John Donne
and
the Metaphysical Poets
John Donne’s biography
John Donne’s literary work
The Metaphysical poets
John Donne’s biography
John Donne was born in Bread Street, London in 1572 to a prosperous Roman Catholic family. His
father, John Donne, was a well-to-do ironmonger and citizen of London. Donne's father died suddenly
in 1576, and left the three children to be raised by their mother, Elizabeth.
Donne's first teachers were Jesuits. At the age of 11, Donne and his younger brother Henry were entered
at Hart Hall, University of Oxford, where Donne studied for three years. He spent the next three years
at the University of Cambridge, but took no degree at either university because he would not take the
Oath of Supremacy required at graduation. He was admitted to study law and it seemed natural that
Donne should embark upon a legal or diplomatic career.
In 1593, Donne's brother Henry died of a fever in prison after being arrested for giving sanctuary to a
proscribed Catholic priest. This made Donne begin to question his faith. His first book of poems,
Satires, written during this period of residence in London, is considered one of Donne's most important
literary efforts. Although not immediately published, the volume had a fairly wide readership through
private circulation of the manuscript. Same was the case with his love poems, Songs and Sonnets,
assumed to be written at about the same time as the Satires.
Having inherited a considerable fortune, young "Jack Donne" spent his money on womanizing, on
books, at the theatre, and on travels. In 1596, Donne joined the naval expedition that Robert
Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, led against Cádiz, Spain. In 1597, Donne joined an expedition to the
Azores, where he wrote "The Calm". Upon his return to England in 1598, Donne was appointed
private secretary to Sir Thomas Egerton, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, afterward Lord Ellesmere.
Donne was beginning a promising career. In 1601, Donne became MP for Brackley, and sat in Queen
Elizabeth's last Parliament. But in the same year, he secretly married Lady Egerton's niece,
seventeen-year-old Anne More, daughter of Sir George More, Lieutenant of the Tower, and
effectively committed career suicide.
Sir George had Donne thrown in Fleet Prison for some weeks. Donne was dismissed from his post, and
for the next decade had to struggle near poverty to support his growing family. Donne later summed up
the experience: "John Donne, Anne Donne, Undone." Anne's cousin offered the couple refuge in
Pyrford, Surrey, and the couple was helped by friends. It was not until 1609 that a reconciliation was
effected between Donne and his father-in-law, and Sir George More was finally induced to pay his
daughter's dowry.
In the intervening years, Donne practised law, but they were lean years for the Donnes. Donne was
employed by the religious pamphleteer Thomas Morton, later Bishop of Durham. To this period,
before reconciliation with his in-laws, belong Donne's Divine Poems(1607) and Biathanatos (pub.
1644), a radical piece for its time, in which Donne argues that suicide is not a sin in itself.
As Donne approached forty, he published two anti-Catholic polemics Pseudo-Martyr (1610) and
Ignatius his Conclave(1611). They were final public testimony of Donne's renunciation of the Catholic
faith. Pseudo-Martyr, which held that English Catholics could pledge an oath of allegiance to James
I, King of England, without compromising their religious loyalty to the Pope, won Donne the favour
of the King. In return for patronage from Sir Robert Drury of Hawstead, he wrote A Funerall
Elegie (1610), on the death of Sir Robert's 15-year-old daughter Elizabeth. At this time, the Donnes
took residence on Drury Lane. The two Anniversaries— An Anatomy of the World(1611) and Of
the Progress of the Soul(1612) continued the patronage. Sir Robert encouraged the publication of the
poems: The First Anniversary was published with the original elegy in 1611, and both were reissued
with The Second Anniversary in 1612.
Donne had refused to take Anglican orders in 1607, but King James
persisted, finally announcing that Donne would receive no post or
preferment from the King, unless in the church. In 1615, Donne
reluctantly entered the ministry and was appointed a Royal Chaplain
later that year.
Just as Donne's fortunes seemed to be improving, Anne Donne died, on
15 August, 1617, aged thirty-three, after giving birth to their twelfth
child, a stillborn. Seven of their children survived their mother's death.
Struck by grief, Donne wrote the seventeenth Holy Sonnet, "Since she
whom I lov'd hath paid her last debt." Donne continued to write poetry,
notably his Holy Sonnets(1618), but the time for love songs was over.
