Absence, Desire, and Love in
John Donne
and Roland Barthes
Christopher B. Smith
Department of English
One of John Donne’s varied
responses to the condition
of love is to playfully examine the condition of desire and those who
mediate
it. His poems collectively place an emphasis on the poetically conjured
beloved, who is signified, in several ways, as absent in the text. It is
this
absence that Roland Barthes, founder of semiotics (the study of signs)
and
author of A Lover’s Discourse, sees
as one of the necessary conditions for the amorous cycle, which refracts
absence and presence through the binaries of self and other. For
Barthes, the
lover’s discourse is not the exchange of romantic sentiments, but rather
a
conversation that he who is in love holds with himself, made possible by
a
repertoire of images that constitute the condition of being in love. The
self
therefore remains in place, while “the [pursued] other is, by vocation,
migrant, fugitive” (Barthes 13).
Inherent in this condition is desire as a
language-producing force, which Barthes’ student Julia Kristeva
separated into
two elements of signification: the symbolic and the semiotic. The former
is a
structure that governs the ways symbols can refer; the latter can be
seen as
the origin of drives that, while not embodied as language, are, to Kelly
Oliver, important in its fluidity: “Rhythms and tones do not represent
bodily drives; rather bodily
drives are discharged through rhythms
and tones” (Oliver xiv). It is the “dialectical oscillation” (xv)
between the
symbolic and the semiotic that makes signification take place. Language,
operating with the same logic as a bodily drive, can then be seen as a
desirous
exchange motivated by an absence which is never obtained—only sought
through
endlessly deferred signs—which Donne dramatizes and Barthes theorizes.
As in
the enlarged frozen moments Barthes offers up for further examination in
A Lover’s Discourse, Donne poetically
strikes a series of poses which constitute his fictional speaker’s
identity in
relation to a series of revisions of an elusive beloved.
Kristeva refers to poetic language as a “particular
signifying practice” (Kristeva 93), an unsettling process of the
identity of
the speaking subject that transcends the “religious sensibility” that
all human
knowledge has retained as “its blind boundaries” (94). As it uses the
signs of
transcendence to “sustain itself,” it remains “knowingly the enemy of
religion”
(94). It is this highly fluid view of poetry that allows Donne to write
both
his Holy Sonnets and his often bawdy verse, the speaking subjects of
which may
also sustain a stance of speaking against
love, or embark upon the bitterly tinged, “anti-love,” revisions of
accepted
conventions (the Petrarchan sonnet, the comparison poem, the response
poem).
This can all be seen as part of a shifting subject-in-process that is
sustained
by contradiction: the speaker, containing Whitmanesque multitudes, thus
continually mutates while speaking about love. It is the paradoxical
nature of
desire as governed by absence that forms a clear example of this;
Kristeva says
that such crises of contradiction, “far from being accidents, are
inherent in
the signifying function” (94).
She sees poetic language as the best embodiment of “the
never-ending rapprochement between
the signifiable and the referent” (215). It differs from visual art in
its
signifying (as opposed to simply representative) function; the dual,
“heterogenous” operations of the symbolic and semiotic drives need one
another
in order for this to occur (52-53). As the semiotic is contained by the
symbolic, the resultant rhythmic and stylistic mannerisms continually
enact a
“repletion of the distinguishing or arbitrary void” that separates the
signifier and signified (215), creating in effect a “plurality of
signifiers
[which] aims at and fails at being” what is signified (214). Kristeva
likens
this poetic activity—a pursuit of the thing the speaker is seeking, as
put into
a system of signs—to a game of chess, which can easily be equated with
the
amorous pursuit described by both Barthes and Donne.
