{"id":147158,"date":"2023-03-12T09:45:33","date_gmt":"2023-03-12T17:45:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=147158"},"modified":"2023-03-12T09:45:33","modified_gmt":"2023-03-12T17:45:33","slug":"super-infinite-the-transformations-of-john-donne","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=147158","title":{"rendered":"Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here are some highlights from this 2022 book by Katherine Rundell<\/a>:<\/p>\n

* The power of John Donne\u2019s words nearly killed a man. It was the late spring of 1623, on the morning of Ascension Day, and Donne had finally secured for himself celebrity, fortune and a captive audience. He had been appointed the Dean of St Paul\u2019s Cathedral two years before: he was fifty-one, slim and amply bearded, and his preaching was famous across the whole of London. His congregation \u2013 merchants, aristocrats, actors in elaborate ruffs, the whole sweep of the city \u2013 came to his sermons carrying paper and ink, 1 wrote down his finest passages and took them home to dissect and relish, pontificate and argue over. He often wept in the pulpit, in joy and in sorrow, and his audience would weep with him. His words, they said, could \u2018charm the soul\u2019. 2
\n That morning he was not preaching in his own church, but fifteen minutes\u2019 easy walk across London at Lincoln\u2019s Inn, where a new chapel was being consecrated. Word went out: wherever he was, people came flocking, often in their thousands, to hear him speak. That morning, too many people flocked. \u2018There was a great concourse 3 of noblemen and gentlemen\u2019, and in among \u2018the extreme press and thronging\u2019, as they pushed closer to hear his words, men in the crowd were shoved to the ground and trampled. \u2018Two or three were endangered, and taken up dead for the time.\u2019 There\u2019s no record of Donne halting his sermon; so it\u2019s likely that he kept going in his rich, authoritative voice as the bruised men were carried off and out of sight.<\/p>\n

* His poetry is wildly delighted and captivated by the body \u2013 though broken, though doomed to decay \u2013 and by the ways in which thinking fast and hard were a sensual joy akin to sex. He kicked aside the Petrarchan traditions of idealised, sanitised desire: he joyfully brought the body to collide with the soul.<\/p>\n

* Donne lived under a state which both censored and spied on its citizens, and his letters are largely \u2013 though not solely \u2013 practicalities. Will you come for dinner? I am ill. Might you give me money? Can you find me work? (Or, more accurately, because a significant portion of the letters are outrageous pieces of flattery: you are so ravishingly exquisite, can you find me work?)<\/p>\n

* Donne is the greatest writer of desire in the English language. He wrote about sex in a way that nobody ever has, before or since: he wrote sex as the great insistence on life, the salute, the bodily semaphore for the human living infinite.<\/p>\n

* St Paul\u2019s Cathedral. He was born in sight of both his future job and his final resting place, which must be rare.<\/p>\n

* no women were allowed in the Inns [of Court], except for the \u2018laundresses\u2019 who cleaned, and who had to be under the age of twelve or over forty in order to prevent romantic entanglements.<\/p>\n

* the Inns of Court wielded against their students a litany of sumptuary regulations, to keep the men looking as serious externally as they were presumed to be internally. All gowns were to be \u2018of a sad colour\u2019, and there was a formidable list of forbidden accessories and styles, including ruffs, hats, boots, spurs, swords, daggers, long hair, beards, and \u2018foreign fashions\u2019 generally; overall, the Inns\u2019 legislation stated that each student should ensure \u2018his apparel pretend no lightness, 1 or wantonness in the wearer\u2019.<\/p>\n

* when we get dressed we ask something of the world. All clothes speak: they say desire me, or oh ignore me, or endow my words with greater seriousness than you would were I not wearing this hat.<\/p>\n

* He understood that presentation, voice and look are not frivolities to be dismissed, but weapons to be harnessed.<\/p>\n

* Performance, and the clothes that accompany it, remained an interest all Donne\u2019s life. From his youth, when he posed exuberantly for images, until his death, before which he demanded that he be sketched for his statuary dressed only in his winding-sheet, Donne knew this: that to get dressed is to make both a statement and a demand. There\u2019s no such thing as neutral clothing: to attempt neutrality is itself a statement of style.<\/p>\n

* Donne lived through a plague with mortality rates at sixty per cent and higher. (Covid-19 has a global mortality rate of about three per cent.)<\/p>\n

* Between Thomas More\u2019s execution in 1535 and Henry\u2019s death in 1593, we can count eleven members 1 of Donne\u2019s family who died in exile or in prison for their Catholicism.<\/p>\n

* There was the power of his ambition, and his understanding that promotion and success would not be compatible with open Catholicism, but there would also have been new books and new conversations, drinking with Protestants, flirtations with Protestants. There would have been the pull of other allegiances over denominational ones \u2013 to the monarch and to the idea of nationhood, which slowly took on the shape of national loyalism and led him towards the Church of England. His priorities shifted, realigned, took on new shapes.<\/p>\n

* Was, then, the young Donne a great tumultuous lover: a conqueror of swathes of women? After so much time and so much entropy, we can only guess: but, almost certainly, not. 12 Women of his class would have been hard to seduce \u2013 they were fiercely and carefully protected. Make a mistake, they knew, and you could be punished for life.<\/p>\n

* The idea that Donne\u2019s poetry would give you, of a beautiful young man cutting through swathes of London\u2019s finest female population, would have been difficult \u2013 though not impossible \u2013 to pull off.<\/p>\n

* Because of this devil-may-care attitude to his own work, when you quote a Donne poem, you are in fact quoting an amalgamation, pieced together over four hundred years from an array of manuscripts of varying degrees of scrappiness.<\/p>\n

* The poems we know as \u2018by John Donne\u2019 have in fact been constructed by editors, piecemeal, from the best of the manuscripts and the seventeenth-century print editions: the title page should, were it to be bluntly literal, read, \u2018Poems, by John Donne and by educated guesswork\u2019.<\/p>\n

* the more you read Donne\u2019s verse, the more you love him, and the more you read Donne\u2019s prose, the less you can bear him.<\/p>\n

* If he took her to bed like he wrote \u2013 if he knew how to render bodily his poetry \u2013 then he was worth sacrificing all the wall hangings in England for.<\/p>\n

* Everything that made him so spectacular a poet made him ill-suited to being a father: having a parent whose mind is riddling, intense and recalcitrant of easy comfort is rarely what a child dreams of.<\/p>\n

* For a man so emphatic, and capable of such fervent enthusiasm, he never did manage to enthuse very emphatically about his offspring while they were alive.<\/p>\n

* The difficulty of history is that we must, to some extent at least, take men at their word; we must assume that they planned to do what they said they planned to do, and for roughly the reasons they said they did. We cannot read disingenuousness into every single speech, or the whole of history would be eaten alive by scepticism.<\/p>\n

* generally sermons, in Donne\u2019s day, were heard hungrily: they had breaking news in them, politics, entertainment, theatre; people gossiped about them and picked over in the week that followed.<\/p>\n

* Donne\u2019s sermons almost all follow the same structure, as was common to the vast majority of preachers. He would begin by laying out what was to follow, which usually was formed in two or three parts, and each part would have branches running out from it, and each branch further branches. Donne preached without a text in front of him; he would write the sermon out in full, take notes, and memorise it. He used the classical trick, employed by orators for thousands of years, of imagining a speech as a physical structure \u2013 a memory palace, a temple \u2013 through which he could move in his imagination. He was explicit about it: he compares the sermon to a \u2018goodly palace\u2019 through which he guides his audience.<\/p>\n

* \u2018marriage is but a continual fornication sealed with an oath.\u2019<\/p>\n

* The world is made up entirely of things that can kill you. Scarcely anything exists, Donne wrote with relish in the Devotions , which has not caused the death of someone once: \u2018a pin, a comb, 1 a hair pulled, hath gangrened and killed.\u2019<\/p>\n

* Poets and playwrights, meanwhile, were killed and killing at a far greater rate of frequency than their percentage of the population seems to merit: Thomas Wyatt killed a man in an affray, Ben Jonson stabbed a man in a duel, Christopher Marlowe was murdered, probably in a tavern brawl, though possibly in an elaborate intrigue.<\/p>\n

* and a woman without a dowry would have to be spectacularly beautiful or lucky.<\/p>\n

* he wrote poems that take all your sustained focus to untangle them. The pleasure of reading a Donne poem is akin to that of cracking a locked safe, and he meant it to be so. He demanded hugely of us, and the demands of his poetry are a mirror to that demanding. The poetry stands to ask: why should everything be easy, rhythmical, pleasant? He is at times almost impossible to understand, but, in repayment for your work, he reveals images that stick under your skin until you die. <\/p>\n

* The difficulty of Donne\u2019s work had in it a stark moral imperative: pay attention. It was what Donne most demanded of his audience: attention. It was, he knew, the world\u2019s most mercurial resource.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here are some highlights from this 2022 book by Katherine Rundell: * The power of John Donne\u2019s words nearly killed a man. It was the late spring of 1623, on the morning of Ascension Day, and Donne had finally secured … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14100],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-147158","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147158","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=147158"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147158\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":147159,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147158\/revisions\/147159"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=147158"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=147158"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=147158"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}