Love As Death: Exercises in Substitution

The warning of George Herbert's "Jordan (I)" against "Catching the sense at two removes" is bracing for the ingenious modern critic. I hope my search for the referred pain of mortality in Donne's erotic lyrics can be justified by noting his obsession with

personal immortality, which often seems to be their only unifying characteristic. Such inferences will always be uncertain, if only because the degree of Donne's serious personal investment in his lyric speakers is uncertain. But imperfect evidence is not worthless evidence, and—as a disturbed wave pattern may delineate a submerged wreck—consistent and peculiar characteristics of poetic speech may help to reveal characteristics of the poet's mind.

The love-lyrics pursue immortality by an inventive system of substitution: not a scapegoat villain replacing the dead person in the transaction of revenge, or a child replacing a parent in the mortal cycle, or Christ replacing humankind in the economy of condemnation, but instead love replacing death in the manageable universe of poetic creation. Long before the Death's Duell sermon, where Walton acknowledges the morbid tendency, Donne's writings served "to discharge his memory of his preconceived meditations, which were of dying."^[32] Like standard mortification exercises, Donne's poetic practice requires recognizing the figured presence of death in all the businesses of life. Donne's idiosyncracy is his insistence that his passion and his poetry can reverse the transaction, vivifying mortality by containing and transmuting it within his omnipresent experience of sexual love. It is not surprising that Donne would write that he and his wife lie "in two beds, or graves" during an illness (Letters , p. 145); but even the heartily sexual undressing in the "Elegy: Going to Bed" echoes common Reformation metaphors for dying.^[33]

Love and death make a familiar pairing, and a simple code of substitution or inversion is a familiar mode of psychological evasion. Undoing this reaction-formation, replacing the references to love in Donne's poems with parallel references to death, often does surprisingly little violence to their colloquialism, their internal coherence, or their continuity with Donne's other writings. In "Loves Growth," for instance, a series of conventional proverbs about death are transformed into—or thinly disguised as—Metaphysical pronouncements about love.^[34] If these delicate lyric entities can survive so crudely performed a transplant, then the theory underlying the operation will be partly vindicated. The fact that the poems accommodate thanatos precisely where they manifest eros does not preempt more straightforward readings, but it does indicate the psychological associations subliminally active in their creator.

In "The Sunne Rising," the lovers bear some odd resemblances to corpses. If they were dead rather than impassioned, it would indeed be

irrelevant for the sun to intrude announcing morning, and absurd to imagine them undertaking any of the tasks of life—study, work, harvest. Death, as least as much as love, "all alike, no season knowes, nor clyme, / Nor houres, dayes, moneths, which are the rags of time" (9–10). In the oblivion of death, climate is changeless, and time a seamless shroud. The timelessness that love grants him is precisely what he elsewhere fears death will impose on him. Indeed, Donne eventually revives these same words to emphasize the supreme imperative of salvation: one sermon declares that there are "no seasons, no moneths, no yeares, no dayes" in the eternal hereafter,^[35] and another asserts that "first and last are but the ragges of time, and his mercy hath no relation to time."^[36] The only cure for eternal death is Resurrection: a Son rising, the limitless love of a personal savior. Donne's mate is indeed "all States, and all Princes, I" (21), if his terror of death is leading him (here as in lines 17–18 of "The Relique") into a characteristically megalomaniacal identification with that King of Kings. But, of course, not even that exalted identity confers a full immunity from death.

Donne's boast in the second stanza that he can eliminate the light of the sun merely "with a winke" (13) is the egotistical facet of solipsism; to assert that eclipsing one's own perception of the sun is indistinguishable from eliminating the sun itself is to risk recognizing that an entire universe disappears with the extinction of any individual consciousness. Donne was not alone in trying to handle this dangerously two-edged sword, which the Reformation emphasis on interiority would surely have sharpened. Thomas Traherne argues that "The sun in your eye is as much to you as the sun in the heavens. For by this the other is enjoyed. It would shine on all rivers, trees, and beasts in vain to you could you not think upon it."^[37] And Thomas Browne characteristically puts the sword of ratiocination back into the sheath of faith: "Nor need we fear this term 'annihilation'. . . . For the eyes of God, and perhaps also of our glorified selves, shall as really behold and contemplate the world in its Epitome of contracted essence, as now it doth at large and in its dilated substance" (p. 124).

