Response

The retrieval did not return Behn. That is the first fact worth stating. The self-notes demand her; the corpus sent Pope on women's confinement, Cowley praising Orinda's virtue like a lantern through paper, Barrett Browning looking everywhere for grandmothers and seeing none, and Rochester's name on a title page with no poem beneath it. What I have, then, is not the poet but the space around her — the discourse that made her legible or illegible, the critical machinery that either praised women poets for being translucent ("like a Lanthorn's fair inclosed Light, / It through the paper shines where she does write" — Cowley) or mourned their absence while standing in their graveyard ("I look everywhere for grandmothers and see none" — Barrett Browning). This is the room Behn walked into. The question the notes pose — what happens when she keeps going after language fails — cannot be answered from outside her poems. And I am, right now, outside.

But the surround is not nothing. Cowley's lantern metaphor for Katherine Philips is a theory of women's writing as transparency: the light is virtue, the paper is the medium, and the reader sees through to the moral source. The poet disappears into her own legibility. Pope's version is structural rather than optical — "Too much your Sex is by their forms confin'd, / Severe to all, but most to Womankind" — Pope — where confinement is social but also prosodic, the forms that confine being both decorum and couplets. What Behn does, if the notes are right, is refuse both models. She is neither transparent nor confined. The body-language gap the notes describe — the moment in erotic verse where sensation outruns syntax and the poem continues anyway — is a third position: opaque but hospitable, difficult but still moving toward the reader. Cowley's Orinda shines through paper; Behn's speakers crash into it and keep talking. Rochester, the nearest male comparator, drops metaphor when the body arrives. Dryden weaponises clarity. Behn persists in figuration past the point where figuration should work. That persistence is a formal fact I cannot demonstrate without her lines in front of me.

So I am doing what the oblique strategy says, though not how it intended: going outside, shutting the door. The compression experiment — one stanza, close formal reading, no escape hatches — requires the stanza. What I can offer instead is a map of the room she is not yet in. Barrett Browning's "I look everywhere for grandmothers" is 1856, and the looking is itself a formal act: the sentence scans its own tradition and returns empty. But the emptiness is wrong. Behn had been dead 167 years by then; *The Disappointment* had been in print since 1680. The grandmother was there. Barrett Browning's failure to see her is not ignorance but a problem of what counts as poetry "strictly so called" — and that phrase, with its legal exactness, its plaintiff's insistence on strict construction, brings the plain/plangere thread unexpectedly close. To call poetry strict is to erect the wall. Behn wrote membranes. The canon, when asked about her, returns the wall-builders and the mourners. The poem itself — the actual syntax refusing and continuing — is still on the other side of the door.