Donne's verse epistles have not received much notice from the awesome critical industry centred on his work. Any explanation of this surprising fact would include reference to factors such as an assumed lack of poetic richness in these poems, the assumption that patronage poetry is too conventional to merit serious critical attention, and perhaps even some embarrassment at a deification of living patronesses.¹ But we believe that the most significant factor is an unrecognized one: namely the lack of a descriptive and theoretical framework within which the real interest of these poems can be perceived and analysed. In this essay we attempt to establish such a framework and carry out an analysis which will locate, describe, and account for versions of the self emerging within these verse letters. In the course of this critical inquiry we will build on John Danby's hints about the explicitly social basis of so much seemingly purely metaphysical speculation.² We hope to develop an approach which through its very attention to the minute movements of a particular text reveals how these only become intelligible when inserted in a wider context which includes the writer's precise social situation. We hope that the critical method being evolved here will ultimately be explored in connection with the whole corpus of Donne's work.

I

In 1608 Donne wrote a poem beginning, “You have refin'd mee,” a verse epistle to his new patroness Lucy, Countess of Bedford, in what seems to have been the most personally testing period of his life.³ Although Donne himself includes the comment that “darke texts need notes,” his editors and critics do not seem to have found this a particularly interesting poem. However, we think it both demands and rewards scrutiny. These are the first two stanzas:

MADAME,
You have refin'd mee, and to worthyest things
          (Vertue, Art, Beauty, Fortune,) now I see
Rarenesse, or use, not nature value brings;
And such, as they are circumstanc'd, they bee.
          Two ills can ne're perplexe us, sinne to'excuse;
          But of two good things, we may leave and chuse.
Therefore at Court, which is not vertues clime,
          (Where a transcendent height, (as, lownesse mee)
Makes her not be, or not show) all my rime
Your vertues challenge, which there rarest bee;
          For, as darke texts need notes: there some must bee
          To usher vertue, and say, This is shee.(4)

In the editorial glosses on these stanzas they come across as being fairly unproblematic. Grierson finds Donne's introduction of himself in “as, lownesse mee” (stanza two), “quite irrelevant” (and is more unsettled than Milgate), yet he assumes that he has solved any minor enigmas, and the lines seem not to need extended commentary.⁵ However, on closer inspection there are important and unresolved tensions in these lines. The countess is alchemist, a near creator (as lines 21-22 of the poem make explicit) through whose agency the poet can now perceive things as they really are. This sets up a dichotomy between things as he perceives them now and things as he perceived them before. Now he sees that value is the product of contingent social relationships. Already there may be hints, clarified later in the poem, that value, being generated by rareness or use, is an aspect of market transactions. Even seemingly transcendent, platonic forms, Vertue, Art, Beauty, “worthyest things” indeed, get their worth in this way and so have to be placed in the same category as the thoroughly contingent sub-lunar abstraction, Fortune. But before his “refinement” he had assumed, in good idealist (platonic or stoic) fashion that value transcended the contingent placings of social practice; he had assumed that value was a reflection of the object or person's intrinsic nature, that, in his own words, “nature value brings.”

Such relativistic talk, appropriate to a market, may not surprise readers today. But when we recall that the poem is addressed to Lucy, and that Donne is overtly talking about her, the worthiest thing whom he is both worshipping and elegantly asking for patronage, it is, at the very least, a strange and rather risky compliment. After all, the poem implies that she is not inherently valuable, that her worthiness is a product of contingent social circumstances, and that her refining has given him perceptions of this kind. (The second stanza is connected to the first by the logical connector “Therefore,” thus removing any lingering doubts that the first stanza is also about Lucy.) The countess's value as one of the “worthyest things” paradoxically depends on her being “circumstanc'd” in a social situation where her attributes (virtues, it so happens) are most valuable precisely because they are rare, the court rather conspicuously not being the “clime” of virtue.

This does have a rationale and can be resolved once we see the structure of Donne's basic model here. He is actually working with a model which assumes the existence of two worlds or “climes.” One is a platonic clime in which Lucy exists with platonic forms, and which her usher-exegete has knowledge of. (This world of essences transcends all contingency and relativity, and so supersedes all notions of value deployed by social man.) A second clime is the present historical world, the world of the court, Mitcham, and Donne's frustrated daily existence, one where value is a function of contingent market relations, supply and demand, mere “circumstance.” It is in this second world that the countess is “worthyest,” most valuable, and it is here that Donne so desperately wishes to find employment as the official usher of the valued one. His role is to introduce the myopic courtiers to the rare (and useful?) worthy one. In this he himself gains value as the indispensable spectacles through which courtiers can perceive the rare and hidden riches of that dark text, Lucy. The “alienated intellectual” overcomes his alienation, finds community, wins employment and use as an essential mediator between the two climes.⁶ However, Donne fails to show us why the lower clime should value virtue, why this particular rare commodity should be desired by courtiers at all. The unexamined gap in his argument here is simply leapt over as he assumes, optimistically, that the second clime must find use and market value for representatives of the higher world.

Donne does not resolve the paradox in the way we have been doing, but wisely leaves it in its highly compressed form, with only hints that the very absence of virtue at the court makes the countess “worthyest” and endows both her and her usher-exegete with value. It is understandable enough that Donne should not have wanted to express the views we have described in this plain form, and so we already have sound reasons for a wish to darken the text. Of course, the double-edged nature of the paradoxical compliment to the countess could have been simply handled by leaving it out, thus obviating the danger of relativising the countess's virtue. Nevertheless, this would not have permitted Donne to introduce the important self-reference so well worked into a complex image of the relations between poet, patroness, society and ethical idealism. Here we have a non-trivial explanation for his desire to keep the text dark, one which offers an account of verbal processes and relevant social and psychological motivations.

We mentioned the significant degree of self-reference in the poem and this facet invites some further consideration, especially in the light of Donne's “egocentricity,” widely commented on by critics.⁷ The statement of this egocentricity is inevitably more complex here than in many of the Songs and Sonnets, where the poet-lover focuses on himself and his relations with a lover. This poem, however, is focused on the patroness, and since he delicately seeks patronage the relationship is one which needs most careful handling; not the time, one would think, for an overt display of egocentricity. In this connection it is interesting to note how the poem begins with a reference to himself. It does certainly bestow credit on the countess—she, as alchemist, has succeeded in refining him. Yet the image also turns Donne into the central object of attention, just as the alchemist's attention focuses on the materials he desires to transform. And as the success of the alchemist is defined by his success in refining the material, so the countess's success is defined in terms of her effectiveness in working on the present material, the poet. Thus at the very opening of the poem the overt focus on the patroness has been inverted and become part of a rather complicated self-referring process. Lines two and eight (the self-mentioning, which Grierson found “irrelevant”) again refer to him; so do lines nine, eleven and twelve. Without doubt there is a large enough amount of self-reference in the opening stanzas at least to attract one's curiosity.

