KATHERINE

PHILIPS

life and poetry

 KATHERINE PHILIPS

Best known today for her poems on female friendship, Katherine Philips wrote some 125
poems on a variety of subjects; she translated plays by Pierre Corneille and five shorter Italian
and French pieces; and she wrote a series of letters to Sir Charles Cotterell that were published
after her death as Letters from Orinda to Poliarchus (1705). Philips (whose non de plume was
Orinda) was one of a relatively small number of British women writers whose poems were
widely circulated in the 1650s and early 1660s, and she seemed to her contemporaries to be, as
the title pages of the first two editions of her Poems declared, "the Incomparable" (1664) or "the
Matchless Orinda" (1667).

The only daughter of Katherine and John Fowler, she was born in early January 1632 in the
parish of Saint Mary Woolchurch Haw in London. There is no exact record of her birth, but the
poem "On the 1. of January 1657," in which she says her "time / ... / is swell'd to six and twenty
years," may indicate that her birthday coincided exactly with the first day of the new year. In any
case, that she was born early in January 1632 was confirmed by John Aubrey, who cited in his
Brief Lives (1813) the parish record to indicate that she was baptized on 11 January. She had an
elder half brother, Joshua Fowler, and, as a result of her mother's later marriages, a younger half
brother, Daniel Henley, and a half sister, Elizabeth Phillipps (sic). Although none of these
siblings is mentioned in any of Philips's extant works, other relatives are important figures in her
poetry and letters.

Of Katherine Philips's father, not a great deal is known. John Fowler was a relatively
prosperous cloth merchant. When he died in December 1642, he left a legacy of some
thirty-three hundred pounds, most of which was divided between his wife, his son, Joshua, and
his daughter. The Fowler household also included a "cosen Blacket" who, after the poet's death,
told Aubrey that young Katherine "was mighty apt to learne ... she had read the Bible thorough
before she was full foure years old."

Philips's mother, born Katherine Oxenbridge, was the granddaughter of an early Separatist,
John Oxenbridge, and one of seven children of the physician Daniel Oxenbridge and his wife
Katherine Harby Oxenbridge. One of Katherine Oxenbridge's brothers, John Oxenbridge
(1608-1674), is known to literary scholars for his friendship with John Milton and Andrew
Marvell. A Puritan and Parliamentarian, John Oxenbridge went, two years after the Restoration
of the English monarchy in 1660, to Surinam, then to Barbados, and finally to Massachusetts,
where he became the pastor of the First Church of Boston. Philips's other two uncles, Daniel and
Clement Oxenbridge, were also Parliamentarians, and Philips herself was sent, when she was
eight, to a boarding school run by a Mrs. Salmon, whom Aubrey identifies as "a famous
schoolmistris, Presbyterian." At Mrs. Salmon's school in Hackney, Aubrey's notes go on to
indicate, Philips was trained in the Puritan John Ball's catechism: "She was very religiously
devoted when she was young; prayed by herself an hower together, and tooke sermons verbatim
when she was but ten years old." With clear High Church sympathy, Aubrey adds that "She was
when a child much against the bishops, and prayed to God to take them to him.... Prayed aloud,
as the hypocriticall fashion then was."

As Claudia A. Limbert has recently noted (Restoration, Spring 1989), sometime in the mid
1640s John Fowler's widow married one George Henley. Whether the daughter went to live with
the Henleys or stayed in Mrs. Salmon's school for a few more years is unknown, but it seems
clear that when in late 1646 or early 1647 her mother married her third husband, Sir Richard
Phillipps of Picton Castle in Pembrokeshire, the fifteen-year-old Katherine joined her in Wales.
The earliest extant writing by the girl then named Katherine (sometimes spelled Catherine)
Fowler is clearly connected with the area near Picton Castle.

Now in parcel 24 of the Orielton Collection of the National Library of Wales is a single sheet
of paper signed "C Fowler" and dedicated to Anne Barlow, daughter of Dorothy and John
Barlow of Slebech, a town some two miles from Picton Castle. On one side of the paper, in the
young poet's hand, is a sixteen-line poem arguing that "A marryd state affords but little ease /
The best of husbands are so hard to please." The reader is urged to "be advised by me: / Turn,
turn apostate to love's Levity." Following this witty antimarriage poem is a prose "recipt to cure
a Love sick Person who cant obtain the Party desired." The latter urges one to combine "two oz:
of the spirits of reason three oz: of the Powder of experiance five drams of the Juce of Discretion
three oz: of the Powder of good advise, and a spoonfull of the Cooling watter of Consideration"
to create pills which will save the head from "maggots and whimsies and you restored to your
right sences." In a kind of postscript, the writer concludes, "if this wont do apply the plaister and
if that wont do itts out of my power to find out what will." On the opposite side of the paper is a
poem in which the poet maintains that "If himans rites shall call me hence, / It shall be with
some man of sence." The husband she seeks will be a man of Jonsonian moderation, "Nott with
the great, but with a good estate," and he should be always "Ready to serve his friend, his
country and his king." Although the phrase about a good husband serving friend, country, and
king has a formulaic ring (and although one should of course be cautious about assuming that
the speaker in the poem is Catherine Fowler herself), that phrase may suggest that its author was
already bending away from Parliamentarian politics and toward a Royalist stance.

The man whom the poet married in August 1648, however, was not a Royalist but a
Parliamentarian. James Philips was a relative of Sir Richard, their two families being descended
from Sir Thomas Phillipps of Cylsant who lived early in the sixteenth century. Sir Richard was
the direct descendant of Sir Thomas's heir; James was a descendant of a younger son, Owen.
James Philips was also related by marriage to Sir Richard, for his first wife, Frances, was Sir
Richard's daughter. Born in 1594, James was fifty-four years old when he married the
sixteen-year-old Katherine Fowler.

The owner of property in both Cardiganshire and Pembrokeshire, James Philips of Cardigan
Priory and nearby Tregibby was, by the 1640s, a person of some political significance—a
member of Parliament and, in Philip Webster Souers's words, "a man of energetic character,
who, throughout the period of the Commonwealth, enjoyed a degree of influence which was the
portion of few men in all Wales." Though some have described him as a dedicated, even severe
upholder of the Roundheads' cause, there is reason to believe that James Philips was instead a
relatively apolitical man devoted more to the ideals of public service than to the nuances of
partisan politics. In a seventeenth-century manuscript now in the National Library of Wales, he
is described as one whose "genius is more to undertake public affaires, regarding sometim more
the Employment then the Authority from whom he received the Same" and "One that had the
fortune to be in with all Goverments, but thrived by none" (MS. Llanstephan 145, f. 70v). It may
be that Philips's assigning her husband the name "Antenor" in her poems is motivated partly by
his age (Antenor was an elderly counselor in the Iliad). It may also be relevant, as Patrick
Thomas suggests, that Antenor attempted to make peace between the Greeks and the Trojans.
The name may thus designate James Philips as a man with a moderate temperament. It might
even be a playful reminder to a beloved husband that he might be less partisan.

Neither Philips's poems nor her letters provide proof positive that Katherine and James
Philips's marriage was a happy one. Nevertheless, as Orinda teases and cajoles Antenor, they
image a relationship of easygoing respect. From the poetry can be drawn at least the outlines of
one indicative episode in their political and personal lives. Sometime during the Protectorate
(1653-1659), one J. Jones threatened to publish Philips's poem "Upon the double murther of K.
Charles, in answer to a libellous rime made by V. P." Knowing how embarrassing the clearly
Royalist publication of that poem would have been to her husband, Katherine Philips wrote "To
Antenor, on a paper of mine which J. Jones threatens to publish to his prejudice." Her approach
is a comic one in which she begins with the abrupt question, "Must then my crimes become thy
scandall too? / Why sure the Devill hath not much to do." Rather than follow the common
wisdom of the period that a man is responsible for his wife's actions, she asserts a separation of
responsibilities by reminding Antenor that "Eve's rebellion did not Adam blast, / Untill himselfe
forbidden fruit did tast."

On another occasion, Orinda bids Antenor, "give o'er, / For my sake talk of graves no more"
in "To my Antenor, March 16. 1661/2." The date of the poem suggests that the situation in
which it is written is intensely serious, for while in February 1662 James Philips had been found
innocent of the charge that in 1654 he had sentenced the Royalist colonel John Gerard to death,
in March he seems to have been in the midst of real financial difficulties. Nevertheless, Orinda's
tetrameter lines are cheerful—as cheerful as Orinda is hoping Antenor will become. In "To my
dearest Antenor on his parting," Orinda writes a poem whose paraphrasable content is not unlike
poems of parting by her male contemporaries—John Donne, for example. In "A Valediction:
forbidding Mourning" (1633) Donne employs his famous image of a compass to teach his lady
that their parting is only physical; Philips uses the image of "watches, though we doe not know /
When the hand moves, we find it still doth go, / So I, by secret sympathy inclin'd / Will absent
meet, and understand thy mind." In both poems woman is the lesser partner: Antenor, Orinda
says, is her "guide, life, object, friend, and destiny." And yet the very fact that a woman defines
the relationship gives Philips's poem a different cast from Donne's lines.

As James Philips's wife, Katherine Philips lived from 1648 until her death in 1664 at his
family home, Cardigan Priory. Cardigan is in the southwestern corner of Cardiganshire and thus
only a short distance from Pembrokeshire, where many of her friends and relatives lived.
Knowing that she also maintained many of her London friends throughout her adult life, one
might speculate that Philips often, or at least sometimes, accompanied her husband when he
went to London for meetings of Parliament. Certainly she was in London in the spring of 1655,
for her only son, Hector, who died in infancy, was buried there in Saint Syth's Church. And from
the title of the poem Philips wrote to mourn the death of her twelve-year-old stepdaughter,
Frances Philips, we know that the girl died in 1660 in Acton—a London suburb where Katherine
Philips's mother (by then married to a fourth husband, Maj. Philip Skippon) resided. Katherine
and James Philips's only daughter (also a Katherine), born in Cardigan in April 1656, would live
to marry Lewis Wogan of Boulston, Pembrokeshire, and to bear fifteen children—fourteen of
whom lie buried with their parents in Boulston Church.

In the two poems Philips wrote on the death of her young son, she uses Judeo-Christian
numerology to express the intense pain of a bereaved mother who, after seven years of marriage,
bore a son who was "in less than six weeks, dead" ("Epitaph on Hector Philips"). She also uses
the number forty, which is associated with periods of privation and pain—periods (such as the
Israelites' forty years of wandering) followed by relief and joy. Moreover, forty is the number of
days after childbirth when a mother is "churched," and Philips begins her poem "On the death of
my first and dearest childe" with the stanza "Twice Forty moneths in wedlock I did stay, / Then
had my vows crown'd with a lovely boy. / And yet in forty days he dropt away; / O! swift
vicissitude of humane Joy!" Instead, then, of returning to the church to offer a monetary gift and
prayers of thanksgiving for her son's birth, this mother can offer only poetry: "An Off'ring too
for thy sad Tomb I have / Too just a tribute to thy early Herse, / Receive these gasping numbers
to thy grave; / The last of thy unhappy Mothers Verse." As she puns on the word numbers in that
poem, so Philips puns on the word mourning in the epitaph: "So the Sun, if it arise / Half so
Glorious as his Ey's, / Like this Infant, takes a shroud, / Bury'd in a morning Cloud."

Among Philips's poems are many elegies and epitaphs, at least four of which were actually
carved on church monuments. The only one known to survive is inscribed on John Lloyd's
monument in Cilgerron Church, a few miles southeast of Cardigan. The others are the epitaph
for young Hector Philips, who was buried in a church that a few years later burned in London's
Great Fire of 1666, and two commemorating John Collier (described in John Fowler's will as his
"servant and cozen") and Collier's daughter Regina, who were buried in Beddington, Surrey, in
January 1650 and September 1649, respectively. Other poems occasioned by deaths of friends
and relatives include verses in memory of Mrs. Mary Lloyd of Bodidrist in Denbighshire; a
poem memorializing "the most Justly honour'd Mrs Owen of Orielton"; an epitaph on James
Philips's mother; a poem on the death of Sir Walter Lloyd; and an Publius written in memory of
her stepfather Philip Skippon. Philips also wrote two poems addressed to women who had lost
their husbands—"To my dearest friend, on her greatest loss" and "To Mrs. Wogan ... On
theDeath of her husband"—and she wrote two elegies on members of the royal family—"On the
death of the Duke of Gloucester" and "On the Death of the Queen of Bohemia."

Interesting examples of the historical (and gender) specificity of Philips's poetry are to be
found in her five epithalamia, all of which focus on the bride (rather than, as do the typical
Renaissance epithalamia, on the groom) and which express hope that the marriage will be the
kind of loving (albeit hierarchical) companionate marriage that seventeenth-century writers of
marriage tracts and sermons recommended. In, for example, "To my deare Sister Mrs. C. P. on
her nuptialls," addressed to her sister-in-law Cicily Philips, Orinda acknowledges the
seventeenth-century reality of wives' marriage responsibilities with the line "May her content
and duty be the same." But she also prays, "May his and her pleasure and Love be so / Involv'd
and growing, that we may not know / Who most affection or most peace engross'd; / Whose
Love is strongest, or whose bliss is most." That the poem's tone will be different from that of
epithalamia such as Edmund Spenser's or Donne's is announced in the opening lines in which
"wild toys" are rejected in favor of a different kind of "solemnitys." That the word solemnities is
used in the Renaissance to refer to ceremonies such as marriage is especially relevant to a
discussion of this poem because—as Patrick Thomas notes—Cicily Philips's wedding was the
first to have been performed in Cardigan after the 1653 Barebones Parliament (of which James
Philips was a part) had declared marriage a civil, rather than a religious, ceremony and required
that it be performed by a justice of the peace. Indeed, the wedding in question was performed,
the parish register indicates, "by James Phillips ... one of the Justices of the peace of the said
Countie of Cardigan." Just as this civil ceremony was performed in Saint Mary's Church rather
than in a secular setting, so too are "Orinda's wishes for Cassandra's bliss" presented in a
numerologically precise poem in which twenty-four lines (one for each hour of the day) close
with the hope that the couple will "count the houres as they doe pass, / By their own Joys, and
not by sun or glass; / While every day like this may sacred prove / To Friendship, duty, gratitude
and Love."

