This chapter has already flagged the cognate type of ontological positioning in lyrics, such as the first poems in Spenser’s Amoretti and Giles Fletcher the Elder’s Licia, that establishes the text as a physical object that can be held. Recalling Susan Stewart’s emphasis on touch, such references clearly make the poem more immediate in one sense, as do Wyatt’s allusions to touching the strings of his instrument, while in another reminding us forcefully that it is indeed a representation. Again one sees that distancing generally but by no means always counters immediacy and that it moves in strange and often contradictory ways. If the poem is variously established as an aesthetic achievement and a material object through this form of distancing, its author is separated from its speaker to some extent and established as a poet—thus potentially classifying him both as an artist committed to craft and as a rhetorician committed to craftiness.
Refrains vary in any number of respects, not least in the fact that they sometimes assume and sometimes refuse the several mediatory functions my brief survey of types of framing has introduced. Recalling the new historicist insistence on the hyphenated version of “re-presentation,” refrains enact and trope that process by quite literally presenting again what was said in a previous refrain, while at the same time their incantatory power may intensify the presence of what occurs earlier in the stanza. Indeed, it is no accident that refrains are often deployed towards a purpose so many critics consider central to lyric, calling up what is absent: their own returning tropes that mission, and their repetitiveness awakens lyric’s root in magical charms, discussed so acutely by Andrew Welsh.63
Yet refrains may also form a kind of metaframe by fulfilling many mediatory agendas, in so doing drawing attention to their own status as frames. They may, for example, turn space into place by providing the familiarity of a predictable element; moreover, if one seconds Yi-Fu Tuan’s observation that space involves movement and place pause, refrains create a momentary stopping place.64 Sometimes they refer directly to the text’s status as poem or song, as Spenser famously does in all three of the refrains cited above; in an intensified version of that process, the one in “Daphnaïda” itself alludes to refrains (“Weepe Shep-heard weepe to make my undersong” [245]). That device may also draw attention to the text’s artistry and hence its identity as an art object through its very existence as a formal feature of poetry. Similarly, returning to “Daphnaïda,” the structure of the lament within it, a series of seven groups of seven-line stanzas, is emphasized by the fact that the final strophe in each group terminates on a refrain, encouraging us to notice Spenser’s architectonics. And if other types of mediatory elements contest the presentness of lyric by introducing different time sequences, refrains trope temporality, representing as they do a form of repetition that looks backward to previous occurrences and forward to future ones; the refrains of Spenser’s wedding poems reinforce this emphasis on time semantically through a number of techniques, notably the change in the final line of the stanzas of the “Epithalamion” and, in the “Prothalamion,” the usage of the word “long,” and the references to ending the song. In their Janus-like stance towards the poem, refrains substantiate John Hollander’s analysis of how they are connected to the act of remembering—an act that is the antithesis of the immediacy associated with lyric and the invocatory potential of the refrain itself.65
This brief, individuated catalogue of some principal mediating elements in lyric and of functions distinct to them allows me to generalize further about common features of the poetic processes they effect. Like Orpheus walling the citizenry within towns, these devices may establish boundaries; they may position the text spatially and ontologically, notably by signaling that it is an event or an object; and they may define the status of the poem’s author and reader. In so doing, these elements intensify effects and processes that I have scrutinized in earlier chapters; for example, they negotiate the guilt so often associated with lyric and expressed in the trope of turning, they establish multiple positionalities for both audience and reader, and, as those instances suggest, they contribute to the many types of process and change lyric typically enacts.
The establishment of these boundaries assumes a range of forms. For all that Watson’s headnotes sometimes blur distinctions, headnotes and other mediatory devices more often establish them. Thus they can negotiate the transgressive elements within the text, distancing them from author and reader in ways that enable their continuing presence. Because guilt about writing secular lyrics was so intense in the early modern period, we encounter many versions of this mediatory pattern. Gascoigne both writes salacious love poems and claims they are composed by someone else. He thus invites us to think that although he is virtuous, there will indeed be cake and ale; or to put it another way, he has his cake and pretends not to eat it. In distancing the reader from the lyric by stressing its literary antecedents, Watson’s headnotes also distance himself from it by referring to “the author” in the third person. (In his collection, like a number of others, the impression of boundaries that is achieved semantically is enforced visually: the headnotes at the top of Watson’s poems interact with the prominent borders at the bottom to create a frame.) Whereas recent scholarship has focused on Ben Jonson’s pioneering assertions of authorship, the instances in which he qualifies or conceals it are no less intriguing. Like Watson, Jonson on occasion protects his authority precisely by hedging his authorship: the third person pronouns in the subtitles of “A Celebration of Charis in Ten Lyrick Peeces” (“His Excuse for Loving” and so on) must have been attractive to a poet who elsewhere claims he does not write of love, while “Excuse” distances him not only from love per se but also from the process of defending it. Similarly, the type of frame that locates a poem of courtly praise within another narrative and in so doing assigns it to a speaker ostensibly separate from the author offers some shelter from accusations of sycophancy; Donne’s Somerset-Howard epithalamium is the most obvious example, but Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender offers many more.
