Gender Fluidity and Violence in Edward Herbert’s ‘Echo to a Rock’

Abstract

While the echo poems of Philip Sidney and of Barnabe Barnes have been studied in terms of gender fluidity, and Barnes’s in terms of violence, similar early seventeenth-century echo poems have been overlooked. Edward Herbert’s ‘Echo to a Rock’ continues the tradition of earlier echo poems in manipulating the feminine voice and shifting blame from the speaker to Echo so that Echo as the representative of womankind assumes responsibility for the speaker’s own actions. At the same time, not only is gender representation ambiguous in echo poems, with Echo serving as the poet’s alter ego, but also in ‘Echo to a Rock’ Echo’s gender is further undermined and confused by triangulating the conversation with the inclusion of an inanimate object, a rock which may or may not be identified with Echo, the beloved, and/or the speaker’s inmost thoughts.