John Donne (1)Besprekingen

Most of the Love Poems deal with Death and Despair.

Only four resonated with me:

Love's Growth
Break of Day
Lover's Infinities
and - The Bait

Wood engravings by Jane Lydbury. Fleece Press. One of 200 copies bound in maroon paper boards with paper label. 200 copies of this book were printed by hand by Simon Lawrence on an 1853 Hopkinson and Cope Albion Press. The type is Van Dijck, and the paper is Barcham Green Charter Oak. 7 copies were printed on sheepskin parchment and bound by Angela James.

paperback

The star rating shows my enjoyment level, not the book's quality. I am in no way qualified to say anything about that. I did enjoy reading these poems though. The early ones were saucy, snarky and quite naughty. The later Divine poems were beautiful. All were interesting, though I am lacking quite a bit of knowledge to get their full meaning.½

The stars are for Donne, not particularly for this edition. But if you just like reading the poems, the edition does not really matter.

A tiny book containing only an excerpt of one prayer before the Sermon preached by John Donne at St. Paul's, London, on 1 July, 1627.

I’ve always enjoyed Donne so this read did not disappoint

John Donne is one of my favorite poets. This collection is excellent. His poems are spiritual and his poems are sensual. I love his mindset and the time in which he lived. He may have been a cleric, but I'm not being preached at. I can open this book and just enjoy.

Before picking this up, I’d only read two or three of Donne’s poems in a high school English class. I liked what I saw and found him more readable than Shakespeare, and I still agree with that assessment now that I’ve read everything. His rhythms and words are plainer, more like spoken English than anything, without the stylistic complexity that Shakespeare seems to inject into everything longer than four lines, and so there’s a different sort of beauty to it. And the meanings come through better, at least for me.

I think where Donne really shines is his love poems (and I’m not alone in that view, I don’t think). He gets the tenderness and submissiveness of romance, and the flattery of wooing, and can get downright erotic without ever getting racy—though the poem where he gently and persistently talks his lover into taking all her clothes off in front of him was probably close at the time, even if he’s using religious metaphors.

He’s also good at memorial poems and wrote a lot of religious poems as well, and there was this whole genre of letter-poems which I didn’t know about, in which you’d write a friend about your life or to continue a conversation, except you’d do it in rhyming verse. There were some miscellaneous sorts of poems as well, and the overall tone of his poems is gentleness and reverence, with a quiet wit. I was as taken with that as I was with his technique, and did I mention he has some truly impressive rhymes?

All that said, though, this is 17th century poetry. It’s not the easiest of reads, especially the longer poems that go on for pages, and I definitely found myself reread poems a few times to understand what he was saying in them. By the time I was nearing the end of the collection, I was also very ready to be. The poems are wonderful but they’re also 200 pages of moderately difficult verse so y’know. I really liked the collection and am glad I picked it up, but unless you’re like me and willing to commit to the experience, it might be better if you simply look up Donne’s poems and read a few of them. (Which I absolutely suggest you do.)

To bear in mind: Donne was writing in the 1600s and, while more open-minded than some of his peers, was still a man of his time. Do not expect perfect 21st-century ideas about women—but you weren’t going to, were you?

9/10

Excellent introduction

John Donne's poems warrant great study, being often mysterious in both language and context,
while being also beautiful, inspiring, annoying, repetitious, and memorable.

Rebound paperback

These are not, cannot be, "sermons". They are magnificent meditations on thought processes and devotional sensitivities which speak libraries of consciousness. A man who sought to find hope, in spite of the encounter with idiots which all of us find who are born of woman into this vale of tears. In the fullness of his life, Donne took to the collar, and preached high Faith of the Protestant/protesting persuasion. His joys were grave, his gravity was glorious, but this is not smooth reading for the Faithful. No! He himself knew that those professing a "faith" had no collateral, or in today's vernacular derived from his Elizabethan abundance, "no skin in the game". He keenly ached from the knowledge that his listeners were unlikely to be able to hear the "sermon in the sermon" under their own personal hopes, selfish prayers, disobedience of God's ordinances, distractedness in the poetry, or vanity. In Edmund Fuller's Introduction, "This is no liberal, permissive, comfortable soothing, but rather a firm, sometimes stern, preaching on the demands of the Faith and the obligations that go with professing it." Today, we witness the fact that the preachers today have entirely given up that project.

