47-) English Literature

47- ) English Literature 

Henry Vaughan 

Henry Vaughan (born April 17, 1622, Llansantffraed, Breconshire, Wales—died April 23, 1695, Llansantffraed), Anglo-Welsh poet and mystic remarkable for the range and intensity of his spiritual intuitions.

Educated at Oxford and studying law in London, Vaughan was recalled home in 1642 when the first Civil War broke out, and he remained there the rest of his life.

He was a Welsh metaphysical poet, author and translator writing in English, and a medical physician. His religious poetry appeared in Silex Scintillans in 1650, with a second part in 1655. In 1646 his Poems, with the Tenth Satire of Juvenal Englished was published. Meanwhile he had been persuaded by reading the religious poet George Herbert to renounce "idle verse". The prose Mount of Olives and Solitary Devotions (1652) show his authenticity and depth of convictions. Two more volumes of secular verse followed, ostensibly without his sanction, but it is his religious verse that has been acclaimed. He also translated short moral and religious works and two medical works in prose. In the 1650s he began a lifelong medical practice.

Henry Vaughan, the major Welsh poet of the Commonwealth period, has been among the writers benefiting most from the twentieth-century revival of interest in the poetry of John Donne and his followers. Vaughan's early poems, notably those published in the Poems of 1646 and Olor Iscanus of 1651, place him among the "Sons of Ben," in the company of other imitators of Ben Jonson, such as the Cavalier poets Sir William Davenant and Thomas Carew. His poetry from the late 1640s and 1650s, however, published in the two editions of Silex Scintillans (1650, 1655), makes clear his extensive knowledge of the poetry of Donne and, especially, of George Herbert.

Even though Vaughan would publish a final collection of poems with the title Thalia Rediviva in 1678, his reputation rests primarily on the achievement of Silex Scintillans. In the preface to the 1655 edition Vaughan described Herbert as a "blessed man ... whose holy life and verse gained many pious Converts (of whom I am the least)." Vaughan's transition from the influence of the Jacobean neoclassical poets to the Metaphysicals was one manifestation of his reaction to the English Civil War. During the time the Church of England was outlawed and radical Protestantism was in ascendancy, Vaughan kept faith with Herbert's church through his poetic response to Herbert's Temple (1633).

Early life

Henry Vaughan was born at Newton by Usk in the Llansantffraed (St. Bridget's) parish of Brecknockshire, the eldest known child of Thomas Vaughan (c. 1586–1658) of Tretower and Denise Jenkin (born c. 1593), the only daughter and heir of David and Gwenllian Morgan of Llansantffraed. Vaughan had a twin brother, Thomas Vaughan, who became a philosopher and alchemist.

In his letters to Aubrey, Henry Vaughan reported that he was the elder of twin sons born to Thomas and Denise Vaughan of Newton-by-Usk, in Saint Bridget's parish, Brecknockshire, Wales, sometime in 1621. Seven years later, in 1628, a third son, William, was born. William died in 1648, an event that may have contributed to Vaughan's shift from secular to religious topics in his poetry. Henry and his twin, Thomas, grew up on a small estate in the parish of Llanssantffread, Brecknockshire, bequeathed to Vaughan's mother by her father, David Morgan. Denise and Thomas, Sr., were both Welsh; Thomas, Sr.'s home was at Tretower Court, a few miles from Newton, from which he moved to his wife's estate after their marriage in 1611. It is likely that Vaughan grew up bilingual, in English and Welsh."

Vaughan's life and that of his twin brother are intertwined in the historical record. Both grew up on the family estate; both were taught for six years as children by the Reverend Matthew Herbert, deemed by Vaughan in "Ad Posteros" as "the pride of our Latinity." Under Herbert's guidance in his "shaping season" Vaughan remembered that "Method and Love, and mind and hand conspired" to prepare him for university studies. Wood described Herbert as "a noted Schoolmaster of his time," who was serving as the rector of Llangattock, a parish adjacent to the one in which the Vaughan family lived."

Of Vaughan's early years little more is known beyond the information given in his letters to Aubrey and Wood. Images of childhood occur in his mature poetry, but their autobiographical value is unclear. "The Retreate," from the 1650 edition of Silex Scintillans, is representative; here Vaughan's speaker wishes for "backward steps" to return him to "those early dayes" when he "Shin'd in my Angell-infancy." As seen here, Vaughan's references to childhood are typically sweeping in their generalizations and are heavily idealized. Inevitably, they are colored by the speaker's lament for the interruptions in English religious life wrought by the Civil War. From the perspective of Vaughan's late twenties, when the Commonwealth party was in ascendancy and the Church of England abolished, the past of his youth seemed a time closer to God, during which "this fleshly dresse" could sense "Bright shootes of everlastingnesse."

In "Childe-hood," published in the 1655 edition of Silex Scintillans , Vaughan returns to this theme; here childhood is a time of "white designs," a "Dear, harmless age," an "age of mysteries," "the short, swift span, where weeping virtue parts with man; / Where love without lust dwells, and bends / What way we please, without self-ends." Now, in the early 1650s, a time even more dominated by the efforts of the Commonwealth to change habits of government, societal structure, and religion, Vaughan's speaker finds himself separated from the world of his youth, before these changes; "I cannot reach it," he claims, "and my striving eye / Dazles at it, as at eternity."

Vaughan was kin to two powerful Welsh families, one Catholic, one Protestant. His paternal grandfather, William, owned Tretower Court. His paternal grandmother, Frances, was the natural daughter of Thomas Somerset, who spent some 24 years in the Tower of London for adhering to Catholicism. As she survived into Vaughan's boyhood, there may have been some direct Catholic influence on his early nurturing. Vaughan shared ancestry with the Herbert family through the daughter of a famous Welsh knight, Dafydd Gam, slain at Agincourt, the "Davy Gam, esquire" of William Shakespeare's Henry V. He is not known to have claimed kinship with George Herbert, but may have been aware of the tie.

There is evidence that Vaughan's father and mother, although of the Welsh landed gentry, struggled financially. For the first sixteen years of their marriage, Thomas Vaughan, Sr., was frequently in court in an effort to secure his wife's inheritance. The home in which Vaughan grew up was relatively small, as were the homes of many Welsh gentry, and it produced a modest annual income. At Thomas Vaughan, Sr.'s death in 1658, the value of the property that Henry inherited was appraised at five pounds."

Nevertheless, there are other grounds for concluding that Vaughan looked back on his youth with some fondness. Vaughan's family has been aptly described as being of modest means but considerable antiquity, and Vaughan seems to have valued deeply his ancestry. With the world before him, he chose to spend his adult years in Wales, adopting the title "The Silurist," to claim for himself connection with an ancient tribe of Britons, the Silures, supposedly early inhabitants of southeastern Wales."

Vaughan would maintain his Welsh connection; except for his years of study in Oxford and London, he spent his entire adult life in Brecknockshire on the estate where he was born and which he inherited from his parents. In "The Praise and Happinesse of the Countrie-Life" (1651), Vaughan's translation of a Spanish work by Antonio de Grevara, he celebrates the rural as opposed to the courtly or urban life. Without the temptations to vanity and the inherent malice and cruelty of city or court, he argues, the one who dwells on his own estate experiences happiness, contentment, and the confidence that his heirs will grow up in the best of worlds."

This delight in the rural is also manifest in Vaughan's occasional use in his poetry of features of the Welsh landscape--the river Usk and the diversity of wildlife found in the dense woodlands, hills, and mountains of south Wales. Yet Vaughan's praise for the natural setting of Wales in Olor Iscanus is often as much an exercise in convention as it is an attempt at accurate description. Seeking in "To the River Isca" to "redeem" the river Usk from "oblivious night," Vaughan compares it favorably to other literary rivers such as Petrarch's Tiber and Sir Philip Sidney's Thames. Proclaiming the quality of its "green banks," "Mild, dewie nights, and Sun-shine dayes," as well as its "gentle Swains" and "beauteous Nymphs," Vaughan hopes that as a result of his praise "all Bards born after me" will "sing of thee," because the borders of the river form "The Land redeem'd from all disorders!"

As the eldest of the twins, Henry was his father's heir; following the conventional pattern, Henry inherited his father's estate when the elder Vaughan died in 1658. Eventually he would enter a learned profession; although he never earned an M.D., he wrote Aubrey on 15 June 1673 that he had been practicing medicine "for many yeares with good successe." His brother Thomas was ordained a priest of the Church of England sometime in the 1640s and was rector of Saint Bridget's Church, Llansantffread, until he was evicted by the Puritan forces in 1650. Their former teacher Herbert was also evicted from his living at this time yet persisted in functioning as a priest for his former parishioners."

Education

There is no independent record of Henry's university education, but it is known that Thomas Vaughan, Jr., was admitted to Jesus College, Oxford, on 4 May 1638. Matriculating on 14 December 1638, Thomas was in residence there "ten or 12 years," achieving "no less" than an M.A. degree, Henry wrote to Aubrey. Concerning himself, Henry recorded that he "stayed not att Oxford to take any degree, but was sent to London, beinge then designed by my father for the study of Law." As a result most biographers of Vaughan posit him as "going up" to Oxford with his brother Thomas in 1638 but leaving Oxford for London and the Inns of Court about 1640."

 

Thomas Vaughan later remarked that "English is a Language the Author was not born to." Both boys were sent to school under Matthew Herbert, Rector of Llangattock, to whom both wrote tributes. Matthew Herbert may have reinforced a devotion to church and monarchy the boys had learnt at home. Like several of Vaughan's clerical acquaintances, he later proved uncompromising during the interregnum. He was imprisoned, his property was seized, and he narrowly avoided banishment.

The buttery books of Jesus College, Oxford show Thomas Vaughan being admitted in May 1638. It is thought that Henry went up at the same time; Anthony Wood states, "He made his first entry into Jesus College in Michaelmas term 1638, aged 17 years. There is no clear record to establish Henry's residence or matriculation, but the assumption of his association with Oxford, supported by his inclusion in Athenae Oxoniensis, is reasonable enough."

Recent research in the Jesus College archives, however, suggests that Henry did not enter Jesus College before 1641, unless he did so in 1639 without matriculating or paying an admission fee, and left before the record in the surviving buttery books resumes in December of that year. It has been suggested that Henry went to Oxford later, after Thomas, based on poems each wrote for a 1651 edition of the Comedies, Tragi-Comedies, with Other Poems of William Cartwright, who had died in 1643. Thomas had clearly attended Cartwright's lectures, which were a draw at the time: "When He did read, how did we flock to hear!" Henry apparently had not, as his poem "Upon the poems and plays of the ever-memorable Mr William Cartwright" begins with the words, "I did but see thee." This and the 1647 poem "Upon Mr Fletcher's plays" are celebrations of Royalist volumes that implied "a reaffirmation of Cavalier ideals and a gesture of defiance against the society which had repudiated them."

As the Civil War developed, Vaughan was recalled home from London, initially to serve as a secretary to Sir Marmaduke Lloyd, a chief justice on the Brecknockshire circuit and staunch royalist. Vaughan is thought to have served briefly in the Royalist army. On his return, he began to practise medicine.

By 1646, Vaughan had married Catherine Wise, with whom he reared a son, Thomas, and three daughters, Lucy, Frances, and Catherine. His courtship with his first wife is reflected in "Upon the Priory Grove", in his first volume of poetry, Poems, with the Tenth Satire of Juvenal Englished (1646). After his first wife's death, he married her sister, Elizabeth, probably in 1655.

The easy allusions to "the Towne," amid the "noise / Of Drawers, Prentises, and boyes," in poems such as "To my Ingenuous Friend, R. W." are evidence of Vaughan's time in London. In "A Rhapsodie" he describes meeting friends at the Globe Tavern for "rich Tobacco ... / And royall, witty Sacke." There is no official record of his attendance at an Inn of Court, nor did he ever pursue law as a career. Instead the record suggests he had at this time other inns in mind. In his first published poetry Vaughan clearly seeks to evoke the world of Jonson's tavern society, the subject of much contemporary remembrance. Jonson had died in 1637; "Great BEN," as Vaughan recalled him, was much in the minds and verse of his "Sons" in the late 1630s. In his Poems with the Muses Looking-Glasse (1638) Thomas Randolph remembered his election as a Son of Ben; Carew's Poems (1640) and Sir John Suckling's Fragmenta Aurea (1646) also include evocations of the witty London tavern society to which Vaughan came late, yet with which he still aspired to associate himself throughout Poems."

Yet even in the midst of such celebration of sack and the country life--and of praise for poets such as John Fletcher or William Cartwright, also linked with the memory of Jonson--Vaughan introduces a more sober tone. The London that Vaughan had known in the early 1640s was as much the city of political controversy and gathering clouds of war as the city of taverns and good verses. Olor Iscanus also includes elegies on the deaths of two friends, one in the Royalist defeat at Routon Heath in 1645 and the other at the siege of Pontefract in 1649. Vaughan's return to the country from London, recorded in Olor Iscanus from the perspective of Jonsonian neoclassical celebration, also reflected a Royalist retreat from growing Puritan cultural and political domination."

Secular works

Vaughan took his literary inspiration from his native environment and chose the descriptive name "Silurist", derived from his homage to the Silures, a Celtic tribe of pre-Roman south Wales that strongly resisted the Romans. The name reflects the love Vaughan felt for the Welsh mountains of his home, in what is now part of the Brecon Beacons National Park and the River Usk valley, where he spent most of his early and professional life.

By 1647, Vaughan with his wife and children had chosen life in the countryside. This was the setting in which Vaughan wrote Olor Iscanus (The Swan of Usk). However, it was not published until 1651, over three years after it was written, which presumably reflects some crisis in Vaughan's life. During those years, his grandfather William Vaughan died and he was evicted from his living in Llansantffraed. Vaughan later decried the publication, having "long ago condemned these poems to obscurity."

Olor Iscanus is filled with odd words and similes that beg attention, despite its dark and morbid cognitive appeal. It is founded on crises felt in Vaughan's homeland, Brecknockshire. No major battle was fought there in the Civil War, but the effects of the war were deeply felt by him and his community. The Puritan Parliament visited misfortune, ejecting Anglicans and Royalists. Vaughan also lost his home at that time.

There is a marked difference in the atmosphere Vaughan attempts to convey in this work and in his most famous work, Silex Scintillans. Olor Iscanus represents a specific period in Vaughan's life, which emphasises other secular writers and provides allusions to debt and happy living. A fervent topic of Vaughan throughout the poems is the Civil War, and it reveals Vaughan's somewhat paradoxical thinking, which ultimately fails to show whether he took part or not. Vaughan states complete satisfaction at being clean of "innocent blood", but also provides seemingly eyewitness accounts of battles and his own "soldiery". Although Vaughan is thought to have been a Royalist, these poems express contempt for all current authority and show a lack of zeal for the Royalist cause.: s9, p. 21  His poems generally reflect a sense of severe decline, which may mean he lamented the effects of the war on the monarchy and society. His short poem "The Timber", ostensibly about a dead tree, concludes: "thy strange resentment after death / Means only those who broke – in life – thy peace."

Olor Iscanus includes translations from the Latin of Ovid, Boethius, and the Polish poet Casimir Sarbiewski.

Conversion and sacred poetry

It was not until the writing of Silex Scintillans that Vaughan received significant acclaim. The period shortly preceding the publication of the first volume of the work (1650) marked an important period of his life. Certain indications in the first volume and explicit statements in the preface to the second volume (1655) suggest that Vaughan suffered a prolonged sickness that inflicted much pain. Vaughan interprets this experience as an encounter with death that alerted him to a "misspent youth". Vaughan believed he had been spared to make amends and start a new course not only in his life but in the literature he would produce. He described his previous work as foul and a contribution to "corrupt literature". Perhaps the most notable mark of Vaughan's conversion is how much it is credited to George Herbert. Vaughan claims he is the least of Herbert's many "pious converts". The influence of Herbert's poetry has been widely noted, with many of Vaughan's works based on works by Herbert. It was during this period of Vaughan's life, around 1650, that he adopted the saying "Moriendo, revixi" – by dying, I gain new life.

The first volume of Silex Scintillans was followed by The Mount of Olives, or Solitary Devotions (1652), a prose book of devotions providing prayers for various stages in the day, for prayer in church and for other purposes. It appears as a "companion volume" to the Book of Common Prayer, to which it alludes frequently, although it had been outlawed under the Commonwealth. The work was also influenced by Lancelot Andrewes's Preces Privatae (1615) and John Cosin's Collection of Private Devotions (1627). Flores Solitudinis (1654) contains translations from the Latin of two works by the Spanish Jesuit Juan Eusebio Nieremberg, one by a 5th-century Bishop of Lyon, Eucherius, and by Paulinus of Nola, of whom Vaughan wrote a prose life.

Vaughan practised medicine, perhaps as early as the 1640s. He attached to the second volume of Silex Scintillans (1655) a translation of Henry Nollius's Hermetical Physick. He went on to produce a translation of Nollius's The Chymists Key in 1657.

46-) English Literature

46-) English Learning

John Donne 

  Poetry of John Donne

Because almost none of Donne’s poetry was published during his lifetime, it is difficult to date it accurately. Most of his poems were preserved in manuscript copies made by and passed among a relatively small but admiring coterie of poetry lovers. Most current scholars agree, however, that the elegies (which in Donne’s case are poems of love, not of mourning), epigrams, verse letters, and satires were written in the 1590s, the Songs and Sonnets from the 1590s until 1617, and the “Holy Sonnets” and other religious lyrics from the time of Donne’s marriage until his ordination in 1615. He composed the hymns late in his life, in the 1620s. Donne’s Anniversaries were published in 1611–12 and were the only important poetic works by him published in his lifetime.

Donne’s poetry is marked by strikingly original departures from the conventions of 16th-century English verse, particularly that of Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser. Even his early satires and elegies, which derive from classical Latin models, contain versions of his experiments with genre, form, and imagery. His poems contain few descriptive passages like those in Spenser, nor do his lines follow the smooth metrics and euphonious sounds of his predecessors. Donne replaced their mellifluous lines with a speaking voice whose vocabulary and syntax reflect the emotional intensity of a confrontation and whose metrics and verbal music conform to the needs of a particular dramatic situation. One consequence of this is a directness of language that electrifies his mature poetry. “For Godsake hold your tongue, and let me love,” begins his love poem “The Canonization,” plunging the reader into the midst of an encounter between the speaker and an unidentified listener. Holy Sonnet XI opens with an imaginative confrontation wherein Donne, not Jesus, suffers indignities on the cross: “Spit in my face yee Jewes, and pierce my side….”

rom these explosive beginnings, the poems develop as closely reasoned arguments or propositions that rely heavily on the use of the conceit—i.e., an extended metaphor that draws an ingenious parallel between apparently dissimilar situations or objects. Donne, however, transformed the conceit into a vehicle for transmitting multiple, sometimes even contradictory, feelings and ideas. And, changing again the practice of earlier poets, he drew his imagery from such diverse fields as alchemy, astronomy, medicine, politics, global exploration, and philosophical disputation. Donne’s famous analogy of parting lovers to a drawing compass affords a prime example. The immediate shock of some of his conceits aroused Samuel Johnson to call them “heterogeneous ideas…yoked by violence together.” Upon reflection, however, these conceits offer brilliant and multiple insights into the subject of the metaphor and help give rise to the much-praised ambiguity of Donne’s lyrics.

The presence of a listener is another of Donne’s modifications of the Renaissance love lyric, in which the lovers lament, hope, and dissect their feelings without facing their ladies. Donne, by contrast, speaks directly to the lady or some other listener. The latter may even determine the course of the poem, as in “The Flea,” in which the speaker changes his tack once the woman crushes the insect on which he has built his argument about the innocence of lovemaking. But for all their dramatic intensity, Donne’s poems still maintain the verbal music and introspective approach that define lyric poetry. His speakers may fashion an imaginary figure to whom they utter their lyric outburst, or, conversely, they may lapse into reflection in the midst of an address to a listener. “But O, selfe traytor,” the forlorn lover cries in “Twickham Garden” as he transforms part of his own psyche into a listener. Donne also departs from earlier lyrics by adapting the syntax and rhythms of living speech to his poetry, as in “I wonder by my troth, what thou, and I/Did, till we lov’d?”. Taken together, these features of his poetry provided an impetus for the works of such later poets as Robert Browning, William Butler Yeats, and T.S. Eliot.

Donne also radically adapted some of the standard materials of love lyrics. For example, even though he continued to use such Petrarchan conceits as “parting from one’s beloved is death,” a staple of Renaissance love poetry, he either turned the comparisons into comedy, as when the man in “The Apparition” envisions himself as a ghost haunting his unfaithful lady, or he subsumed them into the texture of his poem, as the title “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” exemplifies. Donne’s love lyrics provide keen psychological insights about a broad range of lovers and a wide spectrum of amorous feelings. His speakers range from lustful men so sated by their numerous affairs that they denounce love as a fiction and women as objects—food, birds of prey, mummies—to platonic lovers who celebrate both the magnificence of their ladies and their own miraculous abstention from consummating their love. Men whose love is unrequited feel victimized and seek revenge on their ladies, only to realize the ineffectuality of their retaliation. In the poems of mutual love, however, Donne’s lovers rejoice in the compatibility of their sexual and spiritual love and seek immortality for an emotion that they elevate to an almost religious plane.

Donne’s devotional lyrics, especially the “Holy Sonnets,” “Good Friday 1613, Riding Westward,” and the hymns, passionately explore his love for God, sometimes through sexual metaphors, and depict his doubts, fears, and sense of spiritual unworthiness. None of them shows him spiritually at peace.

The most sustained of Donne’s poems, the Anniversaries, were written to commemorate the death of Elizabeth Drury, the 14-year-old daughter of his patron, Sir Robert Drury. These poems subsume their ostensible subject into a philosophical meditation on the decay of the world. Elizabeth Drury becomes, as Donne noted, “the Idea of a woman,” and a lost pattern of virtue. Through this idealized feminine figure, Donne in The First Anniversarie: An Anatomie of the World laments humanity’s spiritual death, beginning with the loss of Eden and continuing in the decay of the contemporary world, in which men have lost the wisdom that connects them to God. In The Second Anniversarie: Of the Progres of the Soule, Donne, partly through a eulogy on Elizabeth Drury, ultimately regains the wisdom that directs him toward eternal life.

Prose of John Donne

Donne’s earliest prose works, Paradoxes and Problems, probably were begun during his days as a student at Lincoln’s Inn. These witty and insouciant paradoxes defend such topics as women’s inconstancy and pursue such questions as “Why do women delight much in feathers?” and “Why are Courtiers sooner Atheists than men of other conditions?” While living in despair at Mitcham in 1608, Donne wrote a casuistic defense of suicide entitled Biathanatos. His own contemplation of suicide, he states, prompted in him “a charitable interpretation of theyr Action, who dye so.” Donne’s Pseudo-Martyr, published in 1610, attacks the recusants’ unwillingness to swear the oath of allegiance to the king, which Roman Catholics were required to do after the Gunpowder Plot (1605). The treatise so pleased James I that he had Oxford confer an honorary master of arts degree on Donne. In 1610 Donne also wrote a prose satire on the Jesuits entitled Ignatius His Conclave, in both Latin and English.

In 1611 Donne completed his Essays in Divinity, the first of his theological works. Upon recovering from a life-threatening illness, Donne in 1623 wrote Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, the most enduring of his prose works. Each of its 23 devotions consists of a meditation, an expostulation, and a prayer, all occasioned by some event in Donne’s illness, such as the arrival of the king’s personal physician or the application of pigeons to draw vapours from Donne’s head. The Devotions correlate Donne’s physical decline with spiritual sickness, until both reach a climax when Donne hears the tolling of a passing bell (16, 17, 18) and questions whether the bell is ringing for him. Like Donne’s poetry, the Devotions are notable for their dramatic immediacy and their numerous Metaphysical conceits, such as the well-known “No man is an Iland,” by which Donne illustrates the unity of all Christians in the mystical body of Christ.

It is Donne’s sermons, however, that most powerfully illustrate his mastery of prose. One-hundred and fifty-six of them were published by his son in three great folio editions (1640, 1649, and 1661). Though composed during a time of religious controversy, Donne’s sermons—intellectual, witty, and deeply moving—explore the basic tenets of Christianity rather than engage in theological disputes. Donne brilliantly analyzed Biblical texts and applied them to contemporary events, such as the outbreak of plague that devastated London in 1625. The power of his sermons derives from their dramatic intensity, candid personal revelations, poetic rhythms, and striking conceits.

Style

His work has received much criticism over the years, especially concerning his metaphysical form. Donne is generally considered the most prominent member of the metaphysical poets, a phrase coined in 1781 by Samuel Johnson, following a comment on Donne by John Dryden. Dryden had written of Donne in 1693: "He affects the metaphysics, not only in his satires, but in his amorous 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 softnesses of love."

