Tony Perkins in Welles’ The Trial I ran into my friend Alan in the gym on Monday. As I have reported in a number of past posts, Alan has been battling tumors in both lungs that continue to baffle doctors. At least one doctor predicted that he would be dead a […]
Tag Archives: death and dying
Gripped by a Mind of Winter
Snow is pounding us for the third time in two weeks and classes once again have been canceled. Significantly enough, I have been forced once again to postpone Midsummer Night’s Dream. “Where are the songs of spring? Ay, where are they?” queries Keats (although he’s asking from the vantage point of autumn, not that of […]
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Wallace Stevens, Winter | Comments closed
The Limitations of Cerebral Teaching
The new semester begins today. Margaret Edson’s play W;t is a useful reminder of where I should put my priorities as I begin teaching. When my career started out, I had a number of things in common with Vivian Bearing, the English professor and Donne scholar in W;t. I too reveled in the complexity of texts, […]
The Tolling Bell Says You’re Not Alone
I talked yesterday about the poet being like one blundering around in the dark, making utterances that some, in their suffering, find consoling. The poet doesn’t know which poems will reach which readers. To make another analogy, he or she is like Queequeg, carefully constructing a coffin that then, after he is dead and in […]
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged John Donne, Loss of a child, Margaret Edson, Meditation 17, W;t | Comments closed
Doctors, Bad Bedside Manners, and Poetry
Margaret Edson In Margaret Edson’s W;t there is a doctor, Jason, who has taken her 17th century poetry class as a challenge. As he puts it, You can’t get into medical school unless you’re well-rounded. And I made a bet with myself that I could get an A in the three hardest courses on campus. […]
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged Doctors, John Donne, Margaret Edson, Medical Care, W;t | Comments closed
Wit Won’t Cushion Us against Death
Will John Donne’s “Death Be Not Proud” help one handle the fact that one has cancer? It is significant that the cancer victim and Donne scholar in Margaret Edson’s W;t is rejecting her poet by the end of the play. I’m actually not sure whether this particular poem would help any cancer patient. There’s a […]
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "Death Be Not Proud", "If Poisonous Minerals", John Donne, Margaret Edson, W;t | Comments closed
Arguing over Life, Death, and a Semicolon
John Donne Cancer has gone from being a word to being a reality for me as two close friends have been struck. Alan Paskow, whose progress I’ve been reporting on, had an operation before Christmas that removed three tumors from his right lung (one the size of a grapefruit). And Beth Reynolds had a tumor […]
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "Death Be Not Proud", cancer, John Donne, Margaret Edson, W;t | Comments closed
Ring Out the Old, Ring in the New
I am writing to you from the home of my parents in Sewanee, Tennessee, where I figure I have spent around 48 of my 58 Christmases. In this I differ from the Tennyson in the third Christmas passage of In Memoriam. For the first time since Hallam’s death, he is not celebrating the season in […]
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged Alfred Lord Tennyson, Christmas, grieving, In Memoriam | Comments closed
Dead Hands Reaching Out to Comfort
Alfred Lord Tennyson’s three Christmas passages in In Memoriam are reminiscent of the way that my own family celebrates Christmas. My ancestry is British and the ceremonies that we observe date at least as far back as my great grandmother Eliza Scott Fulcher, born in the 1850’s. Christmas in Sewanee, Tennessee (which is where we are […]
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged Alfred Lord Tennyson, Christmas, grieving, In Memoriam | Comments closed
