ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

IRREMEDIABLY DONNE
to call “A Valediction: of Weeping” by the kind of generic title often supplied
in the miscellanies to describe the occasion of lovers separating. When Donne
weeps, he weeps as no other has done, a pun that might seem strained were the
poem or Donne in general less eagerly committed to “conceits,” including the
possibility here that amid the many kinds of mirrorings the poet has encoded
his wife Anne’s maiden name (More) within the body of the poem. It might,
too, be easy to arraign Donne on charges of mere cleverness if the concluding
heptameter, in its cadenced reach, did not season the wit so absolutely:
Let me powre forth
My teares before thy face, whil’st I stay here,
For thy face coines them, and thy stampe they beare,
And by this Mintage they are something worth,
For thus they bee
Pregnant of thee;
Fruits of much griefe they are, emblemes of more,
When a teare falls, that thou falls which it bore,
So thou and I are nothing then, when on a divers shore.
15
(ll.1–9)
Parting and departing, separation and death, division and dissolution, something
then nothing: Donne’s imagination slides relentlessly, and precariously, between
these related realities in all his love poetry but especially in the Valedictions,
where the thread linking the two lovers receives perhaps its finest—in both
senses of that word—spinning in “A Valediction: forbidding Mourning.” 30 And
when Donne is the one who is left, as in “A Nocturnall upon S.Lucies Day,”
grief knows no bottom:
’Tis the yeares midnight, and it is the dayes,
Lucies, who scarce seaven houres herself unmaskes,
The Sunne is spent, and now his flasks
Send forth light squibs, no constant rayes;
The world’s whole sap is sunke:
The generall balme th’hydroptique earth hath drunk,
Whither, as to the beds-feet, life is shrunke,
Dead and enterr’d; yet all these seeme to laugh,
Compar’d with mee, who am their Epitaph.
(ll. 1–9)
Donne does not paint death into some tidy corner. For this carnival of grief, this
doubly darkened festival of midnight mourning—St. Lucy’s Day falls on the
shortest day of the year in the old calendar (December 12th)—Donne pulls out
all the stops. The somber musicality and “spent” imagery of the opening stanza
set the mood for the bleak, witty paradoxes that follow. All attempt, and in some