A Little World Made Cunningly

Gossips maintained that Elizabeth Heywood, the well-bred matron of a recusant family, carried within a pouch the head of her illustrious granduncle Thomas More, though this was not the case. The former Lord High Chancellor of England and author of Utopia, More was convicted of treason and executed in 1535. His daughter bribed the executioner for her father’s head, which she pickled in wine and spices; her cousins, the Heywoods, were gifted only a molar, and even that was split down the root. Elizabeth’s brothers, both of whom became Jesuit priests, divided the divine dentistry between them, with Jasper Heywood clinging to that relic when he was later imprisoned in the Tower of London under suspicion of helping to organize a Catholic rebellion. While preparing for his own execution, Jasper was visited by his sister and young nephew Jack, who decades later wrote, “I have been ever kept awake in a meditation of martyrdom … as, I believe, no family… hath endured and suffered more in their persons and fortunes, for obeying the teachers of the Roman doctrine, than it hath done.”

This wasn’t hyperbole; Jack’s brother died of the plague in Newgate Prison in 1593, punished for harboring a priest. However, Jack wouldn’t see Jasper beheaded; the queen was lenient and exiled the priest instead. Jack records being taken to witness other scaffolds graced with the Church’s saints and recalls how Protestants jeered and Catholics would “pray to him whose body lay there dead; as if he had more respect, and better access to heaven.” When he wrote those words, he was no longer young Jack but rather Dr. John Donne, Anglican dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral—the most transcendent devotional poet and the greatest erotic poet the English language ever produced, not in spite of those qualities but because of them.

In her exquisitely written, perceptive, and moving Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne (FSG, 2022), the British scholar Katherine Rundell argues that Donne’s “writing is itself a kind of alchemy: a mix of unlikely ingredients which spark into gold.” No 17th-century poet still reads quite as shockingly new as Donne does. Not Ben Jonson, who is so clearly of the Renaissance, or sublime George Herbert, enmeshed in the theology of his day. Not Thomas Traherne, whose beautiful mysticism demands a high price of entry, or Andrew Marvell, a chameleon whose politics are now so distant. Even Shakespeare, with all those Ren-Faire jester hats and jigs, is more a subject of that far country of the past than is Donne. An uncertain Catholic and then a recalcitrant Protestant, Donne was a skeptic, an agnostic who knew that in doubt comes faith. His is a “quintessence even from nothingness, / From dull privations, and lean emptiness […] I am re-begot / Of absence, darkness, death: things which are not.” If his age saw the first glimmerings of such anxieties, then Donne reads as modern before modernity because his manuscripts circulated among courtiers and poets. Yet only God can generate from a vacuum, and Rundell explains that Donne’s family and their faith “would haunt him for life. … To read him is to know that we cannot ever expect to shake off our family: only to pick up the skull, the tooth, and walk on.”

Donne was a 23-year-old law student at Lincoln’s Inn during the winter of 1595 when Robert Southwell, another Jesuit, was taken to that field of heretics called Tyburn to be hanged, drawn, and quartered. Southwell was also a fine poet, known for his facility with metaphor. “Man’s mind a mirror is of heavenly sights,” Southwell wrote, “A brief wherein all marvels summed lie.” A Catholic in matters of theology and prosody, his verse dwells where matter and spirit coincide. Such poetry consecrated reality, as in the conceit that a mere mind reflected the entire universe. An intimately physical poet, Southwell assumed the political risks of his vocation and was ultimately decapitated, flayed, and mutilated. Long before his death, Southwell understood how human bodies mark suffering and majesty. Responding in verse to Protestant denunciations of the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, he rhetorically wrote, “If Adam fashioned were of slime and clay, / Bread may to Christ’s most sacred flesh be wrought.” If all things are possible in the Lord, then surely wafer can be turned into Christ, Southwell argued. This Eucharistic resplendence, the belief that matter and spirit, though not reducible to one another, are intrinsically connected, defines the Jesuit’s verse. His was a faith of sinew and ligament, skin and bone, organ and blood. The sympathetic crowd became so overcome at Southwell’s execution that several spectators rushed forward to tug at the pious priest’s legs, hastening his death so he wouldn’t be alive for the disemboweling. Donne wasn’t one of them, as far as we know. By that point, he had already begun to question whether the price of his family’s Catholicism was worth it.

