It was the same old desire that had resounded through his youth, before the complexities and compromises of marriage and family, and it was still there: the thinking body. A completed meshing of body and imagination: that would be the thing most worth having. The Donne of the ‘Anniversaries’ is still the same Donne as the young man in ‘The Ecstasy’ who declared ‘love’s mysteries in souls do grow,/But yet the body is his book.’ When the mind can be made to infuse every inch of the body; that is when living becomes most possible. It hadn’t, Donne implied, yet been achieved, but its achievement
...more
