“Ardeur de veoir”: Reading Knowledge in Pernette du Guillet’s Rymes

“Ardeur de veoir” : Reading Knowledge in Fernette du Guillet’s Rymes Jan Boney Miss Rich, who is, I understand, twenty-one years old, displays a modesty not so common at that age, which disclaims any extraordinary vision . . . the poems a reader will encounter in this book are neatly and modestly dressed, speak quietly but do not mumble, respect their elders but are not cowed by them, and do not tell fibs. . . . —W. H. Auden1 . . . I’d rather taste blood, yours or mine, flowing from a sudden slash, than cut all day with blunt scissors on dotted lines like the teacher told. —Adrienne Rich2 A LTHOUGH ADRIENNE RICH may not have been thinking pre­ cisely of him when she wrote “ On Edges,” W. H. Auden did occupy the pedagogical function. Certainly, the great Auden, as the chairman of the committee that publicized her first book in a pres­ tigious series, and as a recognized early influence on Rich, fell into the category of “teacher.” His condescending cautions to the younger poet —expressed in his praise of her, his warnings against extraordinary visions and immodestly-dressed poems, and his exhortation to respect elders—unmistakably do correspond to the teacher’s call for a practice of blunt scissors and respect for the dotted lines against which Rich rebels in her poem. I start this piece with a fiercely unfair example of a violently failed teacher-student relationship not because there is a similar failure in the teacher-student relationship described in du Guillet’s poetry, but to point out that the parallel possibilities of failure and revolt are always present for real pedagogical pairs, for pairs of lovers, and for pairs of poets.3 While the pedagogical model for relationships is fraught with prob­ lems of authority that threaten to overwhelm, it is also a site of erotic tension, particularly when the relationship crosses gender lines. This ten­ sion results from, on the one hand, the supposedly immaculate nature of the teacher-student relationship, and, on the other, the threat of eroti­ VOL. XXX, NO. 4 49 L ’E sprit C réateur cism (we need only recall, for example, Abelard and Heloise) that always lurks beneath the surface of that relationship. The relationship between Sceve and du Guillet is similar in many respects to the one between Auden and Rich in the dialogue of the epigraphs (the first epigraph is advice from an older poet to a younger one; the second is a response to that advice); the du Guillet-Sceve relationship is also similar in some ways to the one between Petrarch and Sceve.4 In all three relationships, the one between older teacher and younger student is one of authority, whether acknowledged or resisted. With the case of the pair of Sceve and du Guillet, however, we have the added problem—not present in AudenRich or Petrarch-Sceve—of an imitated-imitator pair that is also an erotic pair. The case of du Guillet-Sceve supplements the pedagogical relationship with an erotic relationship, or if that is too strong a word, let us say an explicit, necessarily male-female relationship, potentially erotic because of its male-female composition. Careful attention needs to be paid to the nature of the imitative relationship and the pedagogical rela­ tionship, both as they cross the gender line and also as they are eroti­ cized. This attention to gender will certainly help us read du Guillet, but will also tell us about the nature of Renaissance lyric authored by poets of either gender. Not only is this couple different from Petrarch-Laura, PetrarchSceve , or Auden-Rich, there are important differences as well between Sceve and du Guillet. Sceve’s poetry is, for the most part, Petrarchist. Petrarchist poetry evacuates the speaking (or writing) female from the text in favor of a highly written female object, usually something to look at and almost invariably, in the Petrarchist tradition, cold, rejecting, and silent.5 This presents a problem for any woman writing inside or in response to that tradition. Sceve’s poetry participates in this dynamic to a lesser degree than most poets: he does not describe the beloved as silent (indeed, he seems to acknowledge her...