The Challenges of Orpheus

by Heather Dubrow

  Multiple directions of address may serve the multiple agendas of love poems in other, less aggressive ways as well (in so doing reminding us that persuasion poems may be hidden in lyrics ostensibly serving other purposes, while overt persuasion poems may in fact pursue quite different aims too). The audiences of Herrick’s writings are often unspecified, allowing us to imagine a range of listeners, diegetic and otherwise. If his erotic lyrics on the lady’s body, such as “Fresh Cheese and Cream,” assume a particular, desirable lady as their primary audience, they are probably attempts at seduction; if, recalling the final poem in Jonson’s “Celebration of Charis in Ten Lyrick Peeces,” readers posit that woman as an overhearer, he is ostensibly filling the informative function that the discourse analysts associate with speech, but in the interests of seduction; if one imagines another woman, not a target of seduction, as overhearing, he is trying to shock; and if one thinks about a male coterie readership, the poems have the odor not of fresh dairy products but of locker-room socks.

  No less than love poetry, devotional poetry typically encompasses multiple addressees, especially when, as in the Reformed verse of the early modern period, interiorized meditation is prototypical.95 In these poems, as in the work of Graham, Nouvel, and Piano on which I opened, one sometimes perceives the audiences only through a glass darkly: in a phrase like, “May Christ’s sacrifice always be remembered,” how does the reader distinguish, for example, an injunction directed to the self, a prayer directed to God, and an injunction directed by a priestly figure to a congregation? Critics variously read Donne’s La Corona as the voice of a priestly celebrant participating in communal devotion or as that of an individuated private believer.96 Moreover, positions often switch in the course of a lyric, so that God may be represented as a bystander at some points and an addressee at others. Nonetheless, in many instances it is possible—and fruitful—to analyze seriatim how a given devotional poem addresses its many audiences.

  As we have seen, in many religious poems the speaker addresses another side of the self; and meditation based on a conversation with God, as so many poems of the era are, may be at once monologue and dialogue. Michael C. Schoenfeldt has incisively anatomized that pattern in George Herbert’s “The Collar,” and such a conflation appears in many other poems by that author as well.97 In another such lyric by Herbert, entitled “Dialogue,” the interaction between the two voices is emphasized when it culminates in an interruption by the grieving but grateful sinner: “Ah! no more: thou break’st my heart” (32). If the number of Herbert’s poems that open on a direct address (often to God though also to his own heart, a book, the church, and so on) is striking, no less telling is the habit, manifest in such poems as “Sinne (I)” and “Sion,” of apparently turning inward and addressing the self in addition to or instead of the external audience addressed later in the same text. In some such lyrics, God’s voice is represented directly and in others just implied in the speaker’s reactions, a situation comparable to the one Ilona Bell has posited for the interaction of lover and lady in many secular poems.98 Indeed, in a study that resists seeing the solitary speaker as normative, Gémino H. Abad describes the “lyric of interaction,” a category that includes both explicit and implicit responses from a listener, as a significant subdivision of the mode.99

  Many authors of religious poetry were, of course, ministers, and their verse is often implicitly and sometimes explicitly addressed to a congregation, a third audience that is typically present as some form of side participant. The interest in exemplarity that characterizes both medieval and early modern culture encourages the representation of the struggles of a single soul as a case study for other believers. The presence of side participants is, of course, often hard to demonstrate conclusively, but discussions of the ars praedicandi, as well as gestures towards such listeners in a number of poems, do encourage this type of reading. In the seventh chapter of his Priest to the Temple, Herbert encourages exemplarity: “Sometimes he tells them stories, and sayings of others …for them also men heed, and remember better then exhortations” (233). In Herbert’s own canon, a number of lyrics, such as his allegorical “Pilgrimage,” appear in narrative form; in other instances, the juxtaposition of an earlier and later version of the self, so characteristic of this poet, thus incorporates an implicit story of change. Practicing what he preached, as it were, Herbert opens one poem, “Mark you the floore?” (“The Church-floore” [1]), thus drawing attention to the speaker’s position as a minister addressing a congregation.

