If you had been a gentleman in Elizabethan London, a gentleman of kind of common means and habits, your typical day went one thing like this: You rose at 4 a.m., you wrote 14 letters and a 30-page treatise on the nonexistence of purgatory, you fought a duel, you composed a sonnet, you went to observe a Jesuit get publicly disemboweled, you invented a scientific instrument, you composed one other sonnet, you attended the premiere of As You Like It, you romanced another person’s spouse, and you then caught the bubonic plague and died.
They packed lots in, the Elizabethans, is my level. Possibly posterity, contemplating our personal age, will decide that we’re packing lots in, with the fascism and the COVID and the melting glaciers. Possibly. However there was a peculiar paradoxical ugly-beautiful density to life because the Elizabethans lived it. The Reformation was simply behind them; the civil battle was coming; Elizabeth, the virgin queen, could have been semi-celestial, however her subjects lived in a police state. That they had a ardour for advantage and a genius for cruelty. That they had fantastic manners and barbaric inclinations, beautiful garments and horrible ailments. They oscillated madly between the summary and the corporeal. And amongst his contemporaries, no person oscillated extra madly than John Donne.
Donne was product of contradiction, or of transformation. Born an outsider, a Catholic at a time when being Catholic in England was illegal—his uncle after which his brother went to jail for his or her religion, and his brother would die there—Donne labored his manner in, into the within, shifting and shedding as he went.
He was a bookish lover-poet who went to sea with the doomed and dashing Earl of Essex and caught a imaginative and prescient of hell when he watched Spanish sailors being burned alive within the harbor at Cádiz. (His Rutger Hauer–in–Blade Runner second: “I’ve seen stuff you folks wouldn’t imagine. Assault ships on hearth off the shoulder of Orion.”) He was a splenetic satirist, all-observing, all-condemning, who was additionally a world-class flatterer/ingratiator. He had a slicing, dicing, predatory thoughts that he utilized with equal drive to intercourse, to politics, and eventually to a non secular vocation. Younger Donne had an infected libido, previous Donne an infected conscience. The person who wrote “License my roving hands, and let them go / Before, behind, between, above, below” would change into, because the dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral, the grave divine who warned his congregants that “a man may be an adulterer in his wife’s bosom, though he seek not strange women.”
As for his poetry, it’s unlovable and it’s irresistible. English verse is just not the identical after Donne. Concord and gentility—the music of Spenser—exit the window, and in comes a ferocious, generally grating mental vitality and an intense superiority. You possibly can learn pages of Donne and register solely the oppressive proximity of his pulsing mind. However then he’ll snag you. “Busy previous idiot, unruly solar,” grumbles the lover as daylight pushes in on the bed room window. “Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide / Late school boys.” Encrusted as his vocabulary may very well be, he had a stunning expertise for rapid, on a regular basis speech. One second his verse is alien, twisted, stuffed with fussy wiring and unusual mechanical conceits (Dr. Johnson: “Who however Donne would have thought {that a} good man is a telescope?”); the following he writes “For God’s sake hold your tongue, and let me love,” or “I run to death, and death meets me as fast,” and we hear him chatting with us throughout 4 centuries in ringing monosyllables.
Super-Infinite is the title of Katherine Rundell’s new biographical research of Donne. It appears like an album by Monster Magnet. And certainly, Rundell responds to Donne in one thing of a heavy-metal, hyperbolizing register. Learn the primary stanza of “Love’s Development,” she guarantees us, and “all of the oxygen in a five-mile radius rushes to greet you.” One other poem, “The Comparability,” during which Donne contrasts the charms of his mistress with these of one other lady, takes the custom of poets praising feminine magnificence “and knifes it in a darkish alley.” And so forth.
However overpraise, or reward with reverb, could be very Elizabethan and really, very John Donne, as Rundell exhibits us. “Compliments,” she writes, “had been core forex,” and Donne was loaded. He flung out admirations; he strewed encomia. “Your going away,” he assured one Woman Kingsmill in a letter, “hath made London a lifeless carcass.” Rundell calls this Donne’s “pleasure in extravagance.” When Elizabeth, the younger daughter of Sir Robert Drury, died, Drury (the kind of grandee to whom Donne was all the time sucking up) commissioned an elegy. And though Donne had by no means met Elizabeth Drury, he went at it with a vengeance: In two lengthy, barely bonkers poems, “The First Anniversary” and “The Second Anniversary,” he unfurled the complete howling panorama of human existence and virtually beatified the deceased lady. “She, she is lifeless; she’s lifeless; when thou knowest this / Thou knowest how dry a cinder this world is.” It was heavenly hackwork. “If he had written it of the Virgin Mary,” opined Ben Jonson, “it had been one thing.”
Donne’s love poetry is excessive: Our bodies soften, souls commingle, genders elide, dying is an atom away. For sheer piercing morbidity, what picture can match the “bracelet of vibrant hair concerning the bone” that he summons in “The Relic,” his fantasy of being exhumed whereas nonetheless sporting the tokens of his love? His spiritual poetry is equally excessive: “Spit in my face you Jews, and pierce my facet,” runs one in every of his Holy Sonnets (extra of these hammering monosyllables), during which he prays to tackle the sufferings of Christ. “Buffet, and scoff, scourge, and crucify me, / For I’ve sinned, and sinned.” On a great day, Donne noticed the world as an natural biological-spiritual unity, the well-known complete the place “no man is an island.” On a nasty one, it grew to become a slaughterhouse, a Boschian mill: “Th’ earth’s race is however thy desk; there are set / Vegetation, cattle, males, dishes for Demise to eat. / In a impolite starvation now he hundreds of thousands attracts / Into his bloody, or plaguey, or starved jaws” (“Elegy on Mistress Bulstrode”).
An extremity of notion, ultimately, is the place the 2 Donnes meet: He was a mystic in mattress, and a mystic within the pulpit. The virtually Tantric lover, looking for an essence past the physique, was additionally the yearning-for-eternity preacher: “As quickly as my soul enters heaven, I shall have the ability to say to the angels, I’m of the identical stuff as you.”
He managed his exit like David Bowie, stripping bare within the weeks earlier than he died and wrapping himself in his winding-sheet in order that an artist might make sketches for the posthumous carving of a marble monument. As a preacher, Rundell tells us, Donne’s “speciality” was his present for riffing on infinity. One imagines his congregants at St. Paul’s creaking and shuffling of their pews as he laid the imaginative and prescient upon them: “There shall be no cloud nor solar, no darkness nor dazzling, however one equal gentle; no noise nor silence, however one equal music.” And there it’s, the ultimate resolving energy chord: the radiant wave during which all of the contradictions—of the age, and of the person—can be consumed.
This text seems within the September 2022 print version with the headline “Heavenly Hackwork.”
