SOURCE: Kuchar, Gary. “Southwell's ‘A Vale of Tears’: A Psychoanalysis of Form.” Mosaic 34, no. 1 (March 2001): 107-20.

[In the following essay, Kuchar offers a psychoanalytic reading of “A Vale of Tears.”]

Contemporary psychoanalytic discussions of subject formation attribute immense importance to processes of mourning. This concern with mourning in the work of post-Lacanian theorists, most notably Judith Butler and Julia Kristeva, is not simply a reflection on how one negotiates loss throughout one's life but more primarily how the subject is itself constituted by mourning: formed, that is, by and through loss. From this perspective, mourning is not simply something the subject engages in when confronted with abandonment; but, rather, the subject is itself an effect of loss—the product of a series of renunciations and compromise formations. For Lacan and his recent reformulaters, a primordial loss of an egoless sense of unity and fullness—the loss, in other words, of a past that could never have been present as such—is the condition of possibility for the emergence of a subject who is able to take itself as an object of its own thought. In order for self-consciousness to emerge, according to Lacan, a division (or Spaltung) between the emergent ego and the idealized mirror image with which the ego identifies, but which it subsequently fails to adequately incorporate, must take place. The ego's failure to incorporate the imago of this ideal ego results from the disjunction between the infant's actual motor incapacity, its real lack of bodily integrity, and the totality of the wholly integral self that it desires to emulate. To this extent, consciousness is structured by a disjointure, or gap, between the ego and its specular, imaginary Other that is set up within the self as both the condition and the effect of language. Self alienation, then, is the very basis of subjectivity—the ground of identity itself: “The only homogenous function of consciousness is the imaginary capture of the ego by its mirror reflection and the function of misrecognition which remains attached to it” (Ecrits 32). This formulation of the self as conditioned by self-difference, by an enabling emptiness or gap, has profound implications for the meaning and motivations of art and religion.

Indeed, Lacan states unequivocally, “In spite of [the formulation's] generality,” at its heart, “religion […] consists of avoiding this emptiness” (Ethics 130). Aesthetic and spiritual practices are, at bottom, modes of renegotiating identity, strategies of mourning aimed at confronting dividedness while living out imaginatively the sense of self-unity that the subject is constitutionally deprived of. As Kristeva puts it, symbolic language possesses therapeutic efficacy insofar as it “imposes itself as a means of countervailing the loss of Other and of meaning: a means more powerful than any other because more autonomous, […] it fills the […] psychic need to confront separation, emptiness, death” (Black Sun 129-30). Lacan provides a more specific view of the therapeutic efficacy of symbolic language when he claims that the process of psychotherapy operates by enabling the patient to “reorder the past contingent events by conferring on them the sense of necessities to come” (Language 18). In short, it is symbolic acts of interpretation that enable a subject to transform objectifying and traumatizing events into subjectively meaningful experiences. Devotional and religious writings often present explicit examples of this desire to mitigate feelings of meaningless and loss, centring as they often tend to do around the desire for identity with God as the absolute Subject, the source and the delta of all meaning.

This therapeutic dimension of devotional writing is evident in the work of the early modern Jesuit poet Robert Southwell, particularly his poem “A Vale of Tears,” published in the year of his execution, 1595. Southwell's poem presents an unusually dramatic illustration of how the therapeutic efficacy of early modern religious poetry often derives from its careful organization, its movement from a rhetoric of division, emptiness, and loss to a language of union, identity, and wholeness. This movement occurs through the speaker's shifting disposition toward the Alpine landscape that he confronts in the poem. When the speaker begins, he perceives the landscape as a horror vacui, a wholly godless, objectifying, and alienating unreality. Through a process of poetic meditation, however, it emerges as an appropriate setting for a spiritually meaningful transformation of self that is enabled by an increased sense of God's presence. In this respect, Southwell presents a variation on the technique of spiritualizing the physical, a well-established convention that consists, as Saint Augustine says, in the knowledge that “every good of ours either is God or comes from God” (27). In “A Vale of Tears,” the devotional practice of spiritualizing the physical consists in the act of relating elements of creation that appear void of meaning because they seem unrelated to God's goodness, back to their divine source. Through the poem's emphasis on paradox, visual and aural oppositions, and its insistent representation of an objectless but omnipresent mourning, it expresses the speaker's feelings of loss and self-division and his ultimate hope for union with God. The formal dimensions of the poem perform this movement from loss and division to the emergence of a meaningful sense of spiritual purpose.

