Donne was like a walking bomb, ready to explode at any time. Born in London in 1572, the son of a prosperous merchant, his early career was very successful. But in 1601, when he was nearly thirty, he eloped with the niece of his patron, Sir Thomas Egerton, who was the Keeper of the Great Seal, an extremely important government post. Ann More’s father was also a member of the Egerton household, and he seriously disapproved of the marriage partly because Ann was, at fifteen, still a minor. The result of this was that Donne lost his position and was left without any means of making a living. He was pardoned and the marriage was declared legally valid—they were madly in love with one another—but Donne had to spend the next ten years as an outcast, without steady employment, without prospects.
He retrieved his fortunes in the end, partly because his sermons were much admired by King James and by his successor, King Charles I. But even his best friends were a little afraid of him and of the sudden passions that darted through him. Ben Jonson, one of his closest friends, said that Donne ought to have been hanged “for not keeping of meter,” and although this applied primarily to his undisciplined verse, it also applied to his life, which was as undisciplined and chaotic as his poetry.
The passionate, unpredictable character of John Donne is very much apparent in his poems. They are rough, awkward, often obscure, sometimes absurd. But when they work, when everything fits together, they are as good as any lyrics in English. Donne only misses being counted in the very first rank of poets because he failed to write an epic or “major work.” (Perhaps he would have written such a poem if he had not devoted his efforts in his later years to preaching.)
The poems fall into three categories. First, there are the many love poems, written before he met Ann More and while he was courting her. A dozen or more of these are among the best love poems ever written. But they are “difficult”; that is, they require careful reading and intense study—an odd requirement for a love poem!
The second category is religious poems—the “Holy Sonnets,” and others. One begins:
Death be not proud, though some have
callèd thee Mighty and dreadful, for
thou art not so.
Not all the Holy Sonnets are as famous as that one, but a choice dozen are nevertheless very fine. They have a deep, throbbing note, like this one, about the Day of Judgment:
At the round earth’s imagin’d corners blow Your trumpets, Angels, and arise, arise From death, you numberless infinities Of souls, and to your scatter’d bodies go.
“At the round earth’s imagin’d corners” is so typical of Donne. Four great Archangels will blow their trumpets on the Last Day to wake the living and the dead. But Earth is round, so where will the four Angels stand? (Do angels have to stand anywhere?) Why, at the world’s “imagin’d corners”! If you try to imagine what he means the effort will show you what is necessary when reading Donne.
Finally, there is a third category, the so-called “Anniversaries.” Donne had another patron after 1611, the death of whose young daughter occasioned a series of overwrought poems celebrating her and “anatomizing” the world: taking it apart and examining it. Donne’s vision of the world in the “Anniversaries” is not delightful. Like all good poets he was unsentimental; what is more, his time was no better than ours and maybe worse. It was above all a time of change, of intellectual revolution. Donne was deeply disturbed by that, but he understood it as well as anyone.
When reading lyric poems it is always appropriate to start by reading out loud. Read the poem again silently, more than once, as many times as necessary to understand it—and then read it aloud again to see the difference and to test your comprehension. Does it sound “right”? I say “always,” but it is truly difficult to do this with many poems of Donne. Coleridge, in a remark, gave the hint that should be heeded: “To read Dryden, Pope, etc., you need only count syllables, but to read Donne you must measure Time, and discover the Time of each word by the sense of Passion.”
Among the love poems of Donne, the following are not to be missed: “Song (Go and catch a falling star),” “Love’s Deity,” “The Funeral,” “The Good Morrow,” “The Blossom,” “The Undertaking,” “The Canonization,” “Love’s Alchemy,” and “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning.” Among the religious poems, read these: “Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward,” “Hymn to God My God, in My Sickness,” “A Hymn to God the Father,” and Holy Sonnets numbers 1, 5, 7, 10, 14, and 18. The Third Anniversary is the most interesting of the series, although deeply flawed. Read all this, and then read on. These lists are far from exhausting the poetical interest and beauty of Donne.
Finally, you may wish to have a taste of Donne’s extraordinary sermons. “Death’s Duel” should at least be looked at: try to discover what is happening in it. And the “Devotions upon Emergent Occasions” contain many wonderful things, including these famous lines:
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were. Any man’s death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
GEORGE HERBERT
1593–1633
Poems
The great events of George Herbert’s life took place within him, not in the outside world.
His career, such as it was, was undistinguished. Born in 1593 and a member of an important and influential English family in the early seventeenth century, he was neither rich nor important nor influential himself. However, with the help of his family and particularly of his mother, a great lady who was also a close friend of John Donne’s, Herbert attained an important university post at Cambridge and appeared, while still in his twenties, to have worldly success within his grasp. But this was dependent on the patronage of the old king, James I, and when James died in 1625 Herbert was left adrift. More importantly, he had made the decision to leave the outer world and concentrate on the inner, and to resolve the struggle between his will and God’s. He was ordained and became a country parson in the little church at Bemerton, in Wiltshire. He died a few years later, in 1633, at the age of thirty-nine, leaving a sheaf of poems with a friend, “to be published or not, as you see fit.” The friend saw fit to publish the works of George Herbert in a volume that he called The Temple: Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations, and so we have them today.
The devotion and humility of Herbert in his post at Bemerton became legendary. He gave himself entirely to his parishioners, exhausting himself in their behalf. But he continued to write poems in his last years and to practice the lute, his only diversion.