The Challenges of Orpheus: Lyric Poetry and Early Modern England

3 The Craft of Pygmalion: Immediacy and Distancing

c h a p t e r 3 The Craft of Pygmalion Immediacy and Distancing Poetry, Paul Celan declares, is a handshake.1 Or, following William Waters’s acute and suggestively revisionist translation of this poet who so often resists translation, the phrase becomes a “pressing of hands,” an expression that, Waters demonstrates, deploys the double meanings of the German “Handwerk” to suggest both craft and the actions of literal human hands.2 “Handshake” gestures towards the honesty and immediacy so commonly attributed to lyric. Waters’s translation implies several sources and symptoms of that immediacy: a lack of intermediaries (no third hand intervenes in the pressing), an expression of what is directly apprehended (in this case tactilely experienced), an emphasis on the present and on presence (what better instance of the sense of touch so often associated with lyric than the meeting of hands).3 Yet in turning to a lyric that might at first appear to be a textbook example of everything Celan’s observation evokes, whichever way it is translated, one encounters a sleight—and a slighting—of hand. Indebted to the so-called ugly beauty tradition, the libertine defiance of the opening stanza is immediate in many respects: I can love both faire and browne, Her whom abundance melts, and her whom want betraies, Her who loves lonenesse best, and her who maskes and plaies, Her whom the country form’d, and whom the town, Her who believes, and her who tries, Her who still weepes with spungie eyes, t h e c r a f t o f p y g m a l i o n 107 And her who is dry corke, and never cries; I can love her, and her, and you and you, I can love any, so she be not true. (“The Indifferent,” 1–9)4 Donne’s characteristic creation of a distinctive voice calls up a sense of the speaker’s presence, and that figure eschews temporal shifts by addressing the reader in the present about attitudes that appear unchanging. The presence of an audience is established as clearly as that of the speaker: the deixis that, as many students of lyric have acknowledged, so often encourages immediacy is here literalized , inasmuch as “her, and her, and you and you” (8) achieves signification through an act of gesturing or pointing. A poem that glorifies in emotional distance insists in another sense on an immediate relationship with its readers, both the internal audience and other women and men as well. The second stanza continues these types of immediacy. But Donne is the master of endings that turn the poem and in so doing often turn on and against the addressee .5 In the third strophe he engineers a different but related type of reversal: Venus heard me sigh this song, And by Love’s sweetest Part, Variety, she swore, She heard not this till now; and’t should be so no more. She went, examin’d, and return’d ere long, And said, alas, Some two or three Poore Heretiques in love there bee, Which thinke to stablish dangerous constancie. But I have told them, since you will be true, You shall be true to them, who’are false to you. (19–27) Pace Carew, the stanza reminds us that Donne does not always exile the gods and goddesses of earlier poetry; here, however, the introduction of Venus is characteristic , both in the fact that it startles the reader and in its insistence that Venus, rather than occupying a more elevated realm, shares the world and the values of the speaker. Indeed, whereas he seems to cede authority to her, she in fact serves his purposes. But if it sustains the amoral values introduced earlier, the conclusion, eschewing any aesthetic temptation of its own towards “dangerous constancie” (25), involves a number of abrupt shifts in the immediacy the text had so firmly established. The reader is pulled from the present tense commonly associated with lyric to not one but two alternative time sequences. The poem removes the observations in the first two stanzas from the lyric present, establishing them instead as a song performed on a particular occasion; moreover, the third stanza contrasts the sequential events about Venus being narrated, what narratologists call story time, and the discourse time in which they are being told. Venus’s own words, though enlivened by direct discourse, also...