SOURCE: "Excusing the Breach of Nature's Laws: The Discourse of Denial and Disguise in Katherine Philips' Friendship Poetry," in Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660–1700, Vol. 14, No. 1, Spring, 1990, pp. 1–14.

In his preface to the first authorized edition of Katherine Philips' Poems, her editor and confidant, Charles Cotter ell, praises the poems that follow by attempting to situate them beyond gender, beyond history, beyond language, beyond geography, and beyond mortal existence:

Some of them would be no disgrace to the name of any man that amongst us is most esteemed for his excellency in this kind, and there are none that may not pass with favour, when it is remembred that they fell hastily from the pen but of a Woman. We might well have call'd her the English Sappho, she of all the female Poets of former Ages, being for her Verses and her Vertues both, the most highly to be valued; but she has called her self ORINDA, a name that deserves to be added to the number of the Muses, and to live with honour as long as they. Were our language as generally known to the world as the Greek and Latine were anciently, or as the French is now, her Verses could not be confin'd within the narrow limits of our islands, but would spread themselves as far as the Continent has Inhabitants, or as the Seas have any shore. And for her Vertues, they as much surpass'd those of Sappho as the Theological do the Moral, (wherein yet Orinda was not her inferiour) or as the fading immortality of an earthly Lawrel, which the justice of men cannot deny to her excellent Poetry, is transcended by that incourruptible and eternal Crown of Glory where with the Mercy of God hath undoubtedly rewarded her more eminent Piety.

This urging for transcendence typifies the neo-platonism espoused by Philips and her circle of friends; the movement toward the "eternal Crown of Glory" fittingly acknowledges Philips' recent, untimely death. The condescending "pen but of a Woman" is echoed by women and men alike in the seventeenth century. But Cotterell's introduction to the poems of "The Matchless Orinda" reveals more than sexist commonplaces and conventions of praise. The areas of transcendence Cotterell outlines are precisely those that trigger what I shall call a "discourse of denial and disguise" in Katherine Philips' poetry. Orinda's poems, in fact, insist upon their ties to gender, history, and language, although they often seem to follow the path to a superior realm Cotterell maps out both for the collection and its author. At times, Philips draws her reader beyond history while she herself is covering up her royalist politics prior to the Restoration; at other times, she appeals to a transcendent, non-physical notion of friendship while creating exclusive, affectionate bonds with other women.

I do not focus on the categories of politics and affection arbitrarily. One of the interests of this essay is the way in which the poems from one category draw upon the other for their metaphors. Philips is best known for her poems on friendship, though the first poem in the 1667 collection defends the memory of Charles I against the satirical pen of a man who would "murder" the king again, in print. The poet protests in the opening line of this poem, "I think not on the State," then proceeds to chastise Vavasor Powell for libelling the dead king. The lines in which Orinda explains why she must speak out—though it is irregular for her to do so as a woman and an apolitical person—tellingly parallel her protests against—and partial reconciliation with—the physical world in her friendship poems:

… this is a cause
That will excuse the breach of Nature's laws.
Silence were now a sin, nay Passion now
Wise men themselves for Merit would allow.

"Nature's laws," a phrase that echoes the popularity of the new science of the seventeenth century, here refers to rules of decorum and propriety rather than principles of physics. A woman's "natural" condition is silence; passion most grievously violates that nature. But a "cause" can invert the natural order, transforming "whatever is" into "whatever's not."

The poetry of Mrs. Katherine Philips, the Matchless Orinda, whether political or affectionate, struggles with "nature" and its contradiction. To sort out the conflicting voices in the poetry, we might think of "Philips" as the voice of the woman whose proper place is guarded, "Orinda" as the voice of the poet for whom silence is a sin. For Orinda, the medium for violating the natural order is the language of poetry. It is Philips who needs transcendence, who dares not acknowledge a political, public, or physically affectionate life; it is Orinda who circumvents the censor, whose metaphors return the subjects of her poetry to the physical world.

