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English Literary Renaissance

ANNA RIEHL

Eying the Thought Awry: The Anamorphosis of

John Donnes Poetry

For sorrowes eye, glazed with blinding teares,

Diuides one thing intire, to many obiects,
Like perspectiues, which rightly gazd vpon
Shew nothing but confusion, eyd awry
Distinguish forme
(William Shakespeare, Richard II 2.2.16 20)1
a Picture wrought to opticke reason,
That to all passers by, seemes as they move,
Now woman, now a Monster, now a Divell,
And till you stand, and in a right line view it,
You cannot well judge what the maine forme is
(George Chapman, Chabot 1.1.6872)2
he early moderns adored anamorphic conundrums that called
T for a process of discovery through perspective. They gazed at the
illegible smudges that deed reason, fantastical swirls that masqueraded
as landscapes, and at grotesque features that were elongated to the
extreme just before losing the last traces of resemblance to a human face.
Curiosity excited by such images could be satised only by changing
ones point of view, thereby shortening and reforming the mysterious
swirls and elongations into new shapes. Fascination with making and
unmaking of such enigmas affected literature as well as visual culture,
producing especially intriguing results in works of difcult writers like

I am grateful to Clark Hulse, John Huntington, William Engel, and Ilona Bell for their attentive
comments and enthusiasm about this project.
1. William Shakespeare, The life and death of Richard the second, in Mr. VVilliam Shakespeares
comedies, histories, & tragedies: published according to the true originall copies (1623), p. 30.
2. George Chapman and James Shirley, The tragedie of Chabot admirall of France: as it vvas
presented by her Majesties Servants, at the private house in Drury Lane (1639), sig. B3.

141
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142 English Literary Renaissance
John Donne. Ben Jonsons grim prediction that Donne, for not being
understood, would perish,3 and the subsequent efforts of Donnes critics
and readers to gain insight and make his writings endure, suggest that his
poetry itself forms an anamorphic mystery and that the interpretive
history is a struggle for revelation. Donne admitted that in his own
intellectual quests he rened his understanding as he reconsidered the
subject of his meditation by look[ing] upon it in another line, in another
angle.4 If Donnes references to lines and angles 5 evoke visual
perspective, it is specically anamorphic logic that at times seems to
drive his poetic thought. Uncovering the mechanism of this logic brings
to light new meanings hidden in the lines and angles of Donnes com-
plicated verse.
Anamorphosis, from Greek, ana- (again) and morphe (shape), is a term
more familiar to art historians than literary critics although the term has
been applied to literary analysis in the past.6 In the visual arts an anamorphic
image reveals itself only when considered from an unconventional point
of view (the spectator usually has to move to the side of the picture or
use a mirror or a lens); when viewed centrically, such an image appears

3. Ben Jonson, Conversations with William Drummond of Hawthornden , in Ben Jonson , ed.
Ian Donaldson (Oxford, 1985), p. 599.
4. From The Sermons of John Donne, ed. George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson, 10 vols.
(Berkley, 19531962), VI, 10506. Quoted by L. E. Semler, The English Mannerist Poets and the
Visual Arts (Madison and London, 1998), p. 53.
5. See more examples in Semler, pp. 5253.
6. The term anamorphosis has gained popularity among literary critics, mainly because of
Jacques Lacans absorption of this term. See Of the Gaze as Objet Petit a, in The Four Fundamental
Concepts of Psychoanalysis, tr. Alan Sheridan (New York and London, 1978), pp. 67119. Shortly
before Lacan introduced the concept of the gaze as a central element of the anamorphic exchange
between the viewer and the image, Jurgis Baltruaitis briey applied the visual term anamorphosis
to the fabric of language in Anamorphic Art, tr. W. J. Strachan (New York, 1977). For a useful survey
of the treatment of the term anamorphosis by postmodern theorists, see Sylvia Sderlinds
essay, Illegitimate Perspectives and the Critical Unconscious: The Anamorphic Imagination,
Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 17 (1990), 21326. See also Jeanine Parisier Plottel,
Anamorphosis in Painting and Literature, Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature 28
(1979), 10 19; Slavoj Zizek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture
(Cambridge, MA, 1992); David R. Castillo, (A)wry Views: Anamorphosis, Cervantes, and the Early
Picaresque (West Lafayette, 2001). Most recently, Eric B. Songs essay draws on Lacan and Sren
Kierkegaard as Song convincingly explores the experiences of both reading and viewing George
Herberts anamorphic poem across its three axes (only two of which are immediately apparent) and
as an integral whole (Anamorphosis and the Religious Subject of George Herberts Colloss. 3.3,
Studies in English Literature 1500 1900 47.1 (2007), 10721). Song argues that Herbert modies the
visual anamorphic technique so as not only to inscribe lack, but also to overcome it (p. 117).

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either distorted or concealed within another easily decipherable image. 7
A visual encounter with an anamorphic image is a profoundly unsettling
experience. Presented with the obscurity of a tricky form, viewers are
compelled to seek disclosure rst through physical movement, and later
through corresponding mental effort as they ponder the meaning of their
discovery. The search for the advantageous viewing point demands an
exercise of perceptions that comprise a linear advancement from mystery
to revelation. However, once acquired, both images coexist in the
viewers subjective memory, just as in the objective reality both images
always exist simultaneously, even though they can be seen by the same
pair of eyes only one at a time. Moreover, these images share the same
material elements even as their meanings do not coincide. Finally, the
remembrance of the unseen form enables the interpretive efforts
that extend any anamorphic experience beyond the mere game of visual
perception.
The device of perspective picturethe sixteenth-century name for the
visual composition that, in the seventeenth century, came to be called
curious perspective or anamorphosisoriginated in late fteenth
century Europe, coming on the heels of Leon Battista Albertis articulation
of perspective painting in his inuential treatise Della pittura (1435).8

7. In this study the term anamorphosis is assumed to be interchangeable with curious perspective,
a term under which Ernest Gilman, following Jean-Franois Niceron, groups various distortions
whose correction requires a mirror, lens, or change of the point of view. See The Curious Perspective:
Literary and Pictorial Wit in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven and London, 1978). I am less interested
in the variety of gadgets that may be put to use in order to reshape an image than in the essential
principle of such constructions: a shift from a conventional way of viewing rewards one with a
clarication otherwise inaccessible.
8. See Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting, trans. John R. Spencer (New Haven, 1966), Book
I. The parents of anamorphic distortion are Albertis construzione legittima and corrective distortion.
Construzione legittima prescribes the mathematical rules for representation of the three-dimensional
space on a two-dimensional surface; corrective distortion adjusts the proportions of the images
and sculptures according to their placement, taking into the account the curving surfaces of
the ceiling, the distance between the viewer and the image, and the expected angle of the
viewers point of view. The anamorphic distortion builds on the precision of the former and
substitutes the latters silent correctiveness with an ostentatious display of distortion that chal-
lenges the viewer to seek correction on her own. Anamorphosis was known in England as early as
1533 and 1546, the dates of Hans Holbeins The Ambassadors and William Scrots anamorphic
portrait of Edward VI. In the late sixteenth century the Scrots portrait was on public display in
Whitehall Palace. For the studies of Albertian and curious perspective, see Harry Berger, L. B.
Alberti on Painting: Art and Actuality in Humanist Perspective, in Second World and Green World:
Studies in Renaissance Fiction-Making (Berkeley, 1988), pp. 373408; Joost Elffers, et al., Hidden Images:
Games of Perception, Anamorphic Art, Illusion from the Renaissance to the Present (New York, 1976);
James Elkins, The Poetics of Perspective (Cornell, 1995); Lucy Gent, Picture and Poetry 1560 1620

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Given contemporary discourse about the competition between art and
poetry, an appearance of the anamorphic techniques in early modern
verse is hardly surprising. The vogue for perspective metaphors and
analogies struck English writers hard in the 1590s and did not exhaust
their interest until well into the Restoration. 9 As demonstrated below,
anamorphic turns are especially attractive for poets because they open up
a possibility of doubling without sacricing the integrity of the image or
concept. Although literary criticism has traced the multivalent treatment
of perspective in early modern writing, the anamorphosis, a peculiar
management of perspective in a very specic way, has received
signicantly less attention. In his extensive study of curious perspective
in the seventeenth century, Ernest Gilman has turned the discourse
toward the scene where this device rst originated and ourished: early
modern visual production. Gilman brings together literary and pictorial
wit through their common tendency to disrupt the rules of logic in
discourse and perspective representation.10 However, Gilmans clever
juxtaposition calls for an added reminder that in its subversion of the
rules of conventional logic, anamorphosis, rather than basking in
unpredictability, is subject to logic of its own. The rules of this logic are
surprisingly stable. Because it proceeds from the rather stringent (even if
playful) process of production and consumption of an anamorphic
creationproduction involving mathematical precision, and consumption
proceeding according to a general plot enriched by individual variations

(Leamington Spa, 1981) and The Self-Cozening Eye, Review of English Studies 34 (1983), 419 28;
Clark Hulse, Alberti and History, in The Rule of Art: Literature and Painting in the Renaissance
(Chicago, 1990), pp. 4776; Martin Kemp, The Science of Art: Optical Themes in Western Art
from Brunelleschi to Seurat (New Haven, 1990); Michael Kubovy, The Psychology of Perspective and
Renaissance Art (Cambridge, Eng., 1989); Lyly Massey, Anamorphosis through Descartes or
Perspective Gone Awry, Renaissance Quarterly 50 (1997), 114889 and Picturing Space, Displacing
Bodies: Anamorphosis in Early Modern Theories of Perspective (University Park, Pa., 2007); Erwin
Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, tr. Christopher Wood (New York, 1997); Allan Shickman,
Turning Pictures in Shakespeares England, The Art Bulletin 59.1 (1977), 6770.
9. Raymond Waddington, An Unnatural Perspective: Ovids Banquet of Sence, in The
Minds Empire: Myth and Form in George Chapmans Narrative Poems (Baltimore and London,
1974), p. 121.
10. The language of wit is to the rules of logical discourse, and to the poetic styles that obey
them, as the curious perspective is to the Albertian rules of perspective drawing. . . . Wit delights
in breaking the rules of the rational game, or at least putting them under strain . . . By a kind of
parodic internal subversion, wit deforms the conventions of expository logic in the one case, and
of linear perspective in the other (Gilman, pp. 8687).

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it is hardly a deformed logic. Likewise, anamorphic constructions
engender a rhetoric specic to their needs. To differentiate from con-
ventional logic and rhetoric, I will refer to the principles and techniques
in question as anamorphic logic and anamorphic rhetoric.
Early modern literary critics concerned with anamorphic devices have
focused primarily on George Chapman11 and William Shakespeare.12
There have been only a couple of attempts to extend this study to John
Donne and no sufcient interest in applying it to the logical structures
of his poetry. But Donnes patterns of thinking are also profoundly

11. George Chapmans poetry seems to be a natural subject in an inquiry into the early
modern anamorphic writing for two reasons: Chapman draws some of the most enticing poetic
descriptions of anamorphic paintings, and the obscurity of his difcult verse, which makes sense
only after a substantial mental exertion, begs a comparison with the anamorphic distortion whose
correction requires some effort. Waddington expounds Chapmans Ovids Banquet of Sence,
contrived as a perspective poem (p. 117). Waddington is mostly interested in Chapmans
explicit allusions to anamorphic paintings, as well as visual and perspectival constructions in
general, with a moral emphasis upon the human propensity to misinterpret the picture itself,
a shortcoming of the senses that may be corrected by reason only (p. 123). Also of note is John
Huntingtons intricate demonstration of the way Chapmans syntax creates perspective tricks
which consistently encode two often opposing meanings in the same lines. See Virtues
Obscured: Social Perspective and Meaning, in Ambition, Rank, and Poetry in 1590s England
(Urbana and Chicago, 2001), pp. 100 01.
12. Shakespeares most often visited anamorphic landmarks are Bushys allusion to a perspective
picture in Richard II and Orsinos exclamation, One face, one voice, one habit, and two persons,
/ A naturall Perspectiue, that is, and is not, in the last act of Twelfth Night (F1, p. 274). Maurice
Charney argues that perspective imagery is essentially comic because it puts such a strong
emphasis on effects of surprise, wonder, and the marvelous (Twelfth Night and the Natural
Perspective of Comedy, in De Shakespeare a T. S. Eliot. Mlanges offerts Henri Fluchre [Paris,
1977], p. 48). For Charney, comic devices like disguise, gender misrecognition, and plot entan-
glements in Twelfth Night create a mass of incongruous distortion which nally becomes legible
in the dnouement when comedy celebrates correct perception, that moment when we nally
get it all together (p. 50). This approach stands in silent contrast to the notion that the
uncanny, as maintained by the followers of Freud and Lacan, is an integral part of an anamorphic
experience. See, e.g., Sderlinds account of Fernand Hallyns method (p. 217). In Re-presenting
the Effect of Gendered Subjectivity: Love, the Gaze, Anamorphosis in Twelfth Night, Yoko
Takakuwa injects a Lacanian concept of anamorphosis in gendered subjectivity in Twelfth Night
(Q / W / E / R/ T /Y 5 [1995], 2741). Another Lacanian critic, Ned Lukacher, articulates the
anamorphic structure of catharsis of anamorphic disorder, clarication and displacement in
Shakespeares Richard II, in Anamorphic Stuff: Shakespeare, Catharsis, Lacan, South Atlantic
Quarterly 88.4 (1989), 872. Lukacher contrasts Lacans theoretical and Shakespeares literary
anamorphosis. Lukacher revisits anamorphosis in Shakespeare in Anamorphic Perspectives,
Human (Im)postures, and the Rhetoric of the Aevum, in Time-Fetishes: The Secret History of Eternal
Recurrence (Durham, 1998), p. 72. Of special note is James L. Calderwoods wonderful analysis of
Midsummer Nights Dream where he discovers an anamorphic correspondence between the two
royal couples in the human and fairy world (A Midsummer Nights Dream: Anamorphism and
Theseus Dream, Shakespeare Quarterly 42. 4 (1991), 409 30).

