Katherine Rundell, Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne, Faber, £16.99, 352 pages
John Donne was the poet of love and death and is therefore of special attraction to Catholics. William Shakespeare’s younger contemporary, he was brought up in a religious minority at a time of religious terror, “a darkly particular way to grow up”. As a Catholic in Elizabethan England, he would see his relatives jailed and executed for their beliefs from childhood onwards. Metaphors of imprisonment plague his writing on illness and suicide: “whensoever any affliction assails me, me thinks I have the keys of my prison in mine own hand”, he wrote in Biathanatos, “and no remedy presents itself so soon to my heart as mine own sword”. His mother kept the old faith, and Donne looked after her until her death just before his own, housing her in his deanery at St Paul’s Cathedral. Hisbrother Henry was arrested in 1593 for harbouring a Catholic priest, William Harrington, and died in Newgate Prison of bubonic plague. Rundell’s account of it is gripping:
There were rumours, at the time, that the Jesuits were in some way implicated in Henry’s arrest. There were rifts between Jesuits and seminary priests – many Catholic priests saw the increasingly extreme positions of the Jesuits, who advocated various degrees of violence against the monarchy, from deposing to beheading, as over-much and ungodly. Harrington, the priest discovered in Henry’s rooms, was one of those who had begun to feel doubts – he had written of his need to be ‘answerable to my father’s estate’, which required loyalty to queen and country and the system into which he had been born – and when the priest hunters came crashing through the door, whispers ran through London that Harrington had been betrayed because of his weakening stance. It is very possible that Donne felt the Jesuits were in part to blame for the death of his brother. (p72)
Not everyone was cut out for martyrdom, John Donne included. When Henry died in 1593 Donne was still a Catholic; when he married in 1601 he was not. Even though prodigiously gifted and by chance of patronage highly educated, as Donne was, social progress in Elizabethan and Jacobean society was extremely difficult if not impossible for Catholics. Against all odds, and after much deft employment of his literary (persuasive) skills, for which from early manhood he was famous in a court that celebrated the high culture of music, poetry and learned preaching, he married into status and comfortable money. He and Anne More lived distant from the court and parented many children, six of whom ultimately survived, the last of whom was the cause of Anne’s death in childbirth.
But it was only after many years of oleaginous importuning of court influence, and after Anne’s death, that Donne was offered advancement by King James I, first in a diplomatic mission abroad (unsuccessful), and then as Dean of St Paul’s, where the full range of his talents could coruscate.Congregations in those days were more like crowds; St Paul’s Cross, the external area beside the cathedral, could accommodate two thousand hearers, architectural acoustics allowing those among the front thousand to hear Donne’s highly original and dramatic delivery, the rear thousand the recipients of verbal summary passed back.
The first preacher the new king Charles called upon was Donne, such was his fame and prestige. It was an irony, then, that it was not long before he caused the king offence when in an extensive metaphor about the church lacking perfection he referred to kings whose wives may have “sucked in their infancy from another church”. Charles’s wife was Henrietta Maria, daughter of the king of France and an ardent Catholic! Bishop Laud had to act as midwife of an abject apology from Donne to the king.
Donne’s modern fame resides in his genius as a poet and as a love poet in particular. His love poems are simultaneously complex and direct. “I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I / Did, till we loved?” he writes in “The Good Morrow”.Rundell dubs him “an infinity poet”, maestro of the knotted beauties of seventeenth-century English. But he is also the poet and essayist of death. In December 1623, when he thought he was dying, he went urgently from his sick-bed to write the Meditations in which he insists on human multiplicity: “Man consists of more pieces, more parts, than the world doth, nay, than the world is.” Those meditations contain Donne’s famous argument that “no man is an island”.His great prose work, Biathanatos, from 1608, is a dark treatise on suicide that he suppressed during his lifetime.
John Donne was prodigy, rake, soldier, poet, flatterer, prisoner, priest. He was born a child of persecuted Catholics and died as the most revered Protestant preacher in England.In this impressive book, which is both biography and apology, Katherine Rundell reminds us of his essential message, which is a profoundly Christian one. It is to pay attention. As he commanded in one of his sermons:
Now was there ever any man seen to sleep in the cart between Newgate and Tyburn? Between the prison and the place of execution, does any man sleep? And we sleep all the way, from the womb to the grave we are never thoroughly awake.
Most of all, our attention is owed to one another, the demand for which is conveyed in an extended metaphor:
No man is an island, entire in 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…any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind...
Reading Hour 