Most, though not quite all, of Philips's poems are occasioned by specific events in the lives of
relatives, friends, or members of the royal family. They include a variety of literary kinds:
wooing poems and poems of parting; the epithalamia and the elegies and epitaphs previously
mentioned; philosophical pieces on topics such as "The World," "Submission," and "Death";
verse letters to friends and relatives; pastoral dialogues; and even one pindaric ode, an ode on
retirement (first published, as was Abraham Cowley's "On Orinda's Poems. Ode," in 1663 in
Poems, by Several Persons). In addition to Cowley, Philips's acquaintances included many
British writers. As early as 1651 Henry Vaughan printed in his Olar Iscanus the poem "To the
most Excellently accomplish'd Mrs. K. Philips," in which he promises to "vow / "No Lawrel
growes, but for your Brow." Two essays on the topic of friendship—one published by Francis
Finch in 1654, the other by Jeremy Taylor in 1657—were written for Philips. After Philips's
death, James Tyrell, Thomas Flatman, Abraham Cowley, William Temple, and one J. C. wrote
poems in her memory; and, as Allan Pritchard has noted, Marvell echoes several of Philips's
lines in poems published in his posthumous volume of 1678.

Sixteen fifty-one, the same year that Vaughan praised his fellow Anglo-Welsh poet, marks
Philips's earliest print publication. Her poem in praise of William Cartwright appeared as the
first of fifty-four prefatory poems in the posthumous edition of his Comedies, Tragi-Comedies,
with Other Poems ... The Ayres and Songs set by Mr Henry Lawes. Several poets whose works
appear there also appear in the next volume in which Philips's verses were printed: Henry
Lawes's Second Book of Ayres, and Dialogues (1655). Dedicated to Mary Harvey, Philips's
friend since their time together at Mrs. Salmon's school and by 1655 the wife of Sir Edward
Dering, the 1655 book includes, as a prefatory poem, Philips's Henry Lawes and, with music by
Lawes, her "Friendship's Mysterys"—called there "Mutuall Affection between Orinda and
Lucatia."

The theme of friendship so apparent in her marriage poems is given a different spin in the
poems for which Philips is best known: the poems in which she exploits the language and
literary genres used by seventeenth-century love poets to treat Orinda's relationships with female
friends such as Lucasia (Philips's name for Anne Owen, later Lady Dungannon), Rosania (Mary
Aubrey), and Philoclea (Malet Stedman). If one were to substitute different names in some of
the friendship poems, they might read like verses celebrating love between a Renaissance male
poet and his lady. "Parting with a Friend," for example, which treats a leave-taking between
Rosania and Lucasia, includes the lines "Although you lose each others Eyes, / You'l faster keep
the Heart." In "Dialogue betwixt Lucasia and Rosania" (which eighteenth-century writers
George Ballard and Elizabeth Elstob would later agree was one of Philips's best poems), Lucasia
hopes that "when crumbled into dust / We shall meet and love forever." "Friendship in Emblem,
or the Seale, to my dearest Lucasia" begins, "The hearts thus intermixed speak / A Love that no
bold shock can break." The latter poem is one of several in which echo-allusions to poems by
Donne help Orinda assert "Friendship's Mysterys." Whereas Donne's "The Canonization"
(1633), for example, claims that poet and lady "prove / Mysterious by this love," Philips's
"Friendship's Mysterys" calls to Lucasia, "let's prove / There's a religion in our Love."

Unlike Philips's marriage poems, which assume the hierarchical relationship between
husband and wife implicit in seventeenth-century discussions of companionate marriage, the
friendship poems stress the equality inherent in real friendship. Playing on "She's all States and
all Princes I, / Nothing else is" in Donne's "The Sunne Rising" (1633), for instance, Orinda says,
"All our titles [are] shuffled so, / Both Princes and both subjects too" in "Friendship's Mysterys."
In another poem, "Friendship," Philips contrasts the two estates: "All Love is sacred, and the
marriage ty / Hath much of Honour and divinity; / But Lust, design, or some unworthy ends /
May mingle there, which are despis'd by friends."

Some critics have argued that the people to whom Philips gave coterie names formed a
Society of Friendship. The title of the poem "To the excellent Mrs A. O. upon her receiving the
name of Lucasia, and adoption into our society. 29 Decemb 1651" might help validate that idea,
as indeed might "To my Lady M. Cavendish, chosing the name of Policrite." Moreover,
"Friendship in Emblem, or the Seale, to my dearest Lucasia" can be read as a description of the
society's actual insignia. Edmund Gosse describes Philips's society as an early salon: "It would
appear that among her friends and associates in and near Cardigan she instituted a Society of
Friendship, in which male and female members were admitted, and in which poetry, religion,
and the human heart were to form the subjects of discussion." Souers's readings of the poems
lead him to the conclusion that the society included only Orinda and her female friends, most
likely only Lucasia and Rosania. Thomas quotes a letter from Sir Edward Dering to Lucasia to
suggest that Gosse was closer to the truth than Souers. Thomas argues, however, that since many
of Philips's connections, even those with Anglo-Welsh writers, were centered in London, any
society that she might have headed must have been based there. It seems, however, that Philips
uses the word society to refer to what twentieth-century writers might call a network of friends,
what the Oxford English Dictionary refers to in definition I.1.a of "society": "Association with
one's fellow men, esp. in a friendly or intimate manner; companionship or fellowship."

Be that as it may, there is no question that Philips's own contemporaries associated her name
with the theme of friendship. The broadside written by one J. C. after her death, for example,
includes these lines:

She, who in Tragique buskins drest the Stage,

Taught Honour, Love, and Friendship to this Age;

Is gone to act her Part in bright attire,

With Scenes of Glory, in th' Angelique Quire.

She Taught the World the sweet and peaceful Arts

Of blending Souls, and of compounding hearts;

Without th' ingredients of reserv'd intents,

Hypocrisies, and windy complements.

 The theme of friendship was especially popular among seventeenth-century Royalist poets,
who often used pastoral poetry to image court life as a place of polite civility in contrast to what
they saw as the noisy barbarisms of their populist contemporaries. Philips's contribution to that
tradition was to imagine the golden world as a female paradise in which Orinda and Ardelia
could sit quietly and live "remov'd from noise of warres / In one another's hearts" ("A retir'd
friendship, to Ardelia") or where a poet could use the characteristically female activity, "to spin,"
in the assertion "But I, resolved from within, / Confirmed from without, / In privacie intend to
spin / My future minuts out" ("A Countrey life").

