JOHN DONNE

[1572-1631]

A poet, theologian, lawyer, greatest pulpit orator of his day. John Donne was born into an old Roman Catholic family, at a time when anti-Catholic feeling in England was near its height. His faith barred him from many of the usual avenues of success, and his point of view was always that of an insecure outsider. Though he attended both Oxford and Cambridge, as well as Lincoln's Inn, he never took any academic degrees and never practiced law. After quietly abandoning Catholicism some time during the 1590's, he had hesitations about becoming an Anglican. He had no gift for commerce, and though he inherited money from his father (who died when Donne was only 4), it was far from enough to render him independent. Hence he had to make his way in the world indirectly¡ªby wit, charm, learning, valor, and above all, favor. Partly from sheer intellectual curiosity, he read enormously in divinity, medicine, law, and the classics; he wrote to display his learning and wit. He traveled on the Continent, especially, to Spain; even in later years, he traveled much.

    In 1598 Donne was appointed private secretary to Sir Thomas Egerton, the Lord Keeper, and he sat in Elizabeth's last parliament and moved in court circles. But in 1601 he secretly married Lady Egerton's niece, 17-year-old Ann More, and thereby ruined his own worldly hopes. Famous letter to his wife was signed: "John Donne, Anne Donne, Un-done." The marriage turned out happily, but his imprudence was not forgiven until he reconciled with his father-in-law in 1608. Sir George More had Donne imprisoned and dismissed from his post; and for the next dozen years, the poet had to struggle at a series of temporary employments to support his growing family. As a man of 35, Donne was no longer the brilliant young gallant of the 1590's; sick, poor, and unhappy, he was composing, but not publishing, a treatise on the lawfulness of suicide. As he approached 40, he may have helped Thomas Morton, Dean of Gloucester, in composing anti-Catholic polemics. In return for patronage from Sir Robert Drury, he wrote in 1611 and 1612 a pair of long poems, The Anniversaries, on the death of Sir Robert's daughter Elizabeth. None of these activities represent a full employment of Donne's volcanic intellectual energy. To be sure, he was surrounded by many friends. He had friends among the courtiers, politicians, poets, and clergy. He was never quite without resources. Yet, broadly speaking, Donne's middle years were a period of searching, uncertainty, and unhappiness.

    In 1615 Donne took Anglican orders. He was in due course appointed Reader in Divinity at Lincoln's Inn. In the 17th century, among court circles and at the Inns of Court where lawyers congregated, preaching was at once a form of spiritual devotion, an intellectual exercise, and a dramatic entertainment. Donne's metaphorical style, bold erudition, and dramatic wit at once established him as a great preacher in an age of great preachers. Fully 160 of his sermons survive. In 1621 he was made Dean of St. Paul's, where he preached to great congregations of "City" lawyers, courtiers, merchants, and tradesmen. In addition, his private devotions were published in 1624, and he continued to write sacred poetry till within a few years of his death. Obsessed with the idea of death, Donne preached what was called his own funeral sermon just a few weeks before he died. It is a terrifyingly personal meditation on dissolution, as befits a man who arranged for a final portrait of himself to be taken, dressed in his shroud.

    There are two distinct but related authors known as John Donne. First is the scandalous young spark, who wrote obscene and cynical verses¡ªJack Donne, the rake. Then there is the gravely witty, passionately religious divine, who wrote verses to his God as ardent as those he had once addressed to his mistresses. This is Dr. John Donne, the Dean of St. Paul's. Yet the key to both men is the same; it is a kind of restless, searching energy, which scorns the easy monotony and the smooth, empty phrase; which is vivid, immediate, troubling; and which makes the reading of Donne's poetry an imaginative and intellectual struggle and an all-absorbing experience.

    The poetry of Donne represents a sharp break with that which written by his predecessors and most of his contemporaries. Much Elizabethan verse is decorative and flowery in its quality. Its images adorn, its meter is fluent. Image harmonizes with image, and line swells almost predictably into line. Donne's poetry, on the other hand, is written very largely in conceits. Most of the traditional "flowers of rhetoric" disappear completely. For instance, in his love poetry one never encounters bleeding heart, cheeks like roses, lips like cherries, teeth like pearls, or Cupid shooting the arrows of love. The tears which flow in "A Valediction: of Weeping" are different from, and more complex than, the ordinary saline fluid of unhappy lovers; they are ciphers, naughts, symbols of the world's emptiness without the beloved; or else, suddenly reflecting her image, they are globes, worlds, they contain the sum of things. The poet who plays with conceits not only displays his own ingenuity; he may see into the nature of the world as deeply as the philosopher. Donne's conceits in particular leap continually in a restless orbit from the personal to the cosmic and back again. Donne's rhythms are colloquial and various. He likes to twist and distort not only ideas, but metrical patterns and grammar itself. In the satires, which Renaissance writers understood to be "harsh" and "crabbed" as a genre, Donne's distortions often threaten to choke off the stream of expression entirely. But in lyrics (both those which are worldly and those which are religious in theme), as in the elegies and sonnets, the verse never fails of a complex and memorable melody. Donne had an unusual gift, rather like that of a modern poet, T. S. Eliot, for striking off phrases which ring in the mind like a silver coin. They are two masters of the colloquial style, removed alike from the dignified, weighty manner of Milton and the sugared sweetness of the Elizabethans.

    Donne and his followers are known as the "metaphysical school" of poets. Strictly speaking, this is a wrong name; there was no organized group of poets who imitated Donne, and if there had been, they would not have called themselves "metaphysical" poets. That term was invented by Dryden and Dr. Johnson. But the influence of Donne's poetic style was widely felt, especially by men whose taste was formed before 1660. George Herbert, Richard Crashaw, Henry Vaughan, Andrew Marvell, and Abraham Cowley are only the best known of those on whom Donne's influence is recognizable. The great change of taste which took place in 1660 threw Donne and the "conceited" style out of fashion; during the 18th and 19th and 20th centuries both he and his followers were rarely read and still more rarely appreciated. Finally, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, three new editions of Donne appeared, of which Sir H. J. C. Grierson's, published in 1912, was quickly accepted as standard. By clarifying and purifying the often-distorted text, Grierson did a great deal to make Donne's poetry more available to the modern reader. Almost at once it started to exert an influence on modern poetic practice, the modern poets being hungry for a "tough" style which would free them from the worn-out rhetoric of late 19th-century romanticism. And Donne's status among the English poets quickly climbed from that of a curiosity to that of an acknowledged master. Esteem for metaphysical poetry never stood higher than in the 1930s and '40s, largely because T. S. Eliot's influential essay "The Metaphysical Poets" (1921), in which he pointed out that their works embody a fusion of thought and feeling that later poets were unable to achieve because of a "dissociation of sensibility," which resulted in works that were either intellectual or emotional but not both at once. In their own time, however, the epithet "metaphysical" was used contemptuously: in 1630 William Drummond of Hawthornden objected to those of his contemporaries who attempted to "abstract poetry to metaphysical ideas and scholastic quiddities."¹⁾

1. quiddity: sophism; sophistry.