Go and catch a falling star,
Get with child a mandrake root,
Tell me where all past years are,
Or who cleft the devil’s foot,
Teach me to hear mermaids singing,
Or to keep off envy’s stinging,
And find
What wind
Serves to advance an honest mind.
All kings, and all their favourites,
All glory of honours, beauties, wits,
The sun it self, which makes time, as they pass,
Is elder by a year now than it was
When thou and I first one another saw:
All other things to their destruction draw,
Only our love hath no decay;
This no to-morrow hath, nor yesterday;
Running it never runs from us away,
But truly keeps his first, last, everlasting day.
John Donne, an imposing figure in the history of English poetry, was born in London in 1572 and was eight years younger than Shakespeare. There is no evidence that they ever met, though some quotes from Donne are as well-known as those of the elder poet:
Go and catch a falling star
Death be not proud
No man is an island
For whom the bell tolls
In a sense there were two faces of John Donne. In his early maturity he was a raffish adventurer known as Jack Donne. He sailed with Sir Walter Raleigh and was part of the Earl of Essex’s expedition in 1596 when the Spanish port of Cádiz was captured and burned. Later in life, at the encouragement of King James I, he became a celebrated cleric and ultimately Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral. Some 160 of his sermons have survived.
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Donne is recognized and studied today as the father of what came to be called Metaphysical Poetry. It included such other poets as Andrew Marvell, George Herbert and Henry Vaughan, and it valued originality and intricacy with frequent splashes of wit. Complex conceits and metaphors were frequent and often unexpected.
Donne’s metaphysical poetry comes in several sizes. Here is a typical Donne epigram called “A Lame Beggar.”
I am unable, yonder beggar cries,
To stand or move;
If he say true,
He lies.
And this piece, surely more of its time than today.
If in his Study he hath so much care
To hang all old strange things,
Let his wife beware.
Donne’s shortest poem came about when he secretly and without permission married sixteen-year-old Anne More. Her father had him imprisoned for a time, and Donne summarized:
John Donne
Anne Donne
Undone
Later, family peace was declared, and ultimately Anne died while delivering their twelfth child. Yes, twelfth.
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Now, on a grander poetical scale, here is one of Donne’s finest metaphysical pieces, “The Sun Rising.” Note how Donne personifies the sun and chastises him for intruding on a lover’s world.
Busy old fool, unruly Sun,
Why dost thou thus,
Through windows, and through curtains call on us?
Must to thy motions lovers’ seasons run?
Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide
Late school boys, and sour prentices,
Go tell Court-huntsmen, that the King will ride,
Call country ants to harvest offices;
Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.
Thy beams, so reverend, and strong
Why shouldst thou think?
I could eclipse and cloud them with a wink,
But that I would not lose her sight so long:
If her eyes have not blinded thine,
Look, and tomorrow late, tell me,
Whether both the India’s of spice and mine
Be where thou leftst them, or lie here with me.
Ask for those Kings whom thou saw’st yesterday,
And thou shalt hear, All here in one bed lay.
She’is all States, and all Princes, I,
Nothing else is.
Princes do but play us; compar’d to this,
All honor’s mimic; All wealth alchemy.
Thou sun art half as happy’as we,
In that the world’s contracted thus;
Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be
To warm the world, that’s done in warming us.
Shine here to us, and thou art every where;
This bed thy center is, these walls, thy sphere.
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As Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral, Donne wrote some extraordinary sacred poetry His nineteen Holy Sonnets are among the greatest writings ever in that form.
Please see Sonnet X, “Death be not proud” in our Video. And here feel the passion of Holy Sonnet VII, Donne’s view of the Day of Judgement.
At the round earth’s imagined corners, blow
Your trumpets, angels, and arise, arise
From death, you numberless infinities
Of souls, and to your scattered bodies go,
All whom the flood did, and fire shall, o’erthrow,
All whom war, dearth, age, agues, tyrannies,
Despair, law, chance, hath slain, and you whose eyes,
Shall behold God, and never taste death’s woe.
But let them sleep, Lord, and me mourn a space;
For, if above all these, my sins abound,
‘Tis late to ask abundance of thy grace,
When we are there; here on this lowly ground,
Teach me how to repent; for that’s as good
As if thou’hadst seal’d my pardon with thy blood.
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Donne was a prolific poet. He wrote songs and sonnets, epigrams and elegies, satires, hymns, valedictions, lamentations and . . . ah, well . . . love poetry, some of it quite intimate. Here are excerpts from a piece called “To His Mistress Going to Bed.”
Come, madam, come, all rest my powers defy,
Until I labour, I in labour lie.
The foe oft-times having the foe in sight,
Is tired with standing though he never fight.
Off with that girdle, like heaven’s zone glistering,
But a far fairer world encompassing.
Unpin that spangled breastplate which you wear,
That th’eyes of busy fools may be stopped there.
Unlace yourself, for that harmonious chime
Tells me from you that now it is bed time.
Off with that happy busk, which I envy,
That still can be, and still can stand so nigh.
Your gown going off, such beauteous state reveals,
As when from flowery meads th’hills shadow steals.
Off with your wiry coronet and show
The hairy diadem which on you doth grow:
Now off with those shoes: and then safely tread
In this love’s hallowed temple, this soft bed.
In such white robes heaven’s angels used to be
Received by men; thou, Angel, bring’st with thee
A heaven like Mahomet’s Paradise; and though
Ill spirits walk in white, we easily know
By this these Angels from an evil sprite:
Those set our hairs, but these our flesh upright.
License my roving hands, and let them go
Before, behind, between, above, below.
And the next line:
O my America! My new-found-land.
I guess explorations take many forms.
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Small sidebar. You may have noticed that Donne liked to write about beds. Here from the 1590’s is the famous Great Bed of Ware which can accommodate five couples.
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VIDEO. And now, we offer readings of three of Donne’s best-known poems.
First is “Go and catch a falling star,” This ode to inevitable infidelity has a bouncy and light-hearted air, but one can’t help but feel that some level of misogyny has crept in..
The second piece is the most famous of the Holy Sonnets, Number 10,
“Death be not proud.”
And to close, “No Man is an Island” from Devotions (1624)
CLICK ON THIS LINK FOR VIDEO: WHEN ALL IS SAID AND DONNE
