Going Too Far

by Robin Morgan

  In his “Elegie upon the Death of Donne” Thomas Carew,4 another seventeenth-century poet, lists six specific wrongs in poetry which Donne redressed and four positive virtues that he attained. Even greatly reduced (and prosified) by space requirements here, the two lists read like a composite of model requirements which every poet (and revolutionary) should strive to emulate. Very briefly, the wrongs redressed are (1) the pedantic, (2) servile imitation due to laziness, (3) licentious theft from ancient and foreign models, (4) “the subtle cheat of slie exchanges,” (5) “the jugling feat of two-edg’d words,” and (6) wrongs done “by ours” to other cultural and linguistic traditions. The virtues are: (1) rich fancy, (2) bold expression, (3) mastery of language, and (4) originality. Certainly Donne’s originality has been the subject of much analysis, and it is true that “if we except Donne’s Holy Sonnets (although even here, their directness is dramatically different from the Elizabethans) and the heroic couplets of his Satires and Elegies, nearly every other poem is cast in a form of his own devising.”5

  T. S. Eliot’s key essay “The Metaphysical Poets”6 is greatly indebted to the pioneer work in this field done by Dr. Helen Gardner, yet is itself so rich in perceptions relevant to our political adaptation of the sensibility of these poets that I am at a loss as to which of his insights to quote here (I urge the reader to treat herself to the complete essay). Eliot notes that the poetry of Donne (and to an extent that of Marvell and Bishop King7), like that of Chapman, is late Elizabethan in feeling: “a direct sensuous apprehension of thought, or a recreation of thought into feeling.” Others usually considered to be among The Metaphysicals, including Herbert, Vaughan, and Crashaw (whose devotional poems, such as those to Saint Teresa, found an echo in the poems of Christina Rossetti) returned through the Elizabethan period to the early Italians for their influences, Eliot feels. But the not-coincidental tone set by Elizabeth Tudor and her Renaissance England informs and illumines to a considerable extent the work of all The Metaphysicals.

  Eliot adds more pieces to the jigsaw puzzle of definition we are assembling on the metaphysical poets, each of which will be of use when we come to applying all this to the concept of metaphysical feminism. He finds rapid association of thought and a “telescoping” of images characteristic. (This is frequently accomplished with brilliantly witty puns.) He points out that “a thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility.” This unified sensibility was almost a given among sixteenth-century poets and dramatists (in Elizabeth’s reign); in the seventeenth century “a dissociation of sensibility set in, from which we have never recovered.” Eliot sees this dissociation (of thought and feelings) as aggravated by Milton and Dryden, and he theorizes that Donne, Marvell, and the seventeenth-century poets up to the Revolution were “the direct and normal development of the precedent age,” suggesting that the eighteenth-century Dr. Johnson may have overlooked this context for what he viewed, from his perspective, as such an aberrative group.8

  In a related vein, and (all unaware) using terms ideally suited to a feminist context, J. B. Leishman characterizes Donne’s poetry in particular as “the dialectical expression of personal drama.”9 One might use precisely the same phrase to describe feminism.

  And Having Done That, Thou Hast Done

  “If, as I have, you also do

  Virtue attir’d in woman see,

  And dare love that, and say so too,

  And forget the He and She; …”

