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