The Good-Morrow (explication)

Here you can see another video explication of John Donne's "The Good-Morrow".

The Metaphysical Poets and the Metaphysical Conceit

 

En literatura inglesa no se suele emplear el término "barroco" (baroque). El estilo que aquí llamaríamos barroco o exageradamente complicado y alambicado lo llaman allí "metaphysical": the metaphysical poets, los poetas metafísicos o conceptistas; el "concepto" o juego de ideas conceptista o barroco es el "metaphysical conceit":

 

 Conceit,  an elaborate metaphor comparing two apparently dissimilar objects or emotions, often with an effect of shock or surprise. The *Petrarchan conceit, much imitated by Elizabethan sonneteers and both used and parodied by Shakespeare, usually evoked the qualities of the disdainful mistress and the devoted lover, often in highly exaggerated terms; the *Metaphysical conceit, as used by *Donne and his followers, applied wit and ingenuity to, in the words of  Dr. *Johnson, 'a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike' e.g. Donne's famous comparison of two lovers to a pair of compasses.

 

Metaphysical  Poets. Poets generally grouped under the label include *Donne (who is regarded as founder of the 'school'), George *Herbert, *Crashaw, *Henry Vaughan, *Marvell and *Traherne, together with lesser figures like *Benlowes, *Herbert of Cherbury, Henry *King, Abraham *Cowley and *Cleveland. The label was first used (disparagingly) by Dr. *Johnson in his 'Life of Cowley' (written in 1777). *Dryden had complained that Donne 'affects the metaphysics', perplexing the minds of the fair sex with 'nice speculations of philosophy'. Earlier still William *Drummond censored poetic innovators who employed 'Metaphysical Ideas and Scholastical Quiddities'. The label is misleading, since none of these poets is seriously interested in metaphysics (except Herbert of Cherbury, , and even he excludes the interest from his poetry). Further, these poets have in reality little in common: the features their work is generally taken to display are sustained dialectic, paradox, novelty, incongruity, 'muscular' rhythms, giving the effect of a 'speaking voice', and the use of 'conceits', or comparisons in which tenor and vehicle can be related only by ingenious pseudo-logic.

With the new taste for clarity and the impatience with figurative language that prevailed after the *Restoration, their reputation dwindled. Their revival was delayed until after the First World War when the revaluation of metaphysical poetry, and the related downgrading of *Romanticism and *Milton, was the major feature of the rewriting of English history  in the first half of the 20th cent. Key documents in the revival were H. J. C. *Grierson's Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century (1921) and T. S. *Eliot's essay 'Metaphysical Poets', which first appeared as a review of Grierson's collection (TLS, 20 Oct. 1921). According to Eliot these poets had the advantage of writing at a time when thought and feeling were closely fused, before the *'dissociation of sensibility' set in about the time of Milton. Their virtues of difficulty and togh newness were felt to relate them closely to the modernists—*Pound, *Yeats, and Eliot himself.

(From The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature)

 

Andrew Marvell: NIVEL AVANZADO

Andrew Marvell: NIVEL AVANZADO

From A History of English Literature, by Émile Legouis and Louis Cazamian (1926-1937)

The End of the Renascence, 1625-1660 — 6. Puritan poetry. Marvell.


The Puritans also had their songsters, who, while they were less numerous than those of the other party, included one of the most endearing and another, much the greatest of the poets of the century—Marvell and Milton.

It is impossible not to place among the Puritans Andrew Marvell (1621-78) (1), who, under the Commonwealth was tutor to the daughter of Lord Fairfax, the great Parliamentary general, and who subsequently was Milton's friend and with him secretary to the Privy Council. He was the most inspired and affectionate of Cromwell's panegyrists, and after the Restoration he carried on in verse and prose the struggle for religious and political liberty. Yet it must be recognized that no one could be less like than Marvell to the conventional harsh and gloomy Puritan, the enemy of all worldly and artistic amusement, for ever mouthing verses of the Old Testament in order to denounce the sins of the world.

This figure is dispelled as we look at Hanneman's portrait of Marvell, a man thirty-seven years old, with brilliant, living eyes, a laughing, mocking mouth and a calm brow, or as we read the verses which the poet wrote in his thirtieth year, alight, as they are, with human love and feeling for nature. Even in the poems of his maturity and in his pamphleteer's prose the gaiety is apparent of a jovial and mirth-loving  spirit. On the whole, religion has far less place in Marvell's verses than in those of the Anglicans we have just considered. While he wrote many verses which witness to the sincerity of his faith, he made both more numerous and finer poems filled with the joyous humanism and the cordial, vital quality which prove him a son of the Renascence. Undoubtedly he revered the Bible; but he also loved wine, women, and song.

He wrote his essentially poetic works at Nunappleton, Lord Fairfax's country-seat, where he lived from 1650 to 1652. He is inspired by the country, but not, like earlier poets, by the country seen in accordance with the pastoral convention. The desire for a more precise, for a local poetry, was already making itself felt, and one of the first poems which fulfilled it was John Denham's Cooper's Hill. But while a landscape was to Denham no more than the starting-point for historical and moral reflections, Marvell indulged far more fully in the happy contemplation of natural scenery. Before him only Wither had expressed, amid much rubbish, the intimate enjoyment he drew from fields and woods. Marvell spontaneously returned to this theme which was to be so dear to the Lake poets. He is very Wordsworthian in Upon the Hill and Grove at Billborough, in which he describes a sort of natural terrace whither Fairfax, after his retirement, was wont to resort in search o quiet and of a meditative mood.

