Twenty nights of John Donne

John Donne, unknown artist c. 1595, © National Portrait Gallery, London

I’ve been on a John Donne odyssey – for twenty nights!

When I posted the Heaney-Frost blog for A-level students, I received a message from my cousin, ‘Do you have anything on John Donne?’ I hadn’t, but I have now. I have selected the following poems for close reading: ‘The Flea’, ‘The Anniversary’, ‘The Sun Rising’ and ‘A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning.’ Only the last of these has not appeared on CCEA A-level papers in the previous five years, but the others may still be useful in a discussion of ‘one other appropriately selected poem.’ I have not given a deep analysis of ‘The Good Morrow’, but the poem captured my imagination as a poet. (More on this in a separate blog). 
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Your exam essays have to be ‘informed, personal and creative’, so that’s the approach I took. I have been reflective in my own approach to the poems, reading them without any critical references (with the exception of footnotes in the poetry book), and then consulting critical work afterwards. Please note that the information below is human authored, and the close readings are my own original work. It may not be as complete as what you find on AI, but you can at least clearly identify the evolution of thought and the names of critics who helped me after the initial close reading. I have purposely not compiled this information in essay form. Click Read More...

This blog should take around forty minutes to read. It has been set up without pictures in the body of the text so that you can select the main text and convert to audio file. One section carries on from the next, so I weave in comparisons from poem to poem. I have been able to include the poems, which makes it look even longer, but I think it’s handy to read the poems all over again. NB they lose their format in my blog, so check your book.

Throughout, I have been mindful of your Assessment Objectives:

AO1: Articulate informed, personal and creative responses to literary texts, using associated concepts and terminology, and coherent, accurate written expression.
AO2: Analyse ways in which meanings are shaped in literary texts.
AO3: Demonstrate understanding of the significance and influence of the contexts in which literary texts are written and received.
AO4: Explore connections within and between literary texts.
AO5: Explore literary texts informed by different interpretations

The Flea

Mark but this flea, and mark in this,   
How little that which thou deny’st me is;   
It sucked me first, and now sucks thee,
And in this flea our two bloods mingled be;   
Thou know’st that this cannot be said
A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead,
    Yet this enjoys before it woo,
    And pampered swells with one blood made of two,
    And this, alas, is more than we would do.

Oh stay, three lives in one flea spare,
Where we almost, yea more than married are.   
This flea is you and I, and this
Our marriage bed, and marriage temple is;   
Though parents grudge, and you, we’re met,   
And cloistered in these living walls of jet.
    Though use make you apt to kill me,
    Let not to that, self-murder added be,
    And sacrilege, three sins in killing three.

Cruel and sudden, hast thou since
Purpled thy nail, in blood of innocence?   
Wherein could this flea guilty be,
Except in that drop which it sucked from thee?   
Yet thou triumph’st, and say’st that thou   
Find’st not thy self, nor me the weaker now;
    ’Tis true; then learn how false, fears be:
    Just so much honor, when thou yield’st to me,
    Will waste, as this flea’s death took life from thee.

The four words ‘Mark but this flea’ emphatically announce the speaker, the poet and the poem. This is a strong opening, marked by the use of the imperative. The reader has high expectations from the first line. There is also a territorial tone to these four words, as though the little flea is heralding a flag of conquest. I have never actually seen a flea, and I never want to see a flea, and I’d imagine any A-level student will struggle to discern the destruction such a mite can make in laying down its mark, but there is a generation of grannies and grandas, who grew up in an era before strong chemical soaps, when the flea was at large in clothing and on bedsheets. (There have also been several outbreaks of flea infestations in European hotels in recent years).

‘It sucked me first,’ keeps up the confident voice of the speaker and is strongly onomatopoeic and sexual in tone. Contextual information is provided in a footnote in the Norton edition I am reading from – that medical theory held that blood was mingled during sexual intercourse, leading to procreation. However, without knowing this, my personal intertextual observation is that sucking, marking and blood letting are features of Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula, which enters the literary scene around three hundred years after this late 1590s poem. We can imagine that such folklore existed in Donne’s time. The poem almost pre-empts gothic literature. [I have added a little screenshot to the end of this blog so that you can decide if the long 's' is significant or not.]

The rhythm is discernible, particularly in the line ‘A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead’, which is written in a sort of mounting iambic pentameter. The first line, though, is iambic tetrameter, so the poem alternates in metre. The rhythm perhaps mirrors the underlying tension and the woman’s resistance before she yields. The lines beginning with a trochee might be said to simulate penetration. However, it is the flea who seems to experience more enjoyment at this point in the poem. The regular form of nine lines with three rhyming couplets and one rhyming tercet also stands out. 

The second stanza opens with another imperative and a hint of frustration and pleading: ‘oh stay.’ There are now ‘three lives in one flea,’ instead of the ‘two bloods’ of the first stanza. The third blood is presumably that of the couple mixed together. Is the flea a euphemism for God – omnipresent and responsible for this pairing? ‘Spare’ and ‘are’ appear as a slant rhyme, but an older dialect for ‘are’ may be at play. The speaker, speaking to the woman, suggests they are more than married, that they are joined in an external way, so if the flea is God, then their souls are joined in matrimony. The speaker may be suggesting that this act is permissible by a higher order. The parental grudge is an indication of the youth of the speaker. Even the colour at this point is macabre — these young people are imprisoned in jet. The poem now takes a deeper turn into darkness, with murder and self-murder. There is a sort of trinity of killing. The woman is ‘apt to kill’ the flea. There is then the idea of self-murder. Finally, there is sacrilege, which also appears as a killing — indicative, perhaps, of death in the way of the soul and on account of fleshly sin.

‘Cruel and sudden’ opens the third and last stanza. The speaker is asking his lover if she has purpled her nail, ‘in blood of innocence.’ The woman has now apparently killed the flea, but  ‘blood of innocence’ may also allude to the first sexual experience for this woman, who ‘triumph’st’ in her pursuit of the flea. Notably, she is in a position of strength at this moment, and not passive, but either a sexual battle or battle of wills follows, and she must yield to the man and waste her honour. 



The Anniversary

All Kings, and all their favourites,
All glory of honours, beauties, wits,
The sun itself, which makes times, as they pass,
Is elder by a year now than it was
When thou and I first one another saw:
All other things to their destruction draw,
Only our love hath no decay;
This no tomorrow hath, nor yesterday,
Running it never runs from us away,
But truly keeps his first, last, everlasting day.

Two graves must hide thine and my corse;
If one might, death were no divorce.
Alas, as well as other princes, we
(Who prince enough in one another be)
Must leave at last in death these eyes and ears,
Oft fed with true oaths, and with sweet salt tears;
But souls where nothing dwells but love
(All other thoughts being inmates) then shall prove
This, or a love increased there above,
When bodies to their graves, souls from their graves remove.

And then we shall be throughly blest;
But we no more than all the rest.
Here upon earth we’re kings, and none but we
Can be such kings, nor of such subjects be;
Who is so safe as we? where none can do
Treason to us, except one of us two?
True and false fears let us refrain,
Let us love nobly, and live, and add again
Years and years unto years, till we attain
To write threescore: this is the second of our reign.


‘The Anniversary’ is immediately lyrical and whimsical. If Donne took his time over this, there is a sense of enjoyment in the process. The poem opens dramatically, like an announcement, as though the speaker is a town crier proclaiming his thoughts to his audience, and this is reinforced by the repetition ‘all’: ‘All Kings, and all their favourites /All glory of honours, beauties, wits’. Whatever intimacies lie ahead, the tone is declarative. Like ‘The Flea’, this poem also has three stanzas, the first of which appears redolent with love and endurance. The love object and subject have known one another for a year. The sun itself is ‘elder by a year’, an unusual way to think about the sun, which is normally considered fairly constant and not afflicted by age. The first stanza is less metaphorical, less sexual and less dark than ‘The Flea’. Like 'The Flea’, though, it opens with a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed one (a trochee) and emphasis in ‘All kings’. However, ‘Only our love hath no decay’ hints that death will be a relevant theme. The last line in relation to the love of the couple, ‘But truly keeps his first, last, everlasting day’, is romantic.

The rhyme scheme is regular: AABBCCDDDD. The metre is difficult to discern, and this may be to do with the positioning of those initial sounds mentioned above. Certain sounds are additional (extrametrical) and difficult to count: this is so in the line, ‘Is elder by a year now than it was.’ It is almost necessary to demote ‘now’ to squeeze it in and allow it to fall, when, in fact, it is equal to the preceding word ‘year.’ So, perhaps, we have two stressed syllables (a spondee). This forces the reader to slow down, but the pattern doesn’t lose anything: instead, it mimics natural speech. Counting metric feet (scansion) is difficult in this poem, but there appears to be a mix of iambic tetrametre, as per the first two lines in the first stanza, and iambic pentametre, as in last line. What can all of this mean? Is John Donne following his own path, or is he simply embracing irregularity to reflect the course of love?

That hint of darkness in the word ‘decay’ comes alive in the first line of the second stanza, when the lovers are apparently now in ‘graves’, and so we encounter the concept of love beyond the grave, that death is not a divorce, that even separate graves will not separate the couple. There is sadness at the idea of leaving flesh behind, the separation of soul and body — eyes and ears and tears — but love will only increase ‘there above.’ In both poems so far, the body and soul play a role. In ‘The Flea’, the body is most pertinent. The joining of bodies and souls in ‘The Anniversary’ is more explicit: ‘When bodies to their graves, souls from their graves remove.’

The parenthesis in this stanza is also notable, the two ‘asides’ again reminiscent of natural speech. In the second, the thoughts are in brackets literally and metaphorically, ‘(All other thoughts being inmates) then shall prove.’ The word ‘inmates’ during this period denotes ‘dwellers’, but the modern meaning of imprisoned is relevant too: the parenthesis contains the superfluous thoughts, which are not needed in heaven. A feminist reading would take into account that the man and woman in this stanza are equal as princes, or authors of the verb ‘to prince’: ‘we/(Who prince enough in one another be)’. 

The third stanza opens with the idea that the couple will be ‘blest’ if their souls remain together, but this is not unique to them, ‘But we no more than all the rest.’ They are equal to others. The next line ‘Here upon earth we’re Kings, and none but we / Can be such Kings, nor of such subjects be’ seems paradoxical: they are kings and subjects. Perhaps Donne is suggesting that on earth, people have a social hierarchy, but this isn't the case for souls. This is politically interesting in reverse, as kings become equal to men, which is all the more relevant with the mention of treason. The speaker seems to be saying that the lovers will not be kings in heaven, so no one can be treacherous to them; but the speaker also implies that the lovers can be treacherous towards one another – as equals. This is also significant in terms of a feminist reading and subverts tropes of women as distant, passive goddesses. Here, the woman is an active political equal. No love can be as relevant as theirs, so they are somehow safe from harm from beyond their cocoon – their parenthesis. There is no hierarchy between them, no prey, no sense of conquering one another like the couple in ‘The Flea.’ Theirs is a dual monarchy. The remainder of the poem is sentimental to a point: they will love one another for sixty years, ‘Let us love nobly, and live, and add again / Years and years unto years, til we attain / To write threescore.’ However, the poem ends on a cryptic note. This long stretch of fidelity will be like a second reign. They will be kings again if they can reach that milestone – that anniversary.


The Sun Rising

Busy old fool, unruly sun,
Why dost thou thus,
Through windows, and through curtains call on us?
Must to thy motions lovers’ seasons run?
Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide
Late school boys and sour prentices,
Go tell court huntsmen that the King will ride,
Call country ants to harvest offices;
Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.

Thy beams, so reverend and strong
Why shouldst thou think?
I could eclipse and cloud them with a wink,
But that I would not lose her sight so long;
If her eyes have not blinded thine,
Look, and tomorrow late, tell me,
Whether both th’ Indias of spice and mine
Be where thou leftst them, or lie here with me.
Ask for those kings whom thou saw’st yesterday,
And thou shalt hear, All here in one bed lay.

She’s all states, and all princes, I,
Nothing else is.
Princes do but play us; compared to this,
All honor's mimic, all wealth alchemy.
Thou, sun, art half as happy as we,
In that the world's contracted thus;
Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be
To warm the world, that's done in warming us.
Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere;
This bed thy center is, these walls, thy sphere.


The sun, having made its appearance in ‘The Anniversary’, takes centre stage in ‘The Sun Rising.’ The speaker addresses it in an opening that is as emphatic as ‘Mark this Flea,’ and as dramatic as ‘All Kings, and all their favourites’ in ‘The Anniversary.’ Added to this is a sense of colloquialism: ‘Busy old fool, unruly sun’. The unruly sun reflects the unruly poet in his independent approach to form, and, if  John Donne is the speaker, his apparent reluctance to begin the day.  The personified sun is watching the lovers through the windows, and so receives an unusual chiding for its voyeurism and its implication in the tryst, ‘Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide.’ This is reminiscent of the flea acting as a voyeur, but if the sun is an image for God and the flea is an image for God, then ‘Saucy pedantic wretch,’ is unexpected. The sun, usually depicted as a man, is a woman here and a ‘saucy’ one at that, and so the sun has been emasculated and diminished. Or, perhaps ‘pedantic’ sun is a metaphor for poetic form: if so, it can leave the poet be. The sun is redirected to late school boys, sour apprentices, huntsmen, the king, ants, all those who must abide by time. Lovers, meanwhile, have no need for ‘rags of time.’ Today we’d call this sense of timelessness ‘mindfulness’, not paying attention to the outside world when absorbed in the task, as lovers or poets might well be.

‘The Sun Rising’ , like both ‘The Anniversary’ and ‘The Flea’ has three stanzas. This time the rhyme scheme is ABBA CDCDEE, alluding to the former and latter parts of the Petrarchan and English (Shakespearean) sonnet respectively. The rhythm, as with both poems mentioned so far, is uneven; albeit there is a strong sense of iambic dimeter and iambic tetrameter, which sometimes bounce off one another in a regular pattern: ‘Busy old fool, unruly sun, / Why dost thou thus’. 

The personification of the sun continues in the second stanza. The rays are strong, but the speaker can make them disappear by closing his eyes. Donne gives us a nice metaphor to explain this: just as the moon eclipses the sun and sends the earth into darkness, the speaker can eclipse the sun’s rays by closing his eyes momentarily, ‘I could eclipse and cloud them with a wink.’ The speaker moves swiftly on to his lover and ‘her sight so long’ that she could blind the very sun. The exotic ideas of travel, export and spices are introduced, with a mention of the new world that is under exploration – ‘th’Indias of spice and mine’ (the East Indies for Spices, the West Indies for goldmines, according my footnote). We now have a sense of time and place that was not so apparent or relevant in ‘The Flea’ or ‘The Anniversary’, which are both fairly timeless poems by comparison. 

The world is in disarray, and the Indias are not where they are supposed to be in relation to the sun; nor are the kings, who are also seemingly in the same bed as the lovers, ‘Ask for those kings whom thou saw’st yesterday, / And thou shalt hear, All here in one bed lay’. This is a confusing idea, which is perhaps explained in the first line of the third stanza, a compelling line, ‘She’s all states.’ In terms of a feminist reading, this is a powerful image. It may be argued that the woman is a state ready to be conquered by man or a king, but she is, in fact, ‘all states’ and therefore any ruler is secondary or dependent upon her: ‘She’s all states; and all princes I, Nothing else is.’ The last clause is confusing to the modern reader, but could mean, ‘Nothing else exists’. If this remains unsolved, the pronoun ‘us’ is of interest in the next line: ‘Princes do but play us.’ If the concept of ‘all states’ trumps all rulers, then she is in a powerful position already, but here she is one of ‘us’, one of these people mimicked by princes.

The idea of princes connects this poem to ‘The anniversary’, in which 'prince' is a verb denoting equality between lovers. A political reading might make something of the idea that all riches are myths — ‘all wealth alchemy.’ In other words, all wealth is worthless compared to what lies in the bed. The lovers are happy that the world is distorted, ‘contracted’, and the sun is only half as happy as them – again it is unusual to think of the bright sun being less than wholly happy. Donne is teasing out literary clichés and replacing them with his own ideas. Unlike the couple in ‘The Anniversary’, who see decades before them, this couple is hitched to a timeless frame, as though they are subjects of a painting. In warming them, the sun has cocooned them, just as the couple in ‘The Flea’ are ‘cloistered in these living walls of jet’ or the souls in ‘The Anniversary’ are ‘so safe’ together in heaven.
   
            Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be
            To warm the world, that’s done in warming us.
Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere;
This bed thy center is, these walls, thy sphere.

This is an intimate poem. The world is moving fast. People are travelling and conquering countries for their riches, not pausing to think of the riches of such intimacies.


A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning

As virtuous men pass mildly away,
   And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say
   “The breath goes now,” and some say, “No,”

So let us melt, and make no noise,
   No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move;
‘Twere profanation of our joys
   To tell the laity our love.

Moving of the earth brings harms and fears,
   Men reckon what it did, and meant;
But trepidation of the spheres,
   Though greater far, is innocent.

Dull sublunary lovers’ love
   (Whose soul is sense) cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
   Those things which elemented it.

But we, by a love so much refined,
   That our selves know not what it is,
Inter-assured of the mind,
   Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss.

Our two souls therefore, which are one,
   Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
   Like gold to airy thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so
   As stiff twin compasses are two;
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.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
   Like th’ other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
   And makes me end where I begun.


In ‘A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning’, the title and form both indicate a narrative. The word ‘Valediction’ points to a farewell; while ‘forbidding mourning’ suggests some conflict regarding the farewell, one that is continuing, as per the present continuous ‘forbidding’. ‘Mourning’ is a gerund acting as a noun, but the ‘ing’ here also gives a sense of unending. From the title alone, we might expect conflicted lovers torn apart by a departure. 

In stark contrast to the previous three poems, ‘The Flea’, ‘The Anniversary’ and ‘The Sun Rising’, this poem is written in nine quatrains with a regular alternative rhyme scheme ABAB. It begins in a whisper, with unstressed syllables: ‘As virtuous men pass mildly away, / And whisper to their souls to go, / Whilst some of their sad friends do say, / “The breath goes now”, and some say “no.”’ These lines depict death, of men whispering to their souls to depart, whilst their loved ones try to come to terms with it. The narrative continues through the use of dialect. The concept at this stage is general, a comment on mankind, and specifically men. The metre is again a contrast to the poems above, using a modest iambic tetrameter, which has a certain sway, almost like a soft lullaby. This is a tender ‘forbidding’.

In the second stanza, ‘men’ is reduced to two people in one of the most gentle lines encountered so far in this John Donne odyssey,  ‘So let us melt, and make no noise / No tear-floods, nor tempests move.’ This is soft and wistful and a contrast to the imperative ‘Mark this flea.’ This poem is a personal one, and one imagines an older speaker with less bravado. The farewell in terms of death is now coupled with a farewell between two people. It’s not clear what the second two lines in the second stanza mean. ‘Twere profanation of our joys to tell the laity our love.’ Was it pointless for this couple to tell religious lay people of their love? There is an untold story here, one that is maybe personal to the poet. Not knowing the timing of writing of the poems gives the reader much to play with in terms of imagination. Is he saying that their love, cocooned as in the poems mentioned above, did not become more by being shared in a church?

In the third stanza, there is a certain panning beyond the couple. This is a cryptic stanza. ‘Men reckon what it did and meant’. I take ‘it’ to mean the ‘earth’, so men try to understand earthquakes, probably scientifically. There is then ‘trepidation of the spheres’ – the footnote in my edition suggests the movement of the celestial spheres is the reference here, so I might interpret this as follows, ‘We are afraid of earthquakes and seek to understand them,’ but ‘we accept the idea of heaven, and need no explanation for it.’ 

The fourth stanza provides the beautifully assonant line, ‘Dull sublunary lovers’ love’, sublunary meaning beneath the sphere of the moon – a contrast to the lovers in the ‘The Sun Rising’, who are interrupted and taunted by a pedantic sun. These lovers beneath the moon seem to connect sense or intelligence with their souls, if the parenthesis is understood, ‘(Whose soul is sense).’ They cannot ‘admit’ absence, meaning they cannot stand or tolerate absence because it takes away the things that brought them together – ‘those things which elemented it’. This may allude to the body. This dull love that is scrutinised by science, is not the sort of love that the couple ‘we’ (in stanza five) have; though it is possible that the same couple is relevant to this story and playing both roles – that of humans whose hearts are torn between not being able to stand absence and accepting it.

The lovers in Stanza Five have a love so ‘refined’ that they don’t understand it, they ‘know not what it is’. The last two lines of Stanza Five are grammatically challenging, ‘Inter-assured of the mind, / Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss.’ I interpret this as the speaker saying that this couple work in tandem, that they should not mind or care less about missing eyes, lips and hands: their love is so strong that they can stand being apart physically. This interpretation is confirmed by the first line in the sixth stanza, ‘Our two souls therefore, which are one, / Though I must go, endure not yet / A breach, but an expansion, / Like gold to airy thinness beat.’ The tone continues to be gentle, and redolent with beautiful imagery, gold being malleable, like love. The speaker has narrowed the discussion from ‘mankind’ to ‘us’ to ‘I’. It is he who must depart, and his explanation suggests that there is reticence on the part of his wife or lover, who must be convinced that this absence or journey is an expansion of their love.

The hushed voice filters into the seventh stanza, in which there is the tone of a teacher explaining to a pupil, ‘If they be two, they are two so / as stiff twin compasses are two.’ The conceit of the twin compasses provides an extraordinary image for love, and if this was a modern or scientific idiom for Donne’s contemporary reader, compasses are now almost as romantic as a quill or candle. The explanation offered in the didactic voice, ‘Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show / To move, but doth, if the other do.’ There is grace. There is almost a dance (I'm thinking of a modern tango), the long leg of the departing half of the couple moving out as the fixed foot, the other leg staying fixed, but bending. Were it not for the references to lovers, this stanza could just as well denote a son or daughter waiting at home for their father.

The dance continues in the eighth stanza, along with the iambic lilt, ‘Yet when the other far doth roam, / It leans, and hearkens after it, / And grows erect, as that comes home.’ This is an interesting choice of words. ‘Erect’, in sexual terms, would usually apply to the man, so there is some reversal here in terms of sexual roles. The woman is not passive: she is active, tall, and dominant  – phallic even – as the tired lover comes home. She also grows, harking back to that image of expansion (and possibly also a more literal reference to pregnancy). In the end, a circle created as his foot moves around the page, the circle being symbolic of eternity and transcendent love. In the first stanza, friends were called upon to either accept death or try to deny it by saying ‘no’, but this poem, with its lullaby tenderness, could address death as eternal love for any family member in the stanzas that go beyond lovers.


Part II

In Part II of this blog, I turn to scholars and address the topics of love, religion and metaphysics, which are relevant to the four poems discussed. I am also interested in biographical details and publishing considerations by way of context.

Love & Women

The poems I selected above do not reflect the range John Donne's complex, often contradictory, portrayal of love and women. Further reading of Donne's poetry reveals that he moves between Ovidian eroticism, misogynistic objectification, and spiritualised equality. I feel that the four poems discussed above, perhaps with the exception of 'The Flea' (though it too is fairly mild compared to other poems) are spiritual and denote equality in love. Scholars Achsah Guibbory and Ilona Bell (See the Cambridge Companion) highlight how Donne, often focusing on his wife Anne More, moves between portraying women as mere physical objects and elevating them to partners in a private, transcendent, and sometimes revolutionary, spiritual experience.

Achsah Guibbory, in her essay on ‘Erotic Poetry’, provides us with an explanation for some of those iambic patterns that I found difficult to discern in ‘The Flea’, ‘The Anniversary’ and ‘The Sun Rising.’ She writes, ‘Donne’s love poetry strikes us as fresh and immediate, with its urgent rhythms, its irregular, frequent stresses communicating the sense that passion cannot be contained within regular iambic feet.’ She also describes poems in which there is a piece of the puzzle missing, something I observed in ‘Valediction: Forbidding Mourning’ regarding the line ‘Twere profanation of our joys to tell the laity our love’. 

Guibbory suggests that Donne goes farther than Roman poet Ovid: ‘Whereas Petrarchan poetry idealised women and spiritualised desire, ‘Donne’s Ovidian Elegies flaunt the speaker’s sexuality as he describes his escapades.’ Guibbory suggests that in his elegies, which are not on your syllabus, he mocks the idea of constancy and faithfulness as unnatural and removes woman from the pedestal on which she had been adored in courtly and Petrarchan poetry. (I return to Petrarch below).

Donne experiments with a variety of roles in his poems, some of them featuring female speakers. The concluding lines to the poem Community are written to shock: ‘Changed loves are but changed sorts of meat, / And when he hath the kernel eat / Who doth not fling away the shell?’ In ‘Loves Alchymie’, meanwhile, Donne attacks those who glorify their sexual experiences and reduces women to mere bodies. Yet, we have seen in the four poems above, that he celebrates both women and love. In ‘The Sun Rising’ there is a sense of equality, while ‘The Anniversary’ is positive and celebratory of love. In ‘The Flea’, there is no particular praise of the woman or her love, but the woman has an interesting role, killing the flea, triumphing and then yielding. The woman again plays an active part in ‘A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning’, that of the ‘fixed foot’ of the compasses. Guibbory discusses the autonomous private world of love, citing ‘The Sun Rising’ as an example of love being an autonomous sphere that includes the beloved, ‘as the two lovers constitute a self-sufficient, all-powerful world.’ 

Fear of death haunts Donne’s love poems, as in the case of the first stanza of ‘A Valediction: forbidding mourning.’ Guibbory suggests Donne’s ‘boldest intervention was representing erotic love as a spiritual experience’ and that his poems have references that are specifically Catholic, for example relics, saints and martyrs, and sacraments. The sacraments were reduced to two in the Reformation: baptism and communion. We do not know, however, when these poems were written, or if they were written when he was Catholic. Guibbory concludes that the poems are anti-institutional and radical: ‘Donne’s celebration of erotic love as a transcendent spiritual experience was boldly revolutionary not only in its anti-institutionalism, but also because it opposed a long-standing Christian tradition that distrusted the body and sexuality.’ All four of the poems I have covered in Part I are relevant to this statement.

Considering the role of women, I turn to Ilona Bell. She makes the observation that Donne does not linger over the physical appearance of women and suggests that although his attitudes to women are changeable, he is nonetheless obsessed with women. Donne described his wife, Anne More, as the most important subject and reader of his poems. Bell believes that ‘many of his love poems were written to and for her.’ Some of these poems may have been private and for his wife’s own consumption. In his elegies, which were written when he was a young lawyer and civil servant, there is both revulsion for the female body and spiritual glory. ‘The Comparison’, which is not on the A-level syllabus, compares two women. One woman’s sweat is the ‘Almightly balm of th’early East’; the other woman’s is ‘ranke sweaty froth’ or ‘ripe menstruous boils.’ Bell notes that the positive woman depicted is the one who is sexually active and emotionally responsive. In a sense, and through various characters, Donne’s Elegies ‘encourage women’s sexual freedom’, whilst paradoxically demonstrating Donne’s desire to conquer and control. Bell, in an exploration of ‘Sapho to Philaenis’ in which the speakers are lesbian, concludes that regardless of Donne’s motive, ‘this is hot stuff’, that the poem celebrates the women as independent, creative and sexually liberated and that there may be some code in it relating to Anne More, meaning the lesbian love affair becomes a subtext for the affair between a young Donne and his lover, ‘my half, my all, my more.’ Bell also acknowledges the equality of the relationship between man and woman in the ‘Anniversary’ – both subjects are kings and subjects, rulers and ruled – so that, in the end, Donne’s treatment of women is complicated and multi-faceted, from ‘witty misogynist’ to ‘a great devotee of women.’

Metaphysical Theme

Metaphysical, meaning beyond the physical world (or beyond nature), was a term in use in the 1600s, but Samuel Johnson (in c.1779-81) extended it to group together poets like John Donne, Abraham Cowley and John Cleveland. He wrote of them, ‘the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together’ to create a sense of shock rather than poetic beauty, that they wrote as beholders rather than partakers of human nature: ‘Their wish was only to say what they hoped had been never said before.’ He also criticised these poets for counting syllables instead of reading metre. 

What is metaphysical poetry then, if we accept it as a term at all? The most reliable idea is that of time. It appears to be relevant to the seventeenth and late sixteenth century. These poets have been accused of (and praised for) looking for something ‘new and strange’, and so we might add the word ‘radical’ to the list, best illustrated by Donne’s ability to shock in his sexual poetry. Realism is also at play, and some of the sexual references previously discussed might also be deemed realist. The intellectual aspects of the poems are also clear in Johnson’s attack, while the word ‘wit’ also frequently comes up.

During a revival of metaphysical poetry in the early twentieth-century, the ‘personal experience’ inherent in Donne’s poetry received attention, and this would have been pertinent in an era of psychological discovery. Scottish critic, Herbert John Clifford Grierson (1866–1960), who is credited with instigating the modern Donne revival in the early twentieth-century, points to both the psychological and philosophical importance of the poems. He uses the term ‘ratiocination’, which means the process of exacting logical reasoning. This, I feel, is most relevant to the poem, ‘A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning’ in which there was a clear didactic argument. Grierson also points to the juxtaposition of learned and colloquial writing, something that readers of Seamus Heaney will be familiar with. Poet T.S. Eliot wrote that it is difficult to define metaphysical poetry and which poets practised it, it being difficult to find ‘any precise use of metaphor, simile, or other conceit, which is common to all the poets…’ Eliot brings in another word then – conceits, these extended metaphors, which Johnson felt were yoked together by violence. (The compass discussed in ‘A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning’ is the most well-known of conceits).

George Williamson concluded that metaphysical poetry is ‘complex, sensuous and intellectual as opposed to the simple, sensuous and passionate tradition.’ I think that today we are so accustomed to complex, sensuous and intellectual poems, and so it may be difficult for us to understand why all of this was considered unique. I studied Geoffrey Chaucer (1343-1400) for A-level, and many of the ingredients in ‘The Pardoner’s Prologue’, a sort of long conceit which is shocking, radical, realist and intellectual, are relevant to this recipe for metaphysical poetry. Was Donne maybe part of a longer lineage of English wit?

Religion

Central to an understanding of Donne’s life was religion, and in the context of sixteenth and seventeenth century England, this meant Christianity. There is a debate about Donne’s religious convictions, whether he was truly Catholic or not – his family remained Catholic during some of the most violent years of the Reformation, while Donne himself converted to Protestantism gradually from his twenties onwards: in 1621, and at the age of forty-three, he was appointed Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral. The death of his brother Henry in 1594 is often highlighted as a significant moment in this trajectory. (Henry was imprisoned for harbouring a Catholic priest). In between times, Donne wrote some important publications in favour of Roman Catholics taking an oath of allegiance to the king. 

Donne’s mother, Elizabeth Heywood, belonged to one of the best-known Catholic families in England, and she lived with Donne’s family until her death. Alison Shell and Arnold Hunt point out that Donne’s grandfather, John Heywood (c. 1497–c. 1580), poet, playwright and jester at the court of Mary I, was exiled to Europe under Elizabeth I. Donne’s own reasons for joining the Church of England apparently resulted from a long period of study. As with his treatment of women in his poetry, Donne’s relationship with religion is complex. Shell and Hunt point to Donne’s fascination with names and meaning, how he detached words from Catholic meaning and reclaimed them for Protestant use. He promoted the idea of Protestant churches rejecting the ‘false’ doctrines of the Roman church, while remaining in unity with her. He opposed the Calvinst idea of predestination on the grounds that God could not have created some human beings merely to damn them, but he also challenged the view of the Pope as the antichrist. 

Politics, ultimately, plays a role and intersects with religion in a fundamental way in the 1500s and 1600s. Tom Cain suggests Donne accepted monarchic absolutism, in the same way that most of the political nation did, ‘For Donne, God as king and father presided over a patriarchal structure which was by definition hierarchic.’ In 1627, Donne wrote, ‘My tenets are always for the preservation of the religion I was born in, and the peace of the state and the rectifying of the conscience; in these I shall walke.’ He saw the church as ‘Catholike’ – the word originates from the Greek adjective katholikos, which means ‘universal’. (Church of Ireland students will be familiar with the words ‘I believe in the Holy catholic church’ within ‘The Apostles’ Creed’). Tom Cain also points to Donne’s belief in the unity of humanity. Donne wrote, ‘All mankind is of one Author, and is one volume.’ In ‘The Sun Rising’, we saw how the lovers contracted all humanity into their own private bed. In terms of his place in the church and his reputation, it is significant that King Charles I asked Donne to preach on his first appearance as king, instead of the Arminian Bishop Neile. Although Donne agreed with the Arminian position on free will (and to the Calvinist idea of predestination), he was opposed to the Arminian position on downgrading of preaching. His views were complex, but this was a turbulent era for religion and many interpretations of the bible exist and divide the vast number of Protestant denominations to this day.

C.S. Lewis proposed that Donne’s Catholicism, which was the more conservative religion in the 1600s, gave him a mediaeval approach to love poetry, and he criticised the lack of substance in Donne’s poetry, proclaiming it was ‘Hamlet without a prince.’ A contemporary of Lewis, Joan Bennett, contested Lewis’ assessment: Donne was writing that man and woman united by love may approach perfection more nearly than either could do alone. Bennett suggested that any contempt for women, as might be inferred in the conquering reference in ‘The Flea’ is not a general characteristic of his love poetry, and indeed ‘The Anniversary’ illustrates the sense of safety between lovers. Bennett also contested Lewis’ idea that John Donne had a medieval view of sex. She clarified that he did not repent his love poetry in the Holy Sonnets but rather stated that love for his wife led directly to the love of God. There is no ouvert or oblique mention of sex in ‘The Anniversary’, but there is this idea of the body and the soul, and neither seem sinful, once one is left behind. The medieval view that sex within marriage is sinful is absent, and this is explored in ‘The Sun Rising.’


Biography

I am continually interested in the career trajectory of poets and writers and found John Donne’s life compelling. Born in 1572, he was a contemporary of Shakespeare. (That they didn’t know one another seems astonishing given their professional profiles).  I listened to some podcasts in which author and Donne biographer Katherine Rundell featured and was struck by her passionate assessment of Donne's physical beauty, best seen in the famous Lothian portrait of the young Donne (c. 1595): it seems his looks were central to his success and identity. My own bird’s eye view of the Irish literary scene today – and I'm sure this is relevant to the rest of the British isles – is that a series of gatekeepers, often without consulting one another (but seemingly following one another) decide what is ‘in’.  This can be arbitrary; though I think that radical approaches continue to prevail. Donne, were he alive today, would find his way to being 'in.' Throughout his life, even when he experienced failures in terms of gaining public office, he had an audience for his poetry. I could add a little personal observation at this point: Donne's political career seemed to stall in 1601 when he was an MP, which is often connected to the scandal of his secret marriage to Anne More; but I wonder, having read his poems and seen the vast contradictions and roles portrayed – and with a small amount of knowledge of his prose writing, his position on suicide being most salient – if a legal or political career was wrong for him anyway. This was a man of passion. Did he need some sort of spiritual vocation? In his wilderness years between 1601 and 1614, he worked in various roles. We might say he was a struggling writer during that time, were it not for the fact that he found the idea of professional writing vulgar. (See below).

Donne wrote most of his elegies between 1592-95 when he was studying law. He had previously enrolled at Oxford University at the age of 12, a young age even in the context of the time, and according to Jonathan Post, enrolling young – his age was given as eleven – was a way of Catholics avoiding subscription to the Act of Supremacy. Sir Richard Baker wrote that Donne was a ‘great visitor of ladies’ and a ‘frequenter of plays’ when he was studying law. (Who knows? Maybe he saw Shakespeare's 'Romeo & Juliet' in his twenties). Like many young people, he was also an adventurer and, by 1596, was part of Sir Walter Raleigh and the Earl of Essex’s expedition to the Spanish port of Cadiz. The backdrop to his life was colonialism, discovery, and trade: for example, the Virgina company was chartered in 1606.

John Donne fell in love with Anne More around 1597 and was imprisoned by her father for marrying her in 1601. He wrote in 1614, thirteen years after their marriage, that ‘we had not one another at so cheap a rate as that we should ever be weary of one another’. They had made grave sacrifices to be together and needed to live by their decision and make it work. Anne More died in 1617, at the young age of thirty-one, and after giving birth to at least twelve children, six of whom survived. (She died just five days after giving birth to a still born child). The physical toll on her body in a constant cycle of pregnancy and recovery with twelve pregnancies and births, including two stillbirths, across fifteen years, is unimaginable. 

A curious detail mentioned by Jonathan FS Posts is that their daughter, Constance, married the actor Edward Alleyn in 1623 – she was twenty and he was 57 (and died within the year). If this was an arranged marriage, it provides a little insight into the circles in which the family moved. Another interesting detail he made about the household is that Donne’s Catholic mother lived in the family home and that some vestiges of Catholicism were in public view, for example, a painting of the Virgin Mary in the dining room.

Having survived the London plague of 1625, Donne died in 1631, at the age of 59 and following a dramatic sermon: Izaak Walton (1593–1683), Donne’s contemporary and first major biographer, wrote about Donne’s ‘decayed body and dying face’in the pulpit. The sculpture of Donne that can be seen in the rebuilt St Paul’s Cathedral today, captures him wrapped in a winding sheet, a contrast to the Lothian portrait of his youth – the idea of the soul’s hierarchy over the body manifested in art.

Literary Influences & Reception

Andrew Hadfield writes of Donne, ‘he styles himself as a metropolitan poet,’ and points to Donne’s enthusiasm for the metropolitan poets of ancient Rome: Ovid, Catullus, Martial and Juvenal. Hadfield considers the parallels in Donne’s work with Ovid’s work, the ‘erotic tension and comic excess’ generated by lust. The poem beginning ‘Come, Madam, Come’, for example, is ‘replete with Ovidian sexual energy and tension’. The most famous quote from this poem is ‘License my roving hands, and let them go / Before, behind, between, above, below / O My America! My new-found-land, / My Kingdom, safliest when with one man manned.’ This was considered scandalous in 1633 and wasn’t printed until 1669. Hadfield also discusses the influence of fourteenth-century Italian poet Petrarch, whose work pervaded Europe in the sixteenth century. (He wrote extensively in the 14-line sonnet form – structured into an octave and a sestet, separated by a volta, or ‘turn’ in thought). Hadfield points out that while John Donne rejected the iambic pentameter for ‘harsher rhythms and more colloquial speech-forms’ he didn’t burst onto the scene and transform everything ‘in one fell swoop.’

C.S. Lewis suggested that Donne had the two distinct styles of his predecessors. On one hand, Spenser, with his ‘mellifluous, luxurious, ‘builded rhyme’, on the other Wyatt with his ‘abrupt, familiar, and consciously ‘manly’ style.’ C.S. Lewis also praised Donne’s wit, stating, ‘if you are not enjoying these, you are not enjoying what Donne intended’, and in this ‘The Flea’ served as a case in point. 

It may be useful for A-level students to also have some contextual information on how John Donne’s poetry was received over time. When poet and playwright Ben Jonson went to Scotland (1618-19), William Drummond, who had objected to poets using metaphysical ideas, is reported to have said of Donne that, ‘for not keeping of accent’ [metre] Donne ‘deserved hanging.’ However, contemporary Thomas Carew was positive about John Donne, praising him as a revolutionary poetic genius in his 1633 elegy. He proclaimed Donne the ‘king of wits,’ crediting him with purging the Muses’ garden of ‘servile imitation’ and establishing a new, masculine, and original poetic style. John Dryden, meanwhile, criticised Donne in 1693: ‘He affects the metaphysics, not only in his satires, but in his amoros verses, where nature only should reign; and perplexes the minds of the fair sex with nice speculations of philosophy, when he should engage their hearts, and entertain them with the softness of love.’ 

Most of John Donne’s poems were published after his death, this despite technical advances in print during his lifetime. In fact, Donne preferred handwritten manuscript circulation, and this must have given him complete control over who first saw his poetry. (The modern equivalent may be a literary writer, with a small print run, ensuring that the book is placed in the hands of all the key people in the field, those who will help the artist achieve their ambitions). Ted-Larry Pebworth wrote that manuscript circulation was considered superior to print, and that Donne considered offering his poetry to the masses a violation of his dignity. In a modern context, he might disapprove of a blog like this, preferring academic publications. The idea of professional (paid) writing, he considered offensive. (At least there's no paywall then!) 

John Donne printed nine prose works, including six sermons, three of which were printed by royal command. A nice quote from Pebworth’s essay, found in letter to a Mr Andrews, demonstrates the esteem he held for himself:

‘A book which, if it has been baptised merely in the blood of the printing-press, goes to shelves resigned to moth and dust; let it but come to us written by the pen, and it is received with reverence and wings its way to the high-perched cases which shine the ancient Fathers.’ 

​(Shakespeare’s long narrative poems were designed for print and were highly successful in his lifetime).

Copyright: Christies. The Bolland Donne Manuscripts, dated c.1630-33. NB. If the long S is relevant to Donne's wording, then consider the meaning of the F word in the context of the 1600s, when it merely meant copulation. Still shocking at the time, of course.