The Complete English Poems (Penguin Classics) by John Donne

Author:John Donne
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2004-06-23T23:00:00+00:00

A FEVER

9–12 Or if, when thou, the world’s soul, go’st … Petrarch wrote that the death of his mistress had left the earth without a sun, and destroyed the world for him (Canzoniere 268, 326, 338, 352). Donne develops the conceit that a woman can be the sustaining soul of the world in The First Anniversary and in Verse Letters to the Countess of Huntingdon and the Countess of Bedford.

13–14 O wrangling schools, that search what fire / Shall burn this world the conceit sceptically dismisses those squabbling philosophers who had disputed how the world would end. It was the Stoics who spoke of a general conflagration.

16 might ] must MS

18 torturing ] tormenting several MSS

19 For much ] For more 1635–69 and MS; Far more several MSS

19–24 much corruption needful is … Greek medical men held that illnesses are caused by an unequal mixture of the elements, and that fever is like a fire whose best fuel is decayed or corrupt matter, the elements now consuming each other. Donne argues that her fever cannot persist, or cannot touch her real nature, because her essential attributes are of incorruptible substance and not corruptible flesh.

21 meteors fireballs or shooting stars which soon consume their own substance; transitory phenomena, peculiar to our sublunary region of imperfectly mixed elements and of change.

24 firmament the immutable heavens beyond our world of change.

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