The Challenges of Orpheus

by Heather Dubrow

  Solidity and its concomitant implications of harmony are the primary valence of the vocabulary of columns and masons. Yet an era that saw the literal breakup of monasteries, whose fabric was on occasion put to other uses, and that witnessed frequent large fires—Stratford-upon-Avon, for example, suffered three major blazes during the 1590s alone—would not necessarily associate buildings with permanence.38 The emphasis on pillars, the most solid element in a building, may be a response to this, but the threat remained. Literal columns, like the stanzas they troped, were liable to be scattered. Thus latent in the vocabulary of materiality that provides an antidote to fluidity is a reminder of its ever present threat.

  That peril not only remains but surfaces in stanzas that refuse or redefine their role as exemplar of binding and controlling. Ben Jonson’s “To the Immortall Memorie, and Friendship of that Noble Paire, Sir Lucius Cary, and Sir H. Morison” explores versions of separation and reunification (the “infant phenomenon” who is born only to think better of it, the death of one of the eponymous heroes and their continued twinning, the hyphenation of “twi-Lights” [93–94], and so on) and also embodies those patterns in its stanza forms.39 Jonson’s anglicization of the three parts of the Pindaric ode into “turn,” “counter-turn,” and “stand” emphasizes a movement from debate to achieved stasis and harmony, in other words, to the functioning of stanzas as a bulwark against fluidity. Much as the relationship between turn and counter-turn is mimed within strophes through syntax like “Alas, But Morison fell young: / Hee never fell, thou fall’st, my tongue” (43–44), so too the linear structure of individual stanzas progresses from change and potential scattering to gathering. Consisting until the end of lines of varied length yet concluding on an iambic pentameter couplet that indeed binds, visually and aurally, they enact a movement towards containment and stability. And this realization of the potentialities described by Drayton, Gascoigne, and Puttenham remains a significant component in the workings of the poem.

  Yet at the same time, the prevalence of such patterns makes their violation when Jonson famously scatters words and the structure of the stanza as a whole through an extraordinary enjambment, emphasized by the metrical variation created by the poet’s last name—

  And there he lives with memorie; and Ben

  The Stand

  Jonson, who sung this of him, e’re he went

  (84–85)

  —all the more startling. One critic rightly observes that this passage is multivalent, suggesting at once overflowing and separation, disunity and unity;40 but surely the scattering predominates. This transgression mimes the semantic content of the first of the two stanzas in which it appears, which involves “holy rage” (80) and “leap[ing]” (79), but it also serves to question the stability celebrated by the poem as a whole and symbolized by its stanzas.41 Often himself associated with the assertion of authorship, Jonson thus complicates it here.

  That master of the interrogative John Donne repeatedly asks similar questions about and through his stanza forms. To be sure, by concluding the first and last lines of all the stanzas in “The Canonization” on “love,” he not only comments on the ubiquity and significance of that state but also suggests that the stanzas celebrating it are themselves cohesive and contained, again exemplifying the principles theorized about stanzas. Elsewhere, however, he more characteristically undercuts the predominant conceptions of the stanza form that I have been identifying. Donne often plays the putative solidity of a stanza against challenges to that stable unit, and the challenges often, but by no means always, triumph. On the one hand, “The Sunne Rising” concludes each stanza on couplets which semantically and aurally express the assured victories of the speaker; on the other, the varied line lengths and enjambments earlier in the stanzas suggest scattering more than gathering. Similarly, in Donne’s couplets, themselves a kind of little stanza, we encounter in miniature this variation from exemplifying to defying the common potentialities of the stanza. These couplets sometimes deploy the closural propensities of their form by expressing epigrammatic sentiments in a balanced iambic pentameter unit, but elsewhere they juxtapose balance and imbalance through the contrast between semantic cohesion and a striking variation in line length. Enacting an aural inconstancy appropriate to its subject matter, “Womans Constancy” concludes on this type of heterometrical couplet: “Which I abstaine to doe, / For by to morrow, I may thinke so too” (16–17).42

  Printing and scribal practices typically reinforce the role of stanzas in restraining potential fluidity or even chaos, but sometimes, as in certain of these instances from Donne and Jonson, they destabilize or at least complicate that function. If Drayton’s commentary on his Barrons Wars compares the stanza he uses to a pillar, the frequency of stanzas that are comprised entirely of iambic pentameter or that use another line consistently often creates a similar effect in the work of other writers as well. The visual impression of a column may be intensified when the printer puts only one stanza on each page and frames it with a border, as is the case with Spenser’s “Epithalamion” in his 1595 volume, which mimes the effect of capital, shaft, and base.

  That well-wrought urn the sonnet is sometimes presented and represented as though it consists of separate stanzas. Echoing the usage analyzed above, Gascoigne’s Certayne Notes of Instruction refers to the units within the form as “staves” (460), and some manuscripts and printed books adhere to this assumption by leaving noticeable blank space between the sections of these poems; Mary Wroth, for example, generally does so in the manuscript of her poetry, Folger V.a.104. Similarly, when the term “quatrozain” or “quaterzain” is used for a sonnet, as the titles of the paratextual poems in Thomas Watson’s Hecatompathia and the subtitle of the 1594 edition of Michael Drayton’s Ideas Mirrour do, might not these texts draw attention to the fact that those lyrics are primarily comprised of four-line subunits even though the term in question explicitly refers to the fourteen-line structure of their poems?

