LOVE'S DIET
To what a cumbersome unwieldiness
And burdensome corpulence my love had grown,
But that I did, to make it less,
And keep it in proportion,
Give it a diet, made it feed upon
That which love worst endures, discretion.
Above one sigh a day I allowed him not,
Of which my fortune, and my faults had part;
And if sometimes by stealth he got
A she sigh from my mistress' heart,
And thought to feast on that, I let him see
'Twas neither very sound, nor meant to me.
If he wrung from me a tear, I brined it so
With scorn or shame, that him it nourished not;
If he sucked hers, I let him know
'Twas not a tear, which he had got,
His drink was counterfeit, as was his meat;
For, eyes which roll towards all, weep not, but sweat.
What ever he would dictate, I writ that,
But burnt my letters; When she writ to me,
And that favour made him fat
I said, if any title be
Conveyed by this, Ah, what doth it avail,
To be the fortieth name in an entail?
Thus I reclaimed my buzzard love, to fly
At what, and when, and how, and where I choose;
Now negligent of sport I lie,
And now as other Fawkners use,
I spring a mistress, swear, write, sigh and weep;
And the game killed, or lost, go talk, and sleep.
Written c 1592 – 1600
Published 1633
entail = legal term describing the bequeathing
of property to a specified group rather than an individual inheritor
Fawkners = archaic form of 'Falconers'
spring = term describing a game bird rising from cover
John Donne is arguably the most fascinating and most contradictory figure in the history of English poetry. His Songs and Sonnets are among the most passionate, erotic, witty and engaging love poems ever written, their subject matter vastly at odds, or so it would seem, with his later career as a respected theologian and the Dean of St Paul's Cathedral in London. It is from one of Donne's sermons that the phrase 'No man is an island' derives — an eternally relevant reminder of the fact that the lives of all human beings are intertwined, no matter what their sex, religion, ethnicity or social status.
Donne (his surname is pronounced 'Dunn' to rhyme with 'fun' by most scholars) was born in his parents' home in Bread Street in the city of London some time in the first half of 1572. His maternal grandfather John Heywood was a singer, musician and creator of short dramatic skits, referred to as 'interludes,' that were performed in the presence of Elizabeth I and in the metropolitan legal colleges and chambers collectively known as the Inns of Court. The Heywood family was directly related to the English Catholic martyr Sir Thomas More, a highly-ranked statesman whose defiance of Henry VIII and subsequent execution for refusing to sign the 1534 Oath of Succession because it repudiated the authority of the Pope saw him canonised by the Church in 1886.
Donne's father could boast of no such noble connections. An ironmonger by trade, he prospered in his business but died in his early forties, leaving behind six surviving children and an estate valued at approximately £3500. Six months after his death, his thirty year old widow Elizabeth married the fifty year old physician and widower John Symynges, a fellow Catholic whom it was likely she and her deceased husband had been acquainted with for several years. In 1583 the reconfigured Symynges family moved to a house located close to London's St Bartholomew's Hospital where, within two years, Donne's younger sisters both fell ill and died.
Donne was originally educated by a Catholic tutor hired by his wealthy stepfather, a risky move in a country where 'the old religion,' as it was known, had been more or less outlawed by then in all but name. One of Donne's maternal uncles was the exiled Jesuit priest Jasper Heywood who re-entered England via the Continent and conducted masses in secret until he was arrested in 1583 and tried for the crime of treason. As Donne would recall in his 1610 anti-Catholic polemical work Pseudo-Martyr: 'I had my first breeding and conversation with men of suppressed and afflicted religion, accustomed to the despite of death and hungry of an imagined martyrdom…'.
In 1584 Donne and his younger brother Henry were sent to Oxford University to further their education, lodging in Hart Hall (now known as Hertford College) which was home to many fellow Catholics including Henry Wotton, someone who was to remain Donne's close friend until his death. Donne spent three years at Oxford before leaving — without obtaining a degree because he would have been expected to sign the Oath of Supremacy that denied Papal power and acknowledged Elizabeth I as head of the Church of England — for Cambridge where he did not seek admittance to a college but was able to study rhetoric, history, philosophy, French, Italian, science and mathematics and immerse himself in the literary life of the city and the works of its rising poet-dramatists including Robert Greene and Christopher Marlowe.
Donne left Cambridge around the age of seventeen but did not return to the house of his mother who, following the death of Dr Symynges in 1588, had become the wife of another Catholic gentleman named Richard Rainsford. Elizabeth Rainsford and her new husband soon relocated to Antwerp in the Spanish-controlled Netherlands where, they hoped, they would be free to practice their religion without falling foul of the government or an emerging and increasingly militant group of Protestant extremists known as the Puritans.
Little is known about the next phase of Donne's life. Some scholars believe he may have spent time on the Continent, perhaps as a soldier fighting in Sir Francis Drake's 1589 Spanish campaign, while others conjecture that he visited the Low Countries and France before travelling to Italy to spend time with his exiled Jesuit uncle Jasper Heywood. The next definite mention of him occurs in 1591 when he was accepted at Thavies Inn, one of the London Courts of Chancery, as a law student. In May 1592 he entered nearby Lincoln's Inn to further his legal studies, a move that introduced him to life at the royal Court and placed in him the orbit of high profile Protestant students such as Thomas Egerton, son of Sir Thomas Egerton, Lord Keeper of the Seal.
The Inns of Court were also hotbeds of literary activity, with poet/playwrights including John Davies, Thomas Lodge and John Marston regularly displaying their satirical wit at the Revels that were a common feature of life as a footloose young male law student. It was during this time that Donne himself probably began to write, producing epigrams and satires in the prevailing literary fashion before going on to create his Elegies and some of his earliest and, for their time, most scandalous love poetry (some of which would not be deemed 'decent' enough to publish until the late nineteenth century).
But Donne's time at Lincoln's Inn was not without its tragedies. In the spring of 1593 his brother Henry, now a student at his former alma mater Thavies Inn, was arrested after a Catholic priest was discovered in his room. The priest, whose name was William Harrington, was subsequently tried for sedition and executed, by which time Henry himself, long since confined to the dank and disease ridden prison at Newgate, was dead of the plague. It was probably after these traumatic events that Donne began to seriously contemplate abandoning the religion of his forefathers and converting to Protestantism, a change inspired as much by self-preservation and his hopes of obtaining some sort of paid position at the Court of Elizabeth I as it was by his growing disillusion with the insularity, pedantry and obsession with martyrdom which had become intrinsic components of the faith he had been raised in.
The desire to distance himself from the activities of his brother and their Catholic background were no doubt critical in persuading Donne to join the English expeditionary force being assembled by Lord General Robert Devereux, otherwise known as the Earl of Essex, to attack the Spanish port city of Cadiz. Henry Wotton was employed as Essex's secretary at the time, a fact that aided Donne's cause and saw him granted permission to join the other young men of good (if not noble) birth as a member of the invading Protestant forces. Donne and his fellow adventurers left Plymouth on 3 June 1596, with the poet personally witnessing the sinking of the Spanish flagship the San Felipe by Walter Ralegh thirteen days later, a horrifying sight he was later to memorialize in an epigram titled The Burnt Ship:
Out of a fired ship, which, by no way
But drowning, could be rescued from the flame,
Some men leap'd forth, and ever as they came
Near the foe's ships, did by their shot decay;
So all were lost, which in the ship were found,
They in the sea being burnt, they in the burnt ship
drown'd.
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Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex
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Donne's return to England and to his temporarily abandoned legal studies proved to be short-lived. A little over one year later he joined a new expedition, led again by Essex and Ralegh, which had been assembled to wipe out was left of the Spanish fleet in the Azores archipelago and seize the treasure that these ships were transporting back to Spain from its colonies in South America and the West Indies. Luck was not with the English this time, with a lack of wind hampering their progress and frustrating Ralegh who, after attacking the island of Fayal and enduring the loss of many men, returned to Plymouth battered, depleted and empty-handed in late October 1597.
This time Donne did not return to Lincoln's Inn to resume his legal studies. Now twenty-five years old, the veteran of two royally sanctioned expeditionary campaigns and a fluent speaker of the Spanish, French and Italian languages, he was appointed Chief Secretary to Sir Thomas Egerton who, in addition to his position as Lord Keeper of the Seal, also presided over the House of Lords and the Court of the Star Chamber and served as the senior judge in the perpetually busy Court of Chancery. Egerton was a supremely powerful figure in Elizabethan England, a former Catholic who had renounced his now suspicious faith as a means of furthering his career, a highly-placed civil servant who was personally involved in the hunting down of clandestine priests and other religious dissidents — a role not lost upon Donne who became part of his official household, living more or less as a member of the Egerton family in York House close to the sprawling, twenty-three acre city-within-a-city that was the Palace of Whitehall.
It was at York House, while carrying out his duties as Egerton's schedule-maker, guest-greeter, researcher and document-drafter, that Donne met Ann More, the fourteen year old daughter of the new Lady Egerton's short-tempered brother, Sir George More. Donne fell deeply in love with Ann during the course of the next two years, something he was careful to keep secret from his employer despite his favoured status as Egerton's trusted secretary and confidante.