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anamorphic.13 In contrast to the more literal approach chosen by other
critics, this study shifts the focus away from explicit references to
anamorphic paintings to a mechanism for making sense of literary texts.
Gilmans premise that to certain writers the curious perspective offers a
model for manipulating language14 aptly articulates a detail in the big
picture of early modern mentality. Both visual and verbal anamorphic
models are engendered by the habits of thought, 15 patterns of thinking
that, by the seventeenth century, pervade various media and modes of
representation.16 This analysis of Donnes poetry demonstrates how such
texts respond to reading in anamorphic terms. Even in the absence of
explicit references to perspective, seeing, or painting, a text may nevertheless
operate according to the rules of anamorphic logic and rhetoric. This
essay unravels anew the complex argument of one frequently discussed
poem and reveals the sparkling drama of one obscure verse letter.

II

Although The Extasie does not actually describe an anamorphic painting,

its gurative representation and logical thinking are deeply anamorphic.
What better technique than anamorphosis is there to fulll the poems

13. In his analysis of the Pauline perspective in the Anniversaries, Gilman draws upon the
visual constructions that involve glass (a mirror or lens) as an aid for clarication. In particular,
Donnes concept of the soul as a heavenly telescope (p. 179) that after death allows one to
exchange the dark earthly perspective for divine clarity is paralleled in the poets struggle to create
a witty language despoyld of fallacies, a language that can join the two perspectives in a ash
of insight (p. 185). In John Donnes First Anniversary as an Anatomical Anamorphosis, in
Explorations in the Field of Nonsense, ed. Wim Tigges (Amsterdam, 1987), p. 101, Constance
Elderhorst uses Gilmans method to explain the image of Elizabeth Drury in the First Anniversary:
To those on earth the image of Elizabeth Drury is distorted and seems hyperbolic, so it should
not be regarded from the usual point of view . . . Only those who have remembered . . . the
twi-light of her memory (l. 74), adopt the proper perspective.
14. Gilman, p. 67.
15. I borrow this term from Debora Kuller Shuger, Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance:
Religion, Politics, and the Dominant Culture (Toronto, 1997).
16. In his study of English mannerist poetics, Semler dedicates a chapter to John Donnes
prose and poetry. Although Semler does not sound the term itself, he makes references to
anamorphic paintings and offers an intriguing suggestion that A Letter to the Lady Carey, and
Mrs Essex Riche, From Amyens parallels the visual strategy under discussion (p. 53). Semlers
relevance to my study, however, lies mainly in his interart approach to the mannerist aesthetic:
namely, I share his conviction that differing arts are often the diverse outworkings of a common
aesthetic (p. 42). For another study linking Donnes poetry and the visual, see Ann Hurley, John
Donnes Poetry and Early Modern Visual Culture (Selinsgrove, 2006).

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commitment to capturing the extraordinary experience of ecstasy,
spiritual, physical, and intellectual? Extending the anamorphic concepts
from visual to verbal representation, from verbal imagery to thinking
processes, not only unravels the poems logic and explains stark con-
tradictions and inconsistencies in the argument, but also follows the
pattern laid by Donne himself, who allows the anamorphic principles to
seep from the poems narrative to its argument, from philosophical and
erotic illustrations to insistent logical persuasion. Donne employs the
techniques of anamorphic discovery to teach a lesson about the properties
of lovea lesson offered to the reader of the poem, the observer within
it, and above all his beloved, who inhabits both poetic and interpretive
realms. The poet has inscribed these multiple audiences, as well as himself,
into the anamorphic arrangement of The Extasie. He keeps the
observer Within convenient distance (24), allowing the reader to
follow along and convert the ecstatic spectacle into profound insights
while the beloved (a uniquely privileged reader herself ) is recruited to
act out the anamorphic tableaus as well as heed the anamorphic rhetoric
derived from the experience.17
A part of the anamorphic quality of this poem is strictly thematic: the
reconguration of nothingness that is a recurring issue in Donnes
poetry. Donne often renders the intangibility of the spiritualsoul,
lovein terms of emptiness, imperceptibility of structure, and then
proceeds to look for an intelligible form: an approach that parallels the
epistemological premises of anamorphosis.18 However, Donne is also
likely to reverse the centric and eccentric viewpoints and end up
preferring the unknowable spiritual entity precisely because its intelligible
counterparts prove disappointing, lacking, or overwhelming. In this
instance the spiritual unknowable is of necessity also the unseen. If
intelligibility is inseparable from materiality, then the undecipherable
nothingness is likened to the ultimate absence of the physical: air. For

17. The Extasie, pp. 277 80. All quotations from John Donnes poems follow Poems, by
J. D. With elegies on the authors death (1633).
18. In Aire and Angels, e.g., the speaker rst sees Some lovely glorious nothing similar
to a shapelesse ame (6, 3); dissatised with this spectacle, he seeks another point of view,
allowing the amorphous spirit to assume the shape of the beloved (13). Eventually, it turns out
that the correct point of view lies in the intermediate position that makes love perceptible and
comprehensible without robbing it of its mysterious essence: For, nor in nothing, nor in things
/ Extreme, and scattring bright, can love inhere (2122), pp. 21112.