The natural man can be good, if he "relieve the poor, defend the oppressed". But the godly man must also have faith in the Trinity -- in God as Creator, and in Creation itself, as the Spirit of God. Donne is relentless about this Trinity--and the Holy Spirit is not overlooked--"who gave me comfort in sickness...troubles, and perplexities, and diffidencies of my conscience". [6]

"Challenge him, that magnifies himself above you, to meet you in Adam; there bid him, if he will have more nobility, more greatness, than you, take more original sin than you have." [10]

"Nor can any epitaph be confident in saying, here lies; but, here was laid. For so various, so vicissitudinary is all this world, as that even the dust of the grave has revolutions." [10]

"The Saint cannot accelerate, the reprobate cannot return the Resurrection. And all that rise to the right hand, shall be equally kings; and all at the left, equally, what? ...they shall have bodies to be tormented in...Miserable, unexpressible, unimaginable, macerable condition, where the sufferer would be glad to be but a devil; where it were some happiness, and some kind of life, to be able to die; and a great preferment, to be nothing." [11]

"Our sins are our own, and our destruction is from ourselves. We are not as accessories, and God as principal in this Soul murder: God forbid." [11]

"That which Zipporah said to her husband Moses in anger, the Church may say to Christ in thankfulness, 'Thou art truly a bloody husband to me'." [12]

"The good works that are done openly to please men have their reward, says Christ, that is, shall never have reward." [13]

"But for those men that served God's execution upon the idolaters of the golden calf, it is pronounced in their behalf that therein they consecrated themselves to God; and for that service God made that tribe, the tribe of Levi, his portion, his clergy, his consecrated tribe." [16 noting the qualitative shift following a people's indulgence in murders; cf. Rape of the Sabines creating Rome, annihilation of villages creating the Mongols, etc]

The "image of God" is in the soul. [19-29]

TK reminder from other works, Donne was a Universalist: "In 1624, the English poet John Donne wrote, “No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.”

I first read Donne’s poetry in high school English and he instantly became one of my favorite poets. His Holy Sonnets include two of his most famous poems, Death, Be Not Proud and At the Round Earth’s Imagined Corners. These sonnets speak of sin, atonement, death, and immortality. Donne’s poetry is easy to understand for readers with even a little theological knowledge, yet their depth gives scholars plenty to ponder.

Here's where I started, as a Freshman at Amherst College, an enthusiasm for verse I did not entirely comprehend; a classmate of mine, Schuyler Pardee, and I went to our wonderful professor, G Armour Craig, with a proposal: Could we perhaps translate Donne for modern students? He was genial, did not laugh at us, though our project never got off the drawing board. Perhaps he recommended further courses, I cannot recall. What I do recall is that my classmate was one of the dozen fellow "poets" in my class, but he also was the first person I knew to commit suicide, a few years after graduation.

When I got to U MN grad school, I took Leonard Unger's 17C English Poets seminar, wherein we read Donne and his heirs. I wrote on Herbert and Andrew Marvell; the latter I later pursued in my Ph.D., This Critical Age: Deliberate Departures from Literary Conventions in 17C English Verse, advised by Leonard Unger. When I told him I wanted to write on Marvell, Leonard suggested the broader topic which proved so fruitful to me. Though one might not know it from his criticism, especially in American lit like TS Eliot, Leonard Unger I considered a professor of comparative literature. For example, his good friend Saul Bellow and he once composed, during lunch at the U MN Faculty Club on the top floor of the Student Union,
a verse translation of the first lines of the Wasteland--in Yiddish.

At a postdoctoral seminar at Princeton I first encountered the Donne First Edition, 1633. I was befuddled, like its first readers, by the intermix of body/ bawdy and religious poems. Having just completed my dissertation which noted Donne's having lifted "The Indifferent" wholesale from Ovid, Amores II.iv. One of the things Donne borrows is his shocking and dramatic shift of pronouns from third to second person, "I can love her and her, and you and you..." Ovid has "sive aliqua est," and six lines later, "sive es docta," then a couplet later, back to third person, "est quae," then back to "you," "tu, quia tam longa es"(line 33). He took his surprising shifting of tones, from distant connoiseur to precipitant leher: his "dramatic" pyrotechnics.

In my community college teaching career, I would recite a couple of Donne's poems from memory,
his Song, "Go and catch a falling star," illustrating adunata, the catalog of impossibilities, and sometimes
his holy sonnet, "At the round earth's imagined corners, blow / Your trumpets, Angels, and arise, arise..."
I saw a first edition of the Songs and Sonnets during postdoctoral study at Princeton, and the confused intertwining of the love poems and holy pieces made clear how befuddled early Donne readers would have been.
Now for your delectation, an "adunata," list of impossibilities:
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.
Teach me to hear mermaid's singing--
Or to keep off Envy's stinging
Or find
What wind
Serves to advance an honest mind.

Il "Notturnale" di Santa Lucia. Il cammino verso il Natale è disseminato da molte occasioni per festeggiare. Feste antiche e moderne, pagane e religiose, tradizionali e popolari, le occasioni non mancano in tutte le culture. Prima e dopo la Natività i giorni del calendario religioso si intrecciano con quello atmosferico. Come è il caso della festa dedicata a Santa Lucia, una figura storica femminile nella quale si celano diversi simboli.

Lucia era una donna di origine siciliana, proveniente da una ricca famiglia di Siracusa. Venne martirizzat a a causa della sua fede cristiana durante le persecuzioni anticristiane dell’imperatore Diocleziano. Visse a cavallo tra il III e IV secolo dell’era moderna. La leggenda narra che sua madre si fosse ammalata e che Lucia andasse in pellegrinaggio fino a Catania a pregare sulla tomba di Sant’Agata martire per guadagnare la sua salute. La Santa le apparve e le preannunziò il suo martirio. Lucia, tornata a casa lasciò il suo fidanzato promesso sposo e si dedicò completamente alla vocazione religiosa. La tradizione dice inoltre che visitasse anche i malati nelle catacombe con una candela sulla testa per farsi luce. Il promesso sposo la denunziò per la sua fede. Venne sottoposta a torture per farla abiurare. Non riuscirono a piegare la sua fede nemmeno quando venne condannata a morte. Prima di morire preannunziò sia la morte di Diocleziano che la fine delle persecuzioni contro i cristiani.

Ciò avvenne di fatto nel 313 d.C. con l’editto di Costantino. Il 13 dicembre viene festeggiato il giorno della sua nascita che secondo il calendario giuliano, in vigore fino al 1582, era il giorno più breve dell’anno. Tutt’oggi la festa di santa Lucia rappresenta, quindi, dopo i giorni invernali più bui, il cammino ancora lungo verso il ritorno della luce. E’ sull’origine del suo nome che si gioca tutto il significato di una festa che ha risonanze oltre che pagane e religiose anche poetiche e letterarie. Basta pensare al significato della parola latina “lux”, di qui la considerazione importante del fatto che Santa Lucia è anche la protettrice dei ciechi. Fu il giorno di Santa Lucia ad ispirare al poeta metafisico inglese John Donne la poesia “A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy’s Day…”.

‘TIS the year’s midnight, and it is the day’s,
Lucy’s, who scarce seven hours herself unmasks ;
The sun is spent, and now his flasks
Send forth light squibs, no constant rays ;
The world’s whole sap is sunk ;
The general balm th’ hydroptic earth hath drunk,
Whither, as to the bed’s-feet, life is shrunk,
Dead and interr’d ; yet all these seem to laugh,
Compared with me, who am their epitaph.

E’ la mezzanotte dell’anno.
E’ la mezzanotte del giorno di Lucia,
per sette ore a stento si disvela.
Il sole è sfinito e dalle sue fiasche
non raggi costanti, ma deboli bagliori ora manda.
La linfa del mondo tutta fu assorbita.
Bevve la terra idropica l’universale balsamo.
Morta e interrata la vita si è ritratta,
là, ai piedi del letto, quasi. Eppure,
tutto ciò non par che un riso
rispetto a me che sono il suo epitaffio.

Study me then, you who shall lovers be
At the next world, that is, at the next spring ;
For I am every dead thing,
In whom Love wrought new alchemy.
For his art did express
A quintessence even from nothingness,
From dull privations, and lean emptiness ;
He ruin’d me, and I am re-begot
Of absence, darkness, death—things which are not.

