Donne and the Rhetorical Tradition

Author(s): William Empson

Source: The Kenyon Review , Autumn, 1949, Vol. 11, No. 4 (Autumn, 1949), pp. 571-587
Published by: Kenyon College

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/4333090

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William Empson

DONNE AND THE RHETORICAL

TRADITION

[This Review will publish a series of fresh papers on the poe

Donne, running through several numbers, in the belief that he
deserves a new evaluation now that the controversial period
has passed. Mr. Empson's paper is the first.-Editors]

I CAN'T offer any new view of Donne, that is, my opinions how-
ever unacceptable have appeared in book form already; but I
have been reading some of the recent learned works about the
Elizabethan rhetoric teaching and its influence on the poets, and I
feel something needs to be said about them. I shall mainly be
concerned with Miss Rosamund Tuve's massive study Elizabethan
and Metaphysical Imagery. I also read Shakespeare's Small Latin
and Less Greek by T. W. Baldwin and Shakespeare's Use of the
Arts of Language by Sister Miriam Joseph (comforting things to
have in bed with one while the guns fired over Peking) and such is
the extent of my erudition on the matter.
Of course, in a broad way, these authors are quite right; the
rhetoric training did have a great effect on any poet who had been
through it, and even the assertively unlearned Shakespeare (the
case seems pretty well proved) had been through it all in his gram-
mar school. All the same, the new research does not seem much use
in detail. The only important Shakespeare crux I can find Mr.
Baldwin trying to clear up is Hamlet's "Fix a comma twixt our
amities." He speaks triumphantly about this, and really does I
think explain how it came to be written; and yet the only moral
seems to be that Shakespeare's training led him for once into writ-
ing a bad line - bad now and bad then (maybe as an attempt to
make Hamlet a bit of a university pedant it went over with the first

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572 KENYON REVIEW

audiences tolerably). In general, I

for the rhetoric training don't sh
verdict of three centuries (with
for his time -the main evidence
from his jokes against it) that th
that "all a rhetorician's rules/Ser
far as it made the boy practise inv
professional ease in handling them
the poet and his audience. But t
search, when Miss Tuve applies it
to be that he did not mean at all
admires him for, because Donne t
rules of rhetoric in a particularly
Of course I don't deny that some
him. But it seems to me that she
themes of Donne's poems, and tel
our own ignorance and self-indul
The chief technical question rai
me, is how far the meanings of w
be narrowed. She sometimes goes
catachresis "only the prick of the
whereas in synecdoche what is un
glimpsed . . . it is clear, when on
culled images, that the poets ex
relevant associations with a keen
relevant begs the previous questi
more than one point may be rele
Donne's comparison of the sepa
passes, she says, some modern rea
tive irony" because compasses are
tive" objects employed by school
Donne does not express a "tortur
pered by not having read any crit
passes. But surely the reality, th

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 WILLIAM EMPSON 573

intellectual uses of the compasses, their reliability in a situa-

tion where native intuition cannot guess the answer unaided,
are all relevant to the comparison. The series of "pricks"
from detailed points at which the comparison fits are a delightful
grace, but they can be thrown aside in the last line, "And make me
end where I begun" - the final point in drawing the circle is where
the pencil began, but not also the centre, whereas Donne means
he will return to his wife. What he chiefly wants to imply by the
comparison is that his argument about true love is not a fanciful
convention, such as he has laughed at in earlier poems, but some-
thing practical which he has proved in experience. No doubt Miss
Tuve might answer that this is an allegoria not a catachresis, but it
has always been considered a specially "violent" image, and that
seems to be her criterion for catachresis. If you can switch round
the technical terms however you like I do not see how they can ever
decide anything.
Earlier in the book, however, she has emphasized very strongly
the wealth of possible meanings in a metaphor. In a translation
(such as "Another Antony/In her strong toil of grace") the figure
furnishes many meanings, she says, not under the control of the
poet "except as he reins them in with the tiny threads of the co-
operating words. All tropes give the reader his head in this
fashion." Thirty pages later she has managed to jerk back the
reader's head in a savage bearing-rein or martingale, obviously
weakening the powers of this poor horse, and I cannot see how she
has done it. Nor indeed do I know why his head was ever loose.
I think it is true to say that she can never quote her rhetoricians as
specifically admitting that a metaphor may have more than one
point of likeness; she is reduced to claiming that the Elizabethans
"could hardly fail to know it." The Ramists, apparently, recog-
nized that a metaphor could have more than one logical function,
but that is not the same thing. If the rhetoricians did not even say
this much it seems clear that the poets had to go beyond them even
to do what Miss Tuve approves.

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 574 KENYON REVIEW

The license allowed to Cleopatra's "toil of grace" is not ex-

tended to Hamlet, and here I think Miss Tuve is overplaying her
hand. Many people would be prepared to read Donne in a nar-
rower manner, but when the same argument is used on Shakespeare
they will have more of a shock. There is a footnote about
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them.

If you have been properly trained in rhetoric, she says in effect,

and are thereby able to pick out the logical essential in a metaphor
and drop the irrelevant, you will be spared from the romantic idea
of fighting the waves and also from the absurdity of thinking you
could win; that is, the sea here is a metaphor intended to be forgot-
ten at once, which does not affect the phrases either before or after.
I do not understand why she thinks this an attractive offer. The
Arden edition, which happens to be the nearest, tells me of four
authorities who report that "the Celts, Gauls, and Cimbri exhibited
their intrepidity by armed combats with the sea," and says where
Shakespeare could have read about them in English. (Anyway
there is Xerxes as well as the northern legends.) However, it goes
on, the word sea is anyway a stock metaphor for a battlefield, fit-
ting slings and arrows, so on either count the 18th Century critics
were wrong in wanting to emend it. Even the narrower half of this
very sensible note, written by the despised Dowden, goes beyond
Miss Tuve, who thinks that our only business with sea is "the logi-
cal task of abstracting 'vastness, recurrence of numberless units.' "
No doubt few listeners in the theatre have much time for taking
arms against the sea, as the speech is rattled off; but the overtone
of this idea is just what is wanted. Hamlet already feels that it is
hopeless to fight his situation, so the idea of a possible surprising
success needs to be excluded from a phrase which otherwise sounds
hopeful in a heroic manner; also he feels that to act as if fighting
the waves (a traditional idea even if remote) would have a certain
splendor and might therefore lead to peace - the idea of ending

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 WILLIAM EMPSON 575

the waves of course ts not absurd

ing you when you drown. In a cas
reader is entitled to ask, like the
son, one small and subtle reason"
gard this passage as so much dulle
content to report the findings of
lieve that Renaissance readers would be much troubled by .
What she is really doing, I fancy, is going back to the 18th Century,
not the 16th; she is trying to give Theobald what he wanted with-
out the embarrassment of having to emend the text.
The argument is not really different, I think, when it is applied
to more strained and less good authors. For example "Marston's
first image below would be the opposite of efficacious if the gulf
remained long enough to swallow the cormorant":

TO EVERLASTING OBLIVION
Thou mighty gulf, insatiate cormorant,
Deride me not, though I seem petulant
To fall into thy chops. ...

"The vaguely sensuous epithet for gulf allows it, too, to have
chops." Actually gulf had a regular meaning "space into which
prey is swallowed," best recalled nowadays through "maw and
gulf,/Of the ravined salt-sea shark" in Macbeth, but not as strained
as you might think from that one use; the N. E. D. has quite
flat uses like the wicked wolf who had taken many sheep into his
gulf (Spenser). Miss Tuve seems to take for granted that the
word means, as nowadays, "great empty space below one, into
which one might fall," but the primary English use is about the sea,
though the root is cognate with "gulp"; various uses including the
modern one arise toward the end of the 16th Century, but I should
fancy "whirlpool" or maelstrom (as more directly connected with
a bay of the sea) was what Marston would take as the head mean-
ing in this rather blank context. Anyway the idea that the word
has only one meaning, most of which must be abandoned before
you arrive at the cormorant, seems to me ill-informed. Nor can I

