Sara Morrison
1> John Donne’s “The Relique” opens with the
speaker’s meditations on what might happen to his and his lover’s bodies after
death. He first imagines that their mutual grave will be disturbed to
accommodate another corpse. Although he describes this invasion as inevitable,
he hopes that the gravedigger will oppose customary practice and leave them
alone when he sees a remnant, a relic, of their living bodies: “a bracelet of
bright haire about the bone” (6).[1]
Synecdochal of their earthly love, the hair performs two roles: first, as
inspiration for the gravedigger to re-cover their grave, and second, as a
mnemonic device for the lovers’ resurrected souls, so that they might reconvene
in the afterlife. If the sight of the hair changes the gravedigger’s course of
action, the hair then functions successfully as an active relic, transforming
the viewer. The speaker is not convinced of the hair’s efficacy, however, and
so he imagines another way for the dead lovers to influence the gravedigger. If
he refuses to sanctify their grave as a resurrection rendezvous, the speaker
imagines that perhaps the gravedigger will take their bodies to “the Bishop,
and the King” to be sanctioned as relics that can perform miracles (15). As
such, the lovers’ bodies would be capable of transforming many viewers, and
their miracles would not be forgotten in the grave of time, since, as the
speaker insists, poetry would resurrect the relics’ actions: “and since at such
time, miracles are sought, / I would have that age by this paper taught / What
miracles wee harmelesse lovers wrought” (20-22). Poetry can narrate the lovers’
“miracles” and can therefore save them from silent death; however, in this
case, it falls short when its task is to describe the beauty of the speaker’s
lover. “But now alas,” mourns the speaker, “All measure, and all language, I
should passe, / Should I tell what a miracle shee was” (31-33). The same
language that can describe the ineffable is too limited to describe the mortal.
2> “The Relique” reveals quite explicitly Donne’s
interest in material relics, but when faced with the possibility that his
poetic relics lack affective muscle, the speaker invokes rather more
conventional tropes of a poem’s immortality. The “paper” may be able to teach
its readers of the “miracles wee harmelesse lovers wrought,” even though the
speaker is unable to describe his beloved (22). When he stops short of
blazoning her, acknowledging the limits of encomiastic language, the speaker gestures
toward the possibility that what’s wrought from blazonic language can function
as a substitute for lost relics. Once officially sanctioned as relics, the
lovers can be seen, and their miracles can teach people how to love “well and
faithfully” (23). Such miracles rooted in action can be described; but she is a miracle and so defies blazonic
description. Elsewhere, Donne relies on such language to describe the body, and
in most cases, the poet-speaker himself confers sanctity on the blazoned body,
elevating disarticulated body parts to relics. Poetic blazon is the vehicle
through which the poet-speaker creates lively relics of ordinary bodies. In
those instances, the dismembered body used for poetic preservation is much like
the martyred body, because it is reduced to an amalgam of parts or relics to
which a viewer has access. Here, blazoned relics are not static artifacts;
rather, like medieval relics, they have the potential to engage, even alter,
their viewer or reader. Because poetic blazons both house and represent the
fragmented body, they function as reliquaries that themselves actively engage
their readers, guiding their view. Just as medieval reliquaries often focus the
eye on the relic housed inside, the poetic blazon, too, directs the reader to
one particular body part at a time. Moreover, as Caroline Walker Bynum has observed,
there is a synecdochal identification of reliquary with relic, such that the
reliquary that houses the relic shares its inhabitant’s curative powers.[2]
Such identification of the aesthetic with the material allows for a reading of
Donne’s blazons as both reliquary and relic: poetic blazons both produce active
bodily relics and are the lens through which a viewer experiences them.
3> Critical discussion of the Renaissance blazon
has been informed by the idea that poetic blazon silences the blazoned subject.
A tool of self-actualization for the poet, the blazon dismembers the subject
either to affirm the poet’s integral identity, to endear him to a patron, or to
display his command of the poetic form, among others. Whatever the presumed
mid-range goal, the blazoner’s desired end is mastery. This critical tradition
owes much to the influential work of Nancy Vickers, whose triangular model maps
poetic description as a conversation between men, which effectively renders the
female subject arbitrary and silent.[3] In
her recent discussion of the blazon, Catherine Bates locates a sea change in
critical understanding of the blazoner. Drawing on Vickers’ ideas about Acteon,
“the iconic figure that stands behind every blasonneur
and whose mythic story shadows every scene of voyeuristic looking and bodily
partition,” which suggest that the blazoner fragments the female subject in
defense of his own subjectivity, Bates argues instead that the blazoner’s
subjectivity is unstable and vulnerable.[4]
Such mastery is elusive, thereby disrupting the myth of the stable writing—and
reading—subject; I argue, therefore, that the blazoned subject’s silence is
likewise unstable. In this model, voyeurism is welcome, not forbidden, as the
blazoned subject’s afterlife relies on such looking. Acteon is destroyed by his
own hounds, yet the relic’s response to the voyeur is not compulsorily punitive
but can be restorative as well.
4> The blazoned subject’s body is much like the
martyred body: both are reduced to an amalgam of parts capable of post-partition
activity. Relics resulting from martyrdom or from poetic blazon are effective
because of their visibility; when a viewer adores (or abhors) them, they, in
turn, transform the viewer. Thus, a relic’s effectiveness relies on an
audience. The metonymy of part to whole is critical to an understanding of the
interaction between viewer and relic: “If a martyr was present in every minute
bit of his dust, if he cured the sick and raised the dead, then both decay and
partition could be overcome.”[5]
The belief that the whole martyr, including his or her restorative powers, was
encapsulated in each body part helped to explain not only whole-body
resurrection but also the healing capabilities of sanctified, dismembered
parts. Martyrs’ relics often were housed in reliquaries, which facilitated
public viewing and individual access to the relic. In the case of poetic
relics, the poem itself functions as the reliquary—it allows for communal
viewing, and it guides the reader’s eye precisely.
