What is said, matters. How it is said, matters. To whom it is said, matters. When it is said, matters.
The little nuances of our communication are more intricate and powerful than we often care to believe. How much value do we place on the words ‘Love’ and ‘Hate’? When does ‘never’ mean never? Why does one person’s way of speaking catch our imagination in a different way to another?
After the Fact
I’ve had the privilege of hearing the inspiring Tom Lockwood twice before: at the British Milton Seminar in 2008, and at his Chatterton Lecture on John Donne in 2009 (I’m heard 67 minutes in). His recent presentation at Leicester’s Early Modern Seminar on ‘agency’ presented a particular conundrum which is encountered – as often happens – in study and life combined.
What agency do words have after the fact? If something is said too late, does it matter that it was said at all? What if something is not said, or revealed too late?
It is agency that distinguishes Andrew Marvell from the typical manuscript poet. It is thanks largely to attribution that we know Marvell wrote ‘occasional’ poems in his early career. Other occasional poems of his may never have been seen by their addressee.
Who was the enigmatic ‘Horatian Ode’ for? Who eventually got to read it, if anyone? Answering the first question might help to unpick the entangled ambiguities that enshroud the poem. The second prompts a different kind of response.
Agency holds all of the power here, but it’s unreachable. Manuscript expert Harold Love says that the poem was ‘almost definitely meant to reach Cromwell’s hands’, but this is purely guesswork. He’s using his reading of the poem to inform the agency because he’s unable to use the agency to inform a reading of the poem. We don’t know who it’s for, and so agency cannot tell us more about Marvell’s complicated personal and political sentiment in this most public of private poems.
The 1653 ‘The Character of Holland’ might be the clearest example of a Marvellian job application. But it’s another strange case because its audience is not clear. Perhaps the Rump Parliament was the intended target, and its dissolution around the time of composition made the poem an opportunity lost, so it got tucked away as a silent statement. But why is it then published twelve years later in 1665?
A manuscript of ‘To His Coy Mistress’ released in the 1670s has an interesting kind of agency. The different life scenarios – a lonely late-20s male in the late 1640s when the poem was supposedly written, and the potentially married politician in the 1670s – raise many issues about the poem in these different settings.
There are many poems where the agency remains a mystery. Was lyric poetry such as ‘The Garden’ written in the early 1650s in the seclusion of Nun Appleton, or in the 1660s during a hectic life in Westminster? It’s written to nobody, for nobody, and perfectly devoid of attachment to any one particular moment.
In all these examples, the vastly differing circumstances render it different verse at different times.
Is it regretting what is gained? Regretting what is lost? Marvell’s manipulation of agency is such that it’s difficult to make biographical sense of much of his work. It’s written to be elusive, furtive, and private.
Words Never Crossing the Bridge
The most powerful and painful aspect of agency is the power to conceal; all that is lost by words never crossing the bridge. How different would life have been if I’d always shared what I wanted to say, or kept quiet when I knew that was better?
I’m very conscious of ‘too little, too late’ – fabrication churned out by desperation and guilt. Most of us are probably guilty of this at some point. But there is a different brand – the ‘too much left unsaid’ folk – wary of laying their cards on the table due of guardedness.
In the film Three Men and a Little Lady, the architect, Peter, is finally forced to admit to best friend Jack that he loves Sylvia, after many years of living together and with her on the verge of marrying an Englishman and moving away. Those words unspoken would have been his downfall.
Jack: You love Sylvia – and she loves you!
Peter: She loves me?
Jack: Yes!
Peter: Then why is she marrying Edward?
Jack: Because you never asked her!!
Silence always wanted to win the day, but agency is what grants this film a happy ending. As chance would have it, there’s time in the film to set the world to rights.
We don’t always have that chance. We just need to know a risk is worth taking.
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