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4. Ben Jonson and the Loathéd Word

LINDA GREGERSON

“THE PROFIT OF GRAMMAR,” wrote Ben Jonson in his preface to The English Grammar, “is great to Strangers, who are to live in communion, and commerce with us; and, it is honourable to our selves. For, by it we communicate all our labours, studies, profits, without an Interpreter.”^[1] Jonson's dream of a language impervious to interpretation was at the heart of a lifelong and notorious quarrel with the stage.^[2] With the exception, in our own era, of Samuel Beckett,^[3] one can scarcely think of a playwright of comparable stature so driven by animus toward the very essence—the collaborative essence—of his craft. What I wish to argue in the present essay is that Jonson's quarrel, while trenchantly enacted in the playhouse and repeatedly rendered in the idioms of the stage, extended well beyond the theater to language itself. In the Jonsonian lyric as in the Jonsonian drama, the word is staged with profound ambivalence: it is the crown of labor and the servant of politics, an accessory to pleasure and an instrument of profit, a hedge against transience, a symptom of transience, the ground of self-sufficiency, the currency of subjection. Jonson's ambition was to craft a self-sufficient word, but the ambition is profoundly paradoxical, as much a death wish as a will to omnipotence. Governed by this paradox, the Jonsonian lyric is at once virtuosic and strangely, savagely vacated.

The seventeenth-century poems we read most easily today tend to be those in which are muted the dynamics of topicality, the circuits of patronage,

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title, estate, political faction, and literary salon that dominate the overwhelming preponderance of Jonson's lyric production. We favor the Jonson canonized by nineteenth-century anthologists:^[4] songs extracted from theatrical context, brief elegies to children, the outpourings of lovers and nymphs who populate The Underwood, “lesser Poems, of later growth,”^[5] poems we can flesh out with affective and biographical “story,” poems whose conventions have been retrofitted and adapted to so many different historical moments we can tell ourselves they are somehow less bound to history than are the other kind. That other kind, the poems published in the 1616 Folio under authorial supervision and authorial proclamation (“the ripest of my studies”), impress us for the most part as straitened and withholding, unfriendly to readers. Some of our uneven preference has to do with discontinuities in learned community and discomfort with the footnotes that copiously testify to our need for prosthetic assistance. In Epigram 18 (“To My Meere English Censurer”) Jonson criticizes his detractors as too ignorant to be capable of discernment: “To thee, my way in Epigrammes seemes new, / When both it is the old way, and the true.” For new, read dry or obscure, and retain the stinging charge of monolingualism, and we, the great majority of us, find ourselves reproached for failures of learning and attention. It is not pleasant to be chronically reproached.

So we chiefly avoid the lyric Jonson, embarrassed by our reliance on the footnotes, put off by our sense that the poems were written for a body of initiates to which we do not belong, those whose Latin and Greek are larger than our own, those who know the period players, the details of affiliation and ideological controversy, the gossip and competitive ambitions of the age. We are not wrong about the exclusionary dynamic. On the contrary, it is even more sweeping than at first we may imagine. The Epigrammes begin with a single cautionary couplet addressed “To the Reader”: “Pray thee, take care, that tak'st my booke in hand, / To reade it well: that is, to understand.”^[6] Stand under: submit. But even granting that submission, who among the general readership can with certainty claim to stand inside the circle Jonson so acidly describes? Describe: to trace the outline of, as with a compass. For the circle has no enumerable contents. Its members are distinguished not by particulars of character or faith or learning or occupation but by essence, which goes without saying. In Jonson the category of virtue cannot be broken down for analysis or inventory. For all their topicality his lyrics systematically eschew distinctive feature and distinctive event. We may arm ourselves with philological and sociohistorical detail, but no amount of filling-in unlocks these

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poems. The genuinely daunting prospect that opens up behind the footnotes is that of featureless tautology.

WITHOUT

	This morning, timely rapt with holy fire,
	I thought to forme unto my zealous Muse,
	What kinde of creature I could most desire,
	To honor, serve, and love; as Poets use.
	I meant to make her faire, and free, and wise,
	Of greatest bloud, and yet more good then great;
	I meant the day-starre should not brighter rise,
	Nor lend like influence from his lucent seat.
	I meant shee should be curteous, facile, sweet,
	Hating that solemne vice of greatnesse, pride;
	I meant each softest vertue, there should meet,
	Fit in that softer bosome to reside.
	Onely a learned, and a manly soule
	I purpos'd her; that should, with even powers,
	The rock, the spindle, and the sheeres controule
	Of destinie, and spin her owne free houres.
	Such when I meant to faine, and wish'd to see,
	My Muse bad, Bedford write, and that was shee.
	(E76, “On Lucy Countesse of Bedford”)

Even before the Muse dictates the name that signifies aristocratic bloodline and landed estate, the lady's Christian name glimmers (lucent) just below the surface of the daystar summoned to be her (inadequate) poetic approximation. Her bosom contains all virtues and exceeds them (it is softer) in quality. Fate derives its three parts (the “rock” or distaff, the spindle, the shears) and time its allegorical divisions (the “hours,” female divinities who govern the changes of season) from her soul.

