JOHN DONNE (1572-1631)

(Adapted from The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 2000)

Lovers eyeballs threaded on a string. A god who assaults the human heart with
a battering ram. A teardrop that encompasses and drowns the world. John
Donnes poems abound with startling images, some of them exalting and others
grotesque. With his strange and playful intelligence, expressed in puns,
paradoxes, and the elaborately sustained metaphors known as conceits,
Donne has enthralled and sometimes outraged readers from his day to our own.
Donne prided himself on his wit and displayed it not only in his conceits
but in his grasp of learned and obscure discourses ranging from theology
to alchemy, from cosmology to law. Yet for all their ostentatious intellectuality,
Donnes poems never give the impression of being academic exercises put into
verse. Rather, they are intense monologues in which the speakers ideas and
feelings seem to shift and evolve from one line to the next. Donnes prosody is
equally dramatic, mirroring in its variable and jagged rhythms the effect of
speech (and eliciting from his classically minded contemporary Ben Jonson the
gruff observation that Donne, for not keeping of accent deserved hanging).
As a Catholic in Protestant England, growing up in decades in when anti-
Roman feeling reached new heights, Donne could not expect any kind of public
career, not even to receive a university degree. He chose not to live under such
conditions. At some point in the 1590s, having returned to London from travels
abroad, and having devoted some years to studying theological issues, Donne
converted to the Church of England, and about twenty years later in 1615 he was
ordained and started a distinguished career as a court preacher and dean of St
Pauls. Donnes metaphorical style, bold erudition and dramatic wit established
him as a great preacher in an age that appreciated learned sermons
powerfully delivered. Some 160 of his sermons survive, preached to
monarch and courtiers, lawyers and London magistrates, city merchants and
trading companies. Before he began his ecclesiastical career, his life was
full of hardship and economic problems. He was dismissed as secretary of Sir
Thomas Egerton after his secret marriage to the seventeen-year-old niece of his
employer and even sent briefly to prison. Donne was then reduced to a retired
country life beset with financial insecurity and a rapidly increasing family; his
wife bore twelve children by the time she died at thirty-three.
Like most gentlemen of his era, Donne saw poetry as a polite
accomplishment rather than as a trade or vocation, and in consequence he
circulated his poems in manuscript but left most of them uncollected and
unpublished. His production is generally divided into two kinds of poems:
love poetry and religious poetry, the former assumed to have been written
before he became dean of St Pauls and the latter in the years of his ecclesiastical
career. However, the poets own attempt to distinguish between Jack Donne, the
young rake, and Dr Donne, the grave and religious dean of St Pauls is perhaps
(intentionally) misleading. We do not know the time and circumstances of for
most of Donnes verses, but it is clear that many of his finest religious poems
predate his ordination, and it is possible that he continued to add to the love
poems known as his Songs and Sonnets after he entered the Church.
Theological language abounds in his love poetry and daringly erotic images
occur in his religious verse.
Although they were not widely known during his lifetime, Donnes Songs
and Sonnets have been the cornerstone of his reputation since their publication
after his death in 1633. These are poems that challenge the popular Petrarchan
sonnet sequences of the 1590s (and indeed the collection contains only one
formal sonnet). What binds these poems together and grants them enduring
power is their compelling immediacy: the speaker is always in the throes of
intense emotion, and that emotion is not static but constantly shifting and
evolving with the movements of the poets thought. Donnes repeated
insistence that the private world of lovers is superior to the wider
public world, or that it somehow contains that world, or obliterates it, is
understandable in light of the many disappointments in his career. Yet this was
also a poet who threw himself headlong into life, love, and sexuality
and later into the very visible public role of court and city preacher.
Donne has been long grouped with Herbert, Vaughan, Crashaw, and
Marvell under the heading of Metaphysical Poets, a label first used by
critics like Samuel Johnson and William Hazlitt, who found the intricate
conceits and self-conscious learning of these poets incompatible with poetic
beauty and sincerity.

* TO STUDY METAPHYSICAL POETRY, read the entry in M. H. Abramss A

Glossary of Literary Terms available on the website for this subject.

* WE READ TWO OF DONNES LOVE POEMS FROM SONGS AND SONNETS

(A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning and The Sun Rising) AND ONE
RELIGIOUS POEM FROM HOLY SONNETS (Sonnet 14).