Katherine Rundell on John Donne

 




It was 1593 and John Donne was 21: tall, dark and exquisitely moustached. He was studying law at the Inns of Court in central London, and was living high. He excelled at the business of frivolity and was elected Master of the Revels, in charge of putting on pageantry and wild parties for his fellow scholars, with raucous singing and drunken dancing of the galliard. (The dance, which involved great leaps and kicks and spins, was Queen Elizabeth’s favourite: she was said, even in her 50s, to dance “six or seven galliards in a morning”.) He was writing, for a group of male friends, rakish poetry that was beginning to make him known.
 
 
But as the year went on, the plague was spreading: the theatres were ordered to close, the bear-baiting to cease. In the streets officials wielded 3ft-long marshal wands, to swat at people who weren’t social distancing. Donne wrote to a friend a lament for the city’s swagger:

“Now pleasure’s dearth our city doth possess:
Our theatres are fill’d with emptiness;
As lank and thin is ev’ry street and way
As a woman delivered yesterday.”
 
If you fell ill, your house was boarded up with your whole family inside it for 20 days. The illness came on so speedily that they said a man could “dine with his friends and sup with his ancestors”. One man, the playwright Thomas Dekker wrote, “felt a pricking in his arm … and upon this, plucking up his sleeve, he called to his wife to stay; there was no need to fetch him anything from the market; for see (quoth he) I am marked; and so showing God’s Token, died a few minutes later.” Symptoms were fast and cruel: a racing pulse was followed by buboes – hard, red plague sores, some as large as an apple. More wealthy students retreated to the countryside as the plague advanced; others, with nowhere to go, stayed in London. Donne was one such man; his brother Henry, just arrived at the Inns of Court, was another.
 
It had always been Donne’s job to look after Henry – his younger, more vulnerable brother. In the spring of 1593, Henry’s lodgings were raided: he had been hiding a young Catholic priest in his chambers. The penalty for practising as a priest was death. Henry was thrown in jail, through which the plague was raging. Donne did not immediately visit his brother. He delayed just a few days – he didn’t have days. Almost as soon as he arrived in Newgate, Henry became feverish, tortured by buboes. He died fast. He was 19 years old.
 
Henry’s death was to be one in a series of horrors that battered Donne’s life. Born into a family hounded for their Catholicism, he lost six children, as well as his wife, Anne, who died during childbirth at the age of 33. An attempt to be a swashbuckling privateer ended in him watching sailors leap burning into the sea to drown. He thought, relentlessly, of killing himself: he wrote the first full-length treatise on suicide in the English language. There are few poets who knew greater sorrow.
 
But despite or perhaps because of it, there are also few who insisted so passionately on awe. A single human soul, he wrote, is larger than the world itself: “It is too little to call Man a little world … Man [is] the giant, and the world the dwarf.” He kept insisting – in his poetry and later, when he became the dean of St Paul’s, in his sermons, and on his deathbed – that life is an astonishment, and it behoves us to be astonished.
 
If Henry’s death changed Donne, it was to make his work only more intense, more urgent, more defiantly witty. His best verse is a triumphant call to life: it is desire, sincerity, joke, all bound into one. It’s there, for instance, in A Valediction, Forbidding Mourning: the lovers are imagined as the two feet of a pair of mathematical compasses, joined eternally at the base:
 
“If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two:
Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if th’other do;
And though it in the centre sit,
Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans, and hearkens after it,
And grows erect as it comes home.”
 
His poetry loves the body, because Donne, unlike so many of the poets who went before him, never pretended not to have a body – “grows erect as it comes home” is a pun so obvious it might as well be a little sketch of a penis. He revelled in the real fleeting delight of it: he wrote in To His Mistress Going to Bed:
 
“Full nakedness! All joys are due to thee:
As souls unbodied, bodies unclothed must be
To taste whole joys.”
 
Donne burst out from a poetic tradition that watched him, dismayed, as he laid waste their rules and traditions. Ben Jonson wrote that Donne, “for not keeping of accent, deserved hanging”. Many other poets of the time were still playing the “my lady is a perfect dove” game. Think of Walter Raleigh writing to Queen Elizabeth:
 
“A flower of Love’s own planting,
A pattern kept by Nature,
For Beauty, form and stature
When she would frame a darling.”
 
