John Donne: the Meatloaf of his age

So I do this thing when teaching poetry and my students just aren't getting it: I paraphrase it for them, usually trying to make it funny. As teaching techniques go, it isn't bad ... it relaxes the class, gives them a sense of the poem's big picture, and lets them know that the material isn't merely arcane code designed to frustrate them.

But then there are times when I wonder if I don't perhaps take it beyond the point of usefulness. Yesterday, for example.

We're doing John Donne's poetry this week, which is a joy to teach: it's beautiful, striking, and all about sex. What's not to like? Anyway, we started with "The Flea," in which Donne addresses his would-be lover, who is presumably refusing his advances -- or at least not letting him get to home plate. But look, says Donne, this flea that just bit me has bitten you (eww--bathe much?). Our two bloods have mingled in this little guy! It's like we're married already! Can we get busy now?

Or something like that. I think the nadir of my paraphrasing came when I compared "The Flea" to those torturous arguments made in the back seats of cars by teenage boys to their dates. "You might say," I continued in a rhetorical flourish that I'm glad I didn't make during my thesis examination, "that 'The Flea' is the 'Paradise by the Dashboard Lights' of Jacobean poetry."

Yup. I said that. It's the kind of thing that would probably give Harold Bloom a massive coronary, but I have to imagine it's got its negative aspects too.

On the other hand, there might be something to this Meatloaf-John Donne connection. One could certainly explore it in a scholarly article, especially in terms of Donne's lesser-read poem "Bat Fleeing Hades":

Like the black-wingèd bat that flieth swift
From the darkling halls of infernal Dís,
So I soon from thy lap will flee, upon
The early tremblings of rosy-cheek’d dawn.

Or we could look at Meatloaf's "Elegy on his Mistress Tripping Out." Or Donne's unpublished mansucript Ballades of Powere (Occasioned by the Great Tavernne Fyre).

Truly, a fruitful area for literary research.