Donne's "The Token": A Lesson in the Fashion(ing) of Canon Author(s): James S.

Baumlin Reviewed work(s): Source: College English, Vol. 59, No. 3 (Mar., 1997), pp. 257-276 Published by: National Council of Teachers of English Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/378377 . Accessed: 18/01/2012 16:45
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DONNE'S "THE TOKEN":

A LESSON

IN THE FASHION(ING) OF CANON James S. Baumlin

A major transmission its lackofstabilityin canon,attribution, is and feature of manuscript transmission an immediateadvantage text. For an author thefluidity of manuscript has in that he or she may easilyredefine canonand text at will and as oftenas desired. balBut anced against that advantageis the very real disadvantagethat oncea work leaves its no over it. author'shands,he or she is able to exertabsolutely control Ted-Larry Pebworth, "ManuscriptPoems and Print Assumptions" (3) The deconstructive momentis that when the "identity" the authordissolves. of Roger Poole, "The Yale School as a Theological Enterprise" (7) Renaissance a poetsseemedcapable giving themselves secularmissionthat was to demysof outsidethe theological realm. Whentheyweremostselftify languageas languageoperates which was not infrequently,they were aware of the deceptivetendencyof all conscious, Theirown obligation to expose deception was this and languageto deifyits would-be objects. to confess abandonment languageby thegods.But at thesame time theyhad, themthe of selves, to undertaketo createa language that couldtruly tame the gods and bring them inside.So thepoethad to acknowledge what languagenormallycannotdo,what wordsmay not say. He had to manipulatethem,in hopeof turning theminto his words,magicwords, so that, in spiteof theirusualincapacities, couldenrichthem,endowthemwith thepower he to speakafter all, thepowerthat attestedto a presentsignified,a captured within. god But the transcendent is nevercaught,after all... god Murray Krieger, "Presentation and Representation in the Renaissance Lyric" (36)

y titling my essay so, I wish to acknowledge that Renaissance literature is indeed "fashioned,"that is, constructed into a canon whose meaning unfolds throughout the interpretive history of particulartexts and traditions. My title also suggests that the construction and interpretation of Renaissance litera-

A specialist in Renaissanceliterature and the history of rhetoric,James S. Baumlin is a professor of English at Southwest Missouri State University. His recent publications include Ethos:New Essaysin Rhetorical and CriticalTheory, coedited with Tita French Baumlin (Dallas: Southern Methodist UP, 1994).

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ture are themselves subject to "fashion,"that is, to changes in canonicity and, particularly,in the reigning methodologies or means of interpretation. I call attention to this double usage because it reflects the double movement of my argument. Specifically, I wish to argue for the canonicity of a poem which I believe is by John Donne, though it has been fashionable for some decades to doubt his authorship. At the same time, I shall argue for its canonicity by means of a deconstructive method once fashionable, but now less so. Paradoxically,my paper argues on behalf of authorial presence-on behalf of the conceptof authorship-by means of a method that has served to deny such presence and to question the very notions of canonicity (Felperin 79-83), Roland Barthes's proclaimed "death of the author" imposing, as Harold Bloom suggests, an "anticanonical myth" (37) upon Western literary tradition. "Sonnet: The Token" has been all but banished from discussions of the Donne canon, and I wish to bring it back. By the same token, through the vagaries of critical "fashion" the methodologies of deconstruction seem virtually spent. They are not yet quite abandoned or banished from Renaissance studies, so I cannot claim to "bring them back." Still, in response to arguments made against poststructuralisttheory, I wish to show how it is that deconstructive readings continue to rejuvenate and reconstruct Renaissance literature (in this case, a disputed poem in the Donne canon): such readings provide more than passing fashion. And yet, self-reflexively, to interpret this poem (any poem) is to argue for the means of interpretation: hence my argument's double movement. Whether the argument succeeds remains to be seen. I offer it, ultimately, as an instance of the ways critical "fashion" both enables, and threatens to limit, the "fashioning" or interpretation of literature and the construction of canon. I It is by now commonplace to note that Donne owes his modern reputation as much to Herbert J. C. Grierson as to T. S. Eliot, Grierson's 1912 Oxford edition of Donne'sPoeticalWorks having introduced the poetry to its widest and most appreciative readership since Donne's lifetime. Donne's stock rose as influential readings of individual lyrics (Empson, Brooks) established him as the darling of New Critics; still, as theories-and readings, and Donne editions-proliferated throughout the middle decades of this century, historians "old" and "New" (Tuve, Andreason, Carey, and Marotti among others) sought various contextualizations of the poems, often turning to explore their intertextual relations. Though "The Canonization," "The Ecstasy," and "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" remained Donne's acknowledged masterpieces, these were now situated within a larger conversation whose voices include the whole of the Songsand Sonnets.Or almost the whole, for the question of dubia, of doubtful or "undecided" attributions, has continued to

