tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post453329249920598208..comments2024-01-28T03:56:39.351-08:00Comments on TOM CLARK: More than Moone: John Donne: A valediction of weepingUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger8125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-52328589953262273092012-06-05T09:37:05.354-07:002012-06-05T09:37:05.354-07:00om,
Yes, the rain here of yesterday plus full moo...om,<br /><br />Yes, the rain here of yesterday plus full moon coupled with Donne's "teares" and "O more then moone," plus all these Vermeers -- very nice.<br /><br />6.4<br /><br />light coming into fog against invisible<br />ridge, bird slanting toward pine branch<br />in foreground, sound of wave in channel<br /><br /> arrives at “something,” same<br /> “self” as well as one<br /><br /> in comparison with whom one,<br /> sleeping, was sitting<br /><br />silver line of sun reflected in channel,<br />cloudless blue sky to the left of pointSTEPHEN RATCLIFFEhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12339481653546188412noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-65693001369146861052012-06-05T06:46:33.745-07:002012-06-05T06:46:33.745-07:00WB I think he has abandoned the stable world to ma...WB I think he has abandoned the stable world to make her his medium of exchange. <br /><br />It's the famous instability of his, so many have disapproved over the centuries.<br /><br />The deep hurt perhaps from the orginal sources -- who can say what it would have been like to have, as a child, watched members of your family having body parts excised before being burnt or hung as a public spectacle.<br /><br />Yes, it does seem there is here a figurative category shift, back and forth between exchange and use, in fact these abrupt and willful naughty category shifts of Donne's seem to be a kind of signature with him.<br /><br />The figure of the coins, stamped and given value by her, reminds us, though, in harder practical terms, that it took not only clever rhetorical shifts but coin to get, or more importantly stay, anywhere in that world (as of course also in this present one).<br /><br />The mapping of the extended dominions of these great imperial maritime companies, East India, and Dutch East India, upon the walls of those interiors of Vermeer's put me in mind of the way in Donne's early Elegies the woman's body is charted out as a sort of expeditionary site. <br /><br />But now in the love poems to and for Ann there is perhaps a tonal shift in among the category shifts, to something more equable -- minting these infinite (it must have seemed to him at the time) emblemes of More.<br /><br />"The tears are fruits of much grief; but they are symbols of more to come. For, as your image perishes in each tear that falls, so shall we perish in each tear that falls, be nothing when between us rolls the salt, estranging sea..." (H. C. Grierson)<br /><br />"While Donne was a thinking mind, vividly alert to the implications of intellectual change and controversy, he was also a receptor, played through by the divided mind of the period... for Donne the 'self' was in doubt. The more he looked at or for it, the more it vanished. Existing aso a process in time and subject to contingency and interpretation, it was possible to say 'that now / We are not just these persons, which we were' ("Womans constancy", ll. 4-4); 'You are both fluid, chang'd since yesterday' ('the second Anniversarie', l. 393")... 'Our selves', he wrote, are 'what we know not'..." -- Stevie DaviesTChttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05915822857461178942noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-4658580663771567812012-06-04T14:18:07.377-07:002012-06-04T14:18:07.377-07:00That instability that Carey refers to; the terribl...That instability that Carey refers to; the terrible, ineluctable risk that love is: no simple resolutions; no fixed descriptors. <br />The hurt that's nothing if not communicable, seen, till it's almost livid with signifiance.<br />Donne was The Guv'nor, weren't he?Mose23https://www.blogger.com/profile/01100756913131511440noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-31165633218970732392012-06-04T13:49:28.951-07:002012-06-04T13:49:28.951-07:00"Fruits of much griefe they are, emblemes of ..."Fruits of much griefe they are, emblemes of more"<br />This shift between the "fruits" and the "emblemes" intrigues me. <br />Is it love tipping sorrow to excess?<br />Are we moving from use to exchange value?<br />Is this about a grief observed?Mose23https://www.blogger.com/profile/01100756913131511440noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-72232728656222688372012-06-04T11:25:26.871-07:002012-06-04T11:25:26.871-07:00The reckless and hasty decision to run off with An...The reckless and hasty decision to run off with Ann More, the underage ward of a man on whom his career hopes, as a young law school graduate sans other prospects, depended, set Donne on an all-for-love course he would then faithfully if perhaps also desperately sail through to the end.<br /><br />Ann provided him a "mast of children", and died, barely past thirty, exhausted by that childbearing and by their impoverished life.<br /><br />Yet the poems he wrote to and for her in their early days together are a classic locus of the value-generating, meaning-generating exchanges, "beautiful raindrop exchanges" of two people for whom separation represents the loss of everything.<br /><br />Here the speaker's pregnant tears seem a feminizing image, displacing the image of sexual aggression to be found elsewhere in early Donne poems.<br /><br />"The development of thought follows the changing identities suggested for the tears -- coins, fruits, seas, mirrors, globes. By means of the conceit, the poem projects instability." -- John Carey<br /><br />Donne's departures and leavetakings seem to have been the occasion of a doubled anxiety, as his experiences at sea had not been happy.TChttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05915822857461178942noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-40069922719425395112012-06-04T10:42:22.631-07:002012-06-04T10:42:22.631-07:00How do we navigate The Zone, Tom, bearing the “fru...How do we navigate The Zone, Tom, bearing the “fruits of much griefe?” You’ve sailed us into a tropic lush with answers, some ways of contending with even the accidental and the inevitable: window light, books, other people, “the magic-fire of music,” (as Nietzsche called it); the hands of the geographer and of the astronomer taking the measure of things, a woman with eyes closed, another smiling, all travellers like ourselves, all making the journey together, yet alone.<br /><br />Much to ponder here in Donne and that school of painting in which I find many parallels with the photos of Russell Lee.Hazenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13417573435195561519noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-28203246219833971752012-06-04T10:28:26.878-07:002012-06-04T10:28:26.878-07:00"We have non-stop spring rain".<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUvRltuKGRU" rel="nofollow">"We have non-stop spring rain"</a>.TChttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05915822857461178942noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-18204279010065838522012-06-04T10:14:58.332-07:002012-06-04T10:14:58.332-07:00Tear as globe. Beautiful raindrop exchange.Tear as globe. Beautiful raindrop exchange.Susan Kay Andersonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16277139119869470939noreply@blogger.com