by John Donne
JOHN DONNE
Collected Poetry
With an Introduction and Notes by
ILONA BELL
PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
Introduction
Further Reading
A Note on the Texts
COLLECTED POETRY
Songs and Sonnets
The Good Morrow
Song (‘Go and catch a falling star’)
Woman’s Constancy
The Undertaking
The Sun Rising
The Indifferent
Love’s Usury
The Canonization
The Triple Fool
Lovers’ Infiniteness
Song (‘Sweetest love, I do not go’)
The Legacy
A Fever
Air and Angels
Break of Day
The Anniversary
A Valediction of My Name in the Window
Twicknam Garden
Valediction of the Book
Community
Love’s Growth
Love’s Exchange
Confined Love
The Dream
A Valediction of Weeping
Love’s Alchemy
The Flea
The Curse
The Message
A Nocturnal upon St Lucy’s Day, Being the Shortest Day
Witchcraft by a Picture
The Bait
The Apparition
The Broken Heart
A Valediction Forbidding Mourning
The Ecstasy
Love’s Deity
Love’s Diet
The Will
The Funeral
The Blossom
The Primrose
The Relic
The Damp
The Dissolution
A Jet Ring Sent
Negative Love
The Prohibition
The Expiration
The Computation
The Paradox
Farewell to Love
A Lecture upon the Shadow
Image of Her Whom I Love
Sonnet. The Token
Self Love
When My Heart Was Mine Own
Epigrams
Hero and Leander
Pyramus and Thisbe
Niobe
A Burnt Ship
Fall of a Wall
A Lame Beggar
Cales and Guiana
Sir John Wingefield
A Self Accuser
A Licentious Person
Antiquary
The Juggler
Disinherited
The Liar
Mercurius Gallo-Belgicus
Phrine
An Obscure Writer
Klockius
Raderus
Ralphius
Faustus
Elegies
Elegy 1. The Bracelet
Elegy 2. The Comparison
Elegy 3. The Perfume
Elegy 4. Jealousy
Elegy 5. O, Let Me Not Serve So
Elegy 6. Nature’s Lay Idiot
Elegy 7. Love’s War
Elegy 8. To His Mistress Going to Bed
Elegy 9. Change
Elegy 10. The Anagram
Elegy 11. On His Mistress
Elegy 12. His Picture
Elegy 13. The Autumnal
Elegy 14. Love’s Progress
Elegy 15. His Parting from Her
Elegy 16. The Expostulation
Elegy 17. Variety
Sappho to Philænis
The Epithalamions or Marriage Songs
An Epithalamion, or Marriage Song, on the Lady Elizabeth and Count Palatine
Epithalamion Made at Lincoln’s Inn
Eclogue at the Marriage of the Earl of Somerset
Satires
Satire I
Satire II
Satire III
Satire IV
Satire V
Upon Mr Thomas Coryat’s Crudities
In eundem Macaronicon
Incipit Ioannes Dones
Metempsychosis
Epistle
The Progress of the Soul
Verse Letters
The Storm
The Calm
To Mr Henry Wotton (‘Here’s no more news than virtue’)
To Mr Henry Wotton (‘Sir, more than kisses’)
H. W. in Hiber. Belligeranti
To Sir H. W. at His Going Ambassador to Venice
To Mr Rowland Woodward (‘Like one who’in her third widowhood’)
To Mr R. W. (‘Zealously my muse doth salute all thee’)
To Mr R. W. (‘Muse not that by thy mind thy body’is led’)
To Mr R. W. (‘If, as mine is, thy life a slumber be’)
To Mr R. W. (‘Kindly’I envy thy song’s perfection’)
To Mr T. W. (‘All hail sweet poet’)
To Mr T. W. (‘Haste thee harsh verse’)
To Mr T. W. (‘Pregnant again with th’old twins’)
To Mr T. W. (‘At once, from hence’)
To Mr C. B.
To Mr E. G.
To Mr S. B.
To Mr I. L. (‘Of that short roll’)
To Mr I. L. (‘Blest are your north parts’)
To Mr B. B.
