I had been reading and researching Welsh poet Katherine Philips at the Library of Congress, the British Library, the Bodleian Library, the National Library of Wales and the University of Wales. I had finally found her adult home at Cardigan Priory in Pembroke, Wales where Philips lived with her husband from the age of 15. I wanted to gaze at the rocks and rivers that she wrote about. In particular, she wrote a poem that mentioned them about a member of her writing circle named Rosania .
Excerpt from: Injuria Amicitia
Lovely apostate! What was my offense? Or am I punished for obedience? Must thy strange rigour find as strange a time? The act and season are an equal crime. Unless (with Nero) your uncurbed desire be to survey the Rome you set on fire.
While I, who to the swans had sung thy fame, and taught each echo to repeat thy name, will now my own private sorrow entertain, to rocks and rivers, not to thee, complain.
If you skipped that part, give it another opportunity. It’s from one of the most profoundly whining, manipulative poems that I have ever had the good pleasure to read in all my life. It’s priceless – when you’re not the one drowning in rage and hurt and abandonment.
The deed that spawned this poem is directed at Rosania who went off and got married behind Philips’s back. Rosania came to her side in London when Philips was dying from smallpox and nursed her through death when such care could easily have meant her own death.
Above are the rocks and rivers of Pembrokeshire that she saw 300 years ago, and that I saw in 1993. The rocks and rivers she complained to rather than Rosania, who with any luck got a little breathing room after this rather intense missive.
Later, I tried to find Philips’s burial place in London. She was buried in a church that no longer stands. It was destroyed in the Great Fire and I could find no records of what, if any, arrangements were made for those buried in the church. Ashes to ashes. I walked the street it had stood on, and the nearby street where her father’s shop had stood. Trying to feel it, trying to feel her, trying to locate her. Feeling only a seedy street in a huge city with the gray noise of the voices and lives of the millions that followed her there.
As I was doing this work I wanted to be respectful of her woman-oriented feelings and experiences. I wanted to be historically accurate. I read the opinions of others as I developed the bibliography. Some wrote stilted literary criticism that failed to recognize the glory I found in her passionate writing known as female friendship poetry. Was Philips writing in code because lesbianism was forbidden, but friendship was, as she put it: “Innocent?” Or, in fact, was she describing an emotional experience between women that was life sustaining, soul fulfilling, painfully intense, and worthy of literary criticism as its own genre, but not one that had a sexual component for her?
Which brought me to my next question. Was it my place to evaluate her work, or her experience? I was a 21-year-old from a country that didn’t exist when she lived. I was aware that I had significant limitations. It wasn’t just the 350 years that separated us, it could also be my lack of imagination.
I was determined that I would figure it out, at least for myself, at least well enough to write a preface that had eluded me during my work stateside.
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