Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne

by Katherine Rundell

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.

There was something in the way a verse letter could elevate the details of the day-to-day and render it sharp-edged and memorable that he cherished. It appealed to the part of him that wanted his own brand of intense precision to suffuse everything he touched.

John Donne was an infinity merchant; the word is everywhere in his work. More than infinity: super-infinity.

He is protection against those who would tell you to narrow yourself, to follow fashion in your mode of thought. It’s not that he was a rebel: it is that he was a pure original.

They do us a service, the true uncompromising originals: they show us what is possible.

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 practice of commonplacing – a way of seeking out and storing knowledge, so that you have multiple voices on a topic under a single heading – colours Donne’s work; one thought reaches out to another, across the barriers of tradition, and ends up somewhere fresh and strange.

The ideal commonplacer is half lawyer, building up evidence in the case for and against the world, and half treasure hunter; and that’s what Donne’s mind was in those early days.

But for Donne, divergence from the accent and peculiar breaks in form contain the very stamp of what he meant: they were never aimless. The world was harsh and he needed a harsh language.

He was an inventor of words, a neologismist. 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.)

Donne rejected it: he would not blame those who died of plague. He refused to speculate. He said in his sermons that a plague could not ‘give a reason how it did come’. It was ‘not only incurable, uncontrollable, inexorable, but undisputable, unexaminable, unquestionable’.

But the same clarity would also allow him a fierce intensity with which to imagine himself: ‘I am a little world made cunningly/Of elements and an angelic sprite.’

Because of this devil-may-care attitude to his own work, when you quote a Donne poem, you are in fact quoting an amalgamation, pieced together over four hundred years from an array of manuscripts of varying degrees of scrappiness.

But Donne’s poetry was different in one thing: once it escaped from his immediate grasp, it spread like fire. There are more than four thousand copies of his individual poems, in 260 manuscripts – and it’s extremely likely there are more out there, in archives and private collections, waiting for us to discover them. Without having any way of knowing it, he became one of the most popular manuscript poets of his generation.

The poems we know as ‘by John Donne’ have in fact been constructed by editors, piecemeal, from the best of the manuscripts and the seventeenth-century print editions: the title page should, were it to be bluntly literal, read, ‘Poems, by John Donne and by educated guesswork’.

Perhaps to look for Anne in Donne’s verse is to misunderstand what the poems are doing: they’re not representations of her, but representations of him: him watching her, needing her, inventing for her. They are trumpet blasts across a hard land, more than they are portraits.

Donne’s mind was cacophonous. His relentless imagination was his single most constant feature; he wrote about his ‘worst voluptuousness, which is an hydroptique immoderate desire of humane learning’. In his darker moments, it tortured him. His mind had ceaselessness built into it. It was to be, throughout his life, a site of new images, new theology, new doubts: even those who disliked his work acknowledged that he was a writer who had erupted through the old into the new.

It’s why so much of Donne’s imagery around sex is so totalising: the man and woman become one, the woman becomes a state, a country, a planet. Sex, for Donne and those like him: permission, for those who watch the world with such feverish care, to turn one person into the world and to watch only them. It was a transforming of his constant seeking for knowledge.

Donne’s scepticism was more than a wit’s pose; it was a fundamental ordering principle, faced with a world in which erudition could be faked by snake oil men who smelled of ink, and charlatans would sell you false certainties between hardback covers. He valued the pursuit of knowledge too highly to watch it being bastardised without lashing out.

It’s there so often with Donne, that doubleness: there was his canny, cautious, political side, planting his sycophantic adjectives in the hope they would seed money; and then there was also something else: pleasure in extravagance. There must have been real satisfaction for him somewhere in lavishing compliments.

But if you take what Donne and Jonson are saying seriously, it was something that mattered: that those who read high-flown praise as only flattery were not approaching the written word with the care it demanded – that sycophancy should always be examined to see if it had in it a prescription. Language makes demands.

It was the same old desire that had resounded through his youth, before the complexities and compromises of marriage and family, and it was still there: the thinking body. A completed meshing of body and imagination: that would be the thing most worth having. The Donne of the ‘Anniversaries’ is still the same Donne as the young man in ‘The Ecstasy’ who declared ‘love’s mysteries in souls do grow,/But yet the body is his book.’ When the mind can be made to infuse every inch of the body; that is when living becomes most possible. It hadn’t, Donne implied, yet been achieved, but its achievement would transform the experience of moving through the world: it would cut back at the chaos.

He must have known the decision would shake everything in his life into a new and daunting shape – what it was not, though, was a repudiation of his bone-deep love of the strange ways that language works upon us.

When Donne did change his mind, Walton tells us, he changed it hard. He met his new calling with the energy and determination of someone who had previously lived in the relentless watchfulness of uncertainty and now cast it aside with relief: ‘now all his studies, which had been occasionally diffused, were all concentred in divinity. Now he had a new calling, new thoughts, and a new employment for his wit and eloquence.’