Several types of mediation listed above involve erecting a different form of barrier: as we have seen, they create distance from the lyric through mechanisms that in effect allow the author to reject it. Or, from another perspective, they build in judgments on the poem and thus deflect judgment on its author: he may become not the cryer of dubious wares but rather the voice that cries foul by rejecting some of the values and assumptions of the text. Helen Vendler has noted how many of Shakespeare’s sonnets are what she terms “morning-after” reflections, and she proceeds to demonstrate how retrospection enables the incorporation of judgment.66 In many instances, of course, the judgments on the text in question are more subterranean and ambivalent. By turning the April eclogue in praise of Elizabeth into a poem-within-a-poem and assigning it to the intermediary Hobbinol, who repeats the song of the absent Colin, Spenser at once participates fully in courtly rituals and builds into his text some distance from the poem; as we saw, Donne erects similar barriers when praising a distasteful courtly wedding, thus anticipating negative judgments.
Mediating devices, especially when they function as frames, establish boundaries in another sense as well. Renzo Piano, like his fellow architect Jean Nouvel, is committed to transparent walls that do not wall in. Piano writes dismissively of the attempt to construct by constricting: “We instinctively seek enclosure, a fixing of limits, in what is built. Space does not exist except insofar as it is precisely—and solidly—circumscribed. This is a concept of space that disturbs me.”67 Desirous of, rather than disturbed by, circumscription, lyric poets often use mediating devices as barriers against transgressive meanings. Most obviously, a title like “The Lover Complains to his Mistress” excludes homoerotic meanings, and, as we have seen, the title some manuscripts assign to Donne’s “Breake of Day” excludes the possibility of a female speaker. Reflecting the commitment to positivistic interpretation often characteristic of structuralist narratology, Genette’s claim that paratexts ensure that the en
suing text is read correctly does not adequately gloss some texts I have examined, but it encapsulates this type of intermediary.68
If many mediating devices, as observed above, locate the text ethically by passing judgment on it, another function they often share is locating it spatially and ontologically, in a sense an additional version of establishing boundaries. We may learn who is speaking, where, when, and to whom, all of which can at least complicate the universality and timelessness sometimes attributed to lyric. To return to questions about voicing discussed in Chapter 2, surely the ways Marvell’s “Bermudas,” analyzed in more detail below, positions the singers in terms of a particular place, historical moment, and nationality precludes simple identification with them. But if giving lyric a local habitation and name delimits it in those ways, it also delimits an anxiety associated with it in Chapters 1 and 4, the scattering of the voice (and implicitly the body) of the latter-day Orpheus who writes it. Marvell’s Juliana may refuse the poem like its speaker’s other gifts, but the narrator and the audience invited or commanded to “Hark” (1) do hear Damon’s song in “Damon the Mower.”69
Especially intriguing is how such frames may establish a lyric as an event in the sense not only of something localized temporally and spatially but also flagged as significant, worthy of or even demanding our attention—not coincidentally, the very function Rayna Kalas attributes to alienable picture frames.70 Many other devices may emphasize this status; as George T. Wright points out in his compelling essay on the lyric present, for example, tense may do so,71 and a headnote may do so by connecting the text to a well-respected source. The intensity of a refrain, I observed, may contribute to the ritualistic numen of a text, thus making it an event in the sense that ceremonies are. Again demonstrating the connections between that ritualistic mode lyric and anthropological practices, Herbert Blau adduces Henry James’s usage of the term “ado” to argue that rituals involve ado, rather than just do.72 The implications of the term—something that is astir, something forced on one, something involving trouble—gloss the consequences of establishing lyric as an event. Herrick suggests ado in some of these senses when he entitles two poems, one of which I examined earlier, “A Vision.” (As we will see shortly, Marvell’s “Bermudas” plays on such commands and the expectations of significance they often entail, by reversing them.)
Establishing a lyric as an event also distinguishes it from what has come before, thus enabling the kinds of changes in linguistic registers and communicative rules that the mode often entails. Anthropology, as well as cognate disciplines, can yet again help us to understand these processes. Many recent studies in that field advocate focusing attention not merely on the ritual per se but also on the “warm-up” practices that prepare for it and the “cool-down” after it.73 Similarly, studies of games, which are often compared to rituals, emphasize the need for procedures that distinguish the time and space of games as marked cases, suspending certain rules and instituting others. Erving Goffman’s theory of keying, where something is assigned a significance different from its ordinary one, such as the reinterpretation of fighting gestures as playful ones, is a case in point.74 Barnabe Barnes attempts to excuse the transgressive sexual fantasies and their realization in a violent rape in the fifth sestina of Parthenophil and Parthenophe by emphasizing the fictive, which is keyed by the mythological references; “it’s only a poem” functions like “it’s only a game.” To return to Marvell’s “Damon the Mower,” the insistence on a conventional pastoral name in effect identifies the rules of the game generically; and given the generic conventions in question, the reader is also aware that Damon’s performance is likely to involve ado in several senses—something troublesome, something over which he does not have control.
