donne's sense of disunity

7/29/2019 Donne's Sense of Disunity

1/15

Irresolvable Dialectics:Donne's Sense ofDisunity

Nahla M. BeierDonne's uses and abuses of logic were for a long time thesubject ofmuch critical misapprehension. For despite Rose

mood Tuve's attempt to ponray him as a master-logicianwriting in verse, one only needs to glance at the beginningof a poem like "A Feaver" to realize that whatever knowledge oflogical principles Donne had at his command-AivinSullivan's study of textbooks of logic and rhetoric suggeststhat most Renaissance knowledge of logic was at bestconfused (107-20)- , it was not being put to serious use inhis poetry:

Oh doe not die, for I shall hateAll women so, when thou art gone,That thee I shall not celebrate,When I remember, thou wa:st one.

Since 1938, when C. S. Lewis in frustration deemedDonne's logical gymnastics "not so much the play as theirritability of intellect" (70), Donne's convolutedness hasbeen the despair ofmany a puzzled reader, from Clay Hunt,who saw behind Donne's exuberant logical manipulation anexhibitionistic desire to overwhelm conventional readerswith the complexity of his singular personality (11), to J. B.Leishman, who read in it a flippant lack of serious commitment which supposedly characterizes Donne's life as well ashis work (29-51 ).

A more thoughtful view, articulated in the sixties by criticslike J.E.V. Crofts and Arnold Stein, held that Donne's127


2/15

128 Explorations in Re-Missance Culturemisuse of logic is deliberate and appropriate, a "means ofpeopling the unknown with the phantoms of what might be"(Crofts 87), or simply an aspect of Renaissance witty

Invention ... the virtuoso's ability ID forgo straightperformance, and ID mix his categories, while hedisplayed his imaginative skill by the consciouscontrol of what he was doing and by the surprisingnew light he cast on his subjecL (Stein 89)

Michael McCanles attributed to Donne a more senousintention than displaying virtuosity, seeing as his primarypurpose "the pushing of a given argument to the pointwhere its inadequacy for reflecting reality becomes fullyrecognizable" (277). Finally, drawing out the fu ll metaphysical implications of McCanles's view, Murray Roston arguedthat in Donne

tl1e witty or paradoxical inversion of normal assumptions leads IDwards some revelatory experience, a feelingat the conclusion of tlte poem that the reader has beenprivileged to glimpse an intimate and rare mystery,\Vhether of human or divine origin. (75)

It is this latter i(lterpretive tradition that has largely guidedmy attempts (Beier 71 -142) to show how Donne's seeminglyplayful manipulations of visual conventions and logicaltenets usher the reade1 into a radically avisual and alogicalrealm of comprehension. This essay, howeve1, will focusmostly on a relatively unexarnined group of poems thatconstitute Donne's metaphysical failures, or moments thatlose sight of the transcendent. end . The logical dispa1itiesdisplayed here seem neither playful nor deliberate, but arenonetheless crucial to understanding the divided nature ofDonne's mind, and the means by which he overcomes hisinne1 divisiveness. Rather than exploring them within thecontext of formal categories ofwit, as Stein has attempted to


3/15

Nahla M. Beier 129do with some, or setting them against contemporary theoriesof metaphysical conceit,1 I shall lay bare the dialecticalstructure of these poems which tellingly duplicates at largethe most basic syntactical s tructure of Donne's poetic style.It is the simple and hitherto unexplored level of syntax thatmay provide us with important clues to Donne's successes aswell as his failures in intimating transcendence.

A distinguishing feature of Donne's poetic style is hisextensive use of comparison formulae, or equations that takethe basic form: A is to B as X is to Y. One notices such aformula at the end of"Air and Angels":

Then as an a n g e ~ face and wingsOfair, not pure as it, yet pure doth weare,So thy love may be my love's sphere.

The proportion is constructed with precision:Donne's love : his beloved's love = the purity of anangel : the purity of an angelic body.

