Meditation

17. Meditation

19. Expostulation

Death’s Duel, Selections

Appendix: Memorial Verses

To the Deceased Author, upon the Promiscuous Printing of his Poems, the Looser Sort, with the Religious, By [Sir] Tho[mas] Browne

To the Memory of My Ever Desired Friend Dr Donne, By H[enry] K[ing]

On the Death of Dr Donne, By Edw[ard] Hyde

On Doctor Donne, By Dr C. B. of O.

An Elegy upon the Incomparable Dr Donne, By Hen[ry] Valentine

An Elegy upon Dr Donne, By Iz[aak] Wa[lton] (‘Is Donne, great Donne deceased’)

Elegy on D. D., By Sidney Godolphin

On Dr John Donne, Late Dean of St Paul’s, London, By J[ohn] Chudleigh

An Elegy upon the Death of the Dean of Paul’s, Dr John Donne, By Mr Tho[mas] Carey

An Elegy on Dr Donne, By Sir Lucius Carie

On Dr Donne’s Death, By Mr Mayne of Christ-Church in Oxford

Upon Mr J. Donne and his Poems, By Arth[ur] Wilson

Epitaph upon Dr Donne, By Endy[mion] Porter

In Memory of Doctor Donne, By Mr R. B.

Epitaph (‘Here lies Dean Donne’)

Notes

Chronology

Acknowledgements

PENGUIN image CLASSICS

GENERAL EDITOR, POETRY: CHRISTOPHER RICKS

COLLECTED POETRY

JOHN DONNE was born in 1572 into a family of devout Catholics. He studied at Oxford University, travelled on the Continent, and then studied law at Lincoln’s Inn. In 1596–7 Donne joined the military expeditions to Cadiz and the Azores. In 1597 he became secretary to Sir Thomas Egerton, the Lord Keeper of the Great Seal. Donne fell in love with Egerton’s niece, Anne More; having made a clandestine marriage contract, they were secretly married in December 1601. Donne lost his position in Egerton’s service, but the marriage was declared legal in April 1602. In the years following his marriage, Donne was a Member of Parliament and Justice of the Peace. He obtained temporary positions and patronage from a number of aristocrats who are the subjects of his poems. He was ordained as an Anglican minister in 1615, becoming Royal Chaplain and first Reader in Divinity at Lincoln’s Inn. In 1617 Anne Donne died, after giving birth to their twelfth child. In 1621 Donne was appointed Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral. John Donne died in 1631, at the age of fifty-nine. The first collected edition of his poetry was published posthumously in 1633.

ILONA BELL is Clarke Professor of English Literature at Williams College. She has a BA from Harvard College and a Ph.D. from Boston College. She has received fellowships and grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Bunting Institute and the Mellon Foundation. She is the author of Elizabethan Women and the Poetry of Courtship (1998) and Elizabeth I: the Voice of a Monarch (2010), and has published numerous articles and book chapters on John Donne, William Shakespeare, George Herbert, Ben Jonson, Elizabeth I, Mary Wroth, John Milton, the Maydens of London and Elizabeth Cary. She has also edited John Donne: Selected Poems (2006) for Penguin Classics.

Introduction

Around 1618 Ben Jonson predicted that John Donne ‘for not being understood would perish’. Since we might think the passage of time has made Donne’s poetry difficult, it is telling to hear this from Donne’s contemporary, a learned poet who ‘esteemeth John Donne the first poet in the world in some things’. When the first edition of Donne’s poems was published in 1633, Thomas Carey, one of Donne’s most astute disciples, contributed ‘An Elegy upon the Death of the Dean of Paul’s, Dr John Donne’ which described Donne’s formidable poetic powers: ‘Thou hast … drawn a line / Of masculine expression, … shot such heat and light / As burnt our earth, and made our darkness bright, / Committed holy rapes upon our will … [T]o the awe of thy imperious wit / Our stubborn language bends’.

The next century failed to appreciate the challenges Donne’s poetry posed, just as Jonson predicted. The neoclassical poet John Dryden protested that Donne ‘affects the metaphysics’ and ‘perplexes the minds of the fair sex with nice speculations of philosophy, when he should engage their hearts, and entertain them with the softnesses of love’. Samuel Johnson, the great eighteenth-century man of letters, also objected: ‘The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together.’1

The nineteenth century was both more appreciative and more critical.2 The Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge found Donne’s poems – ‘where the writer thinks, and expects the reader to do so’ – electrifying: ‘Wit! – Wonder-exciting vigour, intenseness and peculiarity of thought … this is the wit of Donne!’3 The most popular Victorian anthology omitted Donne’s poems because, as Alexander Grosart explained when he published The Complete Poems of John Donne in 1872, ‘It needs courage to print the poetry of Dr John Donne in our day.’ On the value of Donne’s poems the nineteenth century was divided. ‘Few are good for much’, Henry Hallam wrote in the late 1830s: ‘the conceits have not even the merit of being intelligible, and it would perhaps be difficult to select three passages that we should care to read again.’ Yet Robert Browning was so fond of quoting the love poems in his own love letters to Elizabeth Barrett that she referred to Donne as ‘your Donne’.4

By the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, thanks to Sir Edmund Gosse’s and Sir Herbert Grierson’s seminal editions and T.