Soul Music

John Donne and the purpose of poetry.
Portrait of John Donne writing.
Donne’s poems, forcefully intimate, were written to be passed hand to hand.Illustration by John Broadley

One way to chart the development of English poetry over the past four hundred years is to look at the fluctuating reputation of John Donne. A courtier and priest who was born in 1572 and lived in London at the same time as Shakespeare, Donne was highly regarded as a poet in his lifetime, even though he never published a book of poems. The large number of surviving handwritten copies of his work shows that it was eagerly shared by connoisseurs, and the first printed editions appeared soon after his death, in 1631. When his friend Ben Jonson, another leading poet of the age, came to praise Donne in verse, the quality he singled out was his intellect: “Donne, the delight of Phoebus and each Muse, / Who, to thy one, all other brains refuse.” Jonson might have complained about his friend’s handling of meter—“Donne, for not keeping of accent, deserved hanging,” he reportedly said—but, in early-seventeenth-century poetry, knottiness and braininess were more admired than smoothness and musicality.

By the time Samuel Johnson came to write his “Lives of the Poets,” in 1779-81, tastes had changed. In a neoclassical era, ideas still had a place in poetry, but they were supposed to be familiar ones, dignified by harmonious verse—“What oft was thought, but ne’er so well express’d,” in the words of Alexander Pope, the master of the rhyming couplet. By this standard, Donne’s ideas looked weird. Johnson found them “abstruse.” He bestowed on Donne and his contemporaries the label “the metaphysical poets,” not intending it as a compliment. Their trouble, he wrote, was that they were “men of learning, and to show their learning was their whole endeavour; but, unluckily resolving to show it in rhyme, instead of writing poetry they only wrote verses.” Their ideas, unlike Pope’s, were “seldom natural”: “The reader, far from wondering that he missed them, wonders more frequently by what perverseness of industry they were ever found.” This judgment prevailed into the nineteenth century. The most popular poetry anthology in Victorian England, Francis Turner Palgrave’s “The Golden Treasury,” included not a single poem by Donne.

In contrast, the fifth edition of “The Norton Anthology of Poetry,” published in 2004, includes thirty-one—more than those by Wordsworth or Keats, almost as many as those by Shakespeare. What made the difference was the revolution of modernism, and particularly the influence of T. S. Eliot. In his 1921 essay “The Metaphysical Poets,” Eliot argued that it was exactly Donne’s difficulty and strangeness that made him great. “A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility,” Eliot wrote, and modernist poets wanted to recover that union between intellect and feeling. If the poetry that resulted was obscure, that was not a defect but a proof of authenticity. “Poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult,” he declared.

Three hundred years earlier, Donne had felt the same way. In “An Anatomy of the World,” he turned an elegy for a fourteen-year-old girl into a diagnosis of spiritual chaos in a world that “Is crumbled out again to his atomies. / ’Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone.” And he worked this incoherence into the very texture of his poetry. In “A Valediction: Of Weeping,” parting lovers cry coins and globes; in “The Comparison,” the sweat of a rival’s mistress is the “spermatic issue of ripe menstruous boils.” In “A Nocturnal Upon St. Lucy’s Day,” Donne annihilates himself: “I am rebegot / Of absence, darkness, death; things which are not.”

Katherine Rundell titles her new biography of Donne “Super-Infinite” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). It’s an ingenious way of making his difficulty sound exciting as well as formidable. “Super-infinite” is a word that would be equally at home in a mathematical theorem and a comic book. In fact, it was one of Donne’s many neologisms, used in a sermon to describe the world that waits for us after death: “an infinite, a super-infinite, an unimaginable space.” For Rundell, it is a perfect example of Donne’s “absurd, grandiloquent, courageous, hungry” style, the way he dislocated language in pursuit of extremes.

Rundell is an Oxford scholar whose previous books have mostly been novels for children, and in “Super-Infinite” she writes with both the knowledge of an expert and the friendly passion of a proselytizer. Donne, she promises, “is protection against those who would tell you to narrow yourself, to follow fashion in your mode of thought.” His writing expresses “what he knew with such precision and flair that we can seize hold of it, and carry it with us.”

There are many such injunctions and takeaways in the book, as if the reader must be convinced that investing time in a four-hundred-year-old poet will bring moral profit as well as aesthetic pleasure. Among the things Donne can teach us, she writes, are how “to build our own way of using our voice,” and that “there is no such thing as safety, while you are alive,” and that human beings are “capable of . . . genius, but also destruction.” She concludes, “Donne’s work had in it a stark moral imperative: pay attention.”

But did Donne think of poetry as a form of instruction, a matter of moral imperatives? Other poets of the seventeenth century certainly did. Milton announced that his purpose in “Paradise Lost” was “to justify the ways of God to men,” while Herbert wrote, “A verse may find him, who a sermon flies.” With Donne, however, things are never quite so clear-cut. What drew readers to him in the twentieth century is, rather, his very modern bafflement, which finds its way into even his most religiously affirmative poems.

Donne was most widely known in his lifetime as a priest. As the dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral from 1621 until his death, he was one of the capital’s most prominent clergymen, a celebrated preacher whose performances drew thousands. “Super-Infinite” begins with a description of a 1623 sermon in which “the extreme press and thronging” of his audience led to a stampede, in which “two or three men” were “taken up dead for the time”—in other words, probably unconscious. When Izaak Walton wrote the first, brief biography of Donne, in 1640, his focus was on the religious evolution that led the poet to take holy orders around the time that he turned forty-three. The poetry he wrote some twenty years earlier is barely mentioned, except as “the recreations of his youth.”

Donne the poet and Donne the priest were both writers, but they make very different impressions. “It’s sometimes said that the more you read Donne’s verse, the more you love him, and the more you read Donne’s prose, the less you can bear him,” Rundell writes. In fairness, it depends on which prose you read. “Biathanatos,” a treatise on the religious ethics of suicide, is discouragingly long and dense, and “Ignatius His Conclave,” a satire on the founder of the Jesuit order, is unlikely to raise a chuckle today.

But “Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions,” a series of vivid and searching reflections on mortality, remains just as powerful as when Donne wrote it, in 1623, during a serious illness. Lying in bed, he heard church bells toll for the dying and wondered if they were being rung for him. Perhaps “they who are about me, and see my state, may have caused it to toll for me, and I know not that,” he writes. The thought led to Donne’s most famous lines, though probably few who quote them know who wrote them and why: “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main . . . any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

In his poetry, Donne seduces and mocks; in his sermons and tracts, he ponders sickness and sin and death. He was aware of the dichotomy, describing one of his books, in a letter, as “written by Jack Donne, and not Dr. Donne.” The problem for biographers, from Walton to Rundell, is how these two phases or faces fit together.

Rundell observes that Donne was born within sight of the cathedral where he would later preside—the old St. Paul’s, which burned down in 1666 and was replaced by Christopher Wren’s dome. But he was hardly destined to rise in the Church of England. The Donnes were a Catholic family, who kept the old faith at a time when Queen Elizabeth I was determined to make England a Protestant realm once and for all. Through his mother, the poet was related to Thomas More, the author of “Utopia,” who died as a martyr in 1535 for resisting Henry VIII’s break with Rome. Half a century later, being a Catholic was still a matter of life and death. In 1593, when Donne was twenty-one, his younger brother Henry was arrested for hiding a Jesuit priest in his rooms in London and died in jail of plague. (The priest was hanged, drawn, and quartered.)

Donne’s Catholic background meant that certain doors were closed to him. He attended Oxford as a teen-ager but didn’t take a degree, since doing so required swearing an oath of allegiance to the Church of England. As a young man, however, he converted to Anglicanism—whether out of sincere belief, the desire to get ahead, or (most likely) a combination of both. Donne was set on a career at court, and the right faith was a prerequisite, along with intelligence, boldness, and the ability to flatter.

In a system where power was personal, flowing down from the Queen to her favorite noblemen to their protégés, a winning appearance was equally important. A portrait painted in his early twenties shows Donne as the perfect courtier; his pencil-thin mustache, Rundell writes, reveals “a man who understands that even facial hair has to it an element of performance.”

Writing poetry was another part of that performance. In later literary eras, the poet came to be thought of as a solitary figure communing with his soul. “I wandered lonely as a cloud / That floats on high o’er vales and hills,” Wordsworth wrote. For the Elizabethans, however, poetry was a social art. Gentlemen often wrote poems to win over a lover or a patron, and a number of figures known in their lifetimes as diplomats or soldiers would be surprised to learn that they are remembered solely for their poetry.

Donne’s poems were written to be passed hand to hand. Manuscript copies from his lifetime are still being discovered. This intimacy helps to explain one of their most recognizable features: the casually forceful first lines that seem to reach out and shake you by the shoulder. “For God’s sake hold your tongue and let me love,” Donne demands in “The Canonization”; “Busy old fool, unruly Sun,” he chides in “The Sun Rising.” He’s no more polite toward himself. “I am two fools, I know / For loving, and for saying so / In whining poetry,” begins “The Triple Fool.”

Once Donne has your attention, he’s unafraid to make demands on it. Another of his favorite techniques is the “conceit,” a complex extended metaphor. Ordinarily, poetic comparisons are brief and easy to grasp. “My love is like a red, red rose / That’s newly sprung in June,” Robert Burns wrote. Donne’s classic poem “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning,” in contrast, takes twelve lines to explain why parting lovers are like the two legs of a pair of compasses, observing:

Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if the other do.

And though it in the center sit,
Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.

“Got to go—my mom jeans and dad jeans are here.”
Cartoon by Edward Koren

Donne’s conceits are often as artificial and far-fetched as this. In “The Flea,” for instance, he compares an insect that has bitten both the poet and his mistress to their “marriage bed,” because their blood mingles inside it. But the metaphors aren’t merely virtuosic; in elaborating them, he discovers surprising new aspects of his subject. “The Ecstasy” begins by likening the reclining poet and his lover to a pillow on a bed, then to a violet drooping on a riverbank. Their clasped hands are cemented together by a balm; their eyes are threaded together on a string. These inanimate comparisons are undeniably weird—the kind of thing Samuel Johnson had in mind when he complained about images “yoked by violence together.”

The uncanniness is deliberate. Donne turns the lovers’ bodies into objects to emphasize that their souls have escaped and are now merging in the air to create a new, joint soul. (“Ecstasy,” he counts on the reader to know, comes from the Greek word ekstasis, which literally means “standing outside oneself.”) As Donne explains:

When love with one another so
Interinanimates two souls,
That abler soul, which thence doth flow,
Defects of loneliness controls.

When lovers come together, in other words, they form a new being free from “defects” such as maleness and femaleness. But that isn’t the end of the poem’s chain of reasoning. After achieving this ecstasy, Donne urges, the lovers should return to their gendered bodies so they can reënact their spiritual union on the physical plane. Love without sex would be invisible, and therefore incomplete:

So must pure lovers’ souls descend
T’affections, and to faculties,
Which sense may reach and apprehend,
Else a great prince in prison lies.

“The Ecstasy” can be read as a seduction poem that takes a long detour to reach the customary plea—“Sleep with me.” It can also be read as a theoretical statement about the bisexuality of the spirit, in the tradition of Plato’s Symposium. Above all, however, it is the poetic equivalent of a gymnast’s floor routine: a demonstration of literary agility, as Donne leaps from idea to image and back without ever putting a foot wrong. Shakespeare, Donne’s contemporary, amazes us by making great verse seem so easy to write, as if it simply spoke itself. Donne amazes us by making it look almost impossibly hard.

Even so, his love poems weren’t as challenging as his actual love life. After fighting in two naval expeditions against the Spanish in the mid-fifteen-nineties, Donne was offered a job as a secretary to Thomas Egerton, the Lord Keeper, one of the highest-ranked legal officers in Queen Elizabeth’s court. Donne moved into his employer’s London mansion, where the household included Egerton’s niece by marriage, Anne More. Soon they fell in love. “Something in her face or manner bludgeoned John Donne in the heart,” Rundell writes in a typically vigorous metaphor.

Anne was around fourteen and Donne was in his late twenties, but that wasn’t why the affair had to be clandestine—such an age difference wasn’t unusual for the time. A more serious obstacle was the imbalance in wealth and social status. Anne’s father hoped she would marry into a titled family, and would never have considered the middle-class Donne as a suitor. So the couple presented him with a fait accompli: in 1601, after four years of courtship, they were secretly married by a priest who was Donne’s friend.

It was a gambit straight out of “Romeo and Juliet,” and, while it didn’t end quite as badly, the lovers paid a high price. When Anne’s father found out about the marriage, he had Donne fired and thrown in jail. The poet was soon released and eventually won his father-in-law’s grudging acceptance of the marriage, but the damage to Donne’s professional standing was irreparable. He had betrayed his employer’s trust, and no one was willing to take the risk of hiring him again. The couple moved out of London and endured years of poverty as their family grew. His career in government was over before it had really begun.

It took Donne a very long time to reconcile himself to the fact. Not until 1615 did he finally give up his secular ambitions and take holy orders, at the suggestion of King James I and some high-ranking churchmen. The sequence of events leaves the distinct impression that, for Donne, the priesthood was less a calling than a consolation prize. Rundell compares the deanship of St. Paul’s to a piñata: “hit it, and perks and favours and new connections came pouring out.”

Izaak Walton’s biography worked hard to combat this mercenary interpretation, finding precedents for Donne’s reluctance to become a priest in Moses, who resisted God’s call out of humility, and St. Augustine, who had to overcome inner “strifes” before he converted to Christianity. Once Donne was ordained, Walton insists, he became a different man: “Now he had a new calling, new thoughts, and a new employment for his wit and eloquence. Now all his earthly affections were changed into divine love.”

But the intellectual restlessness and addiction to metaphor that made Donne a great love poet are just as evident in his religious verse and his sermons. The continuity comes into sharp focus in one of his favorite puns—his own name, which sounds like “done,” and in an age of variable orthography could be spelled the same way.

When his secret marriage was discovered and ruin loomed, the poet wrote to his bride, “John Donne, Anne Donne, Un-done”—a bit of wordplay that became part of his legend. Because his poems are mostly undated, it’s impossible to know how many years passed before he returned to the same pun in the refrain of his solemn poem “A Hymn to God the Father”:

Wilt thou forgive that sin, through which I run,
 And do run still, though still I do deplore?
  When thou hast done, thou hast not done,
   For I have more.

Even when God has pardoned the poet, He doesn’t “have Donne.” Only when Donne remembers Christ’s sacrifice is he convinced that he will be saved: “having done that, thou hast done; / I fear no more.”

What is the real inspiration for this poem—the religious belief or the play on words? It may seem like a minor question, but it helps to explain the unsettling power of Donne’s work. His wit is a corrosive element; by finding aggressively new ways to think and write about any subject, he raises the suspicion that there are no stable realities. Maybe language doesn’t just describe our world but creates it.

There was plenty of support for that idea in a society like Renaissance England, where so many fundamental beliefs were being rewritten. For centuries, being a good Christian had meant obeying the Pope; now it meant hating him. For even longer, the stars in the night sky had revolved around the Earth in harmonious spheres. Now, thanks to the discoveries of Copernicus and Kepler, “The sun is lost, and th’earth, and no man’s wit / Can well direct him where to look for it,” Donne wrote in “The Anatomy of the World.”

This mental vertigo works itself into Donne’s poems in ways large and small. One of his “Holy Sonnets” begins in arresting fashion: “At the round earth’s imagined corners, blow / Your trumpets, angels.” The image is taken from the Book of Revelation, where, on Judgment Day, angels stand at “the four corners of the earth.” The poem acknowledges that, since we know the Earth is a sphere, its corners can only be a figure of speech; even Scripture can’t be taken at face value. But, if so, who’s to say that the angels, too, aren’t “imagined,” along with the redemption they herald? Donne the priest would never have doubted the existence of angels and Judgment Day, but Donne the poet couldn’t stop himself from raising the question. As the modernists would find centuries later, once poets start thinking in language, there’s no telling where they might end up. ♦