"W;t"

This week I have been discussing Margaret Edson’s “W;t” with the students in my English 112 course. In one scene, Vivian Bearing’s professor, E.M. Ashford, objects to an edition of text that Bearing has used to cite John Donne’s Holy Sonnet X. The edition to which Bearing has referred punctuates the line as “And Death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die!” Ashford reasons, “But it is ultimately about overcoming the seemingly insuperable barriers separating life, death and eternal life. In the edition you chose, this profoundly simple meaning is sacrificed to hysterical punctuation. ‘And Death’ capital D...’shall be no more;’ semi-colon. ‘Death,’ capital D, comma,‘thou shalt die!’, exclamation mark. Gardner's edition of the Holy Sonnet reads: ‘And death shall be no more,’ comma...’death thou shalt die’…Nothing but a breath, a comma, separates life from life everlasting. Very simple, really. With the original punctuation restored, death is no longer something to act out on a stage with exclamation marks. It is a comma. A pause. In this way, the uncompromising way, one learns something from the poem, wouldn't you say? Life, death. Soul, God. Past, present. Not insuperable barriers, not semicolons, just a comma.”

This scene in “W;t” gave me pause to consider the simplicity of what often separates us from what we deeply desire. Fear, uncertainty, or lack of belief in ourselves can separate us from living the life of our dreams. The need to be right, defensiveness, or an inability to deeply listen to another can separate us from love. And sometimes we make things more difficult with hysterical punctuation, when simply the use of a comma would eliminate the insuperable barriers.

Write about what keeps you separate from what you deeply desire, and then write about one thing you could do differently that would help you to obtain it.