John Donne

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John Donne

• and
• the Metaphysical Poets

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• John Donnes biography
• John Donnes literary work
• The Metaphysical poets

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John Donnes biography

•   John Donne was born in Bread Street,
  London in 1572 to a prosperous Roman Catholic
  family. His father, John Donne, was a well-to-do
  ironmonger and citizen of London. Donne's father
  died suddenly in 1576, and left the three
  children to be raised by their mother, Elizabeth.
•        Donne's first teachers were Jesuits. At
  the age of 11, Donne and his younger brother
  Henry were entered at Hart Hall, University of
  Oxford, where Donne studied for three years. He
  spent the next three years at the University of
  Cambridge, but took no degree at either
  university because he would not take the Oath of
  Supremacy required at graduation. He was admitted
  to study law and it seemed natural that Donne
  should embark upon a legal or diplomatic
  career. In 1593, Donne's brother Henry died of a
  fever in prison after being arrested for giving
  sanctuary to a proscribed Catholic priest. This
  made Donne begin to question his faith. His first
  book of poems, Satires, written during this
  period of residence in London, is considered one
  of Donne's most important literary efforts.
  Although not immediately published, the volume
  had a fairly wide readership through private
  circulation of the manuscript. Same was the case
  with his love poems, Songs and Sonnets, assumed
  to be written at about the same time as the
  Satires.  Having inherited a considerable
  fortune, young "Jack Donne" spent his money on
  womanizing, on books, at the theatre, and on
  travels. In 1596, Donne joined the naval
  expedition that Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of
  Essex, led against Cádiz, Spain.  In 1597, Donne
  joined an expedition to the Azores, where he
  wrote "The Calm". Upon his return to England in
  1598, Donne was appointed private secretary to
  Sir Thomas Egerton, Lord Keeper of the Great
  Seal, afterward Lord Ellesmere.

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•     Donne was beginning a promising career. In
  1601, Donne became MP for Brackley, and sat in
  Queen Elizabeth's last Parliament. But in the
  same year, he secretly married Lady Egerton's
  niece, seventeen-year-old Anne More, daughter of
  Sir George More, Lieutenant of the Tower, and
  effectively committed career suicide. Sir
  George had Donne thrown in Fleet Prison for some
  weeks. Donne was dismissed from his post, and for
  the next decade had to struggle near poverty to
  support his growing family. Donne later summed up
  the experience "John Donne, Anne Donne, Undone."
  Anne's cousin offered the couple refuge in
  Pyrford, Surrey, and the couple was helped by
  friends. It was not until 1609 that a
  reconciliation was effected between Donne and his
  father-in-law, and Sir George More was finally
  induced to pay his daughter's dowry.In the
  intervening years, Donne practised law, but they
  were lean years for the Donnes. Donne was
  employed by the religious pamphleteer Thomas
  Morton, later Bishop of Durham. To this period,
  before reconciliation with his in-laws, belong
  Donne's Divine Poems(1607) and Biathanatos (pub.
  1644), a radical piece for its time, in which
  Donne argues that suicide is not a sin in itself.
   As Donne approached forty, he published two
  anti-Catholic polemics Pseudo-Martyr (1610) and
  Ignatius his Conclave(1611). They were final
  public testimony of Donne's renunciation of the
  Catholic faith. Pseudo-Martyr, which held that
  English Catholics could pledge an oath of
  allegiance to James I, King of England, without
  compromising their religious loyalty to the Pope,
  won Donne the favour of the King. In return for
  patronage from Sir Robert Drury of Hawstead, he
  wrote A Funerall Elegie (1610), on the death of
  Sir Robert's 15-year-old daughter Elizabeth. At
  this time, the Donnes took residence on Drury
  Lane.  The two Anniversaries An Anatomy of the
  World(1611) and Of the Progress of the Soul(1612)
  continued the patronage. Sir Robert encouraged
  the publication of the poems The First
  Anniversary was published with the original elegy
  in 1611, and both were reissued with The Second
  Anniversary in 1612.       

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•     Donne had refused to take Anglican orders in
  1607, but King James persisted, finally
  announcing that Donne would receive no post or
  preferment from the King, unless in the church.
  In 1615, Donne reluctantly entered the ministry
  and was appointed a Royal Chaplain later that
  year. Just as Donne's fortunes seemed to be
  improving, Anne Donne died, on 15 August, 1617,
  aged thirty-three, after giving birth to their
  twelfth child, a stillborn. Seven of their
  children survived their mother's death. Struck by
  grief, Donne wrote the seventeenth Holy Sonnet,
  "Since she whom I lov'd hath paid her last debt."
  Donne continued to write poetry, notably his Holy
  Sonnets(1618), but the time for love songs was
  over. In 1618, Donne went as chaplain with
  Viscount Doncaster in his embassy to the German
  princes. His Hymn to Christ at the Author's Last
  Going into Germany, written before the journey,
  is laden with apprehension of death. Donne
  returned to London in 1620, and was appointed
  Dean of Saint Paul's in 1621, a post he held
  until his death. Donne excelled at his post, and
  was at last financially secure.

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•     In 1624, Donne was made vicar of St
  Dunstan's-in-the-West. On March 27, 1625, James I
  died, and Donne preached his first sermon for
  Charles I. But for his ailing health, (he had
  mouth sores and had experienced significant
  weight loss) Donne almost certainly would have
  become a bishop in 1630. Obsessed with the idea
  of death, Donne posed in a shroud - the painting
  was completed a few weeks before his death, and
  later used to create an effigy. He also preached
  what was called his own funeral sermon, Death's
  Duel, just a few weeks before he died in London
  on March 31, 1631. The last thing Donne wrote
  just before his death was Hymne to God, my God,
  In my Sicknesse.  Donne's monument, in his
  shroud, survived the Great Fire of London and can
  still be seen today at St. Paul's.

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John Donnes literary work

• John Donne is considered a master of the
  conceit, an extended metaphor that combines two
  vastly unlike ideas into a single idea, often
  using imagery. 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), when such typical Petrarchan
  conceits appear in Donne, they are soundly
  mocked. Metaphysical conceits go to a greater
  depth in comparing two completely unlike objects.
  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 liked to twist and distort not only
  images and ideas, but also traditional rhythmic
  patterns.
• Donne's works are also remarkably witty,
  employing paradoxes, puns, and subtle yet
  remarkable analogies. His pieces are often ironic
  and cynical, especially regarding the motives of
  humans and love. Common subjects of Donne's poems
  are loveespecially in his early life,
  deathespecially after his wife's death, and
  religion.

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Characteristic of Donnes Poetry

• Donne set what has come to be known as the
  pattern for metaphysical poetry. His poetry can
  be characterised by the following attributes
• -It is sharply opposed to the the sense of human
  dignity, and the idealised view of sexual love,
  which constituted the central tradition of
  Elizabethan poetry, especially in writers like
  Spenser.
• -It adopts a diction and meter modelled on the
  rough actual speech.
• -It is usually organised in the form of an urgent
  or heated argument.
• -It puts to use a subtle and often outrageous
  logic.
• -It is marked by realism, irony and often a
  cynicism in its treatment of the complexity of
  human motives.

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• His career can be viewed as having two phases
• Phase I
• His early poetry consist of five satires,
  twenty elegies (mainly about love, and deal with
  their theme in a variety of ways). Some are
  indeed cynical they deal with the paradoxes of
  lust.
• Songs and Sonnets - by far the most
  interesting of Donnes early work, the love poems
  in the collection are of different mood,
  addressed to different persons. In the songs and
  sonnets, Donnes development is characteristic
  the opening of the poem shock the reader into
  attention, sometimes by asking a question. Then
  the thought or argument is ingeniously developed
  in terms of ideas derived from philosophy or
  scientific notions.
• Donnes chief quality in the early work is the
  union of passion and rationalisation.

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• Phase II
• Although it changes in focus and theme,
  Donnes later poetry remains as complex and dense
  as his earliest endeavours. The later work
  reflects his religious tension and his poetic
  exploration of mans relationship with God.
• Most but not all of Donnes Divine Poems
  were written during the last phase of his life,
  when the young and sophisticated scholar had
  grown into the grave and philosophical divine.
  The texts often explore controversial or though
  questions about religion with startling
  directness.
• The Divine poems were largely written after
  the death of Donnes wife, when he had
  effectively abandoned the worldly, sensuous life
  behind him and was searching instead for a right
  relationship with God.
• The 19 Holy Sonnets contain Donnes finest
  examples of religious poetry. These poems are
  marked by the same intensity, the same
  combination of passion and argument that can be
  found in Songs and Sonnets, although the object
  of the passion has now changed. Donnes later
  passion is more complex- it is a blend of the
  hope and anguish that marks the religious mans
  search for the right relationship with his God,
  when he is aware not only of Gods greatness but
  also of his own comparative unworthiness.

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"The Flea"

• Summary
• The speaker tells his beloved to look at
  the flea before them and to note "how little" is
  that thing that she denies him. For the flea, he
  says, has sucked first his blood, then her blood,
  so that now, inside the flea, they are mingled
  and that mingling cannot be called "sin, or
  shame, or loss of maidenhead." The flea has
  joined them together in a way that, "alas, is
  more than we would do."
• As his beloved moves to kill the flea, the
  speaker stays her hand, asking her to spare the
  three lives in the flea his life, her life, and
  the flea's own life. In the flea, he says, where
  their blood is mingled, they are almost
  married--no, more than married--and the flea is
  their marriage bed and marriage temple mixed into
  one. Though their parents grudge their romance
  and though she will not make love to him, they
  are nevertheless united and cloistered in the
  living walls of the flea. She is apt to kill him,
  he says, but he asks that she not kill herself by
  killing the flea that contains her blood he says
  that to kill the flea would be sacrilege, "three
  sins in killing three."
• "Cruel and sudden," the speaker calls his
  lover, who has now killed the flea, "purpling"
  her fingernail with the "blood of innocence." The
  speaker asks his lover what the flea's sin was,
  other than having sucked from each of them a drop
  of blood. He says that his lover replies that
  neither of them is less noble for having killed
  the flea. It is true, he says, and it is this
  very fact that proves that her fears are false
  If she were to sleep with him ("yield to me"),
  she would lose no more honour than she lost when
  she killed the flea.

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• Commentary
• This funny little poem again exhibits
  Donne's metaphysical love-poem mode, his aptitude
  for turning even the least likely images into
  elaborate symbols of love and romance. This poem
  uses the image of a flea that has just bitten the
  speaker and his beloved to sketch an amusing
  conflict over whether the two will engage in
  premarital sex. The speaker wants to, the beloved
  does not, and so the speaker, highly clever but
  grasping at straws, uses the flea, in whose body
  his blood mingles with his beloved's, to show how
  innocuous such mingling can be--he reasons that
  if mingling in the flea is so innocuous, sexual
  mingling would be equally innocuous, for they are
  really the same thing. By the second stanza, the
  speaker is trying to save the flea's life,
  holding it up as "our marriage bed and marriage
  temple."
• But when the beloved kills the flea
  despite the speaker's protestations (and probably
  as a deliberate move to squash his argument, as
  well), he turns his argument on its head and
  claims that despite the high-minded and sacred
  ideals he has just been invoking, killing the
  flea did not really impugn his beloved's
  honour--and despite the high-minded and sacred
  ideals she has invoked in refusing to sleep with
  him, doing so would not impugn her honour either.
  
• This poem is the cleverest of a long line
  of sixteenth-century love poems using the flea as
  an erotic image, a genre derived from an older
  poem of Ovid. Donne's poise of hinting at the
  erotic without ever explicitly referring to sex,
  while at the same time leaving no doubt as to
  exactly what he means, is as much a source of the
  poem's humour as the silly image of the flea is
  the idea that being bitten by a flea would
  represent "sin, or shame, or loss of maidenhead"
  gets the point across with a neat conciseness and
  clarity that Donne's later religious lyrics never
  attained.

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Hymn to God, my God, in my Sickness"

• Summary
• The speaker says that since he will soon
  die and come to "that holy room" where he will be
  made into the music of God as sung by a choir of
  saints, he tunes "the instrument" now and thinks
  what he will do when the final moment comes. He
  likens his doctors to cosmographers and himself
  to a map, lying flat on the bed to be shown "that
  this is my south-west discovery / Per fretum
  febris, by these straits to die." He rejoices,
  for in those straits he sees his "west," his
  death, whose currents "yield return to none," yet
  which will not harm him. West and east meet and
  join in all flat maps (the speaker says again
  that he is a flat map), and in the same way,
  death is one with the resurrection.
• The speaker asks whether his home is the
  Pacific Sea, or the eastern riches, or Jerusalem.
  He lists the straights of Anyan, Magellan, and
  Gibraltar, and says that only straits can offer
  access to paradise, whether it lies "where Japhet
  dwelt, or Cham, or Shem." The speaker says that
  "Paradise and Calvary, / Christ's Cross, and
  Adam's tree" stood in the same place. He asks God
  to look and to note that both Adams (Christ being
  the second Adam) are unified in him as the first
  Adam's sweat surrounds his face, he says, may the
  second Adam's blood embrace his soul. He asks God
  to receive him wrapped in the purple of Christ,
  and, "by these his thorns," to give him Christ's
  other crown. As he preached the word of God to
  others' souls, he says, let this be his sermon to
  his own soul "Therefore that he may raise the
  Lord throws down."

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• Commentary
• Scholars are divided over the question of
  whether this poem was written on Donne's deathbed
  in 1630 or during the life-threatening fever he
  contracted in 1623. In either case, the "Hymn to
  God my God" was certainly written at a time when
  Donne believed he was likely to die. This
  beautiful, lyrical, and complicated poem
  represents his mind's attempt to summarize
  itself, and his attempt to offer, as he says, a
  sermon to his soul. In the first stanza, the
  speaker looks forward to the time when he will be
  in "that holy room" where he will be made into
  God's music--an extraordinary image--with His
  choir of saints. In preparation for that time, he
  says, he will "tune the instrument" (his soul) by
  writing this poem.
• The next several stanzas, devoted to the
  striking image of Donne's body as a map looked
  over by his navigator-doctors, develop an
  elaborate geographical symbolism with which to
  explain his condition. He is entering, he says,
  his "south-west discovery"--the south being,
  traditionally, the region of heat (or fever) and
  the west being the site of the sunset and, thus,
  in this poem, the region of death. (A key to this
  geographical symbolism can be found in A.J.
  Smith's concise notation in the Penguin Classics
  edition of Donne's Complete English Poems.) The
  speaker says that his discovery is made Per
  fretum febris, or by the strait of fever, and
  that he will die "by these straits."
• Donne employs an elaborate pun on the
  idea of "straits," a word that denotes the narrow
  passages of water that connect oceans, yet which
  also refers to grim personal difficulties (as in
  "dire straights") Donne's personal struggles
  with his illness are like the straits that will
  connect him to the paradise of the Pacific Sea,
  Jerusalem, and the eastern riches no matter
  where one is in the world--in the region of
  Japhet, Cham, or Shem--such treasures can only be
  reached through straits. (Japhet, Cham, and Shem
  were the sons of Noah, who divided the world
  between them after the ark came to rest Japhet
  lived in Europe, Cham lived in Africa, and Shem
  lived in Asia.)

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• Essentially, all of this word play and
  allusion is merely another way of saying that
  Donne expects his fever to lead him to heaven
  (even on his deathbed, his mind delighted in
  spinning metaphysical complexities). The speaker
  says that on maps, west and east are one--if one
  travels far enough in either direction, one ends
  up on the other side of the map--and, therefore,
  his death in the "west" will lead to his
  "eastern" resurrection.
• He then shifts to a dramatically different
  set of images, claiming that Christ's Cross and
  Adam's tree stood physically on the same place,
  and that by the same token, both the
  characteristics of Adam (sin and toil) and of
  Christ (resurrection and purity) are present in
  Donne himself The phrase "Look Lord, and find
  both Adams met in me" is Donne's most perfect
  statement of the contrary strains of spirituality
  and carnality that run through his poems and ran
  through his life. As the sweat of the first Adam
  (who was cursed to work after expulsion from
  Eden) surrounds his face in his fever, he hopes
  the blood of Christ, the second Adam, will
  embrace and purify his soul.
• Donne concludes by charting his actual
  entry into heaven, saying that he hopes to be
  received by God wrapped in the purple garment of
  Christ--purple with blood and with triumph--and
  to obtain his crown. As his final poetic act, he
  writes a sermon for his own soul, just as he
  preached sermons to the souls of others during
  his years as a priest. The Lord, he says, throws
  down that he may raise up Donne, thrown down by
  the fever, will be lifted up to heaven, where his
  soul, having been "tuned" now on Earth, may be
  used to make the music of God.

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Metaphysical Poets

• A term used to group together certain
  17th-century poet, usually Donne, Marvell,
  Vaughan and Traherne, though other figures like
  Abraham Cowley are sometimes included in the
  list. Although in no sense a school or proper
  movement, they share common characteristics of
  wit, inventiveness, and a love of elaborate
  stylistic manoeuvres.

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The Metaphysical poets turned to the medieval
scholastic philosophers for stylistic
inspiration, borrowing from them the terminology
and the difficulty of their style of argument.
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The Metaphysical Conceit

• Just as did the Petrarchan sonneteers, Donne
  and his followers had their own metaphysical
  conceits.
• Samuel Johnson described their conceits as
• A kind of discordia concors (harmony or
  unity gained by combining disparate or
  conflicting elements) a combination of
  dissimilar images, or discovery of occult
  resemblances in things apparently unlike. The
  most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence
  together.
• Put more simply, a metaphysical conceit is
  what we would call an extended metaphor, a
  comparison between two relatively unlike
  entities.
• The most famous sustain conceit is Donnes
  drawing of parallels between
• -the continuing relationship of his
  personas soul with that of his beloveds
  (despite their physical parting)
• -the coordinated movements of the two feet
  of a compass