00:00:00
In this video we pick up the discussion
of John Donne's "Valediction: Forbidding
00:00:05
Mourning," a very famous poem, and we pick it up in the third stanza which is where we
00:00:10
left off our discussion in the previous
video. Here John Donne says, "Moving of th'
00:00:16
earth brings harms and fears, / Men reckon what it did, and meant; / But trepidation of
00:00:21
the spheres, / Though greater far, is
innocent." What he's talking about
00:00:27
here most likely is that moving of the
earth refers to an earthquake.
00:00:32
That's literally what
happens when there is an earthquake, and
00:00:39
in the Renaissance people often also
thought that an [with] earthquake what happened
00:00:43
was that as the ground kind of shook air
was pushed out, and an earthquake is
00:00:49
really air being pushed out of the
earth. That ties it back actually to
00:00:55
the first stanza where we talked
about how the breath escapes the body.
00:00:59
So this conceit or this metaphor
here is nicely related because it's also
00:01:05
talking in a sense about how earthquakes
would expel air out of the solid
00:01:11
earth. So what is being compared here is
really two things that you can
00:01:17
see and experience and feel, which
would be something like an earthquake,
00:01:22
and then things that are more invisible,
things that are happening far away and
00:01:29
you can't necessarily see with the
senses, but that maybe have even more
00:01:34
powerful effects, a more powerful kind of
impact on life. So that's the comparison
00:01:39
here. And the reason why John Donne makes this comparison is because earlier in
00:01:44
the previous stanza he had talked about
how some people ... focus on outward
00:01:48
things. They focus on what they can see --
like tears and sighs and things like
00:01:53
that. But he's saying those people who
truly understand reality know that
00:02:01
there's much more than just the
externals. There's spirit, there's soul,
00:02:05
there's all these other things that are
much more difficult to capture.
00:02:10
So he's comparing then moving
of the earth, an earthquake, to what he
00:02:16
calls trepidation of the spheres. To
understand what that refers to we have
00:02:21
to understand what the spheres are.
During John Donne's time there was
00:02:26
really a transition that was happening
from one particular scientific model of
00:02:32
the universe to a new one, and the old
medieval model is often referred to as
00:02:38
what's called the Ptolemaic universe,
named after the astronomer Ptolemy. The
00:02:44
basic idea of the Ptolemaic universe
is that the earth is at the center and
00:02:49
all the other planets, as well as the
moon and the stars and so on, move around
00:02:55
the earth. So it's earth-centric, as
opposed to heliocentric, which is when
00:03:02
the sun is in the middle. And
heliocentric -- this is the Copernican
00:03:07
model, after Copernicus, and Galileo later
confirmed the same model, roughly around
00:03:16
the same time when John Donne was
writing. So in the Ptolemaic universe,
00:03:22
then, you have all of these planets and
so on moving around the earth and they
00:03:26
each move in their own sphere. Each of
these kind of sectors you might
00:03:31
say -- these are all different spheres, and
they're perfect circles. The
00:03:37
planets move around the earth in
perfect harmony and in perfect circles.
00:03:43
Now astronomers realized that this
doesn't quite work out, and they had to
00:03:49
make up some very fancy kinds of
modifications to the Ptolemaic
00:03:55
universe to actually make it work. Just as one example, they talked about
00:03:59
things called epicycles, which is where
the planet as it's moving around the
00:04:03
earth is basically going backwards ... all the way around, and
00:04:10
that accounts for the fact that
sometimes when you look out at night you
00:04:14
can see a planet that appears to be
moving backwards, whereas it's supposed to move
00:04:18
in the other direction. That's a very
complex kind of system and there's much
00:04:23
more to an epicycle, but at least it
gives you
00:04:27
little bit of a sense of what's going on
there. Okay, so we have these perfect
00:04:32
spheres then, and I use the word "perfect"
on purpose because the idea is that
00:04:37
everything above the moon is eternal and
is perfect, whereas things that are under
00:04:45
the moon are corruptible. In other words,
they can die, they can change,
00:04:51
and they are also what's called sublunary ... so the word "sublunary," which
00:04:59
you're going to see in John Donne's poem in a moment, this means "earthly." It means
00:05:04
"earthly," and also it has this sense that
something is temporary, that it's not
00:05:10
going to last forever. So "sublunary" means not necessarily of great value. Now as we
00:05:17
think about all of these spheres, then,
moving around the earth, we get this
00:05:22
sense that there's something very
beautiful about this, and I would suggest
00:05:26
that if you are fascinated by the
Ptolemaic universe
00:05:29
you should read C.S. Lewis's book The
Discarded Image, which talks about
00:05:33
how profound the shift was from this
older model to the ...
00:05:40
Copernican model with its focus on
heliocentrism. We don't have tons of time
00:05:46
to talk about this model but if we go
back to our poem I think you can see now
00:05:52
that what he's talking about here --
trepidation of the spheres -- trepidation
00:05:56
means a kind of trembling. ... What he's he's saying
00:06:01
here is that when something happens in
the spheres, some kind of wobble ... so
00:06:08
there's a sphere and it's going around
the earth ... if there's something that
00:06:12
happens there far away from the earth,
people can't see it, and they don't they
00:06:16
don't think it's important. It's innocent,
it's harmless, but it actually has quite
00:06:22
a powerful impact. And during this period
people really did believe that the
00:06:27
planets had this incredible astrological
kind of influence on life on Earth.
