The Prescribed Satisfaction of An Irrational Heat

I found Milton's Doctrine and Dsicipline of Divorce not only surprisingly easy to engage but downright pleasant to read. Though I don't have a great deal of time now to discuss my thoughts in any length worthy of the text, I do wish to highlight a few segments I found particularly intriguing:

1) the allegorical figures of error (a "blind and serpentine body" (697) lacking a head) and custom (a face without a body). I must admit that I'm not quite sure how to approach this fantastically grotesque pairing, but I am deeply impressed with it.

2)Milton's argument against those who, when failing to defame the text, attempt to attack the author. This notion of the text--man's intellectual baby, according to Aeropagitica--being a distinct entity, divorced in many aspects from its author (or from the sins of its father, rather) opens up ways to talk about how authorial power, intent, and contamination in relation to book production might have been conceptualized in the seventeenth century.

3) the linking of occurrences in "personal," internal world of home and family with the health and well-being of the state. In relation to this, the proclamation of Britain as a leader in innovation and liberation--a historical identity as that which is responsible for "teaching nations how to live" (701)--and therefore as a necessary supporter of charitable divorces. Also, Milton's statement concerning his usage of the English tongue to convey his message when, he writes, "[i]t might perhaps more fitly have been written in another tongue" (702).

4) The dichotomy that Milton creates between intellectual "textualists" and common men of common sense and good heart.

This is, of course, an adumbration of forthcoming, more detailed interaction. Something to think about in the meantime, however.

Engaged in Single Combat

...so...Milton's prose...

Take heart, dear audience, I can guarantee you that reading this entry will not consume a large chunk of your time. It's important to stress that my reticence is not due to a lack of interest--I'm interested, quite actually, I just don't know what the hell Milton's saying. Also, the genre of poetry easily lends itself to various interpretations (both historically informed and hideously ignorant) while prose is a bit more concrete, requiring, I feel, a bit more responsibility. Therefore, the thought of offering detailed analyses on subjects that I know nothing about makes me uncomfortable.

...

Well, I would like to point out a few things of interest before you close the browser window (disclaimer: these thoughts are not so much interpretations and constructions of meaning as they are a highlighting of particular points with an acknowledgement of my positionality as modern reader). In the "Second Defense of the English People," Milton asks "who is there who does not identify the honor of his country with his own?" (818). Upon reading this passage, my initial thoughts were of (in order) 1) Bendict Anderson's Imagined Communities, 2) contemporary theories of the nation-state, and 3) identity politics. The major connective theme running through these seemingly disparate (I assure you, they are not) avenues is a fascination with the ways in which Milton and others struggled to justify the execution of a king without turning their worldviews completely inside-out.

To overthrow one's king was seen as a violation of the natural hierarchy, the divine order, of life. In "Second Defense of the English People," we see Milton attempting to transform and employ this sense of the natural to glorify the actions of the people and cement British identity at its most tremulous moment. Rather than nature coming undone at this "unnatural" exercise of power, Milton invokes images of earth and fertility in his description of Britain in the aftermath of revolution: "And Britain, which was formerly styled a hotbed of tyranny, will hereafter deserve to be celebrated for endless ages as a soil most genial to the growth of liberty" (818). He continues this theme onto the next page, equating liberty with a particularly British plant exported to and disseminated among foreign countries and peoples (819). For Milton, then, violent, even monstrous uprising and overthrow is agricultural renewal, the happy return of a long-absent, almost Edenic spring.

The last point which I wish to briefly touch on here is the place and duties that Milton assigns himself in the revolutionary army. Proclaiming his mind sharper than his body, Milton writes that "with the better part of my frame I contributed as much as possible to the good of my country and to the success of the glorious cause in which they were engaged" (819). His contributions, though not "bodily" in the fleshly, sword-waving sense, were nevertheless highly active and integral to the victories experienced. In "Second Defense of the English People," we see Milton construct himself not as a rather passive collector of history, but as a kind of ink-stained warrior ordained by God to "[record] with dignity and elegance, and that the truth, which had been defended by arms, should also be defended by reason; which is the best and only legitimate means of defending it" (819). The wall erected between thought and action, speech and war, is severely destabilized, allowing us to engage historical record not as recitation but as creation, and even more so, a valuable (if not the most valuable) weapon.

God Himself, Milton writes, is an "Author" (819).

His Paper Pale Despair

Though I honestly sat down with the intent of devoting this blog entry solely to Milton's sonnets, I have to confess: I was not only distracted but ensnared by Sidney, Wyatt, Donne, Shakespeare (I generally dislike the Bard and often find him--gasp!--rather overrated), and Petrarch. This last poet will probably receive far less of my attention than he rightfully deserves, but there's only so much I'm-such-a-tortured-Italian-lover one can take. Granted, it should be noted and appreciated that Petrarch occupies an extremely prominent role in literary history, but...tortured...Italian...lover....

As my experience with Wyatt is, well, scanty at best, you'll have to forgive any glaring offenses this post might offer to his person and writings. I find it fitting to begin with him, however, as I think he is credited with actually bringing the sonnet into English (as a direct response to/borrowing from Petrarch). Though I wish to concentrate primarily on "Whoso list to hunt"--with particular attention paid to representations of women and female/feminized sexuality within this specific text--one can see just by glancing at the other Wyatt selections that love and desire are often conceptualized as bitter and often physically painful experiences for the speaker. In "Farewell, Love," for example, Love is equipped with "baited hooks" and "darts" (55), and when it is not ripping flesh from bone, Love submerges the speaker in disappointment and impotence.

This last sense, that of impotence in the moment of conquest, appears to be the heart of "Whoso list to hunt," the emotion around which the entire scene is organized and conveyed. The notion of conquest, with its sexual and colonial connotations, is aptly deployed in the intrepretation of Wyatt's work, for we immediately see the highly problematic (and fascinating) construction of woman as hunted deer, as a de-rationalized, wild creature whose flesh is quite literally inscribed with the name of her master. In Wyatt's image of the woman/deer we not only find an intimate linking of death and sex, but we as readers are also allowed and/or exhorted to take over the hunt. This potential exhortation I find to be a fair example of what contemporary feminist theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has termed "homosociality." The bloody conquests to be had in hunting--a hyper-masculine sport almost entirely associated with men and male-bonding--and those to be had in sexual relationships (another hyper-masculine sport almost entirely associated with men and male-bonding) are really not all that different, and Wyatt's speaker simultaneously commiserates with and hands over the reigns to both activities to his audience.

Shakespeare's "Dark Lady" and dark, irrational, diseased desires of sonnet 147 are constructed in a similar fashion as those of Sin and her son/lover Death in Milton's Paradise Lost. Desire in Paradise Lost is experienced very bodily, whether centered on the overthrow of heaven or, in the case of Death, sexual want of his mother. Desire, or lust, is the first characteristic of Death, resulting in the rape of his mother immediately after he was born: “I fled, but he pursued (though more, it seems, / Inflamed with lust than rage) and swifter far, / Me overtook his mother all dismayed, / And in embraces forcible and foul...” (759). In this passage, it is not difficult to see the links established between sexuality, desire, women, and death, nor is it to see similar articulation in Shakespeare’s sonnet 147, in which the speaker frankly declares “Desire is death” (61). Indeed, the object of desire, one would assume a woman, is described in the same manner as Milton’s Death: “black as hell, as dark as night” (61), and the speaker’s want of her is described as a “fever, longing still / For that which longer nurseth the disease” (61). Death and Shakespeare’s lust also share a famished appetite that consumes everything and yet is never satiated.

The specifically feminized corporeality of desire is also expressed in John Donne’s Holy Sonnet 14, in which the speaker beseeches God to “Batter my heart, three-personed God; for you / As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend; / That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend / Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new” (62). In the speaker’s request, there is some slippage between spirit and body, as one is not sure whether God is being asked to break the speaker’s will or his bones.

Holy Sonnet 14 is, as we see, founded on bodies and bodily images, and much, if not all, of these images are highly sexualized, as it is doubtful that bodies can be imagined entirely absent of sex, sexuality, and sensuality. Donne thoroughly enjoyed mixing sexual and religious images, connecting somewhat dichotomous conceptualizations and constructing a more intimate relationship with God through flesh. In 14, this relationship is best represented through sex, with the speaker taking the “feminized” or submissive, penetrated position in relation to God’s penetrating, beating masculinity. The beginning line, “Batter my heart” (62), can not only be read as a spiritually violent request, but as a sexual one, and the forceful repetition of “break, blow, burn” (62) act as damaging thrusts into the very core of the speaker. Indeed, reading these lines as images of “sacred” rape are not inappropriate here, for at the end of the sonnet, the speaker proclaims that he shall never be “chaste, except you ravish me” (62).

I would like to write some about Sidney, but I feel that those thoughts are best saved for another post. Perhaps tomorrow.

Unmolding Reason's Mintage

Last semester I enrolled in ENGL 196: American Literary Traditions. I admit to a bit of grumbling in signing up for that course--it's a survey course, and no one seemed particularly interested in reading anthologies filled with, I don't know, Emily Dickinson with her weird line breaks or Faulkner with his distinctly American depression. Besides, as I was attempting to professionalize myself for an eventual specialization in British literature, I thought America was...well, really a waste of time (other than, of course, the uber-cool New World/colonial references in Paradise Lost).

That course not only challenged and deepened how I understood certain historical and cultural distinctions dividing elements of Bristish literature from American--and British identity from American--but it completely changed the trajectory of my academic interests. For it was in that course that I developed a love of what could be called the "horrible woods"--the forest as a place of sin, confusion, miscegenation, and unnameable terror. The horrible woods is a recurrent topic in American lit., often covertly influential if not always immediately recognizable. Even during the Transcendentalist movement, though the woods were not usually still conceptualized as evil or threatening (to my knowledge), they still retained a definite transformative power. It is this interest in the monstrous woods that I wish to explore in Comus.

Beginning Milton's work is a angelic being in the process of descending into this constricting sty known as earth. At the end of the work the spirit will ascend into Heaven, creating not only a lovely "book-end" effect, but leaving a kind of map behind to readers, a map created through his narrativization of each step (and feeling) from earth to Heaven. Virtue, the spirit proclaims, is our vessel of transport, the bridge between and guide through different worlds--she is also the only hope anyone has of escaping the woods. We are told that "the perplex't paths of this drear wood, / The nodding horror of whose shady brows / Threats the forlorn and the wand'ring Passenger" (91), and as we learn in the progression of Comus, we are all alien, wandering travellers in the foreign worlds/woods. Here is where the acute awareness of audience--of the readers/recipients of the tale both internal and external to the text--possessed by Comus should be stressed.

This awareness is heightened with direct addresses to audience: "Listen," the spirit beseeches, "for I will tell ye now / What never yet was heard in Tale or Song / From old or modern Bard, in Hall or Bow'r" (91). As discussed in class, Milton was fascinated by binary pairs, particularly that of light and dark, sight and blindness. This passage reflects that interest, for we are made aware of receiving a tale only "now" being brought to light, a story of the hidden and the solemn occurring in a dark labyrinth of trees. We are being made aware; awakened; warned of the true histories of dismissed myths: "I'll tell ye; 'tis not vain or fabulous, / (Though so esteem'd by shallow ignorance) / What the sage Poets taught by th' heav'nly Muse / Storied of old in high immortal verse [...]" (102). "Unbelief," the spirit proclaims, "is blind."

The light of day and the dark of night are not only seen as oppositional, but they actively police each other, or rather, the night muffles what the sun shouts. It is here that Comus offers a fascinating definition of evil: "'Tis only daylight that makes Sin," he announces, radically challenging any firm, fixed understandings of good and evil. Sin, for Comus, is only that which is seen (in multiple senses of the word) as sin, witnessed and documented and confessed to as sin, and "these dun shades will ne'er report" (93). The testament of nature or the "witness" of nature to the validity or unnaturalness of human actions (a theme only touched on in previous posts) is severely disturbed in this work: for here, nature is not a coherent whole, operating as a complete sentience, but is divided and working against segements of itself for the varied desires of its inhabitants. In this division, it seems clear that forests are places of chaos, gluttony, sexuality, and monstrosity--the paradox of natural unnaturalness, or unnatural naturalness. Whether these acts and ways of being are evil remains a question of perspective (though I think it's safe to assume that Comus is made, at the very least, uncomfortable by them).

I feel a quick note should be added here about the body/mind dualism so present in Comus: the concept of knowledge or words as food to be digested by the spirit or the mind's "stomach" is, of course, a major trope (the best example of this would probably be the Fruit of the Knowledge of Good and Evil) that tends to complicate the line constructed between mind and body as it simultaneously reifies it. That said, I wish to highlight the scene containing philosophy's "perpetual feast of nectar'd sweets, / Where no crude surfeit reigns" (101). It is such a startling image of bountiful austerity that perfectly embodies the complicated, (unnaturally?) mixed nature of Comus.

Make Room for the Bouncing Belly

The favorite of this week's reading is by far Thomas Carew's Coelum Britannicum (although Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue does have the eternally unmatched line: "Beware of dealing with the belly" (163)). Several themes (not surprisingly) connect these texts--issues of empire, questions of history and its link to/influence on contemporary and future time, a concern with in/corporeality and, specifically, deformity--but I find that Carew's work unites them in more complex and fascinating ways, and he does so primarily (and wonderfully) through the character of Momus.

Coelum Britannicum opens with Mercury informing us of the greatness of Britain's rulers; they are, in fact, so great that through only their illustrious examples of virtue, they have convinced Jove of his own moral reprehensibility, causing him to turn over a new leaf, so to speak. (But more on this later.) In this scene, the imperialists (and by extension, the colonial project) are praised and marvelled at as being things benevolent and kind, majestic faces possessing "imperial brows" unmarred by the "regal circle [that] prints no awful frowns / To fright your subjects" (167). The language continues in ways reminiscent of the sixteenth-century Cult of Love: the sovereigns display calm[ing] eyes that "[s]hed joy and safety on their [subjects'] melting hearts / That flow with cheerful loyal reverences" (167). Clearly in Coelum Britannicum one can be a good colonizer or a bad colonizer, but the term seems not essentially bent one way or the other.

A striking aspect of imperialism in this context (and in that of Jove's court) is its connection with the body. Here, sweet looks (as opposed to, perhaps, the rather inherent nature of authority in the title of "king" or "queen") cause hearts (not minds, to risk reifying the mind/body dualism) to melt and ooze with requited love. The ruled populous appears to possess a type of agency here--a somewhat drippy, passionate agency--that is constructed as desiring such governance, much like "weak-willed but amorous" women are imagined in some misogynistic popular thought to actively desire male sexual dominance. The people are in love with these "glorious twins of love and majesty" (167), though in a way that ultimately rejects the body and its lusts as things unvirtuous.

For as we see in the masque's continuation, corporeal desire is a dominant characteristic of Jove's empire. Whereas the "good" sovereign(s) shed only joy on the puddled hearts of their subjects, Jove sheds clothing, linking sexuality, sexual expression, and sexual violence with notions of "bad" imperialism. "Of old," we are told, "when youthful blood conspired / With his new empire, prone to lust, / He acted incests, rapes, adulturies / On earthly beauties..." (167-168). It is important to emphasize that the pursuit and possession of empire itself is not viewed here as (an) act(s) of gendered/sexual violence, but rather the mixing of "youthful blood" (a very bodily metaphor) with the ability to exercise power over colonized women.

But, as previously stated, Jove has decided to reform. Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of this confession and repentance is intent to purge and (re)write history, beginning with the "eternal records of his shame / Shin[ing] to the world in flaming characters" (168). Though much could be said about just these few lines, I couldn't possibly do them justice at the moment, and so I'll continue to the best part of Coelum Britannicum: Momus, the "Protonotary of Abuses" (169). A dark and witty historian warring with a hyper-revisionist intent on obliterating the records of his shame inscribed on human (now "natural[ly] deform[ed]" (173)) flesh. Seriously, can it get any better?

Only if you throw in several mentions of female genitalia as "two-leaved book[s]" and Jove as having previously "stretch[ed] his limbs [...] betwixt adulterous sheets" (170). Sheets as in bed sheets? ... Sheets as in book pages? ... Jove as a kind of sexual bookmark? I love this winking ambiguity.

Question'd Every Gust

Initial thought after initial reading of Lycidas: Oh, dear. That was...labor.

Not that I'm at all against intellectual labor, but attempting to engage Lycidas on a meaningful and perhaps even transformative level was simply impossible. (I have been reading John Dewey for another course this semester, and though I am unsure of a good deal of his pedagogy, I see his influence hovering about this last sentence. A bit disconcerting and something that requires more reflection.) I confess to having read Johnson's tirade against the poem--his attacks on the supposed incoherency and vulgarity of its style and content--before reading Lycidas itself, but my reactions greatly differ from his: He hated it. I am simply apathetic.

Well, I shouldn't say "simply" anything. I found several of its images individually striking (the lines concerning the "perfidious Bark" (123) in particular) and I have certainly become a big fan of Camus, but these were small thrills almost immediately forgotten by the poem's end--an end that took only six pages to get to (hardly laborious) but felt much longer.

Why? I don't know. Quite possibly because I was a shallow audience and need to reread the text and revise my statements. I think I'll go do that now.

And Over the Mound Add a Verse

This set of readings--Theocritus Idyll I, Bion Lament for Adonis, Virgil Eclogues V & X, Spenser The Doleful Lay of Clorinda, and Moschus Lament for Bion--offers us a wealth of possibility for literary and historical criticism, aesthetic appeal, and various means of interpretive engagement. Despite these numerous approaches readers could take, however, one connective theme is overt and dominant: that of the natural world. As these works are gathered and arranged under the genre termed "pastoral," the natural world and the speaker's relationship to it are emphasized in and through our readings of them, thereby becoming the overt and dominant connective theme(s).

As I look over this last sentence, I realize that my thoughts stand in need of some clarity. When I use the term pastoral, I have in mind the definition offered by some editors of The Norton Anthology of English Literature: pastorals, for these scholars, "project a cultivated poet's nostalgic image of the peace and simplicity of the life of shepherds and other rural folk in an idealized natural setting" ("Poetic Forms" 2851). Though this seems fairly straightforward, the process of how certain texts become grouped under particular genres to the exclusion of others has been of great interest to me of late, for our perceptions of what a text "is," to what tradition a poet is supposed to belong to (or to have created, directly referring to Theocritus) directly affects how we read and understand not only that text but the historical context from which it sprang and its influences on subsequent generations. In short, are these texts deemed pastoral because they deal with the natural world, or do their concerns with the natural world cause them to be known as pastoral? Upon first glance, it may seem like I am simply asking the same (irrelevent) question twice, but I find a distinction here that I hope gets at (and perhaps denaturalizes) the process and politics of 1)anthology compilation, 2)genre creation, 3)arbitrary divisions made in time and literature, and 4)our places and powers as readers.

But it's late and I digress.

If compelled, I'd have to say that the most fascinating aspect of the works is the presence of the pathetic fallacy. Upon beginning the reading, I was expecting to roll my eyes at (now) trite and overused descriptions of happy...I don't know...flowers or fat bumblebees blushing with a shepherd's first thrill of love, or some such thing. Instead, I found complex and just a little bit frightening conceptions of what it means to, as Daphnis did, name and define one's subjectivity in terms of one's interactions with earth and water: "I am Daphnis, the one who herded his cows here, / And who watered here his bulls and calves" (5).

To anticipate bird tears and receive images of stags tearing into dog flesh was shocking. The thought that nature's way of expressing grief over the impending death of Daphnis is to act unnatural--to "run contrary" (6)--is paradoxical in a way that I feel unequipped to fully understand. What I do notice, however, is that the natural world is certainly not conceived of in Idyll I as peaceful (and by this I mean non-violent). Its usual course involves the death of the stag; its monstrous turn is not towards death and violence in and of themselves, but to a perverse reversal of roles.

The Doleful Lay of Clorinda also reveals a rather ambiguous--even malignant--pastoral world. The speaker confesses her griefs to the empty, echoing woods in the hopes of finding relief in the pouring forth of emotion. Instead, her "plaints" are returned to her, "to pay their usuary with a doubled paines" (699). Though it can be argued that here, the natural world is simply spiritually inanimate, there is something haunted, even malevolent in its emptiness. It is a hell filled with dead life, a place where pain is returned and magnified in the presence of mute and apathetic witnesses. This scene finds an echo of its own in Virgil's Eclogue V, in which the "hazels and rivers" (1) are directly named as witnesses (granted, if more empathetic ones) of death. Though "gods and stars" are found to be unpitying, the name of witness can connote a kind of active inaction.

It's a complicated term and one I hope to discuss in later segments.


Works Cited

"Poetic Forms and Literary Terminology." Norton Anthology of English Literature. Ed. M. H. Abrams and Stephen Greenblatt. 7th ed. New York: Norton, 2001.