John Donne’s Biathanatos

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21 pointslermontov3 comments

Interesting write-up, Donne does not get enough discussion or credit.

"Elegy II: The Anagram" [0] is in my mind the funniest poem ever written in the English language. Modern comics could not approach the amount of shade thrown in those verses.

0 - http://www.online-literature.com/forums/showthread.php?18947...

And one of the most erotic too.

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Elegy XIX: To His Mistress Going to Bed

...

Thou shalt upon another forest set,

Where some do shipwreck, and no further get.

When thou art there, consider what this chase

Misspent by thy beginning at the face.

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The last four lines quoted as I have done here are almost incomprehensible and yet in context it is really rather racy even today.

John Donne had a remarkable intellect. We live in a visual culture, but the early modern period was very much a literary culture, and the breadth of learning demonstrated in just a short poem by Donne or Marvell continues to astonish. Donne's ruminations on suicide parallel those of Hamlet around the same time. Whenever I walk past St Pauls in London, I think of Donne, giving his regular 2 hour plus sermons in the old cathedral.

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