‘A Valediction of My Name in the Window’ invokes the body in all its corporeality, the ‘muscle, sinew,’and vein, / Which tile this house’. Yet ‘Song’ famously revels in the fantastical play of imagination:

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 …

In ‘Elegy on Mrs Bulstrode’ death feeds on the deceased as we eat supper: ‘Th’earth’s face is but thy table, and the meat / Plants, cattle, men – dishes for Death to eat’. In ‘Elegy on the Lady Markham’ ‘Tears are false spectacles’; in ‘A Valediction of Weeping’ tears are coins, then globes, then the moon that controls the tides and the speaker’s safe return from his sea voyage. Constructing metaphors as workmen make globes, Donne wields continents and oceans, ranging from ‘the Indias of spice and mine’ to the bed where the speaker has just awakened with his lover in ‘The Sun Rising’. Donne’s vision of the world is at once global (‘Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone’) and intensely private: ‘Let us possess one world, each hath one, and is one’ (‘The Good Morrow’).

Donne is less an idealist or an aesthete than a builder, an explorer, a sceptic, a sensualist. Very much a man of his time yet forward-looking, Donne’s mind ranges from the Copernican revolution and newly found stars and planets to anatomical dissection. Unsolved scientific problems concern him: ‘Of longitudes, what other way have we, / But to mark when and where the dark eclipses be?’ (‘Valediction of the Book’).16 ‘The Second Anniversary’ asks us to confront what we do not know: ‘Know’st thou but how the stone doth enter in / The bladder’s cave and never break the skin? / Know’st thou how blood, which to the heart doth flow, / Doth from one ventricle to th’other go?’

In ‘Metempsychosis’ the newly created earth comprises a laboratory for the study of natural science: ‘That swimming college and free hospital / Of all mankind, that cage and vivary / Of fowls and beasts’. Containing the first recorded use of the word ‘college’ to mean a society or gathering place for scholars, these lines associate Donne’s experimental poetry with the empirical experiments that generated the scientific revolution. In ‘The First Anniversary’ the stable, hierarchical world order collapses altogether. The ‘new philosophy calls all in doubt’ heralding the modern era: ‘ ’Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone’.17 In ‘A Nocturnal upon St Lucy’s Day’, the very notion of stability dissolves, and Donne is ‘re-begot / Of absence, darkness, death, things which are not’ – and naught.

Donne’s language yields chasms where the flat verbal surface doubles over and splits apart, leaving us on the edge of an interpretative divide. Yet the physical world keeps intruding. Donne’s early poems, the epigrams, satires and elegies, are immersed in city life with its temptations and sexually transmitted diseases, its vanities, self-deceptions and social climbing, its greed, corruption and depravity. The famously knotty satires mock stupidity, deride self-indulgence and attack corruption.18 The epigram ‘Klockius’ ends with a humiliating, witty exposé:

Klockius, so deeply’hath sworn, ne’er more to come

In bawdy house, that he dares not go home.

Klockius swore off prostitutes only to discover (as we ourselves discover in the final epigrammatic turn) that his own home is little better than a bawdy house.

Donne was a master of the epigram, a classical genre that challenges the poet to speak volumes in a few pithy lines. Donne’s epigrams delight in wordplay, but they also reveal that play can have serious consequences:

Thy sins and hairs may no man equal call,

For as thy sins increase, thy hairs do fall.

                             (‘A Licentious Person’)

The absurd mathematical ratio, combined with the pun on hair, heirs and (less precisely) whores, juxtaposes the insidious spread of venereal disease, which threatens the licentious man’s life, and patrilineage. In the epigrams, as in so many of the longer poems, the biting turn of the ending sends us back to the beginning to rethink what we thought we knew.

In his witty, irreverent elegies Donne writes with remarkable frankness about sexuality: the pressure of an erection, the delights of foreplay, the medical rediscovery of the clitoris, the pleasure of orgasm, the let-down of post-coital sadness.19 ‘Elegy 8. To His Mistress Going to Bed’ dramatizes the thrill of seducing his mistress: ‘O my America, my new-found-land’. The discovery of her naked body is all the more revelatory because Donne’s contemporaries rarely removed all their clothes. ‘The Comparison’ (Elegy 2) contrasts the friend’s aggressive, unsatisfying sex life with the mutual satisfaction the speaker and his mistress enjoy by paying careful, knowing attention to one another’s bodies. ‘Sappho to Philænis’ adopts the persona of the Greek lesbian poet Sappho, who cherishes the ‘mutual feeling’ she shared with her female lover Philænis.20 If Donne’s portrayal of Sappho arouses male voyeurs – and it pays to look closely at the ending – it also gives female creativity and female pleasure a voice that vies with the much-vaunted ‘masculine persuasive force’ of ‘Elegy 11. On His Mistress’.21

In ‘Elegy 14. Love’s Progress’, which was omitted from the first and second editions of Donne’s poems presumably due to objections from the censor, Donne figures ‘progress’ in two senses: both a journey towards ‘this desired place’, ‘the centric part’ of the woman’s body, and an advance in what is known. The poem promulgates what Renaissance scientists were discovering about the body, both by studying classical texts and by conducting their own anatomical dissections. Yet Donne’s ‘application’ and ‘use’ of their findings to advocate non-reproductive sexual pleasure, for women as well as men, poses a far more radical challenge than the published medical treatises were prepared to condone. ‘[P]ractise my art’, Donne writes in ‘Love’s Progress’, directing his readers to put his ‘map’ of the body to ‘use’ while at the same time inviting us to actively engage with his daring, innovative poetry.

The repeated deferrals, surprising climaxes and continually retraced footsteps ‘progress’ like medical science by constantly testing and re-examining their own starting assumptions. Impatient with set patterns and suspicious of ready-made answers, the ‘new strange shapes’ of Donne’s experimental poetry challenge poets and lovers, and lovers of poetry to do better – to circle back, recalculate and begin anew.

In ‘Satire III’ Donne urges us to seek the one true Church, not by accepting truths handed down from our father, or forefathers, or the Church Fathers but by actively seeking our own answers. Donne came of age during a time when religious belief was passionately debated and politically fraught. Within two generations the government had abandoned Roman Catholicism under Henry VIII (r. 1509–47) and institutionalized the Protestant Reformation under Edward VI (r. 1547–53) only to reinstate Catholicism with Queen Mary (r. 1553–8) and return to Protestantism with Queen Elizabeth (r.