Renaissance Tropologies: The Cultural Imagination of Early Modern England

7. Eucharistic Semiotics and the Representational Formulas of Donne’s Ambassadors

169 Eucharistic Semiotics and the Representational Formulas of Donne’s Ambassadors Alexandra Mills Block In the verse epistle “To Mr Tilman after he had taken orders,” John Donne praises the priest as an “Embassadour to God and destinie.”1 He is the ultimate mediator, able to “Bring man to heaven, and heaven againe to man” (48). Donne’s metaphorical ambassador helps to clarify the verse epistle’s central focus: representation. The poem is constructed as a series of similes that moves into a final metaphor, as Donne declares Tilman “a blest Hermaphrodite” (54).2 The poem’s accumulation of simile suggests that no comparison quite expresses how completely Tilman has been transformed by his ordination . This accumulation of simile, with its explicitly comparative structure, makes all the more stunning Donne’s final hermaphrodite metaphor. The poem’s last words are doubly marked with sameness-despite-difference: syntactically, in 7v 170 Eucharistic Semiotics the X is Y structure of metaphor, which stands out against the established pattern of simile, and tropically, in the paradoxical figure of the hermaphrodite. This emphasis on the disjunctive compression of metaphor fits the poem’s focus, which is not only the honor of Tilman’s new position, but also the poetic difficulty of expressing that honor adequately. As in “To Mr Tilman,” Donne’s texts often connect the figure of the ambassador to questions not just of political and religious representation, but also of literary expression and its challenges. For Donne as writer, the ambassador seems to encapsulate the difficulties of representation—the elusiveness of an accurate, reliable signifying relationship between two things. Fraught with opportunities for abuse, ambassadorship allows Donne to explore the possibilities of representation as they pertain directly to his own endeavors, not only in the realm of religion—his own ministerial representation of God—but also in the realm of literature—his texts’ representation of tenor by vehicle, of author to reader. That is to say, the figure of the ambassador allows Donne to explore the viability of various representational models, with particular attention to how reliably the representative stands for the represented. His interest focuses particularly on different foundations for the connection between the two entities. Sometimes he seems interested in describable likenesses between them; sometimes he suggests they have something more mystical in common, a shared substance, essence, or soul; and sometimes he asserts boldly that representative and represented have nothing in common beyond the metaphorical connection he asserts. The idea of ambassadorship allows Donne to test these different foundations, playing them off one another and pushing their limits. “To Mr Tilman” suggests that sheer wit may be able to pull successful poetic representation out of a hat, as the reader is bowled over by the illuminating extremity of the “blest Hermaphrodite”—in that metaphor, Donne embraces, seems even to glory in, the Alexandra Mills Block 171 magnitude of his representational task. But in other works, Donne’s ambassadors preside over more vexed and apparently anxious efforts to stabilize representation. 1 In the verse epistle “To Sir Henry Wotton, at his going Ambassador to Venice,” Donne proposes two very different means toward the same end: securing stability of representation through the likeness of representative and represented. One means focuses on textual investiture—the king, by declaring in writing that Wotton is now his ambassador, imposes likeness on him. Donne’s other avenue toward representational likeness is more mystical—the individual essence of the representative is replaced by the essence of the represented, sealing their identity with one another. It is this latter method Donne uses in creating his poem as his own ambassador to Wotton, a representational triumph by which he one-ups the king. Initially, the poem seems to treat Wotton’s appointment as the king’s ambassador quite positively, but in several important ways the successfulness of the likeness-based representational relationship is undercut. Donne begins the poem by listing all the other “papers” that will keep his poem company in Wotton’s possession, beginning with the letters of credence that establish Wotton as the king’s ambassador: After those reverent papers, whose soule is Our good and great Kings lov’d hand and fear’d name, By which to you he derives much of his, And (how he may) makes you almost the same, A Taper of his Torch, a copie writ From his Originall, and a faire beame Of the same warme...