1This essay examines the ethical implications of address as a trope in ‘lyric’ poetry. Recent work on lyric, notably Jonathan Culler’s contribution to the 2008 PMLA issue on ‘the new lyric studies,’1 has treated address as its determinative feature. For Culler, those features often considered characteristic of lyric—its being ‘sung to the lyre,’ its ‘spontaneous overflow’ of subjective feeling—find their joint source in address: both towards both the poem’s ‘content,’ and towards its audience. In both instances, address functions as a marker for what Culler considers the ultimate stakes of lyric: that the poem should not only describe entities, but transform them. Derek Attridge probes the specifically ethical dimension of this when treating address as the mode for the ‘singular’ encounter between reader and text. Attending to the alterity underlying such address is what he will term ‘responsible reading.’2 However, I will suggest that the question of alterity is not exhausted in the encounter between the lyric poem and its reader-auditor, but that it reaches back into the very fabric of its prosody: that is, a third sphere of address, in which lyric addresses its own verse medium.

2Culler intends his essay as an intervention in a critical history where the ‘Romantic notion of lyric as expression of intense personal feelings’ has been superseded by New Criticism’s model of poetry as ‘dramatic monologue,’ with lyric relegated to ‘a fictional imitation of the act of a speaker’ (Culler 2008, 201).3 Against ‘the assumption that the speaker of a lyric is not the poet but a persona’ (202), Culler would salvage those aspects that lyric-as-dramatic-monologue overlooks:

stress on the reconstruction of the dramatic situation deprives rhythm and sound patterning of any constitutive role (at best they reinforce or undercut meaning); it devalues intertextual relations, except when they can be assimilated to allusions made by the consciousness dramatized; and it ignores the characteristic extravagance of lyric, which frequently engages in speech acts without a real-world counterpart. (202)

3In response, he proffers a minimal description of lyric—’short non-narrative poems’ (203)—but this is soon fleshed out. Discussing Robert Frost’s ‘Spring Pools,’ Culler notes how the poem exceeds the interpretative framework of dramatic monologue, notably in its address to nature, where the lyric ‘I’ does not simply describe pools and trees, but demands ‘a responsive nature’ that will attend to his address, thereby creating a pathos around nature’s deafness to human desires. This address, Culler suggests, exceeding the dramatic monologue it might at first appear to be,

shifts the work into the mode of those poems in the lyric tradition that call to be calling, both to display their poetic calling and to mark the belief that language can sometimes make things happen, through acts of naming, highlighting, and reordering, as well as through the instigation of poetic forms that will repeat as readers or listeners take them up and articulate them anew. (204)

4 Frost’s desire here recalls various ‘elements and aspects of lyric in Greek and Latin literature’ (204), which literature ‘treats the poem as an event addressed to an audience, performed for an audience’ (204). Lyric is ‘discourse addressed, a rhetorical transaction’ (205). It is the ‘event’- character of this transaction, he suggests, that sustains the two distinctive features of lyric mentioned above. Its ‘foregrounding of language... in the forms, shapes, and rhythms of discourse,’ arises out of the ‘focus on the lyric as linguistic event’ (205); similarly, the model of lyric subjective expression arises out of the ‘distinctive... temporality’ of lyric as event: twinned with the focus on rhythm, lyric engenders a peculiar ‘bodily experience of temporality;’ whilst the event’s sheer untranslatability enacts ‘the formative dwelling in a particular language’ (205). Lyric’s insistence on being a linguistic event, finally, points to an investment, and speculative belief, in the efficaciousness of language: lyric’s master trope, but also the basis of its linguistic project.

