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Fitting infinity on the page: a calculus of verse; and, Nights I let the tiger get you (poems)

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Fitting infinity on the page: a calculus of verse; and, Nights I let the tiger get you (poems)

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FITTING INFINITY ON THE PAGE: A CALCULUS OF VERSE

and

NIGHTS I LET THE TIGER GET YOU (poems)

by

Elizabeth Cantwell

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(LITERATURE AND CREATIVE WRITING)

May 2014

Copyright 2014 Elizabeth Cantwell

ii
DEDICATION

for my two Cs

(who make it all worthwhile)

iii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This project would not have come to fruition without all of the professors I worked with
during my time at the University of Southern California, especially those on my qualifying
committee and my dissertation committee. I am indebted to Marjorie Perloff for introducing me
to the work of Christian Bök; to Rebecca Lemon, for her kindness and insight; to Bruce Smith,
for helping light the spark that started it all; to Clifford Johnson, for discussions of quantum
physics and chaos; and to David St. John, for invaluable mentorship, creative guidance, and
general metaphysical reassurance.
I am also sincerely grateful, of course, to the Graduate School at the University of
Southern California for the generous support of the Provost’s Fellowship and for the Russell
Fellowship that enabled me to spend an extra year researching and writing this dissertation. I
could not have completed Nights I Let The Tiger Get You without the Provost’s PhD Travel
Grant from the Graduate School.
And finally, immense thanks are due to my parents, Carrie and Jay Wilcox, for their
emotional support and loving trust; to Christopher Cantwell, for his relentless belief in me; and
to Cooper, for delaying this project with his arrival, but not delaying it too long.

iv
TABLE OF CONTENTS

DEDICATION ii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iii
LIST OF FIGURES v
ABBREVIATIONS vi
ABSTRACT vii

INTRODUCTION: EXCEPT TO MAKE IT WORTH DEFENDING 1
I. What is forever has no youth or age 2
II. One would like to stick one’s hand out of the globe 9
III. It is as though I had picked up a thread which I had mislaid 14

CHAPTER ONE. TROILUS, CALCULUS, AND CHAOS: BOUNDLESS DESIRE, LIMITED ACTS 20
I. Sudden, radical, irrational change 28
II. Most admired disorder 31
III. The Trojan War has been going on for the last three thousand years and it hasn’t
stopped yet 40
IV. This is the monstruosity 45
V. Take but degree away: the form of chaos 52
VI. The nature of the sickness found, Ulysses, what is the remedy? 59
VII. A dear ghost 66

CHAPTER TWO. HE DISAPPEARS: THE QUANTUM MECHANICS OF ANNE CARSON
AND LADY MARY WROTH 73
I. In endles rounde 78
II. We want people to have a centre 93
III. Something small and delicate 97

CHAPTER THREE. THE SELF-REPLICATING POETRY MACHINE:
SPENSER’S “EPITHALAMION” AND INFINITE REGRESS 107
I. “I never saw my clock making babies” 113
II. And its echo ring 123
III. By virtue of one mirror reflecting itself in the other 130
IV. A new breed of automaton 144
V. A poem to outlast terrestrial civilization itself 156

CONCLUSION: UNLEASHING THE UNIVERSITY 173

BIBLIOGRAPHY 180

APPENDIX A: NIGHTS I LET THE TIGER GET YOU 186

v
LIST OF FIGURES

fig. 1: the Lorenz Attractor 42

fig. 2: the last page of Anne Carson’s Nox 107

fig. 3: The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even [The Large Glass].
Duchamp 1915-1923; replica 1965-66. Oil, lead, dust, and varnish on glass. 131

fig. 4: Objet-dard. Duchamp 1951. Bronze. 164

vi
ABBREVIATIONS

CBC Bök, Christian. Crystallography. Ontario: Coach House Books, 2003.
CBX Bök, Christian. “The Xenotext Experiment.” In SCRIPTed, Vol. 5, Issue 2 (August
2008): 227-231. Web.

CBW Bök, Christian. “The Xenotext Works.” Posted on Harriet: The Blog on 2 April 2011.
Web.

CP Ammons, A. R. Collected Poems, 1951-1971. New York: W. W. Norton & Company,
2001.

IAT Bevington, David. “Instructed by the Antiquary Times: Shakespeare’s Sources.” Troilus
and Cressida. Ed. David Bevington. London: The Arden Shakespeare, 2001.

LMW Wroth, Lady Mary. The Poems of Lady Mary Wroth. Josephine Roberts, ed. Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983.

LN Bevington, David. “Longer Notes.” Troilus and Cressida. Ed. David Bevington. London:
The Arden Shakespeare, 2001.

SAL Hadfield, Andrew. Spenser: A Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.

T Spicer, Jack. Troilus. In No: A Journal of the Arts 3 (2004): 73-154.

U Wroth, Lady Mary. The First Part of the Countess of Montgomery’s Urania. Josephine A.
Roberts, ed. Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2005.

V Spicer, Jack. My Vocabulary Did This To Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer.
Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2010.

WES Hadfield, Andrew. “Why Edmund Spenser Matters,” The Huffington Post (UK). Web. 27
June 2012.

vii
ABSTRACT

Fitting Infinity on the Page: A Calculus of Verse probes the poetry of both the Early
Modern age and the contemporary “information” age in search of the infinite. The preoccupation
with infinity—both mathematically and phenomenologically—crops up at regular intervals in
verse; as a mode of writing obsessed with limits and boundaries, with rules and measure, poetry
offers an especially fraught space for writers with infinity on their minds. A close examination of
this relationship between stanzas and science prompts some fascinating questions: In what ways
did Early Modern poets use form to parallel or anticipate the mathematical procedures necessary
to harness infinity? How do today’s poets situate themselves in the new cosmos—in a
multiverse, for example, instead of a universe? How does poetry understand the space of the
page with regards to the space that lies beyond our atmosphere and within our bodies? This
dissertation’s three chapters each loosely “pair” an Early Modern poet with a contemporary one:
William Shakespeare with Jack Spicer, Lady Mary Wroth with Anne Carson, and Edmund
Spenser with Christian Bok. Other important figures—John Donne, Margaret Cavendish, and
Marcel Duchamp—pop up along the way. In an interdisciplinary (or, perhaps, undisciplinary)
manner, Fitting Infinity on the Page opens itself to both historical and structural cross-
pollination. It examines the intersections of chaos theory and poetry in a chaotic manner, and
illuminates connections between quantum mechanics and sonnet sequences by accelerating the
particles of verse, watching them smash into each other, and analyzing what strange new entities
they produce.
Nights I Let The Tiger Get You is a collection of poems that, like the critical section of this
dissertation, deals with the way the unknowable and the unquantifiable is constantly rearing its
head in the course of our everyday lives. The manuscript is a neurotic journey through the surreal
viii
déjà vu of recurring dreams and the disorienting patterns of our own personal histories. The
collection’s poems view the failures of a family’s internal structure through the distorted lens of
the subconscious—but the language’s twists and turns ultimately open the narrator’s world to
hope.

1
INTRODUCTION.

EXCEPT TO MAKE IT WORTH DEFENDING
________________________________

In 1967, the American physicist Robert R. Wilson founded a national laboratory—now
known as the Fermilab
1
—where physicists from across the country could converge at an
enormous particle accelerator, revving quantum bits of matter up to impossibly high speeds in an
attempt to understand some of the secrets tucked inside the atom. Two years later, Wilson found
himself attempting to justify the signature, multimillion-dollar accelerator to the Congressional
Joint Committee on Atomic Energy. Robert P. Crease and Charles C. Mann recount a key
moment in Wilson’s testimony:
One exchange, between Wilson and a skeptical Senator John Pastore of Rhode Island, has
become legendary in the research community. Pastore asked, “Is there anything connected
with the hopes of this accelerator that in any way involves the security of the country?”
“No, sir,” Wilson said. “I don’t believe so.”
“Nothing at all?”
“Nothing at all.”
“It has no value in that respect?”
“It has only to do with the respect with which we regard one another, the dignity of men,
our love of culture. It has to do with, are we good painters, good sculptors, great poets? …
It has nothing to do directly with defending our country except to make it worth
defending.” (344)

The pursuit of the infinite—in science, mathematics, and the arts alike—has never been
undertaken in the interest of tangible, quantitative rewards. Rather, those who have sought out the
immeasurable, the impossible, and the infinitesimal have done so out of some awful, improbable

1
In 1967, it was simply called the National Accelerator Laboratory; it was re-named the Fermi National Accelerator
Laboratory in 1974, in honor of Enrico Fermi, and subsequently nicknamed “Fermilab.”

2
obsession, some nagging need to transcend or traverse everyday life’s linear strictures. Some
desire to touch the gorgeous and terrible. Some attraction to fear and beauty alike.
This dissertation swims in just such a suspension. Robert R. Wilson’s testimony could
double as a defense of my own research, my own mechanical production. This interrogation of
the infinite in poetry—of the way it bleeds into verse from science and mathematics and then
bleeds out of the verse again—this interrogation that disregards traditional strictures of time,
space, and discipline—what concrete, quantitative value could it possibly have? And yet there is
an undefinable and undeniable value in producing value-less discoveries, formulating
uncategorizable relationships, speeding thought particles up and watching them fly.

∞
I. WHAT IS FOREVER HAS NO YOUTH OR AGE

To open a dissertation on poetry with an anecdote about physics may once have been seen
as an academic 180. But as Robert R. Wilson’s own words attest, the line between the arts and the
sciences has long been more blurry than many give it credit for. The arts do not exist in a cultural
bubble; major breakthroughs in any field, perhaps especially in science, send ripples through all
corners of society—literary, visual, theatrical, cinematic, etc. Today, literary critics and scientists
alike are re-thinking the traditional divide between the “two cultures” of science and the
humanities (a demarcation made famous by C.P. Snow’s 1961 study, The Two Cultures and the
Scientific Revolution
2
). Howard Marchitello’s most recent book, The Machine in the Text:
Science and Literature in the Age of Shakespeare and Galileo, comments on the “new science

2
Much has been written on Snow’s theory that the communication barrier between the arts and the sciences was
hindering modern culture’s ability to effectively solve problems. See especially C. P. Snow’s The Two Cultures and
the Scientific Revolution: The Rede Lecture 1959 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961).

3
studies-inflected criticism of early modern culture [that] allows us to see that art is a knowledge
practice and, conversely, that scientific practices can be understood as imaginative, creative, and
literary” (1). Carla Mazzio speaks of how contemporary critics have “rightly challenged earlier
assumptions that once posited science as autonomous, proto-rationalist, and privileged with
relationship to truth, and accordingly, models of interpretation that found literature merely
‘reflective’ of scientific principles, or vice versa” (qtd. in Marchitello 1-2). Richard Holmes’
bestselling book The Age of Wonder takes the Romantic period as its backdrop, examining the
ways the second scientific revolution intersects with the great Romantic poetry revolution—and,
working in the succeeding era, Barri J. Gold’s Thermopoetics: Energy in Victorian Literature and
Science close-reads Victorian literature for clues about fiction’s relationship with its
contemporary science. Renaissance scholar Henry S. Turner has written two books probing the
relationship between Early Modern literature and scientific practices (both contemporary to the
Renaissance and contemporary to ourselves).
3
This list, already bordering on the tedious, merely
scratches the surface of the studies attempting to draw a double-headed arrow between poetry and
science [poetry ⟷ science], uncovering and strengthening the sinews that connect the two fields.
As may be clear from the disproportionate number of Renaissance scholars in this very
brief overview of cross-disciplinary scholarship, my own research has zeroed in on the early
modern period as an era whose poetic science—or scientific poetry—resonates with our own in a
particularly fascinating and rewarding frequency. It may seem absurd to think that the
scientifically-inclined poetry of an era so far removed from our own could possibly have anything
new to say to readers and scholars steeped in the incredible technological, mathematical, and
astronomical discoveries of the past century. However, the assumption that every new scientific

3
The English Renaissance Stage: Geometry, Poetics and the Practical Spatial Arts (Oxford University Press, 2006);
Shakespeare’s Double Helix (Continuum Press, 2008).

4
discovery makes the beliefs and practices of previous generations that much less relevant—that
science, by its very nature, validates a worldview privileging only the now—is too easy. There
are, of course, certain advances that have effectively wiped the slate clean; we wouldn’t want to
reinstate vitalism, or abandon the sterilization of surgical instruments. However, thinking about
all of science in this light does a disservice to the scientific theories and experiments that hold just
as much enduring power as the most ancient philosophical dilemmas. Poetic meditations on the
ache of mortality, the transience of love, the nature of grief, the purpose of joy—we have no
problem seeing these as timeless. Why, then, is it so difficult to imagine that a contemplation of
cloning could be equally as enduring across generations? Elizabethan poets didn’t have the
vocabulary to use the word “cloning,” but the mental dilemmas over what makes someone an
individual and how (or whether) each person’s flesh is stamped with some sort of “soul” or
uniqueness are certainly not a 20
th
-century invention. We give ourselves, perhaps, too much
credit.
However, if 21
st
-century scientists are ready to take credit for anything, it is that any sort
of cure-all “certainty” has been abandoned in favor of mystery and wonder. And this is exactly
why it is so important and—I would argue—necessary to study poetry’s response to the
mathematical and scientific concepts tied to infinity by pairing contemporary literature with the
work of Early Modern poets. Both eras share this sense of the sublime, this metaphysical
obsession with things far bigger than we are. Renaissance poets and natural philosophers grappled
with God, with the realization that our universe extends into invisible and potentially infinite
realms. Today’s poets and physicists must contend with dark matter, dark energy, the Higgs
Boson particle, the potential multiverse—all phenomena that resist easy proof or explanation, that
loom uncomfortably over textbook problem sets.

5
Furthermore, these two eras share a spirit that I would like to call “undisciplinary”;
according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the definition of “science” as a branch of learning
opposed to the “arts” or “humanities” only appeared at the end of the 17
th
century, so many Early
Modern poets did not even have the vocabulary to articulate a difference between their work and
the work of the “natural philosophers” (“Science”). Similarly, today’s academic climate
encourages the search for connections between branches of study that were once seen as
disparate, and in many cases contemporary artists are using scientific and technological
inventions to assist them in conceiving of, creating and/or executing their ideas. If the potentially
fruitful scientific resonances between Renaissance literature and contemporary poetry are
sometimes overlooked, it’s no wonder—we are all too entangled in an exclusive way of thinking
about science and progress. The revolutions of quantum mechanics and astrophysics have not so
much made the scientific musings of the Renaissance irrelevant as they have enabled new
pathways to interpretation and thought about Early Modern poetry. According to quantum
mechanics, when we measure a particle we actually affect its position in space and time; when we
scan a 17
th
-century sonnet, we are bringing one of its layers into our own room, our contemporary
space-time. This layer responds to us by changing itself to yield new meanings; Empson could
not have written “Donne the Space Man”
4
before the first space research flight—yet, when he did
write it, he did not distort or misrepresent the poetry in front of him. Donne’s lines simply offered
up a previously dormant possibility. When we read poems we are thus reading oeuvres that touch
two moments at once.
There is a long history of philosophical and scientific debate over the true “nature” of
time, and most experts will be quick to acknowledge that simple linear models cannot truly

4
In true communion with the idea of the nonlinear study, I am referencing a work here before I’m introducing it; try
to keep this example in your head and come back to it in a few pages.

6
represent time’s progression. Nevertheless, separating time up into “past,” “present,” and “future”
blocks (and always giving priority to the present)—Heidegger’s “vulgar” conception of time—
remains the only way for most of us to navigate our lives. And though there are exceptions, many
humanities departments reinforce linearity as the only possible temporal construction by carving
time up into discrete, conveniently-labeled periods (“Classical,” “Medieval,” “Renaissance,”
“Victorian,” etc.). Perhaps we’d be much better off if we were willing to step outside of our
beliefs in successive time and adopt a completely different model: one that’s folded, crumpled.
These adjectives, of course, belong to Michel Serres, whose ahistorical take on literature
has informed many of my goals in this dissertation. Serres puts our assumption that we are, in this
present moment, at the furthest point of a line of time marching ever forward on equal footing
with the old geocentric model of the universe; both concepts are self-centered and false. In
Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time, he notes:
I cannot help thinking that this idea is the equivalent of those ancient diagrams we
laugh at today, which place the Earth at the center of everything, or our galaxy at
the middle of the universe, to satisfy our narcissism. Just as in space we situate
ourselves at the center, at the navel of the things in the universe, so for time,
through progress, we never cease to be at the summit, on the cutting edge, at the
state-of-the-art of development. It follows that we are always right, for the simple,
banal, and naive reason that we are living in the present moment. The curve traced
by the idea of progress thus seems to me to sketch or project into time the vanity
and fatuousness expressed spatially by that central position. (48)
What better place to resist such solipsistic sequencing than under the banner of poetry, a potential
sanctuary for alternative narratives and empathetic thought?

7
Interestingly enough, artists of the Early Modern period shared this desire to orient
themselves outside of linear time. In their study on Renaissance anachronism, Christopher S.
Wood and Alexander Nagel discuss the ways in which artists of the 16
th
and 17
th
centuries
willfully inserted anachronistic objects in their depictions of ancient or medieval scenes. Wood
and Nagel assert that this artistic strategy was not an ignorant mistake; rather, chronological
storytelling “was simply one way of organizing time. Artifacts and monuments configured time
differently. They stitched through time, pulling together different points on in the temporal fabric
until they met. By means of artifacts, the past participated in the present. A primary function of
art under the substitutional system was precisely to collapse temporal distance” (408). A primary
function of art. And oh, we are always and forever still enacting this same attempt: to touch
someone from another time and place. To feel that affinity. To reaffirm that life is not a one-way
street, but a glorious and terrifying circle.
5

In Tape for the Turn of the Year, A. R. Ammons notes: “nothing permanent is old: / what
is forever has no / youth or age” (54). The infinite and infinitesimal paradoxes, thought
experiments, and visions in which my dissertation deals are examples of just such artistic
permanence. The resonances of these concerns are constant, circular, and colliding, not uni-
directional or future-oriented. My work will point out the ongoing dialogues between the two
periods, rather than succumb to a linear tracing of influence from the past to today. By dipping
my pen into interdisciplinary ink, I hope to perform readings of poetry that pour the stuff of well-
known stanzas into new and twisted molds. I hope, also, to demonstrate the flexibility and range
of study in the humanities—a field which has, of late, been under fire for its supposed irrelevance,
and has consequently suffered massive funding cutbacks and academic disdain.

5
It doesn’t matter if we learn from history. We will still repeat the mistakes of our past. Because they are our
mistakes.

8
As this dissertation demonstrates, I firmly believe an openness to historical cross-
pollination is crucial to work in the humanities; it can structure study in opposition to teleological
narratives that are, too often, forced into a specific shape by entities with controlling interests in a
particular goal or endpoint. When speaking of the way literature is made to function as an
academic discipline that bears the weight of transmitting “culture,” Bill Readings notes:
Each [literary] example illustrates a universal law, each speaking picture holds
down a unique place within the extended and non-contradictory museal or
canonical space of rational historical understanding. To call this space—which is
also the space of the Norton Anthology—museal is to refer to the way in which the
ground plan of the modern museum is already a linear map of a particular account
of a history of art, offering a unified account of linear development and a
generalized system of classification. (73)
I believe, and I think Readings does as well, that such a unified account is dangerous, and that the
field of the humanities is the best space in which to revolt against such predetermined floor plans.
The ideal poetry syllabus is not museal but chaotic: appearing random because it constructs itself
with great sensitivity towards the smallest shifts in language, the most imperceptible linguistic
alignments. A chaotic study of the capacity of poetry to encompass the infinite ought to refuse
“traditional” methodologies and forms of literary analysis. It should be organized by resonances
in the field of language, not by the dates on which certain poems were written; thus, such a study
must also be uppercase-C Chaotic, in the sense meant by Hesiod: undifferentiated, outside of
history.

9
∞
II. ONE WOULD LIKE TO STICK ONE’S HAND OUT OF THE GLOBE

I first became interested in studying the poetic operations of infinity while re-reading
Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida. I was struck by the frequency with which Shakespeare
invokes the concept of the infinite and the immeasurable in the play—and by the manner in which
he treats these concepts. His interest in the infinite seemed to be less about the abstract,
transcendent notion and more in the mathematical particulars of the term: how can one perform
everyday calculations when infinity is one of the terms? How do you bargain for something
unquantifiable? The study of poetic infinity in the abstract—the sublime, the divine—has been
performed many times over. But this attention to the more obviously lyrical side of the infinite
has, I think, resulted in a scholarly neglect of the more mathematical and concrete shades of the
word in literature. This dissertation, then, attempts to treat works of poetry that display a scientific
interest in that which goes on and on forever, not just a general awe of the immeasurable. In
doing so, I have attempted, in turn, to pay attention to scientific concepts that display a poetic
interest in the universe.
The idea of infinity necessarily straddles this line between the arts and the sciences;
indeed, it has long met with resistance from some in the scientific community who saw it as
mathematically (and even existentially) troubling. This reluctance to admit the infinite to official
theories notoriously dates all the way back to Aristotle, who rejected what he termed “actual”
infinity on philosophical and logical terms. Only “potential” infinity (unending processes that
could be treated in finite, understandable packets, like the cycling of the seasons) was acceptable.
Such desire to ban the troublingly unquantifiable from regimented thought is by no means strictly
an ancient superstition; Paul Dirac, one of the founders of quantum mechanics, was famously

10
very upset by the infinities that continually cropped up in his equations. Decades of work went
into “renormalizing” Dirac’s quantum field theory—the translation of “renormalizing,” here,
approaching something like “getting rid of the infinities.” What an interesting and telling term,
“renormalizing”; mathematics, it seems, would like to (at least linguistically) deny the normalcy
of being unable to express some aspect of the world in a neat package—a normalcy of which
poets have long been aware. But just as mathematicians are working in a medium made up of a
substance antithetical to the infinite—numbers—so, too, do poets struggle against the confines of
their medium—language—to express something that resists expression. This dissertation
celebrates the poets and scientists alike who work on in the face of an ultimately unrealizable
goal.
I do not mention Paul Dirac lightly; as a poet of numbers, his philosophies and goals loom
over the subsequent pages. Dirac’s notorious reticence to speak and general distrust of
language—he saw words as “treacherous” and “believed that true clarity could be achieved only
in mathematical symbols” (Farmelo 110-11)—is itself poetic, as many of the best poets have
arrived at their work armed with a healthy suspicion of language. Furthermore, Dirac was often
less interested in the functionality of his work than in its beauty—or, rather, he sought beauty first
and foremost, with the firm belief that beauty and functionality were closely intertwined. In his
famous Scott lecture at the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Dirac proposed “the principle of
mathematical beauty, which says that researchers who seek the truly fundamental laws of nature
in mathematical form should strive mainly for mathematical beauty” (Farmelo 301). In Dirac’s
view, looking back at the successive theories in the field of physics, it becomes clear that “in each
case, the mathematics involved in the theory is more beautiful than the mathematics of the theory
it superseded” (Farmelo 301). Dirac’s frustrations with the persistent infinities in quantum

11
mechanics, then, was due in part to his view that such unruly “quantities” (if they can even be
called “quantities”) ruined the precise beauty of his calculations.
Such a view is not representative, though, of some sort of fundamental failure of the
mathematical imagination. Artists and poets, too, resist the ugly pull of the infinite, a concept that
often refuses to align with their formal aspirations. After all, as a mode of writing obsessed with
rules and measure, poetry is not so different from the regulated space of the laboratory. It is only
natural that, when things get out of hand, the poet and poem alike turn to linguistic and
metaphoric confinement. In the lovely little lyric “The Good Morrow,” Donne addresses his love
tenderly:
And now good morrow to our waking souls,
Which watch not one another out of fear;
For love all love of other sights controls,
And makes one little room an everywhere.
Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone;
Let maps to others, worlds on worlds have shown;
Let us possess our world: each has one, and is one. (8-14)
Aware of the unmeasurables which love admits, Donne asserts, in a controlled stanza, that “one
little room” can contain an everywhere. That the poem can encompass the infinite. Donne’s desire
to keep close to his lover and his own little world—his own metaphorically spherical room
6
—

6
I do not use the word “spherical” here lightly; my interest in Donne’s “spheres” (globes, worlds, planets) stems
from William Empson’s lovely and fascinating essay entitled “Donne the Space Man,” in which he unravels Donne’s
desire to travel to other worlds—to discover lands that were, to him, infinitely far away. Empson hones in on
Donne’s use of the word “sphere,” which certainly carries Ptolemaic connotations in many of Donne’s poems, but
which Empson also imbues with a more contemporary weight. Interestingly, Empson resists the infinite as much as
he evokes Donne’s desire for it; at one point, he notes, “there are thousands of millions of other galaxies (if not an
infinite number, which I still hope can be avoided).” See William Empson, “Donne the Space Man,” The Kenyon
Review 19.3 (1957): 337-399.

12
while others are out mapping new territories finds a related expression centuries later in A.R.
Ammons’s Sphere: The Form of a Motion:
I am not a whit manic
to roam the globe, search seas, fly southward and northward
with migrations of cap ice, encompass a hurricane with

[146]
a single eye: things grown big, I dream of a clean-wood
shack, a sunny pine trunk, a pond, and an independent income:
if light warms a piney hill, it does nothing better at the

farthest sweep of known space. (145.10-12, 146.1-4)
But it would be a mistake to take Ammons or Donne at face value. Ammons claims to shy away
from “the farthest sweep of known space” in a book-length poem whose long, scrawling lines
openly flaunt their interest in exactly the opposite of the above excerpt’s assertion—their excited,
unstoppable syntax covers topics from gas stations to constellations. John Ashbery, less interested
in claiming contentment with microcosms, notes in “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” that
The pity of it smarts,
Makes hot tears spurt: that the soul is not a soul,
Has no secret, is small, and it fits
Its hollow perfectly: its room, our moment of attention. (43-46)
Here, of course, is Donne’s “little room,” though Ashbery laments its supposed walls—the tragic
realization that something as purportedly immeasurable as a soul could, finally, “fit” somewhere.

13
He continues: “One would like to stick one’s hand / Out of the globe, but its dimension, / What
carries it, will not allow it” (56-8). Just as we can’t take Donne or Ammons at their word that they
prefer the enclosed space to the ranging horizon, so too must we be wary of Ashbery’s performed
despair at the success of renormalization—at the banishment of infinities from the theory of how
our bodies and souls operate. After all, what is he doing in “Self-Portrait” but sticking his hand
out of the globe?
Thus, while the following chapters are obviously interested in interrogating poems and
texts that engage explicitly with the concept of the infinite, they are also interested in how poetry
seeks this concept out—how poets attempt to harness, unleash, suppress, or celebrate infinity in
its most difficult-to-wrangle, mathematic forms. How do we, as poets and people, construct
infinity? How do we use it to test the space of the page, to lend ourselves a purpose, to manipulate
time, to manage our navigations of the world around us? Because of the limitations of language,
such questions can never be satisfactorily addressed—an obstacle similar to that faced by particle
physicists attempting to gather information about quantum objects:
… if we are faced with the choice of position or momentum measurements on a particle,
we cannot say that the particle possesses specific values for these quantities prior to the
measurement. If we decide to measure the position, we end up with a particle-at-a-place.
If we choose instead to measure the momentum, we get a particle-with-a-motion. In the
former case, after the measurement is complete, the particle simply does not have a
momentum, in the latter case it does not have a location. (Davies and Brown 21)
Our own human tools (whether linguistic or scientific) can never yield exact results. We cannot
have both speed and position; there is a slipperiness at the heart of the fabric making up our
universe and our minds.

14
∞
III. IT IS AS THOUGH I HAD PICKED UP A THREAD WHICH I HAD MISLAID

Unfortunately, my subject’s essential slipperiness doesn’t exempt me from finding some
sort of organizing principle for my dissertation. The work that follows is divided into three
chapters, each of which attempts to encapsulate a different aspect of infinity’s operations in
poetry. The chapters loosely “pair” an early modern poet with a contemporary one, sounding out
resonances across the centuries.
Chapter One, “Troilus, Calculus, and Chaos: Boundless Desire, Limited Acts,” looks at
two iterations of the Troilus story—Shakespeare’s and Jack Spicer’s. Though these two works are
technically plays, not poems, their attention to language, image and what can only be called the
“strange” are undeniably poetic; their characters circle around and around the stubborn question
of the incalculable. Reading these plays, I couldn’t help but find myself drawn to the way they
attempt to portray an off-kilter world, unbalanced societies—thrown into disorder, essentially, by
the introduction of the infinite. How do we reckon when our means for doing so—simple
addition, subtraction, multiplication—are jammed up by infinity? Using chaos theory and
calculus as my guides, I navigate the odd mazes Shakespeare and Spicer have created, searching
for tangents and Lorenz attractors in the (purposefully) unwieldy forms these two authors have
chosen for their stories.
After this examination of the mechanics of the infinite, I turn to the infinitesimal in
Chapter Two, “ ‘He Disappears’: The Quantum Mechanics of Anne Carson and Lady Mary
Wroth.” It is no coincidence that this chapter looks at two female poets; denied traditional
patriarchal expanses and searching for alternative routes to infinity, Wroth and Carson subdivide
their way to an impossibly spacious freedom inside impossibly tiny zones: syntactical gaps,

15
translational hiccups. Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus—specifically “A Crown of Sonnets
Dedicated to Love”—is nestled against Anne Carson’s Nox to pose new questions about the
atomic possibilities of verse. Wroth’s work asserts its “microscopic” character in its
magnification of strange linguistic leaps. Applying an analogy between molecules and syllables to
her writing would not, in fact, be anachronistic; Robert Hooke’s 1665 Micrographia itself draws
such a parallel: “In the preface he suggested that the microscope would produce an ‘alphabet’ for
the expression of complex forms. ‘As in geometry we begin with bodies of the most simple nature,
so we need begin with letters before we try to write sentences or draw pictures’” (Wilson 228).
Furthermore, when looking through a microscope, the magnified entities often appear so alien
that the only way to successfully describe them is by invoking similar macroscopic images or
processes—proceeding, like a poem, by analogy. For example, “Boyle frequently invoked
macroscopically appreciable alterations in qualities that result from changes in motion or situation
in order to model microscopic alterations: velvet, waving wheat, the hair of angry dogs, the
pounding of glass and scraping of horn, pea fields viewed from the side, the nap of taffeta, all
show us the origins of forms and qualities” (Wilson 228). Quantum mechanics, too, has long lent
itself to poetic interpretations. Wroth and Carson, then, offer a fantastic opportunity to reverse the
direction of these analogies and move from imaginative image to concrete particle, from iamb to
quark.
After descending into the abyss of the infinitesimal, I return to questions of “big infinity”
in my third chapter, “The Self-Replicating Poetry Machine: Spenser’s ‘Epithalamion’ and Infinite
Regress.” Taking on Edmund Spenser’s innovative marriage poem, Marcel Duchamp’s The Bride
Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even, and Christian Bök’s Xenotext Experiment, I unpack the
ways in which these varied works share a single goal: to attain a sort of eternal life through

16
unending replication. I examine contemporary self-replicating technologies and Renaissance
thoughts on reproduction in an attempt to continue the infinite lives of these texts through close
readings. There is an undeniable link between contemporary efforts to extend, modify, and
replicate life and the job of the poet that has not gone unremarked on; in his weekly “On Science”
column in the St. Louis-Post Dispatch, Dr. George Johnson remarked that the process of altering
genetic material “is like inserting a phrase from Shakespeare into a line of code in a computer
program” (qtd. in Turner 61). Though at the time this was just a turn of phrase, Bök’s insertion of
a poem into the genetic code of a small organism has turned this figure of speech into reality. (But
does it matter that such an imaginary event has actually come to pass, as the implications of its
biological endurance were already being contemplated by Edmund Spenser centuries before?)
Whether sexual, mechanical, or both, the reproductions in this chapter demand attention.
Christian Bök is an interesting figure with which to close my dissertation. Not only is he
the most explicitly interested in the possibilities of combining poetry with science, he also seems
to be poised at a key station from which threads of thought can be traced out to the Early Modern
era and back. His Xenotext Project—designed to create an eternal, living poem—may seem on
the surface to be an incontrovertibly contemporary thing, a pairing of poetry and science that
could only occur in the 21
st
century. However, this project shares much with Donne’s use of the
lyric as an alchemical laboratory in which to fuse the genetics of two people and two souls—a
language-based chemical reaction, which he describes in poems like “The Flea” and “The Ecstasy”
in no uncertain language. “The Ecstasy” witnesses this mad-scientist experiment:
Our hands were firmly cemented
With a fast balm, which thence did spring;
Our eye-beams twisted, and did thread

17
Our eyes upon one double string.

So t’intergraft our hands, as yet
Was all the means to make us one,
And pictures on our eyes to get
Was all our propagation. (5-12)
Donne stands invisibly next to Bök in the laboratory, keeping watch over the experiments he
couldn’t physically perform.
Even before the Xenotext Experiment, Bök’s interest in the infinite (and in strange ways
to extend life) cropped up in his work. His Crystallography, a book composed in concert with the
molecular makeup of crystals, contains an intriguing passage. Section 3 of the prose poem
“Enantiomorphosis” recounts a story which, in turn, was supposedly recounted by Christian
Weiss, a German crystallographer in the late 18
th
/early 19
th
centuries (enclosures within
enclosures). Weiss reportedly purchased a medieval treatise on the use of mirrors in chess, which
discusses how two mirrors facing each other can “trap the spirits of the dead who pass between
them” (CBC 146). Bök explains further that:
any living person who has no soul can step into either one of the mirrors as if it were an
open door and thus walk down the illusory corridor that appears to recede forever into the
depths of the glass by virtue of one mirror reflecting itself in the other. The walls of such a
corridor are said to be made from invulnerable panes of crystal, beyond which lies a
nullified dimension of such complexity that to view it is surely to go insane … After an
eternity of walking down such a corridor, a person eventually exits from the looking glass
opposite to the one first entered.

18

Weiss speculates that a soulless man might carry another pair of mirrors into such a
corridor, thereby producing a hallway at right angles to the first one. Such a man might, of
course, perform this procedure again and again in any of the corridors until he has erected
an endless labyrinth of glass … (CBC 146)
…thus forming endless self-replications, erecting a maze that could guarantee eternal life—but
only, of course, for the soulless—for Ashbery’s “not a soul”—for those looking for an infernal
and terrifying escape from the “little room.” The word “labyrinth,” here, draws a dotted line from
Bök’s hellish infinity to Lady Mary Wroth’s crown of sonnets, which opens with the line “In this
strang labourinth how shall I turne” (P77; 1). Her corona unfolds with the perplexity, difficulty,
and frustration of a writer caught in an infinite maze. In writing her sonnet sequence from the
perspective of a woman rather than a man (a revolutionary step in Early Modern England), Wroth
set up a mirror (reversed) image of the standard approach—perhaps in the hope that these
refracting mirrors could set up a series of recursive images through which she could slip, escaping
societal and courtly structures. She notes:
Thus let mee take the right, or left hand way;
Goe forward, or stand still, or back retire;
I must thes doubts indure without allay
Or help, butt travaile find for my best hire;

Yett that which most my troubled sence doth move
Is to leave all, and take the thread of love. (P77; 9-14)

19
Ashbery seems to hear Wroth, and as she picks up her thread of love, he assures her in “Three
Poems” that
Right now it is important to slip as quickly as possible into the Gordian contours of the
dank, barren morass (or so it seems at present) without uttering so much as a syllable;
to live in that labyrinth that seems to be directing your steps but in reality it is you who
are creating its pattern, embarked on a new, fantastically difficult tactic whose success
is nevertheless guaranteed. You know this. (147)
And she does.

Later in “Three Poems,” Ashbery again overhauls the vast distance between himself and
Wroth by “no longer waiting … It is as though I had picked up a thread which I had mislaid but
which for a long time seemed lost” (155-6). In my dissertation, I hope to make sure the threads
connecting these authors are neither mislaid nor lost, but rather plucked out and celebrated. As I
write this, I am in a small vintage Airstream trailer in the Santa Monica mountains, underneath a
breathtakingly expansive sky full of stars and planets and nebulas and time. It is impossible not to
feel both tiny and huge here—insignificant and omniscient. Though this dissertation cannot aspire
to quite such lofty heights, I do hope that the analyses, arguments and musings that follow can
serve to both expand and contract the reader’s particular sphere.

20
CHAPTER ONE.

TROILUS, CALCULUS, AND CHAOS: BOUNDLESS DESIRE,
LIMITED ACTS
________________________________

The Computation.

For my first twenty years, since yesterday,
I scarce believ’d thou couldst be gone away;
For forty more I fed on favors past,
And forty’on hopes that thou wouldst they might last;
Tears drown’d one hundred, and sighs blew out two;
A thousand, I did neither think nor do,
Or not divide, all being one thought of you;
Or in a thousand more, forgot that too.
Yet call not this long life; but think that I
Am, by being dead, immortal. Can ghosts die?
(Donne 113-4)

It’s tempting to pass off this simple lyric by John Donne as silly, lacking depth—an
overly-literal take on a cliché: every hour away from the one you love feels like an eternity. Such
a metaphor seems especially mundane for a metaphysical poet who deals in elaborate conceits.
Today, numbers and basic arithmetic are thrown into rhetoric (poetic, political, or otherwise) so
often and so comfortably that we don’t give it a second thought. We take this vocabulary for
granted. But numerical calculations were still a nascent arena of thought during the 16
th
and 17
th

centuries. Donne didn’t have a digital clock sitting by his bed, over his microwave, set into the
dashboard of his car; he wasn’t used to marking minutes or falling back on numbers to justify a
belief. But he was starting to think more about how numbers created their own language, how
they spoke in strange ways, ways that words couldn’t. In fact, the period of 1500-1700
7
saw
several major shifts in the way people thought about numbers, measurement, and computation; it

7
Donne lived from 1572-1631, placing him squarely in the middle of this cultural shift.

21
saw the replacement for most purposes of roman numerals by arabic ones and the
consequent supersession of the counting-board or abacus by arithmetical calculation on
paper. It witnessed the proliferation of textbooks on commercial arithmetic and double-
entry bookkeeping; the introduction of decimals, logarithms and algebra; and the adoption
of most of the arithmetical symbols with which we are now familiar. (Thomas 103)
Along with these shifts in the “art” of calculation came shifts in the demographics of those who
would have possessed such knowledge. At the beginning of the 16
th
century, mathematical study
was not considered necessary for the general population; only a few professions required a
knowledge of arithmetic, and grammar schools usually left basic operations like addition,
multiplication, and division off of their syllabi.
8
As mercantile business grew, however, so did the
need for merchants to keep accurate records of their profits and losses. Over the course of the
century, a basic mathematical language began to seep into the conversations and writings of
everyday people.
Donne’s poem, then, engages in a practice that was only recently emerging. The vast
numbers in “The Computation” would have been outside the range of the abacus’s power—
beyond the reach of any almanac—and would have has a mysterious power for Donne’s readers.
The speaker of this poem does not even have a cave wall, as Robinson Crusoe would a century
later; to mark the passing of the years, he only has his mind. So what is the method by which he
memorizes—and memorializes—the impatient time? He measures it not in counters, but in
verse—not in roman numerals, but in metered feet. Poetry has become a method of reckoning.

8
As Keith Thomas points out, though many jobs were beginning to require a basic knowledge of math, “the grammar
school curriculum was almost exclusively literary: very few grammar schools before 1660 seem to have taught
arithmetic, and then only as an extra to be done on half-days and holidays or by poor boys destined for
apprenticeship” (109).

22
And, as far as methods of reckoning go, it is refreshingly pliable and far-reaching. Donne
is able, in his verse, to subvert the strict rules of the new arithmetic and engage in a mathematics
that is distorted. Otherworldly. His additions unfold in a numerical realm floating somewhere
outside the limits of the earth. The years accounted by the poem’s speaker amount to more than
could be experienced by any man in a single lifespan; if added up, they total 2400. Yes, the
speaker is literally saying that each of the 24 hours since he last saw his loved one has felt like
100 years. But Donne is also trying to navigate the idea of numbers. Do they, despite their
authoritative claim to represent reality, actually open up new pockets of uncertainty? New
opportunities to distort the lines within which we try to live our lives? For some men, Donne
suggests, life will feel like far more than the 63 years they were allotted—or 49 years, or 78 years.
In fact, the number of felt years might extend into the thousands. For the general reader, this idea
might be troubling; in fact, the popular view at the time was that an ordinary man need only learn
to count as high as a typical lifespan—and “it took only a little skill in arithmetic to number the
days of man.”
9
But if men’s years were to feel like millennia, not decades, they would need
something other than an abacus to keep track of them. They might even need a poem.
Donne plays with time, plies it, stretches it to its limits, refuses to take it at its face
“value.” In this way, he resembles many men and women of his time—people in early modern
England thought of time in a more elastic way than we do post-time zones, post-cell phone
alarms, post-stopwatches. The only people to frequently think of elapsed time in terms of minutes
were astronomers, who needed to be precise about the moment at which a certain phenomenon
was spotted. Even the numbering of years was more relaxed; people over 20 often approximated

9
See Thomas 130-131: “Their vocabulary was limited and stylised, making much greater use of some numbers than
of others because they were ‘rounder,’ and seldom extending to very high figures, because large-scale calculations
did not concern them … As a preacher remarked, it took only a little skill in arithmetic to number the days of man”
(130-31).

