The New Lifetime Reading Plan

Donne's poetry is at once highly sensuous (often highly sensual), uncompromisingly intellectual, and startlingly per- sonal. By the use of metaphor, sometimes complex, sometimes brutally direct, Donne merges sense and intellect in a manner to which our own taste seems keenly receptive. At his worst his figures of speech are the ingenious conceits that annoyed the forthright Dr. Johnson [59]. At his best they seem identical with the thought itself.

His love poetry bypasses not only ali the Elizabethan con- ventions, but ali the standard sentiments that had been the sta- ple of erotic verse up to his day. "For God's sake hold your tongue, and let me love." A man who begins a poem that way is imitating no one. He is not writing exercises. He is a real man speaking, and his voice is in the room. Donne can be shocking, outrageous, tender, learned, colloquial, fantastic, passionate, reverent, despairing; and sometimes he is several of these in a single love poem. It is his awareness of the complexity of emo- tion that recommends him to our unsimple time. And what is true of his love poetry is also true of his devotional verse, which often seems to have an erotic tinge: It is the work of the whole man, including the physical man. Two often-quoted lines condense a great deal of John Donne:

Love's mysteries in souls do grow,

But yet the body is his book.

We may, very roughly, liken Donne's poetry to El Greco's painting. As El Greco distorts line, so Donne distorts language, not out of any lust for experiment, but to achieve calculated effects of emphasis, intensity, and directness obtainable in no other way. Just as El Greco's colors at first seem harsh and unnatural, so Donne's rhythms are broken, rough, the agitated reflection of emotions themselves broken and rough. The spiri- tual pain and tension that we feel in El Greco we feel also in Donne. His faith was not serene; it was shadowed with anxi- eties, perplexities, contradictions that seem to anticipate the climate of our own sorely beset time.

Donne produced much writing of interest mainly to the scholar. For the beginning reader, who may be familiar with only a few anthology pieces, I might suggest: the Songs and Sonnets, the Elegies, the First and Second Anniversaries, the Holy Sonnets, the Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, and perhaps a few of the Sermons. At first this "angel speaking out of a cloud" may seem far-fetched and needlessly difficult. But, behind his odd metaphors (often drawn from the trades and sciences) and his seeming extravagances of style lie sound rea­sons. Careful reading will soon make these reasons apparent, and his personal idiom will become less and less alien as it becomes more and more fascinating.

C.F.

41

ANONYMOUS

published 1618

The Plum in the Golden Vase (Chin PHng Mei)

The Chin PHng Mei \Jin ping mei] is a famously, even scan- dalously, erotic novel. It has been banned in China for much of the time since its publication in the early seventeenth century, though that has seldom stopped it from being circulated sur- reptitiously. Its reputation as a "dirty book" has assured it a stormy career in the West as well; for many years the only widely available translation had ali of the sexy parts in Latin, shrouded, as the translator explained (borrowing a phrase from Samuel Johnson), "in the decent obscurity of a learned lan- guage." (There was a time when the existence of similar pas- sages in the works of Ovid and other Classical authors spurred schoolboys on to feats of Latin erudition that they seldom matched in the classroom.)

If the Chin P mg Mei were only an erotic novel, though, it would not be of ali that much interest; the sexually explicit passages are far tamer than one will find in any commonplace bodice-ripper in our own time. What makes this a great novel, indeed a classic of world literature, is that it is a brilliant social satire and critique, a devastating portrayal of sixteenth-century China in the grip of decadence, cynicism, and excess. David Roy, the most recent and best translator of the Chin P mg Mei, likens the book to Dickens's Bleak House [77] in the power of its indictment of a whole society. (The events of the novel are set in the period 1122-1127, the waning years of the Northern Sung Dynasty, but that was simply protective coloration for the anonymous author; readers in the time the book was writ­ten would have recognized the society it describes as their own.)