In addition there are some peculiarities of reference, predominantly in the pronouns. Line one contains the two pronouns, you and mee: in the same line there is the “pronoun” worthyest things. Its reference is ambiguous: Donne has just been refined, so that one possible reference is mee. If he is included in the category of worthyest things, then he belongs to the same class as Lucy (you), another possible referent of this phrase. Worthyest things is plural in number, and so it can indeed refer to both Lucy and the poet. Presumably Donne intended the reference to be multiply ambiguous; at any rate it is not immediately clear, and in searching for an appropriate and permitted referent, the reference to the poet will arise, have to be assessed, and decided on. The fact that in the next line Donne glosses worthyest things as “Vertue, Art, Beauty, Fortune” shows that he acknowledged the need to provide a gloss. As we pointed out above, this list collapses platonic categories into the social and contingent clime of “Fortune,” relativizing and undercutting the platonic model. By the time we reach the end of the second line worthyest things has accumulated a wide range of possible references: “you,” “mee,” “you” and “mee,” “Vertue, Art, Beauty, Fortune.” All of these lead into “Fortune,” and are placed in the same category as Fortune, so that the relativizing tendency has become thoroughly pervasive.

The fourth line of the poem continues to draw on the multiple ambiguity under discussion: “And such, as they are circumstanc'd, they bee.” Here they may refer to all the referents mentioned. Another pronoun, such, is introduced. It in turn may refer to all three and to they; or it may pick out just one of these. If the latter, then we get at least the following readings: (1) Lucy (such r worthiest things r You), the countess, such as she is circumstanced so she is—as she is placed in the contingent social market of fortune, so she is valued, worthiest. (2) Donne (such r worthiest thing r me r refined), the poet, such as he is circumstanced so he is—as he is placed in Lucy's platonic world, as a new creature, so he is valued, worthiest. As he is placed in the contingent social market, so he is valued, as nothing. His appeal to Lucy is therefore that she should “translate” his worth in her platonic world, into a recognised use and hence value in the market, in the appropriate place: as an indispensable usher. The countess is well able to do this. So the reading as it stands is: I, as I am circumstanced so I am, as I am now placed in the social market of fortune so I am currently valued—as nothing.⁸ At this point the paradox, deploying the model of two climes, functions to give line four another, Donne's real, though covert, reading: I am (not as I am, but) as I am circumstanced. The paradox enables Donne to present simultaneously two versions of the self here: one, the platonic one covertly (I am as I am regardless of social valuation and placing); the other, the one constructed according to market values overtly (I am as I am circumstanced). He puts one against the other in a most complex and rather disturbing form, and asks Lucy to realize his worth in one “clime,” the platonic, as “value through use” in the other “clime,” that of contingent social situation and of fortune.

On the surface the statement is of course less complicated: the countess has refined him and now he sees that either rareness or use (being used by or of use to someone) brings value. It is precisely the patronage relationship which makes the poet useful to someone who can use him, and therefore valuable. Until he is used his identity is bestowed by his circumstances and, through no fault of his, or of nature, he is circumstanced such that he has no value.

Stanza two now becomes clearer. It refers to the countess but it also refers to Donne. At court he does not appear (either he is physically absent through having no position, or if there is not noticed) because he currently has no value. He places himself in a revealing structural relationship with the countess: her value does not appear at court owing to transcendent height, while his does not appear owing to an opposite lownesse. So the structural opposition links him firmly with her, in a link which comes close to an equation. This provides a perfect explanation for the difficulty Grierson recorded, and indeed it would be most odd if such a phrase appeared in one of Donne's patronage poems without precise significance and motivation. The concluding couplet gives us a final confirmation: this is about her and about him. She is the “darke text” (as is the poem, as is his motivation) and “darke texts need notes.”

We should ask what or whose need this is. As we noticed earlier, it is most obviously the potential audience of the text, the benighted courtiers. It is also the countess's need, she who is the “darke text” needs to be explicated if she is to be truly valued in the lower “clime.” She needs an exegete, like Donne. Lastly, it is Donne's need: exegetes need “darke texts,” and above all Donne needs to be an exegete, he needs to be of specific use to the countess and the community. Just as the “need” has to be explained, so too with the “must” in the same line. “Some must bee” refers to the exegete, implicitly Donne himself, so that this must bee seemingly has the force of an existential imperative, and it echoes the not be of line nine. That “not be” takes in both Lucy and Donne; how does the non-existent poet of line nine come into existence as the necessary exegete-usher of line eleven? By being employed: and this employment not only brings him into existence, creates him indeed (as lines 21-2 make explicit⁹), but also brings the countess's virtue into the social world, thus indirectly giving her existence and, as we saw earlier, value. This is an astonishingly delicate combination of begging and self-assertion, and the relations hinted at are very complex.¹⁰ Donne is the created creature, she the creator; he low, she high; he patronized, she patron; he exegete, she dark text; he usher, she virtue, he excluded, she included. Yet she too is excluded until he realises her social potential and value for her. Structurally Lucy and Donne are opposed and yet equated, transforms of each other creating each other from shared invisibility into apparent existence and social value.

II

We have by now accounted for the text's darkness. It lies in the double-layered model Donne uses to understand his complex relationship with his patroness and their mutual relations to the social world and value. But we need to go further. On this level the explanation has entailed an account of the supplicant's perception of himself, and we now wish to explore this perception in more depth. We have made clear the way the first two stanzas offer distinct and contrasting versions of the self. To recapitulate, one version of self thus refers an autonomous self to inherent values which would doubtless be recognized in a platonic utopia or by stoic and platonic individuals who have detached themselves from existing societies and are strong enough to pursue a Crusoelike existence (without dog or man Friday of course). The other version of self sees it as socially constructed and dependent, either through equal relationships (as those between friends) or the social relations of the market based on rareness, use and contingency. It is not difficult to believe that Donne could see these two versions of the self as competing and contradictory. But then, it is also plausible to see them as complementary, so that only those who do have inherent worth, participating in the platonic forms, ought to be usable, find employment and value. Such, however, is obviously not the case in the world which Donne strove so hard to convince about his marketable potential and use. For Donne these competing versions of self-identity became highly problematic and a constant, often agonized, preoccupation, in the period before his ordination.

