i played it back and forth and wrote down the film script:
-Oh, yes. Your essay on the Holy Sonnet is a melodrama with a veneer of scholarship unworthy of you... to say nothing of Donne. Do it again...
-Begin with the text, Miss Bearing, not with a feeling.
"Death be not proud
Though some have called thee
mighty and dreadful, for
Thou art not so
-You've entirely missed the point of the poem.. because i must say you've used an edition of the text that is inauthentically punctuated.
-In the Gardner edition -
--That edition was checked out--
- Miss Bearing?
--I'm sorry --
-You take this too lightly. 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 that 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 overcoming the seemingly insuperable barriers separating life, death and eternal life. 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," captial D, comma...
"thou shalt die!", exclamation mark.
- 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 Helen Gardner is 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. Very simple really. With the original punctuation restored, death is no longer something to act out on a stage with exclamation marks. It is a comma. A pause. In this way, the uncompromising way one learns something from the poem, wouldn't you say? Life, death, soul, God...past, present. not insuperable barriers. Not semicolons. Just a comma.
--Life, death. I see. I'll go back to the library--
--simple human truth. uncompromising scholarly standards. they're connected.
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