Ursula Howells

            I woke up at 2:30 on Monday and decided to get up to properly get ready for bed and then to try to go back to sleep until 5:00. 

            I did the dishes and slightly sliced my index finger while washing a knife. As long as I kept running it under water it kept bleeding and so I stepped and just let the blood dry over the wound.

            I washed my face, flossed, water flossed and brushed my teeth, then I took my clothes off and went to bed. 

            But I couldn’t sleep and so I got up to write my journal entry for the day before. I went to bed again a little after 4:00. I still couldn’t conk out but I tried to relax for a while before starting the day at 5:00. 

            I memorized the first two verses of “A la pêche des coeurs" (Fishing for Hearts) by Boris Vian. 

            I started working out the chords for “Sparadrap” by Serge Gainsbourg. 

            At around 12:40 I logged on for my Introduction to British Literature lecture. I usually hand write my notes because I’m such a slow typist and then it takes me hours to transcribe them. But this time I tried an experiment and typed my notes while watching, pausing and rolling back the video. It took me an hour more than my normal note taking, but it’ll be interesting to see if I saved time on transcription since I used a lot of shorthand such as typing “op” for opportunity and didn’t stop to spell correct anything. 

            Professor Teramura had offered an optional survey last week and had asked for students to share their covid coping techniques. Some have been watching the Star Wars and Handmaids Tale TV shows. Someone got a new cat and he shared the picture. Someone said they were using the Pomodoro technique in which one works in 25 minute intervals with five minute breaks and then after four pomodoros take a 15-30 minute break and then start over. The professor said he was going to try it. 

            He said he was going to start sending out reminders for assignments on weekly basis. 

            He is offering a week extension on our second short response essay but we must fill out a form to take it. 

            The lecture is on how the poetry of John Donne George Herbert Aemilia Lanyer provide opportunity for thinking in words and on the relationship between poetic form and content. At the bottom of the page was a special announcement. 

            When Spenser died The Fairy Queen was incomplete but he died as a major poet and was buried next to Chaucer in the part of Westminster Abbey that is now known as Poets Corner. This official record makes sense as dedication to Queen Elizabeth and as national vision featuring heroes of England’s mythical past such as Arthur and its divine representative St George. It was a deep response to religious conventions of the day with Elizabeth painted as a champion of Protestantism against the pope’s misguided side. The Fairy Queen is about English Protestantism against Catholicism in stories like the one about Red Cross and Una meeting a sage who recites ave Maria establishing that he’s Catholic but he turns out to be a wicked magician. He and evil Duessa represent the catholic threats to English Christianity and could also be seen as a national polemic. 

            Unlike Spenser who was exclusively a poet, John Donne wrote erotic lyrics, prose paradoxes, funereal elegies, autobiographical vignettes, religious writing, a polemic treatise on suicide, verse epistles, holy sonnets and sermons. He has one of the richest treasure troves of writing of early modern authors, which is a testament to the swerves of his life. 

            Donne was complex about his allegiances. He was raised Catholic and was related to Thomas More. His Jesuit uncles each had half a tooth of skull of More. Liz unofficially tolerated Catholics, following the advice of Bacon, “Don’t make windows into men’s souls.” It was possible to survive as a Catholic but it had to be a secret. There were priest holes in Catholic homes for hiding. 

            Donne started at Oxford at 12. Students over 16 had to subscribe to the queen’s religious supremacy so Dunne didn’t take a degree but enrolled in the law school. His brother was jailed for harbouring a Catholic priest who was executed and his brother died in prison of the plague. 

            Donne fought for England against Catholic Spain and was at the battle of Cadiz. He did change faith eventually became an Anglican priest but the process is complex and his poetry shows this. 

