HOW ARE EYES LIKE BUTTONS?

What we see in “Air and Angels,” as in so many of the songs and sonnets, is the negotiation in Donne between two forms of jouissance, phallic and feminine. The jouissance of mystics, Lacan says, is feminine: turned toward infinity and the inexpressible. Donne the mystic needs, so the man in him urges, the balance and ballast of phallic jouissance as well, the jouissance linked with the body and with time (the penis rises and falls). The two Donnes often meet together and reason within the precincts of the poem. The negotiations require all his insight, cleverness, and rhetoric. Donne's speakers want a good lay but with nothing less than a brightness that condenses from the metaphysical air.

I've taken the metaphor of “negotiation,” of course, from “The Ecstasy.” Here the feminine or mystic Donne is in beautiful ascendance. The description of the ecstasy of the mingling of two souls into an abler one is sustained with extraordinary brilliance, an amazing mingling in itself of analytical description and exquisite evocation of feeling. But to this the phallic boy, if remaining super cool, adds his honeyed quota of argument and persuasion. He's even more exhibitionist than usual, indulging, as he does, the fancy that some passer-by may hear his “dialogue of one”—speech, after all, is the speaker's present potency—and “mark” (see) their ecstasy and their lovemaking, should he succeed in persuading the lady to enter into it. He might almost be addressing the imaginary listener, man to man. But in fact his immediate forensic focus remains the lady.

The poem is not least interesting for the tricky ambiguity of its many comparisons, which moved T. S. Eliot to pick quarrels with them. The figures are largely in the hands of the phallic youth, even as the mystic discourses loftily. They complicate the surface argument. Caught as they

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are in a teacherish poem, they seem uncertain of their right to play. Yet of course they do. Figures always manage to get in some play.

Donne first delineates and celebrates a mutual gaze that “sees” in the other the unutterable ideal. Subject and object become as elevated as they are confused, lost in an amatory no-space and no-time. But already at the beginning of the poem, a pagan, sensual strain introduces a note of unsatisfied physicality.

The two lovers are seated on a flowery bank, as by a riverside. “Our hands were firmly cemented,” says the speaker,

	With a fast balm, which thence did spring,
	Our eye-beams twisted, and did thread
	Our eyes, upon one double string;
	So to' intergraft our hands, as yet
	Was all the means to make us one,
	And pictures in our eyes to get
	Was all our propagation.

Impatience can be detected in the expression “as yet” (“as yet/Was all the means”) and even in the begrudging use of all (“all the means”), as in “that's all there was.” But the metaphors, too, are giveaways. John Carey traces “cemented” to Paracelsus and the alchemical process by which solids penetrate one another at high temperatures. But the lack of penetration is really the speaker's complaint: this “cement” is a tendentious hyperbole for plain sweat, and “balm,” like “cement,” tells of a frustrated desire for a glued-together sweetness along the whole length of the body. (“As souls unbodied, bodies unclothed must be, / To taste whole joys,” Donne writes in “To His Mistress Going to Bed.”) Eliot says of the next quatrain that “the blemish…is first, that the figure of the hands as cemented is not left to itself, but is rubbed over by the more complicated image of grafting,” but this is perhaps to miss the point: the violent sexual “cut” of an engrafting is precisely what hasn't been attained “as yet.”^[15] The second figure seeks to surpass, if not to rub out, the first. The situation is this: Donne is overlaying on the description of a spiritual ecstasy a grumble about its exclusion, as yet, of a sensational ecstasy.

As for the braided eye-beams, so physically uncomfortable an image to imagine the eyes entering into, they anticipate the caught-together, painful pleasure of sexual intercourse. The eye, said a theory of the time, puts out beams for contact. But to be strung together in this optical-material

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fashion, with eye-buttons that don't connect up directly with a hole in the beloved, is to be strung along, to be martyred for love. “The threading of the eyes like buttons on a double thread,” Eliot elaborates, “not only fails to render the sense of losing oneself in an ecstasy of gazing into the eyes of a loved person, it actually aggravates the difficulty of finding out what it is all about.” But Donne's unsightly image (deliberately so, no doubt, given that Donne was all smoothness when he chose to be) betrays the speaker's unease with being synecdoched into a gaze; it is psychologically revelatory. The amatory trance keeps the libido on a tight (a too tight?) rein. The politics of Donne's metaphor is sexual and disgruntled. There's something textbookish about Donne's presentation of the ecstasy—as theory, illustration, ideal—and the body “naturally” lobbies against it. Its protest, heard in the figures, is instructive in a different way.

The other thematically sensitive comparison comes in a later stanza, where the subject is still the “new,” the “abler” soul mixed from the already “mixed souls” of the two lovers. But the incomplete articulation of the comparison (an unconscious maneuver?) leaves it transmissible to the body as well:

	A single violet transplant,
	The strength, the colour, and the size,
	(All which before was poor, and scant,)
	Redoubles still, and multiplies.

	When love, with one another so
	Interinanimates two souls,
	That abler soul, which thence doth flow,
	Defects of loneliness controls.

Here, then, is the quietest of replantings of the literal, frankly pagan violet in stanza one:

	Where, like a pillow on a bed,
	A pregnant bank swelled up, to rest
	The violet's reclining head,
	Sat we two, one another's best.

The transfer is two-edged: on the one hand, the violet is uprooted and turned into a figure in the service of elucidating a soul-passion; on the other, this only shows that the flower—which is, after all, the sexual organ of the plant—is still on the speaker's mind, despite the sway of his soultrance.

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The pagan setting of the poem would sooner be taken up by the soul than altogether forgotten. No, it will not be forgotten.

In this poem Donne's speaker would both be above nature and sitting on its bank. Its pregnant bank. Eliot, again, may have missed the point. He called the opening imagery one of the most hideous mixed figures of speech in the language. To compare a

bank to a pillow (it is surely superfluous to add “on a bed” since a pillow may be presumed to have much the same shape wherever it be disposed) does neither dignify nor elucidate…. Having already learned that the bank was shaped like a pillow, we do not require to be told that it was pregnant, unless an earthquake was preparing, which was not the case.

“May be presumed,” “does neither dignify nor elucidate,” “we do not require to be told”—stuffy phrases. What we are “required” to see is really that the pillow is the local, topping mound on an already swollen bank; that however sexy it may look in itself, a pillow is sexier still on a bed; and that such a swelling may speak of the great order of organic fertility. “Pillow… bed,” “pregnant bank”—the writing is alliteratively kissy with the sexuality Eliot's temperament wished to deny.

It is even dangerously seductive, what with its image-coils and licks of the syllabic tongue (for instance, the long i in “Reclining” that pulls the i in “violet” toward its deep-throat hum). This poet could talk the clothes off of almost anyone—never mind that he said he sang “not, Siren-like, to tempt” but was “harsh.” Here nature's line is—naturally—a swell, a curve, a wave or rise and fall. By contrast, the ecstasy is a horizontal negotiation in mid-air (“Our souls, /… hung 'twixt her, and me”; “Our eye-beams…didthread/Our eyes”), even as the lovers' bodies lie like effigies on a tomb, in a flat-line death pose:

	And whilst our souls negotiate there,
	We like sepulchral statues lay;
	All day, the same our postures were,
	And we said nothing, all the day.

To dwell for a moment on these lines: what do the souls, which are later said to mean and speak the same and to be one “abler soul,” have to negotiate? It must be the unstated topic of what their union stands to gain or lose by including the sexual body. (Latent here, perhaps, is the period clicheé of the woman who has to be talked out of her regard for

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virtue.) Meanwhile the writing mutters against the delay. I find the last two syllables of “sepulchral” hard to enunciate. Pul- doesn't pull itself into -chral. The sound dies before chral all but crawls out of the hiatus. Almost the word doesn't want to be got through (any more than one wants to enter the real thing). The l s encourage a pronunciation that half buries the vowel. The internal rhyme, centered in the awkward ul sound, fails of harmony. The fuller sound of the following all brings us back, so to speak, into the daylight. But the inverted word order in “All day, the same our postures were” comments on the unnaturalness of this still-postured state.

Then, too, ambivalence reigns in the difference between “All day” and “all the day.” The latter, shaking off the spondaic drone of “All day,” breathing more freely in its article, and concluding a natural word order, is a winning resolution to the uneasiness of an emptied chronos conveyed by “All day.”

There's no such alienation from natural time, from swells, circles, and arcs, in stanza one, where nature seems to say, “Lovers, do you see? Let the violet be your example. Go to bed in my immediate rhythms.” The syntax folds, tucks, includes. It makes a pillowing parenthetical space for “like a pillow on a bed,” then climaxes the bank's swelling with a caesura (“swelled up, to rest”), a moment-after comma, cut-breathed like the “swel'd” of the original edition. Then “Sat,” coming as it does in an emphatic position, makes to plant and green the lovers on the bank. Here the inverted word order (“Sat we two”) produces an all but erotic jolt.

The implications of the violet's early placement are finally developed when the speaker argues for the body's erotic and orgasmic inclusion in the soul's union:

	But O alas, so long, so far
	Our bodies why do we forbear?
	They are ours, though they are not we, we are
	The intelligences, they the sphere.

	We owe them thanks, because they thus,
	Did us, to us, at first convey,
	Yielded their forces, sense, to us,
	Nor are dross to us, but allay.

His tone is patronizing—“We owe them thanks”!—but at least and at last he makes a pitch. Does he acknowledge, though, the temporal problem

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of the body? He doesn't explain how the body's inevitable experience of anticlimax can keep from dragging the ecstasy back into time. Not that he posits an unending ecstasy. But midway through the poem he changes from past to present tense, as if to defend the ecstasy from passing.

Physical love is not altogether acknowledged as the violet that dies. Further, it is reduced, even as it is elevated, to serving as a textbook illustration of a love generous enough to include the body. Enter a stranger to the margins of the scene, so as to give the occasion the significance of an instruction. But if “one such as we,” does he really need to read in the “book” of their sexual intercourse that the “body” is Love's book, disclosing “Love's mysteries”? Is voyeurism a necessary complement to lovemaking, a securing of its lessons? Rather, the sexual act, in being observed and read as a teaching, is preserved from its mere physical transiency, its character of ending in itself, like the violets that blow.

In all, though utterly remarkable, “The Ecstasy” isn't Donne at his sovereign best. Didacticism is never sovereign. The poem doesn't detach itself from a spiritual accounting of cost.