Creative Engagement: Just A Little History

This week I entitled my rumination I Keep Calling John Donne, Don Juan. I apologize if this has caused any confusion. This title made complete sense in my head because I can't seem to say this author's name without first stuttering Don Juan. Weird, I know, but this name is seriously a tongue twister for me.

Anyways, I decided to clear up this problem because as Professor Calhoun has remarked on my rumination John Donne and Don Juan cannot possibly be confused with one another. This is because Don Juan is a fictional character who can be compared to Casanova. The plot of his stories are ones in which he seduces women and then takes the pleasure in fighting the men that they are betrothed or married to. John Donne's story is much different. In fact, at the age of 29 he married Anne Moore who bore him twelve children in their sixteen years of marriage. Anne Moore died during the birth of her last child, so John Donne was left to tend and take care of his children. He never remarried to help him do so. As far as I can tell John Donne was not a womanizer like the fabled Don Juan.

Rumination #3: I keep calling John Donne, Don Juan

I admit that after reading Norton’s introduction to John Donne I was intrigued by this rebellious, religious and sexual poet. The introduction makes a note, well many notes, about how revolutionary and fresh this author’s writing was; yet other than that I could have told you almost nothing about why John Donne was important. Thus, I consulted my best friend Google. Every once and a while we all need to accept a minor literary defeat and use our crutch, Google, to help us get started. Here is what I found and have used for my own interpretations of John Donne’s poetry.

John Donne is a metaphysical poet, but what exactly does this mean? My handy dandy dictionary describes a metaphysical poet as someone whose work is characterized by the use of complex and elaborate images or conceits, typically written in an intellectual form of argumentation to express emotional states. As if this wasn’t a little mind twist right here, I decided to find an alternative definition to help my analysis of John Donne’s poetry, which is that metaphysical poetry is characterized by verbal wit and excess, ingenious structure, irregular meter, colloquial language, elaborate imagery, and a drawing together of dissimilar ideas. Now I have to apologize for the mini vocabulary lesson that I took all of 60 seconds to read, but understanding the core of what we are reading really helped me to dissect this collection of poems.

With that being said, the first poem on our checklist for this week, “The Flea”, can be thought of as the most blatant form of metaphysical poetry. Following the definitions that I provided above, “The Flea” is an example of the most insignificant thing being turned into an elaborate symbol of love also known as sex. Can these lines be any more explicit? “Mark but this flea, and mark in this, How little that which thou deniest me is; Me it sucked first, and now sucks thee, And in this our two bloods mingled be” (1263). Let’s be honest, John Donne just created the best pick-up line ever by romanticizing a disgusting insect and its eventual death by smushing. He was able to tweak the symbolism of a flea from a bloodsucker and nuisance into a reason for connection between two people. If this is not an example of metaphysical poetry, I’m not really sure what is?

Besides, maybe another one of his poems entitled, “The Sun Rising”. This poem is more charming than the “The Flea”, although it is not at all more conservative than it. In “The Sun Rising” the lovers are in bed being awoken by the bright sun, who is hyperbolized into an old fool who has nothing better to do than to torment lover’s who wish to keep the dark moment in bed. The playful nature of this play furthermore helps to convey its genre. By the speaker insulting the sun and poking fun at daytime the speaker is referencing the Truths of the Age of Reason. Although, John Donne wrote during the Elizabethan era with such authors as Shakespeare and Ben Johnson before the Age of Enlightenment of the 18^th century, his keen interest in the sciences such as Alchemy and Cosmology mimic undertones of the future century. The last stanza, which states, “She is all states, and all prince I, Nothing else is. Princes do but play us; compared to this, All honor’s mimic, all wealth alchemy. Thou, sun, art half as happy as we, In that the world’s contracted thus; Thine ages asks ease, and since thy duties be To warm the world, that’s done in warming us .Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere; This bed thy center is, these walls thy sphere” (1266). This stanza specifically encompasses these two writing structures, with some overlap. It is a metaphysical poem because of its structure and the way the subject is approached and changed to fit John Donne’s will, but it also possesses a strong scientific tone, in which things can only be proven through experimentation and knowledge.

I realize that I only dissected two of John Donne’s poems this week, so I am leaving this as a topic for class discussion: What other poems that we read from this collection can be clearly categorized as metaphysical?

And random side note, every time I say this character’s name, I cannot help but to mispronounce it as “Don Juan”. Maybe it’s just me?

WILDCARD: Florence + The Machine

The Introduction

Recently, I have become obsessed with Florence + The Machine. My German roommate in Paris actually introduced me to this artist in the fall and it seems she is starting to become pretty well known here in the states as well.

Why Florence + The Machine?

The songs written and performed by this woman are some of my favorites. Depending on whatever kind of mood I’m in I can always listen to this album and enjoy it. In fact, it is one of those albums that I can click on and use as inspiration while writing or background noise for studying. It’s beautiful. In general, I always find it hard to find an entire album that I can truly admit that I love, but this time I can honestly say that I am addicted to her sound.

So I did Some Research

This album has a very strong underlying theme. LOVE. What else would I be talking about here? Throughout the album it is apparent that Florence Welch is pulling from her personal experiences. It sounds as if she is detailing her life’s lovers and breakups. I cannot help but feel like this artist has a broken heart, although she takes a more angry approach to her songs than many of our poets did this week. Additionally, many of the songs actually have a very strong melancholy tone that sound as if the artist’s heart was crushed. And when Florence Welch was asked to interpret some of her songs she told reporters, “A lot of the songs are based on what keeps me up at night, that state between waking and dreaming. I guess the things that keep me up at night aren’t exactly nice things. I’m not naturally an aggressive or angry person, so I think it’s kind of a thrill for me to explore these themes. It’s exciting to push it as far as I can, to see how dark you can get.’’ This is true: The album is not the happiest you could ever listen to, but I like how it expresses emotions that we have all felt at some time or another. It’s a great combination of somberness, calmness, anger, lust and frustration. In comparison to the lyrical poems that we read this week, I really enjoy how broad Florence’s emotional spectrum is. I love reading or listening to something that can take you from one stage to the next in a fluid movement. I am clearly a child of my generation, as can be seen with my difficulty to make a connection, other than to respect, the works that we read this week.

The Album

Lungs by Florence + The Machine

• Dog Days Are Over
• Rabbit Heart
• I’m Not Calling You a Liar
• Howl
• Kiss With A Fist
• Girl With One Eye
• Drumming Song
• Between Two Lungs
• Cosmic Love
• My Boy Builds Coffins
• Hurricane Drunk
• Blinding
• You’ve Got the Love

Here is the music video to Cosmic Love. It is one of my favorite songs and I think works perfectly with this weeks lesson.

Rumination #2: If I were Elizabeth Boyle I Would Have Been Wooed Too

There seems to be a trend when looking at literature, which is that as time progresses, so does the literature of the time. To point out the obvious, writing has to evolve. As we move through this course we can slowly start to see the changes made to certain styles, rhetorics and literary genres. Edmund Spenser is one of those authors that dabbled in poetry and played with the preconceived notions about what sonnets and songs should represent, although he stayed true to their natural form. His sonnet Amoretti and his song Epithalamion hold true to these standards.

First of all, Amoretti was written as a petrarchan sonnet, which means that it follows a pattern of writing, including an octave and a sestet. Sticking to tradition, Edmund Spenser followed the typical sonnet’s form, but his topic was generally not discussed. Amoretti is a poem for his beloved wife Elizabeth Boyle, instead of the sonnet in which we hear the speaker yearn almost pathetically for love. In Edmund’s case he already has his lover’s affection and he is detailing their courtship, their romance and eventually in his song, he expresses their everlasting love. Edmund Spenser took a chance as a writer veering away from the norms of accepted literature at the time. Although the selected works we were assigned were not written about taboo topics, he attempted to do something different with what people knew, which was risky. As an artist taking a chance like that can be suicide to a career, example, Mary Wollenstonecraft, but if you do not offend society or insight revolution within the society, the literature will obviously be more whole-heartedly accepted. Amoretti and Epithalamion, although, different pieces, were beautifully written and have clearly been adored by generations as Norton has so nicely stated, “The greatest threat is the force over which the poem exercises its greatest power: time” (903).

The song Epithalamion that is included in this excerpt purposefully differs from his sonnets, which it is meant to, but it also differs from the traditional wedding songs that were sung before entering the bedchamber. In sonnets it is not uncommon to read a lot of pronouns referring to the speaker, but it is uncommon to hear them in an epithalamion. Through this song Edmund Spenser veers away from the tradition of the wedding song, by making himself, the groom, the speaker. He refers to himself in numerous stanzas in the song transforming another part of the wedding ceremony into a declaration of love for his wife. Thus, he revolutionized his Epithalamion to be even more personal and romantic because he combined it with the traditions of ceremony, but placed himself at the heart of its truths.