Fantasies of Death in John Donne's 'The Apparition' and Shakespeare's 'No Longer Mourn for Me."

      ‘The Apparition’ by John Donne and ‘Sonnet 71’ or ‘No Longer Mourn for Me’ by William Shakespeare are poems in which each speaker imagines his own death and its effect on an addressee. Donne’s speaker regards his own death with satisfaction and aims to evoke a supernatural fear in a woman. He creates an eerie, bitter tone with an irregular meter and rhyme scheme. Shakespeare, in contrast, uses the regular meter and rhyme scheme of the English sonnet to portray his death in stark, gloomy tones and declare a simple love with the intention of inducing remorse and renewed affection in the addressee.

     In ‘The Apparition’ Donne exhibits the death wish which Roberts describes as a ‘permanent element in his psychic life’(1947 p959.) On this occasion the satisfaction the speaker foresees in death takes the form of a revenge fantasy in which he haunts a woman who has rejected him. The woman is directly addressed in tones of bitter resentment.

  
   Despite its seventeen lines, varied meter and irregular rhyme scheme, the poem is sonnet-like with an argument in three distinct parts and concluding rhyming triplet. The irregularities are used by Donne to create a disconcerting arrhythmia which complements the bitter and eerie mood of his words.

      The first five lines encapsulate the subject of the poem. It begins in iambic pentameter but the expected pattern is immediately broken by the short second and third lines. The alliteration of ‘that thou thinks thee free’ in line three make of the phrase a sinister whisper accentuated by the sibilant hiss of ‘solicitation ’in line four before a return to iambic stress in tetrameter for the fourth line. This foregrounds the rhyming lines one and four as the subject of the poem. ‘When by thy Scorn, O Murd’ress, I am dead…Then shall my ghost come to thy bed.’ The fifth line shows contempt for the woman, ‘feign’d vestal,’ and the man, ‘worse arms.’

     The next five lines of the poem focus on the woman in bed with her lover and the approach of the ghost. Donne uses monosyllabic words and an alternating rhyme in iambic pentameter for lines six to eight, creating a rapid rhythm much like a fearful, rapidly beating heart but then breaks it abruptly with the four syllables of line nine ‘Thou call’st for more.’ The shock of this break emphasises the sexual jealousy at the root of the speaker’s bitterness. Line ten then appears to stand alone gloating ‘and in false sleep will from thee shrink’’

      The gloating tone continues in the next section of four lines and slows with the breaks in line eleven ‘And then, poor aspen wretch, neglected thou.’ The  phrase ‘quicksilver sweat’ in line twelve is argued by Douds to be typical of Donne’s tendency to insert an conflicting ‘category’ of word into a poem to create dissonance (1937 p1055 -6.) The geological term used metaphorically in a poem about spirits, sex and death may seem incongruous and yet mercury was believed to have supernatural properties, treat venereal disease and known to be poisonous which suit the themes perfectly.

     The short line thirteen again creates a pause emphasising the words ‘A verier ghost than I.’ The speaker finally has the woman’s full attention as she lies terrified into a death-like state but line fourteen denies her any resolution. ‘What I will say, I will not tell thee now/ lest that preserve thee.’

    This takes the poem into the concluding rhyming triplet and a caesura. After this pause the speaker announces that his love is spent but immediately seems to contradict himself by implying there is still time to ‘painfully repent’ and to accept his advances. The final rhyming words of the triplet ‘spent’, ‘repent’ and ‘innocent’ have a quasi-religious tone. As Donne warned in several of his sermons, death can come unexpectedly and one can find oneself suddenly facing the wrath of God or in this case, the speaker, with all ones sins upon one.