Although it is not my intention to evacuate “A Vale of Tears” of its religio-political contexts, many of which would illustrate the dramatic kinds of separation that Southwell experienced as a Jesuit and eventual martyr, my primary concern is to trace the poem's rhetorical functioning. I trace the formal dimensions of the speaker's development toward a sense of spiritual identity at the end of the poem, examining how these formal elements engage the reader throughout the reading experience. By taking this psychoanalytically based formalist approach to Southwell's text, I demonstrate how its imagistic patterning, diction, meditative features, and religious themes possess a certain cathartic and sublimatory efficacy. In particular, I emphasize how the speaker's translation of an alien physical landscape into a symbolically significant expression of spiritual identity constitutes a therapeutic scene; how it stages, that is, the speaker's emerging awareness of his relation to God. I conclude by explaining how Southwell's translation of the Petrachan “plaint” for religious purposes constitutes a literary analog to Lacan's inversion of Freud's view of sublimation. And that this translation presents a significant moment in the literary articulation of desire as it develops in the early modern religious lyric.

A. Lytton Sells implicitly reveals why Southwell's crossing of the Alps in 1586 provided an appropriate occasion for staging a struggle for meaningful spiritual identity when he observes that Southwell “could not but judge the mountains [in St. Gothard Pass] from the standpoint of his age which required ‘nature’ to be perfected by ‘art.’ […] But he stands apart from his age in seeing something in this spectacle that does not displease him” (330). The first part of Sells's comment implies that a sixteenth-century mind like Southwell's would have encountered the “wild, majestic and weird scenery in the neighborhood of the St. Gothard pass” (Janelle 278) as not only something imperfect or fallen but also something quite literally unthinkable, a paradoxical emblem, if you like, of that which stands outside the symbolizable. As Southwell puts it, it is a place “where nothing seemed wrong, yet nothing right” (line 32). To this extent, the landscape presents an encounter with meaninglessness, a scene, that is, where God's presence remains indiscernible. The process of bringing this empty and meaningless site into a meaningful relation with the self is consistent with locating signs of God's presence in the world, a process that in turn enables the speaker to locate his own place in relation to God. It is this process that leads Sells to observe that Southwell sees “something in this spectacle that does not displease him.” In effect, what Southwell comes to see in the landscape is his proper relation to God through a deepened consciousness of sin.

Although Louis Martz's thesis regarding the direct influence of Ignatian meditation on Southwell's poetry has been seriously challenged on a number of fronts, by Joseph D. Scallon in particular, there seems little doubt that certain Ignatian themes and meditative patterns are significant to the poem and to the description of the landscape in particular. The poem presents the speaker's developing awareness of his consciousness of sin and ends with an emphasis on the spiritual importance of transforming “former faults” into “plainful thoughts” (69, 57). This thematic focus clearly resembles the meditative sentiments found in the meditations one sees in Saint Ignatius Loyola, where the practitioner “is to consider who God is against whom I have sinned, reflecting on the divine attributes and comparing them with their contraries in me; God's wisdom with my ignorance, God's omnipotence with my weakness, God's justice with my iniquity” (27).

This meditative process of focussing on one's lack in the face of God's perfection is, as Kristeva puts it in her reading of the Eucharist, to admit: “I am divided and lapsing with respect to my ideal, Christ, whose introjection […] [incorporation] sanctifies me while reminding me of my incompletion” (Powers 118-19). To understand the therapeutic design of Southwell's “A Vale of Tears” is to recognize that the same logic of division and desire for union that is operating in Ignatian meditation also informs the structure of the poem. This is not to repeat Martz's thesis of a direct parallel between the tripartite organization of Ignatian meditation and early modern devotional poetry but to recognize a more general structural and psychological logic common to both. Indeed, Southwell's “A Vale of Tears” dramatizes the same feelings of longing and separation evident in Ignatian modes of meditation in which the practitioner implicates himself in the sufferings of Christ. W. W. Meissner, a practising psychoanalyst and member of the Jesuit order, sees Ignatius's Spiritual Exercises as, in part, “a manifestation of [Ignatius's] own psychic experience [that] reflects in some degree his internal world of dynamic and unconscious fantasy” (88). Meissner suggests that such unconscious fantasy is particularly apparent in the maternal imagery and its associated expression for union evident in the central Ignatian prayer Anima Christi:

Soul of Christ, sanctify me.
Body of Christ, save me.
Blood of Christ, inebriate me.
Water from the side of Christ, wash me.
Passion of Christ, strengthen me.

