Reading Inside-Out: Ben Jonson's "To Celia"

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By Roman Sympos

 

Drink to me only with thine eyes,
    And I will pledge with mine;
Or leave a kiss within the cup,
    And I'll not look for wine.
The thirst that from the soul doth rise
    Doth ask a drink divine;
But might I of Jove's nectar sup,
    I would not change for thine.

I sent thee late a rosy wreath,
    Not so much honoring thee
As giving it a hope, that there
    It could not withered be.
But thou thereon didst only breathe,
    And sent'st it back to me;
Since when it grows, and smells, I swear,
    Not of itself, but thee.

 

                                                       Ben Jonson, “To Celia,” 1616

 

 

Most lovers of poetry are familiar with the lyrics to Ben Jonson’s “To Celia” even if they can’t remember the title of the poem. If they haven’t read it, they’re likely to have heard it sung in any one of half a dozen musical arrangements. And we all know what it’s saying, don’t we?

 

Or do we?

 

How could we not? Jonson’s diction remains lucid to this day and his syntax is straightforward, free of long, droning dependent clauses that might interrupt its flow or the tortured transposition of sentence elements. A Cliff Notes synopsis might read as follows:

 

The poet expresses his love for Celia in tropes of toasting and gifting. In the first stanza he describes their exchange of glances as tantamount to a pledge of mutual fidelity and compares her kisses to fine wine, equivalent to the nectar of the gods. In the second stanza, he describes having sent his beloved a wreath of roses with the expectation that she would keep it fresh. But she returned it, thus leaving his love unrequited, a rejection made more poignant by the scent of her breath, which lingers upon its blossoms as a fond remembrance.

 

If this is your understanding, you may be surprised to learn that there’s a vigorous minority of critics who read the poem inside-out, as ironically expressing not only disappointed hopes, but also sinister, hallucinatory fantasies.

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Peter Stockwell provides a good summary of this position in an excellent article focusing on recent developments in “the cognitive poetic framework of text world theory” and its relationship to traditional “stylistics” (157), topics that needn’t concern us here.[1]

 

Stockwell acknowledges the ardent sincerity expressed in the first stanza of the poem, which is, on a first reading, hopeful and anticipatory. But he perceives a shift in tone in the second, toward the “delusional.”

 

We seem to have slipped from a factual narrative recount into a fantastical wish-world in which an inanimate wreath has hopeful feelings, in which a woman’s presence prevents flowers from withering, and whose breath has such a restorative power and intensity that a dead wreath can grow again miraculously and transfer her scent to overpower the roses! (164)

 

The lover’s delusions become downright sinister if, like Stockwell, we apply a close “stylistic” analysis to the lover’s plaints, beginning as early as the first line, and specifically, with the word “only.”

 

“There are several ways of reading the scope of ‘only,’” writes Stockwell:

 

Drink to me metaphorically (that is, not with your mouth but simply with your eyes)

Do nothing else except drink to me with your eyes

Drink exclusively to me

Drink to me with your eyes and with nothing else

 

Stockwell considers the first two interpretations to be congruent with traditional readings of the poem as a sincere expression of romantic infatuation and disappointment. The second two, however, which confine the scope of the beloved’s permissible objects of attachment exclusively to the speaker—“me only”—and allow for no spoken revision to what he chooses to make of her glance, point to “a relationship in which domination and passivity [are] key,” “a more sinister and unhealthy sort of relationship,” “coercive, seductive and manipulative” (168).

 

The woman is silent throughout: she is to make a toast not by speaking but only with her eyes; she does not ‘kiss’ but rather passively leaves a kiss; she is reduced and disembodied down to her senses; her only action would be a definite and unambiguous rejection, but the writer frames it in a fantastical world that turns it into a token for himself. (168)

 

I’ve quoted Stockwell at length not only because he summarizes, quite ably, an important counter-position to the traditional reading of “To Celia,” but also because he breaks new ground for sceptics, like me.

 

So let me return the favor by trying to advance the line of scrimmage another ten yards.

 

For there’s still another layer of negativity doing its insidious work throughout the poem that transforms the occasion for writing it from an attempt to cope with disappointment and rejection into a poisonous attack on the woman who spurned the lover’s unwanted advances. Read from this vantage point, “To Celia” becomes a back-handed series of insults motivated by resentment and spite.

 

Let’s start, like Stockwell, with “only,” in Jonson’s first line. Stockwell’s fourth reading of “Drink to me only with thine eyes,” to wit, “Drink to me with your eyes and with nothing else,” strikes me as less an attempt to silence the beloved and allow for the play of sexual fantasies than (as Stockwell himself suggests) the first clause of a conditional statement of the form “If x, then y.”  The lover is saying, “If all you’re going to do is make eyes at me and not follow through, i.e. go to bed with me, then I’ll make my promise of fidelity just as empty and not put my ‘pledge’ into words.”

 

The lover is, on this reading, not hopeful or anticipatory, as the mainstream critical tradition would have it, but disappointed and resentful. The beloved is behaving like a coquette, toying with the lover’s feelings, and the lover, who wants to be taken seriously, resents it.

 

Once set in motion, the lover’s resentment contaminates our interpretation of every line to follow, beginning with the next two, which amount to another conditional statement deploying, interestingly enough, the trope of contamination. “Or leave a kiss within the cup,/ And I’ll not look for wine” is tantamount to saying,  “Or, in that case, assuming you are a cock-tease, if you do drink to me from a cup and leave your “kiss” on its rim, I won’t sully my lips and prolong this torment by drinking from it.”

 

The next four lines of the first stanza present a conundrum of long standing in the poem’s critical history. At first glance, read casually, the lover appears to be saying he prefers the woman’s “nectar,” like a bee sipping at a blossom, to that of Jove, namely, ambrosia, which is, in classic mythology, the drink that gives the gods of Olympus eternal life. A lovely sentiment. But if that’s true, if he does prefer her “nectar” to Jove’s, we must conclude that his “thirst” for her does not arise “from the soul,” but from the body. It’s not “divine” but carnal, mere lust. The traditional image of the bee as a promiscuous pollinator, flitting from blossom to blossom and enjoying each sweet while leaving them all pregnant with fruit, reinforces this association.  

 

“But might I” and “not” in the last two lines of this stanza, however, starkly trouble such an interpretation while starkly contradicting each other. Let’s take them one at a time.

 

“But,” like the sentence adverb “however,” always introduces an exception or qualification to the preceding statement, thus indirectly affirming it. Here “but” indirectly affirms that the soul seeks divine nourishment, and “might I” affirms that the man’s love-thirst is of that type, arising from the soul. Taken at face value, the word “but” tells us that the man’s love for the woman is “from the soul” and does “ask a drink divine.” However (“but”) even if he were offered (“might I drink”) the divine nectar his soul thirsts for, he would . . . . wait a second.

 

He “would not change for”—that is, “not exchange it for”—the nectar of his beloved?

 

Shouldn’t that eighth line read something like “I would still change for”—that is, prefer—"thine,” the nectar of lust, rather than the divine nectar of Jove?  

 

Put more succinctly: “But” implies that the lover would rather quench his “divine” thirst with the carnal nectar of his beloved, than with Jove’s, which is what his soul longs for. “Not,” in the next line, says exactly the opposite: the lover would not exchange the nectar of Jove for that of his beloved.

 

These contradictions disappear, or are at least ameliorated, if we take the more jaundiced view of the lover’s intentions demanded by reading the poem as a series of sly and disingenuous insults.

 

On this view, keeping in mind the predatory implications of the first four lines, the lover’s desire is, indeed, not spiritual but basely carnal, and the “thirst” that “[d]oth ask a drink divine” merely hypothetical, as if the speaker were to say, “People whose souls long for more than mere sex look to heaven for relief. That’s not me. However . . . ” (and here’s where Jonson’s “but” is forced to do a lot of heavy lifting) “However, even if I had the chance to quench my thirst with a beverage as insipid, inappropriate, and inadequate to the task as Jove’s nectar, I’d still take it over yours.”  

 

That’s the best I can do, but at least it’s consistent with what came before and what follows, which is more than can be said of any other attempt I’ve read--if, that is, we assume the poem is a poisoned bon-bon rather than an expression of the speaker’s infatuated disappointment or his “coercive, seductive and manipulative” fantasies.

 

The word “nectar” offers a smooth segue to the dominant image of the second stanza, the “rosy wreath” of its first line.

 

As we’ve seen, Stockwell reads the rest of this stanza as a kind of fevered hallucination arising from the lover’s frustrated desires, a “delusional absurdity.” The only exception he allows is in line two, “Not so much honoring thee,” which he says, “references the prosaic reality in which the wreath’s function simply was to honour [the beloved].” What happened to Jonson’s “not”? If the wreath’s “function” was, in fact, to honor the addressee, then the “not” amounts to a transparent attempt at revision, as if to say, “You thought the wreath was to honor you? Not at all!” It’s still another surreptitious insult, this time to the woman’s intelligence.

 

The revised motivation offered by the lover—“giving [the wreath] a hope, that there/ It could not withered be”—Stockwell dismisses as part of the “fantastical wish-world” the man is building in his deluded mind, where “an inanimate wreath has hopeful feelings” and “a woman’s presence prevents flowers from withering.” But who’s suggesting anything fantastical? Taking the roses out of the wreath and putting them in water would prevent them from withering without resorting to supernatural powers, and nowhere does Jonson suggest that the beloved’s “breath has such a restorative power and intensity that a dead wreath can grow again miraculously.” Where does it say the wreath did in fact wither or was sent back dead? If all the woman did was breathe on it before sending it back, it couldn’t have suffered much.

 

I’m asking us to consider the possibility that the lover knows exactly what he’s doing when he revises his original intention for sending the woman a “rosy wreath” and then represents the gift, rather than himself, as hopeful. His wreath wasn’t doing well and he needed someone to look after it. What could be a more demeaning insult than to respond to a woman’s flirtation by asking her to take care of your flowerpot? It’s absurd, and lame, and meant to be perceived as such, but not delusional.

 

Moreover, it sets us up for what Stockwell recognizes as “a marked contrast . . . between the high-blown metaphor and allusion of most of the poem and the prosaic, colloquial and rather earthy ‘it… smells, I swear.’”

 

There is, especially, in the unwanted intimacy of this, an element (isn’t there?) of the obsessive, the stalker, the delusional misfit distracted by his own unreal fantasies, convincing himself of his own rightness by the appeal to a misogynistic tradition of literary seduction. ‘I swear’ binds up the religious oath with the manly curse, and smacks of protesting too strongly. (169)

 

If we leave out Stockwell’s insistent characterization of the male speaker as an “obsessive,” “delusional” stalker bent on “seduction,” rather than a frustrated male tormented by a flirtatious coquette and bent on spiteful retribution, I think we come closer to the truth. “It . . . smells” isn’t about “unwanted intimacy,” but body odor, and specifically, halitosis. You can hear the insult quietly lurking in the interpellated “I swear,” which Stockwell rightly reads as “protesting too strongly.” We might even call it superfluous, mere filler, unless it serves some other purpose. And it does. Along with the end-stopping comma after it, “I swear” leaves “smells” hanging long enough to let other indelicate associations excited by the colloquial “it smells” waft in, all of them together adding up to “it stinks.”

 

As for “grows,” it does seem to be used intransitively, which would support Stockwell’s contention that it reflects the speaker’s addled state of mind. But again, does this warrant reading the entire stanza as hallucinatory or delusional? I think “fanciful” captures more accurately the sarcastic, belittling tone a frustrated and spiteful cavalier might adopt in lashing out at a flirt who can’t tell where "having fun" ends and "making fun of" begins.

 

“To Celia” is to poetry what an ambiguous figure is to optical illusions. It that a rabbit or an old woman? A vase or two profiles in mirror symmetry? You can make sense of it in more than one way, but not simultaneously. Do you know of any other poems that work this way? If you do, I’d love to hear about them. Please post them, along with your interpretations, in our “Comments” section!

 

FOOTNOTES

1. But fascinating and worthy of attention. Briefly, they are mutually dependent critical approaches that fall short of reaching their full interpretive potential without each other’s aid. See “Creative Reading, World and Style in Ben Jonson’s ‘To Celia,’” Language and the Creative Mind, Mike Borkent, Barbara Dancygier, and Jennifer Hinnell (eds). CSLI Publications. 2013. Pp. 157-172.