But Donne is at his most remarkable when he speaks about how very hard it is to seek God at all. More than anyone else, he acknowledged the way that the human heart darts about like a rat. His body, he found, so readily present in desire for other humans, betrayed him when he sought the same intensity in prayer. Donne was a man so in control of his poetry that he could layer it with ten dozen references; he could write a twelve-line sonnet that would take you a week to read, but he was not in control of his mind:

And for all his bitterness and furies, he was insistent on joy.

The idea resonated through his life: he had written years before to Goodere, ‘Our nature is meteoric … we respect (because we partake so) both earth and heaven; for as our bodies glorified shall be capable of spiritual joy, so our souls demerged into those bodies, are allowed to partake earthly pleasure.’

We do wrong if we deliberately ‘bury ourselves’ in ‘dull monastic sadness’. ‘Heaven is expressed by singing, hell by weeping.’ He knew, as Dante did, that there is a special place in hell for those who, when they could laugh, chose instead to sigh.

It is in his sermons, as it was in all his work. Donne was able to hold two conflicting truths ever in front of him: a kind of duck-rabbit of the human condition. Humanity, as he saw it, was rotten with corruption and weakness and...

When he mounted the pulpit, the fondness remained: coinage gave him a way to talk about salvation which had the tactile, textured reality of daily life. In particular, he conjured up the imagery of salvation as purchase, over and over. Donne knew that there were merchants in his congregation, and he used their language: ‘there is a trade driven, a staple established between heaven and earth … Thither have we sent our flesh, and hither hath [God] sent his spirit.’ Christ had to be ‘the nature and flesh of man; for man had sinned, and man must pay’. Money was his best way to point to value that lay beyond money: Christ was ‘money coined even with the image of God; man was made according to his image: that image being defaced, in a new mint, in the womb of the blessed Virgin, there was new money coined.’ Money was the perfect metaphor, being itself at once concrete and metaphysical: metal and human:

In contrast to his love for a golden metaphor, though, Donne had always claimed – before he had any – to hate the business of real-life money.

he loathed the strain of stumbling after cash: ‘only the observation of others is my preservation from extreme idleness, else I profess, that I hate business so much, as I am sometimes glad to remember that the Roman Church reads that verse A negotio perambulante in tenebris’. He’s punning: negotium can mean both ‘business’ and ‘pestilence’, and so, Donne writes, ‘equal to me do the plague and business deserve avoiding.’

Donne had a memento mori, lest he forget even briefly that we are born astride the grave – he left it to a friend in his will, ‘the picture called The Skeleton which hangs in the hall’.

When Donne wrote about suicide there was urgent pain: but when he wrote about death in itself, there is great serious joy, and occasional rampant glee. Spiritually speaking, many of us confronted with the thought of death perform the psychological equivalence of hiding in a box with our knees under our chin: Donne hunted death, battled it, killed it, saluted it, threw it parties. His poetry explicitly about death is rarely sad: it thrums with strange images of living.

telling that none of the love poems are sonnets: he kept that form for death, his other, permanent love.

He had written years before, in another sermon, of his longing for the interlinking of God and man: ‘God hath made himself one body with me.’ So that ‘we’ is Donne imagining himself as having already made that final leap, stepped across the barrier and made a final transformation: John Donne, Jack Donne, Dr Donne, and now, finally, we. The ‘we’ is Donne and the God he has been summoning and summoning.

But people wanted more. They were ravenous enough for his work to make it worth faking it, and within two decades of Donne’s death, ‘new’ work by him began appearing. The phenomenon – pseudepigraphy, the attribution of work to an author who didn’t write it – was nothing new. People had been doing it to Shakespeare for decades; the market mushroomed with work by ‘W.S.’ or ‘W.Sh.’ – as many as ten between 1595 and 1622. In the mid-seventeenth century poems began to crop up in printed miscellanies, aping Donne’s style and ascribed to a just-about-plausibly deniable ‘J.D.’ or ‘Dr Dun’. The fakeries range from comically bad to mediocre: but all are useful, in that they revealed exactly what the forgers were thinking of as typically Donnean.

What’s so telling is that although the fakers thought they knew basically what Donne was about – he liked sex, he loved a metaphor – the pastiches don’t ring even slightly true. They could not step into his voice, because his voice was so constantly in motion: turbulent, shifting between triumph and anxiety, bravado and dread, irony and humility.

The pleasure of reading a Donne poem is akin to that of cracking a locked safe, and he meant it to be so. He demanded hugely of us, and the demands of his poetry are a mirror to that demanding.

The difficulty of Donne’s work had in it a stark moral imperative: pay attention.