Page 43
By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
A compact political-literary lament linking England, Ireland, Eliot, and Donne in a drowning vision of mutual ruin.
Because the page is so compressed, the allusions do the heavy lifting. The result feels like a clipped historical curse: nations, writers, and the sea all collapse into one shared image of drowning and reciprocal violence.
A second typed copy of 'England Dying', saying 'Not one knew / The Irish even / Would kill you too;', naming 'T.S. Eliot / When we drowned', and ending 'Each done / on the Donne island of our own'.
The done/Donne pun inverts no man is an island, leaving each person finished and marooned on a private island of English inheritance. The nursery-like rhyme of 'knew' and 'too' makes the violence sound chillingly casual. That the poem was typed twice suggests the author valued its compact, bitter joke.