SOURCE: Fish, Stanley. “Masculine Persuasive Force: Donne and Verbal Power.” In John Donne, edited by Andrew Mousley, pp. 157-81. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999.

[In the following essay, Fish argues that in his poetry Donne exercises the power of language to dominate and control.]

‘MY FEIGNED PAGE’

For a very long time I was unable to teach Donne's poetry. I never had anything good to say about the poems, and would always find myself rereading with approval C. S. Lewis's now fifty-year-old judgement on Donne as the ‘saddest’ and ‘most uncomfortable of our poets’ whose verse ‘exercises the same dreadful fascination that we feel in the grip of the worst kind of bore—the hot eyed, unescapable kind’.¹ Indeed my own response to the poetry was even more negative than Lewis's: I found it sick, and thought that I must be missing the point so readily seen by others. I now believe that to be the point: Donne is sick and his poetry is sick; but he and it are sick in ways that are interestingly related to the contemporary critical scene. In short, the pleasures of diagnosis have replaced the pleasure I was unable to derive from the verse.

Let's get the diagnosis out of the way immediately: Donne is bulimic, someone who gorges himself to a point beyond satiety, and then sticks his finger down his throat and throws up. The object of his desire and of his abhorrence is not food, but words, and more specifically, the power words can exert. Whatever else Donne's poems are, they are pre-eminently occasions on which this power can be exercised; they report on its exercise and stage it again in the reporting, and when one asks about a moment in the poetry, ‘Why is it thus?’ the answer will always be ‘in order further to secure the control and domination the poet and his surrogates continually seek’. This is, I think, what Judith Herz is getting at in a recent fine essay when she remarks that ‘Donne … will say anything if the poem seems to need it’,² an observation I would amend by insisting that the need to be satisfied is not the poem's but the poet's, and that it is the need first to create a world and then endlessly to manipulate those who are made to inhabit it.

In more than a few of the poems Donne not only performs in this way but provides a theoretical explanation of his performance. Such a poem is the elegy usually entitled ‘The Anagram’, a variation on the topos of the praise of ugliness. What Donne adds to the tradition is an account of what makes it possible, the capacity of words to make connection with one another rather than with some external referent that constrains them to accuracy. Four lines teach the lesson and exemplify it:

She's fair as any, if all be like her,
And if none be, then she is singular.
All love is wonder; if we justly do
Account her wonderful, why not lovely too?

(ll. 23-6)³

That is, if your mistress is indistinguishable from the indifferent mass of women, then say ‘she's fair as any’, and if she is distinguished by the oddness of her features, then say, ‘she is singular’, i.e., a rarity. In either case you will be telling the truth, not as it exists in some realm independent of your verbal dexterity, but as it has been established in the context created by that dexterity. This is even truer (if I can use that word) of the second couplet in which we are first invited to assent to an unexceptionable assertion (‘All love is wonder’) and then told that by assenting we have assented also to the infinite conclusions that might be reached by playing with the two words and their cognates. It is as if the copula operated not to form a proposition, but simply to establish an equivalence between two sounds that can then be related in any way that serves the interpreter's purpose. If love equals wonder, the so-called argument goes, the condition of being full of wonder should equal the condition of being full of love, but since loveful is not a proper word, let's make it lovely.

The obvious objection to this self-propelling logic of schematic figures is that it knows no constraints and is wholly unstable; meaning can be pulled out of a suffix or out of thin air, and the linear constraints of syntax and consecutive sense are simply overwhelmed. But Donne forestalls the objection by putting it into the poem, not however, as an objection but as a rationale for the interpretive fecundity of his ‘method’: ‘If we might put letters but one way, / In the lean dearth of words, what could we say?’ (ll. 17-18). The answer is that we could say only one thing at a time, and that the one thing we could say would be formed in relation to some prior and independent referent. By refusing to be confined by the lean dearth of words Donne becomes able to say anything or many things as he combines and recombines words and letters into whatever figurative, and momentarily real, pattern he desires. As Thomas Docherty has recently observed, in this poem ‘anything we choose to call a stable essence is always already on its way to becoming something else’.⁴ The result is an experience in which the reader is always a step behind the gymnastic contortions of the poet's rhetorical logic, straining to understand a point that has already been abandoned, striving to maintain a focus on a scene whose configurations refuse to stand still.

The case is even worse (or better) with another of the elegies, ‘The Comparison’; for if the lesson of ‘The Anagram’ is that the ‘lean dearth of words’ is to be avoided, the lesson of this poem is that the lean dearth of words—the sequential fixing of meaning—can't be achieved. Structurally, the ‘plot’ of the poem couldn't be simpler: the poet's mistress is compared feature by feature to the mistress of his rival and declared to be superior; but this simplest of plots soon becomes radically unstable because the reader is often in doubt as to which pole of the comparison he presently inhabits. …

It is an amazing performance, a high-wire act complete with twists, flips, double reverses, and above all, triumphs, triumphs at the expense of the two women who become indistinguishably monstrous when the poet makes it impossible for us to tell the difference between them (‘the language of vilification contaminates that of praise’);⁵ and triumphs, of course, at our expense, as we are pushed and pulled and finally mocked by the incapacity he makes us repeatedly feel. But it is a triumph that has its cost, as the last half line of the poem makes clear:

… comparisons are odious.

(l. 54)

This is a moment of revulsion, not from the women for whose features he is, after all, responsible, but from the act by which he makes of them (and us) whatever he wills. Comparisons are odious because they are too easy. Given the requisite verbal skill, it is impossible for them not to succeed, and their success carries with it a lesson that turns back on itself, the lesson of a plasticity in nature so pervasive that it renders victory meaningless. What pleasure can be taken in the exercise of a skill if it meets no resistance? And what security attends an achievement that can be undone or redone in a moment, either by the verbal artificer himself, or by the very next person who comes along?