The two stanzas with which we opened our discussion are thus legitimately seen as explorations of the self. The question of the poet's consciousness of this exploration is one which we have not treated here. Nor do we exclude a range of other possible readings of these stanzas, or for the rest of the patronage poems. But we are suggesting that this reading goes to the heart of these poems and points to their place in Donne's central preoccupations and problems. We believe these neglected poems have much to teach us about these preoccupations and the poetic and intellectual strategies with which Donne confronted them.¹¹

The double version of self we have been exploring certainly connects most of the verse epistles, for they are attempts to work out self-identity, polarizing or clustering around one or other of these two basic stances. Above all, it invites us to link abstract metaphysical problems with the concrete reality and pressures of the poet's existence.

One important feature we have touched on in our depiction of the versions of the self in “You have refin'd mee” can now be brought into prominence. We noted that in presenting contrary versions of self-identity and evaluation Donne envisaged his own level of being in a necessarily equivocal way. He does exist in some mode, but he needs refining, and even creation, by a patroness-alchemist; he does not exist or is not visible (lines 7-12) at court, yet he, or some, “must bee To usher vertue.” Later in the poem he defines himself as one of Lucy's “new creatures,” part of a “new world” created by her (lines 21-22). In other poems to patronesses this tendency becomes an overt assertion by Donne: that he is nothing. In “T'Have written then” he says (again to the Countess of Bedford), “nothings, as I am, may / Pay all they have, and yet have all to pay” (lines 7-8). Of course, line seven is paradoxical: the am asserts existence, I am; and syntactically the verb to be functions to relate entities to other entities or to qualities. That second function is prominent here: the classification of an individual, though he exists, as a nothing. Classifications are culturally and socially given, conventional and subject to historical change. Nevertheless they tend to assume the force of eternal, changeless forms. This is particularly so as the syntactic form X is Y is used to make classifications established by changing cultures and conventions (e.g. “I am a ratepayer”) as well as those relating to the impersonal, natural order (e.g. “The sun is a star”). In this way language blurs the distinction between the two kinds of statements and their reality-status. But over and above that any member of a society is socialized into sets of value systems which become “reality.” In other words, if we look at Donne's “actual” situation, even at this, his worst time, we cannot by any stretch of the imagination see him as nothing: a reasonably comfortable house in Mitcham, one or two servants, frequent trips to London, to influential friends who remain loyal and help in a host of ways, access to books, writing poetry which has an appreciative audience, no hunger. … To the landless labourer in Mitcham Donne would have seemed the opposite of “nothing.” But this only confirms the strength of the conventionally given quality of perception, which meant in Donne's case that not being of the court group was not being at all. For Donne therefore these lines do not have the force of paradox: being is defined in terms of membership of the group to which he aspires: creation is therefore a social act, the act of admitting, drawing in the individual to the group.

Nevertheless, no sooner has Donne offered a negative version of self reflecting his present social situation than he proposes a contrary version of the self as having a transcendental and valuable identity: “Yet since rich mines in barren grounds are showne, / May not I yeeld (not gold) but coale or stone?” (lines 11-12). Donne is certainly at the moment barren ground, in so far as he is anything at all. Yet in the same breath he assumes that he is also a rich mine. This draws, precisely in the ways we have shown before, on the versions of the self as having intrinsic value, whatever the social market value. But the image is mostly subtly chosen for it also informs the patron of the self's potential market value, however hidden that may be. The intrinsically valuable platonic, private and independent self turns out to be as much the property of the patron as the public social self. In specifying the kind of rich mine (line 12) it may be that Donne loses confidence, moving from coal to stone. But whatever the exact market value, this hidden self is certainly cashable. Indeed, he suggests the most valuable kind of mine: a gold mine (negation being the permissible way of articulating the nearly forbidden). Still, however high the self-estimation, however much he feels he has a self beyond the nothing which he is socially, the clash between secret hidden core and apparent social identity forces him to invoke an external agent to strip away this surface (where before it was to burn away impurities), to dig up the riches, so that he may “yeeld” the riches to someone else. Syntactically yield always occurs in forms such as “yielded something for / to someone,” where the someone is never I. Thus the image and the syntax are tied absolutely into use, commerce and markets. The social creator is here revealed as a potential and willing social user and exploiter, while creation turns out to be the discovery of market value in the human being. Conversely, the sense of nothingness, negation, has a social origin—namely, the absence of such exploitive use. Again, the metaphysics of annihilation, of being and of nothingness, the fundamental questions of identity raised in these poems find very tangible social explanation.

“Creation” becomes a specific term here, meaning admission to the desired social group. Some present members of such groups had membership from the beginning and did not need creation. But the process is a general one and may apply to any individual at any social level in relation to any coveted group. The only exception to this is the king, hardly surprising in the time of James I, Donne's ultimate patron, who proclaimed that kings “are not onely Gods Lieutenants vpon earth, and sit vpon Gods throne, but even by God himselfe they are called Gods.”¹² In the poem “To Sir H. W. at his going Ambassador to Venice,” the king fulfils the role of creator for Wotton: “And (how he may) makes you almost the same, / A Taper of his Torch, a copie writ / From his originall …” (lines 4-6). This view of the individual and society encourages one to ask whether it was a common mode of perception at that time or especially found in any specific group; or whether, for example, Donne's origins from an institutionally excluded group—the community of Roman Catholics—disposed him to view self in this way. Much more work on the lines we are suggesting will be necessary before satisfactory answers can be given.