As earlier noted, Philips's "Friendship's Mysterys" appeared with Lawes's music in his
Second Book of Ayres, and Dialogues. Several other Philips poems suggest musical associations.
Subtitles or side notes in Philips's own copies (in National Library of Wales MS. 775B) of three
other poems ("A Dialogue between Lucasia and Orinda"; "To Mrs. M. A. upon absence. 12.
December 1650"; and "On the death of my first and dearest childe, Hector Philipps") indicate
that they were also set to music by Lawes (for the score of the elegy on Philips's son, see Joan
Applegate's article in volume four of English Manuscript Studies). Yet another, "Against
Pleasure," was set by a Dr. Coleman, almost certainly Charles Coleman, doctor of music, who
contributed to the Second Book of Ayres, and Dialogues. In addition, "Parting with Lucasia, 13th
January 1657/8" is subtitled "A Song"; the poem beginning "'Tis true, our life is but a long
disease" is written "To my Lord Biron's tune of—Adieu Phillis" (an unidentified tune); and the
one beginning "How prodigious is my Fate" is written to the tune of the French song "Sommes
nous pas trop heureux," the latter to be published in an article Andrea Sununu and this writer
have written for volume four of English Manuscript Studies. Whether other poems were
intended as songs is unclear, but several were set to music and published in seventeenth-century
songbooks. Two ("Upon the engraving. K:P: on a Tree ... at Barn-Elms" and "On Solitude,"
Philips's translation of "La Solitude" by Marc-Antoine de Gérard Saint-Amant) were set to
music by Henry Purcell. Philips wrote songs to be sung after each of the five acts of her
translation (1663) of Corneille's Pompey. In a letter of 31 January 1663, she indicates that the
first and last songs had been set by her friend Philaster (John Jeffries); the second by
"aFrenchman of my Lord ORRERY's"; the third by Dr. Peter Pett (the advocate-general in
Ireland); and the fourth by "one Le GRAND a Frenchman, belonging to the Dutchess of
ORMOND." In the library of Christ Church College, Oxford, is a manuscript transcription of
three of the songs for Pompey, but the music for the third song is ascribed there (and also in
British Library Add. MS. 33234) to John Banister. As Curtis A. Price suggests, it may be that
some or all of the Christ Church settings were composed for a later London performance of the
play.

Philips's poetry includes two Royalist poems written during the Civil War years, four
celebrating the Restoration, and six occasional poems addressed in the early 1660s to members
of the royal family. Among her poems on the Restoration are "On the numerous accesse of the
English to waite upon the King in Holland," which portrays loyal Royalists going to Holland "to
expresse their joy and reverence," and "Arion on a Dolphin to his Majestie in his passadge into
England," which celebrates the sea journey by which Charles II returned to England in 1660.
Both "On the faire weather at the Coronation" and "On the Coronation" present the crowning of
Charles on 23 April 1661 as a sacred event "Since Kinges are Gods, and OURS of Kinges the
best."

Most of Philips's extant letters were written between December 1661 and May 1664 to her
friend and literary adviser Sir Charles Cotterell, then master of ceremonies in the court of
Charles II (the exceptions are four letters to Berenice, one to Dorothy Temple, and a letter to
Dering recently discovered by Peter Beal and scheduled for publication in volume four of
English Manuscript Studies). Thus more is known about her life and work after the Restoration
of the monarchy than before; and quite a bit is known about her interest in the court of Charles
II. For example, on 3 May 1662 Orinda sent a poem, evidently "To her royall highnesse the
Dutchesse of Yorke, on her command to send her some things I had wrote," to Poliarchus with
the request that he "put it in a better Dress" so that she could insert his corrections before
sending "the Dutchess another Copy, in obedience to the Commands she was pleas'd to lay upon
me, that I should let her see all my Trifles of this nature." Orinda is clearly pleased to continue:
"I have been told, that when her Highness saw my Elegy on the Queen of BOHEMIA, she
graciously said, it surpriz'd her." On 4 June of the same year she thanked Poliarchus for sending
from Portsmouth a "full Relation of the Queen's Arrival"—a topic Philips treated in "To the
Queene on her arrivall at Portsmouth. May. 1662."

On 20 August 1662 Philips wrote from Dublin that she had met Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery.
Having read a scene Philips had translated from Corneille's Mort de Pompée, Orrery encouraged
her to complete the work. By 3 December 1662 Philips had finished the translation, asking
Cotterell to correct any errors he might find in it and agreeing that he should present a copy to
Anne, Duchess of York. In early February 1663 Philips's Pompey was performed in Dublin's
Smock Alley Theatre—Philips thus becoming the first woman to have a drama produced in a
British public theater. As Catherine Cole Mambretti points out, the play is also "the first clearly
documented production of an heroic drama in English heroic couplets." Before 8 April 1663
John Crooke printed the translation in Dublin; later that year he published another edition in
London. It may be that Philips's Pompey was played in London in July 1663, for it was parodied
in William Davenant's Play-house to be Let, produced in August 1663.

During the winter of 1663-1664, Philips went on to translate most of Corneille's Horace, but
the task was yet to be finished when she died in June 1664. First published in its unfinished state
in the 1667 edition of her Poems, Philips's Horace was completed by John Denham in time for a
February 1668 production at court. Denham's conclusion was also used for a winter 1668-1669
production at the Theatre Royal and for the 1669 and 1678 editions of Philips's Poems. When
Jacob Tonson brought out an octavo edition of Poems in 1710, he replaced Denham's work with
equivalent lines from Sir Charles Cotton's translation, first published in 1671.

Not long before she died, another publishing event captured Philips's attention—this having
to do with her original poetry. As noted earlier, one of Philips's poems was printed in 1651; two,
in 1655. As far as can now be determined, no other poems appeared in print until the publication
of a 1663 collection (though an aside in one of Philips's letters may indicate that one poem was
printed on a broadsheet earlier that year). On 15 May 1663 Philips wrote to Cotterell about "a
Miscellaneous Collection of Poems, printed here; among which, to fill up the Number of his
Sheets, and as a Foil to the others, the Printer has thought fit, tho' without my Consent or Privity,
to publish two or three Poems of mine, that had been stollen from me." This collection is Poems,
by Several Persons, printed in Dublin by John Crooke for Samuel Dancer in 1663, an apparently
unique surviving copy of which has recently come to light at the Folger Shakespeare Library.
Philips, it would seem, did not unduly mind that her poems had been "stollen" and printed, and
she says she will send Cotterell a copy of the book "by the first Opportunity." Soon thereafter,
however, Philips's letters tell of her severe distress over an unauthorized publication of her
poems—this the volume titled Poems. By the Incomparable Mrs. K. P. printed by J. G. for
Richard Marriott and advertised for sale in January 1664. Although a few twentieth-century
readers have seen in Philips's distress a coy desire to obscure the fact that she herself had
planned the volume's appearance, one might well believe that a seventeenth-century woman
born into a merchant family and now a member of the gentry with many aristocratic friends
would not have sought that kind of publicity. On 25 January 1664 Philips wrote to Dorothy
Temple of her fear that "the most part of the worlde are apt to believe that I connived at this ugly
accident.... I am soe innocent of this pitiful design of a knave to get a groat that I never was
more vexed at anything."

