Valediction of or to the Book

Date: Thu Feb 28 8:28 PM, 2008

Valediction of or to the Book

Date: Sun Mar 2 1:41 PM, 2008

I think this stanza is perfection:

Study our manuscripts, those myriads
Of letters, which have past 'twixt thee and me,
Thence write our annals, and in them will be
To all whom love's subliming fire invades,
Rule and example found;
There, the faith of any ground
No schismatic will dare to wound,
That sees, how Love this grace to us affords,
To make, to keep, to use, to be these his records.

Date: Sun Mar 2 1:49 PM, 2008

I did not mean my previous posting to be anonymous--apologies. I'm Mary Novik.

Date: Mon Mar 3 8:04 AM, 2008

Yes it's an excellent piece of work, Mary. And the three "Here" stanzas convey something of the substance of the letters mentioned here.

I just don't understand the problems voiced about this poem.

Date: Mon Mar 3 10:53 AM, 2008

I like the poem, too, though/because I find it difficult; that, and the fact that it is so seldom taught, inspired me to choose it for the discussion.

Here are my thoughts on the "Here" stanzas: I believe that they bother people because they do what those lines from "The Canonization" only describe: "You . . . / Who did the whole worlds soule extract, and drove / Into the glasses of your eyes / . . . / Countries, Townes, Courts." I've always been uncomfortable with those lines, as the future worshippers who "thus invoke" the lovers seemed to me to be getting their saints all wrong; the earlier stanzas of the same poem seemed to me to demonstrate that, far from encompassing and "epitomiz[ing]" the world, they reject it and make their own, alternate universe.

But I think I may have been wrong in that assessment. The speaker's point in the opening stanzas of "The Canonization" is that the lovers don't interfere with or have an effect on the rest of the world; but that doesn't mean they don't contain it in microcosm. They are, after all, as "The Sunne Rising" puts it, "all States, and all Princes." "Valediction of the Booke" just takes that idea another step and claims all areas of discourse as being subsumed by the discourse of the lovers.

Now, the problem with that claim (the one that I was avoiding in my earlier desire to deny that the lovers of "The Canonization" would really condescend to "epitomize" such tawdry things as "Countries, Townes, and Courts") is that such epitomizing or (given the ruling metaphor of the "Valediction") anthologizing seems to taint the lovers, to make them seem secular and petty rather than saintly and transcendent. But isn't that the very strategy of de-mystification that we constantly see at work in Donne's erotic verse?

In "The Extasie," the speaker claims the heights of mystical experience for himself and his beloved, only to insist that it would be wrong to remain in ecstasis, that they must "descend." In "Valediction of the Book," the speaker says essentially the same thing in the first of the three "Here" stanzas, thus preparing us for the second and third (the ones that cause the trouble). In those two stanzas, he admits (or perhaps boasts), that this couple's love includes not only the divine, but also the legal and the political. We may not like to think about the legalism and politics that inhere in romantic relationships, but I think most marriages that endure do so partly because the parties involved are willing to "stoop" to deals, negotiations, compromises, and disputes that resemble those of law and politics and thus do not fall either under the theological heading of "abstract spirituall love" or under the more concrete typology of beauty mentioned in the first of the three stanzas. Thus, since the "longitude" of the relationship is what's to be tested at this point, the book of this couple's love must include the seamier, less romantic discourses of law and politics.

Date: Tue Mar 4 2:16 PM, 2008

I didnt hear the debate that took place at the conference about these three stanzas, but having re-read them since the thread of this discussion started, Id like to offer some comments for discussion with reference to the second of the three stanzas beginning with Here:

This stanza seems to me to be predominantly a criticism of lawyers. I think that what Donne is saying is that the love that is recorded in the lovers Book will show lawyers two things that they will not find in their own books. First, they will find out the condition by which mistresses legally belong to the male (and I think that what Donne is referring to here is the sexual relationship the lovers enjoy, which legally represented a contract to marry in his time). Nevertheless, the notion of the female sex as the personal property of the male is a troubling misogynistic concept. However, the second lesson the lovers Book will teach undercuts the suggestion of both misogeny and ownership. Donne suggests that Lawyers will find that the males privilege or claims to ownership within a sexual relationship / marriage no longer apply when a transference takes place whereby what belongs to Love is freely given to women. In other words, where a union is based on love, legal rights and hierarchies that privilege the male are no longer relevant: prerogative these states devours, / transferrd from Love himselfe, to womankinde. Love for the female devours, with all the sexual connotations this verb implies, legal hierarchies and ownership. However, the fifth line introduces ambiguity: the referent for who is not immediately clear. Initially, I assumed that who referred to the female sex, and that the remainder of this stanza prolonged a view of women as fickle and unreliable. However, if the referent for who is taken to be the lawyers, a very different interpretation results. It is the lawyers who exact great subsidies, and whose cause, honour, or conscience proves false and vaine. This reading argues that the idea of love as both spiritual and sexual continues into this stanza, and that love absorbs natures laws whilst eluding the cynical worldly attitude of lawyers.