The source of the creator's credentials could become problematic for anyone who is not totally content to accept the social order and the processes maintaining it. This is, in fact a constant concern in the epistles, and is the obverse of his anxiety about his own lack of being, his own lack of credentials. In the light of this consideration, lines such as these from the opening of “You have refin'd mee” take on a peculiarly bitter and ironic tone: “now I see / Rareness, or use, not nature value brings; / And such, as they are circumstanc'd, they bee.” It is the removal of his blindness which makes him see this unpalatable truth; the countess is indeed creator, though not because of her inherent virtues or nature but because this is how she happens to be circumstanced. The removal of his own blindness makes him see the more massive blindness of the social system to which he seeks admission. Donne's reiteration of the theme that the countess's virtue might go unrecognised (and so her value diminish) except for his good offices takes on a somewhat darker note in this context; here Donne covertly assumes for himself the role of creator. The situation is complex enough for Donne to see himself as nothing, as inherently valuable, and possibly as creator, all simultaneously. All these involved shifts are firmly related to a highly specific set of social relationships. Discussions which perpetually divorce the literary language, the psychological, and the social, will inevitably introduce grave distortions and prove limiting in disabling ways.

We have space to glance at only one more patroness poem, “To the Countesse of Salisbury” in 1614. The first half of this poem (“Faire, great, and good”) uses material from “A nocturnall upon S. Lucies day” and the two Anniversaries for Elizabeth Drury. Donne argues that “all is withered, shrunke, and dri'd / All Vertues ebb'd out to a dead low tyde,” with all striving for universal annihilation, “to draw to lesse, / even that nothing, which at first we were” (lines 1-21). In this state she, the patroness, like the Countess of Bedford or Elizabeth Drury is the female creative deity: “you come to repaire / Gods booke of creatures” (lines 7-8).¹³ And as we saw in “You have refin'd mee,” however much Donne may negate his being in response to the social situation he simultaneously puts an intrinsically valuable self as her seer and exegete (lines 31-6, 65-74). Yet, once more, this stage is superseded as he acknowledges that it is the countess herself who (like God here too) illuminates the dark text he is able to study. The poem concludes with a similar movement worked out in terms of a socially given blindness (lines 75-84). This is contrasted with an intuitive angel-like vision which transcends the lack of “social eyes” through inner illumination. Characteristically, Donne does not leave the matter here. Just as the angelic intuition is actually dependent on a higher power, so Donne's illumination depends on a higher power within the profane, social world—the Countess of Salisbury (lines 71-4, 79-82).¹⁴ Again metaphysical language and imagery actually mediates and transforms specific social relationships. To understand and describe this process is not reductive of Donne's art or his metaphysical stratagems: quite the reverse, we follow the full implications and subtlety of the art and metaphysics Donne is using to manage, under grave difficulties, the social situation which was absolutely central to his psychic, intellectual and poetic development.¹⁵

III

One way of grasping Donne's situation is in the terms proposed by Mark Curtis and Michael Walzer in their studies of intellectuals and their employment in Donne's England. Both historians point out that during the early Stuart period there was a group of intellectually trained people unable to find a “place,” either in the church (on which both concentrate) or in the state. Walzer and Curtis see them as “alienated” from the society's leading groups, to which they felt they had a right to belong. The origins of the exclusion were complex, due in part to an overproduction of graduates, in part to continued pluralism and non-residency which decreased the number of livings for those leaving university, and in part to disadvantageous changes in the patterns of patronage. Though this subject needs detailed study, it seems clear that this group was large in terms of the total number of intellectuals in the community. Curtis sees them as “an insoluble group of alienated intellectuals who individually and collectively became troublemakers in a period of growing discontent with the Stuart regime.”¹⁶ Puritan lectureships offered one important oppositional institution for at least some members of this group, but Curtis presents them as essentially isolated in their alienation, though they did “exhibit an esprit de corps that both originated in their peculiar specialized function and marked their self-conscious alienation from the rest of the clergy.”¹⁷ Here Walzer's study differs seriously from Curtis's. He agrees that this group bred “troublemakers” who were absolutely central in the development of radical politics in Stuart England, but he sees these “advanced intellectuals,” these “free men,” as specifically Puritan intellectuals, men “capable of organizing themselves voluntarily on the basis of ideological commitment,” men committed to “enthusiastic and purposive activity” in new associations outside the traditional patterns, ties and institutions of Elizabethan England.¹⁸ In his The Revolution of the Saints he offers an acute and nuanced account of the wider group of “alienated intellectuals,” providing essential ideological and psychological discriminations which allow deeper insight into the varied processes and causes of this alienation and radicalization. Walzer's richer model allows us to understand the position of Roman Catholic clerics and intellectuals—a very necessary factor when one is concerned with Donne, a member of a Romanist family which included martyrs. Catholics were estranged from the established institutions, just as the saints were, and Walzer notes “significant parallels” between the two groups of alienated clerics: “the priests had taken the lead in the Catholic struggle and their new power—somewhat like that of the Puritan clergy—was related to the collapse of the traditional lay leadership. Among the Catholic clerics the Jesuits especially resembled the Puritan ministers both in their impatience with episcopal control and their willingness to experiment politically.” But, and in Walzer's view this is vital, the Catholic experience was not formed by a radical ideology, for they were “closely bound to the traditional social order and were most often willing to work within the limits of the feudal connection of lord and chaplain. The ultimate effect of their labour was to create a pariah culture, an enclave of secure traditionalism.” This formed a strong contrast to Calvinist intellectuals who depersonalized and objectified social and ideological conflicts and tended towards organization “outside the traditional structure of authority, placing less emphasis upon great personalities.”¹⁹

If we look at Donne in this light, certain of the complex, contradictory features which we have been highlighting become more intelligible. As Walzer's work illustrates so well, the processes which lead to the formation of such specific groupings inevitably mark the individuals involved psychologically and ideologically.²⁰ Donne, in this period, provides a classic example of an excluded intellectual. Structurally, he started from an excluded position as a Roman Catholic, a member of a group exiled from the political nation. This initial exclusion was not based on the kind of self-consciously acquired and held ideological commitment which Walzer described in Calvinist intellectuals. Quite the contrary, he was born into this situation, so that his struggle from the very beginning was to overcome an exclusion forced on him by an inherited ideological position for which he seems to have shown very little conviction.²¹ His aim was incorporation, not opposition to established church, court and state. In gaining employment with Egerton he seemed to have succeeded in this and could look forward to a secure career within traditional institutions. However, his secret marriage to a social superior led to a new exile. Again the exile was not based on ideological commitment, so that even that sustaining force was not available to him.

