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INTRODUCTION
INTRODUCTION
Life of John Donne (1572-1631)
Metaphysical Poetry
Subject Matter
Language
Rhythm
Religion
Life of John Donne (1572-1631 )
John
Donne's adult life can be divided into three clearcut periods. As a young man he
was very much the Elizabethan type─a
man hungry for love, for knowledge, and for action. He was a man about town who
also read eagerly in all fields of knowledge, and took part enthusiastically in
military expeditions in Spain and the Azores. He was charming, full of
intelligence and wit, and had all the reasons in the world to expect success at
court and promotion in civil service under Elizabeth. During that period he
wrote a great number of verse letters to friends, satires and sensual love
lyrics. The Flea belongs to that time.
In
1601 when he was twenty-nine and a hopeful secretary to one of the ministers of
Elizabeth he eloped with Ann More, the 16-year-old daughter of a prominent man
of treat fortune. Her father had Donne imprisoned for a time, ruined all his
hopes of advancement at court, and did nothing to help the young couple
financially. For the next fifteen years Donne experienced only privation and
hardship, depending on the charity of friends for his livelihood while his
family was growing. He wrote a pamphlet on the moral justification of suicide (Biathanatos)
and two others on religious questions much debated at the time. He also wrote
some of his most beautiful lines of love poetry which are usually thought to
have been addressed to his wife. A Valediction belongs to that
period. The young rake had become a husband in love with his wife. Some of the
Holy Sonnets also belong to that time of his life.
In
1615 King James I, his admirer, pressured him to take orders in the Anglican
Church. From then on Donne devoted his efforts to devotional writings─Holy
Sonnets, La Corona series,
Meditations, and Sermons. He lost his wife in 1617 and,
weary of all worldly ambitions, devoted himself entirely to his sacred duties.
In 1621 he was nominated Dean of St. Paul's cathedral church in London and, as
Dr. Donne, he was the most famous preacher of his time.
Donne's secular and religious poetry had characteristics that distinguished it
sharply from the poetry of his time. He had a great number of followers of his
technique, the most famous of whom were Herbert (1593-1633), Crashaw
(1612-1649), and Vaughan (1622-1695). Marvell was also very much influenced by
him. Donne's type of poetry flourished until the Restoration (1660). It is
called Metaphysical Poetry.
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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─the
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.
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Subject Mater
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─the
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.
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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.
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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.
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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〔“No
man is an island...Three-fore thee.”〕);
his fear of divine punishment because of sin. (Sermon LXXVI〔“On
Falling Out of God's Hand”〕;
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.
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