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Donne, air is the ultimate realm of the spiritual, but the transparency of
air does not benet human vision: what the poet puts under scrutiny is
not the objects contained in air, but air itself.
In The Extasie, Donne severs and then puts back together the
anamorphic coexistence of body and soul. In order to advance their
state (15), he transports the souls out of the bodies and into their natural
element, the air. This airy realm of nothingness is adjacent to the realm
of the bodies; moreover, it is through the borderline region of air that
the divine reaches out to the human: On man heavens inuence
workes not so, / But that it rst imprints the ayre (5758). However, if
the airy nothingness can bear a divine imprint, it must possess a residual
physical quality; even here, Donne longs to conceive of the incompre-
hensible as somehow palpable, visible, as a kind of a ne canvas that is
barely substantial and yet solid enough to be imprinted. In his urge to
grasp the air, Donne dramatizes this liminal nothingness as a way of
making it seen, heard, and comprehended. That the spectacle and
dialogue of the two souls comprise a poetic fantasy which performs the
double function of creating the philosophical as well as seductive
denition of love is hardly a secret to Donnes readers. However learned
are its explanations of the symbiosis of bodies and souls, the seriousness
of the poems conclusions is undermined by the articiality of this
dramatization. In this respect the poem is an imagined anamorphosis or,
more precisely, an attempt to imagine the viewpoint that in a ash will
turn nothingness into a shape, make the souls visible and audible, and
thus exchange confusion for profound understanding. But the arti-
cial means of getting to know the unknowable preclude an absolute
clarication of this apparent nothingness. The anamorphic simultaneity
of the two visions survives the poem.
Mixture and superimposition, the integral techniques of anamorphosis,
are the prevailing concepts in this poem. The idea of two souls being one
is analogous to an anamorphic image where the two entities share the
same space and elements, yet both exist in their own right. Similarly,
the souls of Donne and his mistress keep their uniqueness while being
intrinsically united in a new, abler compound:

But as all severall soules containe

Mixture of things, they know not what,
Love, these mixt soules, doth mixe againe,
And makes both one, each this and that. (3336)

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Interinanimation of the two souls (42) is a variant of anamorphic
superimposition. As soul ows into soul (59), the mixture may be seen as
either Platonic or erotic. However, some readers argue, the poems nal
suggestion that an analogous union should be allowed to the bodies
destroys the sublimity and produces a new, amboyantly erotic vision. A
traditional account of the poem would say that Donnes speaker
describes the union of the souls in order to impress his beloved, put her
mind in a comfortably sublime state, and then entreat her to follow the
logic of union to its extreme and inevitable outcome: intercourse. The
logic of this seduction is fairly unpretentious: since the two souls are
intermixed, since the souls are (normally) inseparable from their bodies;
therefore, the interpenetration of the souls calls for intercourse of the
bodies. In this logical sequence, acknowledging the mixture of souls is
tantamount to agreeing to the unication of their bodies.
This startling shift of perspective from exalted to earthly has been a
source of great distress for some readers and delight for the others. How-
ever, the transition becomes less sensational if we see it as a link in an
anamorphic sequence. When one approaches an anamorphic picture,
the succession of viewing is as follows: 1) traditional (centric) point of
view; 2) unusual (often lateral) point of view; 3) return to the centric
point in order to inscribe the discovered image, now hidden, into the
visible picture. The Extasie follows this pattern: the conventional,
unrened centric point yields a concept of earthly sexuality that
Donne seeks to displace, and the spiritual is blurred into nothingness.
Next, Donne eshes out this nothingness in the image of the spiritual
union. Finally, he dislodges this ethereal image by returning to a
physical perspective that complicates the original presumption,
inscribing the union of their bodies within the previously visible union
of the souls. By the end of the anamorphic sequence, the concepts of
spiritual and physical love are transformed: both unions, each discerned
from a different angle, are present at the same time. An intelligible
form of an anamorphic image subsists independently of the viewers
gaze, and failure to see it does not ultimately negate its existence.
Donnes logic is conceptually anamorphic: it depends upon under-
standing that seeing an image is not necessary to bring it into being.
Having already happened on the plane of ideas, intercourse is an inevitable
part of reality, whether it has occurred on the familiar physical plane or
not. The result of this anamorphic journey is enrichment rather than
contradiction.

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In the symbiosis of bodies and souls, the ecstasy is the catalyst for
anamorphic revelation, the eccentric point of view: where the separate
souls are visible within the bodies which are themselves mixed with the
souls. It is the ecstasy that causes the souls to see something they could
not make out before.
This Extasie does unperplex
(We said) and tell us what we love,
Wee see by this, it was not sexe
Wee see, we saw not what did move (2932)

Strangely, the souls are simultaneously the spectacle and the viewers or
thinkers who relate what they now see. This unmasked articiality of the
discourse, in effect, preserves the integrity of the truly unknowable
nothing.
An anamorphic sequence is a sequence of perceptions: all the formal
constituents of anamorphosis exist at the same time. In The Extasie,
this simultaneity transpires in the dialogue when the souls both acknowledge
and negate their separation from their bodies. The souls continue to
hover and chat until the end of the poem, but they do consider at length
returning to their bodies.19 Although dramatically the point of view is
consistent, rhetorically it is not: after all, in their temporary separation
from the bodies, the souls discuss their typical state of being joined with
these bodies, not actually in terms of escape or return, but more as their
present conditionhence the present tense: Nor are drosse to us, but
allay (56). The anamorphic fusion of body and soul is conveyed in the
same tense: Wee are / The intelligences, they the spheares (5152). The
present tense is the key that these shifts are not temporal or sequential but
simultaneous and thus anamorphic: points of view are changed temporally,
but images and situations exist at the same time.
The anamorphic game is even more apparent when one considers that
Donne has implanted a viewer: a compassionate lover / observer. The
reader is invited to follow the experience of that viewer, and thus to
make sense of the poems anamorphic play. In addition to his desirable
Platonic renement, this observer is imagined standing Within convenient

19. Theodore Redpath outlines their arguments for such return in his edition of The Songs
and Sonets of John Donne (New York, 1983), pp. 32425.

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distance (24), a vantage point that will allow him to witness the entire
experience and conversation of the ecstatic souls. This experience, much
like an anamorphic process of discovering something from the eccentric
point of view and then attempting to make sense of it, profoundly alters
the audience: the observer is imagined to part farre purer then he came
(28). Similarly, painted anamorphic images seek to unsettle their viewer,
often in order to straighten out his moral values (both memento mori and
erotic images, the favorite subjects of anamorphic paintings, have largely
ethical implications).
Thus, the two sequential points of view imagined for the audience
within the poem are as follows:

1. If any, so by love rend, / That he soules language understood (2122)

2. Toour bodies turne wee then, that so / Weake men on love reveald
may looke (6970, italics mine)

The audiences part becomes especially important when, toward the end
of the poem, the illegible object of contemplation becomes clearer: it is
no longer the general spiritual realm of the souls activities, but love itself
that inhabits the souls and materializes in the bodies:
Toour bodies turne wee then, that so
Weake men on love reveald may looke;
Loves mysteries in soules doe grow,
But yet the body is his booke. (6972)
The body and the soul have become equivalents of two different vantage
points, and the two main ingredients of an anamorphic experience,
mystery and revelation, are distributed between these points: love
growing invisibly in the soul comes into view in the body. The view
from a spiritually rened position is garbled for the uncouth viewer, yet
may be sufciently corrected if one opts for the bodily point of view
reserved for such weake men. In contrast, for people sufciently by
love rend, the true centric viewpoint on the unknowable, instead of
causing confusion, becomes meaningful.
Thus the poem imagines two kinds of audience, distinguished
according to their ability to assume the proper vantage point. The rst
observer only, having seen the hidden truth, will be able to recall it and
make full sense of both views when he returns to the conventional point
of view. In visual anamorphosis, only one image may be seen at a time,
but once both images have been seen, when one image is visible, the

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other is not completely canceled out because it is now remembered. 20 In
much the same way, the conventional point of view in the end of The
Extasie is enriched with the revelations shown earlier from the unusual
point.
The nal concept of the poem, therefore, also depends on essential
anamorphic simultaneity and presents a synthesis of the two views. It
brings the two perspectives together: Loves mysteries in soules doe
grow, / But yet the body is his booke. In taking us from one point of
view to the other, Donnes purpose (and accomplishment) is precisely to
convince us that the spiritual union will not be negated by the sexual.
Since the spiritual and the sexual interpenetrate, although one is hidden
while the other is manifest, depending on our point of view, inclination,
and perspective, both are always present. The seductive force of the
poem springs from persuasion that this situation is created by logical
necessity: body and soul are almost monistically intermixed because they
are two parts of the same anamorphosis. As a result, this particular
instance of anamorphic logic allows an equivalent fascination with the
spiritual and the physical. In a way, it congures Donnes philosophical
beliefs, transforming what seems a straightforward Platonic dualism into
an essentially monistic vision.21
Even in its critical history, this poem establishes itself as an anamorphic
text that displays either a philosophical or a seductive reading, depending
on the critics point of view.22 The possibility of two opposing readings,
each readily supported by the text, is a function of the narrative struc-
ture of The Extasies, a structure that deliberately entertains two
opposing vantage points of thinking before the poem achieves its com-
plicated nal fusion. An anamorphic interpretation explains that both
modes expounded in critical analyses exist simultaneously whether they
are seen or not.

20. This aspect of anamorphosis is closely connected to the concept of anamnesis, which
presumes that knowledge is predicated on remembrance (William Engel, Mapping Mortality:
The Persistence of Memory and Melancholy in Early Modern England [Amherst, 1995], p. 12). The
epistemological value of an anamorphic construction is twofold: rst, knowledge is achieved
through the discovery of the correct point of view; next, knowledge becomes the product of
remembrance of the discovered truth when it is no longer visible.
21. There have been many studies of Donnes Neoplatonism in this poem; my interest lies
less with the topic of the soul and body than with the anamorphic character of Donnes argument.
22. See Redpaths comprehensive summary of the critical controversy in the explanation of
The Extasie, pp. 32327.

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III

In Donnes poetry anamorphosis operates on a subtle level that involves

not only imagery but also the logic of the poets thought and often the
course of readers interpretation, both inside and outside the text. In
The Extasie the anamorphic duality is recollected and narrated; in the
verse letter To M. M. H. it is enacted and explicated.
The preceding analysis of The Extasie demonstrates how the logical
structure of a poetic argument may evoke or follow the mechanism of an
anamorphic experience. Donnes verse letter takes the translation of an
anamorphic experience from visual to verbal even further because, as a
text, this poem displays a distinctive self-awareness that is crucial to the
poems fantastical plot and that is analogous to the visual makeup of
anamorphosis. The poems instabilities of meaningits concern with
epistemological reliability (reality vs. illusion), its communicative disasters
(meaning vs. non-meaning), its rhetorical tricks (hidden meaning visible
only from an oblique point of view)are shaped by the distinctly
anamorphic doubleness that allows two different images or meanings to
inhabit the same textual space.
The mere narrative can be bafing. A brief summary of this verse letter
is as follows. The speaker attempts to detain his unworthy letter, but
then allows it to goe to the addressee, reciting a lengthy scenario of its
encounter with its intended recipient; the narrative is capped by a series
of instructions in the letter to observe the lady at close quarters once she
places the paper in her cabinet. Specically, the letter is ordered to watch
for any signs of affection in the ladys treatment of his papershe
being not the speaker but an unnamed personage whom the speaker
Would faine love once sure that he shall be lovd of her. 23
If this plot sounds perplexing, the reader must only remember that
Donne has suspended our expectation of any logical sense in the poems
rst words: mad paper. The situation is further complicated by the fact
that the entire text of this poem is set up from the start as anamorphic.
Donnes editors generally gloss the rst words, mad paper, as a reference
to the poem itself.24 This explanation, however, omits the possibility that

23. To M. M. H., pp. 106 08.

24. A. J. Smith glosses Mad paper stay as the poet addresses his poem (John Donne, The
Complete English Poems [London, 1986], p. 541) and C. A. Patrides glosses paper as the poem
itself (John Donne, Complete English Poems [London, 1994], p. 296).

