Donne v. God

"I am a little world" John Donne tells us in one of his sonnets, and by that point in the Norton Anthology he's made a convincing case for just that. In his poems, Donne uses his grasp of the English language to bend the very universe to his will.

In "The Flea," for example, Donne uses his quick wit for the purposes of convincing his chaste lover to have sex with him. (When you get right down to it, a lot of these poems are just Donne using gorgeous prose to tell girls to get naked. "Full nakedness! All joys are due to thee" sounds like something an eloquent seventeen year old might proclaim on prom night.) His argument is that, if their "two bloods mingled be" inside a flea, then why not inside their bed? Here, Donne is using metaphor (or, as the Norton Anthology puts it, "conceit") to get this woman to do what he wants. It's a recurring theme in these poems: Donne (and, occasionally, his lover) are their own solar systems, capable of absolutely anything.

In "The Sun Rising," he uses language to put himself in a position of power over the sun. The sun is a "busy old fool," the sun is a "saucy pedantic wretch," and the sun should just leave Donne and his lover alone, because in his bed (and subsequently, in Donne's charmingly solipsistic worldview, the universe) they are all of the kings and continents of the universe. Once again, Donne uses language to bend the world to his will, except this time he does it literally: "This bed, thy center is" Donne tells the sun. He literally makes the sun revolve around him!

The Norton Anthology notes that in Expostulation 19, Donne imagines God as "a conceit-maker like himself." Which one would have to think would be the height of sacrilegiousness in 17th century England: he's comparing himself to God! Yet Donne somehow never comes off as less than humble; in "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning," he shows that he has an understanding of mortality. He's just trying to live life as fully as he can, to learn as much as possible (these poems are littered with references to science, law, and classical texts). No, the only thing Donne perceives as sacrilegious is not having sex with him. In "The Flea," he tells his lover that murdering the flea that mingled their bloods would be "sacrilege"--in that it would kill the animal, their respective bloods, and the product of that blood-mingling. Even the tiniest things and moments have endless significance to Donne; it's why he can weave them all so skillfully in to his all-encompassing universe.

The Pen, For Good and Evil

There's a real thrill in reading a line like "Not marble, nor the gilded monuments/Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme" (1066): Shakespeare, writing four hundred years ago, was right. Through four centuries of war and disease and genocide and destruction, Shakespeare's sonnets have lived on unaltered, along with the sweet memory of his cherished friend. In the sonnets provided in the Norton Anthology, Shakespeare dedicates a lot of space to his "ingrafting," his ability to, as the Norton Anthology puts it, "renew by grafting, implant beauty again by [his] verse." (1063) Shakespeare, here, is operating just like this century's most popular poets (i.e. rappers): he's bragging about his artistic abilities within the context of his art. Except the gorgeous prose that surrounds these "brags"--and the fact that he was right about his art's longevity--turns these little interjections into something else entirely.*

Because in the sonnets provided, it would seem that everything, to Shakespeare, invokes art or the act of creation. He thematically links childbirth and the act of writing in those first few sonnets. His foolhardy, beautiful friend seems entirely averse to the idea of having a child, which in Shakespeare's eyes is tantamount to giving into Time: how will one's legacy live on otherwise? And so Shakespeare takes it upon himself to keep his beloved alive through his prose. "So long as men can breathe or eyes can see," he says, "So long lives this [poem], and gives live to thee."

But Time itself is also a creator, in Shakespeare's eyes. In sonnet 19, Shakespeare pleads with Time: "O carve not with thy hours my love's fair brow/Nor draw no lines there with thine antique pen" (1064). Notice his choice of instrument: Time and Shakespeare are wielding the same tools here--although for entirely different ends. (Shakespeare is trying to preserve his friend in all of his glory; unfeeling Time is trying to kill him.) Yet once again, the sonnet's last two lines invoke a triumphant defiance of Time's ravages: "Yet do thy worst, old Time: despite thy wrong/My love shall in my verse ever live young."

So for all his boasting, does Shakespeare keep his beloved friend alive through his prose? Are Shakespeare's words, four hundred years after the fact, convincingly recreating the memory of this man long since physically lost to Time? It would seem so. Shakespeare loves this man, but he does not idealize him. Take, for example, sonnet 35, a gorgeous treatise on human imperfection. Roses and silver fountains, the moon and the sun: nothing is perfect, Shakespeare is saying, and his subject's base "imperfection" is in fact what renders him so life-like in the mind of the reader.

*Here's my own interjection that I couldn't really fit into the text above: that a) every freestyle rapper I've even seen has spent at least 30% of their performance talking about how good they are at freestyle rapping, that b) I thought this might have been a recent trend and that c) no, of course not, nothing is new under the sun, not only was Shakespeare doing this four hundred years ago but, as the always resourceful Norton Anthology footnotes point out, "The boast of immortality for one's verse was a convention going back to the Greek and Roman classics."

"Romance is Boring" by Los Campesinos

The lyrics on Los Campesinos' third album, when read together and without the band's frenzied instrumentation, would seem to describe one (young, confused) man's tortured relationship with love. "Romance is boring!" he declare's on the album's title track, before spending the next half hour filling his listeners in on every little detail of his carwreck of a lovelife. The album's fifteen tracks describe no literal "concept" or narrative arc, but are, rather, unified by the sorts of things that the sonnets we've read have been linked by: point-of-view, a pervading sense of romantic hopelessness, etc.

(His self-deluded claim that "romance is boring" happens to echo Sir Thomas Wyatt the Edler's "Farewell, Love": "Farewell, love, and all thy laws forever/Thy baited hooks shall tangle me no more." Of course, neither Wyatt nor Campesino are actually done with love--but both desperately wish they could be. But, then, without love, what would they write about?)

The album has a couple of recurring motifs. Multiple songs reference a TV news program that counts down Gareth's worst breakups of all time, underscoring that feeling that doomed relationships are this guy's entire world: he can't even turn on the TV without being reminded of how bad he is at the whole boy-girl thing. Elsewhere he laments his and his partners' lacking physical appearances; excoriates those who (like him) put intellect and irony over visceral, truly felt emotion ("I think we need more post-coital, and less post-rock") and describes scene after vomit-encrusted scene of youthful, romantic hysteria.

I've written about Los Campesinos for Prefix Magazine, if any of you guys want to check it out.