John Donne Matters

While I was constructing from flat packed, then filling with books etc (mostly books) and then taping up box upon cardboard box this morning, I caught up with the BBC's poetry season program on John Donne presented by the mellifluous Simon Schama. At times in conversation with John Carey (whose book on Donne I remember really liking from my undergraduate days) and at times in conversational re enactment with Fiona Shaw, Schama outlined Donne's difficult, ambitious early years, his pursuit of women culminating in the secret marriage with his employer's young daughter (his employer being Lord Keeper of the Great Seal of all things) and the disgrace that swiftly followed, as well as the life long exhaustion and financial insecurity that slowly settled on him even after his hasty and clandestine wedding was officially recognised. He was a Catholic-born ironmonger's son, and though he switched religious allegiance to the prevailing Protestant faith and clearly had a restless and acute intellect, this still wasn't enough to settle either his career, his social standing, or in the end, his spiritual conscience.

Donne wrote many sonnets which Schama described as 'much rougher' than Shakespeare's, and this is an apt description; for much of Donne's poetry. Rougher that is in terms of emotional directness rather than any lack of skill: 'For God's sake hold your tongue, and let me love'; to quote a well known opening line ('the canonization'). But just as impressive in terms of paradox and more so in terms of images conjured and used in fantastic ways. That's the metaphysical twist really which I've found students delighting in once the analogies are made clear - and also their motives, as quite a few of the poems are explicitly written in order to get a woman into bed with the speaker as quickly as possible. Entertaining to learn that 'To his Mistress Going to Bed' was considered so scurrilous as to warrant omission from an early edition of Donne's collected works - it's the one with 'license my roving hands and let them go...' as well as the cleverly antithetical 'until I labour, I in labour lie'.

In class earlier this year we liked 'The Flea' with its ingenious seduction spiel, and then went on to look at 'A Valediction, Forbidding Mourning'. This took some struggling over (especially the central image of a pair of compasses to evoke one steady spouse at home, and one spouse - Donne himself - on a traveling circuit) but was again appreciated for the sheer unlikeliness of its 'conceit' so persuasively carried through.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
Like th' other foot, obliquely run ;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end where I begun.

This one has in it as well the spiritual element which eventually became Donne's primary concern. The lovers are superior to dull sublunary lovers and have an almost etheric soul connection, 'like gold to airy thinness beat'. Compare with some of the later Holy Sonnets which the program quite correctly identified as shockingly visceral, sensual even: perhaps only Donne could demand to be battered and ravished by the Christian Deity in such a 'Holy' poem (although there's a clear erotic strand in some of the European Medieval mystics, it's true - stuff for another post there though). He was a complex and conflicted man and a correspondingly complex poet. And hardly anyone, according to the 'random' vox pop queries, had heard of him! At least he wasn't being confused with an erstwhile Radio 2 presenter I suppose.

Anyway, such were my thoughts while dismantling our living room. 'We'll build in sonnets pretty rooms' coaxes Donne in one of his more amorous verses; indeed as lovers, in another one, we'll 'make one little room an everywhere'. Well I suppose I was collapsing this particular pretty room into a box, an unintentionally performative enactment of contemporary (to us) poet Don Patterson's description of the sonnet as 'a small square poem...a box for your dreams'. It is quite a good metaphor for such a formal poem, with its line count and metrical measures strictly defined, at least in the traditional versions. Easy enough to grasp the strictures and requirements of the proscribed pattern; it's just how skillfully you fill that box that's the tricky part. Not so heavily that the box collapses, and not uncomfortably full of clunky ill fitting corners nor indeed of wasteful gaps. Things need to fit and find their place. The poet, as Sylvia Plath said, needs to become 'an expert packer of suitcases'; not (I sincerely hope) because he or she is constantly on the move from one location to the next, but because there is so little space and time to say all that needs to be said in the small world of the poetic space which yet needs to contain 'an everywhere'; a wide span of resonances and reference, although not, verbally, every thing.