Daily Book Excerpt: Poetry
Six Centuries of Great Poetry: A Stunning Collection of Classic British Poems from Chaucer to Yeats
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.
– C.H. Sisson A letter to John Donne
John Donne (1572-1631) was a poet and an Anglican priest (although he was born a Roman Catholic- to quote Monty Python: “a Catholic the moment Dad came”). A metaphysical poet, his language still has the power to stun with its honesty and sensual reality. He stands head and shoulders above his contemporaries, and still seems relevant and new today, in my opinion. There is a confessional feel to his work, a truly personal concern: he questions, he badgers God, he declares himself – separately, as an individual – something not at all in tune with the times. He traveled far and wide as a young man, through the Continent, which gave him a less than provincial outlook, and he made a bad marriage (although he loved his wife), incurring the displeasure of powerful people which landed him in prison for a time. He had been on his way to having a successful career as a diplomat, and that was 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 had always interested him (obsessed him), and much of his poetry has to do with that. He was not a blind believer. He was fully engaged in the struggle. He knew that he had to accept God on God’s terms, he could not negotiate or manipulate that relationship, and instead of just accepting that, it tormented him. His poems are urgent, you can feel it in the language. But he also was, at least if you read his stuff, a pleasure-hound. He loved sex, clearly – I mean, who doesn’t – but you didn’t often get a gentleman of a certain class in the early 1600s to write about it so openly. He wrote erotic love poems, none of which were published, yet which he circulated amongst his friends. They are vivid. They pulse with the joy of sex. He is inventive. He clearly has lingered without guilt in the pleasures of love, and has worked to try to find words to describe the act of love. I find his love poems very moving. They do not have the flowery correctness of his courtly contemporaries, all concerned with chivalry and Idealism and Petrarch … His is the passion of a man who loves the skin to skin, who perhaps struggles with what that means beside a blazing love of God – can they be reconciled? Or is that a stupid question? Are they one and the same thing? This is the realm John Donne lived in.
If you only know him as the “death be not proud” guy or the “no man is an island” guy, then it would be well worth it to read his other stuff.
I love John Donne. I would like to sit down and have a talk with the guy. He lived life at a high pitch. He questioned, he experienced, he thought, he felt. All of that is in his verse. His poems also don’t look like other poems of the day. Wars have always been fought about poetry, and they continue to this day. Rhyme schemes or not, line length, what actually IS a poem? The rules were stricter in Donne’s day, and he broke them all. He was not taken seriously by many because of this. His lines are jagged, he interrupts rhyme schemes, he does not follow the meter. Ben Jonson (and I’ll get to him), wrote: “Donne, for not keeping of accent, deserved hanging.”
A contemporary of his gives this vivid picture of him: “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.” Maybe John Donne wasn’t pleased with such a description, but to me, over the span of centuries, sounds like he would have been a fun man to know.
Michael Schmidt, in Lives of the Poets
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.
Schmidt also makes the insightful point that “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.”
Fascinating! I like that a lot. He wrote for himself and his friends who would understand and appreciate. He was not a court poet, along the lines of Philip Sidney or Thomas Campion, 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, holding high posts all along the way, but his poems were private. You can feel how private he is being when writing them. But look whose name has come down through the centuries. A wonderful lesson for artists, although a difficult one to learn.
People have been arguing about Donne for centuries. He has his advocates (TS Eliot being the main one of the 20th century) and his detractors. Coleridge called him “self-impassioned”, a fascinating (and accurate) criticism – although I suppose the same could be said about Coleridge.
Schmidt writes:
During his life, his verse circulated – it is impossible to determine how widely – in manuscript. Two years after his death the poems were published. The publisher may have felt a slightly indecency in handling the work, “so difficult and opaque it is, I am not certain what it is I print.” But the book sold rather well, running through six editions before 1670. Here, the dean – celebrity, monster of eloquence, performer, eccentric – is discovered as a man with a body that felt lust, pain and love, and a mind whose attunement to circumstance was not always easy. The American poet Allen Tate has the effrontery to speak of him as “a contemporary”, perhaps because of his lusts and religious uncertainties, and proceeds to misread him in this light. 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.
One of the reasons I have come to love John Donne is that you cannot say he is just one thing. You may think you have him nailed down in one poem, only to be surprised by what is revealed in the next. It’s an amazing body of work (and that’s not even mentioning the sermons, which are still famous and still studied today).
Here is his poem “The Canonization”. Unfortunately, I cannot recreate what it looks like here, the jagged (yet perfect) line lengths and indentations. But check out how the poem starts. Look at how he asserts that tone, such a specific voice. Look at that! 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.”
There is so much to love about Donne. He’s earthy and spiritual all at once – even his religious poetry is sensual. And religious poetry can be so chaste, so above the neck, that it gets very dry sometimes. He was one of those poets I liked at first meeting – we read “The Flea” in high school and I thought it was hilarious.
Desirae – I agree that his religious stuff is passionate and engaged. It really reads so differently from the other guys writing at that time!
I enjoyed this very much, and not only because you chose one of my favorite Donne poems (esp. the 4th verse, wherein he talks of dying by love, and of building pretty rooms—aspirations common to sensual poets of any era). I’m given to understand that Donne, like Shelley, owes his canonical rank to the New Critics, especially T.S. Eliot, and Cleanth Brooks (who actually wrote an important book that helped define the New Criticism, and called it “A well Wrought Urn”, in tribute to Donne). No other poet of his time (besides Shakespeare, who belongs to every time) speaks to our’s as well—as immediately and as acutely—as Donne.
So, yeah, I love him, too. And I love how passionately you expressed your love for him.