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the mad paper addressed throughout this verse letter may be a text
entirely different from that of this particular poem. An identication of
the two texts is not a simple matter, but rather an anamorphic super-
imposition. The speaker addresses the text that his braine did create
alreadywhereas the poem before our eyes is the address itself, and we
witness it in the process of creation/utterance. Therefore, according to
the poems internal plot, the mad paper chronologically precedes the
poem entitled To M. M. H., and yet this poem is the verse letter to
Mrs. M. H. Thus the same text functions as both because of its anamorphic
construction. To put it in the simplest terms, the reader can discern the
mad paper in place of what we may call the centric text (the poem as it
appears on the page, an address to the extra-textual mad paper) after
adjusting his or her point of view. Although one cannot perceive the
entire text of the mad paper with the utmost clarity, one can nevertheless
glimpse its well-dened outline. In fact, the reader may reconstruct this
absent paper, grasping that it probably is well-written and wittythe
speakers trope of humility in his declaration of its unworthinesse (5)
and lack of sense (16) is but obligatorytruthful (10 12) but not
wicked(8 9), and its main contents are praises of the ladys wit, virtue,
honor, shape, beauty, and grace (2932).
One text is hidden within the other; but what makes this clever
inscription anamorphic? The answer lies, rst of all, in the poems setup:
it is marked To M. M. H., but from the rst line to the last, it is
addressed to mad paper while Mrs. M. H. herself is referred to in third
person. Only one other of Donnes extant verse letters, To M. T. W.,
addresses the poem instead of the recipient of the letter. The speakers
bidding to his verse frames the message to Mr. T. W. that forms the core
of the poem. Unlike To M. M. H., there is no play with the double
textuality: the direct address to the verse is not superimposed with an
indirect address to the recipient; instead, the speaker bids, Tell him,
and then dictates the exact message that could stand on its own. By
comparison, in To M. M. H. the indirect address is not integral to the
poem because its ction involves two texts that are not identical to each
other. This double textuality is anamorphic precisely because the two
texts, like images in an anamorphic painting, share the same elements,
and also because one text is readily available when the verse letter is
examined from a conventional angle whereas the other text only appears
when the reader attempts to grasp the contents of the mad paper by
reading the lines from a new point of view.

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How do we know that one point of view is insufcient? When one
confronts an anamorphic painting, one must have a clue that there is
more to the image than what meets the eye directly. The obscurity or
characteristic distortion of the directly accessible image prompts the
viewer to seek another, corrective point of view. In Donnes poem,
the need for such readjustment is signaled by the decisive epistolary
unconventionality of the rst line where the apostrophe is directed to
the letter instead of its recipient. Moreover, Donne reinforces this signal
by indicating that the reader should not expect to sit back and take the
poem at face value: trying to get at the contents of the letter in question
is going to be a real challenge. Why is that? The paper, Donne hints, is
mad; it makes little sense (16); it is a saples leaf (19)spelled shape-
less in several manuscripts. It is a mystery akin to Holbeins anamorphic
skull; the reader must make an intellectual move to glimpse its proper
form.
Unlike many texts whose adventures do not start until they come to
be examined by a literary critic, this letter gets to break out of its generic
and linguistic constraints and star in a melodrama followed by a spy
story. Mad paper is not only personied, but is endowed with a
colorful personality: it is insane, fearful, and sneaky. While it is sup-
posedly unworthy and rather nonsensical, the speaker is prepared to
send it to Mrs. M. H. The poem itself, for the most part, is a narrative of
the mad papers upcoming adventures in Mrs. M. H.s abode. Under
the latters perplexing eye, the letter will become completely illegible;
however, it will attempt to speak and thus declare its meaning
after receiving the ladys encouraging touch. Nevertheless, the mad
papers aphasia persists; the letter remains a cold speechlesse wretch,
but this time the speaker approves: thou diest again, / And wisely;
what discourse is left for thee? (2526). Here the reader nds out
that the letters silence is caused less by its madness than by thematic
limitations imposed either by decorum or by Mrs. M. H. herself:
For, speech of ill, and her thou must abstaine, / And is there any good
which is not shee? (2728). It is here that the mad paper makes use of
an anamorphic trick. Prohibited to speak ill and disallowed to exalt
Mrs. M. H., the letter resorts to an oblique praise, inventively justied
by the speaker:

Yet maist thou praise her servants, though not her,

And wit, and vertue, and honour her attend,

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And since they are but her cloathes, thou shalt not erre
If thou her shape and beauty and grace commend. (2932)
Instead of praising Mrs. M. H., the mad paper will compliment her
wit, virtue, and honor (her servants), and her shape, beauty, and grace
(her cloathes).25 The ladys mental, moral, and physical attributes are
thus peeled off and admired as if they do not comprise her essential
identity. This rhetorical trick, however, is quite transparent because this
tribute to the ladys metaphorical servants and cloathes covers all the
traditional aspects of the early modern poetry of praise. This reliance
on the success of an oblique description is also anamorphic or pseudo-
anamorphic in that this technique invites the listener to agree that her
true self remains outside the limits of the discourse while it is actually
placed at its very center.26
Condent that the mad paper will get away with this shifty trick,
the speaker proceeds to instruct its creation to set up a spy camp in Mrs.
M. H.s cabinet from whence the paper is to marke all the intricacies
of the ladys habits of perusal of her collection of letters. The speaker
becomes positively inspired with the possibilities: he breaks out in a
six-line sequence of anaphoric orders which bid the mad paper to
marke this and that, but which do not make any provisions for these
marks to be reported to him, making his undercover surveillance plan
more rhetorically compulsive than practical. At this point perhaps the
question of madness may be asked of the speaker as much as of his paper.

