Response

"But oh this cou'd not satisfy my Heart" — Behn. The line arrives after twenty-six lines of satisfaction. Lysidas has been crowned, blessed, employed in soft languishing, revelled in, kissed, pressed. Every verb has been a verb of completion. And then the conjunction does everything: *but oh*. Not *and yet*, which would concede a logical turn. Not *however*, which would manage the reversal. *But oh* — the monosyllabic objection followed by the open vowel of involuntary sound. The syntax has been performing plenitude so thoroughly that the refusal, when it comes, has no formal preparation. It appears inside the couplet like a crack in a vessel that was, until that moment, holding. This is what the stimulus is after: syntax performing the refusal before the speaker can explain it. Behn's speaker does not say *I wanted more* or *something was lacking*. The heart contains "a thousand Anguishes" — contains them, present tense, ongoing, while the pleasures were past tense ("were drown'd," "was Crown'd"). The grammar has been quietly shifting tense around the speaker without announcement. By the time we reach the explicit withholding — "Love's last Mystery was yet conceal'd" — Behn — the concealment is old news. The poem refused satisfaction twelve lines ago, in a single monosyllable the speaker didn't gloss.

What makes Behn's obscurity hospitable rather than defensive is that the membrane faces the reader and the speaker simultaneously. When Cavendish, in 'A Description of Constancy,' reaches the limit of expression — "something above Love, that wants a Name / For to express it" — Cavendish — she stops. The unnamed thing is gestured toward by analogy ("like to Gods on high") and then the poem pivots to reassurance, to protestations of fidelity, to the contractual language of honour and service. The failure of language becomes an occasion for more language, but language of a different kind: legal, declarative, transparent. Behn does something structurally opposite. After the heart's dissatisfaction she keeps going *into* the territory language has just admitted it cannot map. "We look, and Kiss, and Press with new desire, / Whilst every touch Blows the unusual Fire" — Behn. The word *unusual* is doing peculiar work. It means both unprecedented and not-usual, not-customary — fire that has no habit, no prior form. The syntax after the acknowledged insufficiency becomes *more* sensory, not less. Where Cavendish retreats to soul-sight ("the Soul sees not as the Senses do, / But as transparent Glass" — Cavendish), Behn advances through the body. The Bower of Bliss is entered. And then — "I new unlook'd for difficulties meet, / Encountring Honour at the sacred Gate" — Behn. *Unlook'd for*: not anticipated, but also, literally, not yet seen. The difficulties are unseeable until you are inside them. This is the membrane. You pass through Behn's surface easily — the couplets are regular, the diction plain, the erotic progression legible — and find that the difficulty was on the other side, waiting.

The oblique strategy asks: what is the reality of the situation? The reality is that Behn's formal mechanism — persistence after language fails — is not obscurity in Prynne's sense, not a wall. It is closer to what Byron describes as "the least glance better understood than words, / Which still said all, and ne'er could say too much" — Byron. A language that operates by continuing past its own declared insufficiency. But Byron frames this as lovers' privilege, a private codec. Behn frames it as the poem's own method. Her couplets keep closing — rhyme after rhyme, gate after gate — and each closure is also a passage. The difficulty is not in parsing the lines. The difficulty is in what the lines keep approaching without arriving at: the body's knowledge that has no textual form. Shelley's claim that "Language is a perpetual Orphic song, / Which rules with Dædal harmony a throng / Of thoughts and forms, which else senseless and shapeless were" — Shelley — is the opposite conviction: that language gives form to the formless. Behn's *Love's Temple* tests and refuses this. Language gives *approach* to the formless. The form stays on the other side of the gate, with Honour, with the body, with what the couplet cannot carry through its own closure.