"In all flat maps (and I am one)" - Donne

'Discordia concors' - 'Concordia discors' ... plus ... 'Site map'*

"Drawing both on the medieval Mappae mundi and the Ptolemaic tradition revived in the Renaissance, the recurrent cartographic motif in John Donne’s poetry well reflects the preoccupations of a revolutionary period in the history of Western cartography. Yet, for all its cosmic magnitude, Donne’s poems, both holy and secular, are turned, not so much towards an exploration of the world as towards an exploration of the Self as the ultimate object of reflection." [Abstract].

Ladan Niayesh, ““All flat maps, and I am one”: Cartographic References in the Poems of John Donne”, Études Épistémè [Online], 10 | 2006, Online since 01 October 2006, connection on 22 February 2023. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/episteme/955; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/episteme.955

 INDIVIDUAL

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 INTERPERSONAL    :     SCIENCES               

HUMANISTIC --------------------------------------  MECHANISTIC   

SOCIOLOGY  :   POLITICAL 

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GROUP

"Let us take as a first example one of the last poems written by Donne, "Hymn to God my God, in my Sickness", composed either during one of the poet’s serious illnesses in 1623 or alternatively shortly before his death in 1631 ..."

"... Here the poet compares himself, as he lies on his sick-bed, or possibly his death bed, to a flat geographical map studied by his physicians who are compared to cartographers: "my physicians by their love are grown / Cosmographers, and I their map, who lie / Flat on this bed" (ll. 6-8), and later "In all flat maps (and I am one)" (ll. 14)."

The global Psycho-Social-Geo-Political legacies and future?

"Yet for all its symbolic Noachid and Christian background, Donne’s cartographic imagery has room for the latest scientific contributions. Newly discovered territories are directly named here: "is the Pacific Sea my home?" (l. 16), "Anyan, and Magellan, and Gibraltar" (l. 18). And if this metaphorical map is a flat one — "In all flat maps (and I am one)" — it is solely for the sake of commodity, as this flat shape actually stands for an acknowledged and accepted spherical reality: "west and east / In all flat maps (...) are one" (ll. 13-14)."

*I found some irony in 'site map' being the final map on the journal's webpage.

Sources:
 

London July 2022 Foyles, Waterstones and other bookshops:
Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne (Hardback)

https://www.faber.co.uk/product/9780571345915-super-infinite/

BBC Radio 4 Super-Infinite by Katherine Rundell [Episode 3]

Previously on W2tQ: 'maps'