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 576 KENYON REVIEW

see that nmighty as an epithet

being "vaguely sensuous" in so high a degree as to let it have jaws;
at least I suppose I can, but that would mean reading it like Vic-
torian poetry; what Miss Tuve is doing here is just what she blames
other people for. Surely the process is quite simple; the word has
two senses, of which the first is non-living to mark the inhumanity
of Oblivion (a whirlpool I think, but a chasm if you prefer); then
the poet wants to personify this abstraction rather more, so he
moves over to the sense "gullet," and this is attached to the cor-
morant without any strain. The cormorant has the jaws; its gullet
need have no jaws; and its own gullet is not likely to swallow it.
In general, I think, what seems to us a strained metaphor in these
authors was supposed to be mediated by a double meaning (re-
placed in "the sea of troubles" by a stock metaphor). I am rather
surprised that Miss Tuve never even envisages this possibility.
There is a similar puzzle when she sets out to illustrate the
difference between 17th Century poets and modern ones. The first
lines of Yeats's "Byzantium" are quoted as a case where "we ex-
plore irrelevances and delight in ambiguous suggestions," a thing
which the reader of Donne should avoid doing.

The unpurged images of day recede.

The Emperor's driunken soldiery are abed.
Night's resonance recedes, night-walker's song
After great cathedral gong.

The italics are Miss Tuve's, and she says that Renaissance writers

might easily have used such details, but they would not have been
metaphorical; if part of an allegoria, either the similitudes would
have had the public character of symbol, or some indication would
assist the reader to enjoy clearly perceived relatedness and such sug-
gestions as fell in therewith.

All this baffles me completely. Yeats has told us in "Sailing to

Byzantium" that he is going there, and explains what he expects
of it; the second poem, written a few years later, describes (very
properly) the disillusion of the spiritual tourist when he has ar-

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WILLIAM EMPSON 577

rived. The lines are simple descr

course, but not metaphor at all. W
Yeats's prose writings to learn w
it can hardly help meaning what i
Dark Ages of Europe and maintai
throughout them; any mystical old
draw there from our coming trou
he finds an ordinary Fascist type o
The memories of what he saw ther
have to fade before his vision of g
the thing he came there to see can
the meaning of the first two lin
"'night's resonance recedes" is a dir
unexpected calm of the night, and
well may a ghost appear. There i
this. I have to suspect that Miss
the lines are about.
A good deal therefore seems to d
of the Metaphysicals, on her techn
use this figure, and in this figure
are cut out. I am not sure that thi
least it would be a real one. The
abusio, is described as "violent met
modern criticism calls the 'radical'
metaphor," which do not sound id
one 17th Century rhetorician, Hos
"more desperate than a metapho
this, but Sister Miriam Joseph's b
mary of the rather confused uses o
picture of catachresis is quite diff
accounts of the term, listed in her
fines catachresis as "verbs and adje
sense" (whereas ordinary metaphor
it exactly like metaphor and gives

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 578 KENYON REVIEW

adjectives; the first is Sister Miria

two. I gather that some rhetorici
eralizing the term, but that the
and pedantic one, making a distin
whether you were "radical" or wh
the prick of the point of connect
thought it a bit "desperate" to us
to abusio, Sister Miriam does not
not quote anyone actually using i
that they did not. Except of cour
most brilliant things in the style
use of the vulgarisnm. How artifi
use of the vulgarism will always appear." This critical remark
strikes me as true and yet as a silly way to talk about the style of
Henry James. In any case, it is far from what we were looking for,
that is, that people were taught to cut out all the meaning except
the prick of the point from the specific trope catachresis.
However the only possible objection to the exercise of analysing
Donne's rhetoric is that it tends to "explain things away," and I
must now try to show that that happens. As I understand her, she
treats the Donne line of talk that the idealized woman is a world,
or that the two happy lovers are a world, as a straightforward use
of the trope amplificatio. That is, in effect, it is like Pope in the
"Pastorals," saying "Where'er you walk, cool gales will fan the
glade. / Trees, where you sit, will crowd into a shade." I do not
mean that the Pope lines are flat; the nostalgia of their frank un-
truth is almost heartbreaking; but still the thing is meant to be un-
true; it is a trope. I do not think you get anywhere with Donne
unless you realize that he felt something different about his re-
peated metaphor of the separate world; it only stood for a subtle
kind of truth, a metaphysical one if you like, and in a way it pre-
tended to be only a trope; but it stood for something so real that he
could brood over it again and again. The question is one of truth,
or rather truth-feelings, and Miss Tuve ought not to be eager to

