Words of Interest

I chose aery and laity as words I want to further examine from the Donne poem. Aery, is in actuality a word in and of itself. I assumed it to be an archaic version of airy, and though the meanings are similar, aery is more concisely defined as an adj. characterized by a lightness or insubstantiality and airy (as an adj.) is of having the quality of air...
Laity is defined as a body of religious worshippers as seperate from the clergy. I chose this word because it gives a deeper meaning to the poem.
In any case, the play on words is found in the use of the metaphysical conceit comparing the lover's love to the construct of a compass...

Rich's Response to Donne...

A Valediction Forbidding Mourning
By Adrienne Rich

My swirling wants. Your frozen lips.
The grammar turned and attacked me.
Themes, written under duress.
Emptiness of the natations.

They gave me a drug that slowed the healing of wounds.

I want you to see this before I leave:
the experience of repetition as death
the gailure of criticism to locate the pain
the poster in the bus that said:
my bleeding is under control.

A red plant in a cemetery of plastic wreaths.

A last attempt: the language is a dialect called metaphor.
These images go unglossed: hair, glacier, flashlinght.
when I think of a landscape I am thinking of a time.
When I talk of taking a trip I mean forever.
I could say: those morntains have a meaning
but further than that I could not say.

To do something very common, in my own way.

1970 Excerpt from Andeienne Rich's Poetry and Prose, a Norton Critical Edition

Poem With Word Play

A VALEDICTION FORBIDDING MOURNING. by John Donne
AS virtuous men pass mildly away,
And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say,
"Now his breath goes," and some say, "No."
So let us melt, and make no noise, 5
No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move ;
'Twere profanation of our joys
To tell the laity our love.
Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears ;
Men reckon what it did, and meant ; 10
But trepidation of the spheres,
Though greater far, is innocent.
Dull sublunary lovers' love
—Whose soul is sense—cannot admit
Of absence, 'cause it doth remove 15
The thing which elemented it.
But we by a love so much refined,
That ourselves know not what it is,
Inter-assurèd of the mind,
Care less, eyes, lips and hands to miss. 20
Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to aery thinness beat.
If they be two, they are two so 25
As stiff twin compasses are two ;
Thy soul, the fix'd foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if th' other do.
And though it in the centre sit,
Yet, when the other far doth roam, 30
It leans, and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.
Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
Like th' other foot, obliquely run ;
Thy firmness makes my circle just, 35
And makes me end where I begun.

Source:Donne, John.
Poems of John Donne. vol I. E. K. Chambers, ed.London, Lawrence & Bullen, 1896. 51-52.

A play with words-Anonymous (This is only a test!)

A sailor went to sea, sea, sea
To see what he could see see see
And all that he could see see see
Was the bottom of the deep blue sea sea sea