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Under the Sign of Donne - John Donne - Critical Essay
Criticism, Wntr, 2001 by Judith Scherer Herz
Like the vagrant soul, Donne turns up in all sorts of places, in Borges's encounter with Biathanatos, which turned him into an avid Donne reader, in Philip Larkin's "Poem about Oxford: For Monica:" "It holds us, like that Fleae we read about / In the depths of the Second World War," in Bob Dylan's "Sister," "we die and were reborn and then mysteriously saved" ("Wee dye and rise the same, and prove / Mysterious by this love" as "The Canonization" would have it). Not surprisingly, it is mostly the poets who have read Donne with greatest intensity, but there are novelists, too, in this narrative--Virginia Woolf, for example. She, as did all Bloomsbury, read her Donne. In a 1931 diary entry, she lists things that make her happy: music, walks, writing, "and interestingly at Donne of a morning."(44) The following year, indeed the very day that the invitation to deliver the Clark Lectures arrived, an offer she refused, she recorded receiving as a gift a book with Donne's autograph and notes (it was the first 1605 edition of Alberico Gentilis, Regales Disputationes Tres). She made detailed reading notes on his poems and her characters read and know Donne from her earliest novel onward. He appears in several of the essays and has one of his own, "Donne after Three Centuries" in the second Common Reader in 1932, where she attempted to find out how "his voice ... strikes upon the ear after this long flight across the stormy seas that separate us from the age of Eizabeth."(45) She found a writer of contradictions, one who could not see the whole, who particularized, who diminished, who stared intently at detail, who at times is like us, but at others inconceivably remote, who, to the end, "retained the incorrigible curiosity of his youth," one whose "obstinate interest in the nature of his own sensations still troubled his age and broke his repose," who even in death, "must still cut a figure and still stand erect." It is his nonconformity that she valued most, his "queer individuality," her sense of him (as of her self?) as ec-centric, as at once inside and out.(46)
As interested as Woolf was in Donne, he does not seem as deeply implicated in her writing as he is in Djuna Barnes's Nightwood, where he enters the "Watchman, What of the Night?" section of that novel. There the transvestite Dr. Matthew-Mighty-Grain-of-Salt-Dante-O'Connor, talks Browne and Burton, cites Montaigne and uses as a major text in his discourse on the night the lines from a Donne sermon: "We are all conceived in close prison, in our mothers' womb we are close prisoners all. When we are born, we are but born to the liberty of the house--all our life is but a going out of the place of execution and death. 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? Yet he says, men sleep all the way. How much more, therefore, is there upon him in a close sleep when he is mounted on darkness."(47) And in the transmigrations of his imagination, O'Connor sometimes sounds like the repository of the deathless soul's wanderings in Metempsychosis: "What an autopsy I'll make ... a kidney and a shoe cast of the Roman races; a liver and a long spent whisper, a gall and a wrack of scolds from Milano, and my heart that will be weeping still when they find my eyes cold, not to mention a thought of Cellini in my crib of bones" (101).
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