by John Donne
And if no piece of chronicle we prove,
We’ll build in sonnets pretty rooms;
As well a well-wrought urn becomes
The greatest ashes, as half-acre tombs …
(‘The Canonization’)11
English Renaissance poetry is rooted in convention, and Donne, like his contemporaries, writes in well-established genres and verse forms: elegy, epigram, satire, love lyric, epithalamion or marriage song, verse epistle, sonnet, hymn.12 Yet Donne constantly turns conventional poetic forms to unpredictable ends. An avid reader who, like the speaker in ‘Satire I’, preferred the ‘constant company’ of his books to gadding about town, Donne frequently invokes the classics, the Bible, medieval philosophy and earlier Renaissance poets, only to distance himself from them. He mocks the futility of the conventional Petrarchan lover, stuck in a stock conceit and frozen in a static love for an inaccessible, heavenly mistress: ‘Alas, alas, who’s injured by my love? / What merchant’s ships have my sighs drowned?’ the speaker asks in ‘The Canonization’.13
In an era deluged by sonnets, Donne’s love lyrics, although known as Songs and Sonnets, do not contain even one formal sonnet (fourteen lines of iambic pentameter verse in a conventional rhyme scheme). Donne saved those gems for God. His lyrics are written in stanzas using a variety of line lengths and rhyme schemes. His longer poems are primarily in rhymed couplets, although there are also poems in triplets, alternating rhymes and stanzas with intricately interwoven rhyme schemes.
Ben Jonson complained ‘that Donne for not keeping of accent deserved hanging’. Yet Donne’s lines do scan; as Samuel Taylor Coleridge realized, ‘the sense must be understood in order to ascertain the metre’.14 Like most English poets before the twentieth century, Donne writes in traditional metric patterns, most often in iambs: successive feet with one unstressed and one stressed beat (–´). Yet his iambic rhythms are loosened by an unusually high number of substitutions and elisions that unfetter and intensify the verse, capturing the rugged unpredictability of colloquial speech. ‘Holy Sonnet 10 (XIV)’, for example, derives its explosive energy from a preponderance of caesurae, or pauses (//), and spondees, or double stresses (˝):
Bátter /mȳ heárt, // thrée-pér/sōned Gód; // fōr Yóu
Ās yét/ būt knóck, // bréathe, // shíne, // ānd séek /tō ménd.
In Donne’s lyrics, as in Shakespeare’s plays, the rhythms of spoken English continually break through the formal metrical pattern. His lyrics are noted for their dramatic, colloquial opening lines: ‘For God’s sake hold your tongue, and let me love’ (‘The Canonization’); ‘I wonder by my troth, what thou and I / Did, till we loved’ (‘The Good Morrow’); ‘Who will believe me if I swear / That I have had the plague a year?’ (‘The Broken Heart’).
Unlike his immediate predecessors and contemporaries – most notably Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser and William Shakespeare – Donne does not deploy elaborate descriptions of symbolic natural landscapes, classical myths or female beauty. As his fellow poet, Thomas Carey, wrote in his elegy upon Donne’s death:
The Muses’ garden with pedantic weeds
O’erspread, was purged by thee, the lazy feeds
Of servile imitation thrown away,
And fresh invention planted.
Donne can luxuriate in a lovely natural image – ‘Gentle love deeds, as blossoms on a bough, / From love’s awakened root do bud out now’ (‘Love’s Growth’) – but not often, and not for long.
Suspicious of beauteous language, Donne prefers shockingly unpoetic images that dazzle the mind and penetrate the skin. ‘The Flea’ turns a pesky little louse, a conventional trope of libertine poets, into something marvellous: ‘and this / Our marriage bed, and marriage temple is; / … we’are met / And cloistered in these living walls of jet’. Donne’s images can be as strikingly encapsulated as ‘these living walls of jet’ or the ‘bracelet of bright hair about the bone’ of the speaker’s corpse in ‘The Relic’. Yet Donne was also a master of elaborate, extended comparisons known as metaphysical conceits, which require the reader to stop and figure out how, or how successfully, the image captures the conceptual or emotional complexities it seeks to depict. Stanley Fish argues that Donne was his own most important and discriminating reader, and Donne often reconsiders as the lines unfold.15 ‘Valediction Forbidding Mourning’ abandons one dazzling but unsatisfying trope after another: ‘Our two souls therefore, which are one … If they be two, they are two so / As …’
Donne’s innovative diction, intricate syntax and shifting constellation of images dramatize the movement of thoughts unfolding as one line or stanza turns to the next. The first stanza of ‘The Good Morrow’ concludes with a resounding but conventional abstraction about love and beauty, punctuated though not quite punctured by an irreverent joke about the speaker’s previous sexual conquests: ‘If ever any beauty I did see, / Which I desired, and got, ’twas but a dream of thee’. The next stanza starts anew – ‘And now good morrow to our waking souls’ – as if to reassure the woman to whom the poem is addressed that their exalted, consummated love is as fresh and natural as the awakening morning.
Donne reinvigorates poetic language with ‘new-made idiom’ (to borrow a phrase from ‘Valediction of the Book’) drawn from everyday life: building, medicine, food, law, trade, finance, warfare, geographical exploration, astronomy, astrology. Nothing is off limits, nothing too mundane, far-fetched or graphic. ‘Satire IV’ is rooted in the stuff of this world, ‘A license, old iron, boots, shoes, and egg- / shells’. ‘A Valediction of My Name in the Window’ invokes the body in all its corporeality, the ‘muscle, sinew,’and vein, / Which tile this house’. Yet ‘Song’ famously revels in the fantastical play of imagination:
Go and catch a falling star,
Get with child a mandrake root,
Tell me where all past years are,
Or who cleft the Devil’s foot …
In ‘Elegy on Mrs Bulstrode’ death feeds on the deceased as we eat supper: ‘Th’earth’s face is but thy table, and the meat / Plants, cattle, men – dishes for Death to eat’. In ‘Elegy on the Lady Markham’ ‘Tears are false spectacles’; in ‘A Valediction of Weeping’ tears are coins, then globes, then the moon that controls the tides and the speaker’s safe return from his sea voyage. Constructing metaphors as workmen make globes, Donne wields continents and oceans, ranging from ‘the Indias of spice and mine’ to the bed where the speaker has just awakened with his lover in ‘The Sun Rising’. Donne’s vision of the world is at once global (‘Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone’) and intensely private: ‘Let us possess one world, each hath one, and is one’ (‘The Good Morrow’).
Donne is less an idealist or an aesthete than a builder, an explorer, a sceptic, a sensualist. Very much a man of his time yet forward-looking, Donne’s mind ranges from the Copernican revolution and newly found stars and planets to anatomical dissection. Unsolved scientific problems concern him: ‘Of longitudes, what other way have we, / But to mark when and where the dark eclipses be?’ (‘Valediction of the Book’).16 ‘The Second Anniversary’ asks us to confront what we do not know: ‘Know’st thou but how the stone doth enter in / The bladder’s cave and never break the skin? / Know’st thou how blood, which to the heart doth flow, / Doth from one ventricle to th’other go?’
In ‘Metempsychosis’ the newly created earth comprises a laboratory for the study of natural science: ‘That swimming college and free hospital / Of all mankind, that cage and vivary / Of fowls and beasts’. Containing the first recorded use of the word ‘college’ to mean a society or gathering place for scholars, these lines associate Donne’s experimental poetry with the empirical experiments that generated the scientific revolution. In ‘The First Anniversary’ the stable, hierarchical world order collapses altogether. The ‘new philosophy calls all in doubt’ heralding the modern era: ‘ ’Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone’.17 In ‘A Nocturnal upon St Lucy’s Day’, the very notion of stability dissolves, an
d Donne is ‘re-begot / Of absence, darkness, death, things which are not’ – and naught.
Donne’s language yields chasms where the flat verbal surface doubles over and splits apart, leaving us on the edge of an interpretative divide. Yet the physical world keeps intruding. Donne’s early poems, the epigrams, satires and elegies, are immersed in city life with its temptations and sexually transmitted diseases, its vanities, self-deceptions and social climbing, its greed, corruption and depravity. The famously knotty satires mock stupidity, deride self-indulgence and attack corruption.18 The epigram ‘Klockius’ ends with a humiliating, witty exposé:
Klockius, so deeply’hath sworn, ne’er more to come
In bawdy house, that he dares not go home.
Klockius swore off prostitutes only to discover (as we ourselves discover in the final epigrammatic turn) that his own home is little better than a bawdy house.
Donne was a master of the epigram, a classical genre that challenges the poet to speak volumes in a few pithy lines. Donne’s epigrams delight in wordplay, but they also reveal that play can have serious consequences:
Thy sins and hairs may no man equal call,
For as thy sins increase, thy hairs do fall.
(‘A Licentious Person’)
The absurd mathematical ratio, combined with the pun on hair, heirs and (less precisely) whores, juxtaposes the insidious spread of venereal disease, which threatens the licentious man’s life, and patrilineage. In the epigrams, as in so many of the longer poems, the biting turn of the ending sends us back to the beginning to rethink what we thought we knew.
In his witty, irreverent elegies Donne writes with remarkable frankness about sexuality: the pressure of an erection, the delights of foreplay, the medical rediscovery of the clitoris, the pleasure of orgasm, the let-down of post-coital sadness.19 ‘Elegy 8. To His Mistress Going to Bed’ dramatizes the thrill of seducing his mistress: ‘O my America, my new-found-land’. The discovery of her naked body is all the more revelatory because Donne’s contemporaries rarely removed all their clothes. ‘The Comparison’ (Elegy 2) contrasts the friend’s aggressive, unsatisfying sex life with the mutual satisfaction the speaker and his mistress enjoy by paying careful, knowing attention to one another’s bodies. ‘Sappho to Philænis’ adopts the persona of the Greek lesbian poet Sappho, who cherishes the ‘mutual feeling’ she shared with her female lover Philænis.20 If Donne’s portrayal of Sappho arouses male voyeurs – and it pays to look closely at the ending – it also gives female creativity and female pleasure a voice that vies with the much-vaunted ‘masculine persuasive force’ of ‘Elegy 11. On His Mistress’.21
In ‘Elegy 14. Love’s Progress’, which was omitted from the first and second editions of Donne’s poems presumably due to objections from the censor, Donne figures ‘progress’ in two senses: both a journey towards ‘this desired place’, ‘the centric part’ of the woman’s body, and an advance in what is known. The poem promulgates what Renaissance scientists were discovering about the body, both by studying classical texts and by conducting their own anatomical dissections. Yet Donne’s ‘application’ and ‘use’ of their findings to advocate non-reproductive sexual pleasure, for women as well as men, poses a far more radical challenge than the published medical treatises were prepared to condone. ‘[P]ractise my art’, Donne writes in ‘Love’s Progress’, directing his readers to put his ‘map’ of the body to ‘use’ while at the same time inviting us to actively engage with his daring, innovative poetry.
The repeated deferrals, surprising climaxes and continually retraced footsteps ‘progress’ like medical science by constantly testing and re-examining their own starting assumptions. Impatient with set patterns and suspicious of ready-made answers, the ‘new strange shapes’ of Donne’s experimental poetry challenge poets and lovers, and lovers of poetry to do better – to circle back, recalculate and begin anew.
In ‘Satire III’ Donne urges us to seek the one true Church, not by accepting truths handed down from our father, or forefathers, or the Church Fathers but by actively seeking our own answers. Donne came of age during a time when religious belief was passionately debated and politically fraught. Within two generations the government had abandoned Roman Catholicism under Henry VIII (r. 1509–47) and institutionalized the Protestant Reformation under Edward VI (r. 1547–53) only to reinstate Catholicism with Queen Mary (r. 1553–8) and return to Protestantism with Queen Elizabeth (r. 1558–1603). The law required monthly attendance at the services of the Church of England, but dissent was widespread, and failure to comply could be amended by paying a fine. ‘Satire III’ scorns the fictitious Graius for accepting the state Church simply because
Some preachers, vile ambitious bawds, and laws,
Still new like fashions, bid him think that she
Which dwells with us is only perfect …
Donne’s search for the one true Church turns into a search for truth itself, a pursuit so rigorous that it requires the fearless perseverance of a mountain climber:
On a huge hill,
Cragged and steep, Truth stands, and he that will
Reach her, about must, and about must go;
And what the’hill’s suddenness resists, win so …
For Donne the road to knowledge, or ‘truth’, whether secular or religious, is always a ‘strange way’, circuitous but rigorous.22
The sceptical distrust of received truth expressed in ‘Satire III’ returns in ‘Metempsychosis’, a long satirical allegory which traces the progress of a soul from its first incarnation in the apple eaten by Eve and Adam in the Garden of Eden through a series of plants, animals and human beings down to Donne’s day. The final aphorism challenges Donne’s readers to decide for themselves the extent to which something is good or evil:
There’s nothing simply good nor ill alone;
Of every quality comparison,
The only measure is, and judge, opinion.
By defining good and ill as a function of ‘opinion’, or a process of ‘comparison’ that requires one to continually ‘measure’ and ‘judge’, ‘Metempsychosis’ announces a paradigm shift – from a medieval, analogical view of the world that represents good and evil as divinely ordained, eternal verities to a modern, empirical model that advocates continuing intellectual exploration, legal reform and social change. Donne’s allegory of human history reveals that society condones certain behaviours at one moment or place while prohibiting and condemning the same behaviours at other times and places. The allusions to incest, promiscuity and homoerotic love illustrate the poem’s larger, overarching claim that social mores and sexual practices are not inherently ‘good’ or ‘ill’ but constructed as such by law and society.23
The great twentieth-century scholar C. S. Lewis complained that ‘Donne’s poetry is too simple to satisfy. Its complexity is all on the surface.’24 Yet Donne’s poems are not riddles that can be solved once and for all. Donne’s religious poems, like his elegies, satires and love lyrics, are constantly pushing the limits – enacting resistance, seeking answers, risking outrage. In ‘Holy Sonnet 10 (XIV)’ Donne turns all his poetic force and personal charm to wooing God. Following a simple, gentle profession of love, ‘Yet dearly’I love You,’and would be loved fain’, the conclusion is startling: ‘I, / Except You’enthral me, never shall be free, / Nor ever chaste, except You ravish me.’ ‘Ravish’ is one of those characteristic Donnean words that balances two completely different, even contradictory meanings: (1) fill with rapture or spiritual exaltation, (2) seize and carry away by force, violate, rape. By imagining himself simultaneously as a mystic and as the passive object of sexual assault, Donne moves beyond simple binaries – beyond reason. The surprising expression of masochistic desire dramatizes what the poem discovers: that divine love requires a violently wrenching leap of faith and an inexplicable, unearned gift of grace.
The Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, a lyrical collection of prose meditations, expostulations and prayers written during a rela
psing fever that nearly killed Donne in 1623, recycles and explicates many of the images that animate the poetry: man as microcosm of the universe, the body as figure for the soul, sickness as sign of divine providence, the house as an analogue for the rooms of the mind or the foundations of faith. As microcosm expands to macrocosm, Donne, by then an Anglican minister and dean of St Paul’s Cathedral, discovers that he is inextricably bound up with all mankind:
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 friends or of thine own were. Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind …
(17. Meditation)
The Devotions contains what is perhaps the best account of Donne’s own language – attributed to God himself:
My God, my God, Thou art a direct God, may I not say a literal God, a God that wouldest be understood literally and according to the plain sense of all that Thou sayest? But Thou art also (Lord, I intend it to Thy glory, and let no profane misinterpreter abuse it to Thy diminution), Thou art a figurative, a metaphorical God too: a God in whose words there is such a height of figures, such voyages, such peregrinations to such remote and precious metaphors, such extensions, such spreadings, such curtains of allegories, such third heavens of hyperboles, so harmonious elocutions, so retired and so reserved expressions, so commanding persuasions, so persuading commandments …
(19. Expostulation)
Donne’s prose is as direct, agitated, hyperbolic, witty and spectacularly metaphorical as his poetry. Like the God he conjures and strives to imitate here, Donne’s poems use ‘commanding persuasions’ and ‘persuading commandments’ to sway his readers and listeners. With their striking conjunctions of ‘plain’ speech, ‘remote and precious metaphors’ and ‘reserved expressions’, Donne’s poetry and prose reach a feverish pitch of perplexity and discovery. In ‘Holy Sonnet 19 (XIX)’ Donne looks back over his life and writing only to detect a recurrent pattern of contradiction, uncertainty and change:
