THE LITERARY Life The Art of Reading John Donne
SICK GENIUS OF R EMORSE
N MY early twenties, still winding my way through college, I suffered a heinous melancholy—what in John Donne’s day was inevitably called “religious melancholy”—that walloped me almost without re- Iprieve. Wordsworth, in The Prelude, writes about “spots of time,” the heated flashes of remembrance that disorient and transform the present. Those spots of time came crashing 8 * - - * " . ( * 3 " - % * ± 4 onto me now. In September of that year it had been four first novel, Busy Monsters, is months since my father’s fatal motorcycle crash, and yet forthcoming from Norton I felt as if I was just then beginning to live with the new in 2011. He teaches in the hell of it. My father—only forty-seven years old when he Writing Program at Boston died—appeared in my dreams almost nightly, and I woke University and is the senior damp with tears and sweat, so shaken it often took me fiction editor for AGNI. fifteen minutes to recover. I had just two courses that semester, one on Donne and another on Wordsworth, and far too many spare hours. Those lonely spaces frightened me, and the spots of time were coming on more insistently. I felt myself lapsing into real despair, and not just the despair that serves as a synonym for melancholy, but doctrinal despair, the hor- rendous sin of forsaking God, the very crime for which Marlowe’s Faust is damned. Estranged from my mother, parted by distance from my girlfriend of two years, friends fading from my world, my father’s absence grinding a cavern through me—grief and desperation kept trying to force my attention back to the spirituality of my youth. I was in desperate need of therapy but couldn’t afford it and didn’t have the energy for it anyway. Part of me was convinced that some kind of religious melancholy or spiri- tual paralysis was the natural reaction to my father’s early death. But I simply couldn’t go back to the spirituality I had replaced with literature, to the scriptures I had re- placed with Homer and Milton. My heart wanted to, but my mind—befuddled as it was—insisted on holding on to its shreds of reason. And so instead of therapy or religion I fell heavily, almost instinctually, under the spell of Donne’s “Holy Sonnets,” most of which the metaphysical poet is thought to have writ- ten between 1609 and 1611. Each night before sleep, for two hours or more, I examined those lines with a microscopic
FK=JJ=NEAGA intensity. What I discovered there was remarkable. I, the
31 POETS & WRITERS the literary life T H E A R T O F R EADIN G former Catholic, just millimeters from more necessary suspicion, namely that despair, began to feel the strongest (and Donne’s God-torn, earth-torn heart strangest) affinity with this Anglican was beginning to help calm my own minister who had outwardly abjured inner quarrel. Catholicism and his family’s history for the sake of his courtly career. Donne is, ONNE is the most con- always, the great pretender, the crafty flicted of the English chameleon. His anti-Catholic diatribe poet s — perhaps t he of 1611, Ignatius His Conclave, struck me most conflicted poet, then—and still does—as the product of Dperiod—and his work, from the poems someone working overtime trying to to the sermons, is fraught with con- convince himself. tradiction and confusion. His battle I saw in Donne an ego so enormous is ostensibly with his God and his re- it often threatened to consume ev- ligion, but it is really with the varia- erything and everyone around him: tions of his own dramatic self, with Donne himself is the only conscious- the heart and the affliction he cannot ness permitted on the page. There control. In many ways, Donne gave is a startling confidence in his work, me license to be self-consumed, or even when he expresses the profound- more self-consumed (as if I needed est perplexity, and I wanted that con- that). But Donne was self-consumed fidence, wanted wafts of it to rise off because he was so urgently seeking the page and into my body. I saw lines relief from the bewilderment of being in the “Holy Sonnets” and in his other alive, from the severity of vision his poems—“The Ecstasie” and “A Hymn faith forced upon him. Imagine being to God the Father” especially—both part Catholic, part Anglican, subscrib- sexual and pious, a contradiction that ing to the conviction that God’s grace every Catholic must confront, and one can be duly achieved through the sac- that indeed had confronted me in my raments, but suspicious that perhaps boyhood. How fatuous of me to con- Calvin was correct and God saved or sider John Donne a brother, and yet damned every soul before the creation. the affinity I felt for him was the force A Catholic in his heart and dreams, a that kept me returning to his “Holy Calvinist in his daylight mind and doc- Sonnets” each night. trine—for Donne the result is a loaded The frequent melancholy Donne bewilderment. In my early twenties, I suffered—resulting from his apos- felt certain that few other writers or tasy, from his sinful undertakings, and poets in history could have given voice from the death of his young wife after to the tumult turning inside me the the birth of their twelfth child (Anne way John Donne was. More was pregnant almost every year The diverse dichotomies at work of their marriage)—was palpable for in the “Holy Sonnets” are the result me now, more palpable than I had of this same bewilderment. Donne’s wished for. Who was this fearless bard unique attempt to realign himself beckoning God to “ravish” him, plead- with the God he feels he has misplaced, ing, “O’erthrow me, and bend / Your the poems are at times brazen and ir- force, to break, blow, burn and make reverent, marked by an agitation that me new”? I had never read anything characterizes much of Donne’s earlier quite like these dire appeals; for some- verse. Above all, though, the “Holy one in the midst of his own hiatus from Sonnets” embody the sharp duality of mental health, they were both exhila- the metaphysical poet’s personality and rating and fearsome. Something in me the dilemma of a spiritual existence in suspected that Donne was a veritable decay. In Donne, as in no other Eng- maniac, a sick genius far beyond my lish poet, we bear witness to a frighten- grasp, and yet I could not tear myself ing collision of opposites: “Yet dearly away from his verses because I had a I love You, and would be loved fain, /
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But am betrothed unto Your enemy,” fort. I remember writhing in the dark was the teenage niece of Egerton’s wife.) he writes. Like some forlorn heroine on the floor of my dorm room, hearing Donne even sat in prison for a spell. His from a Hardy novel, the poet is to wed the voices of my fellow students jovial sacrifice seemed to me the apex of cour- Satan though his heart belongs to God, and laughing just outside my door, age, and for someone who felt himself to Christ. His spirit gets tugged and reaching across the oval rug for the a coward in every filament of his body, shoved. What melancholic has not felt paperback of Donne’s poems. this was inspiring. the same, cleaved down the As Donne crouched in jail center—the healthy on one did he sometimes imagine side, the ill on the other? himself in the hell he was Wanting God but know- certain existed—he was still ing himself half demon, al- a Catholic, related by blood ready damned? And this is to Sir Thomas More; his what I came to appreciate in conversion to Anglicanism Donne more and more: not was a posture only—the hell just a brother but a comrade he knew awaited him for his who knew my guilt, grief, sins of lechery and seduc- and quandary precisely. tion and doubt, for trying, Donne’s own guilt re- against the literary tradi- sulted from the crawl- tion of the Middle Ages, ing doubt he felt in every to unite body and spirit? cell. Whether he is offer- As for me, when I looked ing praise or insult to the to my past I saw only my God he cannot pin down, father’s blood on the road, Donne’s language is always and when I looked to the incendiary. With the pos- future I saw only a lifetime sible exception of Hopkins, without him. Donne is the one writer But why could I not turn who has made me wish that to the religion of my youth I too were a poet. His en- to seek relief from the ter- ergy pulsates in every line ror of my father’s death? of the “Holy Sonnets.” The Donne’s idea of “terrour,” pleas, cries, and accusations like Augustine’s of evil, exist in the same moment: is a consummate separa- “Oh, to vex me, contrar- +PIO%POOF tion from God. His fear of ies meet in one.” We are the Lord is no metaphori- privy to the poet’s process of working The “Holy Sonnets,” too, convey ac- cal fancy; it is alive and pumping in through the fog, the fear, the doubt. tual physical pain; for Donne, his body’s his every line, in his very blood. His Affection and hatred, creation and de- ill health corresponds to his soul’s cer- Oedipal yearnings exist within their struction, irreverence and subjugation, tain detachment from God’s grace. He own inherent dichotomy: Hate and flesh and spirit: All exist in one breath cannot turn his “dimme eyes” either to rage for the Father seethe on top of for Donne; all are products of the same his past or to his future, for both are his overbearing need for love from that damaged heart and magisterial mind. equally dreadful and baffling. Did he same Father. In the middle of the first I was trying to handle my father’s see in his mind the blanched corpse of “Holy Sonnet” (by the late critic Helen death the same way. The cauldron his wife, Anne, as she lay on her birthing Gardner’s numbering), the poet quite of blame and pity, anger and regret, bed? Despite his vigorous erotic urges placidly proclaims to God, “I am Thy pathos and apathy—each component and self-consumption—expressed so son, made with Thyself to shine, / Thy existed in a single expression of sorrow. unambiguously in his Songs and Son- servant, whose pains thou hast still re- If Donne’s combat is with the heavenly nets, from 1633—Donne loved his wife paid.” But listen to how the poet’s tone Father who ignores him, mine was fervently and never swayed from his de- changes just two lines later: with the earthly father who got himself votion to her. They married in secret killed at a hundred miles an hour. How in 1601, and the marriage cost Donne Why doth the devil then usurp on could I have saved him at that speed? I dearly: He lost his post as secretary to me? could not have. And so the melancholy Thomas Egerton, a powerful official Why doth he steal, nay ravish that’s Thy right? ?D=NHEALKSAHH manifested as actual physical discom- on the staff of Queen Elizabeth. (Anne
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Except Thou rise and for Thine my father’s absence would be regret- a religious one. And this is ultimately own work fight, table constants. the reason why I could not completely Oh I shall soon despair, when I do forsake the idea of God during this see N BED with the “Holy Sonnets” time of my darkness, because it would That Thou lov’st mankind well, yet at night, I often wondered why have meant forsaking literature, too, wilt not choose me, Donne didn’t kill himself. both Donne and Hopkins, and they And Satan hates me, yet is loathe to lose me. Donne, we shouldn’t forget, is were the only solace I had left. Ithe author of Biathanatos (1608), a logi- In my own life literature would When I first read those wrathful, cal and tiresome justification for sui- succeed fully in replacing religion as red-faced lines I nearly pulled the cide, in which he writes: “Whensoever my salvation, my spiritual succor. It covers over my head. Donne barks in- any affliction assailes me, mee thinkes seemed hubristic and ridiculous, but dignant inquiries, accuses God of in- I have the keyes of my prison in mine during my worse fits of woe I remem- dolence, and then threatens Him with owne hand, and no remedy presents it bered how Primo Levi had kept him- switching his allegiance to Satan if He selfe so soone to my heart, as mine own self alive in Auschwitz partly by trying doesn’t clean up His act and pay a little sword.” The “vehement” grief from to recall and then reciting the Inferno, more attention to a poet. Could these the “Holy Sonnets” is the sort of poi- Canto 25 in particular. He brought the be the words of a devout man? They son that forces one to suicide; I knew it literature of hell into a hell on earth, are. Donne’s faith is dynamic; it moved all too well. The word “death” appears and it worked for him, however mini- beneath him like lava beneath crust, five times in the first four “Holy Son- mally. In the end, though, literature sometimes altering the landscape, nets” alone. Donne’s death obsession would not be enough to save Levi from sometimes erupting. Almost daily I is matched perhaps only by Rilke’s; his melancholy, from God’s absence, but wanted to clench my fist and shake it last oration in 1631, just before he died, I hoped that it would be enough for at the heavens in angry objection to was his own funeral sermon, “Death’s me. More wreckage was on the way. my father’s fate, but I didn’t have the Duel.” In his final portrait he dons a It always is. energy for Donne’s bravery, and, any- funeral shroud, as if preparing him- Three years later, during a cataclys- way, was certain that the heavens were self. British literary critic John Carey mic breakup, Donne’s poem “Wom- vacant. The more I immersed myself reminds us that “in Donne’s day the an’s Constancy” became my ballad; in Donne—and in Donne’s God on the natural outcome of religious despair but more than I needed those lines, page—the less I found myself craving was suicide. It was the devil’s master- I once again needed Donne’s God; I the religion of my youth. piece.” It seems a kind of miracle, then, needed his and Hopkins’s melancholy I saw in Donne a passionate artist that John Donne died a natural death, to steel me against the damp months I who simply feels too much, who desires that he chose to continue living despite knew were coming now. Why should what his head and heart cannot agree such an ongoing and unbearable mel- this be? How does reading about upon. I couldn’t deny that his depths ancholy. Did his sonnets rescue him, as Donne’s near despair better prepare of sorrow had a poetic appeal for me; they were beginning to rescue me? Did me to deal with my own? Because, they served his art, and I wanted them he spit in the face of anguish to pen as Milton puts it, “things of melan- to serve mine as well. His cries to God the lines that would eons later end up cholic hue and quality are used against in the “Holy Sonnets” have a dual pur- gripping me? Was he thinking of me? melancholy, sour against sour.” Have pose, then: the attainment of forgive- I didn’t speak to anyone about some of us forgotten this? Have we ness and grace, and the expression of Donne, about how the “Holy Sonnets” deserted the last best hope, the finest his poetic sensibility. Even in his most had invaded my consciousness, or how chance of recovering from the certain desperate hour it would have been im- I thought that they were somehow re- anguish of living? possible for Donne to forget that he placing religion, Christ’s own words, Every new semester I have one or two was, first and foremost, not a preacher and bringing me closer to my father. students who are sunk in the tar of mel- or supplicant, but a poet. That is not to Donne forced me to acknowledge that ancholy and unable to invest in belief, suggest that Donne himself subscribed I was still Catholic—in my way still and if they come seeking my counsel, I to the Romantic notion of the doomed religious—and not because of my up- hand them the most effective remedy bard, since Byron and Keats had yet bringing or because of the Church, I know: Dickinson, Hopkins, Donne. to forge that image. But still, Donne but because of John Donne and Ge- I tell them that the metaphors of God, knew how to turn seemingly ineffable rard Manley Hopkins, John Henry His grace, and His Son—all those remorse into a radiant language, a star- Newman and G. K. Chesterton, Ev- promises of spirituality—may flitter tling communication, and this was all I elyn Waugh and Flannery O’Connor, in and out, but John Donne is forever could hope for, all I could dream of in to say nothing of Dante. Spirituality, there on the page, waiting to strike a a life where I thought melancholy and for me, is a literary affair more than match in this descending dark.
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