Until very recently, studies on the seventeenth-century English poetry had been largely shaped by T. S. Eliot's criticism of the metaphysical poets and by the reading strategies of the New Critics. New explorations of power, gender, ideology in the R ...
Until very recently, studies on the seventeenth-century English poetry had been largely shaped by T. S. Eliot's criticism of the metaphysical poets and by the reading strategies of the New Critics. New explorations of power, gender, ideology in the Renaissance, however, have not only provided radically new understandings of Renaissance texts but have also forced us to reexamine the critical, historical, and cultural presuppositions on which our readings are based. The aim of this paper is to explore the presence, the absence, and the problem of representation in Donne's Songs and Sonnets. For this purpose, I will read "A Lecture upon the Shadow," "A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy's Day," "Air and Angels," and "A Valediction: of my Name in the Window." "A Lecture upon the Shadow" and "A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy's Day" are concerned with shadows and with representation. In "A Lecture," the shadows are representations or signs of the lovers. The shadow is absent, and the present moment of noon is so evanescent, coming and going instantaneously. In the case of "A Nocturnal," the poet is a shadow or representation of the state of dying itself. Love has wrought a new kind of alchemy, in which the poet has been made the quintessence of nothingness. Love, as alchemist, does not extract the quintessence from things but rather from nothingness, such as privation, emptiness, absence, darkness, and death.