John Donne Totally Explained

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John Donne (pronounced like done, ; 1572 – March 31, 1631) was a Jacobean poet and preacher, representative of the metaphysical poets of the period. His works, notable for their realistic and sensual style, include sonnets, love poetry, religious poems, Latin translations, epigrams, elegies, songs, satires and sermons. His poetry is noted for its vibrancy of language and inventiveness of metaphor, compared with that of his contemporaries. He is famous for his Holy Sonnets.
Donne came from a Roman Catholic family, and so he experienced persecution until his conversion to the Anglican Church. Despite his great education and poetic talents, he lived in poverty for several years, relying heavily on wealthy friends. In 1615 he became an Anglican priest and in 1621 Dean of St Paul's. Some scholars believe his literary works reflect these trends, with love poetry and satires from his youth, and religious sermons during his later years. Other scholars, such as Helen Gardner, question the validity of dating when most of his poems were published posthumously (1633). The exception to these is his Anniversaries which were published in 1612 and Devotions upon Emergent Occasions published in 1623. His sermons are also dated, sometimes quite specifically, by date and year.

Early life

John Donne was born in London, England, sometime during end of 1571 or between January and June 19 in 1572, the third of six children. His father, of Welsh descent, also called John Donne, was a warden of the Ironmongers Company in the City of London and a respected Roman Catholic who avoided unwelcome government attention, out of fear of being persecuted for his Catholicism. John Donne Sr. died in 1576, leaving his wife, Elizabeth Heywood, the responsibility of raising their children. This tradition of martyrdom would continue among Donne’s closer relatives, many of whom were executed or exiled for religious reasons. Despite the obvious dangers, Donne’s family arranged for his education by the Jesuits, which gave him a deep knowledge of his religion that equipped him for the ideological religious conflicts of his time. During and after his education, Donne spent much of his considerable inheritance on women, literature, pastimes, and travel. According to Izaak Walton, who wrote a biography of Donne in 1640:
Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, Sir Thomas Egerton, and was established at Egerton’s London home, York House, Strand close to the Palace of Whitehall, then the most influential social centre in England. During the next four years he fell in love with Egerton's 17 (some say 14 or 16) year old niece, Anne More, and they were secretly married in 1601 against the wishes of both Egerton and her father, George More, Lieutenant of the Tower. This ruined his career and earned him a short stay in Fleet Prison along with the priest who married them and the man who acted as a witness to the wedding. Donne was released when the marriage was proved valid, and soon secured the release of the other two. Walton tells us that when he wrote to his wife to tell her about losing his post, he wrote after his name: John Donne, Anne Donne, Un-done. It wasn't until 1609 that Donne was reconciled with his father-in-law and received his wife's dowry.
Following his release, Donne had to accept a retired country life in Pyrford, Surrey.

Early poetry

Donne's earliest poems showed a brilliant knowledge of English society coupled with sharp criticism of its problems. His satires dealt with common Elizabethan topics, such as corruption in the legal system, mediocre poets, and pompous courtiers, yet stand out due to their intellectual sophistication and striking imagery. His images of sickness, vomit, manure, and plague assisted in the creation of a strongly satiric world populated by all the fools and knaves of England. His third satire, however, deals with the problem of true religion, a matter of great importance to Donne. Donne argued that it was better carefully to examine one's religious convictions than blindly to follow any established tradition, for none would be saved at the Final Judgment by claiming "A Harry, or a Martin taught [them] this."
Donne's early career was also notable for his erotic poetry, especially his elegies, in which he employed unconventional metaphors, such as a flea biting two lovers being equated to sex. Donne didn't publish these poems, although he did allow them to circulate widely in manuscript form.
Because love-poetry was very fashionable at that time, there are different opinions about whether the passionate love poems Donne wrote are addressed to his wife Anne, but it seems likely. She spent most of her married life either pregnant or nursing, so they evidently had a strong physical relationship. On August 15, 1617, his wife died five days after giving birth to a still-born baby, their twelfth child in sixteen years of marriage. Donne mourned her deeply and never remarried. This was quite unusual for the time, especially as he'd a large family to bring up.