     In ‘The Apparition’ the speaker is first a martyr, then a vengeful spirit and finally god-like in his judgement.  Roberts argues that ‘Donne’s model and avatar was the early Christian saint and martyr’ and relates his ‘death-wish’ to this self-ideation (1947.pp690-691.) Shakespeare too uses the image of death in a direct address but I would argue, in a very different way. Donne portrays death as a transition to a higher more powerful state and wishes to induce supernatural fear and submission. Shakespeare portrays death as an end, dwells upon the physical and psychological aspects of it and hopes to induce remorse and renewed affection.

     Kirby Farrel argues that feigned death is used frequently by Shakespeare in his plays to enable characters lower down in the social hierarchy to protest against a superior and ‘move love in a hard heart’ (1983. pp76 -77.) The speaker in ‘Sonnet 71’ is not feigning death but attempting to make the addressee experience his death through the imagery and language of the poem. The plaintive tone, simple declarations of love and imagery of death create a reproach in just such an attempt to ‘move love in a hard heart.’

     John Kerrigan argues that the sonnets must be read in sequence or ‘trains of meaning’ which ‘imply a narrative’ are lost (2001 p 74.) In this way ‘Sonnet 71’ is likely to be addressed to a young male patron whom succeeding sonnets will accuse of bestowing his affection and patronage on a rival.  However William Nelles (2009 p 135) argues passionately against reading the sonnets this way and accepting Shakespeare as speaker partly because so many lines reappear in his plays spoken by women. For the purpose of this essay I shall consider ‘Sonnet 71’ alone. The poem is in English sonnet form in iambic pentameter and has the three quatrains and a rhyming couplet of that form.

     In the first quatrain the speaker introduces the subject of his death and the first line ‘No longer mourn for me when I am dead’ brings us at once to the subject of the poem, - the speaker’s death and the addressee’s reaction to it. The iambic pentameter and regular rhyme scheme are established here and this rhythm and the enjambment of the whole quatrain accompanied by Shakespeare’s use of alliteration in line two with ‘surly, sullen bell’ create a sense of the inexorable tolling of that bell. The ‘l’ sounds are continued into lines three and four with the words ‘fled’ and dwell’ and in line four the rather difficult phrase ‘vile world and vilest worms’ forces the reader to slow down for this disturbing image of earthly death and decay.

     The second quatrain begins by answering ‘Nay’ to an unspoken protest and the addressee is urged to forget the speaker although this is immediately made impossible by line six. The image of the ‘hand’ is symbolic of bonds of loyalty between men and of marriage between men and women and the caesura  draws attention to the following simple words ‘I love you so’ completing the sense of an ‘honest’ loving bond which cannot so easily be forgotten. Lines seven and eight still contain the words ‘I’ and ‘me’ even whilst insisting the speaker ‘be forgot’ ‘if thinking on me then should make you woe.’ De Grazia argues that Shakespeare frequently used long Latinate words to indicate affectation and short Saxon ones to show sincerity (2001 p55.)The use of so many short Saxon words for this poem is significant and most obvious in this quatrain which includes ‘Nay’,’ hand’, ‘writ’ ‘love’ and ‘woe.’

     
Another exclamation, ‘O’, begins the third quatrain and is followed by ‘if, I say,’ indicating the emphatic reiteration which will follow. In line ten there is further imagery of decomposition with ‘compounded am with clay’ and in line eleven the paradoxical command to forget the speaker by obeying him. ‘Do not so much as my poor name rehearse.’ In line twelve it is significant that the speaker says ‘let your love with my life decay,’ rather than ‘body’.  The impression is of an ending with no suggestion of a spiritual reunion in an afterlife. This life is the one which matters.

     The ‘wise world’ which would ‘mock’ a display of grief can be understood to have no close relationship with the speaker but be in a position to hear and ‘look into’ the ‘moan’ of the addressee. The word ‘wise’ is almost certainly used ironically and therefore suggests a form of ‘wisdom’ despised by the speaker. Perhaps this is a worldly wisdom which fails to appreciate the relationship between a poet and his muse or lover or patron and the speaker would like the addressee to value that relationship a little more? Having focused upon such large emotive issues in the first three quatrains, to then imply it is all to avoid the derision of a person or persons in the addressee’s life strongly suggests that this is a reproach that such people occupy so privileged a position.

