ABSTRACT
The beginning of Donne’s Elegie: Death offers itself to a double reading: one, which I take to be expressive of the mourning subject’s desire; the other, as bending this desire to authority.
The first reading assumes the speaker to be the mourning subject who, in an apostrophe, turns and accuses language of not providing a discourse that would let grief speak. The passionate subject has recourse to ‘natural’ signs, but verbal ones are denied him. Sighs cannot turn into accents, nor eyes weep words. The passionate body is cut off from language. The loss which the mourning subject experiences is dual: the beloved is lost to death and the self to language. Speechless, the mourning subject finds himself thrust in the topos of inexpressibility, that vast desert of absence and silence. For, where the passionate body is, there language is not. ‘Wild lamentations fill our voiceless bodies. Echoes only are.’2 Vainly, the mourning subject turns to words and pleads:
Come, words, away to where The meaning is not thickened With the voice’s fretting substance, Nor look of words is curious As letters in books staring out … Come, words, away to miracle More natural than written art.
