THE POSSIBLE WORLDS OF MARVELL'S "TO HIS COY MISTRESS"

Cohesion analysis has found a comfortable home in literary

stylistics. Though in recent years logical semantics has provided
exciting new furniture for that home, logic and cohesion have not
been productively united. Most accounts of cohesion mention so-
called "logical relations," yet fail to explain the mechanism
underlying many strong cohesive ties. I argue that by exploring
the behavior of interclausal connectives, we can expand cohesion
analysis in an useful direction; this expansion demonstrates how
logic and language intertwine. I share with Thomas Pavel the
conviction that "[t]he semantics of fiction has remained . . . at
the periphery of critical attention. Yet a comprehensive theory
of literature needs a viable account of literary content that
would complement formal and rhetorical studies" (vii).
Ultimately, logical semantics is crucial for literary criticism.

My project has four stages. First, drawing on M. A. K. Halliday

and Ruqaiya Hasan's classic account of cohesion, I examine Andrew
Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress" (see the appendix!. Second, I
provide an argument that has been conspicuously absent from the
literature on cohesion: not only does interclausal cohesion
exist, but it is far from rare. For this argument, I focus on
words many authors call "connectives." Third, the cohesive force
of many interclausal connectives can be traced to their
underlying logical structure. Fourth, though the data for my
analysis is generated by our familiarity with Marvell's poem, the
supplemented theory can illuminate a work whose critical ground
is over trod.
WHITHER COHESION?

Many stylisticians make use of cohesion analysis. They do not,

however, agree on what constitutes cohesion. Simplifying schemes
abound, sometimes purposely conflating the notions of cohesion
and coherence. In a recent book, Sally Stoddard confines her
attention to referential ties such as pronouns and articles after
pointing out the vagueness in Halliday and Hasan's original
definition (15). Regina Blass comments that "the concepts of
cohesion and coherence sometimes seem to be almost as vague as
the notions of text . . . and unity of meaning themselves" (15).
When Gillian Brown and George Yule claim that "[lt]he cohesive
relationship which particularly interests them [Halliday and
Hasan] is that which they discuss under the headings reference,
substitution, ellipsis and lexical relationships," they remain
true to Halliday and Hasan's original scheme except for the odd
omission of the important conjunction category (192). In a
considerable simplification, Geoffrey N. Leech and Michael H.
Short divide text cohesion into cross-reference (for example, the
use of pronouns) and linkage. Apparently, linkage involves either
"logical or other links between sentences" or "implicit
connections of meaning" (79). In the category of linkage we would
find examples of conjunction (which for Halliday and Hasan
includes words such as yet, though, and therefore), but Leech and
Short are not at a]l clear about the contrast between logical and
"other links," let alone "implicit connections of meaning."

Different typologies of cohesive relations can be traced to the

different purposes authors have when analyzing a text. Halliday
and Hasan provide a wealth of tools for examining texts, but
different authors select only what they view as important cases
of cohesion for their analyses. In this I shall be no different.
In particular, my examination of Marvell's poem will concentrate
on referential, lexical, and especially conjunctive cohesion
(Halliday and Hasan 31-87, 226-92). But actual confusion in the
definition of cohesion may be traced to a failure to draw "the
distinction between the `meaning relations' which hold between
items in a text and the explicit expression of those `meaning
relations' within a text" (Brown and Yule 195). That is, if
certain words mark cohesive ties and if cohesion is a semantic
relation as Halliday and Hasan assure us that it is (4), then the
relation between text constituents can exist whether or not there
is an explicit realization of it in the form of specific markers
(Brown and Yule 195). Blass, on the other hand, believes that
"cohesion is merely a surface symptom of some deeper relation
which can exist independently of it" (17); the deeper relation
requires that we move beyond even considerations of text
coherence (74).