These voices may overlap, and yet are separate from the biographical Katherine Philips. Katherine Fowler, age 16, married James Philips, age 54, in 1648. During the Commonwealth, while James Philips served the Cromwell government by quelling Royalist uprisings, she lived both in her husband's home in Wales and in their London lodgings. Her acquaintances in London, mostly Royalist sympathizers, included childhood friends, the poets Henry Vaughan and Abraham Cowley, and the theologian Jeremy Taylor. Philips' "Society of Friends," described in her poetry as a group of close friends, each assigned classical names and addressed with the hyperbolic conventions of friendship literature (Charles Cotterell, for example, was "Worthy Poliarchus"), may or may not have met regularly. [Philip] Souers casts doubt on the theory that Philips headed a salon for intellectuals, pointing to the infrequency of her visits to London. More likely, he asserts, the Society's "members" kept in touch through correspondence and the circulation of poems in manuscript.

In the eighteenth century, the English equivalent of the salon was the "Bluestocking party," a gathering run by one of several intellectual women for the purpose of drawing together men and women for "serious" (i.e., regarding art and literature) conversation. Souers argues that Philips would not have been sponsoring such parties in the seventeenth century, since the focus on friendship in her poetry (and there is very little other evidence for the "Society") is almost exclusively female. "Orinda's Society was not a salon," he asserts, "it was the official order of Friendship in the kingdom of feminine sensibility." It is possible that Professor Souers, whose 1931 biography of Philips is the only book-length study of her life and work, might startle at Lillian Faderman's observation [in Surpassing the Love of Men, 1981] that had Orinda "written in the twentieth century, her poetry would undoubtedly have been identified as 'lesbian'," but there is no critical dispute that Orinda desires to define her friendships in exclusively female terms. The poems make clear that whatever respect the biographical Philips received from her husband and male acquaintances, the poet, Orinda, felt compelled to defend women's friendships as, alternatively, equal to and superior to men's.

Katherine Philips consulted Jeremy Taylor in the 1650's on the nature of friendship. Taylor dedicated to her his 1657 "Discourse of the Nature, Offices and Measures of Friendship," "Written in answer to a Letter from the most ingenious and vertuous M.K.P.," i.e., Mrs. Katherine Philips. Taylor's acknowledgment of his friendship with his correspondent certifies both that Philips' friendship society was well known and that Taylor believed friendship could extend across gender—as far as the limits of gender allowed. Much of Taylor's book depends upon Cicero's De Amicitia, with two major exceptions in the argument. In Cicero's dialogue, Laelius insists that one never think of one's friend as "useful," and he is explicit in declaring that friendship is possible only between two good (virtuous) men. Taylor explains that he does not mean to sound "mercenary," but that he believes a sign of a worthy man is his ability to do the most good; a man who loves him will do him "all the good he can."

Taylor's other break with the classical conception of friendship, which speaks most directly to Philips' concerns, is his slight admission of women to friendship's realm. First of all, they may enter through marriage: "Marriage is the Queen of friendships, in which there is a communication of all that can be communicated by friendship: … being made sacred by vows and love, by bodies and souls, by interest and custome, by religion and by laws…." Taylor concludes that marriage is the archetype of friendship, friendships being marriages of the soul. Even when he considers women outside marriage, he continues to view them in relation to or in comparison with men. Since Taylor's conception of friendship begins with Christian charity, he is willing to admit that women are capable of generous acts. He addresses the subject explicitly in an aside (for which he later apologizes, seeming to have lost sight of his argument):

But by the way (Madam) you may see how much I differ from the morosity of those Cynics who would not admit your sex in to the communities of a noble friendship. I believe some Wives have been the best friends in the world….

