Prologue for Week 6: Commas, Cancer, and Close Reading

This week, I'm going to challenge you, once again, to make brief, concrete, objective observations about the poetry you are reading. As much as your feelings about a poem matter, there's a real value in deferring the subjective impulse so that you can first see what the poem is on its own merits.

To be clear: my suggestion is that you delay the first-person response. Don't skip it entirely. Let it go at first so you can come back to it with more insight later. (Bonus parenthetical OED Online fact: "delay" and "dilate" share a root, so the Socratic idea of birthing ideas through careful consideration and conversation is very much a part of the delay I'm suggesting.)

Once you understand a poem, how it works with words, what it's trying to do, what it does, and so on, you can have a richer personal interaction with it. Isn't it like that with your best friends? When we react to new people, expecting them to fit a prefabricated ideal, they fail us. When we seek to understand others as others--as people whose ideas and expectations differ from ours--we often find unlooked for truth and beauty.

I think there's a lot of truth and beauty in the video I'm embedding here, where a reader seeks to understand, both technically and personally, one of Donne's most famous poems. It's the first (almost) 11 minutes of an HBO movie I knew nothing about until last semester. I won't over-explain. Get comfortable and watch for yourself. Stick with it, although it seems to have nothing to do with close reading Donne's poetry for the first few minutes.

Here, by the way, is an image of the lines in question from the first printing, in 1633. For bibliographic info and digitized images of the edition, click here.

Now consider watching this part. Practically speaking, it's just a recital of Donne's "Death, be not proud" sonnet. Artistically, it is intense--not graphic, but poetically disturbing.

Building on what you've just watched, I want to give you the opportunity to do some close reading and textual criticism of your own, paying attention not only to how words work in the textbook's printing of a Donne poem, but also paying attention to how meaning may have changed as the poem traveled through time and space from Donne to the printer to the Norton. Sometimes change is an editorial choice, as in the case of the comma depicted above (now a semicolon in the Norton). Sometimes change is simply mechanical: we don't use the long "s" anymore, so even if we follow original punctuation, the line "It suck'd me first, and now sucks thee," ("The Flea," line 3) loses, well, look for yourself to see what I'm getting at:

Not all differences between your Norton and seventeenth-century books of poetry can compete with the examples above, raising interesting questions about death or sex. But all variations raise questions--about authorial intent, cultural censorship, printing house practices, and so on. It will be your job, later in the week, to seek out and attempt to interpret textual variations.

Reading Assignment:

I'm reducing the assignment with the expectation that you will read more carefully and closely. I've selected less than a third of the Donne poems reprinted in your anthology. The short Norton sections on books and publishing in Renaissance England should give you some useful vocabulary for your comments. So, the assigned reading for this week, all of which is fair game on the final, is: 

1. John Donne
• Norton Intro, "The Flea"(and please be sure to read the first footnote), "The Good-Morrow,""The Sun Rising" (and look up "Aubade" in the Appendix), "Air and Angels," "Break of Day," "Love's Alchemy,""The Bait," "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning," "Elegy 19. To His Mistress Going to Bed" (and look up "Elegy" in the Appendix), and Holy Sonnets 1, 5, 10, and 14. 
2. Other
•  "Writers, Printers, and Patrons" (498-500)
• "Publishing History, Censorship" (A59-62)
• Read the italicized subheading and entries for "Bookseller," "Censorship," "Copy Text," "Manuscript," "Printing," "Publisher," and "Textual Criticism"

This Week's Tri-Partite Wildcard

Many of you have commented in your Classwork Assessments about how much you're enjoying discussion in the comments sections of Ruminations. A number of you have also noticed how good Disqus is at facilitating interaction. Let's keep the ball rolling with this week's Wildcard Assignment. In addition to regular classwork expectations (1 Tumblr post, 2 comments on Ruminations), you can get credit for the Wildcard this week if you:

1. Follow 2 classmates on Disqus. Did you know you can follow your classmates? Have you begun to notice someone whose comments always make you think? Follow her or him. When s/he posts a comment, you'll see it in your Dashboard on Disqus, and you can consider joining the conversation.
2. Comment on at least 1 of the Donne poems posted on The Bloffice (my Tumblr). In each case, you'll find an old version of the poem which you can compare with your own version in the Norton. These poem posts, which will include specific instructions, will be added to The Bloffice on Sunday night so as not to prematurely crowd out the current Ruminations. Feel free to comment on as many as you like, of course, but value quality over quantity.
3. Answer any questions asked of you (by classmates and by me) throughout the week. Nested or threaded comments in Disqus allow mini-conversations within the comments section. These nested comments tend to add depth to the discussion.