SOURCE: "Ben Jonson's Poetry: Pastoral, Géorgie, Epigram," in English Literary Renaissance, Vol. 4, No. 1, Winter, 1974, pp. 111–36.

[In the following essay, Friedberg analyzes Jonson's poems in terms of the classical literary tradition.]

Like Donne, Jonson began his poetic career with the epigram. For a man like Jonson who believed that "it is onely the disease of the vnskilfull, to thinke rude things greater then polish'd: or scatter'd more numerous then compos'd," the epigram remains the perfect form, one that convinces by its point rather than its logic, and Jonson's Epigrams contain some of his most "polish'd" and effective writing. Many of the Epigrams provided subjects for his plays: there are epigrams "To Alchymists," "On Lieutenant Shift," "On Court-worme," "On Don Surly," "To Fine Lady Would-bee," poems which combine Jonson's considerable talent for lighting on the abuses of the town with a skeptical, almost metaphysical, wit. Yet mixed with these satires in miniature are commendatory poems, poems of public praise addressed to Jonson's friends at court and poems of private sorrow like those "On My First Daughter" and "On My First Sonne." The obverse to his satiric epigrams, these poems celebrate an ideal and redress the balance upset by the jaundiced eye of the satirist. Although they differ in tone, they conform to the same poetic and expound the same morality, the same attitude toward life and toward the profession of the poet. By adopting the epigram as his primary form and by reducing the epigram to the central act of naming the good man, Jonson commits himself to making his poem a perfect record of the world. Significance no longer resides in feigning; "making," the essential meaning of the poetic act which Jonson traces etymologically to the Greek potein, he understands as constructing rather than creating, an architectural rather than visionary activity. The poet's glory, to Jonson, comes from his ability to reflect the world, its brass as well as its gold, not his ability to transcend it. Sidney's great vision of the poet spurning the earth, renouncing its brazen nature for his own golden one, no longer seems possible to Jonson. Part of the reason for Jonson's retrenchment, his rejection of a visionary poetry for a poetry of reference, is temperamental, but part of that rejection is due to the new way in which the century sees language and especially the language of praise.

Jonson's poems of praise raise the same problems of sincerity and conviction which troubled Sidney in Astrophil and Stella and Shakespeare in those sonnets addressed to the friend. Two centuries of Petrarchanizing had reduced the poetry of praise to a mere formula which any poetaster could imitate. The court poet, as Touchstone knew, had won a reputation for "feigning" by showering his compliments on unworthy subjects. "Since men haue left to doe praise-worthy things," Jonson complained to the Earl of Suffolk, "Most thinke all praises flatteries. But truth brings / That sound, and that authoritie with her name, / As, to be rais'd by her, is onely fame" (Epigrams LXVII, 2–4). In language which recalls Shakespeare's greatest sonnets, Jonson shows how the flattering poet becomes infatuated with the false image of virtue he has created.

Typically, Jonson's poems of praise begin with a discussion of the moral worth not of the subject but of the genre and finally raise more questions about the genre, and about the relationship between poetry and the acknowledgement of virtue, than about the person praised. Often their wit turns on poetry's failure to express what it should. Jonson's highest praise, like that he affords to Donne, is to insist that his subject transcends his poetry's ability to praise: "All which I meant to praise, and, yet, I would; / But leaue, because I cannot as I should!" (XXIII, 9–10).

Jonson's praise of Donne as beyond praise is, of course, the most gross and palpable flattery of all; it succeeds because it is so outrageous. Yet it marks an important theme in Jonson's poetry, the recognition that poetry is inadequate either to create or express real virtue, that its only function must be to recognize and proclaim the virtue it finds in the real world. Naming the virtuous man becomes a moral act, a poem in itself. To William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke and pretender to the title of Shakespeare's Mr. W. H. Jonson wrote: "I doe but name thee PEMBROKE, and I find / It is an Epigramme, on all mankind" (CII, 1–2). To Mary, Lady Wroth, Sir Philip Sidney's niece, Jonson addressed a poem which inverts the Petrarchan mode and tells the lady how little she needs a poet's praise to achieve the immortality of fame.

The poem begins like a Petrarchan sonnet; the word "crowne" invokes the Petrarchan metaphor of sovereignty, and the rhetorical questions which open the poem free Jonson from the flatterer's needs for assertion; he can praise his lady without seeming to flatter her, also a Petrarchan strategy. Yet in the third and fourth couplets Jonson turns on his Petrarchan model, his claim to be able to confer immortality on his subject. The Sidney name does not need the Muses to praise it; rather the poem derives its "glorie" from simply being able to repeat the name. The rhetorical question of 11. 5–6 emphasizes the tentative quality of the poem; its negative statement, continued throughout, questions the value of the poem, the purpose of praise, and not the lady herself. Compared to the accomplishments of the Sidney family, Jonson's poem is an admitted irrelevance; it is an imprese, a seal ring or emblem which is nothing by itself, a mere counter. Thus, Jonson's poem on its simplest level is but a repetition of the name of virtue, an acknowledgement of an ideal, not its creation. Unlike the Petrarchans, those "lowdest praisers, who perhaps would find / For euery part a character assign'd" (CIII, 11–12), and spin a model of virtue out of their own witty conceits, Jonson admits he cannot manufacture virtue: "My praise is plaine, and where so ere profest, / Becomes none more then you, who need it least" (13–14). If poetry has a moral function, and if that moral function is to acknowledge goodness, he argues, then poetry is a form of naming, of designating virtue by giving it a name and by naming those men and women who embody it.