To E. of D. with Six Holy Sonnets
To Sir Henry Goodyere (‘Who makes the past a pattern’)
A Letter Written by Sir H. G. and J. D. alternis vicibus
To Mrs M. H.
To the Countess of Bedford (‘Reason is our soul’s left hand’)
To the Countess of Bedford (‘Honour is so sublime perfection’)
To the Countess of Bedford (‘You have refined me’)
To the Countess of Bedford (‘T’have written then’)
To the Countess of Bedford, on New Year’s Day
To the Countess of Bedford, Begun in France but never perfected
To the Lady Bedford (‘You that are she’)
To Sir Edward Herbert, at Juliers
To the Countess of Huntingdon (‘That unripe side of earth’)
To the Countess of Huntingdon (‘Man to God’s image’)
A Letter to the Lady Carey, and Mistress Essex Rich, from Amiens
To the Countess of Salisbury, August, 1614
Funeral Elegies
Anniversaries
To the Praise of the Dead, and the Anatomy, [Probably by Joseph Hall]
The First Anniversary. An Anatomy of the World
A Funeral Elegy
The Harbinger to the Progress, [Probably by Joseph Hall]
The Second Anniversary. Of the Progress of the Soul
Epicedes and Obsequies
Elegy (‘Sorrow, who to this house’)
Elegy on the Lady Markham
Elegy on Mrs Bulstrode (‘Death I recant’)
Elegy upon the Death of Mrs Boulstred (‘Language, thou art too narrow’)
Elegy, On the Untimely Death of the Incomparable Prince, Henry
Obsequies upon the Lord Harrington, the Last that Died
A Hymn to the Saints, and to Marquesse Hamilton
Epitaph on Himself. To the Countess of Bedford
Epitaph on Anne Donne
Divine Poems
To the Lady Magdalen Herbert, of St Mary Magdalen
La Corona
Holy Sonnet 1 (II) (‘As due by many titles’)
Holy Sonnet 2 (IV) (‘O my black soul’)
Holy Sonnet 3 (VI) (‘This is my play’s last scene’)
Holy Sonnet 4 (VII) (‘At the round earth’s imagined corners’)
Holy Sonnet 5 (IX) (‘If poisonous minerals’)
Holy Sonnet 6 (X) (‘Death be not proud’)
Holy Sonnet 7 (XI) (‘Spit in my face, you Jews’)
> Holy Sonnet 8 (XII) (‘Why are we by all creatures’)
Holy Sonnet 9 (XIII) (‘What if this present’)
Holy Sonnet 10 (XIV) (‘Batter my heart’)
Holy Sonnet 11 (XV) (‘Wilt thou love God’)
Holy Sonnet 12 (XVI) (‘Father, part of His double interest’)
Holy Sonnet 13 (I) (‘Thou hast made me’)
Holy Sonnet 14 (III) (‘O might those sighs and tears’)
Holy Sonnet 15 (V) (‘I am a little world’)
Holy Sonnet 16 (VIII) (‘If faithful souls be alike glorified’)
Holy Sonnet 17 (XVII) (‘Since she whom I loved’)
Holy Sonnet 18 (XVIII) (‘Show me, dear Christ’)
Holy Sonnet 19 (XIX) (‘O, to vex me’)
The Cross
Resurrection, Imperfect
The Annunciation and Passion
A Litany
Goodfriday, 1613. Riding Westward
The Lamentations of Jeremy, for the most part according to Tremelius
Translated out of Gazæus, Vota Amico Facta
Upon the Translation of the Psalms by Sir Philip Sidney and the Countess of Pembroke, His Sister
To Mr Tilman after He Had Taken Orders
A Hymn to Christ, at the Author’s Last Going into Germany
Hymn to God my God, in my Sickness
A Hymn to God the Father
To Mr George Herbert, with One of my Seals, of the Anchor and Christ
Prose
Prose Letters
Madam (‘I will have leave to speak like a lover’)
‘I send to you now that I may know how I do’
To the Right Worshipful Sir George More, Knight (‘If a very respective fear of your displeasure’)
Sir (‘I write not to you out of mine poor library’)
To Sir H[enry] Good[y]ere (‘Every Tuesday I make account’)
To Sir H[enry] G[oodyere] (‘It should be no interruption to your pleasures’)
Devotions upon Emergent Occasions
1. Meditation
4. Meditation
17. Meditation
19. Expostulation
Death’s Duel, Selections
Appendix: Memorial Verses
To the Deceased Author, upon the Promiscuous Printing of his Poems, the Looser Sort, with the Religious, By [Sir] Tho[mas] Browne
To the Memory of My Ever Desired Friend Dr Donne, By H[enry] K[ing]
On the Death of Dr Donne, By Edw[ard] Hyde
On Doctor Donne, By Dr C. B. of O.
