Empson’s Elegy: The Legacy of John Donne in the Poetry of William Empson In the opening to his 1957 essay, 'Donne the Space Man', William Empson identifies John Donne's poetry as a strong influence upon his early work: 'I was imitating it in my own poetry, which I did with earnest conviction' (p.337). Later, he describes this relationship with Donne's work as being carried out 'with love and wonder' (1972, p. 95). In both essays, Empson shows a dedication not only to the defence of Donne's personal reputation, but to his wider ideas and approach to poetry. While explicit, and widely acknowledged by critics beside Empson himself (Gill, 1974; Fry, 1991), the direct effect of Donne upon Empson's creative work has received little attention, excepting brief glosses in support of wider arguments. However, a closer examination of the relationship between Donne and Empson's poetry indicates a broad contextual, ideological and stylistic affinity. This is particularly evident when considering Empson as an imitator and elegist of Donne, using similarly eclectic imagery and adopting the relationship to contemporary science Donne exhibited. In order to understand the extent to which Donne influenced Empson, we must consider Donne through Empson's own interpretation. It is clear that Empson perceived a difference between his own view and that of his contemporaries. His refutation of editing choices in new editions of Donne's poetry, most thoroughly of Helen Gardner's The Elegies and the Songs and Sonnets (1965) in 'Rescuing Donne' (1972), indicates a firm, often contentious critical stance. This earned him some criticism. M.P.H. Merchant, for example, was driven to question whether 'Professor Empson's own opinions were in some way becoming confused with Donne's' (Haffenden, 2009, p.400). In 'Donne The Space Man', Empson largely rejects more widely accepted Earthbound and colonial readings of Donne's microcosms in favour of a prescient Donne, definitively preoccupied with cosmology (1957). In addition to this, Price observes that 'Empson took from Donne a working definition of metaphysical poetry, in which the individual person is made to stand for everything' (2005, p.319). This idea ­ taken from neo­platonic and hermetic philosophy, wherein the universe and man are perceived respectively as macrocosm and microcosm ­ is particularly 1 significant to Donne's representation of love in his early poetry. Empson, indeed, states that Donne and his imitators 'believed [...] that a love affair is the fundamental means of understanding the world' (Haffenden, 1995, p.4). Price argues that this is also true of Empson's poetry, where the disparate scales of the modern cosmos, as described by Eddington and Einstein, and the personal are brought together to reconcile the contradictions of modern life. As such, Empson's view of Donne was deeply connected with his own interests, in cosmology, in the idea of the microcosm, and in the application of new science to personal experience. Empson's celebrated note accompanying his poem, 'Bacchus', provides ‘the notion [...] that life involves maintaining oneself between contradictions that can’t be solved by analysis’ (19691, pp. 104­5). The word 'analysis' here demonstrates Empson's preoccupation with scientific method, and the metaphysical approach to poetry provides a fertile poetic equivalent to this type of thought. Donne's poems are exploratory, juxtaposing images in unexpected ways, often to create highly structured and fundamentally logical arguments. The most widely known example of this is the early love poem 'The Flea', where lines such as 'It sucked me first, and now sucks thee, / And in this flea our two bloods mingled be' function much like an equation: your blood + my blood = our blood, together. The effect is similar to that in 'A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning', where the unification of separated lovers' souls is described: 'Our two souls therefore, which are one'. The influence of such lines is clear in poems like Empson's 'Arachne': 'two is least can with full tension strain, / Two molecules; one, and the film disbands'. While a mathematical rendering of these poems is reductive, losing the elegance of the metaphors, chiasmus and imagery, it serves to illustrate the similarity of such poems to the patterns of scientific thought. Contradiction has a pivotal function in much of Donne's poetry, whether it be in the union of souls as a positive argument for otherwise sinful physical pleasure ('The Ecstasy', 'The Canonization') or the use of objective sciences to illustrate the vicissitudes of passion ('A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning'). This idea of contradiction is equally prevalent in Empson's poetry, often conveyed through a tight lattice of All Empson poetry is taken from this edition. Unless separately cited, all Donne poetry is taken from Burrow, Colin (ed.) (2006) Metaphysical Poetry. London: Penguin. 