E allora studiatemi, voi che sarete amanti
in un altro mondo, in un’altra primavera,
perchè io sono ogni cosa morta
che nuova alchimia d’amore ha trasmutato.
Perchè anche dal nulla la sua arte
ha distillato una quintessenza,
da opaca privazione, da povera vuotezza.
Annichilito, ora rinasco
dall’assenza, dal buio, dalla morte,
cose che non sono.

All others, from all things, draw all that’s good,
Life, soul, form, spirit, whence they being have ;
I, by Love’s limbec, am the grave
Of all, that’s nothing. Oft a flood
Have we two wept, and so
Drown’d the whole world, us two ; oft did we grow,
To be two chaoses, when we did show
Care to aught else ; and often absences
Withdrew our souls, and made us carcasses.

Da ogni cosa, ogni altro prende ciò che è bene,
vita, anima, forma, spirito, ne trae esistenza.
Dall’alambicco dell’amore così fatto,
sono la tomba io, di tutto quel che è nulla. Spesso
fu un diluvio il nostro pianto,
ne sommergemmo il mondo. Noi due. E spesso
siamo mutati sino a essere due caos
quando parve che d’altro ci curassimo. E spesso
l’assenza ci privò dell’anima. Fece di noi carcasse.

But I am by her death—which word wrongs her—
Of the first nothing the elixir grown ;
Were I a man, that I were one
I needs must know ; I should prefer,
If I were any beast,
Some ends, some means ; yea plants, yea stones detest,
And love ; all, all some properties invest.
If I an ordinary nothing were,
As shadow, a light, and body must be here.

Ma per la sua morte (parola che le fa torto)
del primigenio nulla un elisir son fatto.
Se fossi un uomo, che sono uno
dovrei di necessità saperlo. Seguirei,
se fossi un animale, un fine, un mezzo.
Le stesse piante, le stesse pietre
odiano, amano; e tutto, tutto possiede una proprietà.
Se fossi un qualunque nulla,
come lo è un’ombra, vi dovrebbe pur essere
una luce, un corpo.

But I am none ; nor will my sun renew.
You lovers, for whose sake the lesser sun
At this time to the Goat is run
To fetch new lust, and give it you,
Enjoy your summer all,
Since she enjoys her long night’s festival.
Let me prepare towards her, and let me call
This hour her vigil, and her eve, since this
Both the year’s and the day’s deep midnight is.

Ma io sono il Nulla; il mio sole non si rinnoverà.
E voi amanti, voi per cui il sole minore
è trascorso ora in Capricorno
per prendere nuova passione, e a voi donarla,
godete intera la vostra estate perchè lei gode
la festa della sua lunga notte.
Io a lei mi disporrò e chiamerò quest’ora
la sua vigilia, la sua veglia,
in questa profonda mezzanotte
del giorno e dell’anno.

(Traduzione di Rosa Tavelli)

Una poesia quanto mai difficile che qui presento in una buona traduzione. Anche a distanza di tanto tempo, il poeta inglese riesce a trasmettere al lettore moderno il senso di questa festa dedicata sì a Santa Lucia ed alla morte dell’amata del poeta, ma in effetti all’importanza della LUCE nella vita degli uomini. Quella luce che da lì a qualche giorno dalla festa della Santa comincerà lentamente ad aumentare con il solstizio d’inverno il 22 dicembre. Ancora qualche giorno e poi la luce vera del Natale e della Natività darà luce agli uomini portata dalla cometa su quella stalla a Nazareth. In Costa d’Amalfi si suole cadenzare l’aumento della luce seguendo lo scorrere della festa di Santa Lucia dicendo: “A Santa Lucia nu passe ‘e gallina, a Sant’Aniello nu passe ‘e pecuriello”. Ci si riferisce, appunto, allo scorrere del tempo nel giorno 13 dicembre (Santa Lucia). La giornata si allunga di un po’, come un passo di gallina, il giorno successivo (si festeggia sant’Aniello) il giorno avanza ancora di più, come un passo di pecora.

Índice: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6llDyUXkuZLblM1ZW44TnVYTGM/view?usp=sharing

Anything with Donne's poetry gets five stars from me, although I prefer other editions more than this one. As I said in another review:

Donne remains my favorite poet after all these years. This one volume collection has pretty much everything you would want including his great prose pieces where such quotations as "no man is an island" come from. (I'm sticking to modern spelling!) Some say Donne is too intellectual or scientific in his verse--too much clever logic--but I think real feeling comes through, not just cleverness.

Donne remains my favorite poet after all these years. This one volume collection has pretty much everything you would want including his great prose pieces where such quotations as "no man is an island" come from. (I'm sticking to modern spelling!) Some say Donne is too intellectual or scientific in his verse--too much clever logic--but I think real feeling comes through, not just cleverness.

A selection of some of the finest metaphysical and love poetry ever written. My favourites include 'The Broken Heart', 'The Message', 'The Anniversary', 'The Triple Fool', 'The Bait' and 'Air and Angels', and there are choice lines in many of the other selections. However, this collection (compiled by Phoenix) suffers from the absence of the 'No man is an island' sermon, including the famous line "Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee" later used by Hemingway.

My own fascination with John Donne reminds me of the attempts by others to reassure their friends and family regarding death. Socrates did so in the Phaedo by describing his life as one long attempt to prepare for death. His view was echoed and enhanced by Montaigne who, In his essay titled “That to Study Philosophy is to Learn to Die,” turns to mortality and points to the understanding of death as a prerequisite for the understanding of life, for the very art of living.
"[L]et us learn bravely to stand our ground, and fight him. And to begin to deprive him of the greatest advantage he has over us, let us take a way quite contrary to the common course. Let us disarm him of his novelty and strangeness, let us converse and be familiar with him, and have nothing so frequent in our thoughts as death. "(Montaigne, Essays)
But one more example from my reading can be found in Rainier Maria Rilke's beautiful novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. Through Rilke's fascination with faces and appearances the importance of constructing an authentic life is emphasized. This becomes a prerequisite for the prospect of a unique personal death. Death itself is a character in the novel, a "terrible rival", which may seem stronger than the living in its tolling.

The tolling of the bell in Rilke's novel signalling death brings us back to Donne who penned these famous lines:

"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 friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee." (Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, 17)

The picture of the resurrection in the first 8 lines is spectacular. The rest is really for Christians only.

Donne, before a trip, advises his wife on ways to bear their separation. There are a number of poems that I memorized or practically memorized before I was twenty, and although I can now see faults in them, I still love them. This is one of them. The fault is that all the metaphors create a certain emotional distance, which in current poetry, would be intolerable.

Who couldn't do with a little John Donne in their lives?

I'm trying to remember where I picked this one up, but for the life of me I can't. It might have been for a college class I wasn't taking, but seeing it on the shelf at the University Bookstore I was intrigued enough to grab a copy (I did that a lot in college).

This particular book includes selections from every style of Donne's work; from Satires, to Letters, to the Elegies, and a collection of his Holy Sonnets. I feel like it's a good cross-section for anyone interested in his style without wanting to find his whole collected works.

Also, I've now read the Holy Sonnet from which P.J. Farmer took the title for the first Riverworld book, To Your Scattered Bodies Go.

I read eleven poems, plus the 16 sonnet sequence "Holy Sonnets" for my bookclub.

I thought "To His Mistress" was quite sensual. Could you imagine having all of that stuff to take off—girdle, breastplate, busk (corset), gown, coronet, shoes. He says “unpin” and “Unlace yourself.” I’m so glad I don’t have to go through all that to get undressed each night.

In "Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" I really liked the analogy of the compass for a married couple. John Donne wrote this to his wife as he was leaving for Europe. They were like a compass—she was the fixed foot. Since they were one flesh, while he was away, their soul would expand. Like a compass she would remain in place but lean towards him while he was away. Then she would straighten as he returned.

I found the Holy Sonnets quite interesting. What a difference from his earlier works, eh? Of course, Death Be Not Proud is a triumphant poem. I've always loved it. Death should not be proud because some day it's going to die. I've always had that comfort that at the moment of death the victory is won. Sometimes we have the idea that when someone loses their battle with cancer or other illness, they've lost. But at just the moment they've lost the battle, they've won the war through faith in Christ.

The poem called "Spit in my face you Jews" is interesting.

My sins, which pass the Jews' impiety:
They killed once an inglorious man, but I
Crucify him daily, being now glorified.

At first I was wondering where he was going with this--it started out sounding like he was going to bash the Jews, but ended up with him convicting himself. Good one.