Donne saw that we need more than that: words that encompass the strangeness and mad sweep of human desire, human hunger. He summoned fleas, mathematical instruments, mythical fish, snakes, planets, kings. He chastised the sun for rising on his lover’s bed:
 
“Busy old fool, unruly Sun,
Why dost thou thus
Through windows, and through curtains call on us?
Must to thy motions lovers’ seasons run?”
 
He had, he wrote, “an hydroptique immoderate desire of humane learning”: a labyrinthical mind. Searching for a way to note down the majestically improbable problem of being alive, he became a wild inventor of words, a neologismist. He accounts for the first recorded use of about 340 words in the Oxford English Dictionary, including beauteousness, emancipation, enripen, fecundate and jig.
 
Donne is often said to be a difficult poet. But if he is difficult, it is the difficulty of someone who wants you to read harder, to pay better attention. And when you have read and reread them, the poems open – they salute you. The pleasures of Donne are akin to the pleasures of cracking a safe: there is gold inside. And besides, why should it be easy? Very little that is worth having is easy. We are not, he told us, easy: we are both a miracle and a disaster; our lives deserve pity and wonder, careful loving attention, the full untrammelled exuberance of our imagination. When you have known vast horror, and still found glory, you do not compare loves to doves. You write: “Taste whole joys.”
 
Donne knew what it was to be ruthlessly alone. He knew dread, and fear: and that’s why we can believe him when he tells us of their opposite, of ravishments and of love.
 
 
Plague poems, defiant wit and penis puns: why John Donne is a poet for our times. By Katherine Rundell. The Guardian, April 15, 2022.

Katherine Rundell: John Donne, Super-Infinite (1601)
 
John Donne led many lives, from a young rake in his early years to archdeacon of St Paul’s in his old age. Born into a grand Catholic family who had suffered persecution under Protestant monarchs, he was intimately acquainted with the cruelty of sixteenth-century England. In particular, the tragic death of his younger brother who, aged just nineteen, was thrown into prison for hiding a Jesuit priest and subsequently caught the plague.
 
However Donne’s poetry isn’t defeatist – he was famous in his time for his unusual, intelligent and imaginative work, which used fleas to talk about sex and violence to talk about God. And in the view of our guest today, Katherine Rundell, Donne should be considered alongside William Shakespeare as one of the finest wordsmiths this country has ever produced. That’s why she has written a sparkling new biography of the poet: Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne.
 
Katherine Rundell is a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. Her bestselling books for children have been translated into more than thirty languages and have won multiple awards. She has written for, amongst others, the London Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement and The New York Times: mostly about books, though sometimes about night climbing, tightrope walking, and animals.
 
Artemis Irvine talks with Katherine Rundell.
 
Travels Through Time, April 26, 2022.

Faber

Perhaps it was all because of his name. John Donne: for a poet this must have felt a little like destiny, and even in the most unlikely of moments he couldn’t resist making puns. He sat down to write a letter to the enraged father of the teenage girl he had just married in secret. A lesser man might have chosen to play this fairly straight, but not JD. ‘It is irremediably done,’ he wrote to his new father- in-law, and of course he spells it ‘donne’. His young bride’s family name was More; the jokes pretty much wrote themselves. The couple had 12 children and were, he later said, ‘undone’ by their marriage.
 
It is difficult to read Donne and not to like him, at least some of the time. This is in part because of his insistence that even the most pious of prayers might be improved with a penis joke. It is equally because his poems invite us, to an unusual degree, to feel that we might know him. Many poets play games with identity, with whether the speaker of the poem is or is not the same as the poet. Donne does something a little different, which is to circumvent this slightly tired question with an invitation to laugh along. One famous poem pictures his mistress undressing, but it is really the speaker who is revealed: in his desperate lust, his foolishness. ‘O my America! My new-found land!’ he greets her, absurdly. Everywhere, there is something raw and exposed about him. He’s like a child who plays hide and seek by closing his eyes and shouting out here I am. In ‘A Nocturnal upon St Lucy’s Day’, which is perhaps the most beautiful poem about grief in the English language, he insists: ‘Study me then, you who shall lovers be/ At the next world... For I am every dead thing.’
 