A similar dismay informs Philips's other two letters about the book. Dated "Jan. 29 1663/4,"
one was for Cotterell's eyes alone, the other for him to circulate among their friends if he saw fit.
In the private letter, Orinda asks her friend to "Let me know what they say of me at Court and
everywhere else, upon this last Accident, and whether the exposing of all my Follies in this
dreadful Shape has not frighted the whole World out of all their Esteem for me." The public
letter is even more elaborate in its expression of Orinda's concern. In that letter, for example, one
finds the complaint about the poet's being an "unfortunate Person that cannot so much as think
in private, who must have all my Imaginations and idle Notions rifled and expos'd to play the
Mountebanks and dance upon the Ropes to entertain the Rabble, to undergo all the Raillery of
the Wits, and all the Severity of the Wise, and to be the Sport of some that can, and Derision of
others that cannot read a Verse." Orinda regrets not only that her poems have been "collected,"
but also that they are "so abominably printed as I hear they are. I believe too there are some
among them that are not mine." The poems in the 1664 volume are in fact Philips's, except that
excerpts by Sir Edward Dering and Henry More preface two of her poems. The book does
include some manifest errors, and three of Philips's lines are replaced by lines of asterisks.

Whether Poliarchus immediately showed the public letter to their mutual friends is unknown,
but it is printed in the preface to the edition of Philips's works issued in 1667. The letter voices
"how little she desired the fame of being in print, and how much she was troubled to be so
exposed." Realizing the impossibility of completely suppressing a published book (indeed, many
copies of the 1664 Poems survive even today), Cotterell advised Philips to issue a corrected
version of the poems. It may be that her last poem, "To my Lord Arch: Bishop of Canterbury his
Grace 1664," was written with that new volume in mind, for it treats the poet's wish that her
"humble" muse, which had been "hurry'd from her Cave with wild affright," might be protected
by the archbishop. The poem concludes with the hope that the poet will then have the courage to
speak in public:
 Your Life (my Lord) may, ev'n in me, produce

Such Raptures, that, of their Rich Fury Proud,

I may, perhaps, dare to repeat aloud;

Assur'd the World that Ardour will excuse,

Applaud the subject, and forgive the Muse.

Before, however, an authorized version of the poems was printed, Philips died of smallpox on
22 June 1664, at the age of thirty-two. Three years later the folio volume of her works was
published by Henry Herringman—this book edited, it is often said, by Cotterell. Whereas the
1664 volume had comprised 75 poems, the 1667 edition prints 116 poems by Philips, 5
translations from French and Italian sources, and both Pompey and Horace. For the first part of
the volume, the 1667 edition relied on the 1664 quarto, generally maintaining the order of
poems but emending some words and whole lines. For example, line 4 of "On the numerous
accesse of the English to waite upon the King in Holland" was changed from "As Pompey's
residence made Africk Rome" to "As Pompey's Camp, where e're it mov'd, was Rome"; line 90 of
"In memory of that excellent person Mrs. Mary Lloyd" was changed from "As ancient Lamps in
some Egyptian Urn" to "As a bright Lamp shut in some Roman Urn." Although some of the
1667 variants match lines in autograph copies of Philips's poems, it is unknown whether the
other variants introduced into the folio are by Philips, Cotterell, or a third hand. Nor is it known
in what order Philips would have chosen to print her poems had she herself seen them through
the press. Noting, first, that the custom of her age was to begin and end volumes of poetry with
"serious" verse and, second, the enthusiastic tone of many of Philips's Royalist statements, one
may speculate that she would have chosen to begin and end the 1667 volume with Royalist
poems. It is possible that she wrote the poem to the archbishop of Canterbury because she
wanted a poem to balance the first poem in the volume, for both the first and last poems in the
1667 folio employ the traditional humility topos to express the poet's reluctance to speak
publicly about public events. Whereas "Upon the double murther of K. Charles" protests what
Philips saw as the chaotic events of the civil wars, "To my Lord Arch: Bishop of Canterbury"
expresses relief "after such a rough and tedious Storm / Had torn the Church, and done her so
much harm."

In 1697 Samuel Briscoe included four private letters from Philips in a volume entitled
Familiar Letters. Written by the Right Honourable John, late Earl of Rochester, and several
other Persons of Honour and Quality. Berenice, the woman to whom they were addressed, is as
yet unidentified (Thomas suggests that she may have been Lady Elizabeth Ker). The story the
letters tell is of a lost friendship. The first is dated "June the 25th," without a year; the second
and third, 2 November and 30 December 1658. All three express Orinda's intense pleasure in her
friendship with Berenice and conclude with some variation of the formula "Your Ladiships most
Faithful, and most Passionate Friend and Servant, Orinda." In the fourth letter, which the editor
observes "was wrote but a Month before Orinda died," the writer—who now signs herself "Your
Ladiship's most affectionate humble Servant and Friend, K. Phillips"—fervently hopes that
Berenice will "once more receive me into your Friendship, and allow me to be that same Orinda,
whom with so much goodness you were once pleased to own as most faithfully yours, and who
have ever been, and ever will be so."

In 1705, three years after Sir Charles Cotterell's death, Bernard Lintott published a volume of
letters chronicling a far more successful friendship. The preface to Letters from Orinda to
Poliarchus validates the authenticity of the work by claiming that "Anyone who has a Nicety of
Taste, or Judgment, may easily discern the following Papers to be the real Product of that Pen,
which infinitely obliged us with so curious a Variety of Poems, that have procur'd themselves an
universal Applause; and that her Writings in Prose deserve an equal Reputation, is no vain
Conjecture." The preface then goes on to present the letters that follow as "worth the reading" on
two counts. They offer, we are told, an excellent example of a prose style that avoids "the two
Extremes, either of uncorrect Looseness in her Stile, or starch'd Affectation," and they "will
sufficiently instruct us how an intercourse of writing, between Persons of different Sexes, ought
to be managed, with Delight and Innocence." In this volume an Englishwoman has outdone
French practitioners of the art of letter writing; indeed, "'Tis very unaccountable, when we have
such Examples of Excellency among our selves that the French writers, in the Epistolary Way,
should be so frequently translated by us."

Lintott's collection begins with Orinda's letter of 6 December 1661, a letter that opens with an
extended statement of her regard for Poliarchus. It ends on 17 May 1664, only a few weeks
before Philips's death. Gossipy details about the royal family, rival poets, and rival wooers give
the volume the piquancy of an epistolary novel. Several interwoven narratives present the story
of Orinda's sorrow when her friend Calanthe (this code name for Lucasia, G. Blakemore Evans
was the first to realize, was the name Cartwright first gave the character who would later
become Lucasia in his play The Lady Errant) decides to marry Memnon (Marcus Trevor, later
Lord Dungannon) instead of Poliarchus; the story of Philips's work on her translation of Pompey
and of its success on the Dublin stage; the story of her distress over the publication of her
poems; and the story of her intense desire to visit London and to see Poliarchus. The final letter
apologizes to Poliarchus that his godson is to be named after his father, Hector Philips, rather
than after Sir Charles. It ends with a perfect expression of friendship "between Persons of
different Sexes ... with Delight and Innocence": "If am not mistaken in your Goodness, be
pleas'd to come hither this Afternoon a little before three, where it will be privately christen'd
and where you shall find, &c. ORINDA." In 1729, when Letters from Orinda to Poliarchus was
republished, it included one additional letter. The latter was then owned, as it is now, by
Cotterell's family.