The same precision characterizes a comparison formula in"The Exstasie":

As 'twixt two equal armies, FateSuspends uncertain vicfDry,Our souls, (which ID advance their state,Were gone out), hung 'twixt her, and me.[Uncertain vicfDry : two fighting armies = thelover's souls: their bodies].Obviously derived from the simpler simile form, A is like

B, which Donne also uses quite frequently-"The Compari-son," for instance, is composed entirely of similes-thecomparison figure illustrated above should perhaps moreappropriately be termed a ratio, or a proportional analogy,in the sense that it balances one process or situation-or


4/15

130 Explorations in Renaissance Culturegrammatically, one subject-predicate unit-against another,rather than comparing, as in the simile form, a single subjectwith another. Syntactically and logically, the simile emphasizes duality, differing from metaphor, for instance, bykeeping separate the two elements, or the tenor and vehicle,ofa comparison. In other words, in an "A is like B" formulation, A and B are always present, equally significant, anddistinguished. In the "A is B" form of a metaphor, however,a partial, i f not total, identity obtains between the two termscompared,2 which makes it possible to replace A altogetherwith B or to attribute characteristics of B directly to A(Brook-Rose 14). This is not to say that logical differencesbetween simile and metaphor are always as easily distinguishable. Many similes are readily reducible to metaphors:If "ltbraries are like schools, and like camps, and like courts,"for instance, is changed to Donne's line "libraries which areschools, camps, and courts;"3 the difference would be moresyntactical than logical. Because of the complexity of itsinternal relationships, however, the analogical form whichcharacterizes Donne's style defies similar attempts to mergeor make interchangeable its disparate elements. A rephrasing of "The Exstasie" analogy, for example, into a form like"our bodies are two armies, our souls an uncertain victorysuspended between them" is cryptic and distorts the originalmeaning, because tl1e souls do not resemble a victory, butmerely correspond to it as elements in a similar complex ofrelationships.On a few occasions Donne does merge the elements of an

initial analogy into a subsequent metaphor, but the union isawkward, resulting in details that cannot be reconciled withthe original premise:

And now as other falconers use,I spring a mistress, swear, write, sigh and weep;And the game killed, or lost, go talk, and sleep.("Love's Diet")


5/15

Nahla M. Beier 131The consistency of the initial analogy (speaker: his love:object of his love = falconer: hawk: game) is violated by themetaphor "spring a mistress" which merges the third termson both sides of the equation, resulting in a series of activities (swearing, writing, sighing and weeping) appropriateonly to the context of the speaker courting the object of hislove, but not to that of "other falconers" pursuing a game.Thus despite the apparent momentary fusion of terms, themetaphor's inadequacy serves only to accentuate the reader'sawareness of the differences between the two situations.

Propor tional analogy is a convenient way of expressingcertain ideas, hence likely to be encountered in any poet'swriting; nor is a use of it which creates well-balancedequations in itself terribly significant. When a poet resortsto it as frequently as Donne does,4 however, and seems tofuvor that form of t most likely to create a sense of multiplicity, the habit suggests, if nothing else, a divided vision, amind that thinks in dualities. For the purpose of achievinga transcendent oneness with the world, the overridingconcern of all Donne's work, such a habit can serve as adouble-edged weapon, an impetus towards or away fromunity; for it is precisely this same divided vision that hasproduced the united doubleness of many of Donne'sparadoxical images, such as the celebrated phoenix image in"The Canonization," which unites and transcends thedualities posed in the poem between male and female,human and divine, the secular and the religious, the worldof body and the world of spirit. Though born of the samedouble sensibility, such images play an integrating role inDonne, reconciling and uniting larger oppositions in theirimmediate contexts, and engendering an awareness of theillusory or temporal nature of multiplicity. By contrast, inmost of the passages of analogical duality that follow,Donne's divided vision seems unable to transcend itself, andyields nothing other than a fragmented picture of the world.Consider, for example, a passage from "The Storm'' whose


6/15

132 Explorations in Renaissance Cultureevery successive thought is amplified by comparisons, addingup to an astonishing total of nine analogies in fifteen lines:

. . . and so when it [the storm] did viewHow in the port. our fleet dear time did lease,Withering like prisoners, which lie but for fees,Mildly it kissed our sails, and, fresh and sweet.As to a stomach starved, whose insides meet.Meet comes, it came; and swole our sails, when weSo joyed, as Sara her swellingjoyed to see.But 'twas but so kind, as our countrymen,Which bring friends one day's way, and leave them then,Then like two mighty kings, which dwelling furAsunder meet against a third ID war,The south and west winds joined, and, as they blew,Waves like a rolling trench before them drew.Sooner than you read this line, did the galeLike shot. not feared till felt. our sails assail . . .

