The Challenges of Orpheus

by Heather Dubrow

  In other circumstances, however, mediating devices may serve not as counterpart but rather as counterbalance to the types of coercion Roland Greene perceptively identifies with lyric.79 As Milton demonstrates in a passage from Comus discussed in my last chapter, the immediacy of the mode contributes to its seductiveness: its touch may be not a pressing of hands but the embrace of a siren or even of Circe, often associated with that dangerous glee club. Mediating devices often provide a safely distanced vantage point from which not only the author but also the reader can listen to the siren song. If two poems paired above, Fletcher’s opening sonnet and Keats’s “This living hand, now warm and capable,” are published with titles, those devices can provide a barrier when the poems reach out, reminding the readers that, as parents assure anxious children, it’s only a story.

  As Chapter 2 demonstrated from another perspective, the reader may also be distanced by being invited into the “academic” role; a headnote like those in which Watson discusses his sources in detail or a paratextual comment like those in which Gascoigne evaluates the meter of the immediately preceding poem encourages the audience to study the text at a remove from it.80 Again, an audience containing many writers, as early modern audiences did, would respond with particular alacrity and intensity to such invitations. In so doing, they would assume a stance that again recalls anthropological studies of ritual, in this instance observations about the separation between the person performing the ritual and observers.81

  Varied in other respects, many techniques catalogued above also unite in affecting, and even on occasion effecting, the temporality of lyric, creating the multiple time sequences that the more acute studies of the mode substitute for an unremitting emphasis on its presentness. Refrains can both figure and trouble temporality. The devices that comment on what happens in the lyric establish a second time frame corresponding to the discourse time that narratologists contrast with the story time of the narrative itself. These temporal movements may be troped and complicated by shifts in speakers. When Robert Sidney writes in his third song, “Thus sayd a shepheard, once” (63), the abrupt and unexpected introduction of another speaker, which distances us from the original voice, not only effects but also mirrors the results of the intrusion of different time sequences. As in Donne’s “Indifferent,” the shepherd’s present-tense lament is now narrowed to a specific moment in the past, and the presence of the commentator adds yet another temporality, the discourse time in which he speaks.

  The most intriguing and subtle function that connects otherwise distinct mediating devices is creating a kind of wind-up that, like the cognate anthropological processes to which I refer above, enables or at least encourages the performance that follows. Although in some instances headnotes and other framing devices may lessen the intensity of the ensuing lyric by inviting, for example, a detached and scholarly study of its meter, in other instances they form a crescendo of intensity. “Performances seem to gather their energies,” observe Richard Schechner and Willa Appel, who proceed to discuss “this gathering of intensity” as characteristic of not only tribal rites but also the games, sports events, and theatrical productions to which they compare ritual.82 Alerting and activating the senses can prepare readers for the experience of lyric, which is, as Susan Stewart and so many students of Romantic poetry have shown, often an appeal to all five. Notice how often mediating passages refer in particular to sight and hearing, though other senses may be evoked as well—thus the use of “See” (22) in the stanzas that precede the hymn within Milton’s Nativity Ode prepares us for the sensuality of many images in that hymn and in particular for its culmination on “But see!” (237), the vision of the Christ child.83

  Frequently metapoetic through their references to the act of writing or singing, frames in effect may summon up their own song, another type of warm-up and another analogue to prosopopoeia. Crashaw’s hymn on the nativity celebrates the arrival of the Son by effecting the arrival of the sun and of a song:

  Come we shepheards whose blest Sight

  Hath mett Love’s Noon in Nature’s night;

  Come lift we up our loftyer Song

  And wake the Sun that lyes too long.

  (1–4)84

  The Chorus’s injunction “Come lift we up our loftyer Song” (3) is both a performative, in the most precise sense of a statement that effects the action to which it refers, and a warm-up for the subsequent songs by Thyrsis and the Chorus. In short, early modern refrains, like many of their classical precedents, not only may invoke a god or other luminary but also often encourage the creation, delivery, or dispersal of the text, their incantatory repetitions adding emotional power to that invitation and implicitly aligning it with ritual invocations: “The woods shall to me answer and my Eccho ring” (18) Spenser famously announces in his “Epithalamion,” the echo of the refrain troping and proleptically enacting the dispersal of the poem.85

  The same writer’s “Daphnaïda,” discussed from other perspectives above, provides an intriguing mirror image of and commentary on all these forms of warm-up: the narrator attempts to rein in Alcyon’s tension in the frame to his lament, and it is precisely that restraint that generates the intensity of the lyric:

  Then gan I him to comfort all my best,

  And with milde counsaile strove to mitigate

  The stormie passion of his troubled brest,

  But he thereby was more empassionate:

  As stubborne steed, that is with curb restrained,

  Becomes more fierce and fervent in his gate;

  And breaking foorth at last, thus dearnely plained.

