No Man is an Island

Notes on John Donne, IV

Donne and Death

"Death is finished.  It is no more"  -  Last words of Ivan Ilych*

Holy Sonnet 6

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and soul's delivery.
Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,
And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well
And better than thy stroke; why swell'st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally
And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.

What is death?  In Donne's sonnet it is a person to whom the poet speaks directly, "Death, be not proud, though some have called thee Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so."   Note the comma which segregates death from the characteristics which the poet attributes to death.   He follows these words in lines 9-10 with a seemingly audacious claim about death, "Thou'rt slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men, And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell."  So be it, yes Donne was obsessed with death.  However this was limited to certain types of death.  His view minimizing the power of death went against the more popular view of death as espoused by Sir Walter Raliegh and others of the just and might of death.   Donne's arguments in this famous sonnet are not very strong, however, and seem to lack a recognizable logical order.   He is even confused as to whether sleep is better than death or the reverse.  The apparent self-assurance of the poem collapses with the final two lines:
"One short sleep past, we wake eternally
And death shall be no more;  Death, thou shalt die."

Elsewhere (in "A Hymn to God the Father") he has shared his anxiety regarding death more directly,
"I have a sin of fear, that when I have spun
My last thread, I shall perish on the shore."
We also see in the Holy Sonnet an attempt to minimize death through a reassurance that sleep achieved through drugs or magic is better than the "stroke" of death.
  
My own fascination with the poet and his poem reminds me of the attempts by others to reassure their friends and family.  Socrates did so in the Phaedo by describing his life as one long attempt to prepare for death.  His view was echoed and enhanced by Montaigne who, In his essay titled “That to Study Philosophy is to Learn to Die,”  turns to mortality and points to the understanding of death as a prerequisite for the understanding of life, for the very art of living. 
"[L]et us learn bravely to stand our ground, and fight him. And to begin to deprive him of the greatest advantage he has over us, let us take a way quite contrary to the common course. Let us disarm him of his novelty and strangeness, let us converse and be familiar with him, and have nothing so frequent in our thoughts as death. "(Montaigne, Essays)
This is different than the words of Ivan Ilych quoted above that instead seem to echo Donne.  
But one more example from my reading can be found in Rainier Maria Rilke's beautiful novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge.  Through Rilke's fascination with faces and appearances the importance of constructing an authentic life is emphasized. This becomes a prerequisite for the prospect of a unique personal death. Death itself is a character in the novel, a "terrible rival", which may seem stronger than the living in its tolling.

The tolling of the bell in Rilke's novel signalling death brings us back to Donne who penned these famous 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." (Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, 17)

Notes on John Donne, III

Three Holy Sonnets


Sonnet 13 (1)*

THOU hast made me, and shall Thy work decay?
Repair me now, for now mine end doth haste;
I run to death, and Death meets me as fast,
And all my pleasures are like yesterday.
I dare not move my dim eyes any way;        5
Despair behind, and Death before doth cast
Such terror, and my feeble flesh doth waste
By sin in it, which it towards hell doth weigh.
Only Thou art above, and when towards Thee
By Thy leave I can look, I rise again;        10
But our old subtle foe so tempteth me,
That not one hour myself I can sustain.
Thy grace may wing me to prevent his art
And thou like adamant draw mine iron heart.

There is a sense of despair and terror that is aroused by the thought of death and sin that is then repelled in the final sestet as he turns toward God.  While the devil is "our subtle foe" it is Donne that is tempted.  He cannot sustain the grace of God but must rely on God to draw in forth.  This is a theme that we see again and again in the Holy Sonnets, for example:  

Sonnet 10 (14)*

BATTER my heart, three-person’d God; for you
As yet but knock; breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp’d town, to another due,        5
Labour to admit you, but O, to no end.
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should 1 defend,
But is captived, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,
But am betroth’d unto your enemy;        10
Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

Sonnet 1 (2)*

As due by many titles I resign
Myself to thee, O God. First I was made
By Thee; and for Thee, and when I was decay’d
Thy blood bought that, the which before was Thine.
I am Thy son, made with Thyself to shine,        5
Thy servant, whose pains Thou hast still repaid,
Thy sheep, Thine image, and—till I betray’d
Myself—a temple of Thy Spirit divine.
Why doth the devil then usurp on me?
Why doth he steal, nay ravish, that’s Thy right?        10
Except Thou rise and for Thine own work fight,
O! I shall soon despair, when I shall see 1
That Thou lovest mankind well, yet wilt not choose me,
And Satan hates me, yet is loth to lose me.

Of these three my favorite is Sonnet 10 with its stentorian phrases like "Batter my heart" and "break, blow, burn".  In Sonnet 13 Donne declares himself unable to combat, by his own efforts the temptation to despair.  By the end of the poem, in spite of his sureness in the power of the grace of god he will surmount the devil, but his heart is solid iron, unmoved by him but, perhaps, drawn close by god.  And, in Sonnet 10 there is a similar recognition that he is "betroth’d unto your enemy", but can be saved if god will "imprison me".  The last lines of this sonnet exemplify the sort of paradox that recurs throughout Donne's poetry.  Only if he is imprisoned by god and in his thrall can he be "free". 

We see the use of paradox in Sonnet 1 as well when Donne claims that god has made him, and bought him with the blood but having been ravished and stolen by the devil he ends the sonnet with the lines:  "That Thou lovest mankind well, yet wilt not choose me, And Satan hates me, yet is loth to lose me."   The legality of all god's actions (note the first few lines of the poem) is upset by the devil's illegality which seemingly trumps that of god.  The question becomes one about the nature of the grace of God, whether it is freely given or must be earned.  Or, is once given may be stolen by the power of Satan.  Note that in the first sonnet above there was a recognition by Donne that he could not maintain this grace.  The power of the devil in these sonnets seems to mirror the power of Satan of Milton's Paradise Lost which would appear less than half a century following Donne's death.

Returning to the issue of death, it seems that is the only escape from the battle with the devil and that the only hope of the believer is that God's grace will be there after death.  The meditative nature of the sonnets and the solitariness implied  in many of them makes one wonder who was the audience for these works.  I can only speculate that they were intended for use by Donne himself who would turn to sermonizing for the public in his role as the Dean of St Paul's Cathedral in London.


* The numbers are from the Norton Critical Edition and those in parentheses are from the Oxford University Press edition,

Notes on John Donne, II

The Ecstasy

BY JOHN DONNE

Where, like a pillow on a bed

         A pregnant bank swell'd up to rest

The violet's reclining head,

         Sat we two, one another's best.

Our hands were firmly cemented

         With a fast balm, which thence did spring;

Our eye-beams twisted, and did thread

         Our eyes upon one double string;

So to'intergraft our hands, as yet

         Was all the means to make us one,

And pictures in our eyes to get

         Was all our propagation.

As 'twixt two equal armies fate

         Suspends uncertain victory,

Our souls (which to advance their state

         Were gone out) hung 'twixt her and me.

And whilst our souls negotiate there,

         We like sepulchral statues lay;

All day, the same our postures were,

         And we said nothing, all the day.

If any, so by love refin'd

         That he soul's language understood,

And by good love were grown all mind,

         Within convenient distance stood,

He (though he knew not which soul spake,

         Because both meant, both spake the same)

Might thence a new concoction take

         And part far purer than he came.

This ecstasy doth unperplex,

         We said, and tell us what we love;

We see by this it was not sex,

         We see we saw not what did move;

But as all several souls contain

         Mixture of things, they know not what,

Love these mix'd souls doth mix again

         And makes both one, each this and that.

A single violet transplant,

         The strength, the colour, and the size,

(All which before was poor and scant)

         Redoubles still, and multiplies.

When love with one another so

         Interinanimates two souls,

That abler soul, which thence doth flow,

         Defects of loneliness controls.

We then, who are this new soul, know

         Of what we are compos'd and made,

For th' atomies of which we grow

         Are souls, whom no change can invade.

But oh alas, so long, so far,

         Our bodies why do we forbear?

They'are ours, though they'are not we; we are

         The intelligences, they the spheres.

We owe them thanks, because they thus

         Did us, to us, at first convey,

Yielded their senses' force to us,

         Nor are dross to us, but allay.

On man heaven's influence works not so,

         But that it first imprints the air;

So soul into the soul may flow,

            Though it to body first repair.

As our blood labors to beget

         Spirits, as like souls as it can,

Because such fingers need to knit

         That subtle knot which makes us man,

So must pure lovers' souls descend

         T' affections, and to faculties,

Which sense may reach and apprehend,

         Else a great prince in prison lies.

To'our bodies turn we then, that so

         Weak men on love reveal'd may look;

Love's mysteries in souls do grow,

         But yet the body is his book.

And if some lover, such as we,

         Have heard this dialogue of one,

Let him still mark us, he shall see

         Small change, when we'are to bodies gone.

Commentary:
There is often sufficient paradox and complexity in the poems of John Donne that he leaves his readers perplexed.  That is no more true in his lyrics than of "The Ecstasy".  One of his best known verses, this can be read as a representation of an artful young seducer; but my background and our class discussion suggests a more serious interpretation.  My view is based in the classical philosophy of Plato and his poetic and philosophic, many-faceted, stories of the nature of love in "The Symposium";  that narrated by Aristophanes in particular.  This can be seen in the depiction of the joining of the bodies of the lovers in the following passage (lines 1-12): 

Where, like a pillow on a bed
         A pregnant bank swell'd up to rest
The violet's reclining head,
         Sat we two, one another's best.
Our hands were firmly cemented
         With a fast balm, which thence did spring;
Our eye-beams twisted, and did thread
         Our eyes upon one double string;
So to'intergraft our hands, as yet
         Was all the means to make us one,
And pictures in our eyes to get
         Was all our propagation.

With "hands cemented", "Our eyes upon one double string" the lovers close in a natural union of love.  I say natural for this is the setting, familiar yet traditional, somehow moderating the heightened emotion of ecstasy.  This ecstasy (in Donne's time a technical term for the condition of the soul during the mystical experience) suggests a communion of souls that is purified by love.  This is a language that may only be understood by someone similarly afflicted.  The oneness of bodies leads to a "dialogue of one" in the following lines (28-36):

This ecstasy doth unperplex,
         We said, and tell us what we love;
We see by this it was not sex,
         We see we saw not what did move;
But as all several souls contain
         Mixture of things, they know not what,
Love these mix'd souls doth mix again
         And makes both one, each this and that. 

These lines also reinforce the unity of the two bodies as one, a reinforcing that begins in the fourth line of the poem and continues throughout until the end;  that reinforcement comes with the repetition of the word we as if the speaker in the poem is the two as one.  And the oneness is in the mixture of their souls not in the activity of sex.  The union is echoed one final time in the final stanza of the poem (lines 73-76).

And if some lover, such as we,
         Have heard this dialogue of one,
Let him still mark us, he shall see
         Small change, when we'are to bodies gone.


"The Ecstasy" in John Donne's Poetry, edited by Donald R. Dickson.  Norton Critical Editions, 2007. 

Notes on John Donne, I

 John Donne's Poetry 

Song: Go and catch a falling star

Go and catch a falling star,

    Get with child a mandrake root,

Tell me where all past years are,

    Or who cleft the devil's foot,

Teach me to hear mermaids singing,

Or to keep off envy's stinging,

            And find

            What wind

Serves to advance an honest mind.

If thou be'st born to strange sights,

    Things invisible to see,

Ride ten thousand days and nights,

    Till age snow white hairs on thee,

Thou, when thou return'st, wilt tell me,

All strange wonders that befell thee,

            And swear,

            No where

Lives a woman true, and fair.

If thou find'st one, let me know,

    Such a pilgrimage were sweet;

Yet do not, I would not go,

    Though at next door we might meet;

Though she were true, when you met her,

And last, till you write your letter,

            Yet she

            Will be

False, ere I come, to two, or three.

John Donne, born in 1572,  is probably generally familiar for quotations from his writings. Perhaps his best-known line, from Meditation 17 in Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, a prose work, is often quoted as poetic: "No man is an island."
Donne is often considered a difficult poet. Other metaphysical poets, such as Andrew Marvell, have enjoyed a steadier, if less glamorous, regard, since much of their poetry is more accessible. Donne, who almost never seems completely accessible even at his most seemingly transparent, requires great dedication on the part of the reader--and, perhaps, gives more lasting rewards.
A division in Donne's poetry can be drawn between his early, sensual love poetry (often full of Christian imagery but carnal in tone) and his later, largely sacred poetry.   Many of his love poems, however , are considered from early in his career.  While publication dates may be available for some poems during Donne's lifetime, many of his poems were often circulated for many years in manuscript before publication was sought. Therefore, the dates of printing are meaningless as origination dates except as the latest possible date for any particular poem.  His hardships as an adult would eventually change him from the young spendthrift and sometime soldier who wrote "The Sun Rising" to the somber, almost death-obsessed writer of the Holy Sonnets and the Meditations of Devotions upon Emergent Occasions.  In 1615, he became an Anglican priest, although he did not want to take Anglican orders. He did so because King James I persistently ordered it. In 1621 at the age of forty-nine, he was appointed the Dean of St Paul's Cathedral in London.  The importance of religion in his later writing does not mean that there were not religious references in his early love poetry.  For example in the song above, "Go and catch a falling star",  where he rejects the possibility of a "true and fair" woman.  The poem begins with rather brilliant lines declaiming the ephemeral and nigh impossibility of finding such a woman, but later  he suggests there may be hope:
"If thou find'st one, let me know,
    Such a pilgrimage were sweet;"
While not necessarily a Catholic reference one does not have to dwell to long on the line to think of holy pilgrimages, even poetic ones like that made famous by Chaucer.  The insertion of this does not lead the poet to believe that a true woman could be found for him as the poem ends:

"Yet do not, I would not go,
    Though at next door we might meet;
Though she were true, when you met her,
And last, till you write your letter,
            Yet she
            Will be
False, ere I come, to two, or three."


Another love poem has the poet battling with nature, the Sun in particular:

The Sun Rising

 Busy old fool, unruly sun,
               Why dost thou thus,
Through windows, and through curtains call on us?
Must to thy motions lovers' seasons run?
               Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide
               Late school boys and sour prentices,
         Go tell court huntsmen that the king will ride,
         Call country ants to harvest offices,
Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.

               Thy beams, so reverend and strong
               Why shouldst thou think?
I could eclipse and cloud them with a wink,
But that I would not lose her sight so long;
               If her eyes have not blinded thine,
               Look, and tomorrow late, tell me,
         Whether both th' Indias of spice and mine
         Be where thou leftst them, or lie here with me.
Ask for those kings whom thou saw'st yesterday,
And thou shalt hear, All here in one bed lay.

               She's all states, and all princes, I,
               Nothing else is.
Princes do but play us; compared to this,
All honor's mimic, all wealth alchemy.
               Thou, sun, art half as happy as we,
               In that the world's contracted thus.
         Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be
         To warm the world, that's done in warming us.
Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere;
This bed thy center is, these walls, thy sphere.


The poem begins with a bit of rant against the intrusion of the sun into the lover's bedroom lives.  It goes on to suggest their love is like an Arcadian ideal with lines like:  
"Go tell court huntsmen that the king will ride,
         Call country ants to harvest offices,"
And it continues with the suggestion that love is not bound by the artificiality of the linearity of time as measured by more civilized selves.  
The lover's have banished those bounds, and consider wealth mere alchemy, but cannot ignore the sun.  So instead the poet chides the sun with the news that the center of the world that the sun warms is that bed of the lovers whose happiness is indeed more than that of nature.

In these poems and others including "The Bait" and "A Valediction Forbidding Mourning" Donne demonstrates unique metaphors and a wit that is intellectually pleasing with its contrariness.  For example his arguments against the Romantic idealism of Christopher Marlowe's lyrical "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love"  prove as delicious as the fishes swimming after the bait proffered by the poet's beloved:
"When thou wilt swim in that live bath,
Each fish, which every channel hath,
Will amorously to thee swim,
Gladder to catch thee, than thou him. "
The poem ends with an ironic line suggesting the fishes that do not succumb to the bait are wiser than the poet.  It is complexity like this that might leave the reader with the feelings of a twentieth century man who is "bewitched, bothered, and bewildered".   This is a far cry from the Romantic ideal of love.  The poem follows:

The Bait

Come live with me, and be my love,
And we will some new pleasures prove
Of golden sands, and crystal brooks,
With silken lines, and silver hooks.

There will the river whispering run
Warm'd by thy eyes, more than the sun;
And there the 'enamour'd fish will stay,
Begging themselves they may betray.

When thou wilt swim in that live bath,
Each fish, which every channel hath,
Will amorously to thee swim,
Gladder to catch thee, than thou him.

If thou, to be so seen, be'st loth,
By sun or moon, thou dark'nest both,
And if myself have leave to see,
I need not their light having thee.

Let others freeze with angling reeds,
And cut their legs with shells and weeds,
Or treacherously poor fish beset,
With strangling snare, or windowy net.


Let coarse bold hands from slimy nest
The bedded fish in banks out-wrest;
Or curious traitors, sleeve-silk flies,
Bewitch poor fishes' wand'ring eyes.

For thee, thou need'st no such deceit,
For thou thyself art thine own bait:
That fish, that is not catch'd thereby,
Alas, is wiser far than I.

Useful generalizations about so large and varied a body of work as Donne's are not easy. He was a profoundly religious poet, with a peculiarly strong hold on and interest in the physical things of life. He used a unique lens to view his world, creating spectacularly unlikely comparisons that enlightened the reader on the nature of both of the things compared, sometimes in surprising ways. He continues to be read and discussed today, four hundred years after he lived.  I will continue my comments on his poetry and prose in the coming weeks.

Sweetness and Wit

Love's Alchemy

BY JOHN DONNE

Some that have deeper digg'd love's mine than I,

Say, where his centric happiness doth lie;

         I have lov'd, and got, and told,

But should I love, get, tell, till I were old,

I should not find that hidden mystery.

         Oh, 'tis imposture all!

And as no chemic yet th'elixir got,

         But glorifies his pregnant pot

         If by the way to him befall

Some odoriferous thing, or medicinal,

         So, lovers dream a rich and long delight,

         But get a winter-seeming summer's night.

Our ease, our thrift, our honour, and our day,

Shall we for this vain bubble's shadow pay?

         Ends love in this, that my man

Can be as happy'as I can, if he can

Endure the short scorn of a bridegroom's play?

         That loving wretch that swears

'Tis not the bodies marry, but the minds,

         Which he in her angelic finds,

         Would swear as justly that he hears,

In that day's rude hoarse minstrelsy, the spheres.

         Hope not for mind in women; at their best

         Sweetness and wit, they'are but mummy, possess'd.

from: Poems of Love by John Donne. Folio Society, 1958.