1 2 scientific, mathematical, Biblical, literary and mythological references. Poems such as 'High Dive', which portrays indecision from the triple perspective of God, Scientist and Man, flit between these fields of reference at a dizzying speed. Empson shifts and layers connotations so that even when linked, one is left with a sense of overwhelming contradiction: Holding it then, I Sanctus brood thereover, Inform /in posse/ the tank's triple infinite (So handy for co­ordinates), chauffeur The girdered sky, and need not dive in it; Stand, wolf­chased Phoebus, ø infinite­reined, Aton of maggots of reflected girder (Steeds that on Jonah a grim start have gained) And need not keep the moment, nor yet murder. To create this effect, Empson draws upon not one religious perspective but a progression, from the Catholic 'I Sanctus', a prayer in adoration of the holy trinity in the Order of Mass, to ancient Greek Phoebus and 'the heretical Egyptian sun­god' Aton (1969, p.97). In the first quoted stanza, the omniscient Catholic God observes and controls but does not interfere, whereas, in the second, Man is likened to an eclipsed Phoebus, god only of maggots ­ mere reflections of the 'girder' of the Heavens. This is infused with mathematical and astrological imagery. The colloquial parenthesis of the first quoted stanza ('so handy for co­ordinates') alludes to the three axes and dimensions of a graph, parallel to the 'triple' perspectives of the poem. By apposing the mathematical and religious, Empson develops an ambiguity in the phrase 'triple infinite', so that it refers simultaneously to these three perspectives and to the Holy Trinity. The frequent, unsettled shifting of perspective creates a sense of the infinite possibilities of an unmade choice, in a way 3 that is best described through (as it a reaction to) the idea of wave­particle duality. Just as light must be considered simultaneously as wave and particle, the writhing reflections are both 'maggots' and cantering 'steeds'. This breadth of reference is similar to that of the Metaphysical poetry exemplified by Donne, which draws upon imagery from numerous fields and sections of society. For example, 'The Canonization' provides a catalogue of semantic fields present across Donne's poetry; the central religious conceit unfolds amid images of monarchy and the merchant class ('the King's real, or his stamped face', 'What merchant's ships have my sighs drowned?'), litigation and warfare ('Soldiers fight wars, and lawyers find out still / Litigious men, which quarrels move'), alchemical and animal imagery ('We find in us the' eagle and the dove,/The phoenix riddle hath more wit') and a myriad other allusions that encompass the civilised world: 'Countries, towns, courts'. Whereas Donne seeks to situate his love in the context of the society in which he lived, with the aim first of diminishing its apparent impact on the external world ('Alas, alar, who's injured by my love?') before presenting it as a 'pattern' worthy of invocation by aspirant lovers, Empson presents an all embracing scope of religion and mathematics which leaves the reader initially as overwhelmed and uncertain as the diver it portrays, but culminates in a deep investigation of how it is possible to make decisions in a world of infinites. As Kathleen Raine states, the 'imaginative depths' in Empson and Donne, come in part from the 'passion by which both are driven to impose order on fields of knowledge and experience so contradictory as to threaten the mind that contains them with disintegration' (Haffenden, 2006, p.350). In sharing this 'largeness of outlook' (1974, p.84) he perceived in Donne, Empson opened himself up to the same criticism that shaped contemporary receptions of Metaphysical poetry. Louis MacNiece, writing at the same time as Empson, condemned his poems for ‘being merely a set of soluble puzzles, games for the detection fan, the statistician and the crossword puzzler’ (Cunningham, 1988, p.76). This echoes Johnson's protest that ‘the metaphysical poets’ (of whom he goes on to mention Donne in particular) ‘were men of learning, and to show their learning was their whole endeavour’ (2009, p.397). In both cases, they are 4 accused of showing off at the cost of poetic grace and feeling. Johnson went on to suggest that the Metaphysical poets 'neither copied nature nor life; neither painted the forms of matter nor represented the operations of intellect’ (2009, p.397). This was refuted by contemporaries of Empson, most notably T.S. Eliot, whose famous review of Grierson’s 1921 collection of metaphysical poetry revived interest in the group. Eliot (2001) objects to Johnson’s criticism, describing the metaphysical poet as a talented magpie, consolidating ‘disparate experience; the ordinary man’s experience’ (p.966). As such, this breadth of reference, and the difficulty it presents to readers, may be seen as an inevitable progression from the challenges faced by Donne and his contemporaries. Writing in a period of discovery, amid the emergence of Renaissance science, colonial exploration and philosophical advancement, criticism like that of Johnson shows a reticence to adapt to a growing field of knowledge. For Modernist poets like Empson and Eliot, then, coming four centuries later, the argument Empson makes to justify his notes, that 'there [was] no longer a reasonably small field which may be taken as general knowledge' (1969, p.93) seems valid. Furthermore, it is clear that Empson values the ambiguities which arise from this growing field of knowledge applied to poetry. In his first book of criticism, Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), he states that 'the way in which opposites can be stated so as to satisfy a wide variety of people, for a great number of degrees of interpretation is the most important thing about the communication of the arts’ (p.221). As such, Empson's interest in metaphysical techniques emerges from his seeing them as a rich source for critical interpretation. Earlier in the book (pp. 139­145), a close reading of 'A Valediction, of weeping' is used to support Empson's fourth proposed type of ambiguity: 'when two or more meanings of a statement do not agree among themselves, but combine to make clear a more complicated state of mind in the author' (p.133). As illustrated by 'High Dive' and 'Bacchus', Empson's view of modern life is one in which complexity and contradiction are commonplace. 