In almost all ways—mastery, innovation, and fame—Donne far surpassed Southwell, but they shared a faith. Not Catholicism but a sense of the sacredness of the body, of matter being commensurate with spirit. Rundell writes that “Donne loved the trans- prefix: it’s scattered everywhere across his writing—‘transpose,’ ‘translate,’ ‘transport,’ ‘transubstantiate.’… We are, he believed, creatures born transformable.” Donne didn’t necessarily profess an atomistic materialism, but he embraced the flux and chaos of nature, of human mercurialism, our ever-malleability. His was a materialism pushed to such an extreme that it became spiritualism. “When the mind can be made to infuse every inch of the body; that is when living becomes most possible … its achievement would transform the experience of moving through the world,” argues Rundell, and Donne’s entire project, from his Holy Sonnets to Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions (1624), his immaculate sermons to the erotic lyrics of his youth, explores this thesis. Donne is often posited as the poet of contradiction and paradox. Even in his self-presentation, he is shot through with a studied inconsistency. A portrait of Donne made the year Southwell was executed depicts the handsome rake in a collar of delicate lace and a wide-brimmed hat, appearing almost piratical. With roguish glint and sly smile, this is the Donne of fevered erotic verse. By contrast, a 1631 engraving shows Donne posing with his death shroud bundled atop his head, the gaunt and hallowed face of a “man who walked so often in darkness that it became for him a daily commute,” as Rundell writes. Scholars traditionally see these two versions as being in conflict, but they are the same man.

What unites Jack Donne and Dr. John Donne is physicality, the nature of embodiment. The softness of velvet and the glint of a diamond, the turgidness of an erection and the extinguishing of an orgasm are sensory as surely as the fatigue of the sweating sickness or a burning abscess in the throat. If Donne maintained any of Southwell’s faith, it was not a maudlin piety but rather a deep understanding of the body in exquisite pleasure and horrific pain and a sense of how the sacred and profane meet in the cavities of being. Despite his ambivalent conversion around the turn of the century, Donne was still enmeshed in Ignatian spirituality, meditating upon the sensory experience of divinity, visualizing something like the crucifixion. Rundell writes that what Donne yearned for “was the same old desire” for the “thinking body.” (In “Elegy on Mistress Elizabeth Drury,” named after a patron, Donne wrote, “One might almost say her body thought.”) To believe in such an equivalence is not so distant from flesh in the wafer or blood in the wine. As a Protestant, even as an Anglican priest, Donne was latitudinarian. Though he disdained papist clericalism, he remained in the fullest sense a sort of promiscuous Catholic. "When my grave is broke up again / Some second guest to entertain," he wrote in “The Relic,” one of his most celebrated lyrics, “And he that digs it spies / A bracelet of bright hair about the bone, / Will he not let us alone.” This is consummate Donne, from the connection of Eros and Thanatos to the startling image of the bangle of blond around a skeletal wrist—as shocking to encounter in verse as if one were the gravedigger who was violating said burial. It’s a statement of love and dedication—material love and dedication past decomposition and down to the very bones. It's a morbid, Gothic, sexy, and incredibly Catholic poem, despite the sectarian allegiances of its author. That it is titled “The Relic” is a confirmation of sorts.

When Donne wrote about God, he was really writing about fucking, and when he wrote about fucking, he was really writing about God. Ultimately, this was to describe the same thing. “Donne is the greatest writer of desire in the English language,” Rundell argues. “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.” In his lyric “To His Mistress Going to Bed,” written sometime between 1593 and 1596, Donne asks a lover to “License my roving hands, and let them go, / Before, behind, between, above, below. / O my America! my new-found land!” Has ever a canonical poem been so filthy? Those directional adverbs, the comparison of a body to the terrae incognita of new discovery. That Donne pleads for license—for consent—only contributes to the power (and sexiness) of the lines. Fucking, in this poem, is not just an experience but theophany. By 1609 or 1610, when Donne most likely composed the 19 poems that make up the Holy Sonnets—the most perfect verse sequence composed in English—he implores

Batter my heart, three-person’d God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.

The narrator is licensing God to ravish him; he is begging to be penetrated. If Donne is the greatest erotic poet, then he is also the greatest devotional one—to fully embody both roles is to understand that what one is describing is the same thing.     

Donne was always aware, from personal experience as well as theology, that the “body is, in its essentials, a very, very slow one-man horror show,” as Rundell writes, a “slowly decaying piece of meatish fallibility in clothes.” Just as all genuine erotic and devotional poetry is united, so, too, is writing about death and sex. “Mark but this flea, and mark in this,” Donne implores a lover in his scandalous carpe diem poem named after the insect:

How little that which though deniest me is;
It sucked me first and now sucks thee,
And in this flea our two bloods mingled be;
Thou know’st that this cannot be said
A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead.

In this remarkable poem, the grinning suitor tries to convince a lover that their sexual consummation is no big deal because it already happened in the body of the flea, where “our two bloods mingled be”—not to mention Rundell’s observation of what the “long s” of early modern typography would make the words sucked and sucking look like. In keeping with Donne’s fusing of discordant ideas, “The Flea” combines Trinitarian allusions, ingenious wit, metaphysical conceits, and pure horniness alongside the specter of life’s cheapness, as when the narrator asks the namesake predator if “Cruel and sudden, hast thou since / Purpled thy nail, in blood of innocence?” It’s also a reminder of just how dirty the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras were. The poem’s lovers tussle in filthy sheets infested with lice and gnats. Seventeenth-century England was a place of strong odors and casual violence, permeated by the smell of offal and coal miasma, where even the youngest would have witnessed multiple dead bodies.