Again and again in the first and “ripest” of his lyric collections, Jonson performs the trope of naming as the consummate epigrammatic gesture:

	I doe but name thee pembroke, and I find
	It is an Epigramme, on all mankind;
	Against the bad, but of, and to the good:
	Both which are ask'd, to have thee understood.
	(E102, “To William Earle of Pembroke”)

The exemplary patron is an exemplary readership of one. As inspiration and audience, sign and substance, he (elsewhere she) constitutes the poem

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from every angle. All praise, all showing forth of summary virtue is better achieved in the bare syllables of the patron's name than in the furthest reaches of poetic “feigning.” If I, writes the poet, “but say you are/A sydney… /My praise is plaine.” Indeed, to a percipient reader the name is manifest before it is spoken:

	How well, faire crowne of your faire sexe, might hee,
	That but the twi-light of your sprite did see,
	And noted for what flesh such soules were fram'd,
	Know you to be a sydney, though un-named?
	(E103, “To Mary Lady Wroth”)

Jonson's teacher, William Camden, had taught him to seek “the reason of the name” or etymological “consonancy… between the name of the thing and thing named.”^[7] One of the foremost educators and historiographers of his time, Camden was also empowered, as Clarenceux King at Arms in the College of Heralds, to grant or withhold the coat of arms to claimants in the English polity. His own power of naming, in other words, contained both philological and legal force. The brute political lesson, however—that certain names might be a force to conjure with—required no special erudition in early modern England. Nor was it an early modern innovation for poets to address their praise and petition to persons of great family. “Stand high, then, howard, high in eyes of men,”

	… design'd to be the same thou art,
	Before thou wert it, in each good mans heart.
	Which, by no lesse confirm'd, then thy kings choice,
	Proves, that is gods, which was the peoples voice.
	(E67, “To Thomas Earle of Suffolke”)

As the poet punned on the light in Lucy, so he puns on height in Howard (whose name, argues Camden in Remains Concerning Britain, means “High Warden or Guardian”).^[8] And in the pun is lodged an etymological forecast. The career conforms to the logic of the name, is fully present in the name before it is enacted in time. Promotion to high position (Lord Treasurer in the Jacobean state, for instance) merely “proves” or illustrates (as in a proof sheet) the aptitude that was inherent all along. Worth and title, royal election and popular opinion, private ambition and providential “design” are coincident. In the “Epistle to Katherine, Lady Aubigny” (F13), the poet celebrates the distillate union of “title,” “birth,” and

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“vertue,” “the beauties of the mind” and “those of fortune” in a single, consummate embodiment. This pattern, the centripetal working of character and fate, is found throughout the lyric encomia.

But what if virtue does not advertise itself in quite so redundant a manner? What if praise must be delivered to one whose origins are more of the middling sort, who has had to be promoted to title, and promoted in a year (the year of James's accession) when titles were suddenly, embarrassingly cheapened? The cheapening Jonson can only sublimely ignore. But the change in outward honors he can seal as a new, corrective paradigm: “Thou… mad'st merit know her strength, / And those that lack'd it, to suspect at length, / 'Twas not entayl'd on title.” Jonson still wants the feel of airtight homiletic, but now iambic pentameter and the closed circle of rhymed couplet must enlist the aid of chiasmus:

	That bloud not mindes, but mindes did bloud adorne:
	And to live great, was better, then great borne.
	These were thy knowing arts: which who doth now
	Vertuously practise must at least allow
	Them in, if not, from thee; or must commit
	A desperate solcisme in truth and wit.
	(E116, “To Sir William Jephson”)

The poet's wit and the impeccable truth of his verses now rely not merely upon the overdetermined connection of worth and sign but on a manipulated account of derivation: “That bloud not mindes, but mindes did bloud adorne.” The ideology is still one of stasis: virtue is still a cipher, absolute rather than relative, given rather than learned, devoid of particular content and measured by its binary opposite, by those outside the knowing circle, those who fail to acknowledge inherent virtue until it is adorned by title or who, intransigent as well as dull, adhere to desperate solecism. The Latin word soloecismus derives from the Greek Soloikos, which refers to a manner of speaking incorrectly; Soloikos derives from Soloi, an Athenian colony in Cilicia whose inhabitants spoke a dialect regarded as substandard. Solecism, like barbarian or philistine, is a slur spoken from inside the circle, a symptom (and self-constituting strategy) of sealed community.

Wielded as a paradigm by the versifying stepson of a bricklayer, the closed circle might seem an all too obvious (and self-betraying) piece of snobbery. But it also offers tactical advantages. As a paradigm for benefaction, for example, it can free the petitionary poet from an intolerable

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burden of indebtedness. For the poet's ability to mirror a worthy patron in his poem itself bespeaks a fully reciprocal worthiness. The benefit is mutual. Indeed, the poet may go so far as to reverse the usual understanding of benefaction “by making the acceptance rather than the granting of the favor the crucial act of judgment.”^[9] In poems that address the phenomenon of the gift explicitly, like the epigram “To Lucy Countesse of Bedford” (E84) or “An Epistle to Sir Edward Sacvile, now Earle of Dorset” (U13), Jonson delineates an ideal of instantaneous and prevenient succor, giving that so perfectly anticipates want as to spare the poet both overt petition and the accompanying “blush.” So prompt and proximate is the giving that the recipient needn't suffer the smallest conscious interval of being without.

“Be alwayes to thy gather'd selfe the same,” the poet counsels Sir Thomas Roe (E98). The circle of self-sufficiency may be expanded beyond the single self and still retain its essence so long as those it embraces are alike in merit. Acts are emanations of essence. Essence is impervious to fortune. All very good for the self-regard of self-identified worthies. But perpetual self-sameness does rather cramp conventional ideals of travel and learning, progressive enlargement, change by any name. When Sir Thomas's cousin William proposes to seek expanded horizons, the poet sends him off on his journey thus:

	Roe (and my joy to name) th'art now, to goe
	Countries, and climes, manners, and men to know,
	T'extract, and choose the best of all these knowne,
	And those to turne to bloud, and make thine owne:
	May windes as soft as breath of kissing friends,
	Attend thee hence; and there, may all thy ends,
	As the beginnings here, prove purely sweet,
	And perfect in a circle alwayes meet.
	So, when we, blest with thy returne, shall see
	Thy selfe, with thy first thoughts, brought home by thee,
	We each to other may this voyce enspire;
	This is that good aeneas, past through fire,
	Through seas, stormes, tempests: and imbarqu'd for hell,
	Came backe untouch'd. This man hath travail'd well.
	(E128, “To William Roe”)

The poet's epistolary bon voyage is a conspicuous non-sonnet: fourteen lines of couplets locked tight on iamb and masculine rhyme. The travel that prompts the poem is described as a kind of cannibalism: the best

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of other “climes” and peoples are to be eaten and made incorporate (“turne[d] to bloud”) by the traveler. No postcolonial critic could posit the consumerist paradigm more blatantly. But when the poet proposes a corrective wish for the traveler, it does not entail a humbler course of open-minded reciprocity. On the contrary. The “travail” he recommends, a punning composite of labor and geographic distance, is one that shall leave the traveler “untouch'd.” As an ethical or ontological proposition, this standard has a certain austere plausibility; it certainly accords with the pervasive logic of Jonsonian encomium. As a mode of proceeding through time, which poems must do as well as men, the paradigm is more problematic.

UNTOUCHED

Jonson was twice thrown into prison for his plays, once for The Isle of Dogs and once for Eastward Ho. On the second occasion he and his fellow authors were expected to have “their ears cutt & noses.”^[10] They escaped with ears and noses intact, but Jonson, like all satirists of his age, had vivid reason to establish for himself a margin of deniability. In the lyric poems he prominently names those he praises, whose naming itself secures merit. He omits to name, or names by allegorical pseudonym only, those he heaps with scorn or blame so that any who take offense must themselves assume responsibility for both the sin and the sullying of reputation. In order to charge the poet with slander, an accuser would first have to “own” the vice, by publicly recognizing himself in the satirical portrait.

	guiltie, be wise; and though thou know'st the crimes
	Be thine, I taxe, yet doe not owne my rimes:
	'Twere madnesse in thee, to betray thy fame,
	And person to the world; ere I thy name.
	(E30, “To Person Guiltie”)

As the poet contrives to remain untouched by imputations of slander, so, in the opposite case, he contrives to remain untouched by the accidents of mere fact. “[If] I have praysed, unfortunately, any one, that doth not deserve…I hope it will be forgiven me, that they are no ill pieces, though they be not like the persons” (Epigrammes, dedication “To the… Earle of Pembroke”). When, halfway into his book of epigrams, the poet falls into disillusion with one who has been the object of his encomia, he at first repudiates his muse: “Away, and leave me, thou thing most abhord, /

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That hast betray'd me to a worthlesse lord” (E65, “To My Muse”). But on second thought he finds he can have it both ways; he can disclaim the error and simultaneously preserve the efficacy and intactness of his verse: “But I repent me: Stay. Who e're is rais'd, / For worth he has not, He is tax'd, not prais'd.” The verse hits home whether its subject proves worthy or not. In this best of all possible economies, the poet may hold himself blameless (his muse, not his judgment, deceived him), he may retain the credit for high-mindedness (his lord, not he, has failed the test), and he may keep his full store of publishable verse (he can print the retraction right next to the original poems of praise).

Only when the inconvenient accidentals of history overtake his subject from another angle is the poet reduced to the expedient of outright suppression. And even then he contrives to give his canceled lines an afterlife. The “Epistle” he sent to the countess of Rutland some months after her marriage to the earl of Rutland originally ended with the poet's “best” and prophetic wish that the lady bear a son within the year. When the earl was subsequently discovered to be impotent, Jonson simply canceled the last lines of the poem and substituted the disingenuous notation, “The rest is lost” (F12, “Epistle to Elizabeth Countesse of Rutland”). The “loss” is not the poet's, of course, and the suppression is as much an act of effrontery as a gesture of delicacy. Many of his readers would have seen—nay, would have possessed—the poem in manuscript and would know very well to what the sudden gap so conspicuously pointed. The gap itself, by the time the poem was published, mimetically reproduced what was missing in the marriage of the earl and his countess.

THE SAME

“[H]e had ane intention to perfect ane Epick Poeme,” wrote William Drummond of his conversations with Ben Jonson in 1619; “it is all in Couplets, for he detesteth all other Rimes.” Furthermore, “he cursed petrarch for redacting Verses to Sonnets, which he said were like that Tirrants bed, wher some who were too short were racked, others too long cut short” (Conversations with Drummond, 132, 133–34). The projected epic never came to fruition, but Jonson's contempt for the lineage of Petrarch appears to have been durable. High-mindedly rejecting the Procrustean bed of the sonnet, which crams all thought and musical phrasing into a single unvarying format of fourteen pentameter lines, Jonson opted instead, and throughout his lyric career, for the couplet, which would later be recognized as the foundation of English neoclassicism. Even the

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verses of “sonnet length” are overwhelmingly composed in couplets, as if to assert that, although the present poem has happened to achieve its proper fulfillment at fourteen lines, it might easily have stopped at twelve or gone on to sixteen if its matter had so required. On those rare occasions when Jonson produces a sonnet-by-the-book, his relation to the book preserves a considerable margin for irony: the sonnet “On Poet-Ape” (E56) enacts a frank diatribe against poetic hackwork; the dedicatory sonnet to Thomas Wright's The Passions of the Mind in General (UV7) grinds to a suspiciously mechanical halt between the octave and the sestet; the tribute sonnet to Lady Mary Wroth's own Petrarchan sequence is conspicuously double-edged:

	I that have beene a lover, and could shew it,
	Though not in these, in rithmes not wholly dumbe,
	Since I exscribe your Sonnets, am become
	A better lover, and much better Poeët.
	(U28, “A Sonnet, To the noble Lady, the Lady Mary Worth” [sic])

Just how the lady's sonnets have effected the alleged improvements (by inoculation perhaps?) is a process left tactfully unspecified. If Jonson's literary assessments (is it a good thing to “over-come/Both braines and hearts” with one's verses?) preserve a sly elusiveness, and if his feminine end-rhymes (“shew it,” “poet,” “owe it,” “know it”) smack somewhat of parody, Lady Wroth may take some solace in the fact that her person and her name have fared far better in Jonson's encomia (see E103, E105, and the dedication to The Alchemist) than have her poems.

As contrasted to the sonnet, the couplet seems to have commanded Jonson's esteem as the suppler form, more capable of varying response to the varying motions of mind and exigencies of matter. The reader unwilling to take Jonson at his word, of course, might see and hear in the couplet a far more severe, preemptive sameness than ever the sonnet produced. What is it that sameness preempts? Change. And when might sameness seem the better fate? When one sees change as faithlessness. The “Epistle to Katherine, Lady Aubigny” (F13) is a “mirror” wherein the lady may view herself. Augmenting this highly conventional conceit is an equally conventional contrast between the present, truthful mirror and the false or superficial mirror of flattery. Although Jonson's poem does not “reject” the ornaments of physical beauty, title, and wealth, it takes as its chief business “the beauties of the mind”: the lady's obedience and

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virtue, her indifference to fashion, her steadfastness in marriage, her retirement from the court. As the poem modulates from a descriptive to a hortatory mode, the reader may remember that in late medieval and early modern usage a mirror might be an instructive exemplar rather than a passive reflecting surface. The reader may also sense some strain. Katherine Clifton's marriage to the Lord D'Aubigny (1609) had been one in a series of forced unions perpetrated by King James in the early years of his English rule. James's idea was to cement the union of his two kingdoms and to provide for the financial ambitions of his Scottish courtiers by means of a single device: by marrying these courtiers off to English heiresses. If the heiresses and their families tried to resist these unhappy matches—and they often tried strenuously indeed—they resisted in vain.^[11] Lord Clifton's wealth secured, his daughter is encouraged by the poet Jonson to observe a modest country retirement; her husband, Jonson's patron, was all this time a conspicuous presence at a court well known for its sexual and sumptuary license. But never mind. The ideal is one of stasis that transcends the incidentals of daily life. The poem and its subject are imagined as securing one another and a quasi-Platonic “forme” against the assaults of time:

	Madame, be bold to use this truest glasse:
	Wherein, your forme, you still the same shall finde;
	Because nor it can change, nor such a minde.
	(F13, “Epistle to Katherine, Lady Aubigny”)

If the poet prefers sameness to change, this may be because he thinks of change as a falling off from achieved perfection. Change may reveal the fault lines in the poet's modeled “minde.” At the very least, change bodes some limit to the poet's control of his work. “When we doe give, alphonso, to the light, / A worke of ours, we part with our owne right” (E131). These lines “To the Same” cast sameness in several desirable aspects. They address a fellow artist, marking the poet and his dedicatee as persons of similar merit and accomplishment. They reiterate the title and occasion of a previous poem (E130, “To Alphonso Ferrabosco, on his Booke”), sealing compliment with ceremonial redundancy. They posit a closed circle of discernment, impervious to the changeable crowd: “Then stand unto thy selfe, not seeke without/For fame, with breath soone kindled, soone blowne out” (E131). One hears in Jonson's tribute “To the Same” a tenor more of consolation than congratulation on the publication of Ferrabosco's work. One senses again and again in the published poems

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of Jonson that he does not give his own work “to the light” without mixed feelings.

What does this say about compositional and cognitive process? Jonson told William Drummond “that he wrott all his [verses] first in prose, for so his master Cambden had Learned him” (Conversations with Drummond, 143). Whatever this means, it would seem to suggest that poetic form is somehow after the fact, that the venerable but arbitrary contract with meter and rhyme, the sometimes disparate, sometimes concordant pacing of syntax and line are add-ons or enhancements rather than foundational strategies for the discovery of affect or idea. If “all” can be rendered first in prose, what work is left for the verses to do? Perhaps they can shut the subject down. Perhaps they can render it immutable, perfected.

Perhaps they can constitute the poet's word as the last word. “bartas doth wish thy English now were his,” writes Jonson to the English translator of Du Bartas (E132, “To Mr. Josuah Sylvester”). The telling point is not the assessment of relative merit (Jonson later spoke slightingly of the Sylvester translation)^[12] but the ground of the encomium. The translator is imagined as wishing to be told he has outdone, has indeed become, “the originall” (E132). Compare the author's encomium to Thomas May's translation of Lucan: “What Muse, or rather God of harmony/Taught Lucan these true moodes!” (UV29, “To my chosen Friend, The learned Translator of Lucan, Thomas May, Esquire). This particular portrait of method appears at first to imagine some mediating function for poetry: Phoebus and Hermes, “interpreters twixt godds, and men,” are said to have been the Latin poet's teachers. “But who hath them interpreted?” the next line reads, and one thinks for a moment the complex gains and regressions of going between, interpreting, have earned some curious attention at last. But no, for at once: “The selfe same Genius! so the worke will say./The Sunne translated, or the Sonne of May.” The circuits of translation resolve to a tautological pun. The consummate performance, in Sylvester's Du Bartas, in May's Lucan, or rather in Jonson's idealized account of both, is one that makes no difference. One recalls at this point how many of Jonson's own poems were built around direct translations of Martial, Horace, Pliny, Seneca, and Catullus. In Jonson's book, to make no difference is by definition to achieve fidelity or truth; what is more, and far more difficult to grasp, the truth one aims for seals an original perfection precisely by exceeding it.

The extended panegyric to Clement Edmonds, translator of Caesar, speaks more explicitly about the nature of writing-as-action:

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	Not caesars deeds, nor all his honors wonne,
	In these west-parts, nor when that warre was done,
	The name of pompey for an enemie,
	CATO's to boote, Rome, and her libertie,
	All yeelding to his fortune, nor, the while,
	To have engrav'd these acts, with his owne stile,
	And that so strong and deepe, as't might be thought,
	He wrote, with the same spirit that he fought,
	Nor that his worke liv'd in the hands of foes,
	Un-argued then, and yet hath fame from those;
	Not all these, edmonds, or what else put too,
	Can so speake caesar, as thy labours doe.
	(E110, “To Clement Edmonds, on His Caesars Commentaries observed, and translated ”)

Under the pressure of Edmonds's and then Jonson's reinscription, “style” returns to its source in stylus and becomes a weapon for engraving the will upon a yielding table of wax or, which will serve as well, for killing off the competition. Achievement is measured in a sort of double negative, one part grammatical, one part conceptual: not the names of Pompey or Cato (great enemies), not the liberty of Rome (which Caesar defeated by assuming the title of dictator), not even the conversion of foes to agents of posthumous fame can “speak CAESAR” as the current author's labors do. To “speak Caesar” is as much as to proclaim tyrant. Or more: to be as God. Jonson hyperbolically casts the Edmonds translation (mere prose!) as “a new creation” and a miraculous resurrection combined (“restored” to life by Edmonds, Caesar “can dye no more”). English prose (the translation) modulates to English verse (the Jonsonian tribute) and becomes a trump card to Roman imperium. In Jonson's brazen reversal (Caesar takes life from us) of the usual hierarchy (we in the conquered “west-parts” are but a barbarous periphery to empire), one may hear a touch of the colonial's revenge.

“To the Same; On the Same” (E111) continues the encomium to Edmonds, focusing this time on the “matter” of his Observations, the layered commentary on ancient and modern warfare. The commentary demonstrates, writes Jonson, “that, in action, there is nothing new,” that is, that all practitioners of warfare are indebted to a single “master,” the Caesar whose mastery Edmonds revives. All excellence in combat is a variation on “the same.” As if to prove the point by example, the poet casts his poem as itself an exercise in combat and concludes with a preemptive

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strike against imagined detractors. To those who would “deprave thee, and thy work,” he writes to Edmonds,

	CAESAR stands up, as from his urne late rose,
	By thy great helpe: and doth proclaime by mee,
	They murder him againe, that envie thee.
	(E111, “To the Same; On the Same”)

This sounds very like Mark Antony's strategy in his famous funeral oration: there can be no contestation that is not attributable to envy; it is not I who speak but Caesar speaking through me; my speech has the moral force of mouthéd wounds. The airtight circle of authority displays the structure, and the anxious absolutism, of patrilineal pedigree: Caesar by thee by me. It leaves no space for any judgment but “the same.” Jonson's subject here is the hypothetical reception of a book, but he does not scruple to conclude with a curse: those who do not like the book are murderers. But whose in fact is the death grip? Hostile to interpretation, suspicious of the reader, construing the publication of his work as parting with his “right” in it (E131), the poet writes his poetry in stone. And stones mark graves. Jonson's starkest confrontation with the circuit of “the same” is the epitaph to Benjamin, his firstborn son.^[13]

SWANSDOWN

There is, of course, another Jonson. The Jonson who came to Ezra Pound in his Pisan cage in the closing months of a murderous war was a lifeline, the trace memory of an unspoiled world:^[14]

	Hast'ou seen the rose in the steel dust
	(or swansdown ever?)
	(Canto 74)

	Hast'ou swum in a sea of air strip
	through an aeon of nothingness
	(Canto 80)

	This wind is lighter than swansdown
	the day moves not at all
	(Canto 80)

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	Hast 'ou fashioned so airy a mood
	To draw up leaf from the root?
	Hast 'ou found a cloud so light
	As seemed neither mist nor shade?
	(Canto 81)[15]

When the world has been hung by its heels in Milan (and its mistress with it) (Canto 74), when the loneliness of death comes upon the bare survivor (Canto 82), when “the mind swings by a grass-blade” (Canto 83), the slightest hint of underlying order arrives like “palpable/Elysium” (Canto 81). It may come in the guise of song: the curve in the bowl of the lute that produces an air that possesses the power to draw up leaf from root. It may come in the concentric pattern a magnet makes in industrial waste: a rose in the steel dust. It may come in the rising rhythm of the anapest, the triple meter that makes a seventeenth-century lyric go lightly on its feet:

	Have you seene but a bright Lillie grow,
	Before rude hands have touch'd it?
	Have you mark'd but the fall o'the Snow,
	Before the soyle hath smutch'd it?
	Have you felt the wooll o' the Bever?
	Or Swans Downe ever?
	Or have smelt o'the bud o'the Brier?
	Or the Nard i' the fire?
	Or have tasted the bag o'the Bee?
	O so white! O so soft! O so sweet is she!
	(U2.4, “Her Triumph,” from “A Celebration of CHARIS in ten Lyrick Peeces”)

In an age of faithlessness the triple meter is a kind of faith. Crosscut with Jonson in the Pisan cantos is the medieval poet Dante, for whom the underlying structure of three, the terza rima, was homage to the holy trinity: a promise, a mnemonic, a ceremonial performance of devotion. Dante's pilgrim moves through the three-part Comedia, from hell to paradise, toward the vision of a rose. “[S]o light is the urging,” writes Pound in hell, “so ordered the dark petals of iron/we who have passed over Lethe” (Canto 74).

The lightness is remarkable in portions of The Under-wood. The dominance of the pentameter couplet is broken to allow for varied stanzas and

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varied lines; the dominance of epigram and epistle is disrupted to allow for some playful engagement with other genres: the love poem, the dream poem, the pastoral dialogue, the song. We are invited, with equal measures of geniality and rue, to imagine a poet behind the poem:

	Let it not your wonder move
	Lesse your laughter; that I love.
	Though I now write fiftie yeares,
	I have had, and have, my Peeres.
	(U2.1, “His Excuse for loving”)

The poet is no longer an unsullied force of intellect. He has a body. He suffers the liabilities of age. He fears that his love “hath seen”

	My hundred of gray haires,
	Told seven and fortie years,
	Read so much wast, as she cannot imbrace
	My mountaine belly, and my rockie face,
	And all these through her eyes, have stopt her eares.
	(U9, “My Picture Left in Scotland” )

The self-presentation, markedly different from that in the occasional and ceremonial poems, affects a winning informality.

Even women are allowed to speak in The Under-wood, albeit in words provided by the poet. When Charis replies to “Ben” in the ninth part of her sequence, she describes “what Man would please me” (U2.9, “Her man described by her owne Dictamen”) and makes him, somewhat vengefully, a far cry from her aging, untitled, and importunate poet-suitor. Women are discovered to wield the rapier couplet as well as any man: “For were the worthiest woman curst/To love one man, hee'd leave her first” (U6, “Another. In defence of their Inconstancie. A Song”). Women turn the tables on Petrarchan praise and show that they understand its constitutive fictions, and its power structure, very well. They devise a composite lover out of parcels and scraps (for where could they find a whole one worth wishing for?) and find they like the devising rather better than they like the lover:

	And as a cunning Painter takes
	In any curious peece you see
	More pleasure while the thing he makes
― 101 ―
	Then when 'tis made, why so will wee.
	(U5, “In the person of Woman-kind. A Song Apologetique”)

All this is delightful. And there are more in this vein: the songs in Cynthia's Revels, the lover's “Dreame” (U11) that Swinburne so admired,^[16] the Donne-like “Houre-glasse” (U8), a universal subject (romantic love) given purchase by means of well-chosen biographical particulars or musical phrasing so ravishing it might be Herrick's. But lest we too readily psychologize the lyric divide, construing one part as calculated or driven by business and one part as “expressive,” we would do well to remember the business side of love. In Jonson's era, as in others one might name, poets were required to suffer the afflictions of eros; it came with the territory:

	Let me be what I am, as Virgil cold;
	As Horace fat; or as Anacreon old;
	No Poets verses yet did ever move,
	Whose Readers did not thinke he was in love.
	(U42, “An Elegie”)

Does the calculation nullify the lineaments of remembered perfection? The bright lily growing? The swansdown? The snow? Of course not. But the Jonson distilled by Pound to become a precipitating essence of modernist poetics is a Jonson wrested from social and political context to become a secret sharer in very different patterns of affliction and longing, a Jonson carefully stripped of satiric distance, a Jonson estranged from his own most characteristic modes.

NO

Jonson was in some respects estranged from his own era as well. His era was that of the Reformation—a fraught, disorderly, and violent schism in the church that defined itself as universal—and it left him, as a lyricist, remarkably untouched. There are, to be sure, some references to faith in Jonson's poems (I will turn to the rare devotional poems in a moment). Some of these references are downright strained (the “virgin-traine” that consoles a mourning mother for her daughter's death) or disconcertingly pat (“Yet, all heavens gifts, being heavens due, / It makes the father, lesse, to rue”) (E22, “On My First Daughter”). Others bring the paradox of

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Christian consolation into deliberately straitened focus: “He that feares death, or mournes it, in the just, / Shewes of the resurrection little trust” (E34, “Of Death”). Some hedge the question of faith with taut conditionals, as in the epitaph on Sir John Roe:

	If any pious life ere lifted man
	To heaven; his hath: O happy state! wherein
	Wee, sad for him, may glorie, and not sinne.
	(E27, “On Sir John Roe”)

That if is the weightiest syllable in the poem. For the most part, in Jonson, the gestures of faith are either formulaic or missing altogether.

This odd absence is not somehow “explained” by Jonson's extended rejection of Protestantism (the poet told William Drummond he had been “12 yeares a Papist”).^[17] As a lyricist, Richard Crashaw was emphatically of his age, and emphatically dominated by the devotional habits of Counter-Reformation Catholicism. Donne's religious verse—the standard by which we measure the age and the genre—is as arguably “Roman” as it is “Reformed.” The telling absence in Jonson is not thematic—vast stretches of the Renaissance lyric omit explicit reference to matters of religion—but structural: it is an absence of process. Process dominates the lyric poems of Shakespeare, Marvell, Herbert, and Donne and is, I would argue, the chief contribution the Renaissance lyric has made to our tradition. Visible process: a way of getting in conceptual or figurative or syntactical trouble (carried away with metaphorical vehicle, for instance, or with branching modifiers) and needing to invent a way out. Shakespeare, Marvell, Herbert, Donne—regardless of their actual or ostensible subject—cultivate a specific lyric shape, an instinct for crux that the poem must discover and without which the poem is merely a series of verses. This crux is the embodied crisis of two competing conceptual demands; it is an abutment discovered in situ; it cannot be rendered in paraphrase. It coincides, I am convinced, with a foundational religious apprehension; it is the working method of those whose governing instinct is that of a chasm between letter and spirit. Milton built his every line upon this chasm, which is why his poems are a culmination of the English Renaissance—the Elizabethan and Jacobean Renaissance—despite the fact that they were written, the greatest of them, after the Restoration.

Jonson, on the other hand, is not a Renaissance poet at all, not in the English sense; he is rather a neoclassical poet avant la lettre, one whose method looks forward to the eighteenth century and Enlightenment. The

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distinguishing feature of England's belated, northerly Renaissance is that in England, as nowhere else, the rediscovery of Roman and Athenian classics coincided with profound ideological hostility to Rome, a national hostility that ultimately assured the breakup of the Roman Catholic Church. In England the reinvestment in literary continuity collided with renewed insistence on the ruptures and paradox of the Word. In England the reauthorizing prestige of classical Latin and Greek met head-on with a new and radical authorization of the vernacular. Vernacular Scripture was a centerpiece of the Reformation, but the philological competence and the textual method in which this Scripture was newly grounded were the distinguishing accomplishments of the Renaissance. The English Renaissance poem found its characteristic means in just these disorderly intersections; its crowning achievement was a messy, fecund, investigative vernacular.

The word is not, for Jonson, primarily investigative. The word is a maddening struggle for dominance:

	Heare mee, O God!
	A broken heart,
	Is my best part:
	Use still thy rod,
	That I may prove
	Therein, thy Love.
	(U1.2, “A Hymne to God the Father”)

This second of the three devotional poems that open The Under-wood aspires to be very much like a rod itself: thirty-two narrow lines, dimeter throughout, iambic for all but three of its sixty-four feet, it beats its rhythm as the penitent beats his flesh, hoping the chastisement will prove to be from God and thus a sign of God's continuing interest. And like the poems of patronage in Epigrammes and elsewhere, this poem to the heavenly patron seeks to seal its logic with a circular after-measure:

	That gav'st a Sonne,
	To free a slave,
	First made of nought;
	With all since bought.

The sinner looks for reassurance in the price that has been paid for his salvation: worth is measured retroactively, by cost, as a patron may be

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measured by the verses that praise him or a poet by the virtue his verses attribute to the patron.^[18]

“To Heaven” occupies that place in The Forrest—the concluding place—often reserved by poets for poetic retraction or palinode, a turning away from the worldliness of all that has gone before. The exculpatory function of the palinode is always equivocal: the poet takes cover and also assures that all he has written remains intact. Jonson forgoes retraction altogether; we have only the site of retraction, and apostrophe to God. “Good, and great god,” Ben Jonson writes,

	… can I not thinke of thee,
	But it must, straight, my melancholy bee?
	Is it interpreted in me disease,
	That, laden with my sinnes, I seeke for ease?
	(F15, “To Heaven”)

This is a poem about trying to pray. And like the famous effort at prayer in Hamlet, the scene in which the prince beholds his uncle on his knees, this effort runs aground on the split between words and thoughts. Like the famous scene in Hamlet, this poem turns out to be less about prayer than about misinterpretation. “Good, and great God”: the imperfect coincidence of these two terms, good and great, has been the occasion of much vexed negotiation in the epigrams and epistles to lofty patrons. Perhaps godhead is where the discrepancy can finally be resolved? “[C]an I not think of thee”: we may imagine that the melancholy that intrudes its not is the affective experience of the poet at prayer. The melancholy impediment would conventionally—in Donne and Herbert, for example—be the poet's conscious immersion in sin. But in line three we learn that melancholy in the present case is not a feeling at all but something mistakenly attributed to the poet, an instance of ungenerous and incorrect interpretation.

The Latin interpretari (explain, expound, translate, understand) derives from interpres (agent, negotiator). The Indo-European root from which both words derive means “to traffic in” or “sell.” In addition to interpret, the family of per- derivatives includes praise, appreciate, and pornography (G. porne¯, prostitute; from pernanai, to sell). When Shakespeare writes in Sonnet 21, “I will not prayse that purpose not to sell,”^[19] he is making an etymological point.

Praise has never been disinterested, never entirely separable from selling.

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This was the tarnishing reality that made the poet Jonson so loathe to be interpreted.

	I feele my griefes too, and there scarce is ground,
	Upon my flesh t'inflict another wound.
	Yet dare I not complaine, or wish for death
	With holy paul, lest it be thought the breath
	Of discontent; or that these prayers bee
	For wearinesse of life, not love of thee.

The place at which the poet would arrive, at “love of thee,” is introduced as a negative within a negative: “I dare not… lest it be thought…not love of thee.” The poet names only those motives he would not be thought to be governed by: melancholy, spiritual disease, weariness, discontent. According to the doctrine of grace, the path to heaven is a via negativa; the negative way requires a surrender of will. But Jonson, aware of the doctrine, still favors the path of grammatical and poetic coup. “Where have I beene this while exil'd from thee?/And whither rap'd, now thou but stoup'st to mee?” The answer the poet hopes to extract is the title of his poem. Whither am I raped? “To Heaven.” Among religious poets of the early seventeenth century, rape was the classic figure for being seized by God against, or in spite of, one's will. But Jonson wants the rape and wants his will as well. He is determined to storm heaven by sheer force of mind.

His fiercest, and finest, storming begins with a stanza remarkably mild:

	The Sonne of God, th'Eternall King,
	That did us all salvation bring,
	And freed the soule from danger;
	Hee whom the whole world could not take,
	The Word, which heaven, and earth did make;
	Was now laid in a Manger.
	(U1.3, “A Hymne On the Nativitie of my Saviour”)

The alternating pattern of end-stopped tetrameter and trimeter lines (4 + 4 + 3) is underscored by a pattern of simplest frontal rhyme; the deliberate effect is somewhere between nursery rhyme and ballad. But the stripping-to-essence quickly assumes a nearly unbearable torque:

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	The Fathers wisedome will'd it so,
	The Sonnes obedience knew no No,
	Both wills were in one stature;
	And as that wisedome had decreed,
	The Word was now made Flesh indeed,
	And tooke on him our Nature.

“The Sonnes obedience knew no No”: pressing hard on the boundaries of nonsense, treading very near epistemological and metaphysical abyss, Jonson the poet imagines at last a word that would suit him, a word that puts mystery in its place, a word whose obedience knows “no No.” The word he imagines knows no difference between being and meaning, will and effect. The word and the creator who speaks it partake of a single nature. The word secures its poet against change. The word is always and proleptically subdued.

The human son whose name is also Ben Jonson and is in death a “piece of poetrie” seems to be invested with just such properties:

	Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy;
	My sinne was too much hope of thee, lov'd boy,
	Seven yeeres tho'wert lent to me, and I thee pay,
	Exacted by thy fate, on the just day.
	O, could I loose all father, now. For why
	Will man lament the state he should envie?
	To have so soone scap'd worlds, and fleshes rage,
	And, if no other miserie, yet age?
	Rest in soft peace, and, ask'd, say here doth lye
	BEN. jonson his best piece of poetrie.
	For whose sake, hence-forth, all his vowes be such,
	As what he loves may never like too much.
	(E45, “On My First Sonne”)

Readers of the epitaph “On My First Sonne” have generally taken Jonson's confession of “sinne” as the pertinent key to the final, thorny line of the poem. That confession may be disingenuous (a sort of inverted boast: I have loved you too much and swear never to make that mistake again); it may be real (a sin of pride or worldliness: I have loved you with too earthly a love); or it may be a mixture of disingenuous and real (I acknowledge too earthly a love but simultaneously protest the religious strictures against such love). What these readings fail to provide is any account of the mystifying distinction between love and like; all tend to treat these

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words as roughly cognate. If, however, we understand the father as authentically acknowledging a will to reproduce himself, a will to “likeness” that disfigures love in both heavenly and earthly terms, we may at last have a means of construing the sin while preserving the poet's semantic scruple. That scruple is itself a captivating “piece of poetrie,” a final, virtuosic gesture that reenacts the sin even while disavowing it.

There is no outside to Jonson's will. It “knows no No,” and the knowledge registers as a kind of aphasia. The divine poet may deliver a son to death and suffer no division, as “A Hymne” reminds us. But to wish for such a son, to covet such a word, is for the human poet worse than futile: it is blasphemous. Jonson, to his credit, does not flinch. He knows the price of blasphemy and blasphemes still. And he never stops seeking the word that will transcend the very nature of words, the word so right and final it will accommodate no No.

NOTES

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