Here’s the second of the Donne Seminar podcasts from the class I led last semester. In this one, Emily Williams reads “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning.”

I don’t want to comment on any of these readings in particular: the students already know my evaluation of their work, and listeners can form their own judgments. I will say, however, that producing the audio is proving to be quite poignant for me, as it brings back very vivid memories of each student and her or his part in this extraordinarily passionate and insightful class.

I can hear in the original raw audio some of the conversation I had with each student just before she or he began the recitation: my coaching and their nervousness and most of all the energy they were bringing to this moment. It reminds me how much commitment this seminar demonstrated throughout the term, and how at this moment most of the students were thinking more about John Donne than they were about either me or themselves (or, in fact, the grade). Some of the readings are quite breathtaking in their commitment. The audio, particularly the stuff you won’t hear (maybe we’ll save it for The Complete Donne Sessions), recreates the moment very, very vividly for me. If St. Augustine were still alive, he might well bring podcasts into his famous chapter on memory in his Confessions.

I’m also struck by these readings as capstones. We had spent a long time with one author, ranging over many texts, drinking deeply of the heady and disturbing brew served up by William Empson and other critics (but especially Empson), and pushing twice a week to see into the very heart of cognition in time, for Donne asks nothing less of us. The moment of recitation often became an uncanny combination of speaking through Donne and, at the same time, back to him, doing what intimates do when they repeat the words back to the beloved, puzzling, constant companion who uttered them.

Finally, I was intrigued to hear words that Donne himself attributed to his own “masculine persuasive force” coming at times from the lips of women, women who spoke them without a trace of irony. The experience reminded me of both the boundaries between the sexes and the intense commonalities of human experience. It was an experience of both alterity and deep community.

It was a privilege, is what it was, and it’s an honor to share it with you.

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