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unsettle the canon of Donne's Songs and Sonnetsand, necessarily, the ways these poems are arranged and read. The company a poem keeps shapes its meaning in subtle ways, as it plays variations upon previous themes, questioning and testing and overthrowing poems that precede, while anticipating arguments that follow. To omit any poem from a collection (or, conversely, to add a new one) changes the reading experience and, ultimately, the interpretation of any collection as a whole. Absent from the 1633, 1635, and 1639 editions of Donne's Poems, "Sonnet: The Token" was first printed in 1649 "as a stray piece at the tail-end" (Smith 401) of the Songsand Sonnets-a position of some importance, actually, giving it (if temporarily) the collection's "finalsay."IDoubted by modern editors, however, the poem has virtually lost its voice within Donne criticism. Though flouting current fashion, what if we were again to treat the poem as canonical and deserving of attention? What might we learn about the poem and its contexts? What might it teach us about reading the Songsand Sonnets?For part of the answer we must turn first to the poem's more recent reception. "The Token," Grierson writes, "may or may not be Donne's" (2.cxlvii)-a warning duly heeded by Helen Gardner (Grierson's successor as Donne's Oxford editor), who relegates the poem to an appendix of dubia or doubtful works. Since their pronouncements, brief arguments have been raised occasionally for or against its canonicity (Jha 142-45) and for or against its genre (Is a poem of eighteen lines properly a sonnet?), but "The Token" has yet to receive a sustained reading or criticism. Gardner'srationale for doubting Donne's authorship follows: "TheToken" a rather is of poem,a "sonnet" eighteenlines,whichis found charming in a good manymanuscripts aim at collectingDonne'spoems in full; but its that absence fromthe manuscripts GroupsI andII ... is moresignificant of thanits presence in a fairnumberof largeindiscriminate collections.It is much more smooth and elegantthanwe shouldexpecta poem by Donne to be, and it is in a form,the extendedsonnet, that he did not use elsewherefor love-poetry.(Gardner, Elegies ... xlviii) The argument that Donne uses such a form nowhere else in the Songsand Sonnets carries little force, since no two poems of the collection are structurally identical (Shawcross, "Arrangement" 136)-an amazing feat on Donne's part, actually, to have managed such variety among his love lyrics. Perhaps more persuasive, if true, is Gardner's assertion that the poem is "more smooth and elegant" than Donne's other lyrics-an argument based on stylistic considerations that, too, are open to debate. Still, criticism has generally followed the two Oxford editors' lead. Among more recent and influential readersArthur F. Marotti accepts Gardner'slist ofdubia uncritically, "The Token" included, accounting for them largely as Donnean imitations (of which there are many: see Sullivan, "Who... ?"). Such works, Marotti writes, "represent not just the poetic 'influence' of Donne, but also the sharing of

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certain styles of communication-a fact underscored by the games of exchange and answer poetry in which Donne and his friends participated.The very fact that some verse by other authors can be mistaken as Donne's indicates the distinctiveness of a coterie-as well as of a personal-style of writing" (18). Marotti is right in recalling Donne's penchant for "answerpoetry," and I believe that "The Token" reads as just such a poetic "answer"or "exchange." In arguing for Donne's authorship of "The Token," I suggest that the first four lines are likely not his; certainly, they are not his stylistically.The remaining verses, however, form a "perfect"fourteen-line sonnet written in Donne's witty, "metaphysical"manner as an answer to the first stanza'sinitial, Petrarchan theme. Elsewhere Donne begins by parodying another's opening stanzas (see "The Baite") and writes alternating verses with a co-author (see "A Letter written by Sr. H. G. F and J. D. alternis vicibus"). Of course, I cannot prove that another poet wrote lines 1-4 any more than I can prove Donne himself wrote lines 5-18; I do know, though, that the remaining verses overturn the first stanza's naively Petrarchan effusions, turning "Sonnet: The Token" into an anti-Petrarchan parody and an otherwise distinctively Donnean poem. Surveying Donne's indebtedness to Elizabethan poetry, Michael Francis Moloney writes that, "of Petrarchianism,with its gallantry and devotion, its wholesouled admiration, and its credo of eternal trust and faithfulness, [Donne] is openly and fiercely scornful" (134), after which he quotes from several lyrics. Yet "there are other passages,"Moloney adds, "certainlyno less poetic in which he writes as any Sidney, or Daniel, or Constable might have done. Consider, for example, the adoring mood, the grave reticence, of his sonnet, 'The Token' " (135), which he then quotes in full, without further comment. Moloney, I believe, has been misled by the first stanza, as has Judah Stampfer, who suggests that the poem "goodnaturedly dramatizes the speaker'sindulgence in particularities.A garrulous sentimentalist, he is fundamentally wholesome" (212). Perhaps the poet begins sentimentally and wholesomely enough, requesting "some token" or evidence of love: Send me some token, that my hope may live, Or that my easelesse thoughts may sleep and rest; Send me some honey to make sweet my hive, That in my passion I may hope the best. (1-4) In rather hackneyed Petrarchan fashion, the poet requests a "token" (1) and "honey" (3) as curatives against the conventional sickness, restlessness, and anxiety of the Petrarchan lover. By his own admission the lady holds a power of life and death, if not over the poet's person then at least over his "hope" (1), which rests passively, perilously, in her hands and favor. The next stanza's"I beg ... "(5) seems initially to continue this passive, abject, passionate, and typically Petrarchan stance. And yet a fourteen-line sonnet follows

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(in Shakespearean structure: three quatrains and an epigrammatic couplet), in which the poet catalogs items that he does not, in fact, "beg." Indeed, there is no begging at all in the poetic voice, but only refusal and command: I beg noe ribbond wrought with thine own hands, To knit our loves in the fantastick straine Of new-toucht youth; nor Ring to shew the stands Of our affection, that as that's round and plaine, So should our loves meet in simplicity. No, nor the coralls which thy wrist infold, Laced up together in congruity, To shew our thoughts should rest in the same hold. No, nor thy picture, though most gracious, And most desir'd, because best like the best; Nor witty lines, which are most copious, Within the Writings which thou hast addrest. (5-16) Whereas Marotti would ascribe the above to an imitator, I believe that "The Token," after the first stanza, is thoroughly Donnean in thought and style. (For what underlies such an argument as Marotti's if not a belief that the poem is inferior, stylistically or otherwise? The poem is not greatly inferior to such a lyric as "A Jeat Ring Sent," and its reuse of Donnean conceits is hardly evidence against his authorship:we can speak of a "Donnean mode" precisely because his poetry reveals habits and repetitions of thought and language.) The remaining poem, in short, is Donne's rhetorically well as poetically, a distinction that I shall try to clarify later as in this essay. Not only does it return to the conceits of other Donnean lyrics (most notably "The Bracelet," "The Funerall," "AJeat Ring Sent," and "The Relique"); more important, it reveals a self-reflexiveness and an ambivalence toward language so characteristicof the Songsand Sonnetsthat I, for one, cannot imagine anyone else as its author. The challenge, of course, is to read carefully beyond the first stanza. Upon doing so, one discovers a rather sophisticated poetic exploration of the problems of persuasivelanguage and belief-and a work worthy, once again, of Donne's authorship. Though diverse in subject, lines 5-16 present an apparentlyunified pattern of imagery. More than a clothier's metaphor, "knit"(6) suggests "to knot together" or join, with an implication of sexual union (OED vb. 5d)-an image, that is, of covering, enclosing, or "clothing" reinforced by such words as "ribbond"(5), "Ring" (7), "meet" (9), "infold" (10), "laced up together" (11), and "rest in the same hold" (12). But why refuse such tokens? Like the ring which, conventionally, declares marriage in its enclosing/encircling of a beloved's finger, all these are outward, "material signs" of binding and betrothal. Is the poet, then, suggesting that such "signs" as betoken marriage are unnecessary? Would his beloved in fact refuse to

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give them, were they requested? Would the poet-lover refuse to accept them, were they offered? As readers, we could choose any one of these interpretations and base our subsequent reading on it; and perhaps for all three possibilities we can say that the poet seeks pleasure outside of wedlock, either by choice or by necessity. We might even imagine a further complication if one of the lovers is already married, making such external love-tokens impossible (and we can assume the lovers are both mature, given the poet's scorn of "the fantastick straine / Of new-toucht youth"). Still the rejected signs "should"allow the lovers to "meet" or join "in simplicity" (9), and "should"show that their "thoughts ... rest" together "in the same hold" (12) or clasp, the phrase thus invoking an image of hand-holding (and even, if faintly, echoing the "have and hold" of the marriage ceremony, with its exchange of rings and vows). Tantamount, then, to a refusal of marriage, the poem's middle stanzas hardly seem as "adoring," "grave," or "wholesome" as critics have suggested. To weigh further the implication of the poet's refusals, we might compare his arguments to other lyrics of Donne's. In "The Relique," a "braceletof bright haire" (6) is described as a "device"(9) to guarantee the fidelity of the two lovers, who shall by its potency "Meet" (11) at Judgment Day: When my grave is broke up againe Some second ghest to entertaine, (For graves have learn'd that woman-head To be to more then one a Bed) And he that diggs it, spies A bracelet of bright haire about the bone, Will he not let'us alone, And thinke that there a loving couple lies, Who thought that this device might be some way To make their soules, at the last busie day, Meet at this grave, and make a little stay? (1-11) In "The Funerall," similarly, the bracelet-charm is described as a "mystery" and "sign" (4) or sacrament whose preservative powers will keep the poet's "limbs ... from dissolution" (8). Though the bracelet in this present poem is rather of "coralls" than of "haire," its occult power, as Francis Manley observes (388), remains the same: to serve as a love-charm and guarantee of fidelity. The irony here, however, lies in the poet's rejection of its guarantee. Why should the poet not want such a charm, unless he refuses to be "bound"by its "hold"? In "The Token," the poet's refusal of a ring raises further complexities when interpreted emblematically. As Donne states in a verse letter to the Countess of Bedford, "round circles" are no less than emblems or "types of God" ("Honour is so sublime" 46) in their symmetry and perfection; here, too, the "round" and

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"plain" ring signifies truthfulness and morality, its circular form denying all hiddenness and angularity or "crookedness."Elsewhere I have suggested that Donne's "Jeat Ring Sent" meditates on "the loss of meaning that a ring suffers when returned, in breach of faith, to the despondent lover." There, "no longer a visible sign or 'figure' (7) that proclaims (and in a sense, seeks to guarantee) the lady's fidelity, the ring is reduced to mere 'fashion' (8), a bauble to fling away.Thus the poet comments metadiscursively on the disjunction between the signs and intentions of lovers' discourse" (Baumlin,John Donne 218-19). "The Token" argues for this same disjunction by refusing to allow rings, bracelets, and other material objects to stand as sufficient emblems or pledges of mutual love. As Tilottama Rajanobserves, the Songsand Sonnetsare "continuallyself-reversing" (823) in argument: The poemsas theystandmutually eachotherwithina largerstructure which qualify in cannotbe grasped its entiretyfromthe standpoint represented anyone poem. by individual in Moreover, poemsarethemselves binary form,andif they do not stand asJanusin the fieldof knowledge, areat leastincipiently and they self-questioning, theirconclusions. point to the need for otherpoemsto overturn (822) "The Token," indeed, contributes to that "largerstructure"by standing in an intertextual, "mutually-qualifying" relationship with other of Donne's poems and reversing several of their themes-specifically, rejecting their offer of love-emblems (and thereby serving, implicitly, to protect the poet himself from their charm-like powers). So, while the poet in "Elegie: His Picture" commands, "Here take my Picture" (1), hoping thereby to remain present in the lady'smind (and to preserve their it love), here he rejects the same "most desired" (14) object, perhaps because would elicit desire, thus holding him in its power. (As he argues in "Witchcraft by a Picture," with the "picturevanish'd, vanishe feares, / That I can be endamag'd by that art" [10-11]). And his rejection of the lady's "Writings" ("The Token" 16) and "witty lines, which are most copious" (15) appearsmost ambivalent of all, given that Donne-of all seventeenth-century lyricists-reflects most persistently upon the powers and effects of poetic language. The poet in effect commands his beloved not to write: implicitly, then, he continues to reject all arts that could in any way claim to have power over him. But is it at all clear why? Here we must turn to the poem's most vital cultural context, the late-Elizabethan attitudes toward love-token and charm. In probing the depth of Desdemona's presumed guilt, Shakespeare'sOthello describes the handkerchief given her in token of his love: Othello. That handkerchief Did an Egyptian to my mother give; She was a charmer, and could almost read The thoughts of people. She told her, while she kept it,

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'Twould make her amiable, and subdue my father Entirely to her love; but if she lost it, or made a gift of it, My father'seye should hold her loathed.... ... Take heed on it, Make it a darling like your precious eye. To lose't or give't away were such perdition As nothing else could match. Desdemona. Othello. Desdemona. Othello. ... Is't possible? 'Tis true; there's magic in the web of it. ... ... Is't true? Most veritable, therefore look to't well.

Desdemona. Then would to God that I had never seen't! (Othello3.4.55-77) We note Desdemona's fearful response, but are modern readers as willing to believe Othello's story? While postmodern intellectual culture asserts the Saussurean "arbitrarinessof the sign," it seems that Desdemona, herself, is shattered by the unsettling power of a token-charm whose loss threatens to undo her marriage.And the subsequent course of the play--lost handkerchief, lost love, lost marriage, lost life-bears out Othello's claims. Similarly, when Horatio confronts the ghost of Hamlet's father, vowing to "cross it though it blast me" 1.1.127), he .(Hamlet the assumes that a "material text"-his making the "sign of the cross" in ghost's an irresistible power to make evil reveal itself. presence-wields To what extent, then, would Shakespeare'saudience share Desdemona's fear? As Linda Woodbridge writes, "magical beliefaccepts the possibility of human supernatural agency, sometimes aided by divine or demonic forces, sometimes working by sheer force of will aided by magical words";in contrast, "magicalthinkingis the unconscious residue of such belief, which remains to structure experience even though true magical belief has atrophied in the individual psyche" (12). Even as late-Elizabethan culture sought to free itself from the former, it remained subject to the latter. Reflecting cultural currents, Donne's lyrics seem caught in this same double-bind, at once asserting-and unsettling-their own powers of persuasive language. Woodbridge reminds us of "the possibility that literaryworks themselves could at times possess magical efficacy or at least that the aura of such efficacy gave them, in their own day, a special charge that we are no longer aware of" (29). Whether or not Donne's lyrics possess this "special charge," surely some claim it, offering themselves as so many (spell-)binding oaths, testaments, letters, songs, rings, charm-bracelets, portraits, and other verbal/material love-tokens; time and again the Songsand Sonnetsdeclare the powers of language to win and seduce, to

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command or curse or cure-in a word, to wield persuasion. We have yet to decide which Donne poems (if any) take their word-magic seriously and which (if any) ironize their claims; regardless, we know that the poet of "The Token" refusesto place himself under the spell of another'swriting. And we must ask why. Might he fear falling prey to the sort of rhetoric used elsewhere in the Songsand Sonnets? However we choose to answer, nothing said so far quite prepares one for the poem's ending couplet: Send me nor this, nor that, t'increase my store, But sweare thou thinkst I love thee, and no more. (17-18) After rejecting the beloved's picture and "witty lines" (by implication, rejecting poetry itself)-the poet ends with the command, "But sweare ... ". One wonders what comfort there might be in giving or receiving such an oath, in swearing not that "I love thee," or "thou me," but rather that "thou thinkstI love thee." What sort of "token"is thus offered or requested?What evidence or guarantee?The poet does not himself attest to his love; there is, indeed, no proof offered or required beyond the beloved's own swearing. What, then, betokens the final tag, "and no more"? Grammatically,the line can and perhaps should be read as, "and [send] no more." This, admittedly, is the most obvious and straightforwardinterpretation. The line can also, however, grammatically be read, "and [swear] no more," thus darkening the tone. After all the phrase, "and no more," is placed within the line commanding the beloved'sto "sweare,"thus suggesting that the beloved can be certain of (that is, "swearto") "no more" than this. How can the phrase be kept from infecting the grammar of the swearing itself? Might not the lady be commanded even to love "no more"? By this phrase the beloved is superficially to think/swear that "I love thee alone,"that is, love "no more" than "thee." But, now, imagine the poem itself written in response to the lady's charge, "I think thou lovest me not," or "no more." If so, is it really all that perverse to observe that the command, "But sweare thou thinkst I love thee, and no more," contains the grammatical possibility of its own negation: "thou thinkst I love thee, and [I love thee] no more"?No more, perhaps, than as a pleasure to enjoy in secret, but not to wed. Perhaps to love "no more" at all. I think I am right in observing this grammatical/rhetoricalaporia, but I would not swear to it-nor, frankly, should the beloved "sweare"that what she thinksshe in fact knows. The poem is not to be trusted: nothing within its language guarantees the poet's fidelity or the lady'sin turn. be And, finally, in what ways would "swear[ing]" different from other "tokens" that the poet refuses? Modern readers might not sense the seriousness and even danger that such a speech-act as swearing implies for Donne's own age. Oath-taking is hardly a casual event, and it necessarily raises the possibility of perjury (Shirley): one swears against a backdrop of doubt. As in Shakespeare'sSonnet 138-"When my love swears that she is made of truth, / I do believe her, though I know she lies"

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(1-2)-so in Donne's "The Token": the act of swearing itself acknowledges the power and presumed presence of falsehood. Indeed, the title itself reminds us that the poem, like so many of the Songs and Sonnets,is a metadiscourse, a text about texts or "tokens," one specifically requesting a word- or object-as-sign, pledge, or evidence of love. It is implicitly self-reflexive as well: the sonnet is itself a "token" sent to the beloved. The title's significance is made more poignant by the fact that "token" can mean "vestige" or "evidence of what formerly existed," as well as "a word or material object employed to authenticate a person, message, or communication" (OED). In other words, a "token" can serve either as a guarantee of truthfulness and authenticity-of the presence, fullness, faithfulness of the love it is meant to stand for-or as a sign pointing to lack, loss, and absence. To our modern ears the word has perhaps narrowed to a "toy,"that is, a souvenir or remembrance. In Donne's age, the hazards of written communication-of letters lost or mis-taken, of forgery and duplicity that a well-chosen "token" would obviatemade it crucial not simply to send and receive messages at a distance, but to authenticate such messages, guaranteeing their meaning and truthfulness. The title thus raises the problem of "token[ing]," of evidencing, witnessing, guaranteeinglove by means of either verbal or material signs. I am left to conclude that Donne alone, of all seventeenth-century lyricists, could fashion a poem at once so self-reflexive and yet intertextual, so Petrarchan (if only parodically so) and yet wittily metaphysical, so argumentative and yet patently unpersuasive-in a word, so (deliberately) untrustworthy. Rejecting (and thereby both completing and commenting on) the persuasions of the Songsand Sonnets,providing nothing less than an antidote to the verbal magic of other Donnean lyrics, "The Token" declares itself Donne's own, even as it self-destructs.
II

I can imagine several objections to the preceding. First, the poem may not be worth the trouble; it is not among Donne's masterpieces (if it is his at all). A simpler reading might be more defensible, particularlysince "The Token" offers no explicit warrant to divide the poem against itself, either by separating the first stanza from the rest or, more controversially,by positing two distinctive voices that argue at crosspurposes (the first sentimentally Petrarchan,the second wittily anti-Petrarchanand "metaphysical").To me the poem becomes more interesting, more "Donnean," when read as a self-reflexive, self-parodic, double-voiced inversion of other poems in the Songsand Sonnets; still, it remains possible to read the poem as a conventional (though, in that case, not entirely successful) expression of a poet-lover seeking either to give or gain assurances and to allay anxiety, whether his own or the beloved's.

