” It is difficult/ to get the news from poems/ yet men die miserably every day/ for lack/ of what is found there.”William Carlos Williams, “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower”

DEATH be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadfull, for, thou art not so,
For, those, whom thou think’st, thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poore death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleepe, which but thy pictures bee,
Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee doe goe,
Rest of their bones, and soules deliverie.
Thou art slave to Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poyson, warre, and sicknesse dwell,
And poppie, or charmes can make us sleepe as well,
And better then thy stroake; why swell’st thou then;
One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally,
And death shall be no more, death, thou shalt die.
~John Donne, 1572-1631

We’re back to Donne, but here he’s matured, become concerned with eternity and death and life. If you’ve never seen the movie Wit based on the play by Margaret Edson and starring Emma Thompson as Dr. Vivian Bearing, a professor of metaphysical poetry specializing in the holy sonnets of John Donne, get it. Be prepared to confront death and dying, however, in its plain and poetic pride.

I wrote a little about the movie Wit here.
The DHM says Wit is the best movie she will never, ever watch again. Be warned.

“There are a thousand ways to love a poem. The best poets make up new ways, and the new ways mostly take getting used to.~Donald Hall

My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips’ red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damasked, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress when she walks treads on the ground.
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.

Now this one is my favorite Shakespeare sonnet! That’s the sense of humor I’ve got—and have passed on to my urchins, for better or for worse. Drama Daughter says no one understands her sense of (somewhat sarcastic) humor, but I think she and Will would have gotten along just fine.

And it ends on a gentle, almost plaintive, note: I believe my love is just as precious and special as any of those so-called beauties who get all the cliched accolades. By heaven.

I found a video for this one, too, with Snape, or Colonel Brandon as I like to call him since I don’t know Snape, aka Alan Rickman reading the sonnet:

“You cannot translate a poem into an explanation, any more than you can translate a poem into a painting or a painting into a piece of music or a piece of music into a walking stick. A work of art says what it says in the only way it can be said. Beauty, for example, cannot be interpreted. It is not an empirically verifiable fact; it is not a quantity.”~Wendell Berry, Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition (2000), p. 117

This sonnet surprised me by appearing on three people’s lists. I don’t remember ever reading it before.

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou seest the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire
Consumed with that which it was nourish’d by.
This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

The website, No Sweat Shakespeare, has prose translations of Shakespeare’s sonnets:

You may see that time of year in me when few, or no, yellow leaves hang on those branches that shiver in the cold bare ruins of the choir stalls where sweet birds sang so recently. You see, in me, the twilight of a day, after the sun has set in the west, extinguished by the black night that imitates Death, which closes everything in rest. You see in me the glowing embers that are all that is left of the fire of my youth – the deathbed on which youth must inevitably die, consumed by the life that once fed it. This is something you can see, and it gives your love the strength deeply to love that which you have to lose soon.

So the poet is old, and the addressee is young. But whoever it is the poet is talking to can see what the poet is and used to be, and so age makes the young person love the poet more? Even though the inevitable parting is coming soon. (Ha! I agree with Mr. Berry, but that doesn’t stop me from trying anyway.)

The urchins asked if I was going to add a video to every one of these poetry posts, and I said no, but I couldn’t resist this one. “Dallas Bill” quotes Sonnet 73, and then he goes on to explain sonnets in general and the meaning of this sonnet in particular. Priceless.

“Poetry is a counterfeit creation, and makes things that are not, as though they were.”~John Donne

Busie old foole, unruly Sunne,
Why dost thou thus,
Through windowes, and through curtaines call on us?
Must to thy motions lovers seasons run?
Sawcy pedantique wretch, goe chide
Late school boyes, and sowre prentices,
Goe tell Court-huntsmen, that the King will ride,
Call countrey ants to harvest offices;
Love, all alike, no season knowes, nor clyme,
Nor houres, dayes, months, which are the rags of time.

Thy beames, so reverend, and strong
Why shouldst thou thinke?
I could eclipse and cloud them with a winke,
But that I would not lose her sight so long:
If her eyes have not blinded thine,
Looke, and to morrow late, tell mee,
Whether both the India’s of spice and Myne
Be where thou leftst them, or lie here with mee.
Aske for those Kings whom thou saw’st yesterday,
And thou shalt heare, All here in one bed lay.

She is all States, and all Princes, I,
Nothing else is.
Princes doe but play us; compar’d to this,
All honor’s mimique; All wealth alchimie.
Thou sunne art halfe as happy’as wee,
In that the worlds’s contracted thus;
Thine age askes ease, and since thy duties bee
To warme the world, that’s done in warming us.
Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere;
This bed thy center is, these walls, thy spheare.

You can read the poem here with updated spelling, but I rather think the seventeenth century spelling adds to the spirit of the thing.

Arrogant, heedless, self-centered love, true love! And we moderns thought we invented the worship of romantic love! The sunne itself is servant to the lovers in their bed and restricted to their bedroom. And thereby the sunne warms the world, which is also captive to the lovers themselves. In fact the poet and his love are the entire world. Nothing else matters.

Really? Yet, don’t many, many couples, enamoured of one another, freshly in love, thinking that no one else has ever loved as they love, feel exactly like the speaker in Donne’s poem? Lovesickness is a common malady that only the lovers themselves take to be uncommon.

As a poet, Donne has had his admirers and his detractors. Here are a few varying opinions from influential critics.

The “Aginners”:
Ben Jonson: “Don[n]e for not keeping accent deserved hanging.”
Samuel Johnson: ““The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions.”
Stanley Fish: “Donne is sick, and his poetry is sick.”

The Fan Club:
Izaak Walton: “The recreations of his youth were poetry, in which he was so happy, as if nature and all her varieties had been made only to exercise his sharp wit and high fancy; and in those pieces which were facetiously composed and carelessly scattered, – most of them being written before the twentieth year of his age – it may; appear by his choice metaphors, that both nature and all the arts joined to assist him with their utmost skill.”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge: “With Donne, whose muse on dromedary trots, / Wreathe iron pokers into true-love knots; / Rhyme’s sturdy cripple, fancy’s maze and clue. / Wit’s forge and fire-blast, meaning’s press and screw.”
T.S. Eliot: “Expert beyond experience, / He knew the anguish of the marrow / The ague of the skeleton; / No contact possible to flesh / Allayed the fever of the bone.”
A.S. Byatt: “His great love poems stir both body and mind in an electric way that resembles nothing else.”

If you’re a part of the latter group, you can get your own John Donne T-shirt here. Or here. Amazing, what you can find, while exploring poetry on the internet.

“Poetry is prose bewitched.”~Mina Loy

This poem is one of Donne’s early phase, non-religious poems, and it is full of “six impossible things before breakfast.” Yet, even in his pre-Christian days, Donne was familiar with his Bible. Mandrake root: see Genesis 30:14.

DHM: I love the amusing irony at the end, and knowing the greatest irony of all, that Donne became a Christian and married and lost his cynicism about women.
Steve di Bartola: The improbability of true love. I’ve always wondered “what wind serves to advance an honest mind.”

Steve Spanoudis: You might, being critical, complain that this is just a little poem by some guy who had pretty bad luck with the opposite sex and was getting kind of resentful about it. But when the poet is John Donne, you end up with phrases like
…If thou be’st born to strange sights,
Things invisible to see,
Ride ten thousand days and nights
Till Age snow white hairs on thee…
That sound like incantations. Read it twice aloud and I dare you to forget it.
Neocon: The language is archaic, which makes it hard but not too hard. And it’s catchy (pun intended). I memorized it when young, so I can attest to its appeal, including the cynicism it expresses.