John Donne was an English poet, scholar, secretary, and soldier. He was born into a Catholic family. He unwillingly became a priest in the Church of England. From 1621 to 1631, in London, he was Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral. He is regarded as one of the renowned metaphysical poets. His poetry is characterized by the sensual and metaphorical style. He wrote love poems, sonnets, religious poems, epigrams, Latin translations, songs, elegies, and satire. He is also known for his outstanding and moving sermons.
The writing style of John Donne is unique and is characterized by unexpected starting, ironies, dislocations, and paradoxes. Other features of his poetry include everyday speech or dramatic rhythms, tense syntax, and strong eloquence. His poetry with such distinguishing features was a reaction to the flatness of the traditional Elizabethan poetry. It was an adaptation of the decorative and mannerist techniques of European English. The idea of true religion is an important theme of Donne’s poetry. Donne spent much of his time considering the true religion and also theorized it. His poetry includes both secular poems and love and erotic poems. His poetry is celebrated for the mastery of metaphysical conceits.
Though Donne had acquired great education and had great poetic talent, he lived in poverty for several years and relied on his rich friends. He spent much of his income on literature, travel, womanizing, and travel. Donne married Anne More secretly in 1601. They gave birth to twelve children.
A Short Biography of John Donne
John Donne was born on 22nd January 1572 to a Catholic family during a catholic revival. In England, it was a strong anti-Catholic period. John Donne’s father, John, was a wealthy and flourishing merchant in London. John Donne’s mother, Elizabeth Heywood was a grand-niece of Sir Thomas More, a Catholic Martyr. In Donne’s life, religion played an unrestrained and zealous role.
In 1576, the father of John died. His mother married again to a wealthy widower. In 1583, he attended Oxford University at the age of 11, and then he went to Cambridge University. However, due to his religious sect, Catholicism, he never received any degree. In 1592, he started studying law at Lincoln’s Inn at the age of 20. He was intended to pursue a legal or diplomatic career. In the 1590s, he spent all his wealth on womanizing. It was during this time that he wrote his erotic poems and love lyrics. Among the small group of admirers, Satires and Songs and Sonnets, his first books of poems were highly praised.
In 1593, on showing the sympathies of Catholicism, his brother Henry was sentenced, and he soon died in prison. This episode affected him to a great extent, and he started questioning his own faith in Catholicism. It made him write some best works on religion. In 1597, John Donne was appointed a personal secretary, the Lord Keeper of the Great Seal of England, Sir Thomas Egerton. He spent several years with Egerton as a secretary, and it seems that it was during this time that abandoned Catholicism and converted to Anglicanism.
In 1601, Donne turned out to be a Member of Parliament and was on the way to a promising career. In the same year, he married Anne More secretly. Anne More was the niece of Sir Egerton. Anne’s father and Lord Egerton did not support the marriage and, as a punishment, did not provide Anne More a dowry. Donne is fired from his job by Lord Egerton and held him in prison for some time. The next year for the couple was of great struggle; they lived in poverty until the father of any provided her dowry.
John published controversial prose work, “Pseudo-Martyr,” in 1610. The book was anti-Catholic, and he renounced his faith. In work, he suggests that James I can be supported by Roman Catholic without negotiating their religious devotion to the Pope. This won him a lot of appreciation and favor from the king and made him patronage members of the House of Lords. He was appointed as Royal Chaplin soon in 1615. Moreover, his distinguishing features of poetry, such as elaborated metaphor, aptitude for drama, and religious symbolism, earned him the status of a great preacher.
After giving birth to their 12th child, Anne More died in 1617. Afterward, Donne devoted himself to religious practices and gave up writing poems. John became Dean of St. Paul in 1621. Donne wrote Devotion upon Emergent Occasions in his severe illness and published it in 1624. The work contains his famous lines “never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee” and “No man is an island.” He was also appointed as Vicar of St. Dunstan’s in the same year and earned fame for his sermons.
The health of John Donne was deteriorating continuously, and he was getting more and more obsessed with death. Before his death, he delivered a sermon (a pre-funeral sermon) titled: Death’s Duel.” He died on 31st March 1635. His work was fascinating and creative. His use of paradox influenced the poets for years. Though the works of Donne were not appreciated for some time, in the 20th century, W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, and other high profile people reviewed his work and paid a special tribute to these writers.
In 1633, and 1635, the first two editions of the poetry of Donne were subsequently published after circulating in manuscripts.
John Donne’s Literary Style
Due to the distinguishing metaphysical form of writing, the works of John Donne have received lots of criticism for a long period of time. He is generally regarded as an eminent member of the metaphysical poet. The phrase metaphysical was coined by Samuel Johnson in 1781 after the comment of John Dryden of John Donne.
In 1693, John Dryden wrote about John Donne as “He affects the metaphysics, not only in his satires, but in his amorous verses, where nature only should reign; and perplexes the minds of the fair sex with nice speculations of philosophy, when he should engage their hearts, and entertain them with the softness of love.” Samuel Johnson, in Life of Cowley (extracted from his biographical and critical work Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets published in 1781), refers to metaphysical posts that at the start of the 17th century, there were a group of writers that may be termed the metaphysical poets”.
The immediate successors of the metaphysical poets, the Neoclassical poets, viewed them with uncertainty and called their conceits as abusing metaphors. However, the Romantic poets such as Robert Browning and Coleridge reviewed metaphysical poetry. The most recent revival was done by the 20th-century modern poets such as T.S. Eliot, F.R. Leavis, and W.B. Yeats and called them anti-Romantic.
Metaphysical Conceits
The distinguishing feature of the poetry of John Donne is the employment of metaphysical conceit. Metaphysical conceit is an extended metaphor that unites the two totally different ideas to make one idea by using imagery. Donne’s poem “The Canonization” is an extended metaphor in which he equates lovers with saints.
Metaphysical conceits are different from the Petrarchan conceits, and Elizabethan conceits. In Petrarchan and Elizabethan conceits, a comparison is drawn between two closely related objects, whereas in metaphysical conceits, the comparison is quite in-depth, and the two objects are not identical. In the poem “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,” Donne employed one of the most famous in which he compares the two separated lovers to the two legs of the compass. The speaker in the poem claims that no matter how much he travels away from his beloved, in the end, he is united with his beloved, just like the legs of two compasses. He compares his beloved to the static leg of the compass, while he is the moving leg.
Paradox and Irony
Done also employed paradox, subtle and remarkable analogies, and puns to his work witty. His works contain irony and are highly skeptical of human motives and love. His early works are centered on the theme of love, whereas his late poetry is about death and religion.
Meter
There is a shift from classical poetry to more personal poetry in Donne’s poetry. The poetic meter of Donne is structured with alterations and sharp rhythms resembling the ordinary speech. Due to this changing meter, Ben Johnson commented that Donne deserved hanging for not keeping the accent.
Impressive language: Imperatives and Question
Questions
The main characteristic of metaphysical poetry is its energy and freshness of the narrative voices. Interrogatives or questions are powerfully employed by Donne to attain these qualities.
The poem “The Good Morrow” is an illustration of the richness of interrogation in the works of John Donne. The poem opens the middle – in media res – that gives immediate access to “pillow talk” among the partners. The speaker says:
I wonder by my troth, what thou and I
Did, till we loved. Were we not wean’d till then?
But sucked on country pleasures, childishly?
Or snorted we in the ’seven sleepers’ den?
The questions have an acquisitive nature endorsing the humming of a childishly made imagination by the power of love. The listing, enjambment, and caesura in these lines are employed to highlight the incredulity of persona at the good fortune. The structural strategies illustrate a sort of stumbling disbelief. Moreover, the opening verse also draws the realization of the worthless and wasted past and the renovated present and future. Instead of showing the uncertainties, a usual function of interrogatives, the verses are a kind of assertion. The verses signal epiphany: a sudden realization of the speaker about the transformed state of his and his beloved
Imperatives
The imperatives are also used to exert the same vigor, intent, and force. In the poem “The Run Rising,” Donne used the commands as:
… go chide
Late schoolboys and sour prentices,
Go tell court-huntsmen that the King will ride,
Call country ants to harvest offices;
The speaker commands the sun to limit its control on assigned public places. Imperatives are employed to remind “the sun” that the bedroom is not “his” legal domain to control.
Astonishing simplicity
Along with the arresting sentences, another quality of the metaphysical poetry of John Donne is the Astonishing simplicity of the poems. This feature is prominent in the love poetry of John Donne. Although the poetry of John Donne is ideologically and thematically complex, the language of the poetry does not contain flowery phrases as used by the Elizabethan poets. The metaphysical poets favor plain and simple style. In the poem “The Anniversary,” the following couplet has astonishing simplicity. The speaker met his mistress a year ago, and now he assesses their relationship and claims that:
All other things to their destruction draw,
Only our love hath no decay;
A clear statement about the long-lasting love is made by the use of monosyllabic diction, the universal approach by using the opening word “all,” and the neatness of meter. The poetry of Donne has little linguistic ornamentation.
Conclusion
For some critics, the prose work and poetry of John Donne reflects the changing inclinations in his life. He started with love poetry and satires in his youth, and then religious sermon and holy sonnet in the late years. Whereas, other critics question the authenticity of the dates of publication as his works were published in 1633 and 1635 posthumously.