« portrait of the inner city | Main | the power of consensus »
June 5, 2007
John Donne, The Ecstacy
(In Portsmouth, New Hampshire) In a review by John Carey, I came upon a strange and wonderful John Donne poem, "The Ecstacy." Here it is in the left column with my literal paraphrase to the right. (Literal interpretation seems to me a necessary first step in understanding metaphysical poetry, or any dense verse.)
THE ECSTACY |
|
WHERE, like a pillow on a bed, |
1. Two people (the narrator and a woman; see 4) who are fond of one another sit on a flowery bank. |
Our hands were firmly cemented |
2. They hold hands and look into one another's eyes. |
So to engraft our hands, as yet |
3. They unite by holding hands and visualizing the same object (possibly the propagation of the violet mentioned below: 10) |
As, 'twixt two equal armies, Fate |
4. Their souls meet in between their bodies and ... |
And whilst our souls negotiate there, |
5. negotiate (possibly about whether to have sex; see 13) while they lie still and silent for the whole day. |
If any, so by love refined, |
6. If a third person who fully understood love stood nearby, ... |
He--though he knew not which soul spake, |
7. he could benefit morally from what they say in one voice, which is: |
This ecstasy doth unperplex |
8. "This state of fusion shows us that we did not love sex or bodily motion, ... |
But as all several souls contain |
9. but the union of two souls that were never self-sufficent. |
A single violet transplant, |
10. If you replant a single flower (perhaps the violet in 1), it can grow and multiply. |
When love with one another so |
11. [Likewise,] when two souls are in love, they create one better soul. |
We then, who are this new soul, know, |
12. We are this new soul, composed of our own original souls as atoms. |
But, O alas! so long, so far, |
13. But why do we shun our bodies? |
We owe them thanks, because they thus |
14. It was through our bodily sensations that we learned to love; bodies are not superfluous but are mixed with souls into an alloy. |
On man heaven's influence works not so, |
15. Just as heaven (i.e., stars or angels) must influence us through the physical medium of air, so a soul communicates with a soul by means of the body. |
As our blood labours to beget |
16. We struggle bodily to create images that are like souls (referring either to the common thought mentioned in 3 or to conceiving a child). |
So must pure lovers' souls descend |
17. Thus we must descend from thought to our senses ... |
To our bodies turn we then, that so |
18. and appreciate one another's bodies." |
And if some lover, such as we, |
19. And if the third person stayed to watch us have sex, he would still think that we were spiritually united. |
The movement of the poem is from static bodies upward to thoughts and then back into animated bodies. At the beginning, "we" are two separate motionless physical objects (we "sat"; we "lay"). In the middle verses, "we" are one disembodied consciousness, addressing a passive third party and deciding whether to reenter our bodies. At the end, body and soul are one.
I read the poem as an argument by a male narrator to a female lover that they should have sex, because it will be like "ecstasy" (a religious "state of rapture that stupefies the body while the soul contemplates divine things"). In that case, the claim that both souls speak as one in the middle of the poem is more of a hope or a lure than a fact. There is some irony in the poem--a gap between what the narrator means and what he says, and perhaps also between how he sees himself and how we are supposed to see him. But the irony hardly cancels the sensuality of this poem that begins with pregnant swelling banks and ends with souls gone to bodies in plain view of an approving observer.
June 5, 2007 6:56 AM | category: fine arts | Comments