Sapho to Philaenis: Donne Writes Back: His Dialogue With Ovid and Sappho
[In the following excerpt, Meakin discusses Donne's poem about the lesbian poet Sappho as example of how Donne was able to transcend seventeenth-century conceptions of sex and gender.]
DONNE WRITES BACK: HIS DIALOGUE WITH OVID AND SAPPHO
That imitations and translations of Ovid in the sixteenth century constituted a large part of literary endeavour hardly needs stating. Ovid's Epistulae heroidum or his Heroides were translated into English by George Turberville in 1567, the same year that Arthur Golding's translation of the Metamorphoses appeared. Turberville, John Lyly, whose drama Sapho and Phao was first performed in 1584 before the Queen, and Michael Drayton, who in 1597 wrote England's Heroicall Epistles, had their own agendas in responding to Ovid and were not interested in the question of lesbian ‘likenesse’.1 I mention them here to set in relief the uniqueness of Donne's focus. Recent critical discussion of Ovid's relationship to Sappho centres around the motivation behind his ‘invention’ of a discourse of female desire: empathy (Jacobson 1974); or the knowledge that his portrayal of Sappho would forever link his name with hers and her literary authority (DeJean 1989: 75); or the display of his own wit, resulting in a ‘duplicitous glance’, malevolent and compassionate, which suggests he is primarily concerned with the display of his own wit (Verducci 1985: 136).2
Donne responds to or departs from several episodes in Ovid by foregrounding the question of Sappho's sexual orientation rather than engaging as intensely as does Ovid with the questions of authorship and literary property. In Ovid's poem, Sappho renounces the female community which she loves and for whom she wrote, to love a single youth whose attentions or lack thereof have become the source of her poetic genius: ‘ingenio vires ille dat, ille rapit; [My genius had its powers from him; with him they were swept away]’ (206). Ovid exaggerates the number of women Sappho refers to in her own poetry to emphasize the power of a single man and perhaps to portray something of the prodigious lust lesbians were perceived to exercise. Donne's Sapho has recovered from Phaon's desertion and now loves Philaenis. Are we to read Donne's lesbian epilogue as a correction of Sappho's inconstancy or promiscuity, which Ovid emphasizes, or is Donne subtly perpetuating the belief that women were fickle?
Both poems open with laments. Here is Ovid's Sappho:
Ecquid, ut adspecta est studiosae littera dextrae,
Protinus est oculis cognita nostra tuis—
an, nisi legisses auctoris nomina Sapphus,
hoc breve nescires unde movetur opus?
Forsitan et quare mea sint alterna requiras
carmina, cum lyricis sim magis apta modis.
flendus amor meus est—elegiae flebile carmen;
non facit ad lacrimas barbitos ulla meas.
[Tell me, when you looked upon the characters from my eager right hand, did your eye know forthwith whose they were—or, unless you had read their author's name, Sappho, would you fail to know whence these brief words come? Perhaps, too, you may ask why my verses alternate, when I am better suited to the lyric mode. I must weep, for my love—and elegy is the weeping strain; no lyre is suited to my tears.]
(1-8)
The opening of Donne's ‘Sapho to Philaenis’ gestures towards Ovid's poem with some important differences in emphasis, primarily the less self-conscious state of Sapho. She does not complain about the generic implications of her mood, but more generally laments her lack of inspiration:
Where is that holy fire, which Verse is said
To have, is that inchanting force decai'd?
Verse that drawes Natures workes, from Natures law,
Thee, her best worke, to her worke cannot draw.
Have my teares quench'd my old Poetique fire;
Why quench'd they not as well, that of desire?
(1-6)
Sapho's declaration of loss suggests confusion and instability by using an undirected interrogative, unlike the assertive question Ovid's Sappho puts to Phaon. So bereft is Donne's Sapho, she can only state that verse ‘is said’ to be inspired by ‘holy fire’. Moreover, she refers to ‘that’ holy fire and ‘that’ inchanting force, again suggesting some disorientation and a sense that what was hers is no longer. Yet in both Ovid and Donne's poems, Sappho/Sapho's first concern is for her poetry rather than for her beloved, whether Phaon or Philaenis. This prioritization could be an aspect of the topos of inexpressibility, or part of the self-consciousness of letter-writing which we saw in Chapter 1. Many of Ovid's other heroines in the Heroides, perhaps conventionally, immediately draw attention to the physical fact of the letter they are writing or the words written on it, but they are not as concerned about their own writing ability as is Sappho. As a poet and as a woman in love, she has two losses to lament.
In the first two lines, Sapho refers to the inspiration which fuels verse as ‘holy fire’ and as ‘that inchanting force’. While we must keep in mind that the poem is written in the voice of an ancient Greek and not a Christian one, there is still and would have been, I think, in the minds of Donne and his readers, a tension between the different associations of ‘holy’ and ‘inchanting’. The first word suggests the divine inspiration of the Muses, or heaven-sanctioned utterance, while the second suggests that the source of ‘inspiration’ is a darker one. Donne's only other use of the word ‘inchant’ (L., cantare, to sing) or its cognates occurs in ‘The Dampe’, a poem atypically filled with Spenserian ‘Gyants’ and ‘Witches’. The speaker projects his death as a result of the coldness of his mistress, and suggests a more challenging murder: ‘But if you dare be brave, ❙ And pleasure in your conquest have, ❙ First kill th'enormous Gyant, your Disdaine, ❙ And let th'enchantresse Honor, next be slaine’ (9-12). Donne's language recalls Spenser's fairy world of bewitched heroes and heroines, spells and magic mirrors; a world of illusion, rather than the special access to knowledge granted to poets filled with ‘holy fire’.
The tension between Nature and Art becomes overt in lines 3 and 4, and is sustained throughout the poem to a point where Sapho appears to resolve it. Repetition, rhyme, and more subtle aural effects are introduced here as well, and produce incantatory effects so that we already realize that Sapho's ‘inchanting force’ has not ‘decai'd’. We are constantly being asked to assess ‘likenesse’ and difference, both in terms of sound and of sense. The allusion to Orpheus' powers to draw ‘Natures workes, from Natures law’ is, I think, of central importance to the poem, both in terms of the poem as a response to prior poets, Ovid and Sappho, and in terms of Orpheus' own experiences of love and sexuality. Sappho, like Orpheus, is a bisexual poet for Ovid and Donne. Here is the opening of Metamorphoses, 11, to which Donne's lines refer:
Carmine dum tali silvas animosque ferarum
Threicius vates et saxa sequentia ducit,
ecce nurus Ciconum tectae lymphata ferinis
pectora velleribus tumuli de vertice cernunt
Orphea percussis sociantem carmina nervis.
[While with such songs the bard of Thrace drew the trees, held beasts enthralled and constrained stones to follow him, behold, the crazed women of the Cicones, with skins flung over their breasts, saw Orpheus from a hill-top, fitting songs to the music of his lyre.]
