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9. Unordinary Passions

Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle

ALICE FULTON

I'VE BEEN A POET FOR TWENTY-THREE YEARS, and I don't cry easily. I've seen poetry at home in its inky T-shirt and at large in its designerdress. I've done time in poetry boot camp and at the top of Parnassus. I've joined workshops held in funeral parlors and delegations to the People' Republic of China. I've raised consciousness, figuratively, in thepresence of famous feminist poets and lost consciousness, literally, inthe presence of renowned romantic poets. I've been dressed down bycolleagues with thought disorders; I've received an honorary doctorate.I've awoken in the artist colony to find excrement smeared over my bathroom by a rejected fellow. I've overheard three men poets, celebrated fortheir sensitive verse, describe their vengeful rape fantasy: “You hold herhands behind her back while I fuck her and Blameless shoves his fist upher ass.” I've been a poet for twenty-three years, I've seen poetry at homein its sour sneakers, at large in its power suit, and I don't cry easily. So Iwas surprised to find myself moved to tears while reading a poem by Margaret Cavendish, the duchess of Newcastle.

At one time I might have bought into the fiction of dispassionate criticism. However, it now seems disingenuous to elide the emotional components of evaluation: the hysterical rancor that fuels vitriolic reviews, thecritic' crush on beloved works. I've come to think that the deepest engagement is possible only when a reader falls for a poet' work, findingthere a home away from home, self away from self. Whereas I once might

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have mistrusted the slippery slope of this position, I now mistrust appraisals that would lop off the critic' affective life. This is not to dismissanalysis or theory. Statements of feeling (this poetry is exhausting; this poetryis exhilarating) that fail to investigate the cause of emotive effects areirresponsible and naive. By exploring the poem' form and content, bylocating it within an ongoing struggle of tradition, we might understandhow emotion couched in language attains durability. I would like to understand the indelible feeling that traveled across three and a half centuriesof belittlement and neglect to break my voice as I read.

I recently joined a reading group composed of scientists and humanists. At our last meeting a professor of linguistics admitted to “falling in lovewith” Margaret Fuller, the nineteenth-century feminist. I was delightedby his choice of words. It is unscholarly to own up to crushes. I was inthe grip of one myself, but everyone expects gooey thinking from poets.“I'm in love with Margaret Cavendish, the duchess of Newcastle,” I admitted. Margaret Cavendish was all I wanted to talk about really. Everyconversation that night put me in mind of her or her work. Like all lovers, I prize the traits that others have despised in her: her gaucheness andoriginal style, her guileless pursuit of fame, her eccentricity. Her goodness. I respect and would defend this duchess for her courage, honesty, intrepidness, intellect, fairness, charm, innocence, and common sense. Hergoodness. But if these strengths and felicities of character were not amplyevident in her poetry, their presence in her life would hold much lessinterest for me. Had her poetry proved unworthy, I would not have succumbed to what I'm calling “love.”

Margaret Cavendish' poetry deserves emphasis because it has been sacrificed to her legend, and her legend has been founded on the laziness ofhearsay and the wickedness of misogyny for 350 years. She has had herdefenders, of course. Now that I know her, I am fond of her champions. I think better of Charles Lamb for deeming her “the thrice noble, chaste, and virtuous… original-brain'd, generous Margaret Newcastle.”^[1] And Ithink less of Samuel Pepys, who disliked her because she was “so unordinary.”^[2] Her detractors' opinions, when scrutinized, tend to dissolve intogossip. They certainly show little evidence of any comprehensive engagement with her work. Although recent scholarship has been far more responsible than the wholesale bludgeonings meted out by literary history,

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today' attention seems to gravitate toward her prose and plays. In fact, Icould find no serious appraisal of Margaret Cavendish' poems by a criticwhose primary field is poetry.

Although poems are included in several of Cavendish' thirteen books, her debut publication, Poems and Fancies, devotes itself most fully to verse. All of the poems quoted in this essay are taken from that volume. I'vespent a few weeks poring over a reproduction of the 1653 first edition, myprogress slowed to the luxurious basking pace of poetry by the book'antiquated typeface: its ambiguous s and f that blur wise to wife. Becausevery few people have read her work, my wish is to guide readers towardsome of the stronger poems and to suggest their singular merits. It ispossible to read Cavendish' verse for its intriguing representations of seventeenth-century folkways or science. Such an approach has its ownvalue and necessity, but it begs the foundational question of quality: whyare these good poems? By what means do they create pleasure and, yes, emotion? How do they exist within the context of their epoch and thebroader spectrum of aesthetics?

When considered within the nexus of the seventeenth century, Margaret Cavendish' poems bear some resemblance to those of George Herbertand Richard Crashaw. As this comparison suggests, she wrote two different sorts of verse: one is kin to the simplicity of Herbert; the other sharesthe grotesque sensibility of Crashaw. The first sort is uncontrived in thebest sense of the word; the second is contrived in ways that disturb thereader' sense of proportion and taste. Cavendish is not a religious poet, however, and this fact alone assures that any likeness to Herbert or Crashaw will be full of difference.

Whereas Herbert' simplicity is worshipful and austere, Cavendish'plain style is heretical and rustic. Her work is more roughly spun thanhis, her diction and phrasing more impulsive and fauve. Ragged syncopation and slant rhymes enliven her surfaces, and details of seventeenth-century manners and customs sweeten the content. Her finest poems, impassioned by an artless eloquence, bespeak an innocence of “craft” inthe sense of wiles or manipulation. In Sociable Letters (1664) she notedthat “some may say that if my Understanding be most of Sheep, and a Grange, it is a Beastly Understanding; My answer is I wish Men were as Harmless as most Beasts are, then surely the World would be more Quietand Happy than it is.”^[3] Her imagery often arose from her knowledge offarming, and she also drew on the female spheres of housewifery or, as inthe following excerpt, fashion:

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	I Language want, to dresse my Fancies in,
	The Haire' uncurl'd, the Garments loose, and thin;
	Had they but Silver Lace to make them gay,
	Would be more courted then in poore array.
	Or had they Art, might make a better show;
	But they are plaine, yet cleanly doe they goe.
	The world in Bravery doth take delight,
	And glistering Shews doe more attract the sight;
	And every one doth honour a rich Hood,
	As if the outside made the inside good.
	And every one doth bow, and give the place,
	Not for the Man' sake, but the Silver Lace.
	Let me intreat in my poore Bookes behalfe,
	That all may not adore the Golden Calf.
	Consider pray, Gold hath no life therein,
	And Life in Nature is the richest thing.[4]

Her deepest subject is not the human relation to God but to the naturalworld. Her poems challenge Hobbes' assertion of humanity' preeminence, especially as revealed in the manipulation of language. “All Creatures may do as much,” she wrote,

but by reason they do it not after the same manner or way as Man, Mandenies, they can do it at all; which is very hard; for what man knows, whether Fish do not Know more of the nature of Water, and ebbing andflowing, and the saltness of the Sea? or whether Birds do not knowmore of the nature and degrees of Air, or the cause of Tempests?…For, though they have not the speech of Man, yet hence doth not follow, that they have no Intelligence at all. But the Ignorance of Men concerningother Creatures is the cause of despising other Creatures, imaginingthemselves as petty Gods in Nature.^[5]

By stressing the materiality of the human state and the mysterious divinityof the creaturely world, Cavendish posits a radical reversal of grounds:“And for the Mind, which some say is like Gods, / I do not find, 'twixt Man, and Beast such odds…” (“Of Humility”). The intensity of herfellow feeling, coupled with her freshness and guilelessness, makes her apoet of great charm and genuine moral weight.

