Don't tell her about Mistress Overdone, either...
It's a curious thing, being raised in a traditionally-repressive, prudish, gender-dichotomized household where the teenagers, or at least the girls, are not allowed to watch R-rated movies nor read recent Young Adult novels lest there be S-E-X in them, but which is nevertheless highly kulturny and thus filled with many, many old books (or new copies of old books) not kept at all under lock and key: one learns the strangest things from them, as well as learning quickly not to ask one's parents what they mean, which in turn hones one's research and deductive reasoning skills in odd ways. No Splash, no Conan, no Julie of the Wolves - but have away at the Shakespeare, the Penguin Catullus, the Icelandic Sagas, the whole Great Books library without supervision! No vulgar rock'n'roll - but listen to all the Medieval & Renaissance polyphony you want, and don't forget the liner notes! So one ends up knowing a great deal of antique ribaldry and innuendo, and a good deal more than one can ever admit about the substance of said innuendo, while remaining ignorant of modern bawdy and obscene slang and cultural references for a lot longer.
This does have its uses: you can make risque and impertinent remarks that nobody else is likely to catch, quite openly; and you can also do your part in debunking the Myffic Days of Yore and the Legenda Micarea of their figures held up as false demiurges on the altars of those who worship ashes.
Such as, for example, John Donne, who pinch-hits (entirely involuntarily) for Bill the Bard in a recent Town Hall rant seized upon by Hunter yesterda in which one Mary Grabar rants about how The liberals have ravished our virgins on college campuses around the country, and how this is due not to our rape culture and conservation of traditional male privilege but due to, and I Am Not Making This Up, the replacement of John Donne studies with BTVS studies in college today:
As the mush-brained feminists and wild-eyed radicals have taken over English departments and comparative literature departments, they have eliminated or demolished the great works that promoted our values and inspired the passion necessary to propel a movement. The great works of literature that could inspire passion for the love of God, love of a spouse, and loyalty to one’s country, and foster the appreciation for the comedy and tragedy of human life, have been excised from the curriculum. In their place are ideological tracts, video games, television dramas, celebrities, and pornographic performance art. The love of God and a spouse that John Donne could evoke is now replaced by such things as an analysis of Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s sex life.
Mary Grabar is an English major who blames her failure to land a plum professorial assignment on bigotry against Slovenian-Americans and the Culture Wars™ wh5ch has landed her a longrunning gig at Town Hall, and who has previously been batted around by the cool cats at World o' Crap and Sadly, No! for entirely understandable reasons. But this claiming that teaching classes on, e.g., John Donne instead of on Buffy will somehow magically create docile, pious, obedient, civil, cultured offspring who don't have unsanctioned sex or question the norms and assumptions of the city-state, just reveals a staggering unfamiliarity with the work of John Donne himself, nay with the whole contents of the Great Books Library and that vaunted Western Tradition.
Don't, for the moment, go into the question of why we can't study both old and new pop culture in schools. Don't even go into the fact that, in fact, all this talk of how colleges today don't teach Dead White Guys any more is simply Minitrue-worthy disinformation, roundly debunked at Sadly, No! and elsewhere in response to a former Phyllis Schlafly claim that most of the top colleges in the US didn't teach Shakespeare any more, since with this new internet thing it's a relatively simple matter to find current semester courselists for even small community colleges in just minutes. Let's not even go into the fact that a regular feature of Town Hall columns is decrying the feminist obsession with rape on colleges and elsewhere and blaming it on slutty stupid coeds and/or claiming that they're all just lying after having second thoughts about consensual sex. Let's leave aside all the celebration of personal responsibility and ethics and the warnings against casual sex and the exhortations to sacrifice for the greater good of the community found in BTVS itself, and just focus on a little bit of Donne's own writing.
Yes, he was a minister who preached many highly-poetic sermons; yes, he wrote the "Holy Sonnets," - but that hardly accounts for all, or even the best-known part, of his poetic output. It isn't all sweet or deep or both, not all valedictions and twin compasses and unruly suns. Let's take one of the racier ones, the ones that don't usually get taught in school, because, well, the symbolism isn't beautiful and sublime and doesn't really lend itself to decoder-ring style criticism, and then there's the subject matter itself, and even the most smirking and innuendo-given teachers tends to choke a bit when faced with 17th-century jokes about how two young folks being bitten by the same flea = virtual sex! (plus vpreg, think about line 8 there) so they might as well have the real thing, fears of getting caught by her parents or social stigma be damned:
Mark but this flea, and mark in this,
How little that which thou deniest me is;
It suck'd me first, and now sucks thee,
And in this flea our two bloods mingled be.
Thou know'st that this cannot be said
A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead;
Yet this enjoys before it woo,
And pamper'd swells with one blood made of two;
And this, alas! is more than we would do.
O stay, three lives in one flea spare,
Where we almost, yea, more than married are.
This flea is you and I, and this
Our marriage bed, and marriage temple is.
Though parents grudge, and you, we're met,
And cloister'd in these living walls of jet.
Though use make you apt to kill me,
Let not to that self-murder added be,
And sacrilege, three sins in killing three.
Cruel and sudden, hast thou since
Purpled thy nail in blood of innocence?
Wherein could this flea guilty be,
Except in that drop which it suck'd from thee?
Yet thou triumph'st, and say'st that thou
Find'st not thyself nor me the weaker now.
'Tis true; then learn how false fears be;
Just so much honour, when thou yield'st to me,
Will waste, as this flea's death took life from thee.
As pick-up line, I gotta say "Don't kill that flea 'cause it's you and me!" isn't all that enticing: I'd rate it down below "nothing like the sun," but then again it's really just a self-impressed hipster's going for the shock value via the squick, so as such it works very well. I can see the Moldy Peaches riffing on this theme, in fact.
On the one hand, "Keep nagging the gatekeeper for sex until she gives in by calling her a prude and a scaredy-cat and claiming that you're gonna die of blue balls without it, then get snotty about how she's a slut just like all women" is a very Traditional value in Western Civ. On the other hand, I don't really think that "our blood is combined inside this parasite's guts, and it didn't hurt you, so why don't we go ahead and get horizontal, honey?" is a message that the self-appointed Moral Guardians of Western Culture would endorse if it were coming from anyone but a Famously-Christian Dead White Guy - and I don't understand why they think it's fine when it comes from a seventeenth-century poet instead of a 20th or 21st-century rock star.
It gets even better: if you think this is both squicky and a half-assed bit of male chauvinism (gee, J.D, afraid of mpreg? guess not! so why should you worry about sex! Not YOUR problem if she gets pregnant, gets thrown out of her folks' house, gets treated like a pariah by all of so-civilized oh-so-Christian British society!) then wait till you read some of his Goth poems. I mean, seriously, I'm not up enough on the emo scene to know what bands would be most likely fits but surely there is room in playlist land for the sad tale of how young J.D. gets caught fooling around with his girlfriend (we don't know if it's the same or a different, it doesn't say) by her parents because of his smelly new cologne - "The Perils Of Axe", it could as well be titled - starting out with a whine about how unfair it is that the only time they ever made out they get caught and he gets all the blame and suspected of lots more offenses than they ever got to commit, and then spends the rest of the poem on a rant that ranges from her Stepford mom's hypocrisy about her own wild teenage years, to her dad's stinky feet, to saucy political satire on recent terrorist attacks on the government, to increasingly bizarre insults to the fragrance industry ranging from how they contribute to V.D. and homophobia, to claiming that even the Olympian gods really hated that incense shit, culminating with the fantasy of using it to disguise the smell of his girlfriend's dad, if only the old bastard would die and rot already!
--You think I'm making that up? Obviously, you haven't read "The Perfume" yet....
Once, and but once, found in thy company,
All thy supposed escapes are laid on me;
And as a thief at bar is question'd there
By all the men that have been robb'd that year,
So am I-by this traiterous means surprized-
By thy hydroptic father catechized.
Though he had wont to search with glazèd eyes,
As though he came to kill a cockatrice;
Though he hath oft sworn that he would remove
Thy beauty's beauty, and food of our love,
Hope of his goods, if I with thee were seen,
Yet close and secret, as our souls, we've been.
Though thy immortal mother, which doth lie
Still buried in her bed, yet will not die,
Takes this advantage to sleep out daylight,
And watch thy entries and returns all night;
And, when she takes thy hand, and would seem kind,
Doth search what rings and armlets she can find;
And kissing notes the colour of thy face;
And fearing lest thou'rt swollen, doth thee embrace;
To try if thou long, doth name strange meats;
And notes thy paleness, blushing, sighs, and sweats;
And politicly will to thee confess
The sins of her own youth's rank lustiness;
Yet love these sorceries did remove, and move
Thee to gull thine own mother for my love.
Thy little brethren, which like fairy sprites
Oft skipp'd into our chamber, those sweet nights,
And kiss'd, and ingled on thy father's knee,
Were bribed next day to tell what they did see;
The grim-eight-foot-high-iron-bound serving-man,
That oft names God in oaths, and only then,
He that, to bar the first gate, doth as wide
As the great Rhodian Colossus stride
-Which, if in hell no other pains there were,
Makes me fear hell, because he must be there-
Though by thy father he were hired to this,
Could never witness any touch or kiss.
But O ! too common ill, I brought with me
That, which betray'd me to mine enemy,
A loud perfume, which at my entrance cried
Even at thy father's nose; so were we spied.
When, like a tyrant King, that in his bed
Smelt gunpowder, the pale wretch shivered,
Had it been some bad smell, he would have thought
That his own feet, or breath, that smell had wrought;
But as we in our isle imprisoned,
Where cattle only and diverse dogs are bred,
The precious unicorns strange monsters call,
So thought he good strange, that had none at all.
I taught my silks their whistling to forbear;
Even my oppress'd shoes dumb and speechless were;
Only thou bitter sweet, whom I had laid
Next me, me traiterously hast betray'd,
And unsuspected hast invisibly
At once fled unto him, and stay'd with me.
Base excrement of earth, which dost confound
Sense from distinguishing the sick from sound!
By thee the silly amorous sucks his death
By drawing in a leprous harlot's breath;
By thee the greatest stain to man's estate
Falls on us, to be call'd effeminate;
Though you be much loved in the prince's hall,
There things that seem exceed substantial;
Gods, when ye fumed on altars, were pleased well,
Because you were burnt, not that they liked your smell;
You're loathsome all, being taken simply alone;
Shall we love ill things join'd, and hate each one?
If you were good, your good doth soon decay;
And you are rare; that takes the good away:
All my perfumes I give most willingly
To embalm thy father's corpse; what? will he die?
Yeah, let's start analyzing this in English class. I want to have a video camera trained on the teachers' face, though. Especially for the bit about how J.D. practised walking so quietly that not even his shiny silk shirts gave him away with their squeaking as he sneaks around their house at night...
Now it's speculated that these love poems (ahem) were inspired by his romance with his wife, with whom he got involved when he was 25 and she was still a teenager living at home, but nobody really knows how much autobiography and how much fantasy is involved in their narratives. For example, the theory clearly doesn't work so well for "Jealous", in the speaker chides his married girlfriend for being upset that her gouty old husband's jealousy leads him to call her nasty names, when she fantasizes about him dying horribly all the time (this is gone into great and exceedingly gothy detail), so clearly the thing to do is for them to just be better at sneaking around behind his back - no more screwing in his own bed while he's gone - and then laugh at the loser - compared, btw, to a bishop - from a safe distance, just like Protestants laughing at the Pope - or people on the other side of London cocking a snook at the Lord Mayor!
Fond woman, which wouldst have thy husband die,
And yet complain'st of his great jealousy;
If, swollen with poison, he lay in his last bed,
His body with a sere bark covered,
Drawing his breath as thick and short as can
The nimblest crocheting musician,
Ready with loathsome vomiting to spew
His soul out of one hell into a new,
Made deaf with his poor kindred's howling cries,
Begging with few feign'd tears great legacies,-
Thou wouldst not weep, but jolly, and frolic be,
As a slave, which to-morrow should be free.
Yet weep'st thou, when thou seest him hungerly
Swallow his own death, heart's-bane jealousy?
O give him many thanks, he's courteous,
That in suspecting kindly warneth us.
We must not, as we used, flout openly,
In scoffing riddles, his deformity;
Nor at his board together being sat,
With words, nor touch, scarce looks, adulterate.
Nor when he, swollen and pamper'd with great fare,
Sits down and snorts, caged in his basket chair,
Must we usurp his own bed any more,
Nor kiss and play in his house, as before.
Now I see many dangers; for it is
His realm, his castle, and his diocese.
But if-as envious men, which would revile
Their prince, or coin his gold, themselves exile
Into another country, and do it there-
We play in another house, what should we fear?
There we will scorn his household policies,
His silly plots, and pensionary spies,
As the inhabitants of Thames' right side
Do London's mayor, or Germans the Pope's pride.
Yeah, like I said, I want to see how conservative neo-Puritans teach this in a Humanities class. Eternal Verities FTW! Pass the popcorn!
--Now it can be argued that this is early Donne, from before his change of heart from a liberal-secular-hedonist lifestyle, to that of a sober responsible religious man, and so can be handwaved away as discontinuity, or irrelevant, somehow Not Donne (sorry) - but even the Holy Sonnets don't exactly hold up under scrutiny - at least, not as safe, comfortable, guaranteed not to bring a blush to the cheek of the Young Person™ and conveying of solid, unquestioning, middle-class pieties:
At the round earth's imagined corners blow
Your trumpets, angels, and arise, arise
From death, you numberless infinities
Of souls, and to your scattered bodies go;
All whom the flood did, and fire shall o'erthrow,
All whom war, dearth, age, agues, tyrannies,
Despair, law, chance hath slain, and you, whose eyes
Shall behold God, and never taste death's woe.
But let them sleep, Lord, and me mourn a space;
For, if above all these my sins abound,
'Tis late to ask abundance of Thy grace,
When we are there. Here on this lowly ground,
Teach me how to repent, for that's as good
As if Thou hadst seal'd my pardon with Thy blood.
Here in #7 we have what sounds at first casual reading like a conventional declaration of the old credal confidence in the Resurrection of the Dead, the sort of thing you might gabble through by rote at church while thinking about a million other more immediate things, only with a nice bit of Elizabethan-style iambic pentameter to give it some oomph.
Except, when you look at it more closely - and this is something I have a fair amount of experience doing: memorizing sonnets and other bits of antique verse kept me sane saner marginally less insane, during high school and college - you find that it's highly subversive of the conventions. Firstly the whole thing starts out with a distinction between the poetry of human myth and the universe as discovered by scientific methods, which creates a sort of unsettled, fractured state, a dissonant chord that remains and is never resolved for the following lines. --Are we meant to think of "literal" angels with real trumpets somehow still nonetheless operating at the fictional, metaphorical corners of the world? How is this supposed to work? And then, moving on to the ever-popular notion of the Eschaton, persisting mythically even into modern pop-cultural venues in these eras of Unbelief (TM) - and this we see is whence that famous, evocative line so beloved of dark fantasists comes, 'to your scattered bodies go' - we get a mention of the core belief of the Rapture crowd - "you, whose eyes shall behold God, and never taste death's woe," which implies that Donne, as Shakespeare also often does in sonnets, is addressing the presumed reader in generations to come. But instead of joining in the collective triumphalist chiliagasm at the thought of the world's last night (another Donne line, btw) he contrarily begs the Creator to put it off as long as possible, because he has no confidence in his own permanent Saved status, he begs for time and grace to learn how to reform. And then, again with the dissonant, ever-so-slightly-haeretical note, at the end, he says that for God to inspire him now and here to repentance would be, and I quote, but emphasis is mine, "as good as if Thou hadst seal'd my pardon with Thy blood."
Now I'm not saying that Donne was a 17th-century Bishop Spong, or that he did wrestle with doubt about the tenets of Christianity - except in so far as, you know, he talks about his own wrestling with doubt and temptation elsewhere in his own religious poems, which he does, and which get very dark and angsty and romantickal in that St. John of the Cross/St. Teresa/Gerard Manley Hopkins way; but what is inescapable in this Holy Sonnet is that he ends it with an apparent, or at least open-to-question treatment, of the historical Atonement of Christ, and says that what matters is the personal, present, ongoing relationship with the divine - something which doesn't exactly mesh seamlessly with hierarchical norms or the "Magic Words" version of salvation-by-faith-alone of the Left Behind books and the very broad Christian subculture which has produced them. (Remember, this was written back when the Puritans were the Next Big Thing, and that whole Predestination-is-proven-by-your-success-in-life thing which we still stagger under today, in both religious and secular versions.)
I mean, I'm all for this kind of self-directed analytical metaphysical stuff and deconstruction of tropes and shattering of assumptions - let's study Donne, including why he had to change his denomination to get a job and avoid being harrassed by the state, because he wasn't the right sort of Christian in that theocracy - but it just doesn't really jive imo with the Order Over All! rigid, doctrinaire, artistic-and-social orthodoxy of the Town Hall crew. You really would think that they wouldn't actually want impressionable youth reading Donne, if they had any idea of who he was other than Famous Dead White Guy Who Was Also A Minister...
Seriously - do you think Grabar wants to teach a class on the barely-subtextual homoeroticism and the equation of sexual and religious ecstasy in "Please rape me, sweet Jesus, for my own good" "Batter my heart, three-personed God"--? I suspect that she would be as far out of her depth, as if she were to tackle teaching Augustine's "On the Trinity"...
This does have its uses: you can make risque and impertinent remarks that nobody else is likely to catch, quite openly; and you can also do your part in debunking the Myffic Days of Yore and the Legenda Micarea of their figures held up as false demiurges on the altars of those who worship ashes.
Such as, for example, John Donne, who pinch-hits (entirely involuntarily) for Bill the Bard in a recent Town Hall rant seized upon by Hunter yesterda in which one Mary Grabar rants about how The liberals have ravished our virgins on college campuses around the country, and how this is due not to our rape culture and conservation of traditional male privilege but due to, and I Am Not Making This Up, the replacement of John Donne studies with BTVS studies in college today:
As the mush-brained feminists and wild-eyed radicals have taken over English departments and comparative literature departments, they have eliminated or demolished the great works that promoted our values and inspired the passion necessary to propel a movement. The great works of literature that could inspire passion for the love of God, love of a spouse, and loyalty to one’s country, and foster the appreciation for the comedy and tragedy of human life, have been excised from the curriculum. In their place are ideological tracts, video games, television dramas, celebrities, and pornographic performance art. The love of God and a spouse that John Donne could evoke is now replaced by such things as an analysis of Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s sex life.
Mary Grabar is an English major who blames her failure to land a plum professorial assignment on bigotry against Slovenian-Americans and the Culture Wars™ wh5ch has landed her a longrunning gig at Town Hall, and who has previously been batted around by the cool cats at World o' Crap and Sadly, No! for entirely understandable reasons. But this claiming that teaching classes on, e.g., John Donne instead of on Buffy will somehow magically create docile, pious, obedient, civil, cultured offspring who don't have unsanctioned sex or question the norms and assumptions of the city-state, just reveals a staggering unfamiliarity with the work of John Donne himself, nay with the whole contents of the Great Books Library and that vaunted Western Tradition.
Don't, for the moment, go into the question of why we can't study both old and new pop culture in schools. Don't even go into the fact that, in fact, all this talk of how colleges today don't teach Dead White Guys any more is simply Minitrue-worthy disinformation, roundly debunked at Sadly, No! and elsewhere in response to a former Phyllis Schlafly claim that most of the top colleges in the US didn't teach Shakespeare any more, since with this new internet thing it's a relatively simple matter to find current semester courselists for even small community colleges in just minutes. Let's not even go into the fact that a regular feature of Town Hall columns is decrying the feminist obsession with rape on colleges and elsewhere and blaming it on slutty stupid coeds and/or claiming that they're all just lying after having second thoughts about consensual sex. Let's leave aside all the celebration of personal responsibility and ethics and the warnings against casual sex and the exhortations to sacrifice for the greater good of the community found in BTVS itself, and just focus on a little bit of Donne's own writing.
Yes, he was a minister who preached many highly-poetic sermons; yes, he wrote the "Holy Sonnets," - but that hardly accounts for all, or even the best-known part, of his poetic output. It isn't all sweet or deep or both, not all valedictions and twin compasses and unruly suns. Let's take one of the racier ones, the ones that don't usually get taught in school, because, well, the symbolism isn't beautiful and sublime and doesn't really lend itself to decoder-ring style criticism, and then there's the subject matter itself, and even the most smirking and innuendo-given teachers tends to choke a bit when faced with 17th-century jokes about how two young folks being bitten by the same flea = virtual sex! (plus vpreg, think about line 8 there) so they might as well have the real thing, fears of getting caught by her parents or social stigma be damned:
Mark but this flea, and mark in this,
How little that which thou deniest me is;
It suck'd me first, and now sucks thee,
And in this flea our two bloods mingled be.
Thou know'st that this cannot be said
A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead;
Yet this enjoys before it woo,
And pamper'd swells with one blood made of two;
And this, alas! is more than we would do.
O stay, three lives in one flea spare,
Where we almost, yea, more than married are.
This flea is you and I, and this
Our marriage bed, and marriage temple is.
Though parents grudge, and you, we're met,
And cloister'd in these living walls of jet.
Though use make you apt to kill me,
Let not to that self-murder added be,
And sacrilege, three sins in killing three.
Cruel and sudden, hast thou since
Purpled thy nail in blood of innocence?
Wherein could this flea guilty be,
Except in that drop which it suck'd from thee?
Yet thou triumph'st, and say'st that thou
Find'st not thyself nor me the weaker now.
'Tis true; then learn how false fears be;
Just so much honour, when thou yield'st to me,
Will waste, as this flea's death took life from thee.
As pick-up line, I gotta say "Don't kill that flea 'cause it's you and me!" isn't all that enticing: I'd rate it down below "nothing like the sun," but then again it's really just a self-impressed hipster's going for the shock value via the squick, so as such it works very well. I can see the Moldy Peaches riffing on this theme, in fact.
On the one hand, "Keep nagging the gatekeeper for sex until she gives in by calling her a prude and a scaredy-cat and claiming that you're gonna die of blue balls without it, then get snotty about how she's a slut just like all women" is a very Traditional value in Western Civ. On the other hand, I don't really think that "our blood is combined inside this parasite's guts, and it didn't hurt you, so why don't we go ahead and get horizontal, honey?" is a message that the self-appointed Moral Guardians of Western Culture would endorse if it were coming from anyone but a Famously-Christian Dead White Guy - and I don't understand why they think it's fine when it comes from a seventeenth-century poet instead of a 20th or 21st-century rock star.
It gets even better: if you think this is both squicky and a half-assed bit of male chauvinism (gee, J.D, afraid of mpreg? guess not! so why should you worry about sex! Not YOUR problem if she gets pregnant, gets thrown out of her folks' house, gets treated like a pariah by all of so-civilized oh-so-Christian British society!) then wait till you read some of his Goth poems. I mean, seriously, I'm not up enough on the emo scene to know what bands would be most likely fits but surely there is room in playlist land for the sad tale of how young J.D. gets caught fooling around with his girlfriend (we don't know if it's the same or a different, it doesn't say) by her parents because of his smelly new cologne - "The Perils Of Axe", it could as well be titled - starting out with a whine about how unfair it is that the only time they ever made out they get caught and he gets all the blame and suspected of lots more offenses than they ever got to commit, and then spends the rest of the poem on a rant that ranges from her Stepford mom's hypocrisy about her own wild teenage years, to her dad's stinky feet, to saucy political satire on recent terrorist attacks on the government, to increasingly bizarre insults to the fragrance industry ranging from how they contribute to V.D. and homophobia, to claiming that even the Olympian gods really hated that incense shit, culminating with the fantasy of using it to disguise the smell of his girlfriend's dad, if only the old bastard would die and rot already!
--You think I'm making that up? Obviously, you haven't read "The Perfume" yet....
Once, and but once, found in thy company,
All thy supposed escapes are laid on me;
And as a thief at bar is question'd there
By all the men that have been robb'd that year,
So am I-by this traiterous means surprized-
By thy hydroptic father catechized.
Though he had wont to search with glazèd eyes,
As though he came to kill a cockatrice;
Though he hath oft sworn that he would remove
Thy beauty's beauty, and food of our love,
Hope of his goods, if I with thee were seen,
Yet close and secret, as our souls, we've been.
Though thy immortal mother, which doth lie
Still buried in her bed, yet will not die,
Takes this advantage to sleep out daylight,
And watch thy entries and returns all night;
And, when she takes thy hand, and would seem kind,
Doth search what rings and armlets she can find;
And kissing notes the colour of thy face;
And fearing lest thou'rt swollen, doth thee embrace;
To try if thou long, doth name strange meats;
And notes thy paleness, blushing, sighs, and sweats;
And politicly will to thee confess
The sins of her own youth's rank lustiness;
Yet love these sorceries did remove, and move
Thee to gull thine own mother for my love.
Thy little brethren, which like fairy sprites
Oft skipp'd into our chamber, those sweet nights,
And kiss'd, and ingled on thy father's knee,
Were bribed next day to tell what they did see;
The grim-eight-foot-high-iron-bound serving-man,
That oft names God in oaths, and only then,
He that, to bar the first gate, doth as wide
As the great Rhodian Colossus stride
-Which, if in hell no other pains there were,
Makes me fear hell, because he must be there-
Though by thy father he were hired to this,
Could never witness any touch or kiss.
