John Donne: His life, times, and poetry

Many years ago I was given a Modern Library edition of The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of John Donne. I do not recall ever opening book, but, in pruning the bookcases before a move, I never thought to discard it. It was a gift. The words would wait. Donne was someone with whom I would eventually become familiar.

Donne, after all, is responsible for "Goe, and catche a falling star . . . " "Death be not proud . . ." and ". . . send not to know or whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee." Anyone who can write something still current 450 years later probably offers other treasures. Which is why I checked out John Donne: The Reformed Soul by John Stubbs. 

Readable and engaging

Stubbs "was born in 1977 and studied English at Oxford and Renaissance literature at Cambridge, where he completed a doctorate in 2005. He was awarded a 2004 Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Award for John Donne: The Reformed Soul as a work in progress." His biography of Donne, published in 2007, is a 478-page work of scholarship with notes, bibliography, and index that gives an account of Donne's life, times, and evolving thought. 

It might be scholarly, but the book is so readable and engaging I could not help but think of Hillary Mantel's Wolf Hall trilogy, the fictional life of Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII's chief minister. Sir Thomas More, a Catholic, refused to swear an oath accepting the Act of Succession, recognizing the king's marriage to Anne Boleyn as legitimate and breaking with Rome, was executed in 1534. More was also Donne's mother's great uncle. So Donne was born 1572 into a Catholic family at a time when Queen Elizabeth was trying to stamp out Catholicism in England.

Tumultuous times

Donne's father was a London ironmonger who died when Donne was four; his mother a life-long Catholic eventually fled to France; his uncle headed an underground Jesuit mission, was caught, imprisoned, and  exiled; his younger brother died from the plague in 1593 while being held in Newgate Prison for harboring a seminary priest. Donne converted to Anglicanism around age seven.

In other words, Donne's times were tumultuous: Religious conflict between Catholics, Anglicans, and Puritans; regime change when Elizabeth died and James VI of Scotland became James I of Great Britain, foreign threats from the Spanish, and of course a plague. 

His mother remarried. Donne was able to attend Oxford, studied law, sailed as a gentleman adventurer with English expeditions to Cadiz and the Azores, and, in 1597,  became a secretary to Sir Thomas Egerton, the lord keeper of England. In Egerton's service Donne fell in love with Egerton's niece Ann More, secretly marrying her in 1601. The marriage not only lost him his position, it blighted his chances for advancement at court.

In fifteen years of marriage, he and Ann had a dozen children, the last dying shortly after birth with Ann immediately following. (There are no pictures of Ann, no surviving letters.) Through all the vicissitudes: Donne wrote poetry, bawdy verses for friends as a young man, poetic letters to friends, commissioned poems for patrons, and eventually deeply religious works. At King James's urging (demand?), Donne became an Anglican priest and eventually the Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral in London.

The forceful preacher

Stubbs manages to convey enough history of the period to put Donne's decisions into a context (the English court sounds like "Game of Thrones" without dragons), the religious debates (adding to the Catholic/Protestant conflict, there's Calvin in Geneva propounding the idea of predestination), and Donne's evolving thought as he evolves from a randy young man into a forceful preacher:

"We are all conceived in close Prison; in our Mothers wombs, we are close Prisoners all; when we are borne, we are borne but to the liberty of the house; Prisoners still, though within large walls, and then all our life is but a going out to the place of Execution, to death."

One of the things that struck me about Donne's poetry is, as the sentence above indicates, the use of symbol, metaphor, and simile. Take the famous Holy Sonnet 10:

"Death, be not proud, though some have called thee/ Mighty and dreadfull, for thou art not soe;/ For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow/ Die not, poore Death, nor yet canst thou kill mee./ From rest and sleepe, which but thy pictures bee,/ Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,/ And soonest our best men with thee doe goe,/ Rest of their bones, and soules deliverie./ Thou art slave to Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men,/ And dost with poyson, warre, and sicknesse dwell,/ And poppie, or charms can make us sleepe as well/ And better than thy stroake; why swell'st thou then?/ One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally/ And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die." 

What an interesting idea, that that death itself shall die.

Given the archaic spellings, uncommon words, and unfamiliar thoughts, Donne is not an easy read. Which is why Stubb's John Donne: The Reformed Soul is such an engaging and useful introduction to him.