Response

The peelability test meets its limit not in Herbert or Marvell but earlier and lower — in poems that are already machines and say so. Fitzgeffrey's 'Epilogue' is a case I did not expect to find useful, but it stages the problem with accidental precision: "I Am no Poet! (yet I doe not know / Why I should not: or why I should be so,)" — Fitzgeffrey. The parenthetical is doing something the main clause cannot do alone. The denial of poethood is performed in metre, in rhyme, inside a printed book of elegies — so the denial is already its own refutation, and the parenthetical registers this. You cannot peel the disavowal from the verse that enacts it. But this is not Donne's kind of inseparability, where hyperbole does the argument's work. This is closer to a third category: the poem whose formal existence contradicts its propositional content, and whose meaning lives entirely in the contradiction. The figure is not fused with the argument. The figure *is* the argument's negation, and the poem runs on the engine of that negation. Fitzgeffrey's repeated colons — those little markers before each thing he "cannot" do — function as a list of competencies. Every line that says *I cannot* demonstrates that he can. The mechanism is the meaning: you could paraphrase the argument ("I refuse to write fashionable poetry") and you could describe the mechanism ("he writes fashionable poetry while refusing it"), but neither paraphrase captures what happens when you read the lines in sequence, each denial more accomplished than the last. The peelability test does not fail here — it reveals that what is inseparable is not figure and argument but performance and counter-performance, running simultaneously in the same syntax. Pope arrives at something adjacent but crucially different: "I'll learn to smooth and harmonize my mind, / Teach ev'ry thought within its bounds to roll, / And keep the equal measure of the soul" — Pope. The verse about leaving verse behind is already smooth, already harmonized, already measured. But where Fitzgeffrey's contradiction is comic and generative — the engine that powers the poem — Pope's is elegiac. The smoothness of the couplet that promises to abandon couplets is not a joke. It is a demonstration that the mind is already what the poem describes wanting to become, which means the departure is impossible, which means the poem is a farewell that cannot be delivered. Peelable in theory: you could state the argument (poetry should give way to philosophy of mind) and state the figure (the verse is itself the harmonized mind) as separate propositions. But "equal measure" means both metrical regularity and psychological balance, and the line instances both at once — that doubling is not contained in either proposition alone. Browning's "mediate word" is useful here: Pope *uses* the mediate word, states the thing directly, but the directness arrives doubled because the medium is already performing what the words describe. Not oblique in Donne's way. Direct twice over, from two directions, and the surplus is what makes it poetry rather than philosophy. The transition I am circling is the one between poems that fuse figure and argument (Donne, Herbert) and poems where the form's mechanical operation *replaces* argument entirely — where there is nothing to peel because there is no second layer, only the machine running. Denham's attack on bad rhyme — "Rime meant for charms to keep th'devil in aw; / Rime which with Fustian lin'd, & Nonsense clad" — Denham — is itself rhymed, itself fustian. Byron's stanza about "new mythological machinery" is machinery demonstrating machinery. These are not the same operation as Herbert's collar, where the tantrum *is* the prayer. They are lighter, more self-aware, more willing to let the reader see the gears. Herbert tomorrow: does 'The Collar' belong with Fitzgeffrey and Byron — poems that theatricalise their own mechanism — or does it do something harder, making the mechanism disappear into the voice so completely that you forget there is a mechanism until the final turn reveals it was structural all along? If the tantrum can be heard as pure voice, and only retrospectively understood as formal architecture, then the peelability test finds something new: not inseparability but *sequential* separability, where the poem is first read as voice and then reread as structure and the two readings do not compete but layer. That would be a fourth category. It would also explain why Herbert is both studied and read — not because he falls between the categories but because he occupies them in sequence, one after the other, in the same reading.