John Donne’s ‘A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning’
Event Details
- Virtual study facilitated by Vivien Kogut
- Single session, 4.00-6.00pm (GMT)
- Monday 6 December 2021
- Cost £25.00 (includes background materials and opening notes)
God the Geometer, Austrian National Library, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
“It pleased him; it puzzled him; it was so hard, so concentrated, so definite an object compared with the vague sea and the hazy shore”, wrote Virginia Woolf in her story Solid Objects. Objects, like words, have a visible side and an essential nature, something we easily grasp, and something that escapes us. Like words, they invite us to piece them together and derive new meanings at each encounter. Yet, with their particular charisma, objects can also connect us to a time and a place in ways words can never do.
How can a poem prompt dialogue with a woodcut print of a rhinoceros? Or with a magical mirror from the Aztecs? And how can this conversation illuminate our understanding of literature, history and culture?
In this single-session study we will read together John Donne’s poem A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning. Donne (1572-1631) wrote some of the most enduring lines in English literature – ‘no man is an island’ and ‘for whom the bell tolls’ have almost become idioms. His vast body of work – poems, sermons, letters – is rooted in the Renaissance, a period of extraordinary creativity, discovery and experimentation.
We will read Donne’s poem in dialogue with a few surprise objects, exploring possible conversations between poetry and objects, between the Renaissance and our own times.
