Andrew Marvell's Anamorphic Tears

Abstract

Andrew Marvell's Anamorphic Tears Gary Kuchar What is weeping a metaphor or figure for?What does the body mean to say by trembling orcrying, presuming one can speak here of thebody, or of saying, of meaning and of rhetoric? —Jacques Derrida IN his 2003 edition of Andrew Marvell's English poems, Nigel Smith glosses the subject matter of "Eyes and Tears" as secular, with the proviso that the eighth stanza's description of Mary Magdalene is religious: "Marvell's poem begins and remains secular in subject-matter, like other similar examples in the period: see, e.g. Thomas Carew, 'Lips and Eyes' (1640). Only stanza VIII, with the attached Latin version, is religious and certainly may be regarded as part of the English tradition inaugurated by the Elizabethan Jesuit Robert Southwell."1 Smith's account of "Eyes and Tears," one shared by other Marvell scholars, is inadequate not only because it begs the question of the poem's thematic integrity, but also because it elides how the poem revises the ontotheological vision evident in English tear poems by the Catholic converts William Alabaster and Richard Crashaw.2 Indeed, Marvell's [End Page 345] entire poem and not simply one of its stanzas needs to be read as a critical reassessment of the tradition inaugurated in England by Robert Southwell, for the poem revises the Catholic literature of tears tradition by putting verbal adaptations of anamorphic forms of representation in the service of a theological vision whose irony, epistemological skepticism, and overall ontotheology is distinct from previous Catholic instances of the genre. In order to grasp how Marvell's meditation on tears translates anamorphosis into a poetic register, we must examine the relations between "Eyes and Tears" and two sequences in Shakespeare in which the distinction between true and false weeping is complicated through reference to the curious perspective of "optic works." By situating Marvell's poem in relation to both the religious literature of tears tradition and Shakespeare's meditations on the anamorphic qualities of tears, we can better grasp Marvell's idiosyncratically Protestant and epistemologically skeptical answer to the Pauline question inherent to the ars lachrimandi generally: what does it mean to weep in an authentically devout way, rather than in a narcissistically self-oriented way?3 By considering how the poem's translation of anamorphic forms of representation into a verbal register differs from similar tropes in poems by Alabaster and Crashaw, we can broaden and yet at the same time refine Barbara Lewalski's and Joan Hartwig's interpretations of "Eyes and Tears." Arguing for the poem's distinctly Protestant character, Lewlaski asserts that Marvell's curiously reasoned speaker expresses howrepentance provides "a means of clearer vision about natural [End Page 346] order and its goods," thereby deepening the reformation of tear poetry begun in Herbert's The Temple.4 Examining the philosophical views expressed in the poem, Hartwig sees "Eyes and Tears" as expressing the view that "distortion through tears is a valid way of seeing, and that, if we could but put aside given ways of seeing, of perceiving reality, we might find that all is one—dualities are only apparent. There is no true 'this' and 'other.' "5 Though Lewalski's and Hartwig's readings are notable insofar as they address the ontotheological issues at stake in Marvell's poem, neither examines how "Eyes and Tears" presents a thoroughgoing revaluation of the Neoplatonic vision and specific sacramental ethos visible in poems by Alabaster and Crashaw. For instance, Hartwig's thesis that "Eyes and Tears" arrives at the view that "all is one" collapses Marvell's ironic vision of the relations between divine and mundane orders with the effusively Eucharistic view forwarded in Crashaw's "The Weeper" and Alabaster's Spiritual Sonnets , thereby missing the distinct way in which the paradoxes of incarnationist theology are voiced in Marvell's poem. Rather than articulating a theological view in which differences are only apparent, "Eyes and Tears" presses toward the position that the relation between earthly and heavenly orders is grounded in difference— a difference that exists not only between shadow and substance, subject and object, but within identity itself. Through a serious reflection...

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