But Taylor's sense of women is that they are imperfect men:

I cannot say that Women are capable of all those excellencies by which men can oblige the world; and therefore a femal[e] friend in some cases is not so good a counsellor as a wise man, and cannot so well defend my honour; nor dispose of reliefs and assistances if she be under the power of another….

These defects, he admits, are no reason to exclude women from friendship. Women may never be wise men, but, then again, neither will many men.

Orinda's poetry consciously swerves from several points of Taylor's wisdom. Although she does write a handful of epithalamiums, most of the poems celebrate the friendship of women. When Taylor contends that a woman cannot "defend my honour," his examples are explicitly military, of men sacrificing themselves for others in battle. Philips, the voice of restraint, acknowledges that woman's place is not in warfare, but Orinda will often adopt military metaphors when addressing another woman, simultaneously imitating and defying the poetic practices of men.

Orinda expresses affection in military language most explicitly in her poem, "To the truly Noble Mrs. Anne Owne, on my first Approaches." The language is a convention of male speech, as Taylor's document reveals. But Orinda does not merely adopt military metaphors for her own seductive purposes. The poem's simultaneous distance from and embrace of the language of conquerors makes it clear that the speaker is a woman self-consciously appropriating a language that is not hers, not merely imitating male conventions:

Madam,
As in a Triumph Conquerors admit
Their meanest Captives to attend on it,
Who, though unworthy, have the power confest,
And justifi'd the yielding of the rest:
So when the busie World (in hope t'excuse
Their own surprize) your Conquests do peruse,
And find my name, they will be apt to say,
Your charms were blinded, or else thrown away.
There is no honour got in gaining me,
Who am a prize not worth your Victory.
But this will clear you, that 'tis general,
The worst applaud what is admir'd by all.
But I have plots in't: for the way to be
Secure of fame to all posterity,
Is to obtain the honour I pursue,
To tell the World I was subdu'd by you.
And since in you all wonders common are,
Your Votaries may in your Vertues share,
While you by noble Magick worth impart:
She that can Conquer, can reclaim a heart.
Of this Creation I shall not despair,
Since for your own sake it concerns your care.
For 'tis More honour that the World should know,
You made a noble Soul, than found it so.

The conceit of the poem is a simple one: Anne Owen is a "Conqueror," and Orinda is her "Captive." Orinda effects a self-deprecating voice, praising her friend by disparaging herself. According to the poem, Anne Owen wins no glory in conquering Orinda, since Orinda is not worth Anne's attentions; but she is honored, in the world's eyes, by ennobling Orinda's soul, by imparting the conqueror's virtues to the conquered.

The metaphor is familiar in the romance tradition, echoed in the Cavalier poems of Orinda's male contemporaries. But Orinda, intimately addressing Anne Owen from the beginning of the poem, explicitly subverts conventional sex roles. Can one argue that this poem, by the "English Sappho," is meant to be read, as many of Sappho's lyrics were through the nineteenth century, as a fictional, male persona addressing a woman? I believe there is no mistaking that this is a poem about the conquering of one woman's heart by another. The traditionally feminine tokens "honour" and "prize" are associated with the speaker. Anne is compared to a triumphant military leader, yet she retains certain conventionally female attributes: her "charms" and her "Vertues." Orinda is no passive captive, however; she plots and pursues and creates. Not only has Orinda challenged the conventional male/female structure of a conquest poem, she has also created a woman's voice that can be simultaneously submissive and aggressive. In this way, Orinda does not merely imitate a tradition of heterosexual conquest. Rejecting the static positions of conqueror and conquered through a fluidity of roles, she dismantles the power relations of erotic expression.