5> Reliquaries partially or wholly conceal the
relic housed inside, yet they point to what they conceal; concealment is also
revelation. Such is the rhetorical function of the blazon; the metaphors that
conceal the body (whether expressing adoration or repulsion) also reveal it. Eroding
the dichotomy of container and contained, reliquaries “reveal fragmentation but
mask decay,”[6] housing
relics, parts of bodies, but hiding the gross materiality of death. In doing
so, they function also as “memoria of
the saints, reminders of the glorified bodies we will receive in heaven.”[7] As
a comfort to early Christians, the memoria
reminded them that their mortal body could escape post-mortem decay. For
reasons both material and psychic, distinguishing relic from reliquary became
increasingly difficult in the later Middle Ages, “suggest[ing] not only that
the bone is the saint but also perhaps that the
reliquary is the relic.”[8]
6> Such an ontology informs the process and effect
of reading the blazon: the distancing of the viewer from the relic itself and
the transforming of reliquary into relic. The aesthetic image is equal to the
physical relic; it is a kind of second-degree relic, capable of performing as
does its “original.” Not exactly a copy of the relic, the reliquary nonetheless
accomplishes the same degree of cultural work as does the relic it houses. Some
reliquaries were elaborate shrines that contained nooks in the structure,
providing worshippers access to the shrine, and thus to the saint: “Pilgrims
seeking favors would touch or place their bodies within these niches believing
that a miraculous power permeated the whole structure.”[9]
Cradled by the shrine, the pilgrim was surrounded by both reliquary and relic.
Indeed, if only temporarily, the pilgrim shared the reliquary’s compartmentalized
internal space with the relic. Nestled in the niche, the pilgrim accessed the
relic through the shrine, distanced from the physical relic itself, but closely
connected to its aesthetic image. While readers cannot experience the
ontological materiality of Donne’s rhetorical relics, they can perhaps encircle
themselves within blazonic language. The poem itself is the aesthetic image
through which readers access its relics.
7> Such linguistic relics may have been acceptable
to a culture divided on issues of religious materiality. In an attempt to
control the adoration of Mary, Queen of Scots’ relics, for example, “the
English immediately turned to curtailing Mary’s unsanctioned spectacularization
as saintly martyr or mater dolorosa,
as onlookers were carefully prevented from acquiring any relics of the
execution scene.”[10] Such
efforts of the Elizabethan government, which also included “encas[ing] her
coffin in an inordinate amount of lead,” delaying her burial in Peterborough
Cathedral for five months, and burying her “in the middle of the night” acknowledged
the potential for Mary Stuart’s relics to threaten religious reform. [11]
Such relics were disruptive because of their materiality. Poetic relics, on the
other hand, may have seemed less so because of their immateriality. Of the
sanctity of poetic relics, Arthur Marotti suggests that “After Catholic relics
came under attack, starting with the depredations of the late 1530s, when the
shrine of Thomas à Becket was destroyed and his bones scattered, the reverence for
relics began to migrate into print culture, where the remains of a person were
verbal.”[12]
But poetic blazon, it seems to me, exceeds the verbal, recruiting and reviving
the person’s physical nature as well. As many of Donne’s sermons attest, he
preached often about the resurrected body, expressing hopeful assurance in
postmortem physical integrity. Donne’s interest in the rhetorical capability
not only to fragment the body, which can potentially confer sanctity on both
blazoned subject and viewer, but also to rejoin its parts may itself have been
a remnant of his ancestral Catholicism in a climate unsympathetic to its
material signs. As suggested earlier, some of Donne’s blazoned bodies do not
function as active relics, but rather as static icons unable to transform their
viewers. Yet, this is not consistently so. Rather, some of Donne’s blazoned
subjects lose their bodily integrity only to be resuscitated by the very medium
of their destruction.
8> Donne’s Elegy, “The Comparison,” yokes together both
poetic blazon and images of martyrdom, demonstrating his athletic
experimentation with relics’ transformative capabilities. In this elegy, Donne
alternates blazon and anti-blazon to compare the speaker’s mistress with
another man’s. Likening the latter woman to martyrs, the speaker acknowledges
her potential to alter those with whom she comes into contact; but in this
case, such transformations are dangerous to the viewer, as he insists that her
diseased body is infectious. He fears that she confers not sanctity but
disease. Yet she herself is sanctified, restored by the blazon that undoes her.
Unlike “The Relique,” “The Comparison” thus illustrates the way in which blazon
and anti-blazon produce effective active relics, which in this case, transform
through the tactile as well as the visual.
9> Opening with a comparison not of the two women’s
breasts and necks—traditional objects of a blazon—but of the sweat clinging to
the mistresses’ skin, the speaker expresses fear that female bodily fluids are
lively, capable of transmitting disease to other bodies (both male and female).
Described as “ranke sweaty froth…like spermatique issue’of ripe menstruous boiles”
(7-8), the other mistress’ sweat is pungent, tactile, and the product of
reproductive boils. And, like its progenitor, the sweat is generative: the
“spermatique issue” can reproduce itself.[13]
Her sweat is thus infectious, and physical contact with her dangerous.
Continuing his insistence that the other mistress’ filth is contagious, the
speaker asks his friend: “Are not your kisses then as filthy, ’and more, / As a
worme sucking an invenom’d sore?” (43-44). Kissing his mistress is like
ingesting poison. The speaker’s anti-blazon of his friend’s mistress exposes
his fear that her body, the relics of his blazon, can infect her sexual
partners. In contrast, the speaker describes his own mistress’s sweat
“As the sweet sweat of Roses
in a Still,
As that which from chaf’d
muskats pores doth trill,
As the Almighty Balme of
th’early East,
Such are the sweat drops of
my Mistris breast,
And on her necke her skin
such lustre sets,
They seeme no sweat drops,
but pearle carcanetts.” (1-6)
10> Even though the speaker is here describing
sweat, he likens her drops of perspiration to that of fragrant roses and to
“the Almighty Balme of th’early East,” which are familiar encomiastic images.
Whereas the other mistress’ perspiration is described as infectious and thus
dangerous, the speaker’s mistress’ sweat is “lustrous,” strangely beautiful,
and non-threatening. But the final description of them, in which the speaker
redefines them not as “sweat drops, but pearle carcanetts,” conflates the
language of adornment and punishment. The Oxford
English Dictionary defines “carcanet” as “an ornamental collar or necklace,
usually of gold or set with jewels,” but it also defines “carcan,” as “an iron
collar used for punishment.”[14]
Reading the mistress’ sweat either as a jeweled necklace or as an iron collar
draws together traditions of Petrarchan rhetoric and physical torture, locating
her body as the site of praise and pain, thereby likening it to the martyred
body. By blurring the boundaries between ideal Petrarchan beauty and martyr,
the poem begins to establish the mistresses as not entirely dissimilar. The
elegy gestures toward the primary mistress’ martyrdom and her infectious
capability, yet by comparison, she is less threatening than her counterpart.
