This short biography of the poet John Donne recounts his life from Catholic heretic to privateer in Lord Essex’s fleet to impoverished courtier to resplendent Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral and King James I’s personal preacher. He wrote verse all the way. “Even in the early 1590s, Donne’s verse was thought remarkable. The dramatist Ben Jonson, gossiping tipsily over dinner with the Scottish diarist William Drummond of Hawthornden, said that Donne had ‘written all his best pieces ere he was 25’, which would have been 1597…. For Donne, divergence from the accent and peculiar breaks in form contain the very stamp of what he meant: they were never aimless…. Donne’s five Satires are among the hardest to scan and read aloud: deliberately so: they sound exclamatory, darting from expostulation to fluency and back again, poetry that is quick on its feet and angry at you…. He accounts for the first recorded use in the Oxford English Dictionary of around 340 words in the English language.” Donne wrote, “I sing not siren-like, to tempt, for I/Am harsh.”
Posterity has only an account of one of Donne’s poems written in his own hand. Instead, his verse was scribbled out and copied on looseleaf and saved in private collections. “There are more than four thousand copies of his individual poems, in 260 manuscripts…. Inevitably, the poems vary from copy to copy — sometimes just a letter or two, sometimes whole lines — and are often almost impossible to date…. Titles of Donne’s verse are plain, descriptive and uncomplicated. This is because they were largely not written by him…. His poetry left his hands unnamed, allowing it to gather up titles and edits and little flourishes from each poem’s new owner. The poems were akin to living organisms, changing shape and colour as they were copied and recopied.”
Rundell suggests that the beauty of Donne’s verse was in its surprise and the challenge of struggling with his lines. “The pleasure of reading a Donne poem is akin to that of cracking a locked safe, and he meant it to be so. He demanded hugely of us, and the demands of his poetry are a mirror to that demanding. The poetry stands to ask: why should everything be easy, rhythmical, pleasant? He is at times almost impossible to understand, but, in repayment for your work, he reveals images that stick under your skin until you die. Donne suggests that you look at the world with both more awe and more scepticism: that you weep for it and that you gasp for it…. Your love is almost certainly not like a flower, nor a dove. Why would it be? It may be like a pair of compasses. It may be like a flea. His startling timelessness is down to the fact that he had the power of unforeseeability: you don’t see him coming.” In a sermon, Donne suggests, “Between the prison, and the place of execution, does any man sleep? And we sleep all the way; from the womb to the grave we are never thoroughly awake.” On his deathbed, he framed humanity’s relationship with one another, in some of his most enduring lines, “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”
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