Re Carly’s question as to whether Carew is being facetious in his last lines of “A Rapture,” I think he is and he isn’t. The notion of men being atheists and women being whores points out the severest ways that people’s honor, respective of their sex, can be smeared, as women’s chastity and men’s holiness (as we saw in Spenser) are their most valued virtues in the time period. With this idea in mind, Carew is being facetious in that his speaker knows that his religiosity and his lover’s chastity will both be compromised if he succeeds in seducing her, and she, far from not being called a whore, could easily be branded as one by a harsh, prudish society. At the same time, Carew is not being facetious because he is pointing out the most aggravating ways in which society frustrates his speaker and chafes against his lifestyle, as premarital or adulterous sex can quickly lead to one’s downfall, and how all this religious fervor might end up causing more harm than good.

When reading Crashaw’s poem, I was struck immediately by his rhetorical questions “Are they mouths? or are they eyes?” (2). Is Christ delivering us salvation by the word of God or is he watching and judging us? In light of the Richard Rambuss reading, I’m wondering about the relationship that the speaker has with Christ. He paints Christ’s wounds as “full-bloomed lips” and claims that Christ’s blood falls as tears, suggesting that Christ is weeping over the loss of a friend or lover (5, 8). Thus, the sexualizing (although I’m not sure I would call it erotic) images  heighten the original tension of the poem. On one hand, Christ’s wounds are beautiful lips that “hast laid / Many a kiss” and granted peace (10-11). On the other, Christ has a “bloodshot eye” that sheds “many a cruel tear” (7,8) reminding us of the pain he suffered.  Christ is a figure that both saves and comforts us, but whom we also owe a great deal of debt.

I’m trying to make sense of the last few lines of Carew’s “The Rapture.” Carew concludes the erotic/religious poem with: “Then tell me why/ This goblin Honor which the world adores/ Should make men atheists and not women whores” (164-166). Is he being earnest in claiming that Honor makes men atheists while not making women whores, or is this entirely facetious? Why might Honor be a goblin? Should women be whores? This is the first time I can recall the mention of atheism in the works we have read; typically we have looked at differing interpretations of Christianity. What might atheism’s role be in these conflicting factions of Christianity?

q: Who are the Muggletonians?

Muggletonians: Whence Potterverse’s ‘Muggles’?

It was interesting to read “A Hymn to Christ” and noticing the way, yet again, Donne inverts and twists a metaphor. When writing about a tree, he says, “as the tree’s sap doth seek the root below, in winter, in my winter now I go…” Rarely do we think about downward motion with nature: trees and flowers evoke imagery of growth, of blooming upwards. Usually the “movement” of literature is towards spring and summer, instead of winter. This is especially fascinating to me when taken in the context of religious imagery: “the tree of life”; “the tree of knowledge,” but also Ovid, and Pagan connotations. Any thoughts about how Donne uses nature to speak about religious themes in these poems?

I was very interested in Donne’s description of the size of the man compared to the size of the world in “Meditation 4.” Interestingly, he claims that the “pieces of man” when stretched out are much greater than the world. The complexity, he argues, of humans is so great. Why then would the sum of all humans be so much less significant than the complexity of one individual human? It would seem that when added together, the complexities and interactions between humans would be greater than those of any one individual. To Donne, when the world is seen as a collection of humans, something about the greatness of the individual is lost. What is that something? Why is the world so small compared to the individual?