But O ! too common ill, I brought with me
That, which betray'd me to mine enemy,
A loud perfume, which at my entrance cried
Even at thy father's nose; so were we spied.
When, like a tyrant King, that in his bed
Smelt gunpowder, the pale wretch shivered,
Had it been some bad smell, he would have thought
That his own feet, or breath, that smell had wrought;
But as we in our isle imprisoned,
Where cattle only and diverse dogs are bred,
The precious unicorns strange monsters call,
So thought he good strange, that had none at all.
I taught my silks their whistling to forbear;
Even my oppress'd shoes dumb and speechless were;
Only thou bitter sweet, whom I had laid
Next me, me traiterously hast betray'd,
And unsuspected hast invisibly
At once fled unto him, and stay'd with me.
Base excrement of earth, which dost confound
Sense from distinguishing the sick from sound!
By thee the silly amorous sucks his death
By drawing in a leprous harlot's breath;
By thee the greatest stain to man's estate
Falls on us, to be call'd effeminate;
Though you be much loved in the prince's hall,
There things that seem exceed substantial;
Gods, when ye fumed on altars, were pleased well,
Because you were burnt, not that they liked your smell;
You're loathsome all, being taken simply alone;
Shall we love ill things join'd, and hate each one?
If you were good, your good doth soon decay;
And you are rare; that takes the good away:
All my perfumes I give most willingly
To embalm thy father's corpse; what? will he die?
Yeah, let's start analyzing this in English class. I want to have a video camera trained on the teachers' face, though. Especially for the bit about how J.D. practised walking so quietly that not even his shiny silk shirts gave him away with their squeaking as he sneaks around their house at night...
Now it's speculated that these love poems (ahem) were inspired by his romance with his wife, with whom he got involved when he was 25 and she was still a teenager living at home, but nobody really knows how much autobiography and how much fantasy is involved in their narratives. For example, the theory clearly doesn't work so well for "Jealous", in the speaker chides his married girlfriend for being upset that her gouty old husband's jealousy leads him to call her nasty names, when she fantasizes about him dying horribly all the time (this is gone into great and exceedingly gothy detail), so clearly the thing to do is for them to just be better at sneaking around behind his back - no more screwing in his own bed while he's gone - and then laugh at the loser - compared, btw, to a bishop - from a safe distance, just like Protestants laughing at the Pope - or people on the other side of London cocking a snook at the Lord Mayor!
Fond woman, which wouldst have thy husband die,
And yet complain'st of his great jealousy;
If, swollen with poison, he lay in his last bed,
His body with a sere bark covered,
Drawing his breath as thick and short as can
The nimblest crocheting musician,
Ready with loathsome vomiting to spew
His soul out of one hell into a new,
Made deaf with his poor kindred's howling cries,
Begging with few feign'd tears great legacies,-
Thou wouldst not weep, but jolly, and frolic be,
As a slave, which to-morrow should be free.
Yet weep'st thou, when thou seest him hungerly
Swallow his own death, heart's-bane jealousy?
O give him many thanks, he's courteous,
That in suspecting kindly warneth us.
We must not, as we used, flout openly,
In scoffing riddles, his deformity;
Nor at his board together being sat,
With words, nor touch, scarce looks, adulterate.
Nor when he, swollen and pamper'd with great fare,
Sits down and snorts, caged in his basket chair,
Must we usurp his own bed any more,
Nor kiss and play in his house, as before.
Now I see many dangers; for it is
His realm, his castle, and his diocese.
But if-as envious men, which would revile
Their prince, or coin his gold, themselves exile
Into another country, and do it there-
We play in another house, what should we fear?
There we will scorn his household policies,
His silly plots, and pensionary spies,
As the inhabitants of Thames' right side
Do London's mayor, or Germans the Pope's pride.
Yeah, like I said, I want to see how conservative neo-Puritans teach this in a Humanities class. Eternal Verities FTW! Pass the popcorn!
--Now it can be argued that this is early Donne, from before his change of heart from a liberal-secular-hedonist lifestyle, to that of a sober responsible religious man, and so can be handwaved away as discontinuity, or irrelevant, somehow Not Donne (sorry) - but even the Holy Sonnets don't exactly hold up under scrutiny - at least, not as safe, comfortable, guaranteed not to bring a blush to the cheek of the Young Person™ and conveying of solid, unquestioning, middle-class pieties:
At the round earth's imagined corners blow
Your trumpets, angels, and arise, arise
From death, you numberless infinities
Of souls, and to your scattered bodies go;
All whom the flood did, and fire shall o'erthrow,
All whom war, dearth, age, agues, tyrannies,
Despair, law, chance hath slain, and you, whose eyes
Shall behold God, and never taste death's woe.
But let them sleep, Lord, and me mourn a space;
For, if above all these my sins abound,
'Tis late to ask abundance of Thy grace,
When we are there. Here on this lowly ground,
Teach me how to repent, for that's as good
As if Thou hadst seal'd my pardon with Thy blood.
Here in #7 we have what sounds at first casual reading like a conventional declaration of the old credal confidence in the Resurrection of the Dead, the sort of thing you might gabble through by rote at church while thinking about a million other more immediate things, only with a nice bit of Elizabethan-style iambic pentameter to give it some oomph.
Except, when you look at it more closely - and this is something I have a fair amount of experience doing: memorizing sonnets and other bits of antique verse kept me sane saner marginally less insane, during high school and college - you find that it's highly subversive of the conventions. Firstly the whole thing starts out with a distinction between the poetry of human myth and the universe as discovered by scientific methods, which creates a sort of unsettled, fractured state, a dissonant chord that remains and is never resolved for the following lines. --Are we meant to think of "literal" angels with real trumpets somehow still nonetheless operating at the fictional, metaphorical corners of the world? How is this supposed to work? And then, moving on to the ever-popular notion of the Eschaton, persisting mythically even into modern pop-cultural venues in these eras of Unbelief (TM) - and this we see is whence that famous, evocative line so beloved of dark fantasists comes, 'to your scattered bodies go' - we get a mention of the core belief of the Rapture crowd - "you, whose eyes shall behold God, and never taste death's woe," which implies that Donne, as Shakespeare also often does in sonnets, is addressing the presumed reader in generations to come. But instead of joining in the collective triumphalist chiliagasm at the thought of the world's last night (another Donne line, btw) he contrarily begs the Creator to put it off as long as possible, because he has no confidence in his own permanent Saved status, he begs for time and grace to learn how to reform. And then, again with the dissonant, ever-so-slightly-haeretical note, at the end, he says that for God to inspire him now and here to repentance would be, and I quote, but emphasis is mine, "as good as if Thou hadst seal'd my pardon with Thy blood."
Now I'm not saying that Donne was a 17th-century Bishop Spong, or that he did wrestle with doubt about the tenets of Christianity - except in so far as, you know, he talks about his own wrestling with doubt and temptation elsewhere in his own religious poems, which he does, and which get very dark and angsty and romantickal in that St. John of the Cross/St. Teresa/Gerard Manley Hopkins way; but what is inescapable in this Holy Sonnet is that he ends it with an apparent, or at least open-to-question treatment, of the historical Atonement of Christ, and says that what matters is the personal, present, ongoing relationship with the divine - something which doesn't exactly mesh seamlessly with hierarchical norms or the "Magic Words" version of salvation-by-faith-alone of the Left Behind books and the very broad Christian subculture which has produced them. (Remember, this was written back when the Puritans were the Next Big Thing, and that whole Predestination-is-proven-by-your-success-in-life thing which we still stagger under today, in both religious and secular versions.)
I mean, I'm all for this kind of self-directed analytical metaphysical stuff and deconstruction of tropes and shattering of assumptions - let's study Donne, including why he had to change his denomination to get a job and avoid being harrassed by the state, because he wasn't the right sort of Christian in that theocracy - but it just doesn't really jive imo with the Order Over All! rigid, doctrinaire, artistic-and-social orthodoxy of the Town Hall crew. You really would think that they wouldn't actually want impressionable youth reading Donne, if they had any idea of who he was other than Famous Dead White Guy Who Was Also A Minister...
Seriously - do you think Grabar wants to teach a class on the barely-subtextual homoeroticism and the equation of sexual and religious ecstasy in "Please rape me, sweet Jesus, for my own good" "Batter my heart, three-personed God"--? I suspect that she would be as far out of her depth, as if she were to tackle teaching Augustine's "On the Trinity"...