Day's Deep Midnight

 

Me citan en Acta Neophilologica

Me citan en la revista polaca Acta Neophilologica, en este artículo sobre John Donne.

Gładkowska, Dorota. "'Pchła' i 'Dzień dobry' Johna Donne'a − słowo, które stało się ciałem." Acta Neophilologica 19.2 (2017): 97-116.*  ("'The Flea' and 'The Good-Morrow' by John Donne - the word made flesh). Online at Academia.*

         https://www.academia.edu/71624658/

         2024

Lo citado es una de mis publicaciones más antiguas, un trabajo de curso sobre John Donne  escrito nada menos que en el año de gracia de 1982, y que "convertí en publicación" a principios del milenio siguiente y presente.

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The Good Morrow

John Donne - The Canonization

John Donne, Selected Poems

John Donne: 'The Good-Morrow'

Ediciones en red de un comentario sobre el poema de John Donne 'The Good-Morrow' que hice en el año de Jesu Christo de 1982.

José Angel García Landa. "John Donne: 'The Good-Morrow'." Typescript, U of Zaragoza, 1982. Online edition (2005)

http://www.unizar.es/departamentos/filologia_inglesa/garciala/publicaciones/donne.htm

2012

_____. "John Donne: 'The Good-Morrow'." iPaper at Scribd (sos_english) 29 Aug. 2008.*

         http://es.scribd.com/doc/5303666/JOHN-DONNE

         2012

_____. "John Donne: 'The Good-Morrow'." Social Science Research Network 21 Dec. 2012.*

         http://ssrn.com/abstract=2192436

         2012

_____. "John Donne: 'The Good-Morrow'." ResearchGate 24 Jan. 2014.*

         https://www.researchgate.net/publication/256042490

         2014

_____. "John Donne: 'The Good-Morrow'." Academia 5 Sept. 2014.*

         https://www.academia.edu/8202758/

         2014

_____. "John Donne: 'The Good-Morrow'." Semantic Scholar.*

         https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/John-Donne%3A-'The-Good-Morrow'-Landa-%C3%81ngel/bb014a18eb06ce1516c36065ddbc2eca8356275f

         2019

 

 

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John Donne - The Good-Morrow - Poetry Lecture and Analysis by Dr. Andrew...

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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Une vie, une œuvre : John Donne, Eros et Thanatos (1572-1631)

John Donne

From The Oxford Companion to English Literature, ed. Margaret Drabble.

DONNE, John (1572-1631), related on his mother's side to Sir Thomas *More, born into a Catholic family, his uncle Jasper Heywood being the leader of the Jesuit mission in England. His father, a prominent member of the London Ironmongers' Company, died when Donne was 4, and six months later his mother married a Catholic physician, Dr John Syminges. Educated at home by Catholic tutors, Donne went at the age of 11 to Hart Hall, Oxford (not Hertgrod College), favoured by Catholics because it had no chapel, so that recusancy attracted less notice. He may have transferred to Cambridge, but his religion (which he appears to have renounced c. 1593) debarred him at this point from taking a degree in either university. In 1589-91 he may have travelled on the Continent, to Italy and Spain. He sailed as a gentleman volunteer with *Essex to sack Cadiz (1596) and with *Ralegh to hunt the Spanish treasure ships off the Azores (1597). His poems 'The Storm' and 'The Calm' commemorate these voyages. Donne became secretary to Sir Thomas Egerton, lord keeper of the great seal, and in 1601 he was elected MP for Brackley, Northamptonshire, an Egerton seat. He forfeited his chance of a civil career when late in 1601 he secretly married Ann More, Lady Egerton's niece: he was dismissed from Egerton's service and briefly imprisoned. Donne's next 14 years were marked by fruitless attempts to live down his disgrace. At first he depended on the charity of friends and of his wife's relations, living with his ever growing family in a cottage at Mitcham. In 1612 he moved to a London house owned by his patron, Sir Robert Drury of Hawstead, Suffolk, whom he had accompanied on his continental travels. In honour of Sir Robert's dead child Elizabeth, whom Donne had never met, he wrote his extravagant Anniversaries. Other friends and patrons in these years were Sir Walter Chute, with whom Donne went to the continent in 1605-6, Sir Henry Goodyer, probably Donne's closest friend, Lucy, countess of Bedford, Magdalen Herbert (mother of George Herbert), and Sir Robert Ker, Viscount Rochester, to whom Donne offered his services in the Essex divorce case. Despite Ker's good offices, James I considered that Donne was unfit for confidential employment and urged him to enter the Church, which he did in 1615. James made him a chaplain-in-ordinary and forced Cambridge (which regarded him as a careerist) to grant him a DD. In the Church Donne held several livings and the divinity readership in Lincoln's Inn. His wife died in 1617 at the age of 33, after giving birth to their 12th child, and the following year Donne went as chaplain to the earl of Doncaster in his embassy to the German princes. His 'Hymn to Christ at the Author's Last Going into Germany', full of apprehension of death, was written before this journey. In 1621 Donne procured the deanery of St Paul's. One of the most celebrated preachers of his age, as well as its greatest non-dramatic poet, he died on 31 March 1631, having first, as his earliest biographer Izaak *Walton records, had his portrait drawn wearing his shroud and standing on a funeral urn.

Donne was celebrated by contemporaries for his abandoning of Elizabethan classicism's 'soft, melting Phrases' through an 'imperious Wit' (Thomas *Carew). His earliest poems, his 'Satires and Elegies', often lubricious, dazzlingly argued, and luridly self-dramatizing, belong to the 1590s. His unfinished satirical epic 'The Progress of the Soul' bears the date 1601, and some of his Holy Sonnets were probably written in 1610-11. His 'Songs and Sonnets' are, howerver, largely impossible to date. These love poems encompass the intimate and tender but intellectually strenuous 'Valediction: Forbidding Mourning', the dark turbulence of 'Twicknam Garden', the sombre majesty of 'A Nocturnall upon S. Lucies Day', and libertine lyrics founded on an emotionally complex misogynist casuistry.

Donne's prose works include Pseudo-Martyr (1610), an attack on Catholics who had died for their faith, and Ignatius His Conclave, an attack on the Jesuits (1611). Biathanatos, a defence of suicide, to which Donne confessed a 'sickely inclination', was probably written at this time, but its subject matter made it unpublishable until after his death. His Essays in Divinity (1651) were composed in preparation for his ordination and the Devotions (1624) were assembled in less than a month from notes made during a near-fatal fever. His sermons appeared after his death in three volumes, LXXX Sermons (1640), Fifty Sermons (1649), and XXVI Sermons (1660). These were edited by his son John and based on texts which Donne himself prepared from his rough preaching notes during two periods of rest in the country in 1625 and 1630: their memorable exhortations include the well-known 'No man is an Iland . . . never send to know for whom the bell tols, it tolls for thee'. His poems were collected by his son John and published in 1633 (second, enlarged, edn 1635). See also METAPHYSICAL POETS.

R. C. Bald, John Donne: A Life (1970); J. Carey, John Donne: Life, Mind and Art (1981); Elegies and Songs and Sonnets (ed. H. *Gardner, 1965); Divine Poems (ed. H. Gardner, 1952; 2nd edn, 1978); Satires, Epigrams and Verse Letters (ed. W. Milgate, 1967); Epithalamions, Anniversaries and Epicedes (ed. W. Milgate, 1978); Paradoxes and Problems (ed. H. Peters, 1980); Ignatius His Conclave (ed. T.S. Healy, SJ, 1969); Essays in Divinity (ed. E. M. Simpson, 1952); Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (ed. J. Sparrow, 1923); Sermons (ed. G. R. Potter and E. M. Simpson, 10 vols, 1953-62). There is no collected edition of Donne's letters, the best available approach to one still being E. *Gosse, Life and Letters (2 vols, 1899).

This Is My Play's Last Scene

—oOo—

Retropost #1470 (14 de febrero de 2007): Jamais connu de loi

Como el día se presta, pongo esta bonita canción de enamoramiento para quien esté enamorado, o crea estarlo, o quiera estarlo, o lo estuvo en tiempos... qué tiempos. Que los dioses nos libren de volver a vivir tiempos tan interesantes. La cantante es Nolwenn Leroy, la música ya se sabe de quién es, y la letra... la letra me la enseñó hace veinticinco años una chica francesa que ahora andará por los cuarenta. A Nolwenn ni la habían inventado, claro.




En clase de literatura hoy leemos "Sapho to Philaenis" de John Donne. Un poema de amor atípico, inspirado en Ovidio, pero también, supongo, en los propios arrebatos de John Donne, y en el original, como este fragmento de la propia Safo, "Oda a Anactoria":

El igual de los dioses me parece
quien se sienta a tu lado, y oye
cerca de sí tu voz dulce
y tu risa encantadora; eso sí hace
que el corazón se me acelere en el pecho.
Porque cuando te veo aunque sólo sea
un poquito, me quedo sin palabras,
la lengua se me avería, un fuego sutil
se me echa a correr bajo la piel;
con los ojos no tengo vista, me zumban los oídos,
se me escurre el sudor, y me entra
un temblor por todo el cuerpo.
Me quedo pálida como la hierba seca,
y en este ataque de locura casi
parezco muerta.
Y sin embargo tengo que atreverme a todo,
pues alguien tan insignificante...

It's a heartache

—oOo—

Boast Your Stats

Llega a seis mil descargas una de mis publicaciones en ResearchGate:




No es que sea tanto. Y hasta yo tengo otro artículo viejo con más de nueve mil descargas. Pero lo que me divierte es que cuando escribí este peipa sobre Donne, un trabajo de curso allá por el año 1982, en plena Transición, jamás se me ocurrió ni que estaría colgado en algo llamado la Red, ni que lo iba a leer tanta gente. Sobre todo de Argentina, de la India, y de Estados Unidos, si he de creer a mis estadísticas.

Mi semana en ResearchGate

—oOo—

Simon Schama's John Donne

Simon Schama's John Donne from Videos on Vimeo.

The Harem of a Jealous God

A commentary on David P. Barash's Is God a Silverback?

How Monotheists Modelled God on a Harem-Keeping Alpha Male.





Holy Sonnets: Batter my heart, three-person'd God   (Or: God as the Absolute Monarch as an Alpha-rapist)

By John Donne


Batter my heart, three-person'd God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp'd town to another due,
Labor to admit you, but oh, to no end;
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captiv'd, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be lov'd fain,
But am betroth'd unto your enemy;
Divorce me, untie or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

Freud on God

—oOo—

Retropost #442 (3 de agosto de 2005): Do, Did, Donne

Mi cara en tu ojo, la tuya en el mío aparece... Acabo de colgar en la uef el escrito philológico más primitivo que he conseguido alcanzar estirando la mano hasta el fondo del baúl de los recuerdos. Es un comentario de un poema de Juan Pardo que hice allá por el año de gracia de 1982 —casi autobiográfico era el poema por aquel entonces. Era para un trabajo de curso, y me pusieron matrícula de honor, olé; —aunque alguna faltilla he corregido. Aquí queda, para silenciar a la posteridad que lo reclamaba.

Retroposts

—oOo—

This Is My Play's Last Scene

Un poema de los Holy Sonnets de John Donne, "This Is My Play's Last Scene", que me llama la atención en primer lugar por la metáfora de la vida como teatro, aunque es sólo la primera imagen de muchas que da para el telón final:

This is my play's last scene; here heavens appoint

My pilgrimage's last mile; and my race,

Idly, yet quickly run, hath this last pace,

My span's last inch, my minute's latest point;

And gluttonous death will instantly unjoint

My body and my soul, and I shall sleep a space;

But my'ever-waking part shall see that face

Whose fear already shakes my every joint.

Then, as my soul to heaven, her first seat, takes flight,

And earth-born body in the earth shall dwell,

So fall my sins, that all may have their right,

To where they'are bred, and would press me, to hell.

Impute me righteous, thus purg'd of evil,

For thus I leave the world, the flesh, the devil. 

 Traducido así a la ligera:

Esta es la última escena de mi drama, aquí el cielo señala

la última milla de mi peregrinar, y mi carrera,

que he corrido ocioso pero rápido, tiene este último paso,

la última pulgada de mi palmo, el último punto de mi minuto;

y la muerte glotona al punto desmembrará

mi cuerpo y mi alma, y dormiré un rato;

pero mi parte insomne verá ese rostro

que de miedo me hace temblar ya todo el cuerpo.

Entonces, mientras mi alma al cielo, su primer asiento, emprende el vuelo,

y el cuerpo nacido terrenal morará en la tierra,

que del mismo modo caigan mis pecados, y cada cual tenga lo suyo,

a donde se criaron, y a donde querrían llevarme a la fuerza, al infierno.

Consideradme recto, purgado así de mal,

Puesto que así dejo el mundo, la carne y el demonio.

Quizá lo más llamativo, aparte del temor reverencial a Dios que aparece en otros sonetos —Dios es para Donne una especie de terrorífico rey absolutista en su corte majestuosa— es la curiosa manera en que formula su esperanza de resurrección y trascendencia. 

Hay quien dice que las sucesivas reformas y conversiones doctrinales forzosas dejaron a los ingleses sin fe—sólo con una creencia formulaica, y con una religión política. A Donne sí lo dejaron más dispuesto a jugar con las ideas doctrinales que a tomárselas muy en serio. En cuestiones de religión, quizá su expresión más directa y sincera sea esa Elegía en la que dice que la auténtica verdad está en la búsqueda incesante de la verdad, y no en creerse que se ha hallado en una doctrina que prometa certidumbre y detenga esa búsqueda.

Así pues, la teología de este poema, si nos lo tomamos como teología y no como juego de ideas, es totalmente poco ortodoxa... y sin embargo muy cristiana a su manera.

Ante la duda de si él, como pecador, irá al cielo o al infierno, Donne prefiere tomar todas las alternativas. Irá al cielo, irá al infierno, y también se quedará en la tierra.  Es decir, su alma inmortal irá al cielo, que es de donde viene, su cuerpo se quedará evidentemente en la tierra (aunque esto contradice otros sonetos divinos, y la resurrección de los cuerpos) y sus pecados caerán al infierno, que es su lugar más propio. La cosa ciertamente tiene su lógica propia, y reduce a un ejercicio de ingenio metafísico las dudas y angustias sobre el más allá. Quizá sea el mejor uso que pueda dárseles, a esas angustias trascendentales.

 John Donne, 'The Good-Morrow'

—oOo—

Go and Catch a Falling Star by John Donne - An Analysis

Two Poems of Darkness

I

A Nocturnal upon Saint Lucy's Day,
Being the Shortest Day

John Donne

'Tis the year's midnight and it is the day's,
Lucy's, who scarce seven hours herself unmasks;
    The sun is spent, and now his flasks
    Send forth light squibs, no constant rays.
        The world's whole sap is sunk;
The general balm th'hydroptic earth hath drunk,
Whither, as to the bed's feet, life is shrunk,
Dead and interred; yet all these seem to laugh,
Compared with me, who am their epitaph.

Study me, then, you who shall lovers be
At the next world, that is, at the next spring;
    For I am every dead thing
    In whom love wrought new alchemy.
         For his art did express
A quintessence even from nothingness,
From dull privations and lean emptiness.
He ruined me, and I am re-begot
Of absence, darkness, death: things which are not.

All others from all things draw all that's good,
Life, soul, form, spirit, whence they being have;
    I, by love's limbeck, am the grave
    Of all that's nothing. Oft a flood
        Have we two wept, and so
Drowned the whole world, us two; oft did we grow
To be two chaoses when we did show
Care to aught else; and often absences
Withdrew our souls, and made us carcasses.

But I am by her death (which word wrongs her)
Of the first nothing the elixir grown;
    Were I a man, that I were one
    I needs must know; I should prefer,
        If I were any beast,
Some ends, some means; yea plants, yea stones detest
And love. All, all some properties invest.
If I an ordinary nothing were,
As shadow, a light and body must be here.

But I am none; nor will my sun renew.
You lovers, for whose sake the lesser sun
    At this time to the Goat is run
    To fetch new lust and give it you
        Enjoy your summer all.
Since she enjoys her long night's festival,
Let me prepare 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.

                 

II

Darkness

Lord Byron

I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;
Morn came and went—and came, and brought no day,
And men forgot their passions in the dread
Of this their desolation; and all hearts
Were chill'd into a selfish prayer for light:
And they did live by watchfires—and the thrones,
The palaces of crowned kings—the huts,
The habitations of all things which dwell,
Were burnt for beacons; cities were consum'd,
And men were gather'd round their blazing homes
To look once more into each other's face;
Happy were those who dwelt within the eye
Of the volcanos, and their mountain-torch:
A fearful hope was all the world contain'd;
Forests were set on fire—but hour by hour
They fell and faded—and the crackling trunks
Extinguish'd with a crash—and all was black.
The brows of men by the despairing light
Wore an unearthly aspect, as by fits
The flashes fell upon them; some lay down
And hid their eyes and wept; and some did rest
Their chins upon their clenched hands, and smil'd;
And others hurried to and fro, and fed
Their funeral piles with fuel, and look'd up
With mad disquietude on the dull sky,
The pall of a past world; and then again
With curses cast them down upon the dust,
And gnash'd their teeth and howl'd: the wild birds shriek'd
And, terrified, did flutter on the ground,
And flap their useless wings; the wildest brutes
Came tame and tremulous; and vipers crawl'd
And twin'd themselves among the multitude,
Hissing, but stingless—they were slain for food.
And War, which for a moment was no more,
Did glut himself again: a meal was bought
With blood, and each sate sullenly apart
Gorging himself in gloom: no love was left;
All earth was but one thought—and that was death
Immediate and inglorious; and the pang
Of famine fed upon all entrails—men
Died, and their bones were tombless as their flesh;
The meagre by the meagre were devour'd,
Even dogs assail'd their masters, all save one,
And he was faithful to a corse, and kept
The birds and beasts and famish'd men at bay,
Till hunger clung them, or the dropping dead
Lur'd their lank jaws; himself sought out no food,
But with a piteous and perpetual moan,
And a quick desolate cry, licking the hand
Which answer'd not with a caress—he died.
The crowd was famish'd by degrees; but two
Of an enormous city did survive,
And they were enemies: they met beside
The dying embers of an altar-place
Where had been heap'd a mass of holy things
For an unholy usage; they rak'd up,
And shivering scrap'd with their cold skeleton hands
The feeble ashes, and their feeble breath
Blew for a little life, and made a flame
Which was a mockery; then they lifted up
Their eyes as it grew lighter, and beheld
Each other's aspects—saw, and shriek'd, and died—
Even of their mutual hideousness they died,
Unknowing who he was upon whose brow
Famine had written Fiend. The world was void,
The populous and the powerful was a lump,
Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless—
A lump of death—a chaos of hard clay.
The rivers, lakes and ocean all stood still,
And nothing stirr'd within their silent depths;
Ships sailorless lay rotting on the sea,
And their masts fell down piecemeal: as they dropp'd
They slept on the abyss without a surge—
The waves were dead; the tides were in their grave,
The moon, their mistress, had expir'd before;
The winds were wither'd in the stagnant air,
And the clouds perish'd; Darkness had no need
Of aid from them—She was the Universe.

 

 

 

—oOo—

The Road, and Company