If they transform a poem into an event, several of the mediating devices enumerated above also turn a poem into an object, drawing attention to it aesthetically, materially, or both, as Spenser does when he envisions his lady holding the book and, again, as picture frames do. The contrast identified above between Fletcher’s poem and Keats’s seemingly similar one highlights the impact of stressing the materiality of the text. Emphasizing its artifactuality in this way speaks to—though without resolving—the concerns about the insubstantiality of lyric that we have encountered at many junctures. A second effect of treating the poem as an object relates variously to gender, as do so many other issues about lyric. In a sense the text is stationed in the female subject position as an object that can be held by someone else, thus giving the lady the impression—or illusion—that she herself is subject, not object. At the same time, the poet bifurcates himself: he becomes both the text, an instrument that is thus effeminized, and the writer who creates it and at least partly controls it, reminding us that the extent to which the lady herself is subject, not object, is real but limited.
As this bifurcation suggests, while the kinds of distancing listed above may define the status of the text, they also reshape that of author and reader, as well as, on occasion, the relationship between writer and reader. Generally, though not universally, they do so by participating in the interlocking assertions of authorship and authority whose development in the period, traced by so many contemporary critics, is discussed in more detail in my chapter on size and structure. Given the uncertainty in the early modern period about the concept of speaker and the ambiguity in many instances about whether someone is in fact editor or author, these assertions about who is speaking can be reassuring. Moreover, many forms of mediation establish the author’s authority, thus contributing to the era’s construction of conceptions of authorship. As we have already seen, in the seventeenth century writers did begin to assign their own titles; whoever does so, as Anne Ferry and John Hollander both rightly observe, asserts authority and ownership.75 Again, the turnings of poetry turn space into place. Similarly, one consequence of, so to speak, establishing title is establishing the right to sell; as I have already observed in another context, titles, head-notes, and related devices in effect may announce that their creator is hawking the wares that will follow, crying his lament in the sense of that verb established earlier, and that she or he has the right to do so. For all the respectful devotion announced in the initial poem addressed to Licia, Fletcher still represents himself as the architect of a temple. At the same time, however, the devices also qualify or screen the author in order to negotiate anxieties about writing whose recurrence in the early modern period we have repeatedly encountered. We have seen how assuming the subject position of intermediary can be a ploy to shield the author from the dangers of erotic and epideictic verse—reminding one again that the early modern period witnessed many attempts to conceal authorship as well as the efforts to assert it that have been more widely studied.76
The lack of title to the title experienced by many early modern poets made them all the more concerned to establish their power in other ways, thus establishing surrogates for their ability to assign and change their titles: headnotes like Watson’s, a narrative frame like Gascoigne’s, footnotes like those apparently written by Spenser, all allow the writer to lay claim to the text intellectually through the acts of elucidating its literary history or establishing its interpretation. Similarly, to the extent that lyric originates in a summoning of the lyric voice, as Allen Grossman, Susan Stewart, and others have suggested, these frames may also be seen as a reactive redefinition of roles: originally the summoned, the author may demonstrate power by summoning other speaking voices, other landscapes, and audiences through the mediating language of the poem.77 Yet again Marvell’s “Damon the Mower” is telling, for its opening line, “Hark how the mower Damon sung,” accomplishes all those ends. Here, as so often, the same line may create immediacy in some respects and compromise it in others.
In some instances, of course, mediating elements do not merely summon but also dismiss through the act of introducing a new speaker or distinguishing one side of the speaker from another, a characterological equivalent to the way they may dema
rcate an inside where transgressive language and behavior may thrive and an outside where they are not permitted. Arguably the ending of “Lycidas” involves not a commentary by a completely distinct voice but a separation between the speaker as pastoral shepherd and the side of him that wishes to move to new pastures, new genres. The newer self appropriates the poem (an act recalling Thestylis’s defiance in “Upon Appleton House”) with the anticipated move to a different territory enacted through the take-over bid on that territory the page. Ernst Häublein rightly notes that a change in speakers serves closural functions very like that of a quotation and that the two are in fact sometimes identical; another function they may share, one might add, is closing off in the sense of pushing away an alternative.78
No less important than their effects on the author’s subject position are the ways mediating techniques shape the reader’s. Again, though, these processes are complex and contradictory. If one form of mediation, the refrain, is a bridle for the text, other forms serve as it were to bridle the reader’s autonomy, assigning us a role, a vantage point, even an attitude. There is an imperiousness behind the command to harken, as well as an emphasis on the significance of what is going to be heard; orders to hearken or see, so often included in mediating devices, not only remind us that the ensuing lyric will appeal to the senses but suggest that it is, as it were, imperative that we respond to that appeal. If the film camera directs the eye of the viewer while stage productions allow individual members of the audience to decide what they are going to look at and for how long (though those decisions may be guided in part by blocking and lighting), mediating techniques attempt to make the process of reading lyric more cinematic. (Indeed, the pressing of hands about which Celan writes can on occasion precede the twisting of arms.)
The Challenges of Orpheus Page 20