Not quite an active relic because her martyrdom is incomplete, the mistress
functions as a model by which to understand the other mistress as capable of
transforming others.
11> Drawing on language both anti-encomiastic and
martyrological, the speaker enlists anti-blazons to describe the other
mistress’ skin. In lines 29-32, for example, the speaker compares her skin to
that of men who have been dismembered and displayed for public view:
“Like
rough bark’d elmboughes, or the russet skin
Of men late scurg’d for
madnes, or for sinne,
Like Sun-parch’d quarters on
the citie gate,
Such is thy tann’d skins
lamentable state.” (29-32)
12> The comparison in this anti-blazon echoes
established Petrarchan tradition: the speaker insists that the other mistress’
dark skin is “lamentable,” less desirable than his own mistress’ “white
beauty-keeping chest” (23). But the tropes rely on the visible markers of
violence—flogging and dismemberment—to describe her. At issue in the similes
employed to express degree of skin pigmentation is corporeal torture,
mutilation, and the display of body parts. The “men” have “russet skin” because
they have been “scurg’d,” or flogged, for “madnes, or for sinne”; their skin
has been made “russet.” Similarly, the “quarters on the citie gate” are
“Sun-parch’d”; they, too, have been darkened, reddened by the sun. While
ostensibly focusing on skin pigmentation, both images evoke violent ontological
change. Like this tortured skin, “such is” the other mistress’ skin; it is
“tann’d,” changed by the sun but also evoking the process of making leather,
which must be preceded by flaying an animal’s skin. In both images, the men’s
transgressions—madness, sin, treason—linger as visible markers of behavior not
officially sanctioned. She is like them, a martyr for her “sinnes.” And, her
skin, in a “lamentable state,” is capable of both expressing grief and causing
onlookers to pity her.
13> The poem dramatizes this threat to bodily
integrity of which the speaker warns his interlocutor. The speaker cautions the
other man against the mistress’ “ripe menstruous boiles” (8), her “worme eaten
trunkes, cloth’d in seals skin, / Or grave, that’s dust without, and stinke
within” (25-26), and perhaps most threatening, her “dread mouth of a fired gunne”
(39). What is dangerous about her body is not her particular filth, but that
her diseased body can infect the men who touch her. “Are not your kisses then
as filthy, ’and more,” the speaker asks, “As a worme sucking an invenom’d
sore?” (43-44). If one of this Petrarchan quadrangle’s four points is diseased,
then the other three points are in jeopardy, since “kisses” breed disease. Yet
it is precisely her diseased body that is powerful: the speaker fears her
sexuality because he fears that she could kill him. It is ironic then that his
comparisons—his blazons of her—transfer his (de)generative talent to her. Her
“ripe menstruous boiles,” her “invenom’d sore,” her “warts,” her “weals,” are effective
blazonic relics—she threatens to alter men physically with whom she comes into
contact. Here, the blazoned woman is not a powerless, partitioned object. Even
though she is repulsive to the speaker, her filth evokes fear in him that is
visceral. By blazoning her using images of martyrdom, the speaker acknowledges
her potentially destructive influence, which he fears can poison not just her
lover but the speaker’s mistress and the speaker himself.
14> The final series of comparisons illustrates the
speaker’s fear that his friend’s sexual contact with his mistress can infect
each lover. His descriptions of sex are violent, yet the speaker tries to
soften his own experience by using words like “reverent” (50). When describing
the other couple, the speaker asks his friend: “Is not your last act harsh, and
violent, / As when a Plough a stony ground doth rent?” (47-48) Yet the
speaker’s description of his own sexual act is paradoxically encomiastic:
“[…] so devoutly nice
Are Priests in handling
reverent sacrifice,
And such
in searching wounds the Surgeon is
As wee, when wee embrace, or
touch, or kisse.” (49-52)
15> In language couched in terms of partition and
voyeurism, the speaker compares sex with his own mistress first to religious
sacrifice and second to medical examination. Both are encoded with the
potential for death and the invasive gaze of the public eye, either on the
altar or in the anatomy theaters.[15]
Here, the comparisons that the speaker has tried to keep distinct start to
converge. Whether explicitly violent or more subtly “reverent,” sex partitions
both mistresses’ bodies, and begins to make vulnerable their lovers’ bodies as
well. Curiously, this account of sex neglects to name any specific body parts,
instead using synecdoche to suggest the body parts that the lovers use to
“embrace, or touch, or kisse” (52). In this way, the description acts as a
reliquary through which to view the enclosed bodies, distancing viewers from
the precise body part, yet allowing them to “search” for it successfully.
Unlike “The Relique” whose blazon the speaker fears may produce static icons
only, “The Comparison” is a poem that dramatizes poetic blazon’s capability to
produce active relics. Moreover, here the blazon itself functions as an
aesthetic reliquary, housing the relics and directing readers’ eyes toward
them, warning them against transgression or perhaps offering a model of secular
sanctity.
16> Among Donne’s blazons are those that allow for
self-examination; in these instances, the speaker becomes his own voyeur,
exploring the possibility of his own sanctity. In “Loves Exchange,” for
example, the speaker combines an invitation for self-martyrdom with an implicit
challenge to its efficacy. By doing so, he neutralizes the damaging effects of
Love’s torture, representing himself as an active relic and thereby challenging
death. Self-blazons allow the speaker to partition his own body, creating of
himself relics that dispense grace beyond the grave. Because there is nothing
doctrinally heretical about self-examination, Donne’s self-blazons create
acceptable relics that invite voyeurs. In “Loves Exchange,” the speaker invites
“future Rebells” to examine his “Rack’t carcass” so that they might avoid
love’s tortures (38, 42).
