“The fault that I acknowledge in myself is to have descended to print anything in verse.” — John Donne

“So difficult and opaque it is, I am not certain what it is I print.” — first publisher of the work of John Donne

It’s his birthday today.

John Donne (1572-1631) was a poet and an Anglican priest (born a Roman Catholic- to quote Monty Python: “a Catholic the moment Dad came”). A metaphysical poet, language vibrating with honesty and sensuality. His work feels – and is – personal: he questions, he badgers God, he declares himself – separately, as an individual. This particular TONE was not at all in tune with the times. He traveled far and wide as a young man, giving him a less than provincial outlook. He made a bad marriage, incurring the displeasure of powerful people which landed him in prison for a time. He had been on his way to a successful career as a diplomat; all undone by his marriage.

Speaking of “undone”, when he wrote to his wife to tell her the bad news of losing his job, he signed the letter: John Donne. Anne Donne. Un-done.

 
 
Questions of faith obsessed him. He was not a blind believer. He knew he had to accept God on God’s terms, there would be no negotiating. He found this torturous. He is, quite obviously, a pleasure-hound. He loved sex. Loving sex doesn’t make him unique, obviously, but letting it infuse the language to the degree it infused his – especially when you were a “gentleman” of a certain class in the early 1600s – was rare. He wrote erotic love poems, none of which were published, yet which he circulated among his friends. His sex-love poems do not have the flowery correctness of his courtly contemporaries, who focused on chivalry and idealism, influenced by Petrarch. Donne’s is the expression of a man who loves the skin to skin, who struggles with what this might mean in terms of his equally strong love of God. Can the two be reconciled? That is the question, not just for John Donne but for humans through the centuries.

There was more to him than “death be not proud” or “no man is an island”.

I am not a scholar, so forgive me, but: Donne’s poems don’t look like other poems of his day. They fall differently on the page. The rules for poetry were stricter in Donne’s time, and he broke all these rules. Because of this, he was not taken seriously. His line-endings are jagged, he interrupts rhyme schemes, he does not follow the meter. Ben Jonson commented, famously, that John Donne should be hung for what he did with meter.

Donne wrote for himself and friends who would understand and appreciate. He was not a court poet, like Philip Sidney was, he was not a “poet laureate” churning out works meant to be read in public squares on the Queen’s birthday. He was a public man, he held high posts, but his poems were private. You can feel how private he is being when writing them.

Here is his poem “The Canonization”. Unfortunately, I cannot recreate what it looks like, the jagged line lengths and indentations.

Check out how the poem starts. Look how he asserts this tone, using a specific voice. Read other poems of the day and you are not going to find one that starts with such a sentence.

The Canonization

FOR God’s sake hold your tongue, and let me love ;
Or chide my palsy, or my gout ;
My five gray hairs, or ruin’d fortune flout ;
With wealth your state, your mind with arts improve ;
Take you a course, get you a place,
Observe his Honour, or his Grace ;
Or the king’s real, or his stamp’d face
Contemplate ; what you will, approve,
So you will let me love.

Alas ! alas ! who’s injured by my love?
What merchant’s ships have my sighs drown’d?
Who says my tears have overflow’d his ground?
When did my colds a forward spring remove?
When did the heats which my veins fill
Add one more to the plaguy bill?
Soldiers find wars, and lawyers find out still
Litigious men, which quarrels move,
Though she and I do love.

Call’s what you will, we are made such by love ;
Call her one, me another fly,
We’re tapers too, and at our own cost die,
And we in us find th’ eagle and the dove.
The phoenix riddle hath more wit
By us ; we two being one, are it ;
So, to one neutral thing both sexes fit.
We die and rise the same, and prove
Mysterious by this love.

We can die by it, if not live by love,
And if unfit for tomb or hearse
Our legend be, it will be fit for verse ;
And if no piece of chronicle we prove,
We’ll build in sonnets pretty rooms ;
As well a well-wrought urn becomes
The greatest ashes, as half-acre tombs,
And by these hymns, all shall approve
Us canonized for love ;

And thus invoke us, “You, whom reverend love
Made one another’s hermitage ;
You, to whom love was peace, that now is rage ;
Who did the whole world’s soul contract, and drove
Into the glasses of your eyes ;
So made such mirrors, and such spies,
That they did all to you epitomize—
Countries, towns, courts beg from above
A pattern of your love.”

To repeat:

So, to one neutral thing both sexes fit.
We die and rise the same, and prove
Mysterious by this love.

And then there’s “The Flea”, one of his most famous (published after his death). The poem’s title gives an inaccurate assumption of what is to follow. The titular flea is a metaphor for sexual consummation, and how bodily fluids from both partners mix and mingle. And so if a flea sucks Donne’s blood and also sucks the blood of his lover, and if this is just how nature works, then what can be wrong with fluid-mixing in the sex act? Comparing the behavior of a flea to the sex lives of men and women probably had more resonance in the plague-ridden 16th-17th century than it does now. The poem manages to be explicit without being explicit. Sex isn’t mentioned outright, but the imagery is… tumescent. All that SWELLING with BLOOD going on. Naturally, what a surprise, the poem has been called “misogynistic” but … how about you don’t speak for everyone, scholars?

The Flea

Mark but this flea, and mark in this,
How little that which thou deniest 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, nay more than married are.
This flea is you and I, and this
Our marriage bed, and marriage temple is;
Though parents grudge, and you, w’are 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.

QUOTES

Ben Jonson:

The first poet in the world in some things.

“in some things”. Uh-oh.

from “Whispers of Imoortality”
by T.S. Eliot
Donne, I suppose, was such another
Who found no substitute for sense,
To seize and clutch and penetrate,
Expert beyond experience,

He knew the anguish of the marrow
The ague of the skeleton;
No contact possible to flesh
Allayed the fever of the bone.

Michael Schmidt:

His talent for sermons was such that some are still read today.

Camille Paglia, Break Blow Burn:

John Donne, whose career overlapped Shakespeare’s, was the leading figure of the loosely affiliated Metaphysical school of British poetry.

To John Donne
BY BEN JONSON
Donne, the delight of Phoebus and each Muse
Who, to thy one, all other brains refuse;
Whose every work of thy most early wit
Came forth example, and remains so yet;
Longer a-knowing than most wits do live;
And which no affection praise enough can give!
To it, thy language, letters, arts, best life,
Which might with half mankind maintain a strife.
All which I meant to praise, and yet I would;
But leave, because I cannot as I should!

Harold Bloom, The Best Poems of the English Language:

One can choose 1587 as an arbitrary date to begin the richest eighty years of poetry in English. Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine was then first performed, perhaps with Shakespeare in the audience, though we do not know when the greatest of poets first arrived in London: 1589 seems to me rather too late, even as an outward limit. The first three books of Spenser’s Faerie Queene were published in 1590. In the early 1590s, Donne wrote many of the Songs and Sonnets, to be published only posthumously. By 1595, at the latest, Shakespeare was at his first full greatness, joined by Jonson at his strongest in Volpone (1606). The Tribe of Ben–disciples of the lyric and epigrammatic Jonson–included Robert Herrick, Thomas Carew, and Richard Lovelace. Andrew Marvell, a poetic party of one, wrote his lyrics by the 1650s, coming after the posthumous publication of George Herbert’s poetry in 1633. Richard Crashaw and Henry Vaughan published by the 1650s. Milton’s Comus was composed in 1634; Paradise Lost, dictated by the blind poet, was finished by 1665, seventy-eight years after Marlowe first shattered his London audiences.

A contemporary of Donne’s:

Mr John Donne, who leaving Oxford, liv’d at the Inns of Court, not dissolute but very neat; a great Visitor of Ladies, a great Frequenter of Plays, a great Writer of conceited Verses.

Harold Bloom, The Best Poems in the English Language:

Worthy of Shakespeare himself is John Donne, in his “A Nocturnal Upon St. Lucy’s Day,” where love resurrects the poet to his ruin.

Michael Schmidt, in Lives of the Poets, writes:

The subject is spiritual: the fortifying of the soul. But religious and secular, soul and body, are so intertwined in Donne, his thinking and feeling so of a piece, that what he says of one sphere remains true of another. That’s why his religious and devotional poems affect with force even readers who disbelieve or detest the vexed Anglican faith they arise from.

T.S. Eliot, from “Andrew Marvell”, 1921:

A poet like Donne, or like Baudelaire or Laforgue, may almost be considered the inventor of an attitude, a system of feeling or of morals. Donne is difficult to analyse: what appears at one time a curious personal point of view may at another time appear rather the precise concentration of a kind of feeling diffused in the air about him. Donne and his shroud, the shroud and his motive for wearing it, are inseparable, but they are not the same thing. The seventeenth century sometimes seems for more than a moment to gather up and to digest into its art all the experience of the human mind which (from the same point of view) the later centuries seem to have been partly engaged in repudiating. But Donne would have been an individual at any time and place.

