Comma, Comma, Comma

Literature that changes my life does so in bits and pieces. I think about the papers I wrote as an undergrad, and that I may not have gotten an A-plus-plus on them, but that I still think about “The Sounds of Shakespeare” and comparing and contrasting Jimmie Santiago Bacca, a prison poet, with Billy Collins. These papers on poetry changed the way I think.

So lets talk poetry. It is not just the poems, but the dialog that surrounds them. Take “Death be not Proud” by John Donne. It isn’t the poem that changed my life, but the way it was placed within the drama W;t. In W;t, the protagonist Vivian Bearing, a foremost scholar on John Donne, and who is dying of cancer, recalls an old conversation she had with a professor over her own not so A-plus-plus paper. The argument was over a semicolon in the line

“And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.”

The professor argued that scholars believed Donne had meant there to be a comma in the place of the semicolon. Vivian argued that the copy the library had available contained the semicolon. All of the copies in the library at my undergraduate university contained the semicolon as well. The professor insisted on the comma because a comma is but a breath, whereas the semicolon is the closest thing to a full stop without actually becoming a period. The comma is the barest breath between life and death, the barest transition from one existence to the next; it is the reason why W;t is W;t and not Wit.

This changed my life in two ways. The first was the way I punctuated. Before, punctuation had been a mechanical feature of my writing. I used periods because they were socially acceptable ends to sentences. Now I consider the poetic nature those little marks and use them consciously and not because my high school teachers evaluated me on writing mechanics.

The second change occurred a while after I studied the poem and play in class. The spring after I studied W;t, my friend Amy was diagnosed with cancer, and she was gone just a few months later. Like that.. She was a full spirit, an old soul, and she was gone without the full pause of a semicolon. I think of Donne’s comma and how just like that friends and family are gone. Just like that, I’ll be gone too.

DEATH be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadfull, for, thou art not so,
For, those, whom thou think'st, thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poore death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleepe, which but thy pictures bee,
Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee doe goe,
Rest of their bones, and soules deliverie.
Thou art slave to Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poyson, warre, and sicknesse dwell,
And poppie, or charmes can make us sleepe as well,
And better then thy stroake; why swell'st thou then;
One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally,
And death shall be no more, death, thou shalt die.