“Twicknam Garden” both celebrates and subverts the Renaissance garden as a place of refuge from city life, a place that recalls the harmonious union of art and nature that was lost when Adam and Eve were expelled from Paradise, the original garden. As you’ll hear, there are some unpleasant moments of self-aggrandisement and bitterness in the poem, and you’ll hear my commentary trying to tack between the Scylla of ignoring the unpleasantness and the Charybdis of discounting the poem because of it. That’s the kind of tricky sailing Donne often demands from his critics, especially because the emotions in the poem seem so intimately related and are so vividly expressed.

A P.S. to the “Valediction: of my Name in the Window” of a few ADADs back: It now seems to me that a key distinction is between the daylight hours, when the window can be seen through, and the nighttime hours, when the interior lighting makes of it a kind of mirror, and a mirror that displays the poet’s own name. If that bedchamber ever hosts another lover, the name in the window will be an accusing trace of the earlier love that is now betrayed, a trace that will have been written upon the reflection of everything transpiring in the room.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (4.9MB)