by John Donne
19. On the prevalence of post-coital sadness, see Christopher Ricks, Essays in Appreciation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996; New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), ‘John Donne: “Farewell to Love” ’, pp. 19–50. For a historical account of the renewed scientific interest in the clitoris, see Katharine Park, ‘The Rediscovery of the Clitoris: French Medicine and the Tribade, 1570–1620’, in The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe, ed. David Hillman and Carla Mazzio (New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 170–93.
20. The poem has provoked widely disparate responses; a great place to start is Janel Mueller, ‘Lesbian Erotics: The Utopian Trope of Donne’s “Sapho to Philænis” ’, Journal of Homosexuality 23 (1992), pp. 103–34.
21. See Achsah Guibbory, ‘ “Oh, Let Mee Not Serve So”: The Politics of Love in Donne’s Elegies’, ELH 57 (1990), pp. 811–33; Stanley Fish, ‘Masculine Persuasive Force’, pp. 157–81.
22. For an illuminating account of Donne’s religious beliefs, see Jeffrey Johnson, The Theology of John Donne (Woodbridge; Rochester, NY: D. S. Brewer, 2001). On the interpenetration of religion, ethics and poetry, see Theresa M. DiPasquale, Literature and Sacrament: The Sacred and the Secular in John Donne (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1999); Meg Lota Brown, Donne and the Politics of Conscience in Early Modern England (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1995), and John Donne’s Religious Imagination: Essays in Honor of John T. Shawcross, ed. Raymond-Jean Frontain and Frances M. Malpezzi (Conway, AR: UCA Press, 1995).
23. See Ben Saunders, Desiring Donne, and George Klawitter, The Enigmatic Narrator: The Voicing of Same-Sex Love in the Poetry of John Donne (New York: Peter Lang, 1994).
24. C. S. Lewis, ‘Donne and Love Poetry in the Seventeenth Century’, in John Donne: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Helen Gardner (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1965), p. 96.
25. John Updike, The Early Stories 1953–1975 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), p. 597.
26. Manuscript circulation and Donne’s coterie audience are discussed by Marotti, John Donne, Coterie Poet; Ted-Larry Pebworth, ‘John Donne, Coterie Poetry, and the Text as Performance’, Studies in English Literature 29 (1989), pp. 61–75; Dennis Flynn, ‘Donne and a Female Coterie’, Lit: Literature, Interpretation, and Theory 1 (1989), pp. 127–36; David Novarr, The Disinterred Muse: Donne’s Texts and Contexts (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980).
27. John Donne, Letters to Severall Persons of Honour, ed. M. Thomas Hester (1651; Delmar, NY: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1977), p. 238.
28. The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne, Gary A. Stringer et al. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), vol. 2, The Elegies, ‘General Introduction’, p. xlix.
29. Ted-Larry Pebworth and Claude J. Summers reconstruct the political events underlying Donne’s and Wotton’s poetic exchange in ‘ “Thus Friends Absent Speake”: The Exchange of Verse Letters between John Donne and Henry Wotton’, Modern Philology 81 (1984), pp. 361–77.
30. For two quite different approaches to Donne’s female patrons, see Margaret Maurer, ‘John Donne’s Verse Letters’, Modern Language Quarterly 37 (1976), pp. 234–59, and David Aers and Gunther Kress, ‘ “Darke texts need notes”: Versions of Self in Donne’s Verse Epistles’, in John Donne, ed. Mousley, pp. 122–34.
31. For a fuller account of how and why these poems sustain contradictory readings, see Ilona Bell, ‘Courting Anne More’, John Donne Journal 19 (2000), pp. 59–86, and ‘ “If it be a shee”: The Riddle of Donne’s “Curse” ’, in John Donne’s ‘Desire of More’: The Subject of Anne More Donne in his Poetry, ed. M. Thomas Hester (Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1996), pp. 106–39.
32. For further information and additional letters, see John Donne’s Marriage Letters in the Folger Shakespeare Library, ed. M. Thomas Hester, Robert Parker Sorlien and Dennis Flynn (Washington: Folger Shakespeare Library, 2005).
Further Reading
EDITIONS
Carey, John (ed.), John Donne (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1990)
Dickson, Donald R. (ed.), John Donne’s Poetry: A Norton Critical Edition (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007)
Gardner, Helen (ed.), John Donne: The Elegies, and the Songs and Sonnets (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965)
— (ed.), The Divine Poems (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952, 1969)
Grierson, Herbert J. C. (ed.), The Poems of John Donne, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912, 1963)
Manley, Frank (ed.), John Donne: The Anniversaries (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1963)
Milgate, W. (ed.), The Satires, Epigrams and Verse Letters (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967)
— (ed.), The Epithalamions, Anniversaries, and Epicedes (Oxford, New York: Clarendon Press, 1978)
Patrides, C. A. (ed.), The Complete English Poems of John Donne (London: Dent, 1985)
Redpath, Theodore (ed.), Songs and Sonets of John Donne (London: Methuen, 1956; New York: St Martin’s Press, 1983)
Shawcross, John T. (ed.), The Complete Poetry of John Donne (Garden City, NY: Anchor-Doubleday, 1967)
Stringer, Gary A. et al. (eds.), The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995–)
REFERENCE GUIDES
Roberts, John R., John Donne: An Annotated Bibliography of Modern Criticism, 2 vols. (Columbia, London: University of Missouri Press, 1973, 1982)
—, John Donne: An Annotated Bibliography of Modern Criticism 1979–1995 (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2004)
BIOGRAPHIES
Bald, R. C., John Donne: A Life (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1970)
Edwards, David Lawrence, John Donne: Man of Flesh and Spirit (London: Continuum, 2001)
Flynn, Dennis, John Donne and the Ancient Catholic Nobility (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995)
Le Comte, Edward, Grace to a Witty Sinner: A Life of Donne (New York: Walker, 1965)
Parfitt, George A. E., John Donne: A Literary Life (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989)
Stubbs, John, John Donne: The Reformed Soul (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007)
CRITICAL STUDIES
Baumlin, James S., John Donne and the Rhetorics of Renaissance Discourse (Columbia, London: University of Missouri Press, 1991). Examines the rhetorical bases of Donne’s poetry.
Bell, Ilona, ‘The Role of the Lady in Donne’s Songs and Sonets’, Studies in English Literature 23 (1983), pp. 113–29. A revisionist essay showing Donne’s attentiveness to women.
Bloom, Harold (ed.), John Donne: Comprehensive Research and Study Guide (Broomall, PA: Chelsea House, 1999).
Carey, John, John Donne: Life, Mind, and Art (London: Faber and Faber; New York: Oxford University Press, 1981). A study of Donne’s Catholic upbringing and professional aspirations.
Centerwall, Brandon S., ‘ “Loe her’s a Man, Worthy indeede to travell”: Donne’s Panegyric upon Coryats Crudities (1611), And How It was Lost to the Canon’, John Donne Journal 22 (2003), pp. 77–94.
Corthell, Ronald, Ideology and Desire in Renaissance Poetry: The Subject of Donne (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1997). This theoretically informed study of Donne’s poems explores the ways in which feminism, New Historicism and deconstruction illuminate the subject: the speaking subject, the reading subject and the critical subject.
Cousins, A. D., and Damian Grace (eds.), Donne and the Resources of Kind (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; London: Associated University Presses, 2002). A collection of essays analysing poems from a variety of genres.
DiPasquale, Theresa M., Literature and Sacrament: The Sacred and the Secular in John Donne (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1999). Detailed readings that explore the literary implications of Donne’s involvement in the theological and ideological debates of his day.
Docherty, Thomas, John Donne, Undone ( London, New York: Methuen, 1986). Donne deconstructed.
Empson, William, Essays on Renaissance Literatu
re, vol. 1: Donne and the New Philosophy, ed. John Haffenden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). A classic study of Donne’s mind and work.
Ferry, Anne, The ‘Inward’ Language: Sonnets of Wyatt, Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). Analyses of the language used to explore the inner self in the Holy Sonnets.
Fiore, Peter Amadeus (ed.), Just So Much Honor: Essays Commemorating the Four-hundredth Anniversary of the Birth of John Donne (University Park, London: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1972). A collection of essays by eminent Renaissance scholars.
Gardner, Helen (ed.), John Donne: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1962). Changing twentieth-century views of Donne.
Guibbory, Achsah (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to John Donne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Broad-ranging essays offering an introduction and overview of major topics central to Donne’s writing.
Hester, M. Thomas (ed.), John Donne’s ‘Desire of More’: The Subject of Anne More Donne in his Poetry (Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1996). A wide-ranging collection that explores the importance of Donne’s clandestine courtship and marriage.
Hodgson, Elizabeth M. A., Gender and the Sacred Self in John Donne (Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1999). A feminist study which places Donne’s religious poems alongside cultural discourses of gender and spirituality.
Hurley, Ann, John Donne’s Poetry and Early Modern Visual Culture (Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 2005). Explores the visual aspects of Donne’s poetry and shows how important visual culture was despite the iconoclasm of the Protestant Reformation.
John Donne Journal: Studies in the Age of Donne (Raleigh: North Carolina State University, 1982– ). This annual hardcover journal publishes essays on Donne and his contemporaries.
Johnson, Jeffrey, The Theology of John Donne (Woodbridge; Rochester, NY: D. S. Brewer, 2001). The most detailed elaboration of the theological beliefs that permeate Donne’s writing.
Kermode, Frank, John Donne (New York: Longmans, Green, 1957). A brief introduction to Donne’s life and works.
Leishman, J. B., The Monarch of Wit: An Analytical and Comparative Study of the Poetry of John Donne (London: Hutchinson, 1951). Readings of the poems in their literary context.
Marotti, Arthur F., John Donne, Coterie Poet (Madison, London: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986). A study of manuscript circulation that places Donne’s poems in their biographical and socio-historical contexts.
— (ed.), Critical Essays on John Donne (New York: G. K. Hall, 1994).
Mousley, Andrew (ed.), John Donne ( New York: St Martin’s, 1999). A collection of critical essays using historicist, feminist, psychoanalytic and deconstructive approaches.
Nelson, Brent, Holy Ambition: Rhetoric, Courtship, and Devotion in the Sermons of John Donne (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2005). Analyses of the sermons in the context of court and church.
Nutt, Joe, John Donne: The Poems (Houndmills, NY: Macmillan, 1999). Critical analyses of the range of Donne’s poetry.
Papazian, Mary Arshagouni (ed.), Donne and the Protestant Reformation (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2003). A collection of essays examining Protestant influences on Donne’s writing.
Pinka, Patricia Garland, This Dialogue of One: The Songs and Sonnets of John Donne (University: University of Alabama Press, 1982). A study of the speaker’s unfolding thoughts and feelings.
Roberts, John R. (ed.), Essential Articles for the Study of John Donne’s Poetry (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1975). A collection of important, reprinted essays.
Sanders, Wilbur, John Donne’s Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971). Detailed close readings of numerous poems.
Saunders, Ben, Desiring Donne: Poetry, Sexuality, Interpretation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006). Analyses of Donne’s poetry through the lens of theory, with a focus on sexuality and homoeroticism.
Smith, A. J. (ed.), John Donne: The Critical Heritage (London, Boston: Routledge & Paul, 1975). Writings about Donne from his day to the nineteenth century.
—, and Catherine Phillips (eds.), John Donne: The Critical Heritage, vol. 2 (London, New York, Routledge & Paul, 1996). Critical writing about Donne from 1873 to 1923.
Stein, Arnold Sidney, John Donne’s Lyrics: The Eloquence of Action (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1962). Readings which demonstrate the unity of imaginative form.
Sugg, Richard, John Donne (Basingstoke, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). An introduction to Donne’s life and works.
Sullivan, Ernest, The Influence of John Donne: His Uncollected Seventeenth-Century Printed Verse (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993). A study that explores the impact of Donne’s manuscripts.
Summers, Claude J., and Ted-Larry Pebworth (eds.), The Eagle and the Dove: Reassessing John Donne (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1986). A collection of essays on a variety of topics.
Targoff, Ramie, John Donne, Body and Soul (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). A study of Donne’s poetry and prose, from the early verse letters to his last sermon, showing his continuing preoccupation with the complex relation of body and soul.
Warnke, Frank J., John Donne (Boston: Twayne, 1987). A concise, comprehensive overview of Donne the man and artist.
Wiggins, Peter DeSa, Donne, Castiglione, and the Poetry of Courtliness (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2000). Uses Castiglione’s The Courtier to illuminate Donne’s intellectual tolerance, grace, verbal play and love of casuistry.
Winny, James, A Preface to Donne (London: Longman, 1970). An introduction for readers new to Donne.
A Note on the Texts
Astonishingly, Donne did not keep copies of all of his own poems. In 1614, when he was thinking about printing some of his verse, ‘not for much public view, but at mine own cost, a few copies’, he wrote to another friend asking to borrow that ‘old book’, a manuscript collection of poems, saying it ‘cost me more diligence to seek them, than it did to make them’.1
Only one poem exists definitively in Donne’s handwriting, a verse letter to Lady Carey and Mistress Essex Rich, written in late 1611 from Amiens; it is printed here with Donne’s punctuation unaltered.2 In all other cases, we do not know exactly what Donne wrote. A few poems are dated in the manuscripts: ‘To Mr Henry Wotton’ (‘Here’s no more news than virtue’) 20 July 1598; ‘Metempsychosis’ 16 August 1601; ‘La Corona’ July 1607; ‘Goodfriday, 1613. Riding Westward’. ‘The First Anniversary’, ‘A Funeral Elegy’ and ‘The Second Anniversary’ were published with Donne’s approval in 1611 and 1612, not long after they were written.3
Dates for the remaining poems are more or less conjectural. The Elegies, the Satires and most of the Epigrams were written in the 1590s, when Donne was studying at Lincoln’s Inn or serving as secretary to the Lord Keeper. ‘The Storm’, ‘The Calm’ and a few of the Epigrams were written during the Azores expedition of 1597. Most of the Songs and Sonnets were written before Donne’s marriage in 1601, ‘The Curse’ most likely in 1599 and ‘Lecture upon the Shadow’ in January 1601. Dates for individual Epithalamions and Verse Letters appear in the Notes. The Latin ‘Epitaph on Anne Donne’ and ‘Holy Sonnet 17 (XVII, “Since she whom I loved”)’ were written after his wife’s death in 1617; ‘Hymn to God my God, in my Sickness’ and ‘A Hymn to God the Father’ probably in 1623, when Donne was mortally ill.
Despite the paucity of autograph manuscripts, The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne has assembled over 5,000 transcriptions of some 225 poems.4 The variants suggest that Donne was in the habit of revising his poems and that scribes continued to alter the poems, both inadvertently and wittingly. Many of the transcriptions were made during his lifetime, and may well be closer to what Donne wrote than the first edition, which was published two years after his death. Yet most of the extant
manuscripts were copied from other manuscripts, and often the original copy no longer exists, so it can be difficult to know which copy is closest to Donne’s original. The Variorum is dedicated to identifying the most authoritative manuscript version of each individual poem. This Penguin edition is indebted to the many years and countless hours of labour that have gone into producing the Variorum edition.
This edition uses the first published seventeenth-century edition of each poem as its copy-text, except where otherwise noted. For example, the copy-text of ‘The First Anniversary’ is the first edition of 1611, which Donne probably saw into print; the text is emended according to the errata slip found in one copy of the 1612 reprint, which was in all likelihood compiled by Donne himself.5 Most of the poems were published for the first time in 1633; more were added in 1635, a few as late as the seventh printing of 1669. Only when a poem was not published by 1669 has a manuscript been used as the copy-text for this volume.
Texts have been emended with variants from manuscripts or subsequent seventeenth-century editions when there is a compelling reason to do so: when the copy-text contains obvious misspellings, grammatical mistakes, miscopied or misconstrued words, or printing errors; when a particular variant simply makes much better sense; and, most importantly, when the Variorum text presents a notable improvement.6 The emendations are listed as Text notes, along with the most substantive or notable variants, in the Notes. Since there are so many Donne manuscripts, and since most reliable variants appear in several manuscripts, specific manuscripts are not cited.7
To make Donne’s work more accessible to modern readers this edition modernizes the spelling and punctuation, except where the old spelling contains apt double meanings (‘travail’, for example, generally means both to travel and to labour). Pronouns referring to God and Christ have been capitalized for the sake of clarity. Spelling and punctuation were not standardized during Donne’s day, and copyists and printers freely changed both to reflect their own preferences. Spelling and capitalization have changed dramatically since; for example, the first edition regularly uses a colon where we would use a comma; a word or name might be spelled several ways even within a single piece of writing. The punctuation has been modernized very delicately, to eliminate false leads that make reading Donne’s poems more difficult than necessary, but to preserve meaningful syntactical ambiguities. Vowels that are elided (or run together) to create the correct number of syllables for the metre are marked with an apostrophe (‘find’st’,‘the’eagle’). Quotation marks are not used, since they did not exist during Donne’s day.