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John Donne, (born sometime between Jan. 24 and June 19, 1572, London, Eng.—died March 31, 1631, London), leading English poet of the Metaphysical school and dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral, London (1621–31). Donne is often considered the greatest love poet in the English language. He is also noted for his religious verse and treatises and for his sermons, which rank among the best of the 17th century.

Life and career

Donne was born of Roman Catholic parents. His mother, a direct descendant of Sir Thomas More’s sister, was the youngest daughter of John Heywood, epigrammatist and playwright. His father, who, according to Donne’s first biographer, Izaak Walton, was “descended from a very ancient family in Wales,” was a prosperous London merchant. Donne was four when his father died, and shortly thereafter his mother married Dr. John Syminges, who raised the Donne children. At age 12 Donne matriculated at the University of Oxford, where he studied for three years, and he then most likely continued his education at the University of Cambridge, though he took no degree from either university because as a Roman Catholic he could not swear the required oath of allegiance to the Protestant queen, Elizabeth. Following his studies Donne probably traveled in Spain and Italy and then returned to London to read law, first at Thavies Inn (1591) and then at Lincoln’s Inn (1592–94). There he turned to a comparative examination of Roman Catholic and Protestant theology and perhaps even toyed with religious skepticism. In 1596 he enlisted as a gentleman with the earl of Essex’s successful privateering expedition against Cádiz, and the following year he sailed with Sir Walter Raleigh and Essex in the near-disastrous Islands expedition, hunting for Spanish treasure ships in the Azores.

After his return to London in 1597, Donne became secretary to Sir Thomas Egerton, lord keeper of the great seal, in whose employ Donne remained for almost five years. The appointment itself makes it probable that Donne had become an Anglican by this time. During his tenure with the lord keeper, Donne lived, according to Walton, more as a friend than as a servant in the Egerton household, where Sir Thomas appointed him “a place at his own table, to which he esteemed [Donne’s] company and discourse to be a great ornament.” Donne’s contemporary, Richard Baker, wrote of him at this time as “not dissolute [i.e., careless], but very neat; a great visitor of Ladies, a great frequenter of Plays, a great writer of conceited Verses.”

While in Egerton’s service, Donne met and fell in love with Anne More, niece of Egerton’s second wife and the daughter of Sir George More, who was chancellor of the garter. Knowing there was no chance of obtaining Sir George’s blessing on their union, the two married secretly, probably in December 1601. For this offense Sir George had Donne briefly imprisoned and dismissed from his post with Egerton as well. He also denied Anne’s dowry to Donne. Because of the marriage, moreover, all possibilities of a career in public service were dashed, and Donne found himself at age 30 with neither prospects for employment nor adequate funds with which to support his household.

During the next 10 years Donne lived in poverty and humiliating dependence, first on the charity of Anne’s cousin at Pyrford, Surrey, then at a house in Mitcham, about 7 miles (11 km) from London, and sometimes in a London apartment, where he relied on the support of noble patrons. All the while he repeatedly tried (and failed) to secure employment, and in the meantime his family was growing; Anne ultimately bore 12 children, 5 of whom died before they reached maturity. Donne’s letters show his love and concern for his wife during these years: “Because I have transplanted [her] into a wretched fortune, I must labour to disguise that from her by all such honest devices, as giving her my company, and discourse.” About himself, however, Donne recorded only despair: “To be part of no body is as nothing; and so I am. … I am rather a sickness or a disease of the world than any part of it and therefore neither love it nor life.”

In spite of his misery during these years, Donne wrote and studied assiduously, producing prose works on theology, canon law, and anti-Catholic polemics and composing love lyrics, religious poetry, and complimentary and funerary verse for his patrons. As early as 1607 friends had begun urging him to take holy orders in the Church of England, but he felt unworthy and continued to seek secular employment. In 1611–12 he traveled through France and the Low Countries with his newfound patron, Sir Robert Drury, leaving his wife at Mitcham. Upon their return from the European continent, the Drurys provided the Donnes with a house on the Drury estate in London, where they lived until 1621.

In 1614 King James I refused Donne’s final attempt to secure a post at court and said that he would appoint him to nothing outside the church. By this time Donne himself had come to believe he had a religious vocation, and he finally agreed to take holy orders. He was ordained deacon and priest on Jan. 23, 1615, and preferment soon followed. He was made a royal chaplain and received, at the king’s command, the degree of doctor of divinity from Cambridge. On Nov. 22, 1621, Donne was installed as dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral, at which he carried out his duties with efficiency and integrity. But this turnabout in Donne’s professional life was accompanied by searing personal grief. Two years after his ordination, in 1617, Anne Donne died at age 33 after giving birth to a stillborn child. Grief-stricken at having lost his emotional anchor, Donne vowed never to marry again, even though he was left with the task of raising his children in modest financial circumstances at the time. Instead, his bereavement turned him fully to his vocation as an Anglican divine. The power and eloquence of Donne’s sermons soon secured for him a reputation as the foremost preacher in the England of his day, and he became a favourite of both Kings James I and Charles I.