     Both Donne and Shakespeare have used their own deaths as a way to effect change in the attitude of their addressees but whilst Donne takes satisfaction in the idea of haunting a woman who has scorned him and aims to produce fear in her, Shakespeare presents death as an end and uses imagery of decay and the language of love with the intention of inducing remorse and the renewal of affection.

Bibliography

Douds.J . (1937) ‘Donne’s Technique of Dissonance’ PMLA 52(4) pp 1051-1061 JSTOR Available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/458501 (Accessed on: 18th Oct 2012)

Farrell K.  (1983) ‘Self--Effacement and Autonomy in Shakespeare.’ Shakespeare Studies 16(75) EBSCOhost   Available at: http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=7166159&site=ehost-live (Accessed on: October 17th 2012.)

de Grazia (2001) ‘ Shakespeare and the Craft of Language’ in de Grazia and Wells The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press [2001]

Kerrigan.J. (2001) ‘Shakespeare’s Poems’ in de Grazia and Wells The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press [2001]

Nelles W. (2009) ‘Sexing Shakespeare's Sonnets: Reading Beyond Sonnet 20’. English Literary Renaissance ;39(1) p128-140. EBSCOhost. Available at: http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=36880385&site=ehost-live (Accessed on October 19th 2012)

Roberts.D. (1947) ‘The Death Wish of John Donne’ PMLA 62(4) pp 958-976 JSTOR

Available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/459141 (Accessed on: 18th Oct 2012)

The Shifting Characteristics of Modernism as Exemplified in The Turn of The Screw and To the Lighthouse.

 In their discussion of modernism, Bradbury and McFarlane describe it as “a revolutionary movement, capitalising on a vast intellectual readjustment and radical dissatisfaction with the artistic past” (p28.) I will consider the ways in which these readjustments and dissatisfactions are evident in Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw (1898) and Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse’ (1927.) Specifically, the forms of the novels and their shifts of focus from external events to internal experience will be shown to be characteristic of modernist writing and constitute a break from the past.

In the novels of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth century, the reader was traditionally presented with a problem and guided authoritatively through a linear plot comprising of external events and character development to a satisfactory resolution.  The modernist novel,  David Lodge argues, is experimental and  innovative, “concerned with consciousness  and a ‘plot’ which often has ‘no real beginning,’ a lack of objective events, a mixture of viewpoints and an ambiguous ending”( 1976 p481.)   Some ‘moderns,’ including Henry James, exhibit only some of these characteristics or exhibit them in a modified form because “they belong to an early phase of modernism and retain some of the conventions and assumptions of traditional fiction’ whilst others like Virginia Woolf ‘exhibit nearly all of these qualities” (Lodge p 483.) Fletcher and Bradbury also describe James as “the most useful starting point” in the move away from Victorian realism (1976 p396)  and Marianne  Dekoven argues that “Woolf pushed fiction as far formally as any of the other major Modernists” (2011 p226.)

 It will be argued that this distinction between early modernism and high modernism can be seen in these two novels.  James can be seen to modify “the conventions and assumptions” of earlier fiction in his form and his ‘plot’ to be so ambiguous that critics have argued plausibly that it is entirely related to objective external events or wholly psychological. Woolf’s novel will be shown to break radically from earlier writing with its fragmented form and its neglect of external events in favour of the internal and the psychological.  

 Both authors profess a sense of liberation in writing. James says in ‘Future of the Novel’ (1900) “Prose picture… can do simply everything… It moves in a luxurious independence from rules and restrictions.” Woolf says ‘Nothing is forbidden – method or experiment even of the wildest … There is no proper stuff of fiction – everything is its proper stuff’ ( 1921 p164.)

Bradbury and McFarlane argue that “modernism is less a style than a search for a style” (1976 p29) and that “the great works of modernism… balance on the sensibility of transition, often holding in suspense the fores that persist from the past and those that grow from the novel present” (P49.) We see this sense of transition in The Turn of the Screw.  When James’ governess wonders ‘was there a "secret" at Bly—a mystery of Udolpho or an insane, an unmentionable relative kept in unsuspected confinement? (loc 467) we are reminded Of Anne Radcliffe’s gothic novel  The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and Jane Austen’s ironic  Northanger Abbey (1818.)   However, if we are led to anticipate a rational explanation in conclusion, we are frustrated. The possibility of trickery is closed down early with a simple ‘I felt sure…that I had not been practiced upon by the servants nor made the object of any "game"( loc 484.)  James described his novel as ‘a shameless potboiler’ (Letters 1898)and ‘a fairy-tale’ ( 1908)and  Ernest  Tuveson argues that it belongs to the genre of the mirchen, in the Romantic tradition’ (1972 p738) In this case, we might anticipate a conclusion which confirms a supernatural explanation but James does not provide this either.  The novella has a lengthy explanatory beginning, an escalation of events and a tragic ending in traditional narrative style and yet a satisfactory resolution of meaning is withheld.  We see here a ‘modification’ of a linear realist form to encompass modernist ambiguity and multiplicity of meaning.

Virginia Woolf makes no such concessions to realist forms. In ‘Modern Fiction’ (1921) she rejects a sense of obligation ‘to provide a plot, to provide comedy, tragedy, love interest and an air of probability embalming the whole’ (162.) The beginning of To the Lighthouse  is such as Lodge as identifies as modernist; one which ‘ plunges us straight into a flowing stream of consciousness  with which we gradually familiarise ourselves‘(1976 p481.)

The novel begins with Mrs Ramsey’s answer to an unknown question. ‘Yes of course, if it’s fine tomorrow’ and it is not until two pages later that we learn that James has asked if he might go to the lighthouse (1927. loc 1-43.) However, in these pages we have learnt that James is six and at this time, he adores his optimistic mother and hates his pessimistic father.   In a similar way we learn about the other characters in the first and third parts of the novel which ends before the party have reached the lighthouse denying us any conclusion apart from completion of Lily’s painting. The ‘plot’ progresses by jumping from consciousness to consciousness and from thought to thought within a single consciousness.  Woolf describes the mind as receiving   ‘ a myriad impressions … an incessant shower of Innumerable atoms’ (1921 p160) and we see this very clearly in Mrs Ramsey’s thoughts;

 ‘All the great men she had ever known, she thought, deciding that a rabbit must have got in, were like that, and it was good for young men …simply to hear him, simply to look at him. But without shooting rabbits, how was one to keep them down?’ (loc 979)

 By contrast, in the middle part ‘Time Passes,’  an unknown third person narrator states baldly the deaths of three main characters which would surely be events of central importance in earlier novels,  amidst a description of the decaying house .  “Twenty or thirty young men were blown up in France, among them Andrew Ramsey, whose death, mercifully, was instantaneous” (loc 1865) “ The pivotal part ii , “Time Passes,” boldly reduces the crisis novel’s crisis to parentheses …Events no longer obtrude, to be enshrined in metaphor.”  (Trotter 2012 p81.) This is characteristic of modernist writing. “The structure of external ‘objective’ events essential to narrative art in traditional poetics is diminished in scope and scale or presented selectively and obliquely  in order to make room for introspection, analysis, reflection and reverie” (Lodge p 481.)

Here again we see James in a liminal position. Do objective events guide the plot of The Turn of the Screw? This depends entirely on how and, most significantly, when it is read. Ernest Tuveson argues that ‘only after World War I did anyone doubt the governess actually experienced some kind of externally- caused apparitions’  (p800.) Tuveson argues for the novel being a ghost story driven by external supernatural events. The earliest psychological reading of it is by Harold Goddard in the 1920s in which he argues that the ‘ghosts’ are purely a creation of the governess’ ‘pent up emotion (which) overflows in a psychical experience, a daydream, or internal drama’ (c 1920s p8.) He describes the general reaction to this argument. “Evidently my view was utterly heretical” (4) but concludes that ‘the whole story might be reviewed with profit under this psychoanalytic aspect’ (p34.) Of course this was done very thoroughly by Edmund Wilson in 1934.

Tuveson insists that his argument places the mystery ‘against the matrix of thought, the beliefs and interests which James assumed in his readers rather than against the atmosphere of the later twentieth century’ (p783.) He cites Rebecca West in 1916 describing ‘the clear eyes of the honourable and fearless lady who tells the tale’ (p790) but in the following decade, Goddard describes the governess  as ‘an excessively nervous and emotional person’ (p6.) Tuveson asserts that Mrs. Grose,” is intended as a reliable witness for verification” (p792) and is “emphatically not superstitious” (p791) but to Goddard the housekeeper is ‘an ignorant and superstitious woman’ (p28.)

Both critics insist that they have uncovered James’ true meaning but James himself insists that he gave “not an inch of expatiation” (1908) and the text provides justification for both interpretations. The governess expresses her “duty of resistance to extravagant fancies” but makes huge leaps of logic. She interprets Miles looking upwards as proof “there was another person on the tower” (l 1145) and feels ‘a curious thrill of triumph (1177.)  Mrs Grose too is described at one time as “a magnificent monument to the blessing of a want of imagination” but her suggestibility is confirmed when the governess says “had I wished to mix a witch's broth and proposed it with assurance, she would have held out a large clean saucepan” ( p1167.) Tuveson’s assertion that “none of these [psychological] questions occurred to James himself” (p789) is less persuasive than his argument that “the rise of psychoanalysis may be both cause and evidence of a profound change in ways of reacting to forms of experience and art”(p 800.)

Virginia Woolf expresses this focus on the psychological in her essay ‘Modern Fiction’(1921.)  “For the moderns …the point of interest lies very likely in the dark places of psychology” (p162.)  In To the Lighthouse, James’ hostility to his father and possessiveness of his mother has frequently been read with reference to Freud’s ‘Oedipal complex.’  Likewise, Lily’s vacillation between sympathy with Mrs Ramsey and hostility to her could be seen as the conflict between the need for the maternal bond and blame of the mother for ‘castration’ in the ‘Electra complex.’   Lily perceives a mute appeal from Mrs Ramsey to take over conciliating Mr Tansley;  “ Mrs. Ramsay said all this…the glance in her eyes said it”  and she complies but then feels resentful when she feels “Mrs. Ramsay's gratitude… ah, she thought, but what haven't I paid to get it for you? She had not been sincere” (1278.) Lily’s inner thoughts contradict the external event of the dinner conversation and are privileged over it.  To Dekoven, the two women’s relationship is symbolic of the conflict between past and present portraying the “inspiring/inhibiting Victorian mother, Mrs.Ramsay, and cramped/autonomous Modernist daughter, Lily” (2011 p229.)

We also see a shift from external focus to internal in Woolf’s portrayal of ‘moments of being.’ To Woolf, reality is not derived from an event itself but from its significance to the ‘self’ perceiving it. “What is meant by “reality”? It would seem very erratic, very undependable—now to be found in a dusty road, now in a scrap of newspaper in the street, now a daffodil in the sun. It lights up a group in a room and stamps some casual saying” ( 1929 p 165) This occurs frequently in the novel.  James’ joy at his mother’s consent to the lighthouse trip as he cuts pictures from a catalogue, “endowed the picture of a refrigerator, as his mother spoke, with heavenly bliss” (loc 25.) This scrap of paper, much like Woolf’s scrap of newspaper, is not itself significant but becomes an entirely subjective symbol of a moment of joy which is then crushed by his father. Later Lily experiences such a moment. “So that is marriage, Lily thought, a man and a woman looking at a girl throwing a ball.” The tableau has induced an intensely subjective ‘sense’ of marriage in Lily; “suddenly the meaning…descends on people, making them symbolical, making them representative” (1003.) 