“[…] if
I must example bee
To future Rebells; If th’unborne
Must learne, by my being cut
up, and torne:
Kill, and dissect me, Love;
for this
Torture against thine owne
end is,
Rack’t carcasses make ill
Anatomies.” (37-42)
17> The “if” clauses suggest that “future Rebells”
can learn from the speaker’s dissected body; however, his directive to Love to
“kill and dissect” him reveals the didactic limits of dissection. Although the
speaker invites Love’s torture and dissection, he warns that his partition will
not serve Love’s ends—tortured carcasses make poor subjects of study. The
speaker’s challenge to Love is a curious one, since he hopes to outwit Love by
inviting him to “cut up” and tear his body. This challenge is all the more
curious because the speaker seems to invite not dismemberment but
vivisection—Love “enrage[s]” him, “yet kills not.” This is a reluctant martyr
who resists corporeal torture. But when faced with it, the speaker curiously
attempts to maintain control by undermining the mangled body’s active power. In
“The Comparison,” active relics are powerful, granting lively autonomy (for
better or worse) to the blazoned body. Here, however, the speaker resists
Love’s torture and so downplays relics’ effect. Unable ultimately to stave it
off, if he “must example bee,” then he seeks comfort in his relics’ power to teach
“future Rebells.” The speaker wants it both ways. He envisions his own
vivisection, but he does not cut himself open; he is at Love’s whim.
18> Even so, he is unwilling to concede control; to
challenge Love’s torture, he imagines his vivisected body as a set of active
relics. Such attempts at control of one’s posthumous body reach beyond the
imaginative, however, and so might seem familiar to some of Donne’s readers. In
his discussion of Southwell’s execution, Arthur Marotti observes that Southwell
attempted to manage his own relic production:
“Southwell apparently gave
his cap to the Keeper of Newgate prison who treated it, in effect, as a
relic….[And] when Southwell got to the place of execution after being dragged
on a hurdle through the muddy streets, he cleaned his face with a cloth that he
then threw to someone in the crowd….The third holy object was the rosary
Southwell threw from the scaffold to a friend.”[16]
19> While only a select few had contact with
Southwell’s physical relics, many more had access to his writings, which, as
Marotti notes, the publisher William Leake associated with his dismembered
body.[17]
Such ideas echo Donne’s spectrum of concerns, which focuses not only on death,
dismemberment, and resurrection but also on the literary management of such
events.
20> Donne’s representation of the dismembered self
as a corpus of active relics functions as a post-partition control mechanism,
since corporeal torture cannot silence the relics’ productive influence. By
constructing a paradigm that assuages the terrors of dismemberment, Donne seeks
to manage the uncertainty of death. But this is only a temporary fix for the
loss of control that death brings, a kind of purgatory for the dismembered,
decaying body. Resurrection raises a host of new challenges; chief among them
is the condition of the resurrected body. Although in poems like “Loves
Exchange,” Donne explores ways to cope with vivisection and death, other poems
express concern that the afterlife render the body intact. In “The Autumnall,”
for example, the speaker rehearses practical problems posed for bodily
resurrection.
“If transitory things, which
soone decay,
Age must be
lovelyest at the latest day.
But name not Winter-faces, whose skin’s slacke;
Lanke, as an unthrifts
purse; but a soules sacke;
Whose Eyes seeke light within, for all here’s shade;
Whose mouthes are holes, rather worne out, then made;
Whose every tooth to’a
severall place is gone,
To vexe their soules at Resurrection.” (35-42)
21> If bodies are to be resurrected whole, then
each part must be recovered. Resurrection thus complicates the active relic’s
temporary purgatory. The couplet of lines 41-42 expresses a fear of
partial-body resurrection and suggests that the dismembered body whose relics
can be uncannily lively is also the body that “vex[es] soules at Resurrection.”
22> Many of Donne’s sermons echo the speaker’s
concern with whole-body resurrection, especially if death has dispersed the
body’s parts. But in sermons, Donne brings these concerns out of the imaginary,
existing only in language, into the real. In a sermon preached at Lincoln’s
Inn, Easter Term (1620), he dramatizes the postmortem reunion of body parts and
of body and soul.[18]
“Shall I imagine a
difficulty in my body, because I have lost an Arme in the East, and a leg in
the West? because I have left some bloud in the North, and some bones in the
South? Doe but remember, with what ease you have sate in the chaire, casting an
account, and made a shilling on one hand, a pound on the other, or five
shillings below, ten above, because all these lay easily within your reach.
Consider how much lesse, all this earth is to him, that sits in heaven, and
spans all this world, and reunites in an instant armes, and legs, bloud, and
bones, in what corners so ever they be scattered….I, I the same body, and the
same soul, shall be recompact again, and be identically, numerically,
individually the same man. The same integrity of body, and soul, and the same
integrity in the Organs of my body, and in the faculties of my soul too; I
shall be all there, my body, and my soul, and all my body, and all my soul.”[19]
23> As sure and comforting as this may sound, the
promise of whole-body resurrection, that the body will be “recompact again,”
raises questions about the ontological state of the resurrected body. What
Donne’s sermon must leave unanswered is what constitutes the “identically,
numerically, individually” “same man.” Although such questions recur in his
poetry and sermons, Donne promises his listeners in this sermon and others that
God will make each person materially himself.[20]
Such assurances anticipate ontological conditions to which Donne can only give
shape through language.
24> Donne’s numerous references to dispersal and
recovery testify to the human concern with both the “individual” as a unique instance
of body/soul union and the mysteries of death. In a sermon preached on 19
November 1627 at the Earl of Bridgewater’s house in London on the occasion of
his daughter’s marriage, Donne imagines numerous manifestations of
dismemberment that could frustrate one’s resurrection:
“Where be all the splinters
of that Bone, which a shot hath shivered and scattered in the Ayre? Where be
all the Atoms of that flesh, which a Corrasive
hath eat away, or a Consumption hath
breath’d, and exhal’d away from our arms, and other Limbs? In what wrinkle, in
what furrow, in what bowel of the earth, ly all the graines of the ashes of a
body burnt a thousand years since? In what corner, in what ventricle of the
sea, lies all the jelly of a Body drowned in the generall flood? What cohærence, what sympathy, what dependence
maintaines any relation, any correspondence, between that arm that was lost in
Europe, and that legge that was lost in Afrique or Asia, scores of yeers
between? One humour of our dead body produces worms, and those worms suck and
exhaust all other humour, and then all dies, and all dries, and molders into
dust, and that dust is blowen into the River, and that puddled water tumbled
into the sea, and that ebs and flows in infinite revolutions.”[21]
25> Whether a body is “shivered and scattered,”
“eat away,” “burnt,” “drowned,” “blown into the river, [then] tumbled into the
sea,” the end result is the same: the seemingly infinite dispersal of body
parts.
26> To a human, preacher or parishioner, the task
of retrieving those scattered parts would certainly seem daunting, if not
impossible. And, if by some remote chance, a complete body could be recreated,
how could the re-creator be sure that each part belonged to that body? Humans
cannot achieve the promise of personal restoration, but pied-piper-like, God
“whispers, hisses, and beckons” the scattered body to reassemble:
“[…] and still, still God
knows in what Cabinet every seed-Pearle lies, in what part of the
world every graine of every mans dust lies; and…he whispers, he hisses, he
beckons for the bodies of his Saints, and in the twinckling of an eye, that
body that was scattered over all the elements, is sate down at the right hand
of God, in a glorious resurrection.”[22]
27> More precisely, God “whispers, he hisses, [and] he beckons for the bodies of his Saints.” Yet, Donne concludes with just one individual body: “that body that was scattered over all the
elements, is sate down at the right hand of God, in a glorious resurrection.”[23]
Beckoning bodies produces one body; however, the threat of becoming lost in the
anonymous generalities of martyred bodies lingers. In the same sermon, Donne
offers an answer to the question of the “identical” resurrected body by
insisting that “God raises me a body, such as it should have been, if these
infirmities had not interven’d and deformed it.”[24]
“Such as it should have been,” not as
it necessarily was. This proclamation is only momentarily comforting, however,
because it does not suggest on whose terms the “should have” rests. Is the
individual in control of his or her own ideal iconic production? Because
“should have” is a verb tense of the imagination and a mode of the conditional
verging on the imperative, the resurrected body is the rhetorically imaginative
work of the individual. The agency of making (or re-making) the body becomes a
shared project between God, who “raises [the] body” after death, and the
individual who rhetorically creates the body “such as it should have been.”
Donne’s self-blazons appropriate the creative function of resurrection in order
to evoke preservation of the self in a culture that has the potential to debase
the self.
28> Such concerns with self-preservation surface
not only in Donne’s sermons but also in his lyric poetry. Lyric allows Donne to
explore the space of the blazoned woman, occasionally to share that space with
her and more often to experiment with the blazon as a vehicle of relic
production. For example, Donne’s self-blazons work to proliferate his own
iconic production both pre- and post-mortem. This is also true of his blazons
of others. Like the speaker in “Loves Exchange,” who invites Love to “kill and
dissect” him in an attempt to create relics of his vivisected body, the bride’s
“embowel[ling]” in “Epithalamion made at Lincolnes Inne” paradoxically
preserves her. The poem’s final stanza represents a moment of disembowelling
that seems more fitting for an execution than for a wedding night and describes
the bride as a lamb going to slaughter on what the previous stanza had called
“love’s alter”:
“Even like a faithfull man
content,
That this life for a better
should be spent;
So, shee a mothers rich stile doth preferre,
And at the Bridegroomes
wish’d approach doth lye,
Like an
appointed lambe, when tenderly
The priest comes on his knees t’embowell her;
Now sleep or watch with more joy;
and O light
Of heaven, to morrow rise
thou hot, and early;
This Sun will love so dearely
Her rest, that long, long we shall want her sight;
Wonders are wrought, for shee
which had no maime,
To night puts on perfection, and a womans name.”
(85-96; italics in the original)
29> The violent image of marital sex evokes the
blood that results from the breaking of the virgin’s hymen; however, the result
is couched in terms of neither pleasure nor conception but the apparent loss of
her bodily integrity. The bride is figured as an obedient servant who knows her
role; she is likened to “an appointed lambe,” who is greeted “tenderly” by the
priest who also performs his appointed function. The oxymoronic language of
tender disembowellment is further complicated by the bride’s intact body on the
following morning; the new bride awakens with “no maime,” so that her body has
been cleansed and made the same as was her virginal body. [25]
But “no maime” may be a pun on the French “non même,” or “not the same,” which suggests
that she was not the same in the morning. The line invites both contradictory
readings, that she was and was not the same. As in the Protestant figuration of
married chastity, the line suggests that the bride remains chaste—the same—even
after her wedding night, although she is not the same if she is no longer a
virgin. But the oxymoron that maiming is perfection is also a narrative
borrowed from martyrology. The priest’s “embowelling” of the lamb/bride
suggests an embalming, which would result in an iconic moment of cleansing:
embalming involves a cleansing of the body at the moment of death, or in this
case at the moment of the loss of virginity. [26]
Though the bride has been gutted, an iconography has been created of the moment
of loss. If the bride has been transformed into a mimesis of martyrdom, then
the imagery of the wedding night, along with its ritualism and voyeurism,
martyrizes sexuality.
30> The moment at which the priest approaches the
bride “t’embowell her” marks a moment of bodily crisis—what appears to deny the
bride corporeal integrity ushers in an iconic moment which leaves the bride
with “no maime.” This is analogous to what happens to the blazoned body.