            He wrote “Satire 3” when fighting Spain. It’s a challenging poem linguistically. The main point about seeking true religion reminds one of Fairy Queen. Una is faithful and Liz represents religious truth but Donne was different. He does not take one side. It’s tricky but how to worship is a genuine challenge because all faiths are plausible. Seeking true religion is also an allegory like in Fairy Queen but he frames it as the quest for the ideal woman. He makes it erotic in different ways. Mirreus is a catholic seeking the true church. He saw her in Rome a thousand years ago and he loves her rags. Antiquity is ragged compared to Protestantism. There is no reason to choose. Crants prefers austerity of Calvinism because pageantry is too seductive. Peasant women are more wholesome. Graius stays home because some preach laws like fashions that make one think she’s the only perfect one. Better to accept the wives the guardians offer. He is mocking Anglican theology as just doing stuff because dads did like young orphans or wards commanded to marry certain women and if not pay a fine. But picking religion is like finding a wife and needs to be an individual choice. 

            Anglican preachers depicted as bauds or pimps whose success depends on people marrying into the church. Seeking religion is hard. Phrygias abhors all because if some women are whores then marry none. Again marriage is compared to religion and just because it’s sexy don’t trust it. Phrygius is jaded so don’t follow religion. He’s intellectually lazy and since he can’t find religion he doesn’t bother. Graccus loves all as women are diverse and all one kind and so is religion. Like in More’s Utopia religious diversity is good because it pleases god to be worshiped in different was. This position is also bad and blind. Religion is supposed to illuminate and so trying all religions is a blindness because of too much light and promiscuous. “Light” also means insubstantial. All figures in the poem have wrong reasons for choosing religion. Donne says be busy to seek her. Seeking is not bad but adoring or scorning may all be bad. Doubt wisely. To inquire is not to stray, to sleep, or run unless one does it wrong. Thinking is hard. The truth stands on a hill so strive to do the hard work. If you pick wrong you are out. There are lots of views and possible mistakes. The poem is about the stakes of thinking. 

            In four allusive lines he compresses his ideas: “Thrice colder than salamanders” because they were thought cold blooded. “Divine children in the oven” from the Book of Daniel which tells that god protected them from fire. “Fires of Spain” refers to Spain’s hot climate but also fires of the inquisition. “Whose countries limbecks to our bodies be.” Limbecks are from alchemy a vessel for boiling liquid and collecting the evaporation. The speaker asks you to look at what you do. You travel and take risks. If you bear flames you must be cold. He draws on zoology, alchemy and geography. The density of the references needs mental agility. Spenser’s Fairy Queen is difficult on purpose. Donne is more literal. We need to grapple with tough problems. This poem is a mental gym. Satire 3 has a deliberate poetic strategy. Seeking religion and understanding his poem requires intelligence. But the same is true of his poetry broadly. 

            Love poetry of the 16th century sonnet was emotionally intense and complex but Donne makes it more intellectually challenging. “Air and Angels” puts love in abstract. The act of loving is depersonalized. The prophetic like bodiless vision of angels shapeless transcending the material. Even when the speaker encounters a person they are dematerialized. He falls for the glorious nothing of spiritual beauty but since the soul has flesh what is immaterial? Even the soul needs a body. Love is a child of the soul and love needs matter. The speaker gives emotions permission to love her body. Physical beauty can be the object of love. He is being cheeky. There is irony as if he’s being forced to conclude that love is in the body. Ships need to be weighed down. Love is like a ship of abstraction. The weight of material is supposed to make love steady but too much cargo will make it sink. You are too beautiful. There is too much to love. Both options don’t work. His epiphany then is the angel. Angels are pure essence and inhabit bodies of air. So angel “thy love may be my love’s sphere.” One can’t love nothing so love inhabits the world through your love. Maybe so but women’s love is pure but they do not have the same problems because women are not overwhelmed by men’s beauty. 

