In her engaging biography, Katherine Rundell considers the life of the poet John Donne (1572-1631) as one of serial metamorphosis. The approach suits him well, given Donne’s fascination with instability, and the fact that events forced him to keep on adapting. He was born to a Catholic family during the Elizabethan persecution, which left either recusancy or compliance open to him. He chose the latter, and a long future of shape-shifting awaited. Trials of conscience proved as demanding as those of circumstance: in some respects, Donne’s work is a record of this struggle, from the secular verse of early maturity to his sermons, eventually as Dean of St Paul’s.
In a sense, the story spans two portraits, an early study of Donne in his fashionable prime – with looks that deserved, as Rundell puts it, “walk-on music, rock-and-roll lute: all architectural jawline and hooked eyebrows” – and an engraving of him as grizzled patriarch, waiting patiently in his shroud. Between those extremes lie a ruined legal career, a marriage of lethal fecundity (for his unfortunate wife) and great doubt and frustration. Then there was ordination, and an intense ministry. Each stage of the journey prompts lively, sympathetic and thoughtful treatment from Rundell.
Literary biography is an effective means to learning a lot about a writer in one go. What matters most is that the subject is introduced in a way that makes scholarship accessible to contemporary readers. Rundell does this very well. She covers “background” succinctly and her commentary on the poems amplifies Donne’s impact as a living voice. Of Love’s Growth, for instance, she observes: “Read the opening stanza and all the oxygen in a five-mile radius rushes to greet you.” Such touches are typical of her manner, and they in fact help you clarify thoughts of your own.
Donne kept changing – “a man constantly transforming,” says Rundell. Certain qualities and images recur throughout his work, and he transformed these too by reworking them. Another constant was the pleasure he clearly took in exhorting and admonishing. In his poem The Will, for instance, he offers a series of bequests to people they manifestly won’t suit. He pointedly leaves his faith to Roman Catholics, in a dig at the doctrine of works, and his collection of medical textbooks “To him for whom the passing bell next tolls.”
The list goes on, entertainingly, over a half-dozen baroque stanzas. Donne’s manner switches between hauteur and wounded exasperation. Here the target is a woman who is forcing the speaker to die of love, whose graces will (he warns her) languish like a sundial in a grave – and who patently isn’t listening to the poem. The comedy, the tempered aggression and the pathos, as happens quite often with this poet, stem from an interplay of watertight wit and shaky logic, control and vulnerability, in verse that is supple one moment and intentionally grating the next.
The mention of the “passing bell” recalls the passage for which Donne is still probably best known: “No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine … any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send out to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.”
Whereas in The Will, the death knell is very much for someone else, in the Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624) above, the bell tolls for everyone. Rundell suggests these words “cast our interconnectedness as a great project,” but that we don’t really believe them. If we did, she says, they would “upend the world”. For Donne, moving on in his meditation, it is a passing thought, an aside – far from being the climax or overall point of his Devotions, a short book thought out during a near fatal illness.
He did not live into his sixties, and his spiritual writings project a mind consumed by thinking. There was too much to contemplate and report, though there were always beguiling flashes of peace. “Super-infinity” awaits us in the next life, he said; super-abundance surrounds us in this one. Rundell offers a fresh view of a writer living permanently at the edge of his senses.
John Stubbs is the author of Donne: The Reformed Soul, published by Penguin.
This article first appeared in the Easter 2022 issue of the Catholic Herald. Subscribe today.
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