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It might be argued that I have rendered the poem "unreadable."While one might readily acknowledge the ambiguity of its emblems and ending couplet, does reading deconstructively genuinely increase our understanding of its workings? To some-though I would not agree-the preceding might seem little more than a perversion of close-reading, substituting aporiafor the well-worn New Critical conand Or, cepts of "paradox" "ambiguity." perhaps the above does no more than replicate previous deconstructive analyses;if so, a reader might legitimately ask, "Why must every poem be made to say the same thing-that a text's 'rhetoric' makes meaning 'indeterminate' and reading, thereby, impossible? Does Paul de Man need such a poor disciple?" (A complaint against theoretical "fashion"is often a complaint against the failures of "discipleship"and inferior applications of the theory.) It is not, in fact, "unreadability," rather the plurality and the activityof meanbut ing that deconstruction stresses. To claim that Donne's poem fails in "tokening"or signifying and evidencing the poet's love would be a commonplace in deconstructive criticism: the failed persuasion, described above, would simply mark the moment when reading oscillates between apparently mutually exclusive meanings-when grammaror logic gives way to rhetoric, and viceversa.(As Paul de Man argued, more passive versions of reading fail to acknowledge the radical disjunction between rhetorical and grammatical codes.) Yet the problem, even the failure, of persuasion is a theme of the English courtly lyric generally (Baumlin, "Dialogue and Controversia" 11-14), and the reader's participation in the courtly "game" of coterie literature includes the detection, and refutation, of (logical, rhetorical, ethical) fallacy or false argument. Taking "The Token" as one of several examples, Dwight Cathcart suggests that such a poem's ending imperative ("But sweare .. .") has "the discernible effect of leaving the reader off balance: the command has been given, one waits for execution. The reader is expectant, with some portion of his attention not on the poem but on the response to the poem by the person being addressed"(31). What, indeed, is the beloved's expected response? I would complicate Cathcart'sinterpretation by observing that the reader must answer on behalf of the addressee, that the reader becomes, imaginatively, the addressee whose response completes the poem. A mark of coterie literature is the nearly equal status it imparts to readers and writers alike. In very real ways, the coterie reader becomes involved actively in the de/construction and critique or "answering"of a specific poem by a specific, familiar author. My interpretation of "The Token" treats it as a poem both belonging to and completed by the reader, though very much still the creation of its author. The patent unpersuasiveness of "The Token" is simply part of the "readinggame" which the poet himself participatesin when he first acts intertextually as a "reader"(that is, parodist) of the Petrarchan stance and becomes, more subtly, a "reader"of other emblem poems in the Songsand Sonnets. The sort of reading that I have offered is poststructuralistin name only; in fact, it

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reflects the habits of critical reading that define Donne's own early-modern agewhich is an age, quintessentially, of rhetoric. Poststructuralism has taught modern readers to attend to the epistemological and rhetorical skepticism of many early-modern texts, recreating for the modern reader the skeptical habits of mind that educated individuals in the Renaissance adopted, in part through the grounding of their education in Ciceronian/Academic skepticism (Kahn, Sloane)-not to mention the more "militant" versions of Pyrrhonist skepticism, which were in fact recovered and made fashionable during the Renaissance (Popkin). In other words, the Renaissance was the first "modern" age to adopt skepticism as part of its theory of knowledge. The fact that not all Renaissance texts are grounded in skepticism should not surprise; doubt, itself but a part of the total human habit of thought, remains balanced by belief, which is of equal urgency. (Is not Renaissance intellectual culture a battle ground, after all, of religious faith and doubt? Conviction in one area necessitates doubt and denial in others: doubt, denial, deconstruction become defensive weapons in a world where competing arguments-competing rhetorics-vie for dominance.) Deconstruction has been accused of being anti-aesthetic (specifically, antipoetic) in confusing "literature"with "philosophy" and elevating its own critical acts to a mode of creative writing; anti-historical in turning its back on fascism and the atrocities of Auschwitz; anti-political in denying texts their force as action-inthe-world; and, ultimately, anti-humanist in reducing individual human personality to a "mere" effect of language. The attacks are strident and often ad hominem"against (de) Man," assuming that any theory bears the "sins"of its father (Hirsch; Lehman). However apt, such criticism has deflected attention away from the points recent theory has made quite well. Whether or not literature is misread when treated as "philosophy,"the fact is that poetry-early-modern poetry especiallycontains within itself a powerfully destabilizing force, one that complicates the ways its verbal structures are able "to mean." I am referring, of course, to the play of rhetoric, to the ways that rhetoric, as a systematic function of language, intersects and expands and undermines and explodes the grammar of poetic discourse. Rhetoric, simply, is a more powerful instrument than New Criticism recognized in its Empsonian concept of "ambiguity."Deconstruction, then, teaches us to recognize the intertextuality and rhetorical play-that is, the double-voiced nature-of much early-modern discourse. Without claiming this feature either for all literary periods or for all literature of the Renaissance, I do suggest that deconstructive readings serve to identify and explore the "rhetoricalmoment" or "turn"in a text, the moment when competing motives of language subtly intersect and undermine one another's claims. But while deconstruction reminds us about certain features of Renaissance discourse, it is also true that Renaissance literature exceeds and embarrassesdeconstruction in curious ways. Apparently wedded to linguistic skepticism, deconstruc-