(1-5)
Orpheus is then dismembered by the Maenads whose love he repulsed in favour of ‘tender boys’ after losing his wife Eurydice. For both Orpheus and Sappho, their sexual ‘transgression’ seems to be of as great or greater import than their poetic gift. Orpheus' head floats with his lyre down the river Hebrus. His unacceptably (homo)sexual body is literally separated from the bodily site of his poetic gift, his mouth and tongue, and his instrument, the lyre. Head and lyre float out to sea and wash up on the shore of Lesbos, the island on which Sappho was born. Like Orpheus, Sappho's promiscuous and/or ‘depraved’ sexual body is often separated from her voice, ‘literarily’ rather than literally. Orpheus is reunited with his beloved Eurydice in Hades. Sappho, in Ovid's version, is a repentant lesbian now aching with longing for Phaon. Ovid makes sure both poets end up heterosexual, although neither's desire is fulfilled since Orpheus and Eurydice are bodiless shades and Sappho threatens to jump off the Leucadian cliff. And yet Sappho does get her Phaon, for in his Amores, Ovid writes that the lovers were reunited in the epistles his fellow poet, Sabinus Aulus, wrote as replies to the Heroides: ‘det votam Phoebo Lesbis amata lyram [the daughter of Lesbos, her love returned, may offer to Phoebus the lyre she vowed]’ (2.18.34). Again, Donne departs from the tradition following Ovid in leaving his readers in suspense as to Philaenis' response to Sapho's letter.3
The allusion to Orpheus' powers to draw ‘Natures workes, from Natures law’ is also a way of representing Sapho's lesbianism, which draws woman (Philaenis), Nature's ‘best worke’, from the ‘Natural law’ of heterosexuality to what Sapho argues is a more ‘naturall Paradise’, the body of a woman untouched (‘unmanur'd’, as she says, punning on manus/hand) by man. Implicit in this first reference to ‘Natures law’, however, is an indictment of lesbianism, for it draws women away from one of their primary functions: reproduction. The same feminine pronoun, ‘her’, refers first to Nature, traditionally personified as female, but then to Verse, also personified as female: ‘Thee, her best worke, to her worke cannot draw’. Identities already begin to melt and merge here in a fourfold totality of femaleness: Verse, Nature, Sapho, Philaenis. Does Donne intend his reader to become entangled in pronouns and repeated words, setting up tensions, paradoxically through the use of identical words—‘her’, ‘drawe’, ‘worke’,—which mimic the tension between Sapho and Philaenis, and the tension between Verse or Art, and Nature? Is this the singing of a Siren or an Angel, an Enchantress or a Muse?
Sapho describes the unhappy state in which Philaenis' abandonment has left her using standard Petrarchan imagery:
Thoughts, my mindes creatures, often are with thee,
But I, their maker, want their libertie.
Onely thine image, in my heart, doth sit,
But that is waxe, and fires environ it.
My fires have driven, thine have drawne it hence;
And I am rob'd of Picture, Heart, and Sense.
Dwells with me still mine irksome Memory,
Which, both to keepe, and lose, grieves equally.
That tells me'how faire thou art.
(7-15)
As many critics have argued, most recently Heather Dubrow in Echoes of Desire, Donne enjoyed turning Petrarchan conventions upside down as much as he often dispensed with them altogether or, indeed, participated in them. There is a curious passage in Metempsychosis in which Donne mocks the suffering of the Petrarchan lover and yet warns against deviant forms of sexual desire with a reference to sodomy. When we read both passages together, we are once again unsettled as to Donne's tone in ‘Sapho to Philaenis’. If we recall that Carey suggests 1601 as a possible date for ‘Sapho to Philaenis’, the year we know Donne wrote Metempsychosis, there is a possibility that these two passages are variations on a theme in Donne's mind at the time. Donne describes an Ape into whom the ‘Soule’ enters soon after the creation of the world, one whose ‘organs now so like theirs hee doth finde, ❙ That why he cannot laugh, and speake his minde, ❙ He wonders’ (1967b: 454-6). The Ape assumes a ‘likeness’ between himself and the children of Adam and Eve. Is there an echo here of Sapho's ‘Likenesse begets such strange selfe flatterie, ❙ That touching myselfe, all seems done to thee’? We hope not, but following a description of the Ape's desperate Petrarchan antics as ‘the first true lover’ who desires the daughter named Siphatecia—his ‘love faces’, ‘sombersalts’ and ‘hoiting gambolls’—the speaker rather abruptly warns: ‘Sinnes against kinde ❙ They easily doe, that can let feed their minde ❙ With outward beauty; beauty they in boyes and beasts do find’. How does Sapho's beautiful apology for the ‘naturall Paradise’ of lesbian love sound next to this post-Edenic warning about the dangers of feeding one's mind with outward beauty?
Against the Law of Nature, Siphatecia gives in to the Ape's seduction in a graphic scene in which Siphatecia's bodily sensations are described. Since the Ape is having no success with mere flirting, ‘likelier meanes he tries’:
And up lifts subtly with his russet pawe
Her kidskinne apron without feare or awe
Of nature; nature hath no gaole, though shee have law.
First she was silly'and knew not what he ment:
That vertue, by his touches, chaft and spent,
Succeeds an itchie warmth, that melts her quite;
She knew not first, now cares not what he doth,
And willing halfe and more, more then halfe loth,
She neither puls nor pushes, but outright
Now cries, and now repents.
(478-87)
Like Sapho's Orphic verse which ‘drawes Natures workes, from Natures law’, the Ape sets about to commit a sin ‘against kinde’, or against what Donne implies is a law of nature if the Ape will nevertheless suffer no punishment (‘gaole’) for breaking it. The adoption of a law governing sexual congress once there were enough of Adam and Eve's descendants to make incest unnecessary is an issue to which Donne frequently alludes in his poetry, indeed he does so earlier in Metempsychosis: ‘Men, till they tooke laws which made freedome lesse, ❙ Their daughters, and their sisters did ingresse; ❙ Till now unlawfull, therefore ill, 'twas not’ (201-3). Donne, fascinated as he is by words which enact and denote an intermingling, uses ‘ingress’ here (from the Latin, in + gradi, to step in or enter) uniquely, according to the OED, as a synonym for intercourse. The libertine speakers of Donne's Elegies ‘Change’ (10-14) and ‘Variety’ (48-9), and the female speaker of ‘Confined Love’ all begrudge the existence of a law which states, ‘One should but one man know’ (6). On the other hand, the lover in ‘The Relique’ boasts: ‘Our hands ne'r toucht the seales, ❙ Which nature, injur'd by late law, sets free’ (29-30). But one of the main cultural attitudes, at least in England, towards the kind of female homoeroticism which Donne describes in ‘Sapho to Philaenis’ was that it did not break any man-made laws.4 Only when a woman ‘supplemented’ her own natural body, as Valerie Traub states, with either natural (an enlarged clitoris) or artificial (a dildo) implements of penetration (1994: 66) was the serious charge of sodomy levelled against her. Thus, the condemnation of ‘Sinnes of kinde’ in the Metempsychosis may serve to contrast, rather than mirror, the relatively innocent behaviour of Sapho and Philaenis. Except that Donne presents Sapho envisioning this mode of relating as permanent, and not as an immature prelude to heterosexuality.
In the passage from Metempsychosis, above, the Ape lifts the girl's apron, and ‘touches’ her. In ‘Sapho to Philaenis’, it is the sense of touch which is emphasized, as Sapho touches herself in front of her mirror and argues for the coming together of her body and Philaenis' not through penetration but in the touching of ‘brest to brest’ and ‘thighs to thighs’. It is the girl's pleasure which is focused on, indeed mocked, for Donne states that Siphatecia ‘Now cries’ out against the Ape and ‘now repents’ at the cessation of pleasurable sensation. Siphatecia, being ‘silly’ or ignorant of the meaning of the Ape's advances, ‘melts’ in confusion and pleasure. The language of abandonment and loss of self-awareness is again uncomfortably like that of Sapho near the end of her epistle. There is the same ‘addition problem’ for Siphatecia, who is ‘willing halfe and more, more then halfe loth’, and for Sapho who cries, ‘O cure this loving madnesse, and restore ❙ Me to mee; thee, my halfe, my all, my more’ (57-8), although such language is conventional enough. Donne was fond of such mathematical paradoxes elsewhere when it came to sorting out the ones and twos of love, however. One plus one could equal zero, one, two, three, or ‘all’. There are enough similarities between ‘Sapho to Philaenis’ and Donne's anecdote of the Ape and Siphatecia in Metempsychosis, the primary ones being the congruity of a parody of Petrarchisms and a warning against ‘Sinnes against kinde’, to make ‘Sapho to Philaenis’ sound less like a championing of Sappho's Phainetai moi and more like an extremely subtle if still voyeuristic exploration of female homoeroticism for wholly self-interested purposes.
Certainly Donne's references to male homosexuality or bestiality as we would categorize them today are, without exception, unambiguously negative. In “Satire I,” the speaker asks his decadent companion,
Why should'st thou (that dost not onely approve,
But in ranke itchie lust, desire, and love
The nakednesse and barenesse to enjoy,
Of thy plumpe muddy whore, or prostitute boy)
Hate vertue, though shee be naked, and bare?