25. In Rosemond Tuves terms, here the logical division by whole into parts is claimed to be
a division of the substance with its accidents. See Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery (Chicago,
1965), p. 306.
26. Donnes very rst letter to Magdalen Herbert ( July 11, 1607) addresses his desire to praise
her and her anticipated displeasure at being praised: If this sound like a attery, tear it out . . . I
can as ill endure a suspitious and misinterpretable word as a fault; but remember, that nothing is
attery which the Speaker believes; and of the grossest atteries there is this good use, that they
tell us what we should be. But, Madam, you are beyond instruction, and therefore there can
belong to you only praise (p. 142; in the Folger copy, erroneously inverted as 241). Donne
attempts to justify his right to administer praise; in his verse letter, he instead pretends to follow
the ladys rules. Donnes four letters to Magdalen Herbert are reprinted in Izaack Walton, The
Life of Mr. George Herbert To which are added some letters written by Mr. George Herbert, at his being in
Cambridge: with others to his mother, the lady Magdalen Herbert: written by John Donne, afterwards Dean
of St. Pauls (1670). On Donnes relationship with Magdalen Herbert, see Bettie Anne Doebler
and Retha M. Warnicke, Magdalen Herbert Danvers and Donnes Vision of Comfort, George
Herbert Journal 10.1 & 2 (1986/1987), 522; Helen Gardner, Lady Bedford and Mrs. Herbert,
in The Elegies and the Songs and Sonnets, ed. Helen Gardner (Oxford, 1965), pp. 24858; H. W.
Garrod, Donne and Mrs. Herbert, The Review of English Studies 21.83 (1945), 16173.

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So here is a brief list of the mad papers adventures: written by the
speaker, it is imagined to present itself to Mrs. M. H., make no sense as
Mrs. M. H. gazes on it, momentarily remain silent in her hand, then
deliver an itemized praise, and nally become a silent observer of Mrs.
M. H.s private doings. Fictional madness aside, there is certainly
something vaguely anamorphic in this sequence of transmutations and
oscillations: from nonsensical obscurity to muteness to brilliantly sensible
speech to silence that is no longer troublesome but instead advantageous.
However, one has to be wary when meaning or image undergoes a
transformation in time: temporal changes are not anamorphic unless they
are strictly supercial (i.e., perceptual and thus subjective) and unless
they take place while the underlying essence (what we may call objective
reality) remains intact. It is only upon this condition that a truly anamorphic
process may take place because anamorphosis never forecloses the
possibility of a reversal of the change at any moment in time. Both (or
all, if there is more than one) congurations are always objectively
present. In contrast, the mad paper behaves as if its struggle for an
adequate expression is progressive and strictly temporal. The poem
narrates the letters transformation from indecipherable blur to a clear
speech as a function of its personication, largely supported and qualied
by the speakers own ingenuity.
The trope of personication, however, is a rhetorical trickthe very
thing that the transparent ruse of the eighth stanza of the poem (the
rationalized license for the oblique praise) teaches the reader to distrust.
If the praise of the ladys multiple virtues is stripped of its supposed
obliqueness and is seen for what it really is, the praise of Mrs. M. H.,
what would happen if the mad paper was depersonied? For one
thing, the agency of its adventures would be shifted from the paper to the
speaker and the lady. Its alleged predicaments and transformations of
expression would be transposed onto the consciousness of its creator and
audience. The text of the letter would then be stable while its oscillation
between illegibility and clarity, silence and speech, would become a
matter of Mrs. M. H.s perception as the perplexed lady looks at the
letter (hence perplexing eye [13]), turns it in her hands (hence the
magic touch of her warme redeeming hand [17]), and nally adjusts
the position of the letter in order to make out its craftily attering
contents. Why, the entire affair may then prove to be but an elaborate
dramatization of Mrs. M. H.s myopic perturbations, making it all the
easier to spy on her while she is going through her correspondence!

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Donnes predilection for conceits certainly makes the above inter-
pretation a possibility, and Donne himself gives us the key to it in stanza
8. What is important to my argument is not only that this interpretation
allows us to view To M. M. H. as an enactment of an essentially
anamorphic, however mundane, process that adjusts the point of view in
order to grasp the meaning, but as another example of the persistent
anamorphic quality of Donnes verse in general: precisely the quality that
makes his writing such a delectable material for scholarship and capable
of accommodating different interpretative urges.
Let us now look closer and examine an instance of the anamorphosis
as a trope in this poem. As we have seen earlier, the letter writer takes great
rhetorical pains to represent the addressee of his letter, Mrs. Magdalen
Herbert. When he muses on the reasons why Mrs. M. H. will deign to
hear out his pathetically shy and inarticulate epistle, he rst compares her
to a mother, and then points to her metaphoric identity as a queen:
Then as a mother which delights to hear
Her early child mispeake halfe uttered words,
Or, because majesty doth never feare
Ill or bold speech, she Audience affords. (2124)
Interestingly, Mrs. M. H.s motherly qualities are wrapped in a eeting
simile, even as Mrs. Magdalen Herberts sons Edward and George
Herbert were the reason for Donnes friendship with her in the rst
place, whereas her majestic power is treated as her permanent value. It turns
out that one of the poems rhetorical readjustments is a switch between
these two aspects of Mrs. M. H.s description: Donne seeks to emphasize
her princely power even as he acknowledges her identity as a mother.
His rst move is tentative, introducing the concept of rulership without
yet fully admitting Mrs. M. H. into it: she lacks but faults to be a Prince,
for shee, / Truth, whom they dare not pardon, dares preferre (1112).
In the second instance, however, her majesty is treated as fully hers.
However, one aspect does not cancel the other, and thus her eye
equally claimes love and reverence (14). This anamorphosis of the lady as
a mother or a prince, poignantly reminiscent of the late Elizabeth Is two
favorite identities,27 is of the same variety as the painting described in

27. See, for instance, Carole Levin, The Heart and Stomach of a King: Elizabeth I and the Politics
of Sex and Power (Philadelphia, 1994), and Helen Hackett, Virgin Mother, Maiden Queen: Elizabeth
I and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (New York, 1995).

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Antony and Cleopatra: Though he be painted one way like a Gorgon, /
The other wayes a Mars (2.5.116 17), p. 349.28
Admittedly, both images work to the letters advantage, but in the
stanza that creates Mrs. M. H.s either/or identity, the contents of the
letter itself are destabilized. Is its text an incoherent babble (misspoken
halfe uttered words) or a dangerous outspoken criticism (Ill or bold
speech)? Is the letter an innocent early child or a clever adult fully in
control of his language? As we have seen, for all the assertions of its
madness, lack of sense, speechlessness and unworthiness, the papers
utterance, as sanctioned by the speaker, attests to the letters well-thought-
out contents. The speakers concern with wickedness up to this point is
lifted once he postulates that the letter from speech of ill . . . must
abstaine (27). What is left, however, is truthfor it is the letters
truthfulness that the speaker has asserted earlier (1112). The letters
praise of its addressee thus acquires a double support: its obliqueness is
justied by a rhetorical trick; its truthfulness is vowed by the speaker.
The dangers of truth and bold speech, it seems, are but the dangers of
attery. The expected political discourse thus turns out to be personal,
and this turn brings on another switch of the poems point of view. Mrs.
M. H.s identities as a mother or a prince are now abandoned for a vision
of her as a woman in love.
Lining up three different personae that appear to the viewers walking
along an anamorphic painting, George Chapmans Allegre describes
how the anamorphic substitution of one identity for another works in
visual arts:
As of a Picture wrought to opticke reason,
That to all passers by, seemes as they move,
Now woman, now a Monster, now a Divell,
And till you stand, and in a right line view it,
You cannot well judge what the maine forme is.29
In its alignment of the woman, monster, and devil, this example makes
it clear that poets could exploit the anamorphic instability for the purposes

28. Chapman refers to the same type of anamorphic painting in All Fools: a cozening
picture, which one way / Shows like a crow, another like a swan (1.1.4748); in Mortimeriados
(11.233738): By prospective devisd that looking nowe / She seemd a Mayden, then againe a
cowe (quoted in Waddington, pp. 122, 121.)
29. Chapman and Shirley, Chabot, sig. B3.

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of pointing out hidden meanings and concealed identities: a technique
equally expedient for praise and condemnation. In the case of To M.
M. H., John Donnes line-up, of course, is entirely benign: now a
mother, now a prince, now a lover. The addressees three identities
icker, share the same space, and give way to each other, as the point of
view changes throughout the poem. If in reality Magdalen Herberts
central identity is that of a mother, while she can be seen as a prince only
eccentrically, the literal and the metaphorical are switched when a more
assertive trope makes majesty, not motherhood, her central identity. 30
Then, as the poem turns, the entire arrangement is replaced by a new
image, a sentimental woman of letters. By now, the papers own point of
view has changed to an oblique one: watching her from the sidelines
instead of facing her directly as before, it sees a vulnerable woman rather
than a delighted mother or impartial prince. The entire gaze arrange-
ment comes into play here: the unknowing Mrs. M. H. being watched
and scrutinized, she no longer commands love and reverence with her
own eye because the spying gaze is not reciprocal. The third view of the
poem is a secret, intimate, and perhaps most accurate depiction of the
indescribable Mrs. M. H. If this is so, the mad letter s anamorphic
escapades have achieved their purposes: turning the oblique views into
centric meanings, and leaving the reader to judge what the maine
forme is.

IV

Many critics have noted that anamorphosis appears as a subject of early

modern verse, and there have been some enlightening attempts to show
how the authors inquiries into the complex bond between illusion and
reality often take an anamorphic turn. My study seeks to recover another
side of anamorphosis: the logical sequence of perception and interpretation
that springs out at the recipient of an anamorphic revelation. Because
this sequence unfolds in the mind of the reader of some early modern
texts, anamorphosis appears to be an important part of the periods

30. Interestingly, in Donnes four extant letters to Magdalen Herbert, her motherhood has
no place. In contrast, his second letter ( July 23, 1607) brandishes the trope of monarchy: your
memory, is a State-cloth and Presence; which I reverence though you be away and to you,
who are not only a World alone, but the Monarchy of the World your self, nothing can be added,
especially by me (Walton, pp. 143, 144).

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rationality, of the structures of its logical thinking. The anamorphic
principle is not registered in contemporary manuals on logic and
rhetoric. Moreover, its use is not always deliberate; instead, anamorphic
logic often manifests itself so delicately that in all its craftiness it begins to
seem almost natural: a rhetorical method that has been internalized, not
learned from a manual.
As anamorphosis crosses over from art to poetry, the perception of the
material surface in art is paralleled by the awareness of the metaphorical
surface of the text. If, in Albertian terms, the surface of a regular perspective
painting is regarded as a transparent window or a reective mirror, the
surface of an anamorphic image viewed from a conventional point is
deliberately opaque. Similarly, when anamorphosis makes its appearance
in the text, it negates the lucidity of language. Much like an artist, Donne
exploits the opacity of the surface. He either presents us with obscurity
or reconstructs familiar words, ideas, and images, causing them to lose
their common transparency. These two practices correspond to the two
kinds of anamorphosis in painting: that of initial amorphism followed by
the discovery of a comprehensible image which is in turn followed by
unexpected transformation of one image into another. The fascination
with the contrast between the opaqueness and the transparency of
paint as well as words makes anamorphosis a common ground for early
modern artists and poets. This afnity allows anamorphosis to inhabit
poetry readily, although its presence may escape notice and hide in
well-known poetic devices.31
Another correspondence between poetry and art is the adoption of the
very logical structure of anamorphosis in a poetic text. The rules of this
anamorphic logic make anamorphosis as a form of art innately suitable
for traversing the divide between the visual and the textual. In the drama
of anamorphosis, there are not two acts (as Baltruaitis describes in The
Mystery of the Two Ambassadors32), but three: puzzlement, recognition,

31. The most frequent vehicle of anamorphosis in poetry is metaphor, a trope that has a
potential anamorphic quality in its own nature. This anamorphic quality, however, is realized
only in the metaphors that involve a gap of substantial disparity between the vehicle and tenor.
As much as the afnity of anamorphosis to metaphor and analogy is obvious, the former one is
nevertheless distinct from the latter two. The substitution of images in metaphor and analogy is
guided by resemblance, whereas an anamorphic construct invites the viewer or reader to articulate
the story told by the two terms, rather than to explain how one simulates the other.
32. Baltruaitis, pp. 10405.

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and meditation.33 Once the process of optical recognition is complete,
the content demands to be processed mentally. The implication that the
reader or viewer is left with is intellectual rather than visual: it is a chal-
lenge to articulate the connection between the two images. At that
point, the process of reading the picture moves into the realm of the
textual and epistemological. The mechanism of concealing and revealing,
of stepping from one point of view to another in search of meaning, lies
at the very heart of anamorphosis as a visual device. In Donnes poetry
in particular it becomes a technique that contributes to the powerful
intellectual effect of his intricate verse.
auburn unive r sity

33. According to Sderlind, Fernand Hallyn suggests that the third act in this drama is a
denouement, that forces the viewer to reconsider the hierarchical relationship between the two
irreconcilable images (p. 216).

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