If this is a "breach of Nature's laws," it is not without a "cause." Ostensibly, Orinda can push beyond the boundaries of gender's commonplaces because, as she has presented the problem in the poem, she must preserve Anne Owen's reputation, lest "the world" believe it has been sullied by an unworthy conquest. Blame me, says Orinda: let the world understand the pursuit as mine, satisfying my desire to be "subdu'd by you." If Orinda merely proposed this plot and let go of it, Anne would be relieved of her connections with male metaphors, since Orinda has asserted herself as the true aggressor. But the fiction is too pleasurable to renounce. She is not ashamed of the lie she has produced: "Of this Creation I shall not despair." She will pretend, for the world's sake, that Anne is not responsible for her conquest, but in the end Orinda wants both women to be seen as both "Conquerors" and "Captives."

The strange part of this poem is that even though it turns upon the imagined opinion of "the World," it ends transcendently. Orinda becomes Anne's "Votary"; Anne ennobles Orinda's Soul. This is the tension between what I have called, for shorthand purposes, the voices of Philips and Orinda. Orinda's language is, after all, not merely military but also sexual: the title refers to her "first Approaches"; line 9 refers to Anne "gaining me"; and in line 16 Orinda admits she desires to be "subdu'd." In steering the subject away from the physical and into a transcendent realm, Philips echoes Jeremy Taylor's definition of friendship as a marriage of souls. But that definition does not have the ultimate voice in this poem. The last lines, "For 'tis more honour that the World should know, / You made a noble Soul, than found it so," remind the reader that even though it is desirable to have a "noble soul," Orinda, living in a fleshly world, does not gain hers without external intercession.

In a strategy of denial, Philips appeals to a neo-platonic, spiritual notion of friendship. Orinda circumvents this denial by imposing the physical world, through metaphor, upon the transcendent. This suggests to me two separate concerns in the poetry. The first is simply repression: politics, public life, homoeroticism and physicality make Philips nervous, so she admits them only as vehicles to a "higher" truth. The inevitable return of the repressed, however, is staged through Orinda's metaphors. They insist, no matter how much Philips cries, "I think not on the State," Orinda does.

The second concern of the poetry, as I read it, relates to this tension of repression. It is the implicit exploration in Orinda's work of the nature and power of poetic language. In the Anne Owen poem I have been describing above, Orinda defends her "Creation," which is to say, her fiction or her lie, which she enacts in the course of the poem. Composed of language, this creation opposes the ideal realm of friendship, where souls ought to be able to merge without mediation. But if Philips—the voice that favors soul over body—wishes to celebrate her friendships, she is dependent upon Orinda's mediating language. Another poem to Anne Owen, "To my Lucasia, in defence of declared Friendship," seems to suggest that, though friendship is discovered in the ideal realm, it is maintained by its verbal celebration. The following lines are selected from the twenty-stanza poem:

Insecurity commonly motivates demands for written expressions of devotion: some lovers declare their affection in poetry, others in newspaper advertisements, still others in death-defying graffiti, spray-painting "I love you Carol always" across highway overpasses. Many a love affair is over, however, before an author has time to develop the metaphysical justification for announced love that Philips produces in this poem.

Her justification is logically flawed, though sentimentally attractive. Philips first attempts to tiptoe around the physical world in stanza 7: how does one explain "desires" and "passion" in the context of transcendent friendship? The turtle doves seem to provide a safe metaphor. Although they are "fervent," their passion is "spotless." Yet we are left with an image of Orinda and Lucasia contentedly cooing and cooing and cooing. Orinda will not be satisfied with a single declaration. As she echoes the "repeat" of the first line of this stanza in the "repetition" of the fourth, one senses that this is another occasion on which "silence were now a sin."

Her logic breaks down more explicitly in stanza 8. Here we are invited by Philips' Christian neo-platonism to consider "the Flesh" a prison house for "the Soul." As prisoners, we desire to control this "bondage," and we might expect to do so through an appeal to an outside force, i.e., the warden, God, Grace, or some other unfleshly power. There seems to be a bit of corruption in the prison house, however, since our resource is an insider: "the Ear." Or perhaps this sense organ is a privileged prisoner. Promoted, though not freed, for good behavior, the Ear sympathizes with the soul's desire for freedom. The Ear loosens the soul's bonds. The Ear enables one soul to pass a message of affection to another.