00:06:34
In fact, even today if you check your
horoscope you're gonna find out that the
00:06:38
zodiac and the planets
and so on -- these have an impact
00:06:41
supposedly. Alright, so trepidation then
can mean a trembling of the spheres. Some
00:06:49
people read this very specifically as
referring to a movement in the eighth
00:06:53
sphere, which affects the ninth sphere,
and so on. That's very specific -- kind
00:06:59
of detailed meaning of this word -- but you can also understand it more generally as
00:07:04
any kind of movement in the spheres
that's not regular, and that may have
00:07:10
some kind of impact on life on earth. You
can see now, I think, what's going on here.
00:07:17
What people are saying is when there's
an earthquake, they reckon, they consider
00:07:22
they count, they kind of claim even
that it's significant. It
00:07:29
brings harms and fears. People are saying, "an earthquake! Oh, it's the sign of the
00:07:33
end times!" And I'm not even joking
by saying "the end times" because there is
00:07:38
a passage in the Bible that comes to
mind. When you read Matthew 24, verses 6 &
00:07:44
8, where Jesus is talking about the
00:07:47
destruction of Jerusalem in the year 70
AD, this is a passage that's also
00:07:52
often explained to be about
the end times, about the apocalypse. It
00:07:58
says there, in the end times "you will
hear of wars and rumors of wars. There
00:08:03
will be famines and earthquakes. All
these are the beginnings of birth pains."
00:08:08
So the idea, then, is that if there are a
lot of earthquakes and signs and natural
00:08:14
disasters, maybe it's a sign that the end
is near. As I mentioned, most likely
00:08:20
this is a reference to the year 70 AD,
but it is often used ... with
00:08:25
a broader application as well. Okay, so
that's the third stanza. Takes quite a
00:08:32
bit of a bit of explanation, but it
really continues this idea of the
00:08:36
separation between two different ways of
thinking. There are some people who use
00:08:41
their senses and can only understand the
world through what they can see and
00:08:44
experience and then there are some
people who make room for a more
00:08:49
spiritual understanding -- some kind of
reality that goes beyond the senses.
00:08:55
We get then to the fourth stanza, and
this is where this idea is
00:08:59
developed.
John Donne says "Dull sublunary lovers'
00:09:03
love / (Whose soul is sense) cannot admit / Absence, because it doth remove / Those
00:09:10
things which elemented it."
The idea here is that those lovers who
00:09:15
live under the moon (sublunary), who
are earthly and are not in this case
00:09:21
spiritual -- their love cannot
admit absence. So "admit" here is cannot
00:09:30
deal with, cannot acknowledge, cannot
really take in this concept of absence.
00:09:36
And John Donne is is being very clever
here because he's punning on this word
00:09:40
"sense." In Latin "ab" is a kind of prefix or
00:09:45
preposition, and it means "from, away from." So literally "absence" for John Donne
00:09:52
means "away from the senses," and so
there's this play on sense. These
00:09:58
people -- their soul, the way they
experience reality, the way in which
00:10:04
their spirit moves them ... all it is is
just external senses: touch, taste, and so.
00:10:10
That's all they've got, and that's why
they cannot deal with absence. You can
00:10:15
imagine that you are dating somebody and this person is is somebody who really
00:10:19
loves to touch, and to see, and when this
person goes away then the relationship
00:10:26
just ends because ... they
can't they can't deal with the distance
00:10:31
between the two people. So "it ('it' is absence) doth remove / Those
00:10:39
things which elemented it." Those things
are the senses. They're the body parts,
00:10:45
they're the ways in which we experience
the world. And this notion of elementing
00:10:50
continues with all of these
metaphors of, first of all alchemy, as we
00:10:56
said in the previous video, of having
different elements. So there are
00:11:00
four elements (earth, water, fire, air) and I
think it also ties in with
00:11:07
this this larger notion of, well, how is
the universe composed? What makes up
00:11:13
the universe, and how do things connect, whether it's body and spirit, the
00:11:19
earth and the spheres? How are all of
these things constructed? Alright,
00:11:25
then we move on to one more stanza
here before we finish this video.
00:11:31
Here John Donne says, "But we (so here comes the contrast) by a love so much
00:11:37
refined..." There's that alchemical idea,
right, so alchemy, where we take a
00:11:45
particular substance and we play around
with it and we try to turn it into
00:11:50
something else ... he says spiritual love is like some kind
00:11:55
of form of alchemy, where we create some some greater thing. "But we by a love so
00:12:02
much refined / That our selves know not
what it is..." It's very difficult to talk
00:12:07
about spirituality and spiritual love. He
says, "Inter-assured of the mind, / Care less,
00:12:13
eyes, lips, and hands to miss." So for us, if
we don't see each other (the eyes)
00:12:20
if we can't kiss each other, and if we
can't touch each other with the hands,
00:12:24
that's okay, because we are "inter-assured of the mind." We know that we're going to be
00:12:30
faithful. He's not saying though that he
doesn't care about the body at all. He
00:12:35
says we care less." It's still important.
He doesn't dismiss the body. But he is
00:12:41
saying that that spiritual connection,
that elevated sense of love that they
00:12:46
have ultimately will guide them through
this separation.
