Daily Dialogue — December 8, 2017
“Do you think that the punctuation of the last line of this sonnet is merely an insignificant detail? The sonnet begins with a valiant struggle with Death calling on all the forces of intellect and drama to vanquish the enemy. But it is ultimately about overcoming the seemingly insuperable barriers separating life death and eternal life. In the edition you choose, this profoundly simple meaning is sacrificed to hysterical punctuation. And Death, Capital D, shall be no more, semi-colon. Death, Capital D comma, thou shalt die, exclamation mark! If you go in for this sort of thing I suggest you take up Shakespeare. Gardner’s edition of the Holy Sonnets returns to the Westmoreland manuscript of 1610, not for sentimental reasons I assure you, but because Helen Gardner is a scholar. It reads, “And death shall be no more” comma “death, thou shalt die.” Nothing but a breath, a comma separates life from life everlasting.Very simple, really. With the original punctuation restored Death is no longer something to act out on a stage with exclamation marks. It is a comma. A pause. In this way, the uncompromising way one learns something from the poem, wouldn’t you say? Life, death, soul, God, past present. Not insuperable barriers. Not semi-colons. Just a comma.”
— Wit (2001), teleplay by Emma Thompson and Mike Nichols, play by Margaret Edson
The Daily Dialogue theme for the week: Medical, suggested by Denise Garcia.
Trivia: When Margaret Edson wrote the play “Wit” (for which she won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Drama), she was an Atlanta-area kindergarten teacher. In 2010, she changed to teaching sixth grade instead at Inman Middle School in Atlanta. “Wit” was the first (and, as of 2012, the only) play she ever wrote.
Dialogue On Dialogue: In poetry, where every choice — word, punctuation, sentence break, alignment — is critical, the use of a comma in the John Donne sonnet takes on enormous meaning, that the passages of one’s life “just a comma”. Here is the sonnet:
Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow
Die not, poor death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and soul’s delivery.
Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,
And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well
And better than thy stroke; why swell’st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally
And death shall be no more, death, thou shalt die.
