John Donne: The Poems

Joe Nutt

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 1999
• Print ISBN:
  9781137608406
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350317895
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Poetry
• Index: Literature

John Donne's poems are some of the most challenging and stimulating in the English literary heritage. This book looks at the entire range of his poetic output, from the erotic to the divine, from satires to sonnets. Through detailed analysis of a large number of individual poems, Donne's intellectual vitality and unique poetic voice is entertainingly explored. The practical techniques are explained clearly, and when applied to the work of other poets, will enable the reader to feel confident in understanding and discussing even the most demanding verse.

PART 1

ANALYSING JOHN DONNE’S POETRY

1

Elegies and Lust

In this chapter we will look at a number of poems which exhibit an uninhibited, imaginative pursuit of sexual experience. The following elegy, To his Mistris going to Bed, was considered indecent enough to be omitted from the first printed edition of his poetry after his death, but manuscript evidence places it firmly before 1599 so we can ascribe it to Donne’s early twenties. For ease of use as we begin our study, it is quoted in full.

Elegie XIX, To his Mistris going to Bed

Come, madam, come, all rest my powers defie,

Until I labour, I in labour lie.

The foe oft-times having the foe in sight,

Is tir’d with standing though he never fight.

Off with that girdle, like heavens Zone glistering, 5

But a far fairer world incompassing.

Unpin that spangled breastplate which you wear,

That th’eyes of busies fooles may be stopt there.

Unlace your self for that harmonious chyme,

Tells me from you, that now it is bed time. 10

Off with that happy busk, which I envie,

That still can be, and still can stand so nigh.

Your gown going off, such beautious state reveals,

As when from flowry meads th’hills shadow steales.

Off with that wyerie Coronet and shew 15

The haiery Diademe which on you doth grow;

Now off with those shooes, and then safely tread

In this loves hallow’d temple, this soft bed.

In such white robes, heaven’s Angels us’d to be

Receaved by men; Thou Angel bringst with thee 20

A heaven like Mahomets Paradice; and though

Ill spirits walk in white, we easly know,

By this these Angels from an evil sprite,

Those set our hairs, but these our flesh upright.

Licence my roaving hands, and let them go, 25

Before, behind, between, above, below.

O my America! my new-found-land,

My kingdome, safeliest when with one man man’d.

My myne of precious stones, My Emperie,

How blest am I in discovering thee! 30

To enter in these bonds, is to be free;

Then where my hand is set, my seal shall be.

Full nakedness! All joyes are due to thee,

As souls unbodied, bodies uncloth’d must be,

To taste whole joyes. Gems which you women use 35

Are like Atlanta’s balls, cast in mens views,

That when a fools eye lighteth on a Gem,

His earthly soul may covet theirs, not them.

Like pictures, or like books gay coverings made

For lay-men, are all women thus array’d; 40

Themselves are mystick books, which only wee

(Whom their imputed grace will dignifie)

Must see reveal’d. Then since that I may know;

As liberally, as to a Midwife, shew

Thy self: cast all, yea, this white lynnen hence, 45

Here is no pennance, much less innocence.

To teach thee, I am naked first; why then

What needst thou have more covering than a man.

A first reading tells us that the poet is far from shy. Donne revels in the business of undressing his mistress in stages, his excitement mounting as she acquiesces until the climactic exclamation, ‘Full nakedness!’ (1. 33). His desire recognises few limits and he urges the girl on with:

Licence my roaving hands, and let them go,

Before, behind, between, above, below.

(ll. 25–6)

The same explicitness is evident in his wish:

As liberally, as to a Midwife, shew

Thy self:

(ll. 44–5)

Evidently he feels no compunction to be decorous. This points towards a fundamental fact we need to appreciate about Donne’s love poetry: that this type of verse was written for a very limited coterie of friends. It would not have been written with any kind of publication in mind. In fact, Donne openly decried his own poetry as trivial and insignificant, and kept few copies of his poems.

