Might not anxieties about the frailty of poetry and its creator be transferred here, re-gendered in a reassuring power play?

  But any student of Petrarch recalls the swerves between woman as laurel and woman as stone; similarly, in the early modern period the term “poesy” could also suggest an inscription in stone. In yet another paradox, then, the word in question can invoke both the evanescence of flowers and the hardiness of stone. Lady Mary Wroth plays on the connection with the latter in her unduly neglected “Song 1,” discussed in Chapter 3. Thus lyric becomes not merely an evanescent moment but also an “endlesse monument,” not merely a locus of transformation and change but a possibility for permanence, hence an apt medium for the immortalization promised in love poetry and more reliably inherent in another form lyric may assume, the celebratory ode. But other implications of inscription are more multivalent. What is happening to gendering? Hardness is gendered as male in the most common stereotypes, and yet the rime pietose establish its connections with the female as well. At the same time, inscription suggests cutting (an image also used for artistry in many medieval texts, notably the lyrics of the troubadour Bertram de Born). This linkage returns us to artisanal activities and also reintroduces the hints of violence and destruction that are never far off in discussions of lyric. The collection of flowers that is a poesy may have within it thorns sharp enough to pierce even stone.

  Closely related to its denotation of inscription is the now-obsolete use of “posey” for an emblem; Thomas Palmer’s sixteenth-century collection in that genre, for example, is entitled Two Hundred Poosees.66 The usage links lyric to moral adages, a kinship variously eagerly asserted and cynically denied in more explicit debates about the virtue—in the several senses of that term—of lyric poetry. At the same time, the allusion to emblems gestures towards the kernel of wisdom, whether represented as the couplet of a sonnet or the motto at the end of a pastoral, through which lyrics achieve, or attempt to achieve, closure. “Poesy,” in short, emphasizes both the morality and the materiality of lyric, as well as other kinds of verse. But the word, appropriately enough, itself involves yet another paradox, in this instance a turning between two very different images of the material world: the evanescence suggested by wordplay on “leaves” and the solidity suggested by rocks.

  Many issues apparent in the realms of trope and myth recur as well in the more explicit discussions of lyric in early modern treatises. The very term “lyric” is used variously. Poets and rhetoricians present that mode as evanescent and trifling yet powerful as a weapon and durable as stone. For these and other reasons, significant contradictions, often associated with gender, are apparent from one treatise to the next and from one passage of the same treatise to the next. The writings in question, like the myths and tropes on which they draw, however, often resolve, or attempt to resolve, those contradictions by the now familiar strategy of distinguishing two versions of lyric.

  Intensely aware of the precedent of classical lyric, writers of such treatises frequently turn to it as another avenue towards resolving the problems associated with defining and describing their mode. In lieu of clear-cut definitions, they are prone to proffer classical examples: lyric is what Pindar and Horace write, and so on. One effect of this habit is to establish prototypes for English poets and their readers—in the instance of Pindar, one of the most frequently cited lyric poets, a prototype emphasizing the public, communal workings of the mode. Yet, the use of Greek and Roman approaches to lyric more often introduces further complexities and contradictions into attempts to define and describe lyric.

  Authors and other commentators in the English Renaissance inherited and often showed themselves cognizant of the range of terminology in Latin and Greek culture, more cognizant of it than the many critics of our own day who attempt to establish the type of lyric in which they specialize as normative. Classical usages were rendered further complex and even contradictory by changes from one period to another within those cultures; for instance, while archaic Greek lyric was composed orally and performed aloud at events such as weddings, in the Alexandrian period, the mode was often read in anthologies. Nonetheless, in their many forms, classical lyrics warn us against the parochialism of making of one’s own little world an everywhere.67 The Greek use of “melic” for poetry to be sung, mirroring the connection of “lyric” and “
lyre,” applied to both monodic and choral verse. We are thus reminded how problematical is an unqualified association of lyric with individuated subjectivity, as is the relationship between lyric and internalized meditation: indeed, as far as scholars can tell, all melic poetry in archaic Greece was communal.

  Greek practices of naming and defining forms distinguished melic texts, which were associated with stringed instruments, from iambic and elegiac poems, which were accompanied by the flute and allied with distinctive meters (whether the elegy was originally defined in terms of funerary themes as well is, however, disputed).68 Thus meter and what Frye was to term “radical of presentation” were linked early in the history of poetry, and, more to my purposes here, the distinctions that were to generate models of Good and Evil Lyric were anticipated linguistically. The Greek term describing the poet as a singer antedates the usage establishing him as a maker. In writing about poetry, the Greeks frequently deployed the words referring to song: in Homer, aoide, and subsequently melos, the poet being called aoidós (singer) or, later, melopoiós (maker of songs) and poietés.69 But these usages are not clear-cut or consistent. Moreover, lacking a general word for poetry, the Greeks often used “melic” for any text other than drama or epic, including political poetry. In the Alexandrian period, “lyric” was often applied more broadly to any poem intended to be sung, though the period also witnessed an increasing movement towards texts transmitted through writing, not performance.