(Loyola 1-5)

Meissner suggests that the “imagery of protection, being enfolded within the sacred wounds, recalls associations to a fantasy of reunion with the lost mother” (89). Whatever the biographical significance of the imagery here, however, be it fantasy for the lost mother or otherwise, what is important about the therapeutic dimension of Ignatius's imagery is the way it places impersonal images that have potentially tragic dimensions (Christ's body and blood) into (inter)personally significant symbols of union and meaning. It is not the referential function of the images to Ignatius's unconscious that is of therapeutic and poetic interest here, but the form and process through which Ignatius and the tradition to which he belongs that translates a scene of loss and non-meaning into a vision of union with the divine. Indeed, it is exactly this formal and thematic process—the process, that is, of translating a potentially meaningless and threatening encounter with an unfamiliar landscape into a spiritual and symbolically significant experience—that unfolds in Southwell's poem.

This process begins with Southwell's representation of the landscape in the opening three stanzas through the meditative dynamics of Ignatius's fourth exercise in the Spiritual Exercises (see Martz 207-08). This exercise calls for a meditation on hell in which the practitioner imagines hell using all five senses in order to envision its “length, breadth, and depth” (Loyola 29). Drawing on Ignatius's emphasis on the senses in the meditative process, Southwell begins his description of the Alpine landscape by evoking a world characterized by separation and loss. Between stanzas 2 and 3, the speaker moves from an emphasis on sight to sound re-creating the “composition of place” as practised in the Ignatian method: it is first a place “where eie-roume is from rockes to cloudie sky” (5) and then a site “where ears of other sound can have no choice / But various blustring of the stubburne winde” (9-10). What is most important about the influence of Ignatius's meditation on hell for the opening stanzas is that it provides an appropriate method for describing what initially appears as an outward and alien landscape.

Indeed, the opening line of “A Vale of Tears” initiates the dominating movement from high to low, from bright to dark, from vast space to encroaching sky, all of which create a disturbing effect of the landscape as a place of ubiquitous and incomprehensible loss: “A Vale there is enwrapt with dreadful shades / Which thicke of mourning pines shrouds from the sunne / Where hanging clifts yeld short and dumpish glades / And snowie floud with broken streames doth runne” (1-4). Although mourning is clearly a human activity, the landscape appears, nonetheless, objective to the speaker; it appears, that is, as a pure description of a world inaccessible to human intelligibility. Its motions are described as meaninglessly “diverse” as “eares of other sound can have no choice / But various blustering of the stubburne winde” (9-10, emph. mine). The Ignatian focus on the senses operates at this point precisely to undermine the power of human perception to locate signs of meaning in the landscape. This sense of alienation is most disturbing for the speaker as he views the “hollow clouds full fraught with thundering groans / With hideous thumps discharge their pregnant wombe” (15-16). The most terrifying element of the landscape remains its ability to reproduce its indiscernible and, at this point terrifying features.

Having established his sense of terror at the meaninglessness of the landscape through visual and aural imagery, the speaker in “A Vale of Tears” thematizes its lack of discernible shape through the art/nature distinction so common in the period: “Resort there is of none but pilgrim wights, / That passe with trembling foot and panting heart, / With terror cast in cold and shivering frights, / They judge the place to terror framde by art: Yet Natures worke it is of arte untoucht” (21-25). An ambiguity begins to emerge here through the term resort that is crucial to the speaker's translation of the landscape from a site of division and meaninglessness to union and discernible form. On the one hand, these lines thematize the incomprehensibility of “Natures work” by emphasizing the sense that it is “of arte untoucht”; on the other hand, the term resort insinuates not only a “concourse or assemblage of people” but also “an opportunity for repair, retreat, or access to a place” (OED). This is the first point in the poem, in other words, where the speaker begins to advance toward a recognition of the “place” as a scene of repair, of communion, of meaning, rather than a site of sheer terror. To this extent, the speaker has implicitly begun to transform what is “of art untoucht” into spiritually and metaphorically meaningful terms. The poem develops by making this process of transformation increasingly explicit throughout. Indeed, the latent insinuation, in stanza 6, that the place is spiritually purposive rather than symbolically vacuous, becomes central in the following three stanzas. In the lines and stanzas immediately following the art/nature distinction, moreover, the coincidence of interior spiritual states and exterior physical motions is inscribed in the formal movements from alterity to identity, from opposition to union; rather than as an explicitly thematized recognition.

In stanzas 7 and 8, for instance, the oppositional elements of the landscape are tightly condensed into individual words set against one another, creating an uncomfortable sense of physical/spiritual dislocation: “Natures worke it is of arte untoucht […] / With such disordered order strangely coucht, / And so with pleasing horror low and hie” (27-28). This dense juxtapositioning reaches its most condensed expression in the first line of stanza 9 as the word mated inscribes the dual senses of confusion and peace, loneliness and communion, fear and mutuality. Directly at the centre of the poem, the speaker tells us that the landscape is “a place for mated minds, an onely bower / Where every thing doth sooth a dumpish mood” (33-34). The term mated signifies both the sense of being “distraught” as in “the bitter smart that strained by mated mind” and a sense of likeness as in a “sweet union held of mated will” (OED). This sense of likeness or similarity refers simultaneously to the “Pilgrim Wights” of stanza 6 as well as implicitly the identity of the speaker and the landscape itself. Thus the various forms of opposition articulated up to this point are momentarily united in this term, which carries multiple but not opposing meanings. The horrifying, alien landscape is now a “bower,” providing a brief moment of comfort. The unification of subject and object, of the speaker's inner world and the external physical world, is not registered in terms of content as such but, rather, through the productive ambiguity of the word mated. Indeed, it is here, at the centre of the poem, that Southwell's reader, one spiritual pilgrim among many, is invited into the meditational process that the text presents. The place for “mated minds” is no longer a specific place: it is now a shared existential/spiritual condition, a state of being where one seeks to reconcile feelings of dislocation from God. The term mated, then, makes more explicit what remained implicit in the word resort.

It is at this central moment in the poem, what we might call the typological juncture, that the speaker offers the reader the opportunity to imaginatively realign the oppositions formulated so far. The formal and spatial motions of the poem, its movement from opposition to unity, from geographic particularity to spiritual generality, invite the reader to reinterpret a similarity as an identity, thus furthering the symbolic sense of self-unity that the speaker seeks to attain. Indeed, the chaos and “horror of this fearful quier,” the constant jarring motion from sky to earth, heat to cold, reaches a still point in the poem's middle as the reader is invited to imaginatively unite speaker and listener, external and internal. This unification is then registered in the images as the “earth lies forlorne, the cloudie skie doth lower, / The wind here weepes, here sighes, here cries aloude” (35-36). The previous cacophony is briefly translated into a harmonious, if still deeply mournful, choir of sound and sight.

Even at the point of momentary resolution, however, a clear ambiguity remains that reflects the speaker's imperfect sense of spiritual purpose. This is evident to the extent that “soothe” signifies not only “comfort” but also “show” or “declare” (OED). On the one hand, then, the lines express a sense of momentary ease, a sense of spiritual solidarity amongst the various “Pilgrim Wights” sharing the “bower”; and yet, on the other, they further signify the way that the landscape cannot help but to “betray” a sense of loss that remains disconnected from the consciousness of the speaker. The sense of comfort attained here is momentary and imperfect, an imperfection inscribed within the ambiguity of the diction itself. Indeed, the speaker's language and the reality of the external landscape remain imperfectly matched at this point. The connection, in other words, between the interior state of the speaker and the outward world of the landscape has yet to be deliberately thematized, recognized, that is, as a meaningful identity.

After this still point, the imagistic and rhetorical oppositions are explicitly taken up again as the meditative process begins anew by referring back to the imagery of the poem's opening stanza: “The pines thicke set, hie growne, and ever greene, / Still cloath the place with sad and mourning vaile” (41-42). The resolution achieved through the “mated minds” figure proves to be momentary, but it is nonetheless crucial to the reader's deepening consciousness that the speaker is struggling toward a meaningful vision of the self in relation to the previously terrifying landscape. By identifying with the speaker and thus made part of the community of “mated minds,” the meditative focus aims to deepen the reader's awareness of sin in conscious relation to the landscape. The landscape now becomes a fit place for self-analysis and the redeeming power of sorrowful repentance: “All pangs and heavie passions here may find / A thousand motives suitly to their griefes, / To feed the sorrowes of their troubled minde, / And chase away dame pleasures vaine reliefes” (53-56). We have now begun to emerge into a deliberately thematic recognition of the appropriateness of the landscape for religious meditation; the landscape is, effectively, no longer entirely “of arte untoucht.”

Indeed, the landscape is now said to “conspire”—which carries the Latinate meaning of “to breathe together”—with the speaker and his fellow pilgrims: “To plaining thoughts this vaile a rest may bee, / To which from worldly joyes they may retire. / Where sorrow springs from water, stone and tree, / Where everie thing with mourners doth conspire” (57-60). These lines resolve the earlier ambiguity in line 33 (“sooth a dumpish mood”) by making explicit the sense that the speaker now derives comfort, or “rest,” rather than discomfort and terror, from the reflection of his sorrow in the “conspiring” world around him. The sense of “conspire,” however, still implies that the landscape stands in an objective relation to the speaker, that its mirroring effect is more coincidental than providential. This changes in the following three stanzas as a series of auditory images is reconciled and the speaker places the landscape within a familiar biblical and eschatological context.

The passive constructions of stanza 15 shift into deliberate meditation constructed through a series of imperative forms in the following stanzas: “Set here my soule maine streames of teares afloate / Here all thy sinfull foiles alone recount, / Of solemne tunes make thou the dolefulst note, / that to thy ditties dolor may amount” (61-64). The “heavy notes,” “fearfull quier,” “marble grones,” and “roaring beates” of earlier stanzas are now deliberately translated into signs of inward griefs, of “solemn tunes,” that are not only discernible but also spiritually efficacious. The following stanza is alone in situating the landscape within a recognizably biblical context, thus marking the most explicit point in the transition from alterity to meaning, emptiness to identity: “When Eccho doth repeat thy plainful cries / Thinke that the verie stones thy sinnes bewray, / And now accuse thee with their sad replies, / As heaven and earth shall in the latter day” (65-68, emph. mine). The allusion to Luke 19:40 establishes the speaker's sense of self within a meaningful symbolic frame that explicitly extends into a view of eschatological history with the reference to the “latter day.” The spiritual development of the speaker, then, is consistent with the development of the formal dimensions of the poem and the increasing thematization of the self's relation to the landscape: the initial resolution (at lines 33-35) occurs primarily in terms of a rhetorical still point, inscribing within it, nonetheless, a sense of unease about the relation between self and world, whereas the latter resolution functions thematically, as an explicit moment of reconciliation between the inward self and its outward expression. The reader, then, to the extent that he or she identifies with the speaker, moves from a state of unease regarding the discontinuity and ambiguity between self and landscape to a position of identity between interior and exterior worlds.

This process of securing a sense of identity and spiritual purpose by a recognition of the external state as an inward and symbolic reality is secured in the following stanza through a visual image that complements the auditory patterns concluded in stanzas 15 and 16. The imagistic dimension of this resolution is completed through the figure of the “Limbeck,” which purifies the heart while providing a formal resolution, a means of retranslating division and cacophony into unity and harmony: “Let former faults be fuell of the fire, / For griefe in Limbecke of thy heart to still / Thy pensive thoughts, and dumps of thy desire, / And vapoure tears up to thy eies at will” (69-72). The pun on the word still, indicating both “distillation of sins and sorrows” and a sense of “stillness or peace,” resolves the wanderings of desire at both imagistic and rhetorical levels (OED). Likewise, the figure “dumps,” signifying both a musical composition characterized by its sad minor key (Brownlow 123) and the cavernous quality of the Alpine landscape, suggests the resolution of the visual and aural registers of desire initiated in stanzas 2 and 3. By resolving the imagistic and rhetorical oppositions in the poem, the speaker enacts the purifying or distilling process formally as well as thematically, moving from a consciousness of sin to the awareness of contrition, from noise to stillness, from physical and psychological division to imaginative unity. The function of ambiguity is no longer to insinuate division or opposition but rather similarity and identity.