23
their age, and might report themselves as being 40 even if they were actually 38 or 41. So there
was some give and take in the Renaissance understanding of time, and Donne takes full
advantage of this in “The Computation.” He capitalizes on the peculiarities of poem-as-
calculating-machine by moving quickly into the realm of the mystical, the uncomfortable, the
infinite—something which could not be done with either roman or arabic numerals. He closes the
poem with the strange lines: “Yet call not this long life; but think that I / Am, by being dead,
immortal. Can ghosts die?”
We may be tempted to wrap this poem up in the neat twine of its numerical equation (each
hour = 100 years) and think of this closing nod to death as a joke about what would happen to
someone who actually lived 2400 years. But I think there is more to these lines—there is a
sincerity to the question. Donne knows that the average reader would at least approximate the
calculations as he read, and would—as the last couplet approached—read the verse as a purely
fictional metaphor. It seems obvious that the speaker is not actually “living” these years in real
time. However, Donne’s assertion in an aside (“by being dead”) that the speaker has passed away
subversively distorts the reading of the poem as metaphor—if these years are only figments of an
imagination, how could they kill?
The last phrase calls everything even further into question: “Can ghosts die?” This is very
strange indeed. Upon first gloss, it is tempting to read this line as the speaker’s worry that he will
perish after these “years” of separation—“can I die and become a ghost from waiting this long.”
But that is not what he asks at all. He wants to know whether something already a ghost can die.
Perhaps the speaker was dead before the loved one left, and his extended wait may have caused
him to die a second time. Or perhaps the question hinges on the idea of reaching immortality
through death: dead after the long absence of his loved one, the speaker wonders if he might

24
remain a ghost for eternity, if a ghost cannot itself die. Or Donne may be wondering whether,
now dead after 2400 years, he might still be able to achieve orgasm (taking the double entendre of
“die”) with his lover when she returns. However it is read, the line ushers the poem into a new
dimension. With the mention of immortality, what was a simple ratio becomes a lovely missive
from another world.
“The Computation” anticipates Walter Pater’s realization—born of a mechanized and
regulated era—that in a world that takes the hour as its master, each individual moment assumes a
heightened importance. Pater speaks of celebrating the infinitesimally small instant in order to
defer death, “for our one chance is in expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as
possible into the given time” (120).
10
Donne certainly gets as many pulsations as possible into
this given verse, making 24 hours into 24 lifetimes. And though he wouldn’t have been able to
express it in these terms, he is engaging in a sort of calculus here. Calculus is commonly used to
approach limits, measuring a curve by way of the smallest increments possible and thus engaging
in increasingly infinitesimal summations. In “The Computation,” Donne proceeds in the opposite
direction. If we were to chart the moment at which he last parted from his lover, we might plot
Donne’s life as a parabola and his lover’s life as a line tangent to that curve. Their last meeting
might be represented as the point at which the tangent hits the parabola—and as soon as they part,
Donne’s “point” continues its curved path. The apparent space between them now becomes
quadratically larger each moment they are apart—and measuring that is a calculus in its own
right.

10
Pater speaks, in his celebrated “Conclusion,” of the difficulty of holding on to anything in a world that admits the
infinitesimal; experience, for him, is “in perpetual flight,” as it is “limited by time, and … as time is infinitely
divisible, [experience] is infinitely divisible also; all that is actual in it being a single moment, gone while we try to
apprehend it, of which it may ever be more truly said that it has ceased to be than that it is” (119).

25
That the apparent space (and I’m using “space” flexibly here, as “space” can be imagined
temporally) does not match up with actual space—that the years experienced in the poem
outnumber those in real life—is to be expected. As Early Modern poets engage in these
calculations with the infinite, their solutions are bound to depart from Euclidean and Cartesian
space and time. There’s both a freedom and a troubling drawback in crossing these boundaries: it
seems possible to experience and sense infinity in our finite world, but not to actually
accommodate it. The last line of Donne’s poem wonders what happens to these ghostly
sensations, these specters of infinity that have suddenly begun sweeping into our windows at
night. Can they really die if we ignore them? Or must we answer to them? Donne’s readers and
fellow writers were coming of age in the era when these questions were actually beginning to
matter. Just as they were beginning to navigate the new arithmetical language—the language of
addition and subtraction, multiplication and division—natural philosophy had to go and throw
infinity into the mix. It now became urgent not just to measure the surrounding universe, but also
to account for its unreachable reaches—its atoms and cells, its numberless worlds and vast space.
Even with a growing awareness of complex calculations, the early modern period’s
indivisible whole numbers and exacting rules did nothing to describe the strange—sometimes
monstrous—world in which we live. This chapter will explore how poets manipulate the
oversimplified concepts of measurement we are told to use in our “everyday life.” How might
poetry allow us to perform unique calculations with the infinite? “A Computation” witnesses John
Donne working through the problem of measuring time—we may mark it on a clock, but the
minutes on the clock face often refuse to match up with the mental reckoning of the length over
which an experience seems to unfold. Perhaps, Donne suggests, our bodies still exist in this space

26
ruled by the hour, but have simultaneously passed away thousands of times over in the world of
the mind.
Though Donne was writing over four hundred years ago, we still haven’t “solved” this
concern with the inadequacy of measured and regulated time; this is not a story that begins and
ends in early modern England. In fact, a 2011 New Yorker profile of neuroscientist David
Eagleman treads much of the same ground as “A Computation,” just couched in different idioms.
Eagleman has devoted years of research to understanding how the brain perceives time. He
distrusts clocks and watches: “Clocks offer at best a convenient fiction, he says. They imply that
time ticks steadily, predictably forward, when our experience shows that it often does the
opposite: it stretches and compresses, skips a beat and doubles back” (Bilger, “The Possibilian”).
John Donne’s speaker certainly would have agreed to this. And I’m sure he would also have
performed in an admirably textbook manner if asked to participate in one of Eagleman’s
experiments. In one experiment in particular (set up to explore time perception in high-adrenaline
situations), Eagleman’s subjects fell from a 150-foot tower. They then had to close their eyes and
relive the experience, using a stopwatch to time how long they felt the fall had taken, from start to
finish. Eagleman knew the actual duration of the fall, but the important factor was the time
experienced in the participants’ minds. How were their brains processing the temporal space of
experience? By the end of the experiment, it became clear that most of the subjects were over-
estimating their fall times; on average, the subjects reported a time about 36% longer than the
time of the actual fall (Bilger).
Our difficulty with “measuring” our experiences in a world that keeps attempting to
thwart our easy arithmetic is thus itself infinite. Eagleman may very well isolate the operation in
the brain that makes us interpret time slower or faster than a mechanical clock would. But simply

27
being able to name a synapse or identify a mental process doesn’t mean our experiences
themselves will change. We’ll go on over-inflating, making ourselves into ghosts. And perhaps
we’ll go on writing poetry, trying to get as close to a “solution” as we can, settling instead for a
resolution of a rhyme, or even a soft dissolution of a meter.
11

Dilemmas like this aren’t solved in a vacuum. Newton & Leibniz had been working for
decades to enact some closure to ancient paradoxes involving the infinite, and separately and
spontaneously generated two versions of what we now know as “calculus”; this development was
not a unique, genius insight that only one man could have, but a natural evolution of
mathematical and spatial understanding. So it only makes sense that Renaissance poets would
have been simultaneously generating their own thoughts on the matter. I think it’s too easy to
assume that, sans technological tools and a knowledge of later mathematical and scientific
discoveries, any contributions Renaissance poets might make to the conversation would be
virtually irrelevant in today’s context. Such an assumption places an unearned weight on facts and
numbers. There is, after all, what might be called a mystical—or at least intangible—aspect to the
infinite. For all our contemporary equations and formulas and brain scans—for all our
suggestions on paper that we are approaching some sort of total comprehension—we are still shut
out from the true heart and core of what it means to possess or experience an unlimited substance
(time, space, love). Eagleman and his team may just be layering information and data over an
unresolvable landscape, a body teeming with activity that refuses to be nailed down. How might
poetry allow us to perform unique calculations with the infinite, calculations no scientific
machine could execute?

11
Eagleman himself has written a work of literary fiction, Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives, in which he presents
forty short stories describing possible afterlives. That the title is also the name of a key arithmetical function is not, I
think, a coincidence.

28
I. SUDDEN, RADICAL, IRRATIONAL CHANGE

Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida may seem to be the last place one would look for
answers to even simple questions, let alone timeless philosophical dilemmas. The play is far from
the most poetic or exalted of Shakespeare’s works; Troilus is known not for its eloquence or
insight into human behavior, but for its problematic nature—its inexplicable marks of what
seems, at times, like a carelessness toward plot and form. In Shakespeare and His Predecessors,
Frederick S. Boas classifies Troilus as a “problem-play,” noting that the reader’s experience of
the work is that of one “mov[ing] along dim untrodden paths”: “at the close our feeling is neither
of simple joy nor pain … we are left to interpret [its] enigmas as best we may” (345).
Nevertheless, these very enigmatic and problematic qualities make the play a perfect subject of
study for an enigmatic and problematic subject such as the infinite. Stuck in an apparently
unreadable world, how do the characters attempt to measure or reckon their circumstances? What
clues does the author leave us with regard to how we are meant to interpret this work?
At first glance, the outlook on finding the answers to these questions seems bleak.
Outcomes in the play do not seem to follow from initial situations; plans do not unfold as they
should [“The ample proposition that hope makes / In all designs begun on earth below / Fails in
the promised largeness” (I.3.3-5)]; genre is discarded—in fact, the text is alarmingly hostile to its
reader. The most obvious “condition” of its world is that of disease: it is a world absent of healthy
functionality. In a lovely deconstruction of Shakespeare’s “set speech,” Thomas Cartelli notes
that Troilus and Cressida is “a play about which it is difficult to say anything for certain except
that it is anti-nostalgic in the extreme” (10-11). There is certainly no nostalgia here, and no clear
thematic truth. Cartelli hits on something very important when he suggests that “what makes

29
Troilus so rich a text and so provocative a play is its commitment to a habit of subversion that
serves to demystify each of the drama’s competing ideologies (Trojan as well as Greek), which
are revealed, in the end, to be equally imaginary, equally self-referential” (14). This is indeed a
subversive play, particularly with regards to form. There is an established line of scholars—
beginning with Una Ellis-Fermor
12
—who argue that the disjunctive structure of the play is a
purposeful move on Shakespeare’s part, meant to highlight a pervasive theme of disorder and
chaos. I not only agree with this, but also find the play nearly impenetrable unless approached
with the belief that its bizarre nature is deliberate; Richard D. Fly puts it nicely when he asserts
that the “radical instability in the play’s formal elements” is related to “the devastating and form-
denying vision informing it” (275). Where I differ with these scholarly accounts is my assessment
of why Shakespeare has chosen a form that imitates content. Though Fly’s interpretations of the
various actions in the play are elegant, he is only able to claim a nihilism for Troilus as a whole.
Resorting to the notion of the Elizabethan Age as one obsessed with imminent destruction, he
asserts that “Troilus is a particularly accurate microcosm of the form of the age as a whole …
[which was] strongly tinged with thoughts of apocalypse” (288).
I wish to veer away from this type of nihilistic conclusion. In fact, I would like to try to
assert a statement of confidence about the play. Though Troilus fails so spectacularly to hold
together, essentially deconstructing itself, I believe we are left with something beyond
imagination in the end. The system of the play, like the system of all literary works, is a closed
one; if we pay enough attention to its details, we will discover the rules by which it operates.
Rules, after all, don’t always give rise to simple geometric forms; even the most unruly events are
bound by universal laws. Not the Pythagorean Theorem or the Law of Cosines, which any high

12
See Una Mary Ellis-Fermor’s The Frontiers of Drama. New York: Oxford University Press, 1946.

30
school student could recite, but the laws we spend most of our lives attempting to ignore or
erase—the laws of chaos theory.
The word “chaos” here is not invoked in the sense of “utter confusion and disorder”
(OED, “chaos”) that Fly may have in mind when he cites Theodore Spencer’s observation that
“Shakespeare’s age was breaking into chaos” (288). Rather, it refers to an unpredictability that
exists inside a deterministic system. Chaos theory has enjoyed several decades of popularity in
Western culture, and is a subject of a fascination rooted simultaneously in terror and superiority.
Terror because it assures us that we will never be able to properly control or predict our futures;
superiority because it gives us a (potentially false) sense that, in knowing its givens and invoking
its name, we are at least better off than those who lack that vocabulary to explain the turbulence
of their lives. In one of the defining late 80s/early 90s science fiction novels, Jurassic Park,
Michael Crichton chooses chaos theory as the reigning religion of skeptical mathematician Ian
Malcolm:
[W]e have soothed ourselves into imagining sudden change as something that happens
outside the normal order of things. An accident, like a car crash. Or beyond our control,
like a fatal illness. We do not conceive of sudden, radical, irrational change as built into
the very fabric of existence. Yet it is. And chaos theory teaches us … that straight
linearity, which we have come to take for granted in everything from physics to fiction,
simply does not exist … Real life isn’t a series of interconnected events occurring one
after another like beads strung on a necklace. Life is actually a series of encounters in
which one event may change those that follow in a wholly unpredictable, even devastating
way … (171)

31
Substitute “Troilus and Cressida” for “Life” in those last few sentences, and this reads like a
commentary on Shakespeare, not dialogue from a bestseller about dinosaurs. Fly even unwittingly
suggests that this play is governed by chaos theory: “The use of synecdoche in relating parts to
wholes, combined with the ‘domino’ effect, creates the impression of being caught in a
concatenation of relationships where one mishap can set off a chain reaction that will culminate in
general catastrophe” (290). This is precisely how mathematicians involved in chaotic systems
describe their objects of study—as systems that are so sensitive to tiny (nearly invisible) changes
in initial conditions that a butterfly flapping its wings on one side of the globe (one mishap) can
set off a chain reaction ending in a violent storm on the other side of the globe (general
catastrophe). Many of the systems that surround us operate on chaotic models: population growth,
turbulent fluids, the motion of the planets. Why not Troilus and Cressida as well?

II. MOST ADMIRED DISORDER

Like all chaotic systems, this play contains its unraveling even in its initial moment. The
publisher’s preface of 1609, “A Never Writer to an Ever Reader,” presents Troilus and Cressida
as a comedy, proclaiming that “Amongst all [of Shakespeare’s comedies] there is none more
witty than this” (121). A reader possessing one of the Quarto versions would then turn a page to
see the title “The Historie of Troylus and Cresseida”; a Folio reader would find himself reading
“The Tragedie of Troylus and Cressida.”
13
Before we have even reached the text, it has rejected
our orderly systems. We ought to forgive the Folio and Quarto publishers for their indecision
regarding Troilus’s classification; no one in the play gets married, the titular hero (whose status as

13
For more context, see David Bevington’s introduction to William Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida. London:
The Arden Shakespeare, 2001: 1-117.

32
hero is up for debate) is denied a tragic death, and the historical status of the characters and plot is
largely mythical. The most “dramatic” moments fall flat, and the most “comedic” moments are so
dark and perverted that laughter seems inappropriate. A cursory examination of the play’s content
reveals a similar instability—the “plot” revolves around the characters’ failed attempt to justify
the Trojan War’s destruction by assigning an appropriate value to its cause. There is much
discussion—in both the play and the scholarly criticism—of the gap between the actual Helen and
the worth that is assigned to her by the opposing armies (“Brother, she is not worth what she doth
cost / The holding,” Hector notes, in an unusually lucid moment).
Yet this subversion of category and value is not enough to qualify the play as truly
“chaotic.” For that, we must also find evidence that the deterministic system of the play—its
stable five acts—is (barely) containing a system of volatile events. That the processes whose paths
we should be able to predict (characters’ behaviors, which ought to follow from their personal
motivations; plot developments, which should proceed according to natural law and logic) instead
refuse to conform to even the most basic of expectations. Once you start down this path of
inquiry, Troilus provides ample returns. It showers you with a multitude of anticipations and then
expertly deflates them.
Take the very first scene, which witnesses Troilus vowing to retire from the outward fight
for Troy. As late as lines 88-89, he proclaims, “I cannot fight upon this argument; / It is too
starved a subject for my sword” (I.1.88-89). Yet a mere twenty lines later, he says—with no
prelude!—“But to the sport abroad,” and proceeds to return to the battlefield. Why? Arnold Stein
notes that Troilus’s “reversal is frivolous, and strengthens an impression the audience can hardly
have missed: that neither Troilus nor the whole business can be taken seriously in the terms
directly offered by the scene” (149).

But what are the terms offered by the scene? Poets and

33
fiction writers are often advised to establish the rules of the worlds they are creating from the
outset of their works. If the opening line of a novel depicts a man shooting lasers out of his eyes,
the author has successfully established his book as a space in which lasers can shoot out of
people’s eyes. His reader understands this as a given of the fictional environment. However, if he
opens his novel with men having tea in a parlor, and continue in this vein for several hundred
pages, only to end the novel with one of the men shooting lasers out of his eyes and killing his
rival for a woman’s hand in marriage, he will likely lose a good chunk of his readers. They would
not be wrong to think the author had acted unfairly to the rules of the game—had pulled a fast one
on them. Stein seems to believe that the terms Shakespeare has established are those of a world in
which characters walk in Newtonian lines—but this belief is completely unfounded. Shakespeare
is still in the process of laying out his terms in the opening scene, and the terms appear to be those
of a chaotic world, so sensitive that it needs nothing more than a tiny nudge—a butterfly’s
sneeze—to swing events in a new direction. Just before Troilus announces his return to the fray,
an alarm sounds and Aeneas perks up: “Hark, what good sport is out of town today!” (I.1.109).
This is all the incentive Troilus needs to reverse his position—almost infinitesimal, but present
nonetheless. His actions are not causeless, but chaotic. And with this, we may enter into the main
action of the play with a fair warning of what to expect from its lines.
Even events key to the plot’s progression are thrown off by the least disturbance in the
play’s atmosphere. In Act I, scene 3, Aeneas arrives at the Greek camp to deliver Hector’s
challenge: one-on-one combat with “a Grecian that is true in love.”
14
From this point until

14
And even this event is the product of disorder; just a few scenes earlier, Troilus and Aeneas were adjourning to
fight on the field, and now we hear that Hector is proposing one-on-one combat because he has grown restless “in
this dull and long-continued truce” (I.3.261). A footnote in the Arden Shakespeare edition of the play notes that “The
inconsistency between this characterization and the reports of fighting in 1.2.33ff. (see also 2.3.223 and 256, 3.1.142-
3, 4.1.13 and notes), not likely to be noticed in the theatre, is the result of Shakespeare’s having compressed his
source accounts in Caxton and Lydgate” (174, emphasis mine). The editors of the Arden Shakespeare, in a desperate
attempt to explain this disorder away, resort to assuming an audience of forgetful idiots and a lack of interest on the

34
Hector’s meeting with Ajax in Act IV, scene 5—three full acts later—their combat is a central
focus of the Greek council. The decision that Ajax should fight (instead of the expected Achilles)
is the subject of much debate; Shakespeare devotes many lines to a discussion of whether this
move might rein in Achilles’ rogue ego, and how it might act as a microcosm of the larger war.
So by the time the promised fight arrives in Act IV, scene 5, everyone (onstage and off) expects
some conclusive action, some dramatically satisfying scene. The first hints that such a scene is
not arriving come with the act’s opening exchange:
AGAMEMNON [to Ajax]
Here art thou in appointment fresh and fair,
Anticipating time with starting courage.
Give with thy trumpet a loud note to Troy,
Thou dreadful Ajax, that the appalled air
May pierce the head of the great combatant
And hale him hither.

AJAX [Gives money] Thou, trumpet, there’s my purse.
Now crack thy lungs and split thy brazen pipe.
Blow, villain, till thy sphered bias cheek
Outswell the colic of puffed Aquilon.
Come, stretch thy chest, and let thy eyes spout blood;
Thou blowest for Hector. [Trumpet sounds.]

playwright’s end in assembling a coherent plot. This is one assumption too many for me; I believe this is another
confirmation of the chaotic terms Shakespeare has established for this world.

35
ULYSSES No trumpet answers.
ACHILLES ’Tis but early days. (IV.5.1-14)

I cannot help but laugh when I read those last two lines, and I suspect I’m not alone. The
language leading up to them is comically disproportionate to the action—ceremonial and
hyperbolic in all the wrong ways. Shakespeare instills excitement in the listeners by relying
heavily on dramatic language of ritual and promised expectation (the mythical “Aquilon”; the
solemn “Anticipating time with starting courage”; the alliterated “hale him hither”; the bold
“crack thy lungs and split thy brazen pipe”). And yet after the trumpet blows, nothing happens.
Well, Achilles shrugs, ’tis but early days. ’Tis but early days! Perhaps the prefatory note was
right; we do have here a play “passing full of the palm comical” (120).
The scene continues in this vein; Shakespeare casts the dialogue leading up to Ajax and
Hector’s meeting on the field in a heightened rhetoric, repeatedly implying that the fight may
extend into infinite spaces. Aeneas wonders whether the knights will fight “to the edge of all
extremity” (IV.5.69) (to the death); Agamemnon repeats the possibility that their exchange will
run “to the uttermost” (IV.5.92); Hector’s valor is described as “almost as infinite as all.” So it is
hard not to feel disappointed when the entirety of the fight is as follows:
Alarum. [Hector and Ajax fight.]

AGAMEMNON They are in action.
NESTOR Now, Ajax, hold thine own!
TROILUS Hector, thou sleep’st. Awake thee!
AGAMEMNON
His blows are well disposed. —There, Ajax! Trumpets cease. (IV.5.114-117)

36

This exchange is less than half as long as the discussion of the trumpet summons. We hear no
dialogue from either of the combatants, and thus cannot comprehend the truncation of the fight
until Hector explains: “Thou art, great lord, my father’s sister’s son, / A cousin-german to great
Priam’s seed” (IV.5.121-122). Like Troilus’s reversal in the opening scene, what appears to be
random is in fact governed by a tiny condition, the seed of which was planted before either Ajax
or Hector was conceived. Perhaps, even if it disappoints, this clash arms us with the ability to
comprehend why Diomedes and Troilus only fight offstage—why Patroclus dies offstage—why
Troilus tears up a curious letter from Cressida without giving the audience any hint of its
contents. This latter instance is particularly strange in its withheld communication. All the
audience gets is an echo (or perhaps an anticipation
15
) of Hamlet: “Words, words, mere words, no
matter from the heart … / Go, wind, to wind! There turn and change together” (V.3.107, 109).
Language, akin to empty breeze, is unable to effect or affect anything in this world; the words can
only knock into each other, strange pool balls on a paper table.
Another aspect of this play’s chaotic design is a peculiarly haphazard use of source
material—so haphazard that certain events seem unwarranted in the context of the story that
Shakespeare has chosen to tell. Characters appear unbidden and disappear prematurely. The story
of Troilus and Cressida was, of course, engrained in a cultural consciousness by Chaucer’s 1385-
87 Troilus and Criseyde, which Shakespeare probably knew (IAT 382); Shakespeare also likely
read George Chapman’s translation of Seven Books of the Iliads of Homer, Prince of Poets (1598)
(IAT 376). Furthermore, there were several theatrical versions of the tale being performed by

15
The two plays were likely composed during the same span of years around the turn of the 17
th
century. Bevington’s
“Introduction” asserts that Troilus and Cressida was registered on 7 February 1603 (though it was not published until
1609); he notes that “The experimentalism of Troilus can be seen in context when we compare it with other works
written during the pivotal years of Shakespeare’s development, from about 1599 to 1603. Hamlet (c. 1599-1601), like
Troilus, expresses disillusionment about human frailty and sexual inconsistency” (5).

37
Shakespeare’s contemporaries, including Nicolas Grimald’s Troilus ex Chaucero, a comedy
performed at Oxford c. 1540-1547 and written in Latin, and Henry Chettle and Thomas Dekker’s
Troilus and Cressida, performed by the Admiral’s men in April 1599 (IAT 375). However, even
though the more educated members of Shakespeare’s audience would likely know the basic plot
and characters, a presumed familiarity with the outlines of the play does not eliminate the need
for agreement and comprehensiveness within this particular telling of the story. In his other plays
taken from well-known tales, Shakespeare still takes care to introduce his characters, build them
in front of the audience, and weave plots justifying iconic or expected events on their own terms.
With Troilus and Cressida, however, Shakespeare makes a different choice, allowing the
source material to act as confused background noise, tuning in and out. At times, this decision
actually deflates events with the potential to be emotionally and dramatically affecting. For
example, Shakespeare does not allude to the Myrmidons, who will kill Hector—the one main
character whose demise occurs on stage—until Act V, scene 5, a short three scenes before they
murder Hector. Shakespeare practically invites his audience to feel betrayed, as Hector dies at the
hands of men we barely know; yet such betrayal has now become routine in Troilus. In fact, Act
Five, scene five, is full of such problematic introductions. Ajax, whose pouting reluctance to fight
has hurt the Greek camp, re-enters the battle accompanied by Ulysses’ abrupt proclamation that
“Ajax hath lost a friend / And foams at the mouth, and he is armed and at it” (V.5.35-36). What
friend? We are never told. The Arden Shakespeare edition provides an amusing footnote:
We learned at 5.4.14 that Ajax ‘will not arm today’; at 5.5.18 he is ‘snail-paced’.
Yet here [5.5.43] he enters, furious at Troilus. Plainly he has suffered a personal
loss like Achilles’ loss of Patroclus. Ajax has ‘lost a friend,’ possibly Doreus or
Amphimachus, and is ‘Roaring for Troilus’ (35-7), who is presumably the slayer

38
of the friend. This sequence of events, original with Shakespeare, prepares us for
the brief contest between Diomedes and Ajax in 5.6.1-12 as to which of them will
get to claim Troilus as his prize. (LN 5.5.43)
This is a lot of “plainly” and “presumably” for a scene “original with Shakespeare,” for which we
therefore have no ability to understand by reference to an outside source. And all this presuming
and assuming just to understand a twelve-line exchange that results in an offstage fight? At this
point, the holes in the plot are so many and so wide that the nagging thought that Shakespeare
made an awful mess of Troilus’s plot gives way to a nascent realization: he may be doing this on
purpose, planting chaos on the stage as intentionally as Chekov’s gun.
Of course, if there actually were a gun to fire, the audience might have some sense of
closure at the end of the play. But the action “ends” in a state of disorder. The war is not over;
though the Greeks have killed Hector, and Agamemnon’s final line is “Great Troy is ours, and
our sharp wars are ended” (V.10.10), the subsequent and final scene opens with Aeneas
proclaiming “Stand, ho! Yet are we masters of the field. / Never go home; here starve we out the
night” (V.11.1-2). What a joke, then, when Hector naively says “The end crowns all, / And that
old common arbitrator, Time, / Will one day end it” (IV.5.224-226). Instead, the disorder on the
field only parallels the disorder of the body with which Pandarus closes Troilus:
As many as be here of Panders’ hall,
Your eyes, half out, weep out at Pandar’s fall;
Or if you cannot weep, yet give some groans,
Though not for me, yet for your aching bones.
Brethren and sisters of the hold-door trade,
Some two months hence my will shall here be made.

39
It should be now, but that my fear is this:
Some galled goose of Winchester would hiss.
Till then I’ll sweat and seek about for eases,
And at that time bequeath you my diseases. (V.11.46-56)
Not only does Pandarus present a disease of the literal flesh, he also unwittingly displays
symptoms of another disorder housed in the body of the play. Though his lines allude to a new
installment of Troilus (promised to appear “Some two months hence”), no such sequel ever came.
David Bevington shrugs: “It would appear as though there was not enough material left in any
case.”
16
It’s true that there’s not much plot left from the legend of Troy—so why would
Shakespeare promise a play which he knew he couldn’t write? Perhaps Pandarus’s words are
intended less to promise an impossible sequel and more to drive home the nature of this chaotic
system, the impossibility of neat closure. After all, if it weren’t for friction, a double pendulum
would continue its chaotic motion into infinity.
Of course, recognizing Troilus and Cressida as a chaotic system is only half the battle.
Describing the play in mathematical terms cannot keep a reader from getting frustrated with its
problematic nature, or—worse—dismissing it as a “lesser” work. I hope not just to make a
mathematical analogy here, but instead to explore the possibilities of what these new systems of
calculation emerging in the Early Modern period may have meant to Shakespeare. To think about
whether he may have felt a resistance to the idea that arithmetic and numerical thinking could
hold the key to an ordered world. To ponder whether, without his knowledge, he was anticipating
a more complex mathematics in his work. If Shakespeare intuitively understood that nature often
behaves in non-Newtonian ways, and wrote Troilus in part to (even subconsciously) express this

16
Troilus and Cressida, by William Shakespeare, ed. David Bevington (London: The Arden Shakespeare, 2001):
353, note 52.

40
understanding. If we, as contemporary readers, do choose to approach this text as an unmapped
chaotic model, we will need some kind of calculus in hand. This play practically demands an
approach consistent with higher math; in fact, I’ve noticed many critics resorting to the language
of calculus when writing about the play. Daniel Juan Gil, in “At the Limits of the Social World:
Fear and Pride in ‘Troilus and Cressida,’” (already we are speaking of “limits”!) notes that
Shakespeare depicts sexuality in the play as “a category of decidedly public relationships that are
neither social nor antisocial but which proceed at a tangent to normal social conventions” (388,
emphasis mine). James O’Rourke invokes the name of the mathematical approach itself: “The
erotics of art, if Kristeva is used as a guide, would not be a simple recovery of pleasure but a free
fall into a primal and unstable calculus of pleasure and pain in which love neither lives happily
ever after nor dies beautifully, and for which Troilus and Cressida is an exemplary text.” (158,
emphasis mine). A primal and unstable calculus of pleasure and pain—one always revolving
around and within us, constant in its refusal to converge.

III. THE TROJAN WAR HAS BEEN GOING ON FOR THE LAST THREE THOUSAND YEARS
AND IT HASN’T STOPPED YET

Shakespeare’s Troilus may be a double pendulum, but it’s not a completely closed system.
Its characters exist in a larger, more enduring context – they play out their parts over and over
again, the same every time, but different: self-similar but never exactly congruent: fractal. Fractal
geometry (a subset of chaos theory) deals in self-similarity; a “fractal” is “a mathematically
conceived curve such that any small part of it, enlarged, has the same statistical character as the
original” (OED, “fractal”). In simple fractals, this self-similarity is complete and unerring; the

41
tiny pieces of the fractal resemble exactly the overall shape of the entity. However, there are also
many examples of a more partial self-similarity, in which a chaotic system does not generate
exact replicas, but instead roughly traces the outlines of something that’s come before, glides over
them imperfectly. Repetition with a difference. The harrowing ascent up the bell tower at the end
of Hitchcock’s Vertigo.
The Lorenz attractor [fig. 1], a particularly lovely set of solutions for a chaotic system that
resembles a deranged butterfly, follows a typical path for chaotic motion, looping around and
around in patterns that, nostalgically, lean towards previous paths—but never quite replicate
them. It is the same but different, on into infinity. Classically, the Lorenz attractor was used for
calculations involving atmospheric convection or the motion of a water wheel. Part of the
attractor’s appeal was its refusal to repeat itself—“that was the beauty of the attractor,” James
Gleick explains. “Those loops and spirals were infinitely deep, never quite joining, never quite
intersecting. Yet they stayed inside a finite space, confined by a box. How could that be? How
could infinitely many paths lie in a finite space?” (140). Scientists in the 60s and 70s who
witnessed the birth of chaos theory were stunned to realize that chaos was something innate to
nature—something embedded in the motions of the clouds, the currents of rivers, the leaves of
plants—even the dendrites of snowflakes. Might it not, then, be lurking in a process as natural to
human life as communication through language? As storytelling?

42
fig.1

43
An author once told me that there were really only two stories in the world: “stranger
comes to town” and “man goes on a journey.” These archetypal frameworks may be seen as
literature’s strange attractors, pulling stories along their paths. Even more specific are the
prototypical plots that get told and re-told across centuries, each time with a slightly new
“twist”—myths, fairy tales, and now superhero stories. Though many contemporary readers may
not be as familiar with Troilus and Cressida as they are with Spiderman, it absolutely held an
archetypal status in Shakespeare’s time; as mentioned above, the story had been told and retold
for centuries before Shakespeare got to it. Even Chaucer’s famous version was just that, a
version: Troilus was a character from Greek myth, and the story of his romance had medieval
origins.
Though we may be tempted to think that Shakespeare’s version falls into the strange
attractor’s basin—a “stable” state of chaos, in which the points fall closer and closer to a single
threshold (as in the Lorenz attractor below)—the tale is still out there, still circling.
17

The Lorenz attractor travels through more than two dimensions, and in fact, all strange attractors
extend into “non-integer” dimensions; such attractors may very well travel through time as well

17
As recently as May of 2012, there was a new “translation” of Chaucer’s tale: Francesca Abbate, Troy,
Unincorporated (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012).

(basin
)

44
as space. A mere 57 years ago, Jack Spicer wrote a play called Troilus, a play to which he
famously declared loyalty: “All my stuff from the past (except the Elegies and Troilus) looks foul
to me” (JSV 163). Despite such statements, Spicer’s Troilus remained unpublished until 2004,
when it appeared in Issue 3 of No: A Journal of the Arts. The play is a beautiful, weird tour-de-
force. In the No introduction, Aaron Kunin briefly describes the story’s predecessors:
Spicer had memorized parts of Chaucer’s Troylus and Criseyde, which he once described
as “the greatest poem in English.” He was also a serious reader of Dryden, and would
have been familiar both with Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida and with Dryden’s
revision Troilus and Cressida, or Truth Found Too Late. However, even in its most basic
plot outline, Troilus scarcely resembles its source-texts. (77)
And if you’re looking at the details of Spicer’s plot, it does stray far from the path carved by its
antecedents. But Spicer’s version of Troilus’s doomed love story does share with Shakespeare
that structure of chaos, that sense that events are unfolding on a scale with more dimensions than
we—or the characters—can perceive.
Zeus even opens Spicer’s drama with a bizarre prologue in which he explains that the
Trojan War has actually been going on for 3,000 years—a number that makes strange sense. An
attempt to date Greek mythology puts the Trojan War in the 12
th
or 11
th
century BC; since
Spicer’s version was written around 1950, the idea of the war—the ghost of its presence—would
indeed have been hanging around and haunting people for 3,000 years. But the characters caught
in the story—the Agamemnons and the Cressidas, the Thersites and the Patrocli—remain locked
in a lower-dimensional state, their capsule traveling (unperceived by them) through dimensions
they couldn’t possibly know. They are shut out of the higher mathematics in which they
participate. Zeus explains: ”One thing, though—the people in the play don’t seem to know how

45
long the war has lasted. They have the idea that it’s only been going on for nine years or so. I
don’t know why” (81).
As readers, then, we are caught in an odd position. We recognize the characters’
blindness, but we are impotent to wake them up to the calculus swirling around them.

IV. THIS IS THE MONSTRUOSITY

Because that’s what it is, that strange white dust settling on Troilus’s shoulders—those
filaments curving around Cressida’s clavicles. Calculus, the study of change and curvature, the
only way we’ve come up with to approach the infinite. Calculus, which uses tiny quantities to
carefully converge on impossibly large ones. Which is invaluable in measuring and describing
chaotic systems. The language and concept of calculus seems especially appropriate for this
particular system; in addition to being chaotic, Shakespeare’s Troilus also manifests a particular
interest in the incalculable, the immeasurable. As I have mentioned, the Early Modern period saw
certain key figures in both mathematics and philosophy beginning to grapple with infinity as an
actual object—one that can’t ever be fully experienced through the senses, but which still existed
in some definite way. As of Shakespeare’s time, however, there were still very few available
footholds on the climb towards the infinite. The lemniscate (∞) was not even introduced as a
symbol for infinity until John Wallis devised it in 1655; the means of experiencing or coming to
know the infinite were certainly not widely contemplated in at the turn of the 17
th
century.
Shakespeare never uses the word “infinity” in any of his plays—though, significantly, the word
“infinite” appears in Troilus and Cressida four times, tying it with both Antony and Cleopatra
and Hamlet for the most uses of the word. The mathematical definition of “infinity” as “Having

46
no determined limit; of indefinite length of magnitude” has its first OED citation in 1660, years
after Shakespeare’s death. These complications make the questions about dealing with infinite
quantities raised in Troilus all the more intriguing.
The language used when the infinite is invoked in the play is fittingly chaotic in nature. In
Act III, scene 2, for example, comes Troilus’s oft-quoted declaration: “This is the monstruosity in
love, lady, that the will / Is infinite and the execution confined, that the / Desire is boundless and
the act a slave to limit” (III.2.78-80). Leaving aside the obvious puns on “will” and “act” (which
turn the quotation into a sort of ars poetica for Shakespeare), the use of the term “monstruosity”
is especially interesting. Shakespeare’s only use of the word, it is perfectly fitted to the subject at
hand; the infinite and the monstrous have long gone hand-in-hand. And the mathematicians at the
cutting edge of non-Euclidean discoveries faced much disapproval. James Gleick describes the
initial reaction to the Koch curve, a fractal entity first described by the Swedish mathematician
Helge von Koch in 1904 (before “fractals” were “fractals”): “This paradoxical result, infinite
length in a finite space, disturbed many of the turn-of-the-century mathematicians who thought
about it. The Koch curve was monstrous, disrespectful to all reasonable intuition about shapes
and—it almost went without saying—pathologically unlike anything to be found in nature” (100).
One would think. Of course, one would be wrong.
Benoit Mandelbrot, whose fractal patterns are themselves examples of chaotic systems,
explains that he coined the term fractal because, “as the classical monsters were defanged and
harnessed through my efforts, and as many new ‘monsters’ began to arise, the need for a term
became increasingly apparent” (4). So Shakespeare’s use of the word “monstruosity” to describe
the hideous result of attempting to confine an infinite quantity in a finite package seems
instructive. It points us towards this play’s pursuit of a mathematics as yet without a name.