'Arachne' depicts a kaleidoscope of existence through the rapid listing of 'pin­point extremes': 5 Birth, death; one, many; what is true, and seems; Earth's vast hot iron, cold space's empty waves: The effect is one of fragmentation, again drawing on sources such as Platonic philosophy ­ the one and the many ­ and modern astronomical science. The list shifts from certainties ­ life and death being the only certainties ­ to the utterly uncertain, and ultimately unknowable emptiness of space. Ideas of overwhelming complexity and fragmentation are ubiquitous in the interwar period, epitomised in Eliot's 'heap of broken images' in 'The Waste Land' (2006). In 'Arachne', a delicate balance emerges from this chaos of extremes; a 'gleaming bubble between void and void', held firm by the 'mutual tension' both of the aforementioned opposites and of the opposition of the lover and beloved. Bubbles appear as a recurrent motif in Empson's love poetry ('Earth Has Shrunk In The Wash', 'Camping Out'), carrying almost the same range of connotations as circles and spheres in Donne's. Circles in Donne are often images of perfection and completion, as in 'A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning': 'Thy firmness make my circle just, / And makes me end where I begun.' The image of compasses, where the beloved guides the lover, regardless of the distance between them, gives a precise 'firmness' to the relationship, imposing order through mathematical perfection. Donne's lovers create the circle through their unity, but Empson's are external, held outside, on the surface: Tribe­membrane, that by mutual tension stands, Earth's surface film, is at a breath destroyed. Bubbles gleam brightest with least depth of lands ... The threat of instability, the implication that even the slightest breath might destroy the 'gleam' of so tenuous a relationship, turns the poem into a hostile warning rather than a traditional love poem. The fulcrum of the 6 third stanza ('and the film disbands.') bursts the bubble both figuratively and literally, returning to the hostility of the first two stanzas with a jolt. The feral, violent world outside returns with a shift in tone in which this threat is, through direct address, imminent: 'But oh beware, whose vain / Hydroptic soap my meagre water saves.' In both cases, the circle and the bubble offer a stable microcosm around which the complexity of the love affairs can be explored; and as previously stated, love affairs are a means for Donne and Empson to understand the world at large. Historically, the circumstances of both the 16th and 20th centuries make it easy to see why such an approach would appeal to both Donne and Empson. For both, as we have seen, the real world was fragmented. In Donne's case, the changes in scientific thought, particularly the shift in the widely accepted model of the universe from the Ptolemaic to the heliocentric Copernican model, were monumental and unsettling. The Earth was decentralised and likewise Man's place in the universe, as the height of creation according to the Bible and central to the universe according to Ptolemy, was forced into question. In 'The First Anniversary' (1985), Donne declares ''Tis all in pieces, all cohærence gone' (p.355), a judgement that resonates with Empson's depiction of a world in which communication is next to impossible. Empson writes that 'Donne has very serious feelings about the break­up of the unified world of medieval thought' (1974, p.84); this is epitomised in Donne's line 'And new Philosophy cals (sic.) all in doubt' (1985, p.335). Rugoff (1939) describes these changes in thought as a series of 'dislocations, of a world shaken literally out of joint' (p.35), and this has a parallel in the early 20th Century with the desolation that followed the Great War. The England in which Empson's early poetry was composed was one in which an entire generation had been lost, where the rigid class system was on the verge of collapse and the shadow of further war was a constant threat. As such, Empson must have seen an affinity between Donne's world and his own. However, the effect to which the microcosm is employed differs broadly between the two. One commentator wrote of Empson's period that 'the contemporary generation has confidence neither in the universe nor in itself, there is no purpose it seems at the heart of things' (Overy, 2010, p.13). This sense of lacking confidence is a recurring theme in Empson's poetry, in which love is characterised by 7 fear and apprehension. The first lines of 'Letter I' show a wry engagement with this idea: 'You were amused to find you too could fear / "The eternal silence of the infinite spaces,"'. The combination of amusement and fear, and the surprise in 'you too', suggest the subject’s dislocation from human connection. That one should be surprised to feel the same as another person shows the isolation of both subject and narrator; the void between places is, therefore, the unbridgeable gap between people. Whereas in Donne the isolation of a microcosm inhabited by lovers is idyllic, as in 'The Sun Rising': 'She is all states, and all princes I, / Nothing else is [...] / Thou Sun art half as happy as we', Empson's lovers are always held as separate spheres. Though Empson praises the dark spaces between stars, ('All privacy's their gift; they carry glances / through gulfs') it is clear that his value of the spaces hangs on their potential, rather than any true communication. Still, he and the subject remain as distant as ever: 'And say what they think common­sense has seen. / We have space, common­sense in common'. The repetition of 'common', playing with multiple meanings from the ironic 'shared by' to the informal 'vulgar', implies the most basic, peripheral and consequently undesirable of relationships. The connection equates only to sharing the same physical 'space', and the empty space between. The previous line is conditional, the implication of 'what they think' being that even messages and glances are subject to human error or misinterpretation. This culminates in despair in the stanzas final rhetorical couplet, 'Where is that darkness that gives light its place? / Or where such darkness as would hide your face?', which feel as though they are being shouted into the vacuum of space, where even echoes are impossible. Miscommunication, like indecision in 'High Dive', leads to a state of inertia and the eventual futility of 'a tumult never to be told'. Where Donne sets himself against the cosmos in chiding the Sun, Empson makes use of Einsteinian space­time theory to imagine a passion that surpasses that of the visible universe: 'Loose the full radiance his mass can win / While packed with mass holds all that radiance in.' Here the density of the sun, representing the unspent passion of the relationship, reaches a 'critical' point at which it holds in even light. Although written in parts between 1929 and 1935, this metaphor seems to anticipate the black hole (Price, 2005). The significance of the word 'critical' to a literary critic cannot be overlooked, as it pertains in 8 Empson's case particularly, to his influential practice of close reading. As theorised in Seven Types of Ambiguity, Empson infuses the word with double meanings. 'Critical' anticipates the concept of critical mass, implies the point of 'crisis', being 'crucial', and, combined with the changing mood of the sun, the idea of judgement (OED, 2013). The ambiguity of meaning, when placed as an aside, between parentheses, is comic, mirroring the amused fear of the first stanza. The hyperbole of this final conceit, pushing human emotion to supernova when it has been made clear that humans are separate stars in an 'eternal' and 'infinite' void is scientifically apt and darkly comical. The result is that the emotion goes hidden, a separate world beyond the visible universe. For Empson, then, the microcosm is not a means of establishing separation as in 'The Sun Rising', but an unfortunate (and laughable) human condition wherein separation is inevitable. The accumulation and dissolution of passion is similarly addressed through the conceit of tears in Donne's 'A Valediction on Weeping'. Single tears come to encompass whole worlds: A globe, yea world, by that impression grow, Till thy tears mixed with mine do overflow This world, by waters sent from thee, my heaven dissolvèd so. The sphere of a falling tear is 'a globe' which becomes a 'world' by the beloved's 'impression'. The impression here implies an active connection ­ the act of impressing both in minting and bookmaking is a physical stamping and transformation ­ and is both the beloved's reflected image and the impression the tears leave, as illustrated in the first stanza: 'Fruits of much grief they are, emblems of more'. Language of fecundity: 'fruits', 'grow', 'overflow', 'pregnant of thee', characterises the first two stanzas, with an effect similar to that of Empson's growing density of passion in 'Letter I'. The passion is all consuming; the image of a world put together hastily so as to 'quickly make that, which was nothing, all' sets a pace for the growth of passion which cannot be sustained and which, like the tear reaching critical weight, must 9 dissolve. The enjambment and change of meter at the end of the stanza to an all­encompassing fourteener mirror this overflow, like the rushing of a broken dam, the additional clause reinforcing the beloved's active role. A similar image is used in 'The Ecstasy', which is filled with language of clear, intimate communication: 'our souls negotiate', 'he knew not which soul spake, / Because both meant, both spake the same'. The purity of understanding in 'this ecstasy doth unperplex' could not be further from the doubtable hope of communication 'hanged on the thread of radio advances' in 'Letter I'. Where Empson's lover is isolated, begging a 'physician in this banishment', Donne's is active, pursuing ever greater connections with his beloved. His protests that 'pictures on our eyes to get / was all our propagation' is followed by a vibrant, persuasive argument for physical intimacy, whereas Empson stands back and portends a passive, ironic end. In Donne, consummation equates with the subject’s acquiescence. However, for Empson, consummation is not only delayed, but made impossible due to a fundamental miscommunication between lovers. The consistency of these disparate representations of love might seem to suggest broader oppositions. For instance, while Donne could write 'No man is an island' and state that 'Any man's death diminishes me, / Because I am involved in mankind,' (1959, p.109) a similar sentiment from Empson might seem impossible. The desolation of the Great War showed the insignificance of single lives in a way that Donne never experienced. To state that one person is the centre of the universe in the 16th Century is quite different from saying so in the early 20th. However, Empson populates the 'empty spaces' of 'Letter I' with potential worlds, for if the passion of one may be hidden, so might many equal 'untold' passions be present beyond view in the apparently empty void. His microcosms, then, are significant only in that they can be taken as particular instances of manifold or general experience, the 'ordinary man's experience', as Eliot put it. Empson (1974) states of Donne's 'The Sun Rising' that 'a general is given a local habitation in a particular, so that this particular is made much more interesting than all similar particulars [...] and the others are all dependent on it' (p.81). This is the case in 'The Ecstasy' and 'The Canonization', where a single love affair is the 'pattern' for all. In Empson's poetry, however, the particulars are not patterns but single 10 impressions or instances representative of a general truth. For example, the subject of 'To An Old Lady' is Empson's own mother, but ‘when she came across it in print she luckily thought that it meant her own mother, thus showing that it tells a general truth' (Empson cited in Gill, 1974, p.181). The difference is subtle, as Empson's mother is portrayed as a 'planet' in herself, but significant. While Donne's microcosms are progenitive, Empson's planets and stars always carry an awareness of their place among many. In this, there is an implicit connectivity beneath the miscommunication of Empson's poetry, which subtly echoes Donne's sense of involvement in humanity. The idea of microcosms and cosmological conceits, then, resonated with both Empson and Donne as a means of simultaneously negotiating particular love affairs and broader contradictions in the changing worlds around them. These conceits, which placed Donne at the forefront of the 'new philosophy', attracted Empson's critical interest through their rich use of ambiguities, and his personal scientific interest through their clever manipulation of cutting­edge thought. Empson admired Donne's 'largeness of outlook' (1974, p.84) and, despite criticism, shared his voracious appetite for new discoveries and love of esoteric references in poetry. He saw Donne as cosmologically prescient and, as we have seen, went on to write similarly forward­thinking astrophysical conceits. Donne's legacy in Empson is not only creative but sustained through criticism, present as early as Seven Types of Ambiguity and later, in defensive essays like ‘Rescuing Donne’. The dialogue between Empson and Donne's poetry, peripherally acknowledged elsewhere, rewards further interrogation, offering insight into Empson's broader work, but also to the affinity other Early 20th Century writers felt for the Metaphysical poets. Donne's significance to Empson shows a legacy which Empson sought to defend; the depth of influence upon his creative work extends and enriches this legacy, so that Empson's poetry might be considered a rich elegy to Donne. 4000 words. Works Cited Burrow, Colin (ed.) (2006) Metaphysical Poetry. London: Penguin 11 Cunningham, Valentine (1988) British Writers of the Thirties. Oxford University Press. Eliot, T.S. (2006) The Annotated Waste Land with Eliot's Contemporary Prose. (ed.) Lawrence Rainey. Yale University Press. ______ (2001) 'The Metaphysical Poets' in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 2nd Ed. New York. Donne, John (1959) Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions Together with Death's Duel [online]. Ann Abor Paperbacks: University of Michigan Press. Available from: Project Gutenberg. http://www.gutenberg.org [Accessed 10 January 2014]. 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Johnson, Samuel (2009) Selected Writings (ed.) Peter Martin. Harvard University Press. Overy, Richard (2010) The Morbid Age: Britain and the Crisis of Civilisation, 1919­1939. Penguin. 12 Price, Katy (2005) ‘Flame far too hot: William Empson's Non­Euclidian Predicament’ in Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, 30(4), pp.312­322. Rugoff, M. A. (1939) Donne's Imagery: A Study in Creative Sources. New York: Corporate Press Inc. "critical, adj.". OED Online. December 2013. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/44592?redirectedFrom=Critical (accessed Oxford University Press. 24 December 2013) 13