Friday, March 7, 2008

A supplement to my last entry

I have been traveling for a couple of days, and find it quite odd that in New York when I left the temp was about 50 degrees, and upon my return to Memphis, at what should be a warmer period of the day, it was 10-15 degrees cooler.

There's not a lot to report, but we're expecting some snow over the next few hours. I'm really looking forward to that. Hopefully, we get some good accumulation so that our sick child can play in it!

Incidentally, I have had multiple comments about my last entry. Any comments about it being tough to understand, please do not credit to me. That is John Donne. Granted, he is brilliant with his words, but this is "metaphysical poetry." By definition, it is supposed to be complex and difficult to understand. I won't bore you by copying the whole description here, but if you would like to further understand the elements, follow this link (and then scroll to "metaphysical poetry:" http://www.virtualsalt.com/litterms.htm

Here's the point before I try to break it down a little bit: I had to read this poem multiple times, and had to read it slowly, in order to understand the parts of it that I do understand. I first read the poem almost 15 years ago, so I've had a lot of time to think about it.

A brief attempt to break down one part of the poem is below.

"By itself, metaphysical means dealing with the relationship between spirit to matter or the ultimate nature of reality." (ref. http://www.eng.fju.edu.tw/English_Literature/period/metaphysicals.html)

What Donne does in the poem is to represent the desires of the heart (the 'spirit' as referenced above) through some physical manifestation. The clearest example that I recall is the compass metaphor. Okay, it might help to know what the "twin compasses" is. It's that tool that you would use to draw a perfect circle. So he illustrates that as one point of the compass distances itself from the other, they are still tied together and even leaning toward the other, almost calling out for each other. This is the way our hearts, as husband and wife, yearn for each other.

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