47
Though the play may not know what to call it, Troilus is undeniably obsessed with
assigning value—specifically numerical value—to objects and people. It is, in some senses, a
play about measuring; bargains are made, lives are counted, people are appraised in inches. The
question of Helen’s value (particularly about its possible inflation) stitches the play together. Her
value hinges largely on her beauty—an incalculable asset; the Greeks and Trojans are bargaining
over something limitless, something infinite. And when anyone attempts to manipulate
incalculable qualities with a limited algebra, the prognosis is grim. So Troilus’s characters are
doubly in the wrong. Not only are they fighting a war that daily exposes its cause as faulty—a
mistaken calculation—but they are also aware of the flaws in the methods they’re using to
calculate. A contemporary reader may be reminded of the recent banking crisis, when those at the
highest level anticipated the crisis about to unfold—and realized they could only sit back and see
how long they could stretch the self-delusion, the excuses.
Diomedes, for example, understands that the equations of the war do not yield a clear
winner; when Paris asks him who “deserves” Helen more (himself or Menelaus), Diomedes
responds:
Both alike.
He merits well to have her that doth seek her,
Not making any scruple of her soilure,
With such a hell of pain and world of charge;
And you as well to keep her that defend her,
Not palating the taste of her dishonour,
With such a costly loss of wealth and friends.
He, like a puling cuckold, would drink up

48
The lees and dregs of a flat ‘tamed piece;
You, like a lecher, out of whorish loins
Are pleased to breed out your inheritors.
Both merits poised, each weighs nor less nor more,
But he as he. Which heavier for a whore? (IV.1.56-68)
This is a disturbingly dark assessment. Diomedes puts Menelaus and Paris on a scale, but such
equipment can’t offer any solutions; the men’s poisoned motivations are equally disgusting.
Weighing things—a method of calculation which pops up in Troilus’s over and over—offers no
solutions. But Diomedes knows no other way to proceed. He continues setting up useless ratios in
a nihilistic tone:
For every false drop in her bawdy veins
A Grecian’s life hath sunk; for every scruple
Of her contaminated carrion weight
A Trojan hath been slain. Since she could speak,
She hath not given so many good words breath
As for her Greeks and Trojans suffered death. (IV.1.71-76)
This isn’t Helen’s fault. It’s the system that’s flawed. Diomedes’ attitude is justified only if we
deal in his false ratios, his sly efforts to weigh the deaths of the men in battle against the “good
words” Helen has spoken. This is a false equivalence, no matter how accurate the language—and
Diomedes is speaking extremely accurately. By mentioning “every scruple / Of her contaminated
carrion weight,” Diomedes invokes the original meaning of “scruple,” in use since the 14
th

century: “A unit of weight = 20 grains, 1/3 drachm, 1/24 oz. Apothecaries’ weight” (OED,
“scruple”). The word itself is derived from the Latin scrupulous, little pebble. How elegant that

49
pebbles are also the inspiration for the word calculus—which means “small stone” or “pebble.”
The answer for Shakespeare’s characters lies in the scruples, not in the boulders. Troilus begs for
closer attention to subtleties—asking not for more accurate measurements, but for measurements
of a different kind altogether.
Hector also realizes the system of calculation is failing them. In front of the Trojan
council, he wonders: “If we have lost so many tenths of ours / To guard a thing not ours, nor
worth to us / (Had it our name) the value of one ten, / What merit’s in that reason which denies /
The yielding of her up?” (II.2.21-25). And yet he capitulates to Troilus’s warmongering rhetoric
by the end of the scene (“I am yours”), useless in the face of the chaotic rules by which this play
operates. He understands that his fellow warriors’ attempts to assign value are inaccurate,
inadequate—but what alternative does he have? Troilus is actually in the same boat; his response
to Hector’s challenge also calls the common methods of calculation into question. He, too,
invokes the language of weight:
Fie, fie, my brother!
Weigh you the worth and honor of a king
So great as our dread father in a scale
Of common ounces? Will you with counters sum
The past-proportion of his infinite
And buckle in a waist most fathomless
With spans and inches so diminutive
As fears and reasons? Fie, for godly shame! (II.2.25-32)
He is right to reject the “counters” of the abacus, the “diminutive” inches of a yard stick—to wish
to discard the “scale / Of common ounces”—but with what can he replace these early modern

50
machines? Matched with a quantity too large to be measured with the everyday tools—a quantity
literally “past-proportion”—Troilus is left with no other term for what he is looking for except
“his infinite.”
If it is strange for Shakespeare to be using the word “infinite” at all, it is doubly strange
for him to use it as a noun, indicating a quality that might be possessed by a human being (albeit a
royal one).
18
How can “the infinite” be reached? Lacking the tools of calculus, Troilus suggests
discarding reason altogether: “Manhood and honour / Should have hare hearts, would they but fat
their thoughts / With this crammed reason; / Reason and respect / Make livers pale and lustihood
deject” (II.2.47-50). But this is impossible in practice, so Troilus tries to proceed (like his fellow
Trojans) by comparison and algebraic ratio. The first scene sees Troilus assessing himself by
means of elementary proportional comparison:
The Greeks are strong, and skilful to their strength,
Fierce to their skill, and to their fierceness valient;
But I am weaker than a woman’s tear,
Tamer than sleep, fonder than ignorance,
Less valient than the virgin in the night,
And skilless as unpracticed infancy. (I.i.7-12)
But even his most simple math falls short. His ratios start out strong, asserting that Greek
fierceness : Greek valience = 1, and Greek skilfullness : Greek strength = 1. However, when he
stops oversimplifying the Other and turns, instead, to the more precarious ground of the self, his
ratios falter. One who is “less valient than the virgin in the night,” or “skilless as unpracticed
infancy” enters infinitesimal territory. These quantities are too small to be measured on a scale of

18
Shakespeare uses of word “infinite” 43 times in his plays and poems; 35 of these uses are adjectival, five are
adverbial, and only three (including this use) are nominal. The two other plays in which “infinite” is used as a noun
are Two Gentlemen of Verona and Much Ado About Nothing.

51
common ounces—the system of calculation fails on both ends. But Troilus continues to set up
proportions long after they have proven useless. Even as Cressida is betraying him, he is drawing
bold lines across a sheet of graph paper: “As much as I do Cressid love, / So much by weight hate
I her Diomed” (V.ii.174-175). We have returned to “weight,” and it is failing us.
Troilus prides himself on his simplistic approach to life—but if Shakespeare suggests any
lesson in this play, it’s that simplicity does not always result in success. Sometimes, Occam’s
Razor fails. Readers must be wary of taking Troilus’s assertion that he is “as true as truth’s
simplicity” as some sort of heroic code—rather, this statement reflects on his naivety, his failings
as a character. As he watches Cressida leave with the Greeks, Troilus again invokes the mistaken
notion of truth as the simplest path between two points:
While others fish with craft for great opinion,
I with great truth catch mere simplicity;
Whilst some with cunning gild their copper crowns,
With truth and plainness I do wear mine bare.
Fear not my truth. The moral of my wit
Is “plain and true”; there’s all the reach of it. (IV.iv.102-107)
As the events unfold, it becomes clear that Shakespeare is invested in revealing truth’s
complexity. The events in the play prove Troilus so completely wrong. Unless we are interested in
painting Shakespeare as a most offensive anti-feminist, what conclusion can we draw from
Cressida’s betrayal except that life constantly—brutally—refuses to proceed by Cartesian
predictions?

52
V. TAKE BUT DEGREE AWAY: THE FORM OF CHAOS

I have already cited Richard D. Fly’s belief that the “radical instability” in Troilus’s “formal
elements” is intentional on Shakespeare’s part—a brief allusion to my reasons for including this
play in a dissertation on poetry. Yes, the play is concerned with calculation and measurement—
especially as regards infinite or immeasurable quantities—but it also chooses to expose these
themes through both content and form. As mentioned above, Troilus is known for its rejection of
traditional formal concerns; the play oscillates seemingly randomly from rhyming verse (which
often refuses to scan), to blank verse, to prose, and back. But, like any good chaotic model, there
are reasons for these stylistic changes—tiny initial conditions that must be ferreted out. An
analysis of Troilus and Cressida’s formal structure suggests that Shakespeare often uses the most
strict form—iambic pentameter, occasionally rhyming—when expressing sentiments he will use
the play to prove false. However, dialogue that seems to justify the odd occurrences in the play—
the dark vision fueling it—often slips into prose. The rhyming equations of algebra rarely
describe our surroundings.
Troilus’s affirmation of simplicity (above) serves as an appropriate example. Though the
first line is 11 syllables, and the second line only scans as iambic in its latter half, the last four
lines are textbook iambic pentameter. Shakespeare even ends the speech with a heroic couplet,
the most “simplistic” poetic move possible in a verse drama. But the content of these lines is
undermined by the play. When Troilus says “there’s all the reach of it,” the trite ring of his
lines—their too-easy formal qualities—imply that his reach is not enough. His scope is
constrained; it is measured and meted out. Shakespeare has forced him to speak in lines that act
out the exact measurement against which Troilus was railing earlier—has forced the character, in

53
essence, to contradict himself. One could weigh the patterns of Troilus’s speech in a scale of
common hours. Troilus’s declaration of his aphorism-worthy honesty—“ ‘As true as Troilus’
shall crown up the verse / And sanctify the numbers” (III.ii.177-178)—may sound convincing in
its regular rhythm. But should the numbers (a convenient synonym for poetic verse) really be
objects of worship?
If that question were posed to Ulysses, the embodiment of an old Euclidean order that is
quickly failing, his answer would surely be “yes.” His lengthy speech about order and degree in
Act One, Scene Three, is often cited by critics wishing to use the disorder of Troilus and Cressida
as evidence that Shakespeare found anarchy disturbing—that he was politically and socially
conservative, that he wished to return to traditional forms of order. And it is admittedly tempting
to heed Ulysses’s warnings; his appeal to ruled order takes place largely in blank verse, some of
the most poetic in the play. It is easy to be swept up in his melodious rhetoric:
Take but degree away, untune that string,
And hark what discord follows. Each thing meets
In mere oppugnancy. The bounded waters
Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores
And make a sop of all this solid globe;
Strength should be lord of imbecility,
And the rude son should strike his father dead;
Force should be right; or rather, right and wrong,
Between whose endless jar justice resides,
Should lose their names, and so should justice too.
Then everything includes itself in power,

54
Power into will, will into appetite;
And appetite, an universal wolf,
So doubly seconded with will and power,
Must make perforce an universal prey
And last eat up himself. (I.3.109-124)
This is stunning versifying. It moves like Roger Federer at the top of his game: lean, vicious,
graceful. By the time he arrives at those last two lines, Ulysses has us in the palm of his hand. The
image of the wolf so voracious that he must “last eat up himself” hangs over the play, unsated. No
wonder readers are tempted to take this as a definitive statement on the need for order and degree.
Arnold Stein agrees that “[w]hat Ulysses produces is a poem, or rather, a poetical oration; it
exhibits Ulysses’ power and, even more, it exhibits itself” (152). I will return to this last phrase;
for now, it is enough to note the poetic nature of the speech, which—in a play weighed down with
prose—might easily sweep an audience member or reader up in its verbal velocity.
Ulysses further tempts the scholar to take his words as Shakespearean creed by repeatedly
invoking the pre-Kepler concept of the ordered spheres to make his point. For example, Ulysses
calls Nestor’s speech “strong as the axletree / On which the heavens ride” (I.3.66-67), a reference
to the Ptolemaic universe
19
; he praises the “heavens themselves, the planets and this centre” (the
Earth, which was at the center of the universe in Ptolemy’s system) for “Observ[ing] degree,
priority and place / Insisture, course, proportion, season, form, / Office and custom, in all line of
order” (I.3.85-88). He calls the Sun a “planet” (I.3.89)—in keeping, again, with Ptolemy—and
states that it “Corrects the ill aspects of planets evil / And posts, like the commandment of a king,
/ Sans check, to good and bad” (I.3.92-94). Though Shakespeare lived and wrote as the old

19
LN: “As Mephistopheles explains to Doctor Faustus, the earth and the heavenly spheres ‘all move upon one
axletree, / Whose terminine is termed the world’s wide pole’—that is, the poles of the earth and of the Ptolemaic
universe are co-extensive” (1.3.66-7).

55
assumptions about the universe were being overthrown, many people still assume that most Early
Modern subjects, excluding Copernicus or Kepler, aligned themselves with the old order. But, as
we have seen, intellectual revolutions are rarely represented by a few privileged minds correcting
mass ignorances. Nevertheless, scholars continue to use Ulysses’ version of the heavens as proof
that the speech is Shakespeare’s own hypothesis. Even supposedly objective footnotes begin to
rationalize: “The conception of an ordered cosmos interconnected with physical and moral order
in life on earth goes back to Pythagoras, the Platonists and the Stoics. Seminal texts for
Renaissance Europe include Plato’s Timaeus, Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis with the Commentary
of Macrobuys, and Bk 2 of Pliny” (LN 1.3.78-108). Never mind that Shakespeare has placed
Ulysses in an era 1600 years earlier, one that held staggeringly different beliefs about many
things. Surely, though we know little about Shakespeare’s life and reading habits, he was in
agreement with these seminal texts. Surely, Shakespeare thus uses Ulysses as his mouthpiece
here. Such a conclusion seems simple and therefore true. Ah—but now we’ve fallen into
Troilus’s own trap.
The play, after all, does not bear out Ulysses’s belief in degree and order. For all his
manipulations, his attempts to bring things back into some imitation of a (mistaken) heavenly
arrangement, he is unable to control the line of events. In a truly chaotic system, no measures
taken after things have been set in motion can correct the initial distortions. Arnold Stein
discusses the gap between Ulysses’s words and their (absent) consequences; he notes that this
speech “has been so much admired that it has been thought the central statement of the play, or at
least Shakespeare’s expressing his own deeply felt thought. But if the speech on degree is a
central statement, why does it fall so flat as a dramatic issue, an episode of noble eloquence left
high and dry, the action of talk?” (151).

As Stein notes, all the Greeks’ lovely poetics accomplish

56
nothing: “When they have finished analyzing and philosophizing, when they have finished
conceiving their practical strategy and have beautifully set it in motion, nothing happens
according to the plan, or in any way resembles the language they use or the ideas they deploy”
(153-4).

Interestingly, Jack Spicer also paints Ulysses as a great poet (for the first year of the
Trojan War, Spicer’s Zeus informs us, Ulysses stayed in his tent and composed poems) but a
failed strategist. Much is made of an idea Ulysses had before the play’s action begins to set birds
on fire and drop them into Troy, burning the city down. The plan did not play out as Ulysses had
hoped:
DIOMEDE: As it was the Trojans were eating roast pigeon for weeks.
ULYSSES: I admit I may have gone a bit overboard on the scheme, but the idea of
burning birds—it was pure poetry in action. (99)
Poetry in action, perhaps—but as both Spicer and Shakespeare show us, poetry that exists just to
be conscious of its own poetic form, to glory in the rules, may not be that effective in a world that
cannot break itself up neatly into quatrains.
The form of Ulysses’ words seems beautiful and straightforward, but fractals also appear
self-explanatory and measurable if you look at them only from a distance. It’s when you zoom in
only to find an unruly, still-spiraling mess in place of a clean line that things get tricky. For all the
discussion about the failure of form in Troilus, there are surprisingly few voices claiming it as a
highly planned and meticulously executed work, one as calculated as any sonnet. This brings us
back to Stein’s assessment of Ulysses’ speech—that it is a poem that “exhibits itself.” Stein
concludes that, “[u]nless we choose to think Shakespeare himself carried away by his own
eloquence, then we must admit the possibility that the dramatic effect of disproportion and

57
detachment has something to do with Shakespeare’s imaginative concept of the dramatic form”
(152). Indeed, analyzing this speech as poetry opens up several interpretive doors for the reader.
First, as I have mentioned, it allows us to consider the haphazard nature of the play’s form
as deliberate. There is no more deliberate form of writing than poetry; why would a writer
showcase his ability to execute a perfectly stylized speech in the middle of a relative disaster of a
play? Second, it allows us to consider the actual content of the speech itself in a new light. Rather
than looking at this as a teleological moment employed in an intent to move a plot forward
(which, as Stein explains, can only lead to the assumption that the play is a complete failure), we
can think of it as a separate set piece. A performative—and consciously artistic—entity that may
exists on a level of intention other than the purely operative. And now a possibility presents itself:
Shakespeare is using this speech to intensify and elevate the play’s contradictions and paradoxes.
You cannot believe in order and degree, he seems to say, and also be a conscious and critical
observer of the world around you. Read through Ulysses’s impotence, Shakespeare sounds
dissatisfied with the notion that the universe operates by algebraic, fixed, orderly laws. Though he
would not have had the math to realize it, or the vocabulary to express it, Shakespeare was
exposing the planets’ movement as chaotic long before Edward Lorenz and Benoit Mandelbrot.
I am not the first reader to realize this; several other worthy scholars have argued that
Troilus exposes serious flaws in the idea of cosmic order. Speaking of Troilus’s confusion and
anger over Cressida’s betrayal, James O’Rourke comments, “Having imagined himself as the
cause of her desire, he cannot comprehend her being sexual in his absence. His disappointment is
so thoroughly apocalyptic because he saw their union as proof of a cosmic order of values” (155,
emphasis mine). Any audience of the play hoping, like Troilus, for confirmation of some
hierarchical “cosmic order” would likewise walk away with a “thoroughly apocalyptic”

58
disappointment—which perhaps explains the possibility that the play was never performed during
Shakespeare’s lifetime.
20
For Jonathan Dollimore, whose Radical Tragedy examines Troilus’s
embedded social and political resistance, chaos is not only an intrinsic aspect of the play, but a
central part of its message, as well. Dollimore agrees that Shakespeare was not necessarily in-line
with his time’s conservative notions of scientific and astrophysical reality—after all, “in the
Renaissance God was in trouble; ‘he’ was being subjected to sceptical interrogation, not least in
the theatre. I say God, but mean a larger metaphysical scheme of things of which he is only a
part” (lix). I would like to quote Dollimore at length on Troilus, as I think his words confirm the
existence in the play of exactly the type of disorder I have been attempting to describe:
Troilus, in V. Ii., is thrust into confrontation with a world which contradicts his, and
others’, idealisation of it. His description of macrocosmic chaos is more than just a
metaphorical declaration of his own disorientation. For Troilus to ‘suffer into truth’ is not
to achieve tragic insight but rather to internalise the sense of contradiction which defines
his world:
Within my soul there doth conduce a fight
Of this strange nature, that a thing inseparate
Divides more wider than the sky and earth
…
The bonds of heaven are slipp’d, dissolv’d and loos’d. (V. Ii. 145-7 and 154).
This scene is the climax of a play which … relentlessly undermines the related myth that
the universe is providentially governed … More strategically than nihilistically, Troilus
and Cressida exploits disjunction and ‘chaos’ to promote critical awareness of both the
mystifying language of the absolute and the social reality which it occludes. We are for

20
For a larger explanation of the play’s performance history, see Bevington, “Introduction,” 87-117.

59
example compelled by the apparent fact of chaos to think critically about the way
characters repeatedly make fatalistic appeals to an extra-human reality or force: natural
law, Jove, Chance, Time and so on. (42, 44-5, emphasis mine)
I would also include, in this final catalogue, “mathematics” or “computation.”
We are compelled to think critically about the way these characters use systems of
calculation that fall so short of actually accessing the nature of the events unfolding around them
that it would not be a stretch to describe them as “fatal.” We are compelled to think critically
about the way cosmic models are falsified even as they are invoked. And as we do so, we can’t
help but wonder what conclusions Shakespeare’s own critical thought may have yielded. Are
there any hints in the play towards an effective system of measurement? A calculus?

VI. THE NATURE OF THE SICKNESS FOUND, ULYSSES, WHAT IS THE REMEDY?

Troilus does do more than simply identify the problem. There is much evidence in the play
that, decades before Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz were born, Shakespeare was thinking in
terms of the small making up the large—was musing over the idea that the way to infinity is
through the infinitesimal. Of course, as Dollimore points out, “the subversiveness of Jacobean
tragedy” rarely works through “outright rejection.” More frequently, “Jacobean tragedy discloses
ideology as misrepresentation; it interrogates ideology from within, seizing on and exposing its
contradictions and inconsistencies … This is not a transcendent awareness; the drama may
incorporate the contradictions it explores” (Dollimore 8).
21
Fittingly, then, the characters in

21
He goes on to point out that this type of tragedy must naturally resist the expected formal trappings of traditional
drama: “It is, then, a tragedy which violates those cherished aesthetic principles which legislate that the ultimate aim
of art is to order discordant elements; to explore conflict in order ultimately to resolve it; to explore suffering in order
ultimately to transcend it.”

60
Troilus who, along with Shakespeare, attempt to think through a primitive calculus are mocked
and outcast by those around them.
Nestor, for example, repeatedly demonstrates an interest in measuring the large by way of
the small. He regards the course of events as one that proceeds by infinitesimals: “The purpose is
perspicuous even as substance / Whose grossness little characters sum up” (I.3.325-26). During
the Greek Council’s debate over their approach to the war, Nestor asserts that Achilles should be
the soldier to meet Hector’s challenge, as Achilles has the best chance of actually beating him.
Nestor explains that
the success,
Although particular, shall give a scantling
Of good or bad unto the general,
And in such indexes, although small pricks
To their subsequent volumes, there is seen
The baby figure of the giant mass
Of things to come at large. (I.3.341-347)
Nestor believes that even a small, “particular” success can act as a means of advancing the Greeks
to a larger, “general” success—in other words, he sees the war operating as a calculus problem
might. Even Nestor’s use of “scantling” is telling. According to the Oxford English Dictionary,
the word was used in the Early Modern period both as a name for a measuring tool or regulation
(“a builder’s or carpenter’s measuring-rod,” 1556; “a rule or standard of measurement,” 1587)
and to designate “a small or scanty portion or amount; a modicum,” 1585; “a sample, pattern,
specimen,” 1567; “limited measure, space, amount, etc.: a limit,” 1597 (“scantling”).

Like
Diomedes’ earlier use of “scruple,” “scantling” speaks to this play’s obsession with the means

61
and objects of measurement. Furthermore, “scantling” also used during this era to refer to “the
measure or degree of (a person’s) capacity or ability.” In the shadow of these definitions, we are
aware of the figure of a man’s individual potential, tiny when set against the mass of other men
around him—but defiantly present. A miniscule potential alone, but one that could be grouped
with the other miniscule potentials around it and, once measured with the right tool, used to begin
approaching “the general.” Nestor seems suddenly to be speaking Tolstoy’s language, to be
invoking the calculus of history.
22

Nestor’s vision of the Achilles-Hector combat as the potential beginning of a process by
which scantlings and scruples accumulate towards a regal infinity is a move in the right
mathematical direction—yet it is immediately disregarded by those around him. Ulysses responds
dismissively: “Give pardon to my speech: / Therefore ’tis meet Achilles meet not Hector”
(I.3.358-59). Nestor is made out to be a doddering fool, too old to see what is at stake. He is
systematically shut out from the realm of the powerful; his importance comes from his position as
an outsider in a play that must be in the act of subverting faith in power (if it hopes to achieve
anything). Nestor’s portrayal as the most irrelevant of Greeks, then, may not be as straightforward
in this play as it would be elsewhere. And he is not alone: the two other characters who show
some understanding of a calculus of action, Cassandra and Thersites, are also written off by those
around them.
Cassandra’s appearance in Act 2, scene 2, is marked by an insightful prediction that fails to
gain traction. Though the curse that Cassandra’s prophecies will never be believed is part and

22
See Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (New York: Signet Classic, 1968). Tolstoy explains that, in order to comprehend
the arc of human action—whether we are talking about an arc the duration of a week or the duration of a century—
the human mind needs to act like a mathematician working out a calculus problem: “Only by taking an
infinitesimally small unit for observation—the differentia of history, that is, the homogenous tendencies of men—
and, attaining to the art of integrating them (taking the sum of these infinitesimals), can we hope to arrive at the laws
of history” (986). The logic of calculus, in Tolstoy’s words, “corrects the inevitable error which the human mind
cannot avoid when it examines discontinuous units of motion instead of continuous motion” (986).

62
parcel of her myth, the way she phrases her auguries here is specific to Troilus’s obsession with
calculation:
Virgins and boys, mid-age and wrinkled old,
Soft infancy, that nothing canst but cry,
Add to my clamour! Let us pay betimes
A moiety of that mass of moan to come. (II.2.104-107)
Cassandra pleads with the Greeks to begin the process of summation, to offer up small figures on
the way to a massive quantity. “Moiety” here joins “scruple” and “scantling” in the gallery of
words Shakespeare uses in Troilus as he searches for ways to speak about an as-yet-unnamed
specter—“infinitesimal” itself having its first record in the OED only in 1655, at least 50 years
after this play was composed.
23
Though the definition of “moiety” that Shakespeare would have
had in mind is “A part of a larger whole; a small or lesser share, portion, or quantity; a small
amount” (OED, “moiety”), the word would evolve in a curious and relevant way. In 1935,
“moiety” acquired a chemistry-related meaning: “A group of atoms forming a distinct part of a
large molecule” (OED, “moiety”). The seeds of the scientifically infinitesimal had long waited in
the word—still dormant in Troilus, but nearing germination. Almost-sprouted.
The rapidity with which Troilus dismisses Cassandra can be chalked up to her mythical
curse; Thersites, however, can use no such supernatural excuse to explain his status. An outcast
and a fool, Thersites acts as a spokesperson for Troilus’s diseased society. As James O’Rourke
notes, “having been denied an identity within the Symbolic Order, Thersites is not subject to its
mystifications about its practices” (155). Thersites is not lulled into a false sense of order by
Ulysses’ speech, nor does he ever profess a belief in love or valor. He is awful because we know

23
Furthermore, the definition that most of us think of when we hear “infinitesimal”—“An infinitely small quantity or
amount”—does not appear until 1734. See “infinitesimal,” The Oxford English Dictionary, 2
nd
ed, 1989. OED
Online: Oxford University Press, 14 August 2012. Web.

63
he’s right. There is, in fact, a long history of using this character as a spokesperson for
unwelcome truths;
24
Homer gives Thersites a much-discussed bit part in the Iliad to this effect.
25

Kenneth Burke speaks of Thersites’ “use as a narrator's device for bringing to the fore a possible
unconscious protest on the part of the audience … by having it expressed by a figure with whom
one decidedly did not want to be associated” (31). In Troilus, Shakespeare employs Thersites to
critique the way his contemporaries measure and calculate their world. From a removed and jaded
distance, he watches them attempt to order it against its nature; he watches them strive, in vain, to
contain and deny the infinite rather than accept and understand it.
Thersites makes several direct references to mathematics. When describing Ajax’s behavior
to Achilles in Act III, scene 3, he crows: “Why, ’a stalks up and down like a peacock—a stride
and a stand; ruminates like an hostess that hath no arithmetic but her brain to set down her
reckoning” (III.3.253-255). This is a timely simile; hosts and hostesses of taverns were
“notoriously slow in doing sums” (Troilus FN 254-5)

a status quo which was only worsened by
the transition from roman to arabic numerals in sixteenth-century England. Keith Thomas points
out that calculation devices, such as an abacus, were “essential for people whose arithmetical skill
was rudimentary. They also helped them to cope with the bewildering complexity of English
weights and measures. The pound sterling gave rise to awkward and irreducible fractions, making
English money difficult to add and subtract, while multiplication required “a world of paines”
(117). Thersites evokes a hostess attempting to work complex sums out in her head (and failing).
In doing so, he makes a statement about the need for a more complex method of calculation; the

24
See Seth Benardete: “There must be a figuration of wickedness as self-evident as Thersites—the ugliest man who
came to Troy—who says what everyone is thinking.” The Rhetoric of Morality and Philosophy: Plato’s Gorgias and
Phaedras. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009: 101.
25
In his Philosophy of History (American Home Library Company, 1902), Hegel notes: “The Thersites of Homer
who abuses the kings is a standing figure for all times. Blows—that is, beating with a solid cudgel—he does not get
in every age, as in the Homeric one; but his envy, his egotism, is the thorn which he has to carry in his flesh; and the
undying worm that gnaws him is the tormenting consideration that his excellent views and vituperations remain
absolutely without result in our world" (79).

64
“arithmetic” here is a noun describing her brain itself, and this brain is falling woefully short of
the task.
Like Nestor and Cassandra, Thersites speaks of reaching the big by way of the small; he
tells Ajax, “If thou use to beat me, I will begin at thy heel and tell what thou art by inches, thou
thing of no bowels, thou!” (II.i.46) Here, again, is the idea of measuring by pieces, a skill which
Thersites believes himself to possess. Made to believe that he himself is a fragment,
26
he
embraces the language of bits and atoms: “Lo, lo, lo, what modicums of wit he utters!” (II.i.66),
Thersites exclaims. This is Shakespeare’s only use of the word “modicum”—joining “moiety,”
“scruple,” and “scantling” in the growing list of substitutes for “infinitesimal.” And as if the
content of his words weren’t enough, Thersites even protests in the form of his language, refusing
to speak in verse for the duration of the play—refusing, literally, to be measured, to be bound by
a non-chaotic meter.
Thersites’ last appearance in the play is in a fittingly miniscule 15-line exchange with a
character (Margareton) brought on stage for the sole purpose of this dialogue. The apparent
throw-away of a scene is reproduced below:
Enter Bastard [Margareton].
MARGARETON Turn, slave, and fight.
THERSITES What art thou?
MARGARETON A bastard son of Priam’s.
THERSITES I am a bastard too; I love bastards. I am bastard begot, bastard
instructed, bastard in mind, bastard in valour, in everything illegitimate. One bear will not
bit another, and wherefore should one bastard? Take heed, the quarrel’s most ominous to

26
See V.i.7-8. (Thersites: Here’s a letter for thee. Achilles: From whence, fragment?)

65
us. If the son of a whore fight for a whore, he tempts judgement. Farewell, bastard.
[Exit.]
MARGARETON The devil take thee, coward! Exit (V.viii.5-15)
We have already seen so much cursing of society on Thersites’ part—and cursing of Thersites on
the parts of others—that this scene feels redundant. And yet, as I read it, I am reminded of the
implications of Ulysses’ speech for a world in which man was seen as central—as important and
privileged. After all, as Jonathan Dollimore points out, much of Jacobean drama was invested in
exploring the Renaissance “decentering of ‘man’” (4). If we are looking at a chaotic world—one
which requires calculus, one which refuses to privilege man at a supposedly perfect center of a
perfect circle—then we are also looking at a world in which all men are, in some sense, bastards.
The father they thought they knew—Orderly Rule, Aristotle’s First Mover—has abandoned them.
In this world, men are conceived by ellipses, by infinitesimals: everyone is “bastard begot,
bastard instructed, bastard in mind, bastard in valour, in everything illegitimate.” Once again,
Thersites is speaking on behalf of an author who’d rather not lay claim to the message he bears:
the universe does not work in the way you thought. Everything is decentered, off-balance.
Cressida provides a perverted confirmation when she vows to Troilus that “the strong base
and building of my love / Is as the very centre of the earth, / Drawing all things to it” (IV.ii.104-
106). Perhaps her betrayal is not her fault, but the fault of her calculations; after all, the earth’s
core doesn’t draw all things to it. I think the most successful interpretations of Troilus and
Cressida come from a deconstructionist standpoint—as a play unfolding in a chaotic world, the
characters undermine themselves. The dialogue pulls itself apart. The play begins to resemble an
entity so massive that anything inside it must fold in on itself. Shakespeare only uses the word
“chaos” six times in all of his works; predictably, one of its appearances is in this play, embedded

66
in Ulysses’ speech on degree. The speech protests its own truth, as the poetry of his speech admits
a warp in the woof and breaks down:
And appetite, an universal wolf,
So doubly seconded with will and power,
Must make perforce an universal prey
And last eat up himself. Great Agamemnon,
This chaos, when degree is suffocate,
Follows the choking. (I.iii.121-126)
The word “chaos” provokes a telling stutter in the meter and rhythm of Ulysses’ speech, which up
until now has been in near-perfect iambic pentameter. After “chaos” comes “Follows the
choking,” a line unto itself, only five syllables, bookended by trochees. Shakespeare’s “universal
wolf” is a black hole—one which, in the attempt to consume all, causes language to devour itself.
The poetry collapses.

VII. A DEAR GHOST

And that’s not Shakespeare’s fault. Centuries later, Spicer discovers the same result.
Though his path initially spirals off in another direction, it ends up looping the same chaotic,
infinite currents. The characters repeat their ill-informed mis-measurements. Ulysses’s reliance
on order and rigid strategy causes problems for the Greeks; he has a plan to set up a “new
defensive line,” but, as Zeus points out, “unfortunately Ulysses miscalculated and the Greeks
weren’t able to form that line” (130). Miscalculated: of course he did. There’s no room for lines
here, only curves, fractals, spirals.

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Spicer’s Troilus moves like a dream, but not one you’d want to repeat. In its strangeness it
begins to acquire a Lynchian tinge. The warriors are wearing “costumes of the sort American
colleges would use if sword-fighting to the death were an intercollegiate sport” (82); black-robed
figures show up unseen by the characters and shadow them [“[Troilus] takes [Cressida] in his
arms and they turn from the window, kissing. The black figure, unobserved, kisses them both as
the curtain falls” (123)]; dead eagles fall from the sky. But Spicer is not completely reinventing
the story. Rather, he takes the less Euclidean elements of the story that were always there and
brings them to the foreground, blows them up, embraces them. He employs a fractal self-
similarity so extreme that it becomes almost parodic. Take the end of Act I, scene 1, as
Patroclus’s imitation of Agamemnon blends into Agamemnon’s own words:
ACHILLES: You’d better get out of here, Patroclus. Agamemnon and the rest will be
coming in.
PATROCLUS [bouncing to the head of the Council table and imitating Agamemnon]:
Gentlemen, it seems to me that we often fail to realize how important unity is for the
final achievement of victory. Leadership is something organic like the …

[Thersites has opened the door and started to exit during this. He turns in the doorway.]

THERSITES: You’d better get out. I see them coming down the path.
PATROCLUS [walks toward the door, stops, and pats Achilles on the shoulder]:
Good luck, kid!

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[Exits. Achilles takes a seat at the table and, in a moment, the door opens and Agamemnon,
Nestor, Ulysses, Menelaus, and Diomede walk in. Agamemnon immediately goes to the
Council chair, but the others, except Menelaus, say hello to Achilles. Ulysses deliberately
sits down next to Achilles.]

AGAMEMNON [clearing his throat]: Gentlemen, it seems to me that we often fail to
realize how important unity is for the achievement of victory. Leadership is
something organic like the …

[Curtain has been slowly going down from Agamemnon’s first word and hits bottom
here.] (87-8)
Something organic like chaos? Or take the strange exchange among Cressida, Achilles, and
Patroclus about the ocean:
CRESSIDA: Is the Greek ocean so different?
ACHILLES: Different! Try watching the waves break on the edge of a Greek island some
night. You’ll see the difference.
CRESSIDA: What do they look like?
PATROCLUS: They look like someone who has been out on an impossibly long journey
and has come home to die. They crash along the rocks like muscular old men.
CRESSIDA: The waves here die like butterflies.
ACHILLES: And at night, at Chios for example, you can stand on the rocks watching that
black water and know that each dying wave connects with another wave and that with

69
another all the way back beyond the Pillars of Hercules to where the ocean starts—and
you wonder if there is any beginning.
PATROCLUS: Or any end to it.
ACHILLES: There’s just the sound of the black water and the sudden whiteness of it as it
hits the rocks. And we used to stand there alive on the little edge of it …
CRESSIDA: Last night when I watched the ocean I tried to think what it was. Diomede
had his arm around me. I think he was asleep. The torch was burning, although it was low,
and I could see the patterns the waves were making on the sand before they disappeared. I
tried to think of it as Troilus would have, as another land of the dead out there beyond me,
or, as you two did, as something black and limitless, or even as a woman—Diomede
called it that before he went to sleep. But all I saw was an ocean with pieces breaking off
from it in meaningless patterns … (142-3)
But “meaningless” isn’t quite right. How coincidental is it that Spicer, still perhaps a decade
before any real work on chaos theory and the butterfly effect would be started, let alone circulated
to the general public, invokes the butterfly here in Cressida’s lines? Perhaps not coincidental at
all. James Gleick, speaking of the difficulty scientists such as Albert Libchaber had in
understanding and describing the turbulence of water, explains:
Scientific problems are expressed in the available scientific language. So far, the twentieth
century’s best expression of Libchaber’s intuition about flow needed the language of
poetry. Wallace Stevens, for example, asserted a feeling about the world that stepped
ahead of the knowledge available to physicists. He had an uncanny suspicion about flow,
how it repeated itself while changing:
The flecked river

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Which kept flowing and never the same way twice, flowing
Through many places, as if it stood still in one.
Stevens’s poetry often imparts a vision of tumult in atmosphere and water … When
Libchaber and some other experimenters in the 1970s began looking into the motion of
fluids, they did so with something approaching this subversive poetic intent. (196)
The nature of the ocean, the turbulent and fractal qualities of the “pieces breaking off”—
something in the DNA of Troilus’s story forces its authors to find ways to talk about chaos and
calculus before they could have possibly known what those words really meant.
Not that knowing what these words mean could exempt us from retracing their steps. We
can’t stop these stories from going on and on. When examining the issues of calculation and
measurement, the structures of these problematically poetic plays, it is the stories themselves that
reveal an infinite process. The stories themselves that become, in Thersites’ words, “an
arithmetic.” Poetry is a kind of mathematics, in its willingness to yield glorious strange attractors,
impossible fractal islands of language and meaning. When speaking about fractal geometry,
Gleick notes that “Mandelbrot’s work made a claim about the world, and the claim was that such
odd shapes carry meaning. The pits and tangles are more than blemishes distorting the classic
shapes of Euclidean geometry. They are often the keys to the essence of a thing” (94). I hope they
may be a key to the essence of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida. When examined through the
lens of chaos theory, the play’s disorder begins to resolve into a new order, a purposeful design.
The strange behaviors of the characters become just that much more fathomable.
Shakespeare’s obviously troubled relationship with the immeasurable in Troilus almost
demands a chaotic structure; “in the mind’s eye, a fractal is a way of seeing infinity.”
27

27
Gleick 98. How interesting that he should choose to use the phrase Shakespeare immortalized in Hamlet—“in my
mind’s eye, Horatio.”

71
Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, with her immortal longings all balled up inside, might have counted this
among her favorite works of literature. And Spicer’s Ulysses also lives with the curse of seeing
farther into the future than he thought possible:
ULYSSES’ VOICE: Dear Penelope, I have written this letter so often (varying it every
time because I cannot bear to believe, although I know, that you are unlikely to receive
each particular letter I am writing) so often that you must have received this letter and
replied to it God knows how many times yourself. Some day I will receive your letter and
be able to write a new one of my own.
The war goes on—a thousand miles and nine sour years away from Ithaca. I go on
playing the clever general, using up my poetry as a fuel for my cleverness as a freezing
man burns up all his property to keep himself warm. You, of course, have become a ghost
and Ithaca a mythical kingdom—but you are a dear ghost and Ithaca is a mythical
kingdom toward which I can afford to hope someday to sail.
So this letter, as usual, ends with hope and I, the writer, struggle to finish the last
sentence of the letter knowing that I am a liar, knowing that I have no faith in you and no
hope for the fut … [Ulysses stops in the middle of the word and starts erasing the
paragraph—there is a scratching sound on the loudspeaker while this goes on. The voice
goes on again when he finishes erasing.]
So this letter, as usual, ends with hope. It is the least that we can afford to give to
each other. Yours, Ulysses. (154)
Of course Penelope has become a ghost. How could she have avoided it? As John Donne showed
us, the computation leaves few other options. Anyone trying to count to infinity will have to turn

72
into a ghost at some point. But perhaps Spicer answers Donne’s final question: if the ghost is in
poetry, it cannot die.

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CHAPTER TWO.

“HE DISAPPEARS”:
THE QUANTUM MECHANICS OF ANNE CARSON AND LADY MARY WROTH
________________________________

By happening to be open once, it made
Enormous Alice see a wonderland
That waited for her in the sunshine and,
Simply by being tiny, made her cry.
—Auden, ‘The Door’ from The Quest

Scientists in particle physics know all too well that something can, simply by being tiny,
make you cry. Men have gone insane over particles nearly too small to detect. In fact, references
to insanity and terror seem to bubble up inexorably from the well of the infinitesimal, as the
particle physicist Steven Weinberg could attest. Weinberg, along with Abdus Salam and Sheldon
Glashow, received the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics thanks to his work in the 1960s on
electroweak unification. The three men’s discoveries in this field, however, troubled Weinberg
deeply at the time, as they necessitated the existence of the neutrino—a nearly-zero-mass
28

subatomic particle with no electric charge. When he was awarded the Nobel Prize, Weinberg
remembered
being so discouraged by these zero masses that when we wrote our joint paper on the
subject, I added an epigraph to the paper to underscore the futility [of trying to make the
vacuum beget mass]; it was Lear’s retort to Cordelia, “Nothing will come of nothing:
speak again.” Of course, the Physical Review protected the purity of the physics literature,
and removed the quote. (qtd. in Crease and Mann 242)
Lear’s madness, like Alice’s tears, seems the only sustainable reaction in the face of that which

28
Its mass has never been accurately measured; scientists are sure it has some mass, but we cannot get a read on how
much.