            Sonneteers too grappled with this but he analyzed it. There is a relationship between content and form. The poem has 28 lines. In each stanza there are 14 lines like in a sonnet. But it doesn’t conform to sonnet tradition. The rhyme is first in abba like a Petrarchan sonnet but then cdcd like a Shakespearean sonnet with a final two rhyming like a couplet. He doesn’t play by the rules. The form of the poem is a body in a poem about the body. So if it takes the form of two pseudo sonnets, revising the body revises the relation between traditions of erotic poetry to the body which is what the poem is about. Reading Donne is a poetic challenge but the effort is matched by taking pleasure in his audacity. 

            In his poem “Sun Rising” he begins unusually by insulting the sun to set the dramatic context. It seems to be morning and the scene seems to feature two lovers with the sun forcing time upon them. The sun controls the seasons but why should love’s seasons be commanded by the sun. The sun’s seasons are for school and work. Love has no seasons. Love is separate from time and has no measure. The second stanza starts almost respectfully but then he says I could eclipse by closing my eyes. But if he did he would briefly lose her. The poem is geocentric with the Earth at the centre and sun going around. He sends the sun on an errand to check for Indias. The joke is that the riches are here in his bed. She is all states. Everything of power is fake compared to life. Princes are acting but we are real and they imitate us. The world flips. He turns to detente. The sun doesn’t need to travel and should warm us instead. This bed is the centre. The universe is redefined. The poem redefines power and the universe dramatically. “Stanza” means room. Donne’s focus is on the bedroom as the world. He redefines the world, spaces and relationships in global terms. 

            In “The Good Morrow” he rejects the global world for the space of love. “Let us possess one world”. Experience of the world is a great urge but one’s lover is just as satisfying. He discusses two geographies. Earth and the celestial map. But let us possess one. The Renaissance idea of the body as world in microcosm. There are two worlds and two bodies. So the act of discovery involves looking in the eyes and exploring the hearts of lovers. The two hemispheres of a better world of love. 

            Donne was only published after dead but was reproduced widely as a poet because his work was copied in manuscripts. “Sun Rising” alone had forty copies. People found his work shocking and a new appeal was struck. 

            Thomas Carew wrote his elegy. The garden of English poetry had been derivative, lazy, repetitious, weed infested. Donne was a gardener planting something original and fresh. He offered a chance to rethink. Donne is seen as metaphysical but they didn’t say that then because it was a later term. He had metaphorical ingenuity, argumentative intelligence and style obscurity. 

            A Conceit is an elaborate metaphor comparing apparently dissimilar objects or emotions often with shock or surprise. A valedictory of mourning. An attempt to console beloved. A valedictory address of farewell. The rhetorical point of the poem forbids mourning because separation is not cause for sorrow. The situation shows how the speaker’s work cut out solutions in an attempt to redefine love. He starts again with surprise because death is the first image with the death bed. The moment life leaves it is subtle and one can’t tell if the person is dead. Quiet humour. How we should part rejects flood. Rather part as a slow melt. Our love is so deep it would be sharing a divine secret. Normally lovers are sensual but we are of mind. More ethereal. We seem to be two souls but we share one and when separated it stretches out like beaten gold. Lovers are goldsmiths. 

            There is the abab interlacing of two rhyme sounds but when the speaker rejects the breach the words are enjambment running over the sense and grammatical structure from one verse line to next without punctuated pause, de-emphasizing the line ending. Minimizing the break the speaker rejects that there is a breach. They are connected just as lines of metre requires that a word expansion be pronounced with emphasis on the last syllable. The word itself demonstrates expansion that works through the beat of the syllables. If they be two as stiff legs of a compass drawing circles. Two compasses are not sexy. But when the other is connected it grows erect. He began by saying that love is beyond the body but compasses bring us back to the physical stability of the pair. Your firmness makes me just full circle. Final word is “begun” and it starts with death. He links full circle with begin. 

            He converted to Anglican probably for professional reasons. He’d married Ann More so Donne while imprisoned pleads in a letter, “Don’t destroy me.” George More cut off his daughter. “John Donne / Ann Donne / Undone.” He found employment publishing protestant theological works and became a priest of importance. 

            He wrote the Holy Sonnets in 1609 following Ann Locke’s precedent form of sonnet love poetry. Donne’s divine love poetry was extraordinarily varied and also demanding. Sonnet 5 starts with the microcosm of the human body as the world with a soul. The problem of sin but parts in endless night with the speaker as earth and god as the sun. Sin eclipses god imagined as world maker like new discoveries of the Renaissance in science and geography. “Drowned no more.” Warring imagery of poetry concluding in fire. Lust needs to be replaced by fire. The poem addresses the four elements of air, earth, water and fire. The body is composed by god. But this sonnet is disjointed because the break should be at line nine when water to fire Normally the volta is after line eight. The rhyme scheme is abba, half Petrachan and half Shakespearean. There is a split between conventions emphasizing the turn as turn in literary history. The allusive nature of the poem shows aspects of biblical creation and then flood and then burning or washing as in baptism like Christ. The sequence alludes to all these and covers all biblical history with the rationale for the volta to be the turn from the Hebrew Bible to the New Testament and encompassing all time. 

            Donne didn’t publish but others like Aemilia Lanyer got into it. She descended from Jewish-Italian immigrants who came in the early 16th Century. Her family was not aristocratic but she grew up in the home of the Countess of Kent. She spent her life in dialogue with English nobility. The title of her book translated as “Hail God King of the Jews” as was written on the cross. In the centre of the book is a long poem describing the passion of Jesus. How the volume is constructed has that poem surrounded by smaller pieces. It is dedicatory and foregrounds female readers as aristocratic and virtuous women. The book is an intervention declaring that women are not to blame. Men forget that they born of woman. All men need women but reject them like vipers. Misogynistic men are compared to Christ killers. In her reading of the Bible women are central to Jesus’ birth, life and resurrection. Born of woman Christ’s sinlessness is associated with a woman’s body untainted by men. God entrusts the miracle to a woman. She reinterprets Donne’s use of poetry as an intimate space. Her poem embodies the payoff. 

            She tackles the apple and Eve. Gawain evokes Eve as a deceiver. Man’s persistent ruin is to discover ways to destroy the world. They made woman cause of languishment. He says somehow each woman is responsible for passing on original sin. Lanyer turns this on its head and interrupts the narrative when Pontius Pilate’s wife says wife says she had a dream says Jesus is truth. This alternative history could have saved us. Eve was an easy victim for the serpent. Adam is not blameless. He was supposed to be strong. Blaming Eve is inconsistent. Nothing says she deceived him. He just makes the same choice. If Adam was lord of the world why was he not more responsible. One apple. In the Bible god says don’t eat the fruit and then he created Eve. God says this to Adam before Eve was made. Men are the only ones who crucified Jesus. Men’s tyranny is linked to the punishment of Christ. This tyranny is also on women and the crucifixion is associated with misogyny. She close reads the Bible for a social revolution. 

            “The Description of Cooke-Ham” became the first of a major genre known as the Country House Poem. This is where she did her religious poem. It is the site of her inspiration from muses. She is addressing the place and Countess Margaret Clifford Cumberland, who invited her to stay. The poet invites her to remember when nature welcomed her and the scene of joy when nature beautified itself for the countess. The plants, sun and water all want to touch her. Cooke-Ham becomes increasingly magical and anticipates the countess’s desires. Human and nature are blurred. The critical oak tree spreads its arms to invite her. It is oak but also like cedar and palm. It is a space for devotion and she reimagines Clifford as the 13th apostle or another Moses or David. But nature is also text as the Bible merges with the tree. Nat and human are in perfect accord. But Clifford left and nature left. This is echoed on the play on “leaves” and “leaves” and shedding in sadness. The oak is saying goodbye. Lanyer stole the kiss the countess gave the oak. The oak is the emotional heart of the poem. The oak is where she can kiss her patron. She and the oak are rivals. The oak is the site of reading the leaves of Lanyer’s book which was only possible to write there. 

