Donne was born into a Catholic family 1572 in the reign of Elizabeth I, lived through the reign of James I and died in 1631 as Dean of St Pauls, with Charles I on the throne. This was a time when scholars, priests and courtiers, anyone in the public eye, had to tread a careful path of conformity to church and state or risk imprisonment or worse. Donne had his share of troubles and was imprisoned when he married a teenager, Anne Moore, without her father's permission. Katherine Rundell documents the many ups and downs of Donne's life, but it is his poetry, writings and sermons that are her passion.
She claims that Donne is the greatest writer of desire in
the English language, that he belongs alongside Shakespeare at the peak of
English literature, and, she says, to let him fall out of common consciousness would be
as foolish as discarding a kidney or a lung.
She is fascinated by Donne’s complexity. He was incapable of
being just one thing. She writes “he was poet, lover, essayist, lawyer,
pirate, recusant, preacher, satirist, politician, courtier, chaplain to the
King (Charles I) and dean of the finest cathedral in London.
At no point in his life did Donne come to an end of himself.
She delights in Donne’s originality which broke with
convention and did not sit well with his contemporaries. She has plenty of
originality of her own. Here are more quotes:
He wanted to wear his wit like a knife in his shoe; he wanted
it to flash out at unexpected moments.
To read the full text of a Donne sermon is a little like mounting a horse only to discover that it is an elephant, large and unfamiliar.
The pleasure of reading a Donne poem is akin to that of
cracking a locked safe, and he meant it to be so. He demanded hugely of us, and
the demands of his poetry are a mirror to that demanding. The poetry stands to
ask: why should everything be easy, rhythmical, pleasant?
To read his verse is to hear him insist, across the gap
of hundreds of years: for God’s sake, will you listen.
To write about death in the way he did – to send a
suction pump down into the gap between what we know and what we fear – was to risk
chaos. Donne knew it and did it anyway.
There’s a kind of imaginative ferocity to Donne’s writing
about death and it grows overtime as he loses more and more of the people he
loves and their ghosts pile up around him….. He becomes a peddler of the
grotesque, a forensic scholar of the entropy of the body….The body is in its
essentials a very, very slow one man horror show: a slowly decaying piece of
meatish fallibility in clothes over the sensations of which we have very little
control. Donne looked at it, saw it and did not blink. He walked straight at it,
no explanation, justification, no cheerful sallies. There was just a clear-eyed
acknowledgement of the precise anatomy and scale, the look and feel, the
reality of ruin. It was his superpower that unflinching quality. It allowed him
clarity and vision.
….he was the kind of man who demanded of pain that it
shunt you closer to Infinity.
He was a man constantly transforming. He was a one-man
procession: John Donne, the persecuted, the rake, the lawyer, the bereaved, the
lover, the jailbird, the desperate, the striver, the pious, John Donne the
almost dead and reporting from the frontline of the grave.
He’s one whose work, if allowed under your skin, can
offer joy so violent it kicks the metal out of your knees and sorrow large
enough to eat you.
Katherine Rundell spent 10 years researching and writing this life of John Donne. She calls herself an evangelist; she has another convert. I'm going to read John Donne, crack open the safe and open my mind to infinity.
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