Burrowing Into a Poet’s Life

Having encountered a few of John Donne’s poems in high school – “Death be not proud” and “No Man is An Island” – I was recently tugged in by a YouTube conversation with a contemporary biographer. Katherine Rundell, who is also the author of children’s books, has recently ploughed into the poet’s life, returning with gleaming nuggets as any talented forager might. In Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne, Rundell accomplishes the seemingly impossible: to grip readers with the slouchy doings (and thoughts) of a 16^th Century man.

Born Poor To A Rich-Thinking Family

John Donne was born in 1572, on Bread Street in London. From his birthplace, one could glimpse the spires of St. Paul’s Cathedral – a space in which he would later preach as a Dean, and more touchingly, be buried. His parents were not well off, but they had belonged, at one time, to wealthier families. Their lands had been seized amidst pogroms against the Catholics. His maternal grandfather had been a musician in the Royal Court of Henry VIII. Though poor, they bore some of the cultural hauteur of the rich.

Persecuted For Religious Belief

Living through a period when Catholics were persecuted in horrific ways, he watched a great-uncle getting executed, and his brother imprisoned. When Donne married Anne More, he himself was thrown in jail by his infuriated father-in-law. He was to also endure other hardships. Six of his children died, some in infancy, others by the age of 10 or older. His wife, after bearing twelve children, died at 33. John was also frequently ill. Quite understandably then his thoughts often turned towards grief and sin and suicide. He perceived too, man’s bizarre and singular capacity for self-destruction:

Homeschooled Till Oxford

John Donne did not attend school. In his time, that was perhaps a saving grace. Because schools in that period were not only punitive and barbarous (students were known to be beaten to death by harsh schoolmasters), but also unhygienic (reeking of pee) and unhealthy (suffused in cigarette smoke, since all students were encouraged to light up to ward off Plague). John was home-tutored, and then admitted to Hart Hall, Oxford at the age of 11.

“Some students at Oxford worked formidably.” John was one of the overly-diligent ones, rising at 4 a.m. every morning, wrestling with various texts through the rest of the day, till late evening, when students took walks and engaged in “dialectical arguments.”

Building A Bedrock of Knowledge

Donne also kept what is known as a “commonplace book” at Oxford. These were books that students or scholars used to collect their various thoughts and notes on topics. This practice was supposed to have originated with Erasmus, the Dutch scholar. Commonplace books were used for any field – by a lawyer to build arguments, and by a poet, to gather chunks of knowledge across a spectrum of topics.

T.S. Eliot said of a mind like Donne’s: “When a poet’s mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience.” This in contrast to the “ordinary man’s experience” which is “chaotic, irregular, fragmentary.”

Poetry, when Donne was writing it, was not just a literary feat. It was also a means to express one’s political opinions and to question social norms. It was far more significant than it would be now or has been ever since.

Projecting His Sexual Exploits

At 23, as Rundell observes, Donne had penned rapturous and sexually-charged poetry. In a portrait painted of him during his youth, he seemed like quite a dandy and lady-charmer, with his hat, mustache and sword carefully fashioned to win over the opposite sex. He wrote then:

Through his poems, one might have assumed that Donne was the conquistador unparalleled. Amusingly enough, Katherine points out that this might not have been the case. Rather, he was someone who wanted to be seen as a rake, and more so, among his male friends. Outside of his marriage, Donne may not have been winning over other women, as he would have us believe. Yet, he wrote about sex and desire in a way that hadn’t been done till then in English.

While he exults in “love”, he also observes its other sides. Its razor edges, its piercing hurts and disappointments. He is not just rapturous, but according to Rundell, “sharp, funny, mean, flippant and deadly serious.”

Living Through Dark Times

Like Donne’s maternal uncle, other Catholic priests were hung, “drawn and quartered”. This meant their bodies were stretched like pieces of fabric, then hung to death, with limbs eventually being chopped off. All this with crowds and families watching.

There were legends too about the manner in which these priests had accepted their deaths with equanimity and courage. Donne grew up thinking of death, of the manner in which one was supposed to meet it with theatrical stoicism. This was a thought he did not relinquish, right till the end.

Flitting Through Multiple Identities

Donne, however, wasn’t just a pastor or a poet. He was someone who constantly remade himself over life, inhabiting a multitude of roles: lover, priest, lawyer, writer, poet, dean, pirate et al. Well before “trans” had come to represent what it might in contemporary times, Donne already cherished the prefix, using it repeatedly in his poems.

As the author observes, “We are, he believed, creatures born transformable.” As a case in point, his own transformations from poverty to riches, from anonymity to a kind of celebrity-hood, from pirate to priest were evidence of this. He believed moreover that “we, humans, are at once a catastrophe and a miracle.”

Treasuring the Body and Mind

Equally he reveled in the human facility for wonder and awe. In the body’s ability to be one and many things, to savor pleasure and surmount pain. Minds, too, could be fortified against the world, or absorb wondrous sights and sounds that constitute reality. It’s through the mind and body that we can delight in the small, or marvel at the vast.

Despite living in squalid conditions, Donne stayed curious and surprised. He reminds us that “it is an astonishment to be alive, and it behoves you to be astonished.” Despite facing immense losses, he lived with a throbbing sense of eternity.

Mining His Papers

While I stay fascinated by the poet, I’m equally in awe of what Rundell has achieved in filling in the life of someone long dead.

Elucidating her process, Katherine remarks that are few written relics from his private life, in the form of diaries and letters, but there is quite a remarkable corpus of prose pieces, dense essays, sermons and other texts from which one can imagine what the man might have been like.

There are also about 230 letters that were preserved by his son, John Donne junior. The son, unfortunately tampered with their dates and addressee names, so their historical accuracy has been diminished.

Of the 200 poems available to readers, some are epithalamia – which are verses written to celebrate a marriage. Others are obsequies, to mourn deaths. He also wrote letters in verse: Such verse letters “appealed to the part of him that wanted his own brand of intense precision to suffuse everything he touched.”

Living Through Words

Donne continued working with words his whole life. He wanted to find the kind of expressions that would reflect his own close and nuanced observations of the world. “He sought to create for himself a form of language that would meet the requirements of someone who watched the world with careful and skeptical eyes.”

References

Katherine Rundell, Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2022