by John Donne
Love’s not so pure and abstract as they use
To say which have no mistress but their muse,
But as all else, being elemented too,
Love sometimes would contemplate, sometimes do.
Although the love lyrics, unlike the verse letters, do not explicitly name Donne’s private audience, they create the impression of an intimate conversation. In ‘A Valediction Forbidding Mourning’ Donne’s speaker is setting out on a journey, urging his mistress not to cry openly lest her tears ‘tell the laity our love’. Donne’s seventeenth-century biographer Izaak Walton thought Donne wrote this poem to his wife before journeying to the Continent with Sir Robert Drury in 1611–12. Yet Donne’s anxiety that her tears could betray her feelings to the ‘laity’ (or laymen) hints at a clandestine love affair. The intimate tone, the distressing, looming journey and the persuasive pressure to keep their love alive during his absence suggest that the reaction of this private female lyric audience matters.
The speaker makes one attempt to console her after another: he tells her that their separation is as gentle as a soul leaving the body for heaven, as ‘innocent’ as the movement of the heavenly spheres; that their relationship is as malleable, long lasting and precious as ‘gold to airy thinness beat’. At one point he boldly announces, ‘Our two souls therefore, which are one …’ But then he is not so sure, for, as the Book of Common Prayer preaches and all three of Donne’s Epithalamions mention, only holy matrimony can transform two souls into one. A qualification follows almost immediately: ‘If they be two, they are two so / As stiff twin compasses are two …’ This two-legged compass (the kind used to draw circles) is not the sort of image you expect to encounter in a Renaissance love poem, but it works far better than the earlier, more exalted comparisons which evade, and thus fail to dispel, her worries.
The compass, Donne’s most famous metaphysical conceit, has been criticized for shifting direction: pulling apart, circling, drawing together again. Yet that adaptability is precisely what makes the image at once so brilliantly attuned both to his journey and to her feelings. Unlike the preceding more distant and reductive analogies, the image of the compass delineates the complex interactions that simultaneously link and distance the lovers. Even before he leaves, they have begun to pull apart. That is the hard part, especially since, if this is a clandestine affair she cannot be there to bid him farewell or welcome him home. He circles around her because he feels inextricably linked to her even when they are separated. Her soul is ‘the fixed foot’ because she must remain behind. Yet she is nonetheless instrumental. As anyone who has used such a compass knows, her role is actually the more difficult to execute. Only if she exerts a determinedly steadfast force can he complete his perfect circle: ‘Thy firmness makes my circle just, / And makes me end where I begun’. When he returns, she ‘grows erect as that [circling foot] comes home’. The pun, referring ever so discreetly to her sexual arousal, sanctions her passionate desire for his safe return even as it inscribes her power to direct his course – and shape his metaphors.
Donne has been termed many things: a metaphysician more concerned with ideas than emotions; a rhetorician willing to say anything for the sake of the poem; a misogynist who loathed women’s bodies and scorned their minds; an egotist and careerist who wrote poetry for self-advertisement and professional advancement. Yet he also wrote some of the most empathetic, attentive poetic dialogues of love and friendship in the English language.
Donne’s poetry and prose embrace such a wide variety of genres, viewpoints, and personae, his language is so permeated with ‘such remote and precious metaphors, such extensions, such spreadings, such curtains of allegories’ (Devotions), his attitudes shift so quickly in anticipation of the response he hopes or fears to receive, that it is difficult to say exactly what Donne himself thought, even more difficult to identify an abiding system of beliefs. When we give Donne’s ambiguous, enigmatic language the close attention it demands, his attitudes become less predictable and more complexly multi-faceted. The intermingling or cross-pollination of sacred and profane, the refusal to simplify or suppress thoughts or feelings for the sake of clarity or consistency, the readiness to challenge orthodoxy and embrace change, the urge to shock his interlocutor into a more open, inquiring, unconventional point of view – these impulses continue to disturb and unsettle any point of view Donne might take.
Donne’s poems reveal a lifelong preoccupation with love, divinity and social connections – the three great shaping forces on his life. Born in 1572 in London to an ancient Catholic family, John Donne grew up during a time when punitive measures against Catholics were intensifying. His father John, a well-to-do ironmonger, died in 1576, leaving his wife Elizabeth to raise their three children.
Donne studied at Oxford University for three years, but left before graduating so that he would not have to take the Oath of Supremacy, pledging allegiance to the queen and the Church of England. He travelled on the Continent, returning to England to study law at Thavies Inn and Lincoln’s Inn where he wrote and circulated elegies, satires and a few Songs and Sonnets.
In 1593 his brother Henry became ill and died in Newgate Prison, having been arrested for confessing to a Catholic priest. Donne received £700 inheritance from his father’s estate.
In 1596 Donne joined the Earl of Essex’s military expeditions to Cadiz. In 1597 he served under Sir Walter Ralegh in a military voyage to the Azores where he wrote the verse letters ‘The Storm’ and ‘The Calm’.
Upon returning later in 1597 he became secretary, or assistant, to Sir Thomas Egerton, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal. While Donne was in the Lord Keeper’s service, Egerton married his second wife, Elizabeth Wolley, who brought her niece, Anne More, to York House, Egerton’s London mansion and base of operations, to complete her education and be introduced to society. John Donne and Anne More fell in love. Fearing the disapproval of her father, Sir George More, an active anti-Papist, they took great pains to conceal their love affair. At some point rumours reached Anne’s father, and the lovers were separated, but only after they made a clandestine marriage contract that could not (as Donne later wrote to her father) be broken without loss of honour. Lady Egerton died on 20 January 1600. In December 1601 Anne accompanied her father to London for the opening of Parliament. Shortly before Christmas, the seventeen-year-old Anne More and the twenty-nine-year-old John Donne secretly married. Anne returned to Surrey.
Most marriages in the upper echelons of early modern society were arranged by parents or guardians who controlled dowries, lands and inheritance. Yet once a young woman reached the age of twelve, and a young man the age of fourteen, they were legally free to marry without parental permission. It was not until more than a month after they eloped that Donne finally wrote to Anne’s father to reveal the marriage: ‘So long since, as at her being at York House, this had foundation: and so much then of promise and contract built upon it, as without violence to conscience might not be shaken’ (To the Right Worshipful Sir George More, Knight). Claiming that ‘we adventured equally’, Donne affirmed the freely chosen, egalitarian love he celebrates in ‘The Anniversary’ and elsewhere. Announcing with his characteristic but not particularly politic wit that ‘it is irremediably done’, Donne begged Sir George not to direct his anger at his daughter, and pointed out how easily he could ensure the couple’s happiness.32 No such luck. Donne and two of the friends who performed and witnessed the wedding were thrown in jail for a brief time. Worse yet, Donne lost his position in Egerton’s employ which ruined his promising career as a public servant. When Donne’s continuing pleas to his father-in-law and his former boss failed to yield the desired results, he took his case to court. There were judicial hearings in January 1602, but it was not until 27 April that the Court of Audience in Canterbury declared the marriage legal.
Donne won a wife he loved, but in so doing he sacrificed his professional aspirations. The couple moved to the country, where their family grew apace, a child appearing almost
annually. In the years following his marriage, Donne served as a Member of Parliament and Justice of the Peace. In 1606 Sir George More began to pay Anne’s inheritance, helping to alleviate the couple’s financial pressures. In 1608 Donne sought but failed to receive a position from King James.
Donne obtained patronage from a number of aristocratic benefactors whom he courted in poetry, but he failed to gain professional stability until, after much soul-searching, he was finally persuaded by King James to become an Anglican minister. In 1615 he was ordained, appointed Royal Chaplain and made an honorary doctor of divinity from Cambridge University. In 1616 he became first Reader in Divinity at Lincoln’s Inn. The following year, fifteen years after their clandestine marriage, Anne Donne died, seven days after the stillbirth of their twelfth child. Donne expressed his love and loss in the Latin epitaph carved on her funeral monument and the sonnet ‘Since she whom I loved hath paid her last debt’ (‘Holy Sonnet 17 (XVII)’). He vowed never to remarry.
Still grieving over the loss of his wife two years later, Donne travelled to Germany as chaplain to the Viscount Doncaster, and wrote ‘A Hymn to Christ, at the Author’s Last Going into Germany’.
In 1621 John Donne became dean of St Paul’s, the great London cathedral, where his brilliant, witty, dramatic sermons reached a large audience. Donne wrote a few poems after his wife’s death in 1617 and a few hymns to God in contemplation of his own death, but most of his energy and literary talent went into his religious meditations and sermons. In 1623, after nearly dying from a relapsing fever, he wrote Devotions upon Emergent Occasions which was published the following year.
John Donne died on 31 March 1631 at the age of fifty-nine, survived by six of his twelve children. His last sermon, Death’s Duel, was published the following year. The first collected edition of Donne’s poems appeared in 1633. It sold so well that an expanded, reorganized second edition appeared two years later.
Donne sharpened his poetic skills in an era when harbouring a Catholic priest could cost you your life, in a world where wooing, seducing and marrying a young heiress could either secure your fortune or land you in prison and destroy your career, and in a patronage culture where writing brilliant poems of praise could garner valuable support. Together, Donne’s Catholic upbringing, clandestine courtship and financial exigencies bred habits of mind and uses of language that are ingrained in his poetry – verbal and syntactical ambiguity, allegorical figures of speech, enigma, irony, amphibology (saying one thing and meaning another) and equivocation (saying one thing that could be taken to mean the opposite) – and that make reading his poetry as intriguing and challenging today as it was in his own time.
There is no greater or more daring writer of satires, love poems, religious lyrics or philosophical meditations in the English language. Donne extols ‘Lovers’ Infiniteness’, but he was constantly wishing for more – ‘If yet I have not all thy love, / Dear, I shall never have it all; / … / Yet I would not have all yet, / He that hath all can have no more’ – more verbal play, more emotional and spiritual intensity, more physical pleasure, more acknowledgement of his poetry’s persuasive force, more palpable signs of God’s grace, more of the woman he loved most and upon whose name he loved to pun. Yet he was also constantly on the lookout for intellectual challenges, emotional conflicts, competing interpretations – for more of the ifs, ors, yets and buts that continue to make his poems so dialogic and so challenging.
Donne would, I expect, be amused to learn that there is now a John Donne Society, a John Donne Journal, an annual John Donne conference, and that his poetry is discussed in classrooms, conferences and journals around the world by teachers and scholars eager to secure their own academic patronage. He would certainly be pleased to hear that his poems are still read by lovers wooing each other, by friends conversing in a pub, by inquiring minds and aspiring souls struggling with ego, uncertainty and self-doubt. At this point, there is little danger that Donne’s poems will perish for not being understood; it is above all their complexity and difficulty that make them so compelling and endlessly fascinating.
NOTES
1. Quoted from John Donne: The Critical Heritage, ed. A. J. Smith (London, Boston: Routledge & Paul, 1975), vol. 1, pp. 70, 69, 151, 218.
2. For a far more complete account, see Dayton Haskin, John Donne in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).
3. Donne: The critical Heritage, ed. Smith, vol. 1, pp. 266, 275.
4. Kathleen Tillotson, ‘Donne’s Poetry in the Nineteenth Century (1800–72)’, in Elizabethan and Jacobean Studies Presented to Frank Percy Wilson in Honour of his Seventieth Birthday, ed. Herbert Davis and Helen Gardner (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), pp. 322, 317, 325.
5. Edmund Gosse (ed.), The Life and Letters of John Donne (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co.; London: William Heinemann, 1899); Herbert J. C. Grierson (ed.), Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon, 1921), p. xxviii; T. S. Eliot, ‘The Metaphysical Poets’ [1921], in Selected Essays (1932; New York: Harcourt Brace, 1960), pp. 241–50. See Deborah Aldrich Larson, John Donne and Twentieth-Century Criticism (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1989).
6. T. S. Eliot, ‘The Three Voices of Poetry’, first given as a lecture to the National Book League and published in 1953, later included in On Poetry and Poets (London: Faber and Faber; New York: Farrar, Straus, 1957), pp. 106–7; ‘Mr T. S. Eliot on George Herbert’, Salisbury and Winchester Journal 27 (1938), p. 12. In Words Alone: The Poet, T. S. Eliot (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 26–33, Denis Donoghue analyses both the historical impact and the limitations of Eliot’s theory.
7. Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, Understanding Poetry: An Anthology for College Students (New York: H. Holt, 1938; rpt 1950, 1960). Quoted from Leonard Unger, Donne’s Poetry and Modern Criticism (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1950), p. 75. See also Arnold Sidney Stein, John Donne’s Lyrics: The Eloquence of Action (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1962), p. 166: ‘Certainly no other lyric poet has used the subject of his own mind so consistently as an object, as an end’; George Reuben Potter, ‘John Donne’s Discovery of Himself’, University of California Publications in English 4 (1934), pp. 3–23. Subsequent critical emphasis on the reader only strengthened accounts of Donne’s solipsism; see Scott W. Wilson, ‘Process and Product: Reconstructing Donne’s Personae’, Studies in English Literature 20 (1980), pp. 91–103.
8. John Carey, John Donne: Life, Mind, and Art (London: Faber and Faber; New York: Oxford University Press, 1981); Arthur F. Marotti, John Donne, Coterie Poet (Madison, London: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986).
9. For example, Judah Stampfer, John Donne and the Metaphysical Gesture (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970), p. xv, writes that ‘characters in lyric poems are embodied impulses. They are what the speaker grasps of them’. On the exchange of women between male poet and male readers, see Wendy Wall, The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993).
10. For a revisionist account of English Renaissance poetry, see Ilona Bell, Elizabethan Women and the Poetry of Courtship (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
11. In On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982), pp. 202–5, Jonathan Culler deployed Cleanth Brooks’s ‘canonical’ new critical reading of ‘The Canonization’ from The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1947, 1975), pp. 11–21, to epitomize the theory and practice of deconstruction: ‘If the urn is the combination of urn and response to the urn, then this structure of self-reference creates a situation in which responses such as Brooks’s are part of the urn in question. This series of representations, invocations, and readings … at once within the poem and outside it, can always be continued and has no end.’ Additional applications of deconstruction to Donne’s poems can be found in Thomas Docherty,
John Donne, Undone (London, New York: Methuen, 1986), and Ronald Corthell, Ideology and Desire in Renaissance Poetry: The Subject of Donne (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1997). In Desiring Donne: Poetry, Sexuality, Interpretation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), Ben Saunders explores the ways in which shifting theoretical affiliations have impacted Donne criticism.
12. The essays collected in Donne and the Resources of Kind, ed. A. D. Cousins and Damian Grace (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; London: Associated University Presses, 2002), use genre criticism to interpret Donne’s poetry. For a more general study, see Renaissance Genres: Essays on Theory, History, and Interpretation, ed. Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Harvard English Studies 14 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986).
13. Donne’s relation to Petrarchan lyric tradition is explored by Heather Dubrow, Echoes of Desire: English Petrarchism and its Counter-discourses (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), pp. 203–48, and Anne Ferry, All in War with Time: Love Poetry of Shakespeare, Donne, Jonson, Marvell (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), pp. 65–125.
14. Donne: The Critical Heritage, ed. Smith, vol. 1, pp. 69, 266.
15. Stanley Fish, ‘Masculine Persuasive Force: Donne and Verbal Power’, in John Donne, ed. Andrew Mousley (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1999), pp. 157–81.
16. See Dava Sobel, Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of his Time (New York: Walker, 1995).
17. See Charles Monroe Coffin, John Donne and the New Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1937), and William Empson, Essays on Renaissance Literature, vol. 1: Donne and the New Philosophy, ed. John Haffenden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
18. See M. Thomas Hester, Kinde Pitty and Brave Scorn: John Donne’s Satyres (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1982).