  Such practices deserve more attention than they have as yet received because their effects are multiple and varied. On the one hand, as we have seen, “stave” can connote the units of a barrel, hence emphasizing cohesion, and a succession of visually similar units can appealingly create that very effect. On the other hand, however, under some circumstances such divisions can look unbalanced and unstable, notably when the couplet is indented. Such hints of dispersal do not completely disappear, but they are typically contained and restrained with considerable, though by no means unimpeachable, success. The syntactical and semantic links between the units and the repetition of rhymes in the Petrarchan and Spenserian versions of the sonnet evidently draw together its parts. Many poets craft additional ways of doing so, as when Thomas Lodge begins every quatrain in the thirteenth sonnet of Phillis on the word “love.”

  Above all, often the couplet both visually and semantically functions as a base to the column and a basis for drawing together the potentially scattering units, again allowing poets to practice what the treatises on stanzas preach. As we have observed, in discussing his eight-line stanza, Drayton explicitly refers to it as such, and arguably this potentiality is not the least reason for Elizabethan poets’ attraction to the so-called Shakespearean sonnet. This integrative function may be emphasized when the couplet is written or printed flush left, thus creating the visual impression of a base on which the column of print above it securely rests. In Richard Lynche’s Diella, the capitalization of both lines of the couplet and their positioning at the left of the page emphasizes their function in providing stability and unity, with these material effects being emphasized by semantic markers of that role, such as opening on “Then” in the sense of “therefore,” as the eighth, ninth, and fourteenth poem do.43 In Wroth’s manuscript Folger V.a.104, the couplets are generally positioned flush left (sometimes, though by no means always, she intensifies the impression of a firm base by capitalizing both lines). In short, the poststructuralist attraction to the unsettled certainly should not
blind one to the frequency with which other poets also create that representation of solidity: the primary effect of stanzas and their subunits in early modern English verse is indeed to reassert firmness and order.

  Yet once again we are encountering a potentiality for stability, not its inevitable realization. Practices in printing sonnets, like their scribal counterparts, vary considerably; and in instances where one or both lines of the couplet are indented, especially if the second line is not capitalized, the base may seem far less reliable, and the visual effect can be that of a column whose base is apparent but insecure. The column may even appear to be threatening to topple over, its rime potentially sparse, its customary function as an icon for restraint hence toppled as well. Arguably such couplets iconographically represent, or at least gesture towards, the instability of ethical principles and emotional resolutions in the world of the sonnet, form thus adeptly mirroring content; if so, in this as so many other instances, studying the materiality of a text is not an alternative but a route to studying its aesthetic and ethical agendas, and vice versa. Lodge’s edition, for example, indents the first line of his quatrains and of his couplet, thus creating a pictorial impression of imbalance.44 Whereas the Petrarchan rhyme scheme does not as obviously lend itself to either the impression or the refusal of a base, the visual arrangement of its sestet may comparably suggest stability or its opposite. One of the most extreme instances of the latter effect is a sonnet near the opening of Young’s translation of Diana, where Selvagia’s distress is mimed by repeated trochaic inversions, by feminine rhymes, by the syneciosis-like phrase “doe undoe” (14), as well as by the appearance of the final lines:

  Then will I trust in hopes that not forsake me,

  When I have staide her wheeles that overtread me,

  And beaten down the fates that doe undoe me.

  (12–14)45

  The 1595 edition of Daniel’s Delia prints the first line of each quatrain and both lines of the couplet flush left, with other lines presented as hanging indents, so each section as well as the poem as a whole seems to rest on a base. In the 1592 editions of this text, however, the first line of each quatrain and both lines of the couplet are indented, and the border appears only at the bottom; although one needs to resist the temptation to exaggerate the difference, it is clear that in the later version the sonnets appear more securely poised, an effect intensified by the use of a thick border at the top and bottom, the latter replicating and echoing the effect of the flush left couplet. And for all his expressed commitment to the couplet as the base to a column, those written by Drayton are typically indented in editions of his work that appeared during his lifetime. Did he acquiesce to the impact of printers’ practices on authorial agency? Did he simply accept them, manifesting his position as a transitional figure in changing conceptions of authorial authority? Or, pulled between the desire for the solidity of a base and the attraction to unsettling ideas and language that becomes increasingly prominent in his work, did he accept and even delight in the tension between the couplet’s ostensible stability and the countervailing visual effect in these editions? Couplets almost always trope but by no means always perform the desire for closural unity, and printing and scribal practices offer a visual analogue.