Ben Jonson to William Drummond (supposedly), Conversations with Ben Jonson

That Donne’s Anniversary was profane and full of blasphemies.
That he told Mr Donne, if it had been written of the Virgin Mary it had been something; to which he answered that he described the idea of a woman, and not as she was.
That Donne, for not keeping of accent, deserved hanging.

Camille Paglia, Break Blow Burn, on “Holy Sonnet XIV”:

The Petrarchan sonnet was rarely as sexually explicit as Donne makes it in Holy Sonnet XIV, where he portrays himself–or rather his heart–as a kidnapped virgin crying out for a virile liberator. The poem begins with the same brash imperative mood of Holy Sonnet I: “Batter my heart, three-person’d God.” Strong action is needed to rescue the poet from sin

Samuel Taylor Coleridge:

Self-impassioned.

This is so funny to me, because so was Coleridge.

Philip K. Dick, 1974 interview:

I’ve always been much influenced by the 17th-century metaphysical poets like Donne, and especially Henry Vaughan.

John Donne, 1608 note to Sir Henry Goodere, on the publication of Anniversaries:

The fault that I acknowledge in myself is to have descended to print anything in verse, which, though it have excuse, even in our times, by example of men which one would think should have little have done it as I; yet I confess I wonder how I declined to it, and do not pardon myself.

You feel the ambiguity, the anguish, in putting his stuff “out there.”

Harold Bloom, The Best Poems in the English Language:

I think that poetry at its greatest — in Dante, Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, Blake — has one broad and essential difficulty: it is the true mode for exapnding our consciousness. This it accomplishes by what I have learned to call strangeness.

Camille Paglia, Break Blow Burn:

My title comes from a poem in this book, John Donne’s Holy Sonnet XIV: “That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend / Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.” Donne is appealing to God to overwhelm him and compel his redemption from sin.

Izaac Walton, Life of Donne:

Dr Donne sent for a carver to make for him in wood the figure of an urn, giving him directions for the compass and height of it; and to bring with it a board of the just height of his body. These being got, then without delay, a choice painter was got to be in readiness to draw his picture, which was taken as followeth.– Several charcoal fires being first made in his large study, he brought with him into that place his winding-sheet in his hand, and, having put off all his clothes, had this sheet put on him, and so tied with knots at his head and feet, and his hands so placed, as dead bodies are usually fitted to be shrouded and put into their coffin, or grave. Upon this urn he thus stood with his eyes shut, and with so much of the sheet turned aside as might show his lean, pale and deathlike fake. [The picture] became his hourly object till his death.

from “Time and the Garden”
By Yvor Winters
And this is like that other restlessness
To seize the greatness not yet fairly earned,
One which the tougher poets have discerned —
Gascoigne, Ben Jonson, Greville, Ralegh, Donne,
Poets who wrote great poems, one by one,
And spaced by many years, each line an act
Through which few labour, which no men retract.

Michael Schmidt:

Donne wrestles with idea and reality at once, and cannot lie in a single rapture in bed with his beloved the way that Marlowe can in his “Elegy.”

Camille Paglia, Break Blow Burn:

“The Flea” is one of the oddest love poems ever written. It’s a good illustration of the Metaphysicals’ effrontery, incongruities and ostentatious use of conceits (elaborate metaphors). Like so many poems of the period, it’s a cunning strategy of seduction. Here, however, the poet satirizes his own sexual desperation.

Robert Graves:

Donne is adept at keeping the ball in the air, but he deceives us here by changing the ball.

Harold Bloom, The Best Poems in the English Language:

John Donne can seem two poets, the charmed libertine of Songs and Sonnets and the master of devotional verse, but the same deep and versatile wit profoundly inhabits “The Ecstasy” and the Holy Sonnets and hymns.

Yvor Winters:

It was as if, impatient as he was of women, love, fools and God, he was impatient too of the close steps of metre.

Camille Paglia, Break Blow Burn:

[Donne’s Godhead is an] implacable, robust Father with his seething energy.

