Term Paper on "John Donne There Can Be No Question"

Term Paper 10 pages (3941 words) Sources: 1+

[EXCERPT] . . . .

John Donne

There can be no question that one of the central themes of John Donne's work, in poetry and prose, is death. Not for nothing did a recent academic biographer of Donne devote an entire chapter to his subject's attitude towards, uses of, and presentation of, the theme of death (Carey 229ff). As a writer concerned with both the intensely spiritual and the intensely physical, death was a natural focus of Donne's thought and work throughout his life; as a Christian, convinced of the reality of resurrection and salvation, death was in a sense the fixed point around which his world-view revolved. Donne's fixation with the body, with its physical substance, its relationship to the outside world and its role as an expression of the divine, relates powerfully and inevitably to his conception of the significance of the body's physical dissolution in death and the consequences of this for the soul (Selleck 150-1). Given this context, one very particular death, that of his wife Anne in 1617, can be seen as a traumatic and tragic event capable of giving a sharply personal quality to his attitudes to death subsequently. This is by no means a simple matter to establish, however, given that death is a theme throughout his work, rather than preponderating after 1617, that his views of death did not themselves remain constant, and given the intimate connection between his perceptions of death and his religious position (which itself was not fixed). How far these factors can be reconciled, and to what extent an assessment of the role of Donne's wife's death in influencing his views of death itself can therefore be reached, is the question to be addressed in this essay.

It is important to note that, although he was consistently possessed of death's importance, Donne's view of death itself was not fixed and unchanging. Change and changeability were essential to Donne's self-perception; as John Carey notes, Donne understood that to talk about himself 'was to talk about change, and to change as he talked' (Carey 153). On the subject of death, however, this mutability is particularly marked. At times he seems in awe of the power of death, at other times he treats it as insignificant, and even mocks and rebukes death for its pretension. Some of his writing seems to convey fear of annihilation, while elsewhere he speaks of death as welcome and desirable.

The marriage of John Donne and Anne More can be seen as the defining event of Donne's younger life. He met her some time around 1598 and eloped with her, illegally, in 1601 - an act which severely damaged his prospects and from which, in a sense, his career never fully recovered. Anne bore twelve children in their sixteen-year marriage, five of whom died in infancy, before dying of puerperal fever at the birth of her twelfth, stillborn, child, at the age of thirty-three in 1617. The marriage appears to have been a love-match, and was certainly an important stabilizing factor for Donne during the difficult years that followed (Bald, 326). Donne's friend Izaak Walton commented in his life of Donne, published 1670, that the death of Donne's wife in 1617 had 'crucified him to the world' (Parfitt 103). Walton portrayed the death of Ann Donne as a traumatic event for John Donne, which had left him deeply effected by grief and which influenced every part of his life and work. Walton had his own reasons for emphasizing those aspects of Donne's character and life that best fitted in with the view he was putting forward in his biography of Donne the devout Anglican clergyman and writer of sacred verse. For this reason Walton was chiefly concerned with what he called Donne's 'last, best Dayes' (Bottrall 31). It is not necessary, however, to accept uncritically Walton's view of Donne to accept that his wife's death did affect him severely, and that its consequences can be seen in his work. As a man of his time, Donne reflected the contemporary attitude that 'death [was] and important event in one's religious life' and 'the very fact of death was more generally accepted than it now is' (Roberts 960-1), but even given the high visibility and even celebration of death around him, Donne's concern with mortality is particularly strong, from his earliest poems to his final meditations. Part of the reason for this can arguably be found in the fact that death touched him very directly and personally. Of his twelve children, seven died in infancy, and his wife died in childbirth at the age of only thirty-three (Parfitt 102-3). Given the centrality of his marriage in his life, and his concern with mortality, it might reasonably be expected that these events would be reflected in his writings.

In 1947 the scholar Donald Ramsey Roberts observed that 'there is abundant evidence in the poems, letters, sermons, and other works, that the desire for death was a permanent element in [Donne's] psychic life' (Roberts 959), and it is true that references to death and articulations of what amounts to a longing for death appear in Donne's work long before the death of his wife in 1617. In 'A Nocturnall upon Saint Lucie's Day', probably written during the 1590s, the notion of the desirability of death as the only means through which new creation can occur is present:

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. (Complete Poetry 32)

In 'The Computation', from the same period, Donne asks 'Yet call not this long life; but thinke that I / Am, by being dead, Immortall; Can ghosts die?' (Complete Poetry 51). There is an ambiguity about this line - this state of immortality, Donne implies, is barely true existence but the insubstantial condition of a ghost. However, there is still a suggestion that such a condition is more desirable than mortal life without love.

In the works that date from before the death of Anne Donne, death is, as we have seen, addressed, but there is a certain remoteness and abstraction in Donne's conception of death. That can be seen to change after 1617. The conception of death that we find in the Divine Poems and Holy Sonnets and the works of prose that Donne wrote after the death of his wife is as something more concrete, more directly apprehended and engaged with, than is the case in the earlier writings; and, coupled with that, there is a powerful sense of Donne wrestling with the reality of death in his own life, as a man of faith, a man of intellect, and a man of feeling. This new realization of death goes hand in hand with a new and vivid sense of the divine and of the workings of God's will in the world, but this religious sense itself can be partly attributed to the effects of Anne's death on her husband. The epitaph that John Donne wrote to his wife itself lays out the religious trajectory which he is clearly already following in dealing with his loss in spiritual terms.

This epitaph, written in Latin, is the one work which can be identified specifically as having been written by Donne in direct response to his wife's death (Hester 513-4). In this piece of Latin verse we can see Donne's efforts to make sense of the great fact of death, and its relationship with human love and the divine love of which it is an echo, as well as its significance in terms of the more earthly passions which had been one of the younger Donne's abiding concerns. The poem is an eloquent testimony to the violent disruption of human affairs by death, the untimely loss of a loved one, and the challenges such a death poses to the poet's conception of the meaning of life and love. Donne conveys the abrupt and violent way in which her life was snapped off, 'By a savage fever hurriedly carried off' and describes himself as 'by grief made speechless'. He asserts the continuity of their marriage, however, seeking to transcend death by pledging their union anew, 'His own ashes to these ashes weds / in a new marriage' which echoes the divine union between Christ and his Church and thus carries the promise of salvation and eternal life, a point emphasized by the parallels Donne implies between the life and death of Anne and the life of the Virgin Mary and her son. Anne is described in life as 'A mother most pious, most indulgent' who died 'in the 33rd year of age, hers and Jesus's (Hester 521-2). M. Thomas Hester notes that Donne in this poem depicts himself as undergoing the sacrifice of accepting Anne's sacrifice of her life 'for the truth of the eternal Marriage that she and their fifteen years of loving union mirror' (Hester 526). A parallel is drawn between the union of… READ MORE

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