"Wit"

We watched a powerful movie tonight, "Wit", written by Margaret Edson. It is the story of a literature professor, focusing on John Donne's sonnet "Death be not proud", and the professor's experience of dying of cancer. Here is a clip from some of the dialogue.

PROFESSOR: You take this too lightly, Miss Bearing. This is Metaphysical Poetry, not the Modern Novel. The standards of scholarship and critical reading which one would apply to any other text are simply insufficient. The effort must be total for the results to be meaningful. 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 life, death, and eternal life: overcoming these seemingly insuperable barriers.

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!

If you go in for this sort of thing, I suggest you take up Shakespeare.

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

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

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.

VIVIAN: Life, death . . . I see. It's a metaphysical conceit. It's wit! I'll go back to the library and rewrite the paper --

PROFESSOR: It is not wit, Miss Bearing. It is truth.


And so, I look at the photo, and wonder. I am in the woods, and beyond the woods is light. If death is simply a comma, well, that's all the further I can take that question…