  The potential instability of such couplets is simultaneously intensified and delimited when they fill their customary role as aphoristic summaries. On the one hand, as Mary Thomas Crane has shown, humanistic practices focused on the detachment of such nuggets from their original context, on a gathering of them that necessitated a scattering of the text in which they had originally appeared;46 and a couplet that does not seem securely attached to the preceding lines might well appear especially ripe for the picking. Yet by providing a reassuring summary, such epigrammatic units could stress their connection to the preceding lines. Hence if stanzas in early modern lyric poetry typically involve countering the uncontrolled dispersal of texts through the agency and skill of the author, these prosodic units may also enact the tension between scattering and unification.

  As Chapter 3 indicated, with characteristic incisiveness John Hollander has outlined the workings of the poetic refrain; the striking similarities between several of his points and the issues I have been exploring here demonstrate that in many regards refrains synecdochically figure the stanzas they terminate.47 Tracing the term in question to the French for bridling, Hollander examines how this prosodic element restrains or ties; in so doing, I suggest, it bears to its stanza a relationship not unlike the one the stanza typically assumes towards the lyric as a whole, thus again demonstrating how gathering can attempt to counter scattering. For stanzas generally bridle discordant elements that threaten to gallop away out of control and in so doing bridle anxieties about the workings of their mode. If, as Hollander claims, the refrain at once breaks off and reclaims part of a line, the stanza does so as well, restraining and tying together elements whose epigrammatic neatness or metrical irregularity threatens to detach from the whole poem. And if, as Hollander demonstrates, refrains are allusive, drawing attention to previous refrains, one might add that stanzas are also typically metastanzaic, directing the reader’s attention to how both the poet at hand and others have used the form. To Hollander’s analysis one can append the gloss that the processes of breaking off and reclaiming that he traces, whether in the refrains he is analyzing or the stanzas we are scrutinizing, is a form of fort-da that, like other versions of the game, attempts to achieve and assert mastery. And, as in fort-da, success is by no means guaranteed. In short, in writing stanzas lyric poets of the English Renaissance both acknowledge and attempt to rein in the potential dispersal of lyric, with varying degrees of success re-forming and re-formulating its potentially threatening fluidity as controlled pattern and redefining their own role as masculine master rather than effeminized and effeminizing siren.

  Moving from stanzaic practices, notably divisions and recombinations within a given lyric, to the macro-level of pairings and larger groups of texts reveals that authors use the potentiality of combining and separating units of writings to assert more agency than many critics attribute to them, whether in cooperation or conflict with other would-be masters of the text. But somewhat less of that agency is apparent in certain venues where we might expect it, notably the putative narrativity of sonnet cycles, while more is visible in manuscripts.

  Generalizations about all these patterns are, of course, inflected by the range of strategies through which texts are grouped, as even a brief survey reminds us: the breadth of possibilities extends from a group of unconnected poems by other hands that someone may copy into a commonplace book to a crown of sonnets by a single writer. Medieval readers typically purchased unbound sheets that they then bound themselves, as I noted in passing above, and anthologies of lyrics were common in the early modern period as well as the medieval; they range from well-known ones like Englands Helicon to groupings of poems by divers hands brought out in response to events like the death of Prince Henry. But Lerer’s reminder of the differences between miscellanies and anthologies is very much to the point here: whereas a collection like Englands Helicon is obviously unified by its commitment to pastoral, and the most popular of Elizabethan miscellanies, The Paradise of Dainty Devices, is tied together by a predominant piety, it is harder to discern a common thread in many other volumes. This is not to deny, however, that some readers, accustomed to linking texts in commonplace books, may have attempted to find links among the poems, yet again demonstrating their contributions to the process of making meaning.

  Lyrics may, of course, be grouped by many other criteria as well, as we have already seen. In some instances, titles stress the connections among poems, a predilection Susan Stewart traces with her usual incisiveness in analyzing Thomas Watson’s Passionate Centurie of Love.48 The early modern period also witnessed the popularity of certain generic and prosodic forms that encourage or mandate the binding of texts into collections. Most obviously, the model provided by Petrarch invit
ed later poets to realize that sonnets could mate much more readily and successfully than most sonneteering speakers, although that example also demonstrates how tenuous and ambiguous the links among sonnets can be (a pattern we will shortly encounter in Petrarch’s English heirs). Similarly, as The Shepheardes Calender and some of its classical ancestors demonstrate, eclogues can be related to each other by the recurrence of names and situations, as well as by their genre, and the same is true of versions of the psalms. Cognate subject matter can link other types of religious poetry too; Richard Crashaw’s three hymns about the Christmas season, celebrating respectively the nativity, the circumcision, and the epiphany, are further connected by parallels in their images and structures. Encouraged by scribal culture, the practice of writing answer poems produced further pairings; some of Donne’s verse letters appear to be replies of this sort, and Helen Vendler has categorized some Shakespearean sonnets this way.49 George Gascoigne’s “Devises of Sundrie Gentlemen” links its thirty-fourth and thirty-fifth entries through the title, “Another shorter discourse to the same effecte” and their common motto (247). Also popular in the period was the crown, a form with which Samuel Daniel, John Donne, Robert Sidney, and Lady Mary Wroth, among others, experimented.