Donne turns his scholars into lovers, and as a result books about him tend surprisingly often to rise up to the sparkiness of their histrionic, funny and endlessly fascinating subject. Even the driest of textual scholarship is caught up in this Donne effect. John Carey’s idiosyncratic and brilliant 1981 study John Donne: Life, Mind and Art tracks the repeated images across the poems, prose works and sermons. Even odder and also dazzling is David Marno’s Death Be Not Proud: The Art of Holy Attention (2016), which spends 300 pages in the analysis of a single Donne sonnet. The poet has been extremely well treated by his biographers. The first to write his life was his friend Izaak Walton, who was more famous for his celebrations of fishing and whose life of Donne has a good claim to be the first literary biography. R.C. Bald’s wise, deliberate John Donne: A Life was published in 1970, followed by John Stubbs’s lively and elegant biography in 2006. Perhaps, if you are playing this game seriously, it is impossible to write a bad Donne book.
 
Katherine Rundell’s Super-infinite is a wonderfully Donnean book. It sits in a long pedigree of loving, scholarly responses to the poet, but captures with an unusual wit the variety and richness of its subject. It is neither a strict biography nor only a critical engagement with his poems, but offers instead half a riff on his life and half a love letter to him. There is a lot in the life, and Rundell gives us a quick march through.
 
Donne was born into a Catholic family in 1572 and converted to Protestantism; he was at times a pirate, law student, MP (twice), priest and pornographer. We might see in his life a cartoonish version of the cliché about men being radicals in their youth and conservatives in their old age. As a hot young poet he wrote poems which baffled his contemporaries and were immediately copied into commonplace books. By the time he was 50 he was Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral and preacher to the king. He was rich enough to buy a Titian, and moved his old Catholic mother into the deanery with him.
 
Rundell is a fabulous storyteller. Her children’s books – The Explorer, The Good Thieves and others – rollick through sturdy plots peopled by lively characters: the plucky orphan, the twinkly-eyed grandfather. They leave other contemporary tales for children in their dust. She has the storyteller’s instinct that a strong narrative and a couple of fireworks can carry you through almost anything. The challenge she faces in writing of Donne’s life is that there are so many gaps. Nothing is known, for example, of the exact circumstances of Donne’s wedding. Faced with this, biographers respond in characteristic ways. Bald notes: ‘Neither the exact date nor place of Donne’s marriage is known, although a conjecture to the place is worth hazarding.’ This is so honest and so humble. Stubbs jumps over the gap: ‘By this time, Donne was married.’ Rundell is different. ‘And so they married,’ she writes, and with a flourish conjures up a whole novelistic scene, including the words spoken by the couple and a little speculation as to what the bride wore.
 
What Rundell values in Donne is bravado, wit, invention. He was, she writes, ‘a pure original’, and this is a wholly convincing reading of Donne. But it is also – with some irony – a familiar story, and one that previous biographers and scholars have in their own drier styles often told. Rundell observes that Donne sounds like nobody else, and that he was aware of this quality in his own poetry. ‘Donne knew that he had the seeds of something original,’ she writes, and ‘that what he was doing with the English language was fresh and different.’ To prove this, she quotes a phrase from one of his poems: ‘I sing not, siren-like, to tempt; for I/ Am harsh.’ This is a fine point, that Donne was original and knew it, and this is also a fine proof of exactly that. There is indeed something striking – even harsh – about that line-break. But the argument for Donne’s originality is itself an old one. ‘The unusualness of Donne’s poetry was quite apparent to Donne,’ writes John Carey on the second page of his book, and then proves his point by quoting exactly that same line of Donne’s.
 
The moments at which Rundell is a little conventional permit us to distinguish her own true invention: and through it, perhaps, Donne’s. Her innovations are rarely biographical. In a footnote, she describes Bald’s biography as ‘the bedrock of this book’, and her telling of the life draws from Bald’s version and to a lesser degree that of Stubbs, whose more recent biography she scarcely mentions. The life is a lovely melodrama, sometimes macho, sometimes Mills & Boon, but it is not really where Rundell’s interest lies. For her, his words are the magic: ‘Language, his poetry tells us, is a set, not of rules, but of possibilities.’ He invented new words by breaking apart and recombining the old ones. ‘Donne loved the trans-prefix’ she observes, and ‘he loved to coin formations with the super-prefix.’ (Carey, again, in 1981: Donne was ‘especially prone to invent verbs with the prefix “inter-’’’).
 
