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 […]
Tag Archives: John Donne
John Donne’s Seductive Flea
Georges de La Tour, Woman Catching a Flea, c. 1638. Oil on canvas. In case you haven’t heard, the news media was buzzing last week over a CBS interview with President Obama where he nailed a fly that was bothering him. I thought I’d have fun in today’s entry and talk about the symbolic use […]
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged A Fly Buzzed When I Died, courtship, Emily Dickinson, love poetry, sex, The Flea Comments closed
After Apple-Picking, Then What?
So much of the poetry that comforts us in time of death is infused with images of nature, poems like (in my case) Mary Oliver’s “Lost Children,” Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Adonais, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Perhaps the reason is that, with death, our natural side asserts its primacy in a way that cannot […]
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged After Apple-Picking, death of a parent, Hamlet, Robert Frost, Sonnet X Comments closed