For Virginia Woolf, we see that the ‘internal’ and the psychological are more ‘real’ than external events and are privileged over them in both the structure of her novel and in her construction of meaning. This constitutes a radical break with earlier novelistic traditions in which a linear plot guided by events provides meaning and places her novel within the canon of ‘high modernism.’ Henry James has been shown to ‘balance on the sensibility of transition’ retaining many conventions of form but nevertheless failing to fulfil the expectations they arouse in the reader, instead leaving ‘meaning’ open to contradictory interpretations in a style which is characteristic of modernist literature.  

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Austen. J. (1817) Northanger Abbey. Reprint. London. Wordsworth Editions. (1991)

Bradbury. M & McFarlane. J (1976) ‘The Name and Nature of Modernism’ in  Bradbury and McFarlane (Eds) Modernism: A guide to European Literature:  1890 - 1930 London. Penguin Books.

Dekoven. M. (2011) ‘Modernism and Gender’ in Levenson, M. (ed)  The Cambridge Companion to Modernism. 2nd ed. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge Companions Online. Available at: http://dx.doi.org.libezproxy.open.ac.uk/10.1017/CCOL9781107010635 (Accessed 01 October 2013)

Fletcher and Bradbury (1976) ‘The Introverted Novel in Modernism’ in  Bradbury and McFarlane (Eds) Modernism: A guide to European Literature:  1890 - 1930 London. Penguin Books.

Goddard. H. ( 1957*) ‘A Pre-Freudian Reading of The Turn of the Screw. Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 12, (1) (Jun., 1957), pp. 1-36 JSTOR Available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3044415 (Accessed: 24/09/2013)

Radcliffe. A (1974) The Mysteries of Udolpho. Reprint. London. Penguin Classics (2001)

James. H. (1900)  ‘The Future of the Novel.’ The New York Times. 11^th August.

James. H. (1898) ‘Letter to H.G. Wells’ in ‘A selection of the Authors letters’ Available at: HenryJames.org.uk (Accessed 6^th October 2013)

James. H. (1908) ‘Preface to Volume Twelve of the New York Edition’ Available at: HenryJames.org.uk (Accessed 6^th October 2013)

James. H. (1998) The Turn of the Screw. Reprint. Kindle Edition. (2010) Available at Amazon.com.

Lodge. D  (1976) ‘The Language of Modernist Fiction: Metaphor and Metonymy’ in  Bradbury and McFarlane (Eds) Modernism: A guide to European Literature:  1890 - 1930 London. Penguin Books.

Trotter. D. (2011) ‘The Modernist Novel’ in Levenson, M. (ed)  The Cambridge Companion to Modernism. 2nd ed. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge Companions Online. Available at: http://dx.doi.org.libezproxy.open.ac.uk/10.1017/CCOL9781107010635 (Accessed 01 October 2013)

Tuveson. E. (1972)  ‘The Turn of the Screw: A Palimpsest’ Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900,12 (4) pp. 783-800 JSTOR  Available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/449966 (Accessed: 24/09/2013)

Wilson. E. (1934) ‘The Ambiguity of Henry James’ in Sue Vice (ed) Psychoanalytic Critisism: a Reader. Cambridge. Polity Press.  (1996)

Woolf. V. (1929)  A Room of One’s Own. New York: Harcourt Brace. (1957)

Woolf . V. (1921) ‘Modern Fiction’ Collected Essays (Vol 2) Reprint. London. Hogarth Press. (1972)

Woolf.V. (1927)  To the Lighthouse.  Reprint. Los Angeles. Greenlight (for Kindle) (2012)

*This was published in 1957 from a lecture given by Goddard in the 1920s.