792 Death and Decay in Early Modern Lyric Poetry (with Eileen Sperry) | My Last Book with Bruce Gordon

Summary

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The History of Literature – Episode 792

Death and Decay in Early Modern Lyric Poetry (with Eileen Sperry) | My Last Book with Bruce Gordon
April 13, 2026
Host: Jacke Wilson
Guests: Eileen Sperry (Skidmore College), Bruce Gordon (Yale)

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Episode Overview

This episode explores the rich literary engagement with death, decay, and mortality in early modern English lyric poetry, featuring a deep dive with Eileen Sperry, author of This Body of Death: Form and Decay in Early Modern Lyric. The conversation examines how non-narrative poetry of the period shaped— and still shapes—views on mortality, vulnerability, disability, and embodiment. The episode also features Bruce Gordon, biblical scholar, sharing his pick for the “last book” he would ever read, reflecting on the spiritual and literary power of texts like the Psalms.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Real d’Artagnan and Literary Immortality (01:20–06:49)

• Discovery of a Skeleton: The episode opens with the real-life discovery of a skeleton under a collapsed church in Maastricht, possibly belonging to Charles de Batz Castlemore (d’Artagnan), inspiration for Dumas’s The Three Musketeers.
• Mortality vs. Immortality: This find serves as a metaphor for the contrast between human mortality and the literary immortality achieved through characterization and storytelling.

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2. Anton Chekhov on Jealousy and Objectivity (06:50–12:15)

• Chekhov’s Advice: Jacke reads a letter from Chekhov addressing a fellow writer’s jealousy, stressing the need for objectivity, gratitude, and perspective:
  • “You are a good writer, but you lack entirely the ability or the desire to look objectively at things… Writers are as jealous as pigeons… If you could bring yourself to look upon life objectively, you would cease to sing the tune of Lazarus.” (08:59)
• Existential Reflection: Jacke encourages listeners to avoid wasting life on jealousy, tying this perspective to the day’s broader theme: making sense of mortality.

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3. Interview: Eileen Sperry on Death, Disability, and Lyric Poetry

a. Academic Journey & Influences (12:31–15:38)

• Personal Path: Sperry’s passion for Renaissance literature was sparked by an inspiring high school teacher and deepened in university Milton seminars.
• Intersection with Disability Studies: Her research evolved during the pandemic, focusing on how cultural narratives about mortality overlap with frameworks from disability studies.

b. The Early Modern Understanding of Mortality — Literary Forms (16:46–19:24)

• Tragedy & Ars Moriendi: The period’s tragedies and “art of dying” texts portray death as a singular, climactic event to be prepared for.
• Lyric Alternative: Sperry’s interest lies in non-narrative forms (e.g., lyric poetry) that contemplate mortality as an ongoing, shared human condition rather than as a discrete endpoint.

c. Carpe Diem Lyricism: Marvell and Marlowe (19:24–21:35)

• Paradox of the Carpe Diem: Lyric “carpe diem” poems promise youthful immortality within the poem while highlighting that such promises are ultimately illusory.
  • “You need to both sort of offer up this, like, possibility of timelessness, but also stress the fact of time… we are never forever young. We're always hurtling towards death.” (20:32)

d. The Ideology of Ability and Disability Theory (21:35–25:15)

• Tobin Siebers & the “Ideology of Ability”: Discusses how cultural discourse privileges able-bodiedness and constructs futures either denying or overemphasizing mortality.
  • “Often we construct futures that cannot include disability or mortality in any form… The ideal future that a utopic narrative like that can imagine is one without death.” (22:53)
• Complex Embodiment: Sperry advocates for “living at the precipice” of these extremes, accepting bodily vulnerability as constitutive of community.

e. Decay as an Ongoing State (25:15–26:13)

• Redefining Mortality: Rather than an event, decay is presented as the constant state of being—mortality as “horizontal” rather than “vertical” time.

f. Literature, Permanence, and the Anxiety of Immortality (27:11–29:53)

• Literary Immortality: Poets like Shakespeare simultaneously cherish and question their ability to immortalize through verse.
  • “Every time you copy something or repeat something, it changes a little bit… He offers up this promise, but he offers it up over and over and over again.” (28:11)
• Anxiety: The repetitive proclamations in poetry reveal underlying doubts about truly overcoming death.

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4. Case Studies: Key Poets & Works

a. Shakespeare’s Sonnets (31:36–36:53)

• Wholeness & Sequence Debate: Critics have long debated whether Shakespeare’s sonnets should be read as a sequence or as fragmented. Sperry proposes embracing their “prosthetic” assembly as a model for understanding bodily and poetic wholeness:
  • “…Shakespeare really thinks about this through the lens of poetic form… Maybe rather than trying to make excuses for all the ways they don't go together, I could look at them and just say, well, they are together.” (35:19)

b. Edmund Spenser’s “The Faerie Queene” (37:21–40:52)

• Carpe Diem vs. Memento Mori: Spenser juxtaposes indulgence (“Bower of Bliss”) with reminders of death (memento mori), showing that navigating between extremes is central to “temperance.”
• Cyclical Reading: Sperry recommends seeing the poem’s structure as circular rather than linear, embodying a continual negotiation with mortality.

c. Religion, Sin, and the “Correct Temporality” (40:52–43:08)

• Afterlife Concerns: The period’s literature is deeply embedded in Christian notions, insisting on patience and “living in the correct temporality of death.”
  • “One of the sins that presents itself is a failure to live within the correct attitude toward time.” (41:51)

d. John Donne: Death, Intimacy, and Resurrection (43:23–48:33)

• Intimate Decay: Donne’s poetry uses images of decay and dissected bodies as metaphors for profound intimacy and spiritual union.
  • “All of these moments of decay were simultaneously moments of incredible intimacy between the poem speaker and the beloved that he was writing to.” (44:21)
• From Erotic to Religious: Donne’s later sermons carry this theme into discussions of bodily resurrection, seeing postmortem decay as a site for reunion with the divine.

e. Hester Pulter: Grief and Embodied Mortality (48:53–53:15)

• Rediscovered Voice: 17th-century poet Hester Pulter’s writings, suffused with loss (she outlived 13 of 15 children), intertwine emotions and the physicality of grief.
  • “In the bills of mortality in the period, you get deaths attributed to grief frequently… for Poulter, that would have been a sense of like a physical ailment as much as anything else.” (52:34)
• Decay as Affect: Her works exemplify how emotional states were understood as bodily experiences that reinforce human vulnerability.

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5. The Hope in Embracing Vulnerability (53:15–55:46)

• Not a Dark Topic: Despite her deep engagement with mortality, Sperry finds hope in accepting vulnerability and using it to foster community and radical empathy.
  • “Acknowledging that vulnerability ultimately leads to the capacity to build community, to be closer to with one another and to take care of one another. And that's… a future, I think, full of hope.” (54:17)

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Notable Quotes

• “Writers are as jealous as pigeons.” – Anton Chekhov (08:53)
• “We are never forever young. We're always hurtling towards death. So we have to take the most of the time we have right now.” – Eileen Sperry (20:26)
• “Often we construct futures that cannot include disability or mortality in any form… The ideal future that a utopic narrative like that can imagine is one without death.” – Eileen Sperry (22:53)
• “The poem is never going to keep the beloved alive… but it can act in connection with that body in a certain way.” – Eileen Sperry (34:15)
• “John Donne… uses all of these images of sort of fractal or partial bodies to imagine this world in which… if we could be totally absorbed into one another… [and] the decay of the bodies of the faithful creates this opportunity for an intimacy with God in resurrection that wouldn’t exist otherwise.” – Eileen Sperry (44:21, 46:12)
• “That vulnerability ultimately leads to the capacity to build community, to be closer to with one another… That’s... a future, I think, full of hope.” – Eileen Sperry (54:17)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

| Timestamp | Segment / Topic | |-----------|-----------------| | 01:20–06:49 | d'Artagnan discovery & immortality in literature | | 06:50–12:15 | Chekhov on jealousy; reflection on objectivity | | 12:31–15:38 | Eileen Sperry’s academic journey & influences | | 16:46–19:24 | Tragedy, Ars Moriendi, and models of mortality | | 19:24–21:35 | Carpe diem lyric poetry and its paradoxes | | 21:35–25:15 | Ideology of ability, disability theory | | 25:15–26:13 | Decay as ongoing, horizontal process | | 27:11–29:53 | Literature and the anxiety of immortality | | 31:36–36:53 | Shakespeare’s sonnets and wholeness | | 37:21–40:52 | Spenser’s “Faerie Queene,” circular time | | 40:52–43:08 | Religion, sin, and “correct temporality” | | 43:23–48:33 | John Donne: Intimate decay and resurrection | | 48:53–53:15 | Hester Pulter, grief, and embodied mortality | | 53:15–55:46 | Embracing vulnerability, hope in community | | 56:03–60:20 | Bruce Gordon: The last book (Psalms, Kempis) |

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Bruce Gordon: “My Last Book” (56:03–60:20)

• Choice of Book: Bruce Gordon selects The Psalms (‘a mirror’ of human emotion and spirituality) and, outside the Bible, The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis.
  • “The Psalms… They're full of extreme beauty and at other times, vitriol and hatred and violence. But to me, that reflects us. It's a mirror.” (57:43)
  • “The Imitation of Christ… every time I look at it, it brings out something that I never thought about before.” (58:17)

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Concluding Reflection

Throughout the episode, Jacke Wilson and Eileen Sperry illustrate how the literature of the early modern period—especially lyric poetry—offers profound models for facing mortality, not by seeking escape or denial, but by accepting vulnerability, fostering community, and exploring the depths of embodied experience. The episode ends on a note of hope and connection, rooted in both literature and the shared inevitability of death.

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For more on Eileen Sperry’s book or Bruce Gordon’s work, visit your favorite bookstore or historyofliterature.com.

Transcript

[A]

The History of Literature podcast is a member of the podglomerate Network and Lit Hub Radio.

[B]

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[A]

Hello. Today on the podcast, Eileen Sperry of Skidmore College tells us how the lyric poetry of the early modern period shaped our understanding of mortality. And speaking of mortality, a set of bones discovered under a collapsed church floor in the Netherlands might be a famous literary figure. We will hear Chekhov's advice for how to deal with jealousy. And Bruce Gordon, a biblical scholar, will deliver his choice for the last book he will ever read. It might surprise you. That's all coming up today on the History of of Literature. Okay, welcome to the podcast. I'm Jack Wilson. It all began when a floor collapsed in an old church in the Dutch city of Maastricht. Workers were brought in to repair the place and they found a skeleton. A deacon of the church knew just who to call. Wim Dyckman, a retired archaeologist who had spent 28 years searching for the final resting place of 17th century Gascon nobleman Charles de Betts Castlemore, who was better known as d' Artagnan the Musketeer, whose exploits inspired Alexandre Dumas to put him in the center of his famous novel, the Three Musketeers. We are going back 350 years now. That's how long ago the real life d' Artagnan lived. He was a spy and musketeer for King Louis XIV, who died, not King Louis. The d' Artagnan died during the siege of Maastricht in 1673. But his remains were lost to history. D' Artagnan was first written about in 1700 by a French soldier and writer Gatien de Cortiles de Sandras, who wrote a book called Memoirs d Monsieur d'. Artagnan. I guess you pronounce it, you know me in French. Anyway, that's what inspired Dumas, whose book the Three Musketeers came out in 1844. Scientists are now confirming the skeleton's identity through DNA testing, but some nice clues already have given us hope. For one thing, the purported body of d' Artagnan lay buried under the altar in consecrated ground with a couple of clues. There was a French coin from that period in the grave. And best of all, or the best clue of all in my opinion, is that there was a bullet in his chest, which is exactly how the history books described his death. The real life d' Artagnan was all too mortal. But Dumas character has achieved a kind of immortality. And now, hopefully, Wim Dikeman can enjoy his retirement, his quest fulfilled. One pictures him curled up with a good book. A tale of swashbuckling, perhaps, his mind resting easy as he thinks. My adventures are all in my imagination now. I've found d'. Artagnan. Are you a writer, dear listener, or an artist of some sort? Or a human being? I can get as abstract as I need to be in order to meet you where you are and include you in this. If you live on this planet, chances are you've been jealous. And if you're an artist or a writer, you almost certainly are jealous of the success of that rival of yours, or that prize that somebody else won, or the work itself. Oh, I wish I had written this. Damn it, George Eliot. Why is Middlemarch so good? You can be jealous of a writer who's been dead for hundreds of years. Why is everyone still reading this guy? Come on. And not me? Well, in Chekhov's time, there were a lot of people to be jealous of. Writers were publishing fiction in newspapers and journals. A feast which led to a kind of dogfight over the scraps. Who's better at writing this kind of story? Who's getting paid more? Who's getting more praise? Why not me? In 1888, one such writer sent Chekhov a letter, and Chekhov wrote back. Chekhov had some thoughts, not just on writing, but on life. Let's hear the letter quote. You are a good writer, but you lack entirely the ability or the desire to look objectively at things. Nerves, nerves and nerves. Again, be does not speak well of your mignon. That is to be expected. Writers are as jealous as pigeons. Lichen is put out if some other writer turns his attention to the life of the merchant class. Leskov hates to read novels from priest's life, not written by himself. And Biachetsky will never acknowledge your military sketches because he regards himself as the sole specialist in the military field. And you do not care for his wonderful the soldiers in the war. Everybody is highly strung and jealous. You claim that Burenin is embittered against you. Like most writers, he seldom expresses a favorable opinion behind one's back. But should someone ask him whom he regards with greater esteem, you or Sylleus, whom he praises, he would laugh at the humor of the question. If you could bring yourself to look upon life objectively, you would cease to sing the tune of Lazarus. You are one of the happiest of modern writers. Everybody reads you, is pleased, praises you, elects you to membership. Your plays are produced and are well attended. What do you require of the muses in literature? You already hold the rank of major with gold stripes, and this rank should be the charm to keep you from fear and from losing hope of the future because of some stinging fleas and a dog howling beneath the window. End quote. In literature, as in life. Thank you, Anton Chekhov. People, try to look at your life objectively. It's a wonder that I'm even here. It's a gift. Sure, I'd like to have more things going my way, but will I spend my whole life feeling that way? If you were a character in a story or a novel and you were consumed by jealousy, how would you expect that character to be portrayed? As one who deserved more than he or she got? Or as one who got plenty but still wanted more and thus was unhappy? There have been a few characters in the former category, but a lot more in the latter, and rightfully so. We cannot afford to waste our lives based on a desire for things we can't afford or things we have not been afforded. Don't let that be you. Someday you might spend 350 years buried under a church floor with a bullet and a French coin, your only companions. This is all a nice preview for our guest today. Death, decay and early modern poetry. What could be better for spring? Gathering rosebuds while we may. Soon enough we will decay. Is that how that one goes? More or less. Heavy emphasis on the less. Eileen Sperry will explain it all after this. Hey, folks, when I started this podcast, it seemed like I had to figure everything out all on my own website. Hosting, platform scripts, recording, editing. When you're trying to build something new, your to do list can quickly become overwhelming. Finding the right tool that not only helps you out but simplifies everything can be such a game changer for millions of businesses. That tool is Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform behind household names like Heinz and Mattel and and exciting new businesses just getting started. Shopify can help you create a beautiful new e commerce site that matches your brand style. They can help with all the supporting features too, like email and social media campaigns, inventory, shipping, payments, analytics and more. See fewer carts go abandoned and more sales go with Shopify and their Shop Pay button. Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at shopify.com literature go to shopify.com literature that's shopify.com literature right now at the Home Depot. Shop Spring Black Friday savings and get up to 40% off plus up to $500 off select appliances from top brands like Samsung. Get a fridge with zero clearance hinges so the doors open fully even in tighter spaces in your kitchen and laundry. That saves you time like an all in one washer dryer that can run a full load in just 668 minutes. Shop Spring Black Friday Savings plus get free delivery on appliance purchases of $998 or more at the Home Depot off of out April 9 through April 29 US only C store online for details. You tell yourself no one wants your college era band tees, but on Depop, people are searching for exactly what you've got. You once paid a small fortune for them at merch stands. Now a teenager who calls them vintage will offer that same small fortune back. Sell them easily on Depop. Just snap a few photos and we'll take care of the rest. Who knew your questionable music taste would be a money making machine. Your style can make you cash. Start selling on Depop where taste recognizes taste. Hi, it's Jack. One quick note before we begin. Eileen Sperry's title has changed since we recorded this interview. She is now Assistant teaching Professor of English at Skidmore College. Okay, Joining me now is Eileen Sperry who is Visiting professor of English at Skidmore College. She's here to discuss her book this Body of Form and Decay in Early Modern Lyric, which explores how the lyric poetry and other non narrative literary forms of early modern England shape our understanding of what it means to be mortal. Eileen Sperry, welcome to the History of Literature.

[B]

Thanks so much for having me.

[A]

So when did you become interested in the literature of early modern England?

[B]

I had a fantastic high school English teacher who loved Shakespeare and it's because it was. I know, because it was the subject matter that he seemed to love the most, it was what he was most excited to teach. And then, of course, that was what we were most excited to learn. So I had these early experiences, you know, as a teenager in high school, English acting, Romeo and Juliet out with the class, and, you know, all of those great early formative moments. Then when I arrived in my undergrad program, I had sort of carried that love through. But the class that shaped my experience there was a Milton seminar. It was on John Milton, and that centered around this lovely, long, slow reading through Paradise Lost. And I became obsessed.

[A]

Right.

[B]

I could see not just the beauty of the language of the period, but of all of the things that were changing in this culture and in this period that there was so much in flux, and it felt like it was a time of so much possibility in the world that Milton was seeing, but that other authors were seeing as well. I've sort of never been able to get over all of those possibilities that were inherent in those years, those centuries.

[A]

Yeah. So much was in flux, and he seemed to embody it all. Wow. Okay. So you are also influenced by contemporary disability studies. Did your interest in that grow out of this project, or was that something you've also been studying for a while?

[B]

It did grow out of this project. There were moments early on in the writing of the book and back in the days when it was a dissertation project that I started to get a little bit of an inkling, and some of that was in working on some Milton material that kind of fell away from the project as it evolved, but started to get an inkling that there was a language about disability and ability and the way we talk about bodies that was kind of underneath all of these questions about mortality that I had been trac. And so I had begun developing my own vocabulary and disability studies as I was revising the project and building up the chapters. But for me, one of the transformative moments was many of the years that I did most of the writing for the project, and the most intensive research and writing for the project were during COVID And so there was a sense, in a kind of broad societal way, of being able to think about a mass mortality event like Covid and as a mass disabling event, and that there were disability theorists who were offering such beautiful and intelligent frameworks for thinking about how we responded to death, how we responded to these anxieties around our own mortality. And that was the moment that, for me, those two things really were able to come together in the project, and it became the thing that it ultimately ended up being.

[A]

Yeah, it does seem like Covid, really. It kind of shone a light on the way that we take certain things for granted, which is. Seems fundamental to both a study of mortality and a study of disability.

[B]

Yeah. And also the fiction of total independence. Right. That our bodies. You know, there's this desire sometimes to think of ourselves as completely independent beings or to equate our value as beings with our capacity to be totally independent. And it was this moment where briefly but beautifully, that value got inverted a little bit. Like we got to celebrate being dependent on one another and taking care of one another. We got to realize how essential it was to. To recognize that our bodies, ourselves, are always in dialogue and always in community with one another. And so that, too, became this value underneath the project of thinking about how the way we think about our bodies affects the way we think about being in community with one another.

[A]

Right. Okay, so let's talk. I want to come back to that and something called the ideology of ability. But before we do that, so let's talk about mortality and connect it to the literature of this period. So you say that the literature of this period shapes our understanding of what it means to be mortal. What's the best way to help us understand just what this period contributed to that? Is it possible to look at how mortality was viewed prior to this period and then see what was different or maybe just identify what in particular you found that these authors were trying to address?

[B]

Yeah, I think there are two primary examples that I can offer that are sort of the counterpart to what's in my book. One of the forms that the period relies on and that has been explored really extensively in other projects is the form of tragedy. Right. The early modern period is the. It's the period of tragedy. It's the period of all these really big, beautiful Elizabethan and Jacobean Shakespearean tragedies that we're so familiar with, and other scholars have written really beautifully about these. But these were forms in which death had a very specific role. Right. It was an event. It has to happen in a particular time in the play. You know, it's coming in Act 5. You know who it's coming for. It's this culminating moment that everything seems to be pushing you toward. This gets echoed in some of the other popular literature of the period, which are these Arsmoreendi texts. Right. The Art of Dying. These were incredibly popular in England in the late 16th, but really throughout the 17th century, they were printed over and over and over again. They were pretty affordable. They were Small folks would have owned these and maybe had a household copy or had a kind of use copy that would have been in circulation in their family. And these did things kind of similar to tragedy. They prepared folks for the death that was coming at the end of their lives. How do you prepare to die? How do you prepare to die? Well, but those forms encourage readers and audience members to think about death in one particular way as this event in time in the future that we're sort of heading toward. And my interest was in thinking about, well, these are narrative forms. They're telling stories. But what happens if we look at other literary forms? Are there other ways that. That forms in the period start to offer up other ways of thinking about what it means to be mortal?

[A]

Right. Like the carpe diem poets, for example.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Okay, so let's jump to them. Andrew Marvell's Famous To His Coy Mistress and Christopher Marlowe's Shepherd. What do those lyric poems tell us about time and the body?

[B]

I love these poems, and I love teaching these poems, too. Students are such great readers of these poems because I think that they're attuned to some of the dynamics that are happening, right? That they. Some of the students recognize these patterns, and some of them haven't gone very far. But one of the things that students often notice and one of the things that's, I think, integral to this form is that they rely on a sort of central paradox, right? In some ways, what they offer is this promise of kind of continuous youthfulness and immortality, right. I can create this little space in the poem where we can be forever young and forever beautiful, and we can forever enjoy one another. And they hold this up as a kind of possibility, right. One dimension of the poem. And on the other hand, the poem also relies on the fact that it knows and the reader knows and the poet knows that that's a total false promise, right. That never happen. Because you need the flux of time to encourage the person you're trying to seduce to seize the day, to take the fleeting of time, to enjoy their youth, right? So you need to both sort of offer up this, like, possibility of timelessness, but also stress the fact of time. And so you get this lovely dichotomy when you're talking about mortality here, of, gosh, it would be wonderful if we could stay forever young and never age and never decay. But, of course, we're always aging, and we are never forever young. We're always hurtling towards death. So we have to take the most of the time we have right now.

[A]

Yeah, the clock is ticking. So how does that tie in with the ideology of ability? And you cite an old favorite of mine, Tobin Siebers, and he talks about the briefest look at history. I'm getting this quote from you. The briefest look at history reveals that human beings are fragile. Human life confronts the overwhelming reality of sickness, injury, disfigurement, enfeeblement, old age and death. Whatever our destiny as a species, we are as individuals, feeble and finite.

[B]

Yeah, I love Siebers work on this. And I think it was one of those texts, again, that as I encountered it, as I was working on the project, that it just unlocked something for me here. And so when Siebers writes about the ideology of ability, its kind of broadest form is thinking about all the ways that our cultural discourse values an able body over a disabled body, all the ways that that value manifests in the way we form communities, the way we create spaces, the way we construct identity, but in particular, the way that Siebers uses that to think about the way we construct futures. So you're just describing that passage that I quote here, that often we construct futures that cannot include disability or mortality in any form. Right? We create these utopian futures. I don't know if you've encountered the recent Brian Johnson documentary on Netflix.

[A]

No, I don't think so.

[B]

No, this is a. I mean, this is a contemporary, contemporary film. But Johnson is a Silicon Valley millionaire, has a lot of money, and has expressed really clearly his interest in expanding human lifespan. Right. He's doing this long, this big scale experiment on his own body. And the Netflix documentary about this is called Don't Die. And he's very explicit. His goal is to establish human biological immortality. But it's this wonderful encapsulation of this ideology of ability in that the ideal future that a utopic narrative like that can imagine is one without death. Right? That we imagine the ideal future as being one totally free of mortality. Or when you go back to those tragic narratives of the Renaissance, we can imagine a future that only includes mortality, right? That is sort of hurtling inevitably toward death and the eradication of the body. And so what Sieber's framework helped me think about was a way in which you could sort of take those two futures and sort of hold them off to the side in the way that those carpe diem poets try to do, right? To say, okay, one of these exists and the other of these exists as well. But the thing that I want actually is to sort of stand here right, at the precipice of both of them, or right at the moment where both of these overlap with one another. And I want to hold both of those futures simultaneously and try not to head toward either of them, but to live in both of them. And Siebers, later in the book, talks about this as a state of complex embodiment, or this theory of complex embodiment that allows for the body and all of its nuance and all of its contradictions and in all of its mortality to just remain as it is without trying to head in the direction of its own eradication or of its own sort of eugenic erasure.

[A]

Now, do we see with these poets that they're doing this and they're doing it through. Through a concept of decay? Or is that something separate?

[B]

So the way that I use the term decay in the book is to try and describe the aspect of mortality that emerges when we do that. So instead of thinking about death as an event in time, what happens when I take this idea of time and take a new model of it? So rather than a thing that we are heading toward, it's just a thing that is so. Some theorists describe this as like horizontal versus vertical models of time. Rather than moving in a line, what happens when I sort of flip all of time upside down and think of it all simultaneously? And so when we think about mortality not as an event, we think about it as decay as this thing that is true of our bodies but isn't necessarily pushing us in one direction or the other.

[A]

Now, the carpe diem poets and the famous To His Koi Mistress especially, they seem like they're. They're making an argument, right? They're. They're saying, come on like this. This would be great, except we're only going to be young once. We're only going to be young for a certain amount of time. We're only going to have these youthful bodies for a certain amount of time. We got to make the most of it. We can't be. We can't wait around and not get together and so on? Do you see. And I haven't read enough carpe diem poets to have an answer to this myself. Do you see anything besides love and sex in these poems? Is there. Are there people saying, you know, offering this up as a way of living to say there's like, we need to embrace just being alive in a way before death sets in? Or is it. Or do you just see it in. In terms of love from these poets,

[B]

I think the thing that they are imagining is. Or the question they're wrestling with underneath that is the question of what writing can do. Right. It's a question about what the forms of literature allow and what they get to do as poets. Right. The Carpeian forms connect in kind of tangential ways with some of the Petrarchan love poetry of the period. And I write about this in my chapter on Shakespeare's Sonne. But often some of the other sonneteers and other poetry of the period makes this brash claim on the surface that says, you know what? Even if you die, I will keep your memory alive forever. I can hold you in my poetry. I'll celebrate you here. And you'll never really die because you'll always be part of this work of literature.

[A]

Yeah. It's the nature of writing and reading and just thinking about literature as being something a little more permanent than maybe it had seemed to be in previous centuries.

[B]

I think so. But I also think that every poet that is doing that to some degree has an anxiety about the degree to which that's really possible. So in Shakespeare's works, for instance, he offers up this promise, but he offers it up over and over and over and over again. The sequence, right? And this is a sequence that repeatedly calls attention to the fact that it's really hard to make a copy of something. It's really hard to make perfect copies. And that anytime you copy something or repeat something, it changes a little bit, and it changes a little bit more. We see this in Shakespeare's plays as well. He has all these beautiful moments. In Julius Caesar, for instance, in Mark Antony's speech, brutus is an honorable man. Brutus is an honorable man. Brutus is an honorable man. And every time he says it on stage, the audience gets a little more suspicious and a little more suspicious until you realize that what he means is that he's not honorable at all. Iago does the same thing. He describes himself as honest. And the first time you think, okay, sure. And the 10th time, you think, I don't know about this.

[A]

Yeah. So with Shakespeare, there maybe is a little bit. He's protesting too much in the direction of. You can imagine that the object of the poem or the recipient of the poem is saying, well, sure, it'd be nice to be immortal, but I also wouldn't mind just actually living.

[B]

Right. Or that the poet keeps saying, I can do this, I can do this, I can do this. And every time you think, oh, actually, what you're saying is, can I do this?

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Can literature do this? How does it do it? If it does it right.

[A]

Okay, let's take a quick break and then come back with more on some specific authors. Refreshing Wild Cherry Cola meets Smooth cream. The treat you deserve. Pepsi Wild Cherry and cream.

[B]

Treat yourself. K Pop Demon Hunters, Haja Boy's Breakfast Meal and Hunt Tricks Meal have just dropped at McDonald's. They're calling this a battle for the fans. What do you say to that, Rumi?

[A]

It's not a battle.

[B]

So glad the Saja Boys could take breakfast and give our meal the rest of the day.

[A]

It is an honor to share.

[B]

No, it's our honor.

[A]

It is our larger honor.

[B]

No, really, stop.

[A]

You can really feel the respect in this battle. Pick a meal to pick a side and participate in McDonald's while supplies last. Okay, we're back with Eileen Sperry. So, Eileen, we talked about the themes and kind of the framework here. Let's see how you apply it. We started out with Shakespeare. I don't know if we finished with him. Is there more to say about what you're discovering in his treatment of death and decay and so on?

[B]

One of the things that I think is really interesting about Shakespeare, one of the things that was really fun about writing that chapter is that Shakespeare's sonnets have all of these lovely layers to them, right? There's, you know, each individual sonnet is doing something, but then the sequence as a whole is also something really interesting. And one of the things that I got to wrestle with there. And this again, you know, I mentioned earlier ideas coming out of the classroom and the dialogue between writing and work with students. I was teaching a class on Shakespeare sonnets, and I had a brilliant group of students who were really attuned to the way that they saw other critics writing about the sonnets. One of the ongoing conversations is about whether or not these are really a sequence, right? So in the Elizabeth Beathan period, there's this rush of sonnet sequences, and they're often modeled on Petrarch's sequence in the Italian Renaissance. And they often have a particular shape to them, Right. They're telling a particular kind of story. And that's a story that often ends with the poet trying to turn away from questions about the body and a living, beloved woman towards something that feels more noble or more elevated. God, literature, immortality, fame. Something much more disembodied. And Shakespeare's sequence has always frustrated critics because it doesn't do that. And so students were reading these accounts of the sequence that were saying, okay, well, it's not actually a sequence. It's a collection. It's an anthology, or it's a sequence. But you have to read the shift from part one to part two in this particular way, or it's not a sequence. And we have to disregard this section of poems over here and focus on these over here. And what came out of that class and those conversations was this idea of, well, why do we have this particular idea about wholeness? Why do we want the sonnets to hold together in this very specific way? Is there a way that we could just describe the thing that they are doing and say that they are a sequence and that they're complete just in the thing that they are doing? And so that became the basis for thinking about this prosthetic model of lyric that I talk about in this chapter. And. And that prosthetic model responds to some of those earlier ideas of memorializing the beloved in verse by saying something like, you know, the poem is never going to keep the beloved alive. And it's never going to be a total replacement for the body of the beloved, right, for this living, breathing human being that I love. But it can act in connection with that body in a certain way. Or I can think about how it might connect with the bodies of its own readers. And I can think about models of the relationship between literature and the body that aren't replacements for one another or copies for one another, but instead, sort of joining hands in a certain way. Having a prosthetic relationship where something artificial joins with something biological. And we can think about that joining in that body that's created as being whole. Maybe not in a way that we would immediately recognize otherwise, but still whole, still unified, and still one entire object.

[A]

But do you think Shakespeare was doing this? Or are you kind of talking about the way that we and the critics have tried to understand Shakespeare's sonnet? Whether you call it a sequence or whether you call it something else.

[B]

I think Shakespeare is thinking about this, I think maybe through a slightly different vocabulary than we might have. But Sonnet 15 ends with this promise that he's going to engraft the young man anew through his verse. And literally, right, this image of grafting, of taking something and joining it to something else through this very artificial means, but creating something unified out of that. One of the other elements of that chapter and of my argument there is that Shakespeare really thinks about this through the lens of poetic form. You know, these beautiful English sonnets, But they're comprised mostly of three quatrains and a couplet. And Shakespeare's couplets are always a little bit weird, right? They always Feel. Yeah, they always feel kind of pat or self contained. And this is another thing critics have spent a long time writing about what to do with these couplets. Are these totally earnest? Are they. Do we read them as promises? Do we read them as conclusions? Do we read them as summaries? And in that you get to see some of the same conversations that folks were having about the level of the sequence. Right. I have these parts that don't seem to go together and yet they are together. And maybe rather than trying to make excuses for all the ways they don't go together, I could look at them and just say, well, they are together. This is a poem that functions as a whole. How does my idea of what does it mean to be whole? What does it mean to be a body? What does it mean to be a work of literature? How can I use that kind of uneasy joining moment to set the tone for the rest of it?

[A]

Yeah. Or the people who count the syllables and say, well, this isn't quite iambic pentameter. It's not 10, it's 11. Or this one only has nine. And it's kind of, you know, it seems very much besides the point. Okay, let's move to. I've got three other authors I want to. Or poets. I want to ask you about Edmund Spenser. What are you seeing in his works?

[B]

So we had spoken earlier about the Carpe Diem poems. And so in looking at Spenser, Spenser has a beautiful carpe diem poem embedded in the Fairy Queen. It's on book two of the Fairy Queen, this big, beautiful, lush, chivalric epic. It ends with this moment in the Garden of Temptation, the Bower of Bliss, where our allegorical hero of temperance encounters this carpe diem song. Right. Which offers all the temptations we were talking about earlier. Right? You are dying and so you might as well seize the day and make fun choices. Now, at the very other end of that same book of the Fairy Queen, so the first thing that this hero encounters, there's this moment where he has to deal essentially with a group of dead bodies, right? He's run into other characters on his quest, and you have these bodies that have to be taken care of. And he and his companion, the Palmer, get into a debate about what to do with them. And they end with this debate about whether or not they should all be buried. And that moment, I argue in the book, I read it as a memento mori representation in the text. Right. Memento mori were these long standing visual traditions in the Renaissance. And before that, presented these icons of mortality. Here's a wilting flower, here's a skull, right? We often think of Hamlet on the stage, Yorick's skull standing in the grave. But all these other visual icons, and they present them to readers and to viewers and say, essentially, look at this. Think about the fact that you're going to die. And kind of in the same way that the carpe diem poem does, let that knowledge of your own mortality guide the choices that you're going to make subsequently. Now, it's asking you to make an entirely different set of choices here, right? One of these is choose fun, and the other one is choose virtue. But they function largely as the same kind of mechanism. Think about death, think about mortality, and then let that knowledge guide the way that you act. And so in Spenser's poem, I look at how these two scenes stand on either side of this quest narrative, and we have a hero who's supposed to be figuring out how to be temperate, how to live correctly in his body. And he goes from one to the other, but the one that he arrives at is sort of a disaster, right, Guy. And after he hears his carpe diem poem, does one of the most intemperate things that he can do. He destroys the bower. He raises all the trees to the ground. He essentially throws this enormous temper tantrum. And critics keep looking at this moment and going, well, he's not being temperate. He's not being temperate. He sort of failed at the test that he's been set here. He didn't go the place that he was supposed to go. And so rather than read this in the traditional structure of narrative, of start at the beginning and go to the end. And my approach to this book of the Fairy Queen is to suggest, you know, what happens when we read it not as a line, but as a kind of circle, right? What if we read it as this orb in which we're supposed to remain? We're supposed to stay kind of between the two extreme temptations and figure out something in the middle of them.

[A]

There's something we haven't touched on yet that now I'm curious about, and I hadn't thought of it before. I was just hearing you talk just there. But how does religion fit into this? Because a lot of the. You know, the response from the Koi Mistress might be, hey, you know, you're. You're right to say that mortality is bearing down on us. And. But I'm thinking about sin, and I'm thinking about making my Way into heaven. And the, you know, the afterlife is. Is a bigger deal to me than. Than having a bit of fun in the here and now. Do they wrestle with that at all?

[B]

Absolutely. And one of the things that I found so surprising and that was so illuminating, especially in thinking about Spenser's allegory, was that in many of the Ars Morandi texts, one of the sins that presents itself is a failure to live within the correct attitude toward time.

[A]

Right?

[B]

Right. To not think about temporality correctly. And so while the memento mori framework is really tempting. Right. Think about your mortality and live virtuously. You can't. You can't be too eager to do that. Right. One of the things that crops up in these texts is, you know, you can't. You can't commit suicide. You can't shorten your life. You can't want to die too soon. Then you have failed to live into God's timeline. Right. You've sort of failed to obey the divine ordinance for living in the time that's been allowed. But then on the other end, right. The carpe diempos, you can't want too much time. You can't want to slow down time. You can't get too focused on earthly pleasure, because then you've forgotten where you're supposed to be going. One of the terms that keeps popping up in these treatises about this is this term patient. And when patience gets attached to mortality, it creates this language in the period of how to live in the correct temporality of death. And it in fact becomes this really nuanced negotiation that Christians explored in the 17th century.

[A]

Well, I have a feeling that our next author is going to bring a lot of these themes to play as well, and that is John Donne. What do you write about when you talk about John Donne?

[B]

Donne's interest in death and in decay in particular. Donne's interest in decay seems to center across his career on this question of intimacy. And so this was one of the first things that I wrote in this project. This was one of the first chapters and one of the first moments where I sort of saw how this dynamic could really shape so many of the big conversations of the period. But in Donne's poetry, and in his early poetry in particular, we get all these weird images of death. Right. There are all of these dead bodies that are talking, where we get poems from corpses. We get poems with people jumping into graves or imagining themselves as corpses. One of Donne's poems, he imagines opening up a corpse on the Autopsy table and being sort of overcome with the smell of. I mean, it's this deep, visceral language of decaying bodies.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

But past that sort of initial blush of visceral imagery, I started to notice that all of these moments of decay were simultaneously moments of incredible intimacy between the poem speaker and the beloved that he was writing to. So, for instance, my favorite Donne poem, I think, is a valediction of my name in the window. And he's got this beautiful conceit at the center of it in which he's got this speaker, and the speaker has written his name. He scratched his name into the glass of a window before he's left. And he imagines his lover staying home. He has gone away. And that she looks through this name out into the world. She has to look through his sort of scratched graffiti on the window to see anything beyond it. He describes this as a ruinous anatomy, as a kind of death's head. At one point, he describes it as the skeleton that the sinew and muscle of her body will fill out. And so he uses all of these images of sort of fractal or partial bodies to imagine this world in which, you know, what if it were possible, if we could be totally absorbed into one another? So it takes some of those seduction motifs of the carpe Diem poem and almost turns them up to this absurd level of, like, what if our bodies could really become one body? Well, they can only do that if they're permeable, if they are. If they're falling apart in some sort of way. But then I can take those pieces and reassemble them into this new sort of erotic whole. And that would be, I think. I mean, that's sort of done enough, right? But then Donne, of course, likes to turn things up even more or, like, a little bit weirder. But then later in his life, as he starts to preach about resurrection, the same language starts to filter into his sermons, right? Thinking about how the decay of the bodies of the faithful creates this opportunity for an intimacy with God in resurrection that wouldn't exist otherwise. Right? It's okay. You're going to die, and it's okay, even if it feels sort of horrific, Right. He, in one sermon, writes in incredible detail about the worms that will eat you and, you know, sort of wriggle through the ground. But it's okay, because what that's going to do is create the possibilities for a future bodily resurrection where you get recompacted and reassembled as part of the divine. And, like, this becomes this kind of ultimate moment of bodily intimacy, which is bodily intimacy between humanity and the divine in the moments of resurrection.

[A]

You know, we're so used to. This is a bit of a parenthetical here, but it seems like we're so used to absorbing everything that comes before us and topping it. And then you come across these figures like Emily Bronte and William Blake and John Donne and just think, we haven't absorbed that. That's still unusual and shocking and fascinating. And there's so. There's so much richness in John Donne's poetry.

[B]

It's so incredible. And really, for. In. In getting to teach these to students and getting to sit with students with these poems in the classroom, it's such a beautiful moment. It's such a joy as an instructor, because they have that reaction, right. We read Dunn's Holy Sonnets, you know, batter, batter my heart, three person God. And they come into the classroom and they're like, what is happening here? What is going on? This is a great. You know, and once they have a vocabulary to talk through what they are hearing in the poem, yet they're floored. Right. It feels new and it feels dangerous and it feels transgressive in ways they don't anticipate. Yeah, no, we've, we. There's. There's a reason we keep going back to. Done, I think.

[A]

Okay. And our final one is somebody we haven't gone back to over and over because for a long time she was basically unknown. Her manuscript was rediscovered in 1996, and that is Hester Poulter. So let's start with just who Hester Poulter is.

[B]

Hester Poulter. Hester Poulter is a 17th century poet. As you mentioned. We've only really recently rediscovered her work. So she lived in most of her life, she lived in an estate outside London. Uh, her family was associated with royalist forces during the English Civil War. Right. Her husband was a royalist. They fled the cities like many other folks who were aligned with the king did at that time, because it wasn't safe to remain in London. Although there's some. Some evidence that suggests Poulter went back and forth a little bit. But. So Poulter is outside London, she's at this estate. She spends her life there and spends her life writing poetry. We have this beautiful manuscript, it's in the Leeds library in the UK that has a number of these beautiful poems and has part of a draft of a romance, a pastoral. But Holter's poetry explores what her life was like. There she often writes about the estate. She writes about what's happening in England. She writes about the war. She writes about her experience feeling isolated. One of the hallmarks of Poulter's work and one of the reasons that many folks have been really attracted to her writing. She writes extensively and beautifully and movingly about her experiences of grief. Gave birth to 15 children but outlived 13, right? Yeah. And so has this constant state of just bereft grief that runs throughout these poems, right? The rhythms of giving birth, of lying in, of suffering, of getting sick, of mourning these children. And so many of her works try to make sense of this life that she lives that is often just very isolating and very painful.

[A]

And one of the sections of the manuscript the size of a sad soul emblematically breathed forth. It just. It is. She did live to be 73.

[B]

She did.

[A]

So that maybe explains part of it. In an age when the mortality rate was, you know, the life expectancy was. Was lower, but still, 13. 13 times is incredible.

[B]

Yes. And survive, you know, surviving 15 childbirths is.

[A]

Right. And so how does she advance your themes? Is it through grief that you're looking at with her, or is it. Does she also talk about the decay and the other themes that we've been talking about?

[B]

She writes extensively about grief. But my argument here in this chapter is that when we're thinking about someone writing about grief in the 17th century, but also now, what we're thinking about and what we're hearing really is an engagement with decay, right? So in one very particular material way, these kinds of feelings, these affects what we would describe as emotions as a state of kind of mental being, These were felt as bodily experiences for folks in the period. If we're thinking about a humoral sense of medicine, right? The idea that all of our bodily states are affected by. By the balance of our four humors, grief was in that system, right. Grief would have been experienced and thought about as a kind of bodily state of unwellness. And in fact, you get. In the bills of mortality in the period, you get deaths attributed to grief frequently. Right. Five people in London died of grief this year. Ten people of London died of grief this year. And so for Poulter, that would have been a sense of like a physical ailment as much as anything else. And one of the things that becomes clear in Poulter's writing, but also in contemporary grief memoirs, is that anytime we're grieving someone else, anytime we're experiencing this sense of loss, part of what's happening is that we're thinking about our own bodies. We're thinking about our own sense of being in the world and our own fragility, our own mortality.

[A]

When you finished this project, did you feel like, okay, time to pull back the curtains and let the sun shine in, and I just need something light and positive and even fluffy to sort of elevate my mood? Or did you feel like, no, that was part of this all along, that it was a celebration of life, that this wasn't a dark and gloomy topic for me to explore. But there is so much that that is injected into it, whether it's something to think about or something to ponder on or just to appreciate life more because of our exploration of death and decay. What. What was your sort of attitude toward the project after you had finished?

[B]

I will. I mean, I'll be honest. I keep threatening that my next project is going to be like early modern British birthday cakes or early modern cookies. Something totally fluffy and full of joy.

[A]

Right?

[B]

Yeah. But to your second point, yes, I ended writing the project, and the epilogue reflects on this a little bit. But my sense of stepping away from the project was actually about how thinking clearly and acknowledging these vulnerabilities in the body. Right. When we can think about decay and not in. Right. To recall Siebers here, not try and absorb it into this ideology of ability and sweep it under the rug and imagine that we're heading towards this future free of death, free of bodies. But to say, no, this is a vulnerability in our body. This is a reality of the way that we live in the world, that acknowledging that vulnerability ultimately leads to the capacity to build community, to be closer to with one another and to take care of one another. And that's. That's a future I want to imagine. And that's a future, I think, full of hope. Right. It comes only through, I think, sort of sitting with the grief and the pain in the interim. But there's a kind of radical hope on the other side of it, and

[A]

Silicon Valley billionaires to one side. It is going to come for all of us. And that does unite us in that knowledge and in the knowledge that it's going to happen to our loved ones and that it's happening to us.

[B]

Yeah, precisely. But that doesn't have to be a disaster. That doesn't have to be the end of all things. That can be the start of something.

[A]

Right?

[C]

Right.

[A]

Okay. Well, the book is called this Body of Death, form and Decay in Early Modern Lyric. Eileen Sperry, thank you so much for joining me on the history of literature.

[B]

Thank you so much for having.

[A]

And finally today, we hear from Bruce Gordon. After he and I discussed how the Bible has shaped and been shaped by different communities over the past 2,000 years, I asked him a special question. Okay. We're joined now by Professor Bruce Gordon, author of the Bible A Global History. Bruce, this question comes from a listener who asks, what do you want your last book to be? This will be the last book you will ever read. You can either choose one that exists or describe one that has not yet been written. And I'm going to say that with you. I think we need to put some parameters here, because as you and I discussed the show Desert Island Discs, when they do something like this, and they'll say, what book do you want to take to a. A desert island? And they'll say, you could take Shakespeare and the Bible because everyone would take those two books first, I think. But in your case, if you're going to choose the Bible, maybe you could tell us the portion of the Bible you would want to be as your last book. Or you could choose something else if you'd like.

[C]

Yes, well, that's, of course, very dangerous when the Bible starts being dissected and people, of course, everybody's got their favorite part.

[A]

Yeah, yeah.

[C]

It's very hard to pick and choose. I'm a. I love the Gospel of John. There's a quotation from John 14 on the graves of both my parents. It's a book of the Bible. But I have to say I love the Psalms. They're very difficult. They're very complexing. They're full of extreme beauty and at other times, vitriol and hatred and violence. But to me, that reflects the. You know, it reflects us. It's a mirror. And we may not want to admit we have those emotions within us and we may not want other people to see them, but we all know what's there. And I think the. The often harsh language of Psalms combined with the beauty of the poetry expresses so much of who we are and our humanity and our desires and longings and our despairs. So the Psalms would be, if I was to take a book of the Bible, would be certainly one I would want to have. There's another book which means a huge amount to me, and I've just reread it because I think it's so beautiful in its simplicity, yet so profound that every time I look at it, it brings out something that I never thought about before or encountered, and that's the Imitation of Christ by Thomas A. Kempis, which comes from the 15th century. I find that a deeply moving book. And outside the Bible, I could happily end my life reading that book.

[A]

Well, those are two excellent choices. Your choice of the Psalms reminds me a little bit of a choice that a lot of my previous guests have made where a lot of people want a book that they know from childhood and something that would be a comfort, something they remember that a parent read to them or something. And a lot of people choose a big novel and they want to be immersed in that world and have a George Eliot or a Leo Tolstoy kind of taking them through a story. But a lot of people choose poetry, and they want that feeling they get when they read poetry, that there's beauty there, but also thought and room for interpretation and putting yourself, you know, wrestling with these ideas, but doing so with this beautiful language. And it seems like the Psalms would be at the top of a lot of people's list of the book of the Bible to accompany them at that moment in time.

[C]

It's a book that just feeds the imagination. And every time I read the Psalms, it's just. I'm just always astonished where they take me.

[A]

Right. Okay. Bruce Gordon, thank you so much for joining me on the History of Literature.

[C]

Thank you. It was a great pleasure chatting with you.

[A]

Okay, that's going to do it for this episode of the History of Literature. My thanks to Bruce Gordon and of course, to Eileen Sperry. You can find their books wherever you get your books. They're all over the place. We are getting ready for our trip to England on the History of Literature podcast tour. The very first one. And so we're going to replay some past interviews with the guests who are going to be joining us in London and Oxford. That's going to be much of our April as we round the corner towards spring, turning our April into May. But we'll also have some new episodes, episodes sprinkled in. And one episode we have to play again, thanks to a Jack Wilson error, I jumped the gun. Which full circle is what the real life d' Artagnan apparently did not do. One day you're a swashbuckler, and the next day your swash gets buckled. Isn't that how life goes? I'm Jack Wilson. Thank you for listening and we'll see you next time.

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