            Cooke-Ham idealized women in community without men but Woolf in “A Room of One’s Own” writes of women’s restrictions. Shakespeare’s sister would have been denied the right to write. Women need time and space that men have. Here was space where writing could happen Writers denied voice need freedom and space. 

            George Herbert was the youngest of poets of this era. He was like Donne but his career was different. Donne had a powerful position while Herbert was a small town minister. He also didn’t publish but wanted it and asked for it on his death bed. “The Temple” from his book “Sacred Poems and Spontaneous Ejaculations.” The word “ejaculations” had the same meanings as now. Temple is an important word for the book. His architectural book building cares about the materiality of the words on the page. The First church porch where the congregation passes to get to the temple. The poem takes space metapoetry further as the entryway physically embodies on the page the altar. Illustrations were later added to complement that Temple as a metaphor for the human journey into the self. But it was not about the physical altar but the metaphysical human heart. 

            “Easter Wings” looks like wings The poem is technically virtuosic in the way lines change from pentameter to tetrameter to trimeter to dimeter to monometer. They form a perfect representation of the content of man’s culpability for sin,. It drains out from abundance and metaphorizes sin. In the first stanza wealth and abundance are drained until the speaker is poor. In the second body becomes thin. Man is most poor and most thin at the poorest or thinnest lines. As confidence builds the lines get richer and longer. “With thee” is also simple. Easter is the annual celebration of the resurrection of Jesus. The poem falls and rises as the speaker falls and rises. The poem requires the first half for the shape of the wings. The affliction of moments of sickness make ascent better. 

            The felix culpa, the fortunate fall, the idea that Adam’s sin was fortunate because it brought about redemption. The decrease and increase becomes more valuable. Wings are the symbol of flight and the shape of the journey. 

            Compare “The Collar” and “The Love”. Three poems draw on the playful relationship between form and content as a way of thinking of his theological message.

            I had almost finished editing my lecture notes when it was time for dinner, so I guess it was a little quicker than long hand. I think last week I had to finish them on Tuesday. 

            I had three little potatoes, a slice of ham and gravy while watching Interpol Calling. In this story Duval arrives at a hotel in the Himalayas to bring a businessman named Pierce Clyde back to the States because of a fraud investigation. But when Duval gets there he finds that Clyde is climbing the nearby mountain although the climbing season is over and the mountain is more dangerous now. When Duval sneaks into Clyde’s room to do a search he opens a suitcase and triggers a bomb. He has just enough time to toss it into a closet and close the door before it explodes. It was rigged from a Japanese grenade that had been stolen from the owner of the hotel Colonel Peters who had kept it as a souvenir from the war. Clyde is on the mountain with a novice climber named Baratopi, who had only just arrived. Baratopi’s sister is also a guest and she reveals that their father had recently committed suicide after Clyde caused his business to go bankrupt. Baratopi has come there to kill Clyde. After Clyde and Baratopi make it to the top and begin their descent, Baratopi cuts Clyde’s line and leaves him dangling. Baratopi shouting sets off avalanche and it is Clyde who saves Baratopi’s life. When they get back to the hotel Clyde refuses to implicate Baratopi although Duval saw the whole thing through the telescope. Clyde tells Duval he knows nothing of the fraudulent deal. It is revealed however that it was Clyde’s secretary Cloustan that had done the shady deal. Cloustan pulls a gun and demands the keys to the plane. Clyde’s alcoholic wife Miki says she’ll go with him but when she gets close she throws her drink in Cloustan’s face allowing Duval to subdue him. 

           Miki was played by Ursula Howells, who was the daughter of composer Herbert Howells. She co-starred in “Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny and Girly”, she played Francis Forsyte in The Forsyte Saga. She financed the recording of her father’s compositions after he died.