For the purposes of this analysis, I will side with those who
believe that certain words function as cohesive ties because they
signal underlying semantic relations. But this is to say little
until we can characterize these relations in more depth. In the
meantime, I note that there is one common assumption among those
who use cohesion analysis: it is acceptable to study bonds
between sentence clauses. As Leech and Short comment, studying
sentence relations alone "seems rather restrictive for purposes
of literary analysis" (256). In Halliday and Hasan's original
work, cross-clausal cohesion can occur, as it does when a pronoun
refers back to a referent introduced in the previous clause (8).
But when clauses are connected by conjunctions such as but or
therefore, the ties are syntactic rather than semantic, and thus
are not cases of cohesion (8-9)

I will show that Leech and Short are correct in examining clausal
relations as cases of cohesion. To do so involves isolating the
mechanism that underlies a surprising amount of text cohesion,
specifically a logical relation that can be the strong semantic
relation of conditional logic. Thus, we shall be led from a
supplemented theory of cohesion to an examination of the relation
between language and logic. Interclausal and intersentential ties
often exhibit the same type of cohesion, as I suspect
stylisticians unconsciously realize. The proof, though, requires
an analysis of logical structure.
ENTERING THE POEM
I begin by applying an unsupplemented version of Halliday and
Hasan's techniques. Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress" begins: "Had
we but world enough, and time, / This coyness, lady, were no
crime." Halliday and Hasan use the term "exophoric" to
characterize pieces of text that refer to some aspect of the
surrounding speech situation but that are not themselves cohesive
(18). Without a prior reference, the first pronoun--"we"--may be
functioning in this manner. Yet if we consider the title (which
contains "his" and "mistress"), then "we" becomes anaphoric and
thus cohesive. Likewise, "lady" is lexically cohesive, referring
to "we" as well as "mistress." "This coyness" is more complex. It
is anaphoric if we are willing to grant that "coyness" was
introduced in the title. I would like to argue for the
possibility that the phrase also functions cataphorically, that
it also points forward in the text. Halliday and Hasan claim that
a word such as this may be either anaphoric or cataphoric, but
they do not tell us whether it could function both ways at once
(68). Yet one of the interesting differences between natural
language, whether or not in a literary context, and formal logic
is the ability of a word or phrase in a natural language to
perform this sort of double duty. A logically regimented
representation of natural language, however, will assign single
functions to syntactic units: for example, that of quantifier or
variable. Though I claim that logic and cohesion are inextricably
linked, I am not employing the notion of logic as a fully
articulated, abstract system, for this would be to advert to the
type of structures common in formal linguistics. The development
of cohesion theory was, in part, a reaction against the
employment of generative linguistics patterned after formal
logic. Style analyses employing generative grammars focused on
sentence structures rather than on links between sentences.
Halliday and Hasan's work shows us that any linguistic approach
confined to the sentence level is inadequate for the
understanding of text.

In order to pick up the possible cataphoric reference, we need to

move forward through the poem to lines 27-28: "My echoing song;
then worms shall try / That long preserved virginity;" (emphasis
added). We often use this to signify nearness, whereas that
signifies something not quite so near (Halliday and Hasan 57).
The latter demonstrative indicates a spatial or temporal lapse
between the introduction of the topic of the mistress's coyness
and its reintroduction as a reference to her virginity. While
"yonder all before us lie" (line 23) invokes spatial distance,
"Deserts of vast eternity" (line 24), "echoing song," and "And
your quaint honour turn to dust" (line 29) separates the cohesive
references by the inexorable march of time. The phrase "your
quaint honor" points back to the original "coyness," just as
"that long preserved virginity" also points back after a long
passage that sets out a possible future.
If we focus only on the first two lines of the poem, then we have
exhausted the resources of Halliday and Hasan's account. As we
read on we find that after its first appearance, "time" becomes
highly cohesive. The word appears once in both the second and
third stanzas. In the second, time is anthropomorphized ("Time's
winged chariot"), whereas in the third it is personalized ("our
time"). The possessive "our" in "our time" signals empowerment
and accords with the narrator's wish to grasp the moment. (Thus,
I think that we should place the poem back into the carpe diem
tradition, rather than side with critics who believe that Marvell
is in some way subverting the form. In a later section, I
consider whether there is evidence for their claim.) On the way
to developing this personally owned time, Marvell employs
lexically cohesive variants such as "more slow" (referring to how
fast the narrator's love should grow) and "vast eternity"
(mentioned above). Most notable is the narrator's recitation of a
mathematical series, assigning each number to the contemplation
of a different feature of his love. He begins with "ten years
before the Flood," moves on to "An hundred" (line 13), "two
hundred" (line 15), "thirty thousand" (line 16), and finally to
"an age" (line 17) and "the last age" (line 18). Thus, the whole
series refers to time, with the definite article "the" used as a
way to bring the series to a close or limit. According to
Halliday and Hasan, the usually signals anaphoric reference,
pointing backward (72-73). The definite article also indicates
specificity (70-71), which here fits with Marvell's need to
indicate the end of an infinite sequence. Line 19--"For, lady,
you deserve this state"--would make sense only if there were a
final state or limit to the sequence. As with "this coyness," the
use of "this" in "this state" can indicate a present fact. But
unlike the fact of his lady's coyness, this "fact" is introduced
within the scope of a hypothetical conditional.