Jonson's insistence on the reference of poetry is perhaps clearest in his superb commendatory poem "On Lucy Countesse of Bedford." The poem has implicit connections with Elizabethan love poetry and the Petrarchan convention, and it opens with a formal invocation of the Muse. Yet the poem parodies the afflatus theory of poetry suggested by the invocation:

The poem confronts that timeless poetic rapture with the poet's situation in time. The overworked poet's schedule fortunately permits an early conference with his Muse: he is "timely rapt." The colloquial "This morning" which opens the poem gives it a scene and a time linking the act of writing poetry with the poet's humbler, quotidian experiences as a man, as much a part of his daily routine as eating or sleeping. Jonson's poet belongs to a social world of patronage and visits, the drawing-room milieu of Epicœne. Here a visit from Apollo or the Muses seems out of place. And Jonson connects this suggestion, that poetry is simply another human activity, with his rejection of the idea of the poet as a man apart, touched by the "holy fire" of divine inspiration. That poet's Muse is overworked, "zealous"; the figures he forms, those interchangeable Petrarchan ladies, are constructed according to formula, "as Poets use." Again, in this weak, deprecating afterthought, syntactically unrelated to the sentence, Jonson opposes convention to reality.

The same theme is present in the poem's progression of verbs, a series which describes the poetic act in terms of creation: "I thought to forme," "I meant to make," and "I meant to faine." Each of these verbs, especially "faine," a loaded word which suggests fakery as well as poetic invention, develops the hint of the first lines, the falseness of the conception of the poet as a maker of another nature, a golden world. These infinitives suggest the factitious nature of poetic creation and cement the suggestion of unreality, the contrary-to-fact, conditional quality of "thought" and "meant." At the same time, as infinitives they represent frustrated action, incomplete predication. The turn of the poem, while completing the grammar, completes this sense. Words like "meant" and "purpos'd" express the poet's frustration, his inability to create what he imagines. hispowers are limited; poetry cannot extend life or impose poetic justice, as the speaker would like (14–16). No matter how hard Jonson's poet tries to create his ideal lady, he is inadequate to the task. The final couplet reinforces the implication with which the poem begins, that the fact, Lucy herself, possesses greater power than poetic fancy. Poetry is frail, a realm of intention only; it cannot create fact. And in the poem of praise, reality will always triumph over the insufficiency of making things up.

"On Lucy Countesse of Bedford," like the epigram to Donne, contrasts two poets, the speaker or putative poet unequal to his task and the actual poet responsible for both persona and poem, who succeeds by acknowledging poetic weakness. Clearly the poem's literal statements about its intentions are strategic. While the speaker explains how he intends to praise his ideal lady, Jonson is actually praising Lucy; the poem is made out of materials which seem, temporally and logically, to precede its writing. The poem recounts the genesis of another poem, the poem the speaker intends to write but which he discovers is superfluous, unnecessary: "My Muse bad, Bedford write, and that was shee." As in Jonson's Induction to Bartholomew Fair, the curtain appears to have been raised too soon, before all the machinery has been put in place and the actors dressed. Jonson insists upon parading his half-dressed dramatic materials before his audience with their make-up off to include his audience in his creation of illusion. Much the same thing happens in "Lucy Countesse of Bedford," where the premature curtain parts to reveal a dramatis personae of naked grammatical categories. Stripped to its essentials, the poem has three elements, which correspond to the grammatical categories of verb, adjective, and proper noun. Lines 4 and 5 contain two triplets, one verbal ("To honor, serue, and loue") and one adjectival ("faire, and free, and wise"). By placing these triplets in parallel, Jonson stresses the grammatical category of the words rather than their sense. And by stressing grammatical categories so early in the poem, he insists that the act of writing poetry is primarily a linguistic act of predication. The poem begins with the verb, with the desire to act; the verbs Jonson proposes, once purged of their Petrarchan associations, are highly moral. The parallel triplets suggest some relationship between the uncompleted moral action of the verbs and the hovering, unfocused adjectives, which take up the rest of the poem to the concluding couplet. Action, especially the kind of moral action Jonson demands from poetry, depends on the linguistic act of judgment contained in the predication of the adjective, the ascriptive function of linking adjective with noun, quality with substance. Comparing the moral qualities suggested by the ascriptive adjectives ("yet more good then great," "not brighter rise," "I meant each softest vertue, there should meet, / Fit in that softer bosome to reside") implies an act of judgment which can only be completed by locating these qualities in some substance, in Bedford or Penshurst or Sir Robert Wroth. And the poem enacts this search for substance, for the thing which corresponds to the word. The middle twelve lines of "Bedford" present unrealized qualities, adjectives not attached to any person. jonson's persona, his speaker-poet, thinks this person must be created, but for Jonson himself and for the reader these lines amount to a search. In the final couplet this search is concluded, not in a world of Petrarchan Delias and Dianas feigned by the poet, but in a world of fact, of historical persons with last names and local addresses.

As the poems to the Earl of Pembroke, Lucy, Countess of Bedford, and Lady Mary Wroth demonstrate, many of Jonson's poems of praise proceed from his recognition of the limit of the poet's powers. The poet succeeds only when he acknowledges the realities of the quotidian world; when he attempts to create a realm of pure ideality, he fails. Thus Jonson employs the slightest of epideictic forms, the epigram. The etymology of the word "epigram" reflects its origin as inscription, literally attached to the subject upon which it commented, an origin, and a dependence, which the epigram never outgrew. Even after it abandoned its particular setting, its physical link to its subject, the epigram remained dependent on it. This dependence is reflected by the importance of the epigram's title or lemma; the title invokes the particular circumstances of the epigram, its absent subject, linking it irrevocably to some site or locus. And Jonson, if anything, strengthens the epigram's intrinsic dependence on the world outside of the poem. Not only does he insist upon the pallor of the fictive when it is held up to the real, but he reduces the epigram itself to a form of naming, until the poem merely traces the process of discovering the subject already announced in the lemma: "My Muse bad, Bedford write, and that was shee." The epigram, the poetic act, becomes superfluous, a mere repetition of its title. And Jonson recognizes this when he writes "To Robert Earle of Salisburie":

