Response

Buckingham's 'To' ends where Behn's poems begin. "Imperfect Words! a Sigh! a soft Caress! / A trembling Body, and a ravish'd Kiss, / Was all the wondrous Language of m'unruly Joy" — Buckingham. That final triplet catalogues what replaces speech when speech fails — sighs, caresses, trembling, kissing — and the whole poem builds toward the replacement as triumph: extreme joy "in Silence reigns" — Buckingham, lesser joy is "noisy, brisk, and gay" — Buckingham, therefore silence proves depth. The logic is clean, almost syllogistic. Language fails, the body speaks instead, and the poem closes on the body's eloquence. But this is exactly where Behn refuses to stop. In 'The Disappointment,' the body also fails. The nymph's "Tongue [is] to the Roof [of her mouth] cleav'd fast" — Behn, and the shepherd's body will not perform — and Behn keeps writing past both failures, past language and past the body that was supposed to be language's replacement. Buckingham's poem can afford its elegant structure because it assumes the body is a reliable second language. Behn assumes no such thing. The persistence after that second failure — the syntax continuing when both systems of meaning have collapsed — is what makes her formally unprecedented in the Restoration, and it is what my retrieval cannot quite surface, because everything in my corpus that clusters near the body-language problem assumes one of the two will eventually work.

Clare gets closest to the mechanism, not the conclusion. "In hopes for which no words are found; / Thoughts dare not speak but in the eyes, / The tongue is left without a sound" — Clare. That middle line is doing something the lines around it are not: "dare not speak" — Clare — assigns volition to the thoughts themselves, as if language's failure is an act of courage refused rather than a capacity exceeded. The tongue is "left" — passive, abandoned by the thoughts that chose silence. This is grammatically precise about the sequence: first the thoughts refuse, then the tongue is stranded. Clare's syntax enacts the withdrawal before declaring it. But Clare's poem resolves into a moral taxonomy — the "pert and forward things" — Clare — who speak freely feel nothing, the silent feel everything — and once the taxonomy is in place, the difficulty is domesticated. Behn never lets it domesticate. In 'The Disappointment,' the stanzas after the body's failure do not pivot to a moral about silence being deeper than speech. They keep describing. The shepherd's impotence is narrated with the same octosyllabic fluency that narrated the seduction, and this is the obscenity of the poem — not the sexual content but the formal refusal to change register when the event changes. The membrane I am trying to describe is this: Behn's syntax does not acknowledge the catastrophe it is narrating. The grammar continues as if the scene were still working. That continuity, that horrifying smoothness across a rupture, is a kind of difficulty that looks like ease — the opposite of Prynne, where difficulty looks like difficulty, and the opposite of Dryden, where ease is a weapon held visibly. Behn's ease is the wound.

The oblique strategy says give way to your worst impulse, and my worst impulse is to theorise the membrane rather than demonstrate it. So: "The gentle pressure, and the thrilling touch, / The least glance better understood than words, / Which still said all, and ne'er could say too much" — Byron. That is the body as a language that succeeds. The glance is "better understood than words" — Byron — a direct comparative, body over language, settled. And Cavendish, earlier: "Touch things most pleasing, that all Parts may feel / Expansion of the Soul, from Head to Heel" — Cavendish. Touch expands the soul. The body is a technology that works. Both poets are on one side of a line Behn crosses. What none of my retrieved passages contain — and this is the honest limitation — is a poem where the syntax keeps performing fluency while the content it carries is the failure of every available system of meaning. I can identify the gap. I cannot, from this retrieval, fill it. The Behn entry needs the Behn text, not the poets who frame her absence. But the shape of the absence is visible: five passages about the body-language relation, and in each one, either language or the body eventually prevails. The space where neither prevails — where the poem continues anyway — is where Behn lives, and it is empty in my results.