The Fetters of Rhyme by Rebecca M. Rush

Author:Rebecca M. Rush [Rush, Rebecca M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780691212555
Publisher: Princeton UP
Published: 2021-03-05T00:00:00+00:00

Though chatty phrases like “ ’Tis so” and “alas!” reveal her debt to Donne, Philips inverts the libertine principles of the Elizabethan couplet writers. Her defense of resignation is much more in line with Donne’s Jacobean religious poetry, including Holy Sonnet 2, which begins with the same sentiment and rhyme word: “As due by many titles I resigne / My selfe to thee (o god).”168 Yet even in his holy sonnets, in which he adopts a traditional Italian sonnet form and an extreme position of surrender to the divine will, Donne’s rhymes rarely chime, and his meter rarely observes strict rules of measure. He continues to use enjambment, caesura, and irregular meter to disrupt expectations of order and to produce a sense that his conversations with God, like his conversations with friends and lovers in his youthful verse, are characterized by spontaneous outbursts and discursive struggle. Though she too depicts her religious verse as a conversation with herself, Philips uses even-gaited, end-stopped lines, and perfectly chiming rhymes to reinforce the idea that all things “Are held so fast, and govern’d with such art, / That nothing can out of its order start.”169 Verse, for Philips, is designed to reinforce and even enforce divine order.

Philips’s revision of the couplet builds on Jonson’s metrical alteration of the form to make it align with his ethics of the even and unaltered gait. Philips, too, signals her dedication to “That serious evenness that calmes the Brest.”170 But, while Jonson generally focused on the mind as an internal source of order, Philips depicts measure as externally dictated. The world, she claims, is “God’s watch” in which “the least pin” cannot be “misplac’d” without undermining the timekeeping function of the whole.171 But no pin will be lost since the watch is overseen and maintained by the divine watchmaker:

It beats no pulse in vain, but keeps its time,

And undiscern’d to its own height does climb;

Strung first, and daily wound up by his hand

Who can its motions guide and understand.172

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