A Real Vote

Each semester someone in the English Department hosts a penny-poll, and this semester it's Donne vs. Shakespeare - the E.M.E. smack-down.

I sincerely believe that Donne will win for one simple reason. So many people don't like Shakspar because they know just enough about him to have been intimidated.

Donne was profound and funny. He thought in words and ideas so entwined together that they resembled the threads in some nautical rope, and from each twist sprouted some new metaphor which may or may not totally redefine the subject. His poetry embodied linguistic and theological complexity, and his ideas warrant nearly as much concentration as Ulysses.

Shekespear was crass and commercial. He wrote fast-talking but believable characters, and mocked his own cast, his critics, colleagues, and occasionally himself. He killed mercilessly and resurrected without a blink. He hosted fairies, demons, witches, bastards, cuckolds, royalty, and soldiers, and even the funny ones weren't safe. For an E.M.E., he was awfully modern.

How would you vote?

Thornton

My heart is still pounding away from the last two scenes of the BBC North & South. Pounding away, I tell you!

I recall a scene from earlier in the movie where Mr. Thornton has fallen asleep at his desk and his mother covers his shoulders with her shawl, and I remember thinking that he works too hard, and he wouldn't have time to keep a wife and childer happy. He might say that he works for their benefit, as his employees do, but if his employees don't work, they starve. If he doesn't work, his wife and sister wear their own cotton instead of imported silk.

And then I realized that Mr. Thornton personifies a conceptual medium between Mr. Darcy of the Romantic era and Ebenezer Scrooge of the Victorians. It turns my head in fascinating circles to imagine Scrooge as a romantic lead. I think I might indulge in that turn.