In Life of Cowley (from Samuel Johnson's 1781 work of biography and criticism Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets), Johnson refers to the beginning of the 17th century in which there "appeared a race of writers that may be termed the metaphysical poets". Donne's immediate successors in poetry therefore tended to regard his works with ambivalence, with the Neoclassical poets regarding his conceits as abuse of the metaphor. However, he was revived by Romantic poets such as Coleridge and Browning, though his more recent revival in the early 20th century by poets such as T. S. Eliot and critics like F. R. Leavis tended to portray him, with approval, as an anti-Romantic.

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. One of the most famous of Donne's conceits is found in "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" where he compares the apartness of two separated lovers to the working of the 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 classical-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.

Legacy

Donne is remembered in the Calendar of Saints of the Church of England, the Episcopal Church liturgical calendar and the Calendar of Saints of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America for his life as both poet and priest. His commemoration is on 31 March.

During his lifetime several likenesses were made of the poet. The earliest was the anonymous portrait of 1594 now in the National Portrait Gallery, London, which was restored in 2012. One of the earliest Elizabethan portraits of an author, the fashionably dressed poet is shown darkly brooding on his love. The portrait was described in Donne's will as "that picture of myne wych is taken in the shaddowes", and bequeathed by him to Robert Kerr, 1st Earl of Ancram. Other paintings include a 1616 head and shoulders after Isaac Oliver, also in the National Portrait Gallery, and a 1622 head and shoulders in the Victoria and Albert Museum. In 1911, the young Stanley Spencer devoted a visionary painting to John Donne arriving in heaven (1911) which is now in the Fitzwilliam Museum.

Donne's reception until the 20th century was influenced by the publication of his writings in the 17th century. Because Donne avoided publication during his life, the majority of his works were brought to the press by others in the decades after his death. These publications present what Erin McCarthy calls a "teleological narrative of Donne's growth" from young rake "Jack Donne" to reverend divine "Dr. Donne". For example, while the first edition of Poems, by J. D. (1633) mingled amorous and pious verse indiscriminately, all editions after 1635 separated poems into "Songs and Sonnets" and "Divine Poems". This organization "promulgated the tale of Jack Donne's transformation into Doctor Donne and made it the dominant way of understanding Donne's life and work."

A similar effort to justify Donne's early writings appeared in the publication of his prose. This pattern can be seen in a 1652 volume that combines texts from throughout Donne's career, including flippant works like Ignatius His Conclave and more pious writings like Essays in Divinity. In the preface, Donne's son "unifies the otherwise disparate texts around an impression of Donne's divinity" by comparing his father's varied writing to Jesus' miracles. Christ "began his first Miracle here, by turning Water into Wine, and made it his last to ascend from Earth to Heaven."

Donne first wrote "things conducing to cheerfulness & entertainment of Mankind," and later "change[d] his conversation from Men to Angels." Another figure who contributed to Donne's legacy as a rake-turned-preacher was Donne's first biographer Izaak Walton. Walton's biography separated Donne's life into two stages, comparing Donne's life to the transformation of St. Paul. Walton writes, "where [Donne] had been a Saul… in his irregular youth," he became "a Paul, and preach[ed] salvation to his brethren."

The idea that Donne's writings reflect two distinct stages of his life remains common; however, many scholars have challenged this understanding. In 1948, Evelyn Simpson wrote, "a close study of his works... makes it clear that his was no case of dual personality. He was not a Jekyll-Hyde in Jacobean dress... There is an essential unity underlying the flagrant and manifold contradictions of his temperament."

In literature

After Donne's death, a number of poetical tributes were paid to him, of which one of the principal (and most difficult to follow) was his friend Lord Herbert of Cherbury's "Elegy for Doctor Donne". Posthumous editions of Donne's poems were accompanied by several "Elegies upon the Author" over the course of the next two centuries. Six of these were written by fellow churchmen, others by such courtly writers as Thomas Carew, Sidney Godolphin and Endymion Porter. In 1963 came Joseph Brodsky's "The Great Elegy for John Donne".

Beginning in the 20th century, several historical novels appeared taking as their subject various episodes in Donne's life. His courtship of Anne More is the subject of Elizabeth Gray Vining's Take Heed of Loving Me: A novel about John Donne (1963) and Maeve Haran's The Lady and the Poet (2010 Both characters also make interspersed appearances in Mary Novik's Conceit (2007), where the main focus is on their rebellious daughter Pegge. English treatments include Garry O'Connor's Death's Duel: a novel of John Donne (2015), which deals with the poet as a young man.

He also plays a significant role in Christie Dickason's The Noble Assassin (2012), a novel based on the life of Donne's patron and (the author claims) his lover, Lucy Russell, Countess of Bedford. Finally there is Bryan Crockett's Love's Alchemy: a John Donne Mystery (2015), in which the poet, blackmailed into service in Robert Cecil's network of spies, attempts to avert political disaster and at the same time outwit Cecil.

Musical settings

There were musical settings of Donne's lyrics even during his lifetime and in the century following his death. These included Alfonso Ferrabosco the younger's ("So, so, leave off this last lamenting kisse" in his 1609 Ayres); John Cooper's ("The Message"); Henry Lawes' ("Break of Day"); John Dowland's ("Break of Day" and "To ask for all thy love"); and settings of "A Hymn to God the Father" by John Hilton the youngerand Pelham Humfrey (published 1688).

After the 17th century, there were no more until the start of the 20th century with Havergal Brian ("A nocturnal on St Lucy's Day", first performed in 1905), Eleanor Everest Freer ("Break of Day, published in 1905) and Walford Davies ("The Cross", 1909) among the earliest. In 1916–18, the composer Hubert Parry set Donne's "Holy Sonnet 7" ("At the round earth's imagined corners") to music in his choral work, Songs of Farewell. Regina Hansen Willman (1914-1965) set Donne's "First Holy Sonnet" for voice and string trio. In 1945, Benjamin Britten set nine of Donne's Holy Sonnets in his song cycle for voice and piano The Holy Sonnets of John Donne. in 1968, Williametta Spencer used Donne's text for her choral work "At the Round Earth's Imagined Corners." Among them is also the choral setting of "Negative Love" that opens Harmonium (1981), as well as the aria setting of "Holy Sonnet XIV" at the end of the 1st act of Doctor Atomic, both by John Adams.