  —JOHN DONNE, “The Undertaking”10

  It is time we glanced briefly at the work of Donne himself. I can anticipate the distress of some readers in their confusion as to why a feminist should choose male poets as exemplary in any way for feminist politics. The answer is less complicated than even I would assume. I have not chosen “male poets” but a specific set of poets, (who happen to be male) and one poet in particular, Donne. I have in fact not “chosen” them. What they have come to represent has “chosen” me—they have been praised and damned for the very qualities I always have most loved, in art, in life and, I now realize, even in politics. Furthermore, I would with delight have used as my examples women poets, had we access to any who shared that period and poetic sensibility. Elizabeth Tudor, Mary Sidney Herbert, Isabella Whitney all wrote in an earlier time; only three books of poetry in English by women were published during the sixteenth century. During the seventeenth, Lady Elizabeth Carey published (under initials only) the first original play by a woman in England, and Mary Sidney Wroth, Rachael Speght, Lady Diana Primrose, and Dorothy Berry appeared in print. Later still, of course, there would appear “the matchless Orinda,” Katharine Philips, as well as Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle. Yet none of these poets lived (or had access to publication) at that unique moment when the sensibility of the Elizabethan period was confronted with the special tension produced by the controversial new sciences—to unite in the art of The Metaphysicals before it became, in Eliot’s phrase, “dissociated.” The one possible exception is Lucy Harington, Countess of Bedford, who was a patron of Donne’s; among the poems previously attributed to him is one that, according to Ann Stanford, was written by the Countess. This is a poem which begins “Death, be not proud,” but proceeds as an elegy, unlike Donne’s well-known sonnet. Ms. Stanford notes that manuscripts circulated freely at that time, and it is not now possible to discern which of the two poets used the opening phrase first.11

  As for Donne himself, no feminist defense can or need be made for his biography—an eccentric one, to be sure, which ranged from a rather wild youth (he accompanied Essex to Cadiz in 1596 and to the Azores the following year) through a period of scholarship, an appointment as private secretary to the Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, and a defiantly romantic marriage, culminating in his taking orders and ending his life as the Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral (and author of the grand Sermons). During his life he underwent a controversial and probably politically induced (if not opportunistic) conversion from Roman Catholicism to the Anglican Church; he lauded Elizabeth, then denounced her when she executed his old leader, Essex, then mourned her eloquently in his great elegy for another Elizabeth (Drury), “The First Anniversarie.” It is not surprising that a man of such contradictions (which vibrate throughout his poems) should span the excesses of misogyny and a pro-feminism which was daring even for his time (Ben Jonson called some of Donne’s tributes to women “blasphemous”; Jonson, we must remember, wrote Epicene: The Silent Woman).

  So the same Donne who wrote “No where/Lives a woman true, and faire,”12 could also write “All measure, and all language, I should pass/should I tell what a miracle she was”—in his glorious love poem “The Relique,” in which he staggers us with the unforgettable image of a love-token found in an opened grave: “a bracelet of bright hair about the bone.” He can be bawdy: “License my roaving hands, and let them go/Before, behind, between, above, below”;13 exhortatory and praiseful: “Today put on perfection, and a woman’s name”;14 defiant of those who would criticize his lover: “For Godsake hold your tongue, and let me love.”15 He can rail against woman’s inconstancy, and, in a poem like “The Extasie,”16 he can depict with breath-taking lyricism the synchronicity of divine and human love:

  “… Our soules, (which to advance their state,

  Were gone out,) hung ’twixt her, and mee.

  And whilst our soules negotiate there,

  Wee like sepulchrall statues lay;

  All day, the same our postures were,

  And we said nothing, all the day.”

  A unified sensibility indeed.

  Connections

  A reflective interest in experience. A psychological curiosity about love and religion. Surely the former is a fitting description of the changing consciousness of any woman as she begins to examine her own life, with her own tools of expertise. Surely the latter could be an apt expression for the two-fold obsession of women through the ages: human and divine love. (Donne was, in fact, positively “womanly” in his preoccupati
on with this two-fold love, seeing in human love the best approach to cosmic love, as women have done for centuries.

  To go on: psychological curiosity, the desire to startle and to approximate poetic to direct, even colloquial speech, and above all, the blend of passion and thought, feeling and ratiocination. Psychological curiosity—and courage—is more required by the politics of feminist consciousness than by most political movements. The desire to startle is, naturally, experienced by all ignored peoples, but the desire to approximate poetic to colloquial speech seems especially and poignantly relevant to feminism. What else has our embryonic culture been attempting but to articulate in accessible terms that which previously has been unknowable or at least unspeakable? And that wonderful phrase “passionate thinking”—certainly this describes the electric leap of shared and connecting consciousness at its most intense. “Passionate thinking is always apt to become metaphysical, probing and investigating the experience from which it takes its rise.” “The dialectical expression of personal drama.”

