“To rocks and rivers, not to thee, complain” Following in Katherine Philips Footprints
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 in Aberystwyth. 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 behind her home that she wrote about. In particular, she wrote a poem 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 whiny, 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 a woman who went off and got married behind Philips’s back. The woman that Philips wrote this poem to, 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 Cardigan 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 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 white 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.
Since my college years, I’ve had more time to enjoy both the fire and the ease that accompanies intense female bonds. Frankly, I can’t imagine a fulfilling life without both my husband and female bonds. Katherine Philips speaks to my experience like one of few authors of verse or prose in any age.
Perhaps it was just exhaustion and poor nutrition that caused me to feel repelled at her home. Perhaps it was Philips herself, warning me not to interpret her life for her. Not to take a stand that she herself did not take. I can accept that.
I can also accept that it’s not my place to sum up the life of a beautiful poet who lived 350 years ago. Perhaps there are scholars with an education in both literature and Welsh culture who could do a good job of it, but the fact is that I am not among them. I came at this project as a fiery young woman who identified as a deeply ideological feminist. The world was either black or white to me. There was very little gray.
Katherine Philips was like a Michigan winter sky an hour before it drops six inches of snow on our heads: nothing BUT gray, everywhere. She fascinated me. She turned that sky upside down, teasing me with unanswerable clues. Her poetry was a great lesson for me about the breadth and scope of the possibilities of women’s relationships: they were bigger than I could imagine. And I had a lifetime to explore them.
Let me leave you, and this story, with her poetry. In the end, her words are what survive, and what will, hopefully, survive us all.
Friendship’s Mystery, To my dearest Lucasia
Come, My Lucasia, since we see,
That miracles men’s faith do move,
By wonder and by prodigy,
To the dull, angry world let’s prove
There’s a Religion in our Love
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