Donne

Question 1

Donne’s Anatomy: the word “anatomy,” what is referred to

Answer 1

• Anatomy = systematic analysis of a topic but would have had clear references to Vesalius

Question 2

Donne’s Anatomy: nature, contemporaneous science, corruption

Answer 2

• “Her death hath taught us dearly, that thou art / Corrupt and mortal in thy purest part” (the world). The world is the cosmos—creation.
  o This is written one year after Galileo’s publication of the Sidereus Nuncius—it was published the year the lady died. The purest part of the world we could experience began with the moon—and it’s the moon that was shown to be corrupt by Galileo—a dead earth.

Question 3

Donne’s Anatomy: nature, natural philosophy, the new

Answer 3

• “And new philosophy calls all in doubt, / The element of fire is quite put out; / The sun is lost, and th’earth, and no man’s wit / Can well direct him where to look for it. . . .”

Question 4

Donne’s Anatomy: categorization, constellation

Answer 4

• “And in those constellations then arise / New stars, and old do vanish from our eyes” ; we see new constellations; thus the idea of the constellation becomes a kind of form or way of apprehending that changes based on perspective—the impossibility of categorization.
  o Later, ~l.390: “What artist now dares boast that he can bring / Heaven hither, or constellate any thing, / So as the influence of those stars may be / Imprisoned in an herb, or charm, or tree, / And do by touch, all which those stars could do? / The art is lost / and correspondence too….

Question 5

Donne’s Anatomy: allegory, magical causation, lost power, alle agora

Answer 5

Just after section on constellations: recall Bacon’s idea about the commerce between the mind of man and nature in these lines from Donne, continuing from above: “If this commerce ‘twixt heaven and earth were not / Embarr’d, and all this trafic quite forgot, / She, for whose loss we have lamented thus, Would work more fully and pow’rfully on us.”

Question 6

Donne’s Anatomy: time (plus a work referencing this?)

Answer 6

• Since she has been dead, time has ceased to mean anything.
• Woolf may channel such an idea in Mrs. Dalloway, which is meant to be pondering the death of a woman–time does not yoke anyone to a stable reference point–it is only the clock that fixes them and then only for a moment.

Question 7

Donne’s Anatomy: history, memory, possibilities for a new world after this death

Answer 7

• The twilight memory of the deceased, freed from the carcass of the dead world, creates a new world. The world recreated from a memory of what is gone. This includes the possibility of a second kind of Eden—but now from experience we know it’s best to prevent the serpent by lowering expectations from the get-go. This is literally a new world born of, and from, and into, death—we are entering a phase of death-in-life (and near the end of the poem we discover the only remaining hope is life-in-death).

Question 8

Donne’s Anatomy: past ideas about man as the measure of things

Answer 8

• The height of a man standing on his feet used to take him a good deal of the way toward Heaven; three ideas here:
  o Popular beliefs about Biblical figures being of greater stature, including the existence of giants (going along with Methusalem’s age)
  o The heavens were closer (recent astronomy indicated a far vaster distance to the stars than had been known—if not simply a limitless universe)
  o Heaven was also closer simply by virtue of the proud confidence of man, exemplified by his upright, active posture

Question 9

Donne’s Anatomy: community; also independence, uniqueness, singularity–everyone at the center of his or her own cosmos

Answer 9

• Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone; / All just supply, and all relation: / Prince, subject, father, son, are things forgot, / For every man alone thinks he hath got / To be a phoenix, and that there can be / None of that kind, of which he is, but he.”
• Phoenix significance: become their own sun, but also, their own Christ/savior

Question 10

Donne’s Anatomy: identity

Answer 10

• She has been gone long—but “none offers to tell us who it is that’s gone.”
• Identity, too, is lost when there is no center or supreme vantage point from which our identity may be confirmed.

Question 11

Donne’s Anatomy: gender

Answer 11

• Elizabeth Drury becomes a kind of Eve whose death has brought a second fall.
  o The association is somewhat absurd, which may be something Donne is pointing out—how the turning of Elizabeth into Eve is a kind of scapegoating

Question 12

Donne’s Anatomy: cosmos, microcosms, macrocosms

Answer 12

• “She to whom this world must it self refer, / As suburbs, or the microcosm of her, / She, she is dead; she’s dead”—we now have microcosms of death, i.e. of nothing, i.e. mere signs without a cosmic meaning to which they might refer and thereby give us place. No center. [See comments on allegory]

Question 13

Donne’s Anatomy: morality after the death

Answer 13

• What we are left with: “Some princes have some temperance” “some women have some taciturnity,” etc. etc.

Question 14

Donne’s Anatomy: art in historical context, development of art

Answer 14

• We haven’t made gold of our fathers’ silver (alchemy—one of many references to it in the poem); our art has become cramped too—we seem to crave only our own destruction.

Question 15

Donne’s Anatomy: art–specialization, parts, pieces, analysis, not wholes

Answer 15

• Just as the anatomized body will rot, so that we can’t study all of it but must focus on the most important parts, so must this anatomy end before it starts to stink

Question 16

Donne’s Anatomy: what Biblical reference is made toward the end? Significance?

Answer 16

-Song of Moses in Deuteronomy 32: God tells M and Joshue the people will renege on their covenant after M’s death, so they must teach them this song as a witness—they would forget everything, but not the song. The song is what remains.

Question 17

Donne’s Anatomy: art–poetry, what it does; it’s function now

Answer 17

-“Verse hath a middle nature: heaven keeps souls, / The grave keeps bodies, verse the fame enrolls.”

It performs the role of the sepulcher or epitaph; it holds together a memory and an identity

1. Wordsworth
2. Eliot: he shores up these fragments of waste against his ruin, but the “carkass” Donne refers to has begun to stink.
3. (In its milder or less morbid passages, something in common with Merwin)

Question 18

Donne’s Anatomy: manuscript history

Answer 18

• Anatomy important enough to Donne he allowed it to be published in four different editions: 1611, 1612, 1621, 1625.

Question 19

Donne’s Anatomy: biography?

Answer 19

• This poem offers itself as a kind of turning point, though saying so is too simplistic—for me, it’s a helpful signpost; the younger and the older Donne.

Question 20

Donne’s Anatomy: occasion?

Answer 20

• Written on the early death of Elizabeth Drury (d. 1610), the daughter of Sir Robert Drury, a patron of Donne. Donne told Ben Jonson “that he described the Idea of Woman and not as she was.”

Question 21

Donne’s Anatomy: what is Donne doing with the genre of elegy?

Answer 21

• Around this time it could be called an “elegy,” since in the 16th century the words started to take on its definition as a poem of mourning for an individual. Classical elegy just mean “lament,” and throughout its history it is occasionally just used to define a kind of quiet contemplation connected with feelings of sadness or loss. You might also call it an epitaph.
• Donne has turned it into an “anatomy,” which is broadly a systematic analysis of a topic, but also evokes Vesalius and the anatomizing of bodies in anatomy theaters. The famous image of Vesalius handling the partially flayed corpse of a woman and staring at the viewer–the crowd of people around–it is a morbid form and speaks to the fallen condition of art in the exploded cosmos.