Aemilia Lanyer and the Relational Text

The first of Lanyer's dedicatory poems addresses the most powerful of her desired patrons, Queen Anne of Denmark (1574–1619), wife of James I and generous supporter of writers and musicians, Ben Jonson among them. Positioning herself not only as a humble supplicant but also—and more intriguingly—as a mediator, Lanyer confidently directs the Queen to read, and to be transformed by, the poem:

Lanyer hereby invites the Queen to embark on a mutual process of change. Describing the poem as a mirror through which the Queen might see herself in the best possible light, Lanyer also suggests that the poem itself will not be the clear, reflective surface that makes this perception possible unless the Queen gazes upon it. It is difficult to fully appreciate the dynamic process described in this sonnet; it is far easier to imagine the image of the text as a mirror as just that, an image.¹¹ Yet, the reader and writer alike put pressure on the text. What modern theorists seek to make visible, Lanyer insists on directly. Her text is changed by those who read it, and those who read it are changed by the text. If not a claim that Aemilia Lanyer, humble writer, and Anne of Denmark, exalted queen and patron, are friends, it is nevertheless a claim that they might encounter one another in and through a written text, and that this encounter might have real effects on how they perceive themselves and understand the world. If the Queen can see herself in the text, Lanyer continues, she can then see Christ in the text: “Here may your sacred Majestie behold / That mightie Monarch both of heav'n and earth” (43–44).

Lanyer's claim about her poem only makes sense when we accept the conflation of mirror and vessel. The poem contains truth, but its truth is a reflection of the Queen—not the Queen in all her imperfections, but the Queen as she sees herself in the mirror of the poem, as one who gazes upon Christ, perfection itself and thus the source of salvation. The identifications proliferate. Lanyer first likens Anne's daughter, Elizabeth, to Anne herself, both in her “pattern of all Pietie” and then in claiming that she might similarly transform the book and, by extension, Lanyer's scope of vision:

Their engagement might thereby replicate the experience Lanyer had through her relationship with Queen Elizabeth, admirable for her ability “still to remaine the same, and still her owne” (118). The emphasis on integrity, framed as a claim of stasis, becomes a crucial point of defense against the accusation that Lanyer seeks merely to curry favor rather than to honor Christ: “And what our fortunes doe enforce us to, She of Devotion and mere Zeale doth do” (119–120). Lanyer does not hereby assert that she herself meets that standard, but that she aspires to. Together with those she enlists through her writing, Lanyer imagines a shared attempt that might succeed: Christ alone is not enough. One needs models to know how to be devoted to Christ, and one needs, moreover, to interact with those models, to be accompanied by them, affected by them, in order to aspire to integrity and stasis.¹²

This is not to say that Lanyer is blind to the dark side of relationality. In the prose piece addressed “To the Vertuous Reader,” which appears after the dedicatory poems and immediately before the title poem, she acknowledges that models can cause problems because emulation often breeds competition: “Often have I heard, that it is the property of some women, not only to emulate the virtues and perfections of the rest, but also by all their powers of ill speaking, to eclipse the brightnes of their deserved fame” (97–98). Lanyer identifies this impulse to denigrate others as the root of the problem for women. To counter it, she proposes to hold up models without any equivocation, to demonstrate that examples are transformative, that virtue inspires virtue. Thus she brings to a climax her list of wise and good women from the Bible by describing how Christ affirmed the worth of women in every possible way, for he was “begotten of a woman, borne of a woman, nourished of a woman, obedient to a woman … he healed woman, pardoned women, comforted women: … [and] after his resurrection, appeared first to a woman, sent a woman to declare his most glorious resurrection to the rest of his Disciples” (43–50).

When grouped all together in this way, the evidence of good women should be “sufficient to inforce all good Christians and honourable minded men” (54–55) to leave off disparaging women and praise them instead. Yet in a time-honored rhetorical maneuver, Lanyer states as fact what she actually hopes to achieve. As she acknowledges in her closing lines, good examples in and of themselves will not catalyze change. Examples only become effective through an interactive, relational process of identification and inspiration.

Lanyer, in other words, hopes by her writing to inspire others to admire those she writes about, but this hope will only be realized if she can convince her readers to lend a sympathetic ear—to enter into a relationship with her text. Thus she imputes to her readers the virtues she needs them to have, complimenting their good qualities so that they might infuse her work with the same—that “according to their owne excellent dispositions, they will rather, cherish, nourish, and increase the least sparke of virtue where they find it, by their favourable and best interpretations, than quench it by wrong constructions” (58–61). By calling on her readers to be generous, to interpret her in good faith, Lanyer alludes to the process whereby an example becomes a catalyst. When one is sympathetic, inclined to see the good, one is inclined to emulate the good that one sees.

Lanyer thus insists that relationships are necessary even to the private process of self-discovery. In her dedicatory poem to Ladie Lucie, Countess of Bedford, for example, Lanyer recasts the familiar trope of the soul as a cabinet or closet, a private place that contains private thoughts, by portraying herself as the guide who tells the possessor how to use the closet. She first alerts the reader to the existence of the cabinet, presenting it not as something she already knows but as a place to be discovered:

The self resides within, in other words, but self-knowledge is enabled by a mediator who insists that this self-awareness is intersubjective. Clearly, one comes to know oneself by knowing Christ, and one knows Christ not only through oneself but also through another. Lanyer thus invites the reader to embark with her on a devotional journey that involves an active interplay of reading and discernment. Lanyer first offers her reader a detailed description of Christ, stuck with arrows as in popular images of the martyred St. Sebastian, and explains that Christ's wounds are themselves a text, in which one can read salvation. Here, then, are two simultaneous ways of reading: Lanyer's words enable the reader to see Christ's body as a text. The success of this reading depends, however, on the reader. Lanyer underscores this by moving from injunction to request: If the reader is receptive, willing to see and know, then Lanyer can offer her what Christ reveals. Likening “Salve Deus” to the Old Testament ark of the covenant, Lanyer promises that her poem can facilitate the reader's apprehension of a true self: “About this blessed Arke bright Angels hover: / Where your faire soule may sure and safely rest, / When he is sweetly seated in your brest” (19–21). This is the self understood in relation with Christ, nurtured through relationship with the author and the text, which hereby works as a kind of spiritual advisor.¹³

In another dedicatory poem, to Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, prominent patron and famous writer in her own right, Lanyer develops this point in another way by presenting the act of reading as akin to a sacrament. If Mary Sidney deigns to grace the text with her attention, she will see Christ, Lanyer explains. Not only that, she will receive Christ, as from a priest:

In these two compact lines, Lanyer evokes a Protestant understanding of the Eucharist: real reception through textual apprehension.¹⁴ And she herself is the priest, the one with the power to give Christ, not because of her worthiness but because of the worthiness of the one she gives. Thus, like priests and recipients in the Catholic mass, Lanyer both asserts and displaces herself, proclaiming her unworthiness while presuming to hope nevertheless. And presuming, thus, to imagine that her text—not just the inspiration or vision she writes about, but the writing itself—means she has something to give, Lanyer stands as a priest, even as Christ himself, inviting others to Christ's supper: The feast is simultaneously Christ's Passion and Lanyer's poem about it. And Lanyer and Mary Sidney alike, or so this poem seeks to claim, work together as writers to place themselves together with Christ, to fill

This complex understanding of what a relationship with Christ entails is a key theme in Lanyer's title poem, “Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum.” Throughout the poem, Lanyer affirms the traditional Christian message, transformed into the singular salvific truth by Protestant divines, that believers should recognize their utter dependence on Christ alone (“If he vouchsafe to guide my Hand and Quill, … Then I will tell of that sad blacke fac'd Night” [324, 327]). Moreover, she reinforces the importance of interactive relationships when she begins the story of the Passion by dwelling on the failures of Christ's friends. These include not only the memorable prediction that Peter would renounce his allegiance to Christ three times before dawn, but the more subtle inability of Peter and two other disciples to be present to Christ in a time of doubt and fear. Freely drawing on details from the three synoptic Gospels, Lanyer also enhances the scene to emphasize the significance of the friendship as she describes what happened in the garden of Gethsemane, where Jesus went to pray the night before he was arrested. In Luke, Jesus addresses all his disciples as a group, telling them to pray that they might escape his fate (Luke 22:40), but in Mark and Matthew he asks three disciples in particular to come with him, and, when they are alone together, breaks down and admits that he feels as though his heart would break (Matt 26:37–39; Mark 14:33–34). Lanyer expands on this element from Mark and Matthew to highlight that Jesus sought to share the burden of sadness with friends:

In the very next stanza, however, this eloquent questfor the comforts of companionship becomes fodder for a message about the futility of trying to achieve it: “Sweet Lord,” Lanyer asks, “how couldst thou thus to flesh and blood / Communicate thy griefe? Tell of thy woes?” (377–78). The answer is that he could not. Fallible humans all, the three select disciples failed even to fulfill the minimal request that they stay awake. Drawing on a detail that appears only in Luke, Lanyer suggests that an angel con veyed to him the comfort he did not find from his friends (“His Angel did appeare from Heaven to thee, / To yield thee comfort in Extremitie” [431–32; Luke 22:43]). Yet she does not relinquish the idea that Christ's love was not the undifferentiated, impersonal love of a distant deity but instead, crucially, akin to the human love manifest among friends.

Thus when Christ faced “ugly Death” it meant, in Lanyer's rendition, the time when

Even after the stark account of their failure, their sin, their incapacity to sustain Christ, who had to rely instead on the supernatural intervention of an angel, Lanyer reiterates the mutual love that tied Christ and the disciples together as friends. In Lanyer's poem, the drama of friendship fulfilled (if only partially) and betrayed overshadows the scene of men with swords seizing a criminal. Lanyer conveys the message that Christ's sacrifice was the self-sacrificing love of a friend who wanted to save his compatriots by staying within the confines of the garden and describing Christ as one who gives himself up on the condition that the authorities let his friends go free.

Later in the poem, Lanyer memorably defends Eve as one whose “fault was onely too much love” (801). We should read this claim against her insistence here that the disciples were reprehensible because they did not love enough—not, in other words, because of their selfishness, lack of resolve, or treachery per se, but specifically for their failure to stay faithful to a friend:

Here Lanyer sets up a continuum of love, rather than a simple polarity, so that even as Jesus epitomizes a perfection that no human can achieve, and Christ alone is “bound to loose us all” (633), human beings exhibit a varied capacity of love and it is this variety that she wants to emphasize. In lauding (and excusing) Eve as one who loved too much, in contrast with the disciples, who are indicted as those who loved too little, Lanyer's poem implicitly challenges not only the traditional assumption that Eve brought sin into the world, but also the tendency to read the faithful disciples' failings as minor compared to Judas's dramatic betrayal, Pilate's tyranny, or the high priests' persecutorial zeal.

So, too, the poem takes Mary's sorrow at Calvary as an occasion to explore the pitfalls and glories of nearly perfect love. In her grief, Mary is nearly annihilated because of her close identification with Christ:

This glory, the poem suggests, came about through a mutual movement of love, as in parallel couplets, without claims of causality, it describes how God magnified Mary and she “did pleade for Love at great Jehovaes gate” (1036). Her plea becomes an efficacious desire because she was not held down by passionate human attachments: This claim that detachment enabled a humble woman to feel the right desire, to focus all her desire on God, is paradoxical when read in light of the earlier lament that theloss of Christ undid Mary's very sense ofself. Throughout the poem Lanyer stresses that the power of Christ's love was rooted in Christ's particularity, Christ's embodiment as a loving friend and son. Consequently, as the object of transcendent love, a love directed not to fallible humans but to an eternal savior, he nevertheless taught the importance of attachments, of particular, intimate relationships as the site of true love.¹⁵

Thus, when Lanyer concludes this account of the passionin addressing the reader directly and summarizing the lessons learned, she insists on the coincidence, rather than transcendence, of apparent contradictions: “And here both Griefe and Joy thou maist unfold”(1171)for the miracle of Christis to unite “death, life, misery, joy and care” (1179). The message is not that one should overcome particular attachment and tragic implications of human finitude, death, and grief above all, but instead that they can be experienced anew, experienced through attachment to Christ as Christ experienced them:

To love Christ, according to Lanyer's poem, is to feel as Christ felt: passionate joy, unremitting sorrow, an excess which should not be denied but embraced.

John Donne and the Problem of Love

Although Donne is famous in a way Lanyer may never be, the lives of these poets ran on parallel tracks—at least for a time. Like Lanyer, Donne was born into a family that did not fit easily into the religious mainstream of Elizabethan England: Donne's parents were from prominent Catholic families. He too spent much of his early life dependent on those with significant political power and began to write religious poetry afterlosing access to these powerful figures—in his case, because he secretly married the daughter of one of his patrons and was subsequently banished. Further, the Sidney Psalter—the celebrated translation of the Psalms begun by Sir Philip and finished by his sister, Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, after his death in 1586—exercised a distinctive influence on Donne and Lanyer alike. Unlike Lanyer, however, Donne eventually found a route to social status; he became Dean of St. Paul's, the most influential pulpit in England.¹⁶

Of course, the fact that these similar life paths ended with the man financially and socially better off than the woman underscores the masculine privilege that also affected their literary reputations. Other scholars who have compared these two poets suggest, too, that each visualized God in his or her own image, Lanyer by emphasizing Christ's feminized qualities of submissiveness, pacifism, and silence, and Donne by writing about God as a jealous male lover much like himself. However, the diversity in their treatment of how and why relationships are important shows more complexity than this conclusion about their reliance on gendered self-understanding would suggest.¹⁷

If Lanyer's poetry was structured by the question of how we impel ourselves to overcome the difference and distance that separates humans from each other and from God, Donne's problem was how to overcome the tension between singularity and unity—between the appealand necessity of self-sufficiency and the desire for a self-transcendent unity. Like Lanyer, albeit more equivocally, he found an answer in poetry itself. In his love poems as well as in his religious poems, he alternately celebrated and feared unity, the homogenous world that love creates. We need other people, relations, ties that bind, but these same ties threaten to make us dependent, stripped of the singularity that makes us recognizable to ourselves.¹⁸

For Donne, writing seems to offer a partial solution, because the condensed structure and symbolic language of poetry enabled him to explore relations at a remove from the intensity of personal encounters, and thereby to affirm singularity even as he imagined unity.¹⁹

In his poems, Donne eloquently claimed that love creates a new reality that makes what came before nearly unimaginable. “I wonder by my troth, what thou, and I / Did, till we lov'd?” (1–2) he asks in an early poem, “The Good-Morrow.”²⁰

In thinking about both human and divine love, Donne imagines that the power of love comes from this capacity to create another world, to turn the individual into a relational being, part of a unity that transcends particularity:

Yet Donne repeatedly emphasizes, both in his Holy Sonnets and in his love poems, that relationships make one vulnerable and dependent. Self-sufficiency has its advantages. Moreover, Donne's poetry reminds those who would claim that divine love escapes these dangers that undifferentiated love is no love at all (“my face in thine eye, mine in thine appears”). Love derives power from specificity, the sense that the beloved is unique and different from oneself, even as it promises to eliminate the distance between lover and beloved.²¹

To love is to feel contrary pulls of difference and union, particularity and universality.

Thus Donne's poetic claims that love creates the only true reality are interlaced with claims that the unity it promises cannot be achieved. “The Legacie,” for example, begins with an affirmation of life framed as a description of death: “When I dyed last, and, Deare, I dye / As often as from thee I goe” (1–2). This is not merely a flowery way of professing devotion but the beginning of a complicated reflection on what love does to selfhood.

The reader who wonders about the distinction between “I” and “me” in the first line will find no relief in the confusing mix of self-possession and self-disavowal that follows. Love brings death, not to the self exactly, but to the self possessed by the beloved (“that's you, not I / Did kill me”). In love, then, death and survival coincide. We might put it this way: the self was killed by the mixed self that love creates. With this Donne suggests that the self endures, if only to experience its own loss, in the very experience of loving another.

The self survives its own death because love's possession is never complete. Part of the self stands akimbo, not fully encompassed by the merger of two into one. So at the end of “The Legacie,” the speaker asserts that lovers do not, cannot, fully possess or know one another by describing the outcome of the speaker's nearly futile search for the heart his lover took:

The heart was nearly unrecognizable because of its “colours” (specious appear ances) and “corners” (secrets), and could not be judged or described in any simple terms. We might call it an uncontainable remainder, not fully possessed by anyone because not fully knowable by anyone (neither the “I,” the “me” or “my self, that is you, not I”).

Absent simple unity, however, lovers are buffeted by the crosswinds of dependency and self-sufficiency. As Donne emphasizes in “The Message,” a beautiful, bitter poem about possession, love begets vulnerability. In a string of defiant laments, the speaker both bewails and rejects dependence upon his lover: “Send home my long strayed eyes to me, … Send home my harmlesse heart againe.… Yet send me back my heart and eyes, / That I may know, and see thy lyes” (1, 9, 17–18). Tragically, because love alleviates solitude, we feel the isolation all the more acutely when love fails, and its loss transforms a feeling of self-sufficiency into an unbearable sense of dependence.

We are, that is, still separate beings, however much in love. Donne's vision is complex because he eloquently celebrates and laments this fact. Even in “The Extasie,” under a title celebrating a joyful feeling of self-transcendence, Donne somberly describes love as that which “defects of loneliness controules” (44). If love can only control our loneliness, and not banishit altogether, perhaps we should celebrate solitude. Donne insists, however, that this is the most dangerous sort of self-delusion. In 1611, the same year that Lanyer published her poems, he wrote the first of his “Anniversaries” in memory of Elizabeth Drury, daughter of a nobleman who subsequently became Donne's generous patron. “For every man alone thinkes … that there can be/None of that kinde, of which heis, but hee”(216–18). Anomie and atomization will overtake the world if people do not appreciate that relations are crucial. In writing about a dead girl he had never met, Donne seems to reach a level of abstraction that lifts him beyond the contradictions inherent to human love. Idealized as a woman of virtue who transcended the fragmentation of life in the world, Drury was “she that had all Magnetique force alone / To draw, and fasten sundred parts in one” (221–22).²²

From here, it seems a simple step to affirm that this is the nature of divine love: that it draws all things together and makes solitude impossible as it engrafts particular people into a transcendent whole, like the body of the Church, the body of Christ. But relations with God do not work this way—as Donne signals by describing divine love in various contexts as “strange” or “painful.” If it were entirely self-sacrificing, self-negating, as it seems Christ's love was, then it is so unlike any love we experience that we have to think hard about how to understand it.²³

In the Holy Sonnet that begins with the hate-mongering command “Spit in my face, you Jewes,” Donne uses the trope of blaming others for Christ's death as an occasion to indict himself for crucifying Christ daily and thereby set up the key issue in the poem: how, as one whose very being repudiates Christ, can he love Christ? So the crux of the poem comes halfway through, with this plaintive plea: “Oh let mee then, his strange love still admire” (9). What keeps him from admiring Christ's “strange love” is a sense of self so far removed from Christ's. How can one admire Christ's masochistic refusal to use his power, to assert himself, to love even when he was not loved back?

Donne finds it difficult to desire one whose love he does not understand. In the Holy Sonnet “What if this present were the worlds last night?” he challenges himself to see the beauty in Christ's crucified body. Beauty, he concludes, in this remarkably dense and convoluted sonnet, has no fixed or objective reality. The relationship itself creates beauty—through the judgment of one, the reaction of another, and the effect wrought in and through this interaction. Thus at the end of the poem the poet only discerns Christ's beauty by claiming it, and then only conditionally, by asserting a response it hopes to provoke. Just as in an earlier poem Donne hopes to admire Christ's strange love, here he seeks to perceive Christ's tortured body as beauteous and comforting rather than terrifying or ugly. Still, there are no guarantees. The change cannot be simply willed or imposed but only emerges relationally in writing.

Writing, as Donne implies in several poems, has a peculiar status. It is self-contained in a way that conversation or physical encounters are not. Performed in a solitary state, it is not immediately interactive, and so underscores Donne's emphasis on exploring how to break free of self-containment. Thus the Bible, God's communicative act delivered through human authors, is a crucial model that affirms the transformative power of poetic language, as Donne reminds himself and his readers in the “First Anniversary,” in which he defends his choice to write a poem about Elizabeth Drury against those who would claim this genre might trivialize her death.

Donne thus imagines Christ as a muse who inspires him to write the words that lift him out of himself, to rescue him from damnation in a move by which the traditional atonement and the poet's confidence in the written word merge together. As he writes in the Holy Sonnet on the Ascension: “And if thy holy Spirit, my Muse did raise, / Deigne at my hands this crown of prayer and praise” (13–14). So too in the Holy Sonnet with the telling first line “I am a little world made cunningly,” Donne presents himself as alone, as dying alone, yet redeemed also by new (albeit hopeless) desires transmitted by another's writing:

Reading words written by someone else, or writing about what another person's text might enable him to see, he hopes to heal the burns inflicted by lust and envy. Significantly, in the funeral elegy for Elizabeth Drury, Donne focuses on the relationship between writing and personal relationships. Writing, he insists, is inadequate, mere “carkas verses,” except insofar as it successfully conveys the person it seeks to represent. In this way, Donne hesitantly affirms that writing can extend the transformative power of desire and emulation—the desire to emulate—if and when it conveys a living presence.