But trouble was brewing. Donne's former hero, the dashing but dangerously erratic Earl of Essex, was consigned by the Queen to the care of his friend Lord Egerton who in essence became his gaoler, his gaol being the luxurious home-away-from-home that was the already severely overcrowded York House. In early 1600 the new Lady Egerton died, effectively removing any reason for Ann, her ward, to remain in London. Ann was sent back to Losely Park, her father's estate in rural Surrey, leaving Donne to wonder if he would ever see or be allowed to speak with her again.
Donne did not have much leisure in which to dwell upon his loss. Egerton soon remarried, with the third Lady Egerton bringing more than forty of her own household to live at York House. This meant there was no longer space for Donne to lodge in his master's house, obliging him to move to his own quarters further along the Strand either in or in close proximity to (sources disagree) another bustling business/residential complex known as the Savoy. He was living here in February 1601 when the now freed Earl of Essex launched what was to be his ill-fated coup against the Queen that resulted in him and several of his followers being arrested and imprisoned in the Tower of London. (Henry Wotton, Donne's old Oxford friend, had wisely decamped to France to avoid being hauled in for questioning and packed off to gaol along with his former boss and that nobleman's regretful allies.) Essex was swiftly tried for treason and sentenced to death, a legal process that Donne, in his capacity as Egerton's law clerk, directly participated in despite his oft-expressed aversion to all forms of corporal and capital punishment.
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Thomas Egerton, Viscount Brackley
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In October 1601, nearly a year after the execution of Essex and many of his supporters, Donne was appointed the Member of Parliament for Brackley, a Northamptonshire borough under the direct control of Egerton who felt it wise to have his most trusted employee take up the position prior to the convening of what would be the final Parliament that Elizabeth I would be alive to convene and preside over. One of Donne's fellow MPs was Sir George More who had returned to London to attend Parliament accompanied by his daughter. Ann More and Donne renewed their acquaintance, possibly in secret, and three weeks before Christmas became man and wife at a small private ceremony presided over by Donne's friend Samuel Brooke and witnessed by that Anglican cleric's brother, Donne's even closer friend Christopher Brooke. The newlyweds spent their wedding night apart, the groom in his London apartment and the bride in lodgings rented by her unsuspecting father. George More was not informed of his daughter's marriage because, being not yet sixteen, Ann was still legally forbidden to marry without his consent.
The discovery of the marriage, which remained a secret until well into February 1602 when Donne himself wrote to his father-in-law to inform him that it had taken place, effectively ended the bridegroom's fledgling political career and whatever hopes he had formerly cherished of obtaining some kind of paid position at Court. Donne was immediately imprisoned along with the Brooke brothers, consigned to the death trap that was London's unhygienic Fleet Prison where he quickly succumbed to a fever. Although his stay in the Fleet was short — he spent all of what remained of his inheritance to prove that his marriage to Ann was legally valid — it marked the beginning of a very different life for him, one that began with the loss of his position at Egerton's secretary and saw him and Ann become totally dependent on the charity of Francis Wolley, Ann's unhappily married nineteen year old cousin, to put food on their table and a roof over their heads.
The newlyweds moved into a house on Wolley's estate at Pyrford in Surrey and were living here, somewhat reconciled to her father but not completely, in early 1603 when the recently deceased Elizabeth I was replaced on the throne by her cousin James VI of Scotland. Life at Court was utterly transformed under the reign of the new monarch, a transformation that Donne could only observe from Pyrford like the poor relation he had now quite literally become. Many of his former friends and acquaintances were knighted by the new King while his father-in-law was named Treasurer of the Household to Charles, the Prince of Wales. While Donne himself received no honours he did earn the patronage and friendship of Henry Goodyer, an aristocratic, well-connected courtier who was able to keep him apprised of potential job opportunities and provide an outlet for his growing sense of melancholy. Donne was also able to re-establish a connection with Henry Wotton who had deemed it safe to return to England following the death of Elizabeth I and the end of Tudor rule.
In February 1605 Donne, often ill and growing ever more restless and discouraged about his future, applied for and was granted a licence by the King to travel overseas with a younger companion named Walter Chute and a full retinue of horses and servants. The purpose of the journey remains unknown — the companions almost certainly spent time in Paris and had moved on to Venice by the beginning of the autumn — although it seems likely that Donne hoped to revive his stalled political career by using the trip to sharpen his linguistic skills and establish himself in the eyes of the King as a useful would-be diplomat. He returned to Pyrford in the spring of 1606 — still alarmed, as the entire country was, by the attempt the Catholic plotter Guy Fawkes had made in November 1605 to assassinate the King by blowing up Parliament with gunpowder — to be greeted by his anxious young wife and new infant son George. (A third son named Francis would follow in 1607.)
With his family growing and no prospect of obtaining a meaningful job on the horizon, Francis Wolley intervened with his uncle George More to obtain the Donnes an allowance of £80 per year, the interest on Ann's long withheld dowry of £800. Obtaining this income allowed them and their growing family — Ann would give birth to twelve children prior to her childbearing-related death in 1617 — to leave Pyrford and rent a large but draughty cottage of their own in the village of Mitcham, one hour by horseback from London. It was here, in the house that the unhappy poet variously described as his 'prison,' 'dungeon' and 'hospital,' that he devoted himself to researching points of law and divinity and writing heartfelt letters to Henry Goodyer and other sympathetic friends, a group which now included his fellow poet (and convicted murderer) Ben Jonson.
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Ben Jonson
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Donne completed a number of poems and several prose pieces at Mitcham — Biathanatos, a defence of the act of suicide being the most controversial of the latter — while continuing to search in vain for some type of remunerative position at Court. While his searches were unsuccessful, his charm, erudition and courtesy did manage to endear him to several important personages including Magdalen Herbert, a culture-loving gentlewoman who was familiar with his writings. He exchanged many letters with Mrs Herbert throughout 1607 and 1608 and also befriended Lucy Russell, the Countess of Bedford, one of Queen Anne's Ladies in Waiting and someone whose patronage had likewise been sought by Ben Jonson and several other cash-strapped poets.
Yet not even Lucy Russell could help Donne obtain the Court position he continued to seek. Apparently, the King remembered the alleged illegality of Donne's secret marriage to Ann and did not view him as a suitable candidate for a position on his staff — a fact that led to Donne being summoned to a meeting with the Reverend Dr Thomas Morton, Dean of Gloucester, who recommended that he abandon his political/diplomatic ambitions and consider taking holy orders to become a Protestant clergyman. Donne rejected Morton's well intended advice — and the comfortable Church-provided living that would have followed his ordination —explaining that he did not wish to bring 'that sacred calling' into dishonour by having it associated with a life as filled with 'irregularity' as his life had been. This no doubt referred to his growing status as a much admired but still unpublished poet, creator of verse that frequently referenced the sexual adventures he had enjoyed as a young man but had come to bitterly regret since his marriage.
Yet Morton had more than altruism in mind when he offered Donne a way out of the 'prison' that his life at Mitcham had become. As one of the highest ranking clergymen in England Morton was actively engaged in defending Protestantism against its homegrown and foreign-based Catholic detractors and saw in Donne a potential literary ally — someone who, in 1610, made a personal contribution to this war of words by publishing a polemical work titled Pseudo-martyr, dedicated to the King, which called on English Papists to abandon their militant attempts to overthrow the nation's rightful monarch. James I, as he had been known since accepting the crown and creating the Kingdom of Great Britain, was so impressed by Donne's arguments that he all but commanded the reluctant author to enter the ministry.
Although Donne continued to resist the idea of taking holy orders his thoughts remained very much focused on religion, with the composition of what came to be known as his Holy Sonnets taking up much of his time between 1609 and 1614, a period which also saw him return briefly — and unhappily — to the Continent as the companion to Robert Drury and that nobleman's devout, well educated wife Anne. While the elaborately sycophantic elegy he wrote in honour of the Drury's deceased daughter did not win him the favour of former aristocratic patrons like Lucy Russell (who apparently felt that the tributes he had written for them had somehow been cheapened by its appearance), their patronage allowed him to move his young family from Mitcham to a town house in Drury Lane in London, a fashionable area that offered easier access to Court and to the courtiers whose influence he still hoped to exploit to obtain a position as a member of the King's staff.
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Lucy Russell, Countess of Bedford
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For the next three years Donne would, by means of flattery and sometimes outright begging, seek the assistance of several important figures in the orbit of the King and even briefly return to Parliament as an MP, this time representing the borough of Taunton. While these activities did represent progress of a kind, they did not change the King's mind about what profession he felt Donne was best suited to follow. Yet Donne still struggled to accept the idea that he could ever become 'pure' enough in mind and spirit to join the clergy.
In November 1614 the issue came to a head with the death of Donne's seven year old son Francis, the third of his children to die since the beginning of that year. (Drury Lane, fashionable address though it was, was no more hygienic than any other part of overcrowded, stinking, plague-ridden London.) Suffering from recurring bouts of illness and faced with ever-mounting debts, Donne made peace with his doubts and announced that he would take holy orders, confirming his new vocation by publishing a commentary on the opening verses of the first two books of The Bible titled Essays in Divinity.
These commentaries were, in a sense, test runs for the sermons that would, following Donne's ordination on 23 January 1615 and elevation to the revered position of Dean of St Paul's Cathedral in 1621, make him arguably the most famous, widely read clergyman in England. But his newfound social and financial security came at a high cost. On 15 August 1617, five days after giving birth to their twelfth child, his wife Ann died, an incalculable loss — despite their frequent and sometimes lengthy separations — from which he never fully recovered. It had been his love for Ann, and his hasty and perhaps ill-advised decision to marry her, which had ruined his career prospects even as it had inspired much of his best, most moving poetry. He blamed himself for her death and transmuted the physical passion he had shared with her into an equally fierce passion for God and his new calling as an Anglican cleric.
By the time the Reverend Dr Donne, as he was now known, was installed as the Dean of St Paul's in 1621 he had been at the centre of Court life for four years, serving as a Royal Chaplain and as Minister to the Benchers at Lincoln's Inn in addition to being awarded the livings of three parishes in Huntingdonshire, Kent and Bedfordshire. He also took one last journey to Europe, accompanying the diplomat James Hay, the Earl of Carlisle, to Germany in 1618 in the capacity of that Court favourite's personal chaplain.
Donne's position was now so secure that, by 1623, he was able to negotiate a favourable marriage settlement with the former actor and theatre owner Ned Alleyn for the hand of his eldest daughter Constance despite having suffered what had been the life-threatening illness which had inspired his greatest work of prose, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions. Nor was his position at Court weakened by the death of James I on 27 March 1625 and the accession of his son Charles I to the throne. In 1626 Donne was appointed a governor of the charitable institution known as the Charterhouse and later served as an ecclesiastical judge in both the Court of Delegates and the Court of High Commission, the latter being the same court he had applied to in order to validate his marriage some twenty-five years earlier.
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JOHN DONNE, c 1600
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Yet tragedy awaited Donne again in January 1627 when his eighteen year old daughter Lucy, who was staying with her recently widowed sister Constance, suddenly died. Hers was to be one of many deaths Donne would be forced to contend with during that year, including those of his dearest friend Henry Goodyer and that of his former patroness, the now strictly Puritan Lucy Russell.
It was also in 1627 that Donne brought his eighty year old mother to the Deanery of St Paul's to live with him — a long delayed 'duty' that carried with it the irony of having a woman who, despite intense pressure to do so, had never abandoned her Catholic faith residing as his guest within the most visible physical symbol of the English Protestant church. Elizabeth would remain his houseguest until her death in early 1630, an event which no doubt contributed to Donne, whose health had never been robust, falling ill and becoming confined to his bed. He remained in bed — famously leaving it to be measured for the winding sheet he would be buried in — until he somehow found the strength to get up and preach what was to be his last-ever sermon, delivered in the royal presence of Charles I, on 25 February 1631. In a little over a month Donne was dead, leaving the world on 31 March 1631 at the age of fifty-nine.
Although Donne's final sermon had been published under the evocative title Death's Duel literally weeks after he had preached it to the new monarch, two more years would pass before the first edition of his poems would roll off the presses. By then his literary heritage, both secular and sacred, was firmly in the control of his eldest son, also named John, who had followed him into the Church and spent most of his life suing others for what he deemed to be his denied rights to oversee and publish (and thereby profit from) new editions of his father's work. But, as more than one scholar has noted, it was thanks to the greed of John Donne fils that so much of the work of John Donne père survived the cataclysm of the English Civil War and remained available to be 'rediscovered and re-evaluated' by them and the likes of his fellow poet TS Eliot in the first half of the twentieth century where his unusual syntax, unambiguous language and insistence on the importance of conveying individual experience seemed to make him one of the earliest practitioners of Modernism.
HOLY SONNETS
XIV
Batter my heart, three personed God; for, you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, overthrow me, and bend
Your force, to break, blow, burn and make me new.
I, like an usurped town, to another due,
Labour to admit to you, but Oh, to no end,
Reason your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captived, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love, and would be loved fain,
But am betrothed unto your enemy:
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.
Written c 1609-1614
Published 1633
Use the link below to read more poems by English poet, essayist and clergyman JOHN DONNE:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/john-donne
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