"Holy Sonnet IX" by John Donne

Note: At the 19:27 mark, a word cuts out. That word is "specious!" 

Topics discussed in this episode include:

-Make symposia happen!

-Hey mom, I'm on Sleerickets !

-Also on Sleerickets here ! 

-The Inhumanism of Robinson Jeffers

-Aspects of Metaphysical Poetry

-The 20th century Donne revival 

-T.S. Eliot's essay The Metaphysical Poets 

-The Dissociation of Sensibility 

-Intellect as decoration

-The life and times of Johnny

-Donne's treatise on suicide, Biathanatos 

-Hybrid sonnet redux

-Metrically, Donne likes it rough

-There are such things as stupid questions

-Casuistry! 

-Pascal's Provincial Letters 

-Louis Martz's The Poetry of Meditation 

-Another Jesuit poet? 

-Consequentialism

-Eliot's Objective Correlative

-Apophasis

-Hypallage returns!

-"Chug your own blood til you forget what I've done"

-To forget is to be merciless

-Not a saint, but our favorite sinner

Text of poem:

Holy Sonnet IX

If poisonous minerals, and if that tree

Whose fruit threw death on else immortal us,

If lecherous goats, if serpents envious

Cannot be damn'd, alas, why should I be?

Why should intent or reason, born in me,

Make sins, else equal, in me more heinous?

And mercy being easy, and glorious

To God, in his stern wrath why threatens he?

But who am I, that dare dispute with thee,

O God? Oh, of thine only worthy blood

And my tears, make a heavenly Lethean flood,

And drown in it my sins' black memory.

That thou remember them, some claim as debt;

I think it mercy, if thou wilt forget.