John Donne, 1608 letter to Goodere:

I would fain do something, but that I cannot tell what is no wonder. For to choose is to do. But to be no part of anybody is to be nothing. At most, the greatest persons are but great wens and excrescences, men of wit and delightful conversation but as moles for ornament, except they be so incorporated into the body of the world that they contribute something to the sustentation of the whole.

Camille Paglia, Break Blow Burn:

For Donne, God is an eternal, transcendent judge and king.

John Dryden:

[He] perplexes the minds of the fair sex with nice speculations of philosophy, when he should engage their hearts.

Oh, shut up, John. Why do you care how another man woos? What’s it to you? Some of us women prefer “speculations of philosophy” as foreplay.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge:

The vividness of the descriptions or declamations in Donne, or Dryden, is as much and as often derived from the forced fervour of the describer as from the reflections, forms or incidents which constitute their subject and materials. The wheels take fire from the mere rapidity of their motion.

Camille Paglia, “Love Poetry”:

Donne, with Spenser, demonstrates the new prestige of marriage: before this, no one wrote love poetry to his wife. Furthermore, Donne’s erudition implies that his lady, better educated than her medieval precursors, enjoys flattery of her intellect as well as of her beauty.

On Donne’s Poetry
By Samuel Taylor Coleridge
With Donne, whose muse on dromedary trots,
Wreathe iron pokers into true-love knots;
Rhyme’s sturdy cripple, fancy’s maze and clue,
Wit’s forge and fire-blast, meaning’s press and screw.

Harold Bloom, The Best Poems in the English Language:

It may be best to think of Donne’s ironical wit as an instrument of discovery, akin to Shakespeare’s ironically compassionate invention of personalities…Donne’s wit inspired Ben Jonson to a certain ambivalence, which increased in Alexander Pope and his critical defender, Dr. Samuel Johnson. To this Neoclassical tradition, Donnean wit seemed ingenuity, even perverse abuse of metaphor. It is a charming irony that Donne was revived by the Romantics, from Coleridge through Browning and Arthur Symons, the irony being that T.S. Eliot belatedly “revived” Donne as an Eliotic anti-Romantic.

Doctor Johnson, Life of Cowley, on Donne’s hyperbolic style:

Who but Donne would have thought a good man was a telescope?

Camille Paglia, Break Blow Burn, on “The Flea”:

Whether Donne’s ingenious indictment of the perennial double standard was then or ever effective, we don’t know. The poem’s juxtaposition of desire and disgust would be a risky maneuver in any courtship. But “The Flea” makes us feel the evolution in personal relationships at the English Renaissance, when marriage acquired the romantic idealism that adultery had had in medieval literature. Though Donne’s fiancee says little, the poem’s preciosity is a tribute to her intelligence. He will jump through hoops to win her admiration. The poem’s self-conscious artificiality captures the fragility of the complex rituals with which society has always tried to contain and control sexual energy.

Michael Schmidt:

Amour is bleached out of [Donne], his very gender changed, by the blast of faith and the hunger and doubts it brought him.

Harold Bloom, The Best Poems in the English Language:

You don’t argue with Donne, however skeptical or naturalistic you may be. Eloquence and shrewdness in behafl of the invisible are not often so combined.

Robert Lowell, letter to Elizabeth Bishop, April 14, 1962:

Damn the young! My students, after I gave them a laborious six weeks on Pope, Dryden, Dr. Johnson, Goldsmith etc. turned out to have read only one poet before Hopkins–Donne of course. I feel taken in the flank. I am all pointed to explain the new poetry as a continuation, change and revolution of the old. But no one reads the old, except English professors. I’m on a Wordsworth and Blake jag. I’d like to do poems that would hit all in one flash, though loaded with subtleties of art and passion underneath. Or great clumsy structures like Wordsworth’s Leech Gatherer, that somehow lift the great sail and catch the wind. Most of our poets are so weak on brute, energy, flash, power, driving a sentence or a stanza to its mark, though it’s good to be clotted, obscure, ingenious etc. But the typical modern poem is taken over by pedants, people who bore you to death.

Michael Schmidt:

Like Donne, whom he admired, [Robert] Browning plucks at our sleeve with a startling phrase, plunges us in medias res, ignites our curiosity time and again. He satisfies our curiosity. His syntax can be effectively mimetic, scurrying in breathless clauses to a climax, or pacing with dignity, or deliberating ponderously, as the action, rather than the character, requires.

