JOHN DONNE

Introduction

Born - between 24 January and 19 june1573.

Birth place - London, England

Died - 31 march 1631 (aged 59)

Occupation - poet, priest etc.

Nationality - English.

Genres - satire, love poetry, elegy.

Subjects - love, sexuality, religion, death

John Donne was an English poet and a cleric in the Church of England.
He is considered the pre-eminent representative of the metaphysical
poets. His works are noted for their strong, sensual style and include
sonnets, love poems, religious poems, Latin translations, epigrams,
elegies, songs, satires and sermons. His poetry is noted for its vibrancy
of language and inventiveness of metaphor, especially compared to that
of his contemporaries. Donne's style is characterized by abrupt openings
and various paradoxes, ironies and dislocations. These features, along
with his frequent dramatic or everyday speech rhythms, his tense syntax
and his tough eloquence, were both a reaction against the smoothness of
conventional Elizabethan poetry and an adaptation into English of
European baroque and mannerist techniques. His early career was
marked by poetry that bore immense knowledge of English society and
he met that knowledge with sharp criticism. Another important theme in
Donne's poetry is the idea of true religion, something that he spent much
time considering and about which he often theorized. He wrote secular
poems as well as erotic and love poems. He is particularly famous for
his mastery of metaphysical conceits.

Despite his great education and poetic talents, Donne lived in poverty
for several years, relying heavily on wealthy friends. He spent much of
the money he inherited during and after his education on womanizing,
literature, pastimes, and travel. In 1601, Donne secretly married Anne
More, with whom he had twelve children. 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, he was
appointed the Dean of St Paul's Cathedral in London. He also served as a
Member of Parliament in 1601 and in 1614.

Early life

A portrait of Donne as a young man, c. 1595, artist unknown, in the

collection of the National Portrait Gallery, London

Donne was born in London, into a recusant Roman Catholic family

when practice of that religion was illegal in England. Donne was the
third of six children. His father, also named John Donne, was of Welsh
descent and a warden of the Ironmongers Company in the City of
London. Donne's father was a respected Roman Catholic who avoided
unwelcome government attention out of fear of persecution.

His father died in 1576, when Donne was four years old, leaving his son
fatherless and his widow, Elizabeth Heywood, with the responsibility of
raising their children alone. Heywood was also from a recusant Roman
Catholic family, the daughter of John Heywood, the playwright, and
sister of the Reverend Jasper Heywood, a Jesuit priest and translator. She
was a great-niece of the Roman Catholic martyr Thomas More. This
tradition of martyrdom would continue among Donne's closer relatives,
many of whom were executed or exiled for religious reasons. Donne was
educated privately; however, there is no evidence to support the popular
claim that he was taught by Jesuits. Donne's mother married Dr. John
Syminges, a wealthy widower with three children, a few months after
Donne's father died. Donne thus acquired a stepfather. Two more of his
sisters, Mary and Katherine, died in 1581. Donne's mother lived her last
years in the Deanery after Donne became Dean of St Paul's, and died
just two months before Donne, in January 1631.

In 1583, the 11-year-old Donne began studies at Hart Hall, now Hertford
College, Oxford. After three years of studies there, Donne was admitted
to the University of Cambridge, where he studied for another three
years.[10] However, Donne could not obtain a degree from either
institution because of his Catholicism, since he refused to take the Oath
of Supremacy required to graduate.

In 1591 Donne was accepted as a student at the Thavies Inn legal school,
one of the Inns of Chancery in London. On 6 May 1592 he was admitted
to Lincoln's Inn, one of the Inns of Court. In 1593, five years after the
defeat of the Spanish Armada and during the intermittent Anglo-Spanish
War (1585–1604), Queen Elizabeth issued the first English statute
against sectarian dissent from the Church of England, titled "An Act for
restraining Popish recusants". It defined "Popish recusants" as those
"convicted for not repairing to some Church, Chapel, or usual place of
Common Prayer to hear Divine Service there, but forbearing the same
contrary to the tenor of the laws and statutes heretofore made and
provided in that behalf". Donne's brother Henry was also a university
student prior to his arrest in 1593 for harbouring a Catholic priest,
William Harrington, whom he betrayed under torture. Harrington was
tortured on the rack, hanged until not quite dead, and then subjected to
disembowelment. Henry Donne died in Newgate prison of bubonic
plague, leading Donne to begin questioning his Catholic faith.

During and after his education, Donne spent much of his considerable
inheritance on women, literature, pastimes and travel. Although no
record details precisely where Donne travelled, he did cross Europe and
later fought with the Earl of Essex and Sir Walter Raleigh against the
Spanish at Cadiz (1596) and the Azores (1597), and witnessed the loss of
the Spanish flagship, the San Felipe. According to Izaak Walton, who
wrote a biography of Donne in 1658:

... he returned not back into England till he had stayed some years, first
in Italy, and then in Spain, where he made many useful observations of
those countries, their laws and manner of government, and returned
perfect in their languages.

— Izaak Walton
By the age of 25 he was well prepared for the diplomatic career he
appeared to be seeking.[12] He was appointed chief secretary to the Lord
Keeper of the Great Seal, Sir Thomas Egerton, and was established at
Egerton's London home, York House, Strand close to the Palace of
Whitehall, then the most influential social centre in England.

Style

His work has received much criticism over the years, especially
concerning his metaphysical form. Donne is generally considered the
most prominent member of the metaphysical poets, a phrase coined in
1781 by Samuel Johnson, following a comment on Donne by John
Dryden. Dryden had written of Donne in 1693: "He affects the
metaphysics, not only in his satires, but in his amorous verses, where
nature only should reign; and perplexes the minds of the fair sex with
nice speculations of philosophy, when he should engage their hearts, and
entertain them with the softnesses of love."

In Life of Cowley (from Samuel Johnson's 1781 work of biography and

criticism Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets), Johnson refers to the
beginning of the seventeenth century in which there "appeared a race of
writers that may be termed the metaphysical poets". Donne's immediate
successors in poetry therefore tended to regard his works with
ambivalence, with the Neoclassical poets regarding his conceits as abuse
of the metaphor. However he was revived by Romantic poets such as
Coleridge and Browning, though his more recent revival in the early
twentieth century by poets such as T. S. Eliot and critics like F R Leavis
tended to portray him, with approval, as an anti-Romantic.

Donne is considered a master of the metaphysical conceit, an extended

metaphor that combines two vastly different ideas into a single idea,
often using imagery. An example of this is his equation of lovers with
saints in "The Canonization". Unlike the conceits found in other
Elizabethan poetry, most notably Petrarchan conceits, which formed
clichéd comparisons between more closely related objects (such as a
rose and love), metaphysical conceits go to a greater depth in comparing
two completely unlike objects. One of the most famous of Donne's
conceits is found in "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" where he
compares two lovers who are separated to the two legs of a compass.

Donne's works are also witty, employing paradoxes, puns, and subtle yet
remarkable analogies. His pieces are often ironic and cynical, especially
regarding love and human motives. Common subjects of Donne's poems
are love (especially in his early life), death (especially after his wife's
death), and religion.

John Donne's poetry represented a shift from classical forms to more

personal poetry. Donne is noted for his poetic metre, which was
structured with changing and jagged rhythms that closely resemble
casual speech (it was for this that the more classical-minded Ben Jonson
commented that "Donne, for not keeping of accent, deserved hanging").

Some scholars believe that Donne's literary works reflect the changing
trends of his life, with love poetry and satires from his youth and
religious sermons during his later years. Other scholars, such as Helen
Gardner, question the validity of this dating—most of his poems were
published posthumously (1633). The exception to these is his
Anniversaries, which were published in 1612 and Devotions upon
Emergent Occasions published in 1624. His sermons are also dated,
sometimes specifically by date and year.

 What is metaphysical poetry’? Examined its salient features taking

illustration from Donne’s poetry you have been pre described.

 Metaphysical poetry.

 Metaphysical poetry in English literature.

Metaphysical poetry in English literature

The metaphysical poets were a group of 17th-century poets who

concerned themselves with the experience of man and the nature of
being on the world. What is our place within the world and how to best
define that place? Taking up the philosophy of metaphysics, first set
forth by Aristotle, the metaphysical poets wrote of experience, including
love, romance, beauty, imagination and man’s relationship with God.
Less concerned with expressing feeling than with analysing it
.metaphysical poetry is marked by bold and ingenious conceits,
metaphor, drawing something forced parallels between apparently
dissimilar ideas or things complex and subtle thought, frequent use of
paradox and a dramatic directness of language.

Although in no sense a school or movement proper, they share common

characteristics of wit, inventiveness, and a love of elaborate stylistic
maneuvers. Metaphysical concerns are the common subject of their
poetry, which investigates the world by rational discussion of its
phenomena rather than by intuition or mysticism.

Jhon Donne’s Main themes are himself in relation to women and himself
in relation to god’.

What is metaphysical poetry?

Literally `meta’ means beyond and physics’ means` physical nature.

Metaphysical poetry is concerned with the whole experience of man, but

the intelligence, learning and seriousness of the poets means that the
poetry is about the profound areas of experience especially - about love,
romantic and sensual; about man's relationship with God - the eternal
perspective, and, to a less extent, about pleasure, learning and art.
Metaphysical means dealing with the relationship between spirit to
matter or the ultimate nature of reality
Metaphysical poems are lyric poems. They are brief but intense
meditations, characterized by striking use of wit, irony and wordplay.
Beneath the formal structure (of rhyme, meter and stanza) is the
underlying (and often hardly less formal) structure of the poem's
argument. Note that there may be two (or more) kinds of argument in a
poem. In “To His Coy Mistress” the explicit argument (Marvell's request
that the coy lady yield to his passion) is a stalking horse for the more
serious argument about the transitoriness of pleasure. The outward levity
conceals (barely) a deep seriousness of intent. You would be able to
show how this theme of carpe diem (“seize the day”) is made clear in the
third section of the poem.

Origin of the Name:

‘Metaphysical poets’ the name given to a diverse group of 17th‐century

English poets whose work is notable for its ingenious use of intellectual
and theological concepts in surprising conceits, strange paradoxes and
far‐fetched imagery.
The word metaphysics is formed from the Greek Meta ta phusika, a title
which, about the year A.D. 70, was related by Andronicus of Rhodes to
that collection of Aristotelian treatises which since then goes by the
name of the "Metaphysics"

Age:

The term "metaphysical" when applied to poetry has a long and

interesting history. The term "Metaphysical Poet" was first coined by the
critic Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) in his book ‘Life of Cowley’ and he
used it as a disparaging term. Earlier, John Dryden had also been critical
of the group of poets he grouped together as too proud of their wit.
Johnson and Dryden valued the clarity, restraint and shapeliness of the
poets of Augustan Rome (which is why some 18th century poets are
called "Augustan," and therefore were antagonistic towards poets of the
mid-17th century.

The Metaphysical poets were out of critical favor for the 18th and 19th
centuries (obviously, the Romantic poets found little in this heavily
intellectualized poetry). At the end of the 19th century and in the
beginning of the 20th century, interest in this group picked up, and
especially important was T.S. Eliot's famous essay "The Metaphysical
Poets" Interest peaked this century with the New Critics school around
mid-century, and now is tempering off a bit, though Donne, the original
"Big Name" is being superceded now by interest in George Herbert,
who's religious seeking and questioning seems to be hitting a critical
nerve.

Example of Some Metaphysical Poems:

John Donne- The Good-Morrow, The Sunne Rising, The Anniversarie,

The Canonization, A Valediction Forbidding Mourning and A Nocturnall
upon S. Lucies Day
George Herbert- Jordan (I), The Pearl, The Collar, Discipline and Love
(III)

Andrew Marvell- The Coronet, Bermudas, To His Coy Mistress, The

Definition of Love and The Garden
Henry Vaughan- He retreat, The World, Man and “They Are All Gone
into the World of Light”

Characteristics of Metaphysical Poetry

(1) Dramatic manner and direct tone of speech is one of the main
characteristics of metaphysical poetry. In the starting line of the poem
“The Canonization” – there is given a dramatic starting –
 “For God’s sake hold your tongue, and let me love”.

(2) Concentration is an important quality of metaphysical poetry in

general and Donne’s poetry is particular. In his all poems, the reader is
held to one idea or line of argument. Donne’s poems are brief and
closely woven. In “The Extasie”, the principal argument is that the
function of man as a man is being worthily performed through different
acts of love. He continues with the theme without digression. For
instance,

“As ‘twixt two equal armies, Fate

Suspends uncertain victorie,

Our souls, (which to advance their state,

Were gone out,) hung ‘twixt her and me”.

(3) An expanded epigram would be a fitting description of a

metaphysical poem. Nothing is described in detail nor is any word
wasted. There is a wiry strength in the style. Though the verse forms are
usually simple, they are always suitable in enforcing the sense of the
poem. For instance –

“Moving of th’earth brings harms and fears

Men reckon what it did and meant,

But trepidation of the spheres,

Though greater far, is innocent”.

(4) Fondness for conceits is a major character of metaphysical poetry.

Donne often uses fantastic comparisons. The most striking and famous
one used by Donne is the comparison of a man who travels and his
beloved who stays at home to a pair of compasses in the poem “A
Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” –

“If they be two, they are two so

As stiff twin compasses are two,

Thy soul fixt foot makes no show

To move, but doth, if th’other do”.

We find another conceit in the very beginning couple of lines of “The
Extasie” –

“Where like a pillow on a bed,

A pregnant bank swel’d up, …”.

(5) Wit is another characteristic of metaphysical poetry. So, here we find

various allusions and images relating to practicality all areas of nature
and art and learning-- to medicine, cosmology, contemporary
discoveries, ancient myth, history, law and art. For instance, in “The
Extasie”, Donne uses the belief of the blood containing certain spirits
which acts as intermediary between soul and body –

“As our blood labours to get

Spirits, as like souls, as it can,

Because such fingers need to knit

That subtle knot, which makes us man:”

In the same poem, the Ptolemaic system of astrology is also used when
he says –

“… We are

The intelligences, they the sphere”.

(6) Metaphysical Poetry is a blend of passion and thought. T. S.

Elliot thinks that “passionate thinking” is the chief mark of metaphysical
poetry. There is an intellectual analysis of emotion in Donne’s Poetry.
Though every lyric arises out of some emotional situation, the emotion
is not merely expressed, rather it is analyzed. Donne’s poem “A
Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” proves that lovers need not mourn at
parting. For instance,

“So let us melt, and make no noise,

No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move,

‘Twere profanation of our joys

To tell the laity our love”.

(7) Metaphysical Poetry is a fusion of passionate feelings and logical
arguments. For example, in “The Canonization”, there is passion
expressed through beautiful metaphors:

“Call us what you will, we are made such by love;

Call her one, me another fly,

We are tapers too, and at our own cost die,

And we in us, find the eagle and the dove”.

But at the same time, the tone of the poem is intellectual and there is
plenty of complexity involved in the conceits and allusions, such as the
“Phoenix riddle”.

(8) Metaphysical Poetry is the mixture of sensual and spiritual

experience. This characteristic especially appears in Donne’s poetry.
Poems such as “The Canonization”, “The Extasie” – even though they
are not explicitly discussed, the great metaphysical question is the
relation between the spirit and the senses. Often Donne speaks of the
soul and of spiritual love. “The Extasie” speaks of the souls of the lovers
which come out of their bodies negotiate with one another. For instance,

“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”.

(9) Usage of satire and irony is another characteristic of metaphysical

poetry. Donne also uses this in his poems. For example, in “The
Canonization”, there is subtle irony as he speaks of the favoured pursuits
of people – the lust for wealth and favours.

“Take you a course, get you a place,

Observe his honour, or his Grace”.

(10) As far as Donne is concerned, the use of colloquial speech marks

the metaphysical poetry. This is especially apparent in the abrupt,
dramatic and conversational opening of many of his poems. For
instance,
 “For God’s sake hold your tongue, and let me love”

Or,

“Or the King’s real, or his stamped face”

(The Canonization)

(11) Carelessness in diction is another characteristic of metaphysical

poetry. These poems reacted against the cloying sweetness and harmony
of the Elizabethan Poetry. They deliberately avoided conventional poetic
expression. They employed very prosaic words, if they were scientists or
shopkeepers. Thus, we find, in their poetic works, rugged and unpoetic
words. Their versification and their dictions are usually coarse and jerky.

(12) Affectation and hyperbolic expression is another character of

metaphysical poetry. It is often hard to find natural grace in
metaphysical writing, abounding in artificiality of thought and
hyperbolic expression. The writer deemed to say “something unexpected
and surprising. What they wanted to sublime, they endeavored to supply
by hyperbole; their amplification had no limit, they left not only reason
but fancy behind them and produced combination of confused
magnificence”. For instance, the lines of “A Valediction: Forbidding
Mourning” –

“Our two souls therefore, which are one,

Though I must go, endure not yet

A breach, but an expansion,

Like gold to ayery thinness beat”.

(13) The lyrics of the metaphysical poems are very fantastic and
peculiar. According to A. C. Word, “The metaphysical style is a
combination of two elements, the fantastic form and style and the
incongruous in matter and manner”.

Therefore, so far we discussed the salient features of metaphysical

poetry, it is proved that John Donne is a great metaphysical poet.
Conclusion

John Donne is metaphysical poet. Tis theme are himself and relation to
women and himself in relation to god”.
Bibliography

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