Yet his undressing has already taken place as the trajectory of the sign of desire through the text. Colie, 1970 on a similar tendency in MarvellвЂ™s poetry). What is arresting is the refusal of the metaphoric - the literalisation, or un-punning - and the speakerвЂ™s elision of his own disrobing (cf. However, the surprise for the listener should not be total. The clou, the fall, is the final line: 'To teach thee, I am naked first.' (l. 3 'With standing' could be read as 'withstanding' in one word, a connotation of resistance underscor (.)ДЈOn first reading 'Elegy 19: To his Mistress Going to Bed', the nakedness of the speaker is what is abruptly unveiled at the end, whereas the whole poem consists in a mental undressing of the mistress performed by the listener and the speaker.2 Another critic, Thomas Docherty, states: 'What is being sought by the poet is recognition of his o (.).Yet Donne cannot be thought as a mere addition of two personae divided by the moment of conversion from Catholicism to Protestantism, a schizophrenic Jack v. Donne the libertine, Jack Donne as a seventeenth-century courtier and gallant, comes to mind (cf. It had not yet entered 'the realm of darkness' to which our modern world has relegated if one takes up BaudrillardвЂ™s words (1979, 9). Seventeenth century poetry, and that of Donne more specifically, with its troubling interrogations on the relationship between the soul and the body, testifies to the fact that seduction-in the broader sense of the term of the display/discourse of desirewas still possible in the early modern period. Seduction is also in the order of discourse a lie in the field of vision, it is a lure. 2), where 'labour' means, among other things, 'in impatient anticipation' (note 2, 448). As the speaker of 'Elegy 19' declares: 'Until I labour, I in labour lie' (l. It anticipates in language what cannot be performed in it. Seduction is the mark of temporality in the body by an event: sexual consummation. It is both inscribed in time and in the body. pornography and death? To display this enquiry, I will examine more specifically the following poems: 'Elegy 19: To his Mistress Going to Bed', 'The Flea', and rape as religious metaphor in 'Devotion 14: Batter my Heart', one of the chestnuts of scholarly criticism on Donne.ДўSeduction has come to mean what distracts from the truth, from the right path, what threatens the order of innocence. 1 I hope in so doing to come as close as possible to one of the most striking features of DonneвЂ™s wit, by giving a provisional answer to the question: how does eroticism (the erotic in/of the poetic text) come up against its limits, i. These moments when the word is 'naked': the truth of sexual encounter, when the word 'touches' the body, where the word is the body, when the relationship between the signifier and the signified is that of denotation. I would like to focus here more precisely on the reference to the body - carnality, the flesh, the corporeal - in moments of the poetry where seduction takes place literally (or is about to take place literally, as an event). 1 We are at the core of the Catholic doctrine of incarnation (the word made flesh) and transubstanci (.)ДЎThat seduction figures as a theme and acts as the very dynamic of DonneвЂ™s rhetoric and poetry comes as no surprise.

The stealth attraction words