1558–1603). The law required monthly attendance at the services of the Church of England, but dissent was widespread, and failure to comply could be amended by paying a fine. ‘Satire III’ scorns the fictitious Graius for accepting the state Church simply because

Some preachers, vile ambitious bawds, and laws,

Still new like fashions, bid him think that she

Which dwells with us is only perfect …

Donne’s search for the one true Church turns into a search for truth itself, a pursuit so rigorous that it requires the fearless perseverance of a mountain climber:

                                            On a huge hill,

Cragged and steep, Truth stands, and he that will

Reach her, about must, and about must go;

And what the’hill’s suddenness resists, win so …

For Donne the road to knowledge, or ‘truth’, whether secular or religious, is always a ‘strange way’, circuitous but rigorous.22

The sceptical distrust of received truth expressed in ‘Satire III’ returns in ‘Metempsychosis’, a long satirical allegory which traces the progress of a soul from its first incarnation in the apple eaten by Eve and Adam in the Garden of Eden through a series of plants, animals and human beings down to Donne’s day. The final aphorism challenges Donne’s readers to decide for themselves the extent to which something is good or evil:

There’s nothing simply good nor ill alone;

Of every quality comparison,

    The only measure is, and judge, opinion.

By defining good and ill as a function of ‘opinion’, or a process of ‘comparison’ that requires one to continually ‘measure’ and ‘judge’, ‘Metempsychosis’ announces a paradigm shift – from a medieval, analogical view of the world that represents good and evil as divinely ordained, eternal verities to a modern, empirical model that advocates continuing intellectual exploration, legal reform and social change. Donne’s allegory of human history reveals that society condones certain behaviours at one moment or place while prohibiting and condemning the same behaviours at other times and places. The allusions to incest, promiscuity and homoerotic love illustrate the poem’s larger, overarching claim that social mores and sexual practices are not inherently ‘good’ or ‘ill’ but constructed as such by law and society.23

The great twentieth-century scholar C. S. Lewis complained that ‘Donne’s poetry is too simple to satisfy. Its complexity is all on the surface.’24 Yet Donne’s poems are not riddles that can be solved once and for all. Donne’s religious poems, like his elegies, satires and love lyrics, are constantly pushing the limits – enacting resistance, seeking answers, risking outrage. In ‘Holy Sonnet 10 (XIV)’ Donne turns all his poetic force and personal charm to wooing God. Following a simple, gentle profession of love, ‘Yet dearly’I love You,’and would be loved fain’, the conclusion is startling: ‘I, / Except You’enthral me, never shall be free, / Nor ever chaste, except You ravish me.’ ‘Ravish’ is one of those characteristic Donnean words that balances two completely different, even contradictory meanings: (1) fill with rapture or spiritual exaltation, (2) seize and carry away by force, violate, rape. By imagining himself simultaneously as a mystic and as the passive object of sexual assault, Donne moves beyond simple binaries – beyond reason. The surprising expression of masochistic desire dramatizes what the poem discovers: that divine love requires a violently wrenching leap of faith and an inexplicable, unearned gift of grace.

The Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, a lyrical collection of prose meditations, expostulations and prayers written during a relapsing fever that nearly killed Donne in 1623, recycles and explicates many of the images that animate the poetry: man as microcosm of the universe, the body as figure for the soul, sickness as sign of divine providence, the house as an analogue for the rooms of the mind or the foundations of faith. As microcosm expands to macrocosm, Donne, by then an Anglican minister and dean of St Paul’s Cathedral, discovers that he is inextricably bound up with all mankind:

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were. Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind …

(17. Meditation)

The Devotions contains what is perhaps the best account of Donne’s own language – attributed to God himself:

My God, my God, Thou art a direct God, may I not say a literal God, a God that wouldest be understood literally and according to the plain sense of all that Thou sayest? But Thou art also (Lord, I intend it to Thy glory, and let no profane misinterpreter abuse it to Thy diminution), Thou art a figurative, a metaphorical God too: a God in whose words there is such a height of figures, such voyages, such peregrinations to such remote and precious metaphors, such extensions, such spreadings, such curtains of allegories, such third heavens of hyperboles, so harmonious elocutions, so retired and so reserved expressions, so commanding persuasions, so persuading commandments …

(19. Expostulation)

Donne’s prose is as direct, agitated, hyperbolic, witty and spectacularly metaphorical as his poetry. Like the God he conjures and strives to imitate here, Donne’s poems use ‘commanding persuasions’ and ‘persuading commandments’ to sway his readers and listeners. With their striking conjunctions of ‘plain’ speech, ‘remote and precious metaphors’ and ‘reserved expressions’, Donne’s poetry and prose reach a feverish pitch of perplexity and discovery. In ‘Holy Sonnet 19 (XIX)’ Donne looks back over his life and writing only to detect a recurrent pattern of contradiction, uncertainty and change:

O, to vex me, contraries meet in one;

Inconstancy unnaturally hath begot

A constant habit, that when I would not

I change in vows and in devotion.

Unlike Sidney, Shakespeare or Spenser Donne rarely represents himself as a poet; this, along with the metaphorical God of the Devotions, is as close as he gets to a poetics.

Contrariety and ‘inconstancy’ also meet in Donne’s vexed representations of women. At times his poems echo familiar stereotypes and deeply entrenched patriarchal attitudes: women are inconstant and unpredictable, governed by passion rather than intellect: ‘Hope not for mind in women’, Donne jokes in ‘Love’s Alchemy’. Donne’s jibe will still, no doubt, amuse some readers. (I laugh every time I teach John Updike’s short story ‘A & P’ when the narrator asks, ‘Do you really think it’s a mind in there or just a little buzz like a bee in a glass jar?’).25 Yet Donne’s witty dismissal of women’s minds makes one all the more mindful of ‘Valediction of the Book’, where the speaker invokes a tradition of women writers reaching back to classical antiquity in order to convince his own wonderfully intelligent mistress to write her version of their love story:

Study our manuscripts, those myriads

   Of letters, which have passed ’twixt thee and me,

   Thence write our annals, and in them will be,

To all whom love’s subliming fire invades,

      Rule and example found …

The speaker urges her to write a compendium of all practical and theoretical knowledge – ‘This book, as long-lived as the elements, / Or as the world’s form, this all-gravèd tome / In cipher writ, or new-made idiom’. What’s more, by recounting their relationship her book, like Donne’s poem, will expose the mistaken presumptions of powerful, narrow-minded men: ‘In this thy book, such will their nothing see’.

Similarly, the conventional misogynist wit of ‘Song’ (‘Go and catch a falling star’) – ‘Nowhere / Lives a woman true, and fair’ – is proved weak or untrue by the following poem, ‘Woman’s Constancy’, where it is impossible to determine whether the speaker is male or female. When the witty about-face reveals the speaker to be just as inconstant (or not) as the listener, the conclusion prompts us to read the poem again, re-examining the reasons why we might think certain qualities are masculine or feminine. In ‘Break of Day’ and ‘Confined Love’ Donne adopts the voice and perspective of a woman. In ‘The Undertaking’ the male speaker urges his male interlocutor to repudiate conventional gender roles altogether: ‘And dare love that, and say so too, / And forget the he and she’.

If, as some critics contend, ‘Elegy 8. To His Mistress Going to Bed’ subjugates the woman – ‘My kingdom, safeliest when with one man manned’ – ‘The Anniversary’ offers a bold new application of the ideological problems created by Queen Elizabeth’s presence on the throne. Donne imagines the lovers in heaven, but immediately returns them to earth where their love is all the more prized because it is unparalleled and unprecedented: ‘And then we shall be throughly blest, / But we no more than all the rest; / Here upon earth, we’are kings, and none but we / Can be such kings, nor of such subjects be’.