Texts of Donne’s poems are appended.
Since Eliot’s essay on “The Metaphysical Poets” almost a hundred years ago Donne’s literary stock has been high indeed. The anonymous 1595 painting of John Donne by shows a stylish young blade, beardless with a thin moustache, an extravagantly lacy shirt with an open collar, and a prodigiously huge hat. Donne, who was to be a grave divine, dean even of St. Paul’s, and a member of Parliament, here looks like nothing so much as a fashionable man-about-town. His contemporary, the writer and translator Richard Baker spoke of him in his youth as “not dissolute, but very neat; a great visitor of Ladies, a great frequenter of Plays, a great writer of conceited Verses.”
His present literary authority may have seemed unlikely in the days of his youth. The son of a London Roman Catholic bourgeois, his background offered little likelihood of favor in high places. Indeed, his brother died while imprisoned for concealing a priest. He bounced around, gaining admittance to Lincoln’s Inn as a lawyer and sailing with Sir Walter Raleigh. Looking for advantage, he served as secretary to the Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, only to incur his employer’s anger by marrying his niece, whereupon he was fired and initially put in jail. Writing to his wife about his dismissal, he signed “John Donne, Anne Donne, Un-done.” While he was freed soon after, he was in reduced circumstances for years while his wife bore child after child, twelve in sixteen years.
After his conversion to Anglicanism and his ordination as a priest, he wrote anti-Catholic pamphlets and his fortunes improved. He served as prolocutor to the king, sat in Parliament, and became a prestigious and popular prelate and chaplain to aristocrats. By the time of his death the public’s memory of the witty seduction poems of his youth had been overlaid with a newer celebrity based on energetic but wholly orthodox religious verses and such memorable meditations as that in which he declared “never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”
“Elegy XIX: To His Mistris Going to Bed” features a dazzling display of wit, sufficiently risqué that the poem was denied a license. Excluded from his posthumous collected poems, it was published twenty-one years later. Though the sexes are figured as “foes,” and the lady may display a coquettish stand-offishness (what the troubadours called daunger), they are more profoundly at one in their pursuit of the heights of physical love. Donne sets the tone with the play on “labor” in the second line which leads directly to the erection joke – “tired of standing.” The motif returns in line 11 with his envy of the busk, the rigid center front piece of the corset, and again in line 24 with his saying she can set “flesh upright.” His body is only responding, of course, to the glories of hers which outdoes anything else in the natural world; indeed, it is divine because of her physicality, not in spite of it. The twenty-first century reader may find unpleasant his references to her body as a colony (in the oft-quoted line 27 “O my America, my new found land”) or, even more objectifying, as a mine. (l. 29) Yet he describes himself as in “bonds” (l. 30) though they paradoxically free him.
Though others may find an incompatibility between profane and divine love, between the physical and the spiritual, for Donne they are complementary.
Full nakedness, all joys are due to thee.
As souls unbodied, bodies unclothed must be
To taste whole joys.
He is a marvelously natural lover to whom adornments such as jewelry can only detract from the worshipped body, for him a “mystic book.” (line 41) The concluding lines may be read as reflecting prelapsarian innocence and the wonderful reciprocity of the love he envisions or as the cynical selfish line of a clever and courtly libertine. Very likely they are both.
To teach thee, I am naked first: why then
What need'st thou have more covering than a man.
In “The Sun Rising” Donne works some new variations on the old troubadour topos of the alba, the dawn-song in which the lover complains of daylight bringing to an end the idyll he had been enjoying in bed with his beloved. Donne immediately recharges this old motif by the use of vigorous, unmistakably colloquial language, providing the impression of sincerity arising from lived experience.
Similarly, the form is both old and new, conventional and innovative, with both rhyme and meter following well-defined but unpredictable patterns. Each stanza follows a rhyme scheme one quatrain short of a Shakespearean sonnet: ABBACDCDEE while the meter is iambic pentameter for lines three, four, seven, eight, nine, and ten. Line two is regularly shortened (and, in reading, slowed) to a dimeter, in the first two stanzas suggesting thoughtful inquiry and in the last, quiet wonder.
The poet indicates his values at the outset by treating the sun as a menial, annoyingly interfering with the all-important business of love-making. Yet he is not dismissed only to “chide late schoolboys,” but also to tend the king’s affairs, which in the lover’s view are as trivial as a child’s. Not merely human society from the lowest to the highest seems inconsequential to this lover, but even (one might have assumed as much from his high-handed address to the sun) such operations of nature as the ants prudent preparation for winter. The neo-Platonic justification for this amatory solipsism is provided in the couplet that concludes the first stanza. Love is eternal, outside of time; next to love’s glory, time is a ragged beggar.
The following stanza reinforces the hegemonic subjectivity that, for the lover, makes up his entire world. The sun vanishes when he closes his eyes, yet the entire world, his entire world, is ever–present in his lovers’ bed. Next to the delights of love all worldly honor seems inconsequential. The poet’s more-than- lordly position allows him to be condescending to the sun. The poem closes with a distinctly neo-Platonic geometric formula that considers the sphere to be the shape of perfection.
