INTRODUCTION
Life of John Donne (1572-1631)
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John Donneˇ¦s adult life can be divided into three clearcut periods. As a young man he was very much the Elizabethan type˘wa 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.
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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.
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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˘wHoly 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. Paulˇ¦s cathedral church in London and, as Dr. Donne, he was the most famous preacher of his time.
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Donneˇ¦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. Donneˇ¦s type of poetry flourished until the Restoration (1660). It is called Metaphysical Poetry.
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The wordˇ§metaphysicalˇ¨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 loversˇ¦ 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).
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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.
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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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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 coupleˇ¦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.
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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 Donneˇ¦s analysis of himself in love. In the sonnets we find a complex expression of Donneˇ¦s feelings towards God and eternal life.
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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:ˇ§For Godˇ¦s sake hold your tongue and let me love,ˇ¨which is hardly poetic. (The language is the language of ordinary conversation;) the structure of Donneˇ¦s poetry is that of a dialogue of which only one half is heard, a device calledˇ§dramatic monologueˇ¨mage famous by Browning in the XIX century.
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Donneˇ¦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.
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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 Kingˇ¦s real, or his stamped face
Contemplate...
Such run-on lines abound in Holy Sonnet VII and Holy Sonnet XIV:
At the round earthˇ¦s imagined corners, blow
Your trumpets...
Batter my heart, three-personˇ¦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 thanˇ§still.ˇ¨The strong stress falls on the run-on wordˇ§litigiousˇ¨at the beginning of the next line.
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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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Another side of Donneˇ¦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.
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The poets of this century have learned from Donneˇ¦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.
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When T. S. Eliot praises Donne for keeping the proper union of intellectual and imaginative sensibilities, it is perhaps related to the largely ˇ§incarnationalˇ¨ part of Donneˇ¦s life and work. Originally, ˇ§incarnationalˇ¨ 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 Donneˇ¦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 Donneˇ¦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 theˇ§womb to tombˇ¨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:
Weˇ¦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.
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Themes connected with religion are frequently found in Donneˇ¦s writings: for instance, his concern with death (Meditation XVIIˇeˇ§No man is an island...Three-fore thee.ˇ¨ˇf); his fear of divine punishment because of sin. (Sermon LXXVIˇeˇ§On Falling Out of Godˇ¦s Handˇ¨ˇf; and his painful resignation to Godˇ¦s will (Holy Sonnet VII) .
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A saving quality of Donneˇ¦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)
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Neither Donneˇ¦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.