Date: Tue Mar 4 5:21 PM, 2008

This is the poem that in a very real sense provoked my dissertation. It was the first of Donne's poems I delivered on-- and remains a favorite. Had I known this was to be a centerpiece of that last day, I might have postponed seeing my daughter at Rice. (Probably not.)

It begins with a command to the reader: "Study . . . ". It then goes on to describe the early-modern manuscript activity dear to my heart "those myriads / Of letters, which have past 'twixt thee and me," and instructs the reader to study those before writing their annals. As I read it, the letters which passed from the speaker to his lover (AND that she wrote and passed BACK to him, let us please remember) preserve the tracers of their love.

It is this Love that affords them grace "To make, to keep, to use, to be these his [Love's] records. Love is the source that causes them to create, the reason to preserve them thus in textual evidence, to use texts as a means of displaying that love, and remains evidence of that love . . . Great stuff.

As for the "Here" stanzas . . . are we on a quota here?--Margaret

Date: Sat Mar 8 9:00 AM, 2008

Thanks, Theresa, not only for this explanation of the problematic stanzas of ValBook (4, 5, and 6) but also for noting the aptness of the poem as a topic for panel discussion.
Your reading of the stanzas is that they serve different purposes: 4 calls for descent to the less abstract and spiritual features of love, while 5 and 6 illustrate these in the speakers evident preoccupation with legalism and politics. I dont read the three stanzas serving these different purposes; and in particular I dont see 4 calling for what we get in 5 and 6.
Instead, all three stanzas seem parallel in showing how the chronicle proposed in line 12, once written (as long-livd as the elements, Or as the worlds form, this all-graved tome In cipher writ, or new made idiom), may be used by three kinds of readers with an interest in love, one kind in each stanza: divines, lawyers, and statesmen (or those among them who can read).
The point seems to be that all these kinds of readers of the chronicle will use it for self-serving purposes, finding fools gold rather than what the chronicle truly contains: heaven in its beauty (for Loves divines), legalisms to justify possession of women (for lawyers), and (for statesmen) the grounds of their occupation. While they may think they have found what they are looking for in the chronicle, all three groups will misread it and, in consequence, as the speaker predicts in stanzas 3 and 6, they will be wounded by it. In their various ways all three, like the statesmen, will note something in the record of love that is not there.
Make sense?

Date: Sat Mar 8 9:03 AM, 2008

Hello Siobhan. Its a pleasure to talk with you again. Too bad you werent here for the panel discussion.

I agree with you that stanza 5 is mainly a criticism of lawyersespecially of lawyers who deal with love and marriage. It is their notion (not a notion of the speaker or the woman he speaks to) that female sex can be the personal property of males.

I also agree that the referent of who in line 41 is double, indicating both the lawyers themselves and the mistresses and womankind they fancy in their studies and portray falsely in their books.

The poem thus seems (as I have argued with you about other Donne poems) directed against misogyny.

Date: Sat Mar 8 9:04 AM, 2008

Hello Margaret. Your engagement with this poem over the years seems to have been straight as an arrow, and parallel to my own. You make an excellent point about their sharing of correspondence. If I could read her letters as well as his, I might think of the poem as in effect addressed to me, fancying that, with access to these secrets, I could study the correspondence and write the chronicle myself. Alas, I dont have access to most of these letters, if I have access to any of them.

Date: Sun Mar 9 6:21 PM, 2008

This weekend I've been looking at variant texts of this poem, Dennis and Siobhan, and some variants are misogynistic and some are not. The 1633 text is NOT. The Balam MS is. I find the 1633 reading incredibly compelling because she is a fully-formed writer herself (likened to Corrina, Polla Argentaria and Phantsia), not simply the muse (in the Balam the allusion is to Helen of Troy) inspiring his. She is as actively, sensually involved in the exchange as he is. But all those external to their love, to the documented evidence of their love "In this THY book"-- her book-- are variously unable to decipher it.

I'm interested in the choice of "chimeras." It is THE classical symbol of failed art--but failed because it is comprised of disperate parts--like the conglomerate monstrosity in the ars poetica.

Oh, and Dennis, those letters of hers that you seek? In the bottom draw of my desk. (Don't I wish we did have them.)

Date: Tue Mar 11 11:08 AM, 2008

Hi, Dennis, Mary, Siobhan, and Margaret!

First, in reply to Dennis's reply: I did give the impression that I see the three "Here" stanzas serving different purposes, but that is not what I meant. In particular, I think it was incorrect for me to say that 4 calls for 5 and 6. I would correct that to say that all three do serve the same purpose -- to demonstrate that the book of this couple's love can encompass all three discourses -- divinity, law, and politics -- and in so doing epitomize the world of academic discourse as Donne conceived it. I would distinguish the first stanza from the other two only in the light of contemporary (21st-century) reader-response of the sort the panel discussion evoked: that is, I think that most 21st-century readers are more inclined to believe that the lovers' book may epitomize divinity than to admit that it also includes law and politics.

