John Donne - Metaphysical Poet and Destroyer of Feminine Virtue

John Donne Portrait, Artist Unknown

Writer of passionate love poetry, devotional verse and brilliant sermons, John Donne's work and life made a mockery of the conventions of his age.

Poet, John Donne, (1572-1631) had no difficulty in reconciling his two great loves, religion and womanising. Because he was equally comfortable with both, the two subjects frequently inform each other in his poetry. His love poems sometimes contain religious imagery, while the religious and spiritual poems are often steeped in sexual metaphors.

"Donne 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," claimed John Dryden.

Early Life of John Donne

Donne was born in Bread Street, London. His father was an ironmonger, his mother was the daughter of John Heywood, the dramatist. He was also related, on his mother's side, to Sir Thomas More. Sadly his father died when he was four years old and his mother married again six months' later to a Catholic physician, Dr. John Syminges.

Donne was educated at Hart Hall, Oxford, which he left in 1584 and it's believed he later attended Cambridge, but his religion prevented him from taking a degree at either university. He entered Lincoln's Inn in 1592, but shortly after he renounced his faith when his brother, Henry, was imprisoned for protecting and harbouring a Catholic priest.

It is believed Donne travelled extensively, and in 1596, he sailed with the Earl of Essex to sack Cadiz. The following year, he hunted Spanish treasure ships in the Azores with Sir Walter Raleigh. Two poems commemorate these events, "The Storm" and "The Calme". Steady employment followed, when Sir Thomas Egerton, Keeper of the Great Seal, engaged Donne as his secretary. The poet was moving up in the world, and in 1601, he became MP for Brackley, Northamptonshire.

Marriage - on the Sly

Later, that year, he married, in secret, Lady Egerton's niece, Ann More and as a result, was dismissed from his post with Egerton and thrown into prison for a brief period of time. The disgrace prevented him finding decent employment and he had to rely on his friends for his living for around fourteen years.

For a while the growing family lived in Mitcham in Surrey but in 1612, they moved to London to a house in Drury Lane. Around three years later, King James I put pressure on Donne to enter the church. This proved a good career move when he became a chaplain. Cambridge University, much to its disgust, was forced by King James I to make Donne a DD (Doctor of Divinity.) By 1621, he had become the Dean of St. Paul's, a celebrated preacher, a great poet and a highly-esteemed writer of brilliant sermons. He also continued to be a great womaniser, although by now he was a widower, his wife having died in 1617 giving birth to their twelfth child, who was stillborn.

A Poetry of Puns, Conceits, Sex and Religion

One of his most popular poems today (among others) is "The Sun Rising" with its irreverent lines: "Busy old fool, unruly sun, / Why dost thou thus, / Through windows, and through curtains call on us? / Must to thy motions lovers' season run? / Saucy pedantic wretch, go childe / Late school-boys and sour prentices." The poem is literally an impudent rant against the sun for waking up the lovers after their night of blissful sexual indulgence. "You don't need to follow all the niceties of Donne's metaphysical conceit to appreciate this poem as a glorious celebration of sexual fulfilment," says Daisy Goodwin.

Another poem, "Song" begins: "Go and catch a falling star, / Get with child a mandrake root, / Tell me, where all past years are, / Or who cleft the Devil's foot." This poem is another rant, but of a different nature. Donne is expressing his anger at faithless women. The reference to a mandrake is a sexual one, as people truly believed that a woman could become pregnant by this strange plant with its divided root. (They also believed that a mandrake root screamed when wrenched from the ground.) In the third stanza of the poem Donne expresses the wish to find a faithful woman, and says, "If thou findst one, let me know, / Such a pilgrimage were sweet." He sees this search for faithfulness almost as a "holy" project - a pilgrimage.

(A conceit is a term that establishes a relationship between two things that are remote from each other. It is meant to surprise the reader with this bizarre, outrageous and elaborate relationship. However, conceits, although they begin in absurdity, should be seen to become appropriate.)

A Sermon Fit for a King

Little of his poetry was published in his lifetime, although his son published his Collected Poems in 1633. He wrote most of his love poetry in his youth and his religious poetry in his middle and old age. His love poetry is passionate, intellectual, energetic and indulges in punning and wordplay. His devotional verse reveals uncertainties and his struggles to suppress his doubts and achieve true faith.

After James I died on 27 March 1625, John Donne achieved the distinction of preaching his first sermon before the new king, Charles I. Following a period of ill-health including a series of debilitating infections of the mouth, Donne died on 31 March, 1631.

Sources:

• John Donne Selected Poems, Editor: Richard Gill, Oxford University Press, 1990.
• Poems to Last a Lifetime, Editor: Daisy Goodwin, Harper Collins Publishers, London, 2004.
• The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English, Editor: Ian Ousby, Cambridge University Press, 1988.
• The Oxford Companion to English Literature, Editor: Margaret Drabble, Oxford University Press, 1985.

Emily Dickinson, Poems 108 and 303

Emily Dickinson, Public Domain

Emily Dickinson, was born in Massachusetts in 1830 and by the time she was thirty years old, had withdrawn from society and lived as a recluse. She was known for her eccentricity, always dressing in white and maintaining friendships by correspondence. She found a mentor and critic, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who corresponded with her, but Higginson  believed her poetry was not good enough for publication and discouraged her. Dickinson, accepting his verdict, may have had insufficient confidence to send her poems to another critic.

Poem 108

Surgeons must be very careful
When they take the knife!
Underneath their fine incisions
Stirs the culprit - Life!

At first glance, Poem 108 seems merely an amusing comment on the responsibility of being a surgeon. The poem is a metaphor; the surgeon surely represents the patriarchy, while the culprit is the 'victim', woman, or woman-poet, whose life or creativity is in jeopardy. There is something sinister in the choice of the world 'culprit' rather than 'patient'. One might even stretch the allusion as far as the Biblical Eve and her temptation of Adam. As always, Dickinson turns traditional assumptions around, for the accusation in the poem is implicit (although blurred by humour) in mocking the so-called benefactor of powerless women whose creativity is suppressed. It's a matter of conjecture whether Dickinson was thinking of Higginson when she wrote it and whether she showed it to him. If she did, would he have recognised himself?

In the third line of the poem, the choice of the word 'fine' in 'their fine incision' is particularly powerful. 'A fine incision is much more dangerous than a blunt incision; it does more damage more quickly with little surface pain but it gets much deeper.'

Poem 303

The Soul selects her own society -
Then - shuts the Door -
To her divine Majority -
Present no more -

Dickinson's focus on the danger and pain inherent in the external world is further explored in Poem 303. The poem begins very directly: 'The Soul selects her own society - Then - shuts the Door -...' It is possible the latter line might be read differently, as a defensive statement, involving erecting a barrier against the possibility of threat.

Unmoved - she notes the Chariots - pausing -
At her low Gate -
Unmoved - an Emperor be kneeling
Upon her Mat -

This second stanza contains two lines beginning with the word 'Unmoved' as the Soul rejects what does not interest her.

I've known her - from an ample nation -
Choose One -
Then - close the Valves of her attention -
Like stone -

This is final and unyielding, contrasting, as it does, the Valves (possibly alluding to the heart) with the totality, hardness and finality of enduring Stone. The juxtaposition is powerful. The poem is, therefore, about choice and the responsibility of choosing, a responsibility that rests with the chooser, not the chosen.

'A poor role model for modern women' (Val Smith)

In 'Interview with Val Smith', 1996, the poet says: 'She is writing from the closed, domestic, interior position, which is socially gendered, not biologically gendered... It seems to me she's become a kind of icon for the woman writer, for the solitary soul who shuts herself away from society, who chooses to write and to do nothing else but to look after her own soul.'

Smith continues by comparing Dickinson unfavourably with Elizabeth Gaskell, who wrote with the door open so that she could look after her children. Of course, this willingness to assume many roles is true of modern-day women poets, who want to be in the world as a pro-active force. But, perhaps Smith is being prescriptive about women's role, for surely it is a woman's choice whether or not she has children and whether or not she chooses to shut herself away to write poetry.

Sources:
The Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson, 3 volumes, Cambridge, Mass. 1955
'Gender and Poetry', by Angus Calder and Lizbeth Goodman, Literature and Gender, The Open University, London, 1996

Percy Bysshe Shelley – The Unconventional Love-Life of one of Britain's Most-Loved Poets

Dover, (c) Janet Cameron

Romantic poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley had a short, but intense life. Shelley was a rebel and an eccentric, whose outrageous behaviour shocked society.

    

When the Dover steam packet was introduced and crossed regularly from Dover to Calais in the 1780s, it proved a great success with the aristocracy, who began writing about their travels, describing them as "Grand Tours."

Soon the Dover cutters were so highly regarded that they were patronised by bankers, politicians, merchants and lawyers, as well as a love-struck poet. Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) who had good reason to be glad of Dover's efficient port. The great poet, who is famous for such sublime poetry as "To a Skylark," was already married when he fell in love with sixteen-year-old Mary Godwin, daughter of publisher, William Godwin and women's rights champion, Mary Wollstonecroft.

Born in Horsham in Sussex, Shelley was a rebel and a rabble-rouser, intense, imaginative and unconventional. At school he was known as "Mad Shelley" or the "Eton Atheist."

Percy Shelley's First Elopement – Harriet Westbrook

Harriet was the daughter of the proprietor of a coffee-house, and when she was sixteen, she and Shelley eloped to Scotland and were married in Edinburgh in August 1811. For three years, the two young people led a nomadic existence. Their relationship was far from conventional, as apparently Shelley tried to share her with his friend T.J. Hogg. It's not too clear from literary references whether he was successful in persuading Harriet to comply.

By 1814, the marriage collapsed – which is unsurprising since Shelley disapproved of marriage, along with eating meat, religion and royalty. The couple had two children and the effect of Shelley's abandonment of them had dire effects on the whole family. Harriet became suicidal, making distressing scenes to try to get her husband to remain with her.

Ménage à Trois with Mary Godwin and Jane Clairmont

In 1814, when he was twenty-two, Shelley and Mary decided to elope. But first, Shelley invited along Mary's stepsister, Jane (Claire) Clairmont, who was just fifteen years old. The three of them made for Dover, boarding the first steam packet they could find. The carefree threesome travelled through France to Switzerland, where Shelley wrote to his wife, Harriet Westbrook, naively suggesting she should join them.

Instead, in 1816, Harriet threw herself into the Serpentine in London, leaving her unfaithful husband free to indulge his scandalous ménage à trois. His second wife, Mary Shelley, was the author of Frankenstein, and she began to write her great work in the summer of 1816, by Lake Geneva, where she spent her time with her husband and the poet, Lord Byron. Their ménage à trois continued until Percy Shelley's death in 1822 aged thirty-years.

In his essay "On Love," composed in July, 1818, Shelley says: "What is love? Ask him who lives, what is life; ask him who adores, what is God? The poet concludes: "So soon as this want or power is dead, man becomes the living sepulchre of himself, and what yet survives is the mere husk of what once he was."

Sources:

• "On Love," Percy Bysshe Shelley, Romanticism An Anthology, Ed. Duncan Wu, Blackwell, 1994.
• Oxford Companion to English Literature, Ed. Margaret Drabble, Oxford University Press, 1985.