It is a lesson that has just been learned by the speaker of ‘Elegy 7’, a complaint-of-Pygmalion poem in which the first-person voice discovers to his distress that the woman he has fashioned has detached herself from him and is now free to go either her own way or the way of another. He begins by recalling her as she was before they met, and remembers her exclusively in terms of the languages she did not then understand: ‘thou didst not understand / The mystic language of the eye nor hand / … I had not taught thee then, the alphabet / Of flowers, how they devisefully being set / … might with speechless secrecy, / Deliver errands mutely’ (ll. 3-4, 9-12). The point is not only that these were languages unknown to her, but that independently of them she was herself not known because she was as yet unformed. What she now understands now understands—in the sense of supporting or providing a foundation for—her; she is the sum of the signifying systems whose coded meanings and gestures now fill her consciousness and that is why her previous state is characterised as the absence of signification: ‘ill arrayed / In broken proverbs, and torn sentences’ (ll. 18-19). ‘Arrayed’ means both ‘clothed’ and ‘set into order’: by being clothed in his words she attains an order where before there was only linguistic—and therefore substantive—chaos, broken proverbs, torn sentences. Quite literally, his words give her life: ‘Thy graces and good words my creatures be: / I planted knowledge and life's tree in thee’ (ll. 25-6).

The horror is that after having in-formed her, he finds that she is no less malleable than she was when she was nothing but verbal bits and pieces waiting for someone who might make her into something intelligible. The two stages of creation—from incoherent fragments into sequenced discourse—are finally not so different from one another if the configuration achieved in the second stage is only temporary, if once having been planted, knowledge and sense can be supplanted by another gardener who brings new knowledge and an alternative sense. The poet cries out in dismay: ‘Must I alas / Frame and enamel plate, and drink in glass? / Chafe wax for others' seals?’ (ll. 27-9). In short, must others now ‘write’ you, inscribe you, as I have done? Cannot the work of signification be frozen once it has been accomplished? What the speaker here discovers, three hundred and seventy-five years before Derrida writes ‘Signature Event Context’, is the ‘essential drift’ of language, the capacity of any signifier to ‘break with every given context, engendering an infinity of new contexts in a manner which is absolutely illimitable’.⁶ Once an intelligible sign has been produced, one can always ‘recognise other possibilities in it by inscribing it or grafting it onto other chains’. ‘No context can … enclose it’, a truth the speaker of ‘Elegy 7’ now ruefully acknowledges as the poem ends: ‘Must I … / … break a colt's force, / And leave him then, being made a ready horse?’ This final line and a half could not be more precise: the shaping power he exerted before the poem began is given its precise name—force—but once given, the name declares its own problematic; he who lives by force is precariously at the mercy of force wielded by others, by strangers. The grafting of signifiers—and, remember, that is all she is, a chain of signifiers—onto other chains cannot be stopped; and it cannot be stopped because there is nothing to stop it, no extralinguistic resistance to its inscribing power, a power the speaker once again displays when he uncreates what he has made by de-gendering it. He leaves his rival not with a ‘her’ but a ‘him’, a ready-made horse in place of the previously ready-made woman. It is as if he were attempting to forestall the reinscription of his creation by performing it himself and thus removing from the world the graces his words have placed there. It is a particularly nasty instance of someone saying, ‘if I can't have her, no one will’, with a decided emphasis on the will.

It should be obvious by now that in these poems the act of writing is gendered in ways that have been made familiar to us by recent feminist criticism. The male author, like God, stands erect before the blank page of a female passivity and covers that page with whatever meanings he chooses to inscribe. This is how the speaker of the elegies always imagines himself, as a centre of stability and control in a world where everyone else is plastic and malleable. But this self-dramatisation of an independent authority can be sustained only if the speaker is himself untouched by the force he exerts on others. Were that force to turn back and claim him for its own by revealing itself to be the very source of his identity (which would then be no longer his) he would be indistinguishable from those he manipulates and scorns; he would be like a woman and become the object rather than the origin of his own performance, worked on, ploughed, appropriated, violated. (This is in fact the posture Donne will assume in many of the Holy Sonnets.) The suspicion that this may indeed be his situation is continually surfacing in these poems, as when in ‘The Comparison’ the despised mistress is said to be ‘like the first Chaos’, an image that seems to place the poet in the preferred position of shaping creator, the bringer of order; but he cannot occupy that position unless chaos—the feminine principle—precedes him and provides him with the occasion of self-assertion. Chaos is thus first in a sense infinitely less comfortable than the one he allows himself to recognise;⁷ for it is necessary both to the emergence of his being—such as it is—and to the illusion of his mastery, a mastery that is never more fragile than at those moments when it is most loudly proclaimed. …

That is precisely what happens at the end of [‘Elegy 3’] when he makes a perfect revolution from the stance of the opening lines to conclude ‘change is the nursery / Of music, joy, life and eternity’ (ll. 35-6). Critics complain that this conclusion seems inauthentic, that the ‘work seems to come apart intellectually and emotionally’,⁸ but the complaint assumes the survival of a first-person voice of whom unity and integrity might be predicated. But that voice has been the casualty of its own poem, undone by the gymnastic virtuosity that impels both it and the poem forward. All that remains is what Sanders calls ‘the serene beatitude of these lines’, a beatitude that might mark an achieved coherence in a poem like Spenser's Mutabilitie Cantos, whose conclusion it resembles, but here marks only the dislodgement of the centred self by the fragmentary, ecphrastic discourse it presumed to control.⁹ As Docherty puts it, there remains ‘no identifiable “Donne”, no identifiable or self-identical source or authority. … Donne is that which is always the Other [to] himself.’¹⁰

The continual reproduction of a self that can never be the same, that can never be ‘its own’ is at once reported and repeatedly performed in the last of the elegies I shall consider, ‘Elegy 16’, ‘On His Mistress’. The poem is an address to a woman who has offered to accompany the speaker on a journey disguised as his page, and commentary has foundered on the biographical speculation that the woman in question may have been Donne's wife. But the fact of the dramatic occasion is not revealed until line 15, and before that line the poem is focused neither on the woman nor on her proposed stratagem but on itself and on the other verbal actions that have preceded it.

