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John Donne: Verse, Love and Unity

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John Donne: Verse, Love and Unity John Donne: Verse, Love and Unity Matthew Brunette 60 Credit Master’s Thesis in Literature in English Presented to the Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages University of Oslo Faculty of Humanities 30 June 2020 i Acknowledgements I owe thanks to my thesis supervisor, Juan C. Pellicer, for his many valuable insights and suggestions—not least a couple choice book recommendations—and for his patience. My deepest gratitude is reserved for Ina, my own Ann More, who knows what it means to be ‘double dead, going, and bidding go.’ i Unless otherwise stated, all quotations from Donne’s poetry are drawn from Robin Robbins’ revised edition of Donne’s poems, The Complete Poems of John Donne, republished in 2010. Citations from the Bible are taken from the King James Version (KJV), which was produced in Donne’s lifetime and was the version from which Donne himself increasingly drew in composing his sermons and pursuing questions of controverted doctrine after its publication in 1611. Quotations from Donne’s sermons are from Potter and Simpson’s ten volume work, The Sermons of John Donne (Sermons), published between 1953-62 by the University of California Press. Spelling from all sources is preserved. ii Table of Contents Introduction ......................................................................................................................................1 Dogmatic Unity ...............................................................................................................................2 The Significance of an Idea .............................................................................................................5 Theory ............................................................................................................................................8 Method ......................................................................................................................................... 11 Songs and Sonnets ........................................................................................................................... 15 The World Contracted ................................................................................................................... 17 Infinite Love .................................................................................................................................. 25 Inexpressible Love ........................................................................................................................ 31 Metaphors of Love ........................................................................................................................ 38 Poems of Unrequited Love ............................................................................................................ 46 Poems of Non-exclusive Love ........................................................................................................ 51 Body and Soul in the Union of Love............................................................................................... 56 Form and Unity ............................................................................................................................... 61 Unity of Verse ............................................................................................................................... 61 Individuality .................................................................................................................................. 69 The Religious Verse ........................................................................................................................ 72 ‘La Corona’ .................................................................................................................................. 73 ‘Holy Sonnets’ .............................................................................................................................. 78 The Hymns .................................................................................................................................... 91 Conclusion ..................................................................................................................................... 108 Works Cited .................................................................................................................................. 112 Works Consulted .......................................................................................................................... 117 iii Introduction There is a peculiar energy and force to the poems of John Donne. One does not return to them for finely-wrought and painted scenes, for colour and flourish of descriptive language, for copious and flowery imagery, for pleasant flow of cadence, for majesty or decorousness of diction, for quaint sentiments, for epic and visionary flights, indeed, not for any of those elements for which poetry is often supposed to be any good, and for which the best of the English poets—Shakespeare, Milton, the Augustans, the Romantics—are thought to be great. What one discovers in Donne’s verse, rather, is a dexterous and energetic mind. The strength of the poetry is the pressure and individualism of Donne’s personality, and the agility and variety of his thought, the lodestone of which is the striking invention of unexpected figures and conceits. Notwithstanding the disapprobation the extravagance of his similes and metaphors has garnered him through the years—Samuel Johnson was particularly harsh on this ‘discordia concors’ by which ‘[t]he most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together’ (qtd. in A.J. Smith, John Donne: The Critical Heritage 218)—such surprising comparisons are the hallmark of Donne’s poetic style and indicate something vital about the bent of his mind: he could not refrain from joining things. Though Donne had little difficulty in piecing together disparate concepts by dint of some shared characteristic, literary critics have tended to resist applying the same method to the sprawling corpus of Donne’s poetry. If the verse is studied with an eye toward connecting the various poems and genres, it is rarely with the understanding that Donne had abiding philosophical interests. Ramie Targoff, one scholar among a very few who have challenged the reticence among critics to investigate the ‘metaphysics [which] lay behind Donne’s work as a whole’, observes, ‘the project of reading Donne as an author with deeply held beliefs or preoccupations has been almost entirely obscured from view’ (4, 5). The more common perspective, Murray Roston elucidates, is that Donne ‘project[s] himself into a wide variety of roles with a casual and even sceptical disregard for personal consistency of viewpoint’ (2).1 Currently, perhaps the two most urgent questions in Donne scholarship, and those which this thesis will address, are how to connect the poems of Donne’s younger years with the poems of his maturity, and whether or not the poetry evidences a sincerely held, consistent point of view on much of anything. What I hope to show in this essay is that we can trace the silver 1 This evaluation was especially dominant in the early twentieth century, when Donne was ‘rediscovered’, and it has since proved to be entrenched; but these kinds of accusations of the capriciousness of Donne’s philosophy began with Donne’s contemporaries and immediate successors, and were cemented more recently in John Carey’s landmark, John Donne: Life, Mind and Art (1981). 1 thread of a single idea throughout Donne’s verse. I maintain that the central impulse behind Donne’s view of art and life, and that which overflows so powerfully into his writings, is, in his own words, the divinely ordained ‘dislike of singularity; of being Alone’ (Sermons 6: 81). Positively put, Donne’s most continuous fixation is his metaphysically derived belief in the necessity and happiness of unity. This one idea is the catalyst for the greater part of all those Donnean idiosyncrasies and ‘master images’, as John Carey terms them (11). The drive towards oneness explains why Donne is always attempting to integrate heterogeneous concepts in improbable conceits, and why his love poetry and marriage songs persistently emphasise that lovers become one; it is why he believes so fervently in the union of body and soul and why he hates the discordant irregularities of his character. Donne’s desire for unity is the thread which runs through his celebration of mutual relationship, his yearning for union with God, his hatred of the separation of departure and death, his ardent catholicity, and his repeated emphasis on ‘all’, ‘symmetry’, and ‘proportion’ (e.g. The First Anniversary 309- 320). Such diverse motifs as phoenixes, hermaphrodites, fountainheads, roots and buds likewise have their provenance in a habit of compression by which Donne squeezes multiplicity into a singularity. These and the many other eccentricities of Donne’s literary output can be traced to his overarching desire for a unity which mirrors the divine.2 Dogmatic Unity Donne’s consistent representation of unity in style and substance, I contend, is a consequence of his theology. Though the path of his religious experience was tortuous, the evidence points to a man who was always interested in the doctrines of divinity: ‘even in his most sceptical and satirical phase he was deeply preoccupied by a search for religious truth’ (Roston 7). His Catholic upbringing was a serious one, and the commitment of his near relatives to the faith
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