SEL 40, 1 (Winter

Douglas Trevor2000) 81
81
ISSN 0039-3657

John Donne and Scholarly

Melancholy

DOUGLAS TREVOR

Donne is in a sense a psychologist.

—T. S. Eliot

Throughout his life, John Donne’s prose and poetry are filled with
references to, as well as accounts of, his self-understanding as a melancholic.1
If we take his self-professed depressive tendencies as seriously as his
devotional meditations, we find that the two are interlinked: Donne often
describes ecstatic religious experience with the same metaphors of earthly
instability and material metamorphoses he uses to catalogue his melancholic,
self-destructive inclinations. Like Søren Kierkegaard, who will praise Christian
belief in part because it entails great suffering, Donne is inclined to equate
unhappiness with spiritual redemption.
Modern thinkers interested in depression have often commented on
the circular nature of religious despair. According to Julia Kristeva, “the
implicitness of love and consequently of reconciliation and forgiveness
completely transforms the scope of Christian initiation by giving it an aura
of glory and unwavering hope for those who believe. Christian faith appears
then as an antidote to hiatus and depression, along with hiatus and depression
and starting from them.”2 Donne uncovers a similar pattern in Holy Sonnet
III (“O might those sighes and teares returne againe”):

To (poore) me is allow’d
No ease; for, long, yet vehement griefe hath beene
Th’effect and cause, the punishment and sinne.3

Douglas Trevor is assistant professor of English at the University of Iowa. He is working

on a book entitled The Reinvention of Sadness: Writing Learned Selves in Early Modern
England and is co-editor (with Carla Mazzio) of the forthcoming Historicism, Psychoanalysis,
and Early Modern Culture (Routledge).
82 Donne and Melancholy

It is perhaps not surprising to see Kristeva diagnose religious despair as a

form of narcissistic depression; and we might well be tempted to charac-
terize Donne’s melancholy in such a way, particularly if we are willing to
read the emotions expressed in Holy Sonnet III as self-disclosure on the
part of its author. Reading Donne as a “narcissistic depress[ive]” would
mean emphasizing the degree to which his melancholy seems to be per-
petually re-invigorated, principally by his own self-involvement rather than
by bereavement over lost objects. Depressives, Kristeva claims, “do not
consider themselves wronged but afflicted with a fundamental flaw, a con-
genital deficiency . . . For such narcissistic depressed persons, sadness is
really the sole object.”4
The recourse to modern psychoanalytic categories to come to terms
with Donne’s melancholy is not necessary, however; early modern English
writers, notably Robert Burton and—before him—Timothy Bright, provide
us with ample schemata and examples of the causes and symptoms of
depression as it was understood in the period.5 Moreover, Donne complicates
the relationship he posits between melancholy and religious belief,
complicates it in such a way as to transcend Kristeva’s notion of what it
means to be narcissistically depressed. While he is mindful that his inordinate
self-interest sometimes provokes and contributes to his dejection, sadness
is not Donne’s “sole object.” He is occupied by other matters, other concerns,
even other worries: spiritual, professional, and ecclesiastical. In this piece,
I argue that Donne’s scholarly melancholy—grief stimulated specifically
by learned endeavor—forms an integral part of his religious melancholy.
Donne’s self-perceived, melancholic disposition thus manifests itself both
in his approach to learning as well as in his articulations of his experiences
as a Christian. Bereavement, as we have already seen, is, at times, desired
in the devotional realm. Donne prays at the beginning of Holy Sonnet III:

O might those sighes and teares returne againe

Into my breast and eyes, which I have spent,
That I might in this holy discontent
Mourne with some fruit.
(lines 1–4)

As John Calvin himself admits, despair associated with Christian doubt—

in the context of Reformation theology, whether or not one could count
oneself amongst the elect—is hard to avoid: “One of Satan’s deadly weap-
ons is to attack believers with doubts about whether they are among the
elect, and then incite them to look for answers in the wrong way . . . There
Douglas Trevor 83

is hardly anyone who does not think sometimes, ‘If my salvation comes
only from God’s election, what proof have I of that election?’ When this
thought dominates an individual, he will be permanently miserable, in ter-
rible torment or mental confusion.”6 For the male scholar in the early mod-
ern period, as Juliana Schiesari has shown, melancholy “appears as a privi-
leged but also perilous condition,” potentially designating its sufferer as a
genius while also indicating that he is easily subject to distraction, even
madness.7 Although depression, for devout and studious souls alike,
prompts concern, it can also validate the claims advanced by its sufferer—
claims of intellectual as well as spiritual worth.
As we will see in Holy Sonnet XIX (“Oh, to vex me, contraryes meet in
one”), Donne often turns to his volatile humoral makeup to explain his
religious devotion (p. 447). At the same time, however, by insisting so
vehemently on an intimate, even inseparable, relationship between the
learned and the devout life—by claiming, as he does in his Essayes in
Divinity, that “Reason is our Sword, Faith our Target”8—Donne knowingly
exacerbates his humoral imbalance, for scholarly pursuits in particular
were thought in the seventeenth century to invite despondency and
depression. 9 Donne not only recognizes that melancholy lurks behind—
and in a sense authenticates—his thirst for knowledge, he transforms what
Jaques, in As You Like It, calls “a melancholy of mine own” into a subject
for intellectual inquiry, writing Biathanatos, a tract that defends the right
to self-slaughter.10 Donne’s interest in dark themes—decay, misery, guilt,
loneliness—is not limitable to a certain set of texts or to a given period in
his life, although certainly his years at Mitcham, roughly from 1607 to 1609,
were especially fraught with professional uncertainty and personal dissat-
isfaction.11 Rather, as John Carey has argued, Donne’s “grasp of the world
did not basically change” during his life, although of course his opinions
and social attitudes evolved.12 As a poet, controversialist, and preacher, his
most persistent thoughts were often his most morose and despairing ones.
Donne’s obsession with decay, sickness, and degeneration is not limited
to his Anniversaries, although in them we see a particularly vivid assessment
of the world as “rotten at the hart,” likened to “a Hectique fever [that] hath
got hold / Of the whole substance, not to be contrould” (First, pp. 324–71,
lines 242, 243–4). Donne’s tendency to produce such graphic representations
of material transformations—in The First Anniversarie not only the world
but mankind as well “decayes,” while the whole universe “[i]s crumbled
out againe” (lines 143, 212)—has been examined most thoroughly by
Carey.13 Rather than read these descriptions symptomatically, however,
Carey suggests that Donne viewed “change” with equanimity, as “an ally.”14
84 Donne and Melancholy

Related to Donne’s probing, at times disturbing, examinations of metamorphoses

and loss is his skepticism, which compels him to press his investigations
and analyses further and further. Hamlet, perhaps the exemplary embodiment
of the early modern fusion of melancholy and skepticism, shares Donne’s
curiosity as well as his fascination with mutability; indeed the prince’s tracing
of Alexander’s dust to the stop of a beer barrel calls to mind, in abbreviated
form, Donne’s Metempsychosis, in which the reader is led through human
history by following the soul of the forbidden fruit first plucked by Eve.15
Particularly attuned to Donne’s inexhaustibly intellectual nature, although
unfortunately distanced from any consideration of his melancholy, have
been those critical readings that emphasize his skeptical predilections.
Indeed, it is tempting to see in what Joshua Scodel describes as Donne’s
“skeptical mean between the extremes of positive and negative dogmatism”
not merely the skeptic’s desire to find a middle ground but the
melancholic’s desire to attain humoral stability.16 Donne’s emphasis on the
via media, in other words, carries with it a psychological corollary: his
desire for moderation in ecclesiastical affairs mirrors the melancholic’s
yearning for emotional balance and mental tranquillity. The evidence provided
by his poetry, devotional prose, letters, and sermons reveals how Donne—
throughout his life—read his body, faith, and the world-at-large humorally.
Scholars have increasingly sensed the degree to which Donne’s
self-analyses resist an exclusively Christian template of interpretation,
particularly in relation to his divine poems. John Stachniewski, for example,
regretted “[t]he reluctance of literary critics to face the [Holy] [S]onnets
squarely as productions of the early seventeenth century by a self-confessed
melancholic,” while—without elaborating—David Norbrook has identified
a “manic-depressive element” in Donne’s writings. 17 Before either
Stachniewski or Norbrook, Donald Ramsay Roberts argued that “[t]he
persistence, in one form or another, of the idea of a death instinct in
Donne’s intellectual life may be attributed to the fact . . . that a wish for death
was a permanent and constant element in his psychic life” and that this wish
reveals “something more than appropriate Christian resignation.”18 Donne
himself resists a strictly religious understanding of his melancholy by continually
testifying to the potentially strained—if always eventually reconcilable—
relationship between the learned and the devout life. Indeed, it is through
his studies that Donne understands and conceptualizes his devotion. He
comes to read himself as he does his books, with insight, persistence, and
considerable anguish—anguish that he sees saturating the world around
him, and on which he continually draws regardless of the genre in which
he writes.
Douglas Trevor 85

When Donne, in the Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, imagines

himself in a losing duel with death, he considers for a moment one possible
cause of his illness: “But what have I done, either to breed, or to breath
these vapors? They tell me it is my Melancholy: Did I infuse, did I drinke in
Melancholly into my selfe? It is my thoughtfulnesse; was I not made to
thinke? It is my study; doth not my Calling call for that? I have don nothing,
wilfully, perversly toward it, yet must suffer in it, die by it.”19 As Donne
describes it, his melancholy is caused by thinking and studying, the quint-
essential activities of the scholar. But, to what extent is Donne responsible
for these inclinations, these tendencies that seem to lead inevitably to sick-
ness? Initially he proposes two alternatives: the vapors that constitute his
melancholy are either bred by his humors or absorbed—breathed in—by
his lungs. By the end of this passage, however, Donne chooses neither sce-
nario, deciding instead to absolve himself of all responsibility, in the pro-
cess punning on his name (“I have don nothing”), and presenting himself
as an acted-upon, pitiable subject of adversity. Donne’s melancholy, fig-
ured as the consequence of scholarly inclinations he can neither control
nor resist, is also revealed to be ineluctably interwoven with his responsi-
bilities as a preacher. Scrupulously working through counterarguments, in
the process demonstrating the very intellectual rapaciousness he laments,
Donne makes it clear that even if one were to attribute his illness to the
studies that he himself has undertaken, these studies are in fact necessi-
tated by his calling, by that profession that God has selected for him. At
other times, as in Holy Sonnet VIII (“If faithful soules be alike glorifi’d”),
Donne reads his melancholy in less mediated terms, as a kind of despair
that God not only imparts but also lifts away: “Then turne / O pensive soule,
to God, for he knowes best / Thy true griefe, for he put it in my breast” (p.
439, lines 12–4).20 Judging from the above passage from the Devotions,
however, scholarly melancholy forms an integral part of this “true griefe,”
authenticating the sincerity of Donne’s spiritual convictions while caus-
ing him pain, even—potentially—killing him.
The close connections Donne draws between learning and faith are
not, of course, unproblematic in the early seventeenth century. Faced with
the threat of ill-health that was so often thought to accompany scholarly
endeavor, George Herbert (according to Izaak Walton) frequently contemplated
turning his back entirely on the activities and environs that made up the
male scholar’s life at Cambridge: “I may not omit to tell, that he [Herbert]
had often designed to leave the university and decline all study, which he
thought did impair his health; for he had a body apt to a consumption, and
to fevers, and other infirmities which he judged were increased by his studies;
86 Donne and Melancholy

for he would often say, ‘He had too thoughtful a wit: a wit, like a penknife
in too narrow a sheath, too sharp for his body.’”21 In response to Donne’s
question in “Meditation 12” of the Devotions, “It is my study; doth not my
Calling call for that?”22 Herbert answers no. In clear contrast to Donne, who
proclaims no control whatsoever over his scholarly melancholy, Herbert
recognizes the dangers of learning and finally withdraws from such pursuits
when they threaten to overwhelm him.23
Donne argues for the spiritually edifying effects of learning in his
Essayes in Divinity where, in contrast to the opinions offered by Herbert
in A Priest to the Temple—“Curiosity in prying into high speculative and
unprofitable questions, is another great stumbling block to the holinesse
of Scholars”—he proposes that the work of scholars serves God well: “So
he [God] is pleased that his word should endure and undergo the opinion
of contradiction, or other infirmities, in the eyes of Pride (the Author of
Heresie and Schism) that after all such dissections, & cribrations, and
examinings of Hereticall adventures upon it, might return from the furnace
more refin’d, and gain luster and clearness by this vexation.”24 While aware
of the potential pitfalls awaiting those who neglect their faith in pursuit of
learning, Donne usually qualifies his censure of overzealous “dissections,
& cribrations,” or insists that “Humility, and Studiousnesse . . . are so near
of kin, that they are both agreed to be limbes and members of one vertue,
Temperance.”25 In a sermon preached on Christmas Day in 1621, Donne
goes further, asserting that “Knowledge cannot save us, but we cannot be
saved without Knowledge; Faith is not on this side [of] Knowledge, but
beyond it; we must necessarily come to Knowledge first, though we must
not stay at it, when we are come thither.”26 Learning, then, can purify the
Christian believer, or—more relevant to Donne’s own circumstances—
even help to protect the preacher from melancholy: “To be a good Divine,
requires humane knowledge; and so does it of all the Mysteries of Divinity
too; because, as there are Devils that will not be cast out but by Fasting and
Prayer, so there are humours that undervalue men, that lacke these helps.”27
Donne’s conception of life, indeed his passage through life, is deeply
rooted in learning. As Catherine Creswell argues in reading his Holy Son-
nets, “Donne’s rejection of truth as vision, like his rejection of individual
revelation, is an insistence upon interpretation over immanent seeing, often
thematized as a move toward ‘hearing’ the Word or turning to the ‘voyce.’”28
In important ways, however, to live—for Donne—is not only to study and
write but also, in doing so, to suffer. Like Burton, Donne attaches unhappiness
to scholarly pursuits at the same time that he identifies such pursuits as the
Douglas Trevor 87

focal point of his own existence, thereby knowingly risking the onset of
melancholy.29 He also frequently equates his scholarly activity with real
imprisonment, this in spite of the fact that he suffered such detention in
the Fleet following his secret marriage to Ann More. For instance, in a 1625
letter—possibly to Sir Thomas Roe—Donne describes a productive, if stifling,
period of time: “I have spent this Summer in my close Emprisonment. I
have reviewed as many of my Sermons, as I had kept any notes of; and I
have written out, a great many, and hope to do more. I ame allready come
to the number of 80.”30
As books so often occupy Donne’s energies, parts of the scholarly
book as well figure prominently in his description of mortal life: “All this
life is but a Preface, or but an Index and Repertory to the book of life; There,
at that book beginnes thy Study; To grow perfect in that book, to be dayly
conversant in that book, to find what be the marks of them, whose names
are written in that book, and to finde those marks, ingenuously, and in a
rectified conscience, in thy selfe . . . this is to goe forth, and see thy self,
beyond thy self, to see what thou shalt be in the next world.”31 To live is, for
Donne, to read oneself and by reading to begin the process of improving,
or rectifying, one’s conscience. By imagining earth-bound life as a preface
or an index, Donne converts individual being into bound pages, pages that
are carefully, even scrupulously, studied in a quintessentially erudite fashion.
Such an emphasis on the material book causes Donne to privilege, in the
Essayes in Divinity, written praise of God over spoken prayers.32 Books
not only come to symbolize existence for Donne, they also provide him
with an academic audience in times of personal isolation: “I shall be content
that Okes and Beeches be my schollers, and witnesses of my solitary
Meditations,” he claims halfway through his Essayes, implying that when
introspection is recorded and circulated it does not remain “solitary” for long.33
In “Satyre I,” probably composed while Donne was a student at
Lincoln’s Inn (1592–95), he depicts a scholar’s abandonment of his books,
but does so less approvingly than Walton had in recounting Herbert’s de-
parture from university life. Arthur Marotti reads “Satyre I”—correctly, I
think—as reflecting “the poet’s splitting of himself . . . into the scholar-moralist
and the inconstant fool addicted to the fashions of Court and City.”34 The
opening lines bear witness to the speaker’s failed attempt at dismissing his
visitor, but they also cast this visitor as a specter of humoral intemperance,
leaving the speaker to choose between his company and the familiar, dun-
geon-like quality of a Donne study:
88 Donne and Melancholy

Away thou fondling motley humorist,

Leave mee, and in this standing woodden chest,
Consorted with these few bookes, let me lye
In prison, and here be coffin’d, when I dye;
(pp. 214–8, lines 1–4)

Although it resembles a prison or a tomb, this study proves to be more like

a womb: the speaker finds within its walls the “constant company” of
divines, philosophers, statesmen, chroniclers, and poets who nurture his
intellect (line 11). To imagine his death in such surroundings is for the
speaker to imagine himself nestled, perhaps even suffocated, under the
pages of his favorite authors, or even under the volumes of notes written
in his own hand. This is a far cry from being left “in the middle street,” the
speaker’s other, more agoraphobic fear that—fittingly—comes true when
he ventures out of his chambers (line 15).
Torn between social frivolity and book learning, Donne suggests that
the melancholy that wraps him, like Jaques, “in a most humorous sadness,”
is not merely the melancholy of a scholar.35 As much as he attempts to satisfy
the thirst of his mind, and—perhaps more importantly—write of such
attempts, Donne is also subject to distractions: distractions which, if “Satyre
I” can be taken as evidence, prompt regret when they are fulfilled. In a letter
he writes to his friend Henry Goodyer in 1622, he welcomes the passing of
years and gentling of his humors, praising his present melancholic bouts
in comparison to those he once suffered: “Every distemper of the body
now, is complicated with the spleen, and when we were young men we
scarce ever heard of the spleen. In our declinations now, every accident is
accompanied with heavy clouds of melancholy; and in our youth we never
admitted any. It is the spleen of the minde, and we are affected with vapors
from thence; yet truly, even this sadnesse that overtakes us, and this
yeelding to the sadnesse, is not so vehement a poison (though it be no
Physick neither) as those false waies, in which we sought our comforts in
our looser daies.”36 Eager here and elsewhere to put distance between his
“looser,” pre-ordination days and those that follow, Donne blames his current
distempers on his spleen, the organ in which medical theory of the day
would have placed the production of the melancholic humor black bile.37
Recognizing the true source for such “heavy clouds,” rather than following
the “false waies” of his youth, provides Donne with comfort, in part
because with the identification of “true” symptoms his mind, and body,
are spared the harmful effects of misguided rumination.
Douglas Trevor 89

Certainly, the “false waies” with which Donne associates his prior “poison”
remind us of the speaker’s wayward sallies into the streets of London in
“Satyre I.” Nonetheless, letters written before Donne’s ordination indicate
that his lack of clerical credentials also perturbs him, suggesting perhaps
that he might have found a career as a preacher attractive in 1615 in part
because it meant an increase in his stature as a scholar, and thus a possible
diminution of the severity of his melancholic bouts. Writing to Goodyer in
1608, Donne expresses concern over being dismissed as a self-interested
layman, even when the writings he has in mind are in verse rather than
prose: “I have met two Letanies in Latin verse, which gave me not the reason
of my meditations, for in good faith I thought not upon them then, but they
give me a defence, if any man; to a Lay man, and a private, impute it as a
fault, to take such divine and publique names, to his own little thoughts.”38
Donne’s comments regarding his poem “The Litanie” imply that he views
his poetic productions as he does his scholarly projects. Both require
research, if not for ideas, then for “defence” from critics. Keenly aware of
the need to lend weight and legitimacy to his “little thoughts,” Donne at
once seeks out precedents for the claims he is making, as any budding
controversialist must, while at the same time attempting to preserve his
ingenuity as a poet, assuring Goodyer that he in no way had the Latin litanies
in mind when he wrote his own.
If Donne’s letter calls attention to the commonality of scholarly and
poetic enterprises, “The Litanie” itself repeatedly attests to its author’s
awareness—more insisted upon here than in his Essayes—of the dangers
learning can pose to religious belief. Indeed, the most persistent petitions
in the poem dwell upon the speaker’s fear that he will pursue knowledge
too zealously, thereby forgetting more important matters: “Let not my
minde be blinder by more light / Nor Faith by Reason added, lose her sight”
(pp. 456–67, lines 62–3). Excessive attention to writing poetry also prompts
earnest pleas; regarding the prophets, the speaker asks his Lord “That I by
them excuse not my excesse / In seeking secrets, or Poëtiquenesse” (lines
71–2). In stanza thirteen of “The Litanie,” entitled “The Doctors,” Donne
strikes another cautionary note, asking that what the Church Fathers

have misdone
Or mis-said, wee to that may not adhere,
Their zeale may be our sinne. Lord let us runne
Meane waies, and call them stars, but not the Sunne.
(lines 114–7)
90 Donne and Melancholy

Such temperance with regard to learning would have surprised few readers
in Jacobean England, accustomed as they were to arguments that pointed
out the perils awaiting those who pursued knowledge immoderately,
arguments often put forth by learned men (“How well he’s read,” King
Ferdinand remarks of Berowne in Love’s Labour’s Lost, “to reason against
reading!”).39 By the end of “The Litanie,” however, Donne’s wary attitude
toward such intellectual and aesthetic pursuits is qualified, while his own
ability to moderate his passion is openly doubted. The penultimate petition
of the poem, followed only by a final prayer for salvation, finds the speaker
asking God to moderate his dangerous desire for knowledge while at the
same time to refrain from vanquishing it entirely:

That learning, thine Ambassador,

From thine allegeance wee never tempt,
That beauty, paradises flower
For physicke made, from poyson be exempt,
That wit, borne apt, high good to doe,
By dwelling lazily
On Natures nothing, be not nothing too,
That our affections kill us not, nor dye,
Heare us, weake ecchoes, O thou eare, and cry.
(lines 235–43)

Equated here with “affections”—with feelings or emotions that defy

governance, or emanate from an abnormal bodily state—the yearning to
know is recognized as a potential poison, and yet the speaker pleads for it
nonetheless to remain in his system.40 He wants in psychological terms
what the skeptic desires intellectually: to hold a position between extremes.
Donne’s defense of “The Litanie” as having been written in “good faith”
mirrors his insistence that Biathanatos was composed out of “[p]iety,” and
indeed both works are thought to have been written while Donne lived at
Mitcham.41 Each composition, although in a different genre, attests to
Donne’s scholarly blending of intellectual, religious, and melancholic
inclinations. While Donne denies in Biathanatos that his study of self-
slaughter is blasphemous, his decision to keep the book in manuscript form
suggests fear on his part that too wide a readership might cause the work
to be accused of injecting “poyson” into the flower of learning. Donne
realizes, in other words, that his studious inclinations flirt with danger—at
the very least in the form of public censure, at the most, spiritual corruption—
and yet he refuses to forswear such predilections, claiming either that they
Douglas Trevor 91

are a part of his nature, as in “The Litanie,” or that they deserve scripted
preservation, as with Biathanatos. In the latter case, textual abeyance
represents Donne’s familiar yearning for the via media, here between two
extremes described in the 1619 letter to Sir Robert Carre as “the [printing]
Presse, and the Fire.”42
Contrary to what Donne claims in his 1622 letter to Goodyer, “Satyre
III” indicates that the younger Donne is well aware of the spleen, for it figures
prominently in the opening of the poem: “Kinde pitty chokes my spleene;
brave scorn forbids / Those teares to issue which swell my eye-lids”
(pp. 224–9, lines 1–2). Unsatisfied by his own display of Christian belief,
particularly when it is contrasted with the “blinde Philosophers” of past
ages, “whose merit / Of strict life may be imputed faith,” the speaker
resolves to “Seeke true religion” (lines 12–3, 43):

To will, implyes delay, therefore now doe.

Hard deeds, the bodies paines; hard knowledge too
The mindes indeavours reach, and mysteries
Are like the Sunne, dazzling, yet plaine to all eyes.
(lines 85–8)

Commenting on these lines, Richard Strier has argued that “[t]he context,
after all, is not that of the intellectual life in general but of the religious life
in particular.”43 But Donne, I would suggest, does not so neatly distinguish
between the two. Rather, for him, as we have already seen in his Christmas
Day, 1621 sermon, “we must necessarily come to Knowledge first, though
we must not stay at it, when we are come thither.”44 For the speaker in “Satyre
III,” to commit himself to “true religion” means recommitting himself to his
studies. As J. B. Leishman wrote, “this saving truth is, in a sense, factual rather
than doctrinal, and to be attained, not in some beatific vision, but as the
result of a long and laborious process of historical, or semi-historical,
research.”45 Or, as Donne puts it,

though truth and falshood bee

Neare twins, yet truth a little elder is;
Be busie to seeke her, beleeve mee this,
Hee’s not of none, nor worst, that seekes the best.
(lines 72–5)

At the very least, it appears, seeking truth can do no harm, and yet distin-
guishing the “best” of these pursuits from the “worst” vexes Donne long
after he has finished “Satyre III.”
92 Donne and Melancholy

Donne’s religious belief depends upon, and is articulated through, his

own search for “hard knowledge.” In “Satyre III,” the connection between
this search and those “mysteries . . . plaine to all eyes” is unclear, as Strier
acknowledges (lines 87–8).46 But this ambiguity, I would argue, reflects the
intimate relationship Donne maintains between study and devotion; the
latter, while strengthened by the former, is not dependent upon it. The
nature of devotion is a mystery, and yet—paradoxically—it is through the
mind’s endeavors that faith can be made “plaine to all eyes.” While undecided
about the nature of “true religion,” Donne is certain that it is to be
approached through study. And yet, recalling the descriptions of his study
in “Satyre I” and elsewhere, he frequently describes the place in which such
learning occurs as a depressing one, linking scholarly activity with suffering
and isolation, just as he describes, as in the beginning of La Corona, his
verse as a product of his “low devout melancholie” (pp. 429–30, line 2).
Although Donne periodically releases himself from his scholarly impris-
onment, its hold on him remains steady over time. This is in spite of,
indeed because of, the morbid connotations the study carries for Donne,
for it is in his descriptions of the scholar’s place of work that Donne’s fascination
with death is grounded. His learned endeavors, in other words, are endeavors
rooted in a desire if not necessarily to die then to experience the place of
death, a place accessed through the study.
Nowhere is such a conflation between the place of burial and learning
more visible than in a 1608 letter to Goodyer in which Donne reveals that
his study, quite literally, sits atop a crypt: “I have occasion to sit late some
nights in my study, (which your books make a pretty library) and now I
finde that that room hath a wholesome emblematique use: for having under
it a vault, I make that promise me, that I shall die reading, since my book
and a grave are so near.”47 Similarly, in the dedicatory letter to Sir Edward
Herbert that graces the inside cover of the Bodleian Manuscript of
Biathanatos, Donne projects his own melancholy onto the text, assuring
his friend that the book will not take its own life because it is pleased with
its argument: “I make account that thys Booke hath inough perform’d yt
wch yt undertooke, both by Argument and Example. Itt shall therfore the
lesse neede to bee yttselfe another Example of ye Doctrine. Itt shall not
therefore kyll yttselfe; that ys, not bury itselfe.”48 The insinuation here is
that to “kyll” is the same as to “bury,” but if we recall Donne’s already envisioned,
passive modes of expiration—being “coffin’d” in “Satyre I,” noting the proximity
of a grave to his study in the letter to Goodyer—we realize that Donne is
again thinking as much about being placed in the earth as he is of taking
his own life. Suicide remains a part of the equation, but not the focal point
Douglas Trevor 93

of Donne’s attention. This attitude changes somewhat in the closing lines

of the letter to Herbert, where self-slaughter becomes the characteristic
performance of men who spend their lives reading and writing: “I know
yor Loue to mee wyll make in my fauor, and dischardge, yow may adde
thys, that though thys Doctrine [defending self-slaughter] hath not beene
tought nor defended by writers, yet they, most of any sorte of Men in the
world, haue practisd ytt.”49 For Donne, suicide becomes a possible product,
and end, of the learned life, one frequently undertaken and thus uniquely
understood by scholars, indeed even conceptualized in scholarly terms,
for when Donne describes, in the Devotions, the transition from the earthly
to the celestial realm he does so by drawing on an extended analogy with
the material book.50
Upon taking holy orders, Donne gives the impression—as we have
already seen—that his melancholic humor changes. He also indicates, in
his 1619 letter to Carre, that his prior interest in justifying self-slaughter fades
as he devotes himself to writing sermons. Biathanatos, Donne writes to
Carre, is a “Book written by Jack Donne, and not by D. Donne.”51 Here the
scholarly self is ostensibly split, just as the dutiful student is distinguished
from the “motley humorist” in “Satyre I,” but, in fact, both incarnations are
involved in learned activities, the one pious, the other arguably heretical.
Donne’s ordination does not make him a new scholar, however, at least
not to the extent that Walton would want us to believe, or that Donne himself
might have hoped.52 While he devotes himself wholeheartedly to sermon
writing, Donne’s work in this genre betrays its author’s continued fascination
with self-slaughter. Christ’s soul “did not leave his body by force,” Donne
tells his congregation on Easter Day, 1619 (the same year in which he writes
to Carre about Jack and the Doctor), “but because he would, and when he
would, and how he would; Thus far then first, this is an answer to this question,
Quis homo? Christ did not die naturally, nor violently, as all others doe, but
only voluntarily.”53 While Donne refrains from offering the evidence marshaled
in Biathanatos to argue for Christ’s suicide, he nonetheless encourages
his listeners to think of their savior’s death—if only for a moment—as a
voluntary one.54 Christ’s crucifixion here fascinates Donne not because it
is a self-sacrifice for the sins of humanity, but because it affords him another
way of thinking about death.
In a number of texts where melancholy is not formally attached to his
life as a scholar, Donne’s analysis is nonetheless of a scholarly nature; he
reads himself, in other words, in the same rigorous way he reads his books,
just as he describes life on earth—as we have already seen—as “but a Preface,
or but an Index.” Donne’s descriptive tendencies themselves reflect his
94 Donne and Melancholy

melancholy: he builds up intensely earthy (crude or indecent), and earthly

(terrestrial or nondivine) images, only to allow such images to decompose.
While often these images include, or refer explicitly to, the human body,
they frequently transfer the language of the physical world to immaterial
realms—realms that are often of a psychological or spiritual nature, and
sometimes curious mixtures of both.55 In the process, the writer revealed
is one fascinated with inconstancy, one who persistently reads not only
his own constitution but the larger world as tempestuous and unstable.
It is this juxtaposition of cataclysmic, spiritual change with temporal,
earthbound shiftings that is at the heart of the experience of spiritual
illumination as understood and expressed by Donne in many of his sermons,
but particularly in the four extant that he devoted to Paul’s conversion
(preached between the years 1624 and 1630). While it would be impossible
perhaps to avoid metaphors of transformation when describing experiences
of spiritual illumination, Donne nonetheless turns repeatedly to images of
the earth. Paul’s conversion, he reminds us in a sermon preached at St.
Paul’s Cathedral in 1624 on Acts 9:4, “was a true Transubstantiation, and a
new Sacrament.”56 But rather than conclude his sermon with this image of
the new, sanctified Paul, Donne instead glosses another word of the verse
he has chosen—the word earth, here first associated with sin but, by the
end of the passage, transformed into an incubator for the soul awaiting the
Last Judgment: “You heap earth upon your soules, and encumber them
with more and more flesh, by a superfluous and luxuriant diet; You adde
earth to earth in new purchases, and measure not by Acres, but by Manors,
nor by Manors, but by Shires; And there is a little Quillet, a little Close, worth
all these. A quiet grave. And therefore, when thou readest, That God makes
thy bed in thy sicknesse, rejoyce in this . . . That that God, that made the
whole earth, is now making thy bed in the earth, a quiet grave, where thou
shalt sleep in peace, till the Angels Trumpet wake thee at the Resurrection.”57
Repetition of the phrase “quiet grave” emphasizes that Donne’s God has
designated space for his subjects in the earth, space to be occupied until
greater metamorphoses into the heavenly realm are enacted. At the same
time, the phrase calls to mind Despair’s alluring description of the benefits
that follow suicide in book 1 of The Faerie Queene:

Is not short paine well borne, that brings long ease,

And layes the soule to sleepe in quiet graue?
Sleepe after toyle, port after stormie seas,
Ease after warre, death after life does greatly please.58
Douglas Trevor 95

Donne’s study, we might say, has, in this sermon, dissolved into the crypt
beneath it; the allure of the earth is the peaceful withdrawal it affords, perhaps,
from such tasks as “reviewing” sermons, for only death can—in Donne’s
eyes—release the scholar from learned labor.59
Although biographical details (e.g., the abandonment of his familial
religion and the death of his wife) offer us experiences which we can surmise
tortured Donne, his own understanding of his melancholy is—as we might
expect in Jacobean England—humoral; Donne persistently sees himself
as racked not so much by events in his life as by his own constitution, for
as he notes parenthetically in a 1608 letter to Goodyer, “my vices are not
infectious, nor wandring, they came not yesterday, nor mean to go away
to day: they Inne not, but dwell in me, and see themselves so welcome . . .
that they will not change.”60 The extent to which Donne takes sole responsi-
bility for these vices is debatable, particularly when we recall his insistence
in the Devotions that his calling necessitates studying, which invites
melancholy. Whether it is attributable to God, or to his own nature, or to a
combination of both, the “worst voluptuousness” for Donne remains one
temptation alone: the “Hydroptique immoderate desire of humane learning.”61
Here he holds the same opinion as the author of The Anatomy of Melan-
choly, for just as Burton feeds his own scholarly melancholy in an effort to
cure it (“I write of Melancholy, by being busie to avoid Melancholy”), Donne
treats his “Hydroptique” desire with a steady diet of study and meditation.62
Painfully for Donne, however, the very act of introspection by which
one charts one’s spiritual health, or addresses a potential reader, risks
plunging one into despair. In another letter to Goodyer, this one from 1609,
Donne writes of being “contracted, and inverted into my self.”63 Emphasizing
yet again the material transformation of an immaterial abstraction, he confesses
his fear of being too greatly concerned with his own depression while his
wife, sitting beside him, has equal grounds for unhappiness: “But if I melt
into a melancholy whilest I write, I shall be taken in the manner: and I sit
by one too tender towards these impressions, and it is so much our duty,
to avoid all occasions of giving them sad apprehensions.”64 A turn inwards,
here not voluntarily to pray but rather instinctively to brood, reminds us
vividly that the realm for melancholy and religious belief is a shared space,
both metaphorically and psychologically, just as melancholic language in
the period is at once diagnostic (melting used to describe humors that were
heated or imbalanced), as well as figurative. Hamlet’s similar-sounding
lamentation offers us another instance in which a disenchanted scholar
yearns for self-dissolution.
96 Donne and Melancholy

O that this too too solid flesh would melt,

Thaw and resolve itself into a dew,
Or that the Everlasting had not fix’d
His canon ’gainst self-slaughter. God, O God.65

In each case, the speaker’s envisioned disintegration is prompted by a guilt

complex that, paradoxically, feeds itself even by conjuring up its own
annihilation. Self-preoccupation, and the loathing it engenders, stubbornly
remain, such that when Donne imagines attending so scrupulously to his
soul that it is not besmirched “in any minute by actuall sinne,” he confesses
that “even in that I should wound her more, and contract another
guiltinesse.”66
Indeed, in the same 1609 letter to Goodyer in which Donne describes
his anxious marital relationship, he writes of denying himself pleasure in
terms suggestive of the close link between ascetic impulses and willful self-
annihilation: “As I have much quenched my senses, and disused my body
from pleasure, and so tried how I can endure to be my own grave, so I try
now how I can suffer a prison.”67 “[G]rave,” here once again combines with
“prison,” conflating the interlinked, earthly categories of death, suffering,
and even learning (the study superimposed, as it were, over a crypt). In
Biathanatos, Donne claims to keep the keys to such a prison always on
hand so that he might escape whenever he desires, making his prison stay
one of voluntary duration.68 Indeed, just as he—very uncharacteristically
for his age—grants Christians from all churches a chance at redemption,
Donne is equally generous with depression: “God hath accompanied,” he
assures his parishioners, “and complicated almost all our bodily diseases
of these times, with an extraordinary sadnesse, a predominant melancholy,
a faintnesse of heart, a chearlesnesse, a joylesnesse of spirit.”69 Similar sentiments
so overwhelm Donne in the Devotions that he dares, for a moment, to ask
the unthinkable: “Is the glory of heaven no perfecter in it selfe, but that it
needs a foile of depression and ingloriousnesse in this world, to set it off?”70
Donne’s insistent use of metaphors that equate the meltings and
scorchings of the earth with the eternal soul and the earthly self are metaphors
that frequently dissolve the very images they create, as well as the sense of
a stable, authorial persona responsible for these images. Nowhere, perhaps,
is this dissolution more striking than in Holy Sonnet XIX (“Oh, to vex me,
contraryes meet in one”).71 The poem brims with descriptions of inconstancy
that draw from Renaissance medical terminology: both the speaker’s
devotion to God and his more temporal love are “humorous”; each is
“ridlingly distemperd, cold and hott” (p. 447, lines 5, 7). As in the Devotions,
Douglas Trevor 97

Donne is aware not only that one may “mistake a Disease for Religion,” but
that humoral terminology can be used metaphorically to describe religious
practice, as when he likens confessing one’s sins to employing a physic
which “drawes the peccant humour to it selfe.”72 Yet, here the melancholic
tenor of the sonnet does not arise from its humoral juxtapositions. Rather,
such sentiments emerge in the speaker’s self-estrangement, the crystalli-
zation of which occurs in the poem’s sestet:

I durst not view heaven yesterday; and to day

In prayers, and flattering speaches I court God:
To morrow I quake with true feare of his rod.
So my devout fitts come and go away
Like a fantastique Ague: save that here
Those are my best dayes, when I shake with feare.
(lines 9–14)

Today, in present time, the speaker finds himself in a middle realm where
his approach to God is clearly inadequate. The timidity with which he “durst
not view heaven” is replaced, in the following line, by courting that
permeates both his “prayers” to God and his “flattering speaches.” It is
another point in time, a day toward which the speaker looks twice, that is
his “best,” and yet this state too is one marked with high volatility (lines 11, 14).
In a 1608 letter to Goodyer, Donne uses equally tempestuous images, and
even some of the same words, to portray what might be his worst days,
further suggesting the similarities between his melancholic and spiritually
illumined states: “I have over fraught my self with Vice, and so am
ridd[l]ingly subject to two contrary wrackes, Sinking and Oversetting, and
under the iniquity of such a disease as inforces the patient when he is
almost starved, not only to fast, but to purge.”73 In “Oh, to vex me,” the
speaker “quake[s]” and “shake[s]” with fear. The desired state is one of trembling,
akin to the earthquakes that are said to bring “harmes and feares” in “A
Valediction forbidding mourning” (line 9). In the Devotions, we will recall,
Donne uses earthquakes to describe not devotional inclinations but suicidal
ones.74 In each case, distemper pervades the emotional state of the speaker,
a state persistently characterized as being wrapped in the hot and cold
fevers of melancholy.
In “Oh, to vex me,” the inconstant fits that characterize the remembered
and longed-for realm of religious faith abate. The final simile of the poem
(“Like a fantastique Ague”) equates religious fervor with physical fever
before giving way to tremors of “feare.” Reminding ourselves that “doubt”
98 Donne and Melancholy

and “fear” were synonyms in the period, and that fear, sadness, and despair
were all taken to be symptoms of a melancholic condition, only accentuates
the poem’s ambivalent conclusion.75 True contrition, at the moment after
and before it is thrown into fluctuation, is by its very nature anxious and
trembling. Conditioned by his own fear of melting into despondency, his
own visions of being coffined with his books, Donne turns his fear into
faith, his faith into fear, and a charting of his temperament into a description
of the maddening inconstancy that characterizes, in his scripted life of uneasy
sequestration and contemplation, his relationship both to himself and to
his God.
The speaker at the conclusion of “Oh, to vex me,” is painfully aware of
what is expected of him, and yet the sonnet is holy only insofar as it is hopeful;
the speaker’s “best dayes” do not materialize. The “here,” which suggests
at once the present moment and the speaker’s grounded presence (spiritually
and physically) on earth is instead set off by the pronoun “Those.” This
shift from insufficient (“here”) to appropriate contrition (“Those”) is sudden
and surprising, void of syntactical demarcation and formally suggested
only by enjambment (“save that here / Those are my best dayes, when I
shake with feare”).76 Estranged from his idealized self, the penitent supplicant,
the speaker’s longing is disturbingly self-interested as well as pious;
indeed, the poem points out—as does much of Donne’s verse—the uneasy
similarities between the two states of mind.
Roger Rollin, in the most enduring psychoanalytic reading of the Holy
Sonnets, calls them “vexatious . . . in part because they are sick poems in
the service of preventive medicine.”77 But the speaker here, in “Oh, to vex
me,” does not delude himself with even the possibility of a cure. Instead, it
is the acute awareness of his own temperament that renders him melancholic.
Donne is not, as Anne Ferry would have it, “asserting the existence of an
intrinsic state of being which he cannot name,” but rather more troubling,
he is recognizing that this state is inherently tempestuous and unstable. 78
As in the Devotions, the overriding sense of humanity is a somber one:
“Man . . . is but dust, and coagulated and kneaded into earth, by teares; his
matter is earth, his forme, misery.”79 Paul, we will recall, distinguishes between
two kinds of sorrow (“For godly sorrow worketh repentance to salvation
not to be repented of: but the sorrow of the world worketh death”).80 While
Donne forever aspires to the former, he never wholly escapes the latter.81
Worldly sorrow, in his letters, sermons, and verse, is continually mixed with
godly. Rather than discard one kind of melancholy for the other, it is perhaps
more fitting to recognize—as Donne himself does—the shared topologies
of spiritual and temperamental terrain, and to acknowledge that Donne
sees his scholarly melancholy as an integral component of his religious
faith, to be both treasured and feared.
Douglas Trevor 99

NOTES

This essay benefited enormously from the feedback of many scholars; I would
especially like to thank Barbara Lewalski, Jeffrey Masten, and Helen Vendler.
1
Epigraph is from T. S. Eliot, The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry, ed. Ronald
Schuchard (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1993), p. 80.
2
Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon S. Roudiez
(New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1989), p. 134.
3
John Donne, Holy Sonnet III, in The Complete English Poems of John Donne, ed.
C. A. Patrides (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1985), pp. 435–6, lines 12–4. Unless otherwise
noted, subsequent references to Donne’s poetry will be to this edition and will be cited
parenthetically in the text by inclusive page numbers for the first mention of a poem,
and by their numbers and line references on all references. Patrides follows the numbering
of the sonnets established by Herbert Grierson in his edition of The Poems of John
Donne, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1912). Although I do not employ Helen
Gardner’s numbering, I favor her dating of sixteen of the nineteen Holy Sonnets between
the years 1609 and 1611. See “Introduction: II. The Date, Order, and Interpretation of
The ‘Holy Sonnets’” in her edition of John Donne: The Divine Poems (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1952; rprt. 1966), pp. xxxvii–lv.
4
Kristeva, p. 12.
5
The Italian humanist Marsilio Ficino is principally responsible for establishing the
perceived connection between melancholy and learned endeavor in Renaissance Europe.
See book 1, De vita sana or De cura valetudinis eorum qui incumbunt studio litterarum
(1480) of his De vita libri tres.
6
John Calvin, The Institutes of Christian Religion, ed. Tony Lane and Hilary Osborne
(Grand Rapids MI: Baker Book House, 1987), p. 219.
7
Juliana Schiesari, The Gendering of Melancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and
the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1992), p. 104.
8
John Donne, Essayes in Divinity, ed. Evelyn M. Simpson (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1952), p. 16.
9
Surveying a wide range of early modern texts, Lawrence Babb has argued that
“the physiological effects of intellectual labor were such that the man of letters [in Eliza-
bethan and Jacobean England] could hardly hope to escape melancholy” (“Melancholy
and the Elizabethan Man of Letters,” HLQ 9, 3 [April 1941]: 247–61, 261).
10
William Shakespeare, As You Like It, ed. Alan Brissenden (Oxford: Oxford Univ.
Press, 1994), IV.i.15.
11
According to Donne’s nineteenth-century biographer, Augustus Jessopp, the
mournfulness that marks his letters written from Mitcham is “attributable far less to any
mere lack of means than to that intellectual depression inseparable from excessive strain
upon the powers of brain and heart” (John Donne, Sometime Dean of St. Paul’s [Lon-
don: Methuen, 1897], pp. 61–2).
12
John Carey, John Donne: Life, Mind, and Art (London: Faber and Faber, 1981;
rprt. 1990), p. xi.
13
See also George Williamson, “Mutability, Decay, and Jacobean Melancholy,” in
Seventeenth Century Contexts, rev. edn. (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1969), pp. 9–41.
14
Carey, p. 182. I think Carey is right in pointing out that Donne “wanted, and
invented, a universe as changeable as himself, in which all things were continuously
on the edge of nothingness,” but change unsettled Donne in ways I do not think Carey
sufficiently acknowledges (p. 158).
100 Donne and Melancholy

15
See Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. Harold Jenkins (London: Routledge, 1982), V.i.200–5.
Donne ends Metempsychosis by echoing both Hamlet and Montaigne: “The onely measure
is, and judge, opinion” (pp. 402–27, line 520).
16
Joshua Scodel, “John Donne and the Religious Politics of the Mean,” in John
Donne’s Religious Imagination: Essays in Honor of John T. Shawcross, ed. Raymond-Jean
Frontain and Frances M. Malprezzi (Conway AR: UCA Press, 1995), pp. 45–80, 55.
17
John Stachniewski, “John Donne: The Despair of the ‘Holy Sonnets,’” ELH 48, 4
(Winter 1981): 677–705, 705 n. 52; David Norbrook, “The Monarchy of Wit and the
Republic of Letters: Donne’s Politics,” in Soliciting Interpretation: Literary Theory and
Seventeenth-Century English Poetry, ed. Elizabeth D. Harvey and Katharine Eisaman
Maus (Chicago and London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 3–36, 16.
18
Donald Ramsay Roberts, “The Death Wish of John Donne,” PMLA 62, 4 (December
1947): 958–76, 970, 960.
19
Donne, “Meditation 12,” in Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, ed. Anthony
Raspa (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987), pp. 62–4, 63.
20
Here I follow the Westmoreland manuscript. The 1635 Poems, in accordance with
the O’Flaherty and Dobell manuscripts, renders the last line as “Thy griefe, for he put it
into my breast.” See Gardner, p. 14.
21
Izaak Walton, “The Life of Dr. Donne” and “The Life of Mr. George Herbert” (New
York: P. F. Collier and Son, 1937), p. 384.
22
Donne, “Meditation 12,” p. 63.
23
Timothy Bright counsels his reader to “abandon working of your braine by any
studie, or conceit: and giue your mind to libertie of recreation, from such actions, that
drawe too much of the spirit, and therby wrong the corporall members of the bodie” (A
Treatise of Melancholie [London, 1586], p. 243). While Winfried Schleiner argues
convincingly that “by the early seventeenth century melancholy is not presented
unambiguously as the humor of the gifted,” scholars such as Donne and Robert Burton
continue to associate themselves with the malady (Melancholy, Genius, and Utopia in
the Renaissance [Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1991], p. 29).
24
George Herbert, A Priest to the Temple. Or, The Country Parson, His Character,
and Rule of Holy Life, in The Works of George Herbert, ed. F. E. Hutchinson (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1941), pp. 223–90, 238. Donne, Essayes in Divinity, p. 57. Cf. Martin
Luther, De Servo Arbitrio, in Luther and Erasmus: Free Will and Salvation, trans. Philip
S. Watson (London: SCM Press, 1969), pp. 110–2.
25
Donne, Essayes in Divinity, p. 5. Cf. Scodel, p. 62.
26
Donne, The Sermons of John Donne, ed. Simpson and George R. Potter, 10 vols.
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1962), 3:359. All references to
Donne’s sermons are from this edition.
27
Donne, Sermons, 9:254.
28
Catherine Creswell, “Turning to See the Sound: Reading the Face of God in
Donne’s Holy Sonnets,” in John Donne’s Religious Imagination, pp. 181–201, 184.
29
According to Burton, “[t]wo maine reasons may be given of it, why students should
be more subject to this malady [melancholy] then others. The one is, they live a sedentary,
solitary life, sibi & musis, free from bodily exercise . . . The second is contemplation,
which dries the braine, and extinguisheth naturall heat; for whilst the spirits are intent
to meditation above in the head, the stomacke and liver are left destitute, and thence
come blacke blood and crudities by defect of concoction, and for want of exercise, the
superfluous vapours cannot exhale” (The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Thomas C.
Faulkner, Nicolas K. Kiessling, and Rhonda L. Blair, 3 vols. [Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1989], 1:302–4).
Douglas Trevor 101

30
Donne, The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of John Donne, ed. Charles M.
Coffin (New York: Random House, 1952; rprt. New York: Modern Library, 1994), p. 402.
All quotations of Donne’s letters, unless otherwise noted, are from this edition.
31
Donne, Sermons, 6:286.
32
See Donne, Essayes in Divinity, p. 41.
33
Ibid.
34
Arthur F. Marotti, John Donne, Coterie Poet (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press,
1986), p. 39.
35
Shakespeare, As You Like It, IV.i.18–9.
36
Donne, Selected Prose, p. 390.
37
See, for example, Thomas Walkington, The Optick Glasse of Humors (London,
1639), p. 133.
38
Donne, Selected Prose, p. 373. The dating of this letter, as with most of Donne’s
correspondences, is uncertain. Patrides suggests 1609 or 1610 (p. 456).
39
Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost, ed. Richard David (London: Routledge, 1951,
rprt. 1994), I.i.94.
40
According to the OED, affection could be used in Donne’s day to refer to “an
emotion or feeling . . . as opposed to reason,” a “[s]tate of mind generally, mental ten-
dency; disposition,” or a “bodily state due to any influence.”
41
Donne, Biathanatos, ed. Ernest W. Sullivan II (London and Toronto: Associated
Univ. Presses, 1984), p. 31. For the dating of Biathanatos, see Sullivan’s introduction, p. ix.
42
Donne, Selected Prose, p. 387.
43
Richard Strier, “Radical Donne: ‘Satire III,’” ELH 60, 2 (Summer 1993): 283–322, 304.
44
Donne, Sermons, 3:359.
45
J. B. Leishman, The Monarchy of Wit: An Analytical and Comparative Study of
the Poetry of John Donne (1951; rprt. London: Hutchinson, 1962), p. 116.
46
Strier, p. 304.
47
Donne, Selected Prose, p. 372.
48
Donne, Biathanatos, “Appendix A,” pp. 248–50, 249.
49
Ibid.
50
See Donne, “Meditation 17,” in Devotions, pp. 86–7.
51
Donne, Selected Prose, p. 387.
52
See Walton, Life of Dr. Donne, p. 342.
53
Donne, Sermons, 2:208.
54
See Donne, Biathanatos, pp. 128–30.
55
See Elaine Scarry, “Donne: ‘But yet the body is his booke,’” in Literature and the
Body: Essayes on Populations and Persons, ed. Scarry (Baltimore and London: Johns
Hopkins Univ. Press, 1988), pp. 70–105.
56
Donne, Sermons, 6:209.
57
Donne, Sermons, 6:213.
58
Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton (London and New York:
Longman, 1977), I.ix.40.6–9.
59
Cf. Donne’s description of Christ’s depression, that is, his submersion in temporal
suffering, and his eventual redemption (Sermons, 10:192–3).
60
Donne, Selected Prose, p. 372.
61
Donne, Selected Prose, p. 376.
62
Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, 1:6.
63
Donne, Selected Prose, p. 377.
64
Donne, Selected Prose, pp. 377, 378.
65
Shakespeare, Hamlet, I.ii.129–32. Here I follow the Folio text.
102 Donne and Melancholy

66
Donne, Selected Prose, p. 375.
67
Donne, Selected Prose, p. 378.
68
Donne, Biathanatos, p. 29.
69
Donne, Sermons, 7:68–9.
70
Donne, “Expostulation 17,” in Devotions, pp. 87–9, 89.
71
Jonathan Dollimore argues that, in this poem, and in the Holy Sonnets in general,
“an experience of dislocation . . . overrides even the relocating potential of the sonnet
form” (Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology, and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare
and his Contemporaries, 2d edn. [Durham NC: Duke Univ. Press, 1993], p. 180).
72
Donne, “Meditation 5,” in Devotions, pp. 24–6, 26; “Expostulation 10,” in Devotions,
pp. 52–4, 54.
73
Donne, Selected Prose, p. 371. Cf. “Meditation 1,” in Devotions: “O perplex’d
discomposition, O riddling distemper, O miserable condition of Man” (pp. 7–8, 8).
74
Donne, “Meditation 1,” pp. 7–8.
75
See Bright, A Treatise of Melancholie, pp. 101–2.
76
Cf. Anne Ferry, The “Inward” Language: Sonnets of Wyatt, Sidney, Shakespeare,
Donne (Chicago and London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1983), pp. 242–3.
77
Roger B. Rollin, “‘FANTASTIQUE AGUE’: The Holy Sonnets and Religious
Melancholy,” in The Eagle and the Dove: Reassessing John Donne, ed. Claude J. Summers
and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press, 1986), pp. 131–46, 131.
78
Ferry, p. 249.
79
Donne, “Meditation 8,” in Devotions, pp. 40–2, 41.
80
2 Cor 7:10. See also Rom 5:3–5 (KJV): “And not only so, but we glory in tribulations
also: knowing that tribulation worketh patience; And patience, experience; and experience,
hope: And hope maketh not ashamed; because the love of God is shed abroad in our
hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us.”
81
See Donne, “Meditation 17,” in Devotions: “No Man hath affliction enough, that is
not matured, and ripened by it, and made fit for God by that affliction” (pp. 86–7, 87).