• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.12 no.4
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• pp.277-290
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• 2006

This study is to find out the meaning of the death in Donne's "Holy Sonnets" and divine poems. Death issue is the important theme and is used frequently in his poems. He expresses an assertion of faith about the defeat of death and wishes to gain new birth and eternal life through death. Ironically death must be died for rebirth and an inevitable death. Death is another way to get new life and return to Christ. Many readers think that "Hymn to God my god, in my sickness" is Donne's most distinguished achievement in his divine poems. The poem shows that death must be accepted willingly because it is only through death that man can reach heavenly bliss and gain new life. He develops an antithetic parallel between two hills and two trees. Paradise and Adam's tree which brought death into the world are related analogically to Calvary and the Cross, which brought resurrection and eternal life. Death and resurrection are shown to be conjoined in the poem. To sum up, Donne tried to pursuit death for rebirth and modeled after Christ's death and Resurrection.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.1-25
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• 2009

This paper attempts to illuminate the significance of the myth or mythical method used in The Waste Land, which Eliot adapted from Jessie L. Weston's From Rituals to Romance and Sir James Frazer's Golden Bough. While he was composing a modern epic, James Joyce's Ulysses and Igor Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps made him sure that the mythical method would be the best way to make the non-relational and chaotic modern world into a work of art. Although he accepted F. H. Bradley's epistemology that one's actual experience is non-relational, he strongly put an emphasis on 'the unified sensibility' in John Donne's poetry with which a poet changes all the dissociated material into art. He also found another effective method to give the chaotic experiences an order, and to make them modern art: the mythical method in his contemporary anthropology. With the mythical method he incorporated the various barren, horrible and ugly aspects of modern world into a new unity in The Waste Land. In addition, he embraced his contemporary anthropological theory that a primitive life described in myths is a culture just different from modern culture, and heartily employed some aspects of primitive culture to make modern poetry as well as modern culture rich and exuberant.