7 - Reading and rereading Donne’s poetry

Summary

Reporter to Bob Dylan: ''What are your songs about?'' Dylan: ''Some of my songs are about four minutes, some are about five, and some, believe it or not, are about 11 or 12.'' ''Pedantique wretch,'' he might have called the reporter had he been channeling Donne, ''for Godsake hold your tongue.'' For there is a similar defiance, a snarkiness, a catch-me-if-you-can in many Donne utterances, both in those that come down on the side of love, of desire made holy, of making the lovers' ''little roome, an every where,'' and in those that flippantly dismiss such possibilities. He may feel himself ''two fooles . . . / For loving, and for saying so / In whining poetry,'' but he persists and dares the reader to determine just what ''draw[ing his] paines / through Rimes vexation'' is all ''about.'' (''Vexation'' is an interesting word for both writer and reader). ''The triple Foole'' from which these lines come is hardly a complex poem, but its playful self-consciousness strikes a note that one will hear in a number of Donne poems, both the serious and the silly. Can grief be real and its expression truthful if ''he tames it, that fetters it in verse?''