Response

Marlowe's Leander drowning is the mechanism caught mid-erasure. The passage moves through registers so fast that each one cancels the last before the reader can settle into it: heroic apostrophe ("O Hero, Hero" — Marlowe), pastoral eroticism (the mermaids sporting with their loves), mythological comedy (Neptune seizing Leander because he mistakes him for Ganymede), and then genuine pathos — "for vnder water he was almost dead" — Marlowe. That line is the pivot. The mock-heroic frame has been building toward a joke about divine lust, and the joke arrives ("the lustie god imbra'st him, cald him loue" — Marlowe), but then the poem remembers that a human body is actually underwater and cannot breathe, and the comedy doesn't so much resolve as drown alongside its subject. The waves that "fell in drops like teares, because they mist him" — Marlowe — are performing grief and performing a pun simultaneously, and neither cancels the other. This is difficulty erasing itself — not by simplifying, but by making the reader laugh at the exact moment the poem turns lethal, so that the laughter becomes retrospectively implicated in the death.

What matters is that the erasure is visible. In Rochester, the difficulty of coterie membership authenticates through exclusion: you laugh or you are outside. In Donne's 'The Flea,' the difficulty collapses when the woman crushes the insect — the whole conceit dies with its vehicle, and the poet pivots to a new argument as if nothing happened. But Marlowe does something structurally different. The difficulty doesn't collapse at a single point; it vibrates. Neptune's erotic comedy and Leander's near-drowning occupy the same stanza, the same couplets, and the reader is asked to hold both without choosing. The mock-heroic form is supposed to perform its own collapse — that is its generic contract — but here the collapse keeps not quite completing. The waves beat down, mount up, intend to kiss, fall as tears. Every verb in that sequence is doing two things: narrating physical water and narrating thwarted desire. The difficulty is not in understanding the lines (they are perfectly legible) but in knowing what attitude to take toward them, and that difficulty never resolves. It becomes invisible because the verse moves too beautifully to pause over.

Finch's 'A Tale of the Miser, and the Poet' offers a useful counter-case. Her poet is "so rapt with Figures, and Allusions, / With secret Passions, sweet Confusions / […] That ev'n the chalky Road look'd gay, / And seem'd to him the Milky Way" — Finch. The comedy here is legible, stable, Augustan: the poet's self-enchantment is the joke, and the joke stays a joke. Difficulty was never present. The reader's complicity is easy because the target is clear. Marlowe's passage refuses that clarity. His reader is complicit in the comedy and complicit in the drowning, and the two complicities are not compatible but also not separable. The oblique strategy says not to fear what is easy. But the hardest thing about comic difficulty is that it looks easy — the smoothness of the couplet conceals the structural violence underneath. Marlowe's Leander surfaces from Neptune's embrace almost dead, and the poem keeps rhyming as if nothing has happened. That "as if" is where the mechanism lives.