In "The Computation" John Donne used date to make the reader become involved with the poem. After all, computation means an act, process, or method of computing or a calculation according to Webster's Dictionary. The first time that I read the poem I read it literally and added up all the years after I was done. The total was an outrageous number which posed to me the question: was John Donne being literal or just figurative. I then read the poem again and paid close attention to the last line which said,"Yet call not this long life; but think that I Am, by being dead, immortal. Can ghosts die?" This line makes the reader think. Knowing that Donne had written the poem in a time period where Catholicism was the predominant religion, I thought that he had intended the reader to conclude that the man was in purgatory while waiting to move on. However, the reader can infer many things from this poem such as thinking that the ghost is the memory of his girlfriend. None the less, there are many ways to interpret the poem which is, in my opinion, is what the beauty of poetry is about.
The person speaking in "The Computation" is not John Donne but rather a man or a woman that is unable to get over the loss of a loved one. The main purpose of the poem is for that person to express the sorrow of loosing their beloved. The reader is able to gather this by Donne's use of alliteration and hyperbolas through-out the poem.
Does Donne use hyperbolas or hyperboles? (It's an easy mistake to make, especially since Donne is talking about math in this poem...)
ReplyDeleteYou might do some research on Donne's religious background. Like I said in class, Donne was himself a Catholic, but Catholicism was not the predominant religion of England. It was in a battle with the Church of England and the Puritans to determine which church would dominate England for the next four centuries.
I'm raising your grade for this revision, but you're still missing one out of three poetry posts. Can you get this done this week?