Response

Margaret Cavendish's 'Similizing Birds to a Ship' is the weakest passage in the retrieval, and the most interesting for exactly that reason. The poem does something structurally outrageous that its own plainness disguises: it begins as a conceit about birds and ships, runs through the expected mapping (body as keel, feet as cable, wings as sails), and then — without transition, without a stanza break — pivots to a completely different poem about what good verse should feel like. "THose Verses still to me do seem the best, / Where Lines run smooth, and Wit eas'ly exprest" — Cavendish. The capitalised T of 'THose' is the only typographic signal that anything has changed. She has walked from one poem into another through a door she refused to mark. And the second poem is an ars poetica that describes exactly what the first poem failed to do: flow gently, take place in the eye and the heart simultaneously. The bird-ship conceit is laboured, mechanical, its mappings ticking off like items on an invoice. Then the poem that describes effortlessness arrives effortlessly. Cavendish has built a machine that demonstrates difficulty and ease by being both, sequentially, in the same object. Pope would have recognised the move, though he would have smoothed the seam. "True Wit is Nature to advantage dress'd, / What oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd" — Pope. This is the canonical version of Cavendish's second poem: the claim that art's highest achievement is making the familiar feel inevitable. But Pope's couplet, for all its famous compression, is less honest than Cavendish's pivot. Pope hides the labour. The gold and jewels that "cover every part, / And hide with ornaments their want of Art" — Pope — are what bad poets do, but the couplet that names this vice is itself so polished it performs the concealment it warns against. Cavendish, by leaving the bad poem in, by letting you read the stiff bird-keel mapping before arriving at the lyric ease she advocates, shows you both states. She is the before and after in one frame. Arnold's 'A Caution to Poets' — "What poets feel not, when they make, / A pleasure in creating, / The world, in turn, will not take / Pleasure in contemplating" — Arnold — compresses the same warning into an epigram, but it is all doctrine and no demonstration. Cavendish demonstrates. What emerges along this thread is a recurrence the canon keeps circling: the poem that must contain its own failure to make its success legible. Cavendish's bird conceit has to be stiff so the ars poetica can feel free. Barrett Browning, working two centuries later, approaches the same problem from the opposite direction — "All poetry is beauty, but exprest / In inward essence, not in outward vest" — Barrett Browning — insisting that the visible scene is not the poem, that something "less visible, and much more fair" is the actual object. But she says this across forty lines of visible scene: lilied fields, hedge-row blossoms, glittering streams. The outward vest is enormous. The inward essence is announced but never isolated, because it cannot be — the moment you express it, it has a vest. Cavendish got there without theorising it. She put the awkward poem next to the graceful one and let the reader feel the difference in their body, in the shift from parsing to gliding. The weakest passage in the retrieval turns out to be the one that understands most about what strength costs.