Public-Private Partnerships
by and published in Edition Eleven of Pomegranate
Is there a love language? In our postmodern age it is a cliché to talk romantically (or Romantically) of birds and bees and beautiful women. An apt metaphor is Philip Larkin’s image of the earl and countess, set in stone, as statues. What will survive of them is love, but not the private love that might (might!) be afforded by the safety of a coffin. Sir Philip Sidney and William Shakespeare wrote about discovering a language that was pure, framed only for expressing the speaker’s inward emotion, be it love, passion or lust. Their respective sonnet sequences frequently reveal the failure of inward language. Sidney’s Muse tells him to ‘look in [his] heart and write’. Throughout Astrophil and Stella, Sidney frames ‘Reason’ as public and ‘Love’ as private:
SONNET X
Reason, in faith thou art well served, that still
Would’st brabbling be with sense and love in me.
I rather wished thee climb the muses’ hill,
Or reach the fruit of nature’s choicest tree,
Or seek heaven’s course, or heaven’s inside, to see:
Why should’st thou toil our thorny soil to till?
Leave sense, and those which sense’s objects be:
Deal thou with powers of thoughts, leave love to will.
But thou would’st needs fight both with love and sense,
With sword of wit giving wounds of dispraise,
Till downright blows did foil thy cunning fence:
For soon as they strake thee with Stella’s rays,
Reason, thou kneeled’st, and offered’st straight to prove
By reason good, good reason her to love.
In the eighteenth sonnet he is bankrupt of Reason, but he has no pure language of love to speak in. Sidney’s anxiety over his ‘low style’ suggests a concern that pure language might fail his inward passion. His verse is full of public discourse, ‘no kings be crowned but they some covenants make’ (Sonnet 69, l.12).
Shakespeare’s sonnets frequently adopt the language of the public – the lawyer (sonnet 65), the warrior (35), the religious zealot (27) and innumerable instances of economic jargon. The speaker of the sonnets has trouble reconciling his eye and his heart, at ‘a mortal war’ (Sonnet 46, l.1). He settles it:
‘As thus: mine eye’s due thy outward part,
And my heart’s right thy inward love of heart.’
(ll. 13-14)
The love of heart that Shakespeare desires is rarely figured as pure, inward passion and it is probably the difficulty of expressing the ‘inward’ show of love that generates ‘mortal war’. Shakespeare and Sidney raised, for the first time in the English language, questions about how to convey inner feelings of love. Is it possible to ‘look into thy heart and write’?
Frank O’Hara, though not necessarily in the tradition of romantic poets, adopts public occurrences, news stories, and facts to serve as props for his own expressions of inward feeling. ‘It is 12.20 in New York a Friday’, ‘Lana Turner has collapsed’ or, most evidently in ‘Personal Poem’:
I wonder if one person out of the 8,000,000 is
thinking of me as I shake hands with LeRoi
and buy a strap for my wristwatch and go
back to work happy at the thought possibly so
Each of the ‘personal poems’ that conclude, so very often, with himself, are prompted by something else, something external. Perhaps it represents trouble with the concept of ‘inwardness’ in a thriving consumer society. Pop art entertained commercialism as a subject for artistic representation. O’Hara is investigating his private self whilst engaging with the shared public experiences of his society. In one of his more courtly poems, For Grace, After a Party, O’Hara states ‘you do not always know what I am feeling’. It is one of the few poems that does not collapse with the detailing of various shops and sandwiches, or the routine banality of New York life:
Last night in the warm spring air while I was
blazing my tirade against someone who doesn’t
interest
me, it was love for you that set me
afire,
and isn’t it odd? for in rooms full of
strangers my most tender feelings
writhe and
bear the fruit of screaming…
(For Grace, After a Party ll.2-10)
The address to ‘you’ is private, but ‘you’ does not always know what he is feeling. He requires a public room ‘full of strangers’ to release his emotion. Maybe it has something to do with the frenetic shared experience of New York life that makes a city poet crave the public. In parodying the great Romantic, Coleridge, O’Hara says that his lover is ‘not dangerous, or rare, / adventure precedes her like a train, / her beauty is general…’ (To Jane; and in imitation of Coleridge’). Shakespeare informs the reader of the sonnets that he ‘will not praise, that purpose not to sell’ (Sonnet 21 l.14), but he nevertheless lauds specific features, such as the addressee’s incomparable (and even not-to-be-believed) beauty. O’Hara sees the ‘general’ beauty of Jane. In reaching for the telephone she accomplishes more than the bloody deeds of bygone knights. What is general about her (i.e. not specific and private) is what is beautiful.