By our first strange and fatal interview,
By all desires which thereof did ensue,
By our long starving hopes, by that remorse
Which my words' masculine persuasive force
Begot in thee, and by the memory
Of hurts, which spies and rivals threaten'd me,
I calmly beg: but by thy fathers wrath,
By all pains, which want and divorcement hath,
I conjure thee. …

(ll. 1-9)

This long syntactic unit is an extended oath, but while oaths typically invoke some extraverbal power or abstraction, this oath invokes previous oaths. Even when the verse names emotions that would seem to be prior to words, they turn out to have been produced by words: desires that proceed from interviews (exchanges of talk), hurts that flow from threats, pains fathered by the expressions of wrath. The lines call up a familiar Ovidian world of plots, dangers, crises, but the principal actors in that world are not the speaker or his mistress or her father, but the various speech acts in relation to which they have roles to play and meanings to declare. A phrase like ‘fathers wrath’ names a conventional linguistic practice, not a person, and when the speaker swears by it, indeed conjures by it, he acknowledges the extent to which the energy he displays is borrowed from a storehouse of verbal formulas that belong to no one and precede everyone.

Yet even as that acknowledgement is made, the speaker resists it by claiming that the power that is working in this scene has its source in him, or, more precisely, in the ‘masculine persuasive force’ by means of which he produces (begets) his mistress's character. The three words that make up this phrase are mutually defining and redundant. The masculinity he asserts is inseparable from his ability to persuade—that is, to control—and ‘force’ is just a name for the exercise of that control, an exercise that validates his independence and thereby confirms his masculinity. But even as the power of masculine persuasive force is asserted the line itself assigns that power to the words—‘my words' masculine persuasive force’—which thereby reserve for themselves everything the speaker would mark as his own, including his own identity. In the guise of telling a story about a man, a woman, and a proposed journey, the poem stages a struggle between its own medium and the first-person voice that presumes to control it. That struggle is enacted again in the next line and a half when the speaker declares that his words are subordinate to the inner reality of which they are the mere expressions: ‘all the oaths which I / And thou have sworn to seal joint constancy’ (ll. 9-10). The assertion is that the constancy is a feature of his character and is prior to the oaths that serve only as its outward sign; but no sooner has that assertion been made than it is flatly contradicted by the (speech) action of the next line: ‘Here I unswear, and overswear them thus.’ ‘Overswear’ means ‘swear over’, both in the sense of ‘again’ and in the sense of reinscribing, of writing over what has been written previously. Not only does this overswearing undermine the constancy that has just been claimed, it also renders empty the personal pronoun that stood as the sign of the claimant. A consciousness that can rewrite its own grounds in the twinkling of an eye is not a consciousness at all, but a succession of refigurings no different finally from the refigurings it boasts to have produced in others. …

‘ALL SIGNS OF LOATHING’

That irony is the subject of the Satires, despite the still influential account of them as spoken in the voice of one who ‘consistently defends the spiritual values of simplicity, peace, constancy, and truth’.¹¹ Certainly there is much talk of these virtues in the poems, but they are invoked at the very moments at which the speaker is displaying their opposites; rather than naming his achievements, they name the states from which he is always and already distant, the state of being one thing (simplicity), of being that thing without conflict (in peace), and of being that thing forever and truly. The satires record the desperate and always failing effort of the first-person voice to distinguish himself from the variability and corruption—alteration from an original—he sees around him. The basic and (literally) self-defeating gesture of these poems is enacted in the very first lines of ‘Satire I’:

Away thou fondling motley humourist,
Leave me …

The phrase ‘fondling motley humourist’ is made up of words that point to the same quality, instability; a humorist is a person of irregular behaviour, ‘a fantastical or whimsical person’ (OED); a fondling is a fool, someone dazed, incapable of focusing (in an earlier manuscript Donne wrote ‘changeling’); and motley is what a fool wears because a cloth ‘composed of elements of diverse or varied character’ (OED) perfectly suits one who is without a centre. It also suits the traditional figure of the satirist, the writer of a random discourse who moves from one topic to another in ways that display no abiding rationale; the linking definition of satire as ‘satura medley’—a full dish of mixed fruit indiscriminately heaped up—was a standard one in the period and linked the satirist both with the court fool (as he appears, for example, in King Lear), and with the ‘mirror’ or recorder figure who reflects the disorder of a world without coherence and has no coherence of his own. (Here one might cite Skelton's Parrot). In short, what the first-person voice pushes away or tries (in an impossible effort) to push away is himself; rather than saying, as he would like to, ‘Get thee behind me Satan’, he is saying (in perfect self-contradiction), ‘Get thee behind me me.’ From the beginning he is protecting and defending an identity—a separateness from flux and surface—that he never really has.

In what follows, each declaration of distance and isolation is undermined even as it is produced. In line 11 he vows not to leave the ‘constant company’ of his library; but in the previous line that company is said to include ‘Giddy fantastic poets’, an acknowledgement that at once belies the claim of constancy and points once again to the giddiness (absence of stability) of the speaker, who is after all practising poetry at this very moment. In line 12 he is betrayed even by his own syntax:

Shall I leave all this constant company,
And follow headlong, wild uncertain thee?

Who is ‘headlong’—that is, madly impetuous—the motley humorist or the speaker who (at least rhetorically) disdains him? Since ‘headlong’ can either be an adverb modifying ‘I’ or an adjective modifying ‘thee’ it is impossible to tell, and this impossibility faithfully reflects the absence of the difference the speaker repeatedly invokes.

The claim of difference is further (and fatally) undermined when the speaker without any explanation decides that he will follow along after all. As if to reaffirm his self-respect (and his self) he asks for assurances that he will not be left alone in the street (First swear … / Thou wilt not leave me’ [ll. 13-15]), but this weak (and, as he himself knows, futile) gesture only underlines the extent of his capitulation: the distance between ‘leave me’ and ‘don't leave’ has been travelled in only fifteen lines; the stutter rhythm of push away/embrace is now instantiated in the poem's narrative as the now indistinguishable pair prepares to exit together. Before they do, the speaker rehearses the dangers he hopes to avoid, but his recital of them is so detailed and knowledgeable that he seems already to have fallen to them, and when he once again reasserts his difference from the world he is about to enter—‘With God, and with the Muses I confer’ (l. 48)—one cannot take him seriously. Immediately after uttering this line he says ‘But’ and performs the action he vowed never to perform in line 1:

I shut my chamber door, and come, let's go.