Even in his pose as a passionate lover, Donne uses philosophic justifications, most often neo-Platonic, to account for the strength of his desire. When he became an Anglican and a priest the center of his attention shifted from human to divine love while never denying the value and power of the former, and he became a celebrated preacher, drawing crowds to St. Paul’s as well as to Paul’s Cross, the al fresco pulpit nearby.
Remarkably, Donne managed to retain a comparable imaginative energy and sensuality in these religious poems. With “batter,” the first word of his Holy Sonnet XIV, he startles the reader with the ferocity of his passion. Once the reader understands the conceit, it grows only more monstrous. The poet imagines himself raped by God in a transport during which he is largely passive. The violence of the imagery is disturbing and unavoidable. The other governing metaphor of the poem is equally willing to flirt with masochism: the self as a city besieged by the divine, hoping to be captured. While these images are novel and likely to be shocking to many, Donne’s language is justified since the analogies of a rape or a city captured in war, while violent, are entirely consistent with the orthodox doctrine of salvation through grace. For Donne, the edgy rhetoric guarantees the reader’s attention and throws a new light on a familiar teaching.
He sounds as anxious for salvation as his younger self had been that the lady should undress. In praise of Donne Eliot had noted that for him the “disassociation of sensibility,” the separation of thought and feeling, did not exist. For Donne an idea was an experience and each emotion stirred ratiocination. While his every verse is grounded in concrete imagery of lived experience, it often uses the abstract concepts of neo-Platonism or Christian apologetics. For Donne the new discoveries of his day, the explorations of previously unknown regions, the latest in physics, alchemy and chemistry, all seemed to him rich with metaphorical possibilities. The fact is that, until the recent era of scientific specialization, men of letters and men of the cloth actually made scientific discoveries, among them Leibniz, Franklin, Goethe and Mendel. Over the centuries, the science may mutate and develop, but the emotional experiences never changes as though in the last analysis it is to those mutable and turbulent areas of consciousness that one must seek the most authentically lasting truths. Every poem of Donne’s is, though the poet’s craftsmanship, charged with the intensity of his intellect and no less of his heart.
"Elegy XIX: To His Mistris Going to Bed"
Come, Madam, come, all rest my powers defy,
Until I labour, I in labour lie.
The foe oft-times, having the foe in sight,
Is tired with standing, though they never fight.
Off with that girdle, like heaven's zone glistering
But a far fairer world encompassing.
Unpin that spangled breast-plate, which you wear
That th'eyes of busy fools may be stopped there:
Unlace yourself, for that harmonious chime
Tells me from you that now 'tis your bed time.
Off with that happy busk, whom I envy
That still can be, and still can stand so nigh.
Your gown's going off such beauteous state reveals
As when from flowery meads th'hills shadow steals.
Off with your wiry coronet and show
The hairy diadem which on you doth grow.
Off with those shoes: and then safely tread
In this love's hallowed temple, this soft bed.
In such white robes heaven's angels used to be
Received by men; thou Angel bring'st with thee
A heaven like Mahomet's Paradise; and though
Ill spirits walk in white, we easily know
By this these Angels from an evil sprite:
They set out hairs, but these the flesh upright.
License my roving hands, and let them go
Behind before, above, between, below.
Oh my America, my new found land,
My kingdom, safeliest when with one man manned,
My mine of precious stones, my Empery,
How blessed am I in this discovering thee.
To enter in these bonds is to be free,
Then where my hand is set my seal shall be.
Full nakedness, all joys are due to thee.
As souls unbodied, bodies unclothed must be
To taste whole joys. Gems which you women use
Are as Atlanta's balls, cast in men's views,
That when a fool's eye lighteth on a gem
His earthly soul may covet theirs not them.
Like pictures, or like books' gay coverings made
For laymen, are all women thus arrayed;
Themselves are mystic books, which only we
Whom their imputed grace will dignify
Must see revealed. Then since I may know,
As liberally as to a midwife show
Thyself; cast all, yea this white linen hence.
Here is no penance, much less innocence.
To teach thee, I am naked first: why then
What need'st thou have more covering than a man.
The Sun Rising
Busy old fool, unruly Sun,
Why dost thou thus,
Through windows, and through curtains, call on us ?
Must to thy motions lovers' seasons run ?
Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide
Late school-boys and sour prentices,
Go tell court-huntsmen that the king will ride,
Call country ants to harvest offices ;
Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.
Thy beams so reverend, and strong
Why shouldst thou think ?
I could eclipse and cloud them with a wink,
But that I would not lose her sight so long.
If her eyes have not blinded thine,
Look, and to-morrow late tell me,
Whether both th' Indias of spice and mine
Be where thou left'st them, or lie here with me.
Ask for those kings whom thou saw'st yesterday,
And thou shalt hear, "All here in one bed lay."
She's all states, and all princes I ;
Nothing else is ;
Princes do but play us ; compared to this,
All honour's mimic, all wealth alchemy.
Thou, Sun, art half as happy as we,
In that the world's contracted thus ;
Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be
To warm the world, that's done in warming us.
Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere ;
This bed thy center is, these walls thy sphere.
XIV.
Batter my heart, three-person'd God ; for you
As yet but knock ; breathe, shine, and seek to mend ;
That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend
Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp'd town, to another due,
Labour to admit you, but O, to no end.
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captived, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,
But am betroth'd unto your enemy ;
Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.
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