To Philips's canon, twentieth-century scholars have added a few poems not in the 1667
volume: the juvenilia described earlier; three poems in Cardiff City Library MS. 2 1073 ("To Sir
Amorous La Foole," "On Argalus his vindication to Rosania," and "Juliana and Amaranta: A
Dialogue"); "To the Lady Mary Butler at her marriage with the Lord Cavendish, October 1662,"
which appears with Philips's poems in two manuscripts and in Poems, by Several Persons; "To
Rosania and Lucasia: Articles of Friendship," in the Huntington Library; "On the Coronation"
from MS. Locke e. 17 at the Bodleian Library; and the epitaph inscribed on John Lloyd's
monument in Cilgerron (also in the Philips holograph, National Library of Wales, 775B). For
various reasons, scholars have rejected "Upon his Majesties most happy restauration to his
Royall Throne in Brittaine" and "Upon the Hollow Tree unto which his Majestie escaped after
the unfortunate Battell at Worcester," both of which are ascribed "Cecinit Domina Phillips agro
Pembrokiae" in the one known manuscript in which they appear (Bodleian br. bk. Firth b. 20).

The principal sources of information about Philips's life and work include Philip Webster
Souers's biography (1931), refined and occasionally corrected by Patrick Thomas's edition of the
poems (1990), as well as her collected letters (1992), edited by Thomas, and a companion
volume of translations prepared by Ruth Little and Germaine Greer in 1993. The first scholarly
volume devoted solely to Philips, The Noble Flame of Katherine Philips: A Poetics of Culture,
Politics, and Friendship, was published in 2015, and a three-volume edition of her poems,
letters, and other publications, edited by Paula Loscocco, was released in 2017. Much recent
scholarship on Philips has focused on the means by which—in an age when women were urged
to be "chaste, silent, and obedient"—she achieved acclaim as a poet to be read and emulated.
Nevertheless, an increasing number of readers have turned to the works themselves to discover a
writer whose talents were far from modest and whose recognition by seventeenth-century literati
such as Abraham Cowley and John Dryden was well deserved. —Elizabeth H. Hageman.

___________________________________________________________________________
 POEMS

On the Welsh Language

If honor to an ancient name be due,

Or riches challenge it for one that’s new,
The British language claims in either sense
Both for its age, and for its opulence.
But all great things must be from us removed,
To be with higher reverence beloved.
So landskips which in prospects distant lie,
With greater wonder draw the pleasèd eye.
Is not great Troy to one dark ruin hurled?
Once the fam’d scene of all fighting world.
Where’s Athens now, to whom Rome learning owes,
And the safe laurels that adorned her brows?
A strange reverse of fate she did endure,
Never once greater, than she’s now obscure.
Even Rome her self can but some footsteps show
Of Scipio’s times, or those of Cicero.
And as the Roman and the Grecian state,
The British fell, the spoil of time and fate.
But though the language hath the beauty lost,
Yet she has still some great remains to boast.
For ’twas in that, the sacred bards of old,
In deathless numbers did their thoughts unfold.
In groves, by rivers, and on fertile plains,
They civilized and taught the listening swains;
Whilst with high raptures, and as great success,
Virtue they clothed in music’s charming dress.
This Merlin spoke, who in his gloomy cave,
Even Destiny her self seemed to enslave.
For to his sight the future time was known,
Much better than to others is their own;
And with such state, predictions from him fell,
As if he did decree, and not foretell.
This spoke King Arthur, who, if fame be true,
Could have compelled mankind to speak it too.
In this once Boadicca valor taught,
And spoke more nobly than her soldiers fought:
Tell me what hero could be more than she,
Who fell at once for fame and liberty?
Nor could a greater sacrifice belong,
Or to her children’s, or her country’s wrong.
This spoke Caractacus, who was so brave,
That to the Roman fortune check he gave:
And when their yoke he could decline no more,
He it so decently and nobly wore,
That Rome her self with blushes did believe,
A Britain would the law of honor give;
And hastily his chains away she threw,
Lest her own captive else should her subdue.

Epitaph

On her Son H.P. at St. Syth’s Church where her body also lies interred

What on Earth deserves our trust?

Youth and Beauty both are dust.
Long we gathering are with pain,
What one moment calls again.
Seven years childless marriage past,
A Son, a son is born at last:
So exactly lim’d and fair,
Full of good Spirits, Meen, and Air,
As a long life promised,
Yet, in less than six weeks dead.
Too promising, too great a mind
In so small room to be confined:
Therefore, as fit in Heaven to dwell,
He quickly broke the Prison shell.
So the subtle Alchemist,
Can’t with Hermes Seal resist
The powerful spirit’s subtler flight,
But t’will bid him long good night.
And so the Sun if it arise
Half so glorious as his Eyes,
Like this Infant, takes a shrowd,
Buried in a morning Cloud.

To My Excellent Lucasia, on Our Friendship

I did not live until this time

Crowned my felicity,
When I could say without a crime,
 I am not thine, but thee.

This carcass breathed, and walked, and slept,

So that the world believed
There was a soul the motions kept;
But they were all deceived.

For as a watch by art is wound

To motion, such was mine:
But never had Orinda found
A soul till she found thine;

Which now inspires, cures and supplies,

And guides my darkened breast:
For thou art all that I can prize,
My joy, my life, my rest.

No bridegroom’s nor crown-conqueror’s mirth

To mine compared can be:
They have but pieces of the earth,
I’ve all the world in thee.

Then let our flames still light and shine,

And no false fear control,
As innocent as our design,
Immortal as our soul.

An Answer to Another Persuading a Lady to Marriage

Forbear, bold youth, all’s Heaven here,

And what you do aver,
To others, courtship may appear,
’Tis sacriledge to her.

She is a publick deity,

And were’t not very odd
She should depose her self to be
A pretty household god?

First make the sun in private shine,

And bid the world adieu,
That so he may his beams confine
In complement to you.
But if of that you do despair,
Think how you did amiss,
To strive to fix her beams which are
More bright and large than this.

_____________________________________________________________________________
 “LET US SPEAK OUR LOVE”: ROMANCE AND EROTICISM IN THE LYRIC
FRIENDSHIP POETRY OF KATHERINE PHILIPS

Seventeenth century poet Katherine Philips (1632-1664) is well known as foundational in the
tradition of poetry written between women. Her lyric romantic friendship poems have provided
an outlet for the expression of passionate feelings of love between women, as they contain a rich
emotional depth and underlying sensuality. In the heteropatriarchal seventeenth century society
that Philips lived in, explicit and unambiguous treatment of eroticism between women was out
of the question. Philips surmounted this obstacle by drawing on the literary conventions of
heterosexual love poetry and Platonic friendship. These elements working in Philips’ poetry
allowed that an otherwise subversive physical and sensual language of love could be masked by
the assertion that she is only referring to a metaphysical ecstasy of souls. Philips’ romantic
friendship poems contain clear eroticism and intense emotions that stem from a real place in
Philips’ life. With an understanding of the context behind its nature as subtext, it is thus
necessary to stress the eroticism in her poetry in order to unveil its full depth and beauty.