Metaphysical poets of the Renaissance also used objects for their reflections, drawing a long conceit from a flower, a flea, a funeral. Donne, it might even be said, used the most public of all figures, God, in order to contemplate his own spiritual existence (if they can be seen as two different entities). Religion is both private and public. Donne’s brilliant sermons, whatever inward thoughts they reveal, are a public act of worship and instruction. Questions over liturgy, faith, exegesis and prayer were contended in a fiercely and violently public manner during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, following the Reformation. Donne’s Holy Sonnets famously address God in varying tones of sexual and economic enthralment, but the sonnets are private, however, and never published during Donne’s lifetime. Consider the presence of sexuality in death in Donne’s final sermon, Death’s Duel. Donne states that the grave affords only:
Miserable incest, when I must be married to my mother and my sister, and be both father and mother to my own mother and sister, beget and bear that worm which is all that miserable penury; when my mouth shall be filled with dust, and the worm shall feed, and feed sweetly upon me; when the ambitious man shall have no satisfaction, if the poorest alive tread upon him, nor the poorest receive any contentment in being made equal to princes, for they shall be equal but in dust.
Rather like Larkin’s image of the eternal statue, framed for the sights of others, Donne pictures a scene where even in death there is no real privacy, but instead a mixing of the rich and poor, an orgy of cross-contamination: the literal juxtaposition of public and private.
In his poetry, Donne insists that (his) love can transcend mortal existence:
Dull sublunary lovers love
(Whose soule is sense) cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
Those things which elemented it.
But we by a love, so much refin’d
That our selves know not what it is,
Inter-assured of the mind
Care lesse, eyes, lips, and hands to misse.
(A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning ll. 13-20)
If you absent love from society, you also ‘remove those things which elemented it’, and it cannot be written about. They might not miss their body parts, but Donne cannot resist using public language to frame his arguments. The speaker’s lust in Donne’s secular verse conflates love with empires. He is not embracing a woman, but metaphorically setting his hand upon a whole continent. The bedroom, a private space, is made a public world in Donne’s verse. In The Sunne Rising, Donne describes the sun intruding onto the bedroom, but it is the public world that fills the poem; the sun brings with it apprentices, schoolboys, kings. The only way that the lovers’ passions can be expressed is through using public discourse:
She’is all States, and all Princes, I,
Nothing else is.’
ll.21-2
Of course, nothing else could be, because that is everything. The public and the private are blurred. The thin line between them signifies not a dissolving but an important relationship between public and private language, something which is painfully and emotionally staged in King Lear: ‘Unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art’ (III.iv.90-91). Man becomes a wild, unreasoning, insensate beast without the stimulation of public life. The public, here, makes the private. The ‘poor, bare, forked animal’ prefigures Thomas Hobbes’ famous description of man in a state-of-nature as ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish’. If Hobbes desired a reasoning superstructure in which to live, Shakespeare and Sidney’s attempted renunciation of that reason might be seen as seeking to access the heart of one’s existence, whereas O’Hara or Donne fall in and out of it to engage in a public-private love language. Despite Donne’s pleas for his soul to expand and escape the trappings of the dull earth, he is brought back always to rest upon images of the state or the everyday.
It is not just that love might be found in everyday objects or occurrences, or even that all language is public (or it would make no sense to anybody), but that without public discourse, from the vastness of empire to the microcosm of the flea, the poets’ love language wouldn’t work. How to sue for love? How does it feel to be bankrupt of reason? Perhaps the unfettered language of later modernist poets hint at this, but Donne frames the passions of the heart to a reasonable tongue by harnessing the public world. The brave new world of America, the disturbance of a grave, the dawn of Good Friday all ensure that what will survive of us is love, but still fails to speak truly for the heart: ‘all measure, and all language, I should passe, / Should I tell what a miracle shee was.’
Callan Davies
Callan Davies comes from the wilds of darkest Kent, Medway specifically, where we are given to understand wild dragons are constantly roaming which he makes it his business to boldly slay (split infinitive! – Ed) for the benefit of the proletariat. He is currently in his second-year at Exeter University, where he studies English.