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I was just watching an episode of Firefly, and saw in the credits that one of the actors was named "John Dunn". This name is incredibly familiar to me. At first I thought that it was an author, maybe from the Elizabethan period, maybe earlier. A google search on the name isn't turning up anything though. So...who am I thinking of? Am I just thinking of John Dee, the famous alchemist and astrologer of the Elizabethan era, or is it someone else.
I could swear he was an author. A poet. Definitely not modern. Gah! This is driving me insane! Any help?
Posts: 16059 | Registered: Aug 2000
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quote:NOW thou hast loved me one whole day, To-morrow when thou leavest, what wilt thou say ? Wilt thou then antedate some new-made vow ? Or say that now We are not just those persons which we were ? Or that oaths made in reverential fear Of Love, and his wrath, any may forswear ? Or, as true deaths true marriages untie, So lovers' contracts, images of those, Bind but till sleep, death's image, them unloose ? Or, your own end to justify, For having purposed change and falsehood, you Can have no way but falsehood to be true ? Vain lunatic, against these 'scapes I could Dispute, and conquer, if I would ; Which I abstain to do, For by to-morrow I may think so too.
In the interest of full disclosure, he was on a crossword puzzle I did the other day, so I have been newly reminded how to spell it.
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How is that pronounced, anyway? I don't think I ever had a class in which he was studied, so I don't know that I've ever heard his name pronounced. I've always pronounced it "Dunn" in my head, but I have no real reason to think that that's right. Actually, I'll bet it's not.
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I think it is pronounced "dun." At least, that's how I've always pronounced. I wonder if Google knows.
Posts: 26077 | Registered: Mar 2000
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I'm in the process of looking, but I got kind of hung up on what looks like a fairly good page devoted to him, that unfortunately doesn't seem to contain any pronunciation guide.
The whole site looks pretty good, actually. Hm. I sense another night of going to bed too late looming.
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posted
Oh, Space Opera, that is beautiful! I think this is my favorite verse:
Our two souls therefore, which are one, Though I must go, endure not yet A breach, but an expansion, Like gold to aery thinness beat.
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You know, I did *tell* you I was going to be making typos and misspellings.
Reading over it, though, I'm suprised at how many there were. I felt kind of smug about their total absence in that message, after I was through. Ha!
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Donne's great, one of my favorites. Last year I wrote a(n obviously brilliant) paper on corporality/textuality in his poetry. His prose is fantastic, too, though.
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We read some Donne in my AP literature class last year. I really liked it, and I'm not big on poetry usually.
Posts: 7877 | Registered: Feb 2003
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This is so weird! I read "A Valediction Forbidding Mourning" just last night! I was reading my old college literature course text, (I couldn't sleep) and just browsed through the poetry section.
Nothing like a little John Donne (and I always pronounced it like "dun" also), and Dylan Thomas at 2 AM. Posts: 14428 | Registered: Aug 2001
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That is an interesting coincidence Belle. Funny how stuff like that happens, isn't it?
Here's something trivial, but kind of odd. War Stories, the episode of Firefly that I was watching, features and actor named John Dunn, whose name, it would seem is pronounced identically to John Donne, and an actor named Johnny Shakespear.
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posted
John Donne is, if not my favorite poet, among my top ten. I just can't get enough. If I were to get a doctorate in literature, I'd probably choose to specialize in him and become like Vivian in W;t.
Edit after seeing Noemon's: There's a Shakespeare professor at BYU named Bill Shakespeare.