Introduction to Literature
Lesson Four: Donne, Suckling, and Behn
Love
Margarette R. Connor
Outline
• John Donne
– Metaphysical poetry
• Discussion of “The Flea”
– Carpe diem
• Sir John Suckling
– Cavalier poets
– Discussion of “Out upon it!”
• Aphra Behn
– Restoration poets
– Pastoral
– Discussion of “On Her Loving Two Equally”
John Donne (1572-1631)
• One of the finest poets in England in the early
17th century.
• He was a two-sided man.
Jack Donne
• The adventurous spark, a man about town who writes
bawdy and cynical verse to his mistresses. He later
writes erotic love poetry to his beloved wife.
Dr. Donne
• The grave and eloquent divine and dean of St. Paul’s,
one of London’s most important churches.
One major drawback - his religion
• Born into a Roman Catholic family during a peak anti-Roman
Catholic time.
• Attended both Oxford and Cambridge Universities, but because he
was a Roman Catholic, he couldn’t be granted a degree.
• Trained as a lawyer at Lincoln’s Inn, where many lawyers were
trained in those days, but because he was a Roman Catholic, he
couldn’t practice.
• Abandoned Roman Catholicism in his 20s, but because he didn’t
become an Anglican Catholic, he was still barred from many
opportunities.
Early Life of Action and Thought
• Put his talents to use as a man-about-town, courtier and soldier.
• He read enormously in divinity, medicine, law and the classics
and he wrote to display his learning and wit.
• He had to earn a living as he didn’t inherit enough money to be
independent. He traveled the Continent in some of his positions.
He saw action as part of the raiding parties to Cádiz and the
Azores.
• When back in England he played court politics in order to call
attention to himself and find preferment.
Opportunity knocks
• In 1598, when he was 26, he became private
secretary to Sir Thomas Egerton, one of the
highest court officials in England.
• In this post he sat in Elizabeth I’s
last Parliament and was able to
court more power.
Elizabeth I
Then disaster strikes
• In 1601, when he was 29 years old, he secretly
married Lady Egerton’s 17-year-old niece, Ann
More.
• Sir John More, her father, had Donne dismissed
from his post and imprisoned for a short while.
• While there, he wrote the famous epigraph,
“John Donne/Ann Donne/ Undone.”
Happy marriage, years of struggle
• When he was out of jail, he had a very happy
and loving marriage, but he struggled to make a
living for his growing family.
• He still had friends at court, but his betrayal of
the trust of his employer was not forgotten by
others.
• His refusal to join the Anglican Church didn’t
help.
Royal Notice
• By this time, Queen Elizabeth had died and her
successor, James I, had noticed Donne.
• Donne had flatly refused to become an Anglican
priest in1607, but James was sure he would make
an excellent priest.
• In 1615, James I pressured him to enter the
Anglican Ministry by declaring that Donne could
not be employed outside of the Church.
• He was appointed Royal Chaplain later that year.
James I
Preaching in Donne’s time
• In those days preaching was something more
than just a religious activity. It was
– Spiritual devotion
– Intellectual exercise
– Dramatic entertainment.
Donne’s skills
• Donne was a great preacher, and in his day he
was considered one of the best in England.
Factors that made him great:
– his metaphorical style,
– bold erudition,
– dramatic wit.
A major change
• In 1617, shortly after giving birth to their twelfth
child, a stillborn, his wife Ann, aged 33, died.
• This event made a difference in Donne and
brought out his more pensive, religious side.
• Jack Donne was pretty much buried with Ann.
The Reverend Doctor Donne
• In 1621, he was made Dean of St. Paul’s, as I
mentioned, one of the most important churches
in London, for this is where many of
the most powerful
courtiers
worshipped.
The modern St. Paul’s, rebuilt in the 1670s.
Sharp break with his predecessors
• He followed the Continental model of
more intellectualized conceits
– a metaphor or simile that initially appears
improbable, but which forces reader to
acknowledge the comparison, even though it
is exceedingly far-fetched.
Metaphysical poets
• a term for loose group of 17th century poets
–
–
–
–
–
–
Donne
Herbert
Crashaw
Marvell
Vaughn
Crowley
Qualities of metaphysical poetry
• Their subject was the relationship of the spirit to matter
or the ultimate nature of reality; and
• Not merely their subject matter, but the quality of their
expression.
– Ordinary speech
– Love of puns, paradoxes, startling conceits, and obscure, often
scientific terminology
– Some, including Donne, draw on Renaissance neo-Platonism
to show the relationship of soul to the body and the union of
lovers’ souls.
– Tried to depict a more realistic view of the psychological
tensions of sexual love
Carpe diem poems
• The term is Latin for “seize the day” and poems
with this theme advise the listener to enjoy the
pleasure of the moment before youth, or life,
passes away.
• As the famous saying goes, “Eat, drink and be
merry, for tomorrow we die.”
The Flea (1)
• MARK but this flea, and mark in this,
How little that which thou deniest me is ; a
man talking to a woman, and he got a flea in
his hand. MARK take note of a moral
lesson. Donne is making this poem a moral
lesson.
The Flea (2)
• It suck'd me first, and now sucks thee,
And in this flea our two bloods mingled be.
Thou know'st that this cannot be said
A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead ;
 In the Renaissance, people believed that sexual
intercourse actually literally involved the mingling
two bodies; making the two become one; and they
believe the Blood mingled during the intercourse;
this isn’t a sin nor a shame.
The Flea (3)
• Yet this enjoys before it woo, And pamper'd
swells with one blood made of two ; And
this, alas ! is more than we would do.
this flea is enjoying our two blood mingling
while can’t we before we’re married
implication in these lines: pamper’d
swellspossibilities of woman’s pregnancy
The Flea (4)
• O stay, three lives in one flea spare,
Where we almost, yea, more than married are.
This flea is you and I, and this
Our marriage bed, and marriage temple is.
Though parents grudge, and you, we're met,
And cloister'd in these living walls of jet.
Though use ( habbit) make you apt to kill me,
Let not to that self-murder added be,
And sacrilege, three sins in killing three.  she’ll be
committed three sins is she kills the flea
The Flea (5)
• Cruel and sudden, hast thou since
Purpled thy nail in blood of innocence?
Wherein could this flea guilty be,
Except in that drop which it suck'd from thee?
Yet thou triumph'st, and say'st that thou
Find'st not thyself nor me the weaker now.
'Tis true ; then learn how false fears be ;
Just so much honour, when thou yield'st to me,
Will waste, as this flea's death took life from thee.
Sir John Suckling, (1609-1642)
• The prototype of the
Cavalier playboy.
Portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds
Who are the Cavaliers?
• In 1642, a civil war broke out in England.
• There were very complicated reasons for it,
but simply put it was
Puritans vs Cavaliers.
A simple view of the issues
• The economic interests of the urban
middle class coincided with the
religious (Puritan) ideology.
Oliver Cromwell,
leader of the
Parliamentarians
• This conflicted with the traditional, agrarian
economic interests of the Crown and the
allied Anglican Church, which is headed by
the King.
King Charles I
The Opponents
• The people who supported the King were
called the Cavaliers; the other side were
called the Parliamentarians, the Puritans,
or disparagingly, the Roundheads (for their
bowl-shaped haircuts).
Sir Thomas Fairfax (1612-71) Captain general of
the Parliamentary New Model Army and his
opponent Prince Rupert of the Rhine (1619-82)
nephew of King Charles I and general of Royalist
Horse. Center section of the painting depicts
cavalry engagement during the battle of Marston
Moor.
Characteristics of Cavalier poetry
• A cultivated but colloquial idiom. They spoke with the ease
of a noble (and many of them were).
• They employed artificiality, and showed an urbane
refinement and elegant symmetry of form instead of feeling.
– Form is more important than substance!
• They were indebted to the lighter Latin poets - Catullus,
Horace and Ovid.
• They displayed a strong sensuousness and a worldly quality.
They were paganized sophisticates foreshadowing the
amorality of the Restoration
– this is when the king was restored to power after being exiled for
almost 12 years. He went into exile after his father, Charles I, was
executed in 1649)
Suckling’s early life
• Born 1609, son of Sir John Suckling, who
had risen to eminence among the court
officials of James I
– in the last years of his life, was a secretary of
state and comptroller of the royal household
King James I
Education
• 1623, entered Trinity college, Cambridge,
• 1627, passed to Gray’s Inn, the other place men trained for the
law.
• The death of his father, in 1627, left him an orphan, and the
inheritor of great wealth.
• The idea of studying law was now abandoned, and, at 21,
Suckling entered upon his adventurous career as a traveller and
soldier of fortune. He visited France and Italy, returned to
England to be knighted, and, in 1631 fought much in Europe.
The Final Years
• Between 1632-1639, a courtier, who won him fame and admiration.
– plays and poetry, and stayed loyal to his king.
• 1639 fighting broke out between English and Scottish. Suckling went
to fight for his king.
• When civil war threatened, he plotted to have the king control the
army.
• When the plot was discovered, Suckling fled to France.
• Lived anonymously
– became more and more dejected.
• According to some later writers, he committed suicide in 1642 when
the Parliamentarians seemed to be winning the war.
Restoration 1660
• England called back Charles II to be their king.
• He had been exiled in Holland and his mother’s
native France during the time of Puritan rule, and
there he had learned to appreciate the freer and
more lively style of literature.
• When he and his courtiers came back to England,
they brought back a taste for more Continental
entertainment.
“The Incomparable Astrea”:
Aphra Behn
• Not much is known of her early life.
• She was probably born around 1640.
• Her early days are shrouded in mystery, and she
never did much to uncover it.
• Sometime between 1655-1662 she married a
Dutch sea captain named Behn.
After the Restoration
• Behn worked as an undercover spy for the King,
trying to convert double-agents.
– She went to Holland, then at war with England, and
tried to recruit agents from the ranks of the English
Puritans who had fled there after the war.
• When she returned to England, she was
eventually thrown into debtor’s prison for her
efforts
A prolific writer
• In 1670, she brought out her first plays.
• In the next twelve years she produced 19 plays.
• Wrote 14 narratives, including the first antislavery narrative in English, Oroonoko.
• Also produced many volumes of poetry and
translations.
Ideals of the Cavaliers live on
• Behn was loyal to her King and his politics.
• She subscribed to the Cavalier beliefs that
sexuality was natural and overwhelming, and as
such, must be beyond the control of institutions
such as religion.
• Sexuality must also be free from social
constraints like constancy and marriage.
The End of her life
• Behn died in 1689.
• She is buried in Westminster Abbey, though she
wasn’t allowed to be buried
in Poets’ Corner
as she was a
woman.
Poet’s Corner,
Westminster Abbey. Behn
is buried nearby where she
can “peer in” at her rivals,
as one wit put it.
Pastoral poetry
• The form goes back to classic Latin and the works of Virgil
– revived in the Renaissance
What is pastoral poetry?
• Shows the desire of humans to conceive of circumstances in
which the complexity of human problems are reduced to
their simplest elements
– shepherds and shepherdesses have no worries,
– live in an ideal climate,
– their only preoccupations are love and death and making songs
and music.
Uses of pastoral poetry
• It’s used as a vehicle of moral and social criticism
– shepherds were innocent of the corrupting luxuries of courts
and cities.
• It’s also used as a way to allegorically offer thinly
disguised tributes of praise and flattery.
Illustration to Spenser’s
A Shepheard’s Calender