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.