While doing the reading, I was at first surprised by the inclusion of Sir Walter Ralegh’s text from The Discovery of Guiana in a section about Donne. At first glance, they seemed very far apart – Ralegh lived in a different political regime in the 16th century, Donne in the 17th; Ralegh writes in prose about the discovery of El Dorado. This seemed something much more like a fanciful documentary than Donne’s rich verse.

However, when I reached the passage on p.886 about how “Guiana is a country that hath yet her maidenhead, never sacked, turned, nor wrought,” I started perhaps thinking about how Ralegh here also uses explicit sexual metaphors in a new way – in this case, to describe the virginity and rape/pillaging(?) of a new land. I would be interested to know what others thought about the connection between Ralegh’s text here and Donne.

In reading for class today, I was taken with Donne’s use of metaphor. The way Donne shifts between macrocosm and microcosm is really breathtaking, in moments. I’m drawn especially to the middle stanza of “A Valediction: Of Weeping,” which moves from a round ball that becomes a globe, representing the world, and a tear, representing a person, to then joint tears, to “heaven dissolvéd so.” As in The Bait, and in other contemporary verse, water is a focal point here, as something that can speak to both a grand and a minute scale. Water is something that can “wear,” in bearing the lover’s image, as well as can “overflow/ This world.”