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March 2 - March 4, 2024
Donne loved the trans- prefix: it’s scattered everywhere across his writing – ‘transpose’, ‘translate’, ‘transport’, ‘transubstantiate’. In this Latin preposition – ‘across, to the other side of, over, beyond’ – he saw both the chaos and potential of us. We are, he believed, creatures born transformable. He knew of transformation into misery: ‘But O, self-traitor, I do bring/The spider love, which transubstantiates all/And can convert manna to gall’ – but also the transformation achieved by beautiful women: ‘Us she informed, but transubstantiates you’.
he remained steadfast in his belief that we, humans, are at once a catastrophe and a miracle.
He believed us unique in our capacity to ruin ourselves: ‘Nothing but man, of all envenomed things,/Doth work upon itself with inborn sting’. He was a man who walked so often in darkness that it became for him a daily commute.
He believed our minds could be forged into citadels against the world’s chaos: he wrote in a verse letter, ‘be thine own palace, or the world’s thy jail.’ Tap a human, he believed, and they ring with the sound of infinity.
it is an astonishment to be alive, and it behoves you to be astonished.
Donne is the greatest writer of desire in the English language. He wrote about sex in a way that nobody ever has, before or since: he wrote sex as the great insistence on life, the salute, the bodily semaphore for the human living infinite. The word most used across his poetry, apart from ‘and’ and ‘the’, is ‘love’.
Read the opening stanza and all the oxygen in a five-mile radius rushes to greet you.
His family would haunt him for life: and nothing in his writing gives the impression he was surprised that it should be so. We are haunted animals: ghosts, Donne’s work and life suggest, should be treated as the norm. He accepted it as such. To read him is to know that we cannot ever expect to shake off our family: only to pick up the skull, the tooth, and walk on.
Donne was born hungry, a lifelong strainer after words and ideas. He sought to create for himself a form of language that would meet the requirements of someone who watched the world with careful and sceptical eyes.
The Oxford Scholar As I was riding on a day One chanced to ask me by the way How Oxford scholars pass their time And thus I answered all in rhyme Item for Homer poor blind poet Oh, if our tutors did but know it For old tobacco we make free Till smoke makes us as blind as he.
The commonplace book allowed readers to approach the world as a limitless resource; a kind of ever-ongoing harvesting.
T. S. Eliot, a man who had in common with Donne both poetic iconoclasm and good clothes, loved his writing. He said: ‘When a poet’s mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience,’ whereas ‘the ordinary man’s experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary.’
Commonplacing was a way to assess material for those new connections: bricks made ready for the unruly palaces he would build.
He accounts for the first recorded use in the Oxford English Dictionary of around 340 words in the English language. Apprehensible, beauteousness, bystander, criminalist, emancipation, enripen, fecundate, horridness, imbrothelled, jig. (And, for those who bristle against the loose use of ‘disinterested’ to mean ‘not interested’ rather than ‘lacking a vested interest’: Donne was the first to do so, and we must take it up with him.)
He wanted to wear his wit like a knife in his shoe; he wanted it to flash out at unexpected moments.
To read Donne is to be told: kill the desire to keep the accent and tone of the time. It is necessary to shake language until it will express our own distinctive hesitations, peculiarities, our own uncertain and never-quite-successful yearning towards beauty.
Language, his poetry tells us, is a set, not of rules, but of possibilities.
All clothes speak: they say desire me, or oh ignore me, or endow my words with greater seriousness than you would were I not wearing this hat. When he mocks the dress of his compatriots, he is mocking the shoddiness and lack of imagination of what they are asking for.
First swear by thy best love in earnest (If thou which lov’st all, canst love any best) Thou wilt not leave me in the middle street Though some more spruce companion thou do meet
Do not, Donne’s poetry would argue, buy too readily into that which the world wants to sell you. Your outward presentation has unavoidable power, and so must be engaged in with the full force of your intelligence.
Poetry was the best possible way to set down the unwieldy human truth as he saw it, but it was for himself and his close allies.
Poetry could be made to function as entertainment, news, flirtation, insinuation, slander, religious contemplation, invoice, in-joke, thank-you note, apology, profound meditation of love, scurrilous sex dream. Like everything else, it had crazes and fashions: someone invented a joke or an image or a metrical scheme, and someone else wrote a response to it; it multiplied.
But Donne’s poetry was different in one thing: once it escaped from his immediate grasp, it spread like fire.
His poetry left his hands unnamed, allowing it to gather up titles and edits and little flourishes from each poem’s new owner. The poems were akin to living organisms, changing shape and colour as they were copied and recopied.
There is something astonishing in that: that he wore his skill so very lightly. He was willing to lose his work, perhaps because he knew there was more to come. Imagination will beget imagination, and more readily so if it is flung out instead of dragon-hoarded. At no point in his life did Donne come to an end of himself.
‘The extravagancy of paradoxes’ was the pleasure and the point of them – the possibilities that lie inside pointing out absurdity.
what the poems are doing: they’re not representations of her, but representations of him: him watching her, needing her, inventing for her.
A school system which hinged on colossal amounts of memorisation had built a population with the kind of mammoth recall which is, in retrospect, breathtaking – so listeners went home and argued over them, plagiarised them, fell out over them, made them part of the fabric of their days.
The epitaph is in Latin, and Donne chose words that can be translated in a multitude of ways, so that behind each Latin word there’s a queue of English possibilities. For this, the end of her life, he chose words for her that unfurl.
The epitaph is both a hymn and a promise: a vow never to marry again. In the Latin she is ‘Faeminae lectissimae dilectissimaeque’: the words are drafted to do double work, in the Latin lector, so that Anne becomes Donne’s best reader and best text. She is both well read, and read hungrily by Donne: he has studied her and tried to know her. But the Latin of the first part has a harmony which the second half abandons. It grows awkward and uneven in syntax and scansion when it talks about time, decay and loss; he broke the form of the epitaph to salute the breakdown of the heart. He had written,
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Death would not just give life: it would give life free from his constant, relentless questing, finally solidify him and define him.
The difficulty of Donne’s work had in it a stark moral imperative: pay attention. It was what Donne most demanded of his audience: attention.
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