  (190–196)

  In another, related sense, encountered above, mediating devices involve coiling the spring that will uncoil dramatically in the lyric itself: they may perform an action analogous to establishing the rules of the game or turning a quotidian locale into a sacred area where a ritual may be enacted. Citing Eliade, Mary Oates O’Reilly has traced the association of odes with such spaces;86 the same linkage occurs in many other lyric genres as well. The type of keying Goffman describes in a sense prepares a sacred space by changing the meanings of what would otherwise be ordinary words and objects. More literally, as we will see shortly, the opening stanzas of Milton’s Nativity Ode both establish and problematize the idea that the poem not only describes but also takes place within the sacred space where Christ was born (4–5).

  So far I have focused largely on the successful deployment of various procedures for qualifying immediacy. But in a painting by Grant Wood in the Minneapolis Institute of Art, a very small figure, clearly a version of the festiauolo analyzed in Chapter 2, points towards the landscape that virtually engulfs him. Unsettling in the way its artist’s work so often is, the canvas implies that the figure is attempting vainly to assert authority through his deictic gesture: this master of ceremonies lacks mastery. Whether or not one interprets this figure as a type of artist and hence the painting as an ironized undercutting of the act of painting, the implications for the deictic and other mediatory gestures examined here are extensive. Is the self-confident framing that motivates a statement like “Hark how the mower Damon sung” (“Damon the Mower,” 1) no less narcissistic and futile than the posturing by Damon from which the narrator is apparently distinguishing himself? Are the frame and framer, so to speak, really part of what they attempt to frame? Mediating devices are often in turn mediated, moderated, and even mocked by their own limitations—as well as by the types of immediacy with which they interact. Hands may be pressed, pushed away, then pressed again.

  A close and detailed analysis of texts, the agenda of the next section of this chapter, is the best approach to such issues. These poems demand and repay scrutiny primarily because they so aptly demonstrate how the interplay between immediacy and distance that is the central contention of this chapter plays out in the course of particular texts; but in so doing they also exemplify why interplay is so significant not only for individual lyrics but also for their culture. They remin
d us that, as the briefer instances adduced above suggest, the dialogue between immediacy and distancing in their varied forms is often semantic as well as structural. Many of the principal concerns in both early modern lyrics and their counterparts in other eras—notably the authority of speaker and author, the reliability of representation, and the relationship of speech and writing—are analyzed and negotiated precisely through that dialogue. In addition, it can be employed to explore questions about the accessibility of biblical events in contemporary culture that, as indicated above, acquired culturally specific valences and intense force through seventeenth-century millenarian movements.

  In the first song in Lady Mary Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, a shepherdess laments the betrayal and inconstancy of her lover; anticipating her own death, she concludes on the lines that she hopes will appear on her tombstone:

  And thes lines I will leave

  If some such lover come

  Who may them right conseave,

  And place them on my tombe:

  She who still constant lov’d

  Now dead with cruell care

  Kil’d with unkind dispaire,

  And change, her end heere prov’d.

  (41–48)87

  The poem again demonstrates that it is through the interaction of immediacy and distancing that certain issues central to lyric are expressed. In this instance, the text deploys that interplay to stage a problem of interest to many critics today, the relationship between the immediacy of voice, emphasized by the recurrence in close conjunction of the word “sayd” (17, 21), and the permanence, or apparent permanence, of writing.88 The issue of stability in love mirrors that of the stability of texts recording love; the poet who ended the 1621 version of this sequence with a tribute to constancy here evokes a speaker who wants to create a tribute to her own constancy in a medium that will itself have the immutability, or apparent immutability, of inscription. But the feasibility of that project is no more certain than the survival of true love: even if a lover does come, she or he may not “conseave” (43) the lines rightly, and that in turn raises the question of how readers will “conseave” the lines. Moreover, the verb suggests not only comprehension but impregnation; the lover would be a kind of second maker, thus beginning the process of distancing the lines from the shepherdess that will culminate in the inscription.

  These concerns are part of a larger semiotic preoccupation throughout the poem, the issue of what type of signs offer representation that is reliable in its message and lasting in its effects. We start with a reversal of the pathetic fallacy, so nature clearly does not always read the emotions of those within it accurately, nor can it necessarily be read as a register of those emotions; and the shepherdess proceeds to look for other signs she can deploy, announcing, for example, that the willow branches she will wear “shall my wittnes bee / My hopes in love ar dead” (27–28).

  Juxtaposing this poem with others involving epitaphs reveals just how distinctive Wroth’s approach to both the putative immortality of her poem and the related issues of representation are. As William Waters has shown in his acute analysis of such lyrics, the inscription must depend on “a voice that it also, ceaselessly, hopes to ambush.”89 In many instances, ranging from Horace’s ode 3.30 to its heir in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 55 to some of the Rilke sonnets Waters analyzes, the dead person is closely associated with, if not necessarily completely identified with, the stone. But in weakening that linkage by having the shepherdess express the hope that someone may someday carve her words on her tombstone, Wroth replicates and complicates the process of waylaying, establishing the need of two ambushes, which trope each other. She must waylay both the person who will find and inscribe the poem and that of the subsequent reader—or, to put it another way, the process of representation becomes a virtual mise en abîme, since the shepherdess’s words, already a representation, will be represented on the tomb, which will then represent them to onlookers in the hope that one of them will perform a version of the same process in voicing them. This process anticipates the layering of Desdemona’s willow song, analyzed in Chapter 5. In the case at hand, observe too that this sequence is further undermined by the two conditionals in, “If some such lover come / Who may them right conseave” (42–43; italics added), the first arguably emphasized through a spondaic or trochaic foot. In addition to the more general issues about language and immortality raised by Wroth’s interpretation of the conventions surrounding epitaphs, might not these hesitations also encode Wroth’s anxieties about whether her own work will be interpreted “right” (43) and about whether—for all the hermetic privacy Jeffrey Masten has found in her work—it will be widely read?90 The related issue of exactly who is currently being addressed recalls Keats’s “This living hand.”

  These and many other questions are enacted formally through mediating devices; thus the semantic core of the poem is embodied in the techniques that variously create immediacy and distance within it. Most obviously, the poem is full of references to representation in its many guises, reminding us that what we are reading is a text and encouraging us to think how our reactions to it are a sample of the problematical relationship between speech and writing. On one level we are perusing speech that is available to us precisely because it has been inscribed, and yet on another a recurrent concern of that inscription is its own potential unreliability. The relationship between the immediacy of voice and writing—between air and stone, two potentialities for lyric that are, as we saw in Chapter 1, suggested by early modern troping—is further complicated by our inability at several points to determine which we are encountering. Are we reading what is written on the bark or hearing her talk about the fact that she will write on it? And in the final stanza, are we on some level reading the inscription, which is immediate in the sense of addressing us even though it is in the most literal sense inscribed, or are we hearing her recite what it will say, or hearing her read from a paper on which it is written?

  These alternatives evidently raise theoretical questions that recall the decon-structionist debates of the twentieth century, but they also gesture towards questions about the relationships among oral delivery, scribal, and print culture that must have been of interest to Wroth and her readers, poised as they were at a moment when texts were transmitted in all these ways. In particular, the appeal to the person who may find the poem and reproduce it on a tombstone registers authors’ dependence on those who circulated manuscripts and those who published them. One may recall in this context the conditionals cited in the previous paragraph.

  Furthermore, the whole issue of immediacy is itself made immediate and pressing by the way this lyric—much like Robert Sidney’s third song and ninth pastoral—on first reading tricks the reader. We are plunged into the poem by hearing a voice that delivers a transhistorical and transcultural lament; for all the limitations on voiceability, the opening two stanzas certainly invite it. Then suddenly we read, “A sheapherdess thus sayd” (17) and another function of the repetition of that verb is to intensify the abrupt distancing. A specific speaker, defined by a profession shared by few if any of the readers, is named; the poem is further distanced by being located in a pastoral landscape, adumbrated but not clearly established by the opening lines. In short, then, the poem creates an intense impression of the presence of the shepherdess, only to distance her and her speech through doubts about exactly what one is hearing or reading. Thus it stages its semantic core in its workings—issues about loss, betrayal, and representation that call into question not only the promises of lovers but also the authority of the shepherdess and the reliability and permanence of her words.

  Marvell’s “Bermudas” was perhaps written in response to the experiences of John Oxenbridge, a persecuted Protestant minister who had twice gone to the islands in question. It records the hymnlike song of a group of rowers, apparently Puritans themselves, judging from the reference to prelates. The poem demonstrates how the interplay between effects of immediacy and of distance can,
as I am arguing, negotiate theological and spiritual issues as well as broader poetic issues, such as the trustworthiness of representation. Most analyses of this charming lyric have focused on the song at the expense of the lines that precede and follow it. Such studies have typically concentrated on the spiritual and historical sources for that hymn, tracing its skilled paraphrases of Scripture, its quotation of lines from the psalms deftly woven into the song, its debts to other descriptions of Paradise, and its responses to Edmund Waller’s mock epic, Battle of the Summer Islands. Especially acute is Annabel Patterson’s positioning of the poem in relation to contemporary attempts to work out aesthetically and spiritually satisfactory means of praising God.91

  In addition, the hymn within the poem exemplifies the immediacy that often characterizes the spiritual poetry from that and other traditions.92 The song relies on the lyric present. Proximal deictics—“this eternal spring” (13), “here” (14), “these rocks” (31)—give the landscape presence, making it accessible to the sense of touch associated with lyric, while the frequent appeals to the senses and, in particular, the reference to figs that meet the mouth literalizes that emphasis on touch. (Similarly, at the beginning of the poem, the proximal usage in “this song” [4] locates the hymn as immediate to the text if not to the experience itself.) In lieu of the pressing of hands involving touch, this lyric offers us a spiritual pressing involving taste.