Rundell notes that Donne was often a peddler “of the grotesque, a forensic scholar of the entropy of the body” who, in keeping with the Ignatian exercises, often asked his friends to imagine their corpses’ decomposition and who wrote of our “piecemeal rot.” At his most ghoulish, Donne used adjectives and adverbs as visceral as those used to envision the wrestling of lovers:

sometimes in a beheaded man […]
His eyes will twinkle, and his tongue will roll
As though he beckoned and called back his soul,
He grasps his hands, and he pulls up his feet,
And seems to reach and to step forth to meet
His soul.

The poet witnessed much illness and tragedy. His beloved wife, Anne, endured 12 pregnancies and the death of six children; she died in 1617 after a stillbirth. Donne preached that our “very birth and entrance into this life is exitus a morte, an issue from death … in our mother’s womb we are dead … we have eyes and see not, ears and hear not … we have a winding sheet in our Mother’s womb … for we come to seek a grave … in the womb we are taught cruelty, by being fed with blood.” Regardless of the suffering and pain, Donne examines all with a clear eye, unsentimental and unromantic, without platitudes. He admits an equal truth: “I am a little world made cunningly,” where his desire, as Rundell argues, was “to see the hopeless, transitory, pained soul, suffused in glories.”

Donne was intimate with paradox and the “metaphysical conceit,” which allowed him to describe two lovers in terms of a blood-engorged flea or their connection as the hinge of a compass. Contradiction bounds his biography, this man who “reimagined and reinvented himself, over and over: … a poet, lover, essayist, lawyer, pirate, recusant, preacher, satirist, politician, courtier, chaplain to the King, dean of the finest cathedral in London,” as Rundell writes. His great obsession is the enigma of spirit’s relationship to matter, wherein he is never dogmatic concerning answers. We are born between shit and piss, and we are glorious. Inadvertently, Donne’s metaphysics is a sacred ethic for a disenchanted world, a divine moral for us, the godless. To stay sane in a mad world means dwelling in paradox. By pushing oozing, sticky, dripping matter into the sacred—by redefining it as such, by pretending as if there is holiness in spite of everything—Donne created meaning through what Rundell describes as a “great deal of twisting and hammering at his pain to force it to take on the shape … [of] one more kind of making."

Addressing a culled congregation during the plague of 1626, a pandemic Donne described as “undisputable, unexaminable, unquestionable,” the minister contemplated London as a massive charnel-house. Even the burning atmosphere was converted to grief—Donne said that “every puff of wind within these walls, may blow the father into the son’s eye, or the wife into her husband’s, or his into hers, or both into their children’s, or their children’s into both.” There’s horror in this incarnational verse but also transubstantiation, an embodied poetics, the great heaving mass of the departed turned into the wind. Donne’s technical genius is his irregular prosody married to arresting imagery; his intellectual brilliance is the reconciliation of the Catholic and Protestant; his devotional mastery is to dwell at the nexus of the spiritual and the material, the erotic and the transcendent. He winnows us to our bones: few poets have so utterly, completely, and honestly expressed the collective experience of what having a body means. That he was a man of faith—even-tempered with the occasional characteristic doubts of his century—is certainly true. That he believed a literal resurrection awaited him, that on the Day of Judgement he would once again embrace Anne, was his hope. That was his sustaining myth, whether or not it was possible.

What’s undeniable is that in the here and now, people are both exulted and denigrated by the same fleshy appendages, that they share in this glory and degradation of life. That should be enough for people to care for one another, to love one another, whether heaven is empty or not. Convalescing during one of the periodic illnesses that threatened to take him, Donne penned this densely true and beautiful paragraph:

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.

Rundell writes, “In a world so harsh and beautiful, it is from each other that we must find purpose, else there is none to be had. … If we could believe [Donne’s words], they would upend the world. They cast our interconnectedness not as a burden but as a great project: our interwoven lives draw their meaning only from each other.” It’s important not to project too much of our own context onto Donne or to read the motivations of a man from a perplexingly different age as our own. And yet, “rage and sorrow and loss are rage and sorrow and loss.” Despite our material comforts being greater, our technology being superior, our knowledge being deeper, we confront a far more horrific future than Donne did, in the form of rising seas, acidified oceans, and collapsing biospheres. Donne’s blunt wisdom understood that all of us are always ascending the scaffold; the reality is that today many more of us are already climbing its steps. If there is any way to derive wisdom from those cutting, shocking, and exploding poems, it’s that we must choose to live, even upon the scaffold, as if life has meaning, whether or not it does—to embrace spirit in spite of matter, infinity regardless of finitude, not because such fantasies are real but because they’re not. As the poet wrote, “it is too little to call Man a little world; except God, man is diminutive to nothing. Man consists of more pieces, more parts, than the world doth, nay, than the world is.” No man is an island, but every person is a universe. If Donne was a man conversant with divine contradiction, it was only because he most fully realized the extent to which we’re all paradoxes, which is to say, infinite.