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John Donne - Dean of St Paul’s
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- John Donne - An effective preacher
- John Donnes death
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John Donne - Dean of St Paul’sJames I made Donne a Royal Chaplain and chaplain to Lincoln's Inn, so he could stay in London. Donne, however, was ambitious and asked several friends to help him become a dean, (the senior clergyman of a cathedral). In 1621, he was successful, but, sadly, too late for Ann who had died giving birth to a stillborn child in 1617. He was made Dean of St Paul's in London. The churchwas not the present one, which was built only after the Fire of London in 1666 had destroyed the old St Paul's. John Donne - An effective preacherDonne became a very effective preacher. During his lifetime, his Devotions upon Emergent Occasions were published, consisting mainly of meditations, many about death and dying. Donne himself suffered frequent bouts of ill health and was near death several times. One of the meditations later became well known through one of its phrases: ‘For whom the Bell Tolls’, used as the title of a modern novel by Ernest Hemingway. The same meditation contains the equally famous phrase ‘no man is an island’. He also wrote a number of devotional or religious poems. After his death, many of his sermons and other meditations were printed. John Donne's deathDonne died on March 31, 1631, after a prolonged bout of ill health. At the time, he was much better known as a preacher than a poet. In 1633 his poems were first collected and printed, probably without authorisation, as his family tried to stop the publication thinking some of the love poems would hurt his reputation. To-day we focus on his poetry and have to be reminded that he wrote an equal amount of prose material. John Donne’s influenceDonne’s poetry influenced the younger poets who came to be known as theMetaphysicals. It then suffered a decline in popularity until the twentieth century, when Donne came to be seen as one of English literature's standard authors. A man of warm affections, Donne loved to think that his soul could hold communion with distant friends in a rapt trance such as that in which the solitary mystic, striving to shut out every impression of sense, sought to transport his soul into direct communion with the great soul of the universe. It may have been but a half-belief, a pleasing self-imposture, but that it was earnest, we cannot doubt. there is a strange, though by no means unexampled, division between the two periods of his life and the two classes of his work. Roughly speaking, almost the whole of at least the secular verse belongs to the first division of the life, almost the whole of the prose to the second. Again, by far the greater part of the verse is animated by what may be called a spiritualized worldliness and sensuality, the whole of the prose by a spiritualism which has left worldliness far behind. The conjunction is, I say, not unknown: it was specially prevalent in the age of Donne's birth and early life. It has even passed into something of a commonplace in reference to that Renaissance of which, as it slowly passed from south to north, Donne was one of the latest and yet one of the most perfect exponents. The strange story which Brantôme tells of Margaret of Navarre summoning a lover to the church under whose flags his mistress lay buried, and talking with him of her, shows, a generation before Donne's birth, the influence which in his day had made its way across the narrow seas as it had earlier across the Alps, and had at each crossing gathered gloom and force if it had lost lightness and color. Always in him are the two conflicting forces of intense enjoyment of the present, and intense feeling of the contrast of that present with the future. He has at once the transcendentalism which saves sensuality and the passion which saves mysticism. Indeed the two currents run so full and strong in him, they clash and churn their waves so boisterously, that this is of itself sufficient to account for the obscurity, the extravagance, the undue quaintness which have been charged against him. He was "of the first order of poets"; but he was not of the first among the first. Only Dante perhaps among these greatest of all had such a conflict and ebullition of feeling to express. For, as far as we can judge, in Shakespeare, even in the Sonnets, the poetical power mastered to some extent at the very first the rough material of the poetic instinct, and prepared before expression the things to be expressed. In Dante we can trace something of the presence of slag and dross in the ore; and even in Dante we can perhaps trace faintly also the difficulty of smelting it. Donne, being a lesser poet than Dante, shows it everywhere. It is seldom that even for a few lines, seldomer that for a few stanzas, the power of the furnace is equal to the volumes of ore and fuel that are thrust into it. But the fire is always there--overtasked, overmastered for a time, but never choked or extinguished; and ever and anon from gaps in the smouldering mass there breaks forth such a sudden flow of pure molten metal, such a flower of incandescence, as not even in the very greatest poets of all can be ever surpassed or often rivalled. For critical, and indeed for general purposes, the poetical works of Donne may be divided into three parts, separated from each other by a considerable difference of character and, in one case at least, of time. These are the Satires, which are beyond all doubt very early; the Elegies and other amatory poems, most of which are certainly, and all probably, early likewise; and the Divine and Miscellaneous Poems, some of which may not be late, but most of which certainly are. All three divisions have certain characteristics in common; but the best of these characteristics, and some which are not common to the three, belong to the second and third only. It was the opinion of the late seventeenth and of the whole of the eighteenth century that Donne, though a clever man, had no ear.
T.J. Backus, like Collins, saw the seventeenth century as producing a style of writing in which intellect and fancy played a greater part than imagination or passion…that tendency to intellectual subtilty which appears in the prose and verse of the Elizabethan writers, and occasionally extends its contagion to Shakespeare himself, became with [the Metaphysicals] a controlling principle. As a natural consequence, they allowed ingenuity to gain undue predominance over feeling. Of Donne he remarked: His ideal of poetical composition was fulfilled by clothing every thought in a series of analogies, always remote, often repulsive and inappropriate. His versification is singularly harsh and tuneless, and the crudeness of his expression is in unpleasant contrast with the ingenuity of his thinking.
Donne draws on the Neoplatonic conception of physical love and religious love as being two manifestations of the same impulse. In theSymposium (ca. third or fourth century b.c.e.), Plato describes physical love as the lowest rung of a ladder. According to the Platonic formulation, we are attracted first to a single beautiful person, then to beautiful people generally, then to beautiful minds, then to beautiful ideas, and, ultimately, to beauty itself, the highest rung of the ladder. Centuries later, Christian Neoplatonists adapted this idea such that the progression of love culminates in a love of God, or spiritual beauty. Naturally, Donne used his religious poetry to idealize the Christian love for God, but the Neoplatonic conception of love also appears in his love poetry, albeit slightly tweaked. For instance, in the bawdy “Elegy 19. To His Mistress Going to Bed” (1669), the speaker claims that his love for a naked woman surpasses pictorial representations of biblical scenes. Many love poems assert the superiority of the speakers’ love to quotidian, ordinary love by presenting the speakers’ love as a manifestation of purer, Neoplatonic feeling, which resembles the sentiment felt for the divine. Particularly in Donne’s love poetry, voyages of discovery and conquest illustrate the mystery and magnificence of the speakers’ love affairs. European explorers began arriving in the Americas in the fifteenth century, returning to England and the Continent with previously unimagined treasures and stories. By Donne’s lifetime, colonies had been established in North and South America, and the riches that flowed back to England dramatically transformed English society. In “The Good-Morrow” and “The Sun Rising,” the speakers express indifference toward recent voyages of discovery and conquest, preferring to seek adventure in bed with their beloveds. This comparison demonstrates the way in which the beloved’s body and personality prove endlessly fascinating to a person falling in love. The speaker of “Elegy 19. To His Mistress Going to Bed” calls his beloved’s body “my America! my new-found land” (27), thereby linking the conquest of exploration to the conquest of seduction. To convince his beloved to make love, he compares the sexual act to a voyage of discovery. The comparison also serves as the speaker’s attempt to convince his beloved of both the naturalness and the inevitability of sex. Like the Americas, the speaker explains, she too will eventually be discovered and conquered. Angels symbolize the almost-divine status attained by beloveds in Donne’s love poetry. As divine messengers, angels mediate between God and humans, helping humans become closer to the divine. The speaker compares his beloved to an angel in “Elegy 19. To His Mistress Going to Bed.” Here, the beloved, as well as his love for her, brings the speaker closer to God because with her, he attains paradise on earth. According to Ptolemaic astronomy, angels governed the spheres, which rotated around the earth, or the center of the universe. John Donne’s poem, Elegy 19. To His Mistress Going To Bed is a sexually charged, orgasmic-drenched work of twenty-four rhyming couplets. The language he uses throughout has a visceral power, with subtlety and allusion completely abandoned in favor of blatant and unmasked copulation between two lovers. Though the title leaves little doubt of the subject of the poem, it honestly took me by surprise that Donne is so continually suggestive and at times assaultive in his account of their coupling. Instead of using metaphors to alleviate the forthrightness of his subject, Donne chooses to be far more direct and unambiguous about the act being performed. In lines like, “Off with that happy busk, which I envy,” (1. 9) and “Full nakedness! All joys are due to thee,” (1.33) there is essentially no doubt of what is occurring. His use of similes, as with “…like heaven’s zone glistering,” (1.5) and “A heaven like Mahomet’s paradise;” (1. 21) cut right to the heart of the poet’s intent, comparing his lover’s body to celestial bodies of the blessed afterlife. The meaning is clear: the narrator has found heaven here on Earth, in the naked beauty of his mistress and in her embrace. The tone, though overtly sexual and electric, is whimsical and frenetic, witty and even a bit messy. Donne’s rhyming lines tend to be afterthoughts, with the meat of the poetic flavor coming at the beginning of the stanzas. For example, in lines 31-34, his endings are, “free” and “be,” then “thee” and “be,” suggesting a lack of interest in keeping the rhyme scheme fresh or even interesting. He seems to have chosen the rhyming couplets intentionally, as a way of catering to the closed form without exerting excessive thought or energy on it. His interest lies in the raw energy of female flesh and its effect on the narrator, rather than ingenious stanza endings or clever rhymes. Immediacy of emotion and passionate fervor appear to be the point of the poem, even if it comes at the expense of his stanza structure. His style is brisk, fiery, and full of titillating imagery that is unrelenting and wholly unapologetic. It is the brashness of the language and the lack of seduction involved in the scene that stands out most for me. I like the fact that Donne is not interested in wooing his lover, only in getting her clothes off of her body as quickly as possible and joining their dual nether regions into one without delay. His references to angels, Greek gods and earthly souls illustrate a narrator outside of the realm of pure physical beauty and swept up into bodily delights that ascend to the very heavens. Donne’s narrator begins with pure lust, but climaxes with soul-enriching, orgiastic delights that have previously been uncharted by him or any other. “O my America!” indeed. In "Elegy XIX," Donne characteristically combines secular and heavenly aspects of love in an attempt to seduce his mistress: "Now off with those shoes, and then safely tread/In love's hallowed temple, this soft bed" (17-8). In these lines, Donne is conparing the couple's bed to a temple and by association, the acts that he wants to perform there will be sacred, even though they are expressions of secular lust and desire. In order to seduce his mistress, he catalogs her clothing, comparing her clothes to stars--"0ff with that girdle, like heaven's zone glistering,/But a far fairer world encompassing" (5-6)--and to angel ' s clothing - - "In such white robes, heaven ' s angels used to be/Received by men; thou, angel, bring' st with thee/A heaven like Mahomet's paradise" (19-21). Her clothing is so beautiful because it contains a beauty that is even greater than the articles of clothing themselves, and, thus, by praising her clothing he is lauding her beauty. In addition to this cataloging of clothing, he also analyzes her body and uses comparison to praise her physical form that is slowly revealed as the clothing comes off. "Your gown going off, such beauteous state reveals/As when from flowery meads th' hill's shadow steals,' (13-4). After he praises her clothing and her body, he asks her to give his roving hands the right to touch her. At thie point, he continues his comparison, linking her to a new-found kingdom, a "mine of precious stones" (29) and "books' gay coverings" (39). He stresses that she is like a kingdom that is -safeliest when one man manned" (28), insinuating that this woman should allow him and only him into her bed because she is more worthy if she is monogamous. He carries this theme through by comparing women to "mystic books, which only we/(Whom their imputed grace will dignify)/Must see revealed" (41-2), stressing that a woman such as his mistress is a gem that should be reserved for men like himself who know how to appropriately appreciate L~ey,~va~ue ~;~ Other men can "read" her covering but only the speaker has the ability to "read" her nakedness, just like a layman can appreciate a pretty book cover but does not know how to read the pages of the book. And to prove to his mistress that he has her best interests in mind, he takes off his own clothing to set an example for her. Grierson argues that passion in Donne's poetry "is purified and enriched by being brought into harmony with his whole nature, spiritual as well as physical. It has lost the exclusive consciousness of itself which is lust, and become merged in an entire affection, as a turbid and discolored stream is lost in the sea" (33). This passage reflects Grierson's privileging of closure and unity. He praises Donne' s work for its ability to resolve the conflict between love and lust which results in a unified vision of love. He acknowledges Donne's playfulness, but praises how adept he is at moving between this playfulness and a skillful use of words to convey a serious message that has real import. This gaiety, in fact, lessens the negative impact of his sometimes bawdy words, and thus balances the pull between secular passion and transcendental love. Even though Hunt does not think that Donne effectively resolves the conflict between the two views of love, he nonetheless appreciates Donne' s use of extended metaphor throughout the Elegy. Donne's comparison of love to war "freshens this stale conceit by exploiting its latent dramatic possibilities. He makes the beginning of the poem a call to battle, a vigorous challenge delivered in a tone of swagger and arrogance" (Hunt 19). Donne compares his mistress to the riches of a colonized land, a comparison which allows the speaker to address "the mistress in the specific role of an explorer who is requesting a royal patent ('license') which will permit him to discover a new land, explore its unknown riches, conquer it, and having established himself as its autocratic monarch, bring it under the firm mastery of his civil authority" (Hunt 20). Thus, the sexual conquest of the mistress becomes a praising of colonialiem and when juxtaposed with this colonialism, the act of seduction assumes grand proportions and importance. Hunt praises Donne's metaphors because they intellectualize and philosophize the sexual experience, a New Critic characteristic which poststructuralist theorists will interrogate. In her article "Donne's 'Elegy 19': The Busk Between a Pair of Bodies," Sandy Feinstein negotiates this movement between text, history, reader, and criticism byanalyzing the meaning of the busk in Donne's poem. She explains the importance that was placed on fashion in Donne's time and illustrates the struggles that surrounded the busk which was a metal object that "was placed in the lining of the Basquine (tight fitting bodice), in the busk pocket" (64) and was "one of the primary means to create the stiff, erect, masculine visual effect that was achieved by flattening the chest and stomach and elongating the waist" (64). Some men did not want women wearing busks because they allowed women to control their bodies, but other men favored them because they served to control the woman's body. The busk therefore both threatens and sustains the hierarchical order which devalued and deprivileged women. She analyzes the struggles over the busk through twentieth century feminist eyes because modern readers of the poem will need to be made aware of the history of the busk as well as its significance to women today. This balancing act can only be achievedby historicizing the past and the present in terms of a struggle for the future. Achsah Guibbory analyzes Donne's language of love by historicizing both the Renaissance and the postmodern conception of love. She writes that "for modern reader, accustomed to distinct separations between private and public, love and politics may seem strange bedfellows" (811). She argues that love itself is political because it always already involves power relationships between men and women. To claim that Donne was merely being playful when he objectified and seduced women in his poems is, according to Guibbory, a repression of the underlying political struggles for power that occurred _and are still occuring between men and women. Guibbory claims that Donne,s misogyny is a response to a female monarch and to the possible threat to male superiority that she posed. Thus, even as Donne is supposedly glorifying the female body, he in fact is expressing a revulsion of the very form that threatens patriarchy. In Elegy XIX, then, "Donne transfers power from the woman, desired and praised, to the man who hopes to possess her" (Guibbory 821). It is in these various contexts and traditions that we must see Donne's reference to the "busk" in "Elegy 19." In his poem, moreover, the word "busk" is particularly rich in meaning. Donne uses the word as a noun, referring specifically to the article of fashion that so worried Gosson. Even so, the potential puns may have suggested themselves to Donne, considering the poem is concerned with "getting ready" and that it acts as "bait" to catch the Lady--or vice versa, the Lady's bait to catch him. In "Elegy 19" the significance of the busk is manifold. On the one hand, and most obviously, it introduces Donne's running pun and theme of "erection," a preoccupation that might be said to culminate in the witty "flesh upright" of line 24. Busks are straight, erect, and hard, being constructed of wood or whalebone. As the three illustrations show, they are phallic. That the busk comes between "two bodies" (the bodice) is precisely what the narrator hopes to achieve. For the Lady's protective attire, he would substitute himself, one "body," and join the other "body"--the Lady--with his own "busk." The bodice as "breastplate" in line 7 might recall the iconic images of Minerva, goddess of war, an image that is appropriated by the queen in the painting Queen Elizabeth and the Three Goddesses (1569); and even after her death, as represented in the painting, Truth Presents the Queen with a Lance (1625), Elizabeth is shown wearing a woman warrior's breastplate.(47) Donne's narrator would have the Lady "unpin that spangled breastplate" (line 7), the "bodies" that protects her own body from "invasion"; this reference may also be a contemporary allusion to the iron corsets popular at the time. In short, the narrator would have her relinquish her seemingly armorial defense; then, joined to him, he and she would be a new "pair of bodies"--for which his own fleshly busk would be ready to serve. Perhaps, too, Donne knew the bawdy toast, "To both ends of the busk," explained by David Kunzle as a reference to the "two points of sexual interest which seemed all the more vulnerable, the heavier the armor in between."(48) The narrator's "envie" might not be surprising since the busk is "ever hard" and "ever ready" as well as "nigh" to where he would gladly be. Donne explicitly says, it "still can be," unlike the less constant reality of male virility. The busk is "omni-potent," while the narrator is not. The narrator is dependent on what Thomas M. Greene refers to as "the other," against which he argues the poet defines himself.(49) The "busk," on the other hand, is not dependent on an "other" to be "still" or "stand," that is "to be," but it is dependent on another to fulfill its function, to create an erect and flattened torso. It is "happy" not only for its situation but for its literally infinite control; it makes no effort to be what it is or where it is. And not even the Lady can weaken its state and power, and though it clearly can be discarded, it suffers not at all from rejection. Critics have argued about the masculine narcissism and phallocentricity of this poem.(53) Although, as is usual in Donne's poetry, the woman is given no voice, she is here given a challenging presence, albeit one of haute couture The last question posed by the narrator is therefore provocative and telling: "What needst thou have more covering than a man." As I have been arguing, it was in part the "covering" that enabled women to assert their presence, that blurred distinctions, however artificially, however temporarily, however superficially. The irony of this "covering" is exploited by Donne who may at once suggest the high and low end of the hierarchy of male and female control, or lack of control, when it comes to sexuality. On the one hand, the "covering" could be the appropriation of masculine eroticism by women made possible by devices such as busks and breastplates, devices that enabled a woman to control her body's shape, function, and even access. On the other hand, the "covering" may remind the reader that men and women are little different from animals whose instincts drive the male to "cover," or mate with, the female, and the female to let him. The horse, for whom the term "cover" specifically applies in animal husbandry, represented "carnal nature, passion, and irrationality of appetite" in emblematic and allegorical literature.(62) Donne may have been more than a little aware of the implicit antitheses of the questions. Though in the end the narrator may be the only one we know for sure is naked, it is a nakedness that dresses itself in questions about the body and the part it plays in defining the sexual roles of men and women--questions that are left as unanswered and provoking as the one that finally closes the poem.(63) The poem falls into two sections
Donne is obviously impatient, re-iterating the opening ‘Come’, as well as the commands ‘Off with ...’ in ll.5,11, 15, 17, and other similar exhortations. He wants action, not sleep. Lines 1-24 Just as the Elizabethans itemised each part of a woman's anatomy in the conventions of their love poetry, so Donne, in mockery, itemises each article of clothing that needs removing. It is not long before we realise how much more extensive a lady's wardrobe was in those days, and how many layers of clothing she wore
Lines 25-48 The final nakedness is preceded by some energetic foreplay: ‘Licence my roving hands’. The imagery is of exploration and discovery. She is his possession, ‘My kingdom’. Finally she is about to slip off her final undergarment, and ‘Full nakedness!’ is celebrated. Theological imagery ofrevelation is used, as well as of being given grace to receive it. This poetic strip-tease, however, stops just where all teases stop, without the full knowledge of whether she has actually ‘cast all ... this white lynnen hence’. All we know at the end is that the poet at least is naked in anticipation of their love-making. nticipation There is something in Going to Bed of the ecstasy of love: the anticipation of sex is exciting, and the celebration of nakedness. There are not, in fact, too many poems in the English language which do this: most poets are more modest than Donne. There is a certain irony that later Donne became a notedclergyman and preacher. No wonder his immediate family were not happy about these early poems being printed soon after his death. The two things that link love and religion in Donne's life are passion and imagery. Completeness The other theme, born out by the imagery, is that of the completeness of the lovers' world. They occupy the same space as they do in The Sunne Rising: the bed in the room. Within that space he is king and she is
The two main focuses of imagery in Going to Bed are the religious and the geographical. As in Aire and Angels, the woman in her underclothes is likened to an angel (1.19), who brings the joys of Paradise described in Muslim tradition. He also plays with the idea of ghosts (‘Ill spirits walk in white’), by saying that we can distinguish one from the other by which part of our anatomy goes ‘upright’, a frankly erotic play on words. Directory: file -> view view -> Western Europe after wwii view -> Author study: paul fleischman view -> Qpa1 7ela study Guide view -> Arctic Oil/Gas Neg view -> November 1970 Approximately 150,000-500,000 deaths Bhola Cyclone Bangladesh view -> Grade Level: 6 Unit of Study: Caribbean glce view -> Citation: Duffield, Katy view -> Table of Contents Lesson # view -> Chinese Wind Energy Disad Download 0.78 Mb. Share with your friends:
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