If we were to follow Halliday and Hasan, we would find no further

instances of cohesion between the poem's first two lines.
Instead, they would argue that the lines are linked by structural
relations, in particular, some form of coordination (this
category includes what others call "subordination" and
"correlation"). But these structural relations are not cohesive.

For the moment, let us follow Leech and Short and consider the
possibility of some other cohesive tie between the first and
second lines. What are the semantic relations that link one with
another? As a first pass, we can see that Marvell presents us
with a conditional, often expressed in the form "If A, then B."
Indeed, many traditional analyses note this fact, often referring
to the poem's form as a "hypothetical syllogism." Such a
conditional statement links one state of affairs with another,
though the strength of this link may vary considerably from mere
conjunction to full-blown causation. Few commentators have noted,
however, that Marvell's conditional is special: it has
acounterfactual antecedent, signaled by the verb "had." The
resulting subjunctive conditional is not quite captured by
calling it a hypothetical syllogism. The use of the verb "had"
implies that the lovers do not have "world enough, and time"; but
if they did, then there would be no problem with the lady's
coyness. The consequent, by asserting that in the context of the
antecedent condition the lady's coyness would not be a crime,
implies that it is a crime. The rest of the stanza (lines 3-20)
works out the contours of the world created by the antecedent, a
world where the lovers have unlimited time.
LOGIC

I shall show that we should analyze interclausal connectives such

as but, yet, and therefore in terms of logic, and logic in terms
of conditional connections. These connections can be understood
as representing ties between possible worlds. In Halliday and
Hasan's view, the connectives mentioned are examples of
conjunctive cohesion only when they connect sentences (237-
38,257). Yet whatever the underlying semantics are for these
words when they reach across sentences, it is plausibly the same
when they connect clauses. Thus we are correct to search for
interclausal cohesion; our search, though, leads us to
characterize the underlying semantic structure of a whole class
of cohesive relations: that is, cohesion reduces to logic in
these cases.

At the end of the last section, I used the word world loosely but
appropriately. In recent years, Pavel, Marie-Laure Ryan, and many
others have tried to apply the notion of a "possible world" to
the analysis of literary texts, a notion taken over from the
seminal works of philosopher-logicians such as David Lewis and
Saul Kripke. In the context of the present paper, a possible-
worlds approach offers an alternative to the unsatisfactory
truth-functional analysis of "If . . . then" statements.
According to a truth-functional analysis, if the antecedent of a
conditional is false, then the whole conditional statement must
be true, no matter what the consequent may be. Since subjunctive
conditionals often have contrary-to-fact antecedents (as with
Marvell's first line), all of them would be true according to a
truth-functional analysis. There would be no way to distinguish
true from false ones, or likely from unlikely ones. Thus some
logicians invoke the notion of possible worlds as a way to
explain the semantics of conditionals and subjunctive
conditionals in particular. Where they have differed considerably
is in how exactly to construe possible worlds themselves.
According to David Lewis--in his often cited Counterfactuals as
well as the more recent On the Plurality of Worlds--we should
view possible worlds as real, distinguishing them from the actual
one in which we three-dimensional creatures breathe. For Saul
Kripke, on the other hand, possible worlds are constructs of some
sort from the actual world: we stipulate their existence without
thereby being committed to some bizarre ontology of strange
entities. Possible worlds are not the sorts of things that can be
viewed through special telescopes (44): that is, possible worlds
are created, not discovered. Between these extremes are many
variants, but with Simon Beck we could also identify a third
view, that of "antirealism" in which possible worlds do not
exist: they provide only "a convenient manner of speaking" (121).

Recent attempts to employ possible worlds in literary analysis

settle about the first or second view. In a lively new book,
Marie-Laure Ryan decides that Lewis's theory "offers a much more
accurate explanation of the way we relate to these worlds" (21).
Thus she is willing to accept the full ontology of these new
entities. Pavel, on the other hand, objects that Lewis "has
defended the view that all possible worlds, together with all the
objects that populate them. are as real as our own world. But
this form of possibilism is an extreme position, which offends
our most common intuitions" (49). Relying on Kripke's definition
of a model structure (44), Pavel implies that we should consider
possible worlds as "actual abstract entities or as conceptual
constructions" (49). Umberto Eco, though rejecting the "realistic
approach" of Lewis, views possible worlds as "cultural
constructs, matter of stipulation or semiotic products" (343).