When evaluating untried poets, T. S. Eliot suggested that we ask not are they great? but “are they genuine?”^[6] The word genuine, however, hascome to suggest a rhetoric of sincerity that is by no means hard to simulate.

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In his essay on “The Metaphysical Poets” Eliot noted that Herbert'simplicity had been “emulated without success by numerous modern poets.”^[7] The trend continues in contemporary poems that mistake the simplistic for the simple and equate straightforward syntax, modesty of tone, and ordinary language with the genuine. Thus threadbare sentiments andsedentary ethics may be touted as “deeply felt” as long as they are plainlyput. Many poets today, perhaps most, strive for such transparency, butthe choice is more symptomatic of aesthetics than of ethics or character. The word genuine, however, connotes integrity and scruples; it suggestsan authenticity of feeling and a depth of purpose that is unrelated to easeof understanding or clarity of surface. In her ambivalent essay on Cavendish, Virginia Woolf allowed that “the vast bulk of the Duchess isleavened by a vein of authentic fire.”^[8] But how does one assess the “authentic” or “genuine” without slipping into critical fallacies that supposethemselves privy to the poet' unstated motives? I think one can begin byasking what the poet has to gain or lose from the stand she has taken. Ifa poet risks the ridicule, scorn, abuse, and contempt of her age, I suspect I'm in the presence of “the genuine.”

Cavendish was not only the first English woman to write for publication, but she was an ardent feminist whose sense of justice extended, aswe will see, to the natural world. That she has been punished for hercrimes in favor of humanity is beyond question. In Margaret the First biographer Douglas Grant notes that her compassion made her “speakout of turn in a century when cruelty to animals was all too common.”^[9] Her empathy surely was strengthened by her identification with beasts asmutual sufferers. In 1667 she was conflated with an animal in John Lacy'adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew. Cynthia M. Tuerk notes that Lacy'“Sauny the Scott” retains Shakespeare' names for all the characters withthe exception of the shrew, whom he christens “Margaret.” Tuerk speculates that Lacy transformed “the controversial… Duchess of Newcastle” into “the plain speaking, scolding ‘Petticoate Devil’ who must be tamedinto submission through the use of brutality and violence.”^[10]

Seventeenth-century misogyny was founded, in part, on Plato' conception of woman as an animal possessed of bodily life but bereft of reasonand intellect. Cavendish recognized man' assertion of sovereignty as a self-serving belief that condoned the subjugation of nature and, by extension, women. Although her poems do not openly analogize animals towomen, her prose and plays frequently present the comparison. In Orations of Divers Sorts (1662) she wrote that women “live like Bats or Owls, Labour like Beasts, and Dye like Worms.”^[11] She worried that women

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should grow Irrational as Idiots, by the Dejectedness of our Spirits, through the Careless Neglects and Despisements of the Masculine Sex tothe Femal, thinking it Impossible we should have either Learning or Understanding, Wit or Judgement, as if we had not Rational Souls aswell as Men, and we out of a Custom of Dejectedness think so too, which makes us Quit all Industry towards Profitable Knowledge…forwe are Kept like Birds in Cages, to Hop up and down…. [W]e are Shut out of all Power and Authority…. [O]ur Counsels are Despisedand Laught at; the best of our Actions are Troden down with Scorn, bythe Over-weening conceit, Men have of Themselves, and through a Despisement of Us.^[12]

Rather than arguing for woman' superiority to beasts, however, Cavendish argued that man, too, was an animal, and that animals were man'creaturely equals.

Although Cavendish' feminist stand attracted much spite, her empathyfor otherness lends authority to her finest poetry. “A Dialogue of Birds,” which I will excerpt, humanizes animals by endowing them with voices, emotions, and thought. Rather than the treacle and cuteness portendedby such personification, the poem has the dignified purity of the ballads Cavendish loved to sing. Its songlike qualities predict the work of another self-educated “nature” poet, Robert Burns.

Both Cavendish and Burns have a canny eye for country details; bothpress the vernacular into a tumultuous prosody, and both strike an ingenuous, forthright tone. Yet Cavendish' poems are less playful and banteringthan Burns'; their empathy is different in kind, more sober. Burns' “Toa Mouse” recounts with winsome specificity that creature' trials beforeconcluding: “Still thou are blest compared wi' me! / The present onlytoucheth thee.” He then invokes memory and anticipation as sources ofhuman suffering unknown to mice. Cavendish would make no suchclaim. Among beliefs she wished repealed was “That no Beast hath remembrance, numeration, or curiosity” (“The Animal Parliament”). In Burns' poem, moreover, the plowman-speaker informs the mouse of its own hardships. “A Dialogue of Birds,” on the other hand, affords animalsthe agency and eloquence of testimony. The human observer is out of thepicture, and this effacement assures that pity for animals does not devolveinto self-pity. The matchless poignancy of Cavendish' animal poems canbe attributed to the absence of human agendas, as well as the exactitudeand freshness of the depiction. Witness, in the opening passage, how theimage of the lark torquing its small force skyward is effectively extendedto the corkscrew vibrato of its song:

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	As I abroad in Feilds, and Woods did walke,
	I heard the Birds of severall things did talke:
	And on the Boughes would Gossip, prate, and chat,
	And every one discourse of this, and that.
	I, said the Larke, before the Sun do rise,
	And take my flight up to the highest Skies:
	There sing some Notes, to raise Appollo' head,
	For feare that hee might lye too long a Bed.
	And as I mount, or if descend downe low,
	Still do I sing, which way so ere I go.
	Winding my Body up, just like a Scrue,
	So doth my Voice wind up a Trillo too.
	What Bird, besides my selfe, both flyes and sings,
	Just tune my Trilloes keeps to my flutt'ring Wings.
	I, said the Nightingale, all night do watch,
	For feare a Serpent should my young Ones catch:
	To keep back sleep, I severall Tunes do sing,
	Which Tunes so pleasant are, they Lovers bring
	Into the Woods; who listning sit, and mark:
	When I begin to sing, they cry, hark,
	hark. Stretching my Throat, to raise my Trilloes high,
	To gaine their praises, makes me almost dye.
	Then comes the Owle, which saies, here' such a doe
	With your sweet Voices; through spight cries Wit-a-woo.
	In Winter, said the Robin, I should dye,
	But that I in good warm house do flye:
	And there do pick up Crummes, which make me fat,
	But oft am scar'd away with the Pusse-cat.
	If they molest me not, then I grow bold,
	And stay so long, whilst Winter Tales are told.
	Man superstitiously dares not hurt me,
	For if I am kill'd, or hurt, ill Luck shall be.
	The Sparrow said, were our Condition such,
	But Men do strive with Nets us for to catch:
	With Guns, and Bowes they shoot us from the Trees,
	And by small Shot, we oft our Lifes do leese,
	Because we pick a Cherry here, and there,
	When, God he knowes, we eate them in great feare.
	But Men will eat, untill their Belly burst,
	And surfets take: if we eat, we are curst.
	Yet we by Nature are revenged still,
	For eating over-much themselves they kill.
	And if a Child do chance to cry, or brawle,
― 198 ―
	They strive to catch us, to please that Child withall:
	With Threads they tye our legs almost to crack,
	That when we hop away, they pull us back:
	And when they cry Fip, Fip, strait we must come,
	And for our paines they'l give us one small Crum.
	I wonder, said Mag-pye, you grumble so,
	Dame Sparrow, we are us'd much worse I trow.
	For they our Tongues do slit, their words to learne,
	And with the paine, our food we dearely earne.
	Why, say the Finches, and the Linnets all,
	Do you so prate Mag-pie, and so much baule?
	As if no Birds besides were wrong'd but you,
	When we by cruell Man are injur'd to.
	For we, to learn their Tunes, are kept awake,
	That with their whistling we no rest can take.
	In darknesse we are kept, no Light must see,
	Till we have learnt their Tunes most perfectlie.
	But Jack-dawes, they may dwell their houses nigh,
	And build their Nests in Elmes that do grow high:
	And there may prate, and flye from place to place;
	For why, they think they give their House a grace.
	Lord! said the Partridge, Cock, Puet, Snite, and Quaile,
	Pigeons, Larkes, my Masters, why d'yee raile?
	You're kept from Winters Cold, and Summers heat,
	Are taught new Tunes, and have good store of meat.
	Having a Servant you to wait upon,
	To make your Cages cleane from filth, and Dung:
	When we poore Birds are by the dozens kill'd,
	And luxuriously us eate, till they be fill'd:
	And of our Flesh they make such cruell wast,
	That but some of our Limbes will please their tast.
	In Wood-cockes thighes they onely take delight,
	And Partridge wings, which swift were in their flight.
	The smaller Lark they eate all at one bite,
	But every part is good of Quaile, and Snite.
	The Murtherous Hawk they keep, us for to catch,
	And learn their Dogs, to crouch, and creep, and watch:
	Untill they have sprung us to Nets, and Toiles,
	And thus poore Creatures we are made Mans spoiles.
	Cruell Nature! to make us Gentle, Mild:
	They happy are, which are more feirce, and wild.
	O would our flesh had been like Carrion, course,
― 199 ―
	To eate us onely Famine might inforce.
	But when they eate us, may they surfets take,
	May they be poore, when they a Feast us make.
	The more they eate, the leaner may they grow,
	Or else so fat, they cannot stir, nor go.
	O, said the Swallow, let me mourne in black,
	For, of Mans cruelty I do not lack: I
	am the Messenger of Summer warme,
	Do neither pick their Fruit, nor eate their Corne;
	Yet they will take us, when alive we be,
	I shake to tell, O horrid Cruelty!
	Beate us alive, till we an Oile become.
	Can there to Birdes be a worse Martyrdome?
	O Man, O Man, if we should serve you so,
	You would against us your great Curses throw.
	But Nature, shee is good, do not her blame:
	We ought to give her thankes, and not exclaime.
	For Love is Natures chiefest Law in Mind,
	Hate but an Accident from Love we find.[13]

Over the next two pages the titmouse chides the other birds for neglectingtheir “Home-Affaires,” and heeding this call to domesticity, they set aboutgathering spilled corn, newly sown seed, ripe cherries, and ant eggs withwhich to feed their chicks. Their flight home is likened to men returningfrom market, joined by “a Troop of Neighbors.” The birds' communalactivities—their need to eat, breed, and exchange information—implytheir kinship with the human. Embodiment is the leveling factor: we arealike in our ineluctable physicality, and this debt to materiality createsequity. Once in their nests, the birds carol a hymn asking God for a finetomorrow. The view of the age was that man' immortal soul establishedhis supremacy to nature. In constructing birdsong as prayer, Cavendishsuggests that the natural world also communes with God and partakes ofdivinity by means of unorthodox worship. The poem' closure finds insleep—with its intimations of mortality—a denominator both commonand consoling. In a lovely simile the ebbing of birdsong is compared toa gradual closing of eyes:

	At last they drousie grew, and heavie were to sleep,
	And then instead of singing, cried, Peep, Peep.
	Just as the Eye, when Sense is locking up,
― 200 ―
	Is neither open wide, nor yet quite shut:
	So doth a Voice still by degrees fall downe,
	And as a Shadow, wast so doth a Sound.
	Thus went to rest each Head, under each wing,
	For Sleep brings Peace to every living thing.

“John Clare was the nearest thing to the ‘natural poet’ for whom primitivists had been searching ever since the mid-eighteenth century,” the Norton Anthology asserts.^[14] The naif-seekers need not have waited so long: in Margaret Cavendish they could have had their innocent. Yet the unstudied rudeness of her work would not have pleased “the primitivists” in pursuit of a happy savage, painting idyllic naturescapes. Although “ADialogue of Birds” has something of the sweetness of Clare' verse, Cavendish generally is a far more disturbing poet. “'Twas pity that in this Titanic Continent wherebrute Nature is so grand, Genius should be sotame,” Emerson remarked of his own day and place.^[15] Cavendish' geniuswas of the untamed variety; her expressiveness, as we shall see, exceedsthe rules of decorum and aesthetics. Yet these violations awaken uncannyemotions—from grief to repugnance—and are largely responsible for theforce of her poems.

“Nobody, so far as I know, not even an 18th-century minor poet, couldimagine any connection between events in the mind of a cricket and thosein the mind of a human,” Lewis Thomas writes.^[16] Robert Burns' “To a Louse,” with its comic ruminations on extermination, hardly counts. Fastforwarding to the nineteenth century, there is John Clare' fanciful portrayal of “Insects” freed of “labours drudgery.” Clare' poem says moreabout human misery and envy, however, than it does about the “tineyloiterer on the barley' beard.” “I will begin to feel better about us,” Lewis Thomas concludes, “… when we finally start learning about some of thethings that are still mystifications. Start with the events in the mind of acricket, I'd say, and then go on from there.”^[17] Several of Margaret Cavendish' poems start in such places—the minds of birds, stags, or hares—and go on to suggest sympathetic connections between animal and humanintelligences. Her poems, like John Clare', are fearlessly anthropomorphic. But her assignment of human traits illuminates the animals' sentience rather than the human psyche.