  Joyously celebrated as a glorious vocation, guiltily distanced because of the speaker’s unworthiness, and finally gratefully accepted with the help of Christ, a calling to the ministry is the subject of Herbert’s “Aaron.” The movement from internalized meditation on whether the sinful speaker is capable of assuming the role of priest to its assumption is signaled and staged by a change of address: the poem concludes “Come people; Aaron’s drest” (25). That conclusion is complicated, as critics have acknowledged, by reminders of remaining vestiges of sin and of Christ’s status as the only true preacher.100 But the fact remains that here, as in so many other texts analyzed in this chapter, a shift in direction of address enacts and emphasizes the central issues of the poem: in this instance the speaker’s achievement of his calling is staged when he calls out to his congregation.

  When poets represent the role of preacher, they sometimes do so to negotiate a source of dissension that was far from covert in early modern England: a number of doctrinal divisions were often expressed in the widespread and recurrent debates about whether private worship facilitated or compromised communal devotion and vice versa. The case that the culture, favoring “common prayer,” discouraged its more individualistic alternative has been powerfully made by Ramie Targoff; but in alluding to devotional manuals only briefly, she neglects the ways they not only permit but encourage devotional idiolects.101 Not the least agenda of many religious poems of the period, I maintain, is establishing a type of via media where the conflation of the voice of the individual sinner addressing himself and God with that of a priestly figure calling up a communal activity produces a both/and model that exemplifies and implicitly advocates an interaction between private devotion and communal worship and thus among various audiences.

  This and many of the other patterns I have been tracing throughout this discussion of religious poetry appear in textbook form in Herbert’s “Collar,” which can be adduced relatively briefly here, since it is discussed from cognate perspectives in Chapter 5. Because a penitent Christian is telling the story of an earlier rebellion, we need to distinguish the original conceptions about audience from those of the later version of the speaker.102 Providing a new perspective on comments by Frye and Mill about the overheard lyric, the rebellious would-be traveler may be turning his back on God as a potential listener, a formal action that is a dry run for the abandonment of faith he intends; or he may be initiating that rebellion by defying God through direct address in lines like “Shall I be still in suit?” (6). Or, in a subtle possibility that also recalls Frye, he may be pretending to turn his back while glancing over his shoulder at the omnipresent deity, a formal position whose imagistic analogue is the inclusion of references to wine and thorns in lines that ostensibly attempt to deny spirituality. In contrast, the reformed speaker may be seen either as addressing God directly in a global speech act of confession or at least assuming God’s presence as side participant. The Lord has, as it were, collared this particular miscreant—and that process provides an exemplum for wannabe runaways among Herbert’s readers.

  No less illuminating in its approach to lyric audiences but far more controversial in its doctrine and quality is Donne’s “Litanie.” Whereas John Carey, not unpredictably given his emphasis on apostasy, argues that its stanza on the Virgin would have troubled many Protestants, Helen Gardner firmly, even defiantly, labels it “in many ways …the most Anglican of the Divine Poems.”103 Analyzing direction of address in the poem, and hence
recognizing Donne’s agenda of reconciling private and public worship, offers a different perspective on the disagreement of these critics.

  Incorporating but not referring directly to the four standard parts of a litany, the poem moves from direct appeals to the members of the Trinity, to a discussion of beings such as apostles and martyrs, some of whom served intercessory functions in the Catholic tradition, to a series of prayers. In certain of these stanzas, Donne clearly refers to his personal experience, thus suggesting meditation—in particular, the eighth strophe expresses fears about “Poëtiquenesse” (72)—while others enunciate general problems and fears, such as “being anxious, or secure” (127). This movement between the personal and more general operates in linear form via the pronouns of the poem, with the first person singular predominating early on and the first person plural later.104 But the movement is not clear-cut; some stanzas, for example, use both pronouns, and the image of physician and patient in the final stanza at once evokes the universal application of such images for sinning Christians and refers very specifically and personally to Donne’s own illness.105

