One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally

Most every weekend I spend in Pittsburgh with Matt we make pilgrimage to Caliban Books on Craig Street, a rare and vintage book shop that lies in between the campuses of the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University.  It is the rare occasion indeed that I leave without something, whether a cookbook I'd long sought, a CD from their $5/disc rack of used classical recordings, or a book I went in not knowing how desperately I needed.

Today fell deeply into that last category.  

My chosen undergraduate major was English, a track that virtually predisposed me to the accumulation of dozens, hundreds, and perhaps thousands of books.  Not one to suffer silently, I choose instead to continue buying books, knowing full-well that I will never likely read every single one of them.  

I consider the mission to be salvific in two ways:  the book is there for me when I seek it out and I save it from going to a person who will let it be passed on to someone who won't care for it - its contents or mere presence.

At Caliban today I faced down a ten foot wide shelf of vividly bright, gorgeously bound editions from "The 100 Greatest Books Ever Written" collection printed by the Franklin Press.  There, in crimson red with gold accents and binding, was a copy of The Poems of John Donne.  

I've long had a thing for Donne.  Honestly, I can't even begin to pin down when, where, or how I first came across his Divine Sonnets.  I'd wager a brief gloss during some year of high school English, however I can't be sure.  One of these poems in particular - the tenth, at least according to the Westmoreland manuscript - "Death Be Not Proud" - has inspired, troubled, and stuck with me since at least high school.  

The text is straightforward enough:

Death be not proud, though some have called thee 

Mighty and dreadfull, for, thou are not soe,

For, those whom thou think'st, thou dost overthrow,

Die not, poore death, nor yet canst thou kill mee.

From rest and sleepe, which but thy pictures bee,

Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow,

And soonest our best men with thee doe goe,

Rest of their bones and soules deliverie.

For thou art slave to Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men,

And dost with poyson, warre, and sicknesse dwell,

And poppie, or charmes can make us sleep as well,

And better then thy stroake; why swell'st thou then?

One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally,

And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.  

In personifying Death, playing upon the mind's picture of a Grim Reaper, Donne utilizes modes of the Christian theology of resurrection to present an image of Death vanquished, the human soul redeemed and granted life eternal.

Of course, meditating upon and then mitigating the sting of death is a process far deeper than can be contained in fourteen lines.  In the four hundred and one years since the poem was written, critics have gone on about the modified Petrarchan rhyme scheme, the images contained in the lines, capitalization, punctuation, and everything else that people who put store in literary criticism salivate over.

I read and pondered the poem as much as a high school student who pretends to greater understanding and depth than their average classmate could.  Yet, something remained missing - some ineffable connection between my experience and Donne's words.  It wasn't until I saw HBO's 2001 film adaptation of Margaret Edson's play, "Wit", that the poem really plugged in and lit up for the first time.

The play's protagonist, Professor Vivian Bearing, an expert on Donne, is diagnosed with terminal ovarian cancer.  The play traces the progress of her journey through an experimental course of incredibly strong chemotherapy and flashes back through Bearing's life, recounting an episode of her time as an undergraduate student, first tearing through the tenth Divine Sonnet in a way that a capricious young academic can (in other words, messily and with a certain youthful tenacity).  

In a scene that makes me shiver to this day, E.M. Ashford, the younger Bearing's professor, admonishes the student for choosing an inappropriate edition of the Divine Sonnet under consideration.  

Do you think the punctuation of the last line of this sonnet is merely an insignificant detail?  The sonnet begins with a valiant struggle with death, calling on all the forces of intellect and drama to vanquish the enemy. But it is ultimately about overcoming the seemingly insuperable barriers separating life, death, and eternal life.

In the edition you chose, this profoundly simple meaning is sacrificed to hysterical punctuation:

And Death — capital D — shall be no more — semi-colon!

Death — capital D — comma — thou shalt die —exclamation point!¹

Gardner’s edition of the Holy Sonnets returns to the Westmoreland manuscript source of 1610 — not for sentimental reasons, I assure you, but because Helen Gardner is a scholar. It reads:

And death shall be no more, comma, death thou shalt die.

(As she recites this line, she makes a little gesture at the comma.)

Nothing but a breath — a comma — separates life from life everlasting. It is very simple really. With the original punctuation restored, death is no longer something to act out on a stage, with exclamation points. It’s a comma, a pause.

This way, the uncompromising way, one learns something from this poem, wouldn’t you say? Life, death. Soul, God. Past, present. Not insuperable barriers, not semicolons, just a comma.

Talk about nailing it down.  Small details, sure.  The difference between a comma and a semicolon is only the merest millisecond of breath - a conscious pause of infinitesimal value - but when one considers this literary fine print, it's enough to astound the reader.  

And Matt will tell you that the first thing I did was turn to the index and then onto page 356.  The last line was indeed punctuated correctly.  Otherwise, I'd likely have left the book behind, red leather binding or no.  I might not be a hyper-adherent of the critics, but when something this minute makes sense, it's enough for me.  

This, however, wasn't the 'Eureka!' moment for Donne in my life. 

At the very end of Edson's play, Professor Bearing lies dead on her hospital bed, wholly exposed, her garments torn open by well-meaning medical professionals seeking to resuscitate her in spite of her wishes.  And, in a pre-recorded voiceover, Bearing's voice recites Donne's poem - deliberately, measured, and without the excessive emotion we might believe due this moment of fatal reckoning.  The viewer is in tears, their dramatic journey completed in a truly splendid moment of catharsis.  And with the precision of a surgeon, the voice reassuringly connects that moment of life, death, soul, God, past, and present.  

As presented by Emma Thomson in the HBO adaptation, the moment is heart-rending (even if Bearing remains shrouded).  The battle has been lost - at least in purely physical terms.  But the metaphysical / existential passage of life into life everlasting is so perfectly crystallized in this minute and twenty seconds.

It was then, during my freshman year of college, that it became clear.  I'd already experienced my father's death when I was thirteen and, to the best of my knowledge, fully passed through mourning that loss.  I should have known what it meant to see a once vibrant and robust person wither away.  Basically, I understood the first twelve lines of Donne's poem.  

The last two had eluded me until that moment on screen.  There was no need for a brightly lit sequence of passing through a tunnel into some divine waiting room.  No Wagnerian theatrics for gathering the heroic dead.  Only an elegy - marking the pain of loss and the hope for redemption.  That "...expansion, / Like gold to ayery thinnesse beate" that Donne writes of in his "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning."

Only a comma.