John Donne, Songs and Sonnets

I’ve been reading Shakespeare at a slightly accelerated pace: not necessarily fast, but definitely not what you’d call “leisurely.” I have it in my head that I should finish him by June, when it will have been exactly three years since I first began this reading list (this blog was conceived a little later). This falls into the category of “problems I create for myself,” but it’s good to not get bogged down in the details of Shakespeare, which is very, very easy to do. I don’t, however, want to put everything on pause while I trudge through the Bard, so I’ll continue to work through the reading list while I finish him up.

Today, then, is John Donne, one of the three major metaphysical poets (the others being George Herbert and Andrew Marvell). All three are poets whom I read in school but never really “got,” and frankly I think they’re a little too much for a high school sophomore to wrap his head around. As is the case with all poets, Donne is working in conversation with poets from the past, specifically Petrarch, to whom he owes many of the tropes of love poetry that he so deftly shapes and reshapes. Moreover, Donne truly lives up to the title of “metaphysical” poet, as his poetry contains long and complex meditations on religion, spirituality, infinity, and even Neoplatonism. He often reads like a Persian Sufi poet in the way he marries romantic love with the experience of the divine, which makes his approach interpretation of traditional love poetry truly fascinating. We will focus here on his songs and sonnets; his religious poetry, which occasionally overlaps with his sonnets, feels more conventional, at least in its themes if not in its style.

Love, Revisited

We mentioned that Donne owes a lot to Petrarch for establishing the language with which to talk about love, and it’s interesting how relevant and modern many of those tropes feel, though his spin on them is always refreshing. Consider the simply titled poem, “The Broken Heart,” where he muses on the self-annihilating nature of love:

“He is stark mad, who ever says, / That he hath been in love an hour, / Yet not that love so soon decays, / But that it can ten in less space devour; / Who will believe me, if I swear / That I have had the plague a year? / Who would not laugh at me, if I should say, / I saw a flask of powder burn a day?”

Love is like a fast chemical reaction or a plague, something that destroys and decimates, with the power to metamorphose one thing into another. Who has not heard pop songs comparing love to something like fire or a drug (I’m looking at you, Ke$ha) that is swift and merciless?

Other poems hint at more complicated assessments of love. Consider the poem “Lovers’ Infiniteness,” which deals with the familiar idea that love can be, in some sense, infinite in measure. Yet he astutely recognizes the problems inherent in this idea. First, if she did not offer him all her love, then he can never win it all, if it is indeed infinite. Nor could he have all of her if she had offered it to him at one point, for “All was but all”: there is more to her today than the day she gave him all her love. What’s more, he realizes he can never possess all of her, because that would mean his love would one day plateau, yet he says that it grows every day. Maybe it’s the mathematician in me, but it’s cool to hear a poet give the logic behind his words due consideration, and even cooler when that consideration yields a fuller understanding of the words: for he doesn’t conclude from these meditations that love is finite, QED; rather he is able to understand better what the infinitude of love truly means.

Consider also “The Dream,” wherein the poet is awoken from a dream by his lover, and he feels as if his waking life is a continuation of the dream. Certainly we’ve heard that a beautiful lover may be a dream come true, but the focus is not on the beauty of the lover, but what she represents: a force that conflates reality and fantasy, truth and fiction: “My dream thou brok’st not, but continued’st it; / Thou art so true, that thoughts of thee suffice / To make dreams truths, and fables histories…” We will talk more about the line between dreams and reality later when we get to Descartes, but for now it’s interesting to consider the function of the lover for Donne: she is the instrument of truth the world, the dividing line between what is real and what is not.

Whence comes the metaphysical aspect of Donne’s poetry. Though the woman he loves is a person, she represents divinity and the manifestation of the perfect world in ours. And though both the poet and the lover exist in the world, they somehow transcend finitude through their love. In the poem “A Fever,” where his lover is sick and near death, he doesn’t worry that she will die because if she did, she would take the world with her: she is not only his world, but that which sustains the whole world:

“But yet thou canst not die, I know, / To leave this world behind, is death, / But when thou from this world wilt go, / The whole world vapours with thy breath. / … / Oh wrangling schools, that search what fire / Shall burn this world, had none the wit / Unto this knowledge to aspire, / That this her fever might be it?”

All and Nothing

Donne, like Shakespeare, enjoys playing with the idea of “nothing,” of negation, nonbeing, and the paradoxes those ideas engender. Love has a transformative power, as every lover since Ovid, and even before, knew. When it departs, it leaves the poet as the dried husk of a man, or even perhaps less:

“Study me then, you who shall lovers be / At the next world, that is, at the next spring: / For I am every dead thing, / In whom love wrought new alchemy. / For his art did express / A quintessence even from nothingness, / From dull privations, and lean emptiness / He ruined me, and I am re-begot / Of absence, darkness, death; things which are not.” (“A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy’s Day”)

Love, which sustains the world, which is the essence of truth and reality, also has the power to unmake: its absence is darkness, death, negation.

The obverse of nothingness is completeness, which, if we learned anything from the medieval philosophers, can be as inscrutable as nothingness. Just as God is unknowable, so is love. From the poem “Farewell to Love”:

“I thought there was some deity in love / So did I reverence, and gave / Worship; as atheists at their dying hour / Call, what they cannot name, an unknown power, / As ignorantly did I crave…”

Two poems I think touch on these ideas (negation and completion), and I would like to consider them a little more closely. The first is one of Donne’s more famous poems, “Negative Love”. Being good students, we instantly think of “negative theology,” the idea that God cannot be described except in terms of what He is not: He is not finite, He is not corporeal, etc; that through knowing what He is not, we get a sense of what He is. The poem is short, so let’s quote the whole thing:

“I never stoop'd so low, as they / Which on an eye, cheek, lip, can prey; / Seldom to them which soar no higher / Than virtue, or the mind to admire. / For sense and understanding may / Know what gives fuel to their fire; / My love, though silly, is more brave; / For may I miss, whene'er I crave, / If I know yet what I would have. / If that be simply perfectest, / Which can by no way be express'd / But negatives, my love is so. / To all, which all love, I say no. / If any who deciphers best, / What we know not—ourselves—can know, / Let him teach me that nothing. This / As yet my ease and comfort is, / Though I speed not, I cannot miss.”

We get a sense of Donne’s love: he doesn’t love her for her outer beauty, which many who speak of inner beauty will admire. Yet Donne doesn’t stop at inner beauty either: “virtue, or the mind” are not the object of his admiration, for he can describe what those things are, and love that has reasons is not love. Loving everything about a person is insufficient; for we have no understanding even of ourselves, so how can we expect to accurately love another person. (My edition quotes Montaigne: “And he who hath no understanding of himself, what can he have understanding of?”) Therefore, Donne loves instead what he cannot know, “that nothing,” that inexpressible, untranslatable nothing. This again gives us a sense that his love is infinite, boundless. I am reminded of a line from “John My Beloved,” off Sufjan Stevens’ new album: “I love you more than the world can contain / In its lonely and ramshackle head.” There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy, and to Donne, love is one of them.

As a side note, the idea of misguided or poorly aimed love recurs in Donne’s poems. In the poem “Love’s Alchemy,” he compares the love that people claim to find to compounds created in alchemy that are thought to be precursors of gold, but not gold itself: alchemists glorify “some odoriferous thing, or medicinal,” even though what they seek is (a) not that odoriferous thing, and (b) impossible through the means of alchemy. (This second point may not have been in Donne’s mind, but it certainly adds a dimension to our understanding.)

The other poem that I wanted to take a closer look at is “Air and Angels,” which is a portrayal of “realized” love, one that transcends a woman’s physical beauty and arrives at an abstract vision of “beauty.” Though he professes in “Negative Love” to not love because of outward appearances, he contends in A&A that he could not love without it: for although physical beauty is not an end in itself, one would not be able to recognize transcendent beauty without first understanding physical beauty:

“But since my soul, whose child love is, / Takes limbs of flesh, and else could nothing do, / More subtle than the parent is / Love must not be, but take a body too…”

If love were so subtle as to completely disregard beauty, the soul, which, like a child, can only understand by example, would not be able to comprehend love.

The connection between love, which is “some lovely glorious nothing,” and reality is explored also in the poem “The Ecstasy,” which has the line: “On man heaven’s influence works not so, / But that it first imprints the air, / So soul into the soul may flow, / Though it to the body first repair.” Heaven cannot work through men except through an intermediary, and so in order for two souls to be joined, first two bodies must be joined.

Stray Observations

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•       Penguin editions are usually very solid, but this one was especially good. AJ Smith carefully annotated the poems so that probably half the book is made up of notes; these aren’t simple glosses either, but often are interpretive, a rarity in Penguin books nowadays. Highly recommended if you plan to pick up a copy.
•       Another theme common to Donne is our personal responsibility for our own misery. From “Song”: “But come bad chance, / And we join to it our strength, / And we teach it art and length, / Itself o’er us to advance.” It reminds me of that great line from High Fidelity, paraphrased here: which came first, the music or the misery? Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable, or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?
•       From “The Sun Rising”, which plays on the common theme of young lovers separating at sunrise: “Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clime, / Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time. / She is all states, and all princes, I, / Nothing else is. / Princes do but play us; compared to this, / All honour’s mimic; all wealth alchemy.” And a final command: “Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere; / This bed thy centre is, these walls, thy sphere.”