Early Modern Women Writers and the Literary Mirror
Two patterns which I have noticed in reading Women Poets of the English Civil War and the poetry of Lanyer, Wroth, and Evelyn converge in Hutchinson’s poem, “The Recovery”: water, to include comparing life to a struggle on the stormy sea, and mirrors, and their ability or inability to convey “nature” and/or people as they truly are. Life’s travails are compared to water; poetry, to a mirror. Life is tumultuous; poetry, static.
Lanyer refers to her dedicatory poems as mirrors for her various (numerous) female patrons, stating that her poems are reflections of their virtues, which simultaneously evokes a sense of humility (i.e., I’m only telling it like it is) as well as confidence in her own poetic abilities (in that she is able to match nature’s beauty with her words/skill). In crown sonnet F4, Wroth takes a less realistic “look” at mirrors and light, in confusion as to whether she is looking at the image of her love or her love itself, calling the mirror image cold and frozen as contrasted with life, which is warm and moves. (I examined Lanyer’s and Wroth’s use of mirrors in my discussion posts #5 and #8 respectively). Evelyn’s St. Euphrosina refers to “mirror” six times, calling St. Euphrosina “the mirror of Ladyes and honour,” “beauty’s mirror faire,” “Mirror exemplar,” “heav’nlye mirror faire,” and “Angels’ mirror bright” (see pages 2, 6, 41, 56 and 69). In “The Recovery,” Hutchinson writes:
“In this rock is truth’s crystal healing spring, / Which shows the perfect form of every thing, / Strengthens the weak and doth the sick eyes cure / That they the radiant mirror may endure. / Here I saw the object of my love / Wearing the martyr’s crown, … The bright reflections made me a new crown” (lines 19-37).
Here, the mirror is working in a different way than the few examples provided above. It is a source of torment containing the “dear object of my love,” which is similar to the way that Wroth uses the mirror in F4, crown sonnet in Pamphilia to Amphilanthus. The issue is not, however, whether the mirror is inferior to the image it contains, as in Wroth; the mirror is showing her “love, life, crown, peace, treasure, joys” which in the death of her husband were “lost” (line 1). The mirror is not a satisfactory copy or tribute, as Lanyer suggests her Salve Deus is, to three of her invoked women patrons. It is, rather, something to be “endured.” It shows not her love, but the “object of my love / Wearing the martyr’s crown,” bringing to mind Christ’s crown of thorns, not a crown one would want to see her husband wearing and, further, this crown transfers from the mirror to her: “The bright reflections made me a crown.” In Evelnyn’s Euphrosina, the saint mirrors heaven; here, the mirror shows her hell on earth, torment suffered by martyrs.
The poem ends, as do Pulter’s poems and other of the Women Poets of the English Civil War, with the poet dealing with the storm by calling out to God, trusting in the “rock of life,” no longer gazing on “transient things” (most apparent/obvious in Euphrosina) but instead focusing on God who she asks to “Let my recovered soul for ever more / Rejoice in what I lately did deplore.” The mirror returns in the final lines: no longer will she mistake the “appearances of ill and good” as she seeks “true” understanding of forms in “thy clear mirror view” (72-75).
Works Cited
Lucy Hutchinson, selections from De rerum natura, British Library Additional MS 17018, and Elegies (Women Poets of the English Civil War, pp. 249-295)