Much of Philips’ works are dedicated to and centered around a circle of close like- minded
poets and thinkers from London and Wales where she lived with her much older husband James
Philips. She established the group and acted as its driving force of inspiration, identifying this
literary circle as a “society of friendship”. Members of this Society were given pastoral names
derived from the classical world to refer to each other in their poems and letters. Philips herself
chose the name Orinda, hence the complimentary title of “the Matchless Orinda” with which her
devotees addressed her. Within this society Philips drew inspiration for her poetry from the
passionate relationships she had with her close female friends. First there was Mary Aubrey who
was referred to in Philips’ poetry with the name Rosania. After Aubrey married, became Mrs.
Montague, and failed to continue the intensity of her relationship with Philips, she was replaced
in Philips’ affections by Anne Owen who was given the name Lucasia.

Philips’ literary works were well received within this society and prompted others in the
society to write works in response to create dialogues. One such example is Francis Finch, who
wrote a treatise titled “Friendship” (1653/54) addressed to A. O. (Anne Owen) that celebrated
the perfect friendship between Lucasia and Orinda. Within the dedication of his treatise Finch,
whose coterie name was Palæmon, even went so far as to link their coterie names together as
Lucasia-Orinda with a dash, so as to present the two as a pair wholly unified by their love, a
theme that appears in much of Philips’ friendship poems. In her response to Finch’s treatise, “To
the noble Palæmon, on his incomparable Discourse of Friendship,” Philips likens the effect of
his words on the merits of friendship to a “Light more welcome far/ Then wand’ring Sea-men
think the Northern-star.” This metaphor in which light represents a guiding force of good will be
adapted later by a different poet in a preface written in honor of Philips, demonstrating how
ideas flowed and formed among the members of the society of friendship. The celebration of
female romantic friendship in Philips’ literary circle demonstrates how extensively both her
artistic and personal life were centered around her relationships with women.
 In the literary world prior to Philips, the idea of friendship between same sex individuals
bordered on the religious or the philosophical, but was primarily focused on male friendships.
This understanding of male same sex love was deeply based on classical ideas of Platonism, and
inspired the creation of numerous homoerotic texts. The celebration of friendship among men
made by the prominent male authors of the Renaissance routinely excluded women either by
lack of care or on purpose. In Platonism, perfect love held between two individuals necessitated
an equality of mind and status, and in a patriarchal world those requirements were met between
men, but not between women. In a heteronormative mindset, the social status and mental
capacity of women were seen as lesser than men’s and thus women were excluded from the
possibility of taking part in a metaphysical friendship. Michel de Montaigne’s famous essay “On
Friendship” further exemplifies this notion. His essay paints women as being unable to have true
friendships with men as they are incapable of reaching the pure emotional depths of men’s
friendships with each other. Furthermore, Montaigne dismisses the possibility for women to
share such friendships between themselves.

Philips was the first woman to successfully establish in the early modern literary world the
existence of such intense friendships between women. Her work directly led to a rise in romantic
friendship poems between women after her publication. Major writers in the second half of the
seventeenth century, such as Aphra Behn, Jane Barker, and Anne Finch, named Philips as an
influence. Male homoeroticism had long held a place in literature and society that seemingly did
not threaten heterosexuality and therefore could relatively safely exist. Philips’ friendship lyrics
created a similar place for female same-sex erotics. Harriette Andreadis has eloquently summed
up the impact of Philips’ poetry by saying that: “it was Katherine Philips who established the
model of an eroticized female friendship that set a precedent and¼established a tradition and a
discourse for the expression of passions not otherwise given voice.”

Romantic friendship as a social practice and as a poetic tradition needed to present itself as
celibate in order to prevent suspicion and to provide a justifiable alternative to heterosexual
marriage. However, this self-awareness of public image did not inhibit an underlying element of
eroticism. Throughout Philips’ poetry, the discussion of spiritual friendship uses sensual
language that echoes the more explicit love poems of her contemporary male writers. That
sensual language in Philips’ poetry; however, was framed as belonging to a discussion of
something unrelated to the body. Hiding behind the ideals of Platonism, in which sensuality and
intense love could be masked as an over pouring of spiritual ecstasy, Philips’ works could
appear nontransgressive. Through this, Philips successfully removed herself from the suspicion
of “deviancy” and was still able to express the physicality present in her relationships with
women.

Despite the protection afforded by subtext and the Platonic ideal of friendship, the potential
for discovering transgressive same sex eroticism in Philips’ works did not go unnoticed by her
contemporaries. As the first female English poet to appropriate male heterosexual poetic mores
for the purpose of writing about relations between women, Philips was unsurprisingly often
compared to Sappho, and was even identified in the preface to Poems (1667) as “the English
Sappho.” To appease all the fears introduced by the comparison that Philips could share in the
known same sex inclinations of Sappho, those that made the comparison went to lengths to
describe Philips as virtuous and pure, using the very language of Philips’ own poetry to justify
their assurances of Philips’ moral purity. This tendency is exemplified in the portion of the
preface to Poems. By the Incomparable Mrs. K[atherine] P[hilips] (1664) written by Abraham
Cowley:

“They talk of Sappho, but, alas! the shame

I’th’ manners soil the lustre of her fame.
Orinda‘s inward Vertue is so bright,
That, like a Lantern’s fair enclosed light,
It through the Paper shines where she doth write.
Honour and Friendship, and the gen’rous scorn
Of things for which we were not born,”

Cowley, along with many others writing at the time, cannot separate Sappho’s writings from
the “shame” of taking part in “things for which we were not born,” and therefore sees her
renown as soiled. The thinly veiled language here positions such erotic same-sex relations as
being both deserving of derision and as the antithesis of what is held within the poetry of
Philips. The metaphor that describes Orinda’s virtue as a light that shines through the paper on
which she writes echoes the metaphor used by Philips herself in her earlier discussed poetic
response to Francis Finch, “To the noble Palæmon, on his incomparable Discourse of
Friendship,” in which the words Finch uses to describe the friendship between Lucasia-Orinda
are compared to a guiding light. Undoubtedly, Cowley was familiar with Philips’ use of the light
metaphor in her poem prior to his writing a commendatory preface to a collection in which the
poem appeared.

For Philips, maintaining the virtuous reputation of her poetry and herself, or what Bronwen
Price calls “Philips’ rhetoric of innocence,” was vital. It was precisely her ability to express
through poetry her erotic and romantic feelings for women in a subtle way that kept her free
from persecution. Without the threat of suspicion, Philips could travel with her friends while
benefiting from the goodwill and tolerance of her husband. Her society of friendship was
tantamount both to her life and her poetry, and took up the large part of Philips’ adult life. Philip
Webster Souers, who wrote the biography The Matchless Orinda (1931), discusses how highly
Philips was held in regard in contrast to “Mrs. Behn and her fellows” who he dismissively
claims “corrupted the position in literature that Orinda had made for women.” The rhetoric of
innocence employed so expertly by Philips ensured that her virtuous reputation would remain
the “ideal” for women writers whereas those women writers who came after her and did not
disguise their transgressive subject matters were torn down by critics on a moral basis.
 A poem of parting between Orinda and Lucasia, titled “Parting with Lucasia, a Song”
demonstrates Philips’ use of the conventions of Platonic friendship poetry to safely express the
physical. The first two stanzas read:

“Well, we will do that rigid thing

Which makes Spectators think we part;
Though Absence hath for none a sting
But those who keep each others heart.
And when our Sense is dispossesst,
Our laboring Souls will heave and pant,
And gasp for one anothers breast,
Since their Conveyances they want.”

