Under the Sign of Donne - John Donne - Critical Essay

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At the time that Hartley painted the portrait effigy, and with the concluding lines from Donne's "Oh my black soul ..." echoing, he wrote a poem that brilliantly recapitulates the encounters I've been tracing here. There is a gesture of recognition, a question or two, an acknowledgment of shared sympathies, yet a registering of something else, of danger, of distance, of frozen light:

   John Donne in His Shroud:

   It was a smart caprice
   to dress
   you like this.
   Was it a borrowed occasion
   as some hire evening suits for a party?

   And the white poppy
   on top of your head,
   does that mean now white
   that once was red?
   For red is the color of a pagan wine
   of brisk desire
   and of flesh-fire--
   white is for calm attire.

   In any case, if it is character
   is wanted in a face
   I would say--look at
   John Donne,
   that will suffice,
   fierce passion turned to ice
   and frozen light.

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The ars moriendi tradition that Donne inherited, replayed, eroticized is one link from then to now, so, too, are the intellectual curiosity, the cynicism, the "fierce passion," the linguistic extravagance, the insistent embodiment of the spirit. Yet none of these equals Donne, who remains a multiple, unresolvable provocation. As the allusions accumulate, there is always another sighting to record or encounter to assess. He is certainly useful coin for those who want to trade on his name now that Shakespeare's stock is possibly too common. But for those who take him on, speak to and through him, receive the "blood transfusion" in Al Purdy's words, the results can be astonishing. In either case, Van Mornson's 1983 song provides fitting last words:

"Rave on, John Donne, rave on."

Notes

My gratitude to four attentive and very helpful readers: Ed Pechter, Dayton Haskin, Nicola Nixon, Clifford Duffy.

(1.) See Susanna Avery-Quash, "`Valuable Assistance': Stanley Spencer's Friendship with Gwen and Jacques Raverat," Apollo 150 (Nov. 1999): 3-11; Kenneth Pople, Stanley Spencer: A Biography (London: William Collins Sons, 1991), 27.

(2.) Several Donne lines have the "to be or not to be" or "what's in a name" familiarity: "Death be not proud," "all coherence gone" and, most notably, the two from Devotion 17: "no man is an island" and "for whom the bell tolls." In running a Westlaw search one observes over and over a lawyer citing, a judge reciting from that passage, most often in its most anodyne generalizable reading, although not always, as in a case in the Wisconsin Appeals Court (1986): "No man is an island, John Donne wrote. Likewise, no man is a municipality." Or a 1994 Illinois case brought by a bank, "LaSalle is unable to prove any set of facts which would indicate a pattern of racketeering activity in Baker's [the defendant] part. Insufficiently pleading the element of pattern `rings the death knell' for civil RICO [Racketeering, Influence, and Corruption Act] claims.... In this sort of case, LaSalle Bank should `never send to know' as John Donne put it, `for whom the bell tolls.' Otherwise it would learn the same lesson as earlier civil RICO plaintiffs: `It tolls for thee.'" There were a few surprising exceptions to this default citation. One, a 1972 San Francisco decision on maternity leave policy argued that "it is no longer permissible to treat women in that manner described by John Donne in the passage at the end of `Loves Alchymie'" and then cited the lines beginning, "Hope not for mind in women." And in a 1952 federal tax case, the judge dismissed an argument that although no motive existed during the man's life, such motive was born the moment he died, by remarking that "this paradoxical notion of death's creative power will fascinate anyone who admires the writings of the lawyer-poet-preacher John Donne, but I think it has no place in construing statutes." "Copr. (C) West Group 1999 No claim to orig. U.S. govt. works."