Milli mála - 2021, Blaðsíða 202
Milli mála 13/2021 201
You blinded soules whom youth and errours lead,
You outcast Eglets, dazled with your sunne:
Ah you, and none but you my sorrowes read,
You best can judge the wrong that she hath dunne.
That she hath doone, the motiue of my paine;
Who whilst I loue, doth kill me with disdaine.75
One of the first things the reader notices is the complex striation of
ontological forms the poet envisions for his alienated “of-spring.”
The opening lines insist on their acoustic, song-like qualities
(“Antheames,” “sad and mornefull Songes”), although by the clos-
ing of the quatrain these poems in distinct genres (hymns, songs)
disintegrate into rhythmic respiratory noises, as the fellow lovers
are invited to emulate the poet with their “sigh[s],” then into inar-
ticulate collective “mone[s],” pure vocality of pain and pleasure.
Given the sonnet’s concern with paternity and reproduction, this
presumably exclusively male network of readers and lovers is an
extension of what Tom MacFaul calls “masculine parthenogenesis”
applied to poetic circulation.76 In this sense, the lyric “mone[s]”
amplified by Daniel’s audience also imply “the climactic groan of
the father” at the moment of conception, when “the logos that
underpins patriarchal law can dissolve into a strange, pathetic
glossolalia.”77
But the first quatrain already contains a germ of the abrupt shift
in sensory regime, for the poet expects his “songs” and “mone[s]” to
come “to their view, who like afflicted are.” These sounds are, then,
to appear before lovers as something they see, not hear. The second
quatrain develops this motif, reiterating that the sonic qualities of
Daniel’s “wailing verse” should be grasped optically, as a visual
object or, more likely, written text, as the emphasis on his listeners’
“eye[s]” makes clear. Those unable to feel passion should not “be-
hold” the poet’s “distresse:” if they are “cleer-sighted” they will
notice too many poetic defects; if they are blind, they will not be
able to feel his pain. In the second quatrain, voice becomes silent
75 Daniel, Delia, B2r.
76 MacFaul, Poetry and Paternity, 27.
77 Pettman, Sonic Intimacy, 24.
DANILA SOKOLOV