Jeanette Winterson:

A lot of the older people I knew, my parents’ generation, quoted Shakespeare and the Bible and sometimes the metaphysical poets like John Donne, without knowing the source, or misquoting and mixing.

Camille Paglia, Break Blow Burn:

John Donne’s body of writing falls into two parts, secular and sacred. After he converted and took holy orders in the Church of England, Donne turned away from love poetry and focused his artistic energy on sermons and devotional verse. His sonnets show Shakespeare’s influence, most blatantly in Holy Sonnet !, whose fluid rhythms and falling pattern recall Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29. The imperious Petrarchan lady of sonnet tradition has metamorphosed into God, whom the love-starved poet begs and berates. From the arguable evidence of his plays and poems, Shakespeare was probably an agnostic, but Donne clearly believed in a personal God, with whom he conducted a long, wrangling, sometimes rancorous relationship.

“An Elegy upon the Death of the Dean of Paul’s, Dr. John Donne”
by Thomas Carew
Can we not force from widow’d poetry,
Now thou art dead (great Donne) one elegy
To crown thy hearse? Why yet dare we not trust,
Though with unkneaded dough-bak’d prose, thy dust,
Such as th’ unscissor’d churchman from the flower
Of fading rhetoric, short-liv’d as his hour,
Dry as the sand that measures it, should lay
Upon thy ashes, on the funeral day?
Have we no voice, no tune? Didst thou dispense
Through all our language, both the words and sense?
‘Tis a sad truth. The pulpit may her plain
And sober Christian precepts still retain,
Doctrines it may, and wholesome uses, frame,
Grave homilies and lectures, but the flame
Of thy brave soul (that shot such heat and light
As burnt our earth and made our darkness bright,
Committed holy rapes upon our will,
Did through the eye the melting heart distil,
And the deep knowledge of dark truths so teach
As sense might judge what fancy could not reach)
Must be desir’d forever. So the fire
That fills with spirit and heat the Delphic quire,
Which, kindled first by thy Promethean breath,
Glow’d here a while, lies quench’d now in thy death.
The Muses’ garden, with pedantic weeds
O’erspread, was purg’d by thee; the lazy seeds
Of servile imitation thrown away,
And fresh invention planted; thou didst pay
The debts of our penurious bankrupt age;
Licentious thefts, that make poetic rage
A mimic fury, when our souls must be
Possess’d, or with Anacreon’s ecstasy,
Or Pindar’s, not their own; the subtle cheat
Of sly exchanges, and the juggling feat
Of two-edg’d words, or whatsoever wrong
By ours was done the Greek or Latin tongue,
Thou hast redeem’d, and open’d us a mine
Of rich and pregnant fancy; drawn a line
Of masculine expression, which had good
Old Orpheus seen, or all the ancient brood
Our superstitious fools admire, and hold
Their lead more precious than thy burnish’d gold,
Thou hadst been their exchequer, and no more
They each in other’s dust had rak’d for ore.
Thou shalt yield no precedence, but of time,
And the blind fate of language, whose tun’d chime
More charms the outward sense; yet thou mayst claim
From so great disadvantage greater fame,
Since to the awe of thy imperious wit
Our stubborn language bends, made only fit
With her tough thick-ribb’d hoops to gird about
Thy giant fancy, which had prov’d too stout
For their soft melting phrases. As in time
They had the start, so did they cull the prime
Buds of invention many a hundred year,
And left the rifled fields, besides the fear
To touch their harvest; yet from those bare lands
Of what is purely thine, thy only hands,
(And that thy smallest work) have gleaned more
Than all those times and tongues could reap before.
But thou art gone, and thy strict laws will be
Too hard for libertines in poetry;
They will repeal the goodly exil’d train
Of gods and goddesses, which in thy just reign
Were banish’d nobler poems; now with these,
The silenc’d tales o’ th’ Metamorphoses
Shall stuff their lines, and swell the windy page,
Till verse, refin’d by thee, in this last age
Turn ballad rhyme, or those old idols be
Ador’d again, with new apostasy.
Oh, pardon me, that break with untun’d verse
The reverend silence that attends thy hearse,
Whose awful solemn murmurs were to thee,
More than these faint lines, a loud elegy,
That did proclaim in a dumb eloquence
The death of all the arts; whose influence,
Grown feeble, in these panting numbers lies,
Gasping short-winded accents, and so dies.
So doth the swiftly turning wheel not stand
In th’ instant we withdraw the moving hand,
But some small time maintain a faint weak course,
By virtue of the first impulsive force;
And so, whilst I cast on thy funeral pile
Thy crown of bays, oh, let it crack awhile,
And spit disdain, till the devouring flashes
Suck all the moisture up, then turn to ashes.
I will not draw the envy to engross
All thy perfections, or weep all our loss;
Those are too numerous for an elegy,
And this too great to be express’d by me.
Though every pen should share a distinct part,
Yet art thou theme enough to tire all art;
Let others carve the rest, it shall suffice
I on thy tomb this epitaph incise:

Here lies a king, that rul’d as he thought fit
The universal monarchy of wit;
Here lie two flamens, and both those, the best,
Apollo’s first, at last, the true God’s priest.

Michael Schmidt:

Donne intended to speak to a few, but in the complex clarity of his speaking he engaged, three centuries later, a far wider readership than any of his public-voiced contemporaries.

Harold Bloom, The Best Poems in the English Language:

There is thus no authentic divide between his libertine and his divine poetry.

And that’s the key to “getting” him.

Michael Schmidt:

With Donne, if one misunderstands the man one misreads the poems. T.S. Eliot wanted to draw him back into the mainstream of English verse and his attempt involved a little critical distortion. But Eliot did not misread the man. Donne’s skepticism is unlike our own. His religious struggle was due to an uncertainty about the terms, not the fundamentals, of faith. His problem was not in believing, but in believing rightly, and having accepted right belief, to behave accordingly. We do Donne no justice by loading on him our doubts; nor does he (as Herbert does) offer us help with doubt. His struggle in the secular poems was to determine and resist the finitude of man’s nature; in the religious poems it was to establish finite man’s relations with an infinite God manifested in the Incarnation and celebrated in the Mass.

Camille Paglia, Break Blow Burn, on “Holy Sonnet I”:

“Repair me now,” Donne insists–using the imperative mood, which would have been startlingly inappropriate for a subordinate addressing a superior. There is no flattering honorific, no gesture of deference. He treats God like a superintendent responsible for maintenance and upkeep…Pictorially, the poem is a cruciform emblem. The earthly horizontal–Donne’s path from yesterday’s fleshpots to tomorrow’s tomb–is crossed by the embattled vertical extending from heaven to hell. As in Shakespeare’s 29, there is a slow, steady sinking into gloom, interrupted two-thirds of the way through by a winged savior, who bears the heart skyward. In Shakespeare, a human beloved, potent even in memory, is identified with the cheerful lark of sunrise. In Donne, the benefactor is the Holy Ghost, airlifting the soul from certain damnation.

A Letter to John Donne
By C H Sisson
On 27 July 1617, Donne preached at the parish church at Sevenoaks, of which he was rector, and was entertained at Knole, then the country residence of Richard Sackville, third earl of Dorset.

I understand you well enough, John Donne
First, that you were a man of ability
Eaten by lust and by the love of God
Then, that you crossed the Sevenoaks High Street
As rector of Saint Nicholas:
I am of that parish.

To be a man of ability is not much
You may see them on the Sevenoaks platform any day
Eager men with despatch cases
Whom ambition drives as they drive the machine
Whom the certainty of meticulous operation
Pleasures as a morbid sex a heart of stone.

That you could have spent your time in the corruption of courts
As these in that of cities, gives you no place among us:
Ability is not even the game of a fool
But the click of a computer operating in a waste
Your cleverness is dismissed from this suit
Bring out your genitals and your theology.

What makes you familiar is this dual obsession;
Lust is not what the rutting stag knows
It is to take Eve’s apple and to lose
The stag’s paradisal look:
The love of God comes readily
To those who have most need.

You brought body and soul to this church
Walking there through the park alive with deer
But now what animal has climbed into your pulpit?
One whose pretension is that the fear
Of God has heated him into a spirit
An evaporated man no physical ill can hurt.

Well might you hesitate at the Latin gate
Seeing such apes denying the church of God:
I am grateful particularly that you were not a saint
But extravagant whether in bed or in your shroud.
You would understand that in the presence of folly
I am not sanctified but angry.

Come down and speak to the men of ability
On the Sevenoaks platform and tell them
That at your Saint Nicholas the faith
Is not exclusive in the fools it chooses
That the vain, the ambitious and the highly sexed
Are the natural prey of the incarnate Christ.

 
 
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.