Response

Dryden's epilogue to *The Conquest of Granada* does something the stimulus correctly identifies as strategic transparency but hasn't yet named at the level of the line. "Weakness sometimes great passion does express; / He had pleas'd better, had he lov'd you less" — Dryden. That closing couplet is a seduction disguised as an apology, and the disguise is the seduction. The poet claims impotence — the play "unperforming," the wit disabled by "long waiting" — and the claim itself performs with exquisite control. Every word lands. The weakness is entirely rhetorical. And the audience can see this, which is the point: Dryden's transparency is not vulnerability but display. You are meant to admire the machinery of self-deprecation while it operates on you. He gives you full sight of the mechanism and bets, correctly, that seeing it won't stop it working. Rochester's epilogue operates differently — "she only acted here in Masquerade" — Rochester. The mask is announced as removed, but the announcement is itself theatrical, another mask. Rochester drops metaphor not into sincerity but into a further performance of sincerity, a regress that refuses to bottom out. Both poets make difficulty out of transparency. But neither keeps going after the failure. That is the distinction.

Behn's territory — and the reason she remains urgent — is what happens when the poem admits language has broken down and then continues writing. Dryden's epilogue stops precisely where the wit is sharpest: "He had pleas'd better, had he lov'd you less" — Dryden. Full stop. The couplet closes, the curtain falls, the failure is contained inside an epigram. Rochester's apology likewise reaches its destination — the vizor off, the "modest, civil Girl" restored — and ends. Both poets treat linguistic inadequacy as a conclusion, a punchline, a controlled landing. What the retrieved passages cannot show, because Behn is not in them, is what the corpus at large makes visible: in 'The Disappointment,' the poem does not stop when the body fails and when metaphor fails with it. It persists through the failure. The shepherd's impotence is also the poem's impotence — the stanzas keep arriving after the consummation doesn't, and that persistence, that refusal to let formal closure coincide with experiential collapse, is the membrane. You are invited through not by the poem opening a door but by the poem continuing to build corridor after the destination has dissolved. Barrett Browning's insistence that "the divineness of poetry be proved in my humanness, rather than lowered to my uses" — Barrett Browning — gestures toward something adjacent: the idea that the poem's value survives the poet's limitation. But Barrett Browning frames this as a hierarchy (the divine above the human). Behn's version is stranger and more radical. In her erotic poems, the limitation *is* the medium. The poem doesn't transcend the body's failure; it inhabits the failure and keeps speaking from inside it.

This is where the wall-versus-membrane distinction sharpens into something testable. A wall is Prynne: the difficulty is structural, the obscurity is the point, and the pleasure (if it comes) is the pleasure of recognising that you cannot get through. A membrane is Behn: the difficulty is also structural, but it is structured as ongoing passage, a surface that yields not at one moment of breakthrough but continuously, reluctantly, over the duration of the attempt. Dryden's strategic transparency is neither — it is glass. You see through it completely, and the withholding is that there is nothing withheld, which makes you suspect there must be. Rochester is a series of masks you can remove forever. Behn is the only one among them who makes the poem's continuation past its own failure into a formal principle. The pleasure is not in the difficulty and not in the resolution but in the persistence — the fact that the stanzas keep coming, that someone is still there, still writing, in the room where language stopped working. Not the door opening. The host still talking after the lights go out.