On John Donne
Nov. 3rd, 2019 09:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pallas_athena[Originally posted to Twitter in response to a tweet by Greek Etymologies, which said:]
What a perfect excuse to link to John Donne’s poem The Ecstasy!
When talking about secular/amorous Donne, everyone thinks of the bed-poems, “Come Madam come,” “Busy old fool” etc
This is the opposite of that, a love poem describing a specifically non-sexual encounter.
Sex is present in the poem, both metaphorically and as a desired and looked-for thing. Towards the end, the future Dean of St Paul’s discourses on soul and body in terms that might make his holier parishioners blush.
But this is (most probably) still during the reign of Elizabeth; James’s Scottish Calvinism and its corporeal disgust were still waiting in the wings.
In these years the body is God’s creation in His image and therefore to be exalted. In Donne bodily pleasures become holy, and even the bodily pain of his future sickness brings him closer to God.
But in The Ecstasy, the soul is the protagonist; souls lead, bodies are specifically said to be unmoving (though not unmoved):
“And pictures in our eyes to get
was all our propagation.”
I love that line. Donne is very into reflections — like his tears in A Valediction: of Weeping reflecting his beloved’s face and becoming something more by bearing that image, as a blank disc becomes a coin when it bears the image of a face— then the tear falls and shatters, and the lovers part.
Anyway. Read the poem. Slowly if you can. He most likely wrote it for Anne, who married him w/out her father’s approval. (Her Dad sent him to prison!)
They knew one another about 4 years before they married in secret. It was another 8 years before her family were reconciled.
Here’s the sonnet he wrote when she died after 16 years of marriage. The way he talks about her soul here is especially heartbreaking if you’ve just read The Ecstasy. Flesh is only mentioned once, as an adversary.
Donne was far from perfect; he could be intensely misogynistic. Ironically, he was vile to his daughter Constance in later life when *she* wanted to marry someone he disapproved of. (To be fair, the suitor, Edward Alleyn, was much older and a former actor, so Donne had cause for concern. The couple married anyway; Edward died after three years, and Constance later remarried.)
But flawed as Donne was, he was loved by someone who knew him well. Best any of us can hope for, really.
(Misogyny and angry disavowal of all this soul stuff here)
**********
Postscript: I find the terse style of Twitter unsatisfying to post here. I come here to write good prose, and this isn't that. I wouldn't crosspost at all, but I wanted to save some of my writing on other platforms in case they fold, or in case I have to leave them.
This thread doesn't really say what I wanted it to say, either about Donne or about love.
'Ecstasy' derives, via French and Latin, from ancient Greek ἔκστασις ("displacement, movement outwards"), from ἐξίστημι ("displace, change, stand aside from"), from ἐκ ("out of") + ἵστημι ("stand").
What a perfect excuse to link to John Donne’s poem The Ecstasy!
When talking about secular/amorous Donne, everyone thinks of the bed-poems, “Come Madam come,” “Busy old fool” etc
This is the opposite of that, a love poem describing a specifically non-sexual encounter.
Sex is present in the poem, both metaphorically and as a desired and looked-for thing. Towards the end, the future Dean of St Paul’s discourses on soul and body in terms that might make his holier parishioners blush.
But this is (most probably) still during the reign of Elizabeth; James’s Scottish Calvinism and its corporeal disgust were still waiting in the wings.
In these years the body is God’s creation in His image and therefore to be exalted. In Donne bodily pleasures become holy, and even the bodily pain of his future sickness brings him closer to God.
But in The Ecstasy, the soul is the protagonist; souls lead, bodies are specifically said to be unmoving (though not unmoved):
“And pictures in our eyes to get
was all our propagation.”
I love that line. Donne is very into reflections — like his tears in A Valediction: of Weeping reflecting his beloved’s face and becoming something more by bearing that image, as a blank disc becomes a coin when it bears the image of a face— then the tear falls and shatters, and the lovers part.
Anyway. Read the poem. Slowly if you can. He most likely wrote it for Anne, who married him w/out her father’s approval. (Her Dad sent him to prison!)
They knew one another about 4 years before they married in secret. It was another 8 years before her family were reconciled.
Here’s the sonnet he wrote when she died after 16 years of marriage. The way he talks about her soul here is especially heartbreaking if you’ve just read The Ecstasy. Flesh is only mentioned once, as an adversary.
Donne was far from perfect; he could be intensely misogynistic. Ironically, he was vile to his daughter Constance in later life when *she* wanted to marry someone he disapproved of. (To be fair, the suitor, Edward Alleyn, was much older and a former actor, so Donne had cause for concern. The couple married anyway; Edward died after three years, and Constance later remarried.)
But flawed as Donne was, he was loved by someone who knew him well. Best any of us can hope for, really.
(Misogyny and angry disavowal of all this soul stuff here)
**********
Postscript: I find the terse style of Twitter unsatisfying to post here. I come here to write good prose, and this isn't that. I wouldn't crosspost at all, but I wanted to save some of my writing on other platforms in case they fold, or in case I have to leave them.
This thread doesn't really say what I wanted it to say, either about Donne or about love.