Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 03/01/10

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Monday, March 1, 2010

Poem of the Day: John Donne

From Holy Sonnets

14
Batter my heart, three-personed God; for You
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o'erthrow me,'and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurped town, to'another due,
Labor to'admit You, but O, to no end;
Reason, Your viceroy'in me, me should defend,
But is captived, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly'I love You,'and would be lovéd fain,
But am betrothed unto Your enemy.
Divorce me,'untie or break that knot again;
Take me to You, imprison me, for I,
Except You'enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except You ravish me.

--John Donne

When I posted yesterday's poem, it put me in mind of this one. Not just because of the powerfully emotional religious content (it is as much a "terrible sonnet" as Hopkins's is a "Holy Sonnet"), but because Donne's experiments with verse anticipate those of Hopkins by 250 years or so. The marks ['] that indicate the linkage of one vowel sound to another, to keep the pentameter line, for example:

Yet dear | ly'I love | You,'and would | be lov | éd fain

And the harshness of the diction:

As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend

These are verbal tactics that shocked the poets of the eighteenth century, and which we don't see again until Blake and, later, Browning. Yet Donne is as much a master of innovation as Hopkins, and perhaps as much an inimitable poet. Of course, what makes this uniquely Donne is the mingling of sexual violence -- of rape, in a word -- with religious imagery. Hopkins flirted with such things but, perhaps because of his own sexual insecurity, never used them with such raw power as Donne.