His repeated concern with naming in the epigrams reflects his awareness of the irreducible distance between subject and poem, words and things, as well as his desire to equate them, to make the poem a perfect mirror of the real world, a true equivalent of its subject. In the act of naming, language circumvents its own inherent duplicity by establishing a uniquely perfect correspondence between word and object. Basically, names are circular. "In the code of English," writes Roman Jakobson, "'Jerry' means a person named Jerry … the name means anyone to whom this name is assigned…. The general meaning of such words as pup, mongrel, or hound could be indicated by abstractions like puppihood, mongrelness, or houndness, but the general meaning of Fido cannot be qualified in this way. To paraphrase Bertrand Russell, there are many dogs called Fido, but they do not share any property of 'Fidoness'" ["Shifters, Verbal Categories, and the Russian Verb," Selected Writings, II: Word and Language, 1971]. In proper names language assumes a unique neutrality, a reduction to the level of pure counterness. Names reveal the arbitrary nature of the verbal sign, its purely conventional relation to the concept it designates. Small children often have trouble with names because they do not set off a class of attributes. Introduced to a second person named John, they search for some shared quality of John-ness ("You don't look like John") or reject the impostor altogether ("You aren't John"). Having learned that common nouns imply qualities (mongrelness from mongrel), they expect the same of proper nouns. But names lack the common noun's ability to generate concepts. What they gain in the designating function they lose in the conceptual function; they are more specific than common nouns, more precise in their pointing, but less general. (When names are turned into common nouns, they take the indefinite article: a Quisling rather than the Quisling.) In naming, then, language refers to itself. Names are language at its most purely diacritical; like the phonemes they are made of, they signify simple difference. To Jonson names are valuable because they designate so precisely. They provide the poet with a paradigm of unambiguous reference, a model of contact with the world outside of his poem.

What Jonson's poetry is, then, is a poetry which tests poetry, a search for a point of contact between the realms of poetic language and ordinary reality. To Jonson, poetry's visionary capability is called into question by its inability to find its visions confirmed by nature. He consciously restricts praise to its humblest vehicle, the epigram, while redefining the epigram as a superfluous act of naming, all in order to establish the poem's correspondence to a nonverbal reality. hisrediscovery of Martial's form of the epigram is the result of a generic search for a poetry of reference linked to its origins in the realm of common experience. Reducing that form to mere naming results from a similar search conducted within language. The epigram is a genre of designation; naming locates the same designating function within language. Jonson resorts to both to test poetry, to demonstrate that it does refer. Already poesis has been redefined. It no longer means "making" in the sense of creating, the act of envisioning an imaginative kingdom of words, a heterocosm within language. Jonson admires the poet like Spenser who describes a realm of Platonic ideas beyond our imperfect sublunary existence. But he is uncomfortable with this kind of poet, with Sidney's conception of the poet, advanced in the Apologie for Poetrie, as a Maker not "captived to the truth of a foolish world" but free to people realms of his own making. Sidney attempts to answer Plato's objection that the poet, like the artist, merely imitates what the eye sees, that he is slavishly tied to the senses and unable to transcend the brazen stuff of nature. Sidney's poet is a true legislator of the imagination, a true metaphysician, not tied to the contingencies of nature and history and hence related by lineal descent to prophet and seer, to Orpheus and Holy David. Jonson retreats from this position under pressure. Poetry for him is a moral language related to the orator's, taking its authority not ab numine, from divine inspiration, but from its correspondence to the moral realities of the world. his poet is an arbiter in the court of public morals, not a seer. His gold must be sifted from nature's brass, not created anew through the poet's alchemy.

Jonson's implicit defense of the poet is unlike Sidney's because the poet comes under a different kind of attack from a different quarter. Plato attacks the poet for mastering illusions rather than forms. The poet is inferior to the philosopher because he deals in deceptions; even the lowly artisan knows more about the table he builds than the poet or painter who represents it. Later in the seventeenth century it will be these artisans and mechanics, that strange alliance of Puritans and Baconians, who lead the assault on mere verbiage in natural philosophy, the pulpit, and poetry. But Jonson, who knew Bacon at James's court and defended him as "the marke and acme of our language" whose works "may be compar'd, or preferr'd, either to insolent Greece or haughty Rome" in Timber: or Discoveries, in some sense anticipates the scientific revolution that sweeps England during the century. His reduction of the epigram to the act of naming reflects his awareness of the separation of fact and value. Facts require language, and poets, to express their values; the locus requires the inscription to make it speak. Pure designation fails to solve this epistemological problem, to locate qualities in substances, values in facts. Qualities are abstractions; they belong to the realm of mind and therefore to language. In their linguistic form, as adjectives, their designation is weaker than the designation of a name. An epigram like "Lucy Countesse of Bedford" turns the poetic act into a syntactical act of linkage, grammatical predication; it couples adjective with proper noun. The poem begins with copulatory intent; the poet's frustrated desire to act, to predicate, shows itself in his verbal phrases: "I thought to forme," "I meant to make," and the verbal triplet "to honor, serue, and loue." Grammatically, these infinitives suspend predication; they describe a frustrated intention. The middle of the poem, beginning with the corresponding adjectival triplet "faire, and free, and wise" (5), catalogues the qualities the poet wants to predicate. The final couplet completes the predication suspended in the infinitives while providing a grammatical paradigm for the epigrams: "Such when I meant to faine, and wish'd to see" (17) returns to the infinitives which open the poem, contrasting visionary experience ("faine") with ordinary perception ("see"). The Muse then supplies the missing proper noun, the grammatical designation necessary to complete predication ("My Muse bad, Bedford write"), and the poem concludes with a poem-in-little, a grammatical model of predication ("that was shee") in which one pronoun designates qualities, the other substance.

Significantly, "Lucy Countesse of Bedford" sets up much the same hierarchy of grammatical categories that Bacon advances in the Novum Organum in 1620. There Bacon argues that words contain "certain degrees of distortion and error" and can be arranged accordingly: "One of the least faulty kinds is that of names of substances, especially of lowest species and well-deduced (for the notion of chalk and of mud is good, of earth bad); a more faulty kind is that of actions, as to generate, to corrupt, to alter; the most faulty is of qualities (except such as are the immediate objects of the sense) as heavy, light, rare, dense, and the like" (Novum Organum I.lx). Bacon's well-known antipathy to language is based on the fluidity of its designation. Words fail to represent the truths of nature accurately and precisely. They fail to correspond to things not just on the level of the sentence or discourse but, more damagingly, on the level of the individual word. Words stand for concepts, "notions" in Bacon's terminology, rather than things. Thus, language is open to two kinds of errors; it includes words which are "either names of things which do not exist (… to which nothing in reality corresponds), or they are names of things which exist, but yet [are] confused and ill-defined and hastily and irregularly derived from realities" (I.lx).

This duplicity of names led Bacon's followers in the Royal Society to formulate their famous motto, nullius in verba, and attempt to create an artificial, universal language in which the name of the thing would also express its nature. Seth Ward, professor of astronomy at Oxford, proposed such a project in 1654: "Such a Language as this (where every word were a definition and contain'd the nature of the thing) might not unjustly be termed a naturall Language, and would afford that which the Cabalists and Rosycrucians have vainely sought for in the Hebrew, And in the names of things assigned by Adam" [Vindiciae Academiarum, quoted in R. F. Jones, "Science and Language in England of the Mid-Seventeenth Century," The Seventeenth Century, 1951]. The Royal Society's dismemberment of spoken languages in favor of artificial ones culminates in John Wilkins' Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language, sponsored by the Royal Society and published in 1668. Wilkins tried to create a system of symbols, compounded of straight lines, curves, loops, dots, and whirls, which would reveal the genus and species of each thing it designated. Imaginary creatures like fairies were given no symbols, insuring that language would represent material reality only. As Richard Foster Jones points out, Wilkins' undertaking carries Bacon's mistrust of language to its absurdum; it "representsthe lowest state to which language was degraded. Barred from representing the creations of the imagination and stripped of all connotations from past usage, language was to become nothing more than the dead symbols of mathematical equations."

Poets, of course, suffered most from the attack on language. As Jones insists, "More than to any other linguistic defect, scientists objected to a word's possessing many meanings or the same meaning as another word, and especially to the use of metaphor. The desire to make the word match the thing, to be in a strict sense a description of a thing or action, explains their exaggerated antipathy to metaphors and such figures of speech." What Bacon rediscovers, and what Jonson tries to overcome, is that language is not co-extensive with reality. Seventeenth-century poets and philosophers alike reëxperience the curse of Babel, the withdrawal of the Logos. "In its original form," writes Michel Foucault, "when it was given to men by God himself, language was an absolutely certain and transparent sign for things, because it resembled them. The names of things were lodged in the things they designated … just as the influence of the planets is marked upon the brows of men: by the form of similitude. This transparency was destroyed at Babel as a punishment for men. Languages became separated and incompatible with one another only insofar as they had previously lost this original resemblance to the things that had been the prime reason for the existence of language" [Michel Foucault, Les Mots et les Choses, 1966, trans, as The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, 1970]. In Eden words are things; the names that Adam gives to the animals in Genesis correspond to their natures. But since the fall of Babel values no longer reside in the names of things. In the fourth chapter of Leviathan, Hobbes gives the scriptural account a skeptical going over. He acknowledges that language has a divine origin: "The first author of Speech was God himself, that instructed Adam how to name such creatures as he presented to his sight." But he insists, in a diction that itself suggests a second loss of paradise, that since the fall of Babel our language is fallen, its Edenic perfection lost: "But all this language gotten, and augmented by Adam and his posterity, was again lost at the tower of Babel, when by the hand of God, every man was stricken for his rebellion, with an oblivion of his former language. And being hereby forced to disperse themselves into severall parts of the world, it must needs be, that the diversity of Tongues that now is proceeded by degrees from them" (London, 1651). Language is no longer a system of transparent signs but of arbitrary counters. Divorced from the first Word, fallen languages lose all traces of their divine origin and lapse into the babblings of human error. For Hobbes, as for Bacon, these words are mere counters, nothing in themselves: "The first use of names, is to serve for Markes, or Notes of remembrance" (p. 13); "words are wise mens counters, they do but reckon by them: but they are the mony of fooles, that value them by the authority of an Aristotle, a Cicero, or a Thomas" (p. 15). The kinds of meaning available through the manipulation of these counters came to seem more and more illusory. Their misuse, Hobbes states, has four results, two belonging to the word, two to the proposition: "First, when men register their thoughts wrong, by the inconstancy of the signification of their words: by which they register for their conceptions, that which they never conceived, and so deceive themselves. Secondly, when they use words metaphorically; that is, in another sense than that they are ordained for; and thereby deceive others. Thirdly, when by the word they declare that to be their will, which is not. Fourthly, when they use them to grieve one another." Hobbes is hardly alone in singling out metaphor for special abuse. The metaphoric properties of language, its ability to relate ideas and find resemblances among things through a tertium quid, a common term which applies to both parts of the metaphor in different senses, are no longer accepted as a valid means of penetrating the surfaces of things. For Bacon this use of a common name for different objects or actions becomes the primary occasion for error, the source of much of the deficiency of learning. "The Idols of the Market-place are the most troublesome of all," he writes in the Novum Organum, "idols which have crept into the understanding through the alliance of words and names" (I.lix). A word is "nothing else than a mark loosely and confusedly applied to denote a variety of actions which will not bear to be reduced to any constant meaning" (I.lx), one name applied indifferently to things which are not of the same nature [Foucault, The Order of Things]. Thus words suggest phantom relationships between things which have no other likeness except the likeness of their names.

