John Donne 1572-1631
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Early Life  A.     Studying Law in Lincoln's Inn                B.     Marriage  Productive Years    A.     Works                                  B.     Years Abroad  Devotions to Church     Remarkable Life      A.     Features of Works                                         B.     Last Years  Metaphysical Poetry  Subject Matter  Language  Rhythm  Religion
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Early Life
¡@	Born in 1572, John Donne's father died when he was merely 4 years old.  His mother Elizabeth Heywood Donne, was the daughter of John Heywood, an interludes author and a epigrammatist, and the great niece of Sir Thomas More.  After Donne's father died, with three children, she married six months later to John Syminges, an Oxford physician who practiced his profession in London.  Receiving good education, Donne was tutored at home till 12, and then in 1584, Donne entered Hart Hall, Oxford, where he spent 3 years, learning French and Latin.  Donne probably attended Oxford for three years and further to Cambridge, but he may also have joined his uncle Jasper Heywood, who was charged of an underground Jesuit mission in England and exiled, to Paris and Antwerp.  A.     Studying Law in Lincoln's Inn After spending one year at Thavies Inn, Donne received further education as a nominated law student in Lincoln's Inn in1592.  He stayed there and studied law for two or more years.  Then perhaps Donne went on an adventurous trip.  Soon on his return from the expedition to Cadiz and the Azores from 1596 to 1597, Donne served as the secretary of Sir Thomas Egerton, and hence developed high interest in foreign affairs and state events.  Meanwhile, he dissociated himself from Roman Catholicism. B.     Marriage In 1601, Sir Thomas Egerton's brother-in-law, Sir George More brought his seventeen-year-old daughter Ann More with him to London.  It was then Donne fell in love with Ann More and married her in December the same year.  The wedding was arranged and witnessed by several of Donne's friends, and as Donne revealed the news to the bride's father, Sir George More outrageously had Donne and his friends imprisoned and demanded Sir Thomas Egerton to dismiss his secretary.  The marriage turned out upheld and Donne reconciled with his father-in-law.  Despite his happy marriage and increasing family, for the following twelve years, he remained jobless on and off and depended much upon loans and helps from relatives and patrons. ¡@ TOP
Productive Years ¡@
¡@	A.     Works It was this frustrating decade without regular work that brought out Donne's productive and consecutive works.  Most of his verse letters, sonnets, poems and epithalamiums such as Biathanatos, Pseudo-Martyr, and Ignatius his Conclare, were written against Roman Catholicism.  Donne's famous secular poems, sonnets, and the famous Anniversaries for Elizabeth Drury brought him Sir Robert Drury's attention. B.     Years Abroad In 1611, Donne was invited and joined Sir Robert Drury to the continental trip.  It was then Donne composed several of his most prominent poems, including the famous ¡§A Valediction: Forbidden Mourning¡¨ for his wife to express his sorrow in leaving her and his children. TOP
Devotions to Church ¡@
¡@	Though Thomas Morton had long tried to persuade Donne to accept holy orders since 1606, Donne hesitated.  It was not until 1615 that he was ordained as a priest and accepted King James appointment for a ministry.  The same year, Donne received an honorary doctoral degree of divinity dedicated to him from Cambridge.  But two years later, John Donne was severely buffeted by the death of his wife.  Ann More Donne deceased because of childbirth.  Within their 16-year marriage, she gave him twelve children, only that five of them died.  Ann's death left Donne desolate and thence devoted himself to his work.  In 1619, Donne served as an embassy chaplain in Germany, and later he was appointed as the dean of St. Paul's Cathedral in 1621. TOP
Remarkable Life ¡@
¡@	A.     Features of Works Donne's works were famous for the themes of his faith in God and women.  Donne's witty ability of depicting his belief of God, and fragile life of human being and especially of women, though not writing with conventional glamorous style of verse like the Petrachan style, Donne successfully and beautifully connect the time and space in his poems with extraordinary images.  Donne's usage of diction and language in composing his works is considered revolutionary of his time.  And it is quite recently in the modern study of poems that his style is regarded as ¡§metaphysical¡¨. B.     Last Years Donne reversed to work on prose more than ever in his later years.  Most of his distinguished prose, sermons and devotions were announced in his last years.  In 1623, with his writing of Devotions, Donne proved that his imagination was not at all blunt because of his serious illness.  Donne's last public sermon was Death's Duel in 1631.  He passed away one month after his sermon at court, but left the contemporary with profound depictions of spiritual issues of divinity with natural devices of language.    TOP
Metaphysical Poetry
¡@	The word¡§metaphysical¡¨applied to Donne and his followers refers to their conception of a unified universe where all things physical and spiritual are related. All things have a similarity between them, the most concrete object being in some way an image of the most spiritual. For instance, in the poems presented in this Study Guide, the flea that has sucked both lovers' blood is the temple of their union; the compass of Valediction is an image of the high degree of love between a man and his wife; God in Holy Sonnet XIV is compared to a blacksmith. The prose also uses metaphysical imagery¢wthe unity of mankind is like a continent (Meditation XVII). This use of imagery requires wit; that is, the mental ability to join ideas and objects apparently dissimilar and unrelated. The findings of wit, the disclosure of similarity in the dissimilar, is called metaphysical conceit, which is really the distinctive feature of metaphysical poetry. Metaphysical poetry is then characterized by the predominance of the intellect. Yet what the intellect seeks to express is passion, feelings and emotions. For instance, in the famous compass image of Valediction the mind is very much at work, but it is at work on an analogy to a deep feeling. The mind of the metaphysical poets is not trying to build an intellectual view of a unified universe; it uses the unity of all things to express their passions and their emotions. The metaphysical poets are lyrical poets in whom thought and feeling are associated. TOP
Subject Matter
¡@	The main preoccupations of the metaphysical poets are love, death, and religion. Most of the famous metaphysical poets were religious poets having in mind the universe unified in God. But even the secular poems offered here contain some religious allusions. In The Flea, the black insect is a temple and a cloister; The Canonization is a mock elevation of the lovers to the state of the blessed in the heaven of the god of love; A Valediction forbids the listener to tell lay men the couple's love. Death also pervades the secular poems¢wthe Killing of the insect in The Flea; the act of love as being a dying in The Canonization; the separation of the couple compared to a peaceful death in A Valediction. The religious poems and prose are immediately concerned with death. Love, of God as well a of man, pervades all the works. Yet if we look a little deeper into the meaning of the poems, we realize that (the main preoccupation of the metaphysical poets is themselves; their own complex self-consciousness is the real subject matter.) In his love poetry, Donne is not so much occupied with the description of the charms of the loved one. We hardly find a feature of the girl mentioned. What comes out with great reality is Donne's analysis of himself in love. In the sonnets we find a complex expression of Donne's feelings towards God and eternal life. TOP
Language
¡@	Donne used images taken from everyday life and from the sciences, technology and crafts of his time. The language was also the language of everyday life, and in this his poetry strikingly contrasts with the elevated style of poets of his time, especially Spencer and Shakespeare. The Canonization begins with:¡§For God's sake hold your tongue and let me love,¡¨which is hardly poetic. (The language is the language of ordinary conversation;) the structure of Donne's poetry is that of a dialogue of which only one half is heard, a device called¡§dramatic monologue¡¨mage famous by Browning in the XIX century. TOP
Rhythm
¡@	Donne's deliberate use of conversational style creates a peculiar rhythmic effect. The verse line contains a double series of stresses, one made of the normal stresses of conversation, the other, of the staple iambic foot of the verse. For instance, in the second stanza of The Flea, the iambic feet require the following scanning: Oh stay, three lives in one flea spare, Where we almost, yea more than married, are. Yet the conversation stresses required by the meaning are placed on quite different syllables. The placing of the stresses depends a great deal on the reader; the following is only one suggestion: Oh stay, three lives in one flea spare, Where we almost, yea more than married , are. The iambic stresses do not disappear under the impact of the stresses of normal speech; they are only subdued and they combine with the conversation stresses to from a counterpoint. The colloquial language also affects the verse line which often breaks open at the end and runs on to the next line: Soldiers find wars, and Lawyers find out still Litigious men, which quarrels move, ... The King's real, or his stamped face Contemplate... Such run-on lines abound in Holy Sonnet VII and Holy Sonnet XIV: At the round earth's imagined corners, blow Your trumpets... Batter my heart, three-person'd God, for you As yet but knock... The counterpoint effect of the conversational style overriding the iambic rhythm is echoed in the use of rime, Often the riming sound expected by the listener, is slurred over by the speaker in the poem: Soldiers find wars, and Lawyers find out still Litigious men... Where the rime scheme requires a stronger word than¡§still.¡¨The strong stress falls on the run-on word¡§litigious¡¨at the beginning of the next line. Rime, language, and imagery all combine to give Donne and his followers a poetic style that puts them apart from the main current of English poetry from the Renaissance to the beginning of the XX century. TOP
Religion
¡@	Another side of Donne's writing which requires special attention is his use of religion. Many of the titles of his works show his love for religious topics, even though he may be also writing sensual verses. This strikes many readers as most strange. But the paradoxes which characterize his poetry are matched by the seeming contradiction of his life; that is, Jack Donne, the notorious young playboy, and Dr. John Donne, the religious church minister. The poets of this century have learned from Donne's poetic method, by which emotions are expressed by ideas and ideas defined in their emotional contest. What interested Donne was not the ultimate truth of an idea but the fascination of ideas themselves. He was not committed to a particular philosophic system, but he was interested in conflicting, fascinating, and often disturbing philosophies of his period. His images are drawn from whatever beliefs or ideas best expressed the emotion he had to communicate; that is, to describe an emotional state by its intellectual equivalent. When T. S. Eliot praises Donne for keeping the proper union of intellectual and imaginative sensibilities, it is perhaps related to the largely ¡§incarnational¡¨ part of Donne's life and work. Originally, ¡§incarnational¡¨ meant the striking and paradoxical union of the divine with the human after the model of the god-man Jesus Christ, When applying the term to Donne's poetry, it means his attempt to combine, balance, and reconcile opposites; for instance, the union of man with the divinity, of heart with head, of female with male. It is curious that so many of Donne's works try to describe the mystery of divine love by shocking (though not necessarily irreverent) references to human love and vice-versa. For example, Except You enthrall me, never shall be free, Nor ever chaste, except You ravish me. (Holy Sonnet XIV) In another poem, he tries to raise ordinary secular love to the level, of sacred love. And by these hymns, all shall approve Us canonized for love; (The Canonization) Donne is a typical writer of the¡§womb to tomb¡¨kind of poetry. These poems are very frequently found in the larger contest of love and religion; they are well illustrated by his double meaning of die, for instance, signifying both death and sexual intercourse: We're tapers too, and at our own cost die,... We die and rise the same, and prove Mysterious by this love, We can die by it, if not live by love, (The Canonization) This death-in-life-and-love type of poetry is touchingly described in, A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning a farewell poem addressed to his wife on the occasion of his trip to the Continent; his wife had given birth to a stillborn child during his absence. Themes connected with religion are frequently found in Donne's writings: for instance, his concern with death (Meditation XVII¡e¡§No man is an island...Three-fore thee.¡¨¡f); his fear of divine punishment because of sin. (Sermon LXXVI¡e¡§On Falling Out of God's Hand¡¨¡f; and his painful resignation to God's will (Holy Sonnet VII) . A saving quality of Donne's otherwise serious writing is his peculiar sense of humor, which requires of the reader a certain tolerance for the strange and the macabre. Oh stay, three lives in one flea spare, Where we almost, yea more than married, are. (The Flea) A bracelet of bright hair about the bone (The Relic) Neither Donne's life nor works could be described as conventional. His witty conceits are brilliant sparks of inspiration, a kind of inspiration which the Greeks, at one time, attributed to the divinity. They are divine in the sense that his poetic vision goes far beyond our ordinary human condition and surprises us with its fresh originality as if it had come from another land. But at the same time, his works are rooted in that same human condition which makes him a kindred spirit with us. . . a spirit incarnated. TOP
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