After watching the video preview of the week's work I tried to keep audience in mind while doing the readings. I think it is pretty clear that in "Ode to Virginian Voyage" that the audience would be the soldiers and sailors who are setting out as discoverers for their country. The author is writing this because he has confidence in these peoples' abilities, he "knows" what a wonderful discovery Virginia will be, and he wants to keep these soldiers and sailors positive and optimistic. For me, this was pretty easy to see when reading the text.
However, I'm not so sure of the audience that Donne is trying to target with Elegy 19. In my opinion the poem is pretty racy. I see how he is comparing discovering the newfoundland of America to discovering a woman's body through sex. But why is this comparison being made? And for what purpose? Am I missing the bigger picture? Help!
I think it's important to keep the context of the times in mind while reading Elegy 19. John Donne was a satirist and so he mainly poked fun of the interests and the social and literary trends of the time. At this point in time, so many new accounts of exploration were flooding in to England, and the public was very taken with whimsical fantasies of foreign untouched (virgin) lands and "Golden Age" peoples. Rather than jumping on the bandwagon, John Donne decided to just do what he did best and do his own thing while poking fun at the public's obsession with the New World. The poem itself is indeed quite racy, but the purity that Donne associates with the naked human body seems to be on par with the purity that the public saw in the exploration of the New World. In my opinion, Donne was basically saying that the excitement and wonders that people found in New World exploration could easily be found in the bedroom. At this time the public was totally preoccupied with popularized fantastical accounts about the wider world(keep in mind that exploration was actually just a means of a government gaining more gold or resources and Donne understood this) rather than the spiritual connections that could be made between two people.
ReplyDeleteI definitely had the same question about the audience when reading Donne's work. For me it was the most interesting reading assigned this week because it was so different from the other two and took a completely differnet direction when trying to talk about the new land and the beauty, wonder, and curiosity that surrounded it. Based on my own interpretation of Elegy 19, I think the audience was young men who were looking for a bright future. Appealing to the sexual desires of these men, they can see the connection between the glory of being with a woman as well as the glory of a new land. These men would be able to make a life for themselves on their own terms where no one else had been before. It was their time to set up rules and regulations. This power and exploration that these young men desire would be the same type of excitement they would experience when in the events Donne describes.
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