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tion has proved unwilling to step outside of its epistemology. In contrast, Donne's poetry exploits a range of rhetorics beyond skepticism as it claims to turn language from "arbitrarysign" to sacrament, from recordings of absence to celebrations of presence. In the ending of "AValediction: Forbidding Mourning," for example, the careful, "faithful"reader uncovers powerful confirmation of Donne's hermeticism. There, "like gold to ayery thinnesse beate" (24), the lovers' united souls are said to "endure not yet / A breach, but an expansion" (22-23)-a "golden analogy"which the poet extends hermetically,hieroglyphically even, to the action of the "stiffe twin compasses": If [our souls] be two, they are two so As stiffe twin compasses are two, The soule the fixt foot, makes no show To move, but doth, if the'other doe. And though it in the center sit, Yet when the other far doth rome, It leanes, and hearkens after it, And growes erect, as it comes home. Such wilt thou be to mee, who must Like th'other foot, obliquely runne. (25-34) By inscribing its circle around a center-point or "fixt foot" (27) the compass creates, as Peter L. Rudnytsky (193) observes, the alchemical symbol for gold: 0. Thus the poet fashions golden circles or wedding bands for himself and his beloved, whose own "firmnes"makes his "circlejust, / And makes me end, where I begunne" (35-36)-an assertion of fidelity sealed by the occult powers of this emblem-charm. In "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" we confront that structure of argument most associated with Donne's poetry, the "metaphysical conceit"-an extended argument-by-analogy assuming truth in one aspect of material reality to be reflected elsewhere. Should it surprise that emblems lie at their material/referential/hermeneutic center? In the vocabulary of sophistic rhetoric, the conceit becomes an "artificer-"or "wielder-of-persuasion."More, however, than a line of rhetorical argument, the Donnean conceit often claims to be invested with occult powers. Brian Vickers elaborates on the connections between occult philosophy and analogic reasoning: while Baconian science distinguishes "between words and things and between literal and metaphorical language," the occult tradition "does not recognize this distinction" (95). Instead, Wordsaretreated if theyareequivalent things,andcanbe substituted them. as to for the the Manipulate one and you manipulate other.Analogies,insteadof being, as devicessubordinate argument they arein the scientifictradition, to and explanatory in proof.., are, instead,modes of conceivingrelationships the universethat reify,

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rigidify,and ultimatelycome to dominatethought.One no longer uses analogies: One is used by them. (Vickers 95) Of course, the poet in Donne's "Sonnet: The Token" refuses to be "used by" such analogies-and not surprisingly,since the poem rejects "conceited" argument outright. "The Token" thus reminds us that Donne's most celebrated lyrics often succeed in persuading readers of the truth and ultimate reality of their subjects, but do so while admitting the powerful co-presence of skepticism and doubt. In this regard, the opening stanza of "The Funerall"seems boldly to assert the power of verbal-material signs to sacralize experience: Whoever comes to shroud me, do not harme Nor question much That subtile wreath of haire, which crowns my arme; The mystery, the sign you must not touch, For 'tis my outward Soule, Viceroy to that, which then to heaven being gone, Will leave this to controule, And keepe these limbes, her Provinces, from dissolution. (1-8) Surely the poem appeals to our trust. Still, our reading must be kept constantly in motion, oscillating between the polarities of faith-in the "mystery" and "sign" (4)-and of doubt: we are not to "question much" (2) the bracelet-charm of hair, its meaning and its efficacy, but we are to questionit nonetheless. In contrast, the rhetorical triumph of such poems as "The Canonization," "The Ecstasy," and "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" demands no less than a "leap of faith" from readers. More than "metaphysical"in manner, Donne's poetry provides both a critique and a defenseof the "metaphysicsof presence." (Of course deconstruction, at least in its Derridean mode, is born out of the critique of philosophical essentialism or "logocentrism," thus offering a critique of the "metaphysicsof presence"a critique, that is, of stable meaning and stable, knowable human being. One might add that, while other authors, texts, traditions often remain unconscious of their logocentric assumptions, Donne's poetry plays deliberately and consciously with the problems of presence and absence: with good reason, his poetry is styled "metaphysical.") Indeed, by rendering love (and language) sacramental, Donne transforms of "metaphysics"into a theology presence. Refering to Sir Philip Sidney'sAstrophil and Stella, Murray Krieger writes, "what the poet is trying to bring about-whatever his skepticism about his chances for his literal success-is a miracle of linguistic presence as much as a miracle of quasi-religious presence. His task, and the breakthrough he hopes to accomplish, partake of the realm of semiology as well as Presence that of love's theology" (Poetic 30). Similarly,Donne's response to the problem of poetic presence/absence is simultaneously rhetorical and theological in

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implication, a (trans-)substantiationof language and a rendering of poetic emblem as "mystery" and sacrament. Of course, the theologization of poetic argument entails, at the same time, a rhetorization of theology, and it is no accident that pistis, a Greek word for "persuasion,"is used throughout the New Testament to mean "faith":rendered an effect of persuasion, faith becomes radicallya rhetorical event, an act of interpretation and response (Baumlin,John Donne 13; for discussion of the rhetorical/theological implications of pistis, see Kinneavy 33-35). But, once again, "Sonnet: The Token" rejects the "mystery" of emblems and language, thereby rejecting the theological ground upon which other of Donne's lyrics pitch their tents. Though bound to a linguistic skepticism, the poem's refusal to persuade is but one of many rhetorical strategies operant within the Songsand Sonnets;and this is a point poststructuralisttheory fails to acknowledge, being wholly committed to its ownskepticism. So, an additional possibility remains. Having doubted "The Token," can we not now, in a second reading, take its arguments "on faith"?When one admits that such "materialtexts" as emblems fail to preserve and protect love-when the powers of love-charm are stripped altogether from human relationships-where is one left? By what means can one guarantee another's fidelity? When Hamlet demands that Horatio and Marcellus "nevermake known" the ghost's visitation, he stages an elaborate swearing ritual: Both. Hamlet. Horatio. My lord, we will not. Nay, but swear't. In faith, my lord, not I.

Marcellus. Nor I, my lord, in faith. Hamlet. Upon my sword.

Marcellus. We have sworn, my lord, already. Hamlet. Ghost. Indeed, upon my sword, indeed. Swear.... (Hamlet 1.5.144-49)

And they swear no less than three times, the sword itself offered as an instrument to guarantee their oath. In order to appreciate fully the cultural significance of Hamlet's ritualized behavior, we must note the doctrinal distinction often made between sacramentand sacramental.In Anglican theology, five of the seven traditional, Catholic sacraments (including priesthood and marriage) were reduced to "sacramentals"-that is, to a lesser order than the "saving sacraments"of baptism and communion, given their lack of Scripturalsanction. Having made this distinction, the English Church continued nonetheless to value such rites as analogous to

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sacrament and able to participate in divine reality, though themselves unnecessary for salvation. (John Milton's divorce tracts failed, after all, to sway Anglican opinion against the absolute, indissoluble sacramentalityof marriage.)I make this point, because High-Church Anglicanism included among "sacramentals"a range of other traditionally Catholic rituals, including the sign of the cross, the use of holy water-and the taking of oaths. The verb "to sacrament,"indeed, becomes the Laudian equivalent of "to swear." When Shakespeare'sParolles says "I'll take the sacrament" in surety of his truthfulness (All' Well,4.3.136), he invokes theology to guarantee his rhetoric. In our own age, one might still swear truthfulness with one's hand on the Bible; but how many of us believe that such a material object and "text" as a sword or Bible will itself either protect or punish the oath-taker? For Donne's age, one does not simply "swear" but rather "swears by" some divinely sanctioned power. In "A Hymne to God the Father,"Donne wittily (blasphemously?)asks God to "Sweare by thy selfe, that at my death thy Sunne / Shall shine" (15-16), as if God Himself must "swear by"his own divinity in order to guarantee His promised grace-as if the formality of the verbal ritual itself matters at least as much as the character and intention of participants.Do we really wonder, then, why "The Token" refuses such ritualization? Perhaps the oath, "I think thou lovest me" is all one can be certain about. Another's words-"I love you"-can only be accepted on faith. All we can know, from the perspective of Cartesian consciousness, is our own mind, not another's. Having refused to ritualize love (and, by implication, love poetry), the poet leads his readers into the thoroughly secular or mundane, "modern"reality of contractual relations and personal responsibilities, a world in which the individual is compelled by conscience, and not by the external powers of charm and sacrament. Read this way, "The Token" calls into question the culture's naive (residual) reliance on swearing rituals as well as its belief (though unconscious and equally residual) in the "persuasions"of love-charm. Earlier I stated that "the poem is not to be trusted."From this second vantage point, it would seem that the problem of trust belongs not to the poem but to its reader-participants(which can include the poet and his beloved): perhaps we can trust the poem, but only if we ourselves prove trustworthy.For "The Token" refuses to compel our belief and assent. Rather, trust, truth, troth must be "plighted" in a single, free act of reading/act of faith. Ending with the phrase, "no more" (18), it would seem that the poem-placed last among the Song and Sonnets-imparts a powerfully ironic sense of finality to one's reading of the 1649 edition. III As critical fashion shifts away from deconstruction, it seems time to reappraisethe contributions poststructuralisttheory has made to our understanding and teaching

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of Renaissance literature. Many recent critics have sought to pound nails into its coffin. Some would be pleased to read Renaissance texts as if deconstruction had "never happened." At best, we can say that deconstruction has completed itself as a theory and no longer generates entirely new insights; it has taught us what it could, in other words. Still, we should consider whether poststructuralistreadings have left an enduring legacy. As John T. Shawcross describes deconstructionist and "strictly reader-based criticism," It has been a worldof reactionagainstthe excessesof the past(I hope,past),which saw literature the meansto biography, historyof ideas,a ferretingout of the a as It (to inconsequential the piece of literature). would seem that such excessesare indeedpastandwith theirdemisehasbeguna declinein the viability suchstrictly of and criticism.We move into new fads. Let us poststructuralist deconstructionist will criticism retainthe insightsandapproaches thesenew critof hope thatliterary ical "systems," with of amalgamated the insightsandapproaches authorial presence, theoriesof genre,of form,of mythicsubstructs, the like. (Intentionality and 12-13) While the causes of poststructuralism'sorbit in the American academy are more complex than the above passage acknowledges, still I agree with Shawcross:deconstructionist strategies of reading can, in fact, be incorporated into a poetics of authorial presence and intentionality. The effects of reading, which include the "indeterminacy"and aporiadescribed in deconstructive criticism, need not subvert authorial intention, nor is their only explanation an unconscious linguistic/rhetorical excess. Donne's poetry in general, and "The Token" in particular,teaches us to acknowledge aporiaas the "rhetoricalmoment" within literary texts, and, until we learn to approach historical rhetoric with greater sophistication, we ought not to ignore the insights that deconstruction-that sophistic/ated rhetorical instrument of modern theory-enables in reading the Renaissance.
NOTE
1. Printed posthumously, the canon and arrangement of Donne's Poemsis of course a construction of his editors, both early and modern. Doubtless, then, the best evidence for authorship (and for the various strands of my argument) lies not in the poetry's print history but in its prior transmission in manuwill eventually turn to script, a rather complex story that editors of the long-expected Donne Variorum write. Yet Ernest W. Sullivan II, a Variorum editor of the Songsand Sonnets,informs me that work on "The Token" remains in an early stage, and that no ultimate decision has been made regarding its sheds light on the subject; in the meantime, I have authorship. It may be some years before the Variorum consulted the major modern editions (Grierson, Gardner, Redpath, Shawcross, Smith, Patrides) as well as recent discussions of Donne manuscripts and editing (Pebworth; Shawcross, "Arrangement";Sullivan, "Updating";Wollman). There exists one article-a brief note by Francis Manley-devoted specifically to "The Token," and the few mentions of the poem in book-length studies typically extend to three sentences or less (I cite the most relevant of these). Deconstructive readings of Donne include Tilottama Rajan's" 'Nothing Sooner Broke' " and at least two book-length studies (Baumlin,John Donne;Docherty). Among broader applications of decon-

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struction to Renaissance poetry, see RichardMachin and Christopher Norris, Post-Structuralist Readings; Murray Krieger, Poetic Presence;and Jonathan Goldberg, VoiceTerminalEcho. Howard Felperin and Brook Thomas explore the many fruitful relations between deconstruction and New Historicism, the latter much indebted to the pioneering Renaissance studies of Stephen Greenblatt. My own use of the term "fashioning,"incidentally, has nothing to do with Greenblatt's. Quotations from Donne's poetry are taken from Helen Gardner'sJohn Donne:The Elegiesand The Songsand Sonnetsand John Donne: The Divine Poems. WORKS CITED

Princeton: PrinceAndreason, Nancy J. C. John Donne: Conservative Revolutionary. ton UP, 1967. Barthes, Roland. Image, Music, Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977. in Baumlin, James S. "Dialogue and Controversia English Renaissance Literature: Historicizing the Reader's Response." Publicationsof the Missouri Philological Association19 (1994): 1-20. Discourse. Columbia: U of Mis. John Donne and the Rhetorics Renaissance of -souri P, 1991. Bloom Harold. The WesternCanon: The Booksand Schoolof the Ages. New York: Riverhead, 1994. Brooks, Cleanth. The Well-WroughtUrn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry. San Diego: Harcourt, 1947. Carey,John. John Donne:Life, Mind and Art. New York:Oxford UP, 1981. Donneand the PoetryofMoralArgument.Ann Cathcart, Dwight. DoubtingConscience: Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1975. to de Man, Paul. TheResistance Theory.Ed. Wlad Godzich. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983. Docherty, Thomas. John Donne, Undone.London: Methuen, 1986. Eliot, T. S. Selected Essays.New York:Harcourt, 1932. William. "A Valediction of Weeping." Seven Typesof Ambiguity. 3d ed. Empson, Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1953. 139-48. Felperin, Howard. "Contextualizing the Canon: The Case of Donne." The Usesof the Canon:ElizabethanLiteratureand Contemporary Theory.Oxford: Clarendon, 1990. 79-99. Gardner, Helen, ed. John Donne: The Divine Poems.Oxford: Clarendon P, 1952. , ed. John Donne: The Elegiesand The Songsand Sonnets.Oxford: Clarendon P, 1965. and English Renaissance Goldberg, Jonathan. VoiceTerminalEcho: Postmodernism Texts.New York:Methuen, 1986.

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Greenblatt, Stephen. Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980. Grierson, HerbertJ. C., ed. ThePoemsofJohn Donne.2 vols. 2d ed. London: Oxford UP, 1938. Hirsch, David H. The Deconstructionof Literature: Criticism After Auschwitz. Hanover, NH: UP of New England, 1991. and An Jha, Mohan. The PhoenixRiddle: Interpretation CriticalTreatment Donne's of LovePoems.New Delhi: Arya, 1972. in and Skepticism the Renaissance. Ithaca: Cornell Prudence, Kahn, Victoria. Rhetoric, 1985. UP, Kinneavy, James L. Greek RhetoricalOrigins of ChristianFaith: An Inquiry. New York:Oxford UP, 1987. in Baland Krieger, Murray.PoeticPresence Illusion: Essays CriticalHistoryand Theory. timore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1979. "Presentation and Representation in the Renaissance Lyric: The Net of -~. Words and the Escape of the Gods." Machin and Norris 20-37. and Lehman, David. Signs of the Times:Deconstruction the Fall of Paul de Man. New York:Poseidon, 1991. Machin, Richard, and Christopher Norris, eds. Post-Structuralist Readings English of UP, 1987. Poetry.Cambridge: Cambridge Manley, Francis. "Chaucer's Rosary and Donne's Bracelet: Ambiguous Coral." ModernLanguageNotes 74 (1959): 385-88. Marotti, Arthur E John Donne, CoteriePoet. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1986. Moloney, Michael Francis.John Donne:His Flightfrom Medievalism.Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1944. Patrides, C. A., ed. The Complete EnglishPoemsofJohn Donne.London: Dent, 1985. Pebworth, Ted-Larry. "ManuscriptPoems and Print Assumptions: Donne and His Modern Editors."John DonneJournal 3 (1984): 1-21. and Poole, Roger. "The Yale School as a Theological Enterprise."Renaissance Modern Studies27 (1983): 1-29 New York: Popkin, Richard H. The Historyof Scepticism from Erasmusto Descartes. 1964. Harper, Rajan, Tilottama. " 'Nothing Sooner Broke': Donne's Songs and Sonets as SelfConsuming Artifacts."ELH 49 (1982): 805-2 8. Redpath, Theodore. The Songsand SonetsofJohn Donne. London: Methuen, 1956. Rudnytsky, Peter L. " 'The Sight of God': Donne's Poetics of Transcendence." TexasStudiesin Languageand Literature24 (1982): 185-207.

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Ed. Shakespeare,William. The Riverside Shakespeare. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974. Shawcross,John T. "The Arrangement and Order of John Donne's Poems." Poems in Their Place:The Intertextuality and Orderof PoeticCollections. Neil FraisEd. tat. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1986. 119-63. Some Liminal Means to Literary . Intentionalityand the New Traditionalism: -Revisionism. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State UP, 1991. Shawcross, John T., ed. The CompletePoetry of John Donne. Garden City, NY: Archon, 1967. Shirley, Frances A. Swearingand Perjuryin Shakespeare's Plays. London: Allen and Unwin, 1979. Sloane, Thomas O. Donne,Milton, and the End of HumanistRhetoric. Berkeley: U of California P, 1985. Smith, A. J., ed. John Donne: The Complete English Poems.New York: St. Martin's, 1971. Stampfer, Judah. John Donne and the MetaphysicalGesture.New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1970. Sullivan, Ernest W., II. "Updating the John Donne Listings in Peter Beal'sIndexof II." EnglishLiteraryManuscripts, John DonneJournal 9 (1990): 141-48. . "Who Was Reading/Writing Donne Verse in the Seventeenth-Century?" John DonneJournal 8 (1989): 1-16. Princeton: Thomas, Brook. The New Historicismand Other Old-Fashioned Topics. Princeton UP, 1991. Poeticand Twenand Tuve, Rosemund. Elizabethan Matephysical Imagery:Renaissance Critics.Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1947. tieth-Century Vickers, Brian. "Analogy versus Identity: The Rejection of Occult Symbolism, Ed. 1580-1680." Occultand ScientificMentalitiesin the Renaissance. Brian VickNew York:Cambridge UP, 1984. 95-163. ers. Woodbridge, Linda. The Scythe of Saturn: Shakespeareand Magical Thinking. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1994. Wollman, Richard B. "The 'Press and the Fire': Print and Manuscript Culture in Donne's Circle." Studiesin EnglishLiterature33 (1993): 85-97. -