Response

Jonson's 'To Celia' is a poem made entirely of substitutions. "Drink to me only with thine eyes, / And I will pledge with mine; / Or leave a kiss but in the cup / And I'll not look for wine" — Jonson. Eyes for cups, kisses for wine, breath for preservative, soul-thirst for bodily thirst. Every line performs an exchange. And yet the poem feels plain — feels, in fact, like the plainest lyric in English. Where does the complexity live if not in ornament, not in paradox, not in any figure you can isolate and peel away? The complexity lives in the substitution logic itself, which is so consistent it becomes invisible. The poem doesn't have a conceit. The poem *is* a conceit — a single, total metaphorical operation (the beloved's body replaces all forms of sustenance) executed so evenly across every line that no single line looks figurative. It is all surface the way a sphere is all surface: no edge to grip, no seam to open, but the geometry itself is the structure.

The philologist's finding about *plain* and *plangere* — that plainness and complaint share a root, that the plain-dealer is the plaintiff — changes something here. Jonson's plainness is not neutral. It is a claim against the ornamental, a legal filing. "The thirst that from the soul doth rise / Doth ask a drink divine" — Jonson. That "doth ask" is both request and requirement; the soul's thirst *demands* divine drink, and the plainness of the demand is part of its authority. Compare Byron, who retrieves the same drink-of-love topos three centuries later and drowns it in qualification: "Cupid's cup / With the first draught intoxicates apace, / A quintessential laudanum or 'black drop'" — Byron. Byron cannot say *cup* without glossing it, cannot let intoxication stand without specifying the pharmacology. His ottava rima is a machine for generating parenthetical elaboration. Jonson's song is a machine for refusing it. Both are equally artificial — the plainness and the rococo are both constructed surfaces — but Jonson's construction is harder to see because it looks like the absence of construction. Byron changed the instrument from lute to orchestra. Jonson changed it the other direction: from orchestra to a single held note, where the complexity is in the holding, not the harmony.

In embedding space, Jonson's 'To Celia' clusters near devotional poetry, near Herbert, near the Song of Songs, far more than it clusters near the Cavalier lyrics it supposedly belongs to. The substitution logic (body for sacrament, breath for miracle, kiss for communion wine) is doing theological work in secular dress, or secular work in theological dress — and you cannot determine which, because the plainness refuses to signal its own register. Leapor's 'On Discontent' helps clarify the contrast: "Imagin'd Ills deceive our aking Eyes, / As lengthen'd Shades appear of monstrous Size" — Leapor. That simile is visible, declared, peelable. You can separate the argument (imagined ills distort perception) from the figure (shadows at sunset). Jonson gives you no such leverage. "I sent thee late a rosy wreath, / Not so much honouring thee / As giving it a hope that there / It could not wither'd be" — Jonson. Is the wreath literal or figurative? Is the preservation magical or metaphorical? The poem will not say, and its refusal to say is not ambiguity in the Empsonian sense — multiple meanings held in tension — but something closer to *flatness*, a topology where there is no depth axis along which meanings could be layered. Not fused, not peelable, not sequentially separable. Flat. A fourth or fifth thing.