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Within the context of scientific inquiry the dangers of anthropomorphizing are well-rehearsed. In poetics “the pathetic fallacy,” a term coinedby John Ruskin in 1856, describes the projection of human traits onto the nonhuman. With a nod toward Ruskin the bulk of twentieth-century aesthetics has dismissed the anthropomorphic gesture as inherently sentimental. Postmodern poetry, for its part, doesn't worry about the patheticfallacy; its concerns are other and elsewhere. But science' fear of theanthropomorphic continues, and that caution begins to seem overdetermined. Perhaps our closeness to animals frightens us into assertingdifference. We do tend to subjugate any version of ourselves that is notcompletely to our liking. There is, moreover, some sleight of mind ordoublethink at the heart of the scientific argument. The projection ofhuman traits onto animals is said to distort objectivity: we cannot assumethat they are like us. Animal experiments, however, are founded on justthat assumption. The similitude that creates the test' value also createsthe ethical dilemma. If animals are enough like us to inform us of ourselves, how can we maim and kill them to secure that information? Surelyif animals can serve as models for the human, humans can serve as modelsfor the animal. To anthropomorphize is to acknowledge rather than disavow the inflection of human experience on investigations of nonhumanlife. Human experience, after all, is the only kind we have.

In “The Hunting of the Stag” (Poems and Fancies 113–16) Cavendishuses personification to blur the distinction between human and animal. The poem begins by describing the deer' marvelous physicality: “His Legs were Nervous, and his Joynts were strong.” Like Narcissus the stag is givento admiring his reflection in a brook, “Taking such Pleasure in his Stately Crowne, / His Pride forgets that Dogs might pull him downe.” Although Cavendish no doubt thought of Charles I when composing those lines, the poem does not become an allegory of the death of kings. Just as theabsence of moralizing makes John Clare' verse all the more enchanting, the absence of symbolism makes Cavendish' poems more heartfully profound. How tiresome it would be to read the stag as a stand-in for someloftier idea, and how refreshing it is to read him as a deer, expressing hisown value or dearness. The poem takes the scenic route, meandering intoa fascinating catalogue of trees that does nothing to deepen the tropes oradvance the narrative. The stag wanders into a shady wood where “…slender Birch bowes head to golden Mines.”(“Good Mines are found outby the Birches bowing,” a side note ingenuously tells us.) The forest also holds:

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	Small Aspen Stalkt which shakes like Agues cold,
	That from perpetuall Motion never hold
	........
	The weeping Maple, and the Poplar green,
	Whose Cooling Buds in Salves have healing been
	........
	And Juniper, which gives a pleasant smell
	And many more, which were too long to tell.

The stag' epicurean palate charts his course through Winter-savoury and Cowslips to the ultimate succulence of the farmer' wheat blades. After afine feed he is discovered and pursued by the field' owner, his dogs, andother men who “for sport did come.” The stag leaps into a river and triesto swim invisibly as a fish. “But out alas, his Hornes too high do shew.” His proud antlers give him away, and the hunters' watery reflection undoes his earlier image of noble materiality: “Feare cuts his Breath off short, his Limbs do shrink, / Like those the Cramp doth take, to bottom sink.” The deer struggles until “His Heart so heavie grew, with Griefe, and Care, /That his small Feet his Body could not beare.” At the end he defiantlyfaces the hunters: “But Fate his thread had spun, so downe did fall, /Shedding some Teares at his own Funerall.”

Weeping animals probably make modern readers uneasy. But the unvarnished closure has its own rude power; its nakedness moves beyondsentimentality into poignancy. The stag' self-mourning—venial, vulnerable—is terribly human. The final rhyme contrasts the ritualized grief ofa funeral to the ritualized killing of the hunt. The disproportion—between the stag' prizing of his life and the men' disdain of it, betweencommunal formalized mourning and the animal' lonely death—createspathos.

Earlier the hunters were compared to boys who “when Mischiefe takesnot place, / Is out of Countenance, as with disgrace.” An endearing trait of Margaret Cavendish was her tendency to be thrown “out of countenance” by social occasions. Cavendish' loyal maid, Elizabeth Toppe, describedher in a prefatory letter: “You were always Circumspect, by Nature, not by Art; …your Ladiship is naturally bashful, & apt to be out of Countenance, that your Ladiship could not oblige all the World.”^[18] But some accountssuggest “out of Countenance” as a euphemism for what could happen to Cavendish in unsympathetic company. She admitted to being afflictedwith “bashfulness” from childhood. “It hath many times obstructed thepassage of my speech, and perturbed my natural actions, forcing a constraintedness,

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or unusual motions,” she wrote.^[19] John Evelyn' wife described her conversation as “terminating commonly in nonsense, oaths, and obscenity,”^[20] and Dorothy Osborne wrote that Cavendish' friendswere at fault to “let her goe abroade.”^[21] Douglas Grant writes that when“confronted across the room by Mrs. Evelyn, coldly eyeing her from behind the mask of a modest conventional housewife, Margaret' demonseized command, translating her into the affected, grimacing creaturewhom her guest was later to deride.”^[22] Sir Walter Scott portrayed her as“an entire raree show…asortof private Bedlam-hospital.”^[23]

Such testimonies make me wonder whether she might have sufferedfrom Tourette' syndrome, a neurological disorder characterized by sudden, meaningless movements or vocalizations. These tics can include eyeblinking; squinting; lip smacking; neck jerking; shoulder shrugging; armflailing; nail biting; foot stomping; barking; coughing; hissing; humming;stuttering; sudden changes of voice tone, tempo, or volume; the utteranceof short meaningless phrases; and, most famously, coprolalia, the compulsion to swear or use socially unacceptable words. The “forbiddenness” of a given expression compels sufferers to say it, against their will. Ticscan vanish for long periods; thus Cavendish could have been symptomfree when she first attracted the attention of her adoring husband, thedashing marquis of Newcastle.

Tourette' syndrome can induce some spectacularly bizarre behavior, but I wouldn't want such a “diagnosis” to efface a more important—andmore evident—explanation for the imaging of Cavendish as literary embarrassment. It seems to me that she serves as a dumping ground forrepressed anxieties concerning reputation and authority. Philosopher Robert Paul Wolff writes that the most common reason for acknowledgingclaims of authority, “taking the whole of human history, is simply theprescriptive force of tradition. The fact that something has always beendone in a certain way strikes most men as a perfectly adequate reason fordoing it that way again.”^[24] Despite recurring outreé movements, the authoritative mainstream of literary culture, shaped by “the prescriptiveforce of tradition,” emphasizes seemliness, conventionality, and patrilineage. My reading persuades me that fears concerning the transgression ofsuch traditions have been displaced onto Margaret Cavendish. Her views, indeed her entire self-definition, were—and are—culturally incorrect. Shechampioned women' rights; opposed cruelty to animals; argued for religious freedom; dismissed witchcraft, alchemy, and astrology as unfounded superstitions. She also trespassed on the male preserves of writingand science.

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Although Cavendish' critics ostensibly thought about her, their ownreputations were a large part of the subject. From the start her radicallyindependent style evoked fear of contamination by association. Althoughshe was the first woman invited to visit The Royal Society, the fashionablecenter of scientific discussion, some members opposed the invitation forfear that her presence would attract mockery. Of Cavendish' book Nature' Pictures biographer Kathleen Jones writes: “Although women couldidentify with the characters in Margaret' tales they hesitated to defendher in case they too were branded as ‘ridiculous.’”^[25] Through the centuriesshe has been treated as a contagious site liable to infect writers who ventured a close association. In 1759 Horace Walpole opined that her brainwas “diseased with cacoethes scribendi.”^[26] Those who did venture to writeabout her used a condescending rhetoric as germ barrier or hid behind asurgical mask of satire.

Virginia Woolf notes that Cavendish became a bogey with which tofrighten clever girls. The technique worked all too well. Woolf ' severalrenditions of the duchess are amusing, yet frightened, pieces of writing. Although acknowledging her “wild, generous, untutored intelligence,” Woolf compares Cavendish to “some giant cucumber” spreading itself“over all the roses and carnations in the garden” and choking them todeath.^[27] The genteel flowers snuffed out by this overbearing, phallic vegetable are, I would suggest, such exemplars of acceptable feminine behavior as Katherine Philips, “the Divine Orinda.” Philips declared writing“unfit for the sex to which I belong”^[28] and became sick with shame afterher work was “inadvertently” published. She was, not accidentally, thereigning poetess of Cavendish' moment.

“Margaret' whole attitude to poetry flouted decorum,” writes Douglas Grant. “Her real fault in Dorothy Osborne' eyes was an offense againsttaste.”^[29] The dismissive appraisals by those who've never read her work, the longevity of gossip, the spread of calumny as good copy, the criticalopinions founded on hearsay, the knee-jerk authority of “prescriptive tradition,” the ridicule occasioned by bravery—are frightening. Cavendish'role as designated whipping girl of English literature is frightening. Thefearful derision and hostility directed at her for three and a half centuriesshould be retargeted toward the literary culture that created her reception.

Philosopher Mary Midgley offers sobering thoughts on the suasions offalse evidence:

Even people who know perfectly well that the so-called Protocols of the Elders of Zion were deliberately forged by the Czarist police still find

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no difficulty in accepting them as evidence. The dark vision is too vividto be doubted; its force is its warrant. What we see out there is indeedreal enough; it is our own viciousness, and it strikes us with quiteappropriate terror. And by an unlucky chance, while it remains projected, there is no way to weaken or destroy it. Persecution and punishment ofthose to whom it is attributed do not soften it at all.… Hence thestrange insatiability of persecution, the way in which suspicion seems togrow by being fed…. The joint repressed aggression of a whole populacemakes up a very powerful motive for communal crimes, such as…witch-hunts.^[30]

“I am as fearefull as a Hare… only my courage is, I can heare a sadrelation, but not without griefe, and chilnesse of spirits,” Cavendishwrote.^[31] The comparison of herself to a hare suggests the degree of sympathy she felt with hunted prey. Joy Williams writes, “Hunters have atendency to call large animals by cute names—‘bruins’ and ‘muleys,’ ‘berryfed blackies’ and ‘handsome cusses’ and ‘big guys,’ thereby implying abalanced jolly game of mutual satisfaction between hunter and thehunted—Bam, bam, bam, I get to shoot you and you get to be dead.”^[32] Inlike fashion the abundantly sane Cavendish was nicknamed “Mad Madge.” It was a short journey from being outspoken or “out of countenance” to being declared out of her mind.

“The Hunting of the Hare,” reprinted here in full, is the poem that moved me to tears. Of course, emotions are irreproducible results. Youcould read the poem to your closest companion, as I did, and not bemoved as I was. No doubt my entire life prepared me to be stricken at agiven point. Not just life, but the intrinsic sinews of DNA before livedexperience began. (I wasn't alone in my emotion, though. When I lookedat my husband, he was wiping his eyes.)

The Hunting of the Hare

	Betwixt two Ridges of Plowd-land, lay Wat
	Pressing his Body close to Earth lay squat.
	His Nose upon his two Fore-feet close lies
	Glaring obliquely with his great gray Eyes.
	His Head he alwaies sets against the Wind;
	If turne his Taile, his Haires blow up behind:
	Which he too cold will grow, but he is wise,
― 206 ―
	And keeps his Coat still downe, so warm he lies.
	Thus resting all the day, till Sun doth set
	Then riseth up, his Reliefe for to get.
	Walking about untill the Sun doth rise
	Then back returnes, down in his Forme he lyes.
	At last, Poore Wat was found, as he there lay
	By Hunts-men, with their Dogs which came that way.
	Seeing, gets up, and fast begins to run,
	Hoping some waies the Cruell Dogs to shun.
	But they by Nature have so quick a Sent,
	That by their Nose they race, what way he went.
	And with their deep, wide Mouths set forth a Cry,
	Which answer'd was by Ecchoes in the Skie.
	Then Wat was struck with Terrour, and with Feare,
	Thinkes every Shadow still the Dogs they were.
	And running out some distance from the noise,
	To hide himselfe, his Thoughts he new imploies.
	Under a Clod of Earth in Sand-pit wide,
	Poore Wat sat close, hoping himselfe to hide.
	There long he had not sat, but strait his Eares
	The Winding Hornes, and crying Dogs he heares:
	Starting with Feare, up leapes, then doth he run,
	And with such speed, the Ground scarce treades upon.
	Into a great thick Wood he strait way gets,
	Where underneath a broken Bough he sits.
	At every Leafe that with the wind did shake,
	Did bring such Terrour, made his Heart to ake.
	That Place he left, to Champion Plaines he went,
	Winding about, for to deceive their Sent.
	And while they snuffling were, to find his Track,
	Poore Wat, being weary, his swift pace did slack.
	On his two hinder legs for ease did sit,
	His Fore-feet rub'd his Face from Dust, and Sweat.
	Licking his Feet, he wip'd his Eares so cleane,
	That none could tell that Wat had hunted been.
	But casting round about his faire great Eyes,
	The Hounds in full Careere he neere him 'pies:
	To Wat it was so terrible a Sight,
	Feare gave him Wings, and made his Body light.
	Though weary was before, by running long,
	Yet now his Breath he never felt more strong.
	Like those that dying are, think Health returnes,
	When tis but a faint Blast, which Life out burnes.
― 207 ―
	For Spirits seek to guard the Heart about,
	Striving with Death, but Death doth quench them out.
	Thus they so fast came on, with such loud Cries,
	That he no hopes hath left, no help espies.
	With that the Winds did pity poore Wats case,
	And with their Breath the Sent blew from the Place.
	Then every Nose is busily imployed,
	And every Nostrill is set open, wide:
	And every Head doth seek a severall way,
	To find what Grasse, or Track, the Sent on lay.
	Thus quick Industry, that is not slack,
	Is like to Witchery, brings lost things back.
	For though the Wind had tied the Sent up close,
	A Busie Dog thrust in his Snuffling Nose:
	And drew it out, with it did foremost run,
	Then Hornes blew loud, for th' rest to follow on.
	The great slow-Hounds, their throats did set a Base,
	The Fleet swift Hounds, as Tenours next in place;
	The little Beagles they a Trebble sing,
	And through the Aire their Voice a round did ring.
	Which made a Consort, as they ran along;
	If they but words could speak, might sing a Song,
	The Hornes kept time, the Hunters shout for Joy,
	And valiant seeme, poore Wat for to destroy:
	Spurring their Horses to a full Careere,
	Swim Rivers deep, leap Ditches without feare;
	Indanger Life, and Limbes, so fast will ride,
	Onely to see how patiently Wat died.
	For why, the Dogs so neere his Heeles did get,
	That they their sharp Teeth in his Breech did set.
	Then tumbling downe, did fall with weeping Eyes,
	Gives up his Ghost, and thus poore Wat he dies.
	Men hooping loud, such Acclamations make,
	As if the Devill they did Prisoner take.
	When they do but a shiftlesse Creature kill;
	To hunt, there need no Valiant Souldiers skill.
	But Man doth think that Exercise, and Toile,
	To keep their Health, is best, which makes most spoile.
	Thinking that Food, and Nourishment so good,
	And Appetite, that feeds on Flesh, and blood.
	When they do Lions, Wolves, Beares, Tigers see,
	To kill poore Sheep, strait say, they cruell be.
	But for themselves all Creatures think too few,
― 208 ―
	For Luxury, with God would make them new.
	As if that God made Creatures for Mans meat,
	To give them Life, and Sense, for Man to eat;
	Or else for Sport, or Recreations sake,
	Destroy those Lives that God saw good to make:
	Making their Stomacks, Graves, which full they fill
	With Murther'd Bodies, that in sport they kill.
	Yet Man doth think himselfe so gentle, mild,
	When he of Creatures is most cruell wild.
	And is so Proud, thinks onely he shall live,
	That God a God-like Nature did him give.
	And that all Creatures for his sake alone,
	Was made for him, to Tyrannize upon.[33]

