Saturday, March 31, 2007

A Strange Poem For A Feast Day

When I think of Donne, I think of this poem .

I once wrote the lines below (part of a much longer work). They're a slight misreading, because I quite suspect now that Donne meant Mistress in the sense of wife, which is not to say that my reading is utterly irrelevant. The poem linked above is deeply erotic and deeply intellectual in the best sense of the word.

Of all the things that created are, nothing is subtler than love
As if to balance the Love Begotten and ever o’erflowing.
There was sent into the worlds a man named Donne who, before he
Testified to the truth of the Savior and His redemptive love,
Discovered America to be the height of ecstasy.
One did not see him in Jamestown, stooped over by the pains of plague
But nevertheless he planted himself in the artisanal
Womankind of London-town and afterwards smoked some tobacco.
So if e’en the similitude of colonization licence
Sweetens, surely the act itself prefigures some dirty doings.
But Donne was not the first to conflate new land with woman newer.
From the first did Aeneas seek Lavinia’s shores, reached Italy
Took the woman from whose name was Latium, from whose womb were Latins.
Moreo’er, waylaid by the fates near Syrtean sands, the hero saw
How her peerage’s slavish jealousies burned a queen to ashes.
Blame it upon Juno’s ire against Troy’s children for Tyre’s,
But long before Hesiod drank, soil and rock were named female
As men who learned the facts of life and of agriculture conquered
Rather than stoop to foison’s producers—(somewhere is Eden).
So much would stand on fair Tellus but would it remain on Mars?
If you change the gender of the world, do you remake the rules
Which govern its denizens and do new acts of love thus arise
Unbidden from the warm dunite that undergirds the regolith?
Yet somewhere still there is Eden with questions of human nature:
Whether land’s pollution is twinned with pollution of relations?
They resist these questions, those bound to the loins of Earth, and do fear
The answers, considering it but fantasy to speculate.

No comments: