by John Donne
O, to vex me, contraries meet in one;
Inconstancy unnaturally hath begot
A constant habit, that when I would not
I change in vows and in devotion.
Unlike Sidney, Shakespeare or Spenser Donne rarely represents himself as a poet; this, along with the metaphorical God of the Devotions, is as close as he gets to a poetics.
Contrariety and ‘inconstancy’ also meet in Donne’s vexed representations of women. At times his poems echo familiar stereotypes and deeply entrenched patriarchal attitudes: women are inconstant and unpredictable, governed by passion rather than intellect: ‘Hope not for mind in women’, Donne jokes in ‘Love’s Alchemy’. Donne’s jibe will still, no doubt, amuse some readers. (I laugh every time I teach John Updike’s short story ‘A & P’ when the narrator asks, ‘Do you really think it’s a mind in there or just a little buzz like a bee in a glass jar?’).25 Yet Donne’s witty dismissal of women’s minds makes one all the more mindful of ‘Valediction of the Book’, where the speaker invokes a tradition of women writers reaching back to classical antiquity in order to convince his own wonderfully intelligent mistress to write her version of their love story:
Study our manuscripts, those myriads
Of letters, which have passed ’twixt thee and me,
Thence write our annals, and in them will be,
To all whom love’s subliming fire invades,
Rule and example found …
The speaker urges her to write a compendium of all practical and theoretical knowledge – ‘This book, as long-lived as the elements, / Or as the world’s form, this all-gravèd tome / In cipher writ, or new-made idiom’. What’s more, by recounting their relationship her book, like Donne’s poem, will expose the mistaken presumptions of powerful, narrow-minded men: ‘In this thy book, such will their nothing see’.
Similarly, the conventional misogynist wit of ‘Song’ (‘Go and catch a falling star’) – ‘Nowhere / Lives a woman true, and fair’ – is proved weak or untrue by the following poem, ‘Woman’s Constancy’, where it is impossible to determine whether the speaker is male or female. When the witty about-face reveals the speaker to be just as inconstant (or not) as the listener, the conclusion prompts us to read the poem again, re-examining the reasons why we might think certain qualities are masculine or feminine. In ‘Break of Day’ and ‘Confined Love’ Donne adopts the voice and perspective of a woman. In ‘The Undertaking’ the male speaker urges his male interlocutor to repudiate conventional gender roles altogether: ‘And dare love that, and say so too, / And forget the he and she’.
If, as some critics contend, ‘Elegy 8. To His Mistress Going to Bed’ subjugates the woman – ‘My kingdom, safeliest when with one man manned’ – ‘The Anniversary’ offers a bold new application of the ideological problems created by Queen Elizabeth’s presence on the throne. Donne imagines the lovers in heaven, but immediately returns them to earth where their love is all the more prized because it is unparalleled and unprecedented: ‘And then we shall be throughly blest, / But we no more than all the rest; / Here upon earth, we’are kings, and none but we / Can be such kings, nor of such subjects be’. By claiming that the speaker and his beloved are both kings and subjects, Donne redistributes sexual and political power equally, turning the traditional patriarchal world view topsy-turvy.
Reading Donne’s poems today in an anthology or a poetry collection like this one makes it easy to forget that we are eavesdropping on one side of a conversation that was both deeply private and culturally situated, both permeated with personal allusions and highly attuned to the norms and expectations of early modern English society. Since plays and printed books were subject to government censorship, Donne and his contemporaries could speak more openly about religion, politics, social mores and sexual practices by writing private manuscript poetry for a carefully chosen private audience.
During Donne’s day, literature, especially lyric poetry, was still very close to the oral tradition. Reading was generally vocalized rather than silent. Printed books were becoming more widely available, but short poems were recited, read aloud, sung and passed about in handwritten manuscripts to family and friends.26 Donne permitted a few of his more philosophical or public poems such as ‘The First and Second Anniversaries’ or ‘Elegy On the Untimely Death of the Incomparable Prince, Henry’ to appear in print, but regretted doing so. ‘The fault that I acknowledge in myself, is to have descended to print anything in verse’, Donne wrote to a friend after publishing ‘The Anniversaries’. ‘I confess I wonder how I declined to it, and do not pardon myself.’27 Some of his songs were known and two were published, but most of Donne’s poems did not circulate even in manuscript until over a decade after they were written. He sent poems to a few faithful friends, but made them promise not to make copies. When his poems began to escape the confines of his closely guarded private circle, they were highly sought after, as the existence of over 5,000 transcriptions of individual poems attests.28
A large number of Donne’s poems were written for a specific reader or a select subset of readers: his lover, a trustworthy male friend, a cohort of irreverent male wits, fellow poets or literati, potential or valued patrons both male and female and, of course, God. His poems typically provide clues to the designated audience. ‘Satire V’, for example, an attack on legal corruption, addresses Donne’s boss, Sir Thomas Egerton, and Egerton’s boss, Queen Elizabeth:
Greatest and fairest Empress, know you this?
Alas, no more than Thames’ calm head doth know
Whose meads her arms drown, or whose corn o’erflow;
You, sir, whose righteousness she loves, whom I,
By having leave to serve, am most richly
For service paid, authorized, now begin
To know and weed out this enormous sin.
Donne takes the occasion to praise his employer for his high-minded ‘righteousness’, but he also boldly (and somewhat presumptuously) takes it upon himself to alert the queen to abuses that had not reached her ears.
Donne’s occasional poems are at once highly wrought literary artefacts and acts of communication rooted in an immediate historical context. Each of the verse letters addresses someone Donne knew intimately, or someone he wished to know better. ‘To Mr Henry Wotton’ begins: ‘Sir, more than kisses, letters mingle souls, / For thus friends absent speak’. Whether answering a recently received letter or fretting that he had not received a response to his previous letter, Donne’s verse letters acknowledge what poems written in less overtly autobiographical genres only imply: that events and verbal exchanges outside the poem provoke, interpenetrate and respond to observations and developments inside the poem, and vice versa.
‘[D]ark texts need notes’, Donne writes to his patron, Lucy, Countess of Bedford in ‘You have refined me’, reminding her (and us) that private manuscript poetry depends on a store of topical information and shared experiences that the poem intimates but does not explain. For example, the verse letters to Henry Wotton allude to Wotton’s retreat to the country when his lord, Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, was at odds with the queen in 1598–1600. The poems do not explain that Wotton’s professional position was threatened by events at court since Donne and Wotton already understood that.29 Worried that their missives could easily miscarry, Donne warns Wotton to be discreet. In a prose letter written to Wotton when Essex was under house arrest on suspicion of treason, Donne pauses parenthetically – ‘(for these many entangling clauses are either intruded at least to prevent or breed deceit)’ – to mention the syntactical ambiguities that guard his meaning should the letter be intercepted by the government’s sophisticated surveillance network.
In the epistles to aristocratic patrons – as in the two courtly Epithalamions and ‘The First’ and ‘The Second Anniversary’ – elaborate tropes, ambiguous inverted syntax and abstract language ease Donne’s discomfort at seeking financial reward in exchange for poetic praise.30 Highly conscious of the differen
ce in social stature that separates him from his patrons (or hoped-for patrons), Donne expresses his admiration in general, abstract terms. He lauds the Countess of Huntingdon for ‘beauty, virtue, knowledge, blood’, then defuses the whiff of flattery with wit: ‘And if I flatter any, ’tis not you / But my own judgement, who did long ago / Pronounce that all these praises should be true’ (‘Man to God’s image’). There is often an appealing personal note as well. The verse letter to the Countess of Huntingdon recalls her as a young bride when Donne was serving her new stepfather and secretly courting Anne More. My favourite is a playful tale about Lady Magdalen Herbert hoarding and kissing letters (although this we must infer) from her fiancé, Sir John Danvers, a friend of Donne’s (‘To Mrs M. H.’).
Donne extols the Countess of Bedford so extravagantly that the hyperbole itself becomes the proof of his poetic powers: ‘the reasons why you’are loved by all / Grow infinite, and so pass reason’s reach’ (‘Reason is our soul’s left hand’). Yet, it is the exchange of letters and poems written by her as well as him – ‘what you read, and what yourself devise’ – that proves the countess’s ‘discretion’, ‘wit’, ‘learning’ and ‘judgement’. The reciprocity demonstrates her ability to evaluate and validate or critique his poetry: ‘These are petitions and not hymns’ (‘You have refined me’).
Donne is frequently seen as an egotist, given to self-analysis, self-fashioning and self-advertisement, and indeed, he is often cocky and full of himself, strutting his rhetorical brilliance, as when ‘The Sun Rising’ humorously picks a fight with the sun:
Busy old fool, unruly Sun,
Why dost thou thus,
Through windows and through curtains call on us?
Must to thy motions lovers’ seasons run?
Yet no one’s lyric poems are more profoundly and persistently dialogic, more attuned to a reader’s or listener’s answering response than Donne’s. Some, like ‘Song’ (‘Go and catch a falling star’), are bravura performances, calculated to provoke knowing laughter from Donne’s male peers or to amuse and impress a sophisticated, social gathering: ‘I can love her, and her, and you and you, / I can love any, so she be not true’ (‘The Indifferent’). But most are one side of a private lyric dialogue – a ‘dialogue of one’ as Donne puts it in ‘The Ecstasy’ – with an interlocutor whose views Donne incorporates and whose response he eagerly solicits and anxiously awaits.
Donne’s persuasion poems begin with bold assertions, but they often end with conditionals, with buts, yets, ifs and ors that only the poem’s interlocutor can resolve: ‘If our two loves be one, or thou and I / Love so alike, that none do slacken, none can die’ (‘The Good Morrow’); ‘If our loves faint, and westwardly decline’ (‘Lecture upon the Shadow’). Donne’s love poems invite dialogue and seek reciprocity because, unlike Petrarchist poets who cherish and constantly reiterate their idealized, impossible love, Donne thinks ‘it cannot be / Love, till I love her that loves me’ (‘Love’s Deity’).
Donne’s Holy Sonnets are filled with images of erotic physical love, just as his love poems are permeated with references to exalted spiritual love, because the dynamic is strikingly similar. Donne was well aware that his listeners’ and readers’ responses might be swayed by his own ‘so commanding persuasions, so persuading commandments’, but he also knew that his ‘masculine persuasive force’ could not force a friend or mistress to accede to his persuasions any more than his poetic pleas could force God to proffer His love, grant His grace ‘and make me new’ (‘Holy Sonnet 10 (XIV)’). Donne’s Holy Sonnets yearn for a reassuring, affectionate answer, ‘Yet dearly’I love You,’and would be loved fain’ (‘Holy Sonnet 10 (XIV)’), much as his love poems do. Yet unlike the religious lyrics written by Donne’s follower, George Herbert, where the speaker’s frustration and misery are miraculously answered by God’s voice saying ‘Child’ (‘The Collar’) or ‘You must sit down and taste my meat’ (‘Love (III)’), Donne’s divine poems seek a response he does not receive – and cannot put into words.
Donne expected his readers or listeners to be attentive enough and astute enough to disentangle his intricate syntax, to visualize and conceptualize his metaphors, to enjoy his witty, paradoxical wordplay, and when necessary, to plumb his abstruse, allusive language. Some of Donne’s most perplexing and enigmatic poems such as ‘The Undertaking’, ‘The Flea’ and ‘The Curse’ sustain two complete, and completely opposed, readings, meaning one thing to his mistress, something quite different to his derisive male peers.31 ‘The Undertaking’ consciously conceals the poem’s most private meaning ‘From profane men … / Which will no faith on this bestow, / Or, if they do, deride’. Knowing that many of his contemporaries would misunderstand or disapprove, Donne urges his interlocutor to guard their privacy: ‘ ’Twere profanation of our joys / To tell the laity our love’ (‘A Valediction Forbidding Mourning’). In ‘The Canonization’ and ‘The Ecstasy’ Donne imagines an ideal lyric audience, ‘some lover such as we’, capable of understanding the lovers’ private lyric dialogue.
Critics regularly describe the woman in Donne’s poems (both admiringly and disapprovingly) as a blank, a shadowy insubstantial figure, an excuse for similes, a reflection of male desire. But that is a misconception, based on a failure to understand that she is Donne’s primary lyric audience. Since Donne was writing or speaking to his lover – and remember this was a period when poems were still customarily performed or read aloud – there was no need to describe her. Donne was not trying to flatter her by cataloguing her physical beauty from head to toe. Rather, he was trying to convince her that it was worth taking an extraordinary risk to enjoy and preserve their love.
Some of the Songs and Sonnets contain pointed though veiled hints that Donne’s original, private lyric audience was Anne More, the woman he risked all to marry. In ‘A Valediction of My Name in the Window’ Donne writes his name on the window where it magically merges with hers: ‘ ’Tis more, that it shows thee to thee, / And clear reflects thee to thine eye’. In ‘A Hymn to God the Father’ Donne anticipates his own death and bemoans his earthly sins, unable to overcome his yearning for his deceased wife. The witty but haunting refrain puns obsessively on both their names: ‘When Thou hast done, Thou hast not done, / For I have more’. Donne is quibbling with God (quibbling with God!), but his words resonate with anyone who fears his or her work will never be done.
Donne also begins the most passionate of the letters written to Anne More during their clandestine courtship with a veiled pun on her name: ‘Madam, I will have leave to speak like a lover; I am not altogether one, for though I love more than any yet, my love hath not the same mark and end with others.’ Writing in haste before leaving town on business, Donne leaves a lot unsaid. The omission of her name, combined with the enigmatic opening lines, makes it difficult to ascertain what their relationship was, and Donne wanted to keep it that way. Hence the letter makes a simple but concealed declaration of love, ‘I love more’, meaning, I love you, Anne More. As the thought continues, ‘I love more than any yet’, the loosely punctuated language deftly invites alternative, increasingly flattering interpretations: I love you, Anne More, more than anyone else I ever thought I loved, or, I love you, Anne More, more than anyone else has ever loved you. Having exacted as much play from her name as the syntax can bear, Donne proceeds to conceal the pun from potential gossips and snitches by transforming ‘more’ from a noun to an adverb: ‘I love more than any’, ‘yet, my love hath not the same mark and end with others’. To some extent, Donne sounds proud to distinguish his love from others’ love, proud that he is seeking a rich relationship rather than a large dowry or a passing fling. Still, there is an undertone of complaint, a hint of deprivation and self-pity, that betrays just how much he fears some other lover may indeed win the ‘mark’, the attention, and the ‘end’, the public betrothal and marriage, that still eludes him. ‘How charitably’, he continues, ‘you deal with us of these parts’? As this seemingly innocent statement unfolds, we s
uddenly realize that the only ‘mark and end’ his love has so far achieved is just that: a surprising but pointed question mark. Even as Donne gamely tries to dispel his doubts with wit, he reveals the serious concern underlying his courtly compliment: how do you intend to deal with me?
But it is the following remark that proves this is a relationship not of patronage but of secret, unsanctioned passion that defies and redefines all conventional notions of honourable love: ‘all that part of this summer which I spent in your presence, you doubled the heat, and I loved under the rage of a hot sun and your eyes’. As this torrid love language implies, Donne claims the right to ‘speak like a lover’ because he and ‘Madam’ spent the preceding summer as lovers in deed. In this letter as in his most intimate lyrics, Donne uses the half-playful, half-pleading language of ardent passion, packed with the innuendo of private understanding but complicated by the fear that society may ‘yet’ drive them apart.
John Donne’s prose letter to Anne More resembles the allusive, compressed love language, ‘In cipher writ, or new-made idiom’ (‘Valediction of the Book’), that he uses in the Songs and Sonnets. Like the lady in ‘The Sun Rising’, she outshines the sun; like the auditor in ‘Lecture upon the Shadow’, she has the power to alter the course of nature: ‘Love is a growing, or full constant light, / And his first minute, after noon, is night’. Donne’s letter most closely resembles ‘Love’s Growth’, one of his most tenderly and unabashedly erotic poems where love does ‘of the sun his working vigour borrow’ and ‘each spring do[es] add to love new heat’. Indeed, ‘Love’s Growth’ explains the radical redefinition of love that the letter assumes: