"The Calligrapher"

[fiefoe]

I've always harbored a soft spot for John Donne, so Edward Docx doesn't have a hard sell here. No spoilers, but "Woman's Constancy" is involved in the climax scene.

• rigorously intellectual and yet artfully erotic; full of swagger but the speaker still the supplicant; simultaneously contemptuous and craven; relentlessly bent upon making that lover's bed the center of the universe while irascibly conscious of the rest of the world; the verse cuts a swath back and forth through its paradoxical business like a wrathful snake through dewy grass. Truly Donne is the great antagonist, the undisputed master of contrariety - his antitheses reversing into his theses, his syllables crammed with oppositions, and every clause sent out to vex the next.
• "cumbersome unwieldiness" and "burdenous corpulence" - the words themselves sagging and ungainly on the line.
• Rhythm like a nail gun: "I have loved, and got, and told, / But should I love, get, tell." Love as a treasureless mine. Women as treasureless mines. Slag heaps, shafts, vanishing seams. Men like blind miners tunneling on, though all rumors of fulfillment have been discredited.
• This is not merely sport or showing off. There's a freight of cruelty traveling with that "travel through you" - all the more so because on the surface it seems so casually delivered, a nonchalant relative clause passing time on the way to the next big verb: "Grow."
• he wrote that he was dolore infans - by grief made wordless.
• The grocer's son on "The Legacy": he opened his palms, a reasonable man - "I know you can get a long way up your own arse-we all can, Jazz, mate, that's humanity's condition - but even so that poem there is a pure one hundred percent bollocks."

Discretion: that which love worst endures.

Rob me, but bind me not, and let me go.
Must I, who came to travel thorough you,
Grow your fixed subject, because you are true?
...
And by Love's sweetest part, Variety

Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.
...
        She's all states, and all princes I ;
        Nothing else is ;
Princes do but play us ; compared to this,
All honour's mimic, all wealth alchemy.
        Thou, Sun, art half as happy as we,
        In that the world's contracted thus ;
    Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be
    To warm the world, that's done in warming us.
Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere ;
This bed thy center is, these walls thy sphere.