(37-41)
Here is an example of Donne's assertion which I quoted in my Introduction, that ‘lesse particles then words have busied the whole Church’ (Sermons, ix. 71). If it be not a ‘great thing’, the discrepancy among manuscripts and editions in the spelling of the word, ‘barenesse’ in line 39 is nevertheless pertinent here. Is the word ‘bareness’ or ‘barrenness’? The syllogism which the speaker is employing would suggest that it is ‘bareness’, an emphatic synonym for ‘nakednesse’, as Grierson points out (Donne 1912: ii. 107). As he admits, however, ‘barrennesse’ is also appropriate to the context in that sexual activity between the libertine and his ‘plump muddy whore, or prostitute boy’ would be barren, the purpose being physical pleasure rather than reproduction. This reading would support Sapho's argument that the female body (and the female in her social role) neither needs, nor benefits from, insemination by a male, and what I will argue is possibly an oblique reference to dildos at line 44, which, in the soft pornography of the time, were celebrated or condemned (depending on whether a woman or a man was speaking) as being better than a penis because its use would not result in pregnancy. In ‘Satire II’, Donne makes reference to the endemic ‘Symonie'and Sodomy in Churchmens lives’ (75), and in ‘Satire IV’, to the corrupt courtier who notices ‘Who loves Whores, who boyes, and who goats’ (128) so as to blackmail them. Except for his epigram, ‘The Jughler’, then, Donne's condemnation of sodomy and other ‘deviant’ sexualities are contained in his satires.
We have not yet looked at the whole of ‘Sapho to Philaenis’, however. It is the centre of Donne's poem which startles most, and complicates the poem's allusiveness. Sapho is finally distracted from her misery by her memory of Philaenis' beauty:
Thou art so faire,
As, gods, when gods to thee I doe compare,
Are grac'd thereby; And to make blinde men see,
What things gods are, I say they'are like to thee.
For, if we justly call each silly man
A litle world, What shall we call thee then?
Thou art not soft, and cleare, and strait, and faire,
As Down, as Stars, Cedars, and Lillies are,
But thy right hand, and cheek, and eye, only
Are like thy other hand, and cheek, and eye.
Such was my Phao awhile, but shall be never,
As thou, wast, art, and, oh, maist thou be ever.
(15-26)
Sapho compares the gods to Philaenis and it is they who benefit from such a comparison. Donne rejects the entire natural world and moves, blasphemously, right to the supernatural. J. Mueller, as do Allen and Revard, suggests that by comparing Philaenis to the gods, Donne takes the first line of Phainetai moi, ‘He seems to me equal to the gods’, and ‘wittily translates [it] from the male rival to the female beloved—outsapphizing, at this juncture, Sappho herself’ (1993: 186). This point seems to me to be Mueller's and Revard's strongest in arguing for Donne's familiarity with Sappho's poem, especially since Donne, as usual, goes one step further and rather than making Philaenis ‘equal to the gods’, he has Sapho blaspheme that Philaenis surpasses them.
The blasphemy of the first simile is surpassed by the evangelism of the second. If read literally, Sapho's simile is absurd, for if blind men cannot see the gods, neither can they see Philaenis to enable the comparison. But the idea of something so striking it allows blind men to ‘see’ was conventional in Donne's time. Juan Luis Vives's Instruction of a Christen woman (1541) criticizes the current fad in women's fashion of exposing one's breasts: ‘howe foule a thynge is that, as the commen sayeng is, a blynde man may espy, whan those that se it, some abhorre the abhominablenes: and some wanton menne seyng the parte of the bodye, nat used to be sene, are set on fyre therewith’ (39v). Donne is perhaps also using the words ‘blinde’ and ‘see’ in their theological senses, the notion that atheists are spiritually blind, for in a sermon, Donne describes the Church as ‘A place where the blind might recover sight; that is, Men borne in Paganisme, or Superstition, might see the true God, truly worshipped’ (v. 125).
As I set out in my Introduction, Sapho's defence of her ‘blasphemy’ can be read on several levels, one of which is the way Donne uncannily points, through his mimicry of a convention, to the dereliction of woman from the symbolic order, the ‘world’, but also to her ‘disruptive excess’, beyond patriarchal prescriptions. The micro/macrocosm comparison is a favourite device of Donne's and is worth looking at in a few poems as well as in a sermon, for purposes of comparison and contrast. In his ‘Holy Sonnet’ which begins ‘I am a little world made cunningly ❙ Of Elements, and an Angelike spright’, Donne does not play with gender but his imagination pushes against another frontier when he addresses the astronomers and discoverers who were stretching the limits of the known world and universe: ‘You which beyond that heaven which was most high ❙ Have found new sphears, and of new lands can write, ❙ Powre new seas in mine eyes’ (5-7). In ‘The Good-morrow’, the speaker uses the convention as if the statement, ‘man is a little world’, includes the woman: ‘Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone, ❙ Let Maps to others, worlds on worlds have showne, ❙ Let us possesse our world, each hath one, and is one’ (12-14). Likewise in ‘The Sunne Rising’, ‘the world's contracted thus’ (26) in the lovers, although the arrangement between them betrays a significant imbalance of power: ‘She'is all States, and all Princes, I, ❙ Nothing else is’ (21). Trying to outdo himself in finding one more permutation for the metaphor and extend the limits of epideictic, Donne reverses the comparison in The First Anniversary when he describes Elizabeth Drury as ‘She to whom this world must it selfe refer, / As Suburbs, or the Microcosme of her’ (235-6). In a sermon on Psalm 62: 9 Donne embarks on a dazzling defence of ‘man's’ divinity. I include this sermon passage to set in relief the gender-inflected use in ‘Sapho to Philaenis’:
[A]s though one God were not enough for the administration of this world, God hath multiplied gods here upon Earth, and imparted, communicated, not onely his power to every Magistrate, but the Divine nature to every sanctified man. … [S]ince God is so mindfull of him, since God hath set his minde upon him, What is not man? Man is all. … Absolutely, unconditionally we cannot annihilate man, not evacuate, not evaporate, not extenuate man to the levity, to the vanity, to the nullity of this Text. … For, man is not onely a contributary Creature, but a totall Creature; He does not onely make one, but he is all; He is not a piece of the world, but the world it selfe; and next to the glory of God, the reason why there is a world.
(vi. 297-8)
In this astounding affirmation of both ‘man's’ divinity, his share in the immortal not just in ‘the next world’ but ‘here on earth’, and of the impossibility of his ‘annihilation’, woman is once again subject to ‘internal exile’, both there and not there, her difference assumed to be participating in the relationship between God and man. But ‘if we justly call each silly man ❙ A little world, What shall we call’ woman? Man is ‘all; He is not a piece of the world, but the world it selfe’. The phrase, ‘Partaker of the divine Nature’, also reminds us that part of the debate on the nature of women was the very question (usually asked in jest to show off one's rhetorical skills) of whether women partook of the divine nature (Maclean 1988: 13-14), hence Donne's Problem, ‘Why hath the common opinion affoorded woemen Soules?’ (1980: 28-9).
Holstun uses the gender-inflected use of the macro/microcosm metaphor in ‘The Good-morrow’ to argue that ‘Because sapphic love cannot participate in this political and erotic play of domination … it cannot employ this trope’ (1987: 840). But Sapho does employ the trope, wittily playing with its gender inflections, and then she rejects it because of its inadequacy. As the speaker of ‘Negative Love’ professes, ‘If that be simply perfectest ❙ Which can by no way be exprest ❙ But Negatives, my love is so’ (10-12). Likewise, in a sermon Donne states, ‘we can expresse God himselfe in no clearer termes, nor in termes expressing more Dignity, then in saying we cannot expresse him’ (viii. 105). Sapho realizes that neither gods nor anything in the natural world can do justice to Philaenis and so she is forced to resort to praise by negative comparison. In her lyrical essay, ‘When Our Lips Speak Together’, Irigaray explains to her female interlocutor why she has been insisting on negatives in her evocation of love between women:
And if I have so often insisted on negatives: not, nor, without … it has been to remind you, to remind us, that we only touch each other naked. And that, to find ourselves once again in that state, we have a lot to take off. So many representations, so many appearances separate us from each other. They have wrapped us for so long in their desires, we have adorned ourselves so often to please them, that we have come to forget the feel of our own skin.
(1985b: 217-18; Irigaray's ellipsis)
That Donne's Sapho should insist on negatives therefore might be interpreted as a sloughing off, as it were, the trappings of a specular, possessive claim to the other. Sapho insists on the nakedness of woman that is both ‘her destitution in language’ (1985a: 143), and the starting point for a different language. There is no way of articulating woman or her desire apart from the ‘words as the wrappings with which the “subject,” modestly, clothes the “female” (142; my emphasis). But what about Irigaray's ‘metaphor’ of the two lips, which I quoted above? Is she not just substituting one metaphor, one series of metaphors, for another in her exploration of what a ‘speaking (as) woman’ might be? Diana Fuss clarifies the difference in Irigaray's mimicry of the operation of substitution in phallogocentrism: ‘what is important about Irigaray's conception of this particular figure is that the “two lips” operate as a metaphor for metonymy’ (1989: 66). I will return to the implications of what Fuss identifies as Irigaray's proposed metonymic relationship between language and the body.
Anachronistic a reference though it may be for Sapho, in her rejection of Petrarchisms there is almost certainly an allusion to the imagery the lover uses in the Song of Solomon, or Canticles. Sapho says of Philaenis:
Thou art not soft, and cleare, and strait, and faire,
As Down, as Stars, Cedars, and Lillies are.
(21-2)
While ‘Down’ has the most textual support, Grierson notes the ‘Dowves’ (i.e. doves) of the Phillips manuscript gives the plural as in the other nouns, and a closer parallel in poetic vividness. ‘We get a series of pictures—doves, stars, cedars, lilies’ (Donne 1912: ii. 91). Grierson cites The Winter's Tale, in which Florizel describes Perdita's hand: ‘As soft as dove's down, and as white as it’ (4.4.364). Doves, cedars, and lilies appear frequently in the Canticles and all three occur in the blazon the woman sings of her male beloved, here in the Geneva Bible's translation:
His eyes are like dooves upon the rivers of waters, which are washt with milke, & remaine by the ful vessels. His chekes are as a bed of spices, and as swete flowres, & his lippes like lilies dropping downe pure myrrhe. … His mouth is as swete things, and he is wholy delectable: this is my welbeloved, & this is my lover.
(vv. 12-13, 16)
Both male and female sing each other's praises and both are compared to doves and lilies. The woman yearns for her beloved: ‘In my bed by night I soght him that my soule loved: I soght him, but I founde him not’ (3: 1). Both the erotic blazons and the lovers' separation and desired union in the Canticles seem to echo in Donne's poem. Sapho's words are part of a negative comparison, however. Again, there is an ambiguity as to whether Sapho and Philaenis' love is nothing like the love expressed in the Canticles or is one which defies all (current) categories. None of the comparatives in line 22, with the exception of stars, are frequent in Donne's poetry. ‘Sapho to Philaenis’ contains the only reference to lilies. Only Donne's ‘Upon the Annunciation and Passion’ makes reference to ‘a Cedar’ (8) which plants itself and falls, an allusion to Christ and the cross on which he is crucified. A dove or doves figure in ‘The Canonization’ (‘And wee in us finde the'Eagle and the Dove’, line 22). In the epithalamium Donne wrote for Princess Elizabeth's marriage to Frederick (‘the grave whispering Dove’, line 6), ‘Holy Sonnet XVIII’ (‘And let myne amorous soule court thy mild Dove’, line 12), and ‘His Parting From Her’, in which the speaker refers to his ‘Dove-like friend’ (line 30), the dove obviously symbolized the tenderness which Donne felt was integral to such a relationship. If we are to read ‘Down’, rather than ‘Doves’, ‘Sapho to Philaenis’ is the only instance of it as a substantive noun.
Considered as a group, I suggest Donne's ‘insignificant’ metaphors could also point towards the kind of ineffability we see in Dante's Paradiso as Dante attempts to describe his union with God in the thirty-third Canto, ‘the end of all desires’: ‘O how scant is speech and how feeble to my conception! and this, to what I saw, is such that it is not enough to call it little. O Light Eternal, that alone abidest in Thyself, alone knowest Thyself, and, known to Thyself and knowing, lovest and smilest on Thyself!’ (1961: 33.46-7, her strange blazon, Sapho admits that the best praise she can bestow upon Philaenis is that her right side ‘only’ is like her left. Likewise in Donne's ‘The Dreame’, the speaker says of his beloved:
Thou art so true, that thoughts of thee suffice,
To make dreames truth; and fables histories
.....I doe confesse, it could not chuse but bee
Prophane, to thinke thee any thing but thee.
(7-8; 19-20)
In the epithalamium Thomas Heywood wrote for the 1612 marriage of Princess Elizabeth and Frederick, he obviously intends it as the highest compliment that ‘Unto your selves, your selves, then we must say, ❙ We onely may compare’ (1613: Cv). Finally, compare the sonnet Henry Constable writes ‘To the Countesses of Cumberland and Warwick, Sisters’:
Yow sister Muses doe not ye repine,
That I two sisters doe with nyne compare
For eyther of these sacred two more rare
In vertue is, then all the heavenly nyne.
But if ye aske which one is more devine?
I say like to theyre owne twin eyes they are
How should I yow commend, when eyther one
All things in heaven and earth so far excell.
The highest prayse that I can give is this,
That one of yow like to the other is.
(1960: 146-7)
Outside the context of lesbian love, this compliment of incomparability is both politic and conventional (as we saw in ‘All haile sweet Poët’); it is the context of Sapho's compliment which is, to indulge in a colloquialism, earth-shattering.
There would seem to be at least two ways of interpreting this group of metaphors in ‘Sapho to Philaenis’, both of which cast radically different lights on the issue of lesbian ‘likenesse’ and the Nature versus Art tension. Is Sapho expressing defeat or wonder? Is her epideictic which begins with comparisons to the gods and ends with a comparison of the self to the self a blasphemous parody or a pointing to the dwelling of the immortal in the mortal? On the one hand, critics argue that Donne buries the possibility of lesbian expression in an unmarked grave, so to speak; that Philaenis inhabits a ‘self-contained signifying system’ (Holstun 1987: 840). On the other hand, several critics responding to Holstun argue that Donne suggests a ‘remedy’ for the intertextual rivalries so much more apparent in Ovid's text (Harvey 1989: 128) and moves closer to Sappho (whether he'd read her or not) in whose lyrics ‘love is a forgetfulness of self, a delight in mutuality, in mirroring, in giving pleasure to the beloved’ (Kauffman 1986: 55). On one side of language, we have the realm Holstun asserts Philaenis inhabits, a ‘realm of preverbal monstrosity’; and on the other side of language we have that phenomenon so appealing for Donne: ‘reaching beyond language and thought into wonder’ (Carey 1990: 111) and hence, towards the divine. Both interpretations bring to mind the ‘limit of the thinkable’.
I suggest that one reading of Sapho's epideictic is to see it as wonderment at the uniqueness rather than the ‘monstrosity’ of Philaenis. A sense of wonder which renders the speaker speechless is expressed in a number of Songs and Sonets. For example, the speaker of ‘The Relique’ admits to the inability of language to express the perfection of his beloved: ‘All measure, and all language, I should passe, ❙ Should I tell what a miracle shee was’ (32-3). Wonder in the Songs and Sonets, however, is often complicated by the speaker's need to assert that his love relationship is unique in the world and thus in need of safeguarding from contamination. The speaker of ‘The Undertaking’ boasts: ‘I have done one braver thing ❙ Then all the Worthies did, ❙ Yet a braver thence doth spring, ❙ Which is, to keepe that hid’ (1-4). The need to hide their superior love from ‘prophane men’ is urged on the beloved in ‘A Valediction: forbidding Mourning’: ‘'Twere prophanation of our joyes ❙ To tell the layetie our love’ (7-8). Likewise, the woman in ‘A Valediction: of the Booke’ is urged to collect the love letters passed between herself and the speaker, but ‘This Booke’, ‘this all-graved tome, ❙ In cypher write, or new made Idiome; ❙ Wee for love's clergie only'are instruments’ (19-21). There is in each of these excerpts what Anthony Low and others identify as Donne's desire for a private world which is manifestly superior to the world of ‘dull sublunary lovers’. Such exclusivity demands a code of expression in order to protect it from ‘inundat[ions]’ of the uninitiated, so that the wonder of love is not necessarily inexpressible, it just cannot be shared, or will not be shared, with the outside world. If Sapho's epideictic acknowledges the uniqueness of Philaenis, the confusion of Sapho with Philaenis later in the poem as she stands in front of her mirror—‘touching my selfe, all seemes done to thee’—is her attempt to identify completely with the other, which she ultimately recognizes is impossible. But between the unhappy extremes of fusion and unknowability lies the ‘neere[ness]’ which Sapho calls for in the final line of the poem.
There are problems, however, with such a positive reading of Sapho's ‘all or nothing’ epideictic. After manipulating the topos of inexpressibility and incomparability with dazzling virtuosity, Sapho is suddenly reminded of her old lover, Phaon, and says he was like her, for ‘awhile’. Sapho has breached one of the laws of love: never bring up former lovers. Our imaginations have been taken to the edge of the universe and back, only to find Philaenis compared to someone in Sapho's own backyard: her former male lover. So far, critics have noted that Philaenis comes out ahead of Phaon in this comparison, but the deflatory effect of the comparison has not registered. Phaon appears, moreover, so as to allow us to compare Donne to Ovid, to Sappho. What exactly is being compared in this couplet?:
Such was my Phao 'awhile, but shall be never,
As thou, wast, art, and, oh, maist thou be ever.
(25-6)
The end of Sapho's radical epideictic is the first indication that Sapho and Philaenis are post-Phaon. Phaon is no longer what Philaenis was, is and ever shall be: smooth, symmetrical, and ‘indefinitely other in herself’. Donne perhaps alludes to Sappho's declaration in Ovid's Heroides, 15, ‘o nec adhuc iuvenis, nec iam puer, utilis aetas; [O neither yet man nor still boy—meet age for charm]’ (93). But both males and females change at puberty; indeed women continue to experience time cyclically rather than linearly because of menstruation. Renaissance women were considered to be lustier and naturally more changeable in temperament. So in what way is Philaenis as a woman the same in past, present, and future time? Donne's lines hint that his experimentation with the nature of lesbian love arises out of male performance anxiety. Only a man suffering from such anxiety would look at a woman and view her as unchanging relative to a man, if only in the arena of physical love. The unfavourable comparison of Phaon to Philaenis would suggest that Donne was especially attracted by the imaginative opportunities for stability and constancy which a certain perception of lesbian love presented to his mind. Holstun's assertion that ‘lesbian sexuality becomes a phenomenon of the past which can only be discussed in retrospect’, is one which seems to stem from a careless reading of the present tense in Donne's poem, and of the tentativeness with which Sapho frames her argument against heterosexuality. While Ovid's Sappho waxes elegiac about the good times she and Phaon shared, Donne's Sapho engages in an eloquent argument which she still obviously believes can persuade Philaenis to come to her senses (all of them) and return to Sapho. Donne's Sapho, unlike Ovid's, is not about to jump from the Leucadian cliff to ‘seek her fate’; she is not suspended in a literal cliff-hanger that is resolved beyond the margins of Heroides, 15 in Ovid's Amores where, it turns out, Phaon wises up.
Ovid's Sappho had also compared her beloved Phaon to the gods, Apollo and Bacchus. She argues that if these two gods could love Daphne and Ariadne, neither of whom were poets, Phaon ought to love her: ‘si mihi difficilis formam natura negavit, ❙ ingenio formae damna repende meo. ❙ sim brevis, at nomen, quod terras inpleat omnes, ❙ est mihi; mensuram nominis ipsa fero. [If nature, malign to me, has denied the charm of beauty, weigh in the stead of beauty the genius that is mine. If I am slight of stature, yet I have a name fills every land; the measure of my name is my real height]’ (31-4). Sappho's defence is both a cheap shot on Ovid's part—referring as he is to the tradition that Sappho was ugly—and rather extraordinary in that a woman argues her literary skills more than ‘make up’ for the physical attributes which usually make or break a woman's fortunes. Moreover, a woman's name, although it was better if no one heard of her, was usually made famous or infamous because of her sexual ‘reputation’, chaste or unchaste, not her poetry.
In what is probably another nod to Ovid, Donne's Sapho also refers to her own beauty briefly so that her far-reaching praise of Philaenis seems further eroded after her reminiscence of Phaon.
Here lovers sweare in their Idolatrie,
That I am such; but Griefe discolors me.
And yet I grieve the lesse, least Griefe remove
My beauty, and make me'unworthy of thy love.
(27-30)
Mueller suggests Donne draws from Sappho's Phainetai moi here, but the tone seems to be that of parody. From references outside of time and space, Sapho brings us back to her immediate situation with ‘Here’. To whom does ‘lovers’ refer? Is Sapho loved by others? If so, does she scorn them all for Philaenis or does the promiscuity Ovid exaggerated (‘atque aliae centum, quas hic sine crimine amavi’; my emphasis) continue? Finally, the soaring, visionary language with which Sapho describes Philaenis comes crashing down, like Icarus with his melted wings, into a sea of bathos. Sapho's final lines of this passage can be rudely paraphrased thus: ‘My distress over your absence mars my face, but I am crying less for you so that I do not look so bad that you cannot love me’. Such interludes as lines 25 to 30 make it difficult to assert Donne has a single agenda in ‘Sapho to Philaenis’. It is as if he tries to entertain a male coterie, deflate the reputations of Sappho and Ovid so as to inflate his own, and yet find an answer for his own imaginative problem with which he is so obsessed in his love poetry: the impossibility, the mystery, of two becoming one.
Sapho's argument begins in earnest in the following lines, for the threat of a male supplanting Sapho in Philaenis' affections is real.
Plaies some soft boy with thee, oh there wants yet
A mutuall feeling which should sweeten it.
His chinne, a thorny hairy'unevennesse
Doth threaten, and some daily change possesse.
Thy body is a naturall Paradise,
In whose selfe, unmanur'd, all pleasure lies,
Nor needs perfection; why shouldst thou than
Admit the tillage of a harsh, rough man?
Men leave behinde them that which their sin showes,
And are as theeves trac'd, which rob when it snows.
But of our dallyance no more signes there are,
Then fishes leave in streames, or Birds in aire.
(31-42)
Against Holstun's argument of periodization, I would suggest that Sapho's epistle constitutes a wooing of Philaenis, the promise of a second honeymoon, as it were. First, however, she must dismiss the competition, and she does so on purely physical grounds. The word ‘play’ is a common euphemism for sexual intercourse. The words, ‘chinne’, ‘thorn’ and ‘hair’ are all used by Shakespeare as euphemisms for the penis or pubic hair (G. Williams 1994). Celia and Rosalind in As You Like It pun on ‘chin’ in the same way (3.2.201-6). Sapho's argument is thus based on primary and secondary sex characteristics, and the unevenness of (de)tumescence is augmented by the threat of pregnancy. Sapho thus answers Shakespeare's question in his third Sonnet: ‘For where is she so fair whose uneared womb ❙ Disdains the tillage of thy husbandry?’ (5-6).
Before discussing Sapho's radical reappraisal of woman's reproductive capacity as measure of her worth, I want to address the ‘mutuall feeling’ which heterosexual ‘playing’ lacks. The OED defines ‘mutual’ as ‘reciprocal’ (A.1.a). Its essence is qualitative as opposed to ‘equal’, a word more objectively quantifiable, at least according to Milton who describes Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost: ‘both ❙ Not equal, as thir sex not equal seem'd’ (4.295-6). Consider Donne's use of the word in ‘The Exstasie’: ‘As 'twixt two equall Armies, Fate ❙ Suspends uncertaine victorie, ❙ Our soules, (which to advance their state, ❙ Were gone out,) hung 'twixt her, and mee’ (13-16). Elsewhere in his poetry, Donne uses ‘mutuall’ to connote the absolute unity of heterosexual lovers. In ‘The Dissolution’, the speaker says, ‘wee were mutuall Elements to us, ❙ And made of one another’ (3-4); in the epithalamium Donne wrote for Princess Elizabeth and the Elector Palatine, they are ‘Two Phænixes whose joyned brests ❙ Are unto one another mutuall nests’ (23-4). At least ideally, there is ‘a mutuall feeling’ in these relationships which sweetens it and is part of what Low recognizes as Donne's reinvention of love in terms of the communal rather than the social (1993: 33).
Donne's Sapho compares the mutuality of lesbian ‘likenesse’ with the ownership implied in heterosexuality. Philaenis lacks nothing whatsoever, there is nothing wanting in the natural Paradise of her body, ‘In whose selfe, unmanur'd, all pleasure lies’. The use of the word, ‘unmanur'd’, is an unusual one to our ears. The verb ‘to manure’ was used as it is today, according to the OED, as early as 1599, but its primary meaning in Donne's time was ‘To hold, occupy (land, property); to have the tenure of, to administer, manage’. It also meant ‘to inhabit’ (1.b) and ‘to till’ or ‘cultivate’ (2), and was used figuratively of the body or mind (2.d). Donne uses it in his verse letter to Rowland Woodward, ‘Like one who'in her third widdowhood’, in its primary, secondary, and figurative senses, to recommend the retired life to Woodward: ‘Manure thy selfe then, to thy selfe be'approv'd’ (34). Self-sufficiency and discretion—literally possession of one's self—are the ideals Donne holds up. In ‘Sapho to Philaenis’, Donne uses ‘unmanur'd’ to suggest the same kind of self-possession, not so much in the moral sense, but the physical one, and not just in terms of the individual but a single sex. His puns on ‘man’ and the Latin, manus / ‘hand’, thus contracts several connotations in one word: Philaenis need not be touched by man, sexually or any other way which tries to appropriate her as his property. In both instances, the economic connotations of holding one's property or ‘place’ in the world and of being independent thus have radically different implications for the speakers and their addressees, because of their gender differences. Janel Mueller states, ‘that economic aspects of lesbianism are addressed at all remains for me a compelling index to the seriousness and rigor of Donne's “what if” in “Sapho to Philaenis”—the attempt to imagine friendship and marriage as a conjoint relation of equality’ (1993: 202).
According to Sapho, Philaenis is in no need of the perfection women were considered to achieve upon marriage and subsequent motherhood, nor must she capitulate to becoming the possession or property of her husband, a commodity to be exchanged between men, father and husband. The natural Paradise of Philaenis evokes a world both antithetical and analogous to Marvell's assertion in ‘The Garden’ that ‘Two paradises 'twere in one ❙ To live in Paradise alone’ (63-4). Paradise for Sapho is a body which refuses to ‘Admit the tillage of a harsh rough man’. Ian Maclean concludes that ‘matrimony was a divine, natural and social institution in the eyes of Renaissance thinkers: any alternative is theologically contentious, and requires a new vision of the mental and physical predispositions of the sexes’ (1980: 84). Humanists such as Erasmus in his Praise of Matrimony and Thomas More in his Utopia actively promoted marriage as centrally important to their ideal societies, actively reviving classical metaphors such as David Halperin quotes from the Athenian betrothal ceremony ‘in which the father of the bride says to her future husband, “I give you this woman for the plowing of legitimate children”’ (1990: 141). Renaissance thinkers were, for the most part, of the same mind as the Greeks: ‘in the absence of men, women's sexual functioning is aimless and unproductive, merely a form of rottenness and decay, but by the application of male pharmacy it becomes at once orderly and fruitful’ (141). Irigaray observes: ‘Thus, the idea has been introduced in women's imagination that their pleasure lies in “producing” children: which amounts to bending them to the values of production, even before they have had an occasion to examine their pleasure’ (1990: 85). Here, Irigaray points to the operation of the Oedipal complex which constructs woman as castrated and therefore desirous of the phallus, which she obtains indirectly through the production of (boy) children, and thus acquires value in the eyes of the Father.
What is astounding is that Donne argues against the opinions of his time when Sapho compares the consequences of hetero- and homosexuality for women:
Men leave behinde them that which their sin showes,
And are as theeves trac'd, which rob when it snows.
But of our dallyance no more signes there are,
Then fishes leave in streames, or Birds in aire.
Two women making love are as creatures in their natural element, they belong together and they leave the world as they found it. Donne uses the same metaphor in a verse letter to Henry Wotton, ‘Sir, more than kisses, letters mingle soules’. In his argument that life is a voyage which requires self-disciplined navigation, Donne counsels his friend:
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.
(53-8)
The balance here between presence and absence is a delicate one. Donne's image is so subtle it would seem he almost counsels invisibility and silence, anonymity rather than discretion, but the notions of moderation and assimilation to effect the mutual benefit of individual and community or surroundings are present as well. The image in ‘Sapho to Philaenis’ is perhaps vulnerable to the same set of readings but in its antithetical position to the description of men's sexual activity, it functions primarily to continue the argument of naturalness and mutuality. Donne is not talking about non-signification here, a lack of difference—fishes are different from water, birds are different from air—but they exist in a non-hierarchical relationship, something which is impossible on patriarchal terms. In addition to avoiding pregnancy, Sapho and Philaenis' ‘dallyance’ is not an example of the performative, display-oriented male conception of sexual activity. Sapho's ideal, like the advice Donne gives to Wotton about discretion, is decidedly different from the crowing male lovers in the Elegies and the Songs and Sonets or even the ideal lovers of ‘The Canonization’, who will be ‘invoke[d]’ and begged for ‘A patterne of [their] love’. J. Mueller points out the third party observing the lovers in ‘The Extasie’ and that that third party is male (1985: 39-42). Yet another viewpoint is expressed in ‘A Lecture upon the Shadow’, however, whereby disguises or secrets have no part in true love and lovers are indifferent to opinion: ‘That love hath not attain'd the high'st degree, ❙ Which is still diligent lest others see’ (12-13).
Donne's analogy of men to thieves is perhaps not as straight-forward as it appears. Sapho's meaning seems obvious enough: that men who make love to women often leave behind a child which ‘showes’ the ‘sin’ of fornication. But the analogy to thieves who steal in winter and can thus be traced by their footprints betrays the collective and individual male anxiety of fixing paternity absolutely. The man who loves and leaves, indeed any man, can never be sure of tracing the children his mistress/wife gives birth to, back to his own seed. It is in fact women who could potentially rob men if their children are conceived extramaritally. Family inheritances could be diverted into impure bloodlines and hence, anyone who could be proven a bastard could be cut out of any inheritance. Again here, Sapho's argument in part betrays a male perspective, in which it is males, illegitimate sons, who steal from other males, their supposed fathers. Those men who ‘trespass’ on the property of other men, their wives, are also thieves and cause for anxiety. Donne uses the lover/thief analogy in the same way but more overtly, to begin ‘The Perfume’. The man as lover/thief is betrayed by his ‘traiterous’ perfume. And it is the woman's father, not the woman, who is compared to one who has been robbed. As Anthony Low points out, the most intense relationship is not that of the lover and his mistress but rather the lover and his mistress's father (1993: 38). The woman is the loot, even as the speaker implies she is promiscuous:
Once, and but once found in thy company,
All thy suppos'd escapes are laid on mee;
And as a thiefe at barre, is question'd there
By all the men, that have beene rob'd that yeare,
So am I, (by this traiterous meanes surpriz'd)
By thy Hydroptique father catechiz'd.
(1-6)
Donne's Sapho holds out the best of both worlds to Philaenis: ‘betweene us all sweetnesse may be had; ❙ All, all that Nature yields, or Art can adde’ (43-4). The Nature versus Art argument, most famously articulated by Sidney in his Defence of Poetry, has been one of the tensions underlying Sapho's entire epistle. Sidney argues that ‘Nature never set forth the earth in so rich a tapestry as divers poets have done; … Her world is brazen, the poets only deliver a golden’ (78). The poet is both poiein/maker and vates/prophet, and embellishes the world in which he/she lives. Sapho, despite her protestations of inability, has been employing her considerable Art in wooing Philaenis, convincing her of her own desirability as a woman, over any man. But the sudden surfacing of this ‘Art’ in line 44, after an extensive agricultural, Paradisal paean does not seem logical. If Philaenis' body is a ‘naturall Paradise’ what need is there of Art? Perhaps I employ a ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ (Janel Mueller's term) here, but I cannot but suspect Donne could not resist a joke about dildos. Sapho and Philaenis as two women can enjoy each other naturally as well as use artificial penises and thus make men utterly superfluous. We have just heard Sapho argue that one of the greatest merits of lesbian love is that there is no risk of pregnancy, and she does so without even remotely implying that she and Philaenis use a dildo. Yet not having to fear pregnancy along with never ‘detumescing’ are the two properties of the dildo which women—such as Nashe's Francis in The Choise of Valentines—celebrate in the soft-core pornography of the Renaissance. Donne refers to dildos twice, in ‘The Anagram’ and ‘Satire II’. While one cannot say for sure that these four words, ‘or Art can adde’, added to the end of an argument for natural love have a deflatory effect, it is just the kind of subtle jab Donne could make to amuse his friends and yet not take away from the sincerity of the argument Sapho makes.
Donne, through the voice of Lesbian Sappho, the Tenth Muse, seems to want to construct a world through poetry which holds out the possibility of a world devoid of ‘change’ and ‘sicknesse’, a world symbolized by the naturalness of lesbian love as Sapho argues for it, even as she draws ‘Natures workes, from Natures law’. If Donne's motivation for portraying lesbian love is not simply to rescue it and Sapho from the dismemberments of his poetic predecessors, or to present it as a viable choice for ‘real’ women, his imagination seems attracted to the lesbian woman because she represents through a sexuality which is not frustrated by the changes and ‘unevennesse’ of ejaculation, detumescence, even pregnancy, the perfect union and constancy which proves so elusive in heterosexual relationships, both real and imagined. Sapho speaks for Donne, mediating this union through the sexuality she expressed in her poetry, and while Donne uses her as a kind of Muse figure here, a mutual redemption takes place: Donne represents the ‘honey-sweet pride of Lesbos’ instead of the butch of Martial; Sapho redeems Donne from a fallen world of, to use Ricks's term, ‘post-coital sadness’.
Finally then, we are back where we began: looking at Sapho looking in the mirror as she touches herself. Now that I have discussed what precedes this scene both inside Donne's poem and outside it, are we any closer to determining Donne's construction of lesbian ‘likenesse’? Sapho has just concluded her articulation of a female pleasure which is other than the procreation of children as male property, and her argument sounds very much like what Judith Butler calls the ‘antipenetrative eros of surfaces’ which appears in some of Irigaray's writing: ‘[t]he refusal of an eroticism of entry and containment seems linked for Irigaray with an opposition to appropriation and possession as forms of erotic exchange’ (Butler 1994: 158; see Irigaray 1993c: 179-80). Sapho asks of Philaenis, ‘Hand to strange hand, lippe to lippe none denies; ❙ Why should they brest to brest, or thighs to thighs?’ She suggests that ‘the likenesse being such ❙ Why should they not alike in all parts touch?’ Nowhere does Sapho espouse the bee-line approach to the ‘Centrique part’ which the speaker of ‘Love's Progress’ asserts is the ‘desir'd place’, the telos of love. Donne thus seems to pass the ‘test’ Irigaray imposes:
even the motifs of ‘self-touching,’ of ‘proximity,’ isolated as such or reduced to utterances, could effectively pass for an attempt to appropriate the feminine to discourse. [sic] We would still have to ascertain whether ‘touching oneself,’ that (self)touching, the desire for the proximate rather than for (the) proper(ty), and so on, might not imply a mode of exchange irreducible to any centering, any centrism, given the way the ‘self-touching’ of female ‘self-affection’ comes into play as a rebounding from one to the other without any possibility of interruption, and given that, in this interplay, proximity confounds any adequation, any appropriation.
(1985b: 79; first emphasis mine)
There is a startling example of what seems to be an eros of ‘the fecundity of the caress’ (see Irigaray 1993a: 185 ff.) in Ben Jonson's translation of Petronius: ‘Doing, a filthy pleasure is, and short; ❙ And done, we straight repent us of the sport: ❙ Let us not then rush blindly on unto it, ❙ Like lustful beasts, that onely know to doe it’. Rather, ‘Let us together closely lie, and kisse, ❙ There is no labour, nor no shame in this; ❙ This hath pleas'd, doth please, and long will please; never ❙ Can this decay, but is beginning ever’ (1925-52: viii. 294). Jonson's male performance anxiety registers here in the shame and disgust he expresses for the wholly inadequate sexual act. Jonson was obviously attracted to a ‘becoming’ which avoided postcoital sadness, the ‘disappointment of having come’, and thus his privileging of touch over penetration is at least in part substitutive for intercourse rather than an altogether independent mode of relating. Moreover, we saw the rage with which he expressed Cecilia Bulstrode's ‘rubbing’ and writing in his ‘Epigram on the Court Pucelle’.
In her essay, ‘Love of Self’, Irigaray points to the dangers of love between women in which Sapho appears to get caught up in front of her mirror:
The female has always served the self-love of man, obviously. But there is also the fact that the female does not have the same relation to exteriority as the male. … She herself cannot watch herself desiring (except through another woman? Who is not herself? One of the dangers of love between women is the confusion in their identities, the lack of respect for or of perception of differences).
(1993a: 63)
It takes Sapho some time to distinguish her image in the mirror from Philaenis, even as she touches her own body, but she does, crucially, return to her own body from the ‘other side’ of the mirror. Unlike the opinion of the speaker in ‘Communitie’ and ‘Variety’, one woman is not just like another. Irigaray articulates the likeness and difference in the love between women she enacts with her female interlocutor in ‘When Our Lips Speak Together’: ‘We live by twos beyond all mirages, images, and mirrors. … Our resemblance does without semblances: for in our bodies, we are already the same. Touch yourself, touch me, you'll “see”’ (1985b: 216).
There is a corresponding moment to Sapho's mirror scene in which Ovid's Sappho describes her dreams of Phaon:
illic te invenio, quamvis regionibus absis;
.....oscula cognosco, quae tu committere linguae
aptaque consueras accipere, apta dare.
blandior interdum verisque simillima verba
eloquor, et vigilant sensibus ora meis.
ulteriora pudet narrare, sed omnia fiunt,
et iuvat, et siccae non licet esse mihi.
[In them I find you, though in space you are far away; … I recognize the kisses—close caresses of the tongue—which you were wont to take and wont to give. At times I fondle you, and utter words that seem almost the waking truth, and my lips keep vigil for my senses. Further I blush to tell, but all takes place; I feel the delight, and cannot rule myself].
(125, 129-34)
Sappho has switched from the past tense to the present in this passage in order to convey the illusion of Phaon's presence as she dreams. She describes the physical sensations of her fantasy as if they were real, she touches Phaon, she utters ‘words that seem almost the waking truth’, and if Ovid's Latin is more literally translated, she brings herself to orgasm. In Sappho's dream, her words function in the same way to make Phaon, a man, ‘present’, as Sapho's words and body do in Donne's poem to make Philaenis, a woman, ‘present’. The likeness of their bodies is such that the required suspension of disbelief is something less than in the case of a woman and a man. When compared to the scene in Ovid then, Sapho's autoerotic mirror-gazing is less troublingly narcissistic than it is coincidentally useful to Donne's argument for perfect union. The danger of narcissistic everlastingness is in fact dissolved as Sapho moves to kiss her image in the glass and recognizes it is she and not Philaenis. Likewise in Ovid, Sappho wakes up with only her memories of Phaon's presence, symbolized by the pressed-down grass of the forest.
In her final lines, Sapho resumes her wooing through epideictic and again attempts to surpass stale Petrarchisms. Philaenis once again is thrust into the outer reaches of the galaxy, encompassing or ‘outwear[ing]’ time itself. The final image of the poem is of Philaenis ‘comming neere’ and thus keeping ‘change’ and ‘sickness’ from Sapho. The undecidability of the whole poem does not let up in the final line, for here is both a desire for the absolute, for mastery over time and space which constitutes a phallogocentric economy, and an evocation of the proximate which Irigaray advocates in ‘This Sex Which Is Not One’:
Woman always remains several, but she is kept from dispersion because the other is already within her and is autoerotically familiar to her. Which is not to say that she appropriates the other for herself, that she reduces it to her own property. Ownership and property are doubtless quite foreign to the feminine. At least sexually. But not nearness. Nearness so pronounced that it makes all discrimination of identity, and thus all forms of property, impossible. Woman derives pleasure from what is so near that she cannot have it, nor have herself. She herself enters into a ceaseless exchange of herself with the other without any possibility of identifying either.
(1985b: 31)
Donne's Sapho seems to practice an exchange, a love of self and other through the other once she has ‘cross[ed] back through the mirror that subtends all speculation’ (1985b: 77; Irigaray's italics). Sapho and Philaenis seem to relate as do the lovers in ‘The Good-morrow’ where the speaker says, ‘Let us possesse our world, each hath one, and is one’ (14). But the same thing occurs at the end of both poems: a sudden desire to ‘freeze’ the becoming and exchange between lovers. ‘Sapho to Philaenis’ ends with only the wished-for return of Philaenis; she and Sapho have yet to come ‘neere’, and when they do Sapho anticipates no change rather than ex-change. ‘Love's Infiniteness’ is another poem which expresses the split within Donne's imagination between a desire for an unchanging ‘All’ and the wonder of love which ‘doth every day admit ❙ New growth’ (25-6). ‘The Good-morrow’ ends with a supposition: ‘If our two loves be one, or, thou and I ❙ Love so alike, that none doe slacken, none can die’. Catherine Belsey recognizes in her discussion of the crux at the end of ‘The Good-morrow’ that there is a direct conflict between desire's two imperatives: sustained intensity and fulfillment (1994: 143-6); the same conflict is carried over in Donne's exploration of homoerotics, because here Donne is unable, finally, to step across the threshold of the thinkable and comprehend that difference can bring us together in wonder as much as it always—inevitably yet creatively—separates us.
While Donne's homopoetics, to use Paula Blank's term, are still caught in the mirror of the Same and the Other of the Same, still frustrated rather than invigorated by the difference between Sapho and Philaenis, and if he still to some degree exploits lesbianism and the body of woman, Donne represents homoerotics in a way which Irigaray suggests can be useful in establishing an ethics of sexual difference, regardless of actual practices; that is, as a morphological model, one step in the process of realizing the gender relationship as intersubjective; hence, the possibility of an ‘I, you’ mode of relating rather than an ‘I, not-I’ ‘dialogue of one’. It is precisely that we cannot ‘forget the Hee and Shee’ (‘The Undertaking’), insofar as they signal the irreducible difference between subjectivities, if we wish to enter into fully creative dialogue with one another. In this sense, the poem is not ‘about’ sex at all, as Paula Blank argues in her discussion of the way sameness and difference ultimately transcend gender (1995). ‘Sapho to Philaenis’ shows that there is something ‘other’ to the feminine (and hence, to the masculine) besides its patriarchal status as merely Other of the Same; that it remains ‘somewhere else’, a ‘residue’ or excess which insists on troubling the borders of masculine amplitude. Donne criticism has assumed familiarity with the ‘scene of representation’ (see Irigaray 1985b: 68-85) with which phallogocentrism, Donne's ‘masculine perswasive force’ has obscured the entire landscape, so that if a poem like ‘Sapho to Philaenis’ does not fit, we remove it from our sights. I suggest that ‘Sapho to Philaenis’ points to another ‘place’ entirely unmapped, a ‘new love … so far ahead of its time culturally that it is questionable whether even Donne himself could have understood all its potential implications’ (Low 1993: 3). Anthony Low and I disagree as to the precise characterization of Donne's ‘reinvention of love’ as well as to the orientation of ‘Sapho to Philaenis’, but we agree that Donne did, almost, reinvent love. Low suggests Donne's ‘private love’ is ‘idealized, Romantic, mutual, and transcendent in feeling’, whereas I would point to Donne's rejection in at least some poems of ‘either/or’ modes for the ‘both/and’ modality of flesh and spirit, in something which comes closer to Irigaray's ‘sensible transcendental’ or what Kerrigan suggests ‘we might term, thinking of early Heidegger, a “fundamental ontology” of love, a revelation of being-in-love through the charted voyage of its temporal possibilities’ (1987: 13). Donne's efforts to ‘forget the hee and shee’ when he employs an image of neutrality between lovers in love poems such as ‘The Canonization’, are to erase an aspect of human relating which he elsewhere insists upon, but they might also be read as what Irigaray calls ‘crossing through the neuter—the space-time of remission of the polemic’ so as to ‘set up the return or reappearance of God or of the other’ (1993a: 147); a means of reconfiguring the self and other in a relationship which is horizontal rather than hierarchical. One senses that in writing ‘Sapho to Philaenis’ and so many of his love poems, Donne comes very close to recognizing that the ‘mystery of relations between lovers is more terrible but infinitely less deadly than the destruction of submitting to sameness’ (Irigaray 1993a: 191).
Notes
-
Turberville takes much licence in shifting the emphasis of Ovid's epistles to his own Tudor culture's concerns and expectations. Contemporary advice on women's conduct which demanded a woman's silence in exchange for her chaste reputation provides the lexicon of Turberville's moralized renditions. Lyly chose the fictionalization of Sappho which remembered her as a virtuous princess, not as a poet nor a lover of other women, nor a courtesan; in fact, the only choice open to him in a presentation before Her Majesty. While sharing the Renaissance preoccupation with the proper relations of those on various levels of the world hierarchy, Lyly chooses to represent the threat to and restoration of this order in a social rather than sexual context. But see Philippa Berry's discussion of Lyly (1989: 120-4) in which she suggests Lyly's presentation of Elizabeth as Sappho is more ambiguous in its exploration of the relations between power and sexuality. Drayton's poems (1961: ii. 129-308) constitute a sophisticated and complex response to Ovid, but the epistles are written by women from English history and so Sappho does not appear.
-
Verducci refers to ‘Sapho to Philaenis’ which she suggests is wholly a reaction to Heroides, 15, a portrayal of Sappho ‘as macabre and anachronistic as Ovid's’, yet perfectly faithful to the central tenet of Ovid's poem: the claims of art and life on the poet (1985: 143).
-
The ambiguous ending of Ovid's poem and this allusion to a happy ending for Sappho in Sabinus, was and is usually rejected or ignored in favour of Sappho's suicide. In Ovid's poem, the naiad who appears to Sappho in the forest tells her not that her leap from the Leucadian cliff will kill her, but that it will cure her passion for Phaon (163-72). Sappho makes up her mind to follow the nymph's advice and prays, ‘tu quoque, mollis Amor, pennas suppone cadenti, ❙ ne sim Leucadiae mortua crimen aquae! [Do thou too, tender Love, place thy pinions beneath me, lest I die and bring reproach on the Leucadian wave!]’ (179-80). She pledges her lyre to Phoebus if she survives her attempt to free herself of her passion for Phaon, and this is the vow to which Ovid refers at Amores, 2.18.34. Certainly Sappho worries that her leap from the Leucadian cliff will be fatal, but she seems in part to be indulging in a little calculated rhetorical posturing in order to sway Phaon (see ll. 187-90).
-
But see Crompton 1980/1 for a correction of the notion that lesbianism was not legislated against in Continental Europe in the Middle Ages and Renaissance.
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