THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

profound and consistent perturbation at the thought of death and judgement. Walton remarks of this period that
Donne had ‘betrothed himself to no Religion that might give him any other denomination than a Christian’. However
much the older Donne lacerated himself with memories of a variously misspent youth, he was prepared in 1608 to see
his worst and most distracting ‘voluptuousness’ as a ‘Hydroptique immoderate desire of human learning and
languages’. From the evidence of his various writings, religion was neither a refuge for him nor an escape from
worldly contradictions and confusions; it was the centripetal force in his intellectual and spiritual involvement with
mankind. In all his poetry, both amorous and devout, he intermixes orthodox religious imagery and allusions with
metaphors derived from a variety of secular learning, both ancient and modern. Mental conflict for Donne was
dynamic. The poet who saw himself in the nineteenth of his Holy Sonnets as vexed by the meeting of contraries had in
his earlier Paradoxes and Problemes (published posthumously in 1633) revealed an intellectual engagement with
paradox as a method of analysis. Discord, he noted, had its own creative energy: ‘While I ... feele the contrary
repugnances and adverse fightings of the Elements in my body, my body increaseth; and whilst I differ from common
opinions, by this discord the number of my Paradoxes encreaseth.’ It was from the resolution of paradox in Christian
theology that Donne derived a profound intellectual pleasure.
In a letter of c.1608 he turned from a discussion of religious controversies to a brief reference to his poetry. ‘I doe
not condemn in my self’, he remarked, ‘that I have given my wit such evaporations, as those, if they be free from
prophaneness, or obscene provocations.’ ‘Wit’, the free play of intelligence and a delight in intellectual games and
cerebral point-scoring, characterizes all his most brilliant verse. Donne forges unities out of oppositions, ostensible
contradictions, and imaginative contractions. In the ‘Hymn to God My God, in My Sicknesse’, for example, he plays
with the idea that Adam’s tree and Christ’s cross might possibly have stood in the same place and that east and west
are one on a flat map; he makes theological capital out of the homonymic qualities of ‘Sun’ and ‘Son’ in the second of
the Divine Sonnets and in ‘A Hymne to God the Father’; and in the ‘Hymne to God’ and the eighteenth and
nineteenth elegies - ‘Loves Progress’ and ‘To His Mistris Going to Bed’ - he variously compares the human body to a
map, a landscape, or a continent. As his famous image of ‘stiffe twin compasses’ in ‘A Valediction: Forbidding
Mourning’ also suggests, he was delighted by the serenity of a circle, an image of eternity, which has neither a
beginning nor an end, but whose beginning is its end. He was fascinated both by the inheritance of ancient learning
and by new advances in science and geography. He nods acknowledgement to the disruption of the old, tidy,
intellectual, and theological world order brought about by the discoveries of Copernicus and Columbus, but he refers
ambiguously to the imagined four corners of a round world in the seventh of his Holy Sonnets and he finds poetic use
for the
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redundant Ptolemaic planetary system in his references to the spheres in ‘The Extasie’, ‘A Valediction: Forbidding
Mourning’, and ‘Goodfriday, 1613. Riding Westward’. The often heterodox and destabilized world of Donne’s poetry
is held together both by a transcendent and almighty Creator and by a God-like poet who shows his power by
enforcing conjunctions and exploring correlatives and analogies.
There is, however, a steady note of scepticism in Donne’s erotic verse, one often accentuated by the poet’s
projection of himself as a narrating, and sometimes dictating voice. The speculative, colloquial, and boisterous early
Satyres (printed 1633) suggest a narrator caught up in the animated life of the streets and in the secrets of privy
chambers (though Satyre III vividly explores the difficulty of discovering a true Church amid the conflicts of human
opinion). The fifty-five various poems known as the Songs and Sonets (from the title under which they were first
published in the edition of 1633) have never been satisfactorily dated. Some, including those that Donne may later
have condemned for exhibiting an excess of ‘prophaneness’ and ‘obscene provocation’, had clearly achieved a
considerable éclat through circulation in manuscript. Many of the poems affront readers with a brusque opening
command - ‘Goe, and catche a falling starre’; ‘For Godsake, hold your tongue, and let me love’; ‘Stand still, and I
will read to thee | A Lecture love, in Loves philosophy’ - others have a conversational casualness or give an
impression of interrupted business - ‘I wonder by my troth, what thou, and I | Did till we lov’d?’; ‘Sweetest love, I doe
not goe, | For wearinesses of thee’; ‘So, so, breake off this last lamenting kisse’. The poems suggest a variety of often
dramatic situations but they always present a speaker in immediate relation to a listener even though, as Donne puts it
in ‘The Extasie’, the discourse can effectively be a ‘dialogue of one’. They can vary in form from a neat, comic
demonstration of the folly of resisting seduction (such as ‘The Flea’) to more sober attempts to justify seizing love’s
moment (such as ‘A Lecture upon the Shadow’). In contrast to the Petrarchan tradition of love-poetry that he had
inherited, Donne never attempts to deify or idealize the objects of his passion. In ‘The Dreame’ he does not try to
pretend that his dream is chaste. In ‘The Sunne Rising’, where he responds to the challenge of Ovid, his celebration
of eroticism takes the form of an irreverent address to the Sun who has dared to awake the sleeping lovers. It presents
us with two outside worlds, one of petty activity and drudgery and another of wealth and power; but both are