Week 09, John Donne, Ben Jonson

General Notes on John Donne’s Poetry

Donne’s meter is often rough, as was Wyatt’s—and just as deliberately. He’s often intent on capturing the movements of thought and feeling, which of course don’t always move smoothly. Neither are they easy to separate—emotion can be processed by the intellect in Donne, and vice versa.

That last comment reminds me of T.S. Eliot’s theory of how, after Donne’s time in the C17, and therefore after metaphysical poetry’s vogue, a certain “ dissociation of sensibility” set in. Literary artists, the notion goes, could either think or feel, but they couldn’t do both. In very general terms (though Eliot doesn’t say much on this point), we would have to blame the advent of modern living for this development: technology, urbanity in the arts, a kind of artificiality that suited the new post-English Civil War consensus. It’s easy to see how someone like, say, Alexander Pope superficially fits into this paradigm, though we do him an injustice here since he was good at conveying passion in structured verse. In any case, the idea is that a high degree of “division of labor” set in with regard to the mind’s faculties, just as a more complex and diversified economy demands specialized, partial kinds of labor from its workers. This is of course well before the Industrial Revolution in the later C18, but it’s still accurate because Donne’s time was one of intense expansion and exploration. England was becoming a world power from Elizabeth’s time onwards.

Just as intellect and passion go together in Donne, so do the sacred and the profane or secular. Donne’s career follows a predictable enough arc: frustration in hopes for courtly preferment, an intense love life with some rough patches, and at last settling into the godly role he played so well as a prominent minister in the Anglican Church. You might say Donne went from sinner to near-saint. But the poetry he wrote as a younger man defies easy distinctions between sacred and profane; it’s also true that the “Holy Sonnets” contain a lot of manifestly erotic allusions and figures.

The tone with both God and love objects is intimate, a direct address with lots of self- questioning. The God of Paradox, the “Metaphorical God,” as Donne calls him in the prose, commands us to speak. This is why Donne sees no problem in being so frank with his God—it is all part of the process of understanding Him, or at least of coming to terms with one’s inability to understand God. Donne sees salvation as something one has to work at, whatever his ideas about the availability of unmerited Grace. Poetry is one way to do that, and the Holy Sonnets, while, intensely personal, are also dramatizations of Donne’s spiritual struggles for the benefit of others.

Poem-by-Poem Notes on John Donne

“The Flea”

The flea is a pseudo-Ovidian poem, and Donne is mocking Petrarchan hyperbole as an avenue for praising a lady. And since we are dealing with lovers (not a married couple), “honor” is more of less a jest here. The speaker dramatizes a sex game—we get a sense of spoken rhythm, with rhyme as part of the “rules” of the poem and the argument. There’s an implied mock-argument, with opportunistic references to a sacred union, promptly dropped or modified when the lady rejects it. We don’t see Wyatt’s disillusionment and confusion, but instead Donne offers us a playful and yet precise variation on an old erotic theme. In the end, as it’s easy to discern from his biography, Donne takes marriage seriously, even if it isn’t the point in this poem.

“The Good Morrow”

The poem doesn’t describe a courtly relationship based on fear, but rather genuine “seeing” and “possessing,” without any betrayal. Concrete instances of love prevail over artificiality or vague talk about essences. Here, we ‘‘begin’’ with actual possession. The poem’s tone is confessional, which isn’t in accord with ordinary sonnet conventions. At the same time, the poem has formal dignity, thanks to its stanzaic patterning. Donne is both intellectual and emotional at the same time, just as T.S. Eliot (in “Tradition and the Individual Talent”) says. In this poem, the speaker arrives at a clear statement about the value of the lover’s private universe, which subsumes the world. Of course, the poem ends with an “if-then” clause, not with certainty. The “if” may point us towards the more permanent strategy of marriage, rather than to this temporary “perfection” of soul. There is, as one of my professors at Irvine points out, an implicit awareness of the time frame that the poem has temporarily annulled.

“The Canonization”

This is another argumentative poem; it accosts and dismisses knaves who oppose love, turning the tables on their claims. The Saints (canonized “lovers” of Christ) are patterns of sacrifice. A pun on “die” as orgasm accompanies a more idealistic claim that the poem will immortalize its subject in its stanzas or “pretty rooms” (stanze). Others will approve of the immortalization and perpetuate the original couple’s love with the help of this formal poem. The lovers create the pattern, and the verse only reflects it. There’s a reference to the Phoenix legend—alchemy and the miraculous. The “proof” Donne offers here is super-rational, and the fancy images are the “evidence” he enlists. The poem doesn’t leave the concept of hierarchy in tatters—countries, towns, and courts can reestablish their authority by begging a pattern from “above,” from the lovers.

“The Sun Rising”

The poet revises Petrarchanism in that the distance between the two lovers disappears. Love knows its own value, and it dismisses the outside world. The speaker peers out at the sun, admonishes it, and proclaims the bedroom an alternate world. Just as there’s only one story (the Bible), so there’s only one significant location. But of course there’s a struggle here—this poem is based on a traditional theme in French Troubadour poetry, the “aubade” or dawn song, in which a lover curses the dawn for making the lovers part.

“A Nocturnal upon Saint Lucy’s Day”

Saint Lucy was martyred in 303 A.D., perhaps blinded first. The poem is decreative; it deforms and cancels out the creation to describe the speaker’s mental state. It’s as if Donne’s speaker goes back to the phase of pre-creation, becoming an un-Adamed self. He makes a motion towards St. Lucy—we gain access to negative imagination, in preparation for Lucy’s appearance at the Apocalypse. Is this poem bidding farewell to love poems? There seems to be no way back to lighter fare such as “The Good Morrow” and “The Canonization.” But this nocturnal shows Donne’s lifelong obsession with the soul’s progress, with its relation to the world as a whole, a collectivity. Donne and Herbert take an Augustinian route with respect to death and the world: death is the way and the answer; we shouldn’t cling to this world, which will, after all, go up in flames when the Last Day comes.

“A Valediction, Forbidding Mourning”

The compass is a metaphysical conceit here. Samuel Johnson defines that device as “a suprising image that brings together different ranges of experience.” What does this conceit allow Donne to accomplish? He can resolve the poem’s problem (parting) with a firm, precise image—a concession that turns out not to concede much, or anything. Donne also refers often to alchemy—the refining of base metals to transform them into gold and silver. The connotation of spiritual trial and purification in alchemy is obvious. He also likes optical metaphors and images—things reflected from the eye, or from eye to eye. For example, tears are described as storm raindrops. Ptolemaic cosmology is another source of metaphysical conceits.

“The Ecstasy”

The poem’s contemplation of the body debunks Bemboist Neo-Platonism. In this case, sexual and spiritual love need not be kept separate. In fact, in Donne’s poetry they require each other, and must mix in alchemical fashion. Refer to Aristophanes’ speech about love in Symposium. As so often, we find poets using Plato as a biased witness in favor of their own arguments. “Ecstasy” is a device made possible by the union of two bodies. So how is it that we can even hear the speaker?

“Good Friday, 1613—Riding Westward”

The Ptolemaic system is used here to suggest selfish humanity’s skewed perspective. We follow our own paths, not that of faith as enjoined by God. The human condition is weak; we are “carried along” towards death, work, etc. To turn to the east means turning towards the central spectacle of Christianity: Christ on the Cross atoning for human sins. But of course that is not an easy sight to behold. The words of the poem undercut themselves since the poem’s central fact isn’t words, it’s something to see. The correctional language at the end is quite strong, and to “turn one’s face” would be to die, to look upon the face of God. Jesus’ career teaches us how to die, so in that regard the poem works as a memento mori. (Copernicus lived from 1473-1543; Galileo from 1564-1642.)

“Holy Sonnet 14”

All the old sexual imagery is here, but it serves a different purpose. Donne moves to religious poetry without apparent contradiction or recantation. He never saw erotic love as shameful anyhow. Here, though, he wants to demonstrate an extreme state of spiritual enlightenment or awareness. Violent apprehension is part of religious experience.

“Holy Sonnet 17”

Donne’s wife Anne died in 1617. He treats God as jealous, as in Exodus 20.

“Meditation 4” (It is too little to call man a little world….)

This meditation emphasizes our dependence on God, our incompleteness; Donne toys with the Renaissance idea of each human being as a “microcosm” containing within himself or herself something of all the other creatures and realms. But Donne moves beyond this notion since, if given too much scope, it might encourage prideful self-sufficiency and materialism rather than a sense of spiritual responsibility. Thus the “doctor” metaphor—some of the simplest creatures know how to treat their own wounds, but we do not, and must “send for” the physician. Some of Donne’s language may echo that of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, as when the sermonist writes, “What’s become of man’s great extent and proportion, when himself shrinks himself and consumes himself to a handful of dust? What’s become of his soaring thoughts . . . ?” Hamlet says to his friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, “What a piece of work is a / man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in / form and moving, how express and admirable in / action, how like an angel in apprehension, how like a / god!” (2.2.303-07) He says all this only to bring the whole “majestical roof” (301) down on our heads, reminding us that we are but the most refined dust in the cosmos, a “quintessence of dust” (308). The “Gravedigger” scene may offer Donne some ideas as well, what with Hamlet’s melancholy musings on Yorick’s skull and “Great Alexander” turning to clay, etc.

“Meditation 17” (Perchance he for whom this bell tolls may be so ill . . .)

This famous meditation is taken up in part with how to prevent Church ceremony and symbolism from lapsing into mere formalism; the everyday concerns of life tend to break the connection between spiritual truth and symbolism. Nearly every day (especially when some contagious disease is ravaging the community), the bell tolls for the imminent passing of one or more members of the Church, and Donne’s two metaphors (that each person is one chapter in God’s book and that each person is a piece of earth connected to the mainland) reinforce the solidarity of every person with every other in the Christian community he addresses. And since the opening device is the mention of tolling bells for the dying, Donne’s meditation is also in part a memento mori, a reminder of the perpetual nearness of death. In this sense, we are all, to borrow a line from the villainous Richard III, “very grievous sick . . . and like [i.e. likely] to die” (4.2.56, 62).

“Expostulation 19” (My God . . . thou art a direct God, may I say a literal God)
Medieval and Renaissance Christian typology demands that we begin with the literal level of things and events, and (accepting their literal truth as our foundation) proceed to interpret them at successively more spiritual levels, from the allegorical to the moral to the anagogical. Aquinas and Dante Alighieri categorize the four levels as follows: 1) the literal or historical level, which is simply the event itself. 2) the allegorical level, which relates the literal event to events in the New Testament. 3) the moral level, which explains the abstract moral lesson to be drawn from the literal event. 4) the anagogical level, which relates the literal event to heavenly things. So, too, Donne follows tradition when he begins by invoking the directness and literal truth of God’s Word in the Scriptures. But then, of course, the rest of the Expostulation develops the idea that God is also the greatest of poets because he is “a figurative, a metaphorical god too” (1278), both in the Scriptures and in the process of history. Donne invokes the diversity of people’s understandings, and argues that while one person may value mainly the most literal aspects of the Bible, another may be moved far more by the “majesty” of the words in the text, i.e. by the eloquence and beauty of great passages. Both responses are good since the Bible speaks to different readers at different levels. The argument Donne makes is perhaps a bit risky in that some might be offended with the notion of God’s being “figurative,” as if he were forced to resort to literary devices rather than just say the thing outright. But Donne’s point seems to be that God’s understanding so far transcends the ordinary that such metaphoricity and figurative quality as we find in the Bible is there out of generosity. After all, what does metaphor do but help us get hold of spiritual truths by means of things we understand most readily? (A metaphor compares something difficult to understand or abstract with something easy to understand or perceive, as in Burns’ famous lines, “O, my love is like a red, red rose, / That is newly sprung in June. O, my love is like the melody, / That is sweetly played in tune.”) On the whole, Donne casts God in the role of a poet whose words draw fallen humanity towards the truth. What bridges the gap between our fallen understanding and the Truth? Well, faith; that is what the Bible, in the view of Donne and many other writers, is designed to do, by various means.