Marvell relates his own feelings in the longest of his poems, Upon Appleton House, in which he shows that he is familiar with the aspects of the country and its trees and birds, and that he had studied and compared the songs of birds. He anticipates Wordsworth in preferring the song of the dove to that of the nightingale. As he walks, he can

... through the hazels thick espy
The hatching throstle's shining eye,

and watch the woodpecker at work. He almost identifies himself with the birds and growing things:

Thus I, easy philosopher,
Among the birds and trees confer;
And little now to make me wants
Or of the fowls, or of the plants.

He has dialogues with the singing birds. The leaves trembling in the wind are to him Sibyl's leaves:

What Rome, Greece, Palestine, ere said,
I in this light mosaic read.
Thrice happy he who, not mistook,
Hath read in Nature's mystic book.

To be covered with leaves is a delight to him:

Under this antic cope I move,
Like some great prelate of the grove.

He calls upon the leafy shoots to cling to him:

Bind me, ye woodbines, in your twines,
Curl me about, ye gadding vines.

This is the exalted love for nature of a romantic, but a hint of strangeness and of Elizabethan pedantry are mingled with it.

Marvell's feeling for animals, his suffering when they suffer, is voiced with infinite gracefulness in his semi-mythological poem, The Nymph complaining for the Death of her Fawn.

He was the first to sing the beauty and glory of gardens and orchards. In them he tastes his dearest delights: it seems to him that all creation is

Annihilating all that's made
To a green thought in a green shade.

Marvell's Garden foreshadows Keats by its sensuousness, and Wordsworth by its optimistic and serenely meditative mood.

Yet he preferred wild to cultivated nature. It is in the spirit of charming Perdita in The Winter's Tale that, in The Mower against Gardens, he protests against artificial gardening processes—grafting, budding, and selection.

The feeling for nature which, in the poems we have mentioned, is expressed in its pure state, is readily introduced into poems which are otherwise inspired, by Christianity or by love, nowhere better than in the famous song of the emigrants in Bermuda. Here Marvell imagines that he hears a Puritan refugee from the Stuart tyranny singing praises to God as he rows along the coast of an island in the Bermudas, 'safe from the storms' and prelates' rage':

He hangs in shades the orange bright
Like golden lamps in a green night,
And does in the pomegranates close
Jewels more rich than Ormus shows.

Sometimes Marvell returns to the pastoral, but he gives it a new emphasis of truth, even of realism. The short idyll Ametas and Thestylis making Hay-ropes is very original and gracerul, and there is also the touching complaint of Damon the Mower, who, working beneath a burning sun, laments his Juliana's hardness of heart.

Love poems are not numerous in Marvell's work, but among several which are graceful (The Gallery) or slightly ironical—denouncing women's tricks, artifices, and coquetry (Mourning, Daphnis and Chloe)—a few hold us by their passion. His lines To his Coy Mistress have Donne's strength and passion without his obscurity or bad taste, and run easily and harmoniously. They are the masterpiece of metaphysical poetry in this genre, and they also show a return to the anacreontic theme, 'Gather ye rosebuds while ye may.' But it is repeated with a new intensity. It issues from a heart truly deep and passionate, and the love which is demanded is silent and forceful:

Now let us sport us while we may,
And now, like am'rous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour,
Than languish in his slow-chapt pow'r.
Let us roll all our strength and all
Our sweetness up into one ball,
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Thorough the iron gates of life.
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.

These lines are the very essence of the poetry of Marvell, that strange, sensuous, passionate Puritan. He had, however, another vein. He was an ardent patriot and patriotism rather than piety may be said to have dictated his verses on Cromwell's protectorate and death. It is the dominant note of his Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland [1650], First Anniversary of the Government under His Highness the Lord Protector (1655), and Poem upon the Death of His late Highness the Lord Protector. A sort of competition of poets, in which such as Waller and Dryden took part, was provoked by the great man's death, and Marvell carried off its prize because in his verses the man speaks through the poet. They are penetrated with emotion. Better than the others, Marvell gives the impression of the greatness of him he sang and the immensity of the loss his death occasioned.

After the Restoration Marvell pursued only the art of satire, in prose and verse, and this phrase of his accomplishment is better studied elsewhere. We have said enough to show how far he was original as a pure poet. Nature endowed him richly: his sincerity and straightness of vision sufficed to raise the metaphysical school, to which he belonged, from its state of decline, and to bring it back from extravagance to reason without alienating fancy. In the history of the feeling for nature his place is considerable. He expressed himself with liveliness and happy audacity. But he paid too little regard to versification. His lyrical work is written almost entirely in rhymed eight-syllabled couplets, a pleasant metre, but one so easy that it tempts to carelessness. In the formation of his stanzas, Marvell shows himself one of the least varied and inventive poets of his time. To rank among the greatest, he should have had a more exacting standard of art, and perhaps a more whole-hearted devotion to poetry, as well as those supreme qualities of mastery of the word and the line which are the glory of the other Puritan poet, John Milton.



