wendy not gur

In this article On Campus, Vampires are Besting the Beats the author makes a fair point. There seems to be no rebellion in the college kids of today, and the only things they feel compelled to read are fantasies about vampires or the hilarious stories of Tucker Max’s bar trolls.

But what this author doesn’t realize is that history is repeating itself in the stories of today. People do stay the same after all. The only difference is that the works that are published today are written in plain English and all points are bluntly written.

Chaucer’s poetry, for example, is written in barely comprehensible Germish that takes even the most enthusiastic student plenty of time to slough through. Shakespeare’s 254 famous sonnets of love, “Shall I compare thee to a Summer’s Day”, “Let me not to the marriage of true minds”, and “Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion’s paws” among others were written to a young man known only as Mr. W.H. with women (or perhaps woman for he might have been writing of one girl in particular) seeming dark and faithless, unless he is using her to make a point ”My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;”

Another hindrance against the ‘wheat’ of old is what you must know to comprehend a poem at all. Take John Donne’s The Flea, just as one example. For the average student, reading it dry will only tell them that a flea has sucked her blood and his, then something incomprehensible about marriage and grudging parents and churches and purple. The student understandably thinks “What the heck? This is incomprehensible! Where’s I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell?” Student goes to class the next day and asks the English teacher what on earth the poem is about. English teacher tells him the speaker is trying to get his beloved to sleep with him outside of marriage.

Student says WHAT and turns the poem upside down and holds it up to the light. “Where does it say THAT?”

English teacher tells him that to understand this poem he must know that back in Donne's time they thought the mixing of blood between a man and a woman caused pregnancy. Therefore inside a flea, they have consummated a sort of marriage with the flea as their church and bed. The purple is the king Herod who killed all the Jewish babies after learning that a king had been born among them. Thus when she rebuffs his advance by killing the flea the speaker’s girl has actually committed three sins. She has killed herself in the flea, him, and what could have been.

Student shakes his head in frustration and says, “At least Tucker Max just says plain out that he’s going to get drunk and sleep with too many woman. Why couldn’t John Donne just SAY that? Why did I have to dig thought ten layers for THAT?”

Kid has a point.