Before discussing how the Ear might have gained its favored status, I want to contrast it with the other privileged portion of the flesh that appears in stanza 9: "the Eye." The Eye has traditionally held a superior office as the conveyor of the soul's intentions. Through the Eye, Orinda says, friends can read each other's passions. Lucasia's look, she admits in stanza 17, is like sunshine, an oasis, a resuscitating shower. But "that Look" is improved as a token of affection, she contends in stanza 18, if it is "drest in Words." In this cause, Orinda will not settle for silence. The Ear has greater control over the flesh than the Eye does.

Katherine Philips died several years before Milton's Satan stigmatized the Ear by tempting rather than liberating Eve's soul with a few well placed whispers in her innocent aural cavity. We have no reason to be suspicious of this sense organ in this poem to Lucasia. On the contrary, the Ear assumes the special role of being the part of the flesh that can affect our control over the bondage of the flesh because it is the organ that receives language—at least spoken language. Orinda commands in the first line of the poem, "let us speak our Love." Her poem, while commanding, is also her speech-act, for here Orinda does "speak her love." Creating by speaking is action with precedents no one need be ashamed of, the most famous of which is recounted in the first two chapters of Genesis. So Philips treads on safe ground poetically, and in an extended sense, theologically (the creation of the world producing a harmonious music of the spheres), when she suggests in the 18th stanza that composed ("drest in") words are like harmonious music, "reflecting" one note with another through sympathetic vibration. This is to say, language is creative, language, like music, creates special relationships, and language improves understanding that depends merely upon visual impressions.

But something is wrong with the Eyes and Ears of this work; Philips ignores language's written, rather than spoken, capacities, an odd position to take in a composed poem. Is she practicing denial? writing sloppily? composing cleverly? The synaesthesia of stanza 18 curiously directs us to this problem. I read the musical simile two ways. The first is that there are two musicians; one responds to the performance of the other as each contributes separate lines of a duet. The second interpretation is that the sounding of one string on one instrument effects the sounding of a second string on that instrument through sympathetic vibration, though that string is not played by the musician. I will not dispute there may be other readings of these lines. My quibble is over the word "reflection," a word borrowed from the sense world of the Eye rather than the Ear. Even allowing for changes in English pronunciation since the 17th century, "reflection" is not a particularly strong rhyme for "unison." I believe it is purposefully chosen. Orinda seems to have invented aural reflection to describe her relationship with Lucasia.

The relationship is as contradictory as the mixing of Ear and Eye because it resists seventeenth-century expectations of women's behavior. Orinda must convince Lucasia that declared love is not "impertinent." She gives permission for a woman to "oblige and please" (stanza 9) not a man, but another woman. She intimates a physical dimension to their friendship when she claims the Viol string (stanza 18) does not merely echo or respond but "heaves to reflection." Here, as in the earlier poem to Anne Owen, Orinda calls for performance within the corporeal world rather than transcendence of it.

The third contradiction of this poem is its denial of its graphic dimension. This contradiction actually consolidates the poem's contradiction of senses (Eye/Ear) and contradiction of behaviors (expected/resisted). I have been trying to suggest in the discussions of these two poems to Anne Owen that "Philips" desires contradict "Orinda's." Orinda situates her friendships in a public, political, physical world. Philips retreats from this world through an appeal to an ideal of friendship between souls rather than bodies. Orinda resists Philips' denial by disguising her physical desires as metaphors, rather than subjects, in her poetry. Philips seems to reply that if poetry is the vehicle by which she will "speak her Love," she will make it as transcendent as possible by denying its relation to the visible world.