Thrown back into the position of the alienated intellectual, Donne's feelings and ideas were complex, as we have seen in our discussion of the patroness poems. There he explored the new position in which he found himself; indeed, he constructed a complicated metaphysics in which a platonic model of eternal value was set off against a market model of use. Donne's critical attitude to the world which excluded him, and his self-estimation were bound up with the former model; yet he clearly wanted a place in the market and so had to assert his use as a secular servant, as usher/ideologue. Hence in his version of self the subtle sycophant²² was always accompanied by the critical “troublemaker” who deployed the platonic model subversively against the values of the leading social groups into which he longed to be incorporated. Whereas the Puritan alienated intellectuals developed an ideology exalting their alienation, which they saw as a kind of freedom, and which enabled them to organize against the powerful established groups excluding them, Donne had no such sustaining ideological support, and hence could not see his exclusion as “freedom.” All his efforts were directed towards inclusion in the traditional established group. While his use of the platonic model helped him to cope with the despair of his exile, and thus worked analogously to the Puritan intellectual's view of “freedom,” it was never intended as a programme for social change: Donne wanted inclusion in the securely established traditional order, and in this he was therefore not all that far from the political tendencies of the Roman priests.

We now have a dual model of alienation: on the one hand the radical “free man,” with an ideologically buttressed programme for social change, on the other hand the sycophantic seeker for admission to a securely established traditional order. We have shown some of the forces which lead to either position. We now need to ask whether those who belong to either group show any traces of the other position. In terms of our methodology and hypothesis we need to look at the poetry of those who had gained admission to see if there are signs of alienation. Of course some of Donne's earlier poems will do here, and in fact some of his “stoic” poems which we discuss below, are an excellent case in point, as some of these were written while he was with Egerton. We intend to show that they offer a social critique, but an unconvincing one, with the ring of a rote performance to them, as though it was the fashionable “thing to say” among a group of people. If this is so, then we have an example of people who are included, but who nevertheless deplore what Curtis described as “galloping venality and creeping monopoly [which] had combined to poison the sources of patronage. They were not only distasteful but frequently revolting to some well-intentioned, prospective servants of the State. Complaints about the Court and the indignities of waiting on patrons and winning influence … took on in these years overtones of disillusionment and even disgust that formerly had been less obvious.”²³ Curtis places this in the reign of James I, and clearly this is too late; furthermore we should note that not just prospective but some actual servants of the state found these things unsavoury. So one question that arises from Curtis's remarks and which relates very closely to our analysis of Donne's position is whether the attainment of a place did in fact overcome and do away with the indignities of the situation at court or in patronage.

Donne's early stoic poems suggest that it did not. Other evidence is provided by such apparently untroubled work as Jonson's To Penshurst. We do not have the space here for a detailed analysis, but a brief look at the negations in the poem will quickly reveal disturbances beneath the seemingly untroubled classical surface. The negations permit Jonson to call up—in denied form—the positive forms of assertions which it would be difficult, prohibited or even dangerous for him to make. He uses two types of negation, overt negation—forms with not, no, un-; and covert negations—forms which have a semantically negative content: “these grudg'd at”; and forms which work by “replacing” a form which should or might have been more appropriate. The negations cluster around four topics: the history of the house, the present state of the house, the position of the patronized poet, and the place and function of this house in relation to others like it. We will give some illustrative quotations, and indicate in outline how the negations work. First then the history of the house. Line 1: “Thou art not, Penshurst, built to envious show”—where a past action is presented as a present state, and the present state is contrasted with that of all other houses; line 6: “these grudg'd at [thou] art reverenc'd the while”—the denial of the application of the general rule in this case; lines 45-47: “thy walls … are rear'd with no mans ruine, no mans grone, / There's none, that dwell about them, wish them downe,”—here again we find the overt negation of a state that applies to all other houses and, more tellingly, a straightforward rewriting of the history of the house, which, as Raymond Williams points out, was built on the ruins of an enclosed village.²⁴ Here we have a revealing insight into the use of negation: a troubling reality which the poet wishes, somehow, to control and to transcend, and which surfaces in the form of the negation of that reality. The negations surrounding the present state of the house concern, as Williams again has pointed out, the complete transformation of social and human processes into natural ones. This process is perhaps best described as negation by transformation; human agents, human labour, social relations, are negated and presented instead as thoroughly and unquestionably natural ones. The major examples of this are in those passages where nature of itself, unasked, provides its riches for the house; natural entities act as agents providing for the depersonalized house. Two examples will show the process—lines 19-20: “Thy copp's … never failes to serve thee season'd deere,”; line 24: “The middle ground thy mares, and horses breed.” In fact this process extends to the production of exotic fruits: fig, grape, peach, apricot, without any human effort.

The position of the patronized poet is presented predominantly in terms of negatives: again this serves to call up what may be regarded as the normal situation, and in which a nervousness regarding his own situation also shows itself—

Where the same beere, and bread, and self-same wine,
That is his Lordships, shall be also mine.
And I not faine to sit (as some, this day,
At great mens tables) and yet dine away.
Here no man tells my cups; nor, standing by,
A waiter, doth my gluttony envy:
But gives me what I call, and lets me eate. …

(lines 63-69)

This passage calls up starkly and vividly the humiliation of situations which Jonson must have known and, judging by the immediacy of the language, felt himself. Last but not least there is the negation, implicit in this text, of all those poems that could and should have been written about the reality of the country house period. The prohibition on that however was so strong as to amount to total self-censorship by any poet who wanted patronage.

We are forced to ask about this intellectual, who in Curtis's terms is not alienated, is he undisturbed, untroubled? What is his motive for his production of a patronage poem, a poem which involves such a massive re-ordering and reclassification of the social world, and of known history? Is not this very act of producing a poem as a commodity to be exchanged for the “lord's owne meate …” the very sign of alienation? Not now of course alienation in the sense of Curtis and Walzer, but in one classic sense, where the producer sells his labour-power as a commodity to a master who unilaterally determines in what commodity this labour-power shall be manifested.²⁵ Of course, this is the situation, within the Marxist model, of all labour until the coming of the socialist millennium; however, it is the starkly apparent application and working of this model in the sphere of poetry which we find revealing here; and it may be both useful and necessary to add this notion of alienation to the dual model outlined above.