Returning to the poem, we should notice that a first reading gives us a clear idea of the subject (a girl undressing) and the speaker’s mood (lust). Our immediate response, then, is not difficult or confused. On the other hand, if we look at the opening four lines of this poem, we can see that it resists easy interpretation. Donne proclaims his excited state openly via two puns, on ‘labour’ and ‘standing’. Puns are less common in the present than they were in Donne’s time, bombarded as we are with immediate visual imagery; but verbal games were the essence of good taste then, and we need to grasp that to enjoy the verse of the age. Today, the word ‘wit’ refers to the colloquial quips people employ as common currency, most of which would be better described as sardonic. In Donne’s time, however, ‘wit’ meant something much more than this. In this study we will use the term ‘wit’ to describe the entire range of verbal games Donne plays with his reader. In this more meaningful sense, wit not only enlightens, it also challenges the reader on deeply difficult matters.

What of Donne’s opening puns? Until he labours in making love to the girl, he has to endure a different kind of labour, and this is where we need to appreciate that Donne is paying us a compliment, expecting us to think of additional meanings such as ‘labouring in vain, ‘hard labour’, or even the struggle to proceed on a journey of some kind, and then the pun works. Note also how compact the line is. Not a word is wasted and from this tautness springs a far richer meaning. Again this is something we will find is characteristic of Donne. The briefest of images can sometimes blossom into the most complex thoughts, particularly when we think about them in the context of the whole poem. The second pun, on ‘standing’, compares Donne ‘standing’ to watch his mistress undress with a soldier ‘standing’ waiting for a battle to begin; but the pun additionally relies on us to link ‘standing’ with the poet’s erect penis. The analogy between seduction and preparing for battle has a long history, and Donne jokes here that if he has to wait much longer he will be too tired to fight.

Having proclaimed his intent, Donne then issues a number of commands for the girl to remove various items of her clothing. The technical unfamiliarity of some of them should not disturb us, but we need to know that a ‘busk’ (l. 11) is a stiff corset, and its closeness and unique postioning are what Donne envies. Yet is that all? A closer look at the lines concerned:

Off with that happy busk, which I envie,

That still can be, and still can stand so nigh.

(ll. 11–12)

reveals another pun. We may notice the pun here because ‘still’ is quickly repeated, as ‘labour’ was in line 2. This will prove a helpful way of picking up double meanings in Donne’s poetry. So, how does the pun on ‘still’ work? We need to look at what Donne says about the girl following each of the items she removes. One example will serve. Though her girdle is ‘like heavens Zone glistering’ (l. 5) she is ‘far fairer’ (l. 6). What Donne stresses is her beauty. The function of the breastplate she wears is not to adorn her, but to prevent men ogling her she is so beautiful. This hyperbolic tone, applied to the girl, persists throughout the poem, and is a conventional technique in Renaissance love poetry, most famously parodied by Shakespeare in his Sonnet CXXX, My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun.

So beautiful is Donne’s ‘mistris’, that were he to replace the busk, physically become that intimate with her, he could never remain still. Nor, we imagine, could he ‘stand’ still, and in that case he would soon not still ‘stand’. It is a rich and amusing pun which nonetheless praises her beauty.

Continuing his undressing, Donne produces the lovely compliment:

Your gown going off, such beautious state reveals,

As when from flowry meads th’hills shadow steales.

(ll. 13–14)

one of the few genuinely sensuous images in the poem, before coming to a more conventional image which nonetheless, requires further consideration:

In such white robes, heaven’s Angels us’d to be

Receavd by men; Thou Angel bringst with thee

A heaven like Mahomet’s Paradice; and though

Ill spirits walk in white, we easly know,

By this these Angels from an evil sprite,

Those set our hairs, but these our flesh upright.

(ll. 19–24)

Calling the girl an ‘angel’ is nothing new, but Donne’s angel brings with her ‘Mahomets Paradice’. It is a difficult phrase. Firstly we must remember that Donne was born and educated a Catholic and as such he could hardly use the word ‘angel’ carelessly Secondly, having established the metaphor, he is quick to generate the joke involving the word ‘set’, where evil spirits in white robes are distinguishable from ‘angels’ like the girl, because they make our hair stand on end, while she gives him an erection. (This use of one word, ‘set’ to act for two different nouns, is technically called syllepsis.) The juxtaposition of paradise, a Christian heaven, with this indecency would have been tasteless, and to avoid it Donne equates her paradise with Mohammed, and therefore renders it safely exotic. The Muslim paradise, for a Christian of the period, was a place of very earthly delights, most of them sexual.

From here Donne’s excitement mounts. The rhythm of the prepositional list in line 26, imitates the excited movements we might imagine as she acquiesces to his wish. The exclamation, ‘O my America!’ underlines this excitement and is followed by more clever wordplay, ‘one man man’d,’ ‘My myne’. What follows is absolutely characteristic of Donne. ‘To enter in these bonds, is to be free’ (l. 31) is a dramatically obvious paradox. The reader is again included in the text by being forced to resolve the paradox. Donne can only be free in the girl’s arms, by being enslaved to her. And look at ‘discovering’ (l. 30) to see just how densely Donne plays with words. The paradox is then continued into the last line of this section where notions of setting one’s seal to a legal document, or ‘bond’, are applied directly both to Donne’s wish to be the girl’s lover, and his physical actions as he imagines himself making love to her.

We should consider the whole poem at this point. If Donne’s aim was to seduce, he appears to have succeeded. But this is to underestimate Donne’s poetic confidence. The coaxing moves onto an outrageously daring level: lines 34–5 suggest that, just as souls must depart bodies if eternal joy in heaven is to be gained, so must bodies give up clothes if sexual joy is the object. But there follows an odd diversion. The caesura in line 35 at ‘joyes’, abruptly halts all progress and Donne proceeds with a classical allusion, to liken jewellery worn by women to the golden apples Hippomenes threw to divert Atalanta’s attention in the running race which gained him her hand and saved his head. Donne argues that the ‘fools’ who are diverted by such things cannot distinguish between the woman herself and her possessions; and in another analogy to books, and then covers, he characterises the ‘fools’ as ‘lay-men’ who are not permitted to read (or are illiterate and so cannot read) the ‘mystique books’ of this faith. These analogies, and the diction Donne uses, imply a hyperbolic compliment both to the girl and to himself. She is treated as a religious object, and one so sacred that only high priests may approach it. He, on the other hand, is a high priest who has the perfect faith and authority to read her ‘mystique book’. A further compliment to women explains that Donne will be ‘dignified’ by the ‘grace’ he receives from knowing her. Another caesura at this point gives time for breath before the long-sought-after wish is voiced:

Must see reveal’d. Then since that I may know;

As liberally, as to a Midwife, shew

Thy self:

(ll. 43–5)

The abrupt caesura in line 43 alerts us, so that we cannot miss the daring of Donne’s conclusion: at the culmination of several lines dominated by classical and sacred imagery, the poet suddenly brings us back to frank physical reality. The phrase ‘as to a Midwife’, crowns Donne’s elaborate compliment with earthy directness, an extraordinarily daring effect.

We may be confused, at the end of the poem, that Donne refers to ‘this white lynnen’ (l. 45), when ‘full nakedness’ came earlier. However, this becomes clearer when we realise that the girl was still wearing jewellery and an undergarment at this point. The jewellery goes first, which prepares the way for Donne to demolish the last of her moral reservations, asking her to cast aside her final pretence with the final garment. ‘Here is no pennance, much less innocence’, he asserts, sustaining the duality of the poem’s focus, simultaneously on abstract ideas and physical garments, right to the end.

It only remains for Donne in his eagerness, to show the girl the way and leave us with one final humorous image which exudes the same confidence and strength exhibited throughout the poem:

To teach thee, I am naked first; why then

What needst thou have more covering than a man.

(ll. 47–8)

However, before we leave this poem and look at less frivolous work, we should consider what it can tell us about Donne’s love poetry. He had little time for the chivalrous poetry which was plentiful in Elizabethan England, and was always conscious of his own uniquely rough voice. We might ask ourselves, what is the function of a love poem? We might reflect for a moment on other love poetry we have read. We can start by considering the girl in this poem. What does she look like? What is her background? Her garments suggest she is a member of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• General Editor’s Preface
• Introduction
• Part 1: Analysing John Donne’s Poetry
• Part 2: The Context and the Critics
• Notes
• Index