Fifteen in Fifteen: John Donne

7. John Donne

I’m afraid I have a confession to make, which may come as a shock to those of you who have been following this blog. The last time I studied English Literature was at GCSE. And – I’m sorry, Edexcel, AQA, whoever you were – but it nearly put me off poetry for life. Having to study that damn anthology with THE worst collection of poetry and short stories imaginable – well, it took my literary tastebuds a long time to recover from being force-fed Maupassant and Isabel Allende (both of whom I still detest) at age 16. However, top-set English, taught with aplomb by the formidable and wonderful Mrs Price, did leave me with an abiding fondness for several of our coursework subjects: Pride and Prejudice; Shakespeare’s Richard III; and John Donne.

Donne, in English Literature GCSE, kept company in a collection of poems about love or death by “The Metaphysical Poets”. These “Metaphysical Poets” was clearly intended to refer to any Early Modern, around-about-sixteenth-century poet, and included appearances from Herbert and Marvell - although reading the section on love poetry you would be excused for considering The Metaphysical Poets to be a synonym for Donne. Donne is not an easy poet to understand at sixteen. It’s a problem with all poetry written much before the Victorian era – it comes from a context of which we may know very little. Try reading Dante without a guide to thirteenth century Italian politics. Donne’s work may not be so rooted in the power politics of his time, but it is full of allusions to scientific, cosmological and religious views which are completely alien. I still have my annotated poems from GCSE, with their explanatory notes regarding topics as diverse as “the music of the spheares”, how vision was thought to work, and what people really thought happened during sex (this was Donne, after all). Reading Donne’s poetry is, in the first instance, an unparalleled education in the social and intellectual background of sixteenth century Europe.

But there’s more to Donne than just a history lesson. A great deal of Donne’s poetry, particularly his love poetry, is recognisable and immediate and poignant, even without an understanding of his sixteenth century context. There’s a joie de vivre about Donne’s work, and something endearing in the fact that it is so emotionally overblown. Read The Sunne Rising. Read The Good Morrow. Read The Broken Heart and Love’s Alchymie and The Apparition. Read Holy Sonnet XIV. Donne seems in his poetry to wander through life as a perpetual teenage Romeo. When he’s in love, he and his lover are the entire world. When she doesn’t love him back, his heart is broken and he will die. When they’ve fallen out, all women are stupid and empty-headed (and worse – Love’s Alchymie is one for all feminists to avoid). When he feels he has sinned, he begs for forgiveness from God in the strongest possible terms. You can’t quite take Donne seriously, and one wonders quite how seriously he took himself.

And yet out of this rises some of the greatest poetry I know. Read Holy Sonnet X, “Death be not proud”. An impassioned defiance in the face of mortality, it is one of the best expressions of the Christian hope of eternal life. If there is one thing I am grateful to English 11.1A for leaving me with, it is the ability to understand and recall some of Donne’s best poetry – although the tendency still to refer to one of the Holy Sonnets as “Fred” is one I could live without. It took the discovery of a cheap edition of Donne’s poetry in a secondhand bookshop for his work to appear on my shelves, but it had never really been absent from my life. The final image from A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning simply cannot be forgotten. Like much of Donne’s work, it has stayed with me, tacitly, in my life and my poetry for the past six years. As a legacy of English GCSE, there are a lot worse.

If [our souls] are two, they are two so

As stiffe twin compasses are two,

Thy soule the fixt foot, makes no show

To move, but doth, if the’other doe.

And though it in the center sit,

Yet when the other far doth rome,

It leanes, and hearkens after it,

And growes erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to mee, who must

Like th’other foot, obliquely runne;

Thy firmnes drawes my circle just,

And makes me end, where I begunne.