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 WILLIAM EMPSON 579

disagree here, because one of her main points is that 17th Century
poets believed it was their business as poets to display general
truths. But she says that the astronomical images in Donne are
"dialectical counters in a war of wits," and she has a firm footnote
denying that "what we like to think of as the peculiar character of
metaphysical imagery" has among its causes "the disturbed welt-
anschauung which accompanied the acceptance of the Copernican
world-picture." I agree that the poets who imitated Donne do not
seem to have caught from him any of this line of interest, but in
the young Donne I believe it was fundamental. I think it is ob-
vious that his separate planet, which comes in one form or another
into practically all his good poems, was connected with Copernicus;
and I notice that Miss Tuve gives no reason for thinking otherwise.
She merely finds it natural, as she is classifying tropes, to assume
that they are all fairly similar standard objects, rather like spare
parts of machinery.
She seems a little embarrassed by Jonson's remark that the
"Anniversaries" were blasphemous, and has to explain that edu-
cated readers knew they were only a standard trope. "Jonson
mistook his amplification of a universal for a description of an
exception.... Renaissance images of this sort . . . ask us to
look, through particulars, at the blinding light of significances or
essences." Donne is praised for answering that "he described the
idea of a woman, and not as she was," and we are given other
phrases such as "imitating not the particular but the simple idea
clothed in its own beauties." But it doesn't seem likely that Jonson
wouldn't know what every educated reader knew, and in any case
I shouldn't have thought that it is part of the idea of a woman that
her death is making the sun fall onto the earth, "being weary with
his reeling thus." The only saving grace of the "Anniversaries,"
granting that poor Elizabeth Drury had nothing to do with it, and
that the whole thing seems in rather bad taste however much he
needed the money, was that Donne really did feel things were
breaking up. Blasphemy was a serious accusation, and we need

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 580 KENYON REVIEW

not suppose that he expressed his deepest feeling in defending

himself against it. I feel the two poems really are a bit blasphem-
ous, somehow; perhaps from assuming that anybody can be treated
as the Logos, perhaps from feeling that things can break up so
completely not through any act of God but through a failure of the
spirit of man. In any case, it seems to me that Jonson's criticism
was a penetrating one, and it is tedious to be assured that they
were only talking about rhetorical rules.
Owing to Donne's complete control of the rhetorical instru-
ment, says Miss Tuve, it is particularly "illegitimate" in his case
"to fit out his poems with overtones which diverge ambiguously
from his apparent meaning and which are only to be traced in the
connotations of his image-terms." It seems to me, on the con-
trary, that much of the haunting quality of Donne comes from
writing about a total situation, without realizing quite how much
of it he was getting into his language or even what all his cross-
currents of feeling about it were; he broods like a thundercloud, as
well as flashing like one. I have tried to show this in detail in two
previous books of mine, and will give page references in case any-
one cares to look them up; assuming, you understand, that this is
the kind of criticism of Donne that Miss Tuve disapproves. In
"The Valediction, of Weeping" (my Ambiguity pp. 139-45) I
think there is an idea that the lovers will be unfaithful when they
are separated, an idea which adds to the extremity of grief but is
much opposed to the absolutism of the kind of love which seems
to be presented; and in the Holy Sonnet "I am a little world made
cunningly" (my Pastoral, pp. 74-8) I think the remorseful hope
of atonement with God is crossed with a shrinking hunger for an-
nihilation and escape from God. Both of them are dominated by
the image of the separate planet, and the point is not so much what
"connotations" this "image-term" might have to a self-indulgent
reader as what connotations it actually does have in its repeated
uses by Donne. At least, I hope I made this clear about the re-
ligious poem, where a definite argument is needed. In the "Vale-