  In a letter about the poem to his friend Henry Goodyer, Donne observes,

  Since my imprisonment in my bed, I have made a meditation in verse, which I call a Litany; …[other verse litanies] give me a defence, if any man; to a Lay man, and a private, impute it as a fault, to take such divine and publique names, to his own little thoughts.… [Pope Nicholas V] canonized both their Poems, and commanded them for publicke service in their Churches: mine is for lesser Chappels, which are my friends.106

  The suppliant protesteth too much, but Helen Gardner takes him at his word, declaring that this is “an elaborate private prayer, rather incongruously cast into a liturgical form.”107 But that incongruity is part of Donne’s strategy: as a catalogue of its audiences suggests, he is creating a poem that is private meditation intending towards, verging on public worship. Even my brief description demonstrates that, despite all the orderly repetition intrinsic in the litany form, direction of address careens throughout the poem. It shifts in almost the same way it does when a congregation sings psalms. Clearly the members of the Trinity are the ratified listeners in the beginning stanzas and at the end, and the repeated versions of the pleas “deliver us” and “hear us” establish God as the predominant listener throughout. Although this poem is Reformed enough not to appeal directly for help to martyrs, prophets, and so on, arguably the stanzas referring to them in the third person hint that they are listeners, side participants, thus relying on the porous categories of address at once to incorporate and to distance the Catholic emphasis on intercession and its forfended status in Protestantism: these figures are located on the margins of the poem spatially, much as they dwell on the margins of Reformed belief and of Donne’s own spirituality.

  I do not suggest that Donne literally expected his readers to recite this litany, but both he and they were surely aware that he had adapted a form associated with communal worship, and that type of litany shapes responses to this one. The move to the first person plural in the recurrent phrase “deliver us” and elsewhere encourages us to see other Christians as listeners and quite possibly fellow participants singing its words. In other words, Donne takes a role something like that of the singing man or boy, recalling Herbert’s “Obedience.” A cognate imbrication of the personal and communal also occurs in Milton’s Nativity Ode, discussed in Chapter 3.

  Citing “A Litanie” and Herbert’s “Prayer” among many other instances, A. B. Chambers rightly demonstrates how religious poets of the seventeenth century often incorporate and adapt liturgical forms.108 Their motives in so doing, I am suggesting, are more polemical than Chambers acknowledges. In “A Litanie,” Donne implicitly but powerfully supports the attempt, common in many devotional texts and, as it were, among their political pit crew, to finesse debates about the relative worth of private devotion and public worship, arguments in which participants often not only diminish but discredit one or the other. Less polemically but no less powerfully, this poem itself bridges the two types of devotion in several respects: by adapting for partly private contemplation a genre of public worship, by turning the fruits of that contemplation into a text analogous to those used publicly, and, again, by implicitly suggesting that the individual speaker could provide an exemplum.

  Having multiple addresses is no less significant in pastoral than in love and devotional poetry, but since my opening discussion of the woodcut for Spenser’s April eclogue focused on that issue, a brief discussion can suffice here. Address is central to the workings of pastoral, as Paul Alpers has demonstrated in his magisterial book on that mode.109 In particular, like the soliloquies of drama and the poetry embedded in romances, pastoral poems are often overheard by eavesdroppers or bystanders. The world of nature, it transpires, is no more given to privacy than the world of the Elizabethan or Jacobean house. Songs delivered in the absence of the beloved may still envision her as a side participant; as in the instance of the April eclogue, a shepherd who was originally an auditor may become an animator by repeating the poem to a different audience. Overt in the structure of many pastorals, the dialogic propensities of the genre are manifest as well in the way a poem recited by a single shepherd may be the product or subject of a conversation among shepherds, as is again the case in the April eclogue. The multiplicity of diegetic audiences in many pastorals is mimed by a similar nondiegetic pattern: Alpers’s important article “Pastoral and the Domain of Lyric in Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender” argues persuasively that whereas on the one hand pastoral allowed a degree of autonomy because Spenser’s primary audience was not the monarch or the court, on the other he was not unaware of the traditional poetic role of counselor to a prince.110

  As Alpers’s essay reminds us, if writing of love and religion complicate the evocation of audiences in intriguing ways, so too does another distinctive practice of early modern England, seeking patronage. In particular, the poetry of patronage, like love poetry, often hides its sycophancy by turning its principal audience into side participants. “To Penshurst” (a poem whose classification as lyric is not un-problematical) praises the house, not its owners, thus complimenting the Sidneys lavishly while pretending, in that and other ways, to exemplify the moderation it advocates. Similarly, whether or not, as some critics have claimed, Aemelia Lanyer’s “Description of Cooke-ham” deflects to a tree a kiss ideally meant for the “Mistris of that Place” (11), the poem indubitably deflects address; whereas some passages speak directly to the Countess of Cumberland and her daughter, in many others the second person pronoun refers to the house, but with the clear implication that its noble inhabitants are bystanders. If Lanyer turns away from them and towards the edifice, she too, like other poets I have examined, clearly is looking over her shoulder. This is a soliloquy meant to be overheard. Indeed, the fact that the referents of the second and third person pronoun in the concluding section are, at least initially, confusing enacts the way the text earlier conflated and confounded its audiences:

  This last farewell to Cooke-ham here I give,

  When I am dead thy name in this may live,

  Wherein I have perform’d her noble hest,

  Whose virtues lodge in my unworthy breast

  (205–208; emphasis added to pronouns)111

  Similarly, as its title suggests, in “To his Verses” Herrick addresses his poetry itself directly. Yet, as any sociologist of dinner table dynamics will attest, parents all too often speak to side participants, especially their spouses, in the guise of talking to children; and in this case Herrick clearly envisions his desired patrons, the potential “fost’ring fathers” (13) to his verse, as bystanders.

  Different though the genres and texts examined above may be, certain patterns and strategies recur. As the rhetorical treatises recommend, shifting from one audience to another is often associated with deflection and concealment, particularly the attempt to avert guilt. And audiences are not only invoked and incorporat
ed but also thematized; thus many poems, notably Herbert’s “Collar” and Wyatt’s “My lute, awake!”, analyze the dynamic between speaker and listener, or its absence.112 Indeed, absence is often relevant, and if lyric is typically preoccupied with loss, in many instances, such as Herrick’s “To his Verses,” the presence of audiences is an antidote, whether wholly curative or not, to emptiness. In other words, the recuperative motives that Jonathan Culler and others have associated with prosopopoeia in particular also impel other types of lyric address.113

  We have just seen how the genres and other potentialities of early modern English poetry create a range of positions and functions for the audience. How are those conditions relevant to the function most often—and most uncritically—attributed to these and other lyrics, voiceability, the most straightforward version of the mirrors on which this chapter opened? In discussing this subject, critics of both early modern versions of the genre and its realizations in other cultures too often subscribe exclusively to one of a small group of paradigms. Most prevalent, of course, is the concept of an identificatory voiceability, which provides a version of the role of animator as described by the discourse analysts. Characteristically, Steven Winspur asserts that “it is the very function of lyric to create and sustain this blending of audience and utterer in the formal patterns of a text”; and theories of dramatic monologue, notably the powerful work of Ralph W. Rader, sometimes contrast it with lyric on precisely the issue of voiceability.114 One of the most distinguished and determined proponents of this theory, Helen Vendler, encapsulates it in the affirmation that “because lyric is intended to be voiceable by anyone reading it, in its normative form it deliberately strips away most social specification.… One is to utter [secular lyrics and other ‘private’ poems] as one’s own words, not the words of another.”115 Despite the verb “utter,” this theory does not, of course, assume literal reading aloud but rather a merging of subjectivities that can aptly be troped as ventriloquism or, to return to my original architectural and sculptural examples, as a glass wall that confounds inside and outside or a mirror that merges author and viewer. (Might recent scientific discoveries about mirror neurons, which function as though a spectator is actually performing the actions she is merely watching [someone observing another person eating will have the physiological responses of eating] support the argument that Vendler’s process does occur on occasion?116) But I maintain that on the whole heteroglossia is a more apt model than ventriloquism for the relationship of audience to text: identificatory voicing is only one of several alternative positions readers may assume, and it is often an avenue towards, not simply an alternative to, those different roles.