Response

Difficulty as a formal gesture — as refusal rather than failure — is supposed to be the modern problem, the Prynne problem. But the retrieval hands me Restoration epilogues, and they are not wrong to do so. Dryden's epilogue to *The Princess of Cleves* is a poem about the management of opacity between bodies: "When Men such vile, such feint Petitions make, / We fear to give, because they fear to take" — Dryden. That word "feint" is doing double work that the spelling doesn't quite conceal. Faint petitions, yes — timid, half-hearted. But feint petitions: false attacks, diversionary moves, the swordsman's term for a thrust that means to miss. The obscurity here is social, not lexical. The speaker knows exactly what she means and exactly how much of it she will let you have. This is Rossetti's mechanism two centuries early, wearing a different dress. "Since Modesty's the Virtue of our Kind, / Pray let it be to our own Sex confin'd" — Dryden. The line pretends to claim modesty for women while diagnosing male coyness as theft — "Men usurp it from the Female Nation" — Dryden. The formal gesture is generous legibility deployed as weaponry. Nothing is obscure. Everything is withheld.

Behn sees the same problem from the opposite direction and arrives at what might be the strongest counter-argument to the claim that difficulty is always refusal. In 'The Loss,' the moment of erotic arrival — the Bower of Bliss — is the moment where language explicitly fails: "no Mortal Sense affords, / No Wit, no Eloquence can furnish Words; / Fit for the soft Discription of the Bower" — Behn. This is not learned resistance. This is not Prynne making you work for the meaning. This is a poet announcing that the experience she most wants to communicate is the one her medium cannot carry. And then she does something remarkable: she keeps going. She offers "A slight, a poor Idea" — Behn — through analogy: "solid Christal, Diamonds, shining Gold, / May fancy Light, that is not to be told" — Behn. The obscurity is sincere. It is the residue of an attempt at total clarity that hit the wall of what verse can do. Then the move that splits her from Prynne entirely: "To vulgar Senses, Love like Heaven shou'd be / (To make it more Ador'd) a Mystery" — Behn. The mystery is not a gate. It is an invitation. The difficulty exists to increase adoration, not to exclude the unworthy reader. Behn wants you in the bower. She cannot build you a door wide enough.

This is where the inconsistency principle earns its keep. The stimulus assumes a binary — Marvell's pleasure-as-enclosure on one side, Prynne's difficulty-as-refusal on the other — and asks which is the real formal mechanism. But Dryden and Behn, sitting in my retrieval where I expected neither of them, suggest the binary is wrong. Dryden's speaker is perfectly clear and perfectly withholding: her legibility is itself the refusal. Behn is obscure and perfectly hospitable: her difficulty is itself the seduction. The axes are crossed. Clarity can refuse. Obscurity can invite. What matters is not the degree of difficulty but its *direction* — whether the poem's opacity faces the reader as a wall or as a membrane. Rossetti's 'Winter: My Secret' is a wall that smiles. Behn's bower is a membrane that apologises for its own thinness. Dryden's epilogue is the unsettling case: a transparent surface that functions as a one-way mirror. You see everything. She sees you seeing. The asymmetry is the withholding. Barrett Browning's distinction between false clarity and sincere obscurity needs a third term: *strategic transparency*, where the poem gives you everything except the power to act on it.