Jonson had dealt comically with this kind of purely linguistic control over nature in The Alchemist, where magic masquerades as science and things vibrate with the hermetic affinities and quintessences, secrets that can be unlocked with cabbalistic incantations. Face and Subtle are Jonson's linguistic entrepreneurs, purveyors of discredited metaphors to Sir Epicure Mammon, the man of imagination manqué. Jonson's epigrams, committed to matching qualities to substances, facts to values, test the metaphoric potentialities of a fallen language, the adequacy of names, the extent to which they reveal value. The deficiencies make the location of value difficult; things do not announce their natures through their names; resemblance is more often a source of error than a form of truth. Jonson's naming epigrams, therefore, present the poet's tentative search for true metaphors, names which reveal values.

The Epigrams initiate Jonson's testing of metaphor. Occasionally Jonson finds an abundance of allegorical names, names which are words as well as counters. These word-names identify both quality and substance, the individual and his nature, simultaneously; they repair the division between concrete fact and abstract value present in language since the fall of Babel. Epigram XCI, "To Sir Horace Vere," opens:

In Latin, Vere means "truly"; with its English pronunciation, the name also puns on Latin vir. But it is not the "romane sound, but romane vertue" present in the name that excites Jonson. Here language is transparent, a system of signatures. As in allegory, name is also word, and Vere's name corresponds to his nature, announcing the existence both of an individual and a virtue, the unique (Vere) and the abstract (vir, veritas, virtu). Name identifies both the concrete and the universal and ties the Roman quality of veritas to the man. Language functions metaphorically, and the resemblances of sound and spelling reveal a deeper identity between Vere and Rome.

But names like Vere's, names which contain abstractions and which therefore potentially identify quality as well as substance, seem mere accidents. Words or names seldom announce essences; reality is only intermittently allegorical, and attempts to read it as such usually end, like Mammon's, in delusion. Even when presented with allegorical names Jonson remains cautious. The derivation of Lucy from the Latin lux or lucifer provides Jonson with his opening invention in Epigram XCIV, "To Lucy, Countesse of Bedford, with Mr. Donnes Satyres": "LUCY, you brightnesse of our spheare, who are / Life of the Muses day, their morning-starre!" But the epigram turns on the Countess' patronage of Satire, an act which Jonson sees as proof of a moral nature. Here a metaphorical name, a linguistic revelation, is incidental to the poem's discovery of the subject's value. And in Epigram CIII, "To Mary Lady Wroth," Jonson passes up a metaphorical given name to concentrate on the Sidney family name. Mary means "exalted," according to William Camden, Jonson's friend and master at Westminster School [Remaines Concerning Britain, 1637]. But Jonson instead structures the poem around the relationship between appearance and reality, inner and outer beauty, to question whether appearances can function as signs announcing meanings:

The poem raises the problem of identifying values in a world of fact: how well can one correlate spirit and flesh, physical appearance and moral worth? Jonson couches the problem in terms borrowed from the Neoplatonists' dogma that physical beauty reflects moral beauty, that the light of the soul shines through the eyes. But he sees the spirit as locked in the flesh, unable to shine through. Even in the clearest cases, like Lady Wroth's, only a part of that spiritual radiance, a "twi-light of [the] sprite," is available to the senses. That is enough to identify Lady Wroth, Sir Philip Sidney's niece, as a Sidney, but the recognition of her moral worth depends on family resemblance, on the poet's recognition of her nurture, not her nature. Her name, not her beauty, reveals her goodness; name, not appearance, functions as emblem, "the imprese of the great." Like language, the visible world seldom embodies its moral worth, its essential meaning, in its appearance. To stress this, Jonson excuses himself from the symbolic Petrarchan blazon:

To Jonson the physical world does not reveal its essence symbolically, through its appearance. The Petrarchan invention of finding "characters," emblematic representations of moral qualities, in the lady's appearance becomes "lowdest praisers" but not serious poets. It is a form of false wit, of wasted ingenuity. Like language the visible world is seldom a system of signs or hieroglyphs to Jonson.

Jonson's distrust of resemblance as a form of knowledge, a device for extracting value from the world of facts, severely limits his metaphorical resources. Even when presented with a name that seems to declare a moral genealogy, Jonson draws back from full-scale metaphoric identification. In "To Susan Countesse of Montgomery," Jonson writes:

This coincidence of names, biblical Susanna and contemporary Susan, seems to offer some clue to the Countess' qualities, even to allude to some divine allegory working through history, but Jonson is unable to read it. Jonson plays with the possibilities offered by the resemblance, but his praise resides only in the half-serious way in which he entertains the possible similitudes his imagination suggests. The hint that divine purposes are being revealed remains only a hint, a fantasy, and Jonson's exegesis stops short of identifying the Countess' role in history: "Iudge they, that can: Here I haue rais'd to show / A picture, which the world for yours must know" (13–14). Metaphor is discovered, developed, and then declined.

Jonson's rejection of his central metaphors in "To Mary Lady Wroth" and "To Susan Countesse of Montgomery" points up his sense of the dangers of resemblance, the difficulty of distinguishing true metaphor from false. In fact, in both poems he equates this rejection with the value of his praise. To Lady Wroth he apologizes for his reluctance to catalogue her virtues through her "parts," as "lowdest praisers" perhaps would do. But in his concluding couplet he insists: "My praise is plaine, and where so ere profest, / Becomes none more then you, who need it least." The plainness of his praise, his refusal to spin the fantastic metaphors of a more ornate style, is his highest praise; its value as praise derives from the poet's metaphoric restraint, and this restraint is the touchstone of Jonson's style. In his epigram to the Countess of Montgomery, Jonson declines the invention, the strategy of praise, that her name offers, leaving the question of its significance to rasher poets; the value of his poem resides rather in the accuracy of its portrait, "which the world for yours must know." Here, as in the epigrams to Lady Wroth and the Countess of Bedford, Jonson argues that its equivalence to its subject verifies his praise. And in the majority of his epigrams, what Jonson dramatizes is the poet's selection of equivalents to reveal his subject's inner nature. The act of praising, even the act of writing poetry, becomes an act of selection, of discriminating between false and true metaphors. In this act Jonson's style, its representation of the poet through his voice in the poem, functions as his primary instrument of discrimination. The poet's voice, firmly rooted in the world of fact, tests the metaphors that imagination and tradition provide. The Epigrams offer one instance of this testing; "To Penshurst," which concerns itself with literary tradition more fully, offers another.

The country house poem that initiates the kind in English, "To Penshurst" (II of The Forest) is also a poem of praise. As in Jonson's shorter poems of praise, the real praise resides in the poem's tone of careful discrimination. Behind "Penshurst" lie Martial's epigrams, especially his praise of Faustinus' Baian villa (III.lviii). And through Martial Jonson is able to celebrate a community which combines nature and nurture, Edenic innocence and classical learning. His details function simultaneously as description and allusion, acknowledging Penshurst's place in the real world while linking it, through his use of Martial, to Rome and its culture. Jonson expects his audience to catch both meanings, to note his Latin sources, and yet to acknowledge the essential seriousness in the poet's use of these hyperbolic topoi from the tradition of retirement poetry. Behind the "Bright eeles" that "leape on land, / Before the fishes, or into his hand" (37–38), for example, Jonson expects his audience to recognize both the lamprey from Martial's praise of the sea resort at Formiae, where "natat ad magistrum delicata muraena," and the presence of an Edenic reciprocity between man and nature, a natural fecundity so overwhelming that it justifies the sense of the hyperbole. These two meanings reinforce each other, and the presence, however slight, of Rome and the earthly paradise in the poem tempers its wit and redeems its hyperboles.

The structure of the poem can best be described as a search, conducted through different generic styles, for an adequate language of praise, a poetic style which will allow Jonson to express the values he finds in Penshurst without compromising its locus in the world of fact. Jonson's title, and his turning to Martial for so many of the poem's details, stress the poem's origin in inscription. But the poem's concern with the natural world, and especially with man's relations with nature, forces it into a complex relationship with the more fictive poetic genres of pastoral and georgic. In "Penshurst" Jonson describes a landscape in which real and ideal meet. The poem reveals him drawing on different generic resources to link that ideality to the real world. In the course of "Penshurst" genres are juxtaposed and revalued as Jonson searches for a decorum which will accommodate the several kinds of experience—literary, social, religious—that Penshurst embodies. At the same time, the poem shows Jonson trying to clarify his own attitude toward the literary traditions of the Renaissance, its return to fictive landscapes of pure symbol like pastoral, realms of pure value sanctified by the poets who dwelled in them but with only the most tenuous link to the world of fact.

"To Penshurst" opens with an eight-line part announcing two themes, the search for a language of praise and the conception of poet as arbiter. Here Jonson's syntactical habit of discrimination by negatives places Penshurst in a satiric context, anticipating how Pope will adapt the country house poem. Penshurst lacks the ostentation of other country houses; its value is hardly apparent, not embodied in an "enuious show" of wealth:

These lines present the problem of discriminating values hardly accessible to the sense which Jonson faced in the epigrams. As a building Penshurst is unimpressive; it does not proclaim its value in marble or gold. Subtly, in his diction, Jonson hints here that the values immanent in Penshurst are spiritual, invisible. Penshurst is "reuerenc'd" not for itself, but for its seat in the natural world, its marks of soil, air, wood, and water. Its value lies in its relationship to nature, not in its pillars orgold. And Jonson's negative definition points to the poetic and ethical difficulty of defining that value: It is easier to say what Penshurst is not than what it is. His negative definition acts as a metaphor for the poem's real subject, the act of discriminating value that the poet finally shares with the Sidney family, while suggesting the difficulty of finding a language or style which will permit Jonson to capture the invisible values of Penshurst.

Jonson first attempts to draw on literary resources. Invoking the mythological figures of pastoral, Jonson presents the landscape as a locus of unseen presences, a landscape of spirit as well as fact. These nature deities, though, inhabit a recognizable landscape, one located firmly in the empirical world, and not the generalized pleasance or locus amœnus of pastoral. Natives of Arcadia, these deities have been set down in Kent. Nymphs and satyrs frequent the oak where Lady Leicester began her labor pains: "And thence, the ruddy Satyres oft prouoke / The lighter Faunes, to reach thy Ladies Oke" (17–18). The Muses meet at a tree dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney; Pan and Bacchus feast on the Sidneys' "Mount." At Penshurst the realms of poetry and history miraculously intersect. The mythopoeic style allows Jonson to name the landscape's values; the pagan gods appear as the manifestation of their gifts [Maynard Mack, "Secretum Iter," in The Garden and the City: Retirement and Politics in the Later Poetry of Pope, 1731–1743, 1969], as the embodiments of a nature nearly strong enough to take on physical form:

Thy Mount, to which the Dryads doe resort,
Where PAN and BACCHUS their high feasts haue made,
Beneath the broad beech, and the chest-nut shade.
(10–12)

The pagan gods identify the numen lurking in the shade of Penshurst's forests.