Donne, at least partly, sees the patronage situation in this way. In his quest for incorporation he reluctantly accepts the necessity of turning himself, his abilities, and certain of his poems which are absolutely overt tokens of exchange—witness the usher and mine images—into commodities. Alienated and critical intellectual that he was, he had no wish to be excluded from the traditional ruling circles, and no ideology to encourage an oppositional stance which would entail action with new associations, and he certainly had no wish to be a “troublemaker.” Our approach to Donne from this perspective suggests to us that the whole issue of “the alienated intellectual” in this period not only casts light on his own situation but also needs considerably more research done on it. This research would include and develop the lines of inquiry and methods of analysis which we are applying to Donne's verse epistles in this article. Ideally it would be a collective enterprise bringing together historians, linguists, and literary critics. One important general question which would be focal in such an inquiry would be at what times certain intellectuals became alienated and sufficiently organized to form radical, highly critical groups, acting for change against the reigning hegemony.²⁶

IV

We conclude this study by looking at three verse epistles which were not written to patronesses. The first two we consider, “Sir, more then kisses” (To Sir Henry Wotton) and “Like one who in her third widdowhood” (To Mr Rowland Woodward) were probably written around 1597-1598, a decade before the poems which we have just considered and, significantly, before Donne was dismissed by Egerton and ejected into a social wilderness inhabited by these various “alienated” intellectuals.

It is striking that in these two poems Donne assumes a simple version of the self, one having a virtually autonomous existence, identity without social relationships, and certainly without “creators.” The disturbing issues about alternative versions of the self and its value, central in the later patronage poems are, at least on the surface, conspicuous by their absence. Donne assumes that the individual can retreat into a safe, inherently and unproblematically valuable core. The world around may be obnoxious but the individual has his own mental and moral edifice into which he may retreat, like the snail (To Sir Henry Wotton, lines 49-52).

Given this stance, it is not surprising that Lawrence Stapleton, one of the few critics to attend to the verse epistles with seriousness, should claim, that in those letters, written before 1600, Donne reveals “the assumptions by men of his circle, of a stoical attitude of detachment … man must dwell in himself, to house his spirit, as the snail his body.”²⁷ Nevertheless, the same critic registers something odd about these apparently stoic poems: “The reader feels indeed that in such verses as this Donne is but conning over, genuinely enough, the social lessons of self-mastery … Donne had not, of course retired to any of the uncongenial country residences that he later owed to the help of relatives or friends and resorted to through necessity. He was fashioning an attitude of detachment which might save him from corruption in the world of affairs.”²⁸ Stapleton leaves the issue there; in the context of this study we wish to look more closely at the “stoical attitude” and the stoic self which Donne seems to be cultivating here.

Having roundly abused the whole social world, countries, courts and towns, Donne offers Henry Wotton the following advice:

Be thou thine owne home, and in thy selfe dwell;
Inne any where, continuance maketh hell.
And seeing the snaile, which every where doth rome,
Carrying his own house still, still is at home.
Follow (for he is easie pac'd) this snaile,
Bee thine owne Palace, or the world's thy gaile.
And in the worlds sea, do not like corke sleepe
Upon the waters face; nor in the deepe
Sinke like a lead without a line: but as
Fishes glide, leaving no print where they passe,
Nor making sound; so closely thy course goe,
Let men dispute, whether thou breathe, or no.

(lines 47-58)

Stapleton's feeling that Donne is here “but conning over … social lessons of self-mastery” seems to be a response to the flaccid, simple-minded version of the self informing this passage. There is no recognition that the self may well have internalised unpleasant aspects of the social world which Donne attacks (but inhabits—and ambitiously so), no acknowledgement of the individual's complicity in the state of the society to which he owes his continuing work and existence, no sign that there is any tension between participation and retreat.²⁹ In Christian terms, one might add, such “stoical” stances are surprisingly blind to the effects of the fall—the corruption of the will and blindness of the intellect. There are one or two hints of these vital problems: “Let no man say there, Virtues flintie wall / shall locke vice in mee, I'll do none but know all,” (lines 35-6); and at line forty-eight: “Inne any where, continuance maketh hell.” This suggests that retreat into the self will have to come to terms precisely with evil inside. But this hint is not developed and these earlier poems are innocent of the real difficulties involved in questions of identity discussed above.

Nevertheless, while the surface suggests no complexities, when we look at the poems more closely they reveal movements which make us doubt that the stoic stance was ever at all congenial to Donne, let alone seriously held as a conviction to live by.

The version of self in the poem to Sir Henry Wotton advocates retreat leading to stasis and peace. The external world's instability does provide a threat, and we noted the hinted threat from internal vice. But no change of self is envisaged or demanded: the snail remains a snail within the house, the fish glides along leaving no print and remains exactly the fish it has always been. In the poem to Mr. Rowland Woodward the beginnings of an analysis of self are evident. It has been spatialized so that “wee” may turn into “our selves”:

So wee, if wee into our selves will turne,
Blowing our sparkes of vertue, may outburne
The straw, which doth about our hearts sojourne.

(lines 22-24)

That is, the self has become an inner and outer self, with the inner seen as the heart around which there is the straw of the outer self. The latter can be burned off. Here then is an advocacy of change.

However, if we consider the interactional structures of the poem to Sir Henry Wotton we find the stasis we described rather undercut. The whole poem is organised as a dialogue. Overtly it begins with an address to a friend, in a formal tone; it ends in a gently earnest plea for the friend's love. The overall frame of the poem is thus address and plea, an interaction, and the overt content of the poem needs to be read within this context: retreat, in tension with the interaction of the friend. Contained within this overall frame are the linguistic forms of interaction: commands, questions, statements, mirroring the alternating forms of conversation. Furthermore, they are conducted in the form of intimate address: thou, thine, thy.

In other words, in its formal structure the poem is the very antithesis of retreat: it is constructed around the core forms of the language of social interaction, and whatever version of self is depicted in the apparent stoic pose, there is a deeper version where the self is defined in interaction with others. The others are friends, intimate, and the poet seeks their love, which seems essential to him. With this in mind we can see how the disturbance at lines thirty-five, thirty-six and forty-eight reflects the way the retreat is a very limited one, with the continuing, and sought after support of friends. So the two versions of self in the poem to Wotton are straightforwardly contradictory.

Yet we are struck by the amazing confidence with which, despite this, Donne's poem exhorts his friend to behave and act in ways which seemingly follow from an uncomplicated stoic stance toward the world. This combination of confusion and confident advice, urges us to examine the underlying view of social processes that allows such contradictions and even makes them seem unproblematic. To do so we shall look at the syntactic forms, first pointing out the agents operating in the poem. A selection serves to indicate the kind of agents they are. Initially, some non-human ones: They (Rockes, Remoraes) break or stop ships (lines 7-9); Virtue's flintie wall shall lock vice in me (lines 35-36). Then some human ones: men play princes (lines 23-24); men retrieve and greet themselves (lines 43-5). Third some passives, with the agent deleted: two temperate regions girded in (line 13); you, parch'd in court, in the country frozen (line 15); shall cities be chosen (line 16); falsehood is denizon'd (line 34). In the first group, non-human agents act concretely on other entities, and the actions are physical ones, making, breaking, curing, locking. In the second list, human agents act, but significantly the actions are not direct, concrete, nor do they act on other entities. Instead they are reflexive (e.g., “retrieve and greet themselves”) or non-physical actions, “see,” “know,” (“play-actions” literally, such as “playing princes”). In the last group, the passives, we have no way of recovering who the agents were—who “froze,” “parch'd,” “built,” “denizon'd.”

Without further analysis we think it sound to claim that men are perceived and presented as peculiarly inactive, passive, reflexive; the real agents are nonhuman, concrete or abstract. The imperatives from line forty-seven onwards (“Be thou thine owne home and in thy selfe dwell … Follow … this snaile … Bee thine owne Palace …”) are no exception, for while they do advocate actions by human agents they are figurative actions which are difficult to understand precisely or to perform: they exhort the addressee to be in a certain kind of state, rather than indicating the processes which would lead someone to be in that state. The poem discloses a failure to grasp specific and relevant agents, an inability to specify the processes and agents by which or by whom the new state is to be implemented. In short, there is a marked lack of understanding of processes, agents, and causations in the world. Yet Donne has superimposed a seemingly confident stoic stance on this uncertainty. His shaky perception of agency and process explains the presence of the non-stoic formal frame and the plea for friendship, a call for support. The underlying content of this poem might then be described as being about interaction, but one which proceeds without clear grasp of the “ground rules” of processes in the social world.

The second of the pre-1600 poems we are considering is to Mr. Rowland Woodward, “Like one who'in her third widdowhood.” This has many elements in common with the poem to Sir Henry Wotton just discussed and is open to very similar comment. As Donne advises, “Seeke wee then our selves in our selves” (line 19), we see that the active self is still envisaged as unproblematic in its autonomy, and the complicated perceptions of the patroness poems are again absent. Lines thirty-one onwards may appear to contradict our judgement: “Wee are but farmers of our selves, yet may, / If we can stocke our selves, and thrive, uplay / Much, much deare treasure for the great rent day.” Here farming, thriving, stocking and uplaying treasure may seem to be the very stuff of known social practice and relationships. We believe not, for the field and its cultivation is figured as purely individualistic and autonomous while the market in which the produce can be cashed for payment of rents is a heavenly one, located outside society and beyond history, at the Last Judgement. Despite the apparent Christian dimension here, and despite the explicit mention of original sin and the doctrine of imputed merit (lines 13-18), the self is again envisaged in such a way that the problems about corruption of the will and intellect, or the need for grace in farming the self, let alone questions about the complex interactions between individual and society, cannot arise. Nevertheless, as in the poem to Sir Henry Wotton, the poem has an interactional structure, e.g., “You know, Physitians, when they would infuse” [line 25, our italics] and ends not only with assurance of Donne's love for Woodward, but a strong statement of his need for Woodward's love in return: “But to know, that I love thee'and would be lov'd” (line 36). The intense need for love is expressed in a command to Woodward to love him, a most un-stoic conclusion.³⁰

Clearly, there are continuities between the poem to Wotton and this one; the version of the self is a little more elaborate here and the “stoicism” a little more openly uncertain. If we look at agency, as we did in the other poem, interestingly enough we find a large number of the human agents involved in real, physical processes (though “metaphorically” used to indicate psychological processes): gathering the sun's beams, blowing sparks, outburning straw (lines 20-24). There are far fewer passives, and the deleted agent is in all cases Donne himself (or one of his attributes): tyed to retiredness (line 2); seeds were sown (line 6); betroth'd (line 8). The imperatives are commands to perform actions: manure thyself; with vain outward things be no more moved; to thyself be approved (lines 34-5). Compared with the poem to Wotton there is an increase of agentiveness, awareness of agency, and the realization of what are possible processes which men may carry out to reach a desired state. This increase in the poet's awareness of what social interaction and change could be about is accompanied by signs of a decrease in emphasis on the linguistic forms of interaction, as though a progress in understanding the causes of action leads to a progress from talk to action.

Of course, the stoic stance is classically one which the alienated intellectual may assume. We are interested to note—beyond the versions of self revealed—the uncertainty with which Donne holds this stance, an uncertainty which, as our analysis reveals is based on his wish for incorporation (the plea for friendship, the interactional forms) and an insufficient understanding of social processes. The latter may be a direct consequence of the fact that he was not, as we have pointed out, committed to an ideologically based critique of his society.

In conclusion we turn briefly to a poem written in the period of the patroness poems discussed above. In 1610 Donne addressed “Man is a lumpe” to Sir Edward Herbert, the son of one of his patronesses. The shifts in Donne's approach to the self which had taken place over the preceding ten years in his drastically changed circumstances of renewed “exile” are clear. They link up with the attitudes to self we discussed in relation to his patronage poems. This poem, written to a friend, fellow poet, and fellow philosopher, shows much of the obsession with negativity and annihilation (social and metaphysical) so marked in the patroness poems. The possibility of a virtuous and unequivocally valuable inner core, held out to Wotton and Woodward earlier, is now much further removed as he offers a traditional, compound platonic-Christian image of man composed of destructive and warring beasts which can only be controlled by equally destructive energies directed against the self, and a vision of a Christian God viciously indifferent to the fate of his creatures. Despite some surface suggestions that man may act autonomously to transcend internal wars and external social relations, in fact we get a version of the self and of society which is extremely close to that we described in the contemporary poems. Man in general only acts reflexively—given that “the beasts” and “nature” are his own beasts and his own nature. And though his “businesse is, to rectifie / Nature, to what she was” (lines 33-4), we note that immediately Donne shows that this is not what man does, for “wee'are led awry.” In all this Donne seemingly presents the friend as a means of overcoming the viciousness of man's existence. However, the last few lines of the poem undercut any such reading decisively:

                                                                                You have dwelt upon
All worthy bookes, and now are such an one.
Actions are authors, and of those in you
Your friends finde every day a mart of new.