Rundell’s title Super-infinite comes from one of Donne’s own new formations, and the paradox is impatient with the limitations of language and what it can be used to describe. The book stages an often thrilling meeting between Donne and Rundell, and its basis is this supple, flexible wordplay in which sentences jump between registers and tones, between this world and the next, between everything and something more. On a portrait of the young Donne, soulful and seductive: ‘He wore a hat big enough to sail a cat in, a big lace collar, an exquisite moustache.’ On his despairs and griefs, and the deaths of his family members and too many of his young children: ‘He was a man who walked so often in darkness that it became for him a daily commute.’ On the violence of his style: ‘He wanted to wear his wit like a knife in his shoe.’
 
Phrases such as these do the work which literary critics are sometimes afraid to do. They attest to love, and perform that love, and in so doing Rundell returns us to a Donne who is new yet old, nicely paradoxical, his own man and everyone’s.
 
A pure original: the inventive genius of John Donne. By Daniel Swift. The Spectator, April 16, 2022. 

The last thing that keeps contemporary Anglican preachers awake at night is the risk of serious injury resulting from the crush of people in their congregations. As Katherine Rundell reminds us in this spirited and sympathetic biography, the risk was real enough when John Donne was in the pulpit, especially in the flower of his achievement as dean of St Paul’s. She avoids (thankfully) the cliché about the early modern preacher as a rockstar equivalent, but helps us see that someone like Donne combined the appeal of a great actor, a performance poet, and a charismatic media don – a mixture of Mark Rylance, Kae Tempest and Brian Cox.
 
People came to experience the sheer stage presence; but they also relished the physical energy of the words, the music of rhythms and cadences constructed by an expert rhetorician. And the subject matter was of intense concern: most hearers believed that what Donne was talking about had something to do with their ultimate nature and fate as human agents, and the detail of this was the topic of fierce public contest, literally a question of life and death.
 
Donne knew more than many about this life-and-death dimension. Born in 1572 into a Catholic family of Welsh origin connected with the martyred hero Thomas More, he grew up in the intense and secretive world of a religious minority subject to draconian restrictions and savage official penalties for non-compliance. As a young man studying at Lincoln’s Inn, he saw his younger brother arrested because of his involvement in harbouring a Catholic priest: the priest was executed, and Henry Donne died of the plague in prison, aged 19.
 
In the years that followed, Donne moved away from his Catholic roots, though the details are hard to chart, beginning a journey that would eventually lead him in 1615 to ordination in the Church of England. And part of this involved teaching himself to think of the Catholic culture he had grown up with in much the same terms as most of his English contemporaries did – as a sophisticatedly perverse world that weaponised suffering and death in a way careless of the fate of individuals like his younger brother, exposing innocent and ill-equipped people to lethal risks for political ends, and capable of planning large-scale atrocities.
 
Catholics in the late 16th and early 17th centuries were thought of in a similar way as we might think of Islamic State or al-Qaeda: for English Protestants, the Catholic martyr was not far removed from the suicide bomber in the modern imagination, someone who was as indifferent to the lives of others as to their own. Donne was to write about these matters in his late thirties with just a touch of obsessiveness, overcompensating, perhaps, for guilt at the abandonment of his family’s costly faith.
 
But his first literary flowering was as a love poet. Rundell sensibly warns us against imagining that the astonishingly vivid, funny, exuberantly sensual verses of Donne’s twenties imply that he was an exceptionally promiscuous man. These poems are no more autobiographical than Shakespeare’s sonnets; of course they would be impossible without personal experience, but they are not chronicles of such experience, and the conventional description of the young Donne as a “rake” is probably misleading. What is undeniable, though, is that his is a deeply physical poetry of almost manic intellectual and metaphorical complexity which never wanders far from “this bed thy centre”.
 
Donne undercuts, parodies and inverts all sorts of commonplaces, scolding the rising sun for disturbing lovers in bed, telling his partner that before their coupling they were like unweaned children or snoring sleepers, and, most boldly of all, cheerfully upending the pious idea that physical love is a step on the ladder to pure, spiritual union by insisting that the whole point of spiritual communion is to culminate in physical intercourse.
 
