The poetry of John Donne (1572–1631) - Hodder Education Magazines

(1572–1631)

John Donne's bold, argumentative poems engage the reader in a game of wit. First circulated in manuscript form among his lawyer friends, they have a knowing, playful tone, laced with references to themes and writers familiar to his highly educated audience. A secret marriage to his employer's niece cost him influential connections and the Roman Catholic faith he was born to was another disadvantage. Many Catholics were executed in his youth and adherence to the old religion continued to attract severe punishment. In 1615 he became an Anglican priest and took on high public offices in the Church. As an outsider who became a top-ranking insider, his double perspective perhaps finds an expression in the disputing voices of his poems

Donne’s poems can feel like a battleground of conflicting ideas. In 1543 the Polish astronomer Copernicus first challenged the traditional ancient Greek theory that the Sun revolves around the Earth. Rome was still vigorously repressing such ideas in Donne’s lifetime. His poem ‘The Sun Rising’ plays with conflicting views of the Sun’s place in the universe: ‘Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere; / This bed thy centre is, these walls thy sphere.’ He pictures the whole universe contracted into the lovers’ bedroom.

Donne’s metaphysical conceits often enact the intellectual possibilities of new and old ways of thinking concurrently. In ‘The Relic’, a ‘bracelet of bright hair’ round a dead bone (like the relic of a saint that a Catholic would venerate) becomes a memorial to secular, earthly devotion. Lingering memories of the old order made such conjunctions shocking and exciting.