John Donne (1572-1631)

John Donne appears to be a paradox.

The defining assertion of constancy which reads above his head, ‘Antes muerto que mudado’ (‘Sooner dead than changed’), on William Marshall’s engraving on the frontispiece of the 1633 Poems, sits unhappily with our knowledge of his life: Catholic and converted Anglican; priest and lawyer; diplomat and soldier. Similarly, his poetry blazes with a firmament of colliding voices. The ambiguity of his paradoxes and problems, whether they stand as genuine arguments or as displays of wit, further this sense of the mutability of truth. Donne’s distribution of manuscripts amongst friends, as a general rule, as opposed to publication, makes it more difficult to pin his changing allegiance and subject matter down, historically. Yet, as Donne himself claims in ‘A Defence of Women’s Inconstancy’:  ‘So in Men, they that have the most reason are the most alterable in their designes, and the darkest and most ignorant do seldomest change.’  Beneath the personae of his poems, and throughout his prose, we find a constancy from which the contradictory nature of his work derives: intellectual alacrity. Donne roves ‘before, behind, above, between, below’ language, as both geocentric and heliocentric visions of the universe, astronomy, alchemy, conquest, Platonism and many other complex concepts and imagery are intricately interwoven to propose any argument, to turn any conceit.

Born in 1572, Donne, son of Elizabeth Heywood and John Donne, entered a blood-line of intellectualism and Catholicism. His well-educated mother was the daughter of the playwright John Heywood. Donne’s father died in 1576. Elizabeth’s second husband, the Catholic physician John Syminges, had been highly trained in Oxford and Bologna and was president of the Royal College of Physicians. Donne’s uncle, Jasper Heywood, was a translator of Seneca, and would become head of the Jesuit mission in England from 1581-1583.  Through his maternal great-grand father, John Rastell’s marriage to Elizabeth More, the family was linked to Sir Thomas More.

In 1584 John and his brother Henry matriculated at the ages of twelve and eleven respectively at Hart Hall, the college known as an unofficial shelter for Catholic recusants. Donne would not finish his degree, having matriculated early to avoid taking the Oath of Allegiance. This recognition of the ex-communicated Queen Elizabeth as head of the Protestant Church of England was required of all sixteen year olds studying at Oxford. Yet, in 1610 Donne would be awarded an Honorary Masters from Oxford in the same year his prose work Pseudo Martyr was published. The work justified to Catholics why they should take an amended form of the same oath which he and his brother had sought to escape. Following the Gunpowder Plot the oath was changed to require that Catholics accept the priority of the sovereign over papal authority. At what point Donne turned from Catholicism is uncertain. However, in 1597 he volunteered to join the Earl of Essex and Lord Howard Effingham’s expedition against Catholic Spain. Donne became ordained as an Anglican priest in 1615 following a series of unsuccessful attempts to gain civil employment. This created a new intellectual outlet for him in his sermons. In 1621 he became the Dean of St Paul’s.

Catholic imagery remains an important part of Donne’s work. Ben Jonson identified fundamental Marian imagery in The Anatomie of the World, written in 1610 upon the death of Elizabeth Drury, the daughter of Donne’s patron Robert, claiming ‘if it had been written of the Virgin Marie it had been something.’ In ‘The First Anniversary’ Drury is transformed into the ‘intrisque balme’, the soul of the world. As her soul departs, the world left behind becomes a corpse, which must be dissected in an autopsy to reveal man’s corruption. However, as well as the world’s soul, the poem undeniably venerates her virginity, set in contrast to Eve whose ‘first marriage was our funeral:/One woman at one blow, then kill’d us all,/And singly one by one they kill us now. We doe delightfully ourselves allow to that consumption; and profusely blinde,/Wee kill ourselves to propagate our kinde.’ Virginity upheld over marriage, leans far more towards Catholicism, than the Protestant focus upon the importance of marriage. Not only is Drury virginal, but seems to be represented both as the Virgin Mary, and the Virgin Queen Elizabeth: ‘that Queene ended here her progresse time,/ And as, t’her standing house to heaven did climbe,/ Where loathe to make the Saints attend her long’. However, Donne arguably also uses Catholic imagery both more playfully and perhaps dangerously in poems such as ‘The Canonisation’ and ‘The Relic’. These unequivocally play upon the most controversial Catholic practices of the veneration of relics and of saints, as a means of exploring the Platonic shift from physical, to spiritual and transcendent love: ‘So to one neutral thing both sexes fit/ We die and rise the same, and prove/ Mysterious by this love.’ However, in an age of the persecution of Catholics, such an overt exploration of Catholic doctrine may be seen as a deliberately subversive display of wit.

Even before his ordination, Donne had a detailed understanding of Canon Law as demonstrated in the Pseudo Martyr, and indeed trained as a lawyer after University at the Thavies Inn for at least a year, and at Lincoln Inn beginning in 1592, before embarking upon the military expedition to Cadiz. Donne never practised vernacular law professionally. However, when Secretary to Thomas Egerton in 1590s he would have assisted with Egerton’s projects to reform the legal system, and initiated a suit in Canterbury to judge the validity of Donne’s secret marriage to Lady Egerton’s niece Ann.  This legal training is arguably demonstrated in Donne’s carefully structured arguments, whether seduction poems or paradoxes. ‘The Flea’ sees the insect’s habits as parasite turn it into a marriage temple. In ‘The Ecstasy’ a transcendental experience is carefully twisted into a praise of sexuality which allows such experience to occur, ‘Love’s mysteries in the soul do grow,/ But the body is his book’.

Perhaps another testament to Donne’s legal career is his mastery of poetic voice. Advocate and priest alike require a powerful emotive delivery of their arguments. Isaac Walton, Donne’s first biographer, reports that when Donne delivered a sermon at Ann Donne’s funeral in 1617 ‘indeed his very looks and words testified’ his afflictions and that ‘with the addition of his sighs and tears, exprest in his Sermon, did so work upon the affections of his hearers, as melted and moulded them into a companionable sadness.’ With this same emotive power Donne creates speakers in bold opening declarations which instantly form a voice, often shaped by their relation to another party.  ‘The Sun Rises’ sets two lovers in unity against the sun itself, ‘Busy old fool, unruly sun,/ Why dost thou thus,/through windows, and through curtains call on us?’ As the poem develops they are not only isolated from the sun, but become the world at the centre of a geocentric universe. In a more complicated fashion, in the sonnet ‘Spit in my face ye Jews and pierce my side’ an original anti-Semitic portrait of Christ killed by the Jews, as an entire race held responsible, is inverted as the speaker turns out to be a self-hating sinner rather than Christ. Donne partially shifts the re-crimination of the Jews onto the speaker, as the blunt violence ‘buffet, and scoffe, scourge and crucife’ becomes the speaker’sown sin: ‘but I/ crucifie him daily, being now glorified’. The opening tone of defiance in retrospect is rendered the speaker’s furious entreaty fuelled by their own guilt.

In the year his of his death, 1631, Donne’s appreciation of drama climaxed in his final paradoxical incarnation: the living dead. He seemed to turn his fear of prolonged decline which he had expressed to his sister, into a final intellectual experiment: ‘My noble sister, I am afraid that Death will play with me so long, as he will forget to kill me, and suffer me to live in an languishing and useless age, a life, that is a forgetting that I am dead, then of living’; rather than to forget death, he sought to embrace mortality in the most extreme final display. Donne created his final image, standing on a wooden urn and dressed in a winding sheet, as Walton describes: ‘so tied with knots at his head and feet, and his hands so placed, as usually fitted to be shrouded and put into their grave or coffin. Upon this urn he stood with his eyes shut, and with so much of the sheet turned aside as might show his lean, pale and deathlike face, which was purposely turned toward the east, from whence he expected the second coming of the Saviour’.

Ultimately, Donne’s final dramatic voice, as many were to claim afterwards, was that of his own eulogiser, in the sermon ‘Death’s Duell, or, a Consolation to the Soule, Against the Dying Life, and Living Death of the Body’. Even in his very last months, Donne never ceased to his exploit to the utmost his incredible linguistic versatility.