Although Katherine Philips' poems circulated in manuscript throughout the interregnum, she refused to have them published until her friends convinced her that she must do so in order to refute the faulty, pirated edition of her work, which appeared in 1664. Unpublished poems might seem more likely to appeal to the aural rather than visible world. But even they leave their graphic trace on handwritten pages. The written poem is an "aural reflection." It is the means by which Orinda and Lucasia can coo and coo and coo together, even though they are separated in Wales and London. It is a fiction, of course. Orinda is not "speaking" but writing her love. But it is an acceptable "Creation," as Orinda says in the earlier poem, one which pretends merely to give forth invisible sounds.

Philips repeats the idea that real poetry, verse that will be eternal, is voiced rather than inscribed in her poem, "To my Lady Elizabeth Boyle, Singing now affairs, &c." Here again are political and military metaphors; here again are sounds of sexual submission. And here again is an explicit denial of the power of the pen:

This poem of praise and gratitude to a woman who, with others of Katherine Philips' acquaintance, learned and privately performed songs from Philips' Pompey (a translation of Corneille), is another poem from a vanquished lover to her conqueror. It too depends on contrasts: the oxymoronic "Subduing fair" suggests an androgynous Elizabeth Boyle; chains are made stronger "By being soft and kind." Will contrasts with power, voice with pen, and happiness with fame. Yet even these contrasts are of two sorts: paradoxes and choices. The paradox of the aggressive woman or the soft chain is acceptably unreconciled, but choices must be decided. Orinda's duel of will and power dissolves in a double defeat, but voice wins out over pen and happiness over fame. Philips consistently selects the least physical and least visible quality or object, but Orinda equally consistently undermines that choice. Philips may be thinking of transcendent friendship, but Orinda's poem is still panting from Elizabeth Boyle's obliging siege.

The siege's success, according to the poem, depends neither on the pen nor on another superfluous, long, pointed object, the "needless dart." The third line of the poem clarifies the complaint: Boyle's quantity of erotic arrows is excessive; Orinda's heart puts up no defense. There really is no question of Boyle shooting too many phallic weapons against Orinda; there is no need for any dart at all. Orinda claims that she cannot resist the woman "Who in one action know(s) the way / To Vanquish and Oblige." I find nothing unusual in Orinda's use of military metaphor: she draws equally from poetic convention and her own adult life in England during the Civil Wars. But she emasculates the convention. The "Dart" is needless.

And so, for the same reasons perhaps, the pen is also needless. Charles Cotterell's introduction to the Poems makes it clear that most verses are the products of the pens of men. He also tellingly notes that Orinda's poems "fell hastily" from her pen, as if she wanted to rid herself of that tool as quickly as possible. To have a poem and not a pen is paradoxical, but paradoxes do not upset this poet. Although Orinda knows the power of poetic language and Philips knows the harmony of souls fed by linguistic communication, there are serious objections from both perspectives to the symbolism of the pen. Its mark is too physical for Philips. Its connections are too masculine for Orinda.

Orinda's rejection of masculine symbolism contributes to her "Sapphic," if not "feminist" identity. Hilda Smith [in Reason's Disciples, 1982] cites Katherine Philips as an early feminist role model because of her "retreat" poems, which promote pastoral escape with other women from a male world of politics, war, and sexuality. Since Katherine Philips' concerns about gender difference led her to no political action, nor even to question the sexist commonplaces spoken by her husband and male friends, "feminist" sounds as anachronistic as Faderman's label, "lesbian." Her poetic vision is one of separatism and a rejection of phallocentrism. Her poetic passions are lesbian, whether or not they accurately describe physical consummation. The seventeenth century provides no descriptive erotic vocabulary for such female discourse, unless we expand the customarily asexual label, "The English Sappho," that Katherine Philips shared with Anne Killigrew and others. By validating women's friendship as a theme that combines Katherine Philips' contradictory voices, the poems represent a Sapphic discourse produced by a rejected pen.

Despite Jeremy Taylor's concession that wives make good friends, the words flowing from the pens of most men Orinda knew of, since Aristotle and Cicero, claimed that women did not have the capacity to be friends—whether with men or (had it been thought of) with other women. Theological opinion admitted, by the seventeenth century, that women did indeed have souls, but having less power of reason, women's souls were more vulnerable than men's to corruption and wickedness. Orinda disputes both classical wisdom and theological prejudice. She argues in a didactic, fifteen stanza poem, "A Friend," that such biases are based on faulty premises. Gender distinctions are part of the material world; souls are only temporarily imprisoned in that world. It is the "Philips" voice that appeals to transcendence as an argument for equality in the fourth stanza:

This is another safe argument: Philips takes the tyrant's own words and throws them back at him. Having granted (Christian) women the capacity to love—as daughters, wives, and mothers—and having acknowledged women's "innocence" by their ready protection of it, Philips' male contemporaries have already granted women the vital ingredients of friendship. Moreover, if they truly believe in the separation of the body and the soul, they must dismiss their idea that women's souls are as encumbered as their bodies by their gender. Friendship, being the merging of souls, is gender neutral. "A Friend" asserts that when women are defined in terms of their relations with men, as daughters, mothers, or wives, they love on a less pure level than they do as friends. Friendship is, the third stanza claims,

Relationships, this poem explains, can be created by family, formality, or force, but these are not inherently felicitous joinings. The stanza concludes with Philips' appeal to the abstract ideals of Love and Honour, which produce friendship. If earthly relationships are to produce any happiness at all, they must include friendship. But why is friendship "more free" than "Kindred" or "Marriage-band"? From a seventeenth-century woman's perspective, it is the only relationship over which she has control, having no choice over the family into which she is born and little choice in the man she must marry. But women's friendships are also freer from obligations and consequences than family or marriage. As a daughter, a mother, or a wife, a woman must serve someone else; in friendships between women, love is mutually exchanged.

Another poem, "Friendship," argues that friendship is not merely more free but also more pure than heterosexual union:

All Love is Sacred, and the Marriage-tie
Hath much of Honour and Divinity.
But Lust, Design, or some unworthy ends
May mingle there, which are despis'd by Friends.

Not only does Katherine Philips fret over the corruptibility of marriage, she also clings to an ideal notion of friendship unblemished by desire, manipulation, or expectation. Yet these are certainly attributes—positive attributes—of the friendships Orinda reveals in her poems to other women. Perhaps coming exposed to Elizabeth Boyle's charms is not "lust"; perhaps creating a fiction of desiring to be subdued by Anne Owen is not "design"; perhaps demanding a declaration of love is a "worthy end" unto itself. But this is a philosophical poem, not specific in its address. It holds back the very physical tokens Orinda offers her intimates.

Curiously, Philips' rejection of the physical also rejects a belief in equality of the sexes. She measures men and women by different standards, degrading men and idealizing women. The poems suggest that men degrade themselves by seeking material conquests. For Philips, women's friendships prove that their values are superior to men's. Many feminists would reject this view of women's nature. It fails to query whether or not women, in general, would object more than men to war, violence, ambition, and politics if greater opportunity for participation in so called "men's activities" had been available to them. Philips accepts the seventeenth-century commonplaces: with fewer ties to the world, women can more easily transcend it. By idealizing women as superior peacemakers. Orinda validates the lesbian discourse of her poems addressed to women: appeals to women's "nature" provide a socially acceptable excuse for preferring women to men.

In her philosophical, defining poems, like "A Friend" and "Friendship," Orinda proves that the pen can nearly murder a subject by cramming it into lengthy, laborious stanzas. But when she addresses her friends, when her poem becomes not merely a description but also an act of friendship, it delights with lyrical freshness, the aural reflection of unaffected affection. In "To my Excellent Lucasia, on our Friendship," Orinda combines commonplaces with the gushing of an enamored individual. Here, again, body contrasts with soul, men's happiness contrasts with women's. Here, again, Philips situates friendship in an ideal realm. But here again, as well, Orinda's worldly, poetic language steals back the subject: friendship does not entirely abandon the earth.

Without Lucasia, Orinda was a soulless automaton, a cadaver imitating human life. Since they have become friends, Orinda's previously empty shell has found joy, life, and rest. This is no mere marriage of souls, however; Orinda seems to have consumed Lucasia, to have become Lucasia, to have absorbed Lucasia's soul. The last stanza explains that their souls are like flames: Orinda's appropriation of Lucasia's soul intensifies rather than consumes it.

Nevertheless, "To my Excellent Lucasia, on our Friendship" does not abandon its reader, disembodied, in friendship's transcendent realm. Men's happiness, as "Bridegrooms" or "Crown-conquerors," is admittedly a material happiness scorned by Philips. But it is also inferior to the speaker's because it is produced by mere "pieces of this Earth," in contrast with having "all the World in thee." Philips is slipping here: her preference is not for the spiritual over the temporal, but for the whole over a part. Admittedly, "this Earth" is a subset of "the World," the latter including both the tangible and the intangible. An automaton plus a soul equal a self. Correspondingly, the Earth plus the transcendent realm equal the World. Totality is not merely in the transcendent realm of friendship. Orinda has all the world "in thee," in the person of Lucasia.

In her poem, "A Friend," the word "design" was part of a tyrannical toolkit, wielded by rude men who wanted to exclude women from the delights of friendship. In the last stanza of this poem to Lucasia, however, both the women's "Flames" and their "Design" are "innocent." Design, in Orinda's woman-identified world, is prelapsarian, creative, uncorrupt.

Yet her design is physical. She rejects the "crownconquerors," conveniently displacing her political allegiances to both the crown-conquering Puritans and the crown-conquered Royalists. But the eliminated subject returns as metaphor. The first two lines of the poem confess, "I did not live until this time / Crown'd my felicity." Philips pretends to be apolitical, but Orinda adorns her messages of affection with political imagery. She also situates that affection in the temporal world: "this time" crowns her felicity. The ideal realm is eternal, beyond time; Orinda's friendships are here and now.

In the third stanza, she compares her former self to a watch, underscoring this concern with time. The simile is unfavorable: a watch is mechanically driven, and so was Orinda before she received Lucasia's soul. The difference between the mechanical and the inspired life Orinda desires is the difference between an individual and a community. The watch is a creation, designed to perform a task. It is functional and observable, but not—in the terms of 1980's tech toys—interactive. Lucasia's soul, in contrast, inspires, cures, supplies and guides. Once again, it is the interchange of friendship that most attracts Orinda. But the watch has been enhanced, not replaced. The interchange of friendship occurs in mortal time.

I want to return now to Charles Cotterell's list of praise, with which I began this essay. He says Orinda's poems would not disgrace "the name of any man." He claims her poems are timeless, for her name should "live with honour as long as" the Muses. He laments the isolation of the English language, for he believes Orinda's verses speak beyond the concerns of national boundaries. And finally, her poetry, which he claims reflects her "Vertues," surpassing Sappho, he compares to heavenly glories. Cotterell's goal is not consistent literary criticism. He confuses the poet and her poetry as he shifts his praise of the virtues of each, but his interests are appropriate for discussing a poet whose poems extol transcendence.

The physical side of Orinda's poetry does not reach Charles Cotterell; she excludes it through denial and disguise. According to seventeenth-century social conventions, the poet, Katherine Philips, respects "Nature's Laws": she marries, she mothers, she muses. Her Sapphic persona, Orinda, who forms bonds outside marriage, who renames her friends, and who writes—with a pen—unconventional verses, breaks the Laws. The tension of voices in the poems includes the kind of writer Cotterell describes: a virtuous, timeless, universal, woman poet. But Orinda's voice also insists on poetry not merely in thought but in deed, as she physically reinscribes herself in morality, history, and place.