Blazons destroy the whole body, yet they create and house active relics that
can transform their viewer. As Stephen Greenblatt has observed, “the act of
tearing down is the act of fashioning.”[27]
Inherent in poetic blazon is just such a paradox: it is only through the
violent act of itemizing the female body that the blazon and active relics can
be created. Donne dramatizes this paradox repeatedly in his verse. In his
discussion of the “erotics of salvation” of Donne’s Holy Sonnet, “Batter my
heart,” Richard Rambuss observes that the intact subject rides the fence
between the desire to maintain bodily integrity and a “matching desire for the
self’s utter abasement, even dissolution.”[28]
If the male speaker of “Batter my heart” asserts his own subjectivity and will
over the episode of sacred ravishment, the bride of the “Epithalamion made at
Lincolnes Inne” is denied access to her voice that could utter such imperatives
as “o’erthrow mee, ’and bend / Your force, to breake, blowe, burn, and make me
new” (“Batter my heart,” 3-4). Although the epithalamion does not actively
dramatize the bride’s voice, it appropriates her desires and seeks to function
as an amenuensis for her silence. At the poem’s blazonic moment, the bride can
neither request nor refuse her “disembowelling,” and her silence shrouds her
agency. She accedes to the sacrifice because she “preferres” a “mothers rich
stile,” to which she can have access only if she undergoes the wedding night’s
ritual (87). It is “the Bridegroomes wish’d approach” that initiates the scene
of consummation/martyrdom; however, the line’s syntax obscures the active agent
who “wishes” for the approach (88). The bridegroom may wish for the ritual;
however, the bride herself may also wish for the bridegroom’s approach. Donne’s
penchant for “deliberate misinterpretation” as Annabel Patterson puts it,
obscures the desiring agent. [29]
31> The language of this wedding song’s last stanza
is punctuated with images of sight: after the priest comes “t’embowell” her,
the speaker instructs an unnamed audience, which is perhaps the bride, perhaps
the watchful community, to “sleep or watch with more joy” (91). After the bride
falls asleep, the sun will covet her sleep so long that “we”—presumably
speaker, community, and reader—“shall want her sight” (94). Just as the poem
embraces the possibility that the bride wishes for the bridegroom’s approach,
the agent who “wants her sight” is clouded. “We” want the sight of her, but
“we” also want her active sight; “we” want her to look at “us.” This paradox is
echoed in The Second Anniversary: Of the
Progres of the Soule. As the speaker considers Elizabeth Drury’s death, he
suggests a causal relationship between sight and understanding:
“Shee, of whose soule, if we may say, t’was Gold,
Her body was th’Electrum, and did hold
Many degrees of that; we understood
Her by her
sight, her pure and eloquent blood
Spoke in her cheekes, and so distinckly wrought,
That one might almost say, her bodie thought,
Shee, shee, thus richly, ’and largely hous’d, is gone:
And chides us slow-pac’d snailes, who crawle upon
Our prisons prison, earth, nor thinkes us well
Longer, then whil’st we beare our brittle shell.”
(241-50,
emphasis added)
32> Here, “we” “understood her” either by looking
at her (by the sight of her) or perhaps by her looking at “us” (by her sight).
Her metamorphosis in death sanctifies her; the speaker ultimately likens her to
a saint to whom true devotion is due (511-18), and he acknowledges the
transformative capabilities of her dead body. That she and the “Epithalamion”
bride-as-relic are active forces is of principal import for Donne’s
construction of poetic relics. Rather than create icons that are only acted
upon, Donne constructs relics that actively interact with bridegroom and
reader. Moreover, by fashioning animated female relics, Donne opens a space for
his own self-creation as relic. Both bride and poet seeking favor (from a
patron or from God) are simultaneously active and receptive. They are
culturally similar, as both are subject to self-effacement; the relic, however,
functions as a vehicle for self-preservation in just such hostile cultural
environs.
33> A precondition for a relic’s lively force is an
audience. The poet’s afterlife depends on his readers, and the speaker of the
“Epithalamion” extends the voyeurism of the wedding ceremony into the bedroom,
which, albeit troubling, facilitates the bride’s being such a relic. Martyrdom’s
effectiveness is dependent upon its capacity to elicit both horror and glory
from an audience: the horror of torture leads to eternal glory. In the case of
martyrdom, glory is a cultural production; it is disseminated through stories
and relics that miracle- or redemption-seekers can experience first-hand. The
bride’s relics in the “Epithalamion” are contained in the reliquary that is the
poem, and the reliquary is flexible enough so that “we” can see her and she can
see “us.” Crowded though the bedroom is, the bride is the visual center. A priest
performs both the wedding and the “disembowellment”; the bride acts according
to the “Bridegroomes wish’d approach,” but from that point on, the bridegroom
is curiously absent from the scene. He returns only among the unnamed “we” who
“want her sight” as the sun steals her from “them” in sleep. The bedroom seems
as populated as was the wedding. As Richard Halpern puts it in his discussion
of the complicated matrix of the intersection of public and private spaces in
Donne’s lyric, “his erotic poems define a private space set off from the social
world. Yet his metaphors often reintroduce the very world he claims to want to
exclude.”[30] The
poem invites the world into the domestic space that one might expect to be
reserved only for bride and groom.
34> In the “Epithalamion” bedroom, Donne’s use of
metaphor functions precisely the way that Halpern explains the Donnean conceit,
as “a structure of absolute difference or separation generated paradoxically
through the medium of resemblance.”[31]
Moreover, Halpern’s argument provides a useful lens through which to view the
poem’s use of such disparate metaphors for bride and groom, not to mention for
the moment of consummation itself. The metaphor constructs the bride as a lamb
willingly going to the slaughter, and although the poem avoids naming the groom
as priest, the metaphor suggests such a linkage. It thus conflates and
separates public and private spaces and their rituals. Because it is a priest
who performs the slaughter, rather than a butcher, for example, the ritualistic
moment of the lamb’s death/bride’s loss of virginity produces an iconic moment
of martyrdom that destabilizes the prototypical blazonic triangle and invites
the bride to participate in the audience’s desire to see her. In fact, she
turns this voyeuristic desire on its head, co-opting it for herself, so that
she shares their desire to see. Moreover, the reader is implicated in this
event of martyrdom as the poem moves from the crowded privacy of the bedroom to
a public arena where “we” wait to welcome the bride from her sleep. In this
case, loss of bodily integrity, through both “tender disembowellment” and
blazonic description, does not deplete the bride, leaving her unable to act.
Instead, the martyred bride makes choices and expresses desire. In the poetic
reliquary, she is preserved for all to see, yet she sees “all” in return. Her
relics can be seen (and can see) through the openings of the poem. Moreover,
because of the synechdochal, symbiotic relationship between relic and
reliquary, the reliquary shares her dynamic powers. Like the reliquary of the
martyred body, the aesthetic image is equivalent to the physical relic;
reading, then, preserves both poet and reader.
35> But like the martyred saint, the bride must
undergo “embowell[ment]”; violence necessarily precedes sanctity. In the poem’s
first stanza, the speaker says to her, “Leave, leave, faire Bride, your
solitary bed, / No more shall you returne to it alone, / It nourseth sadnesse,
and your bodies print, / Like to a grave, the yielding downe doth dint” (2-5).
