Some notes on John Donne

(from The Penguin Short History of English Literature, by Stephen Coote; 1993; "From Donne to Dryden", I)

While playwrights of the early seventeenth century were fashioning language into a supreme theatrical medium, other poets were submitting lyric, satire and elegy to a searching re-examination. The most brilliant of these figures was John Donne (1572-1631).

Donne's was a life of passionate intellectual and personal drama. Reared as a Roman Catholic in a protestant nation state, aware of being part of a group often summoned to suffering and martyrdom, Donne called the basis of his creed in doubt and read and questioned his way towards a hard-won, restless Anglicanism. Yet the man who annotated nearly fifteen hundred works of theology and argument was not a mere bookish recluse. Donne was a soldier of fortune, the author of perhaps the finest collection of love lyrics in the language and a man whose naked ambition and sheer recklessness traped him at servile hopes of court patronage. From these he was finally called to the deanery of St Paul's and emerged as one of the most popular preachers and mighty poets of Christian salvation.

Donne's early prose Paradoxes (published 1633) give an indication of the manner of his thought. When he argues that 'a wise man is known by much laughing' or proves 'the gifts of the body are better than those of the mind', Donne was writing in a long-established rhetorical tradition. The plenitude of his inventiveness however suggests a skeptical fascination with the workings of reason as these are revealed through the display of wit.

Wit as ingenuity — the creation of far-fetched arguments or conceits — was a prized rhetorical achievement, and Donne's skill earned him the highest praise from his contemporaries. For later critics such as Dryden and Dr Johnson however, men working in different modes of literary decorum, such effects supposedly revealed a lack of taste which earned Donne and his followers the misleading name of 'metaphysical'. They were accused of linking together recondite ideas, and so failing to achieve the central and classical voice of broad human experience. It took later generations of critics, first Coleridge and then T. S. Eliot, to rediscover in Donne's poetry the thought of a complex and very masculine brain, one which dwelt on the nature of its own perceptions and, by bringing a passionately critical intellect to bear on the traditions of rhetoric, revealed its force through the quality of its wit.

Such wit is often allied to worldly cynicism in Donne's Elegies and Satires, works which pay tribute to the classics by revolutionising them. The Elegies, for example, frequently surpass their Ovidian model in the sceptical analysis of base human motive, in the sheer versatility of 'The Autumnal' and, above all, in the sensual, colloquial force, the vividly re-enacted drama, of 'His Picture' and 'To his Mistress Going to Bed'. In this last work, a new style of love poetry comes to maturity as Donne re-creates the appearance of passionately articulate self-awareness:

License my roving hands, and let them go
Before, behind, between, above, below.
O my America, my new found land,
My kingdom, safeliest when with one man manned,
My mine of precious sones, my empery,
How blest am I in this discovering thee! 
To enter in these bonds, is to be free;
Then where my hand is set, my seal shall be.

empery: empire

This passage is one of the great achivements of seventeenth-century erotic wit, a combination of passion and artifice that seems to re-create the wonder and excitement of sexual arousal itself. The woman is a virgin continent to be explored for her hidden wealth and 'manned'. Such puns, as in Shakespeare's Sonnets, lead to profound emotional insights. In the last line, for example, the poet in bed, naked and erect, envisages his body as a seal which, in the act of love, will validate the union of the lovers themselves. This appearance of a dramatised self — a central feature in all Donne's work — is conveyed here through a language at once knotty, colloquial and capable of supreme sensuousness. Donne's 'strong lines', as contemporaries called them, can thus be seen as a liberating force of criticism which swept away nymphs and goddesses, pining Petrarchan lovers and a melliflousness of tone that all too easily sank to servile imitation.

In the Satires, Donne was concerned to develop what some contemporaries thought they had discovered in Latin satire: the harsh tones of classical moral outrage. In Joseph Hall's Virgidemiarum (1597) and his rival John Marston's Scourge of Villanie (1598), for example, we hear the 'savage indignation' of Juvenal and what was believed to be the dense syntax of Persius. These are re-created through the 'persona' or assumed personality of the intellectually superior malcontent. Though Donne could also clothe a moral type in the foolish fashions of the day, he had an alert sense of the relative foolishness of all human activity, whether this be the teeming life of the streets and court or his own scholarship. With 'Satire III', such scepticism becomes a matter of intense personal seriousness, for this is the work to which Donne criticized the aberrations of all Christian sects in his search for 'true religion'. The tough syntax of the poem is not a literary affectation but the voice of a great intellect in turmoil:

To adore, or scorn an image, or protest,
May all be bad; doubt wisely, in strange way
To sand inquiring right, is not to stray;
To sleep, or run wrong is. On a huge hill,
Cragged, and steep, Truth stands, and he that will
Reachher, about must, and about must go;
And what the hill's suddenness resists, win so:
Yet strive so, that before age, death's twilight,
Thy soul rest, for none can work in that night,
To will, implies delay, therefore do now.

Donne's wit is here the medium of his radical play of mind. It is the discourse of a restlessly argumentative intellect which dramatizes aspects of a complex and obsessive intelligence. Clearly, this is not the verse of Sidney's 'right popular philosopher' proceeding through formal logic and ornament to settled verities.  An acutely questioning self-awareness has intervened to make Donne's the poetry of a highly civilized small group such as that gathered round the great literary patron Lucy, Countess of Bedford (d. 1627), a coterie that was sufficiently daring to question convention in pursuit of the fresh and tougher truths of experience. It was also a group sufficiently small to subsiste on the passing of manuscripts. The greater part of Donne's poems were published posthumously by his son. They are thus the records of a poetic revolution wrought among the few.

Such qualities can be seen again in the love lyrics that make up Donne's Songs an Sonnets. These were probably written over some twenty years. None can be readily dated, and few if any should be given a precise biographical significance. Each however concentrates with a unique rhetoric the colloquial force and erotic passion of the other early works, while the testing, inclusive reference of their wit invariably dramatizes aspects of relationship. These may be cynical, sensuous, mystically celebratory, or give voice to a mournful sense of loss.

Donne's cynical lyrics vary between the flippancy of 'Go, and catch a falling star' and the more intricate worldly satire of 'Love's Alchemy' and the 'Farewell to love' with its ironic and closely observed analysis of the demystification of desire in post-coital enervation. Persuasions to love itself sometimes attain the outrageous casuistry of 'The Flea'. Here, a girl's loss of honour in surrendering her virginity is compared to the loss of blood suffered in a flea bite which, since the flea has bitten the poet too, mixes the blood of both man and woman in its shell, even as the lover's bed will join their bodies.

In 'The Ecstasy', by contrast, Donne discussed with witty yet passionate rigour the deepest relation between shared spiritual love and the natural needs of the body. United, these offer that rapture which is the subject of 'The Dream' and 'The Good Morrow'. These poems are among the great celebrations of intimacy in English literature. It is perhaps in 'The Sun Rising' however that Donne's combination of stanza form and speech rhythm, observation of the world and celebration of the idea that the lovers in their bed are the world, is most wittily yet profoundly expressed. The tradition of the aubade, or the lover's lament for the coming of dawn, is there transformed as the poet seeks to persuade the sun to irradiate a triumphant and mutual passion:

Thy beams, so reverend, and strong
Why shouldst thou think?
I could eclipse and cloud them with a wink,
But that I would not lose her sight so long:
     If her eyes have not blinded thine,
     Look, and tomorrow late, tell me, 
  Whether both th'Indias of spice and mine
  Be where thou left'st them, or lie here with me.
Ask for those kings whom thou saws'st yesterday,
And thou shalt hear, All here in one bed lay.

both th'Indias: the East and West Indies.

Such deep erotic satisfaction is also the subject of 'The Anniversary', 'Love's Growth' and 'The Canonization'. In these works we again see Donne as one of the supreme analysts of passion fulfilled, a man drawing on the notions of scholasticism for conceits that convey a sense of wonder all the more mireculous for the sceptical intellect that apprehends it.

Such learned references in Donne's poetry were drawn from a memory stocked with the arcana and commonplaces of science and theology, and were then juxtaposed to sharply immediate perception. By a transforming paradox, this meeting of opposites frquently 'interanimates' both, and from this flows a new awareness of the complexity of experience. In poems such as 'The Canonization', for example, the doctrine of the intercession of saints suggests how rare yet powerful is a mutual human relationship. In 'Air and Angels', adapting Aquinas's belief that God permits the heavenly hosts assume a body of condensed air in order to appear to men, Donne shows a lover's progress between a too acute sensuousness and a too ethereal idealism:

   Every thy hair for love to work upon
Is much too much, some fitter must be sought:
   For, nor in nothing, nor in things
Extreme, and scatt'ring bright, can love inhere;
   Then as an angel, face, and wings
Of air, not pure as it, yet pure doth wear,
   So thy love may be my love's sphere;
        Just such disparity 
As is 'twixt air and angels' purity,
'Twixt women's love, and men's will ever be.

Love itself is here irradiated with a sense of the divine. But if Donne's is a voice of celebration, he is occasionally a great poet of love's defeat. We see this particularly in 'Twicknam Garden' and, above all, in one of his finest works, 'A Noctural upon S. Lucy's Day, Being the Shortest Day'. Here the desolation of a love occluded by death offers a sense of universal loss, the nothingness of the bereaved and learned self as it seeks a greater darkness in which to prepare for spiritual truth:

Since she enjoys her long night's festival,
Let me preparare towards her, and let me call
This hour her vigil, and her eve, since this
Both the year's, and the day's deep midnight is.

With the death of the beloved, the poet becomes an eremite devoted to the holy service of his departed saint.

Although such poems seem to touch an unworldly ardour, Donne was in fact very much concerned with the world at this stage of his careeer. Hence his writing of verse letters, obsequies and occasional pieces to aristocratic figures. These can sometimes seem mannered and over-ingeniously flattering when compared to his major and more popular work. Nonetheless, while it is right to see some of these verses as the poet's labours as he drudged for patronage — a necessary task in a society where advancement lay in the gift of the great — it is also important not to miss their discussion of attitudes crucial to Donne's maturing thought.

Amid the compliment and professions of friendship, for example, we are offered glimpses of a corrupt and perilous world of relative values, disillusion and vulnerability, the futility and spite of fallen man. In 'The Storm' and 'The Calm' — perhaps the most stimulating of Donne's Epistles — he also debunked the heroic pretensions of the military adventures in which he followed Essex and Ralegh. What in Hakluyt might be a chronicle of national endeavour, here becomes a re-creation of diminishingly painful experience raised to an almost surreal intensity by prodigious wit.

Such techniques are further developed in those most bizarre works The Progress of the Soul and the two Anniversaries (1611-12). These last were written to commemorate the death of Elizabeth Drury, a girl Donne had never seen, and were then printed by her influential father. Donne was later to regret this publicity both as a stain on his gentleman's amateur status and because these essays in extreme hyperbole were persistently misunderstood. What Donne was here concerned to achieve however was a contrast between the powers of Christian innocence imagined in his ideal of Elizabeth Drury and the decay of a corrupt, fallen world. The issue was thus between faith and virtue on the one hand and the toils of worlliness on the other. It is an old theme, but one examined here in the glare of new problems, in particular that scepticism which was to transform the intellectual life of the century.

At its most fundamental, the scepticism with which Donne had already approached literay convention challenged the ordered world inherited from Aquinas and the scholastics. It declared that ultimate truth cannot be approached by reason alone since, in a notion given classic formulation by Montaigne in The Apology for Raymond Sebond (c. 1576), reason works only on sense data and cannot be definitively checked. The central questions that sprang from this dilemma were whether and how one may know God — in other words, is belief a matter of faith or reason? — and whether and how one may gain a knowledge of the physical world — in other words, is fact only opinion or can some enquiries be verified?

In the Anniversaries, Donne set his face against the empirical investigation of nature that was soon to prove if not the final answer to these questions then at least their most powerful reply. He suggests that to let oneself be 'taught by sense, and Fantasy' is only to pile up useless and pedantic confusion. If the new astronomy of Galileo and Copernicus shows that the universe is not the regular, serene construct of the scholastics, then that is not a stimulus to inventing new theories, but proof that the physical world is irremediably corrupt. If the links in the great chain of being are broken, then matters are worse than ever we thought:

    new philosophy calls all in doubt,
The element of fire is quite put out;
The sun is lost, and th'earth, and no mans wit
Can well direct him where to look for it.
And freely men confess that this world's spent,
When in the planets, and the firmament 
They seek so many new; they see that this 
Is crumbled out again to his atomies.
'Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone.

 Donne's answer to this predicament was 'fideism': not sharper telescopes but intenser prayer, not knowledge but virtue, not science but faith. When the soul, shot like a bullet from a rusted gun, courses through the celestial spheres, Donne shows it does not stop to question their movement but hurtles to the seat of all knowledge — the bosom of God. Meanwhile, with the removal of such inspiring virtue as Elizabeth's Drury's, the rest of mankind is left to stagger on in a dark, decaying world lit only by the ghostly memory of the heroine's worth. The intellect at its most extended can only expose its own fallacies, and we must finally admit that the mysteries of Christ 'are not to be chawed by reason, but to be swallowed by faith'. 

This last quotation comes from Donne the preacher. The sermons are the greatest of his prose works, but were preceded by a number of pieces which show Donne involved in both the personal quest for religious experience and the worldly pursuit of profitable employment. His Pseudo-Martyr  (1610) and Biathanatos — a work unpublished in his lifetime — suggest the problems this entailed. Pseudo-Martyr, for example, was designed to appeal to James I by suggesting that Roman Catholics went against the rule of nature when they refused to swear to the king's supremacy in church matters and so laide themselves open to the death penalty. As with Ignatius his Conclave (1611), the work relishes a convert's scabrous anti-Catholic satire. In the labyrinthine and sceptical paradoxes of Biathanatos, on the other hand, Donne argued for the morality of suicide with an involvement rooted in acute personal experience. 

And it is the obsession with death and the last things that characterizes Donne's mature religious works. The Devotion on Emergent Occasions (published 1624) were written when Donne's doctors had declared him too ill to read, let alone compose. The afflicted body houses a soaring mind however. Donne's emotions range over the fear of solitude and physical disintegration, the relation between sickness and sin, sin and death. The entire universe is raided for images because man himself —John Donne— is an image of the universe, an epitome, a microcosm. It is this belief that underlies the most famous passage in Donne's prose:

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, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy frieds, or of thine own were; 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 moment of union is perceived but, as is appropriate for a sick-bed meditation, is perceived in the instant of its dissolution.

It is for his sermons that Donne is best known as a writer of religious prose. In the Jacobean period especially, occupied by preachers of great distinction, the pulpit gained extraordinary influence as a focus of spiritual thought and the dissemination of ideas. Led by the king, the court itself relished the finesse of religioius analysis, and connoisseurs of style and content memorized sermons and took notes on a form of literature that was both popular and learned. Donne's contributions should not be seen in isolation.

Many preachers, particularly those of a Puritan persuasion, argued for an unornamented clarity of style. Others dressed spiritual matters in the garment of learning. While Thomas Adams (c. 1583- ante 1660) combined both in a manner that is often theatrical and powerfully directed to the abuses of the time, Lancelot Andrewes (1555-1626) brought his immense erudition in fifteen languages to passages of Scripture, each word and syllable of which he believed to be divinely inspired. As a result, each word and syllable is examined with the pious ardour of a philologist revealing the depths of the Word of God.

With Andrewes, human drama is often conveyed through a tiny yet telling comment in parenthesis. With Donne it moves to the centre of the stage. The immediate impact of the man, of course, is irrecoverably lost, but his devout biographer Izaak Walton (1593-1683) described Donne 'preaching to himself like an angel from a cloud' and appealing to the conscience of others 'with a most particular grace and an unexpressable addition of comeliness'.

The literary style of Donne's sermons is partly a distinctive reworking of its many sources. For example, Donne could exploit rhetorical patterning with the startling virtuosity of the sermon preached to the Earl of Carlisle in c. 1622 where he describes the agony of being 'secluded eternally, eternally, eternally from the sight of God'. From Seneca, Tacitus, and their Renaissance editor Justus Lipsius however Donne and many others derived an anti-Ciceronian style. This was carefully contrived with a dramatic, irregular immediacy to express a concern with personal experience rather than settled certainties. Sermons such as Death's Duel (published 1632) however suggest that of all the influence on Donne's sermon style the Geneva and Authorized versions of the Bible — the parallelism of the Psalms, the visionary urgency of the Prophets and the evangelical fervour of St Paul especially — were the most telling. Nonetheless, when all the influences have been traced, what finally impresses is the compelling sense of Donne's unique spiritual sensibility, the range and drama of a religious intellect for which every aspect of the world could be a metaphor of the soul's experience.

As part of this technique, the sermons frequently juxtapose macabre effects with the tremblingly numinous, decay with resurrection. On the one hand is the conviction that 'Between that excremental jelly that any body is made of at first, and that jelly which thy body dissolves to at last, there is not so noisome, so putrid a thing in nature.' In contrast is the image of the redeemed soul springing up in heaven like a lily from the red soil of its first creation. Between these experiences come the life of prayer and temptation, the imagining of the last things and, finally, an awareness of mercy.

This was not lightly won, and Donne's religious poetry dramatizes his spiritual conflict with great power and formal mastery. However, since distinctions in the psychology of faith are not always as easy to discern as those in Donne's love lyrics, it is important to emphasize the variety in his religious poetry. The sonnets in 'La Corona', for example, draw on the church's traditions of oral prayer to fashion a devout and accomplished celebration of the mysteries of faith that was to some extent influenced by Roman Catholic practices. 'The Litany', by contrast, while not perhaps a wholly successful poem, is an attempt to express the modest, sober delight in daily piety which is a great achievement of seventeenth-century Anglicanism, and one which finds its truest expression in the work of George Herbert and Thomas Ken (1637-1711). The personal realization of such ideas was terrifying — 'those are my best days, when I shake with fear' — and it forms the true spiritual centre of Donne's alternately defiant and submissive drama of sin and judgement. Around this centres the fear of physical decay. Sonnets such as 'Oh my black Soul!', 'At the round earth's imagin'd corners' and 'Death be not proud' contain doomsday in their small compass.

In 'Good Friday, riding westwards' Donne investigated the paradoxes of Christian faith with intensely dramatic wit, but it is in the 'Hymn to God my God, in my Sickness' and a 'Hymn to God the Father' that his relish of paradox and the strong speech rhythms of personal drama merge most tellingly with theology and faith. In these poems we watch Donne's advance towards the unity of the human and divine. In the first hymn, Donne's body is again a microcosm, a little world hurrying to decay. Yet, in its pain, it also imitates Christ's Passion and so may eventually rise like him to paradise. Finally, at the close of the second hymn, Donne hovers on the edge of death in a state at once confessional, wittily serious and almost ready to accept the extinction of his turbulent personality:

I have a sin of fear, that when I have spun
    My last thread, I shall perish on the shore;
But swear by thy self, that at my death thy son
    Shall shine as he shines now, and heretofore;
        And, having done that, thou hadst done,
            I fear no more.

In the end, Donne's own name — that very personal token of self — becomes something to offer in with to God and so a means of surrendering the human to the divine.

Simon Schama's John Donne

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