Done with Spring

    I started to pick up on Donne after the sequence with Shakespeare and then Milton. Sir Philip Sidney was considered, but I rather just read him than write about him because his work is so scarce compared to John Donne, who published a great deal more than Sidney in his lifetime. So I would like to copy down one of his poems and try to say something about it:

Elegy 6: Perfume

Though he had wont to search with glazed eyes,
As though he came to kill a cockatrice,
Though he have oft sworn, that he would remove
Thy beauty’s beauty, and food of our love,
Hope of his goods, if I with thee were seen,
Yet close and secret, as our souls, we have been.

    So I got the above from a website (the number elegy there is 4, but my source says 6) and then cross referenced that with my source, which is a compilation book of his major works. The above is not the whole poem but only a selection of it, and I think that it will do for our purposes here. So I would like to foreground the text by trying to get a sense of his circumstances or his current state of affairs. Also I just might read the above passage as well as the surrounding verses.

    After reading the above, you would see that the "glazed eyes" behave in a way that Donne is suggesting that he is familiar with them. It used to be that these 'eyes' were set to kill a formidable opponent (cockatrice), but now they see the very opposite of what he is used to seeing. The eyes are that of a father-figure, which could be seen above these lines if you had the material.

    So part of understanding Donne is how he uses certain imagery to affect his audience. I would suggest that his verse teases out our understanding about his chosen subject up for discussion. You are not sure what is being presented even though concrete language is used to invoke an image, but you are drawn in by the familiar passage as if you have insider information about what is happening.