Quite a philosophical romp this time, as well as an unusually long ADAD podcast: upwards of fifteen minutes (you have been warned). The poem takes up most of that time, though I confess I found myself warming to the explication as I went along. You may be the judge of whether that process produces more light than heat.

Responding to a private email from Andrew T. in Monash, I comment on the issue of two ways of reading Donne’s poetry: for the syntax, and for the line. Today’s poem doesn’t force that choice quite so starkly upon the reader as some other of Donne’s lyrics do, but even at that a tension remains between trying to make sense of Donne’s syntax (which weaves, sometimes tortuously, from line to line) and emphasizing Donne’s lines, principally by a) signalling the line’s end and b) giving a little more weight to the end rhymes. Before tonight I had been trying hard to read for syntax, reasoning that Donne was so difficult that reading for the line would make the reading less intelligible. Andrew’s email made me rethink that strategy, and indeed if a short enough lyric presents itself, I may try reading both ways and invite (copious) comment on the results.

C. S. Lewis distinguished two types of poetry recitation: the Bard (edit: no, he calls it “Minstrel”) and the Actor. The Bard, at its bardiest, is something like the heavily incantatory recitation of a W. B. Yeats, as in this excerpt from “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.” The Actor does not treat the poem as an incantation, but is likely to de-emphasize or even ignore the formal aspects of the verse in an effort to get to the sense. As Lewis argues, and as Andrew reminds me, these are extreme positions. Moreover, any lover of poetry (will the guilty parties please raise their hands) must admit that the formal aspects of the verse are inextricably tied to the semantic weight of the verse (or, indeed, vice-versa).

The matter becomes extremely difficult at time in Donne, whose “strong” lines (as they were called by older critics) are at times metrically crabbed or metrically ambiguous. Reading for the form can obscure the sense if one is not careful. Ah, but such care is no doubt part of what Donne sought to encourage by writing as he did. Keep the music, the polemic, the arch self-awareness, and the zealous intensity all in a carefully taut matrix. Something like life.

Martha Burtis once did some very smart and thoughtful (and poetic) work on understanding Donne’s reflexivity by means of the literary theorist and linguistic philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin. I wish she’d put her paper online. It deserves to be read again.

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