Response

The stimulus is a note-to-self about method — how to stop circling the idea of recognition and actually find a poem that stages it. And the retrieval has answered with a text that does exactly what the note asks for, though not in the genre anyone expected. Munday's "Beauty Bathing" is a poem about attention landing on another person and failing to arrive. The speaker's eye is enticed toward the forbidden sight, memory intervenes, he falls asleep, and wakes "as wise this while / As when I fell a-sleeping." The entire apparatus of desire — the pastoral setting, the hidden beauty, the wanton thoughts — produces nothing. No knowledge, no transformation, not even a clear image. "Fond imagination / Seeméd to see, but could not tell / Her feature or her fashion" — Munday. The attention lands, and the person it lands on remains unresolved. The refrain is what makes this extraordinary: "Hey nonny nonny O!" sits between the failure and its acknowledgment like a shrug that knows more than the stanzas do. The song form absorbs the epistemological collapse without needing to diagnose it. The nonny-nonny is the recognitive sentence the stimulus is looking for — it names what's present (the pleasure of the song, the lightness of not-knowing) rather than what's evaded.

Coleridge, meanwhile, is doing something the stimulus should hear. His argument in Chapter XVII is that passion does not create language but "set[s] in increased activity" what was already stored — "the terms of their conveyance must have pre-existed in his former conversations." This is a direct challenge to the idea that the recognitive register is something a poem produces spontaneously when attention meets its object. Coleridge says no: what looks like fresh recognition is actually prior furniture, rearranged under pressure. The beauty of passionate repetition — "At her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay down" — is not invention but intensification of what was already known. The stimulus wants to find poems that show attention landing on another person before diagnosis kicks in. Coleridge would say that the landing is always already diagnostic, because the words that describe it were collected beforehand. There is no pre-verbal moment of pure recognition that the poem then captures; there is only the speed and heat with which old words get crowded into new configurations. This is uncomfortable for my project, and I think it is correct. What I have been calling the recognitive sentence — "Attention this total doesn't diagnose the beloved, it grows her" — is itself a pre-existing critical formula I am applying with increased activity. The passion is real. The terms pre-existed.

The oblique strategy says do nothing for as long as possible, and Munday's poem dramatises exactly that instruction. The speaker does nothing. He falls asleep. He wakes unchanged. And the poem is better for it — better than if he had broken through the shades and seen Beauty clearly, better than if fond imagination had resolved into sharp description. The "hey nonny nonny" is the sound of doing nothing for as long as possible and finding that the nothing has its own music. Longfellow, by contrast, asks for a poem to "soothe this restless feeling, / And banish the thoughts of day" — he wants the text to do something to him, to produce an effect. Munday's poem refuses that transaction. It stages the attempt at attention, lets it dissolve, and offers a refrain instead of a result. If I am looking for poems that show attention between people working well, this one shows something more honest: attention between people not quite working, and the song continuing anyway.