6 Matching Annotations
  1. Dec 2021
    1. If ever any beauty I did see, Which I desired, and got, ’twas but a dream of thee.

      It's a clever reworking of Plato's cave allegory.

      The lover is presented as the Ideal of Beauty, which all earthly beauty is but an imperfect reflection of it. The previous mistresses that the speaker had a relationship with were mere fantasy(dream) of the lady that he is now in love with. It's a quite common conceit in Renaissance lyrics. However, the expression 'desired and got' is an original line of John Donne to refresh this overused cliché.

      Source:

      1. Nassaar S., Plato in John Donne's 'The Good Morrow' (2003)
      2. Book: John Donne, The Complete English Poet (1971)
      3. https://faculty.washington.edu/smcohen/320/cave.htm
    2. den

      A cave where wild animals live.

      Another expression to demean the immature pleasures the speaker and the addressee once enjoyed.

      Also, the imagery of cave connects to the Plato's allegory of the cave which is the inspirational basis for line 6 and 7.

  2. Sep 2020
    1. The Colonel had been a notorious opium-eater for years past

      It should be mentioned that Wilkie Collins was a "notorious opium-eater" himself. The Colonel may be an allusion to himself, and the negative way in which he is depicted could be interpreted as Collins' self-loathing.

      The curse of the Diamond itself may be an allegory for the corrupting influence of opium addiction. The "wretched crystal" that he "picked up" in India can be construed as a metaphor for a bad drug habit.

  3. Jan 2019
  4. Jan 2018
    1. Charity devoid of charity, that Envy who looked like nothing so much as a plate in some medical book, illustrating the compression of the glottis or uvula by a tumour in the tongue, or by the introduction of the operator's instrument, a Justice whose greyish and meanly regular features were the very same as those which adorned the faces of certain good and pious and slightly withered ladies of Combray whom I used to see at mass, many of whom had long been enrolled in the reserve forces of Injustice. But in later years I understood that the arresting strangeness, the special beauty of these frescoes lay in the great part played in each of them by its symbols, while the fact that these were depicted, not as symbols (for the thought symbolised was nowhere expressed), but as real things, actually felt or materially handled, added something more precise and more literal to their meaning, something more concrete and more striking to the lesson they imparted. And even in the case of the poor kitchen-maid, was not our attention incessantly drawn to her belly by the load which filled it; and in the same way, again, are not the thoughts of men and women in the agony of death often turned towards the practical, painful, obscure, internal, intestinal aspect, towards that 'seamy side' of death which is, as it happens, the side that death actually presents to them and forces them to feel, a side which far more closely resembles a crushing burden, a difficulty in breathing, a destroying thirst, than the abstract idea to which we are accustomed to give the name of Death?

      The real allegory:<br> An explanation of how the pregnant kitchen main represents charity not through some abstract ideals of what true charity is and looks like but through her living and showing what charity is constantly.

  5. Feb 2017
    1. I shall call sister-graces, daughters of the same father E.r:perience, who is the progeny of Memory, the first-born and heir of Sense. These daughters £rperie11ce had by differ· ent mothers. The elder is the off spring of Rea.wn, the younger is the child of Fancy.

      This sounds like a super-boring Austen Novel.