Before the ritual spectacle of her wedding night, her bed is “solitary,” “like
a grave,” and thus threatens to hide her from sight—or from seeing. Yet the
rituals involved not only in the wedding night but also in their retelling and
their re-reading are what continually create relic and reliquary. As the
penultimate stanza suggests, “Till now thou wast but able / To be what now thou
art; then that by thee / No more be said, I
may bee, but, I am” (81-83, italics in the original). Ontologically transformed
from a state of future possibility to present reality, the bride is figured as
forever present, forever being seen and seeing through the spaces of the poetic
reliquary.
36> Odd as the “Epithalamion’s” wedding night may
seem to a modern reader, Allen Ramsey observes that George Puttenham’s
sixteenth-century definition of epithalamion is infused with violence that
dovetails with salvation. Puttenham’s version of the English wedding night
dramatizes the groom as a thief who “rob[s] his spouse of her maidenhead and save[s] her life”; and, “the bride
so lustely to satisfie her husbandes love and scape with so litle daunger of her person.”[32]
Here, the groom is a thief, not a priest as in Donne’s “Epithalamion.” However,
Puttenham’s curious suggestion that the husband’s theft of his wife’s virginity
might “save her life” finds a modified echo in Donne’s epithalamion, in which
the bride accedes to the wedding night ritual because it is a necessary hurdle
to the “rich stile [she] doth preferre” (87). In Puttenham’s rhetorical
treatise, the bride’s reward is far less rewarding than it is for Donne’s
bride. Performing the perfunctory wedding night ritual causes each bride only a
“litle daunger of her person,” but
the “Epithalamion” bride is rewarded with agency: her martyrdom translates into
her iconic production as a compendium of active relics that can be seen (and
can see) through the openings of the poem.
37> Puttenham’s treatise and Donne’s poem converge
on two counts: first, the wedding night’s potential for the bride’s danger and
for her salvation, and second, that an audience attends the wedding’s rituals.
Ramsey observes that the English epithalamic tradition was divided into three
parts, and each involves an audience for the new bride and groom. First, there
were “‘songs [that] were very loude and shrill’ (41) to drown the noise made by
the newlyweds”; second, “when the musicians arrived at the chamber door,
because ‘the ballade was to refresh the faint and weried bodies and spirits,’
since ‘the first embracementes never bred barnes…but onley made passage for
children’ (42)”; and third, “when ‘it was faire broad day’ (42); the bride
emerges ‘no more as a virgine, but as a wife’ (42).”[33]
In part one, musicians must play loudly enough so that people cannot hear the
newlyweds. The musicians themselves are the audience in part two. And, in part
three, there must be an audience to assess the bride’s change from virgin to
wife. For the “Epithalamion” bride, the lack of privacy “save[s] her life,”
because she has an audience with whom to interact.
38> Donne’s lyric metaphors repeatedly pair the
seemingly disparate categories of love and martyrdom in such a way as to create
for them a shared psychic landscape. By doing so, he makes possible the
salvation of those marginalized by their cultural environs. Poet and bride
share the prospect of surviving corporeal threat by positioning themselves as
active relics. The speaker of “The Funerall” names himself “Loves martyr,” (19)
and, as suggested at the beginning of this essay, the speaker of “The Relique”
looks forward to the moment at which someone will exhume his and his lover’s
bodies from the grave. After the exhumation, the poetic archaeologist will
“[…] bring
Us, to the Bishop, and the King,
To make us Reliques; then
Thou shalt be’a Mary Magdalen, and I
A something
else thereby;
All women shall adore us, and some men.” (14-19)
39> The poem associates the speaker’s lover with “a
Mary Magdalen,” with a prototype, in other words. The speaker, too, will be “a
something else thereby,” another prototype. [34] Because
Mary Magdalen is most often paired with Christ, the poem’s subtle metaphoric
non-namings invite the association of the “I” of the poem with Christ, the
model of religious martyrdom. However, because Mary Magdalen is also often
characterized as a prostitute, the speaker’s construction of himself as “a
something else” also insinuates that he is a common John, so to speak. He
invites the reader to associate him with the resurrected Christ, but also needs
to be associated with the mortal Christ, because Christ’s body defies the grave.
In order that bodies may be cherished as relics, there must be bodies to
cherish. For love to translate into martyrdom in “The Relique,” the exhumed
bodies must be officially sanctioned and viewed by lay people. Relics take
shape when body parts are viewed by the living. Like the bride in the
“Epithalamion made at Lincolnes Inne,” the speaker of “The Relique” wants
people to look at him and his lover after they are dead. Unlike the bride, the speaker
of “The Relique” explicitly verbalizes his desires, insisting that he wants the
lovers’ physical remains to be sanctified as relics. Because the poem names “the
Bishop, and the King” as the adjudicators of proper relics, Donne’s metaphor
constructs the lovers as legally sanctioned relics for public view. In fact,
the poem itself raises the question of the legality of relics. The exhumed
bodies need such official sanctification only “if this fall in a time, or land,
/ Where mis-devotion doth command” (12-13). If the exhumation takes place in a
time or a place that is plagued by “mis-devotion,” then the relics must be
publicly legitimated. Typically, relics are the remains of a martyr or saint
that are powerful enough to perform miracles on their devotees. Relic
construction in “The Relique” is different, since the bodies were “harmelesse
lovers,” not martyrs or saints, thereby expanding relic production to include
lovers. Love and martyrdom converge to produce secular saints of marginally
auspicious figures. Yet, in this case, those who wield political power must
sanctify the lovers’ bodies. Elsewhere, the blazon allows Donne to confer such
status himself.
40> What the relic tradition offers for Donne is the
possibility not only of disenfranchised people becoming the direct distributors
of divine grace but also of lyric poetry functioning as a substitution for lost
relics. In the sermons and sacred poetry, Donne explores the material
conditions of death, ultimately assuring his audiences that God will restore
bodily wholeness posthumously. Even when he prefaces such comforts with violent
images, anxieties over corporeal disintegration give way to faith in God’s
ability to reconstruct individual, particular integrity. The Songs and Sonnets, too, consider the effects
of violence, expressed through the blazon, on the body, often drawing on images
of both martyrdom and voyeurism. In this way, when blazonic partition creates
not static icons but active relics, rhetorical flourish replaces the material
body. Faced with the imaginative challenge of the ravishing effects of death
and decay, viewers may find comforting spaces in which to find ontological
truths and articles of faith.