"Nothing else is," Donne announces. Perhaps—but all else is therefore nothing. Donne's religious prose again provides an analogue that reveals not only the theological implications of this poetic bravado, but also the specific fear—of closing his eyes into a perpetual darkness of death—that the poem displaces: "Only be thou present to me, O my God, and this bedchamber shall be all one room, and the closing of these bodily eyes here, and the opening of the eyes of my soul there, all one

act" (Devotions , p. 70; Sermons , II, 182, seeks the same kind of instant transfer for his hearing). He cannot look away from the beloved object because their exchange of gazes seems to verify his fantasy of immortal and omnipotent consciousness:

the incapacity of the ego to accept separation results in . . . a mental force which separates the ego from reality, denies reality, represses reality. And the effect is to burden the narcissistic project of loving union with the world with the unreal project of becoming oneself one's whole world (the solipsism to which the philosophers regress).^[38]

Taken together, Donne's Metaphysical conceitedness and his erotic fixations constitute predictable responses to annihilationist terror.

The ending of the second stanza echoes proverbial wisdom about the levelling functions of the house of death: "Aske for those Kings whom thou saw'st yesterday, / And thou shalt heare, All here in one bed lay" (19–20). Donne himself would preach that "All lie alike" in the earth, because the grave holds no special place for "dust Royall" (Sermons , IX, 64; cf. X, 238). Again what profess to be statements about the joys of unique love seem equally germane to the terrors of indifferent death. "Everything In One Place" is the current advertising slogan of the famous Forest Lawn cemetery. The fixing of the sun is a carpe diem motif designed to forestall the ubi sunt motif. A man who would later warn in a sermon "that yesterday is dead" (Sermons , IV, 52) must be perpetually afraid of allowing tomorrow to occur. The patronizing address to the aging sun arouses our common-sense awareness that the sun ages us long before we can weary it. Donne is not merely the aubade lover who refuses to accept that the rising sun must part him from his beloved; he also refuses to accept the parting of soul from body that time imposes on all mortals. In resisting, on behalf of his sexual relationship, social pressures toward ordinary daytime duties, Donne also resists, on behalf of his grandiose self-love, a standard Jacobean argument for accepting mortality: "Shall the heavens stay their ever-rolling wheels . . . and hold still Time, to prolong thy miserable days, as if the highest of their working were to do homage unto thee? Thy death is a piece of the order of this All " (Drummond, pp. 24–25). This is precisely the "all" that Donne tries to appropriate five times in lines 20–24.

"The Sunne Rising" does of course describe lovers defying the universe, rather than corpses submitting to it. But if Murray Roston is right, the poem is also an act of defiance against the Copernican universe that subordinates anthrocentrism to heliocentrism.^[39] "The Sunne Ris-

ing" enlists the richness of insular experience and the egoistical potential of subjectivity as a defense against a bewilderingly unsympathetic cosmos. Donne's deep attachment to this mistress, and his unrealistic worship of her, serve much the same function that Rank and Becker perceive in psychoanalytic transference:

Realistically the universe contains overwhelming power. Beyond ourselves we sense chaos. We can't really do much about this unbelievable power, except for one thing: we can endow certain persons with it. The child takes natural awe and terror and focusses them on individual beings, which allows him to find the power and the horror all in one place instead of diffused throughout a chaotic universe. Mirabile ! The transference object, being endowed with the transcendent powers of the universe, now has in himself the power to control, order, and combat them.^[40]

"The Sunne Rising" asserts the power of human love, but in that assertion we can see the outlines of the threat love must serve to neutralize. The poem presents one side—ostentatiously, one side only—in the human argument with the universe, an argument over which one can effectively declare the other irrelevant.

When Donne needs to retreat from hints of his cosmic insignificance, he uses an idealized lover and a significant setting to re-enslave the sun to human purposes. This battle against the implications of Copernicanism continues—this time in the depressive rather than the grandiose mode of narcissistic crisis—when he courts Lucy, Countess of Bedford, in Twickenham garden, part of which was laid out as a detailed model of the Ptolemaic universe.^[41] "Twicknam Garden" ostensibly describes a pastoral retreat in which Donne's speaker laments an erotic rejection. Yet the diction of the poem suggests an unsuccessful struggle to retreat to a self-centered universe, and what he most laments is his own mortality. The speaker explains that he cannot appreciate the beauty of this refuge because he has become infected with an unlawful and unrequited sexual desire. But in Donne's lyrics, sexual desire for a woman is often a displacement of the narcissistic desire for an immortal self. Beneath the conventional sexual moral of "Twicknam Garden" lies a moral like that of Herbert's "The Flower": that the craving for individual immortality prevents us from accepting our place in a providential flow of nature.^[42]

Throughout Renaissance literature, gardens are both womb and tomb, reflecting both the Edenic immortality we have forfeited and the figurative, cyclical immortality we must learn to accept in its place. In

mourning the passing seasons, as Gerard Manley Hopkins suggests in "Spring and Fall," we mourn ourselves. In the opening lines of "Twicknam Garden," the speaker accuses himself of converting the winds and rains of the season into expressions of his personal sadness:

Blasted with sighs, and surrounded with teares,
      Hither I come to seeke the spring,
      And at mine eyes, and at mine eares,
Receive such balmes, as else cure every thing. . . .

The prescription is conventional: some fresh air in the garden on an April day to purge the heart of sadness. But, as the weather indicates (and as his amorousness may too), the calendar spring has already arrived; the problem is accepting it as itself, rather than through an egoistical literary convention.

The medicine of seeing life renewed around him will surely fail if he is interested only in finding a cure for his entrapment in the cycle of life. The lovelorn Donne in Twickenham garden is like the childless Macbeth in Dunsinane castle, a "yellow leaf" who feels "aweary of the sun" as young trees spring up around him; the women who seemed to promise transcendence have betrayed him back into his mortal destiny. The poem has been characterized as a broad satire on the complaining Petrarchan lover,^[43] but one of his letters shows Donne responding to a spring garden in very much the manner of the "Twicknam Garden" persona: "Because I am in a place and season where I see everything bud forth, I must do so too," he wrote to Goodyer in 1608, yet "the pleasantnesse of the season displeases me. Every thing refreshes, and I wither, and I grow older, and not better, my strength diminishes, and my load growes" (Letters , p. 68). And on his sickbed he would remark, "what a Minute is Mans life in respect of the Sunnes, or of a tree" (Devotions , p. 72).

The second stanza begins with a wish (like the rash wish of an angry child in a fairy tale) "that winter did / Benight the glory of this place, / And that a grave frost did forbid / These trees to laugh and mocke mee to my face" (10–13). In other words, he wishes for some reflex in nature to help conceal the fact that he creates his own misplaced misery. The emphases on winter, night, and that "grave frost" suggest death itself much more emphatically than they do sexual mortification. Clearly this speaker is haunted not only by a failure of transcendence, but also—like the speaker of Marvell's "Mower" poems, where again the grim reaper is thinly disguised as an unrequiting mistress—by a failure of the pathetic

fallacy. The stubborn infantile conviction that the entire world is a harmonious extension of one's desiring faculty is gradually compromised by the good mother, briefly renewed by an ideal lover, and finally shattered by the specter of death.

Freud's famous meditation on "The Theme of the Three Caskets" ends by speculating about "the three inevitable relations that a man has with a woman—the woman who bears him, the woman who is his mate and the woman who destroys him . . . they are the three forms taken by the figure of the mother in the course of a man's life—the mother herself, the beloved one who is chosen after her pattern, and lastly the Mother Earth who receives him once more."^[44] B assanio's choice of the beautiful silent third casket in The Merchant of Venice , and Lear's reconciliation with the beautiful silent third daughter in King Lear , reflect men's efforts to reconceive their inevitable mortality as a chosen fulfillment. The device of this denial "in which the Goddess of Death was replaced by the Goddess of Love"—and the mother by wife and daughter—clearly resembles the code of substitution by which Donne seeks to control mortality.

But rituals can save only those who believe in their efficacy, and the infant learns resentfully that the nurturing entity is not really an eternal extension of the self. Spring may be like a priest administering extreme unction in "Twicknam Garden," as one critic has suggested,^[45] but it cannot redeem the creature to whom mortality tastes as bitter as ashes, whose "spider love . . . transubstantiatcs all, / And can convert Manna to gall," a Host into a corpse, pure food into wormwood (6–7). Unable to imitate the self-sacrificing Christ, he instead replicates Satan's destructive egoism: "And that this place may thoroughly be thought / True Paradise, I have the serpent brought" (8–9). This is precisely the version of the Fall that the Renaissance mystic Jacob Boehme warned against: "This was that true paradise in which Thou didst place our first parents," warning them "not to becloud this holy Sabbath of Thy indwelling Vitality with ego-centric desire, and not to lead the serpent's cunning and falsity therein. . . ."^[46] In Lucy's garden as in Adam's, the sin of pride and the craving for personal immortality are the most dangerous temptations.

The speaker then begs to be transformed into "Some senslesse peece of this place" (16); but (as the author of Biathanatos was well aware)^[47] oblivion is always within the reach of those who truly want it. This ostensible request for extinction is really a quest for immortality: "Make me a mandrake, so I may groane [or "grow"] here, / Or a stone

fountaine weeping out my yeare" (17–18). These are imitations of life, extensions of the very passive and mournful aspects of life he supposedly wishes to escape. The mandrake (as "Song: Goe, and catche a falling starre" indicates) was a plant superstitiously supposed to hold a human soul. What the speaker of "Twicknam Garden" seeks is a local habitation for his soul that will continue to express his emotional experience beyond the extinction of consciousness. The weeping stone fountain—again, tears to match the sighs—would serve that purpose; like Herbert's "Altar," it is a defense-mechanism against terminal silence. Furthermore, the fountain is "weeping out its yeare" rather than bewailing the unkindness of a mistress. The emotion that the speaker projects onto the fountain—presumably the one he is evading in himself—is this sorrow at the transience of his own subjective existence.

As he weeps and drinks the beloved's tears, he must fight the recognition that the creature he desires to love eternally is himself. Burial, mourning, and immortality are all more vivid and prominent in "Twicknam Garden" than is the woman who supposedly inspires the poem. So when the speaker reaches the standard Petrarchan conclusion that his mistress's rejection "kills mee" (27), the literary convention makes explicit the psychological agenda. Exclusion from the bed of a woman he desires is merely one manifestation of a more profound fear that haunts Donne's lyrics, both sacred and profane: the fear of exclusion from the immortality that might be conferred by the absolute devotion of an omnipotent Other. When nature will not violate her principles to save him, then his death is precisely "her truth" (27).

In "The Sunne Rising," reciprocated love offers immortality; in "Twicknam Garden," unreciprocated love imposes death. "The Extasie" defines what Donne desires from love, and thereby hints what he fears from death. Without the full sensual experience of the body, love and immortality alike become meaningless abstractions. "The Extasie" begins with the lovers seemingly lying atop their own graves, resembling the spousal monuments that remained common throughout late Medieval Europe: "Wee like sepulchrall statues lay; / All day, the same our postures were, / And wee said nothing, all the day" (18–20). Even before this explicit comparison, the suggestion of corpses permeates what is ostensibly a scene of pastoral love. Where the swelling of the ground pushes up violets (which were commonly supposed to spring from graves, cf. Hamlet , 5.1.240), this motionless couple lie with their hands "cimented" and their eyes fixed, while their "soules . . . to advance

their state, / Were gone out" (5, 15–16). Though their bodies remain separate, they meet on a higher plane, following a geometric model of enduring love that "Aire and Angels" and "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" will spell out more clearly.

Because it prepares souls and bodies to retie "That subtile knot, which makes us man" (64), this model looks ahead to resurrection. To attain the immediate goal of earthly seduction, as to attain the eventual goal of heavenly salvation, the speaker of "The Extasie" must temporarily abjure his body. Then he must recover it, because unless the loving soul involves the body in its joys, this passion resembles only a failed resurrection: "A man is not saved, a sinner is not redeemed, I am not received into heaven, if my body be left out; The soule and the body concurred to the making of a sinner, and body and soule must concur to the making of a Saint" (Sermons , VII, 103). In another sermon Donne insists,

I must have this body with me to heaven, or else salvation it self is not perfect; And yet I cannot have this body thither, except as S. Paul did his, I beat down this body , attenuate this body by mortification; Wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from this body of death? (Sermons , II, 63; cf. IV, 47)

In the sermons the answer will be Christ; in the erotic verse the answer is a woman, the same kind of creature who delivered him into that body. Donne's craving to unify the divided self permeates his writings, and he uses sexual conjunction much as Browne used experiments on flowers: to provide "not only an ocular demonstration of our resurrection, but a notable illustration of that Psychopanny" which we endure in the grave.^[48]

Donne's experiment appears to be no less successful. By refusing to admit a distinction between the two lovers (even in the pronouns), "The Extasie" constructs a mirror that captures their souls,

         And makes both one, each this and that.

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

When love, with one another so
         Interinanimates two soules,
That abler soule, which thence doth flow,
         Defects of lonelinesse controules.
(36–44)

This is a narcissistic transcription of the usual promises of procreation. By rescuing each of their essences from the vulnerability of residing in a single transient being, this dual soul is able to control the human defect known as mortality. Their physical and spiritual mating allows them to revivify, like violets, in the very face of death. By the peculiar way he advocates and articulates this embrace, Donne manages to make ecstasy—the going of the soul out of the self, as in death—compatible with the interiority he cherishes.

It would be misleading to read this seduction poem as pure philosophical speculation; its first reference, as well as its last resort, is to desiring bodies. Yet in seizing the body, Donne seizes the only form of timelessness he can stand to imagine. What Donne has really discovered is a new way into the old motifs of carpe diem poetry: instead of warning that death will end physical love, Donne presents spiritual love as a foreshadowing of death which can be dispelled by letting the moribund bodies rise to the occasion. This is sexual extortion of an unusually sophisticated sort. The ambiguity of the closing assurance—that any enlightened spectator "shall see / Small change, when we'are to bodies gone" (74–75)—effectively conflates two assurances: that physical lovemaking will simply fulfill their spiritual love, and that the love will persist even when its physical vehicles have expired. The resorting to bodies, and the escape from bodies, are intertwined defenses against the threat of "sepulchrall" mortality that haunts the early lines of the poem. Death will prove to be nothing other than love; bodies and souls will somehow eventually converge in unlimited delight. Those are the Christian rumors that Donne repeatedly seeks to confirm in his secular lyrics by making the conjugal bed a flattering mirror of the tomb.