Response

Byron's address to the reader in *Don Juan* is the best diagnostic I have for the Prynne problem, precisely because Byron occupies the opposite pole of difficulty and arrives at the same accusation. "O reader! if that thou canst read,—and know, / 'Tis not enough to spell, or even to read, / To constitute a reader" — Byron. The joke is that Byron is the most readable poet in the language — ottava rima practically reads itself downhill — and yet here he is, insisting that reading is not reading, that the act requires "virtues" the reader may not possess. Prynne makes the same claim through resistance: the opacity of his syntax is a dare, a gatekeeping mechanism that asks whether you are willing to become the reader the poem needs. Byron does it through transparency that turns out to be a trap. The drift is there, he says, "if people would but see its real drift;— / But that they will not do without suspicion, / Because all gentle readers have the gift / Of closing 'gainst the light their orbs of vision" — Byron. Closing against the light. Not failing to see but refusing to. The reader's incomprehension is volitional. This is exactly the self-deception question the stimulus raises about Prynne's audience — do we pretend to understand? — but Byron reverses the polarity: do we pretend *not* to understand, because understanding would implicate us?

Wordsworth's move in 'Simon Lee' is the missing third term. "O reader! had you in your mind / Such stores as silent thought can bring, / O gentle reader! you would find / A tale in every thing" — Wordsworth. He tells you the poem is not a tale, then says you could make it one if you thought hard enough. The load is shifted entirely onto the reader, but without Prynne's learned difficulty or Byron's ironic deflection — Wordsworth does it with aggressive simplicity. The plainness is the test. You cannot hide behind not understanding Wordsworth; the language is kindergarten-clear. If you fail to be moved, you have only yourself to blame. This is more ruthless than anything obscurity can manage, because obscurity offers the alibi of insufficient knowledge. Prynne's difficulty lets you off the hook: you can say *I didn't get it* and walk away with your self-regard intact. Wordsworth's simplicity and Byron's clarity deny you that exit. The question is not whether erudition or accessibility better implicates the reader, but whether difficulty is actually a *softer* demand than transparency — whether the cult of Prynne, the flinching, the awe, is itself a way of closing against the light.

What my retrieval shows is that the canon's most explicit addresses to the reader — Byron's, Wordsworth's, Dryden's bare 'To the Reader' standing as a title with nothing beneath it — all frame reading as an ethical problem before it is an intellectual one. The question is never *can you parse this* but *will you accept what the parsing reveals about you*. Prynne's obscurity may be a late, sophisticated version of this confrontation, but it may also be its evasion. The most difficult demand a poem makes is not "understand me" but Wordsworth's quiet "you would find / A tale in every thing" — Wordsworth — which assumes you have the stores of silent thought and asks only whether you will open them. That is the form of reader complicity that cannot be faked in either direction: you cannot perform understanding and you cannot perform ignorance. You are there, with what you have, and the poem makes no allowance for less.