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John Donne

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Title: John Donne


1
John Donne
  • and
  • the Metaphysical Poets

2
  • John Donnes biography
  • John Donnes literary work
  • The Metaphysical poets

3
John Donnes biography
  •   John Donne was born in Bread Street,
    London in 1572 to a prosperous Roman Catholic
    family. His father, John Donne, was a well-to-do
    ironmonger and citizen of London. Donne's father
    died suddenly in 1576, and left the three
    children to be raised by their mother, Elizabeth.
  •        Donne's first teachers were Jesuits. At
    the age of 11, Donne and his younger brother
    Henry were entered at Hart Hall, University of
    Oxford, where Donne studied for three years. He
    spent the next three years at the University of
    Cambridge, but took no degree at either
    university because he would not take the Oath of
    Supremacy required at graduation. He was admitted
    to study law and it seemed natural that Donne
    should embark upon a legal or diplomatic
    career. In 1593, Donne's brother Henry died of a
    fever in prison after being arrested for giving
    sanctuary to a proscribed Catholic priest. This
    made Donne begin to question his faith. His first
    book of poems, Satires, written during this
    period of residence in London, is considered one
    of Donne's most important literary efforts.
    Although not immediately published, the volume
    had a fairly wide readership through private
    circulation of the manuscript. Same was the case
    with his love poems, Songs and Sonnets, assumed
    to be written at about the same time as the
    Satires.  Having inherited a considerable
    fortune, young "Jack Donne" spent his money on
    womanizing, on books, at the theatre, and on
    travels. In 1596, Donne joined the naval
    expedition that Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of
    Essex, led against Cádiz, Spain.  In 1597, Donne
    joined an expedition to the Azores, where he
    wrote "The Calm". Upon his return to England in
    1598, Donne was appointed private secretary to
    Sir Thomas Egerton, Lord Keeper of the Great
    Seal, afterward Lord Ellesmere.

4
  •     Donne was beginning a promising career. In
    1601, Donne became MP for Brackley, and sat in
    Queen Elizabeth's last Parliament. But in the
    same year, he secretly married Lady Egerton's
    niece, seventeen-year-old Anne More, daughter of
    Sir George More, Lieutenant of the Tower, and
    effectively committed career suicide. Sir
    George had Donne thrown in Fleet Prison for some
    weeks. Donne was dismissed from his post, and for
    the next decade had to struggle near poverty to
    support his growing family. Donne later summed up
    the experience "John Donne, Anne Donne, Undone."
    Anne's cousin offered the couple refuge in
    Pyrford, Surrey, and the couple was helped by
    friends. It was not until 1609 that a
    reconciliation was effected between Donne and his
    father-in-law, and Sir George More was finally
    induced to pay his daughter's dowry.In the
    intervening years, Donne practised law, but they
    were lean years for the Donnes. Donne was
    employed by the religious pamphleteer Thomas
    Morton, later Bishop of Durham. To this period,
    before reconciliation with his in-laws, belong
    Donne's Divine Poems(1607) and Biathanatos (pub.
    1644), a radical piece for its time, in which
    Donne argues that suicide is not a sin in itself.
     As Donne approached forty, he published two
    anti-Catholic polemics Pseudo-Martyr (1610) and
    Ignatius his Conclave(1611). They were final
    public testimony of Donne's renunciation of the
    Catholic faith. Pseudo-Martyr, which held that
    English Catholics could pledge an oath of
    allegiance to James I, King of England, without
    compromising their religious loyalty to the Pope,
    won Donne the favour of the King. In return for
    patronage from Sir Robert Drury of Hawstead, he
    wrote A Funerall Elegie (1610), on the death of
    Sir Robert's 15-year-old daughter Elizabeth. At
    this time, the Donnes took residence on Drury
    Lane.  The two Anniversaries An Anatomy of the
    World(1611) and Of the Progress of the Soul(1612)
    continued the patronage. Sir Robert encouraged
    the publication of the poems The First
    Anniversary was published with the original elegy
    in 1611, and both were reissued with The Second
    Anniversary in 1612.       

5
  •     Donne had refused to take Anglican orders in
    1607, but King James persisted, finally
    announcing that Donne would receive no post or
    preferment from the King, unless in the church.
    In 1615, Donne reluctantly entered the ministry
    and was appointed a Royal Chaplain later that
    year. Just as Donne's fortunes seemed to be
    improving, Anne Donne died, on 15 August, 1617,
    aged thirty-three, after giving birth to their
    twelfth child, a stillborn. Seven of their
    children survived their mother's death. Struck by
    grief, Donne wrote the seventeenth Holy Sonnet,
    "Since she whom I lov'd hath paid her last debt."
    Donne continued to write poetry, notably his Holy
    Sonnets(1618), but the time for love songs was
    over. In 1618, Donne went as chaplain with
    Viscount Doncaster in his embassy to the German
    princes. His Hymn to Christ at the Author's Last
    Going into Germany, written before the journey,
    is laden with apprehension of death. Donne
    returned to London in 1620, and was appointed
    Dean of Saint Paul's in 1621, a post he held
    until his death. Donne excelled at his post, and
    was at last financially secure.

6
  •     In 1624, Donne was made vicar of St
    Dunstan's-in-the-West. On March 27, 1625, James I
    died, and Donne preached his first sermon for
    Charles I. But for his ailing health, (he had
    mouth sores and had experienced significant
    weight loss) Donne almost certainly would have
    become a bishop in 1630. Obsessed with the idea
    of death, Donne posed in a shroud - the painting
    was completed a few weeks before his death, and
    later used to create an effigy. He also preached
    what was called his own funeral sermon, Death's
    Duel, just a few weeks before he died in London
    on March 31, 1631. The last thing Donne wrote
    just before his death was Hymne to God, my God,
    In my Sicknesse.  Donne's monument, in his
    shroud, survived the Great Fire of London and can
    still be seen today at St. Paul's.

7
John Donnes literary work
  • John Donne is considered a master of the
    conceit, an extended metaphor that combines two
    vastly unlike ideas into a single idea, often
    using imagery. Unlike the conceits found in other
    Elizabethan poetry, most notably Petrarchan
    conceits, which formed clichéd comparisons
    between more closely related objects (such as a
    rose and love), when such typical Petrarchan
    conceits appear in Donne, they are soundly
    mocked. Metaphysical conceits go to a greater
    depth in comparing two completely unlike objects.
    One of the most famous of Donne's conceits is
    found in A Valediction Forbidding Mourning where
    he compares two lovers who are separated to the
    two legs of a compass.
  • Donne liked to twist and distort not only
    images and ideas, but also traditional rhythmic
    patterns.
  • Donne's works are also remarkably witty,
    employing paradoxes, puns, and subtle yet
    remarkable analogies. His pieces are often ironic
    and cynical, especially regarding the motives of
    humans and love. Common subjects of Donne's poems
    are loveespecially in his early life,
    deathespecially after his wife's death, and
    religion.

8
Characteristic of Donnes Poetry
  • Donne set what has come to be known as the
    pattern for metaphysical poetry. His poetry can
    be characterised by the following attributes
  • -It is sharply opposed to the the sense of human
    dignity, and the idealised view of sexual love,
    which constituted the central tradition of
    Elizabethan poetry, especially in writers like
    Spenser.
  • -It adopts a diction and meter modelled on the
    rough actual speech.
  • -It is usually organised in the form of an urgent
    or heated argument.
  • -It puts to use a subtle and often outrageous
    logic.
  • -It is marked by realism, irony and often a
    cynicism in its treatment of the complexity of
    human motives.

9
  • His career can be viewed as having two phases
  • Phase I
  • His early poetry consist of five satires,
    twenty elegies (mainly about love, and deal with
    their theme in a variety of ways). Some are
    indeed cynical they deal with the paradoxes of
    lust.
  • Songs and Sonnets - by far the most
    interesting of Donnes early work, the love poems
    in the collection are of different mood,
    addressed to different persons. In the songs and
    sonnets, Donnes development is characteristic
    the opening of the poem shock the reader into
    attention, sometimes by asking a question. Then
    the thought or argument is ingeniously developed
    in terms of ideas derived from philosophy or
    scientific notions.
  • Donnes chief quality in the early work is the
    union of passion and rationalisation.

10
  • Phase II
  • Although it changes in focus and theme,
    Donnes later poetry remains as complex and dense
    as his earliest endeavours. The later work
    reflects his religious tension and his poetic
    exploration of mans relationship with God.
  • Most but not all of Donnes Divine Poems
    were written during the last phase of his life,
    when the young and sophisticated scholar had
    grown into the grave and philosophical divine.
    The texts often explore controversial or though
    questions about religion with startling
    directness.
  • The Divine poems were largely written after
    the death of Donnes wife, when he had
    effectively abandoned the worldly, sensuous life
    behind him and was searching instead for a right
    relationship with God.
  • The 19 Holy Sonnets contain Donnes finest
    examples of religious poetry. These poems are
    marked by the same intensity, the same
    combination of passion and argument that can be
    found in Songs and Sonnets, although the object
    of the passion has now changed. Donnes later
    passion is more complex- it is a blend of the
    hope and anguish that marks the religious mans
    search for the right relationship with his God,
    when he is aware not only of Gods greatness but
    also of his own comparative unworthiness.

11
"The Flea"
  • Summary
  • The speaker tells his beloved to look at
    the flea before them and to note "how little" is
    that thing that she denies him. For the flea, he
    says, has sucked first his blood, then her blood,
    so that now, inside the flea, they are mingled
    and that mingling cannot be called "sin, or
    shame, or loss of maidenhead." The flea has
    joined them together in a way that, "alas, is
    more than we would do."
  • As his beloved moves to kill the flea, the
    speaker stays her hand, asking her to spare the
    three lives in the flea his life, her life, and
    the flea's own life. In the flea, he says, where
    their blood is mingled, they are almost
    married--no, more than married--and the flea is
    their marriage bed and marriage temple mixed into
    one. Though their parents grudge their romance
    and though she will not make love to him, they
    are nevertheless united and cloistered in the
    living walls of the flea. She is apt to kill him,
    he says, but he asks that she not kill herself by
    killing the flea that contains her blood he says
    that to kill the flea would be sacrilege, "three
    sins in killing three."
  • "Cruel and sudden," the speaker calls his
    lover, who has now killed the flea, "purpling"
    her fingernail with the "blood of innocence." The
    speaker asks his lover what the flea's sin was,
    other than having sucked from each of them a drop
    of blood. He says that his lover replies that
    neither of them is less noble for having killed
    the flea. It is true, he says, and it is this
    very fact that proves that her fears are false
    If she were to sleep with him ("yield to me"),
    she would lose no more honour than she lost when
    she killed the flea.

12
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13
  • Commentary
  • This funny little poem again exhibits
    Donne's metaphysical love-poem mode, his aptitude
    for turning even the least likely images into
    elaborate symbols of love and romance. This poem
    uses the image of a flea that has just bitten the
    speaker and his beloved to sketch an amusing
    conflict over whether the two will engage in
    premarital sex. The speaker wants to, the beloved
    does not, and so the speaker, highly clever but
    grasping at straws, uses the flea, in whose body
    his blood mingles with his beloved's, to show how
    innocuous such mingling can be--he reasons that
    if mingling in the flea is so innocuous, sexual
    mingling would be equally innocuous, for they are
    really the same thing. By the second stanza, the
    speaker is trying to save the flea's life,
    holding it up as "our marriage bed and marriage
    temple."
  • But when the beloved kills the flea
    despite the speaker's protestations (and probably
    as a deliberate move to squash his argument, as
    well), he turns his argument on its head and
    claims that despite the high-minded and sacred
    ideals he has just been invoking, killing the
    flea did not really impugn his beloved's
    honour--and despite the high-minded and sacred
    ideals she has invoked in refusing to sleep with
    him, doing so would not impugn her honour either.
  • This poem is the cleverest of a long line
    of sixteenth-century love poems using the flea as
    an erotic image, a genre derived from an older
    poem of Ovid. Donne's poise of hinting at the
    erotic without ever explicitly referring to sex,
    while at the same time leaving no doubt as to
    exactly what he means, is as much a source of the
    poem's humour as the silly image of the flea is
    the idea that being bitten by a flea would
    represent "sin, or shame, or loss of maidenhead"
    gets the point across with a neat conciseness and
    clarity that Donne's later religious lyrics never
    attained.

14
Hymn to God, my God, in my Sickness"
  • Summary
  • The speaker says that since he will soon
    die and come to "that holy room" where he will be
    made into the music of God as sung by a choir of
    saints, he tunes "the instrument" now and thinks
    what he will do when the final moment comes. He
    likens his doctors to cosmographers and himself
    to a map, lying flat on the bed to be shown "that
    this is my south-west discovery / Per fretum
    febris, by these straits to die." He rejoices,
    for in those straits he sees his "west," his
    death, whose currents "yield return to none," yet
    which will not harm him. West and east meet and
    join in all flat maps (the speaker says again
    that he is a flat map), and in the same way,
    death is one with the resurrection.
  • The speaker asks whether his home is the
    Pacific Sea, or the eastern riches, or Jerusalem.
    He lists the straights of Anyan, Magellan, and
    Gibraltar, and says that only straits can offer
    access to paradise, whether it lies "where Japhet
    dwelt, or Cham, or Shem." The speaker says that
    "Paradise and Calvary, / Christ's Cross, and
    Adam's tree" stood in the same place. He asks God
    to look and to note that both Adams (Christ being
    the second Adam) are unified in him as the first
    Adam's sweat surrounds his face, he says, may the
    second Adam's blood embrace his soul. He asks God
    to receive him wrapped in the purple of Christ,
    and, "by these his thorns," to give him Christ's
    other crown. As he preached the word of God to
    others' souls, he says, let this be his sermon to
    his own soul "Therefore that he may raise the
    Lord throws down."

15
(No Transcript)
16
  • Commentary
  • Scholars are divided over the question of
    whether this poem was written on Donne's deathbed
    in 1630 or during the life-threatening fever he
    contracted in 1623. In either case, the "Hymn to
    God my God" was certainly written at a time when
    Donne believed he was likely to die. This
    beautiful, lyrical, and complicated poem
    represents his mind's attempt to summarize
    itself, and his attempt to offer, as he says, a
    sermon to his soul. In the first stanza, the
    speaker looks forward to the time when he will be
    in "that holy room" where he will be made into
    God's music--an extraordinary image--with His
    choir of saints. In preparation for that time, he
    says, he will "tune the instrument" (his soul) by
    writing this poem.
  • The next several stanzas, devoted to the
    striking image of Donne's body as a map looked
    over by his navigator-doctors, develop an
    elaborate geographical symbolism with which to
    explain his condition. He is entering, he says,
    his "south-west discovery"--the south being,
    traditionally, the region of heat (or fever) and
    the west being the site of the sunset and, thus,
    in this poem, the region of death. (A key to this
    geographical symbolism can be found in A.J.
    Smith's concise notation in the Penguin Classics
    edition of Donne's Complete English Poems.) The
    speaker says that his discovery is made Per
    fretum febris, or by the strait of fever, and
    that he will die "by these straits."
  • Donne employs an elaborate pun on the
    idea of "straits," a word that denotes the narrow
    passages of water that connect oceans, yet which
    also refers to grim personal difficulties (as in
    "dire straights") Donne's personal struggles
    with his illness are like the straits that will
    connect him to the paradise of the Pacific Sea,
    Jerusalem, and the eastern riches no matter
    where one is in the world--in the region of
    Japhet, Cham, or Shem--such treasures can only be
    reached through straits. (Japhet, Cham, and Shem
    were the sons of Noah, who divided the world
    between them after the ark came to rest Japhet
    lived in Europe, Cham lived in Africa, and Shem
    lived in Asia.)

17
  • Essentially, all of this word play and
    allusion is merely another way of saying that
    Donne expects his fever to lead him to heaven
    (even on his deathbed, his mind delighted in
    spinning metaphysical complexities). The speaker
    says that on maps, west and east are one--if one
    travels far enough in either direction, one ends
    up on the other side of the map--and, therefore,
    his death in the "west" will lead to his
    "eastern" resurrection.
  • He then shifts to a dramatically different
    set of images, claiming that Christ's Cross and
    Adam's tree stood physically on the same place,
    and that by the same token, both the
    characteristics of Adam (sin and toil) and of
    Christ (resurrection and purity) are present in
    Donne himself The phrase "Look Lord, and find
    both Adams met in me" is Donne's most perfect
    statement of the contrary strains of spirituality
    and carnality that run through his poems and ran
    through his life. As the sweat of the first Adam
    (who was cursed to work after expulsion from
    Eden) surrounds his face in his fever, he hopes
    the blood of Christ, the second Adam, will
    embrace and purify his soul.
  • Donne concludes by charting his actual
    entry into heaven, saying that he hopes to be
    received by God wrapped in the purple garment of
    Christ--purple with blood and with triumph--and
    to obtain his crown. As his final poetic act, he
    writes a sermon for his own soul, just as he
    preached sermons to the souls of others during
    his years as a priest. The Lord, he says, throws
    down that he may raise up Donne, thrown down by
    the fever, will be lifted up to heaven, where his
    soul, having been "tuned" now on Earth, may be
    used to make the music of God.

18
Metaphysical Poets
  • A term used to group together certain
    17th-century poet, usually Donne, Marvell,
    Vaughan and Traherne, though other figures like
    Abraham Cowley are sometimes included in the
    list. Although in no sense a school or proper
    movement, they share common characteristics of
    wit, inventiveness, and a love of elaborate
    stylistic manoeuvres.

19
The Metaphysical poets turned to the medieval
scholastic philosophers for stylistic
inspiration, borrowing from them the terminology
and the difficulty of their style of argument.
.
20
The Metaphysical Conceit
  • Just as did the Petrarchan sonneteers, Donne
    and his followers had their own metaphysical
    conceits.
  • Samuel Johnson described their conceits as
  • A kind of discordia concors (harmony or
    unity gained by combining disparate or
    conflicting elements) a combination of
    dissimilar images, or discovery of occult
    resemblances in things apparently unlike. The
    most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence
    together.
  • Put more simply, a metaphysical conceit is
    what we would call an extended metaphor, a
    comparison between two relatively unlike
    entities.
  • The most famous sustain conceit is Donnes
    drawing of parallels between
  • -the continuing relationship of his
    personas soul with that of his beloveds
    (despite their physical parting)
  • -the coordinated movements of the two feet
    of a compass
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