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 WILLIAM EMPSON 581

diction" I think my approach to

after all it begins

Let me pour forth

My tears before my face, while I stay here

and the whole reason for this, unflinchingly elaborated, is that

they will become "nothing" when they are apart. The planet
metaphor is not needed at the start but serves to drive home the
awful isolation of the human creature; he can't be blamed if he
tries to get along with what his planet provides him; once the
lovers are separated they are absolutely separated. Of course, a
critic must then go on to argue that other metaphors in the poem
fit in with what he puts forward as its central theme, but to do this
is merely to show that they "observe decorum," in Miss Tuve's
language. I am not sure whether she would consider this an ade-
quate defence. If she objected that the emotion or attitude of the
poet cannot be complex, merely because he argues so much, I think
she would ignore the whole tone of his better poems:

Till my tears mixed with thine do overflow

This world, by waters sent from me, my heaven dissolved so.
"These broken pieces of grammar which may be fitted together in
so many ways are lost phrases jerked out whilst sobbing," I said
in my piece about it, and no doubt that way of putting the thing
underrates the control which the poet never loses, but it still seems
to me more lifelike than the way Miss Tuve talks. No doubt she
could turn round and say that my ignorant modernistic conception
of rhetoric is a false one, and that a really well-trained Ramist
would think of the conscious disorder in these cries of pain as a
triumph of the true art. I should applaud her if she said that, but
I do not see that it would leave anything surviving of her attacks
on the critics who have tried to strike out phrases about the meta-
physical style. Of course my particular interpretations might still
be wrong, but she would have lost her main line of defence.
Poor Mr. Eliot, not to mention minor figures, comes in for a

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 582 KENYON REVIEW

good deal of teasing for having

or did not suffer from the pecu
emotion which arose later. It was a time when "the intellect was
at the tips of the senses" and so on. Admittedly these are literary
phrases, therefore a kind of pot shot at the real point, but they
seem to me good ones. As Miss Tuve spends a great many pages
in claiming that the old rhetoricians firmly avoided ever making
the separation in view, it seems clear that she agrees with the point
Eliot was making. However, I can understand that she might not
feel quite easy about saying so. What she does succeed in showing
about the dear old pedants whom she praises is that they rode se-
renely over a number of baffling gulfs lying in the path of a writer,
which later thought has been forced to examine; she can never (so
far as I can see) quote them as saying anything helpful about these
gulfs - they seem sensible only because they seem like children,
and any actual writer then as now had to jump over the gulfs by his
own muscles. One can heartily agree with her that the innocence
of the rhetorical training saved it from giving false answers to the
problems facing a writer; but she cannot combine this with claim-
ing that the rhetoricians gave definite answers which the writers
must have acted on.
All the same, she offers two definite points of difference be-
tween 17th Century poets and Romantic or modern ones; the later
ones believed in Expressing their Personality and thereby Exploring
the Unconscious, and you misread the early ones if you suppose
these ideas present. The second is different from the first, because
your personality is expected to be worth attention but you are
vaguely assumed to have the same unconscious as everybody
else. The reason is a practical one; if you can't explain what seems
to you a good line, and still decide to print it, you are trusting that
the reader has the same feelings as yourself. The two halves of the
puzzle inherently go together; there would be no point in publish-
ing lines which are only good because they express your (unique)
personality unless the public had some (underground) means of

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 WILLIAM EMPSON 583

knowing what they had expressed. The puzzle is real, but that is
only to say that it had always existed; the Romantics only drew at-
tention to it. (In the same way, if the Freudian theory is true,
writers previous to Freud ought to illustrate it; the idea that it is
unhistorical to suppose that Hamlet illustrates it merely takes for
granted that it is not true.) I don't deny that there is a certain
lack of self-consciousness about 17th Century writers even when
they are writing about themselves, even when like George Herbert
they treat the reader with a certain reserve. The reason why "Ah,
my dear Lord, though I be clean forgot, / Let me not love thee if I
love thee not" is not fussy in spite of its baffling ambiguity is that
he thought of it as an effective appeal to the heart of God (as it
might have been to a loved woman - "Give me more love or
more disdain"); it is not primarily a display of his own complex
state of mind to an interested reader. Cases where the difference
is important are rather rare, but I should think this is one. While
Miss Tuve is blaming the modern critics for ignoring the difference,
it seems to me, she gets very near saying that a poet trained in
rhetoric must be read only for his surface intention. These poets
had also heard (if they needed to hear of it) of the ancient doctrine
that a poet when inspired might say more than he knew. Her ideas
about the simplicity of Donne's purpose in a love-poem sound to
me hard to distinguish from the objections of Dryden, saying that
Donne perplexed the minds of the fair sex when he would have
been more sensibly employed in moving their passions.
In short, I think it has a steadying effect if you contrast Donne
with Pope, instead of letting Miss Tuve drive home the contrast
that she supposes between Donne and Yeats. Pope apparently did
feel that he ought not to publish a line unless he could explain why
it was good at every point. Miss Tuve in effect asks us to believe
that Donne felt the same; a particularly odd idea about Donne,
who took for granted that none of his good poems could be pub-
lished in his lifetime at all, and was ashamed because he had to
publish the "Anniversaries." The more usual view is that authors

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 584 KENYON REVIEW

before and after the Dryden-Johnson period were alike in an im-

portant point of practice; they would stick to a line merely because
it felt good, not necessarily because they were equipped to defend
it. This must be true in the main about the Elizabethans, or
Shakespeare could not have happened. The unconscious was
therefore let in, though the unformulated rules about just where it
could be let in were very different from the Victorian ones. In
comparison with this practical matter, the question about whether
you express your personality does not seem to me important. Any
tolerable author knows that the way to express your personality is
in the course of expressing something else, which you care about
and want other people to care about. Donne obviously does ex-
press a striking personality in a pungent and concentrated manner;
T. S. Eliot ideed suspected him of being too keen on it to write
good sermons. It is hard to believe that he was wholly unconscious
of the process, merely because he had been taught rhetoric; and
Miss Tuve herself insists that the rhetoricians did not get in a
writer's way. However I do not feel that these questions, though
they have to be recognized, are really the important ones.
The important ones seem clear if you have to lecture about
him to students who find him a novelty (by the way, I get an im-
pression that the young feet him much more remote now than the
young did twenty years ago, and I wish they didn't). You get a
series of assertions such as that the individual praised is the Logos
of the virtues he or she typifies, he or she is the abstract idea Beauty
or Virtue itself, and therefore constitutes the reality of those
qualities in any person who possesses them. The lovers who are a
separate planet get part of their dignity from this process, because
they epitomize the actual world and are partly its Logos; this is
what equips them to be a complete planet. Now first, as Miss Tuve
emphasizes, one has to recognize the rhetorical method; the student
has to agree that it is linguistically tolerable for a poet to talk in
this extraordinary way. But that is only part of the necessary fuss
of exegesis; the second stage is the important one, when he has to

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 WILLIAM EMPSON 585

decide "What is the point of it? Is it silly?" I do not think it is

much help, except as a kind of soother to a student, to point out
like Miss Tuve that the allegory of Spenser is at bottom toying
with the same fundamental ideas. The point about Donne is that
he makes the absurdity of the ideas hit the reader with such force.
The contemporary Spaniards, I understand, were using these
ideas as starkly as Donne, who knew Spanish and was brought up
as a Catholic; he read Spanish mystics as a boy at Oxford. There
seems no doubt that he learned his main rhetorical trick from
Spain. (The motto on his youthful portrait is in Spanish, and
Spain was still the great danger to England; it must have been
rather like a modern Englishman or American displaying a motto
in Russian.) But the Spaniards used these tropes, in a certain
sense, like Pope; they did treat them as a device of rhetoric. True
about Christ, this kind of assertion could be used by a Catholic
poet in a Catholic country as a well-known and supremely mag-
nificent formula of praise, and yet not be blasphemous because it
was clearly recognized as a trope. However this account is too
simple; the Catholics, as the Protestants put it, worshipped saints;
that is, when they used the formula about a saint not a king (or
when the English Crashaw used it about a saint) there was sup-
posed to be a queer but not at all embarrassing kind of truth in it.
Contrariwise the Protestants tended to feel that man should meet
God unobstructed and were not keen to use the paradoxes of God-
head even on Christ himself when regarded as man. Miss Tuve I
should expect is making an important point when she says that
the Metaphysicals used Ramist rhetoric or logic, and that this was
felt as interesting because it went with being Protestant (Ramus
was a Protestant martyr). One can quite see Donne feeling that
the Protestant treatment gave an extra gaiety to his defiantly
Catholic but startlingly displaced trope. In any case, when his
imported line of paradox first hit London, it meant something a
great deal odder than it had done in Spain. I think it seemed
nearly as strange as it does to a reader nowadays (and if so Miss

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 586 KENYON REVIEW

Tuve's account is misleading). Donne too, of course, in spite of

the Catholic upbringing, felt the strain of the thing, and made use
of it. No doubt the trick satisfied the violence of his temperament;
he really did feel that the rest of the world was dissolved by the
passion of the moment. But the idea of generalizing the doctrine
of the Logos also fascinated him because he had a deeply sceptical
and inquisitive mind, even if one that felt the drama of scepticism
rather than any rational necessity for it. Miss Tuve suggests that
we read these ideas back into Donne; so far from that, I think that
by sticking to the surviving texts we tend rather to underrate the
scepticism of the 1590's, which could not get printed. The tavern
talk, it seems probable, was full of brash atheism, suggested for
one thing by the repeated changes of official religion; full of what
comes down to us in the accusations claiming to report the talk of
Marlowe. These are not particularly "like" Marlowe, but he prob-
ably said them as well as a lot of other people; the only point of
reporting them was that they served to classify him as a well-known
wicked type. It is odd to find, for instance, that the great work of
Hooker, so much revered by later Anglicans, could be published
only by Government influence; no publisher would take it on its
merits because they knew nobody would buy it except the Govern-
ment side. The first readers of Donne in manuscript, it seems
clear, were quite ready to pick up the sceptical implications.
They were driven home by his other standard trope, indeed the
two together are required if the new idea is to be given its full
force and generality. Donne incessantly clashed the rhetorical
claim that some individual or pair of individuals was the Logos
against the new ideas of Copernicus, in the only form which made
them a practical danger to theology - the idea that there is life on
other planets, to which presumably Christ has not gone. We are
often told that Galileo was condemned merely because he made
man unimportant, no longer at the center of the universe; this is
unfair to his accusers, and I suspect it has been a disingenuous way
of avoiding the real difficulty he raised. Man could easily be made

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 WILLIAM EMPSON 587

trivial as half of the paradox that he was also supreme. The career
of Bruno makes the position clearer; one of the main points in his
condemnation was that he believed in a plurality of worlds. If
there are more worlds than one they cannot all be under the control
of one Pope; if Copernicus says that the earth behaves like the
planets we are faced with the problem of how the inhabitants of
other planets can achieve salvation. Of course your own planet, in
that age of discovery, raised the same problem very sharply;
wherever one's ship beached one found innocent islanders or
civilized Chinese or what not. But it could be said that they all
might have heard of Christ, and ought to be under the Pope; about
the inhabitants of Mars no such argument could be used. The
separate planet stood for freedom. Milton, for example, was be-
ing particularly Protestant when he put in his epic, though he was
shifty about astronomy, lines like "Stored in each orb perhaps with
some that live." But he could not have gone on to discuss their
relation to the Redeemer; the problem was a real one to both sects;
the point was that it was sharper for the Catholics, since they were
committed to a single living authority as well as a single Christ,
and the Protestants tended to ride out of the difficulty (so far as
they admitted it) by treating it as one that hurt the Catholics more.
I deny, then, that Donne is simply "using" a well-known trope,
the standard howling hyperbole of the Counter-Reformation, when
he identifies any person or pair of persons he chooses to praise
with the Logos; because he regularly throws in the idea forbidden
to Catholics of a separate planet, out of reach of the Pope, and this
inherently lifts the old trope into a new intellectual air. For one
thing, on the new planet, having got there by recognizing a mys-
tery, you can thumb your nose at the old earth and express your
personality or your unconscious desires. You might even be thumb-
ing your nose at industrious persons who can't understand what
you mean because they know the rules of the rhetoricians.

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