Recently, I had occasion to pull down from the shelves a copy of John Donne’s collected poetry, republished in 2012 by a major press, with a new introduction and notes. I was going to discuss one of the stanzas in Donne’s “La Corona,” a crown-poem, as the last line of each of the seven stanzas becomes the first line of the next, with the last line of all repeating the first. It is one of Donne’s…
