The muses garden with pedantic weeds o'erspread, was purged by thee....." Write an apppreciation of

University Degree Linguistics, Classics and related subjects

The muses garden with pedantic weeds o'erspread, was purged by thee....." Write an apppreciation of

Ben Jonson is reputed to have said that

"John Donne was the first poet in the world in some things" That he was radically different from his predecessors is unmistakable and in this essay I will explore the probable reasons for this singularity and look at how it is chiefly manifested in his poetry.

Probably the single most significant factor that differentiated Donne from his fellow poets and undoubtedly had a profound effect on his work was his Catholicism. Belonging to this faith in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries meant at best that one could not attend university, hold public office or attend Court. At worst it meant persecution, imprisonment, torture and execution. Donne was educated at home by Catholic tutors, reputedly anxious for a martyr's death themselves and he was often taken to see the public hanging, emasculation and disembowelling of priests supposedly in the hope that it would instil in him some sense of the heroicism of martyrdom. He was in his own words

"ever kept awake in the meditation of martyrdom" and had

"(his) first breeding and conversation with men of suppressed

and afflicted religion, accustomed to the despite of death

and hungry of an imagined martyrdom"

There appears, however, to have been little of the martyr in Donne

but his early love sonnets which generally describe the arrogant

seduction of the wives and daughters of the bourgeoisie that rejected

him display a great deal of the resentment he felt towards

society and it has been suggested that their explicit sexual

content may well have been a form of socio-religious protest

provoked by the common torture used at the time of

emasculating Catholic rebels.

Another aspect of Donne's early life which undoubtedly affected his work was the death of his father when he was just four years old. Donne's mother remarried almost immediately but despite Donne's infancy at the time he recalled his father's 'love and care' throughout his life yet rarely mentions his mother in any of his writing. This is perhaps significant and undoubtedly the loss of a favoured parent coupled with society's rejection of him must certainly have added to his sense of isolation. His father remained an important part of his thoughts throughout his life and Donne agonised in the Holy Sonnets over whether his dead father in heaven realised how determinedly his son was struggling against evil. Donne's rebellion against the repression of his faith appears, however, to have been a private one. Just three years after the Armada he appears in a small portrait under the caption

"Antes muerto que mudado"-Sooner dead than changed. This was undoubtedly an affront to English patriotism and potentially very dangerous during the times he was living in, but the picture was kept secretly and only displayed to a few close friends. It bespoke bravado but kept its bravado to itself-a wise course of action to follow but also typical of Donne throughout his life. Donne's desire for privacy and an image of being a solitary outsider in the Sonnets and Satires contrasts with the young man eager for social acceptance at Lincoln's Inn where he trained as a lawyer after leaving school. There he wrote flattering verse letters to friends and was voted Master of Revels, but even then the very complexity of his poetry served to exclude a wide readership and flattered the intelligence of those who could 'understand' it. He refused to be published (an ungentlemanly thing to do) and made his friends to whom he sent copies of his work promise not to more widely distribute it. He published once ("Anniversaries~) when in dire financial straits and is reputed to have instantly regretted it. Donne seems to have had an extreme anxiety about protecting his imaginative life from the invasive claims of the real world. He often belittles his work in letters to friends possibly hoping that this will forestall any deep investigation and it has also been suggested that he wished to ensure he didn't hinder his own progress in the world with satires that would cause offence and 'shameful' love elegies.

Donne's desire to avoid rejection and better himself

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Donne's desire to avoid rejection and better himself

socially and financially is understandable and appears to have become more important as his life progressed. After secretly courting and then marrying Anne More, the niece of his employer Lord Egerton he was dismissed from his position contrary to what he had hoped would happen. He had anticipated being able to 'win over' the offended relatives and possibly even increase his social standing. Whether this was ostensibly his motive in marrying her or whether he was actually acting out the fantasies of his love elegies is debatable but whatever his reasons the action certainly backfired on him, throwing him into poverty and subjecting him to more disapproval. He was forced to live in a 'thin' house surrounded by his many 'noisy' children and live on the charity of his friends.The bitterness that this situation caused him is evident in his work after this period which will be discussed later.

Donne's "Satyrs" are certainly very different to the verse of his predecessors such as Spenser or Sidney which was largely flattering towards authority. In them Donne poses as moral arbiter and as opposed to his lewd love elegies his tone is serious, responsible and moralistic. He appears to deplore vice and corruption and detects them in almost everyone but himself, especially amongst courtiers and state officials who are in a position of power unlike himself. It has been suggested however, that these poems were written largely to impress his contemporaries at Lincoln's Inn who were reputedly seen as something of a joke by ordinary citizens. They were usually very gullible and open to exploitation by unscrupulous merchants and prostitutes in particular. The courtiers that he ridicules also provided almost the only opportunity for employment and career advancement in the field he and the other students had been trained in. It is possible that their popularity rested largely on the sense of superiority they gave their readers-reversing social reality. Similarly the erotic conquests of the love elegies also acted as compensatory fantasies to a degree and consequently Donne could be seen to be rather servile to their needs in his early work, if not to figures in authority. However his work clearly differs from previous prose in this, but this alone is not the only or perhaps even the most striking dissimilarity. Donne's style of writing would have been very alien to an audience accustomed to the likes of Spenser and Wyatt. He showed a deliberate disregard for orthodox poetical proprieties. He does not 'sugar' his prose and it lacks the conventional smoothness of the poets before him. He writes very differently to them, with a metrical scheme which extends into paragraphs rather than the customary lines and there is little polish. He does not appear to have stopped to recast or refine his work and this in itself suggests an air of urgency previously unused. Coleridge suggested that the best way to read Donne was to '~...discover the time of each word by the sense of passion.~

This reinforces the need to understand the sense of the

phrases being used. The reader is required to think as the author has. The absence of the conventional song-like structure does not mean, however, that Donne uses no sense of rhythm in his work. Indeed John Hayward has suggested that punctuation is used rather like rests in musical notation and this seems a very reasonable description of Donne's style, if we look for example at ~The Canonization" with its irregular line lengths and ABBACCCAA rhyme scheme which seem to have no particular rhythm on paper until they are read aloud. The instability and unpolished feel of Donne's verse implies also an immediacy of experience put directly onto paper, and although we realise that Donne was probably not witnessing someone crying as he wrote "A Valediction of Weeping" we feel that he is experiencing the thoughts and feelings connected to this scene as he writes; he has not stopped to refine or consider his thoughts.

Johnson also said of Donne

"For not being understood, he will perish~ and although this prediction has proved untrue the complexity of both the themes tackled and the poetry itself was one of the chief differences that a seventeenth century audience would have noticed as compared to his predecessors often simple, songlike verse. Donne's frequently obscure references served to prevent many people comprehending his meaning and flattered the intel1igence of those close friends who could. Donne used no classical mythology in his poetry which would have been familiar to his audience, but used complicated metaphysical metaphor and his immense learning is evident in his poetry; he himself refers to his

"hydroptique, immoderate desire for learning" However, a lack of a similar understanding of seventeenth century thought does not necessarily significantly inhibit our appreciation of his work; it is possible to feel what Donne means without necessarily understanding his metaphor, for example in the "Second Anniversarie~ (1612) where he displays his extensive knowledge of the new discoveries surrounding the solar system; even if we do not fully understand this or why it was important at the time we can still see that whatever he is referring to it is clearly momentous at the time but the feeling Donne promotes is that in the end it will not matter at all, when we are dead. The poetry itself is never incomprehensible and this may well have contributed to its enduring popularity (a new edition of his work was called for as late as 1719 when most of his contemporaries had long been out of print.)

The themes and problems explored in the poems were also revolutionary in the literary world. As we discussed earlier, the satires were ostensibly engaged in condemnation, but the very behaviour that Donne condemns in them is very apparent in his own life. He himself says, in one of his sermons preached before King Charles I in 1627 that a satirist satirizes

"...those things which are true nowhere but in himself." In Holy Sonnet number nineteen Donne admits to God that

"I change in vows and in devotionll and his dismay at his fickleness is displayed. This is a constant theme with Donne as is the whole human condition, and he expresses great anger and recrimination about 'changing minds and failing faiths' and often transfers his distaste for infidelity to poetry about unfaithful women, as in "Woman's Constancy." Donne's inconstancy also appears to have extended far beyond his religious beliefs. In 1596 and 1597 he took part in two expeditions against the Spanish, it is said, to enhance his career opportunities, which comes very close to the behaviour he ridicules in his satires I and III (1594/5)and despite his previous anti-establishment leanings his poem "The Storm" honours

"England to whom we owe, what we be, and what we have." Donne's distress at his spiritual weakness under social pressure and in conflict with carnal desires inspires a great deal of his work which often concentrates on the analogous human condition and Man's relationship with God. His financial failure and disgrace also prompted him to consider suicide and he wrote long defences of this mortal sin. Shortly after the death of his brother in custody, accused of harbouring a priest, he renounced his Catholicism and eventually became an ordained minister of the Protestant Church, partly due to financial pressure and the urgings of his close friends including the Countess of Bedford (Lucy) with whom he was reputedly in love.

As we can see Donne's material was certainly unconventional, as was his tone, and he was described as having a 'riddling, intricated, perplexed, labyrinthical soul' His genius was described by De Quincey as having a 'fervent and gloomy sublimity~ who marks him out even from such tragic writers of the time as Webster and Tourneur. Donne's themes are perhaps what we might expect if we consider the temper of the times, but they were certainly unorthodox and asked questions which were to be repeated throughout the following centuries. In his writing, faith and reason are in perpetual conflict and with the breaking up of the old order and the growth of scepticism at the time along with the emergence of what must have been disturbing scientific discoveries this was undoubtedly relevant to the audience as well as Donne himself. Persecution and intolerance also provoked many people to re-examine the religions of the day and towards the end of Donne's career we see him desperately trying to attain a spiritual union with God as opposed to a physical union with the women he used to term his 'profane mistresses.' He attempts, in his poetry, to find a 'correspondence for these intellectual gropings' and to create a single image of the material and spiritual world of his experience whilst exploring his philosophical and religious anxieties and dilemmas. He successfully captured the rhythm of conversation in his work and a great deal of his later work appears to be rather like a conversation either between himself and God or between the spiritual and reasoning/carnal parts of his own mind; in fact it has been said he was the first poet to examine his own psychology. His religious poetry appears to be the most soul searching and throughout his work he exhibits a fear that God has rejected him. After his marriage to Anne More many orthodox circles considered him to be excommunicated and his

flippant treatment of religious themes can be seen to show his anxiety about this. He writes

l'What hurts it me to be excommunicate?" but it is evident that it worried him greatly in relation to God if not the rest of society;and despite his eventual renunciation of his Catholicism the ideas and feelings in much of his work is ostensibly Catholic, with a presence of saints, relics and the hierarchy of angels. These images, however, meet the subversive elements of ridicule, wit and human love in Donne's desperate cynicism. He had renounced his religion without gaining anything. Some of Donne's later work, especlally his sermons can be seen~however, as extremely Calvinistic in the despair and terror of God's damnation they show along with the apparent belief in dependence on God's election, as in "To E of D with Six Holy Sonnets." Many of these works were written either for or under the influence of Lucy, Countess of Bedford, however, who was an eager Calvinist and Donne's adoration of her has often been used as an explanation of this previously uncharacteristic leaning. The Holy Sonnets are said to have been written about her as well as God and Donne's sense of rejection and his pleas for recognition along with his fear of causing offence can equally well be seen to apply to Lucy.

What, then, was it about Donne which made people describe him as a "Copernicus in Poetry" at his funeral? Why did they say that an "awful fire burned in his clear brain"? Donne was not the social rebel he fantasised about

being for very long, if indeed at all; nearing the end of his career he was writing almost to order for the Countess of Bedford and the authorities he had so mocked as a young man. He even wrote an epithalamion for the marriage of King James's daughter. Neither were his unusual metric schemes and style enough to earn him the uncommon praise from Jonson of being recognised as incomparable at his best. Rather than being a lone outsider he craved social acceptance and in his sermons condemned those cast out by society. Donne's true singularity and genius must be seen in his use of poetry as a medium to discuss and analyse the

"The new philosophy (which) calls all into doubt" and the huge questions and conflicts it caused in his own thinking with the sense of foreboding and frustration it accorded in a world where the old religion and morality were failing to keep pace with scientific progress and social change and a life in which spiritual values were constantly being challenged by the materialistic forces of the day. His appeal to our sense of isolation in an uncaring and unexplained world and the relevance of these battles to the centuries following his life, and in particular to our own, have undoubtedly contributed greatly to his enduring popularity.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Carey, J.(ed.)-JOHN DONNE/ Oxford

Donne, J.-SELECTED POETRY/ Penguin

Hunter,W.(ed.)-THE ENGLISH SPENSERIANS/Univ.of Utah

Smith, P.-A GARLAND FOR JOHN DONNE/Harvard