Career and later life

Donne was elected as Member of Parliament for the constituency of Brackley in 1602, but this wasn't a paid position and Donne struggled to provide for his family, relying heavily upon rich friends. It was for Sir Robert that Donne wrote the two Anniversaries, An Anatomy of the World (1611) and Of the Progress of the Soul, (1612). While historians are not certain as to the precise reasons for which Donne left the Catholic Church, he was certainly in communication with the King, James I of England, and in 1610 and 1611 he wrote two anti-Catholic polemics: Pseudo-Martyr and Ignatius his Conclave. Although Donne was at first reluctant due to feeling unworthy of a clerical career, Donne finally acceded to the King's wishes and was ordained into the Church of England in 1615.
   After Anne Donne's death in 1617, the grief-stricken Donne wrote the with this event in mind. The change can be clearly seen in "An Anatomy of the World," (1611), a poem that Donne wrote in memory of Elizabeth Drury, daughter of his patron, Sir Robert Drury. This poem treats Elizabeth's demise with extreme gloominess, using it as a symbol for the Fall of Man and the destruction of the universe.
   The poem 'A Nocturnal upon S. Lucy's Day, being the shortest day' concerns the poet's despair at the death of a loved one. In it Donne expresses a feeling of utter negation and hopelessness, saying that "I am every dead thing...re-begot / Of absence, darkness, death". This famous work was probably written in 1627 when both Donne's friend Lucy, Countess of Bedford and his daughter Lucy Donne died. It is interesting to note that three years later in 1630 Donne wrote his will on Saint Lucy's day (December 13th), the date the poem describes as "Both the year's, and the day's deep midnight."
   The increasing gloominess of Donne's tone may also be observed in the religious works that he began writing during the same period. His early belief in the value of skepticism now gave way to a firm faith in the traditional teachings of the Bible. Having converted to the Anglican Church, Donne focused his literary career on religious literature. He quickly became noted for his deeply moving sermons and religious poems. The passionate lines of these sermons would come to influence future works of English literature, such as Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, which took its title from a passage in, and Thomas Merton’s No Man is an Island, which took its title from the same source.
   Towards the end of his life Donne wrote works that challenged death, and the fear that it inspired in many men, on the grounds of his belief that those who die are sent to Heaven to live eternally. One example of this challenge is his Holy Sonnet X, from which come the famous lines “Death, be not proud, though some have called thee / Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so.” Even as he lay dying during Lent in 1631, he rose from his sickbed and delivered the Death's Duel sermon, which was later described as his own funeral sermon. Death’s Duel portrays life as a steady descent to suffering and death, yet sees hope in salvation and immortality through an embrace of God, Christ and the Resurrection.

Legacy

John Donne is commemorated as a priest in the Calendar of Saints of the Anglican Communion and in the calendar of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America on March 31.
The memorial to John Donne, modeled after the engraving pictured above, was one of the only such memorials to survive the Great Fire of London in 1666 and now appears in St Paul's Cathedral south of the choir.

Style

John Donne is considered a master of the metaphysical conceit, an extended metaphor that combines two vastly unlike ideas into a single idea, often using imagery. An example of this is his equation of lovers with saints in "The Canonization." Unlike the conceits found in other Elizabethan poetry, most notably Petrarchan conceits, which formed clichéd comparisons between more closely related objects (such as a rose and love), metaphysical conceits go to a greater depth in comparing two completely unlike objects, although sometimes in the mode of Shakespeare's radical paradoxes and imploded contraries. One of the most famous of Donne's conceits is found in A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning where he compares two lovers who are separated to the two legs of a compass.
Donne's works are also witty, employing paradoxes, puns, and subtle yet remarkable analogies. His pieces are often ironic and cynical, especially regarding love and human motives. Common subjects of Donne's poems are love (especially in his early life), death (especially after his wife's death), and religion. Donne is noted for his poetic metre, which was structured with changing and jagged rhythms that closely resemble casual speech (it was for this that the more classically-minded Ben Jonson commented that "Donne, for not keeping of accent, deserved hanging").
John Donne was famous for his metaphysical poetry in the 17th century. His work suggests a healthy appetite for life and its pleasures, while also expressing deep emotion. He did this through the use of conceits, wit and intellect — as seen in the poems "The Sunne Rising" and "Batter My Heart". His work has received much criticism over the years, with very judgmental responses about his metaphysical form.

Bibliography

Poetry

Poems (1633)
Poems on Several Occasions (2001)
Love Poems (1905)
John Donne: Divine Poems, Sermons, Devotions and Prayers (1990)
The Complete English Poems (1991)
John Donne's Poetry (1991)
John Donne: The Major Works (2000)
The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of John Donne (2001)

Prose

Six Sermons (1634)

Fifty Sermons (1649)

Paradoxes, Problemes, Essayes, Characters (1652)

Essayes in Divinity (1651)

Sermons Never Before Published (1661)

John Donne's 1622 Gunpowder Plot Sermon (1996)

Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions and Death's Duel (1999; first published in 1624)

Critical works

John Carey, John Donne: Life, Mind and Art, (London 1981)

A. L. Clements (ed.) John Donne's Poetry (New York and London, 1966)

Stevie Davies, John Donne (Northcote House, Plymouth, 1994)

T. S. Eliot, "The Metaphysical Poets", Selected Essays, (London 1969)

G. Hammond (ed.) The Metaphysical Poets: A Casebook, (London 1986)

Sir Geoffrey Keynes, Bibliography of Donne, (Cambridge, 1958)

George Klawitter, The Enigmatic Narrator: The Voicing of Same-Sex Love in the Poetry of John Donne (Peter Lang, 1994)

Arthur F. Marotti, John Donne, Coterie Poet, (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986)

H. L. Meakin, John Donne's Articulations of the Feminine, (Oxford, 1999)

Joe Nutt, John Donne: The Poems, (New York and London 1999)

E.M. Simpson, A Study of the Prose Works of John Donne, (Oxford, 1962)

C. L. Summers and T. L. Pebworth (eds.) The Eagle and the Dove: Reassessing John Donne (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1986)

John Stachniewski, The Persecutory Imagination, (Oxford, 1991)

James Winny, A Preface to Donne (New York, 1981)Further Information

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