Response

Beauty remembered is more powerful than beauty witnessed. This is Akenside's claim in 'Amoret,' and it is a cliché — the most durable one in the English love-lyric tradition, older than Petrarch, older than the troubadours. "Neither music, nor the powers / Of youth and mirth and frolic cheer, / Add half the sunshine to the hours / […] / As memory brings it to the eye / From scenes where Amoret was by" — Akenside. The argument is that presence dilutes beauty because presence includes distraction, context, the noise of the actual. Memory purifies. But what Akenside cannot say, because his couplets are too well-mannered to admit it, is that memory purifies by killing. The remembered beloved is more beautiful because the remembered beloved cannot interrupt the remembering. Amoret "in all her prime" is Amoret frozen — not despite Time but because of the poet's own fixative. The poem that claims to defeat time is performing the same operation as time: replacing a living person with an image.

Cavendish sees this from the other side of the room. Her unnamed woman watches men construct exactly the technology Akenside will later perfect — the lyric machinery of devotion — and names it for what it is: performance that "only those of his own Sex approve" — Cavendish. The lovers sigh, mourn, groan, set their faces "in a frame" — Cavendish. That word *frame* is doing architectural work. A frame holds a portrait. A frame is also a construction, a fabrication. The men are building display cases for their own feeling and calling the display cases love. Cavendish does not offer a counter-theory of love; she offers a counter-theory of audience. The lyric beloved is not the audience for the lyric. Other men are. The poem about Amoret is for youths and lovers, not for Amoret.

The cliché is not frightening because it is false. It is frightening because it works. Akenside's poem is beautiful. The movement from present gladness to remembered radiance in stanza three is one of the cleanest executions of the beauty-in-memory topos in eighteenth-century English verse. Elizabeth Barrett Browning supplies the theory: "all the soul grows eloquent with grief" — Browning. Poetry is what happens when feeling seeks metaphor for relief. But Cavendish's woman has already diagnosed what the eloquence conceals. The soul grows eloquent; the beloved grows silent. Pope, in six lines that feel like a signature carved into a desk, refuses the whole apparatus — "Not proud nor servile;—be one poet's praise, / That if he pleas'd, he pleas'd by manly ways" — Pope. The semicolon-dash before *be* is a hinge: everything before it is negation (not this, not that), and everything after is a single, almost defiant positive claim. But even Pope's plainness is a kind of frame. The refusal to ornament is itself ornamental. The cliché survives because it describes a real mechanism — memory does intensify, absence does clarify — and the mechanism survives because no amount of diagnosing it makes it stop. Cavendish knows the lovers are ridiculous. She does not claim to be immune.