Now, about the content of the book and the gap between that content and its reception by the readers within the poem: I do think you're right to say that actual divines, lawyers, and (literate) politicians will misread the book, that its content will in fact prove inaccessible to them, since they are incapable of seeing anything beyond what they "chuse" to look for (33), what is as "vaine as they" (45), or what reflects "their nothing" (53). I think that such misreading is not, however, a matter of reading into the book what isn't there (more on line 54 in a moment), but of selective reading that distorts the meaning of what is there. That is, I would argue that the stanzas do not paint the love the book documents as wholly ideal, but as gritty and real; the book must thus include such things as "Faiths infirmitie," exhorbitant "subsidies" exacted, "prerogative" invoked, and "Alchimy" in the sense of false magic; for a man in love may sometimes lack faith, a woman in love may sometimes play power games, and lovers of any sex or gender may sometimes try to dupe their partners into believing that gilded lead is gold; but the love will not endure if the lovers refuse to forgive those failures and transgressions. The theologians, lawyers, and statesmen will see ONLY such stuff, missing the deeper meaning of the text, which involves a love capable of higher ground, a love in which beauty is not only the refuge of infirm faith, but also the type of heaven; a love that scorns any lover who "relies" on legal maneuvers and claims of ownership; a love capable of the "true religious Alchimy" (FirAn 182) that Donne himself did find "in the Bible" (ValBook 54). Thus, I think these stanzas are not just a satire on the professionals who will not "get" the book, but a boast about the degree to which the book (and the love it documents) can include the problematic elements those readers will detect without being defined by or limited to them.

My reading bears, I think, on the question of misogyny raised by Siobhan and further elucidated by Margaret. Just having completed a draft of the Oxford Handbook essay on Donne and misogyny, I would argue that Donne is here neither simply misogynous nor simply anti-misogynous. Rather, he is coping with the degree to which all heterosexual couples (especially in the Early Modern period, but not only then) must deal in some way with the specter of misogynous thinking, whether because the man feels he must repudiate misogyny or because he is still fighting his own misogynous instincts or because the woman sometimes acts or speaks in ways that seemingly validate gender slurs or because her actions and words are circumscribed by an ongoing need to invalidate misogynous preconceptions. The book of a love that includes all these possibilities will thus seem misogynous to some readers and anti-misogynous to others. Neither, I think, will be entirely right or wholly wrong!

Finally, the irony that this poem about gathering mss to form a book runs into an interpretive gray area when we consider the gap between Balam and 1633 positively boggles my mind (in a good way)!

Date: Wed Mar 12 6:27 PM, 2008

At the risk or being utterly reductive, if I may quote Donne in response to the final thought in Theresa's last observation ("Finally, the irony that this poem about gathering mss to form a book runs into an interpretive gray area when we consider the gap between Balam and 1633 positively boggles my mind (in a good way)!"): "But yet the body is his booke."

I am presenting on these two variant texts at Siobhan's conference in Cork in April. One of the things the 1633 text allows us to do--I argue--is see the book as a collaborative text in which her writing and his become one, inextractable. The collaborative communion the book preserves is misread even by those who can read. Her presence in the text is part of what is obscured. Her text becomes his because the readers who are reading it can't imagine a writing woman. I love this stuff . . .

Date: Fri May 30 3:47 AM, 2008

Hi, all of you!

Let me expound here the modest thought of a foreign amateur of this immense poet. I think there is no misogyny in this poem (and others): mistresses are ours by the same titles than lovers are theirs: heart and eyes (these protagonists of ALL Donnes love poems).

This stanza is a mere tirade against lawyers (lawgivers), who transferred the power to set love affairs from Love himself to women, subjecting them to the authority of that sort of chimaraes that are honour and conscience. This last statement is enough (I think it explosive still today) to exclude any extra- or pre-judicial position towards women, and men too, in love affairs.

Only interpretative doubt, for me, is to which refer them of line 43: if to women, to subsidies, or to heart and eyes. The difference is practically small, but substantial for tirare a lucido (I dont know how to say it in english) the Donnes lovable psychologism. So, I have let a likewise anonymous loro in my italian version, that I quote here for english dilettanti of italian language.

Qui più che nei lor codici i giuristiTroveranno a che titolo le amantiSono nostre, e come il privilegioDivora questi beni, se da AmoreSia ceduto alle donne, che sebbene 40Da cuore e occhi gran risorse esigano,Lasciano perder chi a loro saffida, A motivo adducendo il loro lonoreO la coscienza futili chimereCome loro, o il loro privilegio. 45

Fiornando Gabbriellihttp://www.johndonne.org/index.php?option=com_weblinks&catid=20&Itemid=54

Date: Fri May 30 3:57 AM, 2008

Pardon, but this text processor has ignored the inverted commas and ends of line that were present in my reply.

f.g.