Flesh and Spirit: The Writing of John Donne

Poet and priest John Donne's work seems to transcend its early 17th century moment and feels as fresh and alive to us as anything written today.  In this episode, we look at the following texts:

"The Bait"
"Elegy 19: To His Mistress Going To Bed"
"Batter my heart"
"Death, be not proud"
"The Flea"
"A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning"
"Meditation 17" from Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions

Additional music: "You Can Leave Your Hat On" by Randy Newman.  Sail Away.  Reprise Records.  1972.  Accessed as public domain through the Internet Archive.

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Transcript

Welcome litterbugs and bookworms, and also to those of you who are merely verse-curious!  Maybe you experimented with a bit of poetry in your college days. . .  This is a judgment free zone!  We all have pasts!  I am the host of the Classic English Literature Podcast, and you are not.  This is the show that gives rhyme its reason, and that’s a particularly apt catchphrase for today’s discussion, because our subject today is the poet and priest John Donne, whose work deftly blends rigid intellectual ratiocination with speculative emotional and spiritual experience.

Before we sample the fruit of Dr. Donne’s garden of delights, please know that you can contact me through the Fan Mail link just below the episode title – send me a text with any and all of your thoughts.  Instagram and TikTok are also available for your perusal –you can get updates and announcements and trivia there and also, should you like, send me a message.  For those of a more antiquarian bent, old-fashioned email at classicenglishliterature@gmail.com also works nicely.  I’d love to hear from you!

There are artists, a very few probably, whose work seems, in an almost literal way, timeless.  I don’t mean that in the way it’s usually used, that a poem, or song, or painting speaks to us from its own moment across the years; that’s not unusual (though critics in recent decades have done much to complicate that assumption).  No, what I mean is something more like these artists have become unmoored from time, that their work is of such a character that it can be difficult, if one was unaware of the history, to accurately pinpoint their moment in the timeline.

So, for instance, take a painter like the portraitist Sir Joshua Reynolds.  Brilliant as his work is, and as wonderful to experience today as it ever was, there’s no mistaking its 18th-century origins.  Everything about it speaks to the moment of England’s ascendency and its debt to classical considerations.  On the other hand, a painter like JMW Turner, perhaps Britain’s most famous Romantic artist, seems to break free from his early 19th century moment with his wild expression and turbulent imagination.  He’s almost pre-Impressionistic.  A casual museum-goer today could be forgiven for dating Turner’s work any time in the last two centuries.

Or the music of The Beatles, whom I hardly ever mention in this podcast.  While almost synonymous with the 1960s, much of their work sounds nothing like that of their peers.  “Paperback Writer” or “Come Together” could be from any era of rock music, in a way that, for instance, Led Zeppelin’s music could not: “Stairway to Heaven” or “Kashmir” are indelibly the product of late 60s early 70s hard rock.

Of course, some of this “timeless” quality springs from the fact that such artists exercised a profound impact on artists to follow, and so we detect their influence in the work of their descendents.  There is no Monet without Turner, no Oasis without the Beatles (though the Beatles should not be blamed for that – it’s not their fault).

I’ve wandered down this digressive path because I think John Donne’s poetry has that similar quality of being unstuck in time.  Like Turner or the Beatles, his work feels contemporary to us, despite the distance of centuries.  Indeed, while his fellow 17th century writers marvelled at his passion and innovation, Donne’s work fell into obscurity for a time.  The Golden Treasury of English Songs and Lyrics, edited by Francis Turner Palgrave in 1861 and the most influential popular anthology of poetry of the Victorian period, neglected to include any of Donne’s verse, seeing it as somehow not entirely representative of English poetry.  Not until the Modernist movement of the early 20th century, instigated primarily by poet TS Eliot, did Donne return to the literary consciousness, his adroit combination of naturalness and artifice, subtlety and passion once again meeting the needs of a culture in flux.

Donne’s personal life was similarly one marked by the turmoil of his times.  He was born in 1572 to a Catholic family, second-class citizens under the Tudor regime (incidentally, his mother was Sir Thomas More’s great-niece, he of Utopia and decapitation fame.  She had, at one point, fled to Antwerp to escape religious persecution at home).  And Donne had a Jesuit uncle imprisoned in the Tower of London.  His brother Henry died in prison of the plague, having been convicted of harboring a priest (the priest was treated to a traditional Tudor drawing and quartering).

Yet despite these traumas, Donne himself generally throve in the Protestant hegemony.  He studied at Oxford and read law at Lincoln’s Inn; became secretary to the Lord Keeper of the Great Seal (the geezer in charge of authenticating royal documents, not the one who looks after marine mammals).  He fell in love with and married the Lord Keeper’s niece Ann, which shocked the haute monde, and landed young John in chokey.  This was probably in 1601.  But no man could put asunder what God hath joined together, and the marriage was declared lawful, despite poor Ann being disinherited for eight years.  The marriage was generally a happy and passionate one, though too punctuated by times of trial and tragedy.  They had twelve children, though they suffered two stillbirths and three of their children died before they reached the age of ten.  These losses at one point drove Donne to suicidal despair.  After a career that included stints in Parliament and anti-Catholic (yes! surprisingly) polemicist for James I, he took holy orders in 1615 and became an Anglican priest.

So what we have here is a portrait of a man whose life is powerfully shaped by the competing religious and political currents of his day as well as by the religious and personal struggles of his private life.  And accordingly, we detect two major strains running through his work: the passionate, sensuous reality of the body and the faithful contemplation of the spirit.  In Donne’s letters, he seems to note this dualism himself, calling himself both “Jack Donne” the lover and “Dr. Donne” the priest.

It would be easy here to overemphasize this bifurcation, presenting his writing as either erotic love poetry or spiritual meditation, but that would be to deny the interdependence of these two modes.  Nor is this to say that Donne’s verse cannot be playful.  In a poem called “The Bait,” he wittily parodies the pastoral eclogues of Christopher Marlowe and Walter Ralegh.  If you’ve listened to episode 40 on those poems, you’ll be familiar with “The Bait”’s opening quatrain:

Come live with me, and be my love,

And we will some new pleasures prove

Of golden sands, and crystal brooks,

With silken lines, and silver hooks.

In this piscatory pastoral (can you believe there is even such a thing?), Donne employs the fishing conceit as a metaphor for sexual seduction.  The nymph (the beautiful woman in a pastoral, not the wet fly) skinny-dips and all the fish cluster about her, these suitors of her favor.  She is her own bait, but the speaker asserts that all this tackle is for him unnecessary, for he has already been caught:

For thee, thou need'st no such deceit,

For thou thyself art thine own bait:

That fish, that is not catch'd thereby,

Alas, is wiser far than I.

Altogether charming and whimsical.  There’s certainly a little sexual sauciness here, as is de rigeur for the pastoral eclogue, as well as a revelling in the abundance and fertility of the natural world.

But for saucy revelling one cannot top his “Elegy 19: To His Mistress Going to Bed.”  This one is a corker, steamy as a teakettle in a Turkish bath.  Maybe I’d better explain part of the title.  Donne includes this poem in his Elegies.  Now, some of you may be confused.  We’ve defined elegies on this show as poems of lament, of mourning, how is that at all racy and what has it to do with a woman getting ready for bed?  Well, it’s a little confusing.  You’re right – that’s what elegies are in English poetry, but Donne refers here to Latin poetry.  There, an elegy was a poem composed in elegiacs – that is, alternating lines of dactylic hexameters and pentameters.  A dactyl is another poetic foot, like the iamb, but has three feet) and were usually about sex.  Our old pal Ovid was a prime purveyor of the love elegy, and Donne apes the old Roman’s wit and sensuality, but does so in sturdy iambic verse.  Here’s the opening few lines:

Come, Madam, come, all rest my powers defy,

Until I labour, I in labour lie.

The foe oft-times having the foe in sight,

Is tir’d with standing though he never fight.

Off with that girdle, like heaven’s Zone glistering,

But a far fairer world encompassing.

Unpin that spangled breastplate which you wear,

That th’eyes of busy fools may be stopped there.

Unlace yourself, 

Ooh la, and may I say, la!  I’m blushing.  OK, right, I don’t think you have to be Freud to get the repetitions of “come” and “labor” and “standing though he never fight.”  Balls of blue.  We imagine the man, the speaker, lying in bed, watching his mistress, urging her on as she undresses.  Baby, take off that girdle.  Unpin your bodice, unlace your corset.  With apologies to Randy Newman, she is not even permitted to leave her hat on: “Off with that wiry Coronet and shew / The hairy Diadem which on you doth grow.”  Take off your shoes and come to bed!  Then he exclaims at the climax, as it were:

Full nakedness! All joys are due to thee,

As souls unbodied, bodies uncloth’d must be,

To taste whole joys.

This poem so curled the hair of the guardians of public morality that it was refused publication, and did not appear until some 23 years after Donne’s death.  And it is delightfully sensual and bursting with an almost operatic over-the-topness.  As he begs to grope and fondle her naughty bits he exclaims: “Oh, my America!  my new found land” as if he were some conquering explorer.  It’s great!

But it’s not just a bit of bawdry.  Look at the lines I quoted above:

Full nakedness! All joys are due to thee,

As souls unbodied, bodies uncloth’d must be,

To taste whole joys.

In this most rapturous of erotic poems, Donne inverts or expands the Platonic idea of the body as the prison of the soul.  He says that just as souls must be unbodied to taste joy, so must bodies be unclothed, and he proceeds that with the assertion that “all joys are due to the thee.”  All joys.  And note the clever ambiguity of the word “due”: is she the cause of all joys or the recipient?  There’s a lovely parallel between the spiritual grace – that humanity can never earn salvation – with sexual grace – that men can never deserve women.  But what I’m getting at is that the physical/spiritual binary in Donne’s thinking cannot really exist as a binary: they are interwoven with each other.  Wonderful poem.

If Elegy 19 is a sex poem with a spiritual center, then “Holy Sonnet 10” is a spiritual poem with a sexual conceit.

Batter my heart, three-person'd God, for you

As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;

That I may rise and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend

Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.

I, like an usurp'd town to another due,

Labor to admit you, but oh, to no end;

Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,

But is captiv'd, and proves weak or untrue.

Yet dearly I love you, and would be lov'd fain,

But am betroth'd unto your enemy;

Divorce me, untie or break that knot again,

Take me to you, imprison me, for I,

Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,

Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

We’ve not heard such an eroticization of the encounter with God since the 14th century mystic Margery Kempe in episode 24.  Actually, this seems like rough sex – perhaps even rape.  The verbs are combative: batter, overthrow, break, bend, blow, burn and, of course, ravish.  The speaker admits, really cries out, his inability to love God properly, cursing his own infidelity, his betrothal to evil or death, perhaps personified as Satan.  Only by force can I be saved.  As theophanies go, this one feels particularly physical and submissive.

Let me pause to clarify a bit of taxonomy.  I called this poem “Holy Sonnet 10.”  Some of you advanced listeners may have been expecting the following poem:

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee

Mighty and dreadful, for thou are not so;

For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow

Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.

From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,

Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,

And soonest our best men with thee do go,

Rest of their bones, and soul's delivery.

Thou'art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,

And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,

And poppy'or charms can make us sleep as well

And better than thy stroke; why swell'st thou then?

One short sleep past, we wake eternally,

And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die. 

This poem is indeed numbered 10 in later editions of Donne’s poems.  But the 1633 edition has “Death be not proud” as sonnet 6, and “Batter my heart” as sonnet 10 which, according to scholar Dame Helen Gardner, was Donne’s intended order.  That’s good enough for me.

But while we’re here, let’s look at Holy Sonnet 6, which may well be the most famous of this cycle; those opening four words have frequently made their way into modern usage.  It’s basically a Petrarchan sonnet (thought we’d left the ubiquitous Pete behind, did you?), with an octave and a sestet, a volta, but with a slightly altered rhyme scheme in the last six lines.  It takes the form of an apostrophe to a personified Death, whose haughtiness Donne renders meaningless.  The faithful person can never die because their soul is delivered unto God.  Donne takes a page from the same book Hamlet and Lady Macbeth must have read, for he says that Death is very like sleep, but he points out that sleep and rest are pleasurable, so how much more pleasurable would Death, seemingly the eternal sleep, be?  

In line 9, at the volta, Donne argues that Death is but a slave, a mere dogsbody, to fate, chance, kings (that’s an interesting one), and desperate men (murder!).  If one is to be judged by the company one keeps, Death hangs out with a pretty disreputable crowd: poison, war, and sickness.  Note that throughout, Donne uses the informal pronoun “thou,” talking down to the humbled Grim Reaper.  Then Donne delivers the coup de grace in the concluding paradox: because of Christian salvation, Death itself must die.  Rhetorically, poetically, a masterstroke.  How much comfort it offers one can never know.

Should one casually leaf through a textbook or literature anthology, one would doubtless encounter the word “metaphysical” to describe John Donne’s poetry and that of his followers.  Now, literally, the word metaphysics means “after physics” and the reason for that is dry old Aristotle wrote a book called “The Physics,” in which he laid down the principles for the movement of objects in the natural world.  Afterwards, he wrote a book called “The Metaphysics,” in which he lays down the principles of first philosophy, that is, such concepts as causation, form and matter, and substance theory.  This has developed over the centuries into the philosophical branch called metaphysics, which is concerned with the basic structure of reality.  So, really, the whole project of philosophy gets its name from a sequel.

At any rate, that adjective metaphysical gets attached by scholars to Donne’s poetry chiefly because of this alloy we’ve been discussing: his intellectual rigor combined with emotional complexity.  His marriage of the physical and the spiritual, the flesh and the soul.  The driving literary element of this style is called the conceit (which is just a fancy literary way of saying extended metaphor), but Donne’s conceits are of a particular quality, so we’ve dubbed them metaphysical conceits.

Here is that quality: a metaphysical conceit is an elaborate extended metaphor comparing two surprisingly unlike objects, one of them being physical while the other is some abstract concept.  These are different to the Petrarchan conceits (there he is again!) which are usually two physical objects: think of all those poems comparing a lover’s eyes to the sun (or not, as in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130).

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about.  In a poem called “The Flea,” Donne compares sexual desire and climax with a flea sucking your blood.  That’ll get you hot.  Here’s how it goes:

Mark but this flea, and mark in this,   

How little that which thou deniest me is;   

It sucked 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,

Yet this enjoys before it woo,

And pampered swells with one blood made of two,

And this, alas, is more than we would do.

Oh stay, three lives in one flea spare,

Where we almost, nay more than married are.   

This flea is you and I, and this

Our marriage bed, and marriage temple is;   

Though parents grudge, and you, w'are met,   

And cloistered in these living walls of jet.

Though use make you apt to kill me,

Let not to that, self-murder added be,

And sacrilege, three sins in killing three.

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 sucked from thee?   

Yet thou triumph’st, and say'st that thou   

Find’st not thy self, nor me the weaker now;

’Tis true; then learn how false, fears be:

Just so much honor, when thou yield’st to me,

Will waste, as this flea’s death took life from thee.

As the speaker tries to woo the lover, she evidently goes to crush a flea that has bitten her (evidently, this is in no way a turn-off for our engorged swain).  He tries to stop her, pointing out that this flea has already bitten him, sucking some of his blood, and now has bitten her, sucking some of hers.  Thus, in the flea, their bloods have mingled, and since this cocktail of bodily fluids is not a sin, then why should the mingling of bodily fluids in the act of coitus be one?

I should note that the poem is based by one of Ovid’s, and relies upon the then accepted medical theory that sexual intercourse resulted in the mixing of the participants’ bloods.  Umm . . . it strikes me that if you are exchanging blood in the act of passion, you are doing something dreadfully wrong, or you are bravely experimental.

It’s a wonderfully weird argument and, as a pick-up line, no one I would suggest at your next singles night.  But it is whimsical, and within its own construction, a quite logical bit of argument.

So that’s kind of what a metaphysical conceit is.  Much more famous, and considerably less stomach-churning, is the one employed in perhaps Donne’s masterpiece, “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning.”  A valediction, by the by, is a fancy word for farewell.  It’s not a common word in modern English, but you’ve probably heard of a “valedictorian,” a speaker at a graduation ceremony, usually the one with the highest grade point average.  Traditionally, this speaker closed the proceedings, sending their fellow students and the audience on their way, probably to some restaurant for a bit of celebratory dinner.  This is the complement to the salutatorian, a speaker with with second highest GPA, who traditionally greeted the attendees at the commencement of the commencement.  These particular roles have largely fallen by the wayside, and various schools have their own speaking orders regardless of the etymology of the roles, and so the audience is generally treated to the same rather hackneyed bromides about believing in yourself, remembering your roots, and working hard to achieve your dreams.  These speakers, of course, are usually very young.

Anyway, in 1611, John Donne had to make a trip to France, and so wrote a farewell poem, a valediction, to his wife.  It really is one of my favorite poems:

As virtuous men pass mildly away,

   And whisper to their souls to go,

Whilst some of their sad friends do say

   The breath goes now, and some say, No:

So let us melt, and make no noise,

   No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move;

'Twere profanation of our joys

   To tell the laity our love.

Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears,

   Men reckon what it did, and meant;

But trepidation of the spheres,

   Though greater far, is innocent.

Dull sublunary lovers' love

   (Whose soul is sense) cannot admit

Absence, because it doth remove

   Those things which elemented it.

But we by a love so much refined,

   That our selves know not what it is,

Inter-assured of the mind,

   Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss.

Our two souls therefore, which are one,

   Though I must go, endure not yet

A breach, but an expansion,

   Like gold to airy thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so

   As stiff twin compasses are two;

Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show

   To move, but doth, if the other do.

And though it in the center sit,

   Yet when the other far doth roam,

It leans and hearkens after it,

   And grows erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must,

   Like th' other foot, obliquely run;

Thy firmness makes my circle just,

   And makes me end where I begun.

In nine octosyllabic quatrains, the speaker comforts his lover or spouse at his departure.  He opens with a simile, comparing their temporary parting to the permanent death of “virtuous men,” who “pass mildly away.”  He says they should part quietly, with no outward demonstration of grief – he resurrects the Anglo-Saxon kenning in “tear-floods” and “sigh-tempests” for the weeping and wailing he forbids.  He says such physical exhibitions of emotion desecrate their higher love.  He speaks of “dull sublunary lovers” – literally, “under the moon”, here meaning earthly, merely fleshly – who “soul is sense.”  That is, all they have is the body, there is no spiritual dimension to their love as there is with ours.  

We then get the first of the metaphysical conceits, which he introduces with a paradox: 

Our two souls therefore, which are one,

   Though I must go, endure not yet

A breach, but an expansion,

   Like gold to airy thinness beat.

We two bodies are yet one soul, so we don’t separate, but expand, as if one hammered out gold to a delicate thinness.   Of course, this implies something of weakening of their connection, he admits that.  But the airy thinness could also imply a diminution of their physicality, an increase of their spirituality.  

And then he comes to the great conceit, the one always invoked when speaking of metaphysical conceits.  He says that if we are two bodies, we are so like a draftman’s or geometer’s compass – you know, the thing you use to draw circles, one pointy end and one pencil end, joined up at the top, kind of groiny?  He says she is the fixed foot of the compass, the pointy bit, and she stays in place, and he is the pencilly bit, the one that orbits her.  The further away he goes, the more she leans towards him – just like  compass increases its angle – and as he returns, she grows more straight, as the angle decreases.  Her firm presence completes his circle, that symbol of endlessness and eternity.

Not bad, huh?

I really like John Donne.  His poetry is so intellectually original and surprising while simultaneously so emotionally accessible and, dare I say it, universal.  I realize that runs against critical fashion, but I don’t care.  I think that despite very reasonable social and political critiques of the notion of literary universality – I do admit it can involve some negative assumptions about the cultural experiences of especially non-Western peoples – Donne is one of the first English poets to make a bid for something of a common humanity, the core emotions and questions that make us human,in whatever local customs they may manifest themselves.  

As I mentioned at the top of the show, Donne was not only a poet, but a priest, and obviously wrote a number of sermons.  Some lines from his most famous one neatly encapsulate what I’m arguing here.  In 1623, Donne suffered a grave illness, perhaps typhus, and wrote a number of meditations as the disease ran its course.  In 1624, he published these under the title “Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions.”  In Meditation 17, he articulates this recognition of our common humanity.  He lies upon his sick bed and hears the tolling of a funeral bell from the church in town.  Who has died?  He realizes that it might as well be him.  He notes that the Church is one, universal, that when a child is baptized or a man dies, it concerns him for he is part of that Church.  He then compares human life and death to a book:

all mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God's hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another.

Another metaphysical conceit: God is the author, death is translation carried out by translators like sickness or war or justice or age.  God is also a publisher, gathering all the pages together in one book and placing it in His library.  

Donne realizes that he is part of an engrafted whole.  He says, “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.”  If any piece of earth be washed away into the ocean, the continent is forever altered.  This line, some may recognize, is pinched by Paul Simon for his 1965 song “I Am a Rock,” with singing partner Art Garfunkel.  All this leads him back to the ringing of the bell, and he says (in a line that Ernest Hemingway would pinch for the title of his 1940 novel of the Spanish Civil War): “ therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.”

Donne strikes upon a notion beautifully articulated in the Zulu and Bantu languages: Ubuntu, usually translated as “I am because we are.”  I exist because you exist.  Bantu actually translates as simply “humanity,” I believe.  What a wonderful idea, and one we’ve not really come across too much in our survey of Brit Lit so far.  So much of what we’ve studied has involved the heroic deeds of the great and the good, or the obsessions of courtiers.  Donne brings us back to a consciousness of ourselves as ourselves.  And that’s as good a place as any to leave it.

Thanks very much for tuning in today – I sincerely hope you enjoyed the show.  If you did, please leave a 5 star review on whatever platform you listen on.  Spread the word to your family, friends, colleagues, and neighbors.  Consider making a donation to keep the show running by clicking on the Support the Show button.  I’ve really enjoyed your company, and we’ll meet again real soon.