_____
Notes:
I wish to thank
Katherine Eggert, Kimberly Johnson, Alison Shell, Deborah Uman, and Mark
Walters, who have read drafts of this paper and provided invaluable insights
and guidance.
[1] All references to Donne’s poetry are taken from The Complete Poetry of John Donne, ed.
John T. Shawcross (New York: New York UP, 1968). Among inventories of parish
churches in pre-Reformation England, women’s hair was listed as a relic. See,
for example, Eamon Duffy, The Stripping
of the Altars. Traditional Religion in England c.1400-c.1580 (New Haven:
Yale UP, 1992), 164.
[2] Caroline Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200-1336 (New
York: Columbia UP, 1995), 211-12.
[3]Nancy Vickers, “’The blazon of sweet beauty’s best,’”
in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory,
ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (New York: Methuen, 1985).
[4] Catherine Bates, Masculinity,
Gender, and Identity in the English Renaissance Lyric (Cambridge: Cambridge
UP, 2007), 90, 96.
[7] Ibid, 209. Here Bynum quotes Ellert Dahl, “Heavenly
Images: The Statue of St. Foy of Conques and the Signification of the Medieval
Cult-Image in the West,” Acta ad
archaeologiam et Artium historiam pertinentia 8 (Rome 1979): 175-92, esp.
186.
[8] Bynum, 211-12, emphasis added.
[9] John Phillips, The
Reformation of Images: Destruction of Art in England, 1535, 1660 (Berkeley:
U of California P, 1973), 24-25.
[10] Katherine Eggert, Showing
Like a Queen. Female Authority and Literary Experiment in Spenser, Shakespeare,
and Milton (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2000), 155.
[12] Arthur Marotti, Religious
Ideology and Cultural Fantasy. Catholic and Anti-Catholic Discourses in Early
Modern England (Notre Dame, IN: U of Notre Dame P, 2005), 27.
[13] The Oxford
English Dictionary defines “spermatic” as: “containing, conveying, or
producing sperm or seed; seminiferous”; and as “full of, abounding in, sperm;
generative, productive.” For a discussion of the androgynous nature of the
mistress, see Heather Dubrow, Echoes of
Desire. English Petrarchism and Its Counterdiscourses (Ithaca: Cornell UP,
1995), 237-44.
[14] Oxford English
Dictionary 1a, 1.
[15] For a discussion of the anatomy theaters, see
Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned.
Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (London: Routledge,
1995).
[18] Donne’s seventeenth-century sermons have earlier
precedents. Bynum explains that twelfth-century theologians believed that “the
resurrection body was the body of the
saint” (Bynum, The Resurrection of the
Body, 200).
[19] John Donne, The
Sermons of John Donne, vol. III, ed. George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson
(Berkeley: U of California P, 1957), 109-10.
[20] For a discussion of Donne’s views on resurrection,
see Ramie Targoff, John Donne Body and
Soul (Chicago: The U of Chicago P, 2008).
[21] John Donne, The
Sermons of John Donne, vol. VIII, ed. Evelyn M. Simpson and George R.
Potter (Berkeley: U of California P, 1956), 98.
[25] Donne’s conflation of the intact yet wounded female
body may be an imitation of Edmund Spenser’s description of Amoret’s body in
Book 3 of The Faerie Queene.
Britomart rushes into Busirane’s castle and saves Amoret from him, although not
before the enchanter has bound her and cut open her heart so that he could use
her blood to write his “straunge characters of his art.” Both Spenser and Donne
employ the paradox of the “perfect hole” to describe female characters who have
endured violent penetration and yet have been restored to their prior, wholly
integral condition. Amoret’s wound “was closed vp, as it had not bene bor’d,”
and the new bride of Donne’s poem, through a “wonder” awoke from the night with
“no maim.” Edmund Spenser, The Faerie
Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton (London: Longman, 1977), III.xii.31, 38.
[26] In William Shakespeare’s 1 Henry IV, both Prince Hal and Falstaff use the word “embowelled.”
A. R. Humphreys, editor of the Arden edition, glosses the word “embowelled” as
“disembowelled for embalming, though with an equivoque on the ‘assay’ or
ceremony of disembowelling the deer” (William Shakespeare, 1 Henry IV, ed. A. R. Humphreys [London: Routledge, 1989], 160 fn
108). “Embowelled” both connotes the emptying out of the body in order to
prepare for embalming the body, or filling the body up, after death, and the
emptying out of the body to prepare it for dismemberment.
[27] Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning. From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: The
U of Chicago P, 1980), 188.
[28] Richard Rambuss, Closet
Devotions (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1998), 54, 59-60.
[29] Annabel Patterson, ‘Quod oportet versus quod convenit: John
Donne, Kingsman?’ in Critical Essays
on John Donne, ed. Arthur F. Marotti (New York: G.K. Hall and Co., 1994),
159.
[30] Richard Halpern, “The Lyric in the Field of
Information: Autopoiesis and History in Donne’s Songs and Sonnets,” in Critical
Essays on John Donne, ed. Arthur F. Marotti (New York: G.K. Hall & Co.,
1994), 63.
[32] Allen Ramsey, “Donne’s ‘Epithalamion made at
Lincolnes Inne’: The Religious and Literary Context” in John Donne’s Religious Imagination. Essays in Honor of John T.
Shawcross, ed. Raymond-Jean Frontain and Frances M. Malpezzi (Conway,
Ariz.: UCA Press, 1995), 42, emphasis added to Puttenham by Ramsey.
[34] In John Donne
and the Rhetorics of Renaissance Discourse, James S. Baumlin also suggests
that the poet “claim[s] to become ‘a something else’—that is, a resurrected
Christ to the lady’s Mary Magdalen” (Columbia, MO: U of Missouri P, 1991), 173.
_____
Sara Morrison
is Associate Professor of English at William Jewell College, Liberty, MO. She
is co-editor of Staging the Blazon in Early Modern English Theater (Ashgate
2013); her current work continues her interest in the blazon and focuses also
on constructions of time in early modern drama.
_____
Studies
in Renaissance / Early Modern
Literature and Culture,
Volume Ten (2017):
Artefacts
_____
