By Michael Winkelman
with apologies to John Donne
To the religious Donne, the circle was the symbol of God. “O Eternall and most gracious God,” he wrote in a prayer in his Devotions, “who, considered in thy selfe, art a Circle, first and last, and altogether.” In the circles of his own world and in the convexity of the heavens, Donne discovered the “Hieroglyphick” of a God whose sun and moon and stars moved circularly. … [Yet his] immoderate love of learning … prepared John Donne for his unique position as the first English poet who experienced the full impact of that “new Philosophy” which … called “all in doubt.” It prepared him too to anticipate … the final breaking of the Circle of Perfection.
Marjorie Hope Nicolson, The Breaking of the Circle: Studies in the Effect of the
“New Science” upon Seventeenth-Century Poetry (1960), p, 80
O what be my soul but a fidget spinner?
A pilgrim whose race was ‘obliquely run,’
(That phrase was nicked from our best man, John Donne)
And yet, when stops the swirling, but a sinner?
Be I more than distraction après dinner,
A wit ready-armed with bon mot or pun?
Though less weighty than a sitcom rerun;
Mere empty motion whilst starves the life inner?
Be life itself but a merry-go-round
Idly twirling like electron orbital
Whose random patterns seem, briefly, cordial
Before our bodies lie still underground?
Then let us pause Time, with a spin together
For momentum once lost is lost forever.