Our bodies “are ourselves, though they are not we”; in an image he uses more than once, drawn from medieval cosmology, he presents the relation of soul to body as that of “intelligence” to its “sphere” – the shaping, ordering force, and the material landscape to which it gives consistency and purpose. A soul deprived of its embodied activity, abstracted from its role as making sense of the world’s stuff, is unimaginable (and later on, in his devotional poetry, he will give this a further twist, describing the human soul as itself a “sphere” in which the “intelligence” is devotion to God: focusing on God is intelligible only when it is giving order to the confused tangle of impulses and longings that are going on within).
 
Donne’s world is, in all sorts of important respects, medieval – meaning quite the opposite of what that word so often evokes in popular discourse now. It is a place in which connections are everywhere, in which the material stuff of the world is always “speaking” and pointing and cross-referencing. In a world like this, you can take enormous risks in playing with concepts and images, because of a confidence that things will join up sooner or later; you can launch out from a trapeze, knowing that someone or something else’s trajectory will bring them to a place where they can catch you.
 
Donne’s poetry, then, often has the flavour of an experiment: suppose we start with this image? Where will it take us? “Let man’s soul be a sphere” is a little like, “Let R be the rate of acceleration of a body with mass M.” Set up the coordinates and see what comes out. Rundell is right to underline the way in which Donne, whether writing about sex or God, sees the human body as the site of the most demanding and exhilarating explorations of what language can produce.
 
If the early love poems play with all the dimensions of delight and surprise that can surround physical love, the devotional poetry and prose linger on the equally diverse and complex realities of human mortality. “Donne hunted death, battled it, killed it, saluted it, threw it parties,” as Rundell splendidly puts it, and he did so in the face of his own death, using protracted illness as an occasion for intense and intricately composed meditations, and quite literally posing for a portrait in his shroud.
 
Mortality was not a quiet cessation but an entry into an unimaginably enhanced and concentrated sensuality, the “one equal music” he evokes in a much-quoted sermon. One of the real strengths of this book is that we are encouraged to see the continuity of Donne’s imagination – and not just in its blazing metaphorical fertility but in its awareness of how readily it can be distracted by the momentary and trivial.
 
In poetry, this can be turned into a new cycle of inventiveness (that extraordinary poem “The Flea” is a case in point); in prayer and devotion, it serves more as a humbling reminder of the difficulty of focusing one’s attention on God: “I ignore God and his angels for the noise of a fly.” But something of the same spirit is there throughout: nothing is beneath notice in this kaleidoscopic world of material change. To quote Rundell again, “The human animal is worth your attention, your awe, your love.” Being aware of mortality does not divert your attention from the passing world but challenges you to think of the depth of what you experience, what you will lose, and – for Donne and his fellow Christians – what you will rediscover in some unrecognisably enriched mode.
 
A sensibility like Donne’s was never going to be comfortable company. It is not surprising that his various attempts to establish himself as soldier of fortune, civil servant, member of parliament and diplomat were not successful. Single-mindedness and professional competence were not his priorities. Most spectacularly, he jeopardised his career and his freedom by marrying the teenage daughter of an aristocratic patron without the family’s consent.
 
Rundell manages to make Anne Donne a credible and lively presence in the story, with her own pathos – a bright and well-educated young woman, doomed to a premature death by poverty and ceaseless child-bearing. It is clear that Donne was deeply in love with her before and after the marriage; yet we can wonder, as Rundell does, what Anne felt about being so often left to cope with the household while her husband desperately tried to court influential patrons (including influential ladies) and establish some kind of financial stability. He wrote some wonderful poems for her; did she get to read them?
 
No life of Donne can be a hagiography. Apart from all the ambiguities around the marriage, it is hard for the contemporary reader to stomach the humiliating flatteries that pretty much every aspiring literary figure of the era had to offer to potential benefactors. In a society still dependent on patronage to an extent we can barely imagine, very few could afford to stand on their dignity. It is tempting to reduce – as some have wanted to do – Donne’s priestly career to a last, barrel-scraping effort to find secure employment. But Rundell insists that this is a skewed picture when set against the evidence of Donne’s own letters; he is never less than serious about ordination and its demands.
 
More uncomfortably, what do we make of Donne’s “male gaze”? The erotic poetry is wonderfully inventive, witty and joyful; is it also a poetry that leaves the female partner silent and (we hope at least) compliant? Even when Donne uses erotic imagery in his devotional work, there are uncomfortable notes of violence – as in the famous “Batter my heart…” sonnet with its stark concluding image of divine rape.
 
