Going Too Far (51 page)

Here I must alert the reader to some of the ways in which I do
not
intend to explore metaphysical concepts. I am not using the word in the Aristotelian sense, nor indeed in any traditional sense of strict philosophical terminology. Metaphysical feminism may or may not “work” on those levels; I welcome sisters better trained in such disciplines than I to pursue that subject.
¹
I am a poet and so have drawn on the traditions of my own discipline for the feminist purpose: I am using the word “metaphysical” as it pertains to “the metaphysical poets.” Again, it must be made clear that I am not discussing poetry written
on
metaphysical subjects (such as that of Lucretius, Dante, Blake, Christina Rossetti). Rather, I am referring to the work of those writers whom Dr. Samuel Johnson (of whom more later) termed “metaphysical”—as they have subsequently come to be called generally in English studies:
various poets in seventeenth-century England, most notably John Donne, but including others, primarily Marvell, Crashaw, and Herbert. The work of this group, and of Donne in particular has, I think, special relevance for our exploration into the beginnings of metaphysical feminism.

It should be noted, too, that I do not refer to this approach as a philosophical one (although it is), because for too many people the word “philosophy” is a signal that the issues have now been moved to some illusory higher ground—which means that we are safe from discussing who will take out the garbage, and happily are no longer threatened with anything so mundane as being arrested. Our seventeenth-century poetic template and our own nascent metaphysical feminism do not permit of such self-deluding twaddle. We are always reminded of the real world. “No metaphor … too high, none too low, too triviall.”
²
Contrarily, I do not refer to this approach as a pragmatic one (although it is), because for too many people the phrase “practical politics” is tantamount to
(1)
a caucus meeting, (2) a telephone booth (where the payoff takes place), or (3) a “militant riot.” Again, these excuses are inadmissible to the metaphysical knowledge that the means and goals must justify each other—and that every gesture is capable of grace.

Definitions

Of metaphysical poetry,
Webster's III
says, “highly intellectualized poetry marked by bold and ingenious conceits, incongruous imagery, complexity and subtlety of thought, frequent use of paradox, and often by deliberate harshness or rigidity of expression.” But there are better definitions, both for our own purposes and in general.

In his wise and beautifully written introductory essay to
Metaphysical Lyrics and Poetry of the Seventeenth Century,
³
H. J. C. Grierson points out that Donne, the “great master” of the metaphysical poets, “is metaphysical not only in virtue of his scholasticism, but by his deep reflective interest in the experiences of which his poetry is the expression, the new psychological curiosity with which he writes of love and religion.” Grierson goes on to define the work of The Metaphysicals as containing “above all the peculiar
blend of passion and thought, feeling
and ratiocination
, which is their greatest achievement. Passionate thinking is always apt to become metaphysical, probing and investigating the experience from which it takes its rise” (italics mine). Still another distinguishing characteristic would be “the double motive, the desire to startle and the desire to approximate poetic to direct, unconventional, colloquial speech.” (As Coleridge would later note, rather devastatingly: “The style of the ‘metaphysicals' is the reverse of that which distinguished too many of our recent versifiers; the one conveying the most fantastic thoughts in the most correct language, the other in the most fantastic language conveying the most trivial thoughts.”)

In his “Elegie upon the Death of Donne” Thomas Carew,
⁴
another seventeenth-century poet, lists six specific wrongs in poetry which Donne redressed and four positive virtues that he attained. Even greatly reduced (and prosified) by space requirements here, the two lists read like a composite of model requirements which every poet (and revolutionary) should strive to emulate. Very briefly, the wrongs redressed are (1) the pedantic, (2) servile imitation due to laziness, (3) licentious theft from ancient and foreign models, (4) “the subtle cheat of slie exchanges,” (5) “the jugling feat of two-edg'd words,” and (6) wrongs done “by ours” to other cultural and linguistic traditions. The
virtues
are: (1) rich fancy, (2) bold expression, (3) mastery of language, and (4) originality. Certainly Donne's originality has been the subject of much analysis, and it is true that “if we except Donne's
Holy Sonnets
(although even here, their directness is dramatically different from the Elizabethans) and the heroic couplets of his
Satires
and
Elegies
, nearly every other poem is cast in a form of his own devising.”
⁵