One of the contradictions Donne’s speakers
offer to the reader is a paradoxically affected insincerity. By degrees,
they
appear to care greatly, a little, or not much at all (“Song,” “Woman’s
Constancy,” “A Fever,” and “The Flea” all offer a variety of attitudes
ranging
from the self-consciously libidinous to the bitter to the solemn) while
at the
same time appearing to think one thing and say another; therefore, the
poems
can be said to involve unreliable narrators, whose speech is deeply
coded. In
this case, it is Barthes’ mode of textual analysis that seems most
useful to
apply, which is not about describing the structure or logic of desire in
poetry
but rather its “avenues of meaning” (Barthes 84). In his textual
analysis of
Poe’s “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” Barthes does not try to
find any
one hermeneutical meaning, nor to exhaust the text of possible meanings,
but to
perform a “crossing of the text” (86), surveying what it may contain.
As read by Barthes, Poe’s narrative has parallels with the
work of Donne. Its unreliable narrator and simultaneous appearance of
codes in
sentences invokes a multiplicity of meaning that ultimately produces the
“undecidability of codes,” its narrative giving the reader only “a
performer
caught up in his own production” (96-97). For Barthes, writing takes
place when
speech no longer does, “at the instant when one cannot locate who is
speaking
[…] only that [it] has begun” (97); Donne’s speaker does not, in
actuality,
speak to his counterpart in love, but rather holds a series of extended
dialogues with himself, caught up in his own musings on love but
simultaneously
aware of the inadequacy of any soothing balm he may produce in his
poetic
labors for any purpose other than a momentary settling of his disquieted
heart,
as “The Triple Fool” illustrates. But is the speaker’s heart disquieted
at all,
or is it merely a necessary condition for the poem to achieve dramatic
resonance with the reader? Of course, the poems will produce a degree of
readings depending on the reader’s state of mind—presumably involved
somehow in
the vagaries of romance, for better or for worse—and it is a kind of
absence in
the poetry (which can today be likened to the non-specific nature of pop
songs
or horoscopes) that makes its effectiveness with the reader possible.
Absence
can make the heart grow fonder, as a Hallmark greeting card’s
appropriation of
a short love poem intended for remembrance makes clear, or it can also
reveal
love as governed by lust, as more cynical readers will no doubt
understand. But
Donne’s speaker seems to feign obliviousness to the ways he will be
interpreted, carrying on with his act of love, as always governed by the
idea
of absence.
Barthes notes that a great deal of poetry, to say nothing
of the quintessentially French chanson
d’amour, is specifically about the absence of the beloved, who, once
set in
verse or lyric, becomes an object circled by rhyming couplets and
melancholic
crooned notes (which seek to bring about a false sense of completion, to
make
the consummation of absence seem facile) which “does not move; it is the
amorous subject […] who, at a certain moment, departs” (Barthes 13). The
absence he speaks of here, which carries with it the idea of the poet in
a form
of stasis, “nailed to the spot, in suspense,”
“can only exist as a consequence of the other […] in a condition of
perpetual
departure, of journeying” (13). The idea of writing poetry—though a
stationary
act—is freighted with the sense of capturing this journey, both in the
ambition
that penning original verse entails and the fact that the poet, once
having
imaginatively conquered one small poetic territory (or a large one, in
the case
of Milton), moves on to the next. Longing motivates poetry, and this
one-dimensional absence creates a longing expressed by the one who stays
while
the other ventures abroad. But absence need not be prolonged; it can
exist in a
perpetual state throughout the relationship between lover and beloved.
The
former may often voice expressions of inadequate love received in
proportion to
what’s been given, or speak of a number of other absences characterized
as
imbalance.
Historically, says Barthes, “woman is faithful (she waits),
man is fickle (he sails away, he cruises)” (14). But Donne’s poetry
inverts the
historically Odyssean archetypes, playing with the audience’s
expectations and
making his voicings of discontent all the more strong. It is a kind of
absurdity that allows Donne to link the feminine nature with absence and
a
variety of other qualities, such as fundamental dishonesty and
corruption,
which the overture-like “Song” enumerates. Today, it is hard for us to
read
“Song” without its bringing to mind the anachronistic image of an
embittered,
bar-hopping pick-up artist who is used to getting drinks thrown in his
face, or
perhaps his belongings tossed out the window by a chain of enraged
lovers.
Naturally, we think that this must be due to his behavior, and so the
poem
becomes a way that the narrator tries to reconcile himself with the ways
of
women, or maybe more accurately, his own ways.
Part of the pleasure we may derive from reading texts such
as Donne’s lies not only in placing our judgment on the speaker, but in
discerning the semiotic drive taking control of their language, as
motivated by
absence. In Donne’s seduction poetry, the semiotic manifests itself in
the
speaker’s constructed display of emotion, often in a buildup of images
that may
have little importance individually, yet which gain meaning in how
prolifically
they may be spun, set in place, then cast aside.
It is “that raving energy known as the Image-repertoire”
(106) which Barthes says is necessary to the lover’s discourse. Once a
relationship fundamentally changes in any way that results in its
disintegration, the repertoire’s meanings will be instantly killed off.
Its
“raving energy” can be likened to Kristeva’s semiotic drive, and this
mental
horde of interassociated images is narrativized—that is, structured by
the
symbolic drive—in Donne. Poems such as “The Bracelet or “The Relic”—with
its very
different “bracelet of bright hair about the bone” (Donne 40)—present us
with
symbolically exercised meditations prompted by images of the other in
the
sentimental object and the memory (or idealization of memory) it evokes.
Similarly, other poems may rely on what we ourselves may have
experienced when
reading them; in this case, the perpetual absence is filled with our own
fragments of the image repertoire.
His elegies may speak directly of loss, but a similar
desire, and its attendant lack, seems their subject. The
image-repertoire may
at times overwhelm Donne’s poetry, as in the self-consciously
“overfraught”
syntax found in the second stanza of “Air and Angels” (Donne 13), and
often
seems to enact a Derridean deference of meaning, as in “The Bracelet,”
laden as
it is with metaphors of circulation. The sense of loss that pervades the
latter
poem is knowing and ironic, perhaps in the
sense that
Donne’s speaker remains aware that there is no sufficient reply to
arrive from
his beloved, no return of the image that will provide satisfaction and
closure.
His efforts to produce the absent signifier are dramatized as romantic
need, or
infused with melancholy. Images accumulate, but they only emphasize the
absence
that has nourished them. In Kristeva’s words, this speaker’s depressed
narcissism becomes “the thing […] the real that does not lend itself to
signification” (Kristeva 187).
Kristeva anatomizes melancholy as “a structure for mourning
for the lost maternal ‘Thing’ and failure of language to compensate for
the
loss” (135). As the Lacanian view of birth creates a void that future
words
will harken back to, it also creates the desire to write out of that
emptiness.
Writing and love are linked in Kristeva’s psychoanalytic appraisal of
the lover
as “a narcissist with an object”
(147), the other who returns the lover’s own ideal image but remains
otherly
and, finally, unattainable. Therefore, “ego is […] to be deferred” in
loving
the other (149), yet the “signifying economy” could not be supported by
“the
transcendental ego alone” (103). While the speaking subject’s semiotic
drive is
linked to the maternal, as the organizing symbolic is paternal, the
“incestuous” creative efforts of the subject allow it to attribute to
itself
“archaic, instinctual, maternal territory” (104). While Kristeva speaks
of
women as objects of exchange in the prohibition of incest, we can see
the
exchange taking place in poetic language as between parts of the
speaking
subject. The necessary object of desire frees up the drives, allowing
them to
flow; the lack, as long as it continues to elude the supply of images in
the
repertoire, makes poetry, a series of variations on that repertoire,
continue
to be produced.
For as Donne’s poetry is predicated on an object of desire
always longed for, it also depends upon a sort of predestined loss. As
in the
case of the lovesick ballad (or perhaps the pop-culture tropes present
in
country music narratives nourished by both romantic and quotidian
hard-luck
misfortune), the eternally approached absence provides meaning. It is
this
fatalism that infuses “The Relic” with a deep melancholy that links the
ultimate demise of self with the departure of the other, envisioned in a
future
where the speaker’s body—mentioned first as part of a “loving couple”—is
exhumed, to prompt awareness of “what miracles we harmless lovers
wrought”
(Donne 40).
It is curious that in a poem such as “The Relic,” the
beloved does not appear, except as an ossified relic herself, a “Mary
Magdalene” (40) laid beside the speaker. It is the absence of
representation of
romantic life as an exchange that supplies the poem with a more subtle
melancholic tint, casting some doubt upon whether the lovers “loved well
and
faithfully” (40); if they truly did, would this poetic attempt at
commemoration,
which can be seen as a way of putting the past right, be necessary? Were
it set
up as an exchange of vows where the speaker’s spouse is given words of
her own,
the poem might be seen as inconsistent: how would we know that they
truly feel
the same way about one another? The speaker’s identity is solidified by
making
his discourse unidirectional, which has the effect of constructing him
as a
figure of (perhaps ironic, if only in light of some of the other poems)
nobility
and pathos. Giving him the final absence of death dramatizes his
purported
unfaithfulness by eliminating the possibility of emotional or physical
infidelity, ultimately capturing the lovers in perfection and finality
in the
grave. Yet what does the beloved have to say about this? In a
sense, leaving her side of the story ambiguous works in the poem’s
favor.
By nature, she must be elusive, at once present and absent, her mystery
enhancing the desirability of the poem’s final arrangement: it is as if
Donne’s
speaker has tamed an unknowable force, the “miracle” (40). Whether an
elegy
(the lover wants the beloved to return) or a seduction (the lover wants
the
beloved to come, initially, to him), the poem depends on this
unattainable
phantom presence to work.
*
Perhaps poetic writing can be characterized in much the
same way that Barthes, in A Lover’s
Discourse, describes the activity of waiting: “futile, or immensely
pathetic,” an activity that becomes (even when only waiting for the
return of a
phone call) a space wherein “all the effects of minor mourning” take
place
(Barthes 37). This futility, which Barthes describes with a comic wit
reminiscent of Donne, is sourced in his statement that “the being I am
waiting
for is not real” (39). When the collection of small absences that
comprises the
lover’s waiting routine is viewed instead as the great absence that
motivates
amorous desire, the being in question becomes something that is built
and
rebuilt again, upon the poetic foundation of one’s perceived ability to
love
and need for loving. Unlike “Song” or “Woman’s Constancy,” the less
caustic and
wry poems of Donne give us narrators who enact the waiting ritual again
and
again, searching for completeness. Variations on a theme, then, can be
seen in
the valedictory poems. But nearly always present is the ironic tinge of
what
the cynic might call clarity; it enables Donne to construct knowing
voices who
cry out in the romantic wilderness and wish to expose human foibles for
what
they are, or tell of the bizarre conditions of love, its metaphysical
frustrations. Thus, Donne’s project is the same as Barthes’: the
introduction
to A Lover’s Discourse states its
fragmentary design is intended to produce a collection of “figures,”
which are
“established if at least someone can say, ‘That’s so true!’” (4). Of
course,
all Donne’s poems could begin with the words with which Barthes ends his
preamble: “So it is a lover who speaks and says” (9).
As in all the poems, it is easy to see the function of
language in “The Bracelet” as a stand-in for the bracelet, and for the
idea of
love itself. The romantic element of the loss that Donne’s speaker
grounds the
poem in seems primarily fictive. Indeed, after an anti-Petrarchan
revision of
typical poetic practice where the speaker’s affinity with the bracelet
is denied
for possible reasons such as that “in color it was like thy hair” (Donne
57),
the images of currency and venereal disease soon employed metaphorize
corruption and exploitation. The dual meaning of “angels,” also present,
subverts the religious imagery used in romantic rhetoric and introduces
the
element of lust, making these angels mutable objects which can “fall”
(as
currencies are exchanged) when lovers are disjoined. Perhaps the purity
of love
is merely a stamp placed upon lust, which Donne’s speaker now sees
unveiled;
physicality and materiality seem to define this relationship, while the
overstatement of sprezzatura present
in the chain-as-union image provides an emphatic irony. Guilt is evoked,
too,
in what becomes a gentle castigation of the absent beloved: the lost
bracelet,
after all, sufficiently symbolizes a deferred romantic ideal to the
extent that
“as the links were knit, our love should be” (57).
Throughout the poem, a number of exchanges take place:
desire into gold, stamped by a number of nations, into “bitter cost” and
insatiable “pains” of jealousy (57), which we might see as being
transferred
back into desire for its linguistic enactment. Desire, among Donne’s
chain of
speakers, is plastic, and we always arrive at the poem as an
unsuccessful
expression of it; the result is that by poem’s end we seem to know a
good deal
more about the speaker than the object of desire, which remains obscure.
Similarly, “The Bracelet” contains much more about the object as
envisioned by
the increasingly incensed, ever-jealous speaker, and the same for its
imaginary
male “wretched finder,” who receives his “most heavy curse” in lines
90-115 of
the poem, finally given the grisly fate of falling victim to poetically
conjured “lust-bred diseases” (59).
As stated above, Kristeva might see the bracelet (aside
from its circular symbolism, which could form a womb or circumscribe an
absence) as “the thing” (Kristeva 187) that motivates both elegiac
melancholy
and passionate desire. The poem can then be seen as a prolonged
expression of
what Barthes refers to as an “Other-ache […] being miserable by himself,
the
other abandons me” (Barthes 57). For Barthes, jealousy is a vital part
of the
discourse the lover holds with himself, for if we don’t possess the
beloved—or
an object bestowed with the beloved’s image in much the same way that
mutable
gold is stamped with the insignia of a country—it is certain that
someone else
does. The jealous lover typically sees the bracelet, and the lover, as stolen, not lost. Thus, the poem can be
seen as the product of the speaker’s creative paranoia, an embodiment of
desire
wherein “form gives being” (Donne 59).
As coinage bears a signifying stamp, the beloved bears the
signifier of the bracelet. Yet, while wearing it, she could just as
easily be
chastised for infidelity, the target of the proclamation (as made by the
speaker of “
Donne’s poems that more directly address the beloved, such
as “Love’s Diet” and “The Flea,” demonstrate Barthes’ rhetorical belief
that
desire, “always the same” regardless of the object’s nominal presence or
absence, constitutes one that is “always
absent” (Barthes 15). So it is that in “Love’s Diet,” the image of the
sigh—a
sound-image of the other—is restricted but inherently necessary to the
amorous
condition, a poetic example of Barthes’ belief that the breaths lovers
share
are examples of the “unglued image” that seeks its complement, giving
off
exhalations by their nature “incomplete, sought to mingle with the
other” (15).
Thus desire is destined for “corpulence” (Donne 35) by the speaker, with
no end
in sight. It “worst endures” temperance and “discretion” (35) because
attempts
to regulate the flow can only be seen as acts of treason against the
self, or
attempts at self-delusion: the semiotic drive can never be held fully in
check.
For these sighs constitute the condition of love itself, both as
physical
experiences of one’s passion and as received auditory strains of the
beloved;
repletion is constantly necessary. Donne’s speaker is fully aware of
this when
he speaks of his mindless, omnivorous “buzzard love” (36).
This ironical characterization of love as foolish and
inchoate evokes Barthes when he states that the phrase “I love you,”
after its
initial declaration, “has no meaning whatever” (Barthes 147), as his
humorous
attempt to grammatically decompose the expression further clarifies. It
does
not “transmit a meaning, but fastens onto a limit situation […] where
the
subject is suspended in specular relation to the other” (148), and this
characterization of “I love you” as a form of emptied language that
betrays
itself again brings to mind the impulse behind Donne’s sigh and the
sight
itself, which cannot be tamed in language, nor can the destruction of
that
language eliminate the impulse: “Whatever he would dictate, I writ that /
But
burnt my letters” (Donne 35). The sigh infinitely restates the condition
of the
relationship, and nothing outside it; it expresses a desire that always
exists.
The fact that the sigh perpetuates itself and is received ad infinitum
again
brings to mind the endless chain of signifiers.
Yet, as inarticulate as the sigh is, Donne’s speakers never
are. Some of the poems may masquerade as sighs of cloudy desire trying
to
express themselves, but the hyperbole of the comparison poem is brashly
deflated by Donne in “The Comparison,” with its final statement that
both this
absent beloved—who we can only presume must have inspired a severe case
of
sour-grapes disdain in the narrator—and comparisons are indeed “odious”
(55).
The series of speakers seems to understand the devalued nature of love’s
language, but still they must pursue an object, as is necessary for
poetry of this
sort to take place. The speaker of “The Flea,” therefore, seems fully
aware
that his desire is base, yet has no choice but to obey it. As it
addresses the
textual character of the beloved (here given the nominally “present”
status to
receive this discourse of desire), it is her absence, in her denial of
desire’s
consummation, which the text commemorates. It seems doubtful that
consummation
would create a wholeness or unity—as in some mythical merging of the
sexes—but
the narrator seems to think so, or pretends this. He takes his absence
and
projects it onto the beloved and on a small, even slightly pathetic
symbol (and
a parasitic one; he, too, becomes a flea, perhaps a trivial nuisance
approaching a woman he’s just met), focusing on the microcosmic symbol
of the
flea (which he’d like to imagine is eating at her), in whom a slight
amount of
the lovers’ “bloods mingled be” (25). This has the dual effect of
comically
trivializing his love—there will surely be other loves, after all,
possibly
spanning intervals of time as short-lived as insects’ lives—as well as
the
mistress’ unspoken desire for chastity. Her fundamentally unknowable
character
becomes the subject of the poem, as does the related issue of the
impossibility
of achieving true consent. The mortal flea’s “one blood made of two”
(25)
becomes the impossible sign, as the narrator first idealizes, then
destroys,
it.
“Air and Angels” offers an archetypal absence-as-presence
in the text when its somewhat archly lovesick narrator says: “Still
when, to
where thou wert, I came, / Some lovely
glorious
nothing did I see” (13). Donne’s speaker’s desire establishes itself in
the
beloved’s body—as it later will in “To His Mistress Going to Bed”—but,
“fix
itself in thy lip, eye, and brow” it may, his love cannot “inhere” (13).
Perhaps
the poem brings up the world of sacred eroticism by comparing love (and
the
beloved) with an angel, but the unspoken subtext is that what he seeks
out is
missing, never evident to the eyes of men; studying the beloved’s
features
brings the subject no closer to what he desires.
But desire still roots itself in the flesh, but finds no
way of prolonging itself, elevating itself beyond lust. As Adam and Eve
in Paradise Lost’s postlapsarian chaos find
themselves unable to fully satiate or console their now altered desires
(it is
after the fall that signification emerges), Donne’s speaker cannot fix
his love
in the again “present” beloved, scrutinize her all he may. This then
becomes no
happy union, but a one-sided, mildly obsessive, “overfraught” (13)
longing, one
wherein the religious is sought out to give this absence a more pleasing
shape.
The mystical version of love, with its denial of the “disparity” (14)
that
really exists, is the narrator’s answer to the conundrum.
Donne’s poetry could not flourish without references to the
beloved’s appearance, or dramatizations of the interaction between
narrator and
lover: however, when this type of writing does occur, it relies upon the
principle of absence to conduct the discourse of desire—what good is
desire without
absence? What good is a poem that speaks of complete fulfillment? Thus,
the
last of the elegies, “To His Mistress Going to Bed,” depicts the process
of the
beloved (artfully denuded) approaching the narrator, the distance
remaining
between them intensifying the desire. This brings to mind Barthes’ essay
on the
phenomenon of striptease in Mythologies,
where he claims that the archetype of woman is “desexualized at the very
moment
when she is stripped naked” (Barthes 84). The exoticism of costumed
“exotic
dancers” works as a disguise to be removed much as Donne’s speaker in
the poem
fetishizes the clothing he removes. It is used as a device to assert
superiority of his knowledge of the beloved over that of others, whose
gaze is
stopped at the surface, on coverings and jewelry. This motivates the
belief
that “Gems which you women use / Are like Atlanta’s balls” (Donne 62),
and that
a “spangled breastplate” is a fixture which stops “the eyes of busy
fools”
(61), bringing to mind Barthes’ belief that the rhinestone costumes of
burlesque are symbols of the “mineral world,” of “the absolute object,
that
which serves no purpose” (Barthes 83), meant to at once present an
impenetrable
façade to stall spectators’ desirous eyes and to create desire.
Donne’s speaker attempts to bring the beloved out of the
world of spectators and into the private world of sex and the
unconscious: “now
‘tis your bed time” (Donne 61). The white robe worn by the beloved
continues to
exoticize her by placing her in the garb of angels suitable for them to
be
“received by men” (62), and conflates the bliss of the promised sexual
union
with the prolonged spiritual union men are thought to have with the
divine, the
promise being more important than the act, a ceremony that surrounds a
great
absence. So the difficulty of undressing the narrator’s love is
prolonged and
characterized as a labor she resists. It reveals a great absence: the
garments
that she is stripped of reveal a disembodied body that falls in line
with the
poem’s credo “as souls unbodied, bodies unclothed must be / to taste
whole
joys” (62). But the whole joy is absent from the text, figured as
unknowable.
Perhaps the wittiest dissection of another version of the
conundrum of “Air and Angels,” and the most anticipatory of postmodern
metafiction, is “The Triple Fool,” a scathing condemnation of the theory
that
the poetic arts might alleviate grief or romantic longing. The concept
of difference comes to mind immediately;
the poem, though it may be put one’s lack into words, certainly does
nothing to
satiate it (unless, as Donne’s speaker might be aware, a romantic
prospect
might hear your self-pitying ode to angst and take that pity upon you).
Multiply as poems may, they will only add up to a chain of signifiers.
So Donne’s speaker condemns both his desire and his desire
to express it: “loving, and for saying so / In
whining
poetry” (9) are equal crimes. But “loving” here might well be couched in
ironic
quotation marks, since we can give it a new valence almost immediately;
that of
“not having.” This casts a shadow over all Donne’s other poetic
enumerations of
love—is a depiction of an idyll of romance what it really is? “Rhyme’s
vexation” (9) is not merely a tonic to soothe the pangs of desire, but
to
perhaps hammer out the contours of a world wherein that desire is
sensible.
Poetry gives the semiotic drive an object which it can attain: as poetic
logic
(working within the symbolic drive) seeks rhyme and meter, the lover
seeks the
beloved. Verse becomes an articulation of one’s image-repertoire, which
can
then achieve a kind of momentary satiety in its recognition of itself as
just
that: a store of images.
Sentiments, when articulated, can come out wrong, and both Barthes and Donne are well aware of that. Perhaps, Donne says in this poem, lovers and poets should do better and keep these sentiments to themselves. But he knows they couldn’t very well stop writing, as much as he could stop loving. Centuries apart, these two authors articulate the same concept: language and love are equally inescapable.
Works Cited
Barthes, Roland. A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments.
Barthes, Roland. Mythologies.
Barthes, Roland. “Textual Analysis of a Tale of Poe.” On Signs. Marshall Blonsky, Ed.
Baltimore:
Donne, John. John Donne’s Poetry. Arthur L. Clements,
Ed.
Kristeva, Julia. The Portable Kristeva.
Kelly Oliver, Ed.
Kristeva, Julia. “The Speaking Subject.” On Signs. Marshall Blonsky, Ed.
Baltimore:
Oliver, Kelly, in
Kristeva,
Julia. The Portable
Kristeva.