“O my America! my new-found land!” is a deservedly celebrated line, but Donne’s roving fingers exploring the woman’s body can hardly fail to evoke the story of colonial penetration and possession that was beginning to dominate the political imagination of the age. Donne was fascinated by maps. Rundell has some good things to say about the place of maps in Britain’s political imagination in the period as part of a defence strategy, and also about how they can work as metaphors for a strange and unexplored human body, one’s own or another’s – a theme that Donne develops with gusto. But this reminds us that mapmaking was no innocent activity in this first era of transcontinental empire-building.
 
Rundell rightly cautions against writing Donne off as a misogynist. There are poems and prose passages which seem to express disgust or contempt at the female body. But as with so much of the period’s literature, we cannot know exactly what is and isn’t an exercise in conventional forms and tropes. We are on safer ground concentrating on what is not conventional and predictable – and there is no shortage of that in Donne. But this does not relieve us of the anxiety around the silent partner (“For God’s sake, hold your tongue,” as one well-known poem begins), the Other who must be encompassed, mapped and possessed – nor should it.
 
The poetry of the past, like its fiction and drama, and indeed its theology or philosophy, will often shake us by its tone-deafness to the moral registers we take for granted. It is no concession to moral relativism to say that it still deserves intelligent reading; we can even say, in many instances, that such reading helps us see how the resources of a historic text lay foundations for new perceptions that its authors would not and could not have contemplated directly. We can appreciate without absolving or ignoring – and without a desperate attempt to show that any anxieties are unfounded and that a historical author is really just an inoffensive contemporary in fancy dress.
 
We go on reading Donne, as we go on reading any serious writer, because we are surprised, frustrated, exhilarated; we resonate with the voice, and we recognise that we have work to do (on ourselves as well as on the text). Katherine Rundell does in this book what any good literary biographer must do: share that sense of work to do, as well as the wonder and delight. Donne presents an interconnected world, both human and more-than-human, “not as a burden but as a great project”, she says – recommendation enough, we might think, in a culture so damagingly confused about how we are involved in our material setting. And, she asks, unanswerably, “Who else of his peers had been able to hold grotesqueries and delights, death and life, so tightly in the same hand?”
 
The infinite art of John Donne. By Rowan Williams. The New Statesman, May 11, 2022.

If you were a gentleman in Elizabethan London, a gentleman of more or less regular means and habits, your typical day went something like this: You rose at 4 a.m., you wrote 14 letters and a 30-page treatise on the nonexistence of purgatory, you fought a duel, you composed a sonnet, you went to watch a Jesuit get publicly disemboweled, you invented a scientific instrument, you composed another sonnet, you attended the premiere of As You Like It, you romanced someone else’s wife, and then you caught the bubonic plague and died.

They packed a lot in, the Elizabethans, is my point. Maybe posterity, considering our own age, will judge that we are packing a lot in, with the fascism and the COVID and the melting glaciers. Maybe. But there was a peculiar paradoxical ugly-beautiful density to life as the Elizabethans lived it. The Reformation was just behind them; the civil war was coming; Elizabeth, the virgin queen, may have been semi-celestial, but her subjects lived in a police state. They had a passion for virtue and a genius for cruelty. They had wonderful manners and barbaric inclinations, lovely clothes and terrible diseases. They oscillated madly between the abstract and the corporeal. And among his contemporaries, nobody oscillated more madly than John Donne.

Donne was made of contradiction, or of transformation. Born an outsider, a Catholic at a time when being Catholic in England was illegal—his uncle and then his brother went to prison for their faith, and his brother would die there—Donne worked his way in, into the inside, shifting and shedding as he went.

He was a bookish lover-poet who went to sea with the doomed and dashing Earl of Essex and caught a vision of hell when he watched Spanish sailors being burned alive in the harbor at Cádiz. (His Rutger Hauer–in–Blade Runner moment: “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.”) He was a splenetic satirist, all-observing, all-condemning, who was also a world-class flatterer/ingratiator. He had a slicing, dicing, predatory mind that he applied with equal force to sex, to politics, and finally to a religious vocation. Young Donne had an inflamed libido, old Donne an inflamed conscience. The man who wrote “License my roving hands, and let them go / Before, behind, between, above, below” would become, as the dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral, the grave divine who warned his congregants that “a man may be an adulterer in his wife’s bosom, though he seek not strange women.”

As for his poetry, it’s unlovable and it’s irresistible. English verse is not the same after Donne. Harmony and gentility—the music of Spenser—go out the window, and in comes a ferocious, sometimes grating intellectual energy and an intense superiority. You can read pages of Donne and register only the oppressive proximity of his pulsing brain. But then he’ll snag you. “Busy old fool, unruly sun,” grumbles the lover as daylight pushes in at the bedroom window. “Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide / Late school boys.” Encrusted as his vocabulary could be, he had a shocking talent for immediate, everyday speech. One moment his verse is alien, twisted, full of fussy wiring and strange mechanical conceits (Dr. Johnson: “Who but Donne would have thought that a good man is a telescope?”); the next he writes “For God’s sake hold your tongue, and let me love,” or “I run to death, and death meets me as fast,” and we hear him speaking to us across four centuries in ringing monosyllables.

Super-Infinite is the title of Katherine Rundell’s new biographical study of Donne. It sounds like an album by Monster Magnet. And indeed, Rundell responds to Donne in something of a heavy-metal, hyperbolizing register. Read the first stanza of “Love’s Growth,” she promises us, and “all the oxygen in a five-mile radius rushes to greet you.” Another poem, “The Comparison,” in which Donne contrasts the charms of his mistress with those of another woman, takes the tradition of poets praising female beauty “and knifes it in a dark alley.” And so on.

But overpraise, or praise with reverb, is very Elizabethan and very, very John Donne, as Rundell shows us. “Compliments,” she writes, “were core currency,” and Donne was loaded. He flung out admirations; he strewed encomia. “Your going away,” he assured one Lady Kingsmill in a letter, “hath made London a dead carcass.” Rundell calls this Donne’s “pleasure in extravagance.” When Elizabeth, the young daughter of Sir Robert Drury, died, Drury (the sort of grandee to whom Donne was always sucking up) commissioned an elegy. And although Donne had never met Elizabeth Drury, he went at it with a vengeance: In two long, slightly bonkers poems, “The First Anniversary” and “The Second Anniversary,” he unfurled the full howling panorama of human existence and almost beatified the deceased girl. “She, she is dead; she’s dead; when thou knowest this / Thou knowest how dry a cinder this world is.” It was heavenly hackwork. “If he had written it of the Virgin Mary,” opined Ben Jonson, “it had been something.”

Donne’s love poetry is extreme: Bodies melt, souls commingle, genders elide, death is an atom away. For sheer piercing morbidity, what image can match the “bracelet of bright hair about the bone” that he summons in “The Relic,” his fantasy of being exhumed while still wearing the tokens of his love? His religious poetry is equally extreme: “Spit in my face you Jews, and pierce my side,” runs one of his Holy Sonnets (more of those hammering monosyllables), in which he prays to take on the sufferings of Christ. “Buffet, and scoff, scourge, and crucify me, / For I have sinned, and sinned.” On a good day, Donne saw the world as an organic biological-spiritual unity, the famous whole where “no man is an island.” On a bad one, it became a slaughterhouse, a Boschian mill: “Th’ earth’s race is but thy table; there are set / Plants, cattle, men, dishes for Death to eat. / In a rude hunger now he millions draws / Into his bloody, or plaguey, or starved jaws” (“Elegy on Mistress Bulstrode”).
 
An extremity of perception, in the end, is where the two Donnes meet: He was a mystic in bed, and a mystic in the pulpit. The almost Tantric lover, seeking an essence beyond the body, was also the yearning-for-eternity preacher: “As soon as my soul enters heaven, I shall be able to say to the angels, I am of the same stuff as you.”

He managed his exit like David Bowie, stripping naked in the weeks before he died and wrapping himself in his winding-sheet so that an artist could make sketches for the posthumous carving of a marble monument. As a preacher, Rundell tells us, Donne’s “speciality” was his gift for riffing on infinity. One imagines his congregants at St. Paul’s creaking and shuffling in their pews as he laid the vision upon them: “There shall be no cloud nor sun, no darkness nor dazzling, but one equal light; no noise nor silence, but one equal music.” And there it is, the final resolving power chord: the radiant wave in which all the contradictions—of the age, and of the man—would be consumed.

The Unlovable, Irresistible John Donne : The Elizabethan poet and divine was a mystic in bed and a mystic in the pulpit. By James Parker. The Atlantic, August 16, 2022.