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Critical Survey of Poetry

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Critical Survey of Poetry More Critical Survey of Poetry: British, Irish, & Commonwealth Poets John Donne by Edmund Miller Other literary forms Although John Donne (duhn) is know n chiefly as a lyric poet, the posthumous volume Poems, by J.D., w hich includes the lyrics, represents only a small part of his literary output. Donne w as famous in his ow n age mainly as a preacher; in fact, he w as probably the most popular preacher of an age w hen preaching held the same fascination for the general public that the cinema has today. Various sermons of Donne’s w ere published during his lifetime, and several collections w ere published in the follow ing decades. Without a commitment to Donne’s religious values, how ever, few today w ould w ant to read through many of his sermons. Donne must, how ever, be credited w ith the careful articulation of the parts of his sermons, w hich create a Table of Contents resounding unity of theme; and his control of prose rhythm and his ingenious imagery retain their Other literary forms pow er, even if modern readers are no longer disposed to see the majesty of God mirrored in such w riting. Achievements Biography John Donne Analysis (Library of Congress) “Kind pity chokes my spleen” “The Autumnal” “To His Mistress Going to Bed” “The Canonization” “The Flea” “The Ecstasy” “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” “Twickham Garden” “A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy’s Day, Being the Shortest Day” Verse letters Epithalamia Memorial verse “Infinitati Sacrum” Holy Sonnets Bibliography Excerpts from Donne’s sermons thus have a continuing vitality for general readers in a w ay that excerpts from the sermons of, for example, Lancelot Andrew es cannot. In the early seventeenth century, Andrew es had been the most popular preacher before Donne, and, as bishop of Winchester, he held a more important position. He also had a greater reputation as a stylist, but for modern readers, Andrew es carries to an extreme the baroque fashion of “crumbling a text” (analyzing in minute detail). The sermons of Andrew es are now unreadable w ithout special training in theology and classical languages. On the other hand, though also w riting for an educated audience w ith a serious interest in divinity, Donne w ears his scholarship more easily and can still be read by the general student w ithout special preparation. His sermon to the Virginia Company is the first sermon in English to make a missionary appeal. The single most famous of Donne’s sermons w as his last. Death’s Duell (1632), preached before King Charles on February 25, 1631, is a profound meditation on mortality. Human mortality is alw ays a major theme w ith Donne, but here he reaches a new eloquence. Full of startling imagery, the sermon takes as its theme the paradox that life is death and death is life—although Christ’s death delivers humankind from death. When this last sermon of Donne’s w as published, Henry King, bishop of Chichester, remarked that “as he exceeded others at first so at last he exceeded himself.” A w ork of similar theme but published by Donne in his ow n lifetime is the Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624). Composed, as R. C. Bald has show n, w ith extreme rapidity during a serious illness and convalescence in 1623, this w ork is based on the structured meditational technique of Saint Francis de Sales, involving the sensuous evocation of scenes, although, as Thomas F. Van Laan has suggested, the w ork is perhaps also influenced by the Ejercicios espirituales (1548; The Spiritual Exercises, 1736) of Saint Ignatius of Loyola. It is divided into tw enty-three sections, each consisting of a meditation, an expostulation, and a prayer. The w ork is an artfully constructed w hole of sustained emotional pow er, but the meditations have achieved a special fame w ith their vivid evocations of the theme that sickness brings people closer to God by putting them in touch w ith their frailty and mortality. Various meditations from the Devotions upon Emergent Occasions present famous pictures of the tolling of the death knell, of the body as a microcosm, and of the curious medical practices of the day, for example, the application of live pigeons to Donne’s feet to try to draw the vapors of fever from his head. By this last practice, Donne discovers that he is his ow n executioner because the vapors are believed to be the consequence of his melancholy, and this is no more than the studiousness required of him by his calling as a preacher. Although in past centuries most readers found the w ork’s self-consciousness and introspection alienating, the contemporary sensibility finds these characteristics especially congenial. The three meditations on the tolling of the bells have, in particular, provided titles and catchphrases for popular w riters. A posthumously published early study of mortality by Donne is Essayes in Divinity (1651). Written in a knotty, baroque style, the w ork is a collection of curiously impersonal considerations of the Creation and of the deliverance of the Israelites from bondage in Egypt. The essays show none of the fire of the sermons and of the Devotions upon Emergent Occasions. A very different sort of contemplation of mortality is provided in Biathanatos (1646). The casuistical reasoning perhaps show s evidence of Donne’s Jesuit background. The same approach to logic and a similar iconoclasm are apparent in Juvenilia: Or, Certaine Paradoxes and Problemes (1633; the first complete version w as, how ever, not published until 1923). The earliest of Donne’s publications w ere tw o w orks of religious controversy of a more serious nature. These w orks also show Donne’s Jesuit background, but in them, he is reacting against his upbringing and presenting a case for Anglican moderation in the face of Roman Catholic— and especially Jesuit—pretensions. Pseudo-Martyr (1610) w as w ritten at the explicit request of King James, according to Donne’s first biographer, Izaak Walton. Here and throughout his subsequent career, Donne is a strongly committed Erastian, seeing the Church as properly subordinate in this w orld to secular authority. The other of these early w orks of controversy, Ignatius His Conclave (1611), w hich appeared in Latin as w ell as English, is still amusing to modern readers w ho are unlikely to come to it w ith quite the strong partisan feeling of its original audience. Achievements John Donne w as a remarkably influential poet in his day. Despite the fact that it w as only after his death that a substantial body of his poetry w as published, the elegies and satires (and to a lesser extent the divine poems and the songs and sonnets) had already created a new poetic mode during Donne’s lifetime as a result of circulating in manuscript. Thomas Carew, in a memorial elegy published in the first edition of Donne’s poems, described him as ruling the “universal monarchy of w it.” The poetry of the School of Donne w as usually characterized in its ow n day by its “strong lines.” This characterization seems to have meant that Donne and his follow ers w ere to be distinguished from the Sons of Ben, the poets influenced by Ben Jonson, chiefly by their experiments w ith rough meter and conversational syntax; Jonson, how ever, w as also—somew hat confusingly—praised for strong lines. Donne’s ow n characteristic metrics involve lines densely packed w ith syllables. He makes great use not only of syncope (dropping of an unstressed vow el w ithin a w ord) and elision (dropping of an unstressed vow el at the juncture betw een w ords) but also of a device almost unique to Donne among English poets— synaloepha (speeding up of adjacent vow els at the juncture betw een w ords w ith no actual dropping). By hindsight, Donne, Edw ard Lord Herbert of Cherbury, Henry King, George Herbert, John Cleveland, Richard Crashaw, Abraham Cow ley, Henry Vaughan, Andrew Marvell, and others of the School of Donne share not only strong lines but also a common fund of imagery. Eschew ing for the most part classical allusions, these poets turned to the imagery of everyday life and of the new learning in science and philosophy. In the middle of the seventeenth century, there occurred w hat T. S. Eliot has memorably described as a “dissociation of sensibility,” after w hich it became increasingly difficult to see Donne’s secular and religious values as part of a consistent w hole. The beginnings of this attitude w ere already apparent in Donne’s ow n day; in a letter, for example, he describes Biathanatos as the w ork not of Dr. Donne but of the youthful Jack Donne. Tow ard the end of the century, the change of perspective is complete w hen John Dryden describes Donne unsympathetically as one w ho “perplexes the Minds of the Fair Sex w ith nice Speculations of philosophy.” The Restoration and the eighteenth century had lost Donne’s sense of religious commitment and thus scrutinized a style in isolation from the content it intended to express. Donne’s poetry w as condemned as artificial, and his reputation disappeared almost overnight. This w as the situation w hen Samuel Johnson w rote the famous strictures on Donne in his Life of Cowley. That these remarks occur in the Life of Cowley is perhaps a commentary on the fallen stature of the earlier poets: Donne did not himself merit individual treatment in Lives of the Poets (1779-1781).
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