The epitaph is both a hymn and a promise: a vow never to marry again. In the Latin she is ‘Faeminae lectissimae dilectissimaeque’: the words are drafted to do double work, in the Latin lector, so that Anne becomes Donne’s best reader and best text. She is both well read, and read hungrily by Donne: he has studied her and tried to know her. But the Latin of the first part has a harmony which the second half abandons. It grows awkward and uneven in syntax and scansion when it talks about time, decay and loss; he broke the form of the epitaph to salute the breakdown of the heart. He had written,
...more