In 1623 Donne fell seriously ill with either typhus or relapsing fever, and during his sickness he reflected on the parallels between his physical and spiritual illnesses—reflections that culminated during his recovery in the prose Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, published in 1624. On Feb. 25, 1631, Donne, who was fatally ill with stomach cancer, left his sickbed to preach a final sermon at court; this was published posthumously as “Death’s Duell” and is sometimes considered to be his own funeral sermon. He returned to his sickbed and, according to Walton, had a drawing made of himself in his shroud, perhaps as an aid to meditating on his own dissolution. From this drawing Nicholas Stone constructed a marble effigy of Donne that survived the Great Fire of 1666 and still stands today in St. Paul’s Cathedral.

Poetry of John Donne

Because almost none of Donne’s poetry was published during his lifetime, it is difficult to date it accurately. Most of his poems were preserved in manuscript copies made by and passed among a relatively small but admiring coterie of poetry lovers. Most current scholars agree, however, that the elegies (which in Donne’s case are poems of love, not of mourning), epigrams, verse letters, and satires were written in the 1590s, the Songs and Sonnets from the 1590s until 1617, and the “Holy Sonnets” and other religious lyrics from the time of Donne’s marriage until his ordination in 1615. He composed the hymns late in his life, in the 1620s. Donne’s Anniversaries were published in 1611–12 and were the only important poetic works by him published in his lifetime.

Donne’s poetry is marked by strikingly original departures from the conventions of 16th-century English verse, particularly that of Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser. Even his early satires and elegies, which derive from classical Latin models, contain versions of his experiments with genre, form, and imagery. His poems contain few descriptive passages like those in Spenser, nor do his lines follow the smooth metrics and euphonious sounds of his predecessors. Donne replaced their mellifluous lines with a speaking voice whose vocabulary and syntax reflect the emotional intensity of a confrontation and whose metrics and verbal music conform to the needs of a particular dramatic situation. One consequence of this is a directness of language that electrifies his mature poetry. “For Godsake hold your tongue, and let me love,” begins his love poem “The Canonization,” plunging the reader into the midst of an encounter between the speaker and an unidentified listener. Holy Sonnet XI opens with an imaginative confrontation wherein Donne, not Jesus, suffers indignities on the cross: “Spit in my face yee Jewes, and pierce my side….”

From these explosive beginnings, the poems develop as closely reasoned arguments or propositions that rely heavily on the use of the conceit—i.e., an extended metaphor that draws an ingenious parallel between apparently dissimilar situations or objects. Donne, however, transformed the conceit into a vehicle for transmitting multiple, sometimes even contradictory, feelings and ideas. And, changing again the practice of earlier poets, he drew his imagery from such diverse fields as alchemy, astronomy, medicine, politics, global exploration, and philosophical disputation. Donne’s famous analogy of parting lovers to a drawing compass affords a prime example. The immediate shock of some of his conceits aroused Samuel Johnson to call them “heterogeneous ideas…yoked by violence together.” Upon reflection, however, these conceits offer brilliant and multiple insights into the subject of the metaphor and help give rise to the much-praised ambiguity of Donne’s lyrics.

The presence of a listener is another of Donne’s modifications of the Renaissance love lyric, in which the lovers lament, hope, and dissect their feelings without facing their ladies. Donne, by contrast, speaks directly to the lady or some other listener. The latter may even determine the course of the poem, as in “The Flea,” in which the speaker changes his tack once the woman crushes the insect on which he has built his argument about the innocence of lovemaking. But for all their dramatic intensity, Donne’s poems still maintain the verbal music and introspective approach that define lyric poetry. His speakers may fashion an imaginary figure to whom they utter their lyric outburst, or, conversely, they may lapse into reflection in the midst of an address to a listener. “But O, selfe traytor,” the forlorn lover cries in “Twickham Garden” as he transforms part of his own psyche into a listener. Donne also departs from earlier lyrics by adapting the syntax and rhythms of living speech to his poetry, as in “I wonder by my troth, what thou, and I/Did, till we lov’d?”. Taken together, these features of his poetry provided an impetus for the works of such later poets as Robert Browning, William Butler Yeats, and T.S. Eliot.

Donne also radically adapted some of the standard materials of love lyrics. For example, even though he continued to use such Petrarchan conceits as “parting from one’s beloved is death,” a staple of Renaissance love poetry, he either turned the comparisons into comedy, as when the man in “The Apparition” envisions himself as a ghost haunting his unfaithful lady, or he subsumed them into the texture of his poem, as the title “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” exemplifies. Donne’s love lyrics provide keen psychological insights about a broad range of lovers and a wide spectrum of amorous feelings. His speakers range from lustful men so sated by their numerous affairs that they denounce love as a fiction and women as objects—food, birds of prey, mummies—to platonic lovers who celebrate both the magnificence of their ladies and their own miraculous abstention from consummating their love. Men whose love is unrequited feel victimized and seek revenge on their ladies, only to realize the ineffectuality of their retaliation. In the poems of mutual love, however, Donne’s lovers rejoice in the compatibility of their sexual and spiritual love and seek immortality for an emotion that they elevate to an almost religious plane.