As always in Donne, it is the nature as much as the merepresence of the comparison which creates the sense ofbewildering multiplicity. Here the mind strains and frag-ments in its attempt to follow the unexpected connectionsforged between contexts as logically disparate as storms,hungry stomachs and fickle friends, happy sailors and apregnant Sara, gales, cannon balls and one's own readingspeed.

In a second technique, used more frequently than that ofsuccessive comparisons, Donne concentrates a wide varietyof contexts or analogues onto a single situation or tenor:

And yet not greater, but more eminent.Love by the spring is grown;As, in the firmament.Stars by the sun are not enlarged, but shown,Gentle love deeds, as blossoms on a bough,From love's awakened root do bud out now.If. as in water stirred more circles be


7/15

Nahla M. BeierProduced by one, love such additions take,Those like so many spheres, but one heaven make.For they are all concentric unto thee,And though each spring do add to love new heat,As princes do in times ofaction getNew taxes, and remit them not in peace,No winter shall abate the spring's increase.("Love's Growth" 15-28)

133

Five analogies highlight various aspects of the speaker'ssense that love does not change or increase but grows "moreeminent," yet the passage leaves one's attention not so muchfocused on the uniting love experience as on the lack ofnecessary connection between stars, blossoms, circles inwater, heavenly spheres, and princes' economical strategies.To sum up, both the divisive nature of Donne's variouscorn parison techniques and the frequency of their use in his

poetry suggest an acute awareness of the multiplicity ofearthly experience, and of the inadequacy of language tocommunicate a more unified vision. Needless to say, Donnedoes not amplify his thought solely by constructing analogies. His use of the more unifying trope of metaphor has, infact, received ample critical attention. Yet much of thecritical inquiry into his metaphoric usage seems to supportthe present view of his divided sensibility. In a quantitativestudy that compares Donne's style to that of fifteen othe1poets, for instance, Christine Brooke-Rose comments on hisrare use of metaphors of "simple replacement," or metaphors that assume complete identity between two terms sothat one term can be totally consumed by the other (296).The metaphors she finds "distinctive of Donne," are those of"simple apposition" (93), which juxtapose rather than mergethe two terms of a comparison, evoking more closely theeffect of analogy than of other kinds of metaphor.5 In bothhis analogies and metaphors, then, the identity achievedremains secondary in our experience to the acute perceptionof radical difference between tenor and vehicles. Donne's


8/15

134 ExplMaticns in Renaissance Culturecomparisons seem, in effect, not merely to associate twoterms by resemblance, which most comparisons do, and notprimarily to "make similar" or "semantically proximate" twopreviously incongruous terms, an active process which PaulRicoeur believes metaphoric utterance to entail (141-59), butto create a kind of unresolved dialectic, an opposition ofparts incapable of synthesis except in superficial ways. Thisparticular dialectical movement does not remain in Donneonly at the syntactical level of the sentence, but can be seenat work throughout the structure of a number of poems inThe Songs and Sonnets.

The dialectical structure of such poems typically takes theform of a vacillation between two contradictory premises orcourses of action both of which lead, iUogically, to the sameconclusion. In "The Dissolution," for instance, the speakerclaims that security in love ultimately leads to death, for alover's "materials," his "fire of passion, sighs of air, I Waterof tears, and earthly sad despair" can only be manufacturedby unrequited love. A hard blow to "love's security," such asthe death of his mistress, does not, however, change theoutcome, for although it replenishes his supply of elements-since 1) the lovers were "mutual elements" to eachother, or "made of one another," and 2) her death obviouslyprovides a new cause for passion, sighs, tears, and despair-it also furnishes him with that much more material tospend:

Now as those active kingsWhose foreign conquest treasure brings.Receive more. and spend more, and soonest break:This (which 1am amazed that I can speak)This death, bad1 wid1 my storeMy use increased.

The speaker is caught in an irresolvable dilemma: secure inher presence and love or anguished without her, he dies. Aresolution or synthesis in a construction of this sort is false by


9/15

Nahla M. Beier 135necessity, as it would have to disregard the logical law ofnon-contradiction.