In 1618, Donne went as chaplain with Viscount Doncaster in his
embassy to the German princes. His Hymn to Christ at the Author's
Last Going into Germany, written before the journey, is laden with
apprehension of death. Donne returned to London in 1620, and was
appointed Dean of Saint Paul's in 1621, a post he held until his death.
Donne excelled at his post, and was at last financially secure.
In 1624, Donne was made vicar of St
Dunstan's-in-the-West. On March 27,
1625, James I died, and Donne preached
his first sermon for Charles I. But for his
ailing health, (he had mouth sores and had
experienced significant weight loss) Donne
almost certainly would have become a
bishop in 1630. Obsessed with the idea of
death, Donne posed in a shroud - the
painting was completed a few weeks before
his death, and later used to create an effigy.
He also preached what was called his own
funeral sermon, Death's Duel, just a few
weeks before he died in London on March
31, 1631. The last thing Donne wrote just
before his death was Hymne to God, my
God, In my Sicknesse. Donne's
monument, in his shroud, survived the
Great Fire of London and can still be seen
today at St. Paul's.
John Donne’s literary work
John Donne is considered a master of the conceit, an extended metaphor that
combines two vastly unlike ideas into a single idea, often using imagery. 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), when such typical Petrarchan conceits appear in Donne, they are soundly
mocked. Metaphysical conceits go to a greater depth in comparing two completely
unlike objects. 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 liked to twist and distort not only images and ideas, but also traditional
rhythmic patterns.
Donne's works are also remarkably witty, employing paradoxes, puns, and subtle yet
remarkable analogies. His pieces are often ironic and cynical, especially regarding
the motives of humans and love. Common subjects of Donne's poems are love—
especially in his early life, death—especially after his wife's death, and religion.
Characteristic of Donne’s Poetry
Donne set what has come to be known as the pattern for metaphysical
poetry. His poetry can be characterised by the following attributes:
-It is sharply opposed to the the sense of human dignity, and the idealised
view of sexual love, which constituted the central tradition of
Elizabethan poetry, especially in writers like Spenser.
-It adopts a diction and meter modelled on the rough actual speech.
-It is usually organised in the form of an urgent or heated argument.
-It puts to use a subtle and often outrageous logic.
-It is marked by realism, irony and often a cynicism in its treatment of
the complexity of human motives.
His career can be viewed as having two phases:
Phase I
His early poetry consist of five satires, twenty elegies (mainly about
love, and deal with their theme in a variety of ways). Some are
indeed cynical: they deal with the paradoxes of lust.
Songs and Sonnets - by far the most interesting of Donne’s early
work, the love poems in the collection are of different mood, addressed
to different persons. In the songs and sonnets, Donne’s development is
characteristic: the opening of the poem shock the reader into attention,
sometimes by asking a question. Then the thought or argument is
ingeniously developed in terms of ideas derived from philosophy or
scientific notions.
Donne’s chief quality in the early work is the union of passion and
rationalisation.
Phase II
Although it changes in focus and theme, Donne’s later poetry remains as complex
and dense as his earliest endeavours. The later work reflects his religious tension and
his poetic exploration of man’s relationship with God.
Most but not all of Donne’s Divine Poems were written during the last phase of his
life, when the young and sophisticated scholar had grown into the grave and
philosophical divine. The texts often explore controversial or though questions about
religion with startling directness.
The Divine poems were largely written after the death of Donne’s wife, when he had
effectively abandoned the worldly, sensuous life behind him and was searching
instead for a ‘right relationship’ with God.
The 19 Holy Sonnets contain Donne’s finest examples of religious poetry. These
poems are marked by the same intensity, the same combination of passion and
argument that can be found in Songs and Sonnets, although the object of the
passion has now changed. Donne’s later passion is more complex- it is a blend of the
hope and anguish that marks the religious man’s search for the right relationship
with his God, when he is aware not only of God’s greatness but also of his own
comparative unworthiness.
"The Flea"
Summary
The speaker tells his beloved to look at the flea before them and to note "how little" is that thing that
she denies him. For the flea, he says, has sucked first his blood, then her blood, so that now, inside the
flea, they are mingled; and that mingling cannot be called "sin, or shame, or loss of maidenhead." The
flea has joined them together in a way that, "alas, is more than we would do."
