(Mueller 148), servile submissiveness to an absurdly
repellent embodiment of patriarchal royal absolut-
ism (Goldberg 111–12), and even bulimia (Fish
223). The most ambitious twelve-step program
may seem hardly sufficient to restore to a man of
such vicious compulsions his former status as the
most persuasive love poet in English literature.
These gloomy assessments of Donne and his work
arise, however, from a misconception both of love
and of poetry. Both of these vital human activities
have been ‘‘defined down’’ in this therapeutic age:
judged as something less than the sum of their parts.
The vital abundance and mysterious subtlety of
love have been subjected to a diminished appraisal
in a fashion analogous to the ‘‘demystification’’ of
the inventive copia and wit of Donne’s poetry. The
recovery can be managed only by the constructive
work of literary criticismand scholarship—a kind
of joint operation seeking to rescue meaning from a
wind-swept sea of floating signifiers.
The interpretation of Donne’s love poetry
offered here depends upon a vision of human
love as an experience fraught with tension.
D’Arcy refers to ‘‘the twofold character of love,
in which respect it is compared to the struggle
of opposites in nature’’ (222). At the heart of
this ‘‘struggle’’ is the tension between Eros and
Agape ́—in the simplest terms, possessive and
self-sacrificing love, desire and charity. The great
value of D’Arcy’s work lies in his insistence that
simply to favor agape over eros will not suffice:
perfect agape is possible only for God whose fund
of benevolence is infinite and inexhaustible. A
man or a woman cannot give absolutely because
we are finite creatures: a measure of self-assertive
egotism, of possessive eros, is (literally) essential
for us in order to retain an identity to be sacrificed
or surrendered. Herein the paradox of the human
situation: our most transcendent aspirations are
as limitless and insatiable as our most sulphurous
desires, while our capacity for each alternative is
strictly limited. What is more, our divergent long-
ings often seem not merely simultaneous, but even
indistinguishable. The swoon of ecstatic self-
immolation is whirled about in the slaver of pred-
atory anticipation. The resolution of this dilemma
by means of supernatural grace is matter for
another essay. My topic here is just the enigma
of earthly, profane love, which embodies so much
of what is both admirable and delightful, repre-
hensible and mortifying, in human nature and
conduct.
This tension at the center of human life finds
its analogue in the tension that is central to poetry,
a tension that attains its exemplary literary form in
irony. ‘‘Irony’’ in this context means a poetic figure
or a rhetorical device; but it refers as well to a
particular vision of reality that is marked by an
acute awareness of the fallibility of human knowl-
edge, the uncertainty of human enterprise, the
contingency of human existence itself. Such con-
siderations are far more pertinent to this discussion
than worries about whether irony is excessively
‘‘elitist’’ (Hutcheon 94) or inappropriate—not to
say incorrect—in certainpolitical contexts. The
concern here is less with irony as a ‘‘political
issue’’ (Hutcheon 2) than with Cleanth Brooks’
concept of ‘‘irony as a principle of structure.’’
Brooks’1949essaydescribes irony as ‘‘a dynamic
structure—a pattern of thrust and counterthrust’’;
and after listing apparently contradictory implica-
tions in a poem by RandallJarrell, Brooks argues
that what results is not incoherence, but a complex
of ironic tension:
None of these meanings cancels out the others.
All are relevant, and each meaning contributes
to the total meaning. Indeed, there is not a facet
of significance which does not receive illumina-
tion from the figure. (740)
The concept of irony as a structure of seman-
tic tension, however, offers an obvious parallel
to Monsignor D’Arcy’s conception of love as a
tension of eros and agape. Together the two con-
cepts provide a means of interpreting Donne’s
love poetry as the ironic embodiment of a vision
of love as a version of concordia discors. The same
violent yoking that Dr. Johnson finds in the meta-
physical style Brooks attributes to irony:
Irony, then, in this further sense, is not only an
acknowledgment of the pressures of context.
Invulnerability to irony is the stability of a
context in which the internal pressures balance
and mutually support each other. The stability
is like that of the arch: the very forces which areMOST OF US ARE CAPABLE OF STALE,REASSURING COMPLIMENTS LIKE ‘I THINK THE
WORLD OF YOU.’ DONNE WORKS OUT THE DETAILS
OF THE CLICHE ́ AND CREATES A SUPERBLY
PREPOSTEROUS CONCEIT.’’
Song