The final stanza of the poem reveals the degree to which Southwell is self-conscious about his poem as both an imperative to, and an example of, the transformation of sorrow into song, of loss into an expression of the desire for union: “Let teares to tunes, and paines to plaints be prest, / And let this be the burdon of thy song, / Come deepe remorse, possess my sinfull brest / Delights adue, I harbourd you too long” (73-76, emph. mine). Southwell here thematizes his application of Petrachan motifs for religious purposes, changing as he does the object of the “plaint” from the courtly lady to God. The Petrachan figure of the “plaint,” exploited by English sonneteers like Sir Thomas Wyatt, expresses, as Kenneth Graham argues, the speaker's desire for the courtly lady while implying an awareness of the speaker's unworthiness and lack of deserving of her love and desire (40-41). As a figure of the lover's “moan” or “sigh,” the plaint tends to sign the inexpressibility of the lover's affection, as in Wyatt's plaining “without tongue” (Graham 42). In this sense, the emotional sincerity and the accompanying inexpressiveness of the lover's “plaint” might be opposed, as Graham explains, to the more self-consciously rhetorical and confident expression of a speaker's “complaint” (40-47). The figure of the plaint, indicating a sense of humbled “uncertainty” and “inexpressibility,” is clearly ideal for the religious poet seeking union, through a deepened consciousness of sin, with the most inexpressible of objects, God. Indeed, Southwell emphasizes the sense of uncertainty around the figure of the plaint as an expression of “pensive thoughts” derived from “former faults” (69, 71). To this extent, the emphasis on plaint expresses the way that Southwell's speaker seeks to deepen his consciousness of separation from God to inspire his own worthiness for union. In Southwell, the “plainfull” speaker is the self-less speaker, a subject prepared to fully acknowledge his unworthiness and distance from the object of desire while hoping, nonetheless, that such an expression will conclude in union with the praised object.

Through this deepening consciousness of sin expressed as “plaining thoughts,” Southwell's speaker seeks to meditatively inhabit the impossibly painful point of separation from the Father dramatized in the crucifixion. Kristeva describes this moment of division when she argues that the

break, brief as might have been, in the bond linking Christ to his Father and to life introduces into the mythical representation of the Subject a fundamental and psychically necessary discontinuity. Such a caesura, which some have called a “hiatus,” provides an image, at the same time as a narrative, for many separations that build up the psychic life of individuals. […] It brought to consciousness the essential dramas that are internal to the becoming of each and every subject. It thus endows itself with a tremendous cathartic power.

(Black 132)

The structural patterning and productive ambiguity of Southwell's poem aims to recreate, at the level of both form and theme, the cathartic power derived from the sorts of separations and unions found in the narrative dimensions of the Passion. Southwell's text seeks to spiritually purify its reader, inspire him or her to meditation to transform the wanderings of desire into contrite and purifying tears of repentance. By transforming a potentially meaningless and thus terrifying encounter with “Natures work” into a spiritually and symbolically significant meditative experience, Southwell anticipates the psychoanalytic principle that a therapeutic effect is evoked by “reordering the past contingent events by conferring on them the sense of necessities to come” (Lacan, Language 18). Moreover, by transforming the contingencies and “diverse noise” of “Natures work” into an occasion for contrite tears and by subsequently transforming those tears into “plaints” and “solemn songs,” Southwell not only narrates the speaker's emergence into a sense of spiritual purpose, but he also thematizes the importance of what we can retrospectively locate as a particular understanding of sublimation. This view of sublimation reflects significant developments in the articulation of desire in the early modern religious lyric as well as its subsequent theorization by psychoanalysis.

This shift in the articulation of desire is evident to the extent that Southwell's transformation of the Petrachan figure of the “plaint” into a religious context presents a literary analogue to the principles behind Lacan's reversal of the Freudian view of sublimation. For Freud, sublimation simply consists in the displacement of instinct from an object that satisfies some direct material need to an object that bears no immediate relation to that need (39). For Lacan, however, the relation is inverted to the point that sublimation consists in investing a particular object, the example he uses is the lady of the courtly love lyric, with the sublime power associated with the source of one's lack, the emptiness around which one's identity is formed (Ethics 87-155). In the courtly lyric, the manifest desire for spiritual and sexual consummation covers over the masochistic reality that the lady functions as a stand-in for this nameless lack, which is the inaccessible source of the subject's desire, what Lacan calls the object-a. The courtly lady marks out, in other words, the emptiness that Kristeva speaks of concerning the “hiatus,” or “break,” represented in the Passion. From this perspective, the economy of sublimation in the courtly lyric tradition consists in the way that “the Object of desire itself coincides with the force that prevents its attainment—in a way, the object ‘is’ its own withdrawal, its own retraction” (Žižek 96). In the courtly love lyric, this impossible situation remains implicit within the structure of the genre, in the way the speaker seeks, but must fail, to receive the lady's desire. In “A Vale of Tears,” however, the impossibly divine nature of the object of desire is made explicit, made, that is, a deliberate thematic issue.

This self-consciousness is apparent in Southwell's emphasis on his “plaining thoughts,” “plainfull cries,” and “plaints,” which make dramatically explicit the fact that his lyric voice simultaneously expresses both his desire for God and his unworthiness to be the subject of God's desire (57, 65, 73). To this extent, Southwell makes the impossible nature of courtly desire a thematic dimension of his religious lyric. By displacing an economy of sublimation orchestrated around a human object, however it may be constituted in pseudo-divine terms, to God himself, Southwell makes explicit what remained more or less implicit in the structure of courtly lyric. In this sense, he poeticizes a mode of sublimation that Lacan later theorizes.

By elevating the object of desire from a woman to God, Southwell's speaker seeks to fill out his own lack in relation to what remains, insofar as he is a body as well as a soul, an impossible Object. Within the sublimatory economy of “A Vale of Tears,” then, the speaker, like the subject of Lacanian theory, knows himself by articulating his lack in relation to God (for Lacan the object-a) as the absolute aim and source of desire. For Southwell's speaker, the process of articulating a deepened consciousness of sin and the act of transforming this recognition into “plaining thoughts” of lack before God establishes his proper identity in relation to the Father. For Southwell, just as for Lacan, it is only by losing the self as ego, losing, that is, one's inwardly directed narcissistic certainty, in favour of a more consciously intersubjective understanding of the self, that a genuine subject emerges. By dramatizing the speaker's disavowal of “former faults” in favour of outwardly directed “solemn songs,” Southwell poeticizes the psychoanalytic principle that a “genuine consciousness of self cannot be attained within the frame of phenomenological introspection but demands a frame of reference outside consciousness” (Lee 73). The speaker's encounter with a landscape that appears uninterpretable constitutes an occasion for inscribing his identity within an economy of sublimation where the self is understood as the subject of a desire for, as well as of, the Other.

Southwell's self-conscious thematization of religious desire in Petrachan terms reflects a significant moment in the history of anthropopathia (the rhetorical term for an expression of God's attributes in language that is normally reserved for describing human characteristics), as it occurs in the early modern religious lyric. By advocating a religious application of Petrachan modes, “A Vale of Tears” participated in a literary history that soon led to such radically anthropomorphic expressions of divine love as Donne's “Show me deare Christ” and “Batter my Heart.” In these poems, Donne encourages his readers “to participate in the alarming extension of a traditional metaphor,” drawing them into an “uneasy complicity” with the speaker's amorous passion for the divine (Kerrigan 338). Southwell's importance to the early modern lyric, then, is not simply a matter of his use of Ignatian exercises, which have been evoked in order to explain away Donne's violations of taste (338) but rather in his articulation and self-conscious understanding of religious desire in Petrachan terms. This articulation of a subject whose identity is dependent upon an “undeserving” desire for a divine, and in this sense, “impossible” Object, anticipates the theorization of a psychoanalytic conception of the self as the subject of its own lack. Indeed, the early modern tradition of religious lyric that Southwell's “A Vale of Tears” participates in not only presents a therapeutic poetics of sublimation, but it also thematizes a view of the subject as a subject of loss, which unexpectedly foresees psychoanalysis.

Works Cited

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