More on the different speakers in Donne's "Songs and Sonnets." The idea of the most capacious intelligence: the one who gets most others. How this plays out in kinds of narrative, especially fantasy fiction. Who gets whom better: Aslan or the White Witch? Voldemort or Dumbledore? Sauron or Gandalf? Yoda or Palpatine? The surprise when we're surprised that the good guys get the evil guys being a staple of narrative interest, because more generally being able to understand others' limitations is central to our assessment of literary characters. Then on to the two poems: "To his Mistress" and a beginning of "A Valediction: forbidding Mourning."
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