Getting and Spending

By Linda Gregerson

Isabella Whitney, The maner of her Wyll, 1573


                                   1
 
We’re told it was mostly the soul
              at stake, its formal
 
              setting-forth, as over water,
where, against all odds,
 
the words-on-paper make
              a sort of currency, which heaven,
 
              against all odds, accepts.
So Will, which is to say, May what
 
I purpose, please, this once, and what
              will happen coincide.
 
              To which the worldly
dispositions were mere after-thought:
 
your mother’s ring and so forth. What
              the law considered yours
 
              to give. Which in the case of
women was restricted—this was
 
long ago, and elsewhere—so
              that one confessedly “weak
 
              of purse” might all the more
emphatically be thought of as having little
 
to say. Except about the soul. The late
              disturbance in religion
 
              having done that much, the each
for each responsible, even a servant,
 
even the poor. Wild, then—quite       
              beyond the pale—to hustle
 
              the soul-part so hastily off
the page. And turn, our Isabella Whitney,
 
to the city and its faithlessness. Whose
              smells and sounds—the hawker’s cry,
 
              the drainage ditch in Smithfield—all
the thick-laid, lovely, in-your-face-and-nostrils stuff
 
of getting-by no woman of even the slightest
              affectation would profess to know,
 
              much less to know so well.
As one would know the special places on
 
his body, were the passion merely personal.
 
 
                                   2
 
Wattle and brickwork. Marble and mud.
              The city’s vast tautology. No city
 
              without people and no people but
will long for what the city says they lack:
 
high ceilings, gloves and laces, news,
              the hearth-lit circle of friendship, space
             
              for solitude, enough to eat.
And something like a foothold in the whole-of-it,
 
some without-which-not, some
              little but needful part in all the passing-
 
              from-hand-to-hand of it, so
every time the bondsman racks his debtor or
 
the shoemaker hammers a nail or one un-
              practiced girl imagines she
 
              has prompted a look of wistfulness,
a piece of it is yours because
 
your seeing it has made it that much slower
              to rejoin the blank
 
              oblivion of never-having-
been. The year was fifteen hundred seventy-
 
three. The year of our Redeemer, as
              they used to say. That other
 
              circuit of always-in-your-
debt. From which she wrested, in her open
 
I-am-writing-not-for-fun-but-for-the-money
              way of authorship, a world
 
              not just of plenty but—and here’s
the part of that’s legacy—of love.
Copyright Credit: Linda Gregerson, “Getting and Spending” from Shakespeare’s Sisters: Women Writers Bridge Five Centuries, published by the Folger Shakespeare Library. Copyright © 2012 by Linda Gregerson. Reprinted by permission of Linda Gregerson.
Source: Shakespeare’s Sisters: Women Writers Bridge Five Centuries (Folger Shakespeare Library, 2012)