(lines 47-50)

The friend produces, every day, actions, which are authors, which are books. And every day there is a market of these actions/authors/books. The principle of commodification is applied to the actions of the friend/patron; his friends, the real authors, may buy and may plagiarize. If the friends are poets in need of patronage they buy the already written texts; so the book or poem which Donne writes to the friend is not in fact written by Donne the poet, but by the friend/patron. Here the friend acts analogously to the patroness/creator, for while she creates the poet and with him his future actions and values, the friend in appropriating the very labour of the poet creates him as poet. The reality, as Donne presents it, is that the friend negates the actions of the poet and thereby the poet. The implications of this stance are if anything an even more savage comment by Donne on his society, where even those whom he calls his friends and lovers reduce him to powerlessness and inferiority. Here the friend is like the creator of the patroness poems; despite the negative view which Donne presents of this friendship, he needs it, either to be created, or written into the social world which he views so critically.

Notes

1. J. Danby, Elizabethan and Jacobean Poets (originally published as Poets on Fortune's Hill, 1962), ch. 1.

2. “Donne's assumption is the relationship of poet to patron as of nothing to everything, and out of this he spins his conceits direct. He makes metaphysics out of the poet and patron relations, and a poet-patron relation out of metaphysics,” Elizabethan and Jacobean Poets, p. 39.

3. See R. C. Bald on this period in John Donne: A Life (1970), ch. 8; see too Donne himself in letters reprinted by E. Gosse, Life and Letters of Donne (reprint 1959), especially vol. I, pp. 114-15, 166, 181, 185-187, 191.

4. All quotations are from Donne's Poetical Works, ed. H. J. C. Grierson (1912, reprint 1966), vol.I; referred to hereafter as Grierson. We have also used W. Milgate's edition of The Satires, Epigrams and Verse Letters (1967).

5. Grierson, vol.II, pp. 156-7; cf. Milgate, pp. 256-7.

6. See M. H. Curtis, “The Alienated Intellectuals of Early Stuart England,” Past and Present, 23 (1962), reprinted in Crisis in Europe, ed. T. Aston (1965). On Donne's desperate wish for “incorporation” see the letter to Goodyer in Gosse, vol.I, pp. 191-2.

7. One of the best studies of this issue is by R. Ellrodt, L'inspiration personnelle et l'esprit du temps chez les poètes metaphysiques anglais, 3 vols. (Paris, 1960), vol.I, especially chs. 3-4.

8. As Danby suggested, Donne is obsessed with his nothingness (note 2, above). For examples of the explicit social causes for his sense of being nothing, and its remedies, see especially prose letters in Gosse, vol.I, pp. 181, 167, 191-2, and on loss of employment as death, for example, p.291; also vol.II, pp. 28, 42; and the verse epistles to the Countess of Bedford and the Countess of Salisbury.

9. See previous note.

10. In contrasting Donne with Jonson, very much at Donne's expense, Danby, like other commentators, misses these rich complexities in Donne's stance.

11. Nor is the manner in which the concept of self is being explored in these poems confined to Donne. That questions about value in just the way we are discussing were current in the milieu from which Donne received his training, is suggested by Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida which includes, among its central preoccupations, a study of conflicting versions of value and their relation to social fabric and metaphysical frameworks.

12. James I, 1609 speech to Parliament, in The Political Works of James I, ed. C. H. McIlwain, (reprint 1966), p. 307.

13. There remain important connections to be examined with the political Petrarchanism cultivated under Queen Elizabeth and discussed in L. Forster, The Icy Fire (1969). The theological vocabulary in patron poems has also been studied by B. K. Lewalski in Donne's Anniversaries (1973); relevant here are chapters 1 and 2: her approach (well illustrated in comments on p.46) tends to isolate the metaphysical and the social in a way, we think, which distorts both areas.

14. It is worth noting how Donne is contemptuous of the market contingencies which donate those very same social eyes he actually covets so strongly!

15. Indeed, we believe the kind of analysis here advocated can be fruitfully applied to many of Donne's poems, secular and religious, and in due course we hope to do just this.

16. M. H. Curtis, op.cit., pp.299, 312, where he also refers to G. E. Aylmer's study, The King's Servants (1961), chs. 3-4. For Walzer see The Revolution of the Saints, (1965), chs. 1-4.

17. Curtis, op.cit., pp. 308-311.

18. Walzer, op.cit.

19. Walzer, op.cit., pp. 130-132; see chs. 4-6 passim.

20. Probably it is worth drawing attention to the relevance of the work of the Frankfurt School to this area of study. See especially: M. Horkheimer, Critical Theory, (1972); T. Adorno, Minima Moralia, (1972), and “Society,” Salmagundi, 10-11, (1969-70), pp. 144-153; H. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (1972).

21. On Donne's early life see especially R. C. Bald, John Donne, chs. 1-4.

22. Not always so subtle: see the letters to Rochester which Gosse sadly called “somewhat ignominious,” published in the Life and Letters of John Donne, ed. Gosse (1959), vol.II, pp. 22-23, 28; on this episode see Bald (extremely sympathetic to Donne), John Donne, pp. 272-274, 313-14.

23. Curtis, op.cit., p. 312.

24. R. Williams, Country and City (1973), pp. 27-34.

25. See especially, I. Meszaros, Marx's Theory of Alienation (1972), ch. 4; B. Ollman, Alienation (1971), part three. Also relevant here is C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism. Hobbes to Locke (1964).

26. Walzer has some suggestive speculations on this topic in his conclusion to The Revolution of the Saints.

27. L. Stapleton, “The Theme of Virtue in Donne's Epistles,” SP, 55 (1958), pp. 187-200, reprinted in Essential Articles for the Study of John Donne's Poetry, ed. J. R. Roberts (1975), pp.451-2. On the date of “Sir, more then kisses,” see Milgate, op.cit., pp. 227-8, and Grierson, op.cit., vol.II, pp. 140-1.

28. Stapleton, article cit., p.452.

29. There is no space here to contrast the profound explorations of such issues in Marvell's Upon Appleton House.

30. The conclusion of a classic contemporary stoic poem, Ben Jonson's fine To the World (“False world, good night”) provides the essential contrast here.