But as Wolfgang Heydrich points out, those who have taken up

possible worlds into literary analysis may not have recognized
"that wherever the very nature of possible worlds was under
discussion there was (and is) more quarrel and controversy among
philosophers than agreement and consensus" (190). One problem
with Lewis's theory was alluded to by Pavel: we may be
uncomfortable with an explosion of new, mysterious entities into
our ontology. And in Pavel's view this leads to the absurd
position that fictional worlds exist independently of the authors
who write about them (49). For Ryan, though, the proposed
"realness" of these worlds is what recommends the theory, since
readers relate to fictional worlds as though they are real (21),
a sentiment echoed in Lubomir Dolezel's suggestion that "possible
worlds acquire fictional existence by being discovered' (235).
Writers such as Pavel and Ryan do not deal with other equally
serious problems raised by philosophers. As W. V. Quine puts it,

[w]hen modal logic has been paraphrased in terms of such notions

as possible world or rigid designator, where the displaced fog
settles is on the question when to identify objects between
worlds, or when to treat a designator as rigid.... (Theories 174)

That is, in Quine's view Lewis never provides a problem-free

account of crossworld identity of individuals, an account crucial
for his theory. Kripke's theory, on the other hand, avoids
ontological multiplication by offering a controversial theory of
reference that depends on the notion of a "rigid designator." Yet
as Alan Sidelle points out, this concept has its own metaphysical
baggage (410-11). Pavel, recognizing that there are problems
involved in adverting to possible worlds, advises us that "the
notion of world as an ontological metaphor for fiction remains
too appealing to be dismissed.... An attempt should be made at
relaxing and qualifying this crucial notion" (50). We should
understand possible worlds "as abstract collections of states of
affairs" (50).

Perhaps John Pollock is too hopeful in believing "that

ontological questions about possible worlds can be safely
separated from the question how to analyze subjunctive
conditionals" (15). Rather than settle the question of
ontological status here, I prefer to opt for a more austere
theory of the sort constantly championed by Quine: multiply your
entities as slowly as possible ( Ways of Paradox 264). For
example, I see no explanatory value in analyzing possible worlds
into states of affairs, as many do, since these seem to me to be
alternative ways of saying the same thing. Thus in order to
analyze Marvell's poem, we need to think of a conditional as a
link between possible states of affairs (worlds), some of which
actually obtain. Whatever else, different possible-world analyses
share the assumption that thinking in terms of possible states of
affairs is natural. Recent evidence reported by James P. Brynes
on children's mastery of hypothetical constructions tends to bear
this out.

Where has this detour into logical semantics gotten us? For one
thing, we can see that coordinating and subordinating
conjunctions (as Halliday and Hasan use the term) may signal the
strength of logical connections. To use one of Halliday and
Hasan's examples (252), surely in "The total came out all wrong,
although all the figures were correct," there is a connection
between two facts or states of affairs, one they call
"contrastive." Following Leech and Short it is difficult to see
why it would not be an example of cohesion. In "The total will
come out all right, unless the figures are incorrect," "unless"
appears to signal full-strength conditionality. I suspect that
all the contrastives, such as but and yet, display subtle
shadings in the strength of connections they signify. Although
authors such as Diane Blakemore rightly claim that the semantics
for but cannot be captured in a truth-functional analysis (125-
41), they have trouble providing a clear mechanism that underlies
its cohesive force. At this point, we can see what motivates the
selection of certain interclausal conjunctions over others: the
strength of the connection between states of affairs picked out
by different clauses can vary. According to this view, there is
no absolute distinction between "loose" conjunctive links and
"tight" causal conditional links: the distinction is a matter of
degree.

