John Donne: Longevity

Drifting thru my 1958 edition of John Donne: Selected Poems. The same 1635 edition is online as well.
It’s remarkable how much carries over the 400 year gap. I wonder what that means about culturally embedded and stylistics tweaks. How can I hear his voice more readily than a contemporary who has more aggregate culture, general and poetic, in common?
In 400 more years, will he still be comprehensible? He could go thru rounds of the wardrobe room of translation which pushes him forward through time in new fashions like any old text.

for the first twenty years since yesterday
I scarce believed thou couldst be gone away
for forty more I fed on favors past.

That still feels fresh and utterly worth thieving. So it’s over the top hyperbolic yet for moods that are that, seems more accurate than accuracy would be.
Languages die when there’s an upgrade to one conferring more advantage. English itself has a had a long run of popularity globally due to economic advantage, status wars and political luck. To know Japanese, German, or Latin were the linguistic means to power. When will English hit a backwater and the thing to do to optimize one’s chances, is to move to a city and learn one of the top languages, Manderin, Spanish, Hindi, Arabic, Portuguese? When the economic peace powerhouse gets the top position for quality of life, people will want to rush their, individuals aggregating for selfish gain.
Anyhew, John Donne. It’s too funny to get the text from the digital edition by going to “find > calm”.

Storms chafe, and soon wear out themselves, or us ;
In calms, Heaven laughs to see us languish thus.
As steady as I could wish my thoughts were,
Smooth as thy mistress’ glass, or what shines there,
The sea is now

That’s just a well-composed, well-controlled, thought.
The syntax chunks into different lengths that makes it feel nimble, not a slave to its line length. The metaphor extends but doesn’t natter away repeating itself.
The slant rhyme of were and there are still regional, or eye rhymes or did one of the words not show up at the dock and got left out of the Great Vowel Shift?
There’s a self-awareness of the immediate sensations of upset and of the second mind reporting and being aware of where one is and is not and how absurd this is. And yet, chop-chop, must be where one is and deal with the choppy waters at hand.
The length of the poem is rife with lovely turns of phrases: “All the tackling is a frippery”, which notes say he meant as a second-hand clothing shop. I knew it as luxurious gaudy cheap excess of ribbons, sparkles and things like bows so it hasn’t drifted far over the years.
“Each one, his own priest and own sacrifice./ Who live, that miracles do multiply/ Where walkers in hot ovens do not die.”
Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego (Hananiah, Mishael and Azariah) references don’t happen in modern poetry. Everyone seems in love with reference to TV, movies, or Ancient Greece and Rome and Old Europe, a little Hinduism thrown in for good measure, but Christian myth has been losing ground. It has the weight of obligation and the past that must be cast off.
Of course, that’s not entirely true, but largely the culture doesn’t teach itself the stories. We want to save children from the harm but loose the intensity of the gain as a lingua franca, like a metaphoric version of latin botanica names, a reference bank of shorthand shortcuts.
I wonder if this would eventually create walls from Christian metaphor that resonates culturally, emotionally, with proving one’s well-readedness by transposing one’s personal story into the framework of epic or anti-epic wrestle. Can we just set down the irony bag and leverage the richness of myths of the People of the Book? Or is there no familiarity with that for there to be richness of caught references?
Anyhew, he says,
I am two fools, I know,
For loving, and for saying so
In whining poetry.
~ The Triple Fool
Although John Donne was a couple centuries earlier (from the history-flattening of now) there’s almost a touch of Issa in the attentiveness to The Flea. Glad that the squalor of needing to live with fleas isn’t such accessible poetry fodder.

MARK but this flea, and mark in this,
How little that which thou deniest me is ;
It suck’d me first, and now sucks thee,
And in this flea our two bloods mingled be.

It is kind of witty. A romantic pining — or is that pleading — to be one body, a pick-up attempt, sweet but lame and eager in any century. Look, our blood is already one: “This flea is you and I, and this/Our marriage bed”. We may as well do it proper and completely. He could have made that up on the fly, or rather, on the flea, but it fell out too easy. It sounds like he’s a player, doesn’t it? or more charitable, a hopeless romantic shirt-chaser?
One can almost see her crossed armed response as he sees a no coming and in S2 protests “Let not to that self-murder added be,/ And sacrilege, three sins in killing three.” As in, don’t kill the symbol of us joined and our blood making life continue. Maybe he has a soft spot for her, and for the tiny beastie that he was roping in as an actor to his patter. Does she fall for that?
In S3, her bloodied her nail squashes the flea and crushes him in the same gesture. Does she smirk or have a level eye. She’s still there which he probably takes as promising, a convertible no, rather than a refusal to back down and drawing a clear line.
He replies with, “learn how false fears be ;/ Just so much honour, when thou yield’st to me,/Will waste, as this flea’s death took life from thee.” He thinks he can logic-her into it.
That’s one last attempt before he either grovels, or straps on the 1635 equivalent speed of a jet pack for moving on to next likely candidate, probably with a lamb’s intestine tucked in his long sock.
Like how an anonymous put it
“this donne guy should have just asked the lady nicely rather than go into some quantum bullshit about the flea marrying them. Sheesh, no wonder this lady though he was a creep. for god sake woman, you should have called social services.”
He probably thought he was acting nicely. He’d thought thru his side entirely.

John Donne under a different lens
The vocabulary is largely direct, concrete, monosyllabic, Germanic and Old French, not Latinate. The plot and personalities come thru strongly so the tools of rhyme and metering don’t draw attention to themselves. Phrases vary length. Lines may be end-stopped or not. It’s all shaken up. The story can be carried by the invisible army of ants of devices.