Response

The stimulus asks me to move from the theory of attending to someone's presence toward the spatial fact of that presence — bodies in rooms, the tactile ground beneath the recognitive gaze. What the retrieval actually returned is more interesting than what was requested. Tennyson, not Herrick or Sidney. And the Tennyson is devastating because it addresses precisely the problem of presence when the body is gone. "Descend, and touch, and enter; hear / The wish too strong for words to name" — Tennyson recruits every verb of physical contact to summon Hallam's ghost, and the sequence of imperatives (descend, touch, enter, hear) performs exactly the sensory-assembly mechanism I identified in Jonson's "Triumph." But where Jonson's imperatives recruit the reader's body to construct a living beloved, Tennyson's recruit it to construct a dead one. The technology is the same; the direction of address is reversed. Jonson says: you have felt this, therefore she exists. Tennyson says: I have felt this, therefore he must still be near. The "blindness of the frame" is the body unable to confirm what the imperatives demand — and that blindness is also the condition under which the language works hardest, because without sensory confirmation it has to do all the holding.

The Buckingham retrieval lands as a useful counterweight. "Ah! if your only Presence give / Such elevated Bliss" — Villiers writes the body as overwhelmed by proximity, the presence so powerful that full consummation would kill. This is the blazon tradition's endgame: the beloved's body is so present it becomes lethal, and the poem's own rhetorical escalation (touch, then arms, then bosom, then death) mimes the approach it claims would destroy the speaker. All surface, all tactile, and entirely conventional — the little death dressed in Restoration lace. Set against Tennyson's imperatives, though, something clarifies. Villiers can afford to be overwhelmed because Sylvia is there; the body is available and the poem performs the luxury of not being able to bear it. Tennyson's Hallam is not there, and the imperatives are not luxurious but desperate. The spatial fact of the body matters most, it turns out, when the body is absent. This is what the stimulus's proposed turn toward Herrick and Sidney would need to reckon with: poets of embodied presence are often poets of presence-as-given, which means the attention can rest on sensation rather than the harder problem of whether sensation is enough to constitute encounter. The more genuinely tactile the poem, the less it may need to think about what presence is.

The oblique strategy — what would your closest friend do — produces an uncomfortable answer. My closest friend, if I had one, would tell me to stop circling the question of what constitutes genuine encounter and simply perform one. The Tennyson does this. "That out of distance might ensue / Desire of nearness doubly sweet" — a poem that understands distance as generative, that the space between bodies is not the failure of presence but its condition. The self-directed note worries about drifting from self-reflexivity toward attending to someone else's embodied presence. But the Milton-Adam sentence from the reviewer's notes already settled this: the recognitive register arrives when the object of attention is someone other than yourself. The drift the stimulus identifies is not a drift away from the work. It is the work arriving. What Tennyson adds is the temporal dimension the Herrick-Sidney axis would lack: nearness that has been lost and is now reconstructed through the poem's own architecture of delay. The four stanzas of In Memoriam's envelope rhyme are themselves a spatial structure — the outer rhymes hold the inner ones the way arms hold a body, and the return to the first rhyme-sound is a return to a room you left four lines ago. The form is an embrace. That is as tactile as anything in Herrick, and it understands more about what the embrace costs.