Donne’s devotional lyrics, especially the “Holy Sonnets,” “Good Friday 1613, Riding Westward,” and the hymns, passionately explore his love for God, sometimes through sexual metaphors, and depict his doubts, fears, and sense of spiritual unworthiness. None of them shows him spiritually at peace.

The most sustained of Donne’s poems, the Anniversaries, were written to commemorate the death of Elizabeth Drury, the 14-year-old daughter of his patron, Sir Robert Drury. These poems subsume their ostensible subject into a philosophical meditation on the decay of the world. Elizabeth Drury becomes, as Donne noted, “the Idea of a woman,” and a lost pattern of virtue. Through this idealized feminine figure, Donne in The First Anniversarie: An Anatomie of the World laments humanity’s spiritual death, beginning with the loss of Eden and continuing in the decay of the contemporary world, in which men have lost the wisdom that connects them to God. In The Second Anniversarie: Of the Progres of the Soule, Donne, partly through a eulogy on Elizabeth Drury, ultimately regains the wisdom that directs him toward eternal life.

Prose of John Donne

Donne’s earliest prose works, Paradoxes and Problems, probably were begun during his days as a student at Lincoln’s Inn. These witty and insouciant paradoxes defend such topics as women’s inconstancy and pursue such questions as “Why do women delight much in feathers?” and “Why are Courtiers sooner Atheists than men of other conditions?” While living in despair at Mitcham in 1608, Donne wrote a casuistic defense of suicide entitled Biathanatos. His own contemplation of suicide, he states, prompted in him “a charitable interpretation of theyr Action, who dye so.” Donne’s Pseudo-Martyr, published in 1610, attacks the recusants’ unwillingness to swear the oath of allegiance to the king, which Roman Catholics were required to do after the Gunpowder Plot (1605). The treatise so pleased James I that he had Oxford confer an honorary master of arts degree on Donne. In 1610 Donne also wrote a prose satire on the Jesuits entitled Ignatius His Conclave, in both Latin and English.

In 1611 Donne completed his Essays in Divinity, the first of his theological works. Upon recovering from a life-threatening illness, Donne in 1623 wrote Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, the most enduring of his prose works. Each of its 23 devotions consists of a meditation, an expostulation, and a prayer, all occasioned by some event in Donne’s illness, such as the arrival of the king’s personal physician or the application of pigeons to draw vapours from Donne’s head. The Devotions correlate Donne’s physical decline with spiritual sickness, until both reach a climax when Donne hears the tolling of a passing bell (16, 17, 18) and questions whether the bell is ringing for him. Like Donne’s poetry, the Devotions are notable for their dramatic immediacy and their numerous Metaphysical conceits, such as the well-known “No man is an Iland,” by which Donne illustrates the unity of all Christians in the mystical body of Christ.

It is Donne’s sermons, however, that most powerfully illustrate his mastery of prose. One-hundred and fifty-six of them were published by his son in three great folio editions (1640, 1649, and 1661). Though composed during a time of religious controversy, Donne’s sermons—intellectual, witty, and deeply moving—explore the basic tenets of Christianity rather than engage in theological disputes. Donne brilliantly analyzed Biblical texts and applied them to contemporary events, such as the outbreak of plague that devastated London in 1625. The power of his sermons derives from their dramatic intensity, candid personal revelations, poetic rhythms, and striking conceits.

Reputation and influence

The first two editions of Donne’s Poems were published posthumously, in 1633 and 1635, after having circulated widely in manuscript copies. The Poems were sufficiently popular to be published eight times within 90 years of Donne’s death, but his work was not to the general taste of the 18th century, when he was regarded as a great but eccentric “wit.” The notable exception to that appraisal was Alexander Pope, who admired Donne’s intellectual virtuosity and echoed some of Donne’s lines in his own poetry. From the early 19th century, however, perceptive readers began to recognize Donne’s poetic genius. Robert Browning credited Donne with providing the germ for his own dramatic monologues. By the 20th century, mainly because of the pioneering work of the literary scholar H.J.C. Grierson and the interest of T.S. Eliot, Donne’s poetry experienced a remarkable revival.

The impression in his poetry that thought and argument are arising immediately out of passionate feeling made Donne the master of both the mature Yeats and Eliot, who were reacting against the meditative lyricism of a Romantic tradition in decline. Indeed, the play of intellect in Donne’s poetry, his scorn of conventionally poetic images, and the dramatic realism of his style made him the idol of English-speaking poets and critics in the first half of the 20th century. Readers continue to find stimulus in Donne’s fusion of witty argument with passion, his dramatic rendering of complex states of mind, his daring and unhackneyed images, and his ability (little if at all inferior to William Shakespeare’s) to make common words yield up rich poetic meaning without distorting the essential quality of English idiom.

Courtesy - Patricia Garland Pinka
- John Danne

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