John Donne Book
I came across an article at PBS's Religion and Ethics Newsweekly - a review actually, of a new book on poet and Anglican priest John Donne - Passionate, Pious, Pragmatic John Donne by David E. Anderson (link). Here's a little of it below ......
***********************
Contemporary readers often know John Donne only as the difficult metaphysical poet whose early erotic poems puzzled, then titillated (and still do) students in English literature survey courses.
"Come live with mee, and bee my love, / And wee will some new pleasures prove" run the famous opening lines of "The Baite." Or "The Canonization": "For God's sake hold your tongue, and let me love; / Or chide my palsie, or my gout." We know without knowing many phrases and thoughts from Donne's sermons and devotional poetry: "No man is an island"; "Death be not proud"; "Batter my heart, three person'd God." As with Shakespeare, they have entered the conversational world sundered and separated from their author and context.
It is not as Donne -- whose final years saw him as a popular preacher rather than a passionate poet -- would have had it. He liked to make a sharp distinction between the "Jack Donne" of the poetry and "Doctor Donne," the Anglican priest who served as dean of the prestigious St. Paul's Cathedral and preached the gospel to king and court. In a famous letter of 1623 to the Duke of Buckingham, Donne argued that poetry was "the mistress of my youth," while divinity was "the wife of my age." ......
The lively, vivid new biography by John Stubbs, John Donne: The Reformed Soul: A Biography (W.W. Norton & Co.) is a welcome addition to Donne studies, especially in unraveling the riddle of religion ..... Stubbs tells Donne's story with verve and style, bringing the characters sharply to life and succinctly navigating the complex cross-currents of religion, politics, and diplomacy that marked the volatile last years of the 16th century and the first decades of the 17th. He is weakest on Donne the poet, assuming too easily that Donne's early love poetry is rigidly autobiographical. Nor does he devote much energy to putting Donne in his aesthetic context or explaining the characteristics that marked what came to be known -- first derogatorily by Samuel Johnson and then more positively by T.S. Eliot -- as metaphysical poetry .....
But Stubbs is especially good on the evolution of the political aspects of Donne's religious views. Unlike British literary critic John Carey, who opened his 1990 study of Donne with the harsh finding that "The first thing to remember about Donne is that he was a Catholic; the second, that he betrayed the faith," Stubbs develops a more balanced and nuanced view that does more justice both to the psychology of the man and the complexities of the age. The see-sawing of official religious persuasions and consequent persecutions -- Donne's illustrious ancestor Sir Thomas More (his maternal great-great-uncle) was a harsh and unremitting persecutor of Protestants until he met his own death as a resistant Catholic under Henry VIII -- kept the religious and theological waters roiled ......
As Stubbs develops his portrait, he draws a Donne who is politically pragmatic and ambitious -- the kind of attitude for which Carey judges him a "betrayer" -- but also intellectually restless and, from a very early age, theologically inquisitive .....
************************
And one of his poems ...
Go and Catach a Falling Star
Go and catch a falling star,
Get with child a mandrake root,
Tell me where all past years are,
Or who cleft the devil's foot,
Teach me to hear mermaids singing,
Or to keep off envy's stinging,
And find
What wind
Serves to advance an honest mind.
If thou be'st born to strange sights,
Things invisible to see,
Ride ten thousand days and nights,
Till age snow white hairs on thee,
Thou, when thou return'st, wilt tell me,
All strange wonders that befell thee,
And swear,
No where
Lives a woman true, and fair.
If thou find'st one, let me know,
Such a pilgrimage were sweet;
Yet do not, I would not go,
Though at next door we might meet;
Though she were true, when you met her,
And last, till you write your letter,
Yet she
Will be
False, ere I come, to two, or three.
***********************
Contemporary readers often know John Donne only as the difficult metaphysical poet whose early erotic poems puzzled, then titillated (and still do) students in English literature survey courses.
"Come live with mee, and bee my love, / And wee will some new pleasures prove" run the famous opening lines of "The Baite." Or "The Canonization": "For God's sake hold your tongue, and let me love; / Or chide my palsie, or my gout." We know without knowing many phrases and thoughts from Donne's sermons and devotional poetry: "No man is an island"; "Death be not proud"; "Batter my heart, three person'd God." As with Shakespeare, they have entered the conversational world sundered and separated from their author and context.
It is not as Donne -- whose final years saw him as a popular preacher rather than a passionate poet -- would have had it. He liked to make a sharp distinction between the "Jack Donne" of the poetry and "Doctor Donne," the Anglican priest who served as dean of the prestigious St. Paul's Cathedral and preached the gospel to king and court. In a famous letter of 1623 to the Duke of Buckingham, Donne argued that poetry was "the mistress of my youth," while divinity was "the wife of my age." ......
The lively, vivid new biography by John Stubbs, John Donne: The Reformed Soul: A Biography (W.W. Norton & Co.) is a welcome addition to Donne studies, especially in unraveling the riddle of religion ..... Stubbs tells Donne's story with verve and style, bringing the characters sharply to life and succinctly navigating the complex cross-currents of religion, politics, and diplomacy that marked the volatile last years of the 16th century and the first decades of the 17th. He is weakest on Donne the poet, assuming too easily that Donne's early love poetry is rigidly autobiographical. Nor does he devote much energy to putting Donne in his aesthetic context or explaining the characteristics that marked what came to be known -- first derogatorily by Samuel Johnson and then more positively by T.S. Eliot -- as metaphysical poetry .....
But Stubbs is especially good on the evolution of the political aspects of Donne's religious views. Unlike British literary critic John Carey, who opened his 1990 study of Donne with the harsh finding that "The first thing to remember about Donne is that he was a Catholic; the second, that he betrayed the faith," Stubbs develops a more balanced and nuanced view that does more justice both to the psychology of the man and the complexities of the age. The see-sawing of official religious persuasions and consequent persecutions -- Donne's illustrious ancestor Sir Thomas More (his maternal great-great-uncle) was a harsh and unremitting persecutor of Protestants until he met his own death as a resistant Catholic under Henry VIII -- kept the religious and theological waters roiled ......
As Stubbs develops his portrait, he draws a Donne who is politically pragmatic and ambitious -- the kind of attitude for which Carey judges him a "betrayer" -- but also intellectually restless and, from a very early age, theologically inquisitive .....
************************
And one of his poems ...
Go and Catach a Falling Star
Go and catch a falling star,
Get with child a mandrake root,
Tell me where all past years are,
Or who cleft the devil's foot,
Teach me to hear mermaids singing,
Or to keep off envy's stinging,
And find
What wind
Serves to advance an honest mind.
If thou be'st born to strange sights,
Things invisible to see,
Ride ten thousand days and nights,
Till age snow white hairs on thee,
Thou, when thou return'st, wilt tell me,
All strange wonders that befell thee,
And swear,
No where
Lives a woman true, and fair.
If thou find'st one, let me know,
Such a pilgrimage were sweet;
Yet do not, I would not go,
Though at next door we might meet;
Though she were true, when you met her,
And last, till you write your letter,
Yet she
Will be
False, ere I come, to two, or three.
posted by crystal | 3:26 PM
6 Comments:
I saw this book at the bookstore the other day, and flipped through it a little bit. It looks fascinating. Just about the greatest preacher ever, so they say...
He was from one of those families that was taught by Jesuits and secretly harbored priests. For some reason (perhaps because all of the sectarianism got to him), he went Anglican. His story sounds very interesting.
Hi Jeff,
yeah, according to that book review, his uncle was Jasper Heywood, the leader of the Jesuit mission in the early 1580s, but he hinself was pretty anti-Jesuit, maybe because his brother was executed for harboring that one priest.
Thanks for the background on Donne. I hadn't known his own opinion of his poetry -- it's somewhat ironic, isn't it?
When I was a high school senior, four of our students were killed in a car accident. No drugs or anything, just a driving home from school accident with a large truck. I hadn't known the senior who was driving, but it hit our whole class hard. That's when Donne's "No man is an island" really happened to hit home.
I'd have like to have heard him preach.
Hi Denny,
I've seen some of his sermons online. You can find them here, though it's not the same as hearing them in person :-)
Crystal, as always, you choose a poet I really like. Thanks for talking about the bio - I'm going to look for it. I've always wanted to read more about donne's life, which seems quite interesting from the little I know.
He was a big influence on T.S. Eliot, who said : "Donne enlarged the possibilities of lyric verse as no other English poet has done."
One of my favorite works by Donne is Meditation XVII, from Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions - the "No man is an island" meditation.
Thanks for linking to that poem, William. I'd heard of it but never read it all. I think I'll post it, so if anyone else hasn't read it before, they can.
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