T. S. Eliot's key essay “The Metaphysical Poets”
⁶
is greatly indebted to the pioneer work in this field done by Dr. Helen Gardner, yet is itself so rich in perceptions relevant to our political adaptation of the sensibility of these poets that I am at a loss as to which of his insights to quote here (I urge the reader to treat herself to the complete essay). Eliot notes that the poetry of Donne (and to an extent that of Marvell and Bishop King
⁷
), like that of Chapman, is
late Elizabethan
in feeling: “a direct sensuous apprehension of thought, or a recreation of thought into feeling.” Others usually considered to be among The Metaphysicals, including Herbert, Vaughan, and Crashaw (whose
devotional poems, such as those to Saint Teresa, found an echo in the poems of Christina Rossetti) returned
through
the Elizabethan period to the early Italians for their influences, Eliot feels. But the not-coincidental tone set by Elizabeth Tudor and her Renaissance England informs and illumines to a considerable extent the work of all The Metaphysicals.

Eliot adds more pieces to the jigsaw puzzle of definition we are assembling on the metaphysical poets, each of which will be of use when we come to applying all this to the concept of metaphysical feminism. He finds rapid association of thought and a “telescoping” of images characteristic. (This is frequently accomplished with brilliantly witty puns.) He points out that “a thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility.” This
unified sensibility
was almost a given among sixteenth-century poets and dramatists (in Elizabeth's reign); in the seventeenth century “a dissociation of sensibility set in, from which we have never recovered.” Eliot sees this dissociation (of thought and feelings) as aggravated by Milton and Dryden, and he theorizes that Donne, Marvell, and the seventeenth-century poets up to the Revolution were “the direct and normal development of the precedent age,” suggesting that the eighteenth-century Dr. Johnson may have overlooked this context for what he viewed, from his perspective, as such an aberrative group.
⁸

In a related vein, and (all unaware) using terms ideally suited to a feminist context, J. B. Leishman characterizes Donne's poetry in particular as “the dialectical expression of personal drama.”
⁹
One might use precisely the same phrase to describe feminism.

And Having Done That, Thou Hast Done

“
If, as I have, you also do

Virtue attir'd in woman see,

And dare love that, and say so too
,

And forget the He and She; …
”

—J
OHN
D
ONNE
, “The Undertaking”
¹⁰

It is time we glanced briefly at the work of Donne himself. I can anticipate the distress of some readers in their confusion as to why a feminist should choose male poets as exemplary in any way for feminist politics. The answer is less complicated than even I would assume. I have not chosen “male poets” but a specific set of poets, (who happen to be male) and one poet in particular, Donne. I have in fact not “chosen” them. What they have come to represent has “chosen” me—they have been praised and damned for the very qualities I always have most loved, in art, in life and, I now realize, even in politics. Furthermore, I would with delight have used as my examples women poets, had we access to any who shared that period
and
poetic sensibility. Elizabeth Tudor, Mary Sidney Herbert, Isabella Whitney all wrote in an earlier time; only three books of poetry in English by women were published during the sixteenth century. During the seventeenth, Lady Elizabeth Carey published (under initials only) the first original play by a woman in England, and Mary Sidney Wroth, Rachael Speght, Lady Diana Primrose, and Dorothy Berry appeared in print. Later still, of course, there would appear “the matchless Orinda,” Katharine Philips, as well as Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle. Yet none of these poets lived (or had access to publication) at that unique moment when the sensibility of the Elizabethan period was confronted with the special tension produced by the controversial new sciences—to unite in the art of The Metaphysicals before it became, in Eliot's phrase, “dissociated.” The one possible exception is Lucy Harington, Countess of Bedford, who was a patron of Donne's; among the poems previously attributed to him is one that, according to Ann Stanford, was written by the Countess. This is a poem which begins “Death, be not proud,” but proceeds as an elegy, unlike Donne's well-known sonnet. Ms. Stanford notes that manuscripts circulated freely at that time, and it is not now possible to discern which of the two poets used the opening phrase first.
¹¹

As for Donne himself, no feminist defense can or need be made for his biography—an eccentric one, to be sure, which ranged from a rather wild youth (he accompanied Essex to Cadiz in 1596 and to the Azores the following year) through a period of scholarship, an appointment as private secretary to the Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, and a defiantly romantic marriage, culminating in his taking orders and ending his life as the Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral (and author of the grand
Sermons
). During his life he underwent a controversial and probably politically induced (if not opportunistic) conversion from Roman Catholicism to the Anglican Church; he lauded Elizabeth, then
denounced her when she executed his old leader, Essex, then mourned her eloquently in his great elegy for another Elizabeth (Drury), “The First Anniversarie.” It is not surprising that a man of such contradictions (which vibrate throughout his poems) should span the excesses of misogyny and a pro-feminism which was daring even for his time (Ben Jonson called some of Donne's tributes to women “blasphemous”; Jonson, we must remember, wrote
Epicene: The Silent Woman
).

So the same Donne who wrote “No where/Lives a woman true, and faire,”
¹²
could also write “All measure, and all language, I should pass/should I tell what a miracle she was”—in his glorious love poem “The Relique,” in which he staggers us with the unforgettable image of a love-token found in an opened grave: “a bracelet of bright hair about the bone.” He can be bawdy: “License my roaving hands, and let them go/Before, behind, between, above, below”;
¹³
exhortatory and praiseful: “Today put on perfection, and a woman's name”;
¹⁴
defiant of those who would criticize his lover: “For Godsake hold your tongue, and let me love.”
¹⁵
He can rail against woman's inconstancy, and, in a poem like “The Extasie,”
¹⁶
he can depict with breath-taking lyricism the synchronicity of divine and human love:

“…
Our soules, (which to advance their state
,

Were gone out,) hung 'twixt her, and mee
.

And whilst our soules negotiate there,

Wee like sepulchrall statues lay;

All day, the same our postures were
,

And we said nothing, all the day
.”

A unified sensibility indeed.

Connections

A reflective interest in experience. A psychological curiosity about love and religion. Surely the former is a fitting description of the changing consciousness of any woman as she begins to examine her own life, with her own tools of expertise. Surely the latter could be an apt expression for the two-fold obsession of women through the ages: human and divine love. (Donne was, in fact, positively “womanly” in his
preoccupation with this two-fold love, seeing in human love the best approach to cosmic love, as women have done for centuries.

To go on: psychological curiosity, the desire to startle and to approximate poetic to direct, even colloquial speech, and above all,
the blend of passion and thought
, feeling and ratiocination. Psychological curiosity—and courage—is more required by the politics of feminist consciousness than by most political movements. The desire to startle is, naturally, experienced by all ignored peoples, but the desire to approximate poetic to colloquial speech seems especially and poignantly relevant to feminism. What else has our embryonic culture been attempting but to articulate in accessible terms that which previously has been unknowable or at least unspeakable? And that wonderful phrase “passionate thinking”—certainly this describes the electric leap of shared and connecting consciousness at its most intense. “Passionate thinking is always apt to become metaphysical, probing and investigating the experience from which it takes its rise.” “The
dialectical
expression of personal drama.”

When I think, then, of metaphysical feminism, I think not only of an all-encompassing feminist vision which goes literally beyond the physical (yet never leaves it behind) but which is in its very form related to those seventeenth-century English poets. An obsession with love has been at the heart of women's concerns—and in fact of feminists' concerns—for millennia, no matter how steadfast certain antithetical feminists remain, fixed in an anti-emotional polar response to what they see only as “feminine sentiment.” How often have feminists called, too, for the “peculiar blend of feeling and ratiocination” in our battles against the patriarchal dichotomizing of intellect and emotion! It is the insistence on the
connections
, the demand for synthesis, the refusal to be narrowed into desiring less than everything—that is so much the form of metaphysical poetry and of metaphysical feminism. The unified sensibility.