‘A poet of the spiritual journey – John Donne’

Much has been written on the life and work of Dr John Donne. This lecture will not add any

new insight but it provides me with an opportunity to share with you my enthusiasm for the

subject. In his lifetime, he was a poet, a propagandist and a preacher. He was neither an

original thinker nor a systematic theologian. He moved in privileged circles and, in the

course of his life, he experienced periods of poverty as well as periods of wealth. Born a

Roman Catholic, he became a defender of the Anglican Church; he wrote religious as well as

secular poetry, including erotic poetry, and from time to time he endured spells of serious ill

health. For me it is the power of his language, its vocabulary, imagery and structure which

makes him most appealing. He is very human; his honesty is breath-taking, and his ability to

describe his own experiences of life and faith turn a personal reflection into a work of

universal value.

Let me begin by quoting one of his most famous poems from the Divine Poems, ‘Batter my

heart…’

Batter my heart, three-personed 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 usurped town, to another due,
Labour to admit 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 you, 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 enthral me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

This is powerful and evocative poetry. Its quality springs as much from its structure as from

its language and imagery. Donne affirms the doctrine of the Trinity, ‘Batter my heart, three
personed God.’ He uses passionate, even erotic, language: ‘nor ever chaste, except you

ravish me.’ He writes of being ‘captived’ and imprisoned, seeking freedom. The use of

short words and phrases in rapid succession gives us the sense of passion in his faith: ‘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.’ This is Donne’s poetry at its best. It is a

vehicle, a medium, for communicating faith.

Donne believed what many Christians believed in his day. Religiously speaking, he lived

between Rome and Geneva. Donne believed that we are created by love, that we have ruined

ourselves by choice, that we are restored by sacrifice (substitutionary atonement) and that the

destiny of humanity was to share in the life of the Trinity in bliss. Donne said of his

preaching, ‘Our mortality and our immortality….are the two reall Texts and Subjects of all

our Sermons.’ His sermons were listened to by thousands. After the death of Lancelot

Andrewes, Donne was the greatest preacher of his day. One commentator wrote that

Donne’s sermons were ‘the most significant prose ever uttered from an English pulpit, if not

the most magnificent prose ever spoken in our tongue.’ One tribute paid to Donne shortly

after his death was given by Richard Busby, subsequently headmaster of Westminster School:

Mee thinkes I see him in the pulpit standing,

Not eares, nor eyes, but all mens hearts commanding,
Where wee that heard him, to our selves did faine
Golden Chrysostome was alive again;
And never were we weari’d, till we saw
His houre (and but an houre) to end did drawe.

Donne preached for an hour to an hour and a half. He held people spellbound and yet if you

were to look at his sermons now they are not easy to read. Henry Hart Milman, one of

Donne’s nineteenth century successors as Dean of St Paul’s, wrote:

It is difficult for a Dean of our rapid and restless days to imagine…a vast
 congregation in the Cathedral…listening not only with patience but even
with absorbed interest, with unflagging attention, even with delight and
rapture, to these interminable disquisitions, to us teeming with laboured
obscurity, false and misplaced wit, fatiguing antitheses. However set off,
as by all accounts they were, by a most graceful and impressive delivery,
it is astonishing to us that he should hold a London congregation enthralled,
unwearied, unsatiated. Yet there can be no doubt that this was the case.

‘Golden Chrysostome was alive again’ and ‘the most magnificent prose ever spoken in our

tongue’: these are high accolades indeed. I shall return to Dr Donne’s time at St Paul’s

Cathedral in a moment or two but let me sketch out some facts about his life.

John Donne was born in 1572 in Bread Street in the City of London. His father died when he

was four years old. His father had been a very prosperous merchant, a senior member of the

Worshipful Company of Ironmongers. His father’s financial legacy provided the young John

with financial security and a stream of private tutors. In 1584, at the age of twelve, John

matriculated at Oxford. He studied law but his interests were far wider. He was never

called to the bar, but he made many good friends while at Oxford. He failed to proceed to

graduate because, as a Roman Catholic, he was not able to subscribe to the Thirty-Nine

Articles nor to take the Oath of Supremacy. He lived in a golden age of literature. These

were the years of Spenser, Bacon, Marlowe, Shakespeare and Jonson. In a recent

publication, John Moses writes of Donne:

Donne had a great agility with words, and the sensuality – indeed, the blatantly
erotic sexuality – of some of his poetry is one of its abiding hallmarks. He
could be playful. He could be tender. He could be erotic. He could be
promiscuous. He could be cynical. He could be brutal. It is….precisely here –
in ‘the expression of free thoughts and uncensored moods’ – that we find ‘the
glory of his greatest poetry.’

Most of his poems seem to date from the earlier part of his life. As Dean of St Paul’s, Donne

seems to try to distance himself a little from his earlier poetic work. Here are a few lines on

promiscuity. In this verse, he uses the word ‘bands’ which means sexual union:
 How happy were our Syres in ancient times
Who held plurality of loves no crime!
With them it was accounted charity
To stirre up race of all indifferently;
Kindreds were not exempted from the bands:
Which with the Persian still in usage stands.
Women were then no sooner asked then won,
And what they did was honest and well done.

Rupert Brooke saw Donne as ‘the one great lover-poet who was not afraid to acknowledge

that he was composed of body, soul and mind, and one who faithfully recorded all the pitched

battles, alarms, treaties, sieges and fanfares of that extraordinary triangular warfare.’ Donne

understood ‘the appetites, the desires, of the flesh, and yet he was able to affirm the integrity

and the value of the world and to point beyond it.’

At the age of twenty-four, Donne volunteered for military service. In 1596 and 1597, he

served in expeditions to Cadiz and the Azores. On his return, he entered the service of the

Crown and the state. One of his companions on his military tours was the elder son of Sir

Thomas Egerton, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, Master of the Roll and a Privy Counsellor.

Donne went to work as one of Egerton’s secretaries. His legal training will have helped and,

through his work, he met ‘men of influence.’ It was on the strength of his relationship with

the Egerton family that Donne entered Parliament as the Member for Brackley, in

Northamptonshire, in 1601. His rise to power and success was, however, short-lived. His

downfall was a young woman. He met and fell in love with the daughter of Sir Thomas

More. They married secretly that year; she could only have been about sixteen. They were

deeply in love and remained so throughout their marriage. Her father, Sir Thomas, was not

pleased and refused to make any financial settlement and demanded that the marriage be

annulled. It was, as far as the More family was concerned, a scandal. Donne, together with

the officiating minister and witnesses, was arrested and imprisoned for week. The validity of
the marriage was upheld and so began a period of financial hardship, if not poverty. Donne’s

legacy from his own father was nearly exhausted and he was unemployable in the circles in

which he had so recently moved.

His poetry in these lean years took on a new depth. He was, at times, close to despair. He

wrote a treatise on suicide. In 1610, Donne became a propagandist for the Reformed faith

and in favour of the Anglican Church. Donne was, in part, attempting to be noticed by the

Protestant King James. Why did Donne shift from his Roman Catholic upbringing to become

a supporter of the Reformation? Not his own wife and children, but his parents had suffered

persecution in the religious unrest of those earlier years. His mother’s family had endured

imprisonment, exile and execution. Of his family, Donne wrote that he:

derived from such a stocke and race, as, I beleeve, no family (which is
not of far longer extent and greater branches) hath endured and suffered
more in their persons and fortunes, for obeying the Teachers of Romane
Doctrine, than it hath done.

Did Donne move away from the Roman Catholic Church because he was ambitious and, as

such, needed to be in favour with those in power who were Protestant? Some commentators

have said that there are elements of self-preservation and self-seeking in his decision to

forsake the Roman Catholic Church. Did he accept the thinking of the Reformers? Like all

of the first Reformers, he never departed from the Catholic tradition of the faith. The 1610

publication, Pseudo-Martyr and the 1611 publication Ignatius His Conclave established

Donne as ‘a serious controversialist.’ In Ignatius His Conclave, Donne portrays the scene in

hell in which Copernicus, Paracelsus, Machiavelli and Columbus come for admission. Their

claims to admittance are refuted by Ignatius, who is seated near the Devil’s Chair. Ignatius

wants to reserve all places in hell for the Society of Jesus, the Jesuits. The Devil’s patience

wears out and tells Ignatius that he and the Jesuits should withdraw to the moon and establish

a new empire there. The story ends with a riot in hell as Ignatius of Loyola attempts to
dispossess Pope Boniface of his seat and place. The point of this propaganda is that the

greatest thinkers in astronomy, philosophy, in political theory and in all knowledge of this

world are those who are thought ideal candidates by the Roman Church for admission to hell.

The Jesuits are those who, particularly in England and France, were associated with a policy

of violence against kings who embraced the Reformed religion and renounced the jurisdiction

of the papacy. Donne was ordained a deacon and priest in 1615. He was immediately

appointed as a Chaplain in Ordinary to the King and the University of Cambridge conferred

on him the degree of Doctor of Divinity. Donne steered a middle course between the

traditions of Rome and Geneva. He wrote:

the Church of God, is not so beyond sea, as that we must needs seek it
there either in a painted Church, on the one side, or in a naked Church,
on the other; a Church in a dropsie, overflowne with Ceremonies, or a
Church in a Consumption, for want of such Ceremonies, as the
primitive Church found usefull, and beneficiall, for the advancing of the
glory of God, and the devotion, of the Congregation.

He was dismissive of the universal and exclusive claims of the Church of Rome. He wrote:

the uncharitableness of the Church of Rome toward us all, is not a Torrent,

nor is it a Sea, but a general flood, an universall deluge, that swallowes all
the world….and will not allowe a possibiltie of Salvation to the whole Arke,
the whole Christian Church, but to one Cabin in that Arke, the Church of
Rome; and then denie us this affirme; not because wee affirme any thing,
that they denie, but because wee denie somethings, which they in their
afternoone are come to affirme.

His most vehement and abrasive expressions of disgust are reserved for the papacy. The

pope is ‘the man of sin at Rome, that pretends to be Christ.’ Donne accepts the title for the

pope of ‘AntiChrist.’

From an early age, Donne read widely. Philosophical and literary influences on Donne

included the Greek authors whom he read in Latin translation – Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus,

Plutarch; the Latin authors – Virgil, Horace, Juvenal, Martial and Seneca; French, Spanish
and Italian writers, together with the biblical, doctrinal and devotional writings of the Early

Church Fathers, Ambrose, Tertullian and Augustine, and theologians of his period, Luther and

Calvin. He was criticised by those who preferred the simplicity of a more Puritan-style

sermon. John Moses writes of Donne’s sermons:

There is a far larger vocabulary in his sermons than in his poetry. There is
the use of alliteration, of parallel structures, of antithesis. There is the
repetition of key words from clause to clause, from sentence to sentence,
enabling them to ‘take fire from each other.’ There is metaphor and paradox
and epigram. There is hyperbole. There is movement, rhythm, music. And
there is passion. ‘Ideas, theories, doctrines, quotations, allusions, imagery, are
all devoted to this end, they are inherent, all caught up in the intensity of the
emotion. The repetition and the alliteration, the internal resonances and
rhythms, all drive inwards to its core.

Scripture, tradition and reason work together to shape his preaching. He states his beliefs

strongly. ‘When I believe God in Christ, dead, and risen…according to the Scriptures,’ he

preached, ‘I have nothing else to beleeve.’ Donne is obsessed with death and the experience

of dying. He is in no doubt about the Christian hope and the torments of damnation. Of hell

he preached:

…but when we shall have given to those words, by which hell is expressed
in the Scriptures, the heaviest significations, that either the nature of those
words can admit, or as they are types and representations of hell, as fire, and
brimstone, and weeping, and gnashing, and darkness, and the worme…when
all is done, the hell of hels, the torment of torments is the everlasting absence
of God, and the everlasting impossibility of returning to his presence.

Of this life, he wrote:

Our life is a warfare, our whole life; it is not onely with lusts in our youth,
and ambitions in our middle yeares, and indevotions in our age, but with
agonies in our body and tentations in our spirit upon our death-bed, that
we are to fight.

Mortality and immortality are the two pillars of his preaching. Death is uppermost on his

mind. At times he seems fearful of it, but he is able to affirm his faith also. His wife Ann

died in August 1617. She died in the thirty-third year of her life while giving birth to a
stillborn child. There were twelve known pregnancies during their sixteen years of marriage:

two children were stillborn, three died in infancy. Her death served to deepen Donne’s

awareness of God. Of Death and faith he wrote:

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;

Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,

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.

Donne died of cancer on 31st March 1631 at the age of 59. He preached his final sermon one

month earlier before the Court at Whitehall. His text was from Psalm 68, ‘And unto God the

Lord are the issues of Death.’ In it he said this:

But whether the gate of my prison be opened with an oyld key (by a gentle
and preparing sicknes) or the gate be hewen downe by a violent death, or the
gate bee burnt downe by a raging and frantique feaver, a gate into heaven I
shall have, for from the Lord is the cause of my life and with God the Lord
are the issues of death.

Everyone knew that Donne was dying. His final words in his sermon were words of trust and

faith:

There wee leave you in that blessed dependancy to hang upon him that hangs
upon the Crosse, there bath in his teares, there suck at his woundes and lye
downe in peace in his grave, til hee vouchsafe you a resurrection, and an
ascension into that Kingdome, which hee hath purchas’d for you, with the
inestimable price of his incorruptible blood.

Donne was installed as Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral in 1621. He held the post for ten years.

He was not a reforming dean. He made no attempt to change practices and care of the fabric

and fund-raising he largely ignored. The Cathedral was said to be in a ruinous condition.

After Donne’s death, the King’s Commission into the state of the Cathedral reported that the

building was now ‘a disgrace to our country, and the cite, and a common imputacon and
scandall laid upon our Religion…it being growen into extreme decay, and like shortly to fall,

if it be not prevented.’ The church was a place full of noise, where bargains, meetings,

brawlings, conspiracies and payments of money were regularly made. Weekly services were

often disturbed by noise from other activities. Donne had other parishes to visit and care for

and would, in the summer, do just that. From the relative poverty of his days before

Ordination, as Dean of St Paul’s, Donne became very wealthy. He was paid £2000 per year,

which is approximately £190,000 in today’s terms.

The Devotions is amongst Donne’s greatest works. They were written during a period of

serious illness in 1623. He believed that he was going to die. The book consists of twenty

three sections, each section consisting of Meditation, Expostulation and Prayer. He wrote

‘with clarity and with great vividness concerning the onset of illness, the impotence of the

human as the fever takes hold, and the ever-present fear of death.’ Donne wrote:

This minute I was well, and am ill, this minute I am surpris’d with a sodaine
change, and alteration to worse, and can impute it to no cause, nor call it by
name.

In the twinkling of an eye, I can scarse see, instantly the tast is insipid, and
fatuous; instantly the appetite is dull and desirelesse; instantly the knees
are sinking and strengthlesse; and in an instant, sleepe, which is the picture,
the copie of death, is taken away, that the Originall, Death it selfe may succeed.

At the height of his suffering, recorded in the seventeeth Devotion, Donne hears a bell ‘tolling

softly for another’ and turns this coincidental external event into an unforgettable emblem of

human transience:

No Man is an Iland, intire of it self; every man is a peece of the Continent,

A part of the maine; if a Clod be washed away by the Sea, Europe is the
lesse….Any Mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde;
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.
Death loomed large upon his mind and consciousness. Our connectedness as human beings

is also reflected in his thought. In the Devotions we also find Donne’s incomparable

statements of the catholicity of the Church and of the interdependence of all people. Donne

wrote:

The Church is Catholic, universall, so are all her Actions; All that she does,
belongs to all. When she baptises a child, that action concerns mee; for that
child is thereby connected to that Head which is my Head too, and engraffed
into that body, wherof Iam a member. And when she buries a Man, that action
concernes me; All mankinde is of one Author, and is one volume; when one Man
dies, one Chapter is not torne out of the booke, but translated into a better
language…but God’s hand is in every translation; and his hand shall bind up all
our scattered leaves againe, for that Librarie where every booke shall lie open to
one another.

I want to draw to a close. One can lecture an entire course on his life, thought and work. A

Hymn to God the Father is a favourite poem of mine. There is an intentional play on his own

name, ‘When thou hast done, thou hast not done…’:

Wilt thou forgive that sin where I begun,

Which was my sin, though it were done before?
Wilt thou forgive that sin, through which I run,
And do run still: though still I do deplore?
When thou hast done, thou hast not done,
For, I have more.

Wilt thou forgive that sin which I have won

Others to sin? and, made my sin their door?
Wilt thou forgive that sin which I did shun
A year, or two: but wallowed in, a score?
When thou hast done, thou hast not done,
For I have more.

I have a sin of fear, that when I have spun

My last thread, I shall perish on the shore;
But swear by thy self, that at my death thy son
Shall shine as he shines now, and heretofore;
And, having done that, thou hast done,
I fear no more.

The metaphysical poets, of which Donne was one, are renowned for the use of language,

happily choosing and mixing sacred and secular concepts and tones. Donne does that, for
example, which his use of erotic imagery in his devotional poems. Metaphysical poets

compress language and ideas. Jonson said, ‘The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by

violence together.’ We meet that in Donne and metaphysical poets acknowledge the

impossibility of expressing in word and image the One we call God. Writing of every beauty

and field of human knowledge and of God, Spenser wrote, ‘Though all their beauties join'd

together were; How then can mortal tongue hope to express the image of such endless

perfectness?’ Donne understood the essential mystery and inexpressibility of God through

human concepts and speech. Theologically, he was a man of his time. Linguistically, his

work stands for all time.

Bibliography

The Cambridge Companion to John Donne

Donne, The Complete English Poems
Moses, John One Equall Light
Donne, Devotions