(l. 52)

Yet even here he hesitates, pausing on the threshold (which he has long since crossed) to analyse an action that he himself finds inexplicable; after all he knows his man too well to believe that he will be faithful, and he knows too that any fickleness will be accomplished by a justification for ‘why, when, or with whom thou wouldst go’ (l. 65). The real question, however, is why the speaker would go in the face of such knowledge, and he poses the question himself in the very act of going:

But how shall I be pardoned my offence
That thus have sinned against my conscience.

(ll. 66-7)

There is no answer, merely the report that, finally, ‘we are in the street’ (l. 67), but the answer is all too obvious: if by conscience he means an inner integrity—an identity that holds itself aloof against all external temptations and assaults—then conscience is what he has not had ever since his first words revealed a mind divided against itself. Ironically, that mind is now unified (if that is the right word) when it accepts (certainly not the right word) its implication in the giddy and the variable, and ventures out into the world to encounter other versions of himself, others who, like him, are ‘many-colored’ and forever on the move. The fiction that it is not he but his fickle companion who refuses to stand still (l. 86) is rhetorically maintained by the distinction of pronouns, but even that distinction is collapsed in the final lines:

He quarreled, fought, bled; and turned out of door
                    Directly came to me hanging the head,
                    And constantly a while must keep his bed.

(ll. 110-12)

That is, he comes home, where he lives, to the speaker, and he comes ‘directly’, as if by instinct, and as he comes he shares with the speaker the pronoun ‘me’—is it ‘comes to me while hanging his head’ or ‘comes to me who am hanging my head’? The attribution of ‘constancy’ is mocked not only by the immediate qualification of ‘a while’, but by everything that has transpired in a poem where inconstancy rules and most spectacularly rules the voice who would thrust it from him (‘Away …’). …

Moreover, insofar as the speaker's relationship to the world he scorns is precarious, so is Donne's, for nothing in the poem authorises us to perform the saving and stabilising move of formalist criticism in which a sharp distinction between the poet and his persona allows the former to stand outside the predicament of the latter. In Donne's poems, as Herz observes, ‘inside and outside are no longer clearly fixed points’,¹² and therefore we cannot with any confidence locate a place in which the poet is securely established as a controlling presence. This is particularly true of ‘Satire 4’, a poem in which the speaker plays with the dangers of displaying Catholic sympathies in a way that cannot be separated from the danger Donne—the Catholic-in-the-course-of-becoming-an-Anglican—risks in presenting such a speaker. Is it the satiric voice who begins by declaring ‘Well; I may now receive’ and then labours to render the suggestion of a forbidden ceremony metaphorical and jesting, or is it Donne? …

What we do know is that once again a Donne poem presents a speaker who refuses to recognise himself in the indictment he makes of others. In this case the indictment is of those who go to court, which is the very first thing the speaker does in an action he finds as inexplicable as we do:

My mind, neither with pride's itch, nor yet hath been
Poisoned with love to see, or be seen.
I had no suit there, nor new suit to show,
Yet went to Court.

(ll. 5-8)

The claim is, as in the earlier poems, a claim of interiority—he need not show himself in order to acquire value; he is content with what he is in himself—and in order to maintain the claim, he at once minimises his sin and renders it something external by calling it ‘my sin of going’ (l. 12). Characterised that way, the sin seems accidental to an inner being it does not touch, something that ‘happens’ to that being before it is even aware. Of course he knows what the commission of this little sin will suggest to some, that he is ‘As prone to all ill, and of good as forget- / ful, as proud, as lustful, and as much in debt, / As vain, as witless and as false as they / Which dwell at Court, for once going that way’ (ll. 13-16); but by insisting on the ‘once’, on the anomalous nature of the event, he pushes the accusation away and reaffirms his status as something apart from the scene he unwillingly enters.

It is in the service of the same affirmation that he labels everything and everyone he meets ‘strange’ and a ‘stranger’, indeed ‘Stranger than strangers’ (l. 23). That is to say, nothing I saw is like me, an assertion belied by the very first person he encounters; that person wears coarse clothes which leave him bare (l. 30); he ‘speaks all tongues’ (l. 35) and has none of his own; rather he is ‘Made of th' accents’ (l. 37), a confection of ‘pedant's motley’ (l. 40). He is, in short, a satirist, affectedly coarse, deliberately ill-attired, a mirror of everything around him, an indiscriminate mixture. The speaker has met himself, and he responds in language that at once admits the kinship and disclaims it:

He names me, and comes to me; I whisper, ‘God!
How have I sinned, that thy wrath's furious rod,
This fellow, chooseth me?’

(ll. 49-51)

‘He names me’ is literal in its identification of the two, but of course in so exclaiming the speaker intends only wonder at so unlikely an act of recognition; but then he performs (unknowingly) the same recognition when he ‘names’ the stranger ‘thy wrath's furious rod’, for this is still another standard description of the satirist and his purpose. Unable to free himself from this unwelcome companion, he has recourse to behaviour that will he hopes drive the wretch away: ‘I belch, spew, spit, / Look pale, and sickly’ (ll. 109-10); but this is precisely the aspect the ‘stranger’ already bears, and it is no wonder that upon meeting it in the speaker ‘he thrusts on more’ (l. 111). The ‘more’ he produces is a compendium of stock satiric themes—‘He names a price for every office paid; / He saith, our laws thrive ill, because delayed; / That offices are entailed’ (ll. 121-3)—and as he listens to this version of himself even the speaker is close to seeing the truth:

… hearing him, I found
That as burnt venomed lechers do grow sound
By giving others their sores, I might grow
Guilty. …

(ll. 133-6)

Guilty, that is, not simply of going, but of being, or rather of nonbeing.

The thought is too horrible and he thrusts it away with a gesture that is its own allegory:

… I did show
All signs of loathing.

(ll. 136-7)

‘All signs of loathing’ is a formulation that definitively begs the question both for the speaker and for Donne. ‘Signs’ of loathing are precisely external indications of something that may be otherwise; whether the speaker really loathes is something we don't know and something he doesn't know either. The same holds for Donne: the entire poem constitutes his sign of loathing, his declaration of distance from the world he delineates and from the voice he projects: ‘this is not me but my creature; this is not my world, but the world in which my creature is implicated in ways that he does not know; I, like you, know; I am in control.’ But the only evidence he might cite in support of this declaration and its claim (the claim to be in possession of himself in contrast to his creature who is not) are his signs of loathing, his production of words, his show; but whether or not anything lies behind the show, whether the signs of loathing stand in for an authentic loathing or whether they constitute a ruse by which the true nature of Donne's impure being is concealed from us and from himself in exactly the manner of his fictional (or is it true?) surrogate, is something we cannot determine. And neither can he. As in the elegies, the foregrounding of the power of signs and of their tendency to ‘compass all the land’ catches the foregrounder in its backwash, depriving him of any independence of the forces he (supposedly) commands. The more persuasive is his account and exercise of verbal power the less able is he to situate himself in a space it does not fill, and he is left as we are, wondering if there is or could be anything real—anything other than artifice—in his performance (a word that perfectly captures the dilemma).

‘TRUE GRIEFE’

The relationship between the exercise of power and the claims to independence and sincerity continues to be thematised in the Holy Sonnets although in these poems Donne occupies (or tries to occupy) the position of the creature and yields the role of the shaper to God. That difference, however, is finally less significant than one might suppose since the God Donne imagines is remarkably like the protagonist he presents (and I would say is) in the elegies, a jealous and overbearing master who brooks no rivals and will go to any lengths (even to the extent of depriving Donne of his wife) in order to secure his rights. It is as if Donne could only imagine a God in his own image, and therefore a God who acts in relation to him as he acts in relation to others, as a self-aggrandising bully. To be sure, in the sonnets the speaker rather than exerting masculine persuasive force begs to be its object (‘Batter my heart, three person'd God’), but this rearrangement of roles only emphasises the durability of the basic Donnean situation and gives it an odd and unpleasant twist: the woman is now asking for it (‘enthrall me’, ‘ravish me’). One might almost think that the purpose of the sonnets, in Donne's mind, is retroactively to justify (by baptising) the impulses to cruelty and violence (not to say misogyny) he displays so lavishly in his earlier poetry. In an important sense ‘Thou hast made me and shall thy work decay’ is simply a rewriting of ‘Nature's lay idiot’, which might itself be titled ‘I have made you, and shall my work decay?’ The plot is the same, an original artificer now threatened by a rival artisan (‘our old subtle foe so tempeth me’), and a complaint against change in the name of a control that would be absolute. Of course in the ‘sacred’ version the complaint is uttered not by the about to be supplanted creator, but by the creature eager to remain subject to his power (‘not one houre I can myself sustaine’); nevertheless the relational structure of the scene is the same, a structure in which masochism (and now sado-masochism) is elevated to a principle and glorified, earlier in the name of a frankly secular power, here in the name of a power that is (supposedly) divine. The fact that Donne now assumes the posture of a woman and like the church of ‘Show me deare Christ thy spouse’ spreads his legs (or cheeks) is worthy of note, but to note it is not to indicate a significant (and praiseworthy) change in his attitude toward women and power; it is rather to indicate how strongly that attitude informs a poetry whose centre is supposedly elsewhere.

Moreover, even as Donne casts himself in the female role, he betrays an inability to maintain that role in the face of a fierce and familiar desire to be master of his self, even of a self whose creaturely nature he is in the process of acknowledging. In a poem like ‘As due by many titles I resigne / My selfe to thee’, the gesture of resignation is at the same time a reaffirmation of the resigner's independence: considering well the situation, it seems proper that I choose to be subservient to you. As Hester has observed, this is not so much a resigning, but a re-signing, the production of a signature and therefore of a claim of ownership, if not of the self that was, as he says, ‘made’ (1.2), then of the act by which that self is laid down (a distinction without a difference).¹³ Ostensibly the poem is an extended plea to be possessed (in every sense) by God, but in fact it is a desperate attempt to leave something that will say, like Kilroy, ‘Donne was here’.

That desperation is the explicit subject of ‘If faithfull soules be alike glorifi'd’, a first line that enacts in miniature everything that follows it.¹⁴ As it is first read, the question seems to be whether or not all faithful souls are glorified in the same way (are they alike?), but then the first two words of the second line—‘As Angels’—reveal that the likeness being put into question is between all faithful souls (now assumed to be glorified alike, but without any content specified for that likeness) and angels who are themselves glorified alike but perhaps not in the same manner (alike) as are faithful souls. If the pressure of interrogation falls on the notion of likeness and therefore on the issue of identity (one must know what something or someone uniquely is before one can say for certain whether or not it or he or she is like or unlike something or someone else), then the interrogation is from the very first in deep trouble when the word ‘alike’, meaning ‘not different’, turns out to be different from itself in the passage from line 1 to line 2.

The trouble is compounded as line 2 further unfolds:

As Angels, then my fathers soule doth see

Whether or not his father's soul sees is still in doubt since the entire construction remains ruled by ‘If’; and the fact of his father's being a Catholic reinvigorates the question that had been left behind in the turn of the second line: are faithful souls glorified alike even if they are faithful to papism? As a result, the status of his father's vision is doubly obscure; we don't know whether it is like the vision of other, more safely, faithful souls, and we don't know, should it pass that test, whether it is as perspicuous as the vision of angels.

It is in the context of that unsure vision that we meet the sight it may or may not see: ‘That valiantly I hels wide mouth o'erstride’ (l. 4). The line presents itself as an assertion of the way things really are—despite appearances I stand firm against the temptations of the world, flesh, and devil—but in the context of what precedes it, the assertion remains only a claim until it is confirmed by one who sees through appearances to the inner reality they obscure. Since, however, the question of whether his father is one who sees in that penetrating way has been left conspicuously open, neither he nor we can be sure of that confirmation, and there remains the suspicion that behind the sign of purity, behind the verbal report of spiritual valour, there is nothing; the suspicion that the truth about him is no deeper or more stable than his surface representation of it. It is this dreadful possibility that Donne (one could say ‘the speaker’, but it will come down to Donne in the end) raises explicitly in the next four lines:

But if our mindes to these soules be descry'd
By circumstances, and by signes that be
Apparent in us, not immediately,
How shall my mindes white truth to them be try'd?

(ll. 5-8)

That is, if my father and other glorified souls (if he is, in fact, glorified and if all faithful souls are glorified alike) descry just as we on earth do, through a variety of glasses darkly, by means of signs, of representations, of what shows (is ‘Apparent’), then there is no way that anyone will ever know what's inside me or indeed if there is anything inside me. A ‘white truth’ is a truth without colour, without coverings, without commentary, but if coloured, covered, and textualised truth are all anyone can see, then the white truth of his mind will continue to be an untried claim, and one moreover that is suspect, given the innumerable examples of those who feign commitments they do not have:

They see idolatrous lovers weepe and mourne,
And vile blasphemous Conjurers to call
On Jesus name, and Pharisaicall
Dissemblers feigne devotion.

(ll. 9-12)

Anyone can say they are faithful or sincere or ‘white’, but such sayings, proffered as evidence of a truth beyond (or behind) signs, are themselves signs and never more suspicious than when they present the trappings of holiness. It is at this point (if not before) that the precarious situation of the poem becomes obvious; as a structure of signs it has done all the things it itself identifies as strategies of dissembling: it has wept, mourned, dramatised devotion; and then, as if it were following its own script, the poem closes by performing the most reprehensible of these strategies; it calls on Jesus' name:

                                                                                          … Then turne
O pensive soule, to God, for he knowes best
Thy true griefe, for he put it in my breast.

(ll. 12-14)

There are at least two levels on which this is an unsatisfactory conclusion. First, there is no reason to believe that the turn to God is anything but one more instance of feigned devotion, one more performance of a piety for which the evidence remains circumstantial (that is, theatrical) and apparent, a matter of signs and show. To be sure, the structure of the sonnet lends these lines the aura of a final summing up, of a pronouncement (‘Then’) detached from the gestures that precede it; but nothing prevents us from reading the pronouncement itself as one more gesture, and therefore as a claim no more supported than the claim (that he valiantly o'erstrides hell's mouth) it is brought in to support. And even if we were to credit the sincerity of these lines and regard them not as dramatic projections but as spontaneous ejaculations, they would not provide what the poem has been seeking, a perspective from which we could discern once and for all what, if anything, was inside him; for all the lines say is that whatever there is in his breast, God knows it, which means of course that we don't, and that we are left at the end with the same doubt that his ‘true griefe’ (here just one more ‘untry'd’ claim) may be false, a confection of signs and appearances. As in the elegies and the satires, the relentless assertion and demonstration of the power of signs to bring their own referents into being—to counterfeit love and grief and piety—undermines the implicit claim of this producer of signs to be real, to be anything more than an effect of the resources he purports to control. …

This is spectacularly the case in ‘What if this present were the worlds last night?’ This first line might well open one of the sermons Donne was later to write; it is obviously theatrical and invites us to imagine (or to be) an audience before whom this proposition will be elaborated in the service of some homiletic point. But in the second line everything changes abruptly. The theatricalism is continued, but the stage has shrunk from one on which Donne speaks to many of a (literally) cosmic question to a wholly interior setting populated only by versions of Donne:

Marke in my heart, O Soule, where thou dost dwell,
The picture of Christ crucified, and tell
Whether that countenance can thee affright?

(ll. 2-4)

Donne addresses his own soul and asks it to look in his heart, where will be found a picture he has put there, either for purposes of meditation or in the manner of a lover who hangs portraits of his lady in a mental gallery. But the meditation is curious in the way we have already noted: Donne does not direct it at his beloved, whether secular or spiritual, but to another part of himself. Although Christ's picture is foregrounded, especially in the lines (ll. 5-7) that rehearse its beauties in a sacred parody of the traditional blazon, in the context of the poem's communicative scene, the picture—not to mention the person it portrays—is off to the side as everything transpires between the speaker and his soul. The gesture is a familiar one in Donne's poetry; it is the contraction into one space of everything in the world (‘All here in one bed lay’), which is simultaneously the exclusion of everything in the world (‘I could eclipse and cloud them with a wink’);¹⁵ but here it seems prideful and perhaps worse, for it recharacterises the Last Judgement as a moment staged and performed entirely by himself: produced by Donne, interior design by Donne, case pled by Donne, decision rendered by Donne. Again, as in the elegies, Donne occupies every role on his poem's stage, and since the stage is interior, it is insulated from any correcting reference other than the one it allows. Thus protected from any outside perspective and from the intrusion of any voice he has not ventriloquised, Donne can confidently ask the poem's urgent question:

And can that tongue adjudge thee unto hell,
Which pray'd forgivenesse for his foes fierce spight?

(ll. 7-8)

The question's logic assumes a distinction between ‘that tongue’ and ‘thee’ (i.e., me), but since Donne is here all tongues, the distinction is merely verbal and cannot be the basis of any real suspense. The answer is inevitable and it immediately arrives: ‘No, no’ (l. 9). But as John Stachniewski acutely observes, ‘the argument of Donne's poems is often so strained that it alerts us to its opposite, the emotion or mental state in defiance of which the argumentative process was set to work’.¹⁶ Here the mental state the poem tries to avoid is uncertainty, but its pressure is felt in the exaggerated intensity with which the ‘No, no’ denies it. Uncertainty and instability return with a vengeance in the final lines:

… but as in my idolatrie
I said to all my profane mistresses,
Beauty, of pitty, foulnesse onely is
A signe of rigour: so I say to thee,
To wicked spirits are horrid shapes assign'd,
This beauteous forme assures a pitious minde.

(ll. 9-14)

In the rhetoric of this complex statement, Donne's idolatry is in the past, but his words also point to the idolatry he has been committing in the poem, the idolatry of passing judgement on himself in a court whose furniture he has carefully arranged. The assertion that he is not now in his idolatry is undermined by the fact that he here says the very same things he used to say when he was. As he himself acknowledges, what he says is part of a seductive strategy, more or less on the level recommended in ‘The Anagram’: if your beloved's countenance is forbidding and harsh, impute to her a benign interior; and if her aspect is ‘pitious’, impute to her a consistency of form and content. In this poem, the suspect logic is even more suspect because it is directed at himself: the referent of ‘thee’ is his own soul, the addressee since line 2. The soul is asked to read from the signifying surface of Christ's picture to his intention, but since that surface is one that Donne himself has as-signed, the confident assertion of the last line has no support other than itself.

Indeed the line says as much in either of its two textual versions, ‘This beauteous forme assures a pitious minde’ or ‘This beauteous forme assumes a pitious minde’.¹⁷ In either variant ‘This beauteous forme’ refers not only to the form Donne has assigned to Christ's picture, but to the form of the poem itself; it is the poem's verbal felicity and nothing else that is doing either the assuring (which thus is no more than whistling in the dark) or the assuming (which as a word at least has the grace to name the weakness of the action it performs). The poem ends in the bravado that marks some of the other sonnets (e.g., ‘Death be not proud’), but the triumph of the rhetorical flourish (so reminiscent of the ending of every one of the Songs and Sonnets) only calls attention to its insubstantiality. Once again, the strong demonstration of verbal power—of the ability to make any proposition seem plausible so long as one doesn't examine it too closely—undermines its own effects. In the end the poet always pulls it off but that only means that he could have pulled it off in the opposite direction, and that only means that the conclusion he forces is good only for the theatrical moment of its production. This is true not only for his readers but for himself; as the poem concludes, he is no more assured of what he assumes than anyone else, neither of the ‘pitious minde’ of his saviour, nor of the spiritual stability he looks to infer from the saviour's picture. The effort of self-persuasion—which is also at bottom the effort to confirm to himself that he is a self, someone who exceeds the theatrical production of signs and shows—fails in exactly the measure that his rhetorical effort succeeds. The better he is at what he does with words, the less able he is to claim (or believe) that behind the words—o'erstriding the abyss—stands a self-possessed being.

The realisation of radical instability (‘the horror, the horror’) is given full expression in ‘Oh, to vex me, contraryes meete in one’, a poem that desires to face the spectre down, but in the end is overwhelmed by it. The problem is succinctly enacted in the first line: if contraries meet in one, then one is not one—an entity that survives the passing of time—but two or many. This would-be-one looks back on its history and sees only a succession of poses—contrition, devotion, fear—no one of which is sufficiently sustained to serve as the centre he would like to be able to claim:

… to day
In prayers, and flattering speaches I court God:
To morrow I quake with true feare of his rod.

(ll. 9-11)

These lines at once report on and reproduce the dilemma: ‘prayers’ seems innocent enough until ‘flattering speaches’ retroactively questions the sincerity of the gesture; and the same phrase spreads forward to infect the assertion of line 11; when he quakes with ‘true fear’, is the adjective a tribute to his artistry, to his ability to simulate an emotion in a way that convinces spectators (including himself) of its truth; or is the fear true in a deeper sense, one that would allow us to posit a moment (however fleeting) of authenticity in the midst of so many performances? The question is of course unanswerable, although as the poem ends (both with a bang and a whimper) there is one last attempt to draw the kind of line that would make an answer possible:

So my devout fitts come and go away
Like a fantastique Ague: save that here
Those are my best dayes, when I shake with feare.

(ll. 12-14)

‘Devout fitts’ recapitulates the problem: can devotion be genuine—heartfelt—if it comes and goes like the ever-changing scene of a fever? In the continual alternation of contradictory spiritual states, no one moment seems any more securely ‘true’ than any other. Nevertheless the poem proceeds to declare an exception with ‘save that. …’ On one level the exception is to the comparison between spiritual and physical health: while in the illness of the body the best days are the days when convulsions subside, in spiritual matters the best days are marked by fearful agitation.¹⁸ But the exception Donne here tries to smuggle in is one that would attribute authenticity to the fits he displays on some days as opposed to others: my life may be characterised by changeful humours, but among those humours one speaks the genuine me. In order for that claim to be strongly received, however, the last line must be disengaged from everything that has preceded it and be marked in some way with the difference it attempts so boldly to declare. But no such mark is available, and as we read it the line is drawn into the pattern from which it would distinguish itself. Either it refers backward to the ‘true fear’ of line 11, already identified as a theatrical production, or, if we give the word ‘here’ full force, it refers to itself—I am at this very moment of writing shaking with true fear—and asks us to accept as unperformed and spontaneous the obviously artful conclusion to a sonnet. In either case, one cannot rule out a reading in which the best days are the days when he best simulates the appropriate emotion (‘look at how good I am at shaking with fear’), and we are as far from an emotion that is not simulated—from an emotion produced other than theatrically by someone other than a wholly theatrical being—than we were when he uttered the first self-pitying line, ‘Oh, to vex me. …’

Reading this same poem, Anne Ferry makes observations similar to mine but reaches a different conclusion. She takes the poem's lesson to be ‘that what is grounded inward in [the speaker's] heart is at a distance from language used to describe it, which cannot render it truly’, and she generalises this lesson into a Donnean theory of sincerity:

… what is in the heart cannot be interpreted or judged by outward signs, among which language is included, even when they are sincere. Inward states cannot therefore be truly shown, even by the speaker's own utterance in prayers or poems, cannot be defined by them, even to himself.¹⁹

Ferry assumes what it seems to me these poems put continually into question, that the ‘inward experience’ or ‘real self’ is in fact there and the deficiency lies with the medium that cannot faithfully transcribe it. I have argued that the problem with language in these poems is not that it is too weak to do something, but that it is so strong that it does everything, exercising its power to such an extent that nothing, including the agent of that exercise, is left outside its sphere. I am not offering this as the insight Donne wishes to convey as opposed to the insight Ferry urges, but, rather, saying that it is not an insight at all—in the sense of something Donne commands—but the problematic in which he remains caught even when he (or especially when he) is able to name it as he does in this passage from a sermon delivered during his final illness:

The way of Rhetorique in working upon weake men, … is to empty [the understanding] of former apprehensions and opinions, and to shape that beliefe, with which it had possessed it self before, and then when it is thus melted, to powre it into new molds, … to stamp and imprint new formes, new images, new opinions in it.²⁰

Once again Donne identifies, this time by its proper name, the activity he has practised all his life, an activity propelled by a force that knows no resistance and simply writes over (overswears) whatever meanings and forms some previous, equally unstoppable, force has inscribed. Once again, he attempts to assert his distance from that force even as he exercises it and reports on its exercise, attempts to possess it without being possessed by it. And once again the attempt takes the form of an act of displacement by means of which his fears are pushed onto others, not this time onto women or Frenchmen or Italians, but onto ‘weake men’. Weak men are men whose convictions are so malleable, so weakly founded, that they can be shaped and reshaped by the skilled rhetorician who becomes, in an implied opposition, the very type of the strong man. But as we have seen, in the story that Donne's poems repeatedly enact, the skilful rhetorician always ends up becoming the victim/casualty of his own skill, and no more so than at those moments when his powers are at their height. The stronger he is, the more force-full, the more taken up by the desire for mastery, the less he is anything like ‘himself’. The lesson of masculine persuasive force is that it can only be deployed at the cost of everything it purports to incarnate—domination, independence, assertion, masculinity itself.