 

Satire and the Satiric Spirit — 3. Political Satire: Marvell, Oldham.—

Under the Restoration the domain of political satire is vast and crowded, and only the scholar can explore all its corners. Great names, brilliant or powerful works stand out above a multitude of pamphlets and invectives, which in the most varied forms express one and the same fund of virulent enmity; where intense words fail to give any artistic relief to the monotony of these outporings of hatred.

It is the art of the satirist which alone counts here. The contemporaries, struck by the wealth of this production, have gathered from it the collections entitled Poems on Affairs of State, in which satires are intermixed with pieces of different characters, and of unequal interest. Among their very diverse themes, there are heard the outburst of a vigorous impassioned inspiration, that of a seething anger against the absolutist and Catholic tendencies of the Stuarts. All the genius of a Dryden, thrown on the side of the monarchy, cannot prevent the confused instinct of an irritated people from voicing itself in even louder tones; and another writer—Andrew Marvell—from lending a poetical expression to this instinct.

Marvell belongs to the preceding age of English literature. (1 bis [see above]). A belated survivor like Milton, he preserves in the midst of the children of Belial the forceful energy of a character that has been tempered by Puritanism. His satires, by virtue of the definite occasion which called them into existence, are part and parcel of the Restoration and must be connected with it.

This occasion brings together three poets of the transition in which the new literature develops from the old. Waller (2), a courtier poet at heart, had celebrated an English naval victory, and attributed its triumph to the reigning dynasty (Instructions to a Painter, 1665); Sir John Denham (3) had inveighed against this adulation in lines of greater manliness (Directions to a Painter, 1667, 1671, 1674). Sparing at first the king's person—for he knows how to bend the stiffness of his principles, and is not above tactics of caution—then abandoning all reserve, he [Marvell] launches until his death (1678) a series of attacks against the foreign policy of the king, and the scandals of public life of the court. Unable to disclose his identity, he has to circulate these pamphlets anonymously, either in manuscript form or in loose sheets, and to hide his main purpose under the veil of allegories. But the personality of the author reveals itself in most cases, and the pulsating ardour of his feeling shines out through all disguises ([The Last Instructions to a Painter], Britannia and Raleigh, Dialogue between Two Horses, etc.). In a language of extraordinary raciness, and a popular tone, with a raw realistic touch, the rage and shame of an England that has been humiliated, enslaved, and contaminated by foreign vices and fashions are here expressed. Such feelings were still exceptional, but their contagious influence was spreading obscurely. As if the new spirit in poetry supplied him with his instrument of expression, Marvell writes most often in heroic couplets; but his unpolished verse, capable of surprising vigour, has not the necessary suppleness or regularity and rather reminds one at times of the simple ballad rhythms. The irresistible virtue of a lofty soul, of a heart embittered but obsessed by noble regrets and high thoughts, nevertheless imbues these strange poems with an energy of movement and phrase, with an eloquence, that make them one of the most eminent examples of English political satire.


________


(1). Complete Works in Prose and Verse, ed. Grosart, 4 vols. (1872-5); Poems and Satires, ed. Aitken in 2 vols. (1892) and in 1 vol. for the Muses' Library (1898). See A. Birrell, Andrew Marvell (English Men of Letters Series, 1905).

(1 bis). (...) Poems and Letters, ed. by H. M. Margoliouth, 1927; P. Legouis, André Marvell, etc., 1928. There would seem to be serious doubt as to the authenticity of several among the satires attributed to Marvell.

(2). Edmund Waller (1606-87): Poems, ed. by Drury, 1893. See Part I.

(3). Sir John Denham (1615-69): Poems, Chalmers, vol. vii. See Part I.

Reflections (On a Drop of Dew)

—oOo—

Andrew Marvell

From The Oxford Companion to English Literature, ed. Margaret Drabble:

MARVELL, Andrew (1621-1678), son of the Revd Andrew Marvell, born at Winstead in Holderness, Yorkshire. in 1624 the family moved to Hull on his father's appointment as lecturer at Holy Trinity Church. Marvell attended Hull Grammar School. He matriculated at Trinity College, Cambridge, as a sizar in De. 1633, and graduated in 1639. In 1637 he had contributed Greek and Latin verses to a Cambridge volume congratulating Charles I on the birth of a daughter. His mother died in Apr. 1638, his father remarrying in November. Around 1639 Marvell may have come under the influence of Roman Catholic proselytizers: according to one story he went to London with them and was fetched back by his father. In January 1641 his father was drowned while crossing the Humber, and soon after Marvell left Cambridge for London. Between 1643 and 1647 he travelled for four years in Holland, France, Italy, and Spain, learning languages and fencing, and perhaps deliberately avoiding the Civil War (he said later that 'the Cause was too good to have been fought for'). On his return from the Continent he apparently moved in London literary circles and had friends among Royalists. His poems to Lovelace ('his Noble Friend') and on the death of Lord Hastings were published in 1649. In the early summer of 1650 he wrote 'An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland', perhaps the greatest political poem in English.

From 1650 to 1652 Marvell tutored young Mary Fairfax, daughter of the Parliamentarian general, at Nun Appleton in Yorkshire. In this period, it is usually assumed, he wrote 'Upon Appleton House' and lyrics such as 'The Garden' and the Mower Poems. In 1653 he was appointed tutor to Cromwell's ward William Dutton, and moved to John Oxenbridge's house at Eton, where he probably wrote 'Bermudas'. In 1654 with 'The First Anniversary' (published 1655) he began his career as unofficial laureate to Cromwell, and was appointed in 1657 Latin secretary to the council of state (a post previouly occupied by his friend and sponsor John Milton, now blind). For eight months during 1656 Marvell was in Saumur with Dutton, where he was described as 'a notable English Italo-Machiavellian'. He mourned Cromwell in 'Upon the Death of His Late Highness the Lord Protector' (1658) and took part in the funeral procession. The following year (January) he was elected MP for Hull, and remained one of the Hull members until his death. At the Restoration his influence secured Milton's release from prison.

From June 1662 to April 1663 Marvell was in Holland on unknown political business, and in July 1663 he travelled with the earl of Carlisle as private secretary on his embassy to Russia, Sweden, and Denmark, returning in January 1665. His satires against Clarendon were written and published in 1667. Later that year he composed his finest satire 'Last Instructions to a Painter', attacking financial and sexual corruption at court and in Parliament, and took part in the impeachment of Clarendon. The Rehearsal Transpros'd, a controversial mock-biblical prose work advocating toleration for Dissenters, which set new standards of irony and urbanity, appeared in 1672 (Pt II, 1673). Gilbert Burnet called these 'the wittiest books that have appeared in this age', and Charles II apparently read them 'over and over again'. According to the report of government spies, Marvell (under the codename 'Mr Thomas')  was during 1674 a member of a fifth column promoting Dutch interests in England, and in touch with Dutch secret agents. The second edition of Paradise Lost contained a commendatory poem by Marvell, and in his prose works he continued to wage war against arbitrary royal power. Mr Smirk, or The Divine in Mode and A Short Historical Essay Concerning General Councils (1676), and An Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government in England (1677), were all Marvell's though prudently published anonymously. The London Gazette offered a reward, in Mar. 1678, for information about the author or printer of An Account. That August, however, Marvell died in his house in Great Russell Street from medical treatment prescribed for a tertian ague. His Miscellaneous Poems appeared in 1681. His Miscellaneous Poems appeared in 1681, printed from papers found in his rooms by his housekeeper Mary Palmer, who gave herself out to be his widow and signed the preface 'Mary Marvell' in order to get her hands on £500 which Marvell had been keeping for two bankrupt friends. This volume did not contain the satires (the authorship of some of which is still disputed): these appeared in Poems on Affairs of State (1689-97).

Famed in his day as patriot, satirist, and foe to tyranny, Marvell was virtually unknown as a lyric poet. C. Lamb started a gradual revival, but Marvell's poems were more appreciated in 19th-cent. America than in England. It was not until after the First World War, with Grierson's Metaphysical Lyrics and T. S. Eliot's 'Andrew Marvell', that the modern high estimation of his poetry began to prevail. In the second half of the 20th century his small body of lyrics was subjected to more exegetical effort than the work of any other metaphysical poet. His oblique and finally enigmatic way of treating what are often quite conventional materials (as in 'The Nymph Complaining for the Death of Her Faun' or 'To His Coy Mistress') has especially intrigued the modern mind.

Poems and Letters, ed. H. M. Margoliouth, 3rd edn rev. P. Legouis and E. E. Duncan-Jones (2 vols, 1971); Latin Poems, ed. and trans. W. A. McQueen and K. A. Rockwell (1964), The Rehearsal Transpros'd, ed. D. E. B. Smith (1971); P. Legouis, Andrew Marvell: Poet, Puritan, Patriot (2nd edn, 1968); H. Kelliher, Andrew Marvell: Poet and Politician (1978); J. B. Leishman, The Art of Marvell's Poetry (1966).


_____________

NIVEL AVANZADO: ANDREW MARVELL

—oOo—

The Metaphysical Poets (NIVEL AVANZADO)

NIVEL AVANZADO: Metaphysical and devotional poetry
 

- A BBC audio on "The Metaphysical Poets."
    http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00cbqhq
    2014


Otros poetas metafísicos que no vemos y apenas mencionamos aquí:

- Por ejemplo, de Henry Vaughan podemos leer "Childhood": http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/vaughan/childhood.htm
 

- O este poema, sobre la oración, del poeta religioso anglicano George Herbert (The Temple), consistente en una serie de "metaphysical conceits":

                          Prayer (I)
Prayer, the Church's banquet, angel's age,
  God's breath in man returning to his birth,
  The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heaven and Earth;
Engine against th' almighty, sinner's tower,
  Reversèd thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
  The six-days world transposing in an hour,
A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear,
Softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss,
  Exalted manna, gladness of the best,
  Heaven in ordinary, man well dressed,
The Milky Way, the bird of paradise,
  Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul's blood,
  The land of spices; something understood.

John Donne (NIVEL AVANZADO)

NIVEL AVANZADO:

Algunos textos y recursos de estudio sobre Donne:

 
- "John Donne." Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Donne
 

- SparkNotes (Donne's poetry).  http://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/donne/



- "A Lecture upon the Shadow" - Tenéis muchos poemas de Donne y otros autores de nuestro programa en The Poetry Foundation.

- Audio / Video:
A lecture on John Donne and "A Valediction Forbidding Mourning":


A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning
 






A lecture upon John Donne:

Sherman, Ted. "John Donne Songs and Sonnets and Divine Poetry Lecture 1."    http://youtu.be/j9j8BfO0H2Q

Une Vie, une Œuvre: John Donne, Eros et Thanatos (audio de France Culture)


________________________

John Donne

Some notes on John Donne

(from The Penguin Short History of English Literature, by Stephen Coote; 1993; "From Donne to Dryden", I)

While playwrights of the early seventeenth century were fashioning language into a supreme theatrical medium, other poets were submitting lyric, satire and elegy to a searching re-examination. The most brilliant of these figures was John Donne (1572-1631).

Donne's was a life of passionate intellectual and personal drama. Reared as a Roman Catholic in a protestant nation state, aware of being part of a group often summoned to suffering and martyrdom, Donne called the basis of his creed in doubt and read and questioned his way towards a hard-won, restless Anglicanism. Yet the man who annotated nearly fifteen hundred works of theology and argument was not a mere bookish recluse. Donne was a soldier of fortune, the author of perhaps the finest collection of love lyrics in the language and a man whose naked ambition and sheer recklessness traped him at servile hopes of court patronage. From these he was finally called to the deanery of St Paul's and emerged as one of the most popular preachers and mighty poets of Christian salvation.

Donne's early prose Paradoxes (published 1633) give an indication of the manner of his thought. When he argues that 'a wise man is known by much laughing' or proves 'the gifts of the body are better than those of the mind', Donne was writing in a long-established rhetorical tradition. The plenitude of his inventiveness however suggests a skeptical fascination with the workings of reason as these are revealed through the display of wit.

Wit as ingenuity — the creation of far-fetched arguments or conceits — was a prized rhetorical achievement, and Donne's skill earned him the highest praise from his contemporaries. For later critics such as Dryden and Dr Johnson however, men working in different modes of literary decorum, such effects supposedly revealed a lack of taste which earned Donne and his followers the misleading name of 'metaphysical'. They were accused of linking together recondite ideas, and so failing to achieve the central and classical voice of broad human experience. It took later generations of critics, first Coleridge and then T. S. Eliot, to rediscover in Donne's poetry the thought of a complex and very masculine brain, one which dwelt on the nature of its own perceptions and, by bringing a passionately critical intellect to bear on the traditions of rhetoric, revealed its force through the quality of its wit.

Such wit is often allied to worldly cynicism in Donne's Elegies and Satires, works which pay tribute to the classics by revolutionising them. The Elegies, for example, frequently surpass their Ovidian model in the sceptical analysis of base human motive, in the sheer versatility of 'The Autumnal' and, above all, in the sensual, colloquial force, the vividly re-enacted drama, of 'His Picture' and 'To his Mistress Going to Bed'. In this last work, a new style of love poetry comes to maturity as Donne re-creates the appearance of passionately articulate self-awareness:

License my roving hands, and let them go
Before, behind, between, above, below.
O my America, my new found land,
My kingdom, safeliest when with one man manned,
My mine of precious sones, my empery,
How blest am I in this discovering thee! 
To enter in these bonds, is to be free;
Then where my hand is set, my seal shall be.

empery: empire

This passage is one of the great achivements of seventeenth-century erotic wit, a combination of passion and artifice that seems to re-create the wonder and excitement of sexual arousal itself. The woman is a virgin continent to be explored for her hidden wealth and 'manned'. Such puns, as in Shakespeare's Sonnets, lead to profound emotional insights. In the last line, for example, the poet in bed, naked and erect, envisages his body as a seal which, in the act of love, will validate the union of the lovers themselves. This appearance of a dramatised self — a central feature in all Donne's work — is conveyed here through a language at once knotty, colloquial and capable of supreme sensuousness. Donne's 'strong lines', as contemporaries called them, can thus be seen as a liberating force of criticism which swept away nymphs and goddesses, pining Petrarchan lovers and a melliflousness of tone that all too easily sank to servile imitation.

In the Satires, Donne was concerned to develop what some contemporaries thought they had discovered in Latin satire: the harsh tones of classical moral outrage. In Joseph Hall's Virgidemiarum (1597) and his rival John Marston's Scourge of Villanie (1598), for example, we hear the 'savage indignation' of Juvenal and what was believed to be the dense syntax of Persius. These are re-created through the 'persona' or assumed personality of the intellectually superior malcontent. Though Donne could also clothe a moral type in the foolish fashions of the day, he had an alert sense of the relative foolishness of all human activity, whether this be the teeming life of the streets and court or his own scholarship. With 'Satire III', such scepticism becomes a matter of intense personal seriousness, for this is the work to which Donne criticized the aberrations of all Christian sects in his search for 'true religion'. The tough syntax of the poem is not a literary affectation but the voice of a great intellect in turmoil:

To adore, or scorn an image, or protest,
May all be bad; doubt wisely, in strange way
To sand inquiring right, is not to stray;
To sleep, or run wrong is. On a huge hill,
Cragged, and steep, Truth stands, and he that will
Reachher, about must, and about must go;
And what the hill's suddenness resists, win so:
Yet strive so, that before age, death's twilight,
Thy soul rest, for none can work in that night,
To will, implies delay, therefore do now.

Donne's wit is here the medium of his radical play of mind. It is the discourse of a restlessly argumentative intellect which dramatizes aspects of a complex and obsessive intelligence. Clearly, this is not the verse of Sidney's 'right popular philosopher' proceeding through formal logic and ornament to settled verities.  An acutely questioning self-awareness has intervened to make Donne's the poetry of a highly civilized small group such as that gathered round the great literary patron Lucy, Countess of Bedford (d. 1627), a coterie that was sufficiently daring to question convention in pursuit of the fresh and tougher truths of experience. It was also a group sufficiently small to subsiste on the passing of manuscripts. The greater part of Donne's poems were published posthumously by his son. They are thus the records of a poetic revolution wrought among the few.

Such qualities can be seen again in the love lyrics that make up Donne's Songs an Sonnets. These were probably written over some twenty years. None can be readily dated, and few if any should be given a precise biographical significance. Each however concentrates with a unique rhetoric the colloquial force and erotic passion of the other early works, while the testing, inclusive reference of their wit invariably dramatizes aspects of relationship. These may be cynical, sensuous, mystically celebratory, or give voice to a mournful sense of loss.

Donne's cynical lyrics vary between the flippancy of 'Go, and catch a falling star' and the more intricate worldly satire of 'Love's Alchemy' and the 'Farewell to love' with its ironic and closely observed analysis of the demystification of desire in post-coital enervation. Persuasions to love itself sometimes attain the outrageous casuistry of 'The Flea'. Here, a girl's loss of honour in surrendering her virginity is compared to the loss of blood suffered in a flea bite which, since the flea has bitten the poet too, mixes the blood of both man and woman in its shell, even as the lover's bed will join their bodies.

In 'The Ecstasy', by contrast, Donne discussed with witty yet passionate rigour the deepest relation between shared spiritual love and the natural needs of the body. United, these offer that rapture which is the subject of 'The Dream' and 'The Good Morrow'. These poems are among the great celebrations of intimacy in English literature. It is perhaps in 'The Sun Rising' however that Donne's combination of stanza form and speech rhythm, observation of the world and celebration of the idea that the lovers in their bed are the world, is most wittily yet profoundly expressed. The tradition of the aubade, or the lover's lament for the coming of dawn, is there transformed as the poet seeks to persuade the sun to irradiate a triumphant and mutual passion:

Thy beams, so reverend, and strong
Why shouldst thou think?
I could eclipse and cloud them with a wink,
But that I would not lose her sight so long:
     If her eyes have not blinded thine,
     Look, and tomorrow late, tell me, 
  Whether both th'Indias of spice and mine
  Be where thou left'st them, or lie here with me.
Ask for those kings whom thou saws'st yesterday,
And thou shalt hear, All here in one bed lay.

both th'Indias: the East and West Indies.

Such deep erotic satisfaction is also the subject of 'The Anniversary', 'Love's Growth' and 'The Canonization'. In these works we again see Donne as one of the supreme analysts of passion fulfilled, a man drawing on the notions of scholasticism for conceits that convey a sense of wonder all the more mireculous for the sceptical intellect that apprehends it.

Such learned references in Donne's poetry were drawn from a memory stocked with the arcana and commonplaces of science and theology, and were then juxtaposed to sharply immediate perception. By a transforming paradox, this meeting of opposites frquently 'interanimates' both, and from this flows a new awareness of the complexity of experience. In poems such as 'The Canonization', for example, the doctrine of the intercession of saints suggests how rare yet powerful is a mutual human relationship. In 'Air and Angels', adapting Aquinas's belief that God permits the heavenly hosts assume a body of condensed air in order to appear to men, Donne shows a lover's progress between a too acute sensuousness and a too ethereal idealism:

   Every thy hair for love to work upon
Is much too much, some fitter must be sought:
   For, nor in nothing, nor in things
Extreme, and scatt'ring bright, can love inhere;
   Then as an angel, face, and wings
Of air, not pure as it, yet pure doth wear,
   So thy love may be my love's sphere;
        Just such disparity 
As is 'twixt air and angels' purity,
'Twixt women's love, and men's will ever be.

Love itself is here irradiated with a sense of the divine. But if Donne's is a voice of celebration, he is occasionally a great poet of love's defeat. We see this particularly in 'Twicknam Garden' and, above all, in one of his finest works, 'A Noctural upon S. Lucy's Day, Being the Shortest Day'. Here the desolation of a love occluded by death offers a sense of universal loss, the nothingness of the bereaved and learned self as it seeks a greater darkness in which to prepare for spiritual truth:

Since she enjoys her long night's festival,
Let me preparare towards her, and let me call
This hour her vigil, and her eve, since this
Both the year's, and the day's deep midnight is.

With the death of the beloved, the poet becomes an eremite devoted to the holy service of his departed saint.

Although such poems seem to touch an unworldly ardour, Donne was in fact very much concerned with the world at this stage of his careeer. Hence his writing of verse letters, obsequies and occasional pieces to aristocratic figures. These can sometimes seem mannered and over-ingeniously flattering when compared to his major and more popular work. Nonetheless, while it is right to see some of these verses as the poet's labours as he drudged for patronage — a necessary task in a society where advancement lay in the gift of the great — it is also important not to miss their discussion of attitudes crucial to Donne's maturing thought.

Amid the complimnet and professions of frienship, for example, we are offered glimpses of a corrupt and perilous world of relative values, disillusion and vulnerability, the futility and spite of fallen man. In 'The Storm' and 'The Calm' — perhaps the most stimulating of Donne's Epistles — he also debunked the heroic pretensions of the military adventures in which he followed Essex and Ralegh. What in Hakluyt might be a chronicle of national endeavour, here becomes a re-creation of diminishingly painful experience raised to an almost surreal intensity by prodigious wit.

Such techniques are further developed in those most bizarre works The Progress of the Soul and the two Anniversaries (1611-12). These last were written to commemorate the death of Elizabeth Drury, a girl Donne had never seen, and were then printed by her influential father. Donne was later to regret this publicity both as a stain on his gentleman's amateur status and because these essays in extreme hyperbole were persistently misunderstood. What Donne was here concerned to achieve however was a contrast between the powers of Christian innocence imagined in his ideal of Elizabeth Drury and the decay of a corrupt, fallen world. The issue was thus between faith and virtue on the one hand and the toils of worlliness on the other. It is an old theme, but one examined here in the glare of new problems, in particular that scepticism which was to transform the intellectual life of the century.

At its most fundamental, the scepticism with which Donne had already approached literay convention challenged the ordered world inherited from Aquinas and the scholastics. It declared that ultimate truth cannot be approached by reason alone since, in a notion given classic formulation by Montaigne in The Apology for Raymond Sebond (c. 1576), reason works only on sense data and cannot be definitively checked. The central questions that sprang from this dilemma were whether and how one may know God — in other words, is belief a matter of faith or reason? — and whether and how one may gain a knowledge of the physical world — in other words, is fact only opinion or can some enquiries be verified?

In the Anniversaries, Donne set his face against the empirical investigation of nature that was soon to prove if not the final answer to these questions then at least their most powerful reply. He suggests that to let oneself be 'taught by sense, and Fantasy' is only to pile up useless and pedantic confusion. If the new astronomy of Galileo and Copernicus shows that the universe is not the regular, serene construct of the scholastics, then that is not a stimulus to inventing new theories, but proof that the physical world is irremediably corrupt. If the links in the great chain of being are broken, then matters are worse than ever we thought:

    new philosophy calls all in doubt,
The element of fire is quite put out;
The sun is lost, and th'earth, and no mans wit
Can well direct him where to look for it.
And freely men confess that this world's spent,
When in the planets, and the firmament 
They seek so many new; they see that this 
Is crumbled out again to his atomies.
'Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone.

 Donne's answer to this predicament was 'fideism': not sharper telescopes but intenser prayer, not knowledge but virtue, not science but faith. When the soul, shot like a bullet from a rusted gun, courses through the celestial spheres, Donne shows it does not stop to question their movement but hurtles to the seat of all knowledge — the bosom of God. Meanwhile, with the removal of such inspiring virtue as Elizabeth's Drury's, the rest of mankind is left to stagger on in a dark, decaying world lit only by the ghostly memory of the heroine's worth. The intellect at its most extended can only expose its own fallacies, and we must finally admit that the mysteries of Christ 'are not to be chawed by reason, but to be swallowed by faith'. 

This last quotation comes from Donne the preacher. The sermons are the greatest of his prose works, but were preceded by a number of pieces which show Donne involved in both the personal quest for religious experience and the worldly pursuit of profitable employment. His Pseudo-Martyr  (1610) and Biathanatos — a work unpublished in his lifetime — suggest the problems this entailed. Pseudo-Martyr, for example, was designed to appeal to James I by suggesting that Roman Catholics went against the rule of nature when they refused to swear to the king's supremacy in church matters and so laide themselves open to the death penalty. As with Ignatius his Conclave (1611), the work relishes a convert's scabrous anti-Catholic satire. In the labyrinthine and sceptical paradoxes of Biathanatos, on the other hand, Donne argued for the morality of suicide with an involvement rooted in acute personal experience. 

And it is the obsession with death and the last things that characterizes Donne's mature religious works. The Devotion on Emergent Occasions (published 1624) were written when Donne's doctors had declared him too ill to read, let alone compose. The afflicted body houses a soaring mind however. Donne's emotions range over the fear of solitude and physical disintegration, the relation between sickness and sin, sin and death. The entire universe is raided for images because man himself —John Donne— is an image of the universe, an epitome, a microcosm. It is this belief that underlies the most famous passage in Donne's prose:

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy frieds, or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

The moment of union is perceived but, as is appropriate for a sick-bed meditation, is perceived in the instant of its dissolution.

It is for his sermons that Donne is best known as a writer of religious prose. In the Jacobean period especially, occupied by preachers of great distinction, the pulpit gained extraordinary influence as a focus of spiritual thought and the dissemination of ideas. Led by the king, the court itself relished the finesse of religioius analysis, and connoisseurs of style and content memorized sermons and took notes on a form of literature that was both popular and learned. Donne's contributions should not be seen in isolation.

Many preachers, particularly those of a Puritan persuasion, argued for an unornamented clarity of style. Others dressed spiritual matters in the garment of learning. While Thomas Adams (c. 1583- ante 1660) combined both in a manner that is often theatrical and powerfully directed to the abuses of the time, Lancelot Andrewes (1555-1626) brought his immense erudition in fifteen languages to passages of Scripture, each word and syllable of which he believed to be divinely inspired. As a result, each word and syllable is examined with the pious ardour of a philologist revealing the depths of the Word of God.

With Andrewes, human drama is often conveyed through a tiny yet telling comment in parenthesis. With Donne it moves to the centre of the stage. The immediate impact of the man, of course, is irrecoverably lost, but his devout biographer Izaak Walton (1593-1683) described Donne 'preaching to himself like an angel from a cloud' and appealing to the conscience of others 'with a most particular grace and an unexpressable addition of comeliness'.

The literary style of Donne's sermons is partly a distinctive reworking of its many sources. For example, Donne could exploit rhetorical patterning with the startling virtuosity of the sermon preached to the Earl of Carlisle in c. 1622 where he describes the agony of being 'secluded eternally, eternally, eternally from the sight of God'. From Seneca, Tacitus, and their Renaissance editor Justus Lipsius however Donne and many others derived an anti-Ciceronian style. This was carefully contrived with a dramatic, irregular immediacy to express a concern with personal experience rather than settled certainties. Sermons such as Death's Duel (published 1632) however suggest that of all the influence on Donne's sermon style the Geneva and Authorized versions of the Bible — the parallelism of the Psalms, the visionary urgency of the Prophets and the evangelical fervour of St Paul especially — were the most telling. Nonetheless, when all the influences have been traced, what finally impresses is the compelling sense of Donne's unique spiritual sensibility, the range and drama of a religious intellect for which every aspect of the world could be a metaphor of the soul's experience.

As part of this technique, the sermons frequently juxtapose macabre effects with the tremblingly numinous, decay with resurrection. On the one hand is the conviction that 'Between that excremental jelly that any body is made of at first, and that jelly which thy body dissolves to at last, there is not so noisome, so putrid a thing in nature.' In contrast is the image of the redeemed soul springing up in heaven like a lily from the red soil of its first creation. Between these experiences come the life of prayer and temptation, the imagining of the last things and, finally, an awareness of mercy.

This was not lightly won, and Donne's religious poetry dramatizes his spiritual conflict with great power and formal mastery. However, since distinctions in the psychology of faith are not always as easy to discern as those in Donne's love lyrics, it is important to emphasize the variety in his religious poetry. The sonnets in 'La Corona', for example, draw on the church's traditions of oral prayer to fashion a devout and accomplished celebration of the mysteries of faith that was to some extent influenced by Roman Catholic practices. 'The Litany', by contrast, while not perhaps a wholly successful poem, is an attempt to express the modest, sober delight in daily piety which is a great achievement of seventeenth-century Anglicanism, and one which finds its truest expression in the work of George Herbert and Thomas Ken (1637-1711). The personal realization of such ideas was terrifying — 'those are my best days, when I shake with fear' — and it forms the true spiritual centre of Donne's alternately defiant and submissive drama of sin and judgement. Around this centres the fear of physical decay. Sonnets such as 'Oh my black Soul!', 'At the round earth's imagin'd corners' and 'Death be not proud' contain doomsday in their small compass.

In 'Good Friday, riding westwards' Donne investigated the paradoxes of Christian faith with intensely dramatic wit, but it is in the 'Hymn to God my God, in my Sickness' and a 'Hymn to God the Father' that his relish of paradox and the strong speech rhythms of personal drama merge most tellingly with theology and faith. In these poems we watch Donne's advance towards the unity of the human and divine. In the first hymn, Donne's body is again a microcosm, a little world hurrying to decay. Yet, in its pain, it also imitates Christ's Passion and so may eventually rise like him to paradise. Finally, at the close of the second hymn, Donne hovers on the edge of death in a state at once confessional, wittily serious and almost ready to accept the extinction of his turbulent personality:

I have a sin of fear, that when I have spun
    My last thread, I shall perish on the shore;
But swear by thy self, that at my death thy son
    Shall shine as he shines now, and heretofore;
        And, having done that, thou hadst done,
            I fear no more.

In the end, Donne's own name — that very personal token of self — becomes something to offer in with to God and so a means of surrendering the human to the divine.

_______________

John Donne: NIVEL AVANZADO

—oOo—

v