ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

IRREMEDIABLY DONNE
Are as Atlanta’s balls, cast in mens viewes,
That when a fooles eye lighteth on a gem
His earthly soule may covet theirs not them.
Like pictures, or like bookes gay coverings made
For laymen, are all women thus arraid;
Themselves are mystique bookes, which only wee
Whom their imputed grace will dignify
Must see reveal’d. Then since I may knowe,
As liberally as to a midwife showe
Thy selfe; cast all, yea this white linnen hence.
Here is no pennance, much less innocence.
To teach thee, I am naked first: Why than
What need’st thou have more covering than a man.
As we might expect, this elegy, popular in the miscellanies of the period,
especially at Oxford, seems destined for controversy, which it has inspired
beginning with initial acts of censorship (the poem was not printed until the
Restoration edition of Donne’s poems in 1669) and continuing into the present
with critical worrying over the speaker’s moral and physical posture. Is he a cad?
A colonizer? A dominator of women? (By the poem’s end, Carey imagines the
woman cowering under a bedsheet.) 26 Or is he a radical libertine and liberator?
Indeed, the reference to “Licence my roving hands” seems designed to call
attention to the daring bravado of writing licentious poetry in general, and in
addition, to the daring politics of a poetic act that a woman has the power to
approve. We, and perhaps more significantly, Donne’s earlier audience might
remember that Marlowe’s limp translation of Ovid’s Elegies was among the works
censored in 1599, and this poem is anything but limply written.
In any event, from the opening command (“Come, Madame, come”) to the
closing query (“What need’st thou have more covering than a man”), Donne
plays fast and loose with sexual puns, wittily blasphemous allusions, hyperbole,
mock worship, and, most of all, with the underlying conceit of the speaker as a
kind of indecent Sir Walter Raleigh of the bedroom attempting to display, in
private, the full extent of his male identity: his “masculine, persuasive force.” As
commentary testifies, Elegy 19 is clever, shocking, outrageously male, easily
insulting to women and to king alike. And yet Donne is so enthusiastic over the
prospect of sex—“Oh my America, my new found lande”—that the poem also
possesses a kind of radical innocence justifying, in the minds of some, the variant
reading of the crucial line 46: “There is no pennance due to innocence” (my italics).
If this poem has long been read as the quintessential Donne elegy, and furthermore,
if it helped to enable more consciously artful poems like Carew’s “The Rapture”
and Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress,” it is not because it is less indecent than some
of Donne’s other attempts in this genre. It is because the intoxicating power of
promiscuity is central to the (male) imaginative experience of the poem, where it
is figured on something approaching a grand scale. (“Behind, before, above,
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