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Donne's "Anniversaries" and the Poetry of Praise
The Creation of a Symbolic Mode
By Barbara Kiefer Lewalski PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1973 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06258-7
CHAPTER 1
Contemporary Epideictic Poetry: The Speaker's Stance and the Topoi of Praise
Although their oddity and complexity make Donne's Anniversaries appear to be sui generis, a large number of generic alignments have been proposed for one or both of them: funeral elegy, epideictic lyric, Menippean satire, Ignatian meditation, epistomological poetry, medieval complaint, hymn. This startling diversity of opinion as to the poems' kind gives much force to Rosalie Colie's view of them as impressive examples of genera mixta, creating a new coherence out of the elements of several generic traditions. Nonetheless, it seems evident that the poems are in some basic sense epideictic or panegyric works; at all events this is the element in the mixture which has caused difficulties for readers and critics from Donne's time to our own.
Considered as epideictic works, the most obvious generic classification for these poems is the funeral elegy. George Williamson has placed them in the broad category of praises for the dead, which includes the classical epicedium, the funeral oration, and the Christian funeral sermon. Refining upon this classification in his masterful account of the centrality of praise in poetic theory from antiquity through the Renaissance, O. B. Hardison identifies the First Anniversarie with the typical funeral elegy, which is composed of praise, lament, and consolation, and the Second Anniversarie with the so-called anniversary poem, which according to Scaliger differs from funeral elegy chiefly in omitting the lament: "no one continues to lament a man who has been dead for one or two years."* On the basis of these identifications, Hardison explains the constituent elements of Donne's poems by reference to conventions and common tropes in the funeral elegy: e.g., he reads the lengthy passages about the decay of the world as a version of the conventional "nature reversed" trope, which the elegist often employs in lamenting that for him the world and all its good is dead. Moreover, because of their exaggerated language of compliment and their idealization of a woman, the Anniversary poems are often related to the Petrarchan tradition. Seeking to define that relationship precisely, Hardison suggests that the poems' closest generic affinity is with Petrarchan elegy, whose conventions were established by the second part of the Canzoniere, written after Laura's death. Those conventions were: the poetlover's focus upon the lady's soul as the subject of his praise; his attempt to understand her soul's pure spiritual essence as image both of the Platonic idea of virtue and of the Christian divine; and his gradual progress in spiritual understanding as he comes to perceive the lady's death to be both cause and symbol of his own mystic death to the world. Obviously, these conventions have relevance for Donne's poems.
Yet recognition of the poems' likeness to these generic kinds has not helped greatly with those matters which have caused the greatest difficulties for readers of the Anniversaries and which have aroused the most intense furor from critics — the extravagance of the hyperbole, and the apparently inexplicable symbolic weight attaching to the dead girl. For neither the conventional funeral elegy nor Petrarch's Canzoniere seem to provide a basis for the kind of praise Donne's speaker accords Elizabeth Drury. Williamson, who takes the subjects of the poems to be, respectively, the consequences of original sin and the potential destiny of the soul, can explain Elizabeth only as a blank counter arbitrarily made a synonym for the world — a "personification of virtue" in relation to the microcosm, and the "form or soul of the world" in relation to the macrocosm. It is not clear on what grounds she personifies or points to these meanings, or whether Williamson intends to adduce a serious flaw when he observes that the "ideological connections between Elizabeth Drury and both of these worlds turn into extreme hyperbole on the elegiac side of the poems." On the other hand, Hardison's view that Elizabeth Drury herself is the subject of the Anniversary poems leaves out of account the subject matter pointed to in both titles {The Anatomy of the World, The Progres of the Soul), and the testimony of both subtitles that Elizabeth Drury is "occasion" rather than subject — the problem being how and why extravagant praises of Elizabeth Drury should be linked to these weighty subjects. Moreover, the assimilation of the Anniversaries to Petrarchan elegy ignores the all-important matter of the speaker's stance. In Petrarch the dramatic situation of the speaker as lover qualifies the hyperbole: it is the speaker's world (not the real world) that has been destroyed by Laura's death; it is to and for him that she is a donna angelicata, a sun, a phoenix, a miracle, the cause and symbol of spiritual transformation, the image of the divine. Donne adopts such a Petrarchan stance in Twickenham Garden, where the speaker is a lamenting lover whose world is blasted by the death of his lady, but in the Anniversaries the speaker is not a lover: he professes to speak of the real world and for us all. Hardison finds "disappointing" Donne's failure to advance from Elizabeth Drury to a more adequate image of the Divine or to the vision of God as Petrarch (and Dante) do, but this very difference suggests that the Petrarchan reading of the Anniversary poems somehow misses their essence.
It seems important then to seek other literary contexts which may illuminate Donne's conception of poetic praise. An obvious starting point is the theory and practice of occasional epideictic poetry in England during the period contemporaneous with Donne's Anniversaries and his other poems of compliment — Le., 1595-1616. Such an investigation may highlight what is commonplace and what is unique about the Anniversary poems, what traditional assumptions and poetic conventions they call upon, and what strikingly new directions they define.
Some norms deriving from Renaissance rhetorical theory and from contemporary funeral elegies, especially those for Queen Elizabeth and Prince Henry, may be briefly summarized, for these materials have been studied extensively by O. B. Hardison, E. C. Wilson, Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Ruth Wallerstein, and several others. For the purposes of the present study, special attention must be given to poetic praises addressed to members of the nobility and gentry — often to individuals whom Donne also praised — for we need to know how such poems customarily differed from the praises of princes. My primary focus here is upon those elements in Renaissance epideictic theory and practice which bear directly upon the problems critics have had with the Anniversaries. Such elements are: the stance the speaker takes toward his subject (which is not of course to be equated with the actual relationship obtaining between the poet and the person praised), and the image which the poem projects of the person praised — a matter which can be approached with some rigor through an examination of the basic topoi of praise out of which specific tropes and images are developed. The fundamental question is, does Donne depart radically in the Anniversary poems from the conventions of praise acceptable in his own age, and, if so, in what particular areas and to what effect.
A. Some Norms for Renaissance Praise and Compliment
Occasional poems of compliment in the Renaissance are based upon classical and Renaissance rhetorical theory. From Aristotle onward it had been customary to distinguish three principal kinds of oratory — judicial (argument in the law courts), deliberative (the oratory of political assemblies), and demonstrative or epideictic (the oratory of ceremonial occasions such as patriotic festivals, commemorations, funerals, and the like) where the purpose is praise or blame. Theoretical precepts concerning poems of praise and compliment were derived from treatises on and examples of demonstrative rhetoric, and also from reading classical hymns to the gods and heroes in the light of the formulas for demonstrative rhetoric.
From Plato onward there was common agreement that the proper object of praise is virtue, and that praise of virtue serves a didactic purpose — to delineate outstanding moral qualities and to inspire the hearer to emulate them. The seminal discussion of the sources and methods of praise occurs in Aristotle's Rhetoric (I.ix); later, the various topics of praise were codified by Menander and the author of the Ad Herennium as the goods of nature, fortune, and character. Almost all Renaissance theorists agreed with Gcero and Quintilian that the goods of nature or fortune are not properly objects of praise in themselves, but should be treated chiefly as means of displaying the subject's virtue in using them rightly. Moreover, the speaker's stance or self-characterization was understood to affect significantly the credibility of his praises. For Aristotle this was a matter of rhetorical art: the speaker is to offer "ethical proof" by presenting himself as a judicious and trustworthy judge of virtue. For Cicero and Quintilian, on the other hand, it is a matter of the orator's nature: only one who has knowledge of all the virtues (Cicero) or who is himself a good man (Quintilian) can properly praise goodness.
In regard to method and style, Aristotle, Quintilian, and the Renaissance rhetorical handbooks identified many varieties of amplification and embellishment as suited to the accepted function of demonstrative rhetoric, to give pleasure; they also recommended the use of tropes which augment the subject's good qualities and compare him to paragons of virtue, as well as the organization of the whole according to such schemes as the six stages of man's life or the four cardinal virtues. Also, since most theorists also viewed praise as a persuasion to virtue, they frequently found appropriate some techniques of deliberative rhetoric which create the semblance of argument and proof. Stylistic devices deriving from the actual literary tradition include the topics E. R. Curtius has found to be characteristic of both classical and medieval praises: inexpressibility, according to which the speaker proclaims his inability to do justice to his superlative subject; outdoing, whereby the subject is said to surpass any with whom he can be compared; and universal renown, whereby "all" mankind is said to honor and praise the person in question.
He who praises has Aristotle's warrant to heighten and idealize the qualities of his subject by "drawing on the virtues akin to his actual qualities," so that "rashness will be called courage and extravagance generosity." This raises the ethical issue of flattery and excessive hyperbole, which classical and Renaissance theorists usually dealt with by asserting that the actual character of the man should be subordinated to the didactic motive of providing fit images of virtue for emulation, or of inciting the person praised to live up to his ideal self, thus projected. Erasmus, for example, declared, "No other way of correcting a prince is so efficacious as presenting, in the guise of flattery, the pattern of a really good prince." There was, however, a decorum governing hyperbole. Quintilian permitted it when the subject was truly exceptional, and the Renaissance rhetorician Henry Peacham concurred, allowing hyperbole when the matter is somehow consonant with such exaggeration. Most agreed with Puttenham in counselling discretion: "although a prayse or other report may be allowed beyond credit, it may not be beyond all measure." Another principle of decorum provided for the suiting of the genre, style, and subject matter of an encomiastic poem to the social position of the person praised. This idea was implicit in Menander's definitions of epideictic kinds in the Peri Epideiktikon, but it received explicit and emphatic formulation by Renaissance theorists such as Scaliger and Puttenham. Ap plying the classical discriminations specifically to English poetry, Puttenham identified hymns praising the gods as the "highest and the stateliest" kind of epideictic lyric, followed by "ballades of praise called Encomia" and also historical poems, which were appropriate especially to princes and great men who "most resembled the gods by excellencie of function, and ... by more then humane and ordinarie vermes." These kinds are to be written in the high style — lofty, eloquent, highly embellished. For inferior or private persons a lower genre and style is appropriate, because their virtues are necessarily of a less heroic order, less "exemplarie" and of less moment: "Wherefore the Poet in praising the manner of life or death of anie meane person, did it by some litle dittie or Epigram or Epitaph in fewe verses & meane stile conformable to his subject."
Some indication of the implications of these principles for the poetry of praise in the English Renaissance, as well as some measure of the changing fashions in such poetry in the decade preceding the writing of the Anniversaries, can be derived from two large collections of contemporary epideictic poetry: the praises and elegies for Queen Elizabeth (d. 1603), and those for young Prince Henry (d. 1613). For one thing, these praises and elegies provide examples of most of the stances available to the speaker of an epideictic poem, though modified in accordance with the particular social decorum appropriate to princes. The speaker might focus upon his own personal responses (admiration, wonder, grief), or he might present himself as spokesman for a group, a community, an entire nation, or nature herself: usually, the speaker of royal praises combined the two.
Within these general categories the speaker could adopt a more specific self-characterization. One posture, not usually available to the praiser of princes, presented the speaker as intimate friend and associate of the person complimented and thus able to observe and attest to his worthiness. The pastoral stance (the speaker as shepherd celebrating or mourning the loss of another shepherd or shepherdess) was extremely common in the praises of Elizabeth but declined markedly in the Prince Henry elegies. For both princes, not surprisingly, the most common stance was that of an inferior in status and merit — a distant admirer, dependent, or subject — giving reverent testimony to his subject's superlative merit. Common also in the praises of Queen Elizabeth, though obviously inappropriate for Henry, was a modified Petrarchan stance, modified in that the traditional amorous basis for the speaker's praise or grief is set aside, and the Petrarchan conceits and attitudes of devotion, dependence, quasi-religious adoration, dolor, and despair are adopted for courtly and political purposes, without the warrant of a deep love relationship. Nevertheless these poems preserve something of a dramatic relationship between speaker and lady, in that the speaker adopts one aspect of the traditional Petrarchan poet's role, that of the humble, devoted servant worshipping his exalted lady from afar. Yet another option for the speaker, evident in the elegies for both princes but especially in the praises of Queen Elizabeth (vide Spenser) is the posture of the Neoplatonic lover who celebrates the Ideas of Beauty and Virtue reflected in the particular person, and who attempts, by ascending the Neoplatonic ladder of love, to embrace those Ideas and the God who is their source. By redefining the personal love, which is the traditional basis for this stance, as devoted admiration — not difficult since Neoplatonic love is in any case a matter of the mind and spirit — the poetic speaker could address in Neoplatonic terms persons of either sex or even persons unknown to him.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Donne's "Anniversaries" and the Poetry of Praise by Barbara Kiefer Lewalski. Copyright © 1973 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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