My suggestion here is somewhat prefigured by Teun A. van Dijk's

analysis of connectives. As he notes,
The typical task of connectives is to express relations between
facts. These relations may be very loose, as in conjunction and
disjunction, or they may have a stronger character, in the sense
that facts may somehow DETERMINE or CONDITION each other. The
large class of different types of connectives expressing these
DEPENDENCY relations between propositions or facts, will be
called CONDITIONALS. (67)

Van Dijk casts his formulations in terms of possible worlds:

With the exception of enumerative conjunction [including what he

calls the "neutral" and] and disjunction, natural connectives are
of the CONDITIONAL types in the sense that the consequent is to
be interpreted in worlds determined by the antecedent. . . (89)

Although pursuit of a possible-worlds analysis lays him open to

the same attack leveled at others who have not accounted for the
ontological status of these entities, I think that he is correct
in presenting natural language connectives as ranging over a
"scale," leading up to some strict form of implication between
clauses (67). Van Dijk also notes that--with the exception of the
neutral and--all the "conjunctive" connectives "condition" one
clause or the other (89). No textbook on logic seriously
questions the central role that the conditional--however
interpreted--plays in our reasoning. At least, then, for the
large class of cohesive elements that Halliday and Hasan lump
under "conjunction," cohesion consists of logic. That is,
interclausal connectives can perform the same duty as
intersentential connectives. Their semantic function is to relate
states of affairs, otherwise known as possible worlds. Although
Leech and Short believe that only a connective such as therefore
signals the strongly cohesive relation of logical reason (250-
51), we need to realize that conditionality itself comes in
degrees. This is why van Dijk rightly refuses to separate rigidly
the "classes of natural connectives" (67).
THE POEM REVISITED

As I said above, Halliday and Hasan would not recognize any

cohesion between Marvell's first two lines. They would recognize
a strongly cohesive element at the beginning of the second
stanza, the contrastive "But": "But at my back I always hear /
Time's winged chariot hurrying near." What is the contrast with,
though? It must be with the conditional world set up in the
poem's first line and worked out in the rest of the first stanza:
the world of unlimited time. If the poem began with an indicative
conditional (in which the antecedent is not contrary-to-fact),
then Marvell would be guilty of an elementary logical mistake:
namely, denying the antecedent. Indeed, most commentators assume
that there is an obvious fallacy. They differ over what follows
from this supposed fact. Anne E. Berthoff, though noting the
poem's "elegant logic" and "the logical pattern of the argument,"
nonetheless places it in the carpe diem tradition (111-13).
According to B. J. Sokol, appreciating the poem's tight logical
structure (including its subjunctive conditional) leads us to the
conclusion "that Marvell deliberately misuses logic, and so uses
illogic to a purpose" (247). The fallacy forces the reader to
view the poem as an attack on the whole carpe diem tradition.
Margarita Stocker claims that Marvell "is unconcerned to maintain
more than the generic convention of [the] syllogism" in order to
"subvert" the logical apparatus in some less obvious manner
(343n3). And according to Bruce King, though the poem has a
"highly articulated logic," it is the allegorical dimensions that
undermine the carpe diem tradition (66,74-76). Contrary to those
who believe that the logical structure is either unimportant or
there to be subverted, I argue that the poem's rhetorical force
is intimately connected with its subjunctive conditional
structure, which at this point we can recognize as bound up with
the poem's tight cohesion. I agree with Berthoff that the poem
has an "elegant logic"; in fact, we should question whether the
poem's reasoning really is flawed.

This is not an easy question to answer, precisely because we are

dealing with a subjunctive conditional that connects possible
states of affairs. The stronger the connection between the
antecedent and consequent, the more difficulty a reader will have
in breaking the link when the poem's speaker "denies the
antecedent." The consequent also will fail. Of course, to say "a
reader will have a difficult time" is a statement of the poem's
rhetorical force and at first blush may seem not to bear on its
logic. But consider someone saying, "If you push that door, it
will open; but if you don't push it, then it won't open." Is
there an "obvious" fallacy here, even though the speaker denies
the antecedent? If the reasoning appears unobjectionable, it is
because we can supply a context in which we accept a number of
implicit additional conditions: for example, that no one else is
around to open the door, that it is latched securely, and so on.
The subjunctive conditional functions smoothly because we easily
can recognize the contours of the appropriate state of affairs or
possible world. Below I argue that Marvell's use of the
subjunctive conditional keys us to appreciate the contours of
another possible world, a world possessing a particular character
that supplies some of those additional implicit conditions
accounting for the poem's logical and rhetorical force. The
poem's logic is not so obviously "flawed."

David H. Sanford recounts evidence that people tend to reason

from conditionals to the associated biconditional (237). A
biconditional (often represented by logicians as "A if and only
if B") can be analyzed as the conjunction of two conditionals:
"If A, then B" and "If B, then A." Marvell links the states of
affairs so strongly that we may well be responding to the
subjunctive conditional as though it were a biconditional; if the
poem really does present a biconditional, then the fallacy
disappears completely even in standard truth-functional logic.
This would not mean that we or his mistress must accept the
poem's conclusion. After all, we still can dispute the
appropriateness of conjoining certain possible worlds with
others; in other words, we can deny the truth of the whole
conditional statement. The speaker's mistress, in particular,
might object that the state of her coyness is not relevant to--
which is to say that it should not be connected to--the fleeting
nature of time. I am not sure how we could show that Marvell
actually meant us to think of the possible worlds as being
connected biconditionally. On the other hand, I cannot see how to
show that he did not. My point is that just two of the possible
approaches to the logic of conditionals provides us with reason
to doubt that the poem's "logic" and "rhetorical force" should
ever have been split from each other. When Stocker claims that
"Marvel! is unconcerned to maintain more than the generic
convention of [the] syllogism" (343n3), she unfairly relegates
logic to a far corner of the literary landscape. I want to revive
the belief that the poem derives a good part of its rhetorical
force from logic yet deny that there must be a horrendous fallacy
at its heart.

The common intuition that there are explicit logical links in the
poem is heightened by Marvell's beginning the third stanza with
"Now therefore"; in fact, the last sentence of the stanza (and
poem) begins "Thus." No doubt Leech and Short are correct when
they remark that therefore signals a relation of reason (250),
but what is the function of "now"? In this case, the word is not
functioning as a demonstrative, but rather as what Halliday and
Hasan call a "continuative." Such a use signals "a new incident
in the story, a new point in the argument, a new role or attitude
being taken by the speaker, and so on" (286). Indeed, the rest of
the stanza reads not as a cold conclusion to an argument, but a
call to vividly amorous activity.

The last two lines begin with a strongly cohesive element: "Thus,
though we cannot make our sun / Stand still, yet we will make him
run." "Thus" connects us not to the immediately preceding
sentence (or in fact to the rest of the stanza), but rather to
the actual world set out in the second stanza: that is, the world
of fleeting time and lost opportunities. Is the "though"
performing a contrastive role as "although" did in Halliday and
Hasan's example, "The total came out all wrong, although all the
figures were correct"? No doubt it is, in addition to a stronger
logical one; this role can be indicated by rewriting the line as
"Even if we cannot make our sun stand still, we can...." The
"even" seems to modify the conditional "if . . . then" in a
complex manner, implying at least the truth of the antecedent
(this possibility hardly exhausts all the semantic overtones).
"Though" behaves in very much the same manner and is another
example of a cohesive tie that works on the basis of conditional
connections: semantic relations that are the basis for what we
loosely refer to as "logical relations."
REVISED COHESION ANALYSIS

Sticking closely to Halliday and Hasan's view of cohesive linkage

impoverishes our ability to characterize the semantic texture of
the poem quite aside from any use of vivid or stirring language.
Availing ourselves of a richer concept of cohesion, though, we
can describe Marvell as setting up a powerful counterfactual
world, the contours of which are described in the first stanza.

He then destroys this world in the second stanza, invoking images

of destruction and decay, picturing what Cleanth Brooks calls a
"bleak reality" (162). We are left with the denial of the
original consequent (line 2): the third stanza presents a
possible world of cavorting, lustful life. If we do not recognize
the logical connections inside sentences as being crucial for
cohesion, we cannot make sense of the compelling nature of the
poem. Unsupplemented, Halliday and Hasan's analysis does help us
understand features of the poem's individual worlds For example,
the use of "now" to introduce the third stanza tells us that
though so far only possible, its world can be actualized
immediately. A supplemented account of cohesion, however, links
these separate worlds together.

Though contemporary critics have downplayed the role of the

"syllogism" in favor of investigating Biblical or philosophical
references, we find that they have an implicit awareness of the
logical structure, as when Stocker comments,

This vision of lengthy courtship is the unavailable, and

undesired, model of their future (or "prophecy"). . The first act
of this futurist projection in the poem is the first paragraph's
mocking vision, here, of a hypothetical courtship . . . . (207-
08)

I wholly approve of her use of words such as "model" and

"hypothetical"; Stocker just fails to see that she is
apprehending the poem's logical structure. But this structure is
not a bare skeleton from which ornamentation hangs; rather, it is
formed by complex, cohesive semantic ties.

Failure to appreciate logical structure can lead critics far

astray. Balachandra Rajan claims,

"To His Coy Mistress" is probably Marvell's most destructive

poem. Its strength is that having turned against itself in the
expected manner of ironic poems, it then turns against its own
internal objections, leaving us with the desert that is the
poem's centre. It is inconclusive because of its consistent,
subversive energy Marvell's other poems do not demolish
themselves as thoroughly . . . . (163)
Rajan focuses on Marvell's negative imagery without placing those images in their proper
sequence. As I indicated above, Marvell directs "subversive energy" against one possible world in
order to destroy it: that is, to deny its actuality. The image of the desert may lie at the poem's
literal (graphological) center, but hardly at a thematic one. To cast the entire poem as destructive
is as much a failure of logical analysis as of literary criticism.
LOGIC AND LITERARY ANALYSIS

Leech and Short suggest a "scale of cohesiveness" on which therefore would be the strongest link,
and and the weakest (250-51). They are on the right track, but the real dirty work is figuring out
what comes in between. I have tried to show that connectives often signal weak or strong
conditional connections, and these in turn underlie logical relations between text constituents.
While investigating these connectives, we find no reason to claim that cohesive linkage between
clauses is different in kind from the linkage between sentences. In the case of "To His Coy
Mistress," failing to examine the logical links between clauses would prevent our seeing how the
poem unfolds within the confines set up in the first two lines.

Although generally enthusiastic in his review of Halliday and Hasan's Cohesion in English,
Stephen A. Bernhardt saw their book as a first step. Future work would

demand the development of more delicate models of analysis which account for the relative force
of various ties and the effects of deliberate versus incidental cohesion. (50)

For at least two reasons, the literature on cohesion contributes little toward characterizing the
"relative force" of ties. First, too many authors lump conjuncts such as but, yet, or and together,
then contrast them with the "strongest" link such as therefore. This in turn can lead to a
dichotomy like Winifred Crombie's in which semantic relations are either "associative" or
"logico-deductive" ( I 13). But as I have argued, these cohesive words lie on a semantic
continuum. Second, no one has tried to isolate the mechanism at work in the cohesion signaled by
connectives; authors assume that cohesion itself is the most basic mechanism. Instead, I have
analyzed a large class of cohesive devices in terms of conditional connections and hence in terms
of logic. The conditional connections, in turn, are to be understood by reference to possible
worlds, or states of affairs. Although some readers may find this scarcely less puzzling, I think
that the arrangement has obvious intuitive advantages. As Robert C. Stalnaker replies to those
who find references to possible worlds completely mystifying,

[a]n analysis makes a claim about a relation among concepts which, if accepted, can be
informative in either direction, or in both directions. It may be as helpful in explaining an obscure
concept to reduce other things to it as to reduce it to other things. (54)

In addition, we can see what so many connectives have in common, and we can begin to provide
a "scale of cohesiveness." As far as determining when "deliberate" cohesion occurs, a
supplemented account assumes that speakers or writers choose particular connectives precisely
because they signal differences in the semantic ties between states of affairs.

Perhaps no one will account satisfactorily for possible worlds. Certainly I have not argued for any
particular interpretation; instead, I concentrate on the primacy of the conditional, rather than the
nature of possible worlds. I am sure that even if possible worlds turn out to be nothing more than
a "convenient manner of speaking," conditionality will continue to figure prominently in logical
semantics. Besides, when we worry that possible worlds may be nothing more than metaphors,
we forget that the language of logical analysis--filled with statements about premises supporting
conclusions and conclusions following premises--is filled with metaphor. But this hardly requires
that such language forfeit its place in discussions of reasoning.

Our ardor for linguistic theory has cooled. No longer do we believe that a straightforward
application of some new formalism will spin out literary insights. Yet perhaps Halliday and Hasan
are too modest when they claim that "[t]he analysis of cohesion .. . will not in general add
anything new to the interpretation of a text" (328). The study of cohesion firmly embeds logic in
literary criticism. My program for revising cohesion theory, beginning as it does with our
intuitions of the "logic" in Marvell's poem, ultimately is tested by turning it back on the poem. By
doing so, we find that the old divisions between logic and language and between logic and
rhetoric should never have occurred.