By superimposing one landscape on another, the purely fictive landscape of gods, nymphs, and satyrs on the actual landscape of Penshurst, Jonson defines its ideality while testing the reality of the literary tradition. Defining that tradition is difficult. Jonson adapted this section of "Penshurst" from one of Martial's epigrams (IX.LXI) celebrating Julius Caesar through an idealized description of a grove of trees planted by Caesar at his estate at Tartessus [William Dinsmore Briggs, "Source-Material for Jonson's Epigrams and Forest," CP, 11 (1916)]. To Martial, writing over one hundred years after Caesar's death and deification, the presence of nymphs and dryads marked the site as sacred, a point of contact between gods and men sanctified by the man-god Caesar. hisdeities mark off the grove as numinous, a spot discontinuous with the rest of the landscape because of its associations with Caesar. Martial sets off the grove by filling it with figures from pastoral:

These pastoral figures emphasize the discontinuity; they stress Caesar's divinity, his difference from other men. Through the pastoral Martial moves from a locus in the real world, Tartessus, into the imaginative landscape of Arcadia. The movement in "Penshurst," however, is more complex. From Martial Jonson learned the technique of invoking other, more numinous genres to identify values in the course of an epigram. But Jonson uses pastoral in "Penshurst" to suggest the essential identity of literary and real landscapes. Rather than separating the zone of the human and historical, the realm of fact, from the zone of the literary and symbolic as Martial does, Jonson superimposes them. The Sidneys share their walks with the Dryads, participating in the same natural rhythms of birth and feasting as these wood spirits. And through these pastoral allusions Jonson is able to show the harmony with the natural world that the middle section of the poem continues.

But Jonson's graceful compliment to his hosts does not stop there. The mythological figures in this section of the poem function not only as divinized forms of nature but also as allusions to a literary heritage with its origins in Rome and Roman culture. Penshurst thus stands in perfect harmony with both human history and nature. It is both a refuge from the world of affairs and a monument to classical culture. Here the Latin deities serve as metaphor both for a relationship with the landscape and with a cultural tradition; they are no mere ornaments, but part of the primary experience of the poem, mediating between natural and literary landscapes and stressing their essential oneness at Penshurst. Through Martial and his use of the pastoral kind, Jonson insists upon a rough equivalence, an important symmetry, between literary experience and all other kinds of experience. Through Martial Jonson verifies not only his sense of Penshurst as a mysterious merging of nature and culture, but also the value of his literary heritage.

In this first section, borrowing a domesticated version of pastoral from Martial, Jonson superimposes natural and literary landscapes to confirm Penshurst's claims to ideality. But this mythopoeic mode is essentially a foreign one to Jonson. Penshurst is the "resort" of Dryads, not their home, and Penshurst itself is capable of announcing its own value without relying on the poet's importation of a fictive landscape. Thus pastoral gives way to a more georgic mode. Now the countryside provides a norm for human behavior:

Here Jonson's controlling pattern of imagery seems to arise from the landscape before him. In this description the realm of fact unfolds its meaning. The images of "serue," "tribute," "crowne," and "yeeld" establish man as the monarch of creation and provide a model for the tenant-lord relationship in human society that Jonson treats later in the poem. Nature itself seems ordered; Jonson's description reveals "an underlying harmonic pattern in the scene" [Paul M. Cubeta, "A Jonsonian Ideal: 'To Penshurst'," Philogical Quarterly 42 (1963)] that seems to come as much from nature as from the poet:

Nature reassumes its Edenic transparency; physical details can be read as natural metaphors reuniting fact and value. And the entire landscape reveals a profound orientation toward man.

The last detail, significantly, is reminiscent of a detail from Virgil's panegyric of the philosopher-poet and husbandman in the second Georgic. There the happy man "quos rami fructus, quos ipsa volentia rura / sponte tulere sua, carpsit" (II.500–01). And as in georgic proper, the metaphors that arise from Jonson's description of the landscape provide models for man's relationship with man. At Penshurst nature willingly sacrifices itself to serve its lord; the forests "prouide" game, the Medway provides "tribute fish." And this willing service is mirrored in the tenant's relationship with his master. Here too there is no enforced tribute:

The essence of georgic sections of "Penshurst" lies in the way it presents its emblematic relationship between human society and its model in the natural world. Jonson structures his poem to present his scenes of human society as the extensions of lessons learned from nature. The motives and values in the natural world identified through Jonson's descriptive metaphors provide "Penshurst" with an inner inevitability of design. The mythopoeic mode of the opening section, which points to the existence of a "spirit" in the natural world, a presence of intention and design in the natural world which in turn requires the presence of Jonson's classical deities to give that presence form, gives way to a georgic mode, in which similar values seem inherent in the very physical countenance that nature presents to man. The values that Jonson finds in nature—fecundity and willing service—point in turn to certain human values: hospitality, generosity, mutual respect. These themes, set in patterns of imagery which link sections of description, provide models for the interpretation of what the landscape teaches. But Jonson never insists on the validity of these models; his evaluation of Penshurst does not ultimately rest on the motifs arising out of the poem's descriptive sections, either on the poem's fictions or its metaphors, but on the explicit evaluation inthe poet's own voice with which the poem ends. "Penshurst," despite its attempts to domesticate pastoral and georgic as instruments of discrimination, reverts in the end to genres, Horatian epistle and epigram, which stress the poet's speaking voice.

Again, for Jonson, the poem reduces itself to the ascriptive act, the act of uniting word with thing. In "Penshurst" Jonson meets the epistemological threat created by the disjunction between word and thing by evolving a poetic strategy which justifies the use of a fictive, ascriptive language. "Penshurst" uses the same structure as the epigrams, but with different terms. In the epigrams words without specific reference, an adjectival rhetoric of praise, are linked to the world through the poet's presence in the poem, through the act of recognizing value in the world outside of the poem, to which the poem refers and from which it derives its authority. The poem of praise thus presents an intersection of subjective quality, the adjective, and objective substance, the person or place. In "Penshurst" generic terms replace the grammatical categories of "Lucy Countesse of Bedford." The pastoral genre takes over the ascriptive function of the adjective; the pagan gods, names of things to which nothing in reality corresponds, stand for the numinous qualities of the landscape. The georgic middle section of the poem, like the verbs in "Lucy Countesse of Bedford," serves a mediating, copulatory function; it provides a generic model for the linking of real and ideal, fact and value. But like the epigram, "Penshurst" is completed only by a return to naming, a generic return to the epigram form. Here, what Jonson does is to insist on the poet's role in tying quality to substance, on his individual role as arbiter.

