An anatomy of the world: The first anniversary. (When words don't fail).

During the last few weeks, I found myself turning to the two seventeenth-century poets who were the icons of my youth: John Donne and Andrew Marvell. Certainly not because their work provides any source of comfort or solace--far from it. For both, the personal is always entwined with the catastrophic.

For Donne, the New Science swept the familiar universe out of the sky, leaving behind a desolate and unmanageable void where order and meaning had once reigned. Here he is on the scary effects of the scientific discoveries of his age, in "An Anatomy of the World: The First Anniversary":

And new philosophy calls all in doubt,

The Element of fire is quite put out;

The Sun is lost, and th'earth, and no man's wit

Can well direct him where to looke for it.

And freely men confesse that this world's spent,

When in the Planets, and the Firmament

They seeke so many new; then see that this

Is crumbled out againe to his Atomies.

'Tis all in peeces, all cohaerence gone;

All just supply, and all Relation.

Nor, for Donne, was there any consolation to seek in the realm of the personal. On the contrary, since the microcosm and the macrocosm mirrored each other, disaster in the one realm was reiterated in the impossibility of achieving fulfillment in the other:

My Love is of a birth as rare

As 'tis for object strange and high:

It was begotten by despair

Upon Impossibility.

This is Andrew Marvell resorting to the new astronomy and geography to define the absolute hopelessness of his situation. He and his beloved will never be united:

Unless the giddy Heaven fall,

And Earth some new Convulsion tear;

And, us to joyn, the World should all

Be cramped into a Planisphere.

Both Marvell and Donne, in their dark, complicated clarity and unsparing pessimism, seem particularly apposite now. They help drown out the chorus of sentimental cliches and spiritual pats on the back that threaten to overwhelm us at this awful time.

Linda Nochlin is Lila Acheson Wallace Professor of Modern Art at New York university's Institute of Fine Arts. Her most recent book, Representing Women, was published by Thames and Hudson in 1999.