Tag Archives: John Donne

Wit Won’t Cushion Us against Death

By Robin Bates | Published: January 8, 2010

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", death and dying, Margaret Edson, W;t | Comments closed

Arguing over Life, Death, and a Semicolon

By Robin Bates | Published: January 7, 2010

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, death and dying, Margaret Edson, W;t | Comments closed

Emily Dickinson’s Deathbed Fly

By Robin Bates | Published: June 26, 2009

Okay, here is a second post on poems about small winged pests, written in honor of President Obama’s cool and cold-blooded killing of a fly. When I was a child, I used to enjoy the poem about “the funny old lady who swallowed a fly.” It is one of those repetition poems, with a new […]

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged death and dying, Emily Dickinson, Gulliver's Travels, Hansel and Gretel, I heard a fly buzz when I died, Jonathan Swift, Lord of the Flies, The Flea, There Was an Old Woman Who Swallowed a Fly, William Golding | Comments closed

John Donne’s Seductive Flea

By Robin Bates | Published: June 25, 2009

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?

By Robin Bates | Published: May 20, 2009

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