Under the Sign of Donne - John Donne - Critical Essay

Criticism, Wntr, 2001 by Judith Scherer Herz

IN THE FITZWILLIAM MUSEUM in Cambridge, there is a painting by Stanley Spencer, "John Donne Arriving in Heaven" (Fig. 1). It is almost his earliest, done in 1911 when Spencer was an eighteen-year-old student at the Slade School of Art. It was exhibited the following year at the Grafton Gallery's Second Post Impressionist exhibition, although not particularly noticed in the hubbub and horror caused by the Cezannes or even by the paintings of the British group--Roger Fry, Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell, and their soon to be nemesis, Wyndham Lewis. There is certainly something of a Cezanesque proto-geometry to the painting's spaces, but in its subject and the generating idea for that subject it was quite unlike the others on those gallery walls. The figures are both their own tombstones and their resurrected bodies. They are at once stationary and in motion, here and there, in prayer and expectation--John Donne just happening by. The painting was prompted by Spencer's receiving a copy of Donne's Sermons from his fellow Slade students, Gwen and Jacques Raverat, and in particular by the phrase, to "Go to Heaven by Heaven," which Spencer interpreted as going past Heaven, alongside it, heaven here being Widbrook Common, a place near Cookham, where Spencer spent most of his life, receiving and painting heavenly visitors.(1)

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Suddenly coming upon that painting prompted a series of questions that resulted in this partial inventory of twentieth century Donne signs and sightings. Among them--where was Donne in the literary/artistic imagination at the start of the century during the years immediately before the 1912 Grierson edition and in the decades that followed? Who read him, painted him, thought about him? What have been the terms of the engagement? And behind those questions--why Donne? This investigation is more exploratory than polemical. The cast of characters is so varied, the Donnes invoked so multiple (love poet, dandy, satirist, religious poet, polemicist, priest), and the responses so various, that gathering the materials and making them speak to each other is in itself a useful enterprise. For it is remarkable that a writer so word specific as Donne, so much a figure (even as a composite of many figures) of a time, of a space, of readily identifiable ways of being and seeing, can inhabit so many different times and spaces and not only enter, but grain-of-sand-like, disturb the imaginations of so many and so diverse readers. Of course, even in the seventeenth century, Donne was there and elsewhere, both in London and at and through the firmament, space travel in the not so very distant future.

Donne turns up surprisingly frequent]y, although certainly not as often as Shakespeare, who is far more thoroughly embedded in subsequent literature as a data bank of allusions,(2) as a set of texts to remake, which, of course, happens with every production on stage or film (and in other media, as well, in opera or musical, from Verdi's Macbeth or Thomas' Hamlet, to Kiss me Kate, or