At the beginning of one of my general literature courses a few years ago, I taught John Donne’s Holy Sonnet “Death Be Not Proud.” The students’ reaction to it, although I provided some historical context, was one of bafflement about its supposed “Old English” and confusion about its metaphysical properties. Towards the end of the semester, we read Margaret Edson’s Pulitzer-Prize winning play Wit, which makes powerful use of that same sonnet in some emotionally-charged scenes. Only two of my students even recognized the poem, while the other twenty-one students claimed that they had never seen it before. Yet after finishing, and crying through, Emma Thompson’s performance in the Mike Nichols-directed HBO movie version of Wit (2001), most of the students had at least three lines of the Donne poem memorized, and when we subsequently did our “analysis” (the second of the semester) of the poem, the students floored me with the depth of their interpretations. When I asked why the poem meant so much more to them this time, one of my students said, “when the poem means something to the characters in the play, and we care about those characters, then it is going to have to mean something to us.” Another student declared that “this time I saw how the poem felt rather than trying to figure out what it meant.”