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Under the Sign of Donne - John Donne - Critical Essay
Criticism, Wntr, 2001 by Judith Scherer Herz
The interests of a black man in a cellar Mark tardy judgment on the world's closed door. Gnats toss in the shadow of a bottle, And a roach spans a crevice on the floor. Aesop, driven to pondering, found Heaven with the tortoise and the hare; Fox brush and sow ear top his grave And mingling incantations on the air. The black man, forlorn in the cellar, Wanders in some mid-kingdom, dark, that lies Between his tambourine, stuck on the wall, And, in Africa, a carcass quick with flies.(28)
In Donne's "Expiration"--kiss, go, ghost, death, kill, word--carry their "ordinary meaning" but at the same time are "dye[d] ... with a peculiarity of meaning," that is, de-and-reformed in metaphor. Crane's poem, like Donne's, 12 lines long, is not about kisses and lovers, but about black poets and musicians in the cellars of the white world cut off from the myth makers who mingle incantations on the air. But it too stays entirely inside its metaphor (as in that Frost line that defines poetry, "like a piece of ice on a hot stove, the poem must ride on its own melting"), no talking animals, just gnats, roaches, and flies." `Make my dark poem light, and light' ... is the text I chose from Donne sometime ago, as my direction" (176), Crane wrote to Allen Tate, referring to the line, minus the "heavy," that comes from the same stanza in Donne's Metempsychosis in which he launches at Paradise. "I have always been working hard for a more perfect lucidity, and it never pleases me to be taken as willfully obscure and esoteric." But he was so taken; metaphysical, he was often called, and whatever that word means, it does seem to link these two apparently so different poets.
The connection that Crane felt between himself and Donne has more to do with deep structure than surface detail. That was certainly the way the poet and critic-teacher, Josephine Miles, approached the issue of the Donne legacy in her 19 71 essay "Twentieth Century Donne": "What 17th century metaphysical, what Donnian traits could be useful to the present?"(29) What she found was a tradition she called "the poetry of concept countered by concept" (210) within a structure that is both "exceptive and limiting ... not merely and but but and yet, with implicative ifs and concessive thoughs" (218). Her terms are different from Crane's (he figures only briefly in her examples, for his handling of time) but, like him, she locates her investigation within the articulation of the poem's elements, its language and thought (Yeats thus becomes the truest heir with other examples drawn from Auden, Eliot, Cummings, Stevens, Warren, but not from too many at the time of her writing). What she was looking for was less what a twentieth-century poet might want to take from Donne, or how such a poet might read, respond, or echo him, than what Donne and his contemporaries had "deposited" in the language that had survival power (language here conceived almost as a geological stratum--a Burgess shale of teeming syntactic forms), so that coming across W. S. Merwin's "Fear," for example, she sees "the survival [there] of the skeleton of exceptive and adversative concept ... as a wonder worth remark, a suggestion of the surviving power of Donne's thought in the 20th Century" (224).
