John Donne

John Donne is the greatest of the poets whom Samuel Johnson, a century after his death, disparagingly called “metaphysical”. His love poems — “The Flea”, “The Good-Morrow”, “The Sun Rising”, “The Canonization”, “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning”, “The Ecstasy” — are dramatic, colloquial, argumentative and erotic, packed with learned and startling comparisons (“conceits”) drawn from theology, alchemy, geography and the new science. His religious poems, above all the Holy Sonnets (“Death, be not proud”; “Batter my heart, three-personed God”), wrestle with God in the same passionate, dialectical voice. In middle age, after years of poverty, he became a priest, Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral and the most celebrated preacher in England; his prose Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624) contains the most famous passage in English sermon literature: “No man is an island, entire of itself… never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

Life

A Catholic boyhood

Donne was born in London in 1572 into a devoutly Roman Catholic family at a time when Catholicism was illegal and dangerous in Elizabethan England. His father, a prosperous ironmonger, died when he was four; his mother was a grandniece of Sir Thomas More, the Catholic martyr, and her brother was a Jesuit who led a mission to England. Donne studied at Oxford and probably Cambridge but, as a Catholic, could not take a degree, since that required swearing the Oath of Supremacy to the queen as head of the Church. In 1593 his younger brother Henry was arrested for harbouring a Catholic priest (who was hanged, drawn and quartered) and died of plague in Newgate prison.

In the 1590s Donne studied law at Lincoln’s Inn and was, by his own and his friends’ account, a fashionable young man about town, “a great visiter of ladies, a great frequenter of playes, a great writer of conceited verses.” He wrote satires, elegies and many of the love poems that circulated in manuscript among friends — none were published in his lifetime. He sailed with the Earl of Essex on the expedition to sack Cadiz (1596) and on the Islands Voyage to the Azores (1597). Somewhere in these years he quietly left the Catholic Church and conformed to the Church of England.

Marriage and ruin

In 1597 he became secretary to Sir Thomas Egerton, the Lord Keeper, a brilliant start to a career in public life. But in December 1601 he secretly married Anne More, Egerton’s sixteen-year-old niece, without her father’s consent. Her father, Sir George More, had him dismissed and briefly imprisoned. The marriage was upheld, but Donne’s career was destroyed. For more than a decade he lived in poverty at Mitcham, outside London, with a growing family — Anne bore twelve children, of whom five died young — dependent on patrons, writing occasional verse and prose to seek favour. He suffered depression; he wrote Biathanatos, a defence of suicide.

The Church

Donne sought secular office for years. King James I, who admired his learning and his anti-Catholic tract Pseudo-Martyr (1610), refused him any preferment except in the Church, and Donne, after long hesitation, was ordained in 1615. He became a royal chaplain, Reader in Divinity at Lincoln’s Inn, and in 1621 Dean of St Paul’s, a post he held until his death. In 1617 Anne died after giving birth to a stillborn child; Donne was devastated. His sermons, preached to crowds at St Paul’s and at court, were famous for their drama, eloquence and meditation on death. In 1623 he fell gravely ill with a fever (perhaps typhus) and, during his recovery, wrote the Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, a series of meditations on each stage of his illness. In his last illness in 1631 he preached his own funeral sermon, Death’s Duel, and had himself drawn in his shroud, standing on a funeral urn; the drawing became the model for his marble effigy in St Paul’s — the only monument to survive the Great Fire of London in 1666. He died on 31 March 1631. His poems were published posthumously in 1633.

The love poems

Donne’s Songs and Sonnets revolutionised the English love lyric. Against the smooth, idealising Petrarchan sonnets of the Elizabethans, with their cruel mistresses and suffering lovers, Donne wrote poems that sound like real speech — abrupt, witty, rough, dramatic — addressed to a lover in a particular situation, often arguing a case.

“The Flea” uses a flea that has bitten both the speaker and his mistress as an argument for sleeping together: “Mark but this flea, and mark in this, / How little that which thou deniest me is; / It sucked me first, and now sucks thee, / And in this flea our two bloods mingled be”. When she kills the flea, he turns her triumph against her.

“The Sun Rising” scolds the sun for waking the lovers: “Busy old fool, unruly sun, / Why dost thou thus, / Through windows, and through curtains call on us?… She’s all states, and all princes I, / Nothing else is… Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere; / This bed thy centre is, these walls, thy sphere.”

“The Good-Morrow” opens: “I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I / Did, till we loved?” and makes the lovers’ little room “an everywhere”, each a hemisphere of the other’s world.

“The Canonization” (“For God’s sake hold your tongue, and let me love”) argues that the lovers, renouncing the world, will be canonised as saints of love.

“A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning”, said to have been written for Anne when Donne went abroad in 1611, asks her not to grieve at their parting, since their love is refined beyond the physical: their two souls are “like gold to airy thinness beat”, and, in the most famous conceit in English poetry, they are like the two legs of a pair of drawing compasses:

If they be two, they are two so As stiff twin compasses are two; Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show To move, but doth, if the other do… Thy firmness makes my circle just, And makes me end where I begun.

“The Ecstasy” describes two lovers whose souls leave their bodies and unite, then argues that souls must return to bodies: “Love’s mysteries in souls do grow, / But yet the body is his book.” “The Relic” imagines his grave dug up and a bracelet of his mistress’s “bright hair about the bone” found on his skeleton. “Air and Angels”, “The Anniversary”, “Twickenham Garden” and the cynical “Go and catch a falling star” show his range, from rapture to misogynist bravado.

The Elegies, more openly erotic, include “To His Mistress Going to Bed”: “License my roving hands, and let them go / Before, behind, between, above, below. / O my America! my new-found-land.”

The religious poems

The Holy Sonnets (c. 1609–10, and later) bring the same dramatic intensity to Donne’s relationship with God, but in a mood of anguish, fear of damnation and longing for grace — reflecting, perhaps, the Calvinist anxieties of his time and his own guilt.

“Death, be not proud” (Holy Sonnet 10) defies death: “Death, be not proud, though some have callèd thee / Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so”; death is “slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men”; “One short sleep past, we wake eternally / And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.”

“Batter my heart, three-personed God” (Holy Sonnet 14) uses violent and sexual images of siege and rape to express the soul’s need to be overpowered by God: “I, like an usurped town, to another due, / Labour to admit you, but O, to no end… Take me to you, imprison me, for I, / Except you enthral me, never shall be free, / Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.”

“At the round earth’s imagined corners, blow / Your trumpets, angels” imagines the Last Judgment. Later poems include “A Hymn to God the Father”, with its puns on his name (“When thou hast done, thou hast not done, / For I have more”) and on his wife’s (More), and “Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward”.

The prose

Donne’s 160 surviving sermons are among the masterpieces of English prose — dramatic, learned, intimate, obsessed with death and resurrection. The Devotions (1624), written during a near-fatal illness, include Meditation XVII, on the tolling of a church bell for the dying:

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less… any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

The metaphysical style

Johnson, in his Life of Cowley (1779), gave the name and the classic criticism: in the metaphysical poets “the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions.” Their wit was “a kind of discordia concors; a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike.” Johnson meant it as a fault; the twentieth century made it a virtue.

The key features are the conceit — an extended, ingenious comparison developed with logical rigour; a dramatic opening that plunges into a situation (“For God’s sake hold your tongue”); colloquial rhythms often deliberately rough (Ben Jonson said Donne “for not keeping of accent, deserved hanging”); argument — poems that reason toward a conclusion by syllogism and paradox; and a fusion of intellect and emotion. The “school” of Donne includes George Herbert, Andrew Marvell, Richard Crashaw and Henry Vaughan.

Reputation

Admired by his contemporaries — Carew’s elegy called him “a king who ruled as he thought fit / The universal monarchy of wit” — Donne fell out of fashion in the age of Dryden and Pope, who found him harsh and over-ingenious. Coleridge admired him. In 1912 Herbert Grierson’s edition of the poems and, decisively, T. S. Eliot’s essay “The Metaphysical Poets” (1921) restored him: Eliot argued that Donne could “feel his thought as immediately as the odour of a rose”, and that after the seventeenth century a “dissociation of sensibility” split thought from feeling in English poetry. Donne became a model for modernist poets and the New Critics. Margaret Edson’s play Wit (1999), about a scholar of the Holy Sonnets dying of cancer, made “Death, be not proud” newly famous.

In conversation

• “No man is an island” — we are all bound up with one another.
• “For whom the bell tolls” — every death concerns us all.
• A Donne-like conceit — a dazzlingly far-fetched comparison argued with complete seriousness (the lovers as compasses).