74
we cannot see—or weigh, or taste, or smell. And, as Weinberg may have sensed, it seems not so
out of tune with the “purity” of the physics literature, after all, especially when it comes to
experiments and theories in the quantum field.
The strange realm of the infinitesimal is often seen as sharing borders with the magical or
paranormal. Documentaries and books on the subject written for a “general”/nonspecialist
audience often use analogies that highlight the unreal aspect of quantum mechanics—the way a
particle is, in a sense, always in two places at once. Like paranormal or supernatural experiences,
these characteristics of the quantum world lack signifiers. They are events that are experienced by
us—or by our atoms—in ways that surpass or bypass the verbal. So it is not surprising that
scientists speak of “strange matter,”
29
or that they discuss the beauty of their equations as much as
(or more than) these equations’ ability to describe truth.
30
In fact, some of the “scientific” terms
assigned to quantities or entities in quantum mechanics are in fact drawn from poetry and
literature—from a field that routinely tries to assign words to things for which no words will ever
be adequate.
Perhaps the most infamous example of this is the quark—in physics, a never-observed
subatomic particle whose existence we can only confirm via secondhand experimental proof.
Though we now instantly associate the word “quark” with its elusive scientific object, the word
only became attached to the infinitesimal particle through a twisted road that traveled through
poetic territory. In fact, throughout the 19
th
century, the word “quark” was “a rare, poetic term for

29
Strange matter is entirely theoretical—a type of matter composed not of neat neutrons and protons (“nuclear
matter”), but more liquid, with up, down, and strange quarks swimming around freely. If it does exist, it is likely
found at the core of neutron stars and in other super dense configurations.
30
Paul Dirac, the English theoretical physicist and one of the “founding fathers” of quantum mechanics, was known
(and sometimes derided) for his interest in the beautiful to the potential exclusion of the practical. As Farmelo writes,
“he had been moved by the sheer sensual pleasure of working with Einstein’s theories of relativity and Maxwell’s
theory. For him and his colleagues, the theories were just as beautiful as Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony, a Rembrandt
self-portrait or a Milton sonnet. The beauty of a fundamental theory in physics has several characteristics in common
with a great work of art: fundamental simplicity, inevitability, power, and grandeur” (Farmelo 74).

75
a particular type of animal call, the cry of a heron or gull” (Crease and Mann 286), and it was
only able to jump from the throat of the bird to the inside of a particle accelerator by way of
James Joyce, whose Finnegans Wake includes the passage: “Three quarks for Muster Mark! /
Sure he hasn’t got much of a bark. / And sure any he has it’s all beside the mark” (Joyce 383).
Even the linguistic movement from Joyce to science was not smooth, and relied on an intuition
with regards to sound—a poetic field—not meaning.
We have Murray Gell-Mann to thank for quark’s tortuous journey. It was Gell-Mann who
first envisioned the possibility of particles with fractional electric charges, and as often happens in
quantum physics, the conceptual idea of this preceded any concrete evidence. In the same way,
the word for such strange entities flowed not from reason, but from impulse. Gell-Mann first
mentioned the possibility of the as-yet-unnamed particles during a talk at Columbia in March of
1963 (Crease and Mann 281). As Crease and Mann recount,
Afterward, over coffee, Gell-Mann used an odd word for these subunits: quork, to rhyme
with pork … “It seemed somehow appropriate,” Gell-Mann said. “A strange sound for
something peculiar. When I was going to publish the idea eight months later or whatever
it was, late in sixty-three, I was paging through Finnegans Wake as I often do, trying to
understand bits and pieces—you know how you read Finnegans Wake—and I came across
‘Three quarks for Muster Mark.’ I said, ‘That’s it! Three quarks make a neutron or proton!’
Joyce’s word rhymes with bark, but it was close enough to my funny sound … So that
was the name I chose. The whole thing is just a gag. It’s a reaction against pretentious
scientific language.” (281-2)
Though Gell-Mann may see the word as “just a gag,” these infinitesimal entities demand
discussion in a language that goes beyond the rational. When a fourth quark (beyond Gell-Mann

76
and George Zweig’s initial three) was predicted by Sheldon Lee Glashow and James Bjorken,
they called it “charm.” In the quantum world, beauty and intuition often replace logic and
measurement.
As I will explore more in the next chapter, Christian Bök has been working on embedding
a (microscopic) poem inside of a genome, observing that “a poet might become a breed of
technician working in a linguistic laboratory … Such a poem might begin to demonstrate that,
through the use of nanoscopic, biological emissaries, we might begin to transmit messages across
stellar distances …” (CBX 230-1). Though I will use his project as an example of an expansive
form of infinity, it is notable that his path towards these stellar expanses begins in the world of the
infinitesimal. A chapter focusing on the very small in a dissertation purporting to take on the very
big may seem dazzlingly out of place, but the infinitesimal and the infinite are expressions of the
same impulse. It is not paradoxical to use nanotechnology as a vehicle in which to traverse outer
space; just as the infinite is a quantity so large that it can never finally be attained, the
infinitesimal is a quantity so small that one can never pinpoint it. And to discuss this never-
pinpointing-ness requires a language that is both scientific and imaginative. Echoing Bök’s
sentiments, the Renaissance scholar Henry S. Turner notes that “we should regard genetic
engineering and biotechnology not simply as a new application of scientific knowledge but rather
as a new mode of poetics” (7).
But just how “new” is this mode of poetics? The ancient Greeks were no strangers to the
logical difficulties of the infinitesimal—think of the Zeno’s Paradox-esque question of halving
the half: if half of 1 is 1/2, and half of 1/2 is 1/4, and so on, we can never proceed empirically all
the way from the 1 to the 0. And yet the stretch of the number line from 0 to 1 is continuous, the
tiny gaps filled by a strange entity—1/∞. “Little Infinity.” Even the Western world, long resistant

77
to the more unexplainable aspects of Greek philosophy, had to admit the infinitesimal to its
thought during the Early Modern era. Just as the new telescopes forced scientists to consider that
the stars may not be suspended in a ceiling of sky fixed some finite distance beyond the earth’s
surface, new microscopes uncovered entire worlds hidden in the smallest elements of life.
Suddenly, it was not possible to assume that any visible piece of matter was undifferentiated and
indivisible. Publications like Robert Hooke’s 1665 Micrographia introduced vast numbers of
people to the alien visuals of the invisible realm. A flea becomes an armored monster. A dot of
ink becomes a rocky planet.
Though many of the mainstream (male) writers of the time gravitated towards Big Infinity—
the huge new tracts of space widened out in the sky—the realm of the infinitesimal was naturally
alluring to more marginalized writers, those who did not feel they had straightforward access to
the limitless. Lady Mary Wroth, sentenced to the outskirts of authorial circles thanks to her
gender and her outspoken nature, may have felt that these invisible-yet-infinite gaps in the
number line were, for her, the most accessible routes to something limitless and unending. Her
corona in Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, “A Crown of Sonnets Dedicated to Love,” relies on
descriptions and reflections of the infinitesimal as it spirals its way towards Little Infinity.
The concept of the infinitesimal is no longer a revelation to today’s authors, but its
implications continue to be probed by contemporary scientists and mathematicians in fascinating
ways. Quantum mechanics, which revolves around particles and events existing on microscopic
scales, has greatly expanded our understanding of infinitesimal phenomena. Though the initial
forays into quantum mechanical thought occurred at the beginning of the 20
th
century, recent
developments in digital technology have taken the microscopic world from something that only a
select few scientists dealt with to an entity with which we all interact on a daily basis. Thanks to

78
the Internet, our primary means of interacting with and entertaining others are invisible—the
result of tiny electrical impulses unfolding inside microscopic chips.
We exchange words with each other on an atomic scale.
And yet we have not reached the “limit” of the infinitesimal; scientists are still struggling to
understand the invisible matter that makes up the vast majority of our universe and the invisible
rips in the fabric of space that contain infinite amounts of energy and power. This new revolution
of the infinitesimal has sent out ripples into contemporary literature parallel to those emitted
during the Early Modern period. And another female writer—Anne Carson—has shown an
interest in enacting unending subdivision in her work, especially in her recent volume of poetry
and essayistic rumination, Nox. My examination of the infinitesimal in these two works—“A
Crown of Sonnets” and Nox—will unfold through the lens of poetic form. Lady Mary Wroth’s
crown relies on formal constraints to approach Little Infinity, and Anne Carson works through the
“form” of a translation to break up the experience of language—and her own memories—into
smaller and smaller bits, composing in the gaps. Both women demonstrate how the invisible
cracks in the fabric of life can be escape routes—doorways to endless, hidden expanses that are
receptive to otherwise marginalized ruminations and ideas.
Unseen rooms of one’s own, in which the rigid rules of the visible world have been
overthrown and replaced with the much stranger laws of quantum mechanics.

I. IN ENDLES ROUNDE

Wroth’s interest in what I have called “composing in the gaps” was a conscious strategy
that enabled her to unimpeachably assert a female voice in a male society. Wendy Wall says that
although strong early modern women like Wroth rarely issued “open challenge[s]” to social

79
norms, they found ways to slip past patriarchal palisades; thus, “prohibitions on women’s
relationship to public writing did not necessarily effect their silence, but rather provoked them
into ‘complex forms of negotiation and compromise,’” she explains by way of Ann Rosalind
Jones (283). Wroth’s particular poetic form of negotiation, as I will discuss in this chapter, relies
heavily on the paradox and protection of the miniature. This was not overlooked by her
contemporaries; Wall recounts how John Chamberlain, the Early Modern commentator known for
his historically significant letters, “complained about the license [Wroth] took with her speech …
She ‘takes great libertie or rather licence to traduce whom she please,’ he protested, ‘and thinks
she daunces in a net.’ ‘To daunce in a net’ meant to render oneself invisible, and thus
Chamberlain expressees his specific irritation that Wroth believed herself free to speak her mind
publicly and escape repercussions” (283). Wroth’s interest in the invisible—the infinitesimal—
did indeed allow her to slip past the usual censors, to cross the usual boundaries.
As Josephine Roberts explains in her introduction to her edition of The Poems of Lady
Mary Wroth, Wroth is notable even among other women writers of the time for daring to
compose outside of the acceptable boundaries of religious writing. In fact, “Lady Mary emerges
alone among her contemporary women writers in creating a complete English sonnet sequence
and in leaving behind a varied collection of lyric verse” (58). As a woman in the courtly eye,
Lady Mary Wroth’s verse was subject to particular scrutinies. Was she upholding the traditional
virtues of the female sex in her writing? What subjects could she talk about publicly? How
carefully did she tread the line between “wit” and “blasphemy”? Many critics have noted how
bold her work is in terms of not playing by the rules—as the first female author in England of an
extended fiction work, she refused to follow other respected female writers who sensibly stuck to
translations of the Bible or religious verse. Furthermore, she flaunted her relationship with

80
William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, in front of the eyes of the public; her prose romance The
Countesse of Mountgomeries Urania was removed from stores less than a year after it appeared in
1621, likely due to apparent similarities between the events depicted and actual occurrences in the
Jacobean Court. A subversive woman in both her life and her writing, it makes sense that her
pursuit of the infinite would also be a subversive one; her crown of sonnets in Pamphilia to
Amphilanthus provides a concentrated opportunity to analyze the ways she seeks the very large
by way of the very small.
A corona in its simplest form usually consists of seven sonnets, intertwined by linking
lines: the last line of the first sonnet is the first line of the second sonnet, and so on. The final line
of the seventh sonnet is also the first line of the initial sonnet, thus completing the circle—if you
were to cut the sonnets out of a manuscript and tape them together at slight angles (overlapping
the repeated lines when necessary), you would actually end up with a physical circle, a crown
made of words to place on someone’s head. Lady Mary Wroth’s “A Crown of Sonnets Dedicated
to Love” (a 14-sonnet sequence) paces its circle in an attempt to locate the infinitesimal. Spiraling
within ever-contracting enclosures, Wroth guides her pen towards the gaps in the system, the
middle of her crown’s gaping O, where she might successfully fall through to a “little infinity.”
Wroth’s search for the infinite is restricted by the too-finite world into which both she and
her female characters have been herded. Even Pamphilia, Wroth’s female protagonist, is bound
by social expectations; in Urania, Pamphilia—a writer of verse—nevertheless buries her verse in
the ground, creating what Bernadette Andrea calls a “central paradox” in the work:
even as [Pamphilia’s] poem is preserved at the metanarrative level, thus preventing
her erasure as the Urania's prototypical woman writer, the local narrative framing
her poem reinscribes the contained position of the woman writer in the romance ...

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She may write, but only from the limits of her own room; she may preserve her
writing, but only within the confines of her own mind. (335)
It is mathematically possible, however, to use limits as a means of approaching infinity and
escaping the boundaries of an inscribed world, a strategy that Wroth’s crown of sonnets employs.
The corona itself is an inset in a larger sonnet cycle, Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, whose
characters are drawn, in turn, from the pages of Urania. “A Crown of Sonnets Dedicated to Love”
is thus a circle within a cycle, which spins out of an invented world—an invented world existing
within a mind that is, itself, encased in a female body, which is trapped in a room, which is
located in a community and a political society with very strict regulations on the abilities of
women to act. This circumscription is precisely imitative of the way their patriarchal society
attempted to contain early modern women writers—Wall points out that the “unstable speaking
position” of women writers like Wroth can be chalked up to their “culturally circumscribed
subject position” (287). Such cultural enclosure was not merely metaphorical; there was in fact a
tradition of what has been called “closet writing,” as many women had to literally shut
themselves up in small, enclosed spaces in order to express their opinions in writing. Margaret
Ezell notes that though this term is “sometimes used as a dismissive adjective of women’s writing,
such ‘closet writing’ needs to be reconsidered,” and she emphasizes the “importance of the closet
as a feminine site of authorship” (80). Is it any wonder, then, that Wroth and her Pamphilia fall
naturally into a quest for the infinitesimal?
Fittingly, “A Crown of Sonnets Dedicated to Love” opens with Pamphilia trapped. “In
this strang labourinth how shall I turne?” (P77; 1) she asks. Her movements are restricted—she is
literally enclosed inside the walls of a maze. Referring back to the diagram above, the bubble
representing the “act of writing” does indeed lead Wroth into a spiraling maze, one in which

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“Wayes are on all sids while the way I miss” (P77; 2). At the end of the first sonnet, Pamphilia
resolves to “leave all, and take the thread of love” (P77; 14) as a means of finding her way out of
the maze. But we already know, from the moment the sequence is identified as a crown of sonnets,
that this thread will end up looping back on itself. Although her uncle, Philip Sidney (whose
“Astrophil and Stella” serves as a model for “Pamphilia to Amphilanthus”), left his embedded
crown of sonnets unfinished, Wroth completes hers—which means that, at the end of the
fourteenth sonnet, Pamphilia is back where she started: “In this strange labourinth how shall I
turne?” (P90; 14) And within this infinite loop, Wroth has cunningly created spaces through
which she (and her female readers) could fall, tumbling down and down and down, traveling
suddenly among like-minded quarks and other quantum matter.
Much of the scholarship on this crown of sonnets comments on the sequence’s obvious
omissions; chief among Wroth’s elisions is her near-complete exclusion of the male beloved from
the verse. Mary Moore highlights the most obvious instance of erasure or emptiness in the
sequence, the peculiar elision of Amphilanthus himself: “Wroth’s absent beloved occupies a more
substantial than usual gap … He never appears descriptively, as in the blazons of male sonneteers,
a kind of poem that clearly can be adapted to the female poet’s purposes. Nor does Wroth’s
beloved become narrative presence, punning name, visual icon” (114). Wendy Wall sees absence
itself as “the central force in the sequence,” seeing “the speaker’s silence about Amphilanthus” as
just one incarnation of a more general obsession with restriction and silence:
Her poetry self-consciously meditates on the dilemma of what cannot be said. The
sequence's intensification of the theme of negation … calls attention to the violent
omissions evident in her own writing. As readers, we are directed not only to discover and
give voice to silences within the work, but also to understand how silence, absence, and
vacancy themselves define both text and speaking subject. (335)

Wall is one of many scholars interested in how Pamphilia to Amphilanthus seems to shun the

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substantive physical world; Elizabeth Hanson, too, comments on Wroth’s aversion to the tangible.
She notes, “Pamphilia to Amphilanthus does not merely lack incident but insistently thematizes
and even celebrates negative states: absence, darkness, sleep, isolation, and immobility. The
speaker firmly brackets off the social world from the scene of her experience” (183). In my own
process of reading and re-reading Wroth’s corona, I have come to see Wroth’s interest in
omission as less an obsession with complete absence and more a pursuit of some point that,
though it may appear to be “nothing,” is actually a very powerful and dense “something”—a
quantum particle, a fragment of strange matter. I have also become interested in the formal ways
Wroth pursues this complex infinitesimal—in how the “gaps” in her corona extend beyond
Amphilanthus’ absence and into the language itself.
Wroth’s poetry is notable for its syntactical complexity—a complexity that occasionally
extends to the point of obscurity. In fact, there is a frequently-revived debate among scholars of
early modern poetry over whether Wroth’s poetry is deserving of scholarly study or is, in fact,
just bad.
31
Are her stylistic peculiarities intentional or the mark of a poor writer? It is my opinion
that, deliberate or not, Wroth’s formal choices force the reader to think on a quantum scale. She
disassembles the macroscopic world so elegantly and completely that it is nearly impossible to
read her verse without contemplating the miniscule components of things rather than the things
themselves. Hanson’s analysis of the second sonnet in the corona, for example, hones in on its
extreme use of synecdoche in its “typically Petrarchan fetishization of a pair of ‘dear eyes’ … But

31
Elizabeth Hanson’s article, cited above, firmly takes the side that Wroth’s work is not worth studying for its artistic
merits—she says that “much of Mary Wroth’s poetry is indeed boring (especially when read at any length), and that
this quality constitutes an aesthetic limitation.” However, she believes that a “serious and detailed consideration” of
Wroth’s writing is important in order to attempt to understand how the early modern female social experience may
have forced women to produce works that are less than brilliant. There are many others, though, who would object to
this characterization of Wroth (myself among them). I do agree with Hanson that it is “normativizing” and
academically troubling to simply make a claim that all early modern women’s writings are “strategic, revealing
techniques for inserting the female voice into the resistant masculine field of literary discourse” (171-2); however, I
think it is just as normativizing and troubling to dismiss all early modern women’s writings as “boring” and refuse to
consider that any of them may in fact be consciously negotiating the gender minefields of the time.

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the fetishization is so complete that we haven’t a clue who, if anyone, they belong to. In the third
sonnet the speaker marks out a position for the beloved with demonstrative pronouns and body
parts, but refuses to organize these materials into a person” (185). This apparent resistance to
macroscopic organization is exactly what we see when examining matter under a microscope: a
mass of individual cells and particles that, studied at this scale, conceal the means by which they
in fact comprise large-scale organisms and function instead as strange and lovely instances of
biological art.
Such displacement of the big picture by strange particles following their own set of rules
also asserts itself throughout “A Crown of Sonnets” in a mechanical way. Hanson scrutinizes the
verse’s “displacement of narrative by conceit,” noting that this strategy is evident “in the
syntactical difficulties which many of the poems present, where the Petrarchan vocabulary seems
to come unmoored from grammar, making it impossible to figure out who is doing what to whom”
(186). Wroth’s refusal to hue to grammatical logic manifests itself most obviously in the corona’s
transitions from one sonnet to the next. Most coronas choose ending lines for their sonnets that
can function as stand-alone sentences, thus making it easy for them to do double-duty as both
concluding and inaugural lines. However, Wroth’s linking lines frequently begin mid-thought;
though they make perfect syntactical sense when they first appear as the last line of a sonnet, their
repetition as the first line of the next sonnet creates an interesting dilemma. Take, for example,
the transition from Sonnet 1 to Sonnet 2:
Yett that which most my troubled sence doth move
Is to leave all, and take the thread of love.

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2.
Is to leave all, and take the thread of love
Which line straite leads unto the soules content
Where choys delights with pleasures wings doe move … (P77; 13-14, P78; 1-3)
What event occurs in the space between these two sonnets? While the “thread” of referents holds
taut in the last two lines of Sonnet 1, the disorienting opening of Sonnet 2 with the now-context-
less “Is” creates both a disjunction in meaning and a confusion in continuity. To read this without
feeling lost in a maze yourself, it is necessary to close the gap between the poems and read the
new “sentence” straight through: “Yett that which most my troubled sence doth move / Is to leave
all, and take the thread of love, / Which line straite leads unto the soules content …” But such a
reading is mistaken. We cannot jettison the period purposefully placed at the end of Sonnet 1, nor
can we ignore the hole between those poems. Rather, we must incorporate the gap into both our
experience of the reading and our understanding of the poem’s carefully perforated construction.
The transition between Sonnets 1 and 2 is not an anomaly or a mistake; it seems to be a
compositional strategy, as Wroth replicates this syntactical division between Sonnets 3 and 4; 4
and 5; 8 and 9; 9 and 10; 10 and 11; 11 and 12; and, finally, 13 and 14.
The twists of Sonnets 11 and 12 are especially interesting to look at, as these poems frame
their own representations of spiraling processes. Sonnet 11 opens with the “Unprofitably pleasing,
and unsound” image of heaven giving “liberty to frayle dull earth / To bringe forth plenty that in
ills abound / Which ripest yett doe bring a sertaine dearth” (P87; 1-4). Looking back at the
previous sonnet, it seems that Wroth is referring not to the actual abundance of poisons, molds
and fungi on the earth—“plenty that in ills abound”—but is speaking metaphorically of the
grotesque growth of false love. Her next section teems with spirals that are both life-threatening

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(implying a certain end) and yet still infinite:
A timeles, and unseasonable birth
Planted in ill, in wurse time springing found,
Which hemlock like might feed a sick-witts mirthe
Wher unruld vapors swimm in endles rounde … (P87; 5-8)
The “birth” of this false love—of the “wantones,” “wrongers,” “impostures, and alone /
Maintainers of all follyes ill begunn” (P86; 10-12)—is both timeless and unseasonable. Though it
cannot be traced back to a specific conception, it nevertheless will always occur at the wrong
place in the circle, for this is a cycle we do not want, a type of enclosing process that cancels
life’s—and love’s—continuous loop. Like hemlock (which often grows in water), the infection of
the untrue will “swimm in endles rounde” in the blood, circling through the body to “feed” the
organs with “unruld vapors.”
Wroth’s interest in contagion here also betrays an interest in the infinitesimal; early
atomists and natural philosophers spent much time trying to uncover the invisible causes of
infectious disease. Wroth, born in 1587, would have been very familiar with the way illness hops
from one person to the next without any observable cause by the time she published the Urania in
1621, and may even have overheard or discussed theories of contagion; Catherine Wilson
explains that “outbreaks of bubonic plague were severe in Europe in the first half of the
seventeenth century and gave rise to a body of interpretive literature of medical and philosophical
interest” (141). Traditional natural philosophy in the early modern period held that disease was a
result of an imbalance of humors in the individual, or otherwise resulted from the sick person’s
own behavior (overindulgence, stress, etc.). But this belief was challenged by iterations of the
plague, as it could not explain “an illness that was not only strikingly nonselective, affecting

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young and old, male and female, workers and the idle rich alike, but was sudden, violent, and
uniform in its manifestations” (Wilson 141). Naturally, those looking for an explanation turned to
the new microscopes and theories of the infinitesimal for possible answers.
By 1650, the increasing use of microscopes and a revival of atomic theory led several
natural philosophers to ascribe contagion to sources invisible to the human eye, but nevertheless
very real. One common theory was that “animalcula” or tiny, self-generating insects were the
cause of disease; August Hauptmann published such a theory in 1650, stating that “[V]ery minute
and almost invisible animalcules are the cause of all deaths in men and animals. The creatures are
minute wormlets beyond the reach of the unaided senses” (qtd. in Wilson 155). Eight years later,
Athanasius Kircher published his own animalculist tract, Scrutinium physico-medicum, in which
he argues that all substances in nature “exhale certain effluvia composed of extremely minute
invisible corpuscles,” which can be beneficial to the human body, have no effect, or act
destructively on the system (qtd. in Wilson 156-7). Surely these effluvia and Wroth’s vapors
share something essential. Indeed, Henry Power’s 1664 Experimental Philosophy in three books
zeroes in on a pond similar to Wroth’s imagined body of water; after observing what he deems
“pond mites” through a microscope, Power concludes that “not onely the water, but the very Air
itself, may certainly at some times and seasons be full of Living creatures; which must be, most
probably, when great putrefactions reign therein, as in the Plague-time especially.”
32
(Water was
an especially fruitful subject in the quest to see the invisible—it was microscopic analysis of rain
water that led Leeuwenhook to inform the Royal Society in 1676 that he had discovered “living
Atoms” [qtd. in Wilson 193].) Though she may not have been aware of the scientific
investigations into what would eventually be called “germs”—indeed, the above-cited

32
Quoted in Wilson 157-8. Wilson notes “With his telescope he thought he could see, on some days, ‘a tremendous
Motion and Agitation of rowling fumes and strong Atoms in the air.’”

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explorations of infection post-date her sonnet sequence—it does not seem coincidental that Wroth
zeroes in on invisible spirits to circulate her argument, spearheading her own poetic investigation
of the miniature.
33

This investigation, like those led by natural philosophers, is extremely interested in
peering inside the body to determine how sensation moves through it. The hemlock’s vapors
swim both in its source water and within the body’s hydraulic system. Sonnet 4 speaks of the
“pierc[ing of] your tender hart,” Sonnet 7 sees the injunction to “nurse [Cupid’s] longings” (a
movement of fluids within the body), and Sonnet 8 commands the reader to “butt chastly lett your
passions move”—again, referring to a circulating motion that occurs within. The move from
Sonnet 11 to Sonnet 12 both opens up another syntactical gap and evokes an inner spiraling
motion:
O noe lett love his glory have and might
Bee given to him who triumphs in his right.

12.
Bee given to him who triumphs in his right
Nor vading bee, butt like those blossooms fayre
Which fall for good, and lose theyr coulers bright
Yett dy nott, butt with fruite theyr loss repaire

33
In any case, there were inquiries into the microscopic before the microscope; the ancient Roman scholar Marcus
Terentius Varro in his De re rustica warned that “precautions must be taken in the neighborhood of swamps …
because there are bred certain minute creatures which cannot be seen by the eyes, which float in the air and enter the
body through the mouth and nose and these cause serious diseases” (qtd. in Wilson 148).

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Soe may love make you pale with loving care
When sweet injoying shall restore that light … (P87; 13-14, P88; 1-6)
The image of the flowers fading and falling, only to be replaced by fruits, is a visible metaphor
for the cycle that Wroth describes as taking place within the body of the object of love. Just as the
flowers “lose theyr coulers bright,” so does the onset of love “make you pale,” as your blood
literally drains from your face, your veins contracting, seemingly inching farther away from the
surface of your skin. But love’s “sweet injoying shall restore that light”—as you become wedded
to another, as love’s power “joine[s] two harts as in one frame to move” (P82; 3), your circulation
will return to normal and create a flush that spreads beneath the flesh.
Wroth’s inward spiral—her honeycombed circle full of empty cells promising an escape
into the “little infinity”—may cycle on without a clear escape from the maze, but leaves open the
promise of a collapsing release. The hole where Amphilanthus should be, the syntactically
troubling spaces between many of the sonnets, and her “absent articles and personal pronouns …
create gaps in meaning” (Moore 115). Though I have been exploring only the gaps in “A Crown
of Sonnets,” Wroth’s entire body of work is shot through with them. In fact, her Urania (which
contains Pamphilia to Amphilanthus) is notably “unfinished,” ending with a grammatical
cliffhanger: “Pamphilia is the Queene of all content; Amphilanthus joying worthily in her; And [.]”
(U 13-14). I place the term “unfinished” in scare quotes, because this “And” is surely not an error
or lapse in composition, but rather a conscious syntactical move on Wroth’s part—the
(unpublished) second part of the Urania begins by repeating this “And,” making the two halves
of this work analogous to two linked sonnets. Without the second part, though, the dangling
conjunction acts as another means of opening up a fissure in the text, of seeking a way through to
an otherwise invisible infinity. Colleen Ruth Rosenfeld, in her exploration of Wroth’s syntactical

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oddities, notes that Wroth’s “And” “propels her narrative beyond the centripetal tension of its
estranged central couple … exceed[ing] the finality of the union between Pamphilia and
Amphilanthus” (1049). Fittingly, she calls this move “a version of Spenserian endlessness”
(1049).
This “And” is not only representative of Wroth’s syntactical prolapses, but also acts as an
instance of the other formal peculiarity about Wroth’s verse—her punctuation. Like Emily
Dickinson, Wroth’s strange choices when it comes to punctuating her verse have often been
“cleaned up” or “standardized” by editors and publishers; however, it is important to examine her
original manuscripts and think about what these stylistic choices reveal. In the chapter of her
introduction entitled “The Editorial Procedure,” Josephine Roberts discusses variations between
the poet’s manuscript and the printed text. She notes that
the most significant area in which the accidentals depart from the author’s own is that of
punctuation. Unlike Lady Mary Wroth’s very light pointing of her autograph manuscripts,
including the Folger copy of the sonnet sequence, the punctuation in the 1621 text is
extremely heavy. Nearly every line has some type of strong punctuation, such as the
period or semicolon. Often the heavy pointing in the 1621 text violates the enjambment of
the poet’s lines. (73)
That the printers felt the need to impose such punctuation on Wroth’s lines, to disrupt the flow of
her poems, indicates that the continuity she was interested in displaying in her work was
particularly uncomfortable for others (especially, perhaps, for male others). That the lines she
wished to draw were perpetuated by infinitesimals that others would rather eliminate with a
period or semicolon than acknowledge and embrace.
Even Roberts herself can’t resist “cleaning up” some of Wroth’s strange decisions; she

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says “I have tried to follow Lady Mary’s punctuation whenever possible,” and yet goes on to
explain that
In the Folgers manuscript she occasionally used the semicolon followed by the virgule as
final punctuation to the poem (; /). This practice is also adopted in some of the poems
contained in the Newberry manuscript, and in each case I have substituted a period as end
punctuation. Wherever punctuation is missing at the conclusion of a poem, I have silently
supplied the period. (74)
Though these may seem like small, standard changes, the replacement of open-ended,
nonstandard punctuation with the decisive finality of the period creates a significant alteration in
the feel and meaning of Wroth’s lines. (Roberts also notes that she has replaced Wroth’s
occasional “reversed semicolons”—“a mark of punctuation indicating an emphatic pause”—with
standard semicolons [74].) The semicolon followed by the virgule is an especially fascinating
choice, both conceptually and visually; more than a caesura, this double punctuation mark would
seem to indicate a hiatus of sorts, a recess in thought through which microscopic connotations
might bubble up, a visual mark of an invisible world waiting beneath or behind the text. From a
contemporary perspective, it is also difficult not to look at this construction— ; / —and see a
winking, uncertain emoticon. (When the virgule is used as a mouth for emoticons, it indicates
skepticism, annoyance, discomfort, or hesitance.) It’s as though Wroth is poking fun at us,
mocking us a bit in our uneasiness with her refusal to play by the rules and admit a finite marking
into her infinite verbal world. It need hardly be said that the insertion of periods where Wroth
initially had no punctuation at all alters the reader’s interpretation of Wroth’s writing, allowing a
feeling of security and enclosure where there ought to be a frightening drop into the void. And
though much of my interpretation of Wroth’s text relies on metaphorical voids, she left literal

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holes in her texts as well, most notably in the second part of the Urania, which “shows her
interest in exploring the mind under states of extreme pressure” (Roberts 52). This second part of
Wroth’s extended prose romance was never published, and was left unfinished—though, as
hinted at above, “unfinished” is a tricky category when it comes to Wroth’s work.
34

Unsurprisingly, perhaps “the manuscript contains several blanks for poems which were never
included” (Roberts 52).
The crown of sonnets in Pamphilia to Amphilanthus ends, of course, where it began—in
the strange labyrinth, with Pamphilia wondering which way to turn. As my abbreviated thoughts
on “A Crown of Sonnets Dedicated to Love” above may indicate, it is nearly impossible to
connect the dots winding through Wroth’s stanzas to form a continuous and “readable” path
through this verbal maze. One could, perhaps, say that “We can discern a point of departure and a
point of arrival, but we cannot always infer that there was a definite route connecting them”
(Davies and Brown 7). This quotation, however, is not pulled from an analysis of Wroth’s text,
but from a description of one of the (many) difficulties of quantum mechanics: the inability to
ever truly pin down an electron’s path through space. Interference patterns, uncertainty,
infinitesimal particles, chaos … the dormant quantum mechanics of Wroth’s poetry lies in wait on
the page for a reader to choose to descend into it blindly.

34
Certainly the first part of the Urania was “finished” in the sense of being ready to publish, but “unfinished” in the
sense of both plot and literal sentence structure. How “finished” Wroth wanted the second part to be, we can only
guess at—but it would be a mistake to assume that something even as basic as having a complete sentence at the end
of the manuscript makes it “finished” for Wroth.

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II. WE WANT PEOPLE TO HAVE A CENTRE

Lady Mary Wroth was, of course, not alone in her plight as an early modern woman
looking for slyly acceptable ways in which to assert her voice, invisible pathways through space.
Margaret Cavendish, who was born two years after the first part of Wroth’s Urania came into
print, was also an outspoken, groundbreaking female writer. She is perhaps of especial
significance to this dissertation because of her interest in science and her novel The Blazing
World, which has a legitimate claim to be among the first few “science fiction” novels ever
published.
As mentioned above, many interpretations of the Urania zero in on the plot’s similarities to
certain events in Wroth’s own life and in the Jacobean court. Wroth’s decision to disguise the
autobiographical elements of her story with a fictional veil presages Cavendish’s similar authorial
choice in The Blazing World, in which an invented version of Cavendish appears as a character,
breaking the fourth wall of the text. It is both interesting and germane that one of the
distinguishing qualities of this work is “its privileging of possible futures, symbolized by the
infinite number of new worlds which can be created by any individual imagination” (Williams
175). However, I want to turn here to her 1656 autobiographical work, A True Relation of my
Birth, Breeding, and Life, originally published as an addendum to her collection Natures Pictures
Drawn by Fancies Pencil to the Life. In A True Relation, Cavendish steps away from fiction’s
more “protected” form of autobiographical writing to speak openly and in the first person about
her experiences. As Gweno Williams observes, Cavendish’s text provides “a remarkable amount
of frank self-analysis, as Cavendish discusses in some detail her temperament, her fears, her
health, her diet, her moods, her handwriting, her occupations and her ambitions, making her

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memoir one of the most self-revelatory pieces of life-writing produced by any woman of the
period” (168). Nevertheless, this frankness is not as straightforward as it may initially seem.
Cavendish’s works betray her understanding of the “self” as a shifting, blurry entity whose
borders are porous, and her very emphatic insistence on the “absolute veracity of her narrative”
(seen even in the title of the memoir—a “True Relation”—a distinction that seems curious for the
author to have to make) may in fact “betray an awareness that the relationship between fact and
fiction is rather more complicated than she is willing to admit” (Williams 168).
Cavendish’s memoir, of course, discloses much less than it pretends to—there are strange
gaps and erasures in her account of herself and her life—“blanks” that should seem familiar to
readers of Lady Mary Wroth. While she felt free to write the fictional version of herself as a
woman who was reaching for Big Infinity as well as Small Infinity
35
, it is notable that her more
upfront, “candid” memoir sees her limited in her scope to the infinitesimal—to, like Wroth, the
invisible wells through which she might descend into a hidden expanse. Cavendish signals the
careful reader to question how “true” her True Relation actually is by leaving pointed and suspect
omissions in her retelling of impersonal historical events; for example, she dispatches with the
execution of Charles I through a vague allusion dropped into the middle of a paragraph about her
mother:
She was of a grave Behaviour, and had such a Magestick Grandeur, as it were continually
hung about her, that it would strike a kind of awe to the beholders, and command respect
from the rudest, I mean the rudest of civiliz’d people, I mean not such Barbarous people,
as plundered her, and used her cruelly, for they would have pulled God out of Heaven, had
they had power, as they did Royaltie out of his Throne: also her beauty was beyond the
ruin of time … (qtd. in Bowerbank and Mendelson 48)

35
A section of The Blazing World deals specifically with the microscopic—Cavendish, of course, was very interested
in contemporary scientific discoveries and trends. She uses the Empress’s imaginary new society to introduce the
Empress (and, by extension, the readers) to the wonders of microscopes, which “never delude, but rectify and inform
[the] senses; nay, the world … would be but blind without them, as it had been in former ages before those
microscopes were invented.” In the next paragraph, the members of the society show the Empress a piece of charcoal
beneath a microscope, which is revealed to contain “an infinite multitude of pores, some bigger, some less; so close
and thick, that they left but very little space betwixt them to be filled with a solid body.” (143)

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I can’t help but be reminded of Peter Falk’s rambling detective in Columbo, whose deliberately
idle chatter disguises an acute mind working constantly but invisibly. Cavendish is no absent-
minded gossip; she knows exactly what she is doing, and her narrative strategy in this work is
exactly that: a strategy.
A strategy, perhaps, that borrows much from quantum mechanics. Cavendish’s distrust of
personal narrative—her belief that the attempt to disclose a soul in writing, even if that writing is
the soul’s own, often veered into fictional territory (she jokingly refers to Plutarch’s Lives in a
letter as “Plutarch’s lies” (qtd. in Williams 68)—reveals a discomfort with the idea that our paths
through life are linear, finite, and easily compressed into words. She would have been thrilled
with the revelation that “quantum particles do not have well-defined paths in space”—that each
particle “somehow possess[es] an infinity of different paths, each of which contributes to its
behavior” (Davies and Brown 8-9). Indeed, this scientific truth complements her narrative in A
Blazing World, as does Bohr’s idea that “the existence of the world ‘out there’ is not something
that enjoys an independence of its own, but is inextricably tied up with our perceptions of it”
(Davies and Brown vii). Physics, according to Bohr, “tells us not about what is, but what we can
say to each other concerning the world” (Davies and Brown 11)—a statement that perhaps goes
far in explaining the natural camaraderie between poetry and physics. After all, what is poetry but
an attempt to explore not what is, but what we can say about our experiences, our emotions, our
surroundings, our histories?
Anne Carson, certainly, would agree. Her Nox, though written nearly three and a half
centuries after Wroth and Cavendish lived, swims in the same strange soup as Pamphilia to
Amphilanthus and A True Relation. An autobiographical work of poetry from a writer who is
relatively reticent about her personal life, Nox simultaneously discloses and encloses, reveals and

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conceals. It acknowledges, like A True Relation, that perhaps the “truth” is a flexible category. It
confirms, like quantum mechanics, that there is an essential “fuzziness” to our existence that can
never be set in perfect definition. “We want other people to have a centre, a history, an account
that makes sense,” Carson says. “We want to be able to say This is what he did and Here’s why.
It forms a lock against oblivion. Does it?” (3.3) Nox is troubled, obsessed with the idea of
history, of why and how we tell each other these stories of the “past,” of how the past bleeds into
and suffuses the present. Of our desperate need to “understand” each other and our futile attempts
to do so. In particular, Carson is trying to understand and process the death of her brother Michael,
who ran away from home in 1978 to evade a jail sentence and resurfaced decades later, only to
die before she could fly to Europe to see him again, to learn who this person had become, who he
had always been. In a 2010 New Yorker review of the book, Meghan O’Rourke notes that “The
details” (of Michael’s life and death) “are affecting, but [Carson] doles them out sparingly. ‘Nox’
shifts between the analytic and the lyrical” (“The Unfolding”). Carson gives us enough to satisfy
our need for a grasp concrete occurrences, while leaving enough gaps in her account to convey to
us the invisibly infinite reality of grief.
In this, she shows herself a kin to Cavendish, who could very well have written Nox
herself had she come along a few centuries later. After all, one of Cavendish’s curious near-
elisions in A True Relation involves her brother, who was executed after the siege of Colchester
in 1648. Her account of his death is “at once understated and valorized” (Williams 171): “my
brother Sir Charles Lucas … being shot to death for his Loyall Service, for he was most
constantly Loyall and Couragiously active, indeed he had a superfluity of courage” (qtd. in
Bowerbank and Mendelson 49). As Williams notes, “this rather evasive account of her brother’s
death seems all the more emotionally charged for being so brief” (171). Indeed, it is widely

97
accepted that the death of Cavendish’s brother, coming at the same time as news of the
desecration of her mother’s and sister’s graves, had a deep and lasting impact on Cavendish’s life.
Anna Battigelli recounts the famed physician Sir Theodore Mayerne’s concern over Cavendish’s
mental health after these events, noting that his belief
that her mental health was not sufficiently robust to withstand the burden of raising
children suggests that the news of her brother’s execution and the desecration of her
mother’s and sister’s graves must have been debilitating. Her health deteriorated, and a
year later, in response to further queries from Newcastle, Mayerne wrote again, expressing
concern not so much about “the nature of the Disease, which is Rebellious, as for the
disposition of the Patient.” In fact, Cavendish seems never to have fully recovered …
(Battigelli 44)
It is undeniably interesting that an event with such a large emotional impact on Cavendish
receives so little ink in her “memoir.” It seems evident that, in A True Relation, “[t]here is always
some ritualized distance between author and reader”—a statement once again made by O’Rourke
about Carson, but which could apply equally to Cavendish.