Did i say emotions were irreproducible results? Silly me. On TV last nighta relaxation therapist described a test conducted on rabbits. The animalswere fed a high-fat diet in order to determine its relation to arteriosclerosis. When the rabbits were “autopsied” (the flimsiest shade of misgivingpassed over the therapist' face as he said the word), one group proved tohave healthy arteries. This was mystifying because all the animals hadreceived exactly the same food. On investigation a single difference cameto light: the healthy rabbits had been cared for by a graduate student whostroked them when she fed them. (At this, a doctor serving as audiencesmiled benignly: isn't-that-sweet.) Of course, the experiment had to beconducted several times to verify the findings. After a sufficient numberof rabbits had been caressed and vivisected, the study concluded that compassion lowers cholesterol.

At last a sound argument for loving-kindness. Let' be merciful andlower each other' cholesterol. The experiment also gave a reproducibleeffect (healthy arteries) stemming from an emotive cause (compassion). Compassion? Wouldn't duplicity, selfishness, coldness, calculation better describe the experiment' character? The listening doctor' sappy smile mademe suspect a connection between sentimentality and synecdoche. To feelselectively, responding with fuzzy feelings to one aspect of an event whilerepressing any troubling emotions stirred by other aspects is, I submit, sentimental.

Lewis Thomas observed that much of the current environmental concernis based on self-interest rather than concern for nature, “that vast incomprehensible

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meditative being.”^[34] Margaret Cavendish consistently took Nature' side. “Dialogue with an Oake” finds a tree arguing with Man, who is about to cut it down. Throughout the poem Man unwittinglytestifies to human greed, which he conflates with Man' “divine nature.” The poem concludes with an ironic comment on Man' perversity and narcissism: only if the Oake desires the afterlife of harvest, in which itwould be transformed into a ship or house, will Man recognize his likenessin the tree and spare it from harvest.

Cavexsndish wrote a series of dialogues in which two players argue opposing sides of a question.^[35] Her gift for seeing the recessive, yin slant ofthings, the ground rather than the figure, helped her to complicate thesepolarized conversations. Thus Darknesse tells Earth that the Sun is responsible for night: “I do not part you, he me hither sends / Whilst heerides about, to visit all his Friends.” Hate depicts Love as self-serving:“Love loves Ambition, the Mind' hot Fire, / And Worlds would ruine, for to rise up higher.” And Ignorance says that Learning “Doth noughtbut make an Almes-tub of the Braines.” Cavendish' penchant for reversalsarose not from a contrarian temperament but from her feelings of alterityand the specious arguments used to enforce that position. Notions ofwhat constitutes “natural” behavior always have been invoked as a meansof controlling women' lives. Cavendish turned the argument against itself: “It is not only Uncivil and Ignoble, but Unnatural, for Men to Speakagainst Women and their Liberties.”^[36] Many of her poems unsettle assumptions of hierarchy. “A Dialogue betwixt Wit, and Beauty” questionssuperiority founded on skin color:

	Mixt Rose, and Lilly, why are you so proud,
	Since Faire is not in all Minds best allow'd?
	Some like the Black, the Browne, as well as White,
	In all Complexions some Eyes take delight.

The dialogues show Cavendish' scientific intelligence, a cast of mindthat assumed as little as possible and pressed the given explanations. Herskepticism led her to mistrust superficial perceptions and to critique theevidence of the senses. Using magnetism to exemplify counterintuitivetruths, she wrote, “What Eye so cleere is, yet did ever see / Those little Hookes, that in the Load-stone bee” (“It is hard to believe, that there areother worlds in this world”). Passion makes us advocates: in the gripof emotion we cling wholeheartedly to one position, and other sides ofthe argument are lost to us. As if in recognition of this, the dialogues

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sometimes warp binary thinking by arguing both positions convincingly. Alterity implodes as agency is exchanged between equally convincingspeakers. Readers are forced to acknowledge the power of both claimsand to establish within the paradox of opposing truths a third, indeterminate space that differs from the fixed positions of dichotomous thinking.

Cavendish objected to standard measures of intelligence, noting that human beings may have “a different Knowledge from Beasts, Birds, Fish, Worms, and the like and yet be no Wiser or Knowing than they; for Different ways in Knowledge make not Knowledge more or less, no morethan Different Paths inlarge one compass of Ground.”^[37] Her passion forequity extended beyond social and humanitarian contexts to notions ofthe sublime. Paradise was “Equinoctiall” (“Of a Garden”); and “a consecrated place” was one where trees “grew in equall space” (“Of an Oakein a Grove”). One of her loveliest works, “The Motion of Thoughts,” uses Euclidean tropes of measurement to describe the light of cognitionand the self-referential neural networks that give rise to consciousness. The poem begins with a nature walk that in romantic fashion leads to anepiphany:

The Motion of Thoughts

	Movingg, mine Eyes being fixt
	Upon the Ground, my with, Gravell mixt:
	My Feet did wathout Directions Guide,
	My ughts did travell farre, and wander wide;
	At last they chanc'up to a Hill to climbe,
	And being there, ings that were Divine.
	First, what they salorious Light to blaze,
	Whose Splendor mapainfull for the Gaze:
	No Separations, Shadowes by stops made,
	No Darknesse to obstruct this Light with Shade.
	This Light had no nsion, nor Extent,
	But fil'd all placl, without Circumvent;
	Alwaies irend="italic">Motion, yet fixt did prove,
	Like to the Twinkling Stars which never move.
	This Motion working, running severall waies,
	Did seeme rend="italic">Contradiction for to raise;
	As to it selfe with it selfe disagree,
	Is like a Skeine of Thread, if 't knotted bee.
	For some ditrait in an even Line,
	But some againe did crosse, and some did twine.[38]

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Lewis Thomas describes the mechanism of thought as follows: “Predictable, small-scale, orderly, cause-and-effect sequences are hard to come byand don't last long when they do turn up. Something else almost alwaysturns up at the same time, and then another sequential thought intervenesalongside, and there come turbulence and chaos again. When we are lucky, and the system operates at its random best, something astonishing maysuddenly turn up, beyond predicting or imagining.”^[39]

	Yet at the last, all severall Motions run
	Into the first Prime Motion which begun.
	In various Formes and Shapes did Life run through,
	Life from Eternity, but Shapes still new;
	No sooner made, but quickly pass'd away,
	Yet while they were, desirous were to stay.
	But Motion to one Forme can nere constant be,
	For Life, which Motion is, joyes in varietie.
	For the first Motion every thing can make,
	But cannot add unto it selfe, nor take.
	Indeed no other Matter could it frame,
	It selfe was all, and in it selfe the fame.
	Perceiving now this fixed point of Light,
	To be a Union, Knowledge, Power, and Might;
	Wisdome, Justice, Truth, Providence, all one,
	No Attribute is with it selfe alone.
	Not like to severall Lines drawne to one Point,
	For what doth meet, may separate, disjoynt.
	But this a Point, from whence all Lines do flow,
	Nought can diminish it, or make it grow.
	Tis its owne Center, and Circumference round,
	Yet neither has a Limit, or a Bound.
	A fixt Eternity, and so will last,
	All present is, nothing to come, or past.
	A fixt Perfection nothing can add more,
	All things is It, and It selfe doth adore.
	My Thoughts then wondring at what they did see,
	Found at the last∗ themselves the same to bee;
	Yet was so small a Branch, perceive could not,
	From whence they Sprung, or which waies were begot.

Cavendish supplies a marginal gloss for what is “Found at the last∗”: “∗ Allthings come from God Almighty.” The glorious light of the mind, whichturns out to be God' light, is self-involved as any animal: “A fixt Perfection

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nothing can add more / All things is It, and It selfe doth adore.” Theparadox of the one/many problem is charmingly enacted by the disagreement between the plural subject, things, and singular verb, is. The speakerthen recognizes her thoughts as diminutive instances of the great forceshe had perceived as external. Shifting its measures from thought to emotion, the poem next suggests that the passions of paradise may exceedthose of earth. The closure dismisses the calculations of astronomy, math, navigation, geometry, and natural philosophy as unequal to the breadthof the heaven. The immeasurable will always outnumber the measurable.

	Some say, all that we know of Heaven above,
	Is that we joye, and that we love.
	Who can tell that? for all we know,
	Those Passions we call Joy, and Love below,
	May, by Excesse, such other Passions grow,
	None in the World is capable to know.
	Just like our Bodies, though that they shall rise,
	And as St. Paul saies, see God with our Eyes;
	Yet may we in the Change such difference find,
	Both in our Bodies, and also in our Mind,
	As if that we were never of Mankind,
	And that these Eyes we see with now, were blind.
	Say we can measure all the Planets high,
	And number all the Stars be in the Skie;
	And Circle could we all the World about,
	And all th' Effects of Nature could finde out:
	Yet cannot all the Wise, and Learned tell,
	What' done in Heaven, or how we there shall dwell.

“Those Passions… /May, by Excesse, such other Passions grow.” Whena poet is praised for her wide emotional range, that amplitude includesthe various shadings of joy, love, and grief. It does not include queasiness, disgust, and horror. The excesses of certain Cavendish poems, however, are likely to stir “such other Passions.” Earlier I divided her verse into twokinds: those that shared the simplicity of George Herbert and those that partook of Richard Crashaw' grotesque sensibility. I've concentrated onthe first sort because I like them best and because critical opinion hasfastened, unfairly, it seems to me, on the Crashaw-like verses.

Richard Crashaw' poetry offers stupendous examples of ecstatic high

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seriousness that crashes unwittingly into banal low comedy. The disproportion between the work' intention and its effect are absurd. His excessesare models of camp. The textbook example, from his poem on the tearsof Mary Magdalen, finds the pilgrim “follow'd by two faithfull fountaines;/ Two walking baths; two weeping motions; / Portable, and compendiousoceans.”^[40] Cavendish' discrepancies of intent and effect sometimes resultin Crashaw-like campiness. The poem seems to have an emotive life ofits own, quite beyond the author' control. Her conceits can be intenselydiscomfiting, yet she is naif enough to be unaware of the feelings she stirs. Keats said of the poetical character that “It lives in gusto, be it foul orfair.”^[41] Cavendish' excesses are at times more foul than fair. Some of herpoetry had me resorting to a vocabulary of teenaged squeamishness: Gross! Yucky!

Cavendish' temperament was pragmatic whereas Crashaw' was visionary; her exaggerations are fueled by realism rather than religion. Her sensibility, moreover, was tragic rather than ecstatic. As a result she tendstoward gory rather than silly extremes. Her macabre poems seize the factsof physicality, excavate their true, but truly unsavory, implications, and push those implications to fantastic lengths that still retain elements ofthe realism necessary to horror. But even these poems reflect Cavendish'deep worldview, albeit in bizarre form. Their ghoulish tropes of embodiment violently enforce equity between humans and animals. Rather than“flesh and blood,” with its suggestions of divine transubstantiation, thehuman form is reduced to “meat.” By dissolving the difference betweenflesh and meat, such poems enact the brutality of carnivorism. In onegruesome passage human body parts are up for sale on “shamble-row,” thebutcher' market, along with dead animals (“Of a Travelling Thought”). In “A Battle between King Oberon, and the Pygmees,” she writes:

	Here beasts and men both in ther bloud lay masht,
	As if that a French Cook had them minc'd, so hasht,
	Or with their bloud a Gelly boyle,
	To make a Bouillion of the spoyle.[42]

Whereas Cavendish' Herbert-like poems are anthropomorphic, her Crashaw-like poems are anthropophagous: they violate taboos concerningthe eating of human flesh. Just as animals are personified in her “simple” poems, persons are animalized in her “grotesque” verse. The body'animality does not discount the possibility of divinity: it extends that

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possibility to beasts, an inclusion that refutes human assumptions of superiority.

I would suggest that horrific events in Cavendish' life forced her ideasinto these ghoulish expressions. During the Civil War, Parliamentarytroops disinterred and dismembered the bodies of Cavendish' motherand sister. Kathleen Jones writes that “the soldiers made game with thedead ladies' hair in their hats.”^[43] When news of this defilement and ofher brother' execution reached Cavendish, she was disconsolate. Theghastliness seems to have made its way, unmediated, into some of herpoems.

Both Cavendish and Richard Crashaw were members of Queen Henrietta Maria' Oxford and Paris courts. Although her bashfulness no doubtprevented conversation, Cavendish might have read Crashaw' manuscripts in circulation. “Extravagant” is often used to describe them both. Richard Crashaw, however, is accorded twelve pages in the Norton Anthology (6th edition), whereas Cavendish is allowed three.^[44] What is“unique” in Crashaw is deviant in her. The best she can hope for is to bedeemed eccentric or outside the center. Historically, “eccentric” is whatfemale poets get to be instead of “original.” Yet it seems to me that eccentricity is to postmodernism what originality was to romanticism: afoundational principle. Although Crashaw was ridiculed for his absurdconceits, his work eventually found its audience. Perhaps postmodernismwill find new ways to revel in the excesses of Cavendish' outlandish passions.

The gusto that makes some poems unwholesome adds conviction toher best efforts. Her satire on pastoral romance is as good in its way as Sir Walter Raleigh' reply to Marlowe' “Passionate Shepherd.”

A Description of Shepherds, and Shepherdesses

	The Shepherdesses which great Flocks doe keep,
	Are dabl'd high with dew, following their Sheep,
	Milking their Ewes, their hands doe dirty make;
	For being wet, dirt from their Dugges do take.
	The Sun doth scorch the skin, it yellow growes,
	Their eyes are red, lips dry with wind that blowes.
	Their Shepherds sit on mountains top, that' high,
	Yet on their feeding sheep doe cast an eye;
	Which to the mounts steep sides they hanging feed
	On short moyst grasse, not suffer'd to beare seed;
	Their feet though small, strong are their sinews string,
― 215 ―
	Which make them fast to rocks & mountains cling:
	The while the Shepherds leggs hang dangling down,
	And sets his breech upon the hills high crown.
	Like to a tanned Hide, so was his skin,
	No melting heat, or numming cold gets in,
	And with a voyce that' harsh against his throat,
	He strains to sing, yet knowes not any Note:
	And yawning, lazie lyes upon his side,
	Or strait upon his back, with armes spred wide;
	Or snorting sleeps, and dreames of Joan their Maid,
	Or of Hobgoblins wakes, as being afraid.
	Motion in their dull brains doth plow, and sow,
	Not Plant, and set, as skilfull Gardners doe.
	Or takes his Knife new ground, that half was broke,
	And whittles sticks to pin up his sheep-coat:
	Or cuts some holes in straw, to Pipe thereon
	Some tunes that pleaseth Joan his Love at home.
	Thus rustick Clownes are pleas'd to spend their times,
	And not as Poets faine, in Sonnets, Rhimes,
	Making great Kings and Princes Pastures keep,
	And beauteous Ladies driving flocks of sheep:
	Dancing 'bout May-poles in a rustick sort,
	When Ladies scorne to dance without a Court.
	For they their Loves would hate, if they should come
	With leather Jerkins, breeches made of Thrum,
	And Buskings made of Freeze that' course, and strong,
	With clouted Shooes, tyed with a leather thong.
	Those that are nicely bred, fine cloaths still love,
	A white hand sluttish seems in dirty Glove.[45]

Cavendish' disdain for affectation is evident in this poem, which mocksthe faux shepherds and shepherdesses of idealized courtly love. Kathleen Jones notes that Cavendish' fellow courtiers indulged in a fad for Platoniclove, but she scorned such dissembling.^[46] Of course, her tendency to beout of countenance made her unpopular at court. In fact, “outness” seemsto have been her salient trait. On the page she is not only outspoken but, it seems to me, out of her epoch. Writers are shaped by inherent temperaments as much as by the climate of their age. Affinities spring up acrosscenturies, in defiance of time. Margaret Cavendish has more in commonwith Whitman' hankering, gross, mystical, nudity than with Milton'sonorous depths. Like Whitman she is “one of the roughs, a kosmos.”^[47]

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Like him she could resist anything better than her own diversity, as herpoems, letters, plays, fictions, and essays testify. “I love those best which I create myself,” she wrote of her work in Sociable Letters.^[48]

But a “barbaric yawp” that issued from a woman' pen could only seemvulgar. Imagine the reception that would greet a woman who wrote “Idote on myself… there is that lot of me, and all / so luscious.”^[49] Oddlyenough, men poets have been praised for the very qualities that are maligned in Cavendish. The absence of rigorous formal education, countedas a debit for her, is no such thing for Burns, Blake, Clare, Keats, and Whitman. Although Christopher Smart, Blake, and Clare were “mad,” their disorder has, if anything, stoked their legends. Cavendish, who was sane, has been slandered as mad and “handled with a Chain,” in Dickinson' phrase. Even so sympathetic a reader as Kathleen Jones speculatesthat “paradoxes,” along with “the sheer bulk of Margaret' work,” haveled to her neglect.^[50] Surely both factors would be construed as strengthsin a man poet. In reference to her own verse Anne Bradstreet wrote, “Ifwhat I do prove well, it won't advance, / They'll say it' stolen, or else itwas by chance.”^[51] Cavendish' single poem in the latest Norton Anthology is burdened with the following footnote: “The duchess clearly, thoughperhaps not deliberately, contrasts the world of women… with that of…Apollonian masculinity.”^[52] It is hard to understand how a foundationalbelief that appears across an entire body of work can be regarded as ahappy accident.

Cavendish hoped for a posterity in which her work would know “aglorious Resurrection… since Time brings strange and unusual thingsto pass!” It seems to me that she should take her place within a traditionof spontaneous composition and vitality: feral poets whose work Robert Lowell characterized as raw rather than cooked and whose writing process Allen Ginsberg summarized as “first word, best word.” Passages of herwork show something of the shrewd earthiness of Chaucer, the sincerityof Christopher Smart, the forcefulness of Robert Burns, the innocence of Blake' songs, the heartfelt engagement of John Clare, the robust egotismof Whitman. An anthology of her best poetry and prose would give readers a place to begin. There is scholarly interest in her work right now, soperhaps some enterprising publisher will issue such an “olio” or collection.

After I'd confessed my strange and unusual passion to the readinggroup, someone said, “Isn't it amazing that she can change you despitethe distance of so much time?”

“Yes, and I can change her,” I said, too quickly. “By changing thereception of her work.” Would that it were so. In a letter “To Poets”

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Cavendish writes, “I have no Eloquent Orator to plead for me, as to perswade a Severe Judge, nor Flattery to bribe a Corrupt one; which makesme afraid, I shall lose my Suit of Praise…. But if the Judge be learned inthe Lawes of Poetry, and honesty from Bribes of Envy; I shall not need tofeare.”^[53] She still has no Eloquent Orator; her writing is its own bestdefense. Although I am thrown out of countenance by her travails, sheseems to have maintained her private equipoise. “The Worlds dispraises cannot make me a mourning garment,” she noted. “My mind' too big.”^[54] Her mind—that insatiable, unordinary place.

NOTES

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