The poet's presence in "Penshurst" is pervasive. Jonson lays a place for himself at Sidney's table (the poet is uninvited in Martial's description of Faustinus' Baian villa, from which Jonson takes this section of "Penshurst," and hardly present in the poem). And Jonson's deviation from Martial is highly significant. hisphysical presence is not literary allusion; he is not there as the voice of Latin culture, but again as a man. The figure he presents of himself and of his table manners emphasize that he is no abstract type of the Poet. Once more, as in the negative references at the beginning and end of the poem, references beyond the Kentish landscape which emphasize the poet's moral choice, Jonson acknowledges an external world of things to which his words must correspond. hisknowledge does not have to be limited to the poem to sustain its world; the poem, while stressing those Edenic qualities of the locus amœnnus, while using the simple as a model of the complex, is not pastoral. And, too, the poet's presence shapes his metrics. Jonson told Drummond that "He had written a discourse of Poesie both against Campion & Daniel especially this Last, wher he proues couplets to be the brauest sort of Verses, especially when they are broken, like hexameters and that crosse Rimes and Stanzaes (becaus the purpose would lead him beyond 8 lines to conclude) were all forced." Jonson's couplets are syntactically open, so that the couplet form does not commit him to more lines than his subject requires [Wesley Trimpi, Ben Jonson's Poems, 1962], and his use of caesura is also quite free, as the last lines of "Penshurst" demonstrate. Thus Jonson's prosody is his own, forged by the requirements of his subject and not the property of his verse form. his rhythms, enjambements, and caesura placement are all dictated by the speaking voice, which is heard through the couplet.

In this passage lies the essence of Jonson's verse. Jonson's rhythms slow to a formal cadence, and his couplets close. hismoral peroration is delivered in the simplest diction, without much verbal patterning. There is a careful choice, almost a hesitation (produced by lingering on the monosyllables and the double caesurae in lines like 90 and 95) in Jonson's use of language; the rhythm creates the sense of a man pausing over almost every word: "Thy lady's noble, fruitfull, chaste withall." And through this style Jonson can point outward from the poem toward satire. He is speaking in his own voice, and through him the world beyond the Kentish countryside is present: "his children thy great lord may call his owne: / A fortune, in this age, but rarely knowne" (91–2). This brief hint of a corruption outside the garden gate provides the perspective in which the values of Penshurst become meaningful [J. C. A. Rathmell, "Jonson, Lord Lisle, and Penshurst," ELR 1 (1971)]. Another form of negative definition, like the opening lines of the poem which also contrast Penshurst to the great world outside, these lines refer to a world beyond the poem, outside of it, which verifies Penshurst. Jonson permits himself no retreat into the isolation of a classical heritage or a pastoral refuge. And the value of a Penshurst education, Jonson suggests, stems from its easy inclusion of the accomplishments of the court and public worlds, "The mysteries of manners, armes, and arts." Jonson finds his own values at Penshurst, and it is these that he praises.

"To Penshurst" presents Jonson's search for a language of praise that will discriminate the invisible values present at Penshurst and yet tie those values to a world of fact. To do this Jonson creates a poem which recapitulates literary history, moving through the mythopoeic mode of the poem's first section, where the pagan gods are superimposed on the Penshurst landscape to suggest its ability to sustain the values of the pastoral, to the georgic middle section, in which the landscape itself is read as a system of signs, a repository not only of intrinsic meanings but also of intrinsic values, ones which profoundly influence the human sphere at Penshurst. And finally, the poem ends in the familiar epigrammatic mode, in that realm of naming and plain speaking in which the Epigrams proper are set. Here the discrimination of values takes the form not of myth or metaphor, but of the poet speaking in his own voice. The poem's central metaphor, its praise of the Sidney family through their estate and the values that arise from the poet's presentation of their estate, gives way to the explicit discrimination of epigram. The Sidneys replace their landscape as emblems of their virtue, and finally they become the poem itself, its primary metaphor: "Reade, in their vertuous parents noble parts, / The mysteries of manners, armes, and arts" (97–8). Praising is reduced again to naming; the Sidneys become the text of their own panegyric, flesh made poem.

"To Penshurst" enacts to a great degree the fate of the fictive classical genres in seventeenth-century poetry. Acknowledged as realms of value, they are nonetheless discarded as irrelevant in a world of fact. "Penshurst" initiates the movement, common in the seventeenth century, of turning from the creation of a second world of literary symbols, the heterocosms of myth and pastoral, as a statement of the values inherent in experience to the creation of a dramatic style, a speaking voice, which dramatizes the poet's selection, and rejection, of false resemblances. New classical genres are imported—Horatian epistle and satire, non-narrative epigram like Martial's rather than the looser Greek Anthology form, and georgic poetry which verifies the emblems it extracts from the landscape with passages of "historical retrospection or incidental meditation" in the poet's own voice—genres which are formally defined in terms of style and meter rather than in terms of their phenomenological content, their creation of self-sufficient worlds. The movement of Jonson's poem is outward from these self-sufficient literary worlds into the world of fact. The poem traces a slow unfolding, a turning of the terms of art from its own world of myth to the poet's world of history. Pastoral opens to georgic; the superimposition of landscapes of fact (the Penshurst landscape) and value (the pastoral landscape of pagan deity and sacred grove) gives way to a genre in which value seems immanent in the world of fact. And as georgic gives way to epigram, Jonson presents the Sidneys themselves as emblems. He reunites the realms of fact and value by creating a plain style which stresses the poet's central role of discrimination in the poem; this is Jonson's great contribution to his contemporaries. Finally, he domesticates the literary tradition, by finding, as in "Penshurst," continuities between the poet's golden world and nature's brazen one.