“inter-assured of the mind”

The expression “inter-assured of the mind” comes into focus when Christabel LaMotte quotes John Donne to Randolph Henry Ash and asks whether the mutual confidence the phrase names can offer a safe mooring in a storm. For her, the words are neither a simple assurance nor a decorative literary allusion: they test whether a love made vivid by bodily desire can also preserve the independent minds and poetic selves of the people involved. The correspondence leaves that question open, while Ash’s answer insists that his love includes LaMotte’s distinctive thought and language, not merely her body.

Source and Exchange

LaMotte introduces the phrase while reading Ash’s copy of John Donne. She quotes the lines about love so refined that the lovers do not know what it is, their minds being assured of one another while they care less about eyes, lips, and hands. She singles out “inter-assured of the mind” as a fine phrase, then asks Ash whether such mutual assurance can be found as a safe mooring in a howling gale. Her question makes Donne’s poetic formulation an instrument for examining their own relationship, not merely a literary reference.

The quotation arrives in a letter that gives bodily intimacy an unmistakable weight. LaMotte describes how Ash takes her out of herself and returns her diminished to a state of wet eyes, touched hands, and lips; she calls herself both without her desire in truth and full of desire. The passage sets the imagined security of minds assured of one another against the immediate force of physical longing. Its paradox matters: the lovers may aspire to a refined attachment that is not governed by bodily contact, yet desire is already shaping LaMotte’s sense of who she is and what she lacks.

A Question Without a Secure Answer

LaMotte does not treat Donne’s phrase as proof that the lovers have achieved an ideal bond. She asks whether it is possible to find this intellectual safety in a gale, and the surrounding letter makes the gale more than a metaphor for romantic uncertainty. She describes their relation as entangled with longing, silence, and reproach, and wonders whether they would be free together if they had the time and space they have allowed themselves to wish for. The expression thus names a hoped-for stability while exposing the pressure under which that hope is formed.

The recurring “And if—” gives the phrase an unresolved counterpoint. LaMotte imagines what might happen if they could spend a week or two together, but the unfinished conditional keeps the possibility from becoming an accomplished fact. Ash replies that the true exercise of freedom is to move wisely within the space that confines them, even as he acknowledges the human desire to know what lies beyond its limits. He admits, too, that familiar lips, hands, and eyes may become less compelling beside the call of the unknown. The exchange therefore refuses a clean division between spiritual confidence and embodied desire: each ideal is tested by the other.

Ash’s Answer: Love of Mind and Making

Ash responds to LaMotte’s concern by rejecting the conventional claim that one loves another person for an abstract essence while quietly meaning the body. He says he would not diminish her, and specifies that what he loves includes her soul and her poetry: the grammar, punctuation, and hurried syntax of her thought. This answer gives the phrase a particular literary force. Being assured of another mind is not just a state of mutual affection; it means recognizing a voice whose verbal form is singular to its author.

Ash’s emphasis on language also complicates the hope that the lovers can be secure simply by rising above bodily attachment. He calls LaMotte’s thought, clothed in words, as essentially hers as a distinctive physical action, and says it would vanish if she vanished. The reply binds personhood to poetic expression rather than setting intellect against embodiment. Donne’s phrase becomes a way to imagine intimacy as attention to the other’s mind and craft, but the exchange does not claim that such recognition removes the conditions, distance, or longing that trouble their relationship.

Significance in the Correspondence

“Inter-assured of the mind” gathers the letters’ central tension into a compact, borrowed phrase: a love may seek intellectual companionship and recognition while remaining subject to bodily appetite and circumstances that limit togetherness. LaMotte’s question prevents the quotation from functioning as a ready-made guarantee, and Ash’s answer makes its ideal concrete by naming her grammar, syntax, and poetry. Its meaning emerges in the difference between a general poetic promise and the particular attention one person offers another.

The phrase also helps show how the correspondence turns reading into an intimate exchange. LaMotte brings Donne to Ash as language worth testing against their experience; Ash answers by describing her own language as inseparable from her identity. Yet the letters preserve uncertainty rather than resolving it into a settled doctrine of love. The hoped-for “safe mooring” remains a question, and the conditional future remains conditional. That incompletion is part of the phrase’s force: mutual understanding can be desired and recognized in writing without making the lovers free of the storm around them.