  When I think, then, of metaphysical feminism, I think not only of an all-encompassing feminist vision which goes literally beyond the physical (yet never leaves it behind) but which is in its very form related to those seventeenth-century English poets. An obsession with love has been at the heart of women’s concerns—and in fact of feminists’ concerns—for millennia, no matter how steadfast certain antithetical feminists remain, fixed in an anti-emotional polar response to what they see only as “feminine sentiment.” How often have feminists called, too, for the “peculiar blend of feeling and ratiocination” in our battles against the patriarchal dichotomizing of intellect and emotion! It is the insistence on the connections, the demand for synthesis, the refusal to be narrowed into desiring less than everything—that is so much the form of metaphysical poetry and of metaphysical feminism. The unified sensibility.

  But for the quintessential definition we must finally go to Dr. Johnson’s wry and condemnatory essay in which he coined the name for the metaphysical poets. He didn’t like them (Donne, Cleveland, and Cowley especially) for all the right reasons—which is to say that his definitions were most piercingly accurate precisely when most limited by his own brazenly affirmed prejudices. The standard practice of these poets, he huffed, was to create situations in which “the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together.”17 He used as an example of this violent yoking Donne’s memorable image of “stiff twin compasses” to describe two lovers separated by geographical distance but still joined in spiritual and emotional unity.18 Donne’s astonishing image needs no defense any longer from anyone. We can concentrate therefore on Dr. Johnson’s phrase—one which seems to me a strikingly appropriate metaphor for metaphysical feminism.

  If by heterogeneous ideas we admit ambivalence, complexity, and the dialectic (philosophical and material); and if we understand “violence” to mean risked force, a defiance of stasis, a hazarding, a gamble with the greatest of stakes; and if by “yoked” we comprehend commitment held in balance by a discipline self-imposed—then we have in effect our own formula alchemized from the dear dross of Dr. Johnson.

  The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together—such as struggle with the person one loves. Such as contradiction (the very element the proto-Marxist ideologue fears and would eliminate as quickly as possible). Such as these two at-first-glance utterly opposed concepts might be yoked together by the sheer violence of our desire:

  (1) The idea of any meaning out there in the universe

  (2) The idea of any freedom here for women

  Normally the first statement would bring us up short at that old chestnut “If God is God he is not good; if God is good he is not God.” But the violence of our desire regarding the second statement speeds us past, through, and into a self-created feminist metaphysic where there simply is no “out there” any longer. Because all that is out there is in here, and always was and always shall be, born of one’s own actions renewingly, mystically, perpetually.

  Microphotography of a blastula dividing in the womb divulges to our eyes a pattern and process identical to that enacted for us by interstellar radio waves “photographing” the expansion of a galaxy. This is a living metaphysically poetic image.19 It is the third possibility.

  The polarizing simplification that rejects the third way is impossible with metaphysical feminism. Impossible to drop out and “navel-gaze” (which a muddled general definition of metaphysical thought might allow, but which our clarified analogy to the seventeenth-century poets does not permit). Impossible because the fantastic is rooted in the miracle of reality and flowers continuously within it. Equally impossible to settle for that reality alone, that “equal pay for equal work,” when this damnably intrusive passionate thinking keeps leading us onward and inward.20 It is only a fitting contradiction, then, that we encounter in John Donne and the other metaphysical poets of seventeenth-century England one excellent model for an approach to our own feminist metaphysic.

  “The ancient Church knew not, Heaven knows not yet:

  And where, what lawes of Poetry admit,

  Lawes of Religion have at least the same,

  Imortall Maide, I might invoke thy name …

  Thou art the Proclamation; and I am

  The Trumpet, at whose voice the people came.”21

  III: SPIRITUALITY

  I OFFER YOU a feminist koan of my own devising:

  Liberation and oppression can look much the same. Being unable to discern the difference between them—this is the meaning of oppression. (So much for at least one of the two definitions.) Or is this the ultimate definition of both?

  In which case we might call it “grace.”

  But in which case?

  Not the least devastating gesture of patriarchal power has been to cast the cosmos itself—the life force, energy, matter, and miracle—into the form of a male god. Feminists have already observed that this has had a less than salutary effect on women. We could spend fifty volumes delineating the destruction done in the names of such gods, and we can also look around us. At this writing, Christian armies and Moslem forces in Lebanon are slaughtering each other and civilians (for which read: women and children and the aged) in the streets of Beirut, even as Catholic and Protestant antagonists draft grammar-school children to snipe at one another across the blood-scummed cobblestones of Londonderry in Northern Ireland. Both of these “religious wars” are misnomers in the political sense, but in a deeper sense they are perfectly named, since both are about the contest between the two great modern patriarchal religions: capitalism and communism. For it is not only the Judeo-Christian tradition which has shored up the patriarchy for five thousand years; it is every male-conceived and -dominated faith.

  I confess to a particular antipathy for the Catholic Church, despite my loyalty to good theater wherever it can be found, and my longstanding passion for Gregorian chant.22 I don’t mean to let the rest of Christianity (or my own religion of origin from which I am so apostate, Judaism) off the hook easily. But it is hard to overlook or forget nine million women burned as witches over a period of three hundred years by Christianity, and largely by the Catholic Church.23 Even today, in Catholic South and Latin America, illegal abortion and childbirth compete for the highest cause of death among women. In the United States, the church is financing Birch-Society-led campaigns to undo the moderate progress women have made in gaining self-determination over our own bodies. So much blood spilled on the cathedral steps, because that perfect microcosm of patriarchy—that hierarchy of octogenarian celibate males running around in drag—still thinks it can rule on the lives and bodies of millions of women, whatever our ages.

  Which should not, I grant, keep us from justly condemning the gray, co-optative mask of modern Protestantism (clamped over the self-righteous expressions of Luther and Knox); the virulent woman-hatred in Fundamentalist Christianity; the woman-fear and woman-loathing rampant in Judaism to this day (as if the scars of that religion’s m
atriarchal origin and its overthrow were still not eradicated from the Jewish collective unconscious); the female-as-temptress or the female-as-nonentity in, respectively, the exoteric and esoteric sophistries of Buddhist, Zen, or Western existential thought; the vitriol spewed on women for centuries in Moslem cultures.24

  Very well. We do not exist or, since this is the choice, we are the devil’s gateway, we are evil. What else, we may ask, is new? And for every female mystic who has somehow managed through her own genius, like Teresa, to reach her transcendence even through the labyrinth of patriarchal means—millions of us have stared with horror at the disbelievable reality of our own ankles stockinged in flame, have peeled open the parchment of our lips that the world might read the scream stuck in that throat. What else can we hear but that unspent scream—even if they did have anything to say to us now?

  So we left their churches, and are still leaving. And the birth of what has been called female spirituality is a new phenomenon in the Women’s Movement.25 This has given me much personal joy—and at present it is worrying me sick. Because once again spirituality is becoming confused with religion—thus going nowhere near far enough. An anthropomorphized god has merely been replaced with a “gynemorphized” god, after all.

  Earlier in this book I noted how, in the original WITCH group in the sixties (due to intellectual laziness and activist frenzy), we never quite got around to doing the research we meant to do. But by 1970 I had embarked on that research, later to compare notes with other women who were reading and working in the same area. Consequently when, in 1973, I affirmed myself publicly as a witch,26 I did not mean it lightly. Still, I should not have been surprised when, at a press conference twenty minutes later, three other well-known feminists declared themselves instant witches. An act of solidarity? I wanted to believe so despite my own feelings of discomfort, which told me that I had been misunderstood and trivialized on the spot. Those initial misgivings were borne out in the following months and years, at times making me regret that I had ever discussed publicly my private beliefs.