While reading the poem “On the Wounds of Our Crucified Lord” I became confused and interested as to why Crashaw compared Christ’s wounds to mouths and eyes. Personally I understand the mouth because the mouth, I’m assuming, could represent when people speak sins and because God died for our sins the blood dripping from those wounds could be the actual physical purging of the world of their sins( or more like forgiveness). He is giving his body and so the blood dripping from Him could be the sins leaving the world. As for the eyes, I am still confused. I know that the blood dripping from the “eyes” represent tears which can represent how tragic and sad the whole ordeal was, but I feel like there may be a deeper meaning to it, can anyone explain?

I was struck by Carew’s explicitly sexual language and references, but even more by is pointed disapproval of the language we have grown accustomed to seeing in our course readings, when referring to sex. He blatantly explains that they aren’t trying to hide his “tall pine” as it is guided into “love’s channel.” In line 105 he asserts, “No wedlock bounds unwreathe our twisted loves, we seek no midnight arbor, no dark groves to hid our loves kisses,” and continues to repudiate the language that most authors during this period rely on, “Of husband, wife, lust, modest, chaste, or shame are vain and empty words, whose very sound was never heard in the Elysian ground” (108-110). Not only is he devaluing the use of these words, but claiming that there is no evidence in  classical mythology, which describes the “abode of the blessed spirits,” that these words are necessary in understanding the world of the Elysium. I found it controversial to entirely and blatantly challenge this vocabulary that has been regurgitated over and over in describing sex, marriage, and religion.

I was particularly interested in George Herbert’s idea of the ideal form of poetry Jordan (1). He argues that poets should focus on the beauty of “truth” and the natural world, rather than fictitious stories. Herbert also addresses the language and structure of poetry: “Is all good structure in a winding stair? May no lines pass, except they do their duty Not to a true, but painted chair?” Herbert is particularly critical of poetry that uses overly embellished language, which he compares to a “winding stair.” He wonders why poetry that focuses on the real world and utilizes straight forward language is not considered the ideal, and he praises pastoral poets: “Shepherds are honest people…”

I really enjoyed Donne’s poem the Ecstasy poem because I think its interesting how Donne argues the importance of physical and spiritual love. He was able to justify his point of view through arguments that were actually persuasive and logical in my opinion. Even though he is notorious for at times going over the limit in what he says, his poem does clearly show how his opinion at the time is very controversial in comparison to the societal consensus on premarital sex being wrong.

Adrienne Rich, a 20th century American feminist poet, wrote “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning” in 1970. The poem is undoubtedly modeled after John Donne’s poem of the same name; however, Rich ironically parodies Donne’s original work. In both poems, the speakers deal with leaving their lovers and discuss the emotions they feel as they contemplate this separation.

Although both poems are about the experience of being apart from a lover, they take radically different stances on the subject. Donne’s love is so strong and refined that the physical distance will ultimately be meaningless. In contrast, Rich is dealing with a difficult relationship and an impending separation that will last forever.

In Donne’s poem, the speaker argues that being apart from one’s lover is not a reason to mourn, for the love he has for the woman he speaks of is so pure that he knows they will remain connected despite their physical distance from one another. Rich’s poem, in contrast, is far less classically romantic than Donne’s. Though it takes on a similar topic of being separated from a lover, Rich imagines a separation that will last “forever,” unlike Donne’s imagining of an everlasting love. Although in Donne’s poem, the two lovers will presumably reunite at some point, this is not the case in Rich’s poem. She tells the person that she is addressing that she wants them to “see this before she leaves,” and then says “when I talk of taking a trip I mean forever.” This is not a temporary separation, and therefore it doesn’t share the overly romantic tone of Donne’s poem.

I noticed that I had left this saved as a draft from last week, so here is my reply to Natalie’s post on misogyny in Elizabethan England.

I certainly felt a little uncomfortable about the disregard of consent in “Hero and Leander,” but I also wondered how much of that is depicting a lack of consent or continuing the theme of women as the seductresses ruining a man’s virtue. Like we’ve seen with the Sirens in The Odyssey or Duessa in The Faerie Queene, women seem to be nothing more than tempting objects meant to thwart the stories’ heroes, making their own feelings and identities, unfortunately, nonexistent.

Emily raised a question in class yesterday about whether the variety in Donne’s poems could be looked at from an autobiographical point of view, with the content reflecting his own experiences, feelings, and opinions over time. Donne’s marriage to Anne More was forbidden by her father, and resulted in both being disowned. “The Flea” describes a an affair in which a pregnancy comes before marriage, “A sin, or shame, or loss of maidenhead…And pampered swells with one blood made of two” in the first stanza and “This flea is you and I, and this our marriage bed” in the second. Because Donne mentions a lack of parental approval of their marriage, reflecting his own life experience, it brings into question the additional use of autobiographical experience in the first semester. Like Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway, who got married while she was already pregnant, it would be interesting to see if any evidence of this exists with Donne’s marriage, since their recluse during their marriage may have allowed for this type of secret.

For my third blog post in a row (yikes), I have a stray thought/question: doesn’t the corporeality and the baroqueness of Donne’s work make him feel like a poet of a rather Catholic sensibility? As opposed to Spenserian sanitized Protestantism. It’s interesting because, as we talked about in class, Donne literally was a Catholic poet until he converted to the Anglican Church. But it seems to me that the Catholicism sticks around in his work. Even in the Holy Sonnets, which are substantially less sexual and bodily than the poems we read for last class, the paradoxes that he plays with and the richness of his ideas+language lend the poems a sort of opulence. 

(Plus, the Holy Sonnets sequence play so perfectly into the trope of Catholic guilt. Holy Sonnet VII, IX, etc.)

I’m having a little trouble reconciling the heavily implied eroticism of Donne’s poetry with his supposedly unassailable piety. In Izaac Walton’s biography of Donne, Walton makes the poet appear as a sort of bastion of Anglican beliefs and practices – practices that proponents of the Church of England often contrasted with the more “sensual” elements of worship in Catholicism. The Norton biography of Donne also points out that Donne only took his position of leadership at St. Paul’s, which he had been holding off on doing, due to his dire financial circumstances. This reluctance, in combination with the subjects of much of his oeuvre, might lead one to question how much of a model of English protestantism of the period Donne truly was.

Hi Raisa,

I thought your point about male “innocence” was interesting; I’ve been finding that the idea of innocence seems to be very multi-layered, such as how Hero is innocent/pure, yet capable of killing men with her denials and having enough sexual knowledge to be a “tease.” Apart from being contradictory, innocence also seems to have several different meanings; I wonder how this idea about a man’s “innocency” in the Book of Common Prayer could be more associated with moral innocence/religious purity vs. sexual innocence, since it seems as if there is an expectation for men to be the more sexually experienced ones in the marriage.