Even if their work isn’t autobiographical, to study a poet’s work at A Level or above is to get to know that person surprisingly intimately.
If so, what are we to make of John Donne?
Donne is a creature of contrast, of complication, practically a living oxymoron: the scion of a staunchly Catholic family who became an Anglican churchman; the poet who seemed obsessed with the pleasures of the flesh only to spend half his life in a devoted, highly intimate relationship with God; the man who prided himself on his wit and facility with language but published next to nothing during his lifetime.
These contradictions shouldn’t undermine our opinion of Donne. There is real, human truth underlying Benedick’s blustering self-justification in Much Ado About Nothing:
doth not the appetite alter? a man loves the meat in his youth that he cannot endure in his age. (II.iii)
Of course it does! Take it from me, now in my mid-50s!
If Donne was still producing the subtle, saucy conceits of his youth decades later, we would probably enjoy his work less, maybe even dismiss him as some kind of dirty old man! Early Bon Jovi doesn’t sound like late Bon Jovi, and ditto The Beatles, The Stones, and any other long-lived band you can think of.
But, the conceits!
I know! To be honest, this is the most annoying thing about Donne. Especially because I have spent so many years trying to reassure students that in English Literature there is no single right answer. This feels closest to the exception that proves the rule …
Approaching Donne, I often find it difficult to remember his historical context. His life spanned a tumultuous six decades of English history. He was a contemporary of Shakespeare and Marlowe, with all the energy of the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean eras. But he outlived them both, and I think later works leads us into the introspection and soul-searching that later haunts some of Milton’s work.
My first, quite brief, encounter with Donne was at University. What have I made of revisiting Donne more fully to teach his works?
I feel a bit sorry for him, to be honest. By any measure, he led a varied and what should have been interesting and satisfying life. After all he was at various stages a student, soldier, MP, prison inmate, priest and the father of twelve children! Despite this, there seems to be a restless, questing unhappiness about his work - a sense that he feels incomplete, and is looking for the other part of the jigsaw puzzle. As a young man, and maybe unsurprisingly, he seems to put his trust in the ecstasy of sexual union, but increasingly it’s the urges of his soul, not his body, which he wants lasting satisfaction in. Death is never far away from Donne’s poetry, be that as a saucy code for orgasm, or as the event which prevents secular love being an answer for him. And then, of course, we hit the large body of his work which is concerned with a different kind of union, between creator and creation. These are intimate, private, and vulnerable - perhaps it’s no wonder they were published posthumously. Donne really is offering his soul for inspection. The Holy Sonnets are almost uncomfortable reading, laced with guilt about his own actions, but also savagely beating himself up about sin inherited from Adam and Eve.
So.
Seven years ago, I was writing in another blog that ‘You don’t read Shakespeare, Shakespeare reads you’, stressing that we know next to nothing about then playwright, least of all his opinion on the thousands of human situations and moral dilemmas he presents us with. We seem to know a lot more about Donne feels, but I reckon my Upstarts will still be able to construct a personal response to the hopes, fears, joys, desires and despairs Donne is about to present them.
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