As his beloved moves to kill the flea, the speaker stays her hand, asking her to spare the three lives in
the flea: his life, her life, and the flea's own life. In the flea, he says, where their blood is mingled, they
are almost married--no, more than married--and the flea is their marriage bed and marriage
temple mixed into one. Though their parents grudge their romance and though she will not make love
to him, they are nevertheless united and cloistered in the living walls of the flea. She is apt to kill him,
he says, but he asks that she not kill herself by killing the flea that contains her blood; he says that to
kill the flea would be sacrilege, "three sins in killing three."
"Cruel and sudden," the speaker calls his lover, who has now killed the flea, "purpling" her fingernail
with the "blood of innocence." The speaker asks his lover what the flea's sin was, other than having
sucked from each of them a drop of blood. He says that his lover replies that neither of them is less
noble for having killed the flea. It is true, he says, and it is this very fact that proves that her fears are
false: If she were to sleep with him ("yield to me"), she would lose no more honour than she lost when
she killed the flea.
Commentary
This funny little poem again exhibits Donne's metaphysical love-poem mode, his aptitude for
turning even the least likely images into elaborate symbols of love and romance. This poem uses the
image of a flea that has just bitten the speaker and his beloved to sketch an amusing conflict over
whether the two will engage in premarital sex. The speaker wants to, the beloved does not, and so the
speaker, highly clever but grasping at straws, uses the flea, in whose body his blood mingles with his
beloved's, to show how innocuous such mingling can be--he reasons that if mingling in the flea is so
innocuous, sexual mingling would be equally innocuous, for they are really the same thing. By the
second stanza, the speaker is trying to save the flea's life, holding it up as "our marriage bed and
marriage temple."
But when the beloved kills the flea despite the speaker's protestations (and probably as a deliberate
move to squash his argument, as well), he turns his argument on its head and claims that despite the
high-minded and sacred ideals he has just been invoking, killing the flea did not really impugn his
beloved's honour--and despite the high-minded and sacred ideals she has invoked in refusing to sleep
with him, doing so would not impugn her honour either.
This poem is the cleverest of a long line of sixteenth-century love poems using the flea as an erotic
image, a genre derived from an older poem of Ovid. Donne's poise of hinting at the erotic without
ever explicitly referring to sex, while at the same time leaving no doubt as to exactly what he means, is
as much a source of the poem's humour as the silly image of the flea is; the idea that being bitten by a
flea would represent "sin, or shame, or loss of maidenhead" gets the point across with a neat
conciseness and clarity that Donne's later religious lyrics never attained.
Hymn to God, my God, in my Sickness"
Summary
The speaker says that since he will soon die and come to "that holy room" where he will be made
into the music of God as sung by a choir of saints, he tunes "the instrument" now and thinks what
he will do when the final moment comes. He likens his doctors to cosmographers and himself to a
map, lying flat on the bed to be shown "that this is my south-west discovery / Per fretum febris, by
these straits to die." He rejoices, for in those straits he sees his "west," his death, whose currents "yield
return to none," yet which will not harm him. West and east meet and join in all flat maps (the
speaker says again that he is a flat map), and in the same way, death is one with the resurrection.
The speaker asks whether his home is the Pacific Sea, or the eastern riches, or Jerusalem. He lists
the straights of Anyan, Magellan, and Gibraltar, and says that only straits can offer access to
paradise, whether it lies "where Japhet dwelt, or Cham, or Shem." The speaker says that
"Paradise and Calvary, / Christ's Cross, and Adam's tree" stood in the same place. He asks God to
look and to note that both Adams (Christ being the second Adam) are unified in him; as the first
Adam's sweat surrounds his face, he says, may the second Adam's blood embrace his soul. He asks
God to receive him wrapped in the purple of Christ, and, "by these his thorns," to give him Christ's
other crown. As he preached the word of God to others' souls, he says, let this be his sermon to his
own soul: "Therefore that he may raise the Lord throws down."
Commentary
Scholars are divided over the question of whether this poem was written on Donne's deathbed in
1630 or during the life-threatening fever he contracted in 1623. In either case, the "Hymn to God
my God" was certainly written at a time when Donne believed he was likely to die. This beautiful,
lyrical, and complicated poem represents his mind's attempt to summarize itself, and his attempt to
offer, as he says, a sermon to his soul. In the first stanza, the speaker looks forward to the time when
he will be in "that holy room" where he will be made into God's music--an extraordinary image-with His choir of saints. In preparation for that time, he says, he will "tune the instrument" (his
soul) by writing this poem.
The next several stanzas, devoted to the striking image of Donne's body as a map looked over by his
navigator-doctors, develop an elaborate geographical symbolism with which to explain his condition.
He is entering, he says, his "south-west discovery"--the south being, traditionally, the region of heat
(or fever) and the west being the site of the sunset and, thus, in this poem, the region of death. (A
key to this geographical symbolism can be found in A.J. Smith's concise notation in the Penguin
Classics edition of Donne's Complete English Poems.) The speaker says that his discovery is made
Per fretum febris, or by the strait of fever, and that he will die "by these straits."
Donne employs an elaborate pun on the idea of "straits," a word that denotes the narrow passages of
water that connect oceans, yet which also refers to grim personal difficulties (as in "dire straights"):
Donne's personal struggles with his illness are like the straits that will connect him to the paradise of
the Pacific Sea, Jerusalem, and the eastern riches; no matter where one is in the world--in the region
of Japhet, Cham, or Shem--such treasures can only be reached through straits. (Japhet, Cham,
and Shem were the sons of Noah, who divided the world between them after the ark came to rest:
Japhet lived in Europe, Cham lived in Africa, and Shem lived in Asia.)
Essentially, all of this word play and allusion is merely another way of saying that
Donne expects his fever to lead him to heaven (even on his deathbed, his mind delighted
in spinning metaphysical complexities). The speaker says that on maps, west and east
are one--if one travels far enough in either direction, one ends up on the other side of the
map--and, therefore, his death in the "west" will lead to his "eastern" resurrection.
He then shifts to a dramatically different set of images, claiming that Christ's Cross and
Adam's tree stood physically on the same place, and that by the same token, both the
characteristics of Adam (sin and toil) and of Christ (resurrection and purity) are
present in Donne himself: The phrase "Look Lord, and find both Adams met in me" is
Donne's most perfect statement of the contrary strains of spirituality and carnality that
run through his poems and ran through his life. As the sweat of the first Adam (who
was cursed to work after expulsion from Eden) surrounds his face in his fever, he hopes
the blood of Christ, the second Adam, will embrace and purify his soul.
Donne concludes by charting his actual entry into heaven, saying that he hopes to be
received by God wrapped in the purple garment of Christ--purple with blood and with
triumph--and to obtain his crown. As his final poetic act, he writes a sermon for his own
soul, just as he preached sermons to the souls of others during his years as a priest. The
Lord, he says, throws down that he may raise up; Donne, thrown down by the fever, will
be lifted up to heaven, where his soul, having been "tuned" now on Earth, may be used to
make the music of God.
Metaphysical Poets
A term used to group together
certain 17th-century poet, usually
Donne, Marvell, Vaughan and
Traherne, though other figures
like Abraham Cowley are
sometimes included in the list.
Although in no sense a school or
proper movement, they share
common characteristics of wit,
inventiveness, and a love of
elaborate stylistic manoeuvres.
The Metaphysical poets turned to the medieval scholastic
philosophers for stylistic inspiration, borrowing from them the
terminology and the difficulty of their style of argument.
Two Developments of the Metaphysical Movement
Secular poetry
-Cleveland
-Marvell
-Cowley
Religious poetry
-Herbert
-Vaughan
-Crashaw
.
The Metaphysical Conceit
Just as did the Petrarchan sonneteers, Donne and his followers had their own
metaphysical conceits.
Samuel Johnson described their conceits as:
A kind of discordia concors (harmony or unity gained by combining disparate or
conflicting elements) ; a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult
resemblances in things apparently unlike. The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by
violence together.
Put more simply, a metaphysical conceit is what we would call an extended metaphor, a
comparison between two relatively unlike entities.
The most famous sustain conceit is Donne’s drawing of parallels between:
-the continuing relationship of his persona’s soul with that of his beloved’s (despite their
physical parting)
-the coordinated movements of the two feet of a compass