There have been settings in popular music as well. One is the version of the song "Go and Catch a Falling Star" on John Renbourn's debut album John Renbourn (1966), in which the last line is altered to "False, ere I count one, two, three". On their 1992 album Duality, the English Neoclassical dark wave band In the Nursery used a recitation of the entirety of Donne's "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" for the track "Mecciano" and an augmented version of "A Fever" for the track "Corruption." Prose texts by Donne have also been set to music. In 1954, Priaulx Rainier set some in her Cycle for Declamation for solo voice. In 2009, the American Jennifer Higdon composed the choral piece On the Death of the Righteous, based on Donne's sermons. Still more recent is the Russian minimalist Anton Batagov's " I Fear No More, selected songs and meditations of John Donne" (2015).

Works

The Flea (1590s) ,Biathanatos (1608),Pseudo-Martyr (1610) ,Ignatius His Conclave (1611) ,A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning (1611) , The Courtier's Library (1611, published 1651) ,The First Anniversary: An Anatomy of the World (1611) ,The Second Anniversary: Of the Progress of the Soul (1612) , Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624) ,The Good-Morrow (1633)

The Canonization (1633) , Holy Sonnets (1633) , As Due By Many Titles (1633)

Death Be Not Proud (1633) ,The Sun Rising (1633) , The Dream (1633) ,Elegy XIX: To His Mistress Going to Bed (1633) ,Batter my heart, three-person'd God (1633) ,Poems (1633)    ,Juvenilia: or Certain Paradoxes and Problems (1633) , LXXX Sermons (1640) ,Fifty Sermons (1649) , Essays in Divinity (1651)  , Letters to severall persons of honour (1651)

XXVI Sermons (1661) , A Hymn to God the Father (unknown)

Reputation and influence

The first two editions of Donne’s Poems were published posthumously, in 1633 and 1635, after having circulated widely in manuscript copies. The Poems were sufficiently popular to be published eight times within 90 years of Donne’s death, but his work was not to the general taste of the 18th century, when he was regarded as a great but eccentric “wit.” The notable exception to that appraisal was Alexander Pope, who admired Donne’s intellectual virtuosity and echoed some of Donne’s lines in his own poetry. From the early 19th century, however, perceptive readers began to recognize Donne’s poetic genius. Robert Browning credited Donne with providing the germ for his own dramatic monologues. By the 20th century, mainly because of the pioneering work of the literary scholar H.J.C. Grierson and the interest of T.S. Eliot, Donne’s poetry experienced a remarkable revival.

The impression in his poetry that thought and argument are arising immediately out of passionate feeling made Donne the master of both the mature Yeats and Eliot, who were reacting against the meditative lyricism of a Romantic tradition in decline. Indeed, the play of intellect in Donne’s poetry, his scorn of conventionally poetic images, and the dramatic realism of his style made him the idol of English-speaking poets and critics in the first half of the 20th century. Readers continue to find stimulus in Donne’s fusion of witty argument with passion, his dramatic rendering of complex states of mind, his daring and unhackneyed images, and his ability (little if at all inferior to William Shakespeare’s) to make common words yield up rich poetic meaning without distorting the essential quality of English idiom.

45-) English Learning

45-) English Learning

John Donne 

Writings

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 reflected his strongly satiric view of a society populated by fools and knaves. 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. Donne did not publish these poems, although they circulated widely in manuscript form. One such, a previously unknown manuscript that is believed to be one of the largest contemporary collections of Donne's work (among that of others), was found at Melford Hall in November 2018.

Some have speculated that Donne's numerous illnesses, financial strain and the deaths of his friends all contributed to the development of a more sombre 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 of Hawstead, Suffolk. 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 increasing gloominess of Donne's tone may also be observed in the religious works that he began writing during the same period. Having converted to the Anglican Church, Donne quickly became noted for his sermons and religious poems. Towards the end of his life Donne wrote works that challenged death, and the fear that it inspired in many, 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, "Death Be Not Proud".

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; death becomes merely another process of life, in which the 'winding sheet' of the womb is the same as that of the grave. Hope is seen in salvation and immortality through an embrace of God, Christ and the Resurrection.

Donne’s love poetry was written nearly 400 years ago; yet one reason for its appeal is that it speaks to us as directly and urgently as if we overhear a present confidence. For instance, a lover who is about to board ship for a long voyage turns back to share a last intimacy with his mistress: “Here take my picture” (Elegy V). Two lovers who have turned their backs upon a threatening world in “The Good Morrow“ celebrate their discovery of a new world in each other:

Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone,

Let maps to others, worlds on worlds have shown,

Let us possess one world, each hath one, and is one.

The poetry inhabits an exhilaratingly unpredictable world in which wariness and quick wits are at a premium. The more perilous the encounters of clandestine lovers, the greater zest they have for their pleasures, whether they seek to outwit the disapproving world, or a jealous husband, or a forbidding and deeply suspicious father, as in Elegy 4, “The Perfume”:

Though he had wont to search with glazed eyes,

As though he came to kill a cockatrice,

Though he have oft sworn, that he would remove

Thy beauty’s beauty, and food of our love,

Hope of his goods, if I with thee were seen,

Yet close and secret, as our souls, we have been.

Exploiting and being exploited are taken as conditions of nature, which we share on equal terms with the beasts of the jungle and the ocean. In “Metempsychosis” a whale and a holder of great office behave in precisely the same way:

He hunts not fish, but as an officer,

Stays in his court, as his own net, and there

All suitors of all sorts themselves enthral;

So on his back lies this whale wantoning,

And in his gulf-like throat, sucks everything

That passeth near.

Donne characterizes our natural life in the world as a condition of flux and momentariness, which we may nonetheless turn to our advantage.” The tension of the poetry comes from the pull of divergent impulses in the argument itself. In “A Valediction: Of my Name in the Window,” the lover’s name scratched in his mistress’s window ought to serve as a talisman to keep her chaste; but then, as he explains to her, it may instead be an unwilling witness to her infidelity:

When thy inconsiderate hand

Flings ope this casement, with my trembling name,

To look on one, whose wit or land,

New battery to thy heart may frame,

Then think this name alive, and that thou thus

In it offend’st my Genius.

Donne’s love poetry expresses a variety of amorous experiences that are often startlingly unlike each other, or even contradictory in their implications. In “The Anniversary” he is not just being inconsistent when he moves from a justification of frequent changes of partners to celebrate a mutual attachment that is simply not subject to time, alteration, appetite, or the sheer pull of other worldly enticements. Some of Donne’s finest love poems, such as “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,” prescribe the condition of a mutual attachment that time and distance cannot diminish:

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.

Donne finds some striking images to define this state in which two people remain wholly one while they are separated. Their souls are not divided but expanded by the distance between them, “Like gold to airy thinness beat”; or they move in response to each other as the legs of twin compasses, whose fixed foot keeps the moving foot steadfast in its path:

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.

A supple argument unfolds with lyric grace. The poems that editors group together were not necessarily produced together, as Donne did not write for publication. Fewer than eight complete poems were published during his lifetime, and only two of these publications were authorized by him. The poems he released were passed around in manuscript and transcribed by his admirers singly or in gatherings. Some of these copies have survived. When the first printed edition of his poems was published in 1633, two years after his death, the haphazard arrangement of the poems gave no clue to the order of their composition. Many modern editions of the poetry impose categorical divisions that are unlikely to correspond to the order of writing, separating the love poetry from the satires and the religious poetry, the verse letters from the epithalamiums and funeral poems. No more than a handful of Donne’s poems can be dated with certainty. The Elegies and Satires are likely to have been written in the early 1590s. “Metempsychosis” is dated August 16, 1601. The two memorial Anniversaries for the death of Elizabeth Drury were certainly written in 1611 and 1612; and the funeral elegy on Prince Henry must have been written in 1612. The Songs and Sonnets were evidently not conceived as a single body of love verses and do not appear so in early manuscript collections. Donne may well have composed them at intervals and in unlike situations over some 20 years of his poetic career. Some of them may even have overlapped with his best-known religious poems, which are likely to have been written about 1609, before he took holy orders.

Poems so vividly individuated invite attention to the circumstances that shaped them. Yet we have no warrant to read Donne’s poetry as a precise record of his life. Donne’s career and personality are nonetheless arresting in themselves, and they cannot be kept wholly separate from the general thrust of his writing, for which they at least provide a living context. Donne was born in London between January 24 and June 19, 1572 into the precarious world of English recusant Catholicism, whose perils his family well knew. His father, John Donne, was a Welsh ironmonger. His mother, Elizabeth (Heywood) Donne, a lifelong Catholic, was the great-niece of the martyred Sir Thomas More. His uncle Jasper Heywood headed an underground Jesuit mission in England and, when he was caught, was imprisoned and then exiled; Donne’s younger brother, Henry, died from the plague in 1593 while being held in Newgate Prison for harboring a seminary priest. Yet at some time in his young manhood Donne himself converted to Anglicanism and never went back on that reasoned decision.

In the writing of Donne’s middle years, skepticism darkened into a foreboding of imminent ruin. Such poems as the two memorial Anniversaries and “To the Countess of Salisbury” register an accelerating decline of our nature and condition in a cosmos that is itself disintegrating. In “The First Anniversary” the poet declares, “mankind decays so soon, / We are scarce our fathers’ shadows cast at noon.” Yet Donne is not counseling despair here. On the contrary, the Anniversaries offer a sure way out of spiritual dilemma: “thou hast but one way, not to admit / The world’s infection, to be none of it” (“The First Anniversary”). Moreover, the poems propose that a countering force is at work that resists the world’s frantic rush toward its own ruin. Such amendment of corruption is the true purpose of our worldly being: “our business is, to rectify / Nature, to what she was” (“To Sir Edward Herbert, at Juliers”). But in the present state of the world, and ourselves, the task becomes heroic and calls for a singular resolution.

The verse letters and funeral poems celebrate those qualities of their subjects that stand against the general lapse toward chaos: “Be more than man, or thou’art less than an ant” (“The First Anniversary”).

These poems of Donne’s middle years are less frequently read than the rest of his work, and they have struck readers as perversely obscure and odd. The poems flaunt their creator’s unconcern with decorum to the point of shocking their readers. In his funeral poems Donne harps on decay and maggots, even venturing satiric asides as he contemplates bodily corruption: “Think thee a prince, who of themselves create / Worms which insensibly devour their state” (“The Second Anniversary”). He shows by the analogy of a beheaded man how it is that our dead world still appears to have life and movement (“The Second Anniversary”); he compares the soul in the newborn infant body with a “stubborn sullen anchorite” who sits “fixed to a pillar, or a grave / ... / Bedded, and bathed in all his ordures” (“The Second Anniversary”); he develops in curious detail the conceit that virtuous men are clocks and that the late John Harrington, second Lord of Exton, was a public clock (“Obsequies to the Lord Harrington”). Such unsettling idiosyncrasy is too persistent to be merely wanton or sensational. It subverts our conventional proprieties in the interest of a radical order of truth.

Donne’s reluctance to become a priest, as he was several times urged to do, does not argue a lack of faith. The religious poems he wrote years before he took orders dramatically suggest that his doubts concerned his own unworthiness, his sense that he could not possibly merit God’s grace, as seen in these lines from Divine Meditations 4:

Yet grace, if thou repent, thou canst not lack;

But who shall give thee that grace to begin?

Oh make thyself with holy mourning black,

And red with blushing, as thou art with sin.

These Divine Meditations, or Holy Sonnets, make a universal drama of religious life, in which every moment may confront us with the final annulment of time: “What if this present were the world’s last night?” (Divine Meditations 13). In Divine Meditations 13 the prospect of a present entry upon eternity also calls for a showdown with ourselves and with the exemplary events that bring time and the timeless together in one order:

Mark in my heart, O soul, where thou dost dwell,

The picture of Christ crucified, and tell

Whether that countenance can thee affright.

The Divine Meditations make self-recognition a necessary means to grace. They dramatize the spiritual dilemma of errant creatures who need God’s grace in order that they may deserve it; for we must fall into sin and merit death even though our redemption is at hand; yet we cannot even begin to repent without grace. The poems open the sinner to God, imploring God’s forceful intervention by the sinner’s willing acknowledgment of the need for a drastic onslaught upon his present hardened state, as in Divine Meditations 14:

Batter my heart, three-personed God; for, you

As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;

That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend

Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new.

The force of the petition measures the dire extremity of his struggle with himself and with God’s adversary. Donne pleads with God that he too has an interest in this contention for the sinner’s soul: “Lest the world, flesh, yea Devil put thee out” ( Divine Meditations 17). The drama brings home to the poet the enormity of his ingratitude to his Redeemer, confronting him bodily with the irony of Christ’s self-humiliation for us. In Divine Meditations 11 Donne wonders why the sinner should not suffer Christ’s injuries in his own person:

Spit in my face ye Jews, and pierce my side,

Buffet, and scoff, scourge, and crucify me,

For I have sinned, and sinned, and only he,

Who could do no iniquity, hath died.

Donne’s religious poems turn upon a paradox that is central to the hope for eternal life: Christ’s sacrificing himself to save mankind. God’s regimen is paradoxical, and in Divine Meditations 13 Donne sees no impropriety in entreating Christ with the casuistry he had used on his “profane mistreses” when he assured them that only the ugly lack compassion:

so I say to thee,

To wicked spirits are horrid shapes assigned,

This beauteous form assures a piteous mind.

In Divine Meditations 18 he resolves his search for the true Church in a still bolder sexual paradox, petitioning Christ as a “kind husband” to betray his spouse to our view so that the poet’s amorous soul may “court thy mild dove”: “Who is most true, and pleasing to thee, then / When she is embraced and open to most men.” The apparent indecorum of making the true Church a whore and Christ her complaisant husband at least startles us into recognizing Christ’s own catholicity. The paradox brings out a truth about Christ’s Church that may well be shocking to those who uphold a sectarian exclusiveness.

Wit becomes the means by which the poet discovers the working of Providence in the casual traffic of the world. A journey westward from one friend’s house to another over Easter 1613 brings home to Donne the general aberration of nature that prompts us to put pleasure before our due devotion to Christ. We ought to be heading east at Easter so as to contemplate and share Christ’s suffering; and in summoning up that event to his mind’s eye, he recognizes the shocking paradox of the ignominious death of God upon a Cross: “Could I behold those hands, which span the poles, / And turn all spheres at once, pierced with those holes?” (“Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward”). An image of Christ’s degradation is directly imposed upon an image of God’s omnipotence. We see that the event itself has a double force, being at once the catastrophic consequence of our sin and the ultimate assurance of God’s saving love. The poet’s very journey west may be providential if it brings him to a penitent recognition of his present unworthiness to gaze directly upon Christ:

O Saviour, as thou hang’st upon the tree;

I turn my back to thee, but to receive

Corrections, till thy mercies bid thee leave.

O think me worth thine anger, punish me,

Burn off my rusts, and my deformity,

Restore thine image, so much, by thy grace,

That thou mayest know me, and I’ll turn my face.

A serious illness that Donne suffered in 1623 produced a still more startling poetic effect. In “Hymn to God, my God, in my Sickness” the poet presents his recumbent body as a flat map over which the doctors pore like navigators to discover some passage through present dangers to tranquil waters; and he ponders his own destination as if he himself is a vessel that may reach the desirable places of the world only by negotiating some painful straits:

Is the Pacific Sea my home? Or are

The eastern riches? Is Jerusalem?

Anyan, and Magellan, and Gibraltar,

All straits, and none but straits, are ways to them.

By this self-questioning he brings himself to understand that his suffering may itself be a blessing, since he shares the condition of a world in which our ultimate bliss must be won through well-endured hardship. The physical symptoms of his illness become the signs of his salvation: “So, in his purple wrapped receive me Lord, / By these his thorns give me his other crown.” The images that make him one with Christ in his suffering transform those pangs into reassurance.

In Donne’s poetry, language may catch the presence of God in our human dealings. The pun on the poet’s name in ““ registers the distance that the poet’s sins have put between himself and God, with new kinds of sin pressing forward as fast as God forgives those already confessed: “When thou hast done, thou hast not done, / For, I have more.” Then the puns on “sun” and “Donne” resolve these sinful anxieties themselves:

I have a sin of fear, that when I have spun

My last thread, I shall perish on the shore;

But swear by thy self, that at my death thy son

Shall shine as he shines now, and heretofore;

And, having done that, thou hast done,

I fear no more.

For this poet such coincidences of words and ideas are not mere accidents to be juggled with in jest. They mark precisely the working of Providence within the order of nature.

The transformation of Jack Donne the rake into the Reverend Dr. Donne, dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral, no longer seems bizarre. To impose such clear-cut categories upon a man’s career may be to take too rigid a view of human nature. That the poet of the Elegies and Songs and Sonnets is also the author of the Devotions and the sermons need not indicate some profound spiritual upheaval. One reason for the appeal of Donne in modern times is that he confronts us with the complexity of our own natures.

Donne took holy orders in January 1615, having been persuaded by King James himself of his fitness for a ministry “to which he was, and appeared, very unwilling, apprehending it (such was his mistaking modesty) to be too weighty for his abilities.” So writes his first biographer, Izaak Walton, who had known him well and often heard him preach. Once committed to the Church, Donne devoted himself to it totally, and his life thereafter becomes a record of incumbencies held and sermons preached.

Donne’s wife died in childbirth in 1617. He was elected dean of St. Paul’s in November 1621, and he became the most celebrated cleric of his age, preaching frequently before the king at court as well as at St. Paul’s and other churches. 160 of his sermons have survived. The few religious poems he wrote after he became a priest show no falling off in imaginative power, yet the calling of his later years committed him to prose, and the artistry of his Devotions and sermons at least matches the artistry of his poems.

The publication in 1919 of Donne’s Sermons: Selected Passages, edited by Logan Pearsall Smith, came as a revelation to its readers, not least those who had little taste for sermons. John Bailey, writing in the Quarterly Review (April 1920), found in these extracts “the very genius of oratory ... a masterpiece of English prose.” Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, in Studies in Literature (1920), judged the sermons to include “the most magnificent prose ever uttered from an English pulpit, if not the most magnificent prose ever spoken in our tongue.”

Over a literary career of some 40 years Donne moved from skeptical naturalism to a conviction of the shaping presence of the divine spirit in the natural creation. Yet his mature understanding did not contradict his earlier vision. He simply came to anticipate a Providential disposition in the restless whirl of the world. The amorous adventurer nurtured the dean of St. Paul’s.