III. SOMETHING SMALL AND DELICATE

How is this ritualized distance navigated? What kinds of lines—continuous or
otherwise—are drawn between the text and the reader, the author and the text, the past and the
present? As discussed above, many of Wroth’s formal strategies are syntactical and Cavendish
plays with shades of narrative disclosure; Carson combines these tactics in Nox, which is both
autobiographical elegy and a translation of a classical Roman elegy, Catullus 101—an elegy for

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the poet’s brother. (Notably, as Carson tells us, “Catullus wrote poem 101 for his brother who
died in the Troad. Nothing at all is known of the brother except his death.” How appropriate to
her situation—and to Cavendish’s!—this not-knowingness, this gap in the history, this cultural
amnesia.) Carson is thus simultaneously participating in a history of elegy, situating herself in a
centuries-wide crowd of brother-mourners, and revealing through her writing the ways in which
the past and the present still touch each other—the ways, to return to Serres, in which the time we
are living on is not borrowed, but crumpled. Carson’s decision to place herself in the historical
succession of translators is particularly interesting from a gendered perspective, as “[o]ne of the
more common modes of women’s writing [in the early modern period] was verse translation,
especially of biblical and religious texts” (Price 287). Wroth’s divergence from religious writing
and translation marked her desire to transcend and transgress, but she did do several translations
of her own, and translation in general provided a way for women writers to assert their voices
without appearing to; though “[o]n the surface translation might be regarded as a means of
cloaking a ‘female’ voice … [it] could also comprise significant innovation as a result of
adaptations of style, form, and focus” (Price 287). It could even be possible to see Pamphilia to
Amphilanthus as a very innovative “translation” of a variety of Petrarchan sonnet sequences into a
female voice.
Metaphorically, of course, there is much to mine from the concept of translation. How do
we attempt to “translate” the lives and words of others into our own personal languages? How do
we “interpret” past events and imitate them through present expressions and actions? Even more
significantly, how can we see “translation” as a process at work, invisibly, inside both language
and the human body—working infinitesimally to expand and replicate life? The word “translation”
means something different for biologists than it does for Carson or Wroth; it refers, of course, to

99
part of the process of gene expression, during which amino acids are ordered to fold into a protein,
thus ‘translating’ genetic information from a nucleotide sequence to a protein sequence. Henry S.
Turner clocks the use of this term in his reflection on the prevalence of literary and linguistic
vocabulary in science:
… the notion of ‘code’ joins a cluster of concepts, including that of the ‘program,’
of alphabets, of typeset printing, and of ‘translation,’ whereby the DNA generates
the RNA that carries the information outside the nucleus to generate a new inverse
string of base-pairs, all of which imagine genetic life as a process of copying, self-
duplication, and as so many particular forms of writing. (61)
The accepted analogy between the molecular structures that form the basis of life and the
linguistic structures that form the basis of our communication is not only convenient to this
dissertation, but also reveals something basic and human about the way we attempt to organize
knowledge. Our language imitates genetic processes, our genes pour themselves into linguistic
molds. In Carson’s hands, translation is a decidedly infinitesimal tool.
She begins Nox with a scrap of the Catullus in the original Latin, typed on a yellowed
piece of paper, the ink bleeding where moisture has hit the page: rain? tears? Nox is, in addition to
an elegiac translation and a poetic memoir, a scrapbook of sorts; the accordioned pages carefully
preserve bits of letters, photographs, drawings, etc. that Carson has pulled together to help tell her
brother’s story. The visual element of the book forces the reader to consider issues of collage and
veracity, to contemplate the book as thing and not just thought—Nox possesses an intense
physicality that similar works lack. This physicality, this object-ness, goes a long way towards
marking the work as something that demands to be dealt with as something comprised of atoms
and electrons and dust—of leptons, a term itself descended from ancient language: the Greek

100
word for “something small and delicate,” leptos (Farmelo 369-70). As the book proceeds, Carson
generally uses the left-hand sides of her pages to “translate” the words in the original poem, while
the right-hand sides offer up her own autobiographical content. In this way we waver between
definition and interpretation, and we experience a fragmentation (exaggerated by the collage-like
nature of the book, the jaggedly torn scraps of paper and scribbled notes) that reminds us of the
discontinuity of life. And where there is discontinuity, there is also the infinitesimal.
Carson nurses the broken nature of her text through her approach to the Catullus
translation; she divides and subdivides, breaking the original poem up into discrete units (the
Latin words), then reaching into those units to find smaller and smaller particles of meaning. The
result is an exploding out, a demonstration of the way a microscopic examination of something
can reveal an infinity. From sixty-three words, Carson generates (or, rather, uncovers—the
meanings are dormant inside the original text) pages and pages of lyrical prose. Take Carson’s
breakdown of miseras:
[cognate with MAERO, MAESTUS] (of
a person) that is to be pitied, sad, poor,
wretched, unfortunate, (applied to the
actions of persons in a pitiable state)
attended by misery, grievous,
distressing ; miserrima Dido: most sad
Dido; (in special use) wretched in
health, sick, suffering; (also applied to
those sick in heart); (with ablative of
cause) nocte fratris quam ipso fratre
miserior: made sadder by the brother’s
night than by the brother himself; (of
love) violent, excessive, extravagant;
wretched in one’s social or financial
circumstances; pitiful, mean,

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contemptible (as a term of contempt);
solacium miserum: worthless
consolation; (exclamatory) me miserum
-eram: alas woe is me! (as substantive)
the wretch.
This “definition” (scare quotes, I think, quite necessary) is representative of the other definitions
in Nox: it starts out reading like a legitimately possible dictionary entry, and quickly veers into
poetic territory. The phrases Carson introduces that use the root word are specific to her project,
to this book— nocte fratris quam ipso fratre miserior the most notable here. Nearly every word
in Carson’s translation is meted out a reference to a brother or a reference to night (or both, as in
miseras). The parenthetical phrases act not only as indications of different functions of the Latin
word, but also as signposts for Carson’s descent into the very small—there is no better
punctuation mark than the parenthetical for attempting to signify a delving into, an extraction
from one thing of something smaller. Interestingly, the more Carson explicates a word, the less
clear the original word itself becomes. This peculiar characteristic of her text brings us back to
Bohr’s philosophy—“uncertainty and fuzziness are intrinsic to the quantum world and not merely
the result of our incomplete perception of it” (Davies and Brown 12). The fuzziness of language
is intrinsic to language; it does not resolve itself the closer you look.
Carson’s text, then, not only exists in a quantum state, but actually exalts its quantum
nature. I’d even dare to call it a “quantum system,” as it is undeniably “in a state consisting of a
collection (perhaps infinite in number) of quantum states superimposed” (Davies and Brown 22).
In Carson’s hands, an ancient lexicon substantiates our contemporary theories; each word
contains an infinite multitude of shades of meaning, all coexisting, all collaborating to make the
poem a world in itself, one nearly impossible to get to the bottom of. It is convenient and telling
that the first word of the poem Carson takes on is multas—in (just a slice of) her words,

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“numerous, many, many of, many a; many people, many, many women, the ordinary people, the
many especially in phrase unus de multis: one of many …” The book opens with an example of
the infinitely large inside the infinitely small—a multitude inside a single ancient word. And the
smaller the word, the more there is to unpack. The small articles, the prepositions, the teeny-tiny
bits of word that provide syntactical connective tissue: these little quantum lexical packets yield
the most to Carson’s touch. Her definitions of the Latin per and et extend all the way down the
length of the page, snowballing meaning after meaning, phrase after phrase—
and, and what is
more, too, also; and in fact, and indeed,
and yes, and quite true too! and even, or
rather, and on the contrary, rather than;
well I for my part, and so too …
reaching, eventually, the ever-present night, the night full of stars, the parenthetical night,
signifier of both absence and infinite presence at once—
(adding an
enlargement of the thought) and indeed,
and moreover; (to mark a parenthesis)
and by the way, (et nocte) (you know it
was night)
You know it was night.
The “night” here—nox—is death and absence and future, a nothingness and an
everythingness. Wroth, too, writing centuries before, honed in on night as a significant touchstone
for her work—“[m]ost blessed night” (P65; 1) whose “black Mantle” (P1; 1) Wroth invokes in
the first line of Pamphilia to Amphilanthus. Analyzing Wroth’s counter-intuitive method of
conveying Pamphilia’s emotional journey, Wendy Wall realizes that her “staging is created
largely through terms of negation, as Wroth creates a sphere for Pamphilia that is cast not only as

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private, but as privative. Wroth’s sequence does seem inordinately preoccupied with the two
Petrarchan subjects of absence and night” (331). Though night is the receptacle of the stars—the
vessel for our ability to imagine the infinite beauty of the heavens—it is also metaphorically
associated with subtraction, division. With a breaking down rather than a building up. The act of
dreaming (which is the first act performed in Pamphilia, when sleep “hiere[s]” her senses “[f]rom
knowledg of [her] self”) is itself an act of quantum escape—a chance for the finite mind to slip
through a gap in consciousness and enact otherwise impossible scenarios. Wroth holds this power
of night dear; she calls night a “strang place” in which entities are “changing in an instant space”
(P63; 6, 7)—and yet her Pamphilia is drawn to it, despite its negative connotations, repeatedly
invoking it as a haven of sorts for her love-battered heart. Carson and Wroth’s lines twine
themselves together in this dark ceiling, seeking out the black holes and the entities that appear to
be “nothing” but are, in fact, much more. These women navigate the suspension of the night:
“(with expressions of motion) through, across (a space, mass, surface, etc.), through the middle of
(a number of persons or objects), through, across (a barrier or boundary) … stellae per noctem
visae stars visible at night” (Carson, “per”).
Carson’s book ends with another kind of translation—the translation of her brother’s
funeral service (held in Denmark, his last country of residence). Carson explains,
His widow has given me a translation of the text of the service, which contains a reading
of Romans 8 and a long speech from the priest about dew and Christ and shooting stars
and the merciful palm of God, and then her own words:
I DO NOT WANT TO SAY THAT MUCH ABOUT MICHAEL
YOU ALL KNOW HIM IN DIFFERENT WAYS.
HE AND I LED A TURBULENT LIFE AND HAD
NOISY ARGUMENTS.
NEVERTHELESS WE NEVER DOUBTED OUR

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MUTUAL LOVE AND RESPECT.

AND NOW SOME FOOD FOR THOUGHT.
YESTERDAY YOU CANNOT CHANGE.
TODAY YOU MIGHT ALTER.
TOMORROW DOES NOT GIVE ANY PROMISE

Carson’s transcription of this translation is notable for its lack of end punctuation, recalling
Wroth’s refusal of closure. Michael’s widow’s words contain heavy significance for Carson’s
project—her reluctance to say much about Michael speaking to her belief in the inadequacy of
language, especially when it comes to describing a person, whose “truth” or “thing”-ness can
never truly be pinned down. Whose quantum fuzziness overtakes our attempts to zoom in on
some essential soul. Perhaps we could all be described as mutam—in Carson’s words, “(of an
animal) that can only mutter, inarticulate.”
This fuzziness is demonstrated throughout Nox in Carson’s treatment of the written word,
of recorded quantities. (See fig. 2 below—Nox ends with a literal fuzziness, a blurring-out of the
translation at which Carson has been working so hard to arrive.) The book itself, of course, is “a
Xerox-quality reproduction of a notebook … including text and photographs and letters, pasted-in
inkjet printouts, handwriting, paintings and collage. Nox has no page numbers” (Ratliff). Not only
does having no page numbers make the book very difficult to cite, it also signals to the reader that
Carson is not interested in helping her locate herself precisely in space and time during the
reading experience. Like quantum physics’ tricky subatomic particles, it is impossible to pin
down an exact location in this book—to say, “Oh yes, that was on page 10,” and immediately flip
to a specific reference or definition. Rather, Carson forces you to wade through her accordion-
folded pages without orientation, opening yourself up for uncertainty or misdirection. Her book
shows a general mistrust of quantification (something appropriate for an author searching out the

105
infinitesimal, the immeasurably small); many of her definitions contain references to inaccuracy.
In breaking open ad, Carson includes the clause “(with numbers) roundabout, approximately”;
her work claims, like Wroth’s, an ethos of subtraction: there is always some smaller, more precise
particle to reach. Where we are right now is roundabout. All we can do is continue in this state of
abstulit—“to subtract, to take up (time).” And because precision seems so impossible on a micro-
level, why attempt it at a macro level? Carson’s text is riddled with “mistakes”—typos, missing
parentheses, overlaps of unreadable letter scraps—mistakes which, like Wroth’s dangling “And,”
are so blatant that we can only assume them to be purposeful. In her definition of sunt, she
writers: “to be (a given kind of person or thing); to be the person or thing in question); to be in
effect, be tantamount to; (of words) to be in meaning; hoc est, id est, nox est that is; (with
numerals) to be equal to; make up.” To be equal to. A word that would seem to carry the weight
of numerical precision, of certain identity, of exact meaning—and yet how strange that one
dangling parenthesis following “thing in question,” how exactly perfect. It completely disorients
the reader, forcing her to trace her eyes back over the previous phrases cluttering the page: Did I
miss a parenthesis? Where did that section actually begin?
We are dropped into an invisible but infinite hole. Even as we are trying to be the person
or thing in question we are only always ever in question. The transcript from Michael’s funeral
above also cries out for the privileging of the present moment (it is only today you might alter)—
another way of rejecting linear time, of saying: We don’t know how this life is organized, how
our pasts and our futures connect. All we can know is the present moment, this atomic second,
this infinitesimal slice of a world we are somehow alive in. And that, of course, is more than
enough. The last line of Nox? “He refuses, he is in the stairwell, he disappears.” He disappears.
There are arguments that, on the quantum scale, continuum space and time itself disappears. And

106
yet, as Carson and Cavendish and Wroth have taught us, we know that disappearance is not the
same as erasure. It leaves traces—miniscule but enormous. It leaves us full of emptiness. It pulls
us to the page waterstained and indecipherable, full to the brim of unarticulated meaning.

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fig. 2

(last page of Nox)

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CHAPTER THREE.

THE SELF-REPLICATING POETRY MACHINE:
SPENSER’S “EPITHALAMION” AND INFINITE REGRESS

________________________________

Poems should echo and re-echo against each other. They should create
resonances. They cannot live alone any more than we can … Things fit
together. We knew that—it is the principle of magic. Two inconsequential
things can combine together to become a consequence. This is true of poems
too. A poem is never to be judged by itself alone. A poem is never by itself
alone.

—Jack Spicer in a letter to Robin Blaser (JSV 163)

The working title for this chapter was “The Desire for Infinite Lives,” which I liked because
of that last word. Usually we speak of eternal life, singular. We think about our spirits continuing
on forever in a linear fashion—just in some context other than the earth. This is religion’s
solution to what Shakespeare’s Cleopatra would call our “immortal longings.” And life—both
secular and spiritual—would be easier if we desired only one existence. But we aren’t wired so
conservatively. We get excited about popular sci-fi infinite universe theories that suggest a new
universe may branch off every time we make a decision, generating a world in which we’ve just
made the other choice. Many of us splinter our lives into “public” and “private” sections, and
some even section our private lives into separate and insulated parts, carrying on double or even
triple lives. We live vicariously through our friends and family, through characters in novels,
through TV shows and movies. No number of lives is adequate. We want them all—we want
infinite lives—so unquestionably and impulsively that I would not be surprised if there turned out
to be something biological about this desire.
Think of how human it is to be obsessed with doppelgängers, with doubling, with mirrors.

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The Western world even puts the search for a soul mate in these terms: we are told to seek our
perfect “other half,” the binary opposite that can act as a perfect mirror and counterbalance to our
own one-dimensional lives. And once we do couple up, we are urged—by our friends, our
families, our own biologies—to reproduce. To combine our DNAs and make a new thing that is
both Us and Not Us, that can carry our legacy on after we die, metaphorically and physically.
Eternal life in heaven is not guaranteed, but eternal life in some form on earth can be. Especially
since we know from Zeno’s Paradox that no matter how small the share of our genes gets (1/2,
1/4, 1/8, 1/16 …) it will never be nothing.
This chapter will discuss the poem as offspring—the poem as potential descendent and
generator. For just as the poem provides infinitesimal, microscopic gaps through which the author
can slip and enable an otherwise impossible widening out—a way for the poem and reader to
blow up far bigger than page or context or room would seem to allow—so too can the poem enact
a rippling-outwards. Can act as a link in a chain that creates itself and that has no beginning and
no end.
Each poem is its own Big Bang.
I’ve often heard some variation of the advice, “Don’t become a writer unless you have to—
unless it is the only thing you are passionate about.” This is fair, but something in its formulation
falls short of the reality. The compulsion to write is often less about passion and more about a
twisted survival instinct: We write to keep living. We write because we are afraid of death. We
write because as long as we are writing we are alive, we are staying alive, we are not alone, we
are sowing pieces of ourselves all over pages and keyboards and pencils and screens, we are
refusing to disappear. As humans, we are built to multiply. That’s coded deep inside of us: the
impulse to reproduce, to generate more and more of ourselves. As writers, we transfer some of

110
this impulse onto the page. We think, stupidly, nonsensically, that the things we write may keep
us alive. May act as vessels of our essential identity and hold us there, on the page, forever.
Shakespeare talked about preserving his loved one in his verses, as the below excerpt from
Sonnet 18 exemplifies:
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade
When in eternal lines to time thou growest. (8-12)
And there is something about a sonnet that can act as a cryogenic freeze, that can keep a dead
woman safe in all her Renaissance bloom and beauty for eternity. Something that carries a piece
of its author in the DNA of its lines. Anne Bradstreet saw her book as not only something that
could preserve life, but as something to which she’d actually given life—a child, equal in
character to her other children. Equally in need of clean clothes, nice shoes, a thorough and hot
bath. As the story goes, the 1650 publication of Bradstreet’s book The Tenth Muse was
undertaken by her brother-in-law without her knowledge
⁠36
; the second edition, published six
years after her death in 1678, thus contains a prefatory poem (“The Author To Her Book”) she
wrote expressing her frustration with seeing her “children” put on public display without allowing
their mother to check them over one last time:
Thou ill-formed offspring of my feeble brain,
Who after birth didst by my side remain,
Till snatched from thence by friends, less wise than true,

36
Her brother-in-law, John Woodbridge, wrote a prose preface to the book in which he attests to having gone behind
Bradstreet’s back to publish the manuscript; many scholars discuss Woodbridge’s actions, including Bethany Reid in
her article “ ‘Unfit for Light’: Anne Bradstreet’s Monstrous Birth” in The New England Quarterly 71.4 (1998): 517-
542. See p. 523.

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Who thee abroad, exposed to public view,
Made thee in rags, halting to th' press to trudge,
Where errors were not lessened (all may judge).
At thy return my blushing was not small,
My rambling brat (in print) should mother call,
I cast thee by as one unfit for light,
The visage was so irksome in my sight;
Yet being mine own, at length affection would
Thy blemishes amend, if so I could.
I washed thy face, but more defects I saw,
And rubbing off a spot still made a flaw … (1-14)
Bradstreet was not the only author to make this comparison; Edmund Spenser, writing nearly a
century before Bradstreet, also spoke of his poetic output as genetic offspring. The prefatory
poem to his Shepheardes Calender, “To His Booke,” anticipate more than just the title of
Bradstreet’s poem; he also prefigures her theme in ways that mark this metaphor as something
approaching a trope:
Goe little booke: thy selfe present,
As child whose parent is vnkent:
To him that is the president
Of nobleness and of cheualree, …
And when his honor has thee redde,
Craue pardon for my hardyhedde. (1-4, 11-12)

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If the overlap between Spenser’s and Bradstreet’s poems seems more expected than surprising,
it’s because this metaphor aligns with our own understanding: writing and procreation are
synonymous. With a poem, the author can generate and bear forth something comprised of her
own cells and genes. Though many poems could be read through the lens of their ability to usher
the author into infinite lives, I will take as a representative example Spenser’s celebrated wedding
poem Epithalamion, a poem written before many of the scientific developments and
understandings of the biology of reproduction, and before mathematicians were really thinking
about the mechanics of infinite doubling or the optics of infinite reflection. The poem contains a
host of strange and wonderful complications that anticipate autotrophic replicators, model
autopoiesis—and prove that these strange tendencies really are inherent in nature, showing up in
literature before anyone could really explain what they were doing there.
But it’s impossible to talk about the Epithalamion in a vacuum. This chapter asserts that
many authors are creating texts positioned to self-replicate, thus refusing closure through
twinning, agamogenesis. To speak of a singular, finite text is always to be mistaken. This is
especially true of Spenser, for whom the concept of closure was quite alien—all of Spenser’s
texts ultimately bleed into each other infinitely. But the bigger, scarier truth is that all texts bleed
into each other infinitely: no work of literature is an island. Fragments of texts break off in the
literary blood stream and drift into the cells of other works, out of context but still carrying the
marks of their original incarnation. To write about a text in isolation is a lie; the ways in which
poems, especially, have been set up to double in on themselves and send out echoes and loop
around and stand in front of mirrors makes it vital to speak about them in concert with a wide
range of other things going on around them (and before them, and after them). So this chapter is
about Spenser’s “Epithalamion,” but it is also about Christian Bök’s “Xenotext Project,” Marcel

113
Duchamp’s The Large Glass, A.R. Ammons’s “Reflective.” It is about wanting to live more lives
than you could imagine. It is about resisting the words “The End.”

I. “I NEVER SAW MY CLOCK MAKING BABIES”

In addition to thinking of the poem as “offspring,” I’m contemplating the poem as “self-
replicating machine”—which, once set into motion by the author, can reproduce itself infinitely.
The idea of poem as machine is nothing new; William Carlos Williams famously said that “A
poem is a small (or large) machine made out of words,” and it is common to discuss poems with a
language we usually save for objects assembled from gears and levers. Similarly, we have long
thought about ideal machines as human-like replicators; one of the earliest conversations about
this dates back to the Renaissance. A common anecdote
⁠ has Rene Descartes speaking to his
student, Queen Christina of Sweden, in about 1649, about the idea of the human body as a
machine (see Freitas and Merkle). Christina is said to have responded “How can machines
reproduce themselves?” or, in another version
⁠ of the story, “I never saw my clock making babies”
(Freitas and Merkle). Although the idea of a clock reproducing itself in the mid-17
th
century
seemed fantastical, we can now imagine a world in which such things exist. If there is any
teleology to life, any end-game, it is far more likely to be directed towards reproduction rather
than enlightenment. How absurd is it to suggest that such a goal might be encoded in non-living
things—in abstract objects—in poems, as in human cells? Surely this idea sounds no more absurd
to us than John Conway’s cellular automaton Game of Life
37
would have sounded to Queen

37
The Game of Life is a “cellular automaton” invented by John Conway and first mentioned in a 1970 Scientific
American article. The “game” consists of a collection of cells that follow a set of programmed rules to determine

114
Christina.
Edmund Spenser’s work provides an ideal opportunity for imagining how a self-replicating
poem might behave. Out of all the Early Modern poets, his work might most convincingly be
described as a machine. In fact, Spenser scholarship has emphasized the poet’s interest in
numbers, mathematics, and proportional architecture ever since A. Kent Hieatt’s influential 1960
study Short Time’s Endless Monument: The Symbolism of Numbers in Edmund Spenser’s
“Epithalamion.” Hieatt’s groundbreaking work decodes for the reader the Epithalamion’s
embedded calendrical patterns, laying out a complex design in which each stanza of the poem
correlates to an hour in the day; each of the 365 “long lines” represents a day in the year; and the
progression of the poem parallels (numerically as well as imagistically) the movement of the sun
through the heavens during the summer solstice. Through parts of Hieatt’s argument are overly-
belabored, his observations opened up the field for other scholars interested in approaching
Spenser from a mathematical angle. Spenser criticism has recently illuminated ways in which the
poet’s work contains not only calculated numerological messages, but also displays a thematic
desire for elegant symmetry and mathematical harmony. A cursory search for critical analyses of
Spenser’s work unearths articles with titles such as “ ‘Unity’ and Numbers in Spenser’s
‘Amoretti,’” “Numerical Composition in The Faerie Queene,” “A Numerical Key for Spenser’s
‘Amoretti’ and Guyon in the House of Mammon,” “The Pattern in the Astronomy of Spenser’s
Epithalamion,” and so on.
38
David E. Chinitz’s article “The Poem as Sacrament: Spenser’s
Epithalamion and the Golden Section” extends these numerical analyses in an astronomical
manner; he argues that the proportions of Spenser’s poem imitate both the mathematical golden

whether they will live, die, or multiply. Many consider the Game of Life an early experiment at simulating life
(including self-replication!) through technology.
38
These articles are, respectively, by G.K. Hunter in The Yearbook of English Studies (1975); Alastair Fowler in
Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes (1962); A. Kent Hieatt himself in The Yearbook of English Studies
(1973); and J. C. Eade in The Review of English Studies (1972).

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mean and the structure of the cosmos.
All of these inquiries into Spenser’s mathematical patterning have solidified a general view
of his work as “mechanical” in the sense of being built out of calibrated parts designed with a
specific goal in mind. In fact, this quality is often one of the first characteristics mentioned in
connection with Spenser; biographer Andrew Hadfield highlights the “precision of the numbers”
which acts as “a significant feature of Spenser’s poetry” (SAL 18). And Robert E. Schofield
singles Spenser out when discussing the early modern penchant for calculation in art. He
mentions that “number, ratio and proportion” was used in Early Modern verse
almost as a metaphysical cipher or game, heightening the appreciation of the reader who
held the key or knew the rules. One of the most extraordinary examples of this is Edmund
Spenser’s Epithalamium, or nuptial poem, in which there are twenty-four stanzas, to
correspond to the hours of the nuptial day, and the action of each stanza is appropriate to
its time of day, scaled to the hours of darkness and light computed for the season of the
year at the latitude where the marriage was to occur. (136)
I point these critical analyses out not to tear them down; I agree that Spenser shows a remarkable
attention to mathematical structure and form. The Epithalamium is an “extraordinary example” of
Renaissance number games and mathematical complexity. And I wouldn’t hesitate to compare the
body of Spenser’s work to a machine—but it is not analogous to Queen Christina’s static clock.
To map Spenser’s symbolism point by point onto an astrological chart or a January to December
calendar is to limit the ultimate importance or value of his poetry. Using Spenser’s poems—
especially the Epithalamion—only as a method of marking time is like using a high-end Swiss
Army knife to cut open an instant oatmeal packet. They can certainly operate in this manner, but
it would be a crime to ignore their dozens of other, stranger functions.

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After all, for someone so purportedly obsessed with numerical accuracy, Spenser was
surprisingly unconcerned with solutions or resolutions. A mind as inquisitive as Spenser’s will
inevitably follow the concepts of ratio and proportion towards something more subversive. And if
exact precision was what Spenser was after, poetry would certainly seem a strange and inefficient
means of getting there. Accordingly, the past 30 years or so have seen “a revolution in Spenser
studies” (Maclean and Prescott ix), spearheaded by (largely deconstructionist) scholars interested
in exploring the less algebraic facets of the poet’s work. Readings of Spenser inspired by Derrida
and Lacan focus on the way his poetry “conveys the sense that the protean nature of language
itself is always at issue” (Maclean and Prescott ix) and emphasizes that the experience of reading
Spenser can never be one of comfort; unwieldy subtext is always erupting out of precise rhyme
and meter. So it is logical to allow his work to emerge from its original Renaissance context and
mingle with such seemingly incongruent figures as Marcel Duchamp and Christian Bök. After all,
though our current understanding of “experimental” poetry is formed with an exclusive view of
the contemporary period, there is no doubt that Spenser was an experimental poet. As Andrew
Hadfield notes, “… no one in English literary history made more things new than Spenser. He
invented his own stanza; his own styles of poetic language; the romance-epic, a weird
combination of English, Italian and Classical poetry; wrote strange and misleading commentaries
to his poetry; and was the first poet to write a marriage hymn about his own wedding” (WES). His
stint as E.K. anticipates Nabokov’s Kinberg; his desire to put the self into his poetry in sometimes
unsettling ways—to curve the page and hold it up to his face like some sick funhouse mirror—
shares space with Cindy Sherman’s photographs.
And this experimental streak of Spenser’s isn’t just contained to artistic pursuits. Angus
Fletcher has offered some intriguing thoughts about how the internal and external geometries of

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Spenser’s works prefigure the cutting-edge scientific theories of the contemporary age. He views
the poet through the lens of Complexity Theory, explaining that
Understanding Spenser in relation to Complexity will require us to think about
fundamental questions—for literature, for science, and for their interactions. One
of these fundamentals is the question whether, while literature may never control
our knowledge with the clarity and definition of science, it surely anticipates our
scientific knowledge, helping to advance science into its first merely approximate
or conjectural stage. (2)
Fletcher here outlines one of the primary concerns for this dissertation: the relationship between
literature and science is not binary, but rather approximates two points on one continuous wave.
The stanzas of Spenser’s Epithalamion may anticipate the Gemini pattern
⁠39
in Conway’s cellular
automaton Game of Life, copying itself as it destroys itself, producing replicas across the board.
Before plunging into close reading, it will be helpful to introduce the scientific side of self-
replication. There are naturally-occurring organisms that self-replicate; the most obvious example
of this is DNA, which unwinds its double helix to allow each single strange to act as the template
for a new strand to form. Although individual humans can’t produce identical copies of
themselves, human cells are constantly dividing and multiplying on their own. Viruses, too, can
self-replicate—although rather than using their own materials as a template to copy, they hijack
the reproductive mechanisms of cells they’ve infected. There are non-biological examples of self-
replication, too—think of ripples or waves, which produce copies of themselves in patterns. Of
course, neither these non-biological structures nor our own cells can self-replicate infinitely.
Mutations in DNA are inevitable, and a rock thrown in a pond can only disturb the water around

39
The Gemini Pattern was the first self-replicating mathematical organism discovered in Conway’s Game of Life.
Over the course of 34 million generations, it creates a copy of itself while destroying its parent.

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it within the parameters of air resistance and friction. Perhaps, then, a man-made entity would
have a better chance of perfect self-replication continuing without end.
The modern search for a self-replicating machine is usually dated from John von Neumann’s
thought experiments in the late 1940s. As the technology necessary for actual construction of
such an object hadn’t yet been developed (DNA’s role in heredity and genetics had not even been
discovered), von Neumann’s efforts were largely confined to theory; nevertheless, his initial
inquiries sparked decades of research and work. Though contemporary scientists and engineers
haven’t yet developed an ideal self-replicating machine, various self-assembling machines
⁠40
have
been realized. Over the past decade, research groups have created robots that can build perfect
copies of themselves, and scientists in La Jolla, CA, created a “test-tube based system of
chemicals that exhibit life-like qualities such as indefinite self-replication, mutation, and survival
of the fittest
⁠ ” (Urquhart 1). The lead scientist on this effort, biologist Gerald Joyce, was excited
about the idea that the team’s RNA enzymes were not only self-replicating, but could also
replicate perpetually; “It’s the first case … of molecular information having been immortalized,”
Joyce said (qtd. in Urquhart 1). These same qualities—self-replication, mutation, and survival of
the fittest—were also embedded in the “BioWatch,” a product of Switzerland’s Logic Systems
Laboratory (Stauffer et al)
⁠ . The BioWatch is a fully-functioning electronic clock, counting hours,
minutes and seconds. What makes it unique are that its digital cells (composed of even smaller
units, the “molecules” of the organism) are able to self-repair when they undergo mutations
(which can be purposely inflicted by viewers of the BioWatch) through “intelligent” self-
replicating molecules.

40
Self-assembling machines are not true self-replicators, as they cannot manufacture copies of themselves
organically; they rely on outside materials and inputs to assemble self-likenesses. For example, a self-assembling
robot may follow a computer program that instructs it to build a machine identical to itself when placed in a room
with the necessary materials.

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We are very close to Queen Christina’s clock that makes babies.
But these recent advances are not so utterly and completely new. These impulses—for endless
iteration, for a glimpse of our own reflections bouncing back and forth between two facing
mirrors into oblivion—have been embedded in our artistic pursuits for centuries. The terms we
use to describe genetic self-replication are pulled directly from literature: we speak of DNA
“transcription”—the process by which genetic information is copied from DNA to RNA—and of
“translation”—the process by which this RNA copy of genetic information is then converted into
working proteins. Our biological grasp of cellular reproduction relies on our understanding of
how literary ideas are duplicated—copies of works are transcribed by readers (via hand, keyboard,
or Ctrl+C); novels and poems are translated into languages other than the author’s tongue, and
reach new readers in these more “functional” forms.
These processes have gained momentum in the digital age: thousands of people type up poems,
copy excerpts from books, and showcase literary quotations on their blogs every day; Twitter
accounts work to
⁠ reproduce the works of Shakespeare and Melville 140 characters at a time;
native speakers of languages all over the world get together in online communities to produce
translations of major works. And although all of this activity may seem unique to the 21
st
century,
early modern writers were engaged in their own versions of retweeting and commenting through
Disqus. The commonplace book is the most obvious analogue of digital transcription; as “sites”
of copied and compiled quotations, proverbs, poems, recipes, letters, etc., each commonplace
book was like a personal Tumblr—a curated collection of other people’s thoughts and words.
Once copied down, these words and quotes were not only “replicated,” but were resurrected:
given new life in a new context. Renaissance writers also participated heavily in translation
exercises—translating or paraphrasing classical poets such as Ovid and Homer was popular at the

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time. The Iliad entered into the discourse of Renaissance writers with Chapman’s 1611
translation, and Ovid’s Metamorphoses erupted into early modern texts thanks to Arthur Golding
and George Sandys. We might say, then, that literature (and poetry in particular) is in an ideal
position to self-replicate with only a little assistance, using readers in place of RNA to act as
templates for copying their embedded “genetic” material and translating their inner codes.
Spenser himself engaged in these literarily reproductive activities. He embedded references to
classical mythology and his literary predecessors in The Faerie Queene, which engages with (and
thus re-animates) such texts as Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Virgil’s Aeneid, Sir Thomas
Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur, and the Roman de la Rose. Spenser also translated a sonnet cycle
by the French poet Joachim DuBellay (who himself translated poetry, kicking off a far-as-the-eye-
can-see chain of texts copying themselves over and over). Translation may seem to be an act of
sexual reproduction; it is impossible to separate a translation from the obsessions, desires, and
fears of its translator, so each translated poem is a product of two parents—the original author and
the translator. However, many writers feel that the literal “correctness” of a translation doesn’t
matter as long as it successfully conveys the poem’s inner meaning. This theory of translation
understands the “inner meaning” of the poem as permanent and unchangeable. As with
Michelangelo’s theory of sculpture— “Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task
of the sculptor to discover it”—the “inner meaning” of the poem pre-dates the poet. The excess
“stone” surrounding the poem is the substance of language itself; each translator must chip away
at this block as best as he or she can to expose the statue already lying beneath it. Thus, the
original poem is self-replicating, even though each copy may not appear to be identical.
The impetus towards endless reproduction in Spenser can be seen not only in form, but also in
content. In Spenser’s translations of DuBellay, he understands the sonnets’ inner meaning to

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hinge on the idea of ruins; he translates DuBellay’s title Antiquitez de Rome—which impartially
evokes objects from eras long past—as the more futile-sounding Ruines of Rome—casting a pall
of disrepair, disintegration, and nostalgia over the sonnets. As Hassan Melehy notes in his article
“Spenser and DuBellay: Translation, Imitation, Ruin,” Spenser’s translation overall
is more celebratory of the Roman ruins [than DuBellay’s sonnets]. But Spenser chooses a
title for the sequence that diminishes one dimension of DuBellay’s: the word antiquité
connotes venerability and decrepitude, both of which Du Bellay announces in his subtitle
[Contenant une Générale Description de sa Grandeur, et comme une Defloration de sa
Ruine] he wishes to convey, but ruine means primarily the latter. (423)
However, I believe Spenser’s emphasis on ruins to be less a result of his desire to cast DuBellay’s
sonnets in a negative light, and more a result of his interest in the infinite—and a consequent
tendency to see this theme in the “inner meanings” of many literary artifacts. Ruins, after all,
carry a weight beyond degradation; they act as reminders of what once was—and, by doing so,
keep this “what once was” from vanishing out of the minds of those who have come after. The
jagged foundation of a church projecting out of the mud takes on the burden of a memorial or a
monument: an enduring and eternal vestige that reproduces its original form in the viewer’s mind.
It’s impossible to look at what remains of the Parthenon without envisioning its original
architecture, in an ideal and therefore perfect form (more perfect than would have been possible
even at the structure’s prime). A city is fleeting; a ruin is forever.
So it is unsurprising that Spenser’s work thus has been seen by some as representative of a
desire for incompleteness, a model of anti-closure. A ruin and a monument at once. Speaking of
The Faerie Queene in his lovely and compelling Endlesse Worke: Spenser and the Structures of
Discourse, Jonathan Goldberg highlights the ways in which “the poem itself is not merely finally

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unfinished, but frustratingly incomplete and inconclusive throughout, even when it encourages its
readers to expect conclusions” (1). His reading of the epic poem is guided by Roland Barthes’
concept of the writerly text. Where the traditional readerly text is linear, carrying pre-determined
meanings and seeking clear closure, the writerly text “is infinite, replete, broken, empty, arbitrary,
structured and deconstructed in its reading, which is its rewriting, produced by reader and author
at once. The writerly text is an ‘endlesse worke’ of substitution, sequences of names in place of
other names, structures of difference, deferred identities” (Goldberg 10). Barthes’ formulation of
the writerly text does seem apt when talking about The Faerie Queene, which is a magnificently
broken poem, one in which self-contradiction and linear frustration is an ambition, not an
accident. One which loops in on itself, avoiding closure in order to leave a window open for
future generation.
The majority of the critical studies that see Spenser’s goals as closer to complexity theory
than to almanac-style reporting revolve around The Faerie Queene—and rightly so, since it is
such a rich and fascinating attempt to flirt with the infinite through “story” and language. The
Epithalamion demonstrates some aspects of the writerly text, but not in as obvious or pervasive a
manner as The Faerie Queene; it does, however, play with openness as a structure and a tool.
Goldberg’s analysis of The Faerie Queene raises the concept of endless iteration: “What cannot
be counted can be recounted, and not reaching an end will be to occupy that fullness of the
word/world which never ends. The power of the text lies in its endless recounting” (72). This is a
power with which the Epithalamion is very familiar. In fact, I believe the strange marriage poem
sets up a mechanism to not just deny closure, but also to enable a process of self-replication—one
purer than Spenser could have achieved through translation or literary reference.