In a true dialectic, as one may observe in a Platonicdialogue, for instance, the synthesis consists of changing theinitial thesis to accommodate a contradiction (antithesis) ofone of its aspects or applications. The compromise thenbecomes a new thesis which can be further qualified leadingto a new synthesis, and so on. In a Donne dialectic, bycontrast, thesis and antithesis are mutually exclusive,constituting a kind of logical equivalent to his double,paradoxical images. The mind's motion is thus caughtbetween two incongruous pictures or two opposed optionsthat cannot be integrated. As suggested earlier, the paradoxical images serve a unitive function by raising questionsabout the limitations of the mind itself in its inability tosynthesize the opposition, and thus offer the reader aglimpse of a state beyond the mind's grasp where oppositions are reconcilable; but no such transcendent awarenessaccompanies the present logical polarities. Both speaker andreader remain in a state of unmitigated tension. Even whena middle term can be found to reconcile such an opposition,Donne seems to ignore it and to pose ins tead a surpriseresolution that does not logically proceed from the confron-tation of thesis and antithesis."The Prohibition" offers a good illustration. Here a logicalresolution can accommodate the speaker's opposed demandsof the lady, not to love him if she does, and not to hate himif she does. Since human feelings are capable of a greaterrange of expressions than the proposed love/hate dualism,she can respond to both demands without necessarily fallinginto a self-contradiction. She can, in other words, simply feelindifferent or lukewarm towards him. Yet the speaker'ssolution in the third stanza surprisingly aims not at resolvingthe dialectical opposition but at maintaining it: "Yet love andhate me too." But before elaborating on this final resolution,le t us examine the dialectical oppositions that lead to each


10/15

136 Explarations in Renaissance Cultureone of the speaker's demands.

In its balancing of me speaker's opt:ions, me poem recallsthe inesolvable dilemma of"The Dissolution." The speakeris slowly languishing due to "unthrifty waste I Ofbream andblood" necessitated by the lady's lack of response. Responding, however, would have essentially me same effect, aquicker form of death, an "ourwear[ing)" of life "at once."The second dilemma is slighdy different, yet also irresolvable: me lady has to hate him in order to be a conqueror andtaste the "triumph" of "victory." Hating him, however,might lead to his death, thus preventing a conquest to boastof. A further contradiction complicates the flow of meargument in both stanzas: the speaker, hough claiming thatthe discussion centers on loving or not loving "him," isessentially appealing to the lady's self-interest or love ofherself; he ought not to die simply lest her love should"frustrate be" or lest her self-esteem should be "lessened."

The speake1's attitude towards the lady remains ambiguous. One senses, on the one hand, his ironic recognition ofher selfishness and notes his desire, in the last stanza, todisinvolve himself and become, ral:her than an object or"triumph" of either her love or hate, a mere "stage" onwhich her emotions can be acted out. On tl1e other hand, hehas spent "breath and blood," "sighs and tears" in pursuingher love, and presumably experiences himself the contradictory emotions that he asks her both to feel and not to feel.Thus despite his claim that he wants to let "l:hese exnemes""l:hemselves, not me decay," it is actually, as the last two linesof the poem suggest, only by maintaining them in a perma-nently balanced opposition that he can live. The referencesto "decay" in the poem, to "waste," "outwearing of life,""perishing" and "lessening," are associated with experiencing either love or hate separately. The combination, notalcogether illogically, sustains life, so that the love whichcould have killed him in the first stanza only causes him inthe third to "die the gentler way," no real death at all, and


11/15

Nahla M. Beier 137the hate of which he might have perished in the secondstanza only tempers in the thi:rd the harmful effect of a love"too great." Yet despite this paradoxical burst of life, nological resolution of the poem's various contradictions isachieved, neither of the irremediable dilemmas of the firstand second stanzas, nor of the ambiguities in the speaker'sattitude, nor of the broader opposition of love and hate. Inits upholding of all these dualities, the poem seems ultimately a celebration of the divisiveness of mixed emotions,a triumph over the speaker's and the reader's futile effortsto integrate and unify experience.A common strategy in these dialectical poems, then, is tointroduce a logically unprepared for element in order toforce a resolution of sorts. In "Love's Deity," for instance,the antithetical poles are two concepts of love. In the oldconcept held "before the [present] God of love was born,"lovers' emotions were expected to be reciprocal not contradictory; "actives" were "fit" "to passives." But the tyrannicalmodern God arranges things so that "I must love her thatloves not me." The speaker momentarily plays with anunrealistic solution to his problem:

Oh were we wakened by this tyrannyTo ungod this child again, it could not beI should love her, who loves not me.

But, finally, his belief in a non-contradictory love relationship is undercut by a self-contradiction:

Rebel and atheist 100, why murmur I.As though I felt the worst that love could do?Love might make me leave loving, or might tryAdeeper plague, 10 make her love me too,Which since she loves before, I am loth to see;Falsehood is worse than hate; and that must be,Ifshe whom 1 love, should love me.


12/15

138 Explorations in Renaissance CultureThe solution to his problem, he concludes, lies simply inaccepting it, in maintaining, as in "The Prohibition," ratherthan resolving the contradiction; for to reciprocate herfeelings and "leave loving" her seems a worse fate thansuffering unrequited love, and to make her reciprocate hisfeelings carries still worse consequences, since he would haveto share her with another. Yet the speaker's contrivedresponse remains unsatisfactory, for not only is the solutiona non-resolution, but dismissing this last alternative, "tomake her love me too" depends solely on a new piece ofinformation, "since she loves before," thrown in at the end,like a new character introduced in the final chapter of amystery novel, to make possible some sort of solution.

The poems of Donne that exhibit this kind of unharmonizable duality are few. He is, no doubt, more memorablewhen he succeeds in transcending his strong sense offragmentation through skillful manipulation of visual andlogical media. Yet these few poems remain significant, i f notso much in themselves, at least in that they reveal, likeDonne's extensive use of analogy, the nature of the threat tobe conquered, the kind of sensibility for which transcendence becomes an urgent need. It would distort Donne,however, to leave the impression that his work is remarkablyunified and transcendent most of the time, and terriblyfragmented or stubbornly dualistic some of the time; no suchsharp dichotomy e x i s t ~ . There are moments that captureboth the fear and its remedy, that link the poems of unrelieved conflict and opposition with the more typical poemsof successfully intimated transcendence. "Love's Infiniteness" describes such a moment .

The dialectical progression ofconclusions in the poem-" Ishall never have all / I should have all / Yet I would not haveall"-has become familiar by now; the novelty resides mainlyin the resolution. The speaker is motivated by the desire topossess the lady totally, yet the tension results from hissimultaneous awareness of two opposed concepts of love, the


13/15

Nah/11 M. Beier 139first portraying it as a fixed, tangible quantity, a piece of landthat can be "purchased" "all" at once, the second as acontinuing process, a growing, the land and its potentialproduce whose totality or "all" can only be relative. Thespeaker does not seem able to reconcile his sense of love'slimitations with his desire for its infinite development.Having all implies an end-"He that hath all can have nomore"- yer not having all seems to be experienced as loss ofpotential love. Caught in a black and white duality of hisown making, he leaves unnoticed the gray area ofoptions inbetween. He could, for instance, ask for all the original lovethat "at the bargain made was meant" as well as for everyadditional development in her feelings to "reward" every"new growth" in himself. But he persists in thinking interms of all or none: "If thou canst give it, then thou nevergav'st it."

A different tone is introduced with the reference to "love'sriddles" (29-30), where the hitherto logical preoccupationwith part and whole is suddenly phrased in a way thattranscends logic into paradox, specifically, the Christianparadox of losing oneself in order to find it. But allowingone's heart "to depart" while simultaneously keeping it "a thand," or losing one's heart to save it, is not what oneunderstands tt>e simpler notion of "changing hearts" toentail, and the speaker abandons the metaphor for the moreappropriate one of oining hearts, thus creating a context ofundistinguished oneness to which the divisive notions ofgiving and taking can no longer apply.

The resolution of "Love's Infiniteness" brings the readercloser to the metaphysical Donne than the other poems wehave examined. Rather than leaving a dialectical oppositionunresolved as in "The Dissolution," or affirming the opposition as in "The Prohibition," or rationalizing an acquiescencein it as in "Love's Deity," it simply draws upon a differentregister than the practical trade register of land purchase,bargains, treasure and stocks upon which the first part of the


14/15

140 Explorations in Rcnaissa'/UeCulturepoem draws. The resolution transcends the situation: thequestions of who gives whom how much, it suggests, aresecondary to the fact that the lovers' duality or distinctnessraises problems that cannot be resolved other than by thelovers' total fusion, whatever such a fusion may mean inpractical terms.Louisiana School for Math, Scie'!Ue and the Arts

Notes1For a comprehensive study of seventeendlCentury d1eories ofwit, see A.]. Smiili's Metaphysical Wit, especially ilie chapter "Arts

of Ingenuity."2Writers on metaphor disagree about ilie extent of such anidentity. Logically, iliere is a sense in which A is not B; oilierwiseilie smtementA is B would be a complete tautology. Some analystsdeny bod1 concepts ofduality or identity as well as ilie form "A isB" as valid descriptions of metaphor, designating ilie trope as "anonpredicative energy-system, different from and opposite to (orcomplementary to) ilie logical mode." See Preminger 494.

'"To Sir Henry Goodyer," I. 18. I have found it convenient incounting analogies to use ilie Penguin edition of Donne's poetry,John Donne: The Complete English Poems, ed. A.]. Smiili.

41 have found 360 analogies in Donne's poetry. but less ilian onesixili of iliat number in ilie poetry of Ben Jonson and GeorgeHerbert Andrew Marvell comes closest to Donne in frequency ofuse: 106 analogies; and aliliough he masterfully uses ilie form onoccasion to structure a whole poem-as in ilie familiar "Seehow/So/Such" tripartite structure of "On a Drop of Dew"- ilieproportion of elements in his analogies tends to lack Donne'sprecision, offering ilie reader fewer correspondences to vacillatebetween.a different yet related context, iliatofilie experience ofDonne'sinlagery, Joan Webber sees in many of Donne's images an attempt to"unite a divided vision." Yet "ilie fusion is a very unsteady onebecause ilie separation or ilie vivid example is so precise, and sointensely felt ... and because tl1e description of ilie fusion is oftenmore abstract and less compelling ilian tl1e separate instances" (80).


15/15

Nahla M. Beier 141Works Cited

Beier, Nahla M. "A Uniry ofTruth: The Metaphysical Poetics ofJohn Donue." Diss. U ofVirginia, 1987.

Brook-Rose, Christine. A Grammar ofMetaphor. London: Seekerand Warburg, 1958.Crofts, J. E. V. "John Donne: A Reconsideration." InJohn Donne:

A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Helen Gardner. EnglewoodCliffs, N. J.: Prentice Hall, 1962.Donne, John. J ohn Donne: The Complete English Poems. Ed. A. J.Smith. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1971.Hunt, Clay. Donne's Poetry: Essays in Literary Analysis. New Haven:Yale UP, 1966.Leishman, J. P. The Monarch of Wit: An Analytical and ComparativeStudyof he Poetry ofJolm Donne. London: Hutchingson, 1965.Lewis, C. S. "Donne and Love Poetry in the Seventeenth Century." In Seventeenth Century Studies: Presented to Sir HerbertOrierson. New York: Octagon Books, 1967.McCanles, 1\{ichael. "Paradox in Donne." Studies in the Renaissance

13 (1966): 266-87.Preminger, Alex, ed. The Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics.Princeton: Princeton UP, 1965.Ricoeur, Paul. "The Metaphorical Process as Cognition, Imagination and Feeling." On Metaphor. Ed. Sheldon Sacks. Chicago: UofChicago P, 1978.

Roston, Murray. The Soul of Wit: A Study ofJohn Donne. Oxford:Clarendon P, 1974.Smith, A.J. Metaphysical Wit. New York: Cambridge UP, 1991.Stein,Arnok:l. John Donne's Lyrics: The Eloquence ofAction. Minneapolis: U ofMinnesota P, 1962.Sullivan, Alvin. "Donne's Sophistry and Certain RenaissanceBooks of Logic and Rhetoric." Studies in English Literature22(1982): 107-20.Tuve, Rosemond. Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery: RenaissancePoetics and Twentieth Century Critics. Chicago: U of Chicago P,

1947.Webber, Joan. Contrary Music: The Prose Style of John Donr1e.Madison: U ofWisconsin P, 1963.

donne's sense of disunity

Documents