(2018)
‘False Spectacles’ and ‘Passion’s Mist’: Distorting Tears in the Poetry of John Donne.
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, Article 7. 10.14324/111.1755-4527.082.
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Abstract
Throughout John Donne’s secular and devotional poetry, encounters with liquescent, transparent and transforming media disclose latent anxieties concerning the efficacy of poetic representation. As such, metaphors of forming and falling tears convey a sense of unease towards the ephemerality of poetic expression, as the distorting effect of tears make one thing—even if only for a fleeting moment—look like another: refracting, reflecting, colouring, and altering perceptions. In the image of the tear, Donne scrutinises textual tensions between presence and absence, difference and similitude, substance and immateriality. At the same time, however, the seemingly falsifying substance of tears offers the possibility of clarifying and overcoming the limitations of language. Indeed, whilst Donne’s ‘tears breath’ in Elegy Upon the Death of Mistress Bulstrode communicates a sense of the transience and semiotic instability of tears—‘breath’ denoting something ‘unsubstantial, volatile, or fleeting’ (OED 3.d), as in Shakespeare’s ‘[a] dreame, a breath, a froth of fleeting joy’ (The Rape of Lucrece, 212)—his opening lamentation at the ‘narrow[ness]’ of language prompts the mondegreen-like slip from ‘tears breath’ to “tears breadth”, drawing our attention to what might be encapsulated and signified within the watery diameter of the teardrop.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | ‘False Spectacles’ and ‘Passion’s Mist’: Distorting Tears in the Poetry of John Donne |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.14324/111.1755-4527.082 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.14324/111.1755-4527.082 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © 2018 Harvey Wiltshire. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY) 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. |
| Keywords: | John Donne, Crying, Tears, affect, Jacques Derrida, Marjory Lange, Timothie Bright, Early Modern poetry, optics, An Elegy upon the Death of Lady Markham, Eyes and Tears, Marvell, Christ wept, Jesus Christ, Gail Kern Paster, weeping, A Valediction: forbidding mourning, A valediction: of weeping, Witchcraft by a Picture, Twicknam Garden, paradox. |
| URI: | https://discovery-pp.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10053713 |
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