An Elegy upon the Incomparable Dr Donne, By Hen[ry] Valentine
An Elegy upon Dr Donne, By Iz[aak] Wa[lton] (‘Is Donne, great Donne deceased’)
Elegy on D. D., By Sidney Godolphin
On Dr John Donne, Late Dean of St Paul’s, London, By J[ohn] Chudleigh
An Elegy upon the Death of the Dean of Paul’s, Dr John Donne, By Mr Tho[mas] Carey
An Elegy on Dr Donne, By Sir Lucius Carie
On Dr Donne’s Death, By Mr Mayne of Christ-Church in Oxford
Upon Mr J. Donne and his Poems, By Arth[ur] Wilson
Epitaph upon Dr Donne, By Endy[mion] Porter
In Memory of Doctor Donne, By Mr R. B.
Epitaph (‘Here lies Dean Donne’)
Notes
Chronology
Acknowledgements
PENGUIN CLASSICS
GENERAL EDITOR, POETRY: CHRISTOPHER RICKS
COLLECTED POETRY
JOHN DONNE was born in 1572 into a family of devout Catholics. He studied at Oxford University, travelled on the Continent, and then studied law at Lincoln’s Inn. In 1596–7 Donne joined the military expeditions to Cadiz and the Azores. In 1597 he became secretary to Sir Thomas Egerton, the Lord Keeper of the Great Seal. Donne fell in love with Egerton’s niece, Anne More; having made a clandestine marriage contract, they were secretly married in December 1601. Donne lost his position in Egerton’s service, but the marriage was declared legal in April 1602. In the years following his marriage, Donne was a Member of Parliament and Justice of the Peace. He obtained temporary positions and patronage from a number of aristocrats who are the subjects of his poems. He was ordained as an Anglican minister in 1615, becoming Royal Chaplain and first Reader in Divinity at Lincoln’s Inn. In 1617 Anne Donne died, after giving birth to their twelfth child. In 1621 Donne was appointed Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral. John Donne died in 1631, at the age of fifty-nine. The first collected edition of his poetry was published posthumously in 1633.
ILONA BELL is Clarke Professor of English Literature at Williams College. She has a BA from Harvard College and a Ph.D. from Boston College. She has received fellowships and grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Bunting Institute and the Mellon Foundation. She is the author of Elizabethan Women and the Poetry of Courtship (1998) and Elizabeth I: the Voice of a Monarch (2010), and has published numerous articles and book chapters on John Donne, William Shakespeare, George Herbert, Ben Jonson, Elizabeth I, Mary Wroth, John Milton, the Maydens of London and Elizabeth Cary. She has also edited John Donne: Selected Poems (2006) for Penguin Classics.
Introduction
Around 1618 Ben Jonson predicted that John Donne ‘for not being understood would perish’. Since we might think the passage of time has made Donne’s poetry difficult, it is telling to hear this from Donne’s contemporary, a learned poet who ‘esteemeth John Donne the first poet in the world in some things’. When the first edition of Donne’s poems was published in 1633, Thomas Carey, one of Donne’s most astute disciples, contributed ‘An Elegy upon the Death of the Dean of Paul’s, Dr John Donne’ which described Donne’s formidable poetic powers: ‘Thou hast … drawn a line / Of masculine expression, … shot such heat and light / As burnt our earth, and made our darkness bright, / Committed holy rapes upon our will … [T]o the awe of thy imperious wit / Our stubborn language bends’.
The next century failed to appreciate the challenges Donne’s poetry posed, just as Jonson predicted. The neoclassical poet John Dryden protested that Donne ‘affects the metaphysics’ and ‘perplexes the minds of the fair sex with nice speculations of philosophy, when he should engage their hearts, and entertain them with the softnesses of love’. Samuel Johnson, the great eighteenth-century man of letters, also objected: ‘The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together.’1
The nineteenth century was both more appreciative and more critical.2 The Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge found Donne’s poems – ‘where the writer thinks, and expects the reader to do so’ – electrifying: ‘Wit! – Wonder-exciting vigour, intenseness and peculiarity of thought … this is the wit of Donne!’3 The most popular Victorian anthology omitted Donne’s poems because, as Alexander Grosart explained when he published The Complete Poems of John Donne in 1872, ‘It needs courage to print the poetry of Dr John Donne in our day.’ On the value of Donne’s poems the nineteenth century was divided. ‘Few are good for much’, Henry Hallam wrote in the late 1830s: ‘the conceits have not even the merit of being intelligible, and it would perhaps be difficult to select three passages that we should care to read again.’ Yet Robert Browning was so fond of quoting the love poems in his own love letters to Elizabeth Barrett that she referred to Donne as ‘your Donne’.4
By the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, thanks to Sir Edmund Gosse’s and Sir Herbert Grierson’s seminal editions and T. S. Eliot’s oracular modernist essays, the originality and strength of Donne’s poetry were widely recognized as the mark of his particular genius.5 In his ground-breaking 1921 anthology Grierson observed that the ‘central theme of [Donne’s] poetry is ever his own intense personal moods, as a lover, a friend, an analyst of his own experiences worldly and religious’ – a view of Donne that dominated criticism for much of the twentieth century. The most important theoretical justification came from T. S. Eliot, whose much-cited definition of the lyric as ‘the voice of the poet talking to himself – or to nobody�
�, maintained that it makes no difference whether the lyric addresses a friend, a lover, a god, a personified abstraction, or a natural object since the poet only pretends to be talking to himself or to someone else: ‘He is not concerned, at this stage, with other people at all: only with finding the right words or, anyhow, the least wrong words. He is not concerned whether anybody else will ever listen to them or not.’ Eliot saw Donne’s poetry as ‘a kind of cypher which will yield clues to a peculiarly interesting personality behind [the] poetry’.6
In the second half of the twentieth century Donne’s poetry came to seem even more intriguingly self-analytical as the biographical identity of Donne, the man behind the poems, gave way to the persona or the ‘identity of the speaker’ (the term is from that catechism of New Criticism, Understanding Poetry, by Brooks and Warren). The dramatic situations, the windows and curtains, the suns and ladies, provided an imaginary backdrop for what really mattered: ‘the conflict of attitudes within the mind of an individual’.7
New Historicism precipitated another major shift in Donne criticism, from the self-contained, coherent verbal construct to the interpenetration of poetry and society. Stressing Donne’s apostasy from his Roman Catholic upbringing, John Carey described Donne as a powerful egotist driven to continual self-advertisement, his professional ambitions thwarted by his clandestine marriage. Arthur Marotti represented Donne as a coterie poet, writing not for print but for manuscript circulation.8 As the world permeated Donne’s satires, verse epistles, epithalamions, funeral elegies and religious writing, the imaginative world of the Songs and Sonnets receded.
Yet even as critical currents shifted, Donne’s poems continued to be seen as a predominantly male undertaking that reduced the woman to a shadowy reflection of male desire or a figure of male exchange.9 Feminist critiques offered explanations: the patriarchal organization of early modern society encouraged Donne’s misogynist wit; the lyric was a monologic and deeply male genre; the very structure of language empowered men by silencing women. Most twentieth-century criticism disregarded the women to whom so many of Donne’s poems were originally addressed.10
Much as the voice of Eliot’s modernist poet speaking to himself morphed into the self-dramatization and self-analysis of the new critical persona, Donne the self-fashioning, self-advertising careerist succumbed to Donne, the self-deconstructing, unstable postmodern subject. With the death of the author, the spread of intertextuality, and the allure of self-reflexivity, the solidity of the poems themselves began to dissolve. Yet, the very process of deconstruction invited constant rereading and reconstruction:
