The Relic

This was definitely on my test (the formatting should be different, e.g. there should be stanzas, but blogger is thwarting me):

When my grave is broke up again

Some second guest to entertain,

—For graves have learn'd that woman-head,

To be to more than one a bed—

And he that digs it, spies

A bracelet of bright hair about the bone,

Will he not let us alone,

And think that there a loving couple lies,

Who thought that this device might be some way

To make their souls at the last busy day

Meet at this grave, and make a little stay?

If this fall in a time, or land,
Where mass-devotion doth command,
Then he that digs us up will bring
Us to the bishop or the king,
To make us relics; then
Thou shalt be a Mary Magdalen, and I
A something else thereby;
All women shall adore us, and some men.
And, since at such time miracles are sought,
I would have that age by this paper taught
What miracles we harmless lovers wrought.

First we loved well and faithfully,
Yet knew not what we loved, nor why;
Difference of sex we never knew,
No more than guardian angels do;
Coming and going we
Perchance might kiss, but not between those meals;
Our hands ne'er touch'd the seals,
Which nature, injured by late law, sets free.
These miracles we did; but now alas!
All measure, and all language, I should pass,
Should I tell what a miracle she was.

Reading Donne, whom I had never really read before, was one of the great unexpected pleasures of all the studying I did. The line, "A bracelet of bright hair about the bone" is impossible for me to forget. It reminds me of Old English verse: It is alliterative, for one. But it also makes poetry out of these weird, but very concrete, images. It isn't fantastic, but it's imaginative. It's sort of pedestrian, and very physical, but also almost ghoulish and really beautiful. Donne also wrote these pretty famous lines:

"Our eye-beams twisted, and did thread

Our eyes upon one double string"

John Donne, that is kind of GROSS. Also kind of sexy. It's like, I love my girlfriend so much, I think I'll pop my eyes out. I don't think that last sentence will make much sense to people other than Emily and Katie M. , but trust me, it is very funny.

This is a portrait of Donne he had commissioned a few months before his death, while he was ill:

It is how he expected he would look when he rose from the grave. I'm not sure how exactly he decided what that would look like. I can only hope that when I rise from the grave I will have such fetching head-gear. But I will probably be wearing kale. Donne had this hung on his wall so he could look at it while he was dying and be reminded of the transient nature of life. John Donne was not fucking around.

Only someone so totally unafraid of dying could have written the way that he did about death. The writing about death in Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions (which title I am totally stealing from him) might actually turn you religious-- it just sounds like the truth:

"...all mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God's hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again, for that library where every book shall lie open to one another; as therefore the bell that rings to a sermon, calls not upon the preacher only, but upon the congregation to come; so this bell calls us all: but how much more me, who am brought so near the door by this sickness."

And now you believe in God. You can thank me later.