In these stanzas, the pain caused by physical absence from each other is identified as
something spiritual and unrelated to the physical realm. However, that pain is described using
the language of physicality or, more precisely of physical pain. Instead of sorrow or emotional
turmoil, what Lucasia and Orinda feel when parted is a “sting”. This continues in the following
stanza with startling powerful physical language. The imagery of heaving, panting, and gasping
for anothers breast has clear sensual and erotic undertones. Claiming that it is their souls who
carry out these actions for the mere reward of “conveyances” protects Philips from censure.

This is not to say that the romantic connection of their souls is an unimportant element of the
poem. The underlying eroticism in this poem is enriched by its emotional depth. Further in the
poem, as Philips elaborates on the temporary necessity of their parting, one of the only uses of
the pronoun “I” occurs. “Yet I must go: we will submit/ and so our own Disposers be” she states.
Throughout the six-stanza poem, Philips only refers to herself as a separate individual twice,
every other pronoun used is the collective “we”. In the line, even her individual motion to “go”
is immediately subsumed by the following words “we will submit.” Through this, her separation
is reimagined as a shared action. The inability in the language of the poem to conceive of
Lucasia and Orinda as two separate beings heightens the reader’s sense of how truly painful it is
for the two to part. Despite this despairing tone, the poem ends on a triumphant note. After
parting and later returning to each other, Philips writes, “we can be Conquerors at home…
/Since we our passions have subdu’d, /Which is the strongest thing I know.” Once again, clearly
physical and erotic language is used under the guise of spiritual union. Here the poem leaves off
just at the point where by coming back together, Lucasia and Orinda’s previously subdued
passions may now be realized.

Philips’ society of friendship provided her with a place to safely legitimize her relationships
with women, through the means of poetic convention. Circling her works amongst the members
of her coterie Philips was able to voice her love for first Mary Aubrey and later Anne Owen
through the convention of lyric friendship poetry to the point that her works were praised by
those around her. The ability to publicly give voice to the feelings that Philips held for the one
she loved, was of obvious importance to her. The end of her relationship with Aubrey, resulting
from Aubrey’s marriage, caused Philips to suffer a great deal from the loss. This suffering can be
seen in her poem “To Rosania (now Mrs. Montague) being with her, 25th September 1652”.
Written after her marriage, the poem mourns the end of the friendship they once shared and
discusses parting and absence with a much different tone than in the previously discussed poem
“Parting with Lucasia, a Song,” for in this instance, the parting promised no reuniting. The last
three stanzas in this poem show the pain and bitterness Philips experienced:

“Divided Rivers lose their name;

And so our too unequal flame
Parted, will passion be in me,
And an indifference in thee.
Thy absence I could easier find
Provided thou wert well, and kind,
Than such a presence as this is,
Made up of snatches of my bliss.
So when the Earth long gasps for rain,
If she at last some few drops gain,
She is more parched than at first;
That small recruit increased the Thirst.”

In these stanzas, a sense of loss, betrayal, and bitterness comes across strongly. Separated by
marriage, Philips suggests that similar to how “divided rivers lose their name” Rosania and
Orinda have also lost a central part of their identities: their love. The effect of Rosania’s
intermittent and increasing absence on Orinda is discussed using “sexually resonant” metaphors
of water and fire that suggest an erotic element in this poem. Orinda’s loss of time with Rosania
has reduced instances of Orinda’s fulfilled “bliss” to intermittent “snatches” that ultimately
result in a worsening drought. The Earth “that long gasps for rain” stands in for Orinda’s soul,
but may just as well represent her body. The use of a water metaphor to refer to bliss or lack
thereof in a woman has a clear element of eroticism that is once again safely framed as a
particularly vibrant rhetoric of spiritual platonic love.

After Aubrey’s loss Philips’ desire for a relatively public and legitimate relationship with
Owen is understandable. In the poem “To my Lucasia, in defense of declared Friendship”
Philips expresses that desire. The very first stanza of the poem perfectly articulates Philips’
feelings on the matter:

“O My Lucasia, let us speak our Love,

And think not that impertinent can be,
Which to us both doth such assurance prove,
And whence we find how justly we agree.”

It cannot be a bad thing, Philips argues, for the two to announce their love and to hear each
other confirm its existence. Following the first stanza, the poem touches on the origin of the
relationship, and establishes the importance, strength, and value of it. With that introduction as a
foundation, Philips then builds an argument on the need to speak their love that is steeped in
emotion, poetic convention, and subtle eroticism.

In 1662, Anne Owen married a man named Marcus Trevor and despite the fact that Philips’
tried incredibly hard to preserve her relationship with Owen, even by accompanying the newly
married couple to Dublin, she was unable to retain her. In the letters that Philips wrote during
this time to her friend, the Honourable Lady Berenice, she expresses the pain caused by Owen’s
increasing absence. In one letter she writes:

“I have suffered, you will rather wonder that I write at all, then that I have not written in a week,
when you shall hear that my Dear Lucasia by a strange unfortunate Sickness of her Mother’s
hath been kept from me, for three Weeks longer than I expected, and is not yet come: I have had
some difficulty to live.”

This letter and others, unambiguously demonstrate that the intensity of emotions that Philips
felt for Owen were not simply a dramaticized poetic invention. There was a real-life basis for the
emotions contained in Philips’ poetry. The separation from Owen as well as financial and
political troubles that wracked James Philips after the interregnum tainted her final years with an
atmosphere of gloom preceding her death by smallpox in 1664.

Katherine Philips’ truest legacy first lies in the numerous poems she wrote expressing the
joys, sorrows, and passions found in her relationships with women, of which a much greater
number were joyous than sorrowful, and secondly in the open door she left to future women
through which they would step into the literary world. An understanding of the history of early
modern poetry between women explains why readings of Philips’ friendship lyrics should not
overlook, efface, or discount her poetry’s underlying eroticism. Readings of Philips’ poetry that
claim, as Lillian Faderman does, that Philips “uses the language of erotic love when she is really
writing about a spiritual union” fail to consider why Philips could not be obvious or explicit with
the handling of eroticism in her poems. Poems between women by necessity could not be
explicitly sexual, as that would be dangerous to the women involved. Instead, Philips’ romantic
friendship poetry expertly drew on conventions of heterosexual love poetry and philosophical
Platonism in order to express eroticism and real feelings of love for other women in forms that
were nontransgressive and celebratory. Ignoring or refusing to acknowledge the expression of
female same sex eroticism and romantic love in Philips’ lyric poems dangerously allows the
antiquated heteronormative rhetoric of the seventeenth century to maintain control over our
current understanding of her poems, poems that laid the foundation of the modern tradition of
poetry between women. By affording recognition to the elements of eroticism and romantic love
in her poetry, and by understanding the historical and biographical context in which she wrote,
readers and critics can experience a greater depth and beauty in Katherine Philips’ incomparable
works of art.