In much of Donne criticism that lesson has been lost or at least obscured by a concerted effort to put Donne in possession of his poetry and therefore of himself. The result has been a series of critical romances of which Donne is the hero (valiantly o'erstriding the abyss). Ferry gives us one romance: the poet, ahead of his times, labours to realise a modern conception of the inner life. An older criticism gave us the romance of immediacy and the unified sensibility: the felt particulars of lived experience are conveyed by a verse that is at once tactilely sensuous and intellectually bracing. Often this romance was folded into another, the romance of voice in which a singular and distinctive Donne breaks through convention to achieve a hitherto unknown authenticity of expression. At mid-century the invention of the persona produced the romance of craft: Donne surveys the range of psychological experience and creates for our edification and delight a succession of flawed speakers. And the most recent scholarship, vigorously rejecting immediacy, voice, authenticity, and craft as lures and alibis, tempts us instead with the romance of postmodernism, of a Donne who is ‘rigorously sceptical, endlessly self-critical, posing more questions than he answers’.²¹ (This last is particularly attractive insofar as it transforms obsessive behaviour into existential heroism of the kind academics like to celebrate because they think, mistakenly, that they exemplify it.) As different as they are, these romances all make the mistake of placing Donne outside the (verbal) forces he sets in motion and thus making him a figure of control. In the reading offered here, Donne is always folded back into the dilemmas he articulates, and indeed it is the very articulation of those dilemmas—the supposed bringing of them to self-consciousness—that gives them renewed and devouring life.²²

Notes

1. C. S. Lewis, ‘Donne and Love Poetry in the Seventeenth Century’, in Seventeenth Century English Poetry: Modern Essays in Criticism, ed. William Keast (New York, 1962), pp. 98, 96.

2. Judith Herz, ‘“An Excellent Exercise of Wit that Speaks So Well of Ill”: Donne and the Poetics of Concealment’, in The Eagle and the Dove: Reassessing John Donne, ed. Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Columbia, MO, 1986), p. 5.

3. John Donne: The Complete English Poems, ed. A. J. Smith (Baltimore, MD, 1971). All further citations of the elegies and the satires are taken from this text.

4. Thomas Docherty, John Donne, Undone (New York, 1986), p. 68.

5. Arthur F. Marotti, John Donne, Coterie Poet (Madison, WI, 1986), p. 48.

6. Jacques Derrida, ‘Signature Event Context’, trans. Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman, Glyph, I (1977), 182, 185.

7. For a brilliant discussion of chaos as it operates in Renaissance literature in general and in Milton's Paradise Lost in particular, see Regina Schwartz, ‘Milton's Hostile Chaos: “… And the Sea Was No More”’, ELH, 52 (1985), 337-74.

8. Marotti, Coterie, p. 308.

9. Wilbur Sanders, Donne's Poetry (Cambridge, 1971), p. 41.

10. Docherty, John Donne, p. 60.

11. N. J. C. Andreason, ‘Theme and Structure in Donne's Satyres’, in Essential Articles for the Study of John Donne's Poetry, ed. John R. Roberts (Hamden, CT, 1975), p. 412.

12. Herz, ‘Poetics of Concealment’, p. 6.

13. M. Thomas Hester, ‘Re-Signing the Text of the Self: Donne's “As due by many titles”’, in ‘Bright Shootes of Everlastingnesse’: The Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric, ed. Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Columbia, MO, 1987), p. 69. Also see Docherty, John Donne, p. 139.

14. All citations from the Holy Sonnets are taken from John Donne: The Divine Poems, ed. Helen Gardner (Oxford, 1964).

15. ‘The Sun Rising’, ll. 20, 13.

16. John Stachniewski, ‘John Donne: The Despair of the “Holy Sonnets”’, ELH, 48 (1981), 691.

17. All manuscripts read assures, but the 1633 edition reads assumes.

18. Anne Ferry, The ‘Inward’ Language (Chicago, 1983), pp. 242-3.

19. Ibid., pp. 243, 249.

20. Sermons, ed. George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson, 10 vols (Berkeley, CA, 1953-62), 2:282-3.

21. Docherty, John Donne, p. 29.

22. I am grateful to Stanley Fish for his helpful suggestions for editing his essay. Ed.]

[Stanley Fish's essay discusses a wide range of generically distinct poems (elegies, satires, and religious sonnets) and discovers a common strand between them in the Donne who fashions reality through language, but who is anxious, at the same time, about the emptiness of his own rhetoric. In the highly mediated, highly textualised world of a Donne performance, there is, according to Fish, a continual effacement of ‘prior and independent referent[s]’ (see p. 159 above), including Donne himself. The gender hierarchy whereby Donne would ideally position himself as creator rather than created, essence rather than construct, subject rather than object of linguistic transformation, collapses to reveal a mutable ‘sign’, as available for linguistic appropriation as those he inscribes and re-inscribes via the use of analogy.

During the course of his commentary upon one of Donne's religious sonnets, Fish makes the interesting point that ‘one must know what something or someone uniquely is before one can say for certain whether or not it or he or she is like or unlike something or someone else’ (see p. 171 above). This position, anti-poststructuralist in its affirmation of a form of essentialism which holds that things and people possess their own unique and inviolable identities, is worth comparing and contrasting with the more attenuated essentialism of Elizabeth Harvey's and Barbara Estrin's feminist approaches.

For an interesting elaboration of Fish's theoretical position, see his ‘What it Means to do a Job of Work’, English Literary Renaissance, 25 (1995), 354-71. For further discussion and contextualisation of his essay, see Introduction, p. 18. Ed.]