John Donne

Why am I up at 20 to midnight posting about John Donne, when I have to get up at 4am to take someone to the airport tomorrow? Clearly I've lost my mind. Nonetheless, those of you who know me and know my particular brand of OCDness or general peculiarity know that I'm reading through my books alphabetically by the author's last name. I know, I know...but I would never have read Dickens, otherwise, and I would have missed out.

So, I'm reading the Mr. Donne's poems - I knew I would like them before I started since LPW quotes them so often, but they are really good in and of themselves. Hard to unravel - at least for those of us who didn't do English Lit at University, but very enjoyable. I recommend them.

Not being a postmodernist, I'm interested in the worldview behind what's written (in other words, "what it means to me" or "how it makes me feel" is irrelevant. I want to know how the author feels and what he means by it. He is the creator of it after all - he should be the one to ascribe meaning to it. But then, that's the problem with a non-Christian worldview - the Creator rarely gets His due.) Anyhoo, to find out what the author is getting at is often greatly helped, I think, by knowing a bit of their personal history (or maybe this is just my love for History coming out.) Though often a person contradicts in their writing and creating what they say they believe and in reverse have a hard time believing or living by what they write and create.

Anyways, getting back to Donne...he was raised a womanising Catholic, lived a pretty immoral life, wrote good stuff, said the right political things at the right time in an effort to make it easier for Catholics to cope with the new Anglican church, was doing pretty well in life, fell in love with one of the many girls, married her secretly, and was thrown in prison by her father and lost his job and a promising future. Wrote some more good stuff, stayed faithful to his wife, was broken-hearted by her death, became more Anglican, was pushed into the ministry, and became one of the most prominent preachers in the land. It seems like the critics all agree that it's impossible to completely accurately work out what poems go with what time in his life. They also all agree that there does seem to be 3 distinct types - womanising, lusty poetry; tender, loving poetry; and "religious" poetry. What they don't seem to see eye to eye on (surprise, surprise) is what was going on in his head. Some seem to imply that he was a Catholic who knew how to survive in an Anglican world. Others that he appreciated the Anglican compromise. People seem to agree that there was a change in his life, but some think it was a change for the worse. Some Christians believe it was a conversion. Others believe it was an acceptance of compromise. And others the tragic downfall of a man who could've been truly great. And then there are the romantics - those who believe that "true love" transformed him from a waster to a great and good man. I don't know. Was he merely a good politician, was it all just romantic love, or could it have been something more - something deeper that transformed a man who slept around into a faithful husband and father, that took a man obviously self-centred and transformed him into someone who wrote, "no man is an island, etc.", that shifted a focus from pleasure to love to God in his poems...I really don't know - maybe after I read the religious poems I'll know more. And if anyone out there has a good bio of Donne, let me know, please.

For now, I'll leave you with some lines from one of my favourites, A Valediction:forbidding mourning":

"If they be two, they are two so
As stiffe twin compasses are two,
Thy soule the fixt foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if the'other doe.

And though it in the center sit,
Yet when the other far doth rome,
It leanes, and hearkens after it,
And growes erect, as that comes home.

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