Book Review

A restless heart keeps its secrets

Donne: the reformed soul

The reputation of John Donne (1572-1631) as poet is as high now as ever. There is none above his summit in the genre he chose. Yet, on the publication of his Poems two years after his death, it was as a preacher that Donne was most highly praised. Of his sermons, 160 survive.

One might say he wrote like an angel, were it not that the human body was never absent from his thoughts. There is that marvellous scene, shortly before the death he expected, when charcoal braziers were lit in his large study at the Deanery of St Paul’s as he stood naked in his shroud for his memorial by Nicholas Stone, which survived the Great Fire and is in the cathedral still. “The braziers gave the scene a Purgatorial fog,” writes John Stubbs, who recently completed a doctorate on Donne at Cambridge. But charcoal burns without smoke, and Purgatory was not something in which he could by then believe.

For the great crux is Donne’s turning from a recusant Catholic to an establishment Protestant. Some find the erotic power of the youthful poems hard to reconcile with his Devotions (1624) and sermons. I think such a dichotomy is unreal. His integrity seems unquestionable in the later years. The problem is with the years when his mind turned.

John Donne was brought up in prosperity, the son of a City ironmonger. His widowed mother remarried when he was four – again to a Catholic, as she was to marry for a third time. The family was Catholic by determination. Thomas More was an ancestor (Stubbs says great-great-grandfather, though I thought the descent was from More’s sister). Donne’s mother bravely visited the Jesuit William Weston in the Tower. The first portrait of Donne bore a motto in Spanish, Antes muerto que mudado – sooner dead than changed. As a Catholic he was sent to Oxford at 12 to avoid the religious oath required at 16. He proceeded to Lincoln’s Inn, another choice for Catholics trying to find a place in a hostile polity.

It was there that an event broke Donne’s life in two, as John Stubbs surmises. His brother Henry sheltered a priest, William Harrington, who was found in his lodgings by a pursuivant. Harrington was hanged, drawn and quartered and Henry died of fever in Newgate. Donne, it is suggested, took steps to avoid any such end to his own life. Stubbs goes as far as saying, “Donne’s perception of his own gentility is every bit as important to understanding his life as the Roman Catholicism he was slowly leaving behind.” This seems more condemnatory than is perhaps intended. Another path was followed by his mother, who left England with her husband in 1595. She was to die only two months before her son, a lodger in his Deanery, her fortune lost but her faith unchanged.

“Becoming a Protestant in the 1590s was not like joining the Nazi party in the 1930s,” Stubbs says. Perhaps not, but there was always the counter-example of Thomas More, who “haunted Donne for years, not as a genocidal zealot but as ‘a man of the most tender and delicate conscience’.” I don’t know where “genocidal zealot” comes from, but conscience was the key to any change.

We do know Donne made a long study in his twenties of the claims of Catholics and Protestants in his day, reading Bellarmine. There is evidence too, that Donne, while not an indifferentist, came to believe privately that Christians, reformed or not, could find a way to God. Yet a change of religion suited only too well Donne’s first chosen profession as a technocrat among courtiers. Stubbs comes into his own at this point, introducing the dashing sonneteer’s new friends with miniature biographical sketches, weighing accounts of his movements, and plausibly linking life and literary endeavour (no easy matter, with Donne’s intentionally artificial approach). He is particularly good on his women friends. This biographer has done a vast amount of work, but always serves the fruit appetisingly. Stubbs brings to life the enveloping horror of the Elizabethan court. As Donne wrote:

Here no one is from th’ extremitie
Of vice, by any other reason free,
But that the next to him, still, is worse than hee.

He was thrown clear from the web by his famously undiplomatic clandestine marriage to Ann More. “John Donne. Ann Donne. Undone,” was in the end the reverse of the truth, for, after years of rustication, writing much of his best poetry, he sought ordination, aged 43.

Never free from sickness for long, he confronted death during a fever in 1624 with the series of Devotions, from which everyone knows the line, “Never send to ask for whom the bell tolls.” From these emerges a strong conviction of the community of mankind.

As for his sermons, it is a fault in modern readers to presume them dull. They were easier listening than the incremental chipping away of his contemporary Lancelot Andrewes. King James lapped up both. Donne’s glorious connected paragraphs penetrate mysteries beyond anything the reader thinks to expect. But Donne’s own inner life must remain mysterious, for all the careful narrative and vivid background of this biography. 

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