John Donne: ‘expert beyond experience’
Priya David
INSIGHT into the Greats
To say that Donne (1572-1631) is the greatest of the Metaphysicals is
like saying that Shakespeare is the greatest of the Elizabethans. Faint
praise indeed! Shakespeare’s achievement far transcends the age in which
he lived. So does Donne’s the poetic genre he was instrumental in
establishing. In fact, Donne’s influence on modern (ie. post-1914)
poetry is greater than that of Shakespeare. But this pervasiveness is
also attributable to the Metaphysical movement of which he was the
leading light.
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John Donne |
The chief characteristic of Metaphysical poetry is Wit. Pope famously
defined wit as what “oft was thought but ne’er so well exprest.” There
is plenty of this by way of sophisticated utterance and ingenious
wordplay involving repetition, hyperbole, punning, paradox and the like,
all delivered with considerable aplomb. For a taste of this, here is a
first quote from Donne: “Nor can you more judge womans thoughts by
teares, Than by her shadow, what she weares. O perverse sexe, where none
is true but shee, Who’s therefore true, because her truth kills mee.”
But Metaphysical wit demands a corollary to Pope’s definition,
perhaps: “What never was thought but ever so well expressed!” Fot the
Metaphysical way of looking at things was often sharply different from
the traditional. It could be flippant, speculative, ironical, cynical,
unsparing even of the sacred cows of poetry such as Nature and
Womankind. Thus Donne could open a poem addressing the sun: “Busie old
foole, unruly Sunne, Why dost thou thus, Through windowes, and through
curtaines call on us?” And end another poem about women: “Hope not for
minde in women; at their best Sweetnesse and wit, they are but Mummy,
possest.”
The chief device of Metaphysical wit, however, was the “conceit”,
meaning the far-fetched simile or metaphor invoked to describe the
subject under discussion. Dr Johnson, writing from the perspective of
the 18th century Age of Reason, complained that in Metaphysical poetry
“the most heterogeneous ideas (were) yoked by violence together.” He may
have had in mind, inter alia, the way Donne persuades his wife to accept
a temporary separation necessitated by his having to go abroad: “If they
be two, they are two so As stiffe twin compasses are two, Thy soule the
fixt foot, makes no show To move, but doth, if the’other doe. And though
it in the center sit, Yet when the other far doth rome, It leanes, and
hearkens after it, And growes erect, as it comes home.” Heterogeneous,
certainly – a pair of lovers compared to a pair of compasses! Yoked
together, true - but hardly by violence. The conceit is
thought-provokingly apposite and moving.
This brings us to the way in which Donne is probably uniquely
Metaphysical, taking the word in its strictly literal sense of “being
beyond the physical or natural.” Beneath his much-vaunted skepticism
about true love, Donne seems to be searching for the ideal bond between
man and woman involving a union that is spiritual as well as physical.
When he feels assured of this, the result is poetry of incomparable
beauty. There is no lovelier love song in English poetry than the one
that begins, “Sweetest love, I do not goe, for wearinesse of thee,” and
goes on to reason with the beloved: “When thou sigh’st, thou sigh’st not
winde, But sigh’st my soule away, When thou weep’st, unkindly kinde, My
lifes blood doth decay. It cannot bee That thou lov’st mee, as thou
say’st If in thine my life thou waste, Thou art the best of mee.”
To such sentiments we cannot but respond with love. Consider again
these famous lines from “The Good Morrow”: “And now good morrow to our
waking soules, Which watch not one another out of feare; For love all
love of other sights controules, And makes one little roome, an every
where.....What ever dyes, was not mixt equally; If our two loves be one,
or, thou and I Love so alike, that none doe slacken, none can die.”
In these two examples the celebrated wit is much in evidence, but it
is in the service of a more exalted emotional state. Conversely, when
Donne is deprived of this through the death of his wife, the emotion is
equally powerful, the wit equally active, but they combine to produce an
almost unbearably tragic effect. The second verse of “A Nocturnall upon
S.Lucies day” reads: “Study me then, you who shall lovers bee At the
next world, that is, at the next Spring: For I am every dead thing, In
whom love wrought new Alchimie. For his art did expresse A quintessence
even from nothingnesse, From dull privations, and leane emptinesse: He
ruin’d mee, and I am re-begot Of absence, darknesse, death; things which
are not.” Indeed, we have to wait for Thomas Hardy early in the 20th
century and U. Karunatilake at its turn to find in English poetry
anything even approaching this evocation of the desolation of
bereavement.
Usually, however, Donne seems to be between these two extremes, his
poems often conveying a sense of unfulfilment. As in Aire and Angels:
“Twice or thrice had I lov’d thee, Before I knew thy face or name;
....Still when, to where thou wert, I came, Some lovely glorious nothing
I did see.” Eliot actually puts his finger on the problem in his poem,
“Whispers of Immortality,” where he tells us that Donne “found no
substitute for sense” even though he was “expert beyond experience.” In
other words, he aspired to a higher “metaphysical” sort of fulfilment in
love, but try as he might he could not transcend the mere sensual
expression of it. Herein lies the special poignancy of Donne’s poetry.
An outstanding example is “The Exstasie” where Donne strives through
intellectual argument to demonstrate the reconcilability of spiritual
and physical love. Yet the emotional logic of the poem belies this,
compelling instead the conclusion that spiritual love is a precarious
condition and that true fulfilment can only be achieved at the physical
level.
Donne’s poetic language, characterised by what Eliot calls the
“recreation of thought into feeling”, represents the high-water mark in
English poetry of the successful unification of thought and emotion. It
is a sad irony that the experience it conveys is mostly of the failure
to find a comparable unification of body and spirit in the relationship
between man and woman. This does not, of course detract from Donne’s
poetic achievement. The experience is so expertly communicated that we
view it ultimately as a condition of human imperfection. Despite the
massive achievement of Shakespeare’s sonnets, it is Donne who is the
greater love poet.
In his later religious poetry Donne seems to have found something of
the spiritual fulfilment he craved in his relationship with God.
Nevertheless, the agitated quality of much of this verse, particularly
in the Holy Sonnets, bears witness to the somewhat precarious nature of
even this relationship.
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