"Doubly Resounded": Narcissus and Echo in Petrarch, Donne, and Wroth.

Augustine, Saint, Bishop of Hippo, 354-430; Self-consciousness (Awareness); Donne, John, 1604-1663; Petrarchism; English poetry

This essay demonstrates how Petrarch's Augustinian meditation on poetry's capacity to scatter or recollect a self leaves a significant and understudied impression on two instances of later Petrarchan resonance, John Donne's "Valediction: Of My Name in the Window" and the first sonnet that appears in Mary Wroth's The Countesse of Montgomery's Urania. I analyze the genealogy of self-constitution and self-loss that Petrarch offers in Rime 23, which narrates the emergence of affective disorder in his life through an allusion to Ovid's Narcissus in Metamorphoses and a revision of Augustine's theory of desire. I argue that Petrarch's Rime 23 revalues a model of self that constructs a petrified barrier around itself in response to Love's attempts to breach the boundaries of his body. This model of petrific policing offers a potential future for poetic self-recollection in Petrarch's poem—and it also produces a topos for Petrarchism with which Donne and Wroth will innovatively engage, to different ontological and ethical ends. In the essay's second part, I demonstrate how Donne, with Petrarchism and Ovid's Narcissus in mind, attempts to produce a "firmness" of self and to regulate desire through poetic inscription. In the final section, I examine how Wroth's sonnet responds to the idea of self-hardening in Petrarchism, the air that so much early English poetry breathes, by answering his Narcissus with the character of Echo, thus imagining a new kind of poetic personhood—echoic and relational—as a response to a masculinist fantasy of a self-protective, rigidified self. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]