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II. AND ITS ECHO RING

One of the more obvious ways in which the Epithalamion exhibits self-replicating behavior
is through its verbal and aural repetition. Though these devices appear in the majority of poetry
during his era, Spenser draws particular attention to this repetition in the poem’s varying refrain,
which cleaves to the central theme of a ringing echo. In fact, the echo motif in the sequence is so
prominent that the Jack Spicer quotation with which this chapter began could be taken as a gloss
on Spenser’s writing. Instead of “poems” plural echoing and re-echoing against each other,
however, Spenser manages to create such “resonances” within one poem. Each of the
Epithalamion’s 23 regular stanzas ends in a couplet that rhymes “sing” and “ring,” and the final
line is always some version of “That all the woods may answer and your eccho ring.”
Spenser is diligent in ensuring variation in the couplets’ wording—and especially in this last
line—changing verbs, swapping pronouns, and even varying spelling. Compare the last lines of
stanzas 2, 3, 8, 13, 17, 21, and 22:
2: That all the woods may answer and your eccho ring.
3: The woods shall to you answer and your Eccho ring.
8: That al the woods them answer and theyr eccho ring.
13: That all the woods may answere and your eccho ring.
17: The woods no more shal answere, nor your echo ring,
21: Ne let the woods us answere, nor your Eccho ring.
22: Ne any woods shal answer, nor your Eccho ring.
This selection of lines emphasizes the way Spenser makes subtle shifts as the poem unfolds,
imitating the distortions that accumulate in an echoed phrase as it becomes more and more

124
difficult to make out the original words. Certain words undergo mutated spellings as the lines roll
on—all/al, shall/shal, answer/answere, eccho/Eccho/echo. Spenser is up to something here; it is
vastly easier to copy a line exactly than it is to impose small variations on it over and over.
Max A. Wickert notes that the study of such auditory resonances used to be more of a focus
in Spenserian criticism, reminding readers that “H.S.V. Jones’s handbook [1930; A Spenser
Handbook] long popularized the view that it is ‘sound, more than sight or thought, that links the
stanzas,’” and that William Minto spoke of “the way in which the verses ‘soar and precipitate
themselves
⁠ ’” (135). Wickert goes on to argue that the second half of the 20
th
century ought to see
more sophisticated arguments proceeding in the manner of Hieatt’s study: numerical structure
over sound. But why discard the intuitive sense that this poem has an aural engine inside it, a
drive towards something productive? The verses “precipitate themselves”—what an apt
description. I believe that looking carefully at the sound in the poem can reveal one of the
structural principles behind the poem: the echo itself.
Spenser creates formal echoes that go beyond the refrain with his irregular rhyme scheme.
The 23 long stanzas oscillate between 18 and 19 lines, and Spenser organizes each stanza using 7-
9 end rhyme sounds. The first stanza contains a complex arrangement of seven end rhymes:
ABABCCBCBDDEFFEEGG. We can see here resonances of a typical quatrain (ABAB, CBCB)
along with groupings of couplets, most obviously toward the end (FFEEGG). The second stanza
develops its argument among eight end rhymes—ABABCCDCDEEFGGFFHH—giving the
stanza the same beginning and ending as the first, but muddling the middle. And the third stanza
again introduces more complexity into the pattern; it is comprised of nine end rhymes:
ABABCCDCDEEFGGFHHII. The poem resists conformity. Though these three rhyme schemes
dominate the Epithalamion, variations on them appear throughout, just as we saw in the refrain.

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Little has been said about the irregularity of the patterns in the Epithalamion; it is surely on
purpose, for as Hieatt’s arguments prove, little in this poem is accidental. A reader might be
reminded of an EEG machine—mapping periodic rises and falls with tiny variations every time
the heart beats. Spenser’s similar but ever-changing sounds and structures capture something
scientists recognize as inherent in nature: the promise of regularity swathed in a subtle refusal to
conform. After all, when listening to an echo, the original sound gradually and inevitably
becomes distorted: lowered in pitch, blurred in accuracy. A YouTube video
⁠41
showing 23
consecutive copies of a VHS tape demonstrates this phenomenon. The original recording is a
1991 music video of Roxette’s single “Fading Like a Flower (Every Time You Leave).” As the
recording gets copied and copied again—digitally echoed—she becomes fuzzy, then surreal and
misshapen, then the hulking shadowy stuff of closets at night and things under the bed, and
finally unrecognizable. The sound of her song modulates in pitch and clarity until it is a static blur
through the eardrums. And yet even the final 23
rd
copy is not nothing—it is merely a different
thing, now unrecognizable from its ancestor, standing as a strange and exciting new being. This is
true of all echoes. Eventually they lead to something new and fresh, to an entity that has
descended from them but is unarguably something else entirely.
Spenser actually encourages this to happen in the Epithalamion. The poem boasts echoes of
many different sorts—aural, literary, mythological. This latter category is worth examining;
Spenser’s references to Greek gods and mythological figures evoke the original myths, but
display them through a blurry and distorted lens. Many well-known myths appear in slightly
altered contexts. For example, in Stanza 7, Spenser speaks of “fayrest Phoebus, father of the
Muse” (121); the Norton Critical Edition responds, “Usually Spenser agrees with Hesiod in

41
m1cke1983. “VHS generation loss.” Uploaded 12 Oct 2008. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mES3CHEnVyI

126
making Jove the Muses’ sire; to call Apollo their father may show the influence of some other
source but is typical of his willingness to modify established myth” (FN 2). To modify—or to
reveal established myth in all its echoed strangeness. Similarly, when commenting on Stanza 12’s
command to “all the postes adorne as doth behove,” the Norton Critical edition elaborates: “i.e.,
adorn the doorposts, as is fitting. Symbolic decoration of doorposts was common at ancient
weddings. Spenser comfortably mixes classical and Christian elements, although the poem’s
biblical and liturgical echoes also allow him to revise and ‘overgo’ the classic epithalamion
tradition” (FN 8). Spenser allows these various traditions to bounce into each other and
encourages the resulting echoes, even as they distort some pre-existing original.
Spenser also creates echoes through similes and metaphors, which take an initial input and
respond to it with an equivalent but less “accurate” copy. Stanza 9, for example, unfolds in a
cascade of similes. Spenser begins by comparing his bride to a holy creature: “So well it her
beseemes that ye would weene / Some angell she had beene” (152-3). He follows this equivalence
up with “Her long loose yellow locks lyke golden wyre,” which fall around her and “Doe lyke a
golden mantle her attyre” (154, 156, emphasis mine). Crowned with “a girland greene,” she
“Seeme[s] lyke some mayden Queene” (157-8, emphasis mine). We can see, in these
compounding similes, a reflection of Spenser’s obsession with reproduction: the poem-version of
his bride can reproduce infinitely through a series of similes. Everywhere she turns, Spenser sets
up another mirror to capture her image through these verbal comparisons—and the reader,
reading them, will continue to duplicate her form in his mind, snowballing associations. No
matter what happens to her earthly body, she stands here as the mother of these attached images.
The following stanza (10), in which Spenser imitates the popular blazon form, further proves his
interest in replicating his wife through comparisons—we witness “Her goodly eyes lyke Saphyres

127
shining bright,” “Her cheekes like apples,” “Her lips lyke cherryes,” “Her brest like to a bowle of
creame,” “Her paps lyke lillies budded,” “Her snowie necke lyke to a marble towre,” “And all her
body like a pallace fayre” (171, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, empases mine).
How does an echo procreate? It answers, as Spenser’s refrain reminds us. It recognizes that
all communication is a question. It resigns itself to repetition but transcends that, adding to every
iterated instance a stranger tone, a more urgent strain. The word “echo” has its own echoes—of
mountains, of mythology, of poetry. Though contemporary readers may not recognize it as such,
“echo” once carried a poetic meaning: “An artifice in verse, by which one line is made to consist
of a repetition … of the concluding syllables of the preceding line, so as to supply an answer to
the question contained in it” (OED, “echo”). A poem using the echo as a primary device would
essentially be interviewing itself, perpetuating its own existence endlessly through a sort of call
and response. As shown above, the pronouns in the Epithalamion’s refrain vary, but the song
remains constant; each subject of the couplet, whether it be the narrator, some maids in the town,
the groomsmen, etc., sings the same song that then “rings” through the woods. And even as the
verse shifts to a claim of silence—the “night” section of the poem taking on variations of the
negative refrain “Ne will the woods now answer, nor your Eccho ring”—the sound continues,
perpetuating even beyond its own will, too in love with itself to come to a halt.
So Spenser has succeeded in creating repetitions inside his poem that can set a generative
process in motion. But as Spicer reminds us, poems (plural!) must also echo against each other.
Poems, Spicer asserts, “cannot live alone any more than we can … A poem is never to be judged
by itself alone. A poem is never by itself alone.” The Epithalamion is certainly no exception. In
fact, Spicer’s comment finds a comfortable home among Early Modern poems and the
commentaries they inspired; the network of 16
th
and 17
th
century literary works and their

128
interpretations was understood to be exactly this—a network—not a group of discrete objects. In
The Order of Things, Foucault ruminates on the ways in which 16
th
century writing formed a
never-ending, always-accumulating snowball of language and knowledge in which each text
needed its companions to shape its meaning:
Scriptural commentary, commentaries on ancient authors, commentaries on the
accounts of travellers, commentaries on legends and fables: none of these forms of
discourse is required to justify its claim to be expressing a truth before it is
interpreted; all that is required of it is the possibility of talking about it. Language
contains its own inner principle of proliferation … [There was an] inevitable relation
that language maintained with itself in the sixteenth century. This relation enabled
language to accumulate to infinity, since it never ceased to develop, to revise itself,
and to lay its successive forms one over another. (40-1).
Foucault’s discussion of commentary in the Early Modern period find a comfortable place in
Spenserian criticism; not only do his works show language accumulating to infinity—continually
revising and proliferating itself—but they also provide fantastic templates for a discussion of
commentary. Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calender is known as much for its accompanying
commentary (written by an “E.K.”) as it is for its poetic content, and Jonathan Goldberg links
Foucault’s understanding of the Early Modern period’s infinite textuality to The Shepheardes
Calender and E.K., noting that
E.K. is concerned mainly with the linguistic value of the text; he notes with pleasure
rhetorical niceties; he elucidates the text by citing other texts, classical antecedents,
contemporary handbooks and dictionaries. Moral meanings follow rhetorical ones.
These features of Renaissance culture have been described briefly but acutely in

129
Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things (New York: Random House, Vintage Books,
1970), pp. 17-44. Foucault describes the ways in which the entire world was seen as
text (liber creaturae), which could only be elucidated by reference to other texts. (FN
5)
Goldberg omits an interesting dimension of E.K.’s commentary: the identity of the commentator
himself. There has long been compelling speculation that “E.K.” is Edmund Spenser himself. As
Theodore L. Steinberg puts it, “the glosses contribute to the unity and meaning of the Calender,”
and it is therefore difficult not to conclude “that Spenser wrote the glosses himself and created the
persona of E.K. in order to illustrate by example and irony much of what he says in his poetry
⁠ ”
(46).
42
We thus have a situation in which Spenser’s work is literally revising and commenting on
itself. The author acts as both language creator and language perpetuator. The relation language
maintains with itself is infinitely folded and looped.
Despite this self-referential quality, there is no question that Spenser’s works should be
examined next to other literature suspended in its same thematic plasma solution. Literature that
touches it on a primal, underlying level. Literature that, as Foucault would say, has a related and
overlapping “original Text
⁠ .”
43
But when critics look to place a work “in context,” they often look
only at writing that emerged in the same time period as the work in question. It seems to me that
the search for an “original Text” should rather exist outside of time.

42
A detailed overview of the clues inside (and outside) the poem that E.K. and Spenser are likely the same person
can be found in “E.K. is Spenser,” by Agnes D. Kuersteiner, PMLA 50.1 (1935): 140-155.
43
Foucault notes in The Order of Things that “There can be no commentary unless, below the language one is
reading and deciphering, there runs the sovereignty of an original Text. And it is this text which, by providing a
foundation for the commentary, offers its ultimate revelation as the promised reward of commentary.” (41)

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III. BY VIRTUE OF ONE MIRROR REFLECTING ITSELF IN THE OTHER

What works share Spenser’s “original Text”; what works participate, like the Epithalamion,
in a project of infinite self-replication? Any attempt to determine the nature of Spenser’s “original
Text” must take its self-referential echoing into account. Though the epithalamium—any poem
written for the bride on her way to the nuptial bed—had been around since Catullus and
Theocritus, Spenser was the first author in its history to place himself in the poem, to use his own
marriage as the poem’s subject. The Epithalamion, then, acts as a mirror literally held up to
nature: held up to the face looking down at it on the desk. And yet Spenser takes care to avoid the
tropes of first-person lyrical poetry; his narrative persona is not interested in divulging personal
information and emotions. So we see reflected back at us both Spenser and not-Spenser: a mirror
with a veil over it that now and then slips just enough to keep us intrigued. It could be Spenser
who said, cagily: “I was never interested in looking at myself in an aesthetic mirror. My intention
was always to get away from myself, though I knew perfectly well that I was using myself. Call it
a little game between ‘I’ and ‘me
⁠ ’” (Duchamp 83).
But it wasn’t Spenser; it was Marcel Duchamp, centuries after Spenser had written his last
words. Marcel Duchamp, who appears so different from Spenser with his ties to surrealism and
Dada, his ready-mades, his vulgar puns—and yet, whose preoccupations align with Spenser’s in a
curious and productive way. In fact, I believe that among the works that could claim kinship to
Spenser’s Epithalamion, Duchamp’s Large Glass—The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors,
Even (1915-1923) [fig. 3]—stands the closest to its 16
th
century predecessor. The Large Glass
also explores marriage, sexuality, and art itself through the depiction of a wedding and a wedding
night. Though usually understood as a visual work of art, the Large Glass is really a work in two

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parts: the standing artwork and the accompanying box full of strange, poetic, and amusing notes
(the Green Box).
44
Through this written archive, the Duchamp scholar is drawn into the imaginary
world of the Large Glass, a static image composed on two panes of glass in oil paint, varnish,
lead wire, lead foil, and dust that nevertheless represents a working machine. The mechanical
process represented in the work begins in the lower panel with the “Bachelors,” and follows a
Rube Goldberg-like sequence of steps that ends in the insemination and impregnation of the
“Bride” in the top panel, an ethereal and heavenly figure.

fig. 3: The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass)

44
Officially titled “The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors Even” – the same title as the large glass, just minus a
comma.

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As so many aspects of the work would be impossible to glean from studying the glass alone, and
reside solely in the notes, it is no stretch to consider the Large Glass a work of poetry as much as
it is a painting—Duchamp, in fact, would have balked heavily at the latter description, his
abandonment of traditional painting having been one of the leaps that led to the creation of the
Large Glass.
45
The Bride “is far more than the shadow registered in paint on the upper half of the
Large Glass: her ‘dossier,’ recorded in Duchamp’s multitude of notes, is an essential part of her
person” (Henderson 129). Duchamp’s obsession with self-reference, echoes and reflections—
along with his interest in the material of glass—makes this work, like Spenser’s, a kind of mirror
standing in front of the artist. (“Glass” is, in fact, Spenser’s preferred word to use when talking
about mirrors.)
“Glass” is also the title of a poem in Christian Bök’s illuminating work, Crystallography:
Mercurial magma,
sand,
lime and soda
cool
into a vitreous
solid,
the most viscous
fluid,
a virtual liquid,
thick

45
When Pierre Cabanne asked Duchamp if he had “already made the decision to stop painting” in the 1920s,
Duchamp responded, “I never made it; it came by itself, since the ‘Glass’ wasn’t a painting; there was lots of lead, a
lot of other things. It was far from the traditional idea of the painter, with his brush, his palette, his turpentine, an idea
which had already disappeared from my life.” (Cabanne 67).

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enough to seem
rigid:

fragile language
⁠ . (1-13)
Bök’s poetry is molecularly-aware but not exclusively scientific; he sees the line break in the
atom. Glass, here, becomes a metaphor for a poem: both are objects constructed out of the
building blocks of life that appear more static and concrete than they are. Just as panes of glass
left standing in windows for centuries will gradually thicken at the bottom and thin at the top as
gravity coaxes “the most viscous / fluid” ever downwards, so poems left standing for centuries
undergo gradual shifts in their centers of gravity. The literature touching them evolves; their
readers lose knowledge of some contextual references and insert new mental allusions and
pictures of their own. They sit on bookshelves facing strange other covers and discover likenesses
as surely as looking into a mirror.
It’s the mirror that opens the door in all of these works to the infinite. Set two mirrors
opposite each other, and you have what’s called “infinite regress”—the never-ending series of
receding images created by the facing reflections. At the end of Crystallography, Christian Bök’s
prose poem “Enantiomorphosis” confronts such dual mirrors. Section 3 of the poem recounts a
story which, in turn, was supposedly recounted by Christian Weiss, a German crystallographer in
the late 18
th
/early 19
th
centuries. Weiss reportedly purchased a medieval treatise on the use of
mirrors in chess, which discusses how two mirrors facing each other can “trap the spirits of the
dead who pass between them” (146). Bök explains further that:
any living person who has no soul can step into either one of the mirrors as if it
were an open door and thus walk down the illusory corridor that appears to recede

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forever into the depths of the glass by virtue of one mirror reflecting itself in the
other. The walls of such a corridor are said to be made from invulnerable panes of
crystal, beyond which lies a nullified dimension of such complexity that to view it
is surely to go insane. The book also explains at length that, after an eternity of
walking down such a corridor, a person eventually exits from the looking glass
opposite to the one first entered.

Weiss speculates that a soulless man might carry another pair of mirrors into such
a corridor, thereby producing a hallway at right angles to the first one. Such a man
might, of course, perform this procedure again and again in any of the corridors
until he has erected an endless labyrinth of glass inside the first pair of mirrors …
(146).
Bök begins here with the idea of endlessness, and his poem quickly takes this singular infinity
and begins to replicate it, invoking infinite infinities, mirrored hallways intersecting with
mirrored hallways without end, “an endless labyrinth of glass.” In a more formal gesture towards
infinite regress, Bök’s poem “Fractal Geometry” sets up its own reflections:
When two identical mirrors face each other
their cycle of self-reflection recedes forever
into an infinite exchange of self-absorption.

Each mirror
infects itself
at every scale

135
with the virus of its own image.

Each mirror
devours itself
at every point
with the abyss of its own dream.

When we gaze upon a fractal, we must peer
at a one-way mirror, unaware of the other
mirror, standing somewhere far behind us. (42-55)
Formally, Bök has arranged the verses to look like mirrors reflecting each other. The verse
mirrors itself structurally (a central section framed by two identical three-line stanzas). This
central section consists of two quatrains that also copy each other—three short lines followed by
one longer line (the line length throughout seemingly precise to a character limit). And the
reflections carry over to the syntactical realm. Each of the two “outside” stanzas begins with the
word “When” and contains the words “mirror” and “other.” Bök crafts each of the two “inside”
stanzas precisely: the first line of each is “Each mirror”; the second line contains a present-tense
verb describing the mirror’s actions followed by the word “itself”; the third line consists of the
phrase “at every” followed by a single-syllable “place” word; and the fourth line follows the form
“with the _____ of its own ____.” The intention to create a formal entity that enacts mirroring in
its very structure is palpable, and recalls Spenser’s own echo chamber of a poem.
Stepping back to look at the structure on a larger scale, this self-contained section of the
poem reveals itself as a sonnet, an ode to a machine replicating itself into eternity. A love poem

136
about the attraction between two mirrors, who, narcissistically, can’t stop staring at their own
image nestled inside the other—thus falling into “an infinite exchange of self-absorption.” A love
poem that nestles up next to Spenser’s Epithalamion, which also reveals layers of narcissistic and
onanistic love when you peer at it. Recall that the echoes in Spenser’s poem can’t help but
conjure up the mythological Echo (especially as some of the iterations of the word are
capitalized), the nymph who loved listening to her own voice so much that she was cursed to only
repeat the last phrase said to her. To be able to say nothing new herself. (And who, not
uncoincidentally, fell futilely in love with that most self-obsessed figure of all, Narcissus.)
Spenser and Bök relate to this fear of self-absorption in a fundamental way. They know what it is
like to feel that the only things coming from your throat have been said before, even as you try to
innovate. This is a central concern of all poets. As is the pathological fear that we have somehow
wished this on ourselves, that we deserve this echo trap because we have loved our own voices
too much—we can hear Echo in Spenser’s “So I unto my selfe alone will sing.”
This self-loving element must be present in literature that generates infinite reproduction.
As mammalian reproduction requires two parents, any method of generation stemming from a
single source (one author —> one poem) must have an onanistic component. Even though the
Epithalamion revolves around a marriage between a man and a woman, the way Spenser talks
about his bride reveals more love circling back towards himself than vectoring outward towards
his beloved. Though one might expect Spenser to spend much of the poem addressing his wife-to-
be, the poem is in fact a series of addresses to people other than the bride. Spenser’s highly
irregular direction of address in this poem deserves closer attention. In most early modern poetry,
the speaker’s intended audience is either concrete and clear (think of Herrick’s “Gather Ye
Rosebuds,” clearly addressing the young woman directly, or Donne’s “Batter my heart,” speaking

137
straight to God) or lyrically indirect (think of Milton’s Sonnet 19, “When I consider how my light
is spent,” which addresses only an implied reader). However, the Epithalamion’s narrator speaks
liberally to anyone and everyone, as though he were standing in the middle of a large auditorium
on a rotating stage, calling out stanzas, half-stanzas, or in some cases merely a few lines at a time
to whichever face catches his eye.
The speaker’s rotating cycle of addresses could be understood as one large, continuous
circle. Stanzas 1-6 address, in general, the traditional muses of poetry and other mythological
figures (the houres, the graces, nymphes, etc.); Stanzas 7-15 speak to the characters in the world
of the poem who are assisting in the wedding preparations and festivities (the groom’s attendants,
the wedding guests, daughters of merchants, virgins, the young men in the town, etc.); and
Stanzas 16-23 move back out to a more supernatural, mythological world (addressing the evening
star, the night, and a variety of gods such as Juno and Hymen). Within this large arc, though, are
a host of smaller arcs that repeat themselves—periodic addresses to the bride, the self, and
(seemingly) the reader. These smaller arcs act as epicycles added onto the larger orbit of the poem.
The envoy then adds more depth to the entire structure by addressing the poem itself (“Song
made in lieu of many ornaments”).
It seems odd that the poem’s primary intended recipient is not the bride; the narrator only
directly addresses her a handful of times. The first time he speaks to her is in Stanza 5, while she
is still asleep. “Wake, now my love, awake,” the stanza begins. The narrator proceeds to ask her
to listen to the melodic harmony of birdsong as the sun rises—“Hark how the cheerefull birds do
chaunt theyr laies / And carroll of loves praise,” he says. But she doesn’t wake up to the lark, the
thrush, or the robin—by the end of the stanza, the speaker is still pleading with her to get up: “Ah
my deere love why doe ye sleepe thus long,” he asks plaintively. Context makes it clear that the

138
speaker is nowhere near his bride at this point—in fact, he asks other characters to go to his
bride’s room and assist her in dressing. So his statements to her can only be apostrophes—the soft
words of a man alone in his room, speaking words out loud to the air.
He next addresses the bride directly in Stanza 13, during their wedding ceremony. This
stanza sees one of the poem’s trademark abrupt shifts in perspective, for it starts out speaking
about the bride in third person—“Behold whiles she before the altar stands”—a curious choice for
it places the bride at arm’s length, distancing her from the groom as though he were also among
the wedding guests “beholding” her from afar. But as the stanza approaches the moment in the
ceremony when the bride and groom will officially be wed, Spenser’s telescopic lens narrows in
suddenly and dramatically and then just as suddenly swoops out again:
But her sad eyes still fastened on the ground,
Are governed with goodly modesty,
That suffers not one looke to glaunce awry,
Which may let in a little thought unsownd.
Why blush ye love to give to me your hand,
The pledge of all our band?
Sing ye sweet Angels, Alleluya sing,
That all the woods may answere and your eccho ring. (234-41).
“Your” hand dissolves into “our” band (which the Norton gloss translates as “bond,” but which
also carries connotations of a wedding band or ring), which is then folded under the “sweet
Angels.” The poem is constantly shifting like this: from personal address, to speech bound to the
narrator’s own self, to a wide and supernatural scope. The most constant form of address
throughout is an ambiguous one—much of the poem is narrated in imperative statements that,

139
despite their instructional nature, are directed at no one in particular. For example, the second
stanza begins in the following strange manner:
Early before the worlds light giving lampe,
His golden beame upon the hils doth spred,
Having disperst the nights unchearefull dampe,
Doe ye awake, and with fresh lusty hed … (19-22).
If we pause here, we might assume that the “ye” Spenser is talking to is his wife-to-be; it’s natural
for a nervous bride to awake before sunrise full of anticipation and excitement for her wedding.
But the next line dispels that assumption:
Doe ye awake, and with fresh lusty hed,
Go to the bowre of my beloved love,
My truest turtle dove,
Bid her awake … (22-25).
So Spenser is not speaking to his bride; she’s still asleep. Who is he asking to visit and wake her
up? The last clear object of Spenser’s address was 21 lines ago, in the first line of stanza 1: “Ye
learned sisters,” the Muses. Is he asking the Muses not just for the traditional poetic inspiration,
but also for mundane physical assistance? “Bid her awake therefore and soone her dight,” Spenser
goes on in Stanza 2. Does he want the Muses to help his bride lace up her corset? One gets the
feeling that Spenser has gone from speaking to mythological inspiration to a “real” person, but
when this switch may have occurred is unclear; and furthermore, it’s worth remembering that
there are no “real” real people here, as even the concrete figures like “ye yong men of the towne”
(261) are only “real” inside the world of the poem. In any case, this ambiguous form of address
oozes throughout, filling up the gaps between direct addresses like sand from an hourglass, or

140
some viscous fluid—a plasma in which the direct addresses are suspended and floating. Some of
these ambiguous addresses seem directed at the reader—“But if ye saw that which no eyes can
see, / The inward beauty of her lively spright, / … Much more then would ye wonder at that sight”
(185-6, 188) and some seem more like soliloquy—“Ah when will this long weary day have end, /
And lende me leave to come unto my love?” (278-9).
This latter type of address in the poem deserves more attention. If I called these ambiguous
addresses a plasma holding the poem together, perhaps that’s not entirely right. They rather
permeate the entire poem like a thick smoke, coating even the direct addresses in a strange
context that can’t be written off. There’s a strange way in which the entire Epithalamion is
actually united in its address—in which the whole thing is focused inward, preparing a bed for
infinite autopoeisis. It may be helpful here to backtrack to the very first stanza. After addressing
the Muses, Spenser kicks off the poem with an interesting proclamation.
Helpe me mine owne loves prayses to resound,

He says traditionally,

Ne let the same of any be envide:
So Orpheus did for his owne bride, (14-16)
That’s a contextually strange mythological reference, since things didn’t turn out so well for
Orpheus and Eurydice, if you recall, but we’ll go with it—
So I unto my selfe alone will sing,
The woods shall to me answer and my Eccho ring. (17-18)
This is such a strange way to kick off the poem. The implied follow-up to “So Orpheus did for his
owne bride” is “So I will do for my bride.” But Spenser doesn’t say that—he says “So I will do
for myself.” This is the first hint we have that the poem is interested in an onanistic self-

141
replication. So why do we treat this line as an outlier—this line that has become the title of many
essays on the Epithalamion, but has never been thought of as a prescription for the poem as a
whole. What if we do understand the whole poem as a self-address, even the parts that claim to be
something else? It’s important to remember that even the “real” people Spenser addresses in the
poem—the townsfolk, not the Greek gods—are unreal in the world of the reader. The gods are
also unreal; as a Protestant, Spenser would not have held the Greek gods in any esteem other than
fictional/literary. Furthermore, the addresses he makes to his bride (the only arguably “real”
person in the entire poem, though she is romanticized and made into a poetic object) slip from
“your” to “our” very quickly, as she becomes, in marriage, an extension of the poet’s self.
In addition to the passages noted above, Spenser’s narrator speaks “to” the bride two more
times before the poem’s end. The speaker’s intended object in Stanza 20 is very subtle and vague.
Spenser spends stanza 19 in a sort of prayer, requesting protections that could only be granted by
a higher power: “Let no lamenting cryes, nor dolefull teares, / Be heard all night” he asks—“Let
no deluding dreames … / Make sudden sad affrights; / Ne let housefyres, nor lightnings
helpelesse harmes” (334-5, 338-40). The pious nature of these lines is complicated by their lack
of any plea to a specific god. They could be addressed to Night, the entity to whom Spenser was
speaking for the majority of stanza 18 (“Now welcome night, thou night so long expected”)—but
we run into trouble with this assumption, as the end of stanza 18 moves away from this address.
Lines 319-321 clearly take Night as their object: “Spread thy broad wing over my love and me, /
That no man may us see, / And in thy sable mantle us enwrap …” So it’s natural for the reader to
assume Spenser is still addressing the night when he says in line 323, “Let no false treason seeke
us to entrap.” But what are we to do when we reach line 326?

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And in thy sable mantle us enwrap, (321)
From feare of perrill and foule horror free.
Let no false treason seeke us to entrap (323)
Nor any dread disquiet once annoy
The safety of our joy:
But let the night be calme and quietsome, (326)
Without tempestuous storms or sad afray …
If Spenser is still addressing the night, why wouldn’t he say “But be calme and quietsome”? If I
were talking to my mother, I wouldn’t say “Mom, don’t be upset. But let my mother be calm.”
Such a pronoun switch would make no sense—unless, between the two sentences, I turned away
from my mother to speak to someone else present. Spenser’s third-person mention of the Night
signals that the narrator is now speaking to some other entity. So when we reach stanza 19, its
catalogue of demands has no identifiable direct object.
The beginning of stanza 20 continues in this vein, and a reader who’s not paying attention
could gloss over the tiny turn towards the bride that Spenser embeds in the stanza:
But let stil Silence trew night watches keepe,
That sacred peace may in assurance rayne,
And tymely sleep, when it is tyme to sleepe,
May poure his limbs forth on your pleasant playne,
The whiles an hundred little winged loves,
Like divers fethered doves,
Shall fly and flutter round about your bed,
And in the secret darke, that none reproves,

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Theyr prety stelthes shal worke, and snares shal spread
To filch away sweet snatches of delight,
Conceald through covert night.
Ye sonnes of Venus, play your sports at will … (353-64).
The references to “your pleasant playne” and “your bed” are slipped in between Spenser’s
ambient prayer and his turn to the cupids flying and fluttering around the bed (“Ye sonnes of
Venus”). These pronouns appear to refer to the bride; but if we take to heart Spenser’s claim to be
singing “unto [him] selfe alone,” we could easily turn this “your” back on the author. Presumably,
both the bride and the groom are sharing the marriage bed—so “your” bed could be either hers or
his. There are no references here to flowing hair, gowns, cherry lips, etc.—the “your” is as
genderless as it is sly.
Even the “you”s that are clearly directed towards his female bride slip readily around the
speaker’s self. His final address to his bride comes at the end of stanza 23 as he’s pleading for
children: “So let us rest, sweet love, in hope of this, / And cease till then our tymely joyes to sing,
/ The woods no more us answer, nor our eccho ring.” (424-6). The “us” and “our” seem to clearly
indicate the bride and the groom—but the bride has no individual identity here, no agency. Only
half of the “us” is certain: the narrator himself. Is there anyone else Spenser could be indicating in
this final “our,” in “our eccho”? As many critics have noted, the bride is conspicuously silent in
this poem. Her passivity has been explained away by some and condemned by others—but
everyone agrees that the bride does not have a voice in the Epithalamion. She’s left no sound to
echo. Who else might participate in the ringing out?
The poem itself, of course. And the envoy, following on the heels of “our eccho,” solidifies
this understanding: “Song made in lieu of many ornaments,” Spenser says, now speaking directly

144
to the poem. The poem could be considered a character here, as real as any of the other characters,
and more vocal; the prospect of the poem sharing in Spenser’s “our” isn’t so far-fetched. After all,
the poem itself is in bed with Spenser and his wife while the cupids fly around them, as it
purports to be unfolding simultaneously with the events. It is impossible to sever the poem from
“your bed,” “our tymely joyes.” The speech and the poem are one and the same; narrator and
verse are bound up in each other.
So it is entirely consistent with the project of the Epithalamion to speak of the poem as
taking place within the self. And the poem within the self traces a big arc, and the big arc within
the poem within the self is accompanied by several little epicycles … and all of a sudden we’re
looking at a system of complex gears, revolving at the heart of this machine that’s primed to spit
out—what? Well, itself, of course. Its own reflection.

IV. A NEW BREED OF AUTOMATON

Re-enter the Large Glass, which shares an echo chamber with Spenser’s poem. The Large
Glass is also a system of complex gears, a machine laid out in pages of mechanical drawings and
notes. Furthermore, the “purpose” of this machine is, just like in the Epithalamion, the
consummation of a marriage—the most traditional route towards reproduction. These two works,
attempting to generate family trees, fixate on marriage for its mirroring qualities, its literal ability
to duplicate. And in writing about this joining together—this symbol of rebirth that prefigures
actual birth—Duchamp and Spenser enable their art to break out of the usual static shell.
Duchamp obsessed over the marital figure of the bride for decades before The Large Glass
was completed; it is possible to trace his interest in the figure of the bride back to the Jura-Paris

145
Road project of 1912. Prominent in the Jura-Paris notes is the idea of a mother/bride figure who
opens the door to the immeasurable. This female figure is described as a “machine-mother
⁠ ” (qtd.
in Henderson 33) whom Duchamp associates alternately with the Virgin Mary and the
automobile
⁠ .
46
Duchamp’s desire to “explore the integration of human and machine forms”
(Henderson 37) in addition to his use, in the Jura-Paris notes, of religious and mythic iconography,
facilitates an understanding of this “machine-mother” as one who need not rely on a father to
reproduce; as a part-mechanical, part-spiritual self-replicator who dwells in a realm that doesn’t
know the limits of our earth-bound, three-dimensional existence. (Once the machine-mother
makes her full transition to the Bride of the Large Glass, Duchamp will frequently invoke the
fourth dimension as a concept key to her comprehension.) The Jura-Paris notes pull back slightly
from the idea of a true infinity; in The Green Box, Duchamp imagines an extension which is both
contained and still emerging: “The Jura-Paris road, having to be infinite only humanly, will lose
none of its character of infinity in finding a termination at one end in the chief of the 5 nudes, at
the other in the headlight-child. The term ‘indefinite’ seems to me more accurate than infinite.
The road will begin in the chief of the 5 nudes, and will not end in the headlight child” (qtd. in
Henderson 37). The concept of being infinite “only humanly” aligns with Aristotle’s potential
infinity—a containable process that has the potential to repeat without an end in sight, such as the
passing of the seasons. This potentially infinite road moves from one generation (an adult figure,
the “chief of the 5 nudes”) to the next (a “headlight-child”), but there is no guarantee that the road

46
The network of images and puns connecting the machine-mother to the automobile is vast; one nexus resides in the
car’s headlights. Henderson explains: “Because Marinetti had referred automobile’s ‘torrid breasts,’ Duchamp and
his fellow travelers might well have played with this Futurist metaphor, augmenting the sexuality of the ‘machine-
mother.’ This interpretation would also allow the merging of the 5 nudes with the automobile itself, an idea Duchamp
describes in one of his posthumously published notes: ‘The 5 nudes, one the chief, will have to lose, in the picture,
the character of multiplicity. They must be a machine of 5 hearts, an immobile machine of 5 hearts.’ Here, the
Futurist theme of sexual union of driver and car is also evoked, for the machine-mother is to ‘give birth to the
headlight,’ conferring on the chief nude (Duchamp?) the role of Bachelor/husband to the Virgin/Bride or machine-
mother” (38).

146
stops there. In fact, Duchamp assures us that the road does not end in the headlight-child, opening
the doors for a succession of generations beyond our own lives or lines of sight.
Duchamp has come to the same conclusion as Spenser: infinite existence, infinite duration,
is possible in this lifetime—but it can only be reached through works of art and women built out
of words. Henderson traces Duchamp’s “quest for the infinite” from the Jura-Paris Road notes to
the Large Glass, noting that, in the former, the mission to reach the other side of numbers is
framed as a journey towards a gatekeeper, “the Christ-like ‘headlight-child,’” who “serv[es] as
intermediary and an ‘opening towards the infinite
⁠ ’” (Henderson 180). However, in the Large
Glass, the infinite becomes both more real and less reachable:
the Virgin/Bride [of the Large Glass] exists beyond the reach of the Bachelor/travelers of
the ‘Jura-Paris Road’ in a four-dimensional realm associated with infinity. She is the
‘married divinity’ in contrast to the ‘celibate human,’ and Duchamp recasts the
divine/human distinction in various scientific and technological metaphors as well as in
the basic geometric contrast between four and three dimensions
⁠ . (Henderson 180)
This idea of the “married divinity” that “exists beyond the reach” of the human rings in harmony
with the Epithalamion, in which Spenser uses mythological references to cast his bride beyond
the realm of mere mortals:
Loe where she comes along with portly pace,
Lyke Phoebe from her chamber of the East,
Arysing forth to run her mighty race,
Clad all in white, that seemes a virgin best.
So well it her beseemes that ye would weene
Some angell she had beene
⁠ . (148-53)

147
The mention of the “virgin” and the “angell” so close together also evoke the Virgin Mary.
Spenser’s bride physically moves in a more elevated manner than those around her. Her
walk to the temple is no mere plodding; rather, she is
Ascending uppe with many a stately stayre
To honors seat and chastities sweet bowre.
Why stand ye still ye virgins in amaze,
Upon her so to gaze
⁠ , (179-82)
Spenser asks. It seems that the “regular” virgins can do nothing but stand still and gaze in this
elevated female’s presence. Duchamp’s Bride also moves in a manner unlike the mortals around
her; her “cinematic” quality stands opposed to the agitated motions of the Bachelors and other
entities in the Glass
⁠ .
47
She is also literally situated above the other figures in the work—again,
like Spenser’s bride, ascending—and as Henderson reminds us, “in religion and myths, the act of
ascending often signifies the attainment of an ideal state, an implied perfection
⁠ ” (Henderson 170).
Two strange brides, two ascensions, two realms left behind, two collisions “between the finite and
the infinite,” two attempts to “striv[e] for the beyond or some higher, ideal state
⁠ ” (Henderson
170). Duchamp and Spenser are both tuned into a certain cosmic wavelength broadcasting
potential steps to self-replication. Their brides are only walking down aisles littered with ink and
paper; their marriages are to an art and to a certain kind of clock, one that makes time as it counts
it.
Clocks: perhaps Duchamp was tuned into the same frequency as both Spenser and Queen
Christina. The gears (metaphorically) turning inside the Large Glass are inching time forward
⁠

47
This introduction of the term cinematic “further emphasizes the oppositional quality between the upper and lower
halves of the Glass … the verbal evocation of such a fluid, Bergsonian conception of time contrast[s] with the
carefully measured time of mechanics (and the Bachelors’ jerky motions) … to distinguish between the infinite and
the finite in the Glass” (Henderson 167).

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even as they put the processes in motion to inseminate the bride and generate something new in a
never-ending loop. Like Queen Christina, Duchamp was interested in clockwork as the basis for
something alive—“given the central role of clockwork systems in the early notes for the Large
Glass, the tradition of automata and other such mechanical toys, which were built around a
‘mouvement d’horlogerie,’ must … be considered as a source for Duchamp” (Henderson 93).
⁠48

Though it would be possible to describe the entire work as an automaton—composed as it is of
separate components all functioning together for the purpose of one living, moving aim—the
Bride is often discussed as a standalone automaton figure within the Large Glass. As the female
reproductive element, it makes sense that Duchamp would envision her as a poetic self-replicator.
His notes for the Bride indicated that her composition would include a “boîte d’horlogerie” (a
clockwork box)
⁠ , but she was also intended “to represent a new breed of automaton, one that takes
advantage of new technology instead of the clockwork mechanics of a much earlier era”
(Henderson 94-5).
⁠
One of the ways in which the Large Glass moves beyond “clockwork mechanics” is in its
attitude toward time. Time in the work is dilated, as indicated by Duchamp’s decision to call the
work a “delay in glass”; his scientific interests revolved around issues of space-time, and his
explorations of the fourth dimension concerned the way extensions in space are inextricably
connected to duration. The way he attempted to visually bring time into the representation of
space is most obvious in Nude Descending a Staircase; speaking of his unorthodox representation
of a “nude” in this work, Duchamp elaborated: “I wanted to create a static image of movement …

48
Henderson goes on to explicitly link this tradition to the Early Modern period: “Artificial figures capable of
independent movement were originally developed as parts of clocks … The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
witnessed the creation of increasingly complex human and animal figures animated by clockwork mechanisms, even
though they were no longer used solely on timepieces. Automatons fascinated such seventeenth-century figures as the
Jesuit Athanasius Kircher, whose interests in perspective and magnetism foreshadowed Duchamp’s” (93).

149
I was explaining [to Katherine Dreier] that, when you wanted to show an airplane in flight, you
didn’t paint a still life. The movement of form in time inevitably ushered us into geometry and
mathematics. It’s the same as when you build a machine …” (qtd. in Cabanne 30-1)
⁠ —which, of
course, brings us back to the strange, mechanical forms of the Large Glass, perhaps occupying a
dimension outside of our own in which they do move, and doing their best in our own dimension
to represent a process unfolding just out of reach.
Spenser’s Epithalamion is also interested in temporal dimensions and unfoldings unfamiliar
to the reader; the way time proceeds in the poem is more akin to Duchamp’s idea of fourth-
dimensional space-time than to a typical early modern clock. The poem appears to advance in a
chronological manner; the many analyses of the poem’s numerology assume that each stanza
represents an hour, and that each hour ticks itself off in accordance to a “normal” linear day.
However, the language of the poem indicates that something more subversive is at work. Stanza
14 begins with the line “Now al is done; bring home the bride againe”—a seemingly
straightforward proclamation that crumbles under scrutiny. “Al” is not “done”; the ceremony may
be over, but there are still ten stanzas’ worth of events to narrate. Spenser jars us by announcing
an ending only a little more than halfway through the poem. He then further muddles things by
placing “againe” at the end of the line. Intellectually, the reader can make sense of this language;
the bride was home this morning and now she will be brought home “againe.” This assumption
proves a little strange—a traditional marriage would see the bride departing to a different home
than the one she’d left that morning (a new home with her husband, not her old home with her
father). Furthermore, “againe” only acquires this “logical” meaning after a mental effort to
understand it. Syntactically, it indicates that this whole experience—the “al” of it—is happening
over and over: that the couple is repeatedly entering in through the temple gates, enjoying the

150
choristers’ “joyous Antheme,” standing before the altar, giving each other their hands, returning
home and starting the cycle all over again—a Groundhog Day of a wedding, an inescapable loop.
Bring the bride home again. And again. And again.
The poem generates its own logic as it generates itself. The implications that the characters
in the poem are trapped in a re-cycling literary version of an Escher building are nowhere felt as
strongly as at the end of stanza three. After instructing an ambiguous entity to summon nymphs,
gather garlands, assemble a bridal bouquet, and sprinkle the aisle with flowers, Spenser says:
Which done, doe at her chamber dore awayt,
For she will waken strayt,
The whiles doe ye this song unto her sing,
The woods shall to you answer and your Eccho ring. (52-5)
This is one of those sentences that Spenser loves and readers despise—a sentence that forgets
itself halfway through and turns into something other than its beginning indicated, thus extending
its life but distorting its form. Does Spenser mean that while the person waits at the bride’s
chamber door they should sing, or is he saying that “while” they sing the woods will
answer/echo? To which clause do we attach “The whiles”? Spenser constructs his turns of phrase
so these two words adhere to both clauses—a Spenserian version of Jeopardy’s “before and after”
phrases: “Terry Grosse Point Blank,” “George Bush Baby.” In addition to this syntactical
distortion, Spenser’s mention of “this song” complicates things. What is “this song” if not this
very song, this poem? And yet how can anyone sing this song without having been presented with
it first—which, if they are being instructed in the third stanza to do so, would be temporally
impossible? How can the nymphs sing the poem if the poem itself is asking them to sing? Circles
are caught inside circles, linear sequencing goes out the window, and the poem widens a Catch-22

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of a loophole inside itself. The only way to make this work is by creating a hall of mirrors, a
system of reflections that circumvents proper linear progression.
The mirroring aspects of marriage (choosing your “other half”—your “opposite”—who, at
the same time, reflects your outlook on life and your hopes for the future) prove important to
Spenser’s manipulation of time and key to his desire for replication. Linda Leavell discusses how
the poem’s Duchampian dilation of time—its extension of a present minute into an infinite
hour—goes hand-in-hand with its interest in marriage:
In time, the loss of innocence in the sexual act is redeemed through
regeneration, which makes the marriage, in one sense, endless. The other sense
in which marriage becomes endless is out of time and slightly more complex;
it has to do with the ritual moment through which man steps out of time into
the holy eternity. Although the Epithalamion clearly takes place in time over
the course of the wedding day, the poet always speaks in the present tense and
thereby creates the effect of the entire poem being a ritual spoken or sung in
the present moment. This stepping out of time is an important aspect of ritual,
and as the Epithalamion is a celebration of the ritual of marriage, it is essential
to the poem. (Leavell 24-5).
⁠

Leavell’s understanding of the way procreation can open the door to infinity, as well her grasp of
the way the poem simultaneously proceeds normally in time and remains in an ever-transpiring
present, align with my own understanding of the poem’s goals. Her analysis of the eternal aspects
of marriage echoes a point from Eileen Allman’s article, “Epithalamion’s Bridegroom: Orpheus-
Adam-Christ,” in which Allman discusses the way marriages move symbolically across centuries
and mythologies. “Every marriage after that first one [Adam and Eve’s],” she notes, “re-enacts

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the union of Man and Woman, a union that is, in fact, a temporary and temporal reunion of the
sexes. Every marriage also leaps forward to a point after the end of time as well as to a point
before its beginning, that is, to the eschatological time when Man as Christ marries Woman as
Church eternally in the New Jerusalem” (242). The poem moves through a medium in which each
moment dilates out beyond itself. A medium in which the “Song” extends past the bride and
bridegroom, acting amathematically: “And for short time an endlesse moniment.” To reach
infinity, Spenser creates a paradox of duration. Time in his poem is ephemeral and abiding—
constantly moving forward and accumulating as slowly and imperceptibly as the dust on
Duchamp’s Large Glass.
⁠49
Though we humans only live “for [a] short time,” a reproductive
poem-machine can stand as “an endlesse moniment” to that short lifespan by preserving the spirit
and replicating it after the body is gone.
Spenser also leaves a door open to the infinite in the Epithalamion by evading closure.
Much has been written about the unfinished nature of The Faerie Queene, which Spenser
abandoned in the middle of the seventh book rather than completing all intended 12 books.
Though the Epithalamion is not clearly open-ended, as it does complete a description of the
wedding day and end with a clear closing “envoy,” Spenser has left clever gaps in the poem’s
scaffolding, one which ends in “endlesse”ness. By varying the rhyme schemes and stanza
configurations, Spenser enables his sound shapes to move through the verses perpetually, like one
of those endlessly watchable screensavers in which a digital object bounces off the edges of the
screen, never hitting the same spot twice. The variety of angles keeps the object going, just as the
variety of angles in Spenser’s poem sets up a chaotic and varying pattern of echoes. Spenser then

49
During the construction of the Large Glass, Duchamp allowed the uncovered piece to accumulate dust for a year
on the floor of his studio. Man Ray documented this accretion in his photograph Dust Breeding (1920). After the
photo was taken, Duchamp cleaned the Large Glass nearly completely, but he left a section of the final piece covered
in dust to seal in the concept of the passage of time.

153
builds in a promise of continuation beyond the final lines: the bouncing ball will never come to a
complete stop. In the final long 23
rd
stanza, Spenser leaves a rhyme dangling—
ABABCCDCDEEFGGFHII. That poor, orphaned H. This is the only place in the entire poem that
Spenser leaves an end word un-coupled. It may help to look at the stanza’s final ten lines:
That we may raise a large posterity,
Which from the earth, which they may long possesse,
With lasting happinesse,
Up to your haughty pallaces may mount,
And for the guerdon of theyr glorious merit
May heavenly tabernacles there inherit,
Of blessed Saints for to increase the count.
So let us rest, sweet love, in hope of this,
And cease till then our tymely joyes to sing,
The woods no more us answer, nor our eccho ring. (417-26)
The sentence leading up to the word “count” comprises all of the preceding fifteen lines, the
longest sentence in the poem. Spenser does not want to stop—on the contrary, he wishes to
“increase the count”—so he leaves “this” dangling. Let us rest, sweet love, in hope of this. What
is “this”? The promise of children, most likely, but more generally the promise of lastingness, of
everlastingness. Of a poem that might go on and on and on. The “this” is unanswered, un-spoken-
for, in order to leave room for it to be continued. Perhaps you speak its rhyme in your head as you
read. Perhaps there are stanzas being written somewhere even now to complete the rhyme, to
resolve the chord. Spenser must have enjoyed leaving an echo waiting for its reply.

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The stanzas leading up to the envoy revolve around the hope of pregnancy, the desire for
offspring. The marriage ceremony becomes an obstacle to navigate in order to stand in line for the
real prize: marital reproduction. Spenser’s obsession with procreation in the Epithalamion is
anything but subtle; there are many sexual allusions in the poem that often get overlooked in
analyses that favor numerical precision. Stanza 12, the central stanza of the poem in which the
bride enters into the marriage temple, is particularly rife with double entendres. Leavell notes that
the Epithalamion often employs language that could refer to either “the sexual act of marriage” or
“the holy rites of marriage”:
The first line, ‘Open the temple gates unto my love,’ immediately embodies this duality,
for ‘unto’ may mean ‘before’ the bride in one case and ‘into’ in the other. Lines 278-79 of
stanza 16 contain a similar ambiguity when the bridegroom asks, ‘Ah when will this long
weary day have end, / And lende me leave to come unto my love?’ … In the next few
lines the phallic ‘postes’ and ‘pillours’ become decked with ‘girlands,’ circular images of
femininity. (18)
⁠

Though overtly sexual references run throughout the poem, they appear to be incorporated less as
a result of some hedonistic pleasure drive than because of Spenser’s concern with achieving
eternal life through the sexual act and its desired fruits. Later in the twelfth stanza, the 433-line
Epithalamion reaches its 217
th
and central line, which I’ve bolded in context below:
Bring her up to th’highest altar that she may,
The sacred ceremonies there partake,
The which do endlesse matrimony make,
And let the roring Organs loudly play
The praises of the Lord in lively notes … (215-219)

155
The idea of “endlesse”ness is thus literally central to the poem. Coming as it does in a double
entendre-laden section, the “sacred ceremonies” referred to in the previous line could be either the
actual holy sacrament of the marriage service or the spouses’ sexual union. The “roring Organs”
certainly do little to resolve the question.
There are many reasons to celebrate sexual activity in a marriage poem, but the poem’s
culmination in the plea for a “large posterity” seems telling. Spenser may have found the desire
for many children more possible to fulfill in a poetic than a genetic manner. Andrew Hadfield’s
biography speculates that Spenser’s first wife, Machabyas Childe, may have had health issues that
kept her from reproducing normally; she bore Spenser only two children in their 11 or 12 years of
marriage, which would have been an outlier in an era when most fertile women bore an average
of one child per year.
50 ⁠⁠ Furthermore, some clues in Spenser’s work indicate that he was familiar
with problematic pregnancies and births. Along these lines, Hadfield examines the portrayal of
childbirth in The Faerie Queene, discussing Book III’s idealized description of Chrysogenee’s
painless labor and birthing of twins:
The stanza is an affectionate and moving moment in the poem that seems to recognize the
pains and perils that women go through when giving birth … Spenser shows that he was
well aware that the real victims of sexual behavior were often women. The most
dangerous years for women were those of sexual maturity and childbirth when a huge
percentage of women died … Is the poem telling us what happened to Machabyas
Spenser? We can never be sure, of course, but Machabyas was probably dead before this
point … It seems likely that the tale of Chrysogenee bears some relationship to life and

50
Spenser and Machabyas married in 1579; most sources have Machabyas dying by 1591. Hadfield notes in Spenser:
A Life, “As [Machabyas] died before the age of 30 she would have still been fertile and it is possible that the lack of
children produced by the Spensers indicates a health problem as well as protracted periods of separation … In normal
circumstances couples would have produced about one child a year” (264).

156
death in the Spenser household, a reminder that, for many, human reproduction came at a
cost as well as bringing joy. (SAL 264)
⁠
It is possible that Machabyas suffered several difficult pregnancies and/or miscarriages, or that
she died in childbirth. Spenser had only two children by his second wife, Elizabeth Boyle, as well
⁠ .
Regardless of his wives’ situations, Spenser reveals a familiarity with the emotions of lack and
loss when it came to offspring. The Epithalamion expresses deep-seated anxieties and fears about
the fleeting nature of worldly happiness; “Spenser hopes for a bright future for the couple with
children and stability in their home, but has to acknowledge that this does not depend on
themselves alone, counterpointing his domestic bliss with that of a threatening world outside his
domestic sphere” (SAL 307)
⁠ . The poem is the one sure place where such domestic bliss can,
unequivocally, be achieved—where an orderly succession can take place within a larger scheme
of chaos and disorder.

V. A POEM TO OUTLAST TERRESTRIAL CIVILIZATION ITSELF

If this is the case, it comes as no surprise that the text contains the onanistic overtones
discussed above—the act of an author mating with his own text is inherently individual. However,
Spenser’s poem suggests that it could actually mate with itself—that, with the author removed
from the equation, it could continue reproducing on its own: a self-sufficient hermaphrodite. The
poem formally embraces opposites, containing both “male” and “female” elements in its lines.
Think of the evolution of the Epithalamion’s refrain. When night falls in the poem’s world, the
“and” your echo ring is suddenly a “nor” your echo ring. Though this logically aligns with the
move from sunlight and celebration to a dark sky and stillness, the new refrain still sounds out of

157
place in a celebratory poem:
Now it is night, ye damsels may be gon,
And leave my love alone,
And leave likewise your former lay to sing:
The woods no more shal answere, nor your echo ring. (311-14)
⁠
The tone here is more admonishing than peaceful. Leavell points out that starting with stanza 21,
the refrains begin with the word “Till,” “meaning that the singing will cease until a future time,
that is, until the couple is blessed with children. Thus, the final three stanzas of the poem depart
from the desperate fears of the night and turn to a mood of hope” (23).
⁠ True—but “Till” also
reads as a depressing ultimatum: until we receive children, we will no longer engage in any sort
of joyful expression or communion. The jarring nature of the negative refrain is somewhat
lessened when given another purpose: to act as a productive “mate” for the earlier positive
refrains.
The Epithalamion contains a wealth of fruitful contradictions—the public versus private
spheres, the “welcome night” that is also teeming with monsters, the beautiful bride who is
compared to Medusa. Though an ideally hermaphroditic human (one who could reproduce on
his/her own) does not (yet) exist, some hermaphroditic organisms are able to undergo self-
fertilization—and this poem may join their ranks. Though it could be a stretch to call the
Epithalamion an organism, it is absolutely not a stretch to call it hermaphroditic—especially as
Spenser was no stranger to the hermaphrodite.
One of his most iconic images, after all, is the 1590 ending of Book III of The Faerie
Queene, in which Britomart watches the reunited lovers Amoret and Scudamore embrace and
fuse into a hermaphroditic creature, a perfect whole made from two halves. Spenser is explicit

158
about this in his description of the embrace:
Lightly he clipt her twixt his armes twaine,
And streightly did embrace her body bright,
Her body, late the prison of sad paine,
Now the sweet lodge of loue and deare delight:
But she faire Lady ouercommen quight
Of huge affection, did in pleasure melt,
And in sweete rauishment pourd out her spright:
No word they spake, nor earthly thing they felt,
But like two senceles stocks in long embracement dwelt.

Had ye them seene, ye would haue surely thought,
That they had beene that fair Hermaphrodite,
Which that rich Romane of white marble wrought,
And in his costly Bath causd to bee site:
So seemd those two, as growne together quite,
That Britomart halfe enuying their blesse,
Was much empassioned in her gentle sprite,
And to her selfe oft wisht like happinesse,
In vaine she wisht, that fate n’ould let her yet possesse. (III.xii.45-46 orig.)

Many interpretations of this passage interpret the “Hermaphrodite” in a relatively tame manner,
seeing it as a holy image of man and woman united in marriage and thus become “one flesh”
(Cheney 193-4).
⁠ However, Spenser’s imagery and allusions point to something more distinctly

159
strange.
Donald Cheney points out that Spenser’s reference is not to a Biblical or Platonic model of
a holy fusion of sexes, but rather to “that rich Romane of white marble wrought”—a seemingly
specific statue. Though the existence of such an artifact is still up for debate
⁠ , the reference
indicates that the model Spenser has in mind is most likely a biologically fantastical being with
both sexes “growne together quite” in one body. Cheney discusses the types of Roman statues
that grew out of a hermaphroditic model and explains how they differ from some of the more
traditional interpretations of the hermaphrodite found in iconographic emblems:
The emblems generally represent a pair of lovers embracing, sometimes in or near a pool
of water, to recall Ovid’s story … The Roman statues, by contrast, show a single bisexual
individual … Such a type finds its basis not in Ovidian myth but in those monsters—no
less fabulous but generally less allegorical in origin—described in natural histories and
accounts of exotic travels like those of ‘Sir John Mandeville.’ Such figures … are visibly
unnatural in their being. (Cheney 294)
⁠
Spenser is not just painting a picture of two halves becoming one. He is attempting to fuse those
two halves, to hold them together in a delicate both-and-and-or. To distort something in such a
way that it reflects itself, reproduces itself.
Though he erases this ending six years later (contributing, as mentioned above, to the epic
poem’s unfinished nature), the image is one which Spenser can’t seem to completely eliminate:
not only are its overtones of “love-making as part-inspiration, part-horror” (SAL 262)
⁠ paralleled
in the uneasy allusions to such troubled mythical figures as Orpheus and Medusa scattered
throughout the Epithalamion, but Spenser also “pointedly reuses this scene in Epithalamion, a
sign of just how important this image of the voyeur and the hermaphrodite was for him” (SAL

160
262).
⁠ In the Epithalamion, however, the two figures who fuse while being watched are none other
than Spenser himself and his new bride. Spenser’s writing himself into this poem marks a literal
self-replication, and now his poetic clone sets himself up to reproduce yet again. Though the
focus in the verse is on Cynthia (in place of Britomart), what is unsaid rings loudly:
Who is the same, which at my window peepes?
Or whose is that faire face, that shines so bright,
Is it not Cinthia, she that never sleepes,
But walkes about high heaven all the night?
O fayrest goddesse, do thou not envy
My love with me to spy:
For though likewise didst love, though now unthought,
And for a fleece of woll, which privily,
The Latmian shephard once unto thee brought,
His pleasures with thee wrought.
Therefore to us be favorable now;
And sith of wemens labours thou hast charge,
And generation goodly dost enlarge,
Encline thy will t’effect our wishfull vow,
And the chast wombe informe with timely seed,
That may our comfort breed:
Till which we cease our hopefull hap to sing,
Ne let the woods us answere, nor our Eccho ring. (372-89)

161
It’s hard to miss the passage’s parallels with the Faerie Queene moment; once again, a
purportedly envious voyeur observes a passionate embrace. Interestingly, the figure of Cynthia is
often read as a representation of the celibate Queen Elizabeth—and Elizabeth is, in turn,
associated not only with virginity but also with a semi-hermaphroditic, self-sufficient sexuality.
For example, the Sieve Portrait of Queen Elizabeth positions her against a backdrop representing
both the Temple of the Vestal Virgin and a marriage temple, thus ensuring that she “occupies a
double space and assumes the identity of both its occupants; in herself, she legitimizes an
illegitimate marriage. The picture places the queen in history, but her place rewrites the love of
Dido and Aeneas; historical progress is also a reversal of history; repetition occurs, but with a
difference. Rather than marry another, the queen marries herself …” (Goldberg 156). The queen
marries herself.
The stanza’s language also points to an autopoietic process. Take the speaker’s desire for an
“enlarging,” which suggests a pregnant woman’s growing silhouette when read in the context of a
plea for procreation. But the word applies to a vast range of of addings-on, and the “generation”
that Spenser asks to be “enlarged” could be linguistic. Words begetting words. Spenser wants his
wife’s “chast wombe” to be informed with “timely seed”—a peculiar way to ask for successful
fertilization. The verb “inform” has a clear relation to knowledge, which, in turn, is bound up in
language.
51
And so we’re transported to a place where bodily fluids may be synonymous with
discourse, where words and sperm are interchangeable, where the text is a body ready to give life.
⁠
Where the hermaphrodite—the organism that can mate with itself—is composed of phonemes

51
Of course, though the OED’s common early recorded definitions of “inform” are knowledge-related (“To give
instruction to (a person, the mind, etc.); to educate, teach, train” —1a. “To give (a person) instructions or directions
for action; to instruct, direct, tell to do something.” —1c.), there are more obscure definitions that show that Spenser
was not coming completely out of left field: for example, definition 6a.—“To put into (material) form or to shape; to
form, shape, mould, fashion, create”—and 8a—“To imbue, or impregnate with a specific quality or attribute; to
impart some pervading quality or spirit to” (emphasis mine). Spenser’s choice of a verb with such a well-known
primary meaning, though, is worth remarking on.

162
and syllables and clauses.
The fusion of poem and author creates a self-perpetuating monster, a text that keeps giving
of itself, whose nature ensures a new type of endless life conceived through poetic information.
Furthermore, the negative refrain here enacts exactly what it claims to deny. Even as Spenser
claims to “cease” the singing of the poem until the couple is granted children, the lines are
working against his desires—they are singing, there are echoes ringing. Harmonious couplets
continue to end each stanza, the intricate rhyme schemes continue to careen—there is a sense here
that in the reading of the poem itself we are able to answer the poet’s plea. Just reading the
poem—or just writing it—engenders something.
In the same way, Duchamp’s Large Glass contains the materials necessary for reproduction.
The glass literally displays both male (the Bachelors) and female (the Bride) elements; on top of
this, it conveys the same onanistic overtones as the Epithalamion. The machine allows the Bride’s
impregnation only through a screen of masturbation; the Bachelors have no direct contact with
the ethereal creature, but rather project something Duchamp aptly names the “Splash” towards the
Bride. And even then the interaction is not physical, but reflected: mirrors serve as the means of
transportation. Thomas Singer sums up the process:
The drops of the Splash, which are surely related to the Bachelors’ onanism, rise toward
the Bride’s domain, are ‘dazzled’ by the Occulist Witnesses, which Duchamp composed
by … scraping away at an area of mirror silvering to form the three patterns resembling
figures in an optician’s chart, and then pass as mirrored images through the three planes of
the horizon that separate the lower and upper panes of glass, where the drops are reflected
in the realm of the Bride near the area of the Nine Shots … The essential point …is that
the drops of the Splash never actually reach the upper panel: ‘The mirrorical drops, not the

163
drops themselves but their image, pass’ into the realm of the Bride. (358)
⁠
Duchamp’s interest in the figure of the hermaphrodite sees mirrors as essential to the process; in
fact, his altar ego, Rrose Sélavy, is a woman—enabling him to enact the fantasy of the self-
sufficient self-replicator by donning a costume and looking in the mirror. His notes indicate a
clear connection between the hermaphroditic figure and the mirror; one reads, for example,
“Reflections from a mirror—or a glass … infra-thin separation … separation / has the 2 senses
male and female” (qtd. in Singer 360). The dust jacket for his book Marcel Duchamp: Ready-
Mades, etc. (1913-1964) enacts just such a version of the “2 senses,” as the pictures on the front
and back of the cover “are mirror images of each other,” showing Rrose Sélavy and Duchamp in
mirrors that reverse their gender. The “male Duchamp” becomes “the female Bride” (Singer 360).
And the infra-thin separation that slips between Spenser the author and Spenser the poetic
bridegroom (Spenser the text) also reverses the male writer as the female poem.
In the end, any work interested in marriage evokes the reflective qualities that are also part
and parcel of the hermaphrodite. Duchamp’s Objet-dard [fig. 4], a small “erotic object” created in
the 1950s and cast in bronze from a mold, resembles a limp penis; the mold it was cast from thus
imitates the female vaginal canal. The representation of the male is a distorted mirror image of the
female. There is only an infra-thin line between the sexes—a “separative difference,” in
Duchamp’s words, that “interven[es] between “identicals,” like castings produced from the same
mold, or objects and their mirror images, to affirm their otherness, and … between opposites, like
molds and castings, or the male and female genders, to affirm their sameness” (Singer 362). The
self is other and the other is the self—there is no escaping the reflection.

164

fig. 4: Objet-dard (1951).

So it is not only conceivable that many texts could contain their own mechanisms of
reproduction, but it is in fact necessary that they do. The mirror art holds up to nature must be like
the stream Narcissus looks into: both revealing and sexually alluring. And, in fact, the
Epithalamion’s project of poetic self-replication—of a text that carries its author into future
generations with it—is now in the process of being literally realized. Christian Bök, post-
Crystallography, has devoted his time and energy to creating a poetic organism that can keep
birthing itself. He has been working for ten years now on “The Xenotext Experiment,” an
interdisciplinary project that he describes as “a literary exercise that explores the aesthetic
potential of genetics in the modern milieu, doing so in order to make literal the renowned

165
aphorism that ‘the world is now a virus’” (CBX 227). In the simplest language, his project is an
attempt to embed a poem inside the genetic code of a simple organism, which, as it replicates its
own DNA and reproduces itself, necessarily creates an equal and opposite poem—a mirror image
poem—in conversation with the first verse.
52
This living text literally enacts infinite reproduction,
existing as it does in a chain of genes producing and reproducing the words it calls its own. As the
organism continued to reproduce itself, and the poem continued to respond to itself, certain
mutations inevitably slip in. Bök sees these mutations not as an accident that could degrade the
poem, but rather as proof that the poem is alive, that it is subject to the world’s erosion.
Recently, Bök announced that the initial phases of his project had succeeded:

Yesterday, I received confirmation from the laboratory at the University of Calgary that
my poetic cipher, gene X-P13, has in fact caused E. coli to fluoresce red in our test-
runs—meaning that, when implanted in the genome of this bacterium, my poem (which
begins “any style of life/ is prim…”) does in fact cause the bacterium to write, in
response, its own poem (which begins “the faery is rosy/ of glow…”). I have finally
demonstrated the viability of the gene (which has taken me about a year to design).
(CBW)
Though there are still hurdles to clear before the Xenotext is officially operational, Bök has
implanted a poem in a living object. Like Spenser, Bök has always been interested in the
possibility of informing a linguistic womb. In Crystallography’s “Friedrich Mohs (1773-1839),”
he begins with the phrase “Words chip away at each other when jostled together” and proceeds to
actually jostle the words together, deleting a letter or two in every line until he is left simply with
an “I,” which feels (in this context) less like a statement of individual being and more like the

52
The organism carrying the poem, “in response to this grafted, genetic sequence, begins to manufacture a viable,
benign protein—a protein that, according to the original, chemical alphabet, is itself another text” (CBX 229).

166
peculiar “I” of language. At the very end of this poem of deletions (which are, in turn, new
creations), we have the line “SOFT —> SORT —> CORE —> CORD —> CARD —> HARD”
(125).

The language changes itself, the language outputs itself. Repetition with a difference. And
it’s clear now that in Crystallography Bök was already thinking about ways to manipulate the
double helix of language, to set in motion a process of words giving birth to not-quite clones of
themselves. To beautiful echoes of themselves—echoes of which Spenser would be proud.

The big advantage of The Xenotext Project over Spenser’s or Duchamp’s or even Bök’s
earlier forays into poetic reproduction is that it brings science to the table. There are certain things
that words simply can never do—but a gene, on the other hand, a virus … Such organisms can
enact what words on a paper never could. And they also imitate our own human processes—we
can see them becoming parts of ourselves, or we could believe that they have already played a
part in begetting us. Bök’s discussions about the Xenotext highlight his understanding of the
work as something both inside and outside of himself. He calls it “a beautiful, anomalous poem,
whose ‘alien words’ might subsist, like a harmless parasite, inside the cell of another life form”
(CBX 229). Anomalous, alien, parasite: these are not the words of a true parent. And yet they are
fitting, for language is always outside of us, always not quite a part of us. Because of the way the
bacterium produces a coded protein in response to the original “text,” Bök has generated not only
a poem, but also the mouth that speaks it—the gene becomes both literary artifact and author.
Which brings up an interesting ambiguity: who is the agent of reproduction here? Is it Bök, or is it
the organism with the Xenotext inside of it? Can an author ever really be in control of his work?
Has Bök, in creating a living poem, encoded a bit of himself along with the words?
The conflation between text and author in the Xenotext—and the resulting confusion as to
the nature of the literary object—is also key to understanding Spenser’s work. In fact, writing

167
about The Faerie Queene, Jonathan Goldberg asks, “Is the narrator the producer of the text? Does
he contain it? Does it come from him? Or, is he produced by the text, a voice made first by the
words on the page?” (126). These questions deal explicitly with the realization that the author and
the text depend on each other—and that this mysterious interrelation confers infinite life through
narration. For either the text or the author to reproduce, they need each other. The text must
continue infinitely to satisfy the author’s desire for eternal life, and the author must give infinitely
of himself to enable the text to continue.
⁠53

A. R. Ammons concurs. His poem “Reflective” displays just this symbiotic relationship
between text and author, all while extending the theme of texts as mirrors:
I found a
weed
that had a

mirror in it
and that
mirror

looked in at
a mirror
in

53
This conflation between textual longevity and authorial longevity is not unique to Bok and Spenser. We see it most
originally and iconically in Sheherezade, the eternal tale-spinner of 1001 Nights, whose every story buys her another
day—but whose days depend on stories. And we see it in Joan Didion’s infamous quote that is perhaps merely a rip-
off of Sheherezade that “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”

168
me that
had a
weed in it (CP 170)
The speaker here is “reading” the weed much as one reads a text, and the result is two facing
mirrors, spinning out that infinite regression between them. This is the ideal poetic experience: an
artistic exchange that propagates as it percolates. Ammons’s reflective episode syncs nicely with
a section of the sonnet cycle preceding the Epithalamion, the Amoretti:
Leave lady in your glasse of christall clene,
Your goodly selfe for evermore to vew:
And in my selfe, my inward selfe I mean,
Most lively lyke behold your semblant trew. (1-4)
Spenser asks his loved one to abandon her literal mirror for a metaphorical one, which promises a
more “trew” experience. His fears that she may gaze in her “christall”
⁠54
too long—the
implications of the eternal lure of reflection in “for evermore to vew”—add Narcissus to the mix,
which resonates with the Epithalamion’s evocation of Echo. And yet the speaker is not generally
anti-mirror; if the woman finds the right sort of mirror to look into, an eternal reflection could
turn into a positive experience. And the speaker himself—much like the speaker in
“Reflective”—hosts just such a promising surface. He acknowledges that his inner mirror cannot
reveal every part of his loved one; however, it can reflect a more important image than a face:
Most lively lyke behold your semblant trew.
Within my hart, though hardly it can shew

54
This is an interesting word choice, and calls Christian Bok to mind; “glass” would have been the more common
substitute for “mirror” in the time. The definition of “christall” that Spenser is most likely working off is “Any
naturally occurring mineral substance which is clear and transparent like ice … Often in historical, poetic, or mythic
contexts: an unspecified or fabulous (precious) material of this kind” (OED, “crystal”).

169
Thing so divine to vew of earthly eye,
The fair Idea of your celestially hew
And every part remaines immortally: (4-8)
The “immortally” returns to the idea of an eternal reflection that is much changed from its
frightening manifestation in the first lines of the poem. When we imagine a woman standing in
front of a mirror “for evermore,” we translate the word “evermore” in our heads as “for the rest of
her life”—a timespan that is, of course, finite. But this new type of reflection in the speaker seems
somehow more enduring. “Remaines immortally.” The infinite is now close at hand.
If we take the speaker as a direct representation of Spenser himself, though, how could this
meaning really be any different? The speaker is just as mortal as the one he loves. So the “I” here
is not so clearly Edmund Spenser, but is closer to the “I” remaining in “Friedrich Mohs”—the “I”
of language. We might re-read this sonnet, conflating the “I” with the sonnet itself:
Leave lady in your glasse of christall clene,
Your goodly selfe for evermore to vew:
And in my selfe, my inward selfe I mean,
Most lively lyke behold your semblant trew.
Within my hart, though hardly it can shew
Thing so divine to vew of earthly eye,
The fayre Idea of your celestiall hew
And every part remaines immortally:
And were it not that through your cruelty,
With sorrow dimmed and deformed it were,
The goodly ymage of your visnomy,

170
Clearer than christall would therein appere.
But if your selfe in me ye playne will see,
Remove the cause by which your fayre beames darkned be. (1-14)
This conflation of text and author takes us back to the promise of language as a mirror. The poem
now has the power to reproduce something over and over—to preserve the parts of the woman in
the verse as in a drop of amber. Once burned into the mirror face of the page, her image is iterated
every time a reader confronts the text, the words embody themselves like a virus into the reader’s
brain and memory—and the beloved is thus given new life. The last line of the sonnet alludes to
this process; by asking the woman to “Remove the cause by which your fayre beames darkned be,”
the speaker evokes the act of seeing, of bringing the eyes slowly into focus as they make out the
words before them.
Though this is a poem about image, the sonnet does not describe the loved one. In fact, she
(like the Epithalamion’s bride) is secondary to the poet’s interest in describing the process by
which his poem can reflect, contain, and project her. The sonnet only replicates itself—words
feeding on words, the man and the weed realizing they are both made up of the same stuff. Such a
reading falls nicely into line with deconstructionist views of the world as text—a chain of
language in which it is impossible to tell where one text ends and the next one begins. Remember
that Derrida and Spenser ultimately share the belief that “there is nothing outside the text” [il n’ya
pas de hors-texte] (Of Grammatology 158).
⁠ Goldberg’s analysis of Spenser’s work in The Faerie
Queene ushers the poet into the ranks of deconstructionists; he notes that book IV, in particular,
“seems to deny that there could be ‘another place,’ that is to say, a different place, a place other
than the text, since it appears to affirm that all space is textual and offers repeated instances of
one text replacing another” (122). I have already noted that the Epithalamion is less about the

171
marriage of a man and a woman than it is about the marriage of an author to the world of literary
texts. This insistence on the continuity of language—on its un-containability, its refusal to be
confined to the page—makes the idea of infinite reproduction through poetry that much more
conceivable. If we, too, are texts, who is to say we could not procreate through the lines of a
sonnet?
⁠55

Though our mortal bodies will die, our textual bodies need not. Writing over 400 years
before Christian Bök would set foot in a laboratory, Edmund Spenser planted the germs of a
poem that could marry itself—and could then bear its own fruit for as long as its words remained
in print—in his Epithalamion. Though the formal wedding poem may not appear to be very
interested in science, Spenser’s project mirrors Bök’s; Bök says of his Xenotext project that it
“strives to ‘infect’ the language of genetics with the ‘poetic vectors’ of its own discourse, doing
so in order to extend poetry itself beyond the formal limits of the book.” (CBX 230, emphasis
mine). Bök goes on to explain, in terms very appropriate to this dissertation:
I foresee that, as poetry adapts to the millennial condition of such innovative
technology, a poem might soon resemble a weird genre of science fiction, and a
poet might become a breed of technician working in a linguistic laboratory. I hope
that my project might, in fact, provoke debates about the future of science and
poetics … I also believe, moreover, that such a poem might begin to demonstrate
that, through the use of nanoscopic, biological emissaries, we might begin to
transmit messages across stellar distances or even epochal intervals so that, unlike
any other cultural artefact so far produced (except perhaps for the Pioneer probes

55
An aside: Spenser’s marriage poem absolutely succeeded in reproducing within the world of texts; “Spenser’s
Epithalamion, supported by the Prothalamion, created a sort of chain reaction in multiplying this species [of
epithalamia], and was essentially the agent, immediate or derivative, without which most of the succeeding English
wedding lyrics would have been pitched in a key lower than they attained, or, more likely, would not have been sung
at all.” (Osgood 205).

172
or the Voyager probes), such a poem, stored inside the genome of a bacterium,
might conceivably outlast terrestrial civilization itself, persisting like a secret
message in a bottle flung at random into a giant ocean. (CBX 230-1)
⁠
It is tempting to ask when a poem might begin to resemble a weird genre of science fiction—
tempting until we remember that it already does. Poets have been transmitting messages across
epochal intervals without the intervention of biological emissaries; the language alone is all that’s
needed to bring Ammons next to Spenser, or Duchamp next to Bök. The Bride of the Large Glass
has always held hands with the bride of the Epithalamion.
This method of achieving eternal life, these self-replicating poetic objects, are attractive to
both readers and writers because they promise rewards that go beyond the biological. We want
not only to populate the world with our children (our words); we also know that the more replicas
of us exist, the more likely it is for someone else Out There to come face to face with us. To
identify us. To look us in the eye and say I understand you. Every time someone sits down to
write she does so in the hope that another person will empathize with her words and therefore, by
the transitive property, with her. So we write in the hope that we will be recognized.
And, in being recognized, sustained. And, in being sustained, replicated.
Infinitely, if possible.

173
CONCLUSION.

UNLEASHING THE UNIVERSITY
_________________

… the time of University is in fact but a single moment, the moment of the
awakening of the idea of knowledge, when the subject is both conscious of
reason and conscious of itself as rational. This single moment is also an
eternity, since, as Fichte insists, the rational ordering of knowledge
allows the infinite multiplication of time: “The art of ordering … insofar
as it takes no step in vain, multiplies time to the infinite and extends the
short span of a single human existence to the dimensions of an eternity.”

—Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (67-8)

In my introduction to this dissertation, I noted that I hoped my cross-disciplinary approach
to reading the poetry presented here could demonstrate the flexibility of study in the humanities,
and could remind some readers of how necessary and significant work in the humanities
continues to be. I believe the study of poetry, especially when combined with scientific and
mathematical concepts and pursuits, can aid in an attempt to teach to the imagination and not the
multiple-choice answer. The concepts and ideas presented in the preceding chapters are presented
not only from a perspective of a literary academic who finds such work fascinating, but also from
the point of view of a teacher who is constantly searching for new ways to involve students in
material that is not often seen as relevant.
My aim in juxtaposing work from two eras separated so seemingly vastly by time and
space was not only to explore the legitimately interesting resonances between Early Modern verse
and contemporary poetry, but also to demonstrate an alternative to historically segregated
narratives of literature that can only limit our understanding of the work. I have found an especial
significance in Michel Serres’s thoughts on folded or crumpled time. Interestingly, these
philosophical concepts may not be as un-grounded in reality as they may first appear. David

174
Bohm speaks of the way in which quantum mechanics “may see mind and matter as enfolded”
(Davies and Brown 121):
…if you fold a piece of paper and make a pattern on it, and then unfold it you get all sorts
of new patterns. While the paper was folded the pattern was implicit—in fact the word
implicit means enfolded in Latin—and therefore we could say the pattern was enfolded.
Now quantum mechanics suggest that this is the way that phenomenal reality comes about
from a deeper order in which it is enfolded. Reality unfolds to produce the visible order
and then folds back in. It is constantly unfolding and enfolding at such a rate that it
appears to be steady … (Davies and Brown 121)
So to “fold” time in this dissertation may simply be a way to imitate the implicit structure of our
own reality—to play with literature the way quarks play with us. Enfoldment, of course, is also
not something just now being floated by contemporary thinkers; as Bohm points out, the Early
Modern philosopher and astronomer Nicholas of Cusa also believed that “reality has this enfolded
structure: that eternity both enfolds and unfolds time” (Davies and Brown 122).
Over and over again, as I researched, as I read, as I wrote, I bumped into these same
correspondences between poetry and physics, between the 21
st
century and the 16
th
. Things
refused to stay in their assigned quadrants. Everywhere you turn, something you’ve tried to
ignore starts bubbling up. To write about Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida and not mention
Spicer seemed impossible—just as impossible as ignoring the strains of chaos theory and calculus
running through both authors’ works. The story of the boy who sold the girl he loved to win a
war—the warrior who could not overcome the onslaught of an angry republic—this story is
inextricably caught up in the futile attempt to “weigh” the infinite. So, too, are Lady Mary Wroth
and Anne Carson’s poetic projects knotted up in the quantum world, shot through with the

175
infinitesimal—and so, too, do Edmund Spenser and Christian Bök make it impossible to talk
about their poetry and not think about what it might mean for language to perpetuate itself
eternally.
My own work has undeniably been influenced by my research interests; the attached
manuscript, Nights I Let The Tiger Get You, deals with the way the unknowable and the
unquantifiable is constantly rearing its head in the course of our everyday lives. The title poem of
the manuscript is my attempt to process a recurring dream I had as a child about my brother—a
recurring dream which, inexplicably, can be seen through hindsight as a prediction of future
events. (In the dream, I fail to save my brother from a tiger—in real life, I would fail to save him
from his own personal “tigers”: alcoholism, drug abuse, mental illness.) I have tried, through my
writing, to be more open to the ways our experiences play out in a nonlinear way. To cross-
temporal pollination. To the weight of things we cannot ever hope to measure.

*

The recent cutbacks to humanities departments in both secondary schools and higher
education demonstrate not only a societal belief that such study is not “important” to
contemporary life, but also, I believe, a (subconscious) fear of what intense immersion in such
fields—in literature, in music, in history, in religion, in foreign language—may yield. Fear, of
course, is something I cannot get away from here (either in my critical writing or my own poetry).
In his Pensées, Blaise Pascal discusses what happens when one contemplates both the universe
and the atom: “Whoever looks at himself in this way will be terrified by himself and … will
tremble at nature’s wonders … For in the end, what is humanity in nature? A nothingness

176
compared to the infinite, everything compared to a nothingness, a mid-point between nothing and
everything, infinitely far from understanding the extremes” (67). Perhaps it is built into human
nature to fear the massive weight of the unquantifiable, the fragility of our own small selves. And
I am obsessed with this terror. As a poet, I write about its objects over and over again: the things
that haunt me, the things I can’t get away from. The things that can’t be balled up into a neat,
quantifiable package and subtracted from the equation.
When I tell people I write poetry, I dread the frequent response: “What is your poetry
about?” I don’t know how to answer; the question demands that I extract a neat quantity—what
my poetry is “about”—from an unwieldy source. And I suspect that this question, though phrased
slightly differently, haunts most defenders of the humanities as well: “What is your department
good for?” What is it about? What’s the point of the humanities? Since the object of this question
resists measurement, there is no cocktail-party-friendly answer. The response(s) would require a
dialogue, a conversation—not a quick sound bite.
Humanities departments celebrate and nurture the unquantifiable: the impossibly large
(the biggest philosophical questions) and the impossibly small (the hour-long discussion devoted
to a single line of a poem, a single piece of marginalia in a historical manuscript). It is no wonder
that the “humanities” are, thus, objects of terror. And that poetry, the form which attempts to
approach the impossibly large via the impossibly small, would be particularly frightening. The
attacks of the culture warriors attempting to shut down the academic pursuit of the humanities are
fueled by fear—a fear that thrives on grey areas. As a result, many university leaders have
determined that the challenges facing today’s humanities departments are to get rid of the
abstract, embrace the market, and submit to financial justifications.

177
Might it be possible to harness and embrace the terror driving these attacks on the
humanities? To shape ourselves in such a way that we are fed by it, not broken down by it? The
paradoxical, complex and confusing nature of both the infinite and the humanities make these
concepts discomfiting. They are easier to do away with than to love.
Yet we must love them.
We must let the university be infinite.
“Let” it be, not ask it to be, or force it to be, because infinity is built into its very nature.
The word “university” stems, ultimately, from the Latin universus (“whole, entire”). It shares a
root with the word “universe.” Though the first definition in the Oxford English Dictionary is the
familiar one (“An institution of higher education”), the second group of definitions are telling:
2. a. The whole body or number of a specified group or class (esp. an extensive one, as
creatures, things, etc.). Also fig. rare after 18th cent. †b. The entirety of something; all
things, all creation. Obs. †c. The whole world; the universe. Cf. universality n. 6b. Obs.
Furthermore, we can also turn to the Latin universum—that which turns in on itself. Serres’s
“folded time” may be uniquely at home in the university, this formless entirety that can touch
itself at all points.
Though many still think of the individual university as finite, bounded by the walls of its
buildings and the boundaries of its campus, Samuel Weber points the way to a more appropriate
conception of the university in “The Future Campus.” Weber warns us not to be “so certain that
the university … is sufficiently self-identical to justify speaking of it in the singular” (2). He
discusses “the tension between closure and openness [that] characterizes the university” as “the
self-contained spaces that formerly characterized universities become increasingly dependent
upon an electronic space that is intrinsically non-localisable” (4). Weber’s deconstruction of the

178
space of the university aligns itself with Derrida, who notes the loss of the “communitary place
and the social bond of a ‘campus’ in the cyberspatial age of the computer, of tele-work, and of the
World Wide Web” (Without Alibi 210). What remains of a localized, concrete entity—a physical
University—no longer has enough gravitational pull to warp the space around it, to act as though
it is confined.
If convention demands that we continue to speak of the university as a singular entity with
boundaries, then the university must begin to resemble one of the poems I have examined in my
dissertation: a structured entity striving to remain whole and coherent despite the impossible
attempt to grasp and transmit something infinite. I say “impossible” here in a Derridean sense:
impossible because it must arrive, because “only the impossible can arrive” (Without Alibi 234).
Since finitude is the human condition, we must carve out a space (other than the religious
sanctuary, which encloses itself and shuts out The Other too quickly) in which to live absolutely.
Though the brain is finite, the mind is infinite
56
; our lives and the lives of our professors will end,
but the pursuit of knowledge set in motion in the classroom is perpetual. The university is a poem
we are trying to read, we are so often misreading: it is a poem that needs to be freed from its
“contemporary” context, its financial constraints, and allowed to exist over the fold of time—to
release its unboundable truth. In the epigraph to this conclusion, Readings implies that the
University is no longer able to exist as a single moment both instantaneous and eternal; I would
like to insist that we can construct a space for knowledge—a nonlinear classroom—that readily
admits a perpetual exchange, that insists you lose your bearings, that is “endlessly unsearchable
every way” (Traherne II.21).

56
As Rudy Rucker notes, “just as the finiteness of our physical bodies does not imply that every physical object is
finite, the finiteness of the number of cells in our brain does not mean that every mental object is finite.” In Infinity
and the Mind: The Science and Philosophy of the Infinite. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005: 36.

179
Yes, what we are trying to convey is hard to put limits or quantifiable value on; so is the
way we are trying to convey it. As Readings points out, the site of teaching itself is infinite:
“Neither convincing the students nor fusing with them, teaching, like psychoanalysis, is an
interminable process” (159). How dangerous, then, to bind pedagogy to a timeline of standards, a
stack of scantron sheets, a list of daily objectives.
57
How important it is to discard limits and
goals, to allow the classroom to exist in Non-Euclidean spacetime, to teach the humanities not
according to the ordered chapters in a textbook, but according to the organic rhythms of the mind.
Readings explains that “The condition of pedagogical practice is, in Blanchot’s words, ‘an infinite
attention to the other’” (161). Whether this other is a student or a poem or a government or a
loved one or an enemy, we must open ourselves up to this encounter.
Are you afraid? What are you afraid of?

The doors are opening, and everywhere, the eternal corridors beckon.

57
For a more in-depth look at the university’s slide toward “accountability” practices, see Peggy Kamuf,
“Accounterability,” Textual Practices, 21:2 (2007): 251-266.

180
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186

NIGHTS I LET THE TIGER GET YOU

187
TABLE OF CONTENTS

A HOT, CLOSE SUN TURNING YOUR TEMPLES INTO ASH 189

NIGHTS I LET THE TIGER GET YOU (I) 190
AS IF TO SAY 194
AND MANY MORE 195
MY MEMORIES OF YOU ARE SILENT 196
INTERLUDE 198
REUNION 199
TAXIDERMY 200
RECESS 201

NIGHTS I LET THE TIGER GET YOU (II) 202
THE LIZARD 206
FORTY FIVE MINUTES 207
CAPACITY 209
YOU’D BE SURPRISED 210
THE INFORMATION AGE 211
APHASIA 212
THREE LEGS ARE ALWAYS IN THE SAME PLANE 213
MORE DETAILS EMERGE 214

NIGHTS I LET THE TIGER GET YOU (III) 216
SPENDTHRIFT 220
I CALIBRATE 221
A KINGDOM AGO, BY THE RIVER 222
GOOD NEIGHBORS 224
TODAY I WOKE UP BENEATH THE INDEX 225
FULL HOUSE 226
LEARNING CURVE 227

NIGHTS I LET THE TIGER GET YOU (IV) 228
A LITTLE TO YOUR LEFT 232

188
A DEFECT IN THE DREAMER’S UNDERSTANDING OF HER LIFE 233
SOMNAMBULISM 235
PLURALS, ARCHAIC 236
NO ONE ELSE BELIEVED 237
WE’VE BEEN HERE BEFORE 238
INVISIBLE FUNERAL IN ONE ACT 239
AFTER THE HOSPITAL, THE IMPOUND LOT 241

NIGHTS I LET THE TIGER GET YOU (V) 242

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 247

189

It would be possible to cite a considerable number of other ‘typical’
dreams … as, for example: dreams of passing through narrow
alleys, of walking through a whole suite of rooms; dreams of the
nocturnal burglar against whom nervous people direct
precautionary measures before going to sleep; dreams of being
chased by wild animals (bulls, horses), or of being threatened with
knives, daggers, and lances. The last two are characteristic as the
manifest dream content of persons suffering from anxiety, &c.

—Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams.

*

And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?

—William Blake, “The Tyger”

190
A HOT, CLOSE SUN TURNING YOUR TEMPLES INTO ASH

And in the space inside your head, between
your eyes and your ears, an entire
planet throbs. Oh sure, despite the clouds you can go

out into the meadow and walk around a bit
but it’s the same old story. Babies
laughing. Fires on top of all the buildings. A man

in a tower with headphones on
gesturing at something you can’t see. Here’s a trick
the dream taught me: The things you never

thought you’d want to save you end up trying
to pry
out of his jaws. And when you think you’ve

won, it all starts up again: the sky, burning and
heavy; the sound of the machines; this

day, and the next day, and
the half-planet still in the dark.

191
NIGHTS I LET THE TIGER GET YOU

(I)

Phone at the end
of the bed. Voice on the end

of the phone. At the end of the bed I sit down,
I am one eye of a whirlpool. Voice

with its phrases like
There’s been an

anaerobic event. I know. The aquatic
hug, the kelp around our ears, the voice filtering

through the surface: slow
music

thrown from the passenger’s side at
down a snowy mountain. I’ve lost

our family album. Of course my mother
needs me.

192
My legs, my legs, two lumbering
jackasses that just can’t get
the job done.

When looking straight ahead,
carrying a person feels almost the same
as dragging a body along
behind you.

But looking backwards—the empty
stretch of river trumps
the face

sliding across the concrete.
Stupider every time,

but smoother. Those easy iron locks, that
oiled machinery. The larded
sides of bread grow slippery
in hot hot hand.

The sound of the tiger
no longer behind us but
on top.

193
It’s not like I didn’t know
what was about to happen. It’s not like
I didn’t know that backyard,

that picnic blanket. What was about to
happen was

not unlike you.

Was typical.

The thing about recurring dreams is

194
Cat licking
a knuckle. Over and over. Cat

licking a knuckle. Joan Didion remembers
Hawking talked
about retrieving time from a black hole.

Fishing it out like a stellar
tiger at the
edge of

information is encoded in the
correlations between future and past

I stop, I think “tiger” is too
cliché but what isn’t and: I can’t change
the way I see it.

Who wouldn’t need a year
to beat the mirror
into muddling out a face. Striped
or bloody. Furred or gleaming. You are one

or the other. You are
one or the other. You

are one or the other.

195
AS IF TO SAY

Holding up traffic as if to say darling, I miss you. The cars chewing
gas, jostling the people inside them. The chickens that have been
waiting on the sidewalks take this opportunity. Nobody honks.
They can see how serious I am. Except it wasn’t traffic. A bank.
Holding up a bank as if to say darling, I miss you, and the bank
employees trembling behind their name tags. The people in line
wonder if their transactions can be completed now before their
lunch hour ends. No one shouts. They can see how serious I am.
I’m sorry, it wasn’t a bank. No. My clothes. Holding up my clothes,
naked, on your front porch. It’s night and your door is closed.
Darling, I miss you.

196
AND MANY MORE

You said, it’s you and me against the world, kid, and the curtains in
your room were still. We were in your bed, we were in something
we had made with our own hands and tongues and stubborn
gluesticks. The wrapping paper we’d put on the walls yelped Happy
Birthday! and the cakes raised their candles and everywhere
surfaces were metallic, they reflected the still things in front of
them.

When I raised my hand up it came back at me covered in icing.

The door of your room was still shut. I thought someone outside
was asking for you. But. It wouldn’t let up, that crumbled sound.
Those tines waiting for you to open wide.

197
MY MEMORIES OF YOU ARE SILENT

In that country there is a train
that stops when it gets tired It doesn’t bother
to read the signs There is a man in my car
who claims to be French
but does not understand me
when I ask quelle heure
est-il He shows me a picture of a man
and points to himself And the man
in the picture has a different
face For weeks I have been woken up
by dreams in which I open my mouth
to speak and only then discover
I am underwater In the backseat of
a cab I go through all the Arabic phrases
I know in my head how much
is the bread and the son
is in the garden with the cow and I love,
I am a woman In the front seat
it sounds like the cab driver is yelling
at the man next to him I think
they are discussing the best streets
to take Meanwhile under another country’s
ocean certain navy officers produce
horrible noises to scare away
the whales The navy needs this portion
of the ocean to be devoid of whales
so they can perform
exercises No one in the navy
bothers to learn the language
of the whales They think that if their noises
are loud enough
the whales will get the gist In the city
I meet another American woman She says
she is having a party in her apartment
When I get there everyone is speaking
English We sit on a rug in the middle
of the floor and she serves us

198
Hamburger Helper Everyone is talking
very loudly and I do not have anything to say
to any of them In the middle of a bite
of artificially colored pasta
I look up and see you looking
at me You glance at your plate
and then back up at me and
you roll your eyes We do not speak
a word out loud I swim up through
the surface of the water
and take a deep breath I hope the whales
are still living in that ocean saying
to each other what was all
that noise about

199
INTERLUDE

I am sitting beneath my car. Watching the dogs. Watching the dogs
wag their tails, the dogs that have tails. The light is red and I am
watching the light for when it turns green. Watching the bubbles
rise over my head towards the surface of the water. If everyone else
can smile at the sunset then I . Don’t think twice about that shadow
passing over. The grand piano squats in the intersection. The light
turns green. The audience rustles like algae. After I play a few
chords, the dog sitting in the aisle barks his approval. Sometimes I
look down at the keys. Saltwater drips over the ivory. Sooner or
later everyone devolves.

200
REUNION

At the empty altar we hugged like drunks. Nowhere to straighten
but against the other’s breastbone.

Meanwhile unblessed wafers writhe beneath the sheet
in throes. They ask us for our barest teeth, for this time a peek of
shorn flesh—

(The flash at the moment of sink
or float The negative sitting
on ice)

What’s the story about the starfish? We should cut off each other’s
arms, throw them into the ocean. We should cut each other off. We
should each cut off the other. I’d give you the literature on this
transaction, but it wouldn’t do much good. The unlit candles hum
like tended refrigerators.

(The stranger who walked in
front of the lens The face half-
veiled in linen)

We are one sad soul in the church of the universe. We are extending
this hug as though it could save us. We are one sad soul in the
churchyard, in the church pond, formerly filled with obese fish.

201
TAXIDERMY

There’s turbulence, like always. Strapped in. The flight attendents
in their trim blue suits squint down the aisles. Something
underneath my feet is rankling. The salt at the bottom. The sea out
the window, drowning its sorrows, its black plastic bags. In the
baggage hold lies someone’s llama. Don’t worry, it’s dead. The
man next to me talks about taxidermy, his marriage in June. A
honeymoon, then he’s retiring. How long before his hands forget
what it feels like? Folded skin cold around them. That llama’s eyes
looking into thin space. That llama’s loving eyes.

202
RECESS

I have listened again & again
for everything I need to know

I have sat inside boxes & waited

but all I got was the voice of some mother,
saying go outside & play

asking me why don’t you ride your bike?
& outside the window a tank rolls by

with our next door neighbor on top

smiling & waving his leafblower
like he had just lost something inside of it

203
NIGHTS I LET THE TIGER GET YOU

(II)

To the point where going back to sleep
seems worthless.

Information is encoded
in the correlations between

Between the object & the reflection:
the ant walking back and forth
across the tile
in the bathroom stall.

future and past

In it I couldn’t tell you
when things start to go wrong. The sidewalk or
the picnic blanket.

The slow zoom on the fur
that grows bigger & bigger
across the screen of my eyelids.

204
Okay, so I am dragging your body
along behind me again. The way the bee
keeps pollen on his legs, we’re together, we’re flying
on to some other field of pistols. We have
more than one shot. Your body bouncing across
every dip in the land. So I am dragging
your body along behind me. The loop around
the eye. Some other field of pistols. The way the bee
stings once & coughs up bee blood. We have more
than one shot, though. We have all the time
between future and past.

205
The joint in the sink. The wall’s anticipation
of the punch. The dip in the

The wall’s anticipation, what will unfold,
unfolding the shirt in the laundry room to see
if the blood stains are gone yet. Folding the shirt
back up. What will unfold must be
anticipated by some animate being, some tiger.

References to ‘metamorphosis’ in mammals are imprecise
and only colloquial.

The trajectory of one fork
across the table. Will it hit
the eye. Will you stop sitting there
like a full-on idiot. Petting the fawn, its soft
ears. Like a full-on idiot, petting the imprecise
fawn.

206
Could you ask it to stop.
Could you be

any more helpless.
This is not

a condemnation of you.
This is not a condemnation.

What is it about the soul
that will almost always, in the momentary

pinch, choose
its own life over

207
THE LIZARD

The day after I was alone in the kitchen. The mailman dropped off
the catalogs and it was me and the vacuums and the wet towels.
There were so many ways to wring them out. For example: into
those already ripples, their walls. Over the other ocean a girl many
years ago cried in a bathtub. The lizard that crawled through the
ceiling fan swirled around her legs in bloody almost cubes. And if
you touch me do I not. And if we were together in the great big
theater with the starfish and the guillotine. Just look how clean this
place is.

208
FORTY FIVE MINUTES

12:01 pm—The list is broken down by minutes.

12:02 pm—The minutes represent
an action: something to be done.
Something to achieve. A body
moving through space in relation to
a goal.

12:04 pm—If the list is not adhered to
it is not the end of the
world. The creation of the list

12:05 pm—is more important than its
execution.

12:11 pm—On the periphery of
the digital world is a small girl
with an afghan pulled over
her eyes so as not to see

12:12 pm—the knife, the way it moved
around and inside of
the man. The knife could cross

12:13 pm—something right off. The girl’s
fingers are spread far apart
for ease of the thing. The time it
takes between the inhalation
of nitrous oxide and the

12:16 pm—laughter. Once

12:21 pm—the girl tried to answer the
question What do
you do with your time? but

209
the sensation it gave her was

12:23 pm—unpleasant. Could the world
unfold itself
any other way. She gets
tired. Of course she gets tired. It

12:23 pm—wraps its numbered turfs
around her brain. In the bedroom,

12:24 pm—the baby on the
pillow, staring into the red
light of the digital

12:26 pm—clock. Iteration becomes
the most rewarding blanket. How
could. The girl’s fingers. How

12: 30 pm—could 2 become 3 in
legs of light and mean you are now
one minute sadder

12:35 pm—The baby lining its body up
with the colon that separates an hour
from its own frail minutes.

12:41 pm—How many lights can fall
across an eye

12:45 pm—What do you do with your time?

12:46 pm—I count it.

210
CAPACITY

My soaking linens are gray, your hair sweeps the floor. The lines
we hum take shape in soap bubbles. They would pop on a breath, if
either of us were breathing. The road outside swells like a sponge.

How do lungs do it anyway? So many spores to absorb. Right now
the only sound is an awful sucking. Don’t sit down over there, the
chair is breaking. Don’t sit down at all: you need the space inside
your chest. Pick your head up, paint my softening nails.

In the road is a bus. Under the bus is a bomb, next to the bomb is
someone’s dirty undershirt. The people on the street are running
because they can smell the puddles, they know that nothing dry is
coming. Is the rainy season over yet, you ask.

I look at the pumpkin seeds building up in our sink. They reek of
lightning. I take a deep breath in.

211
YOU’D BE SURPRISED

In extreme conditions it can become necessary to prop the door
shut. I recommend a wooden chair with a flat top or perhaps an
empty dresser. (Complete isolation is impossible to achieve.) When
she took off her clothes for you, did you see anything underneath?
It’s funny, the things that can hide under rocks, and how deadly
they can be, and how many ways they can find to latch onto your
socks.

I just want to say something to you that’s real and loud, that can be
heard over the howling. Did she ever make you feel like a live
balloon? Look: that rock over there is home to a rattlesnake, that
one a scorpion. This rock right next to you is the one I use to cover
my firearms. You’d be surprised how many times I’ve had to lift it.
And always with another lonely ghost breathing over my shoulder,
leaning bravely into the wind.

212
THE INFORMATION AGE

In half as much time
we will have grown wings. Not angel

ones, with the white and the
genderless and the do not

be afraid, but wings
like an owl’s. Wings to send you

into the sides of mice.
Our backs may ache

but no one can dispute
the twigs. The doors of our houses

oaky and close, the insects
in our beds. And we are not

satisfied. We look at ourselves
in the mirrors and pale,

feathers dropping onto our bathmats
like broken wheels.

213
APHASIA

There are storms farther than you can throw your voice. They climb
in through our windows, they howl at our smiles. Every word you
say sounds like nonsense. How can we talk about happiness with all
that exaggerated thundering in the background?

I realize I am obsessed with making all of this mean something.
With stringing shadows on. This crowd in your mind boiling up like
highway fog. Nonsense, you say. Nonsense? I ask. Nonsense, you
respond.

When I see you in the guillotine’s reflection, I realize: you’d like to
fall off bridges, with all your wild limbs. Outside it is everything up
and running. Nonsense, you say, and howl like a wounded mouse as
you crawl out the door.

214
THREE LEGS ARE ALWAYS IN THE SAME PLANE

Listen, sometimes I just need the silence, or rain. Whichever’s
easiest. There are a lot of things I’ve been working through here in
my kitchen, and one of them is meringues, and one of them is
souffles, and one of them is table legs. And all of them collapse if
you do it right. The way I see it, soon my life will be a discarded
Polaroid. A thing you can look at and say, Here is the best friend,
and here is the bad dog, and here is the place where. If only you
could make it sound like relinquished seeds, like a basement with
an atlas no one’s ever seen.

215
MORE DETAILS EMERGE

Maybe you’re supposed to give some sort of ghost
tour Maybe you’re tasked with taking people
through the streets and making up stories

about dead apothecaries and mourning
wives When the feeling gets to your hand
on the doorknob you know you’re

going to open it now no matter what
I want to be alone and quiet But there’s always
some new axe

cutting through the unfinished side
of my house There’s always someone I have to be
accountable to standing there

with an empty pillowcase whispering
fill it up And my hands are empty and the glass bowl
in front of me is empty

and I keep showing them that but they
seem to think I’m made
of individually-wrapped candies Please

walk slowly up to the lens until you’re almost in
focus Place the yellow light on top of the ceiling fan
and step away Please look in the mirror for me

and tell me what I should be seeing What
is women's writing anyway Sometimes
I think about how broken

my body is I think maybe the only thing that
understands how I see the fragments of
myself is Peyton Manning's neck re-

fused and covered in question mark

216
scars Maybe you’re supposed to tell the tourists
to stay home tonight To wait for Halloween

(I’m always opening the door to the same threat
over and over
and every time it looks like love)

217
NIGHTS I LET THE TIGER GET YOU

(III)

If you or I were launched
into outer space
with the picnic cloth wrapped around us
like a helmet. Only colloquial
problems would remain

at that point. Not tonight’s problems of gravity:
negative nine point eight
& that’s not counting dream resistance.

I fear what I have said of infinities
will seem obscure to you,

Newton said, & he was right.

218
The next night I try to turn left into
the neighbors’ fence. It doesn’t stop

the fawn from rearing up, baring
its new and lashing tail. The next night I try
to turn right. No. The next
night I try to turn left. I fear what I have said
of picnic blankets will seem obscure

to you. The next night I try to not turn at all,
to glance off equilibrium, to balance
your body like moon rocks
in stained

glass.
The fence cracks.

219
I am knocking on their wall. I am
awake, sweating,
I don’t know where my feet are. I am knocking
on their wall like feathers, like bee
feathers in the summer. Honeycombed. Sidewalk

of concavities, sidewalk of skin cells, they’ve tested
your hair, they’ve smoothed your thumb over
with ink. Sidewalk of gasoline.

References to ‘metamorphosis’ in mammals

are written all over the neighbors’
stained glass fence. I am knocking on their wall
with a feather
that emerges from my perfect palm.

220
Inside, bricked up. The Christmas
all the lights were off. Dark tree, dark
couch, dark knees shoved together beneath a velvet
dress.

She was zero point two tigers. You were in the garden
clapping your hands. All the lights were
off & it was me against
the switches.

Questions include:
Whose face did I expect to see?
For what purpose?
And how was this different from any other day?

Bricked up inside
the presence. Dark sleeping life. The purple
thumb on the mantle. Zero point two
tigers. If only this were any way
to decode love.

221
SPENDTHRIFT

Tell me something I don’t know. Everyone who holds the line is
not brave, and everyone who gazes over channels is not a dreamer.
And I am neither. I am eating paper in the back of a dark cab and
filing through phonemes. The girl in my past who slept near a
mummy was another version of me. The boy in your past who shot
a squirrel in the gut was another version of you. The problem is that
the girl woke up without prompting, and the boy cried instead of
laughed. When I give the cab driver my cash, he does not notice the
bite out of the corner of that 5, the ink smudges under my nose. I
guess I didn’t warn you it was monsoon season. I guess I figured
you could tell by the rain.

222
I CALIBRATE

Weighed on a scale, it seems simple. A fire burning an atlas will
always be heavier than a fire burning a single sea. How long has it
been, anyway, since the smoke alarm has gone off? Rings of water
stain the top of your dresser like the jellyfish stings on my thighs.

Sometimes when you go swimming I count the rings, I calibrate, I
ponder whether they mark something between us growing older. I
record the ounces. From atlas to ash: only a difference of three
hundred and eighty-six years.

Fire self-replicates, it sustains itself by copying itself: iterations of
flames inhaling the air. I am not a flame or a ripple. I trace the
roads. I put the paper lined with invisible lines into the kitchen
scale. I wonder how much it would cost to convert these nights into
something we could add up: a group of rungs, some extra pounds—
you know, consequences.

223
A KINGDOM AGO, BY THE RIVER

The louder water is, the more silence is in it.

That is why it is always best
to shoot someone in the neck
right by the water.

*

Eventually everything goes in circles:

the raft, the fat man’s
bowel movements, the hair of the dead
man’s head in the water, the smoke, the eyes of the horses.

The men in the forest will go in circles, too
searching for some silly well they dreamt of long ago

waiting for the bodies, the men they killed
to bloody their doormats

but no one has ever gazed into their necks at dinner parties
no one’s thrown raw meat at their ankles in the marketplace

*

You will carry the cage & the axe
you will carry the wheel & here –

a simple cannon
to blow up the things you have lost.

Those women over there are wounded.

224
They have crow’s nests
for eyes.

They hold the babies of strange animals
in their hands
& laugh wordlessly.

*

The business man says:

If I want the birds to drop dead from the trees
the birds will drop dead from the trees
& we can trample them
until we can paint the walls with them.

The business man’s sad women look into the water
& see only the bottom and the

top & somewhere there are men
who will not read a book
unless it whispers kindly into their ears:

That is no ship
that is no forest
that is no arrow.

Those are not your lungs on the ground, being rained on.

That is not your daughter, bleeding into your palm.

225
GOOD NEIGHBORS

The word “happy” begins to sound strange. When the tongue works
off kinetic memory it holds the bird-filled world at a distance. So
we mouth and we mouth and we build a new wall.

We build one and another and another. Is this enough
to keep it out? you ask. To keep what, I say. When you respond you
are very far away. The ocean, you say. There is a coral reef around
your head that looks like it’s laughing. A starfish covers your best
knee. Yes, I say. This is enough. The next time I touch you I dream
of scales.

226
TODAY I WOKE UP BENEATH THE INDEX FINGER

of a lot of people, anticipating
fever. When I put my head against the

warm of my breakfast table’s stomach
the baby kicked. It did not want a name

or anything like that. Today I felt myself
up in the shower, today I threw away

my second-best bed. Today I told no one
to stop. The baby kicked because it was ugly.

The baby kicked because it had no other way
to say let’s spit up on the walls

and eat Chinese food. Let’s balk
at lists, at the way you climb into

and out of subway stops. Bury
these bulbs, take my temperature. Light me up

like Vegas. When the baby is born
it will have your parting teeth.

227
FULL HOUSE

You’d be mistaken if you said you didn’t hear the birds crying
south for the winter. When the klieg lights came on I could taste it
under our feet. That slowly-burning bottom crust of solace. The
season turning its head. The season drying up in places.

Get up now, before your tongue freezes to my iron heart. It’s too
cold for either of us to still be lying here. But the scar on my thumb
still needs picking, and there are presents to be counted, and —

The applause sign hasn’t worked in years.

228
LEARNING CURVE

The Atlantic Ocean had been burning
for four days We were told to stay inside
but we’d forgotten which houses
belonged to us Now we lie on the beach

watching the local theater company’s
production of A Midsummer Night’s
Dream In the audience one lumbering
ash man walks up to an ash

woman and leans over He looks
surprised at all the ash Like a man who
hits a deer with his car and stops
to see his full name written on its back

in Sharpie On the makeshift stage
Helena speaks of cherries We try to know
what cherries taste like Your gas mask
on top of my opera gloves The whole

wide world doused in ethanol and lit
up We’d peel our skins off
for each other for one glorious incandescent
cruise one saltwater bed of again

again Out of the corner of the sky
something is writing words They
look like they are in our language
But we both fail to read them Maybe this

is starting over

229
NIGHTS I LET THE TIGER GET YOU

(IV)

One of these nights the tiger
will head up in the elevator, I know it. I worry
about whether he will pop
the Mylar balloons on his way
to the body. I wonder whether he will get
parking validation.

There’s been an

evolution, an era. Such a lot of physical
space between the future and
the present. Between the time when I could drag you
behind me and the time your wrists
got so much larger. Between the time

I left you for the tiger
and the afternoon I went out to identify
the twisted piece of metal. To see the steering wheel
meet the driver’s seat. Catalogue it.

A signature on a bold black line
seems so much scarier than that black
hole.

230
The phone at the end of the bed
may die in the presence of
oxygen. The body being dragged along the sidewalk

just trying to trigger anaerobic
metabolism. So why is my hand
empty? Voice on the end of the end

of the end of one eye of a whirlpool, one eye
of a hubcap, you take a breath and
it’s over, you have a picnic and

the tiger’s ready.

231
More stepping across cracks: the fist
in the apple pie. Years and years of three-leaf
clovers. The taste in the mouth that rises
like a runaway hot air balloon, like
a single man in an empty stadium, if the single man
were your mother and your mother
were —

Cross it off: a grand façade, a cafeteria
run, a contact with plaster. I am attached
to my hand. I am attached
to my hand and my hand is attached
to my arm and my elbow and so on, up through
my neck and my eyes. When I said “the fist,”
I meant my own.

I piece together the joints of me
and brace it all
for the moment the speedometer
stops.

232
Spare us our night sweats,
O Lord. Spare us our anguish, our waking
futilities. Spare us our appetites,
our smoking guns. Spare the tiger, he’s worn out
from last time, he’d like to sleep in
today.

I walk my body
through the rooms, through the rooms and rooms
that empty out into that pewed space. I kneel.
When I close my eyes, there she is:
under the fake palm
leaves, holding her purple thumb
high in the air. I open my eyes and see the man

with holes in his sides. I close
my eyes. There she is. I open
my eyes. Turn right, turn left, turn right—you
cannot change the outcome: your body
is made of such heavy stuff.

For compilation album by rock group Crowded House,
see Recurring Dream (album)

I have not been seeing myself naked.
When I get into bed, I put on a shirt.

Neil Finn would like to accompany
your slow, off-stage demise.

233
A LITTLE TO YOUR LEFT

When the café is busy I take my coffee at the bar. Flavor is best
without the artifical sweetness of a booth, without the space on the
wall where your head would be in the cell phone picture.

Whose lips to touch next? Dark matter at the middle of an hour.
Owls perching in their brunchtime holes. The waitress lines us up,
cocks her gun. Why’d you wear such a nice dress? She knows a
good dry cleaner but can’t vouch for her work with blood stains.

Try the croissant. Try the multiple choice. There are questions and
then there are tiny bitter wells of ground-up loss. See that crease
between her eyes? It only comes out when her finger’s got the
trigger. Move a little to your left. Now take a bow.

234
A DEFECT IN THE DREAMER’S UNDERSTANDING OF HER LIFE

The thing is, I’ve been fresh out of fly swatters
for a while now. You can’t use them more than once
on the flies we get around here.

Around 3 a.m. this morning
I tried to focus my eyes but the black shape in the living
room wouldn’t get any sharper. Stop me

if you’ve heard this one before—I’m sure the things that
should connect me to the world keep growing weaker,
more attenuated. I think their fibers are too elastic, too

willing to yield. What else could explain this constant
slippage, this black shape now rising and making
its way towards me? And that night, your fingers

were thin, dead clouds moving steadily west with
the Sun. And the fly pinching me has hands. And his hands have
sunspots. And I fear that if I wake I will be

just one more iteration of some former self, one step farther
from the original. Or perhaps everything
will be dimmed: the wall dim opposite the bed, the idea

of a periphery or boundary dim, the dim
doorway, outside it a dim figure in the hall. And your fingers
were thin, dead clouds with no rain inside, no

hope of opening onto dry fields or into
wounds that could stimulate a buried nerve. Of which
I have far too many, no markers, not even the tell-tale plots

of broken earth above them. Perhaps
it’s not a lawn at all, that stretch of green outside
my window. Perhaps it’s a tiny football field. Stop me

235
if you’ve heard this one before: the moral of this story
is that I’m not even strong enough to pry open
my own eyelids. What kind of a promise is that,

to this whole crowd of people waiting just inside my
skull for nothing more than a fighting chance?

236
SOMNAMBULISM

The bicep gives. Because if you have a pumpkin patch, you have to
have scarecrows. No one else likes hay stuffed up their sleeves or
out their ears. We can erect them in the dark while I paint your
expression on this blanking burlap. Leaves falling around us like
sleepwalkers, awakened.

On the television the man in the headphones says pass. His eyes
are. The hollows in the ground smell like nutmeg and crow
droppings. When will you realize. It’s nothing, the sky. Not even as
large as your handprint against the window. Not even as plangent as
that hungry chicken’s cry.

237
PLURALS, ARCHAIC

Once outside, it’s snow on the roofs, it’s roofs over your favorite
puddles. Sometimes I get sad that no one says “rooves” any more. I
think about this as the roofs move, as they smother their way across
the plot.

The roofs are clouds and the clouds are the faces of the child ghost
and the child ghost is yourself. Kick and scream, that’ll show ’em.
Dig the spikes at the ends of your fingers into the couch arms.
Don’t cry when the wind grips your legs, we’ve been here before.

Except it was autumn then, and the rain beat down our hair like
wheat. And there was something like bounty. And the kine lowed
all around us, circling us like the white of an open eye. Look:
there’s one coming over the horizon now. All we have to do is wait
for it to hit us.

238
NO ONE ELSE BELIEVED

Take it from me, the liquid going over your head is always just that
much more reliable than the moment you’re out of it and shivering.
To be blind is to hear all the noises no one else believed in. The
noise of your friend’s hamster dying. The noise of your mother
charging down the wooden ramp to hold you responsible. When
you used to walk the plank off of your sofa’s arm, there was no risk
of harming anything except the upholstery. Never mind that sharp
ringing, that lying in wait child ghost. He takes a guillotine, sets it
up by your arm. How long will you wait until you hear your wrist
beneath it? And what will you do with the blood?

239
WE’VE BEEN HERE BEFORE

Through all the changing scenes and seasons, seasickness the only
constant. A green tint to the face. A match dropped. An envelope
unsealed.

I always wanted to be someone’s cross of snow. Weathering the lid
after the eye. If ever two were one, then vision crossed and distance
formed a crease inside the chest.

The flames are licking at my nose now. In my lap I catch the hair-
ends like a firefighter. I want you to embrace me and fail, I want to
be replaced with ink, with symbolism. You’ll cremate these words
by the shore, you and the exhaling crowd in all of my ashen hair.

240
INVISIBLE FUNERAL IN ONE ACT

A bird runs into a window

Enter: A woman (who looks
like me) staring at the patterns
on a Persian rug Enter: A stagehand, carrying a
mirror

The woman tapes black
construction paper over the mirror When she stares
at the rug and then back at the blacked-
out mirror, neon ghosts of
paisley fractals squirm

A bird runs into a window &
I watch It strikes its beak with its
own beak

Previously Entered: Maurice Blanchot

Maurice Blanchot stands by a desk lamp
in the corner & notes: It is striking that at
this very moment, when the cadaverous presence
is

Enter: the woman (who is me) staring at
the reflected patterns on her face Enter: the television

projecting a woman (who is not me) staring at
a family photograph and saying
& I didn’t
recognize

Maurice Blanchot scratches
his head He writes: when the cadaverous

presence is the presence
of the unknown before us, the mourned deceased

241
begins to

A bird runs into a window & I
watch & call it by its cadaver name

Enter: the woman, the woman, the philosopher, the
bird They hold mirrors in front

of their faces They stretch out
their arms They will never accidentally crash
through

How else would you touch that othered
eye
the mourned deceased begins
to resemble himself

(It strikes its arm with its

own arm It makes a palindrome out of all
its eyes It lies
in this mirror-plated coffin & talks
of regurgitated worms I
watch)

Exit: me

242
AFTER THE HOSPITAL, THE IMPOUND LOT

The car in the junkyard like a heap of broken. Was not conscious. I
walked next to my father but I could not tell you what he was
wearing or if he had a pulse.

The stuck needle, the crumpling.

That sweet-sick smell of lilies.

In someone’s leg there was a cold silver thing. In another one’s
bedroom there were no more dirty clothes. When I touch my
father’s sleeve we are inside a cave, we are not far from that slow
river.

243
NIGHTS I LET THE TIGER GET YOU

(V)

You’re on the phone, you have a snake
that got its head stuck in the Tupperware container
you tried to put it in instead of an
aquarium.

Something falls past the window
and you flinch. It could have been a bird.
But it also could have been not
a bird. It could have been
your parole officer, or me, saying something like:
You can’t come to my wedding
unless you have been sober for six months.

244
You’re on the phone, you’re making
chili with expired chicken. I wonder
if you will give the snake any.

I could call five months before the wedding
and say something like,
You can’t come to my wedding
unless you have been sober for six months.

245
One more crime, one more
act of the subconscious mind on
the wide-flung haunches.

When I say the word “brother”
I mean

246
The curtain rises. The man
with a blind eye turns it
on me. He doesn’t want
to watch the last act,
my favorite pantomime.
He doesn’t want to be
the spectator at the bloody
dragging end. The bee
who watches that metal twist,
who watches the mother come down
to the edge of the stage
and keel. You’ll see. The curtain
rises and the grass beneath
our feet is real. And once again,
I really believe I can do it.
As the fawn becomes the tiger
and you, that child you, you
pull your hand back
from where you’ve been petting it
but it’s too late. You
on the picnic blanket, petting
the fawn, the fawn who turns into
the tiger. You on the picnic blanket
and I think I can save it,
can save you, I think
I can make it over
in time to take you out of the tiger’s
mouth, but there’s no way
I can pull you out of this,
this mirror, this bottle, this
too too sullied river of letters
addressed to numbers and nights
addressed to drink. This sink. I think
it’s time to let you go
without a show. I think about
how you are the one who sat
yourself down on this checkered
blanket and you are the one
who put out your hand. And you

247
are the one who put your right foot
on the gas pedal and.
This is not a condemnation
of you. But the next time
the curtain rises, the next night,
I’ll know: I just can’t save the child.
And the crowd goes wild.

248
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many thanks to the editors of the following publications in which versions of these
poems first appeared, often bearing different titles:

1110: “And Many More”
The Cortland Review: “Taxidermy”
The Fiddleback: “Today I Woke Up Beneath The Index,” “A Defect In The
Dreamer’s Understanding Of Her Life”
Foothill Magazine: “Forty Five Minutes”
Hot Metal Bridge: “Capacity”
Indiana Review: “As If To Say”
La Petite Zine: “The Lizard,” “The Information Age”
The Literary Review: “Good Neighbors,” “Reunion”
Matter: Selections from “Nights I Let The Tiger Get You”
Poetry Flash: “Interlude”
The Portland Review: “Spendthrift”
RHINO: “A Kingdom Ago, By The River”
Splash of Red: “Learning Curve,” “My Memories of You Are Silent”
The The: “Invisible Funeral In One Act”

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Life on display

Asset Metadata

Creator Cantwell, Elizabeth (author)

Core Title Fitting infinity on the page: a calculus of verse; and, Nights I let the tiger get you (poems)

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Literature and Creative Writing

Publication Date 04/10/2014

Defense Date 03/04/2014

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag calculus,infinity,OAI-PMH Harvest,poetics,Poetry,quantum physics,Shakespeare,Spenser,Troilus

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor St. John, David (committee chair), Johnson, Clifford V. (committee member), Smith, Bruce R. (committee member)

Creator Email eccantwell@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-375512

Unique identifier UC11296530

Identifier etd-CantwellEl-2339.pdf (filename),usctheses-c3-375512 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-CantwellEl-2339.pdf

Dmrecord 375512

Document Type Dissertation

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Cantwell, Elizabeth

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA