6/25/08

Oops. I just inadvertently broke my rules. I'm waiting for the Bank of America to tell me what's up with my checking account.

Anyway, for the last few days I've been writing in my notebook, in order to reuse time during German class. As it is, though, I need to figure out how to write more here, because I think I'm more productive here. And it means I can really dedicate my attention. For the last few days, I've been working on Barnfield, and the Shepherd's Confession and "Nut-Brown Wenche" that has been attributed to him.

Hammond's chapter on Shakespeare was fairly good, and I'm into his chapter on "political sodomy" now--descriptions of homoerotic relationships between rulers and their subjects. James II of course comes up for much discussion. What I'm curious about is how exactly the depiction of homoerotic themes changed in the reign of James I. Drayton made his poem straighter; Shakespeare thought he could release his sonnets (according to Hammond). I mean, presumably, it was yet another process of calibration for each individual to adjust his desires to the new regime, and presumably that process of calibration went in many directions at once. I'm not happy with that answer, however. What do we know about Jonson and desire? Marston and desire?

Donne became a minister. Also--he doesn't have many poems with male-male desire as a theme, although I believe he has one projected lesbian poem. Hall keeps writing for a long time. I don't know what happens to Daniel. Sidney and Spenser are dead. It occurs to me that the Cavalier lyric, evolving out the more lyric moments of Jonson and Donne, because of its investment in a particular sort of inwardness therefore needs to have its desires more clearly laid out than early poems. "Come live with me and be my love" could be voiced by a male shepherd to a male or female shepherd--it's not that we don't know what the answer is; it's that the poem works either way. Once people are writing poems that imagine a particular embodied situation, though, that changes.

"Come live with me and be my love" is a lovely poem about pastoral desire, a fantasy of natural abundance that keys in on the overflow of affection in love. 'Raleigh's' response makes it instead about the falsity of sexual persuasion; a more specific concern, to be sure, but still general.

"A sweet disorder in her dress" however, is really caught up in the desire of a particular lyric speaker. It could be that that doesn't appeal to you at all. It could be that you agree with Herrick. Who knows.

I need to return to this--the lyric definitely changes in between 1590 and, say, 1620-1630, and I think it has something to do w/ the specificity of the imagined speaker. but then so many Elizabethan poems imagine speakers--Tottel is not a pre-Cavalier....