John Donne, " " (21 January
1572 – 31 March 1631) was an English
Jacobean poet,
preacher and a major representative of the metaphysical poets of the period.
His works are notable for their realistic and sensual style and
include
sonnets, love poetry, religious
poems,
Latin translations,
epigrams,
elegies, songs,
satires and
sermons.
His poetry is noted for its vibrancy of language and inventiveness
of
metaphor, especially as compared to
those of his contemporaries.
Despite his great education and poetic talents, he lived in
poverty for several years, relying heavily
on wealthy friends.
In 1615 he became an Anglican priest and, in 1621,
was appointed the Dean of St
Paul's Cathedral in London
.
Early life
John Donne
was born on Bread
Street
in London, England
, into a Catholic family at
a time when Catholicism was illegal in England. Donne was
the third of six children.
His father, also named John Donne, was of
Welsh descent, and a warden of the
Ironmongers Company in the
City of
London
. Donne's father was a respected Catholic who
avoided unwelcome government attention out of fear of being
persecuted for his religious faith.
Donne's father died in 1576, leaving his wife, Elizabeth Heywood,
the responsibility of raising their children. Elizabeth Heywood,
also from a noted Catholic family, was the daughter of
John Heywood, the playwright, and sister of
Jasper Heywood, the translator and
Jesuit. She was a great-niece of the Catholic
martyr Thomas
More. This tradition of martyrdom would continue among Donne’s
closer relatives, many of whom were executed or
exiled for religious reasons. Despite the obvious
dangers, Donne’s family arranged for his education by the
Jesuits, which gave him a deep knowledge of his
religion that equipped him for the ideological religious conflicts
of his time. Donne's mother married Dr. John Syminges, a wealthy
widower with three children, a few months after Donne's father
died. In 1577, his mother died, followed by two more of his
sisters, Mary and Katherine, in 1581.
Donne was
a student at Hart Hall, now Hertford
College, Oxford
, from the age of 11. After three years at
Oxford he was admitted to the University of Cambridge
, where he studied for another three years.
He was unable to obtain a degree from either institution because of
his Catholicism, since he could not take the
Oath of Supremacy required of
graduates.
In 1591 he
was accepted as a student at the Thavies Inn
legal school, one of the Inns of Chancery in London.
In 1592 he
was admitted to Lincoln’s Inn
, one of the Inns of
Court, where he held the office of Master of the Revels. His
brother Henry was also a university student prior to his arrest in
1593 for harbouring a Catholic priest, William Harrington, whom
Henry betrayed under
torture. Harrington was
tortured on
the rack,
hanged until not quite dead, and then was subjected
to live
disembowelment.
Henry Donne died in
Newgate
prison
of bubonic plague,
leading John Donne to begin questioning his Catholic
faith.
During and after his education, Donne spent much of his
considerable inheritance on women, literature, pastimes and travel.
Although
there is no record detailing precisely where he traveled, it is
known that he traveled across Europe and later fought with the
Earl of Essex and Sir Walter Raleigh against the Spanish
at Cádiz
(1596) and
the Azores (1597) and witnessed the loss of
the Spanish flagship, the San
Felipe. According to
Izaak
Walton, who wrote a biography of Donne in 1640:
By the age of 25 he was well prepared for the diplomatic career he
appeared to be seeking.
He was appointed chief secretary to the
Lord Keeper of the Great
Seal, Sir Thomas Egerton, and
was established at Egerton’s London home, York House,
Strand
close to the Palace of Whitehall
, then the most influential social centre in
England.
Marriage to Anne More
During the next four years he fell in love with Egerton's niece
Anne More, and they were married just before
Christmas in 1601 against the wishes of both
Egerton and her father, George More, Lieutenant of the Tower.
This
ruined his career and earned him a short stay in Fleet Prison
, along with the priest who married them and the man
who acted as a witness to the wedding. Donne was released
when the marriage was proven valid, and soon secured the release of
the other two. Walton tells us that when he wrote to his wife to
tell her about losing his post, he wrote after his name:
John
Donne, Anne Donne, Un-done. It was not until 1609 that Donne
was reconciled with his father-in-law and received his wife's
dowry.
Following
his release, Donne had to accept a retired country life in Pyrford
, Surrey
. Over
the next few years he scraped a meagre living as a lawyer,
depending on his wife’s cousin Sir Francis Wolly to house him, his
wife, and their children. Since Anne Donne had a baby almost every
year, this was a very generous gesture. Though he practised law and
worked as an assistant pamphleteer to
Thomas Morton, he was in a state of
constant financial insecurity, with a growing family to provide
for.
Anne bore him 12 children in 16 years of marriage (including two
stillbirths - their eighth and then in
1617 their last child); indeed, she spent most of her married life
either
pregnant or
nursing. The 10 surviving children were named
Constance, John, George, Francis, Lucy (after Donne's patroness
Lucy, Countess of Bedford,
her godmother), Bridget, Mary, Nicholas, Margaret and Elizabeth.
Francis, Nicholas and Mary died before they were ten. In a state of
despair, Donne noted that the death of a child would mean one less
mouth to feed, but he could not afford the burial expenses. During
this time Donne wrote, but did not publish,
Biathanatos, his defense of
suicide. His wife died on 15 August 1617, five days
after giving birth to their twelfth child, a still-born baby. Donne
mourned her deeply, including writing the
17th Holy Sonnet. He never remarried; this was quite
unusual for the time, especially as he had a large family to bring
up.
Early poetry
Donne's earliest poems showed a developed knowledge of English
society coupled with sharp criticism of its problems. His
satires dealt with common
Elizabethan topics, such as corruption
in the legal system, mediocre poets, and pompous courtiers. His
images of sickness, vomit, manure, and
plague assisted in the creation of a strongly
satiric world populated by all the fools and knaves of England. His
third satire, however, deals with the problem of true religion, a
matter of great importance to Donne. He argued that it was better
to examine carefully one's religious convictions than blindly to
follow any established tradition, for none would be saved at the
Final Judgment, by claiming "A Harry,
or a Martin taught [them] this."
Donne's early career was also notable for his erotic poetry,
especially his
elegies, in which he employed
unconventional
metaphors, such as a flea
biting two lovers being compared to sex. In
Elegy XIX: To His
Mistress Going to Bed, he poetically undressed his
mistress and compared the act of fondling to the exploration of
America.
In Elegy XVIII, he compared the
gap between his lover's breasts to the Hellespont
. Donne did not publish these poems, although
did allow them to circulate widely in manuscript form.
Career and later life
Donne was elected as
Member of
Parliament for the
constituency of
Brackley in 1602, but this was not a paid position and Donne
struggled to provide for his family, relying heavily upon rich
friends. The fashion for coterie poetry of the period gave him a
means to seek patronage and many of his poems were written for
wealthy friends or patrons, especially Sir
Robert Drury, who came to be Donne's chief
patron in 1610. Donne wrote the two
Anniversaries,
An Anatomy of the World (1611) and
Of the Progress of
the Soul, (1612), for Drury. While historians are not certain
as to the precise reasons for which Donne left the
Catholic Church, he was certainly in
communication with the King,
James I
of England, and in 1610 and 1611 he wrote two
anti-Catholic polemics:
Pseudo-Martyr and
Ignatius his Conclave. Although
James was pleased with Donne's work, he refused to reinstate him at
court and instead urged him to take holy orders. Although Donne was
at first reluctant, feeling unworthy of a clerical career, he
finally acceded to the King's wishes and in 1615 was ordained into
the
Church of England.
Donne
became a Royal Chaplain in
late 1615, Reader of Divinity at Lincoln's Inn
in 1616, and received a Doctor of Divinity degree from Cambridge
University
in 1618. Later in 1618 he became chaplain to
Viscount Doncaster,
who was on an embassy to the
princes of Germany. Donne did not
return to England until 1620. In 1621 Donne was made
Dean of St Paul's, a leading (and
well-paid) position in the Church of England and one he held until
his death in 1631. During his period as Dean his daughter Lucy
died, aged eighteen. It was in late November and early December of
1623 that he suffered a nearly fatal illness, thought to be either
typhus or a combination of a cold followed by the seven-day
relapsing fever. During his convalescence he wrote a series of
meditations and prayers on health, pain, and sickness that were
published as a book in 1624 under the title of
Devotions upon Emergent
Occasions.
Meditation XVII later became well known for its phrase
"for whom the bell tolls" and the statement that "no man is an
island".
In 1624 he became vicar
of St
Dunstan-in-the-West
, and 1625 a Royal Chaplain to Charles I. He earned a
reputation as an eloquent preacher and 160 of his sermons have
survived, including the famous
Death’s Duel sermon delivered at the Palace of
Whitehall before King Charles
I in February 1631.
Later poetry
His numerous illnesses, financial strain, and the deaths of his
friends all contributed to the development of a more somber and
pious tone in his later poems. The change can
be clearly seen in "
An
Anatomy of the World" (1611), a poem that Donne wrote in memory
of Elizabeth Drury, daughter of his patron, Sir
Robert Drury. This poem treats Elizabeth's
demise with extreme gloominess, using it as a symbol for the
Fall of Man and the destruction of the
universe.
The poem "
A
Nocturnal upon S.
Lucy's Day", being the shortest day of the year, concerns the
poet's despair at the death of a loved one. In it Donne expresses a
feeling of utter negation and hopelessness, saying that "I am every
dead thing...re-begot / Of absence, darkness, death". This famous
work was probably written in 1627 when both Donne's friend Lucy,
Countess of Bedford and his daughter Lucy Donne died. Three years
later, in 1630, Donne wrote his
will on
Saint Lucy's day (December 13), the date the poem describes as
"Both the year's, and the day's deep midnight."
The increasing gloominess of Donne's tone may also be observed in
the religious works that he began writing during the same period.
His early belief in the value of skepticism now gave way to a firm
faith in the traditional teachings of the
Bible. Having converted to the
Anglican Church, Donne focused his literary
career on religious literature. He quickly became noted for his
sermons and religious poems. The lines of these sermons would come
to influence future works of
English
literature, such as
Ernest
Hemingway's
For Whom the
Bell Tolls, which took its title from a passage in
Meditation XVII, and
Thomas Merton’s
No Man is an Island, which took its
title from the same source.
Towards the end of his life Donne wrote works that challenged
death, and the fear that it inspired in many men, on the grounds of
his belief that those who die are sent to
Heaven to live eternally. One example of this
challenge is his
Holy Sonnet X, from which come the famous lines “Death, be not
proud, though some have called thee / Mighty and dreadful, for thou
art not so.” Even as he lay dying during
Lent
in 1631, he rose from his sickbed and delivered the
Death's Duel sermon, which was later described as his own
funeral sermon. Death’s Duel portrays life as a steady descent to
suffering and death, yet sees hope in salvation and immortality
through an embrace of
God,
Christ and the
Resurrection.
Death
It is thought that his final illness was
stomach cancer. He died on
31 March 1631 having written
many poems in his lifetime (though only in manuscript - his poems
would not be printed and published until two years after his
death); but having left a body of work fiercely engaged with the
emotional and intellectual conflicts of his age. John Donne is
buried in
St Paul's, where a memorial
statue of him was erected (carved from a drawing of him in his
shroud), with a Latin epigraph probably composed by himself.
Style
John Donne was famous for his metaphysical poetry in the 17th
century. His work suggests a healthy appetite for life and its
pleasures, while also expressing deep emotion. He did this through
the use of conceits, wit and intellect — as seen in the poems
"
The Sun Rising" and
"
Batter My Heart".
Donne is considered a master of the
metaphysical conceit, an extended
metaphor that combines two vastly different ideas into a single
idea, often using imagery. An example of this is his equation of
lovers with saints in "
The
Canonization." Unlike the conceits found in other Elizabethan
poetry, most notably
Petrarchan conceits,
which formed clichéd comparisons between more closely related
objects (such as a rose and love),
metaphysical conceits go to a greater depth in
comparing two completely unlike objects, although sometimes in the
mode of
Shakespeare's radical paradoxes
and imploded contraries. One of the most famous of Donne's conceits
is found in "
A
Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" where he compares two lovers
who are separated to the two legs of a
compass.
Donne's works are also witty, employing
paradoxes,
puns, and subtle yet
remarkable analogies. His pieces are often ironic and cynical,
especially regarding love and human motives. Common subjects of
Donne's poems are love (especially in his early life), death
(especially after his wife's death), and religion.
John Donne's poetry represented a shift from classical forms to
more personal poetry. Donne is noted for his
poetic metre, which was structured with
changing and jagged rhythms that closely resemble casual speech (it
was for this that the more classically-minded
Ben Jonson commented that "Donne, for not keeping
of accent, deserved hanging").
Some scholars believe that Donne's literary works reflect the
changing trends of his life, with
love
poetry and
satires from his youth and
religious
sermons during his later years.
Other scholars, such as
Helen
Gardner, question the validity of this dating - most of his
poems were published posthumously (1633). The exception to these is
his
Anniversaries which were published in 1612 and
Devotions upon
Emergent Occasions published in 1624. His sermons are also
dated, sometimes specifically by date and year.
His work has received much criticism over the years, especially
concerning his metaphysical form. Donne's immediate successors in
poetry tended to regard his works with ambivalence, while the
Neoclassical poets regarded his
conceits as abuse of the
metaphor. He was
revived by
Romantic poets such as
Coleridge and
Browning, though his more recent revival in
the early twentieth century by poets such as
T. S. Eliot tended to portray him as an
anti-Romantic.
Legacy
John Donne is commemorated as a priest in the
calendar of the
Church of England and in the
Calendar of Saints of
the
Evangelical
Lutheran Church in America on
March
31.
Sylvia Plath, interviewed on BBC Radio in late 1962, said the following about a
book review of her collection of poems titled The Colossus
that had been published in the United Kingdom
two years earlier: "I remember being appalled when
someone criticized me for beginning just like John Donne but not
quite managing to finish like John Donne, and I felt the weight of
English literature on me at that point."
The
memorial to John Donne, modeled after the engraving pictured above,
was one of the few such memorials to survive the Great Fire
of London
in 1666 and now appears in St Paul's
Cathedral
, where Donne is buried.
Donne in literature
Donne has appeared in several works of literature:
- A dying John Donne scholar is the main character of Margaret Edson's Pulitzer prize-winning play
Wit (1999), which was made into
the film Wit starring Emma Thompson.
- Donne's Songs and Sonnets feature in The
Calligrapher (2003), a novel by Edward
Docx.
- John Donne appears, along with his wife Ann and daughter Pegge,
in the award-winning novel Conceit (2007) by Mary Novik.
- Donne and Ann's love is depicted in Maeve Haran's novel "The
Lady and the Poet".
Bibliography
Poetry
- Poems (1634)
- Poems on Several Occasions (2001)
- Love Poems (1905)
- John Donne: Divine Poems, Sermons, Devotions and
Prayers (1990)
- The Complete English Poems (1991)
- John Donne's Poetry (1991)
- John Donne: The Major Works (2000)
- The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of John Donne
(2001)
Prose
- Six Sermons (1633)
- Fifty Sermons (1649)
- Paradoxes, Problemes, Essayes, Characters (1652)
- Essayes in Divinity (1651)
- Sermons Never Before Published (1661)
- John Donne's 1622 Gunpowder Plot Sermon (1996)
- Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions and Death's Duel
(1999; first published in 1624)
- One Million Sermons (2009)
Critical works
- John Carey, John Donne: Life, Mind and Art, (London
1981)
- A. L. Clements (ed.) John Donne's Poetry (New York and
London, 1966)
- Stevie Davies, John Donne (Northcote House, Plymouth,
1994)
- T. S. Eliot, "The Metaphysical Poets", Selected
Essays, (London 1969)
- G. Hammond (ed.) The Metaphysical Poets: A Casebook, (London
1986)
- Sir Geoffrey Keynes, Bibliography of Donne,
(Cambridge, 1958)
- George Klawitter, The Enigmatic Narrator: The Voicing of
Same-Sex Love in the Poetry of John Donne (Peter Lang,
1994)
- Arthur F. Marotti, John Donne, Coterie Poet, (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1986)
- H. L. Meakin, John Donne's Articulations of the
Feminine, (Oxford, 1999)
- Joe Nutt, John Donne: The Poems, (New York and London
1999)
- E.M. Simpson, A Study of the Prose Works of John
Donne, (Oxford, 1962)
- C. L. Summers and T. L. Pebworth (eds.) The Eagle and the
Dove: Reassessing John Donne (Columbia: University of Missouri
Press, 1986)
- John Stachniewski, The Persecutory Imagination,
(Oxford, 1991)
- Ceri Sullivan, The Rhetoric of the Conscience in Donne,
Herbert, and Vaughan (Oxford 2008)
- James Winny, A Preface to Donne (New York, 1981)
- Francis William Teodoro, A New Tomorrow Needs Us
- James Lyle Canda, Someone is Needing My Love
- Pauline T.C Algas, Two Against My One Heart
See also
Cleanth Brooks,(2004) "The Language of Paradox" in Julie Rivkan,
Michael Ryan (eds)
Literary Theory: An Anthology 2nd ed.
pp.28–39
References
- Bald, R. C. John Donne: A Life., Oxford, 1970
- Le Comte, Edward. Grace to a Witty Sinner: A Life of
Donne, (Walker, 1965)
- Stubbs, John. Donne: The Reformed Soul, Viking, 2006.
ISBN 0670915106
- Lim, Kit. John Donne: An Eternity of Song, Penguin,
2005.
- Warnke, Frank J. John Donne, (U of Mass., Amherst
1987)
Notes
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