5However, speaking of lyric ‘as an event addressed to an audience, performed for an audience,’ Culler does not differentiate between two different strata of address at work in the address of ‘Spring Pools’:

Let them think twice before they use their powers
To blot out and drink up and sweep away
These flowery waters and these watery flowers
From snow that melted only yesterday.4

6The subjunctive ‘Let them think twice,’ aside its second person construction, addresses both ‘them’ (the trees whose leaves will cover the pools), and the witness of this address: the poem’s reader-auditor: it is an address both to intra-textual, fictive addressee, and to extra-textual audience. Moreover, the somewhat vain gesture of demanding nature to respond not only signals the insuperable alterity of nature, but also opens up a commonality with its reader-auditor who is equally incapable of making trees think twice. Its ‘rhetorical transaction,’ then, is double: it appeals to one addressee, and performs to the other. But what about when a poem blurs these two strata, the intra- and extra-textual addressees? To see this, I will turn to one of the most canonical instances of poetic address, John Keats’s late, unnamed fragment:

This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou wouldst wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calmed—See here it is—
I hold it towards you.5

7The fragment is characterised by two troubling indeterminacies, which complicate and unsettle its address. First: does the ‘it’ of the final line refer to the ‘living hand, now warm and capable,’ which is introduced through the demonstrative ‘This’ with which the fragment opens, or to the hand that is ‘cold / And in the icy silence of the tomb’ and whose imaginative construction is the central conceit of the fragment as a whole? This indeterminacy impinges on the value of the gesture with which the fragment ends: is the speaker holding out his hand in friendship, or in reproach? One might surmise that the hand that is extended towards ‘you’ is at once ‘warm and capable’ and ‘cold;’ not only would the extended hand contain both symbolic possibilities, but would indicate its own gestural repertoire.

8This means that, as it holds this hand towards us, the text turns away from us in another sense: not through reproach but through self-reflexivity. Where Frost employed an indirect address to nature in order to set up shared experience with his reader-auditor, Keats employs direct address in order to underline textual alterity. This self-reflexive inwardness is in continual tension with the line’s startlingly direct and informal tone (which itself belies the formal ‘you’ form of address), and its prosy, unmetrical rhythms, which do by no means eschew rhythmic regularity (we could read it as two amphibrachys, for instance), but diverge markedly from the densely worked iambic feet and diction of the preceding lines. The voice speaking here thus assumes a register hard to place within the poem’s broader rhythmic and rhetorical palette, just as its hand offers an ambivalent gesture.

9This analysis is in certain ways similar to that pursued by Timothy Bahti in his Ends of the Lyric.6 Bahti develops this line of argument to claim that the hand is itself constituted by such gesture, and ultimately by the representational structure that conditions gesture as such. On this account, the hand is no longer the actually present limb, but a ‘figure’—of itself qua hand, and of handwriting more broadly: the hand as constituted by ‘writing,’ that is (and here Bahti’s deconstructive influence is evident), by the absence that structures all figuration. But this focus on absence as constituted by writerly representation overlooks a second indeterminacy in the poem’s address: the disjunction between the fictive ‘thou’ of the first seven lines, and the ‘you’ to whom the hand is now held out. Who is this ‘you’? Is it a wider, plural audience within the text, or a new fictive character, whom he (be it Keats or a ‘speaking persona’) addresses formally? Or does he, rather, mark a shift from fictive, intratextual addressee to extratextual audience? The precise identity of who is taking part in the rhetorical transaction is withheld from us at the very moment that we, as audience, would become a participant in it. To call the poem a ‘fragment,’ then, is not simply to see it as part of a larger, non-extant work, but also to bear witness to the poem’s broader work of fragmentation, which is most notably effected through its modes of address.

10This entails first and foremost an epistemological crisis: we do not know who we, as addressee, are; nor what we are meant to be looking at. It is this crisis that Bahti focuses on when he takes the hand to ‘figure’ its own absence, and even to allegorise ‘writing’ in terms of such absence. As Bahti notes, this then inflects the poem’s encounter with its reader: ‘To say what the poem means would be to interpret the very juncture of text and interpretation that this poem enacts or writes: ‘This living hand’—see here it is—I hold it towards you’ (94). What I would like to note is that this encounter between ‘text and interpretation’ would thereby attain a properly ethical dimension. In particular, the switch from fictive addressee (‘thee’) to a ‘you’ that refuses to be situated, be it intra- or extra-textually, coincides with a switch from the moral imputation of an unnamed guilt (why should this cold hand ‘so chill thy dreaming nights’?) to an ethical encounter with alterity, embodied in the structure of the address itself.

11This is what is at issue also in Attridge’s performance of a reading of Mongane Wally Serote’s poem ‘The Actual Dialogue’ in The Singularity of Literature (Attridge 2004, 111–118) :7

Do not fear Baas.
It’s just that I appeared
And our faces met
In this black night that’s like me.
Do not fear—
We will always meet
When you do not expect me.
I will appear,
In the night that’s black like me.
Do not fear—
Blame your heart
When you fear me—
I will blame my mind
When I fear you
In the night that’s black like me.
Do not fear Baas,
My heart is vast as the sea
And your mind as the earth.
It’s awright baas,
Do not fear.

12Like ‘This Living Hand,’ Serote’s poem proceeds by way of address, enacting a shift from moral to ethical relations between speaker and addressee, and does so in no small part by playing upon an indeterminacy between the fictive intra-textual addressee and the poem’s address to its reader-auditor: the address which is staged, and the address which does the staging. As we saw, Frost’s address to nature demands responsiveness, whilst the alterity of nature means it continues unperturbed; when Serote addresses ‘Bass,’ the desire for responsiveness is transfigured into a demand for responsibility. Indeed, it employs a very precise moral context: the poem is spoken by a black South African addressing a white South African (‘Baas’ is black South African argot for ‘Boss,’ or white landowner). A white South African himself, Attridge is addressed not simply as a fictive addressee, taking the place of ‘Baas,’ but literally as ‘Baas.’8 Much as he might, as trained literary critic, remind himself that the addressee ‘Bass’ is a fiction, that ‘the work is a staging of the linguistic event it involves me in,’ the poem’s force lies in no little part from at least momentarily collapsing this distinction: ‘I am and I am not that man [Baas] as I read the poem’ (117). Attridge as reader uncannily bridges two textual addresses: intra-textual fiction and extra-textual audience.

13It might seem tendentious for Attridge to choose so highly charged a moral context in order to demonstrate an ethical stakes peculiar to literature. After all, the poem employs address as a means of reflecting upon the fears and prejudices that provide affective sustenance for apartheid, and Attridge recognises that his own response to its address is inextricable from the moral and political stain of apartheid. It is hardly surprising, one might contend, that a poem with so overdetermined a moral predicament should demand an ethically ‘responsible’ reading—but why should this apply to literature as such? One of the important aspects of Attridge’s reading is to show how the experience of readerly alterity the poem opens up (and which his reading opens itself up to) is central to the poem’s moral and political reflection. As he says, ‘The racism that the poem probes, challenges, mocks, and seeks to overcome is brought into being anew, and a terrible history reborn, each time it is creatively performed by a reader’ (117); yet the creative performance is more than a singular memorialisation of this history. The alterity figured by, and in, the poem’s address facilitates an openness to difference which would exceed and destabilise the very logic of difference in which apartheid can operate. When in reading we ‘attempt to do justice to the otherness of the poem’ (118), we are engaging in an openness to otherness as such, an openness that eschews interpretative mastery: ‘responsible reading’ or ‘reading performance’ involves both ‘performing and being performed by the work’ (what Attridge calls the ‘eventness of the reading’ [136]). And, of course, it is precisely the logic and consequences of such mastery that Serote’s poem addresses. The poem’s moral and political content lies in the singular event of its addressing an audience; it is because this address is shown to arise out of, and subsequently engender, an exposure to an ‘other,’ that it becomes a broader allegory of the ‘singularity’ of literature.

14In both ‘This Living Hand’ and ‘The Actual Dialogue,’ the shift from morality to ethics takes place as the poems probe address as a site for an encounter with alterity; this is analogous to the movement traced in Emmanuel Lévinas’s institution of ‘ethics as first philosophy.’9 Lévinas’s argumentation has a philosophical precedent in Martin Heidegger’s account of the ‘call of conscience’ in Being and Time. Heidegger (in) famously eschewed the term ‘ethics’ in favour of ‘ontology;’ yet his discussion of ‘conscience’ in Being and Time is concerned precisely with how the ‘ontical’ categories of moral normativity have an ‘ontological’ foundation in an exposure to alterity.10 And whilst Lévinas focuses exclusively on alterity in the face of ‘the other,’ Heidegger offers a broader account of the alterity constitutive of human being-in-the-world. It is this notion of alterity that I wish briefly to pursue.

15 If Gewissen initially means ‘conscience’ as a moral awareness, Heidegger also wishes to play on the cognates of wissen (to know) more generally: it ‘gives us something to understand; it discloses’ (Heidegger 1962, 314). This disclosure, Heidegger proposes, takes the form of a ‘call.’ Within Being and Time’s wider architectonic, this ‘call’ serves as the moment at which Dasein (human existence) becomes conscious of the basis its own being-in-the-world, and the structure of its address becomes crucial in this regard. When we are called to by our consciences, Heidegger suggests, we interpret it as an imputation of guilt: for the content of the ‘call of conscience’ he offers the judgement ‘Guilty!’ [Schuldig!] (326). But insofar as ‘Guilty!’ is a predicate of our being (‘I am guilty’), we should move beyond its ‘ontic’ definition to ask what its ‘ontological’ significance might be; the imputation ‘Guilty!,’ in other words, ‘must... be detached from relationship to any law or “ought” such that by failing to comply with it one loads himself with guilt’ (328). Instead of worrying about its moral content, or even its subjective affect, we should refer guilt back to the basic relationality of Dasein to the world it inhabits—and, we shall see, to itself.

16In this respect, it is significant that the German Schuld, here translated as ‘guilt,’ has a far broader connotative field of indebtedness or lack; for Heidegger this becomes the call’s distinctive feature. Its semantic content is, ‘[t] aken strictly, nothing. The call asserts nothing, gives no information about world-events, has nothing to tell’ (318). And this ‘nothing’ of assertion points to the ‘formally existential idea’ of ‘being-the-basis for a being which has been defined by a ‘not’ [‘Nicht’]’ (329). The ‘nothing,’ he will argue in ‘What is Metaphysics?,’ is that which exceeds all thinking— the very act of thinking the ‘nothing’ will ineluctably transform it into a thinkable ‘something.’11 Heidegger thus considers the encounter with the nothing emblematic for the problem of ontological difference more generally (how do we think ‘being’ without grasping it as ‘a being’?); but it has a second significance, more germane to my concerns: our openness to the ‘nothing’ exacts a conception of alterity that withdraws from its determination as ‘the other.’

17The Nicht pertains not only to the call’s semantics, but to its structure: ‘The call comes from me and yet from beyond me’ (320, emphases in original). It discloses by opening up a scission within Dasein itself, as Dasein internalises this ‘nothing’ into its own mode of self-relation: it calls from itself to itself ‘by way of nothing at all.’ Disclosing this nothing through its structure, the call touches upon the central feature of human being-in-the-world: ‘The caller is Dasein in its uncanniness: primordial, thrown being-in-the-world as the ‘not-at-home’—the bare ‘that’ in the ‘nothing’ of the world’ (321, translation modified). The alterity at issue, then, conditions not only our relation to the world and those people and entities whom we encounter in it, but, insofar as we inhabit the world ‘uncannily’ rather than as self-present subjects, our relation to ourselves.

18What is at issue here, then, is not simply the shift from guilt as indeterminate moral imputation to the nothing as an ethical relation to alterity, but uncanniness as the experience of, and address to, alterity. This is where I think the analogy between Heidegger’s call and Keats’s fragment becomes illuminating. For Keats too thematises alterity not simply as the relation between addresser and addressee, or ‘text and interpretation,’ but as self -relation—he is not only addressing his fictive addressees and his audience, but the verse medium in which the fragment is written. As we saw above, the sudden shift in the poem’s address is registered metrically: the gesture of holding this hand towards ‘you’ assumes the register and rhythms of prose. This had been set in motion in the previous line, with its caesura followed by the interpolating ‘—See here it is—.’ This shift in register, from subjunctive and conditional to imperative and direct address, effects a metrical shunt: as the long cadential line that had developed with the conceit finally signals its closure, the poem introduces one further rhythmic impulsion.

19This is a characteristic Keatsian rhythmic ploy, equally visible in the caesura before the final couplet of the sonnet ‘When I have fears: ‘

And when I feel, fair creature of an hour!
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love! —then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone and think,
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink. (Keats 166, ll.9-14)

20Both instances introduce a four syllable interjection after a cadence spanning several lines; in both, the first of the four syllables (the seventh in the iambic line) is difficult to situate within stress/unstress foot metrics. Basic precepts of scansion might dictate that the word ‘then’ be unstressed, both grammatically—as a temporal conjunction—and metrically—placed on an odd-numbered syllable in an iambic line. And yet the internal dynamics of the poem imply otherwise. Firstly, given the role of temporal conjunctions in the poem’s development (‘When I have fears’ [l.1], ‘When I behold’ [l.5], ‘And when I feel’ [l.9]), with the ‘whens’ culminating in this ‘then,’ the word ‘then’ attains demonstrative force. Secondly, it interrupts the regular rhetorical structure of the sonnet thus far, where each quatrain has started with ‘when;’ one would anticipate the ‘then’ to arrive on the opening word of the final couplet (a precedent for this would be Shakespeare’s Sonnet XXX, ‘When in the sessions of sweet silent thought;’ this is a rare instance of Keats adhering to the Shakespearean sonnet scheme). Upsetting the iambic line, extending fleetingly the accumulation and acceleration of the preceding lines despite the overdetermined mimesis of the caesura, this prosodic and grammatical vacillation introduces a sense of uncanniness into Keats’s use of the sonnet form.

21In the late fragment, too, the four-syllable interjection starts with a metrical unstress that demands accent, through the prosodic pause effected by its shift from description to interpolation, subjunctive to imperative, the imaginary to the demonstrative. But if in ‘When I have fears’ one might simply offer a foot inversion, this is untenable for the ‘here’ that follows. By means of comparison we could say:

Then on the shore
3 2 |1 4
See here it is
3 4 | 1 212

22Syllables seven and eight of ‘This Living Hand’ would have the same rising cadence as an iamb, just with far stronger accent than the following foot: Keats is not simply destabilising the words’ metrical value within the foot, but the relations between feet, and ultimately the rising cadence of the metrical line. And this is not simply a metrical effect: these four syllables would extend—and in the same gesture upset—the regularity of smaller motifs of phonic patterning that the fragment had built up. In its long /i: / vowel (‘see’) we hear an echo of ‘dreaming nights’ and ‘stream again,’ but now it is brought forward one syllable in the line. The following /??/ diphthong elongates the vowel further, turning the middle of the line into a kind of metrical pile-up. More is at issue here than the niceties of stress-unstress scansion: through its metrical fluctuations and its prosodic patterning, the poem becomes uncanny to itself.

23This uncanniness, finally, becomes crucial to the construction of the voice of the fragment’s speaker. As noted, ‘See here it is’ refuses the rising cadence exacted by the pentameter’s terminal stress, introducing a tension between speech and metre; in this respect it echoes the opening line, ‘warm and capable,’ which would immediately set up a tension that abates gradually as the lines that follow increase in metrical regularity (culminating in ‘And in the icy silence of the tomb’). But when this tension returns with the shift in address, metre is brought to breaking point, and the final line dissolves into prose. This is not a purely prosodic effect: the metrical uncanniness serves to construct a speaking persona, and indeed the shifts in rhythm and diction also stage this construction of persona. And conversely, just as in the poem’s final gesture effects upon its addressee a kind of fragmentation, so these rhythmic shifts have a similar effect on the speaker: the uncanniness of voice is part of the poem’s status as fragment.

24This also means that the poem’s ‘lyric’ address, through its engagement with its verse medium (what Culler called ‘the forms, shapes, and rhythms of discourse’), attains a specifically dramatic valence—precisely what Culler wishes to save lyric from. This is not to say that Culler denies the role of narrative or dramatic techniques in lyric (although it is somewhat troubling that he, heuristically or otherwise, treats ‘narrative’ and ‘drama’ as equivalent); rather, he aims to show how lyric address exceeds the model of dramatic monologue or narrative. Lyric advertises itself through, and as, this constitutive excess. This would allow us to grasp a ‘lyric’ moment in ‘The Actual Dialogue.’ Whilst the poem takes the form of dramatic monologue, its urgency (its ‘drama,’ even) lies at those moments of excess—its anaphora of ‘Do not fear,’ for example, or its slippages in register (most notably the pathos of ‘It’s awright Bass,’ where the speaker’s slightly childlike pronunciation exposes the childishness of the fear by setting up an intimacy that only renders the sense of alterity all the more piquant). But the reverse is true: Keats’s fragment attains dramatic urgency through its exceeding the metrical framework of its address. Characteristic of lyric address, then, would be this continual excess—with respect to its prosody as well as its narration.

25As it happens, there is some dispute as to whether the fragment can be considered a ‘lyric’ at all: the lines were found on the manuscript page of an unfinished verse tale entitled The Jealousies (or Cap and Bells), and might be dramatic speech to be uttered by a character, or simply a short poem he had noted down on the manuscript sheet most readily to hand. Lawrence Lipking has called the fragment ‘one of the best examples in literature of a radical ambiguity or ‘rabbit-duck’—an artefact that can be read in two fully cogent and mutually exclusive ways.’13 If the addressee is a present interlocutor within a drama, the hand is present (either literally, in a drama, or fictively, in a narrative); if the addressee is an absent reader, the reader-auditor’s must fill in this absence through imaginative response: as far as Lipking is concerned, it cannot be both, and when critics have tried—he considers ‘a third possibility: the lines addressed (as scholars used to fancy) privately to Fanny Brawne’ (182)—the fragment loses its delicacy and pathos. He concludes: ‘The two versions tend to cancel each other out when combined’ (182).

26Lipking aligns the decision as to whether the address is intra- or extratextual with the decision as to whether the fragment is dramatic or lyric. But we have seen that Keats’s fragment plays on the uncertainty between these two addresses, and addressees—an uncertainty crucial to its institution of readerly alterity—and indeed stages the address both to its present interlocutor and to its audience. The staging, moreover, pertains not simply to the poem’s rhetorical address, but also to its construction of a speaking voice through its engagement with metre, and ultimately to its addressing its own verse medium. The poem’s uncanny inhabitation of its own form is continually dramatised through its prosodic intricacy.

27Lipking suggests that both readings—as drama, as lyric—would converge insofar as they demand of their interlocutor an imaginative act that would overcome alterity: ‘This Living Hand,’ he says, ‘goes as far as a poem can go toward encroaching on a reader’s space, or abrogating the distance between poet and reader’ (183). In his own discussion of this poem, Culler offers a similar analysis: the fragment demands that we, as its audience,

los [e] our empirical lives: forgetting the temporality which supports them and trying to embrace a purely fictional time in which we can believe that the hand is really present and perpetually held toward us through the poem.14

28And yet, this abrogation of distance, which would constitute its efficaciousness as rhetorical event, takes place through a prior construction of distance; it is the absence and alterity of our temporal experience of the poem that would demand that we attempt to overcome this distance—not by cancelling it out, but by attending to it, by responding to its address. But at work in this address is an alterity not of poem to reader, but of poem to itself—one that dynamises its inhabitation both of the conventions of dramatic monologue, and the constraints of metre and diction. Herein lies the poem’s drama, its urgency: its excess. To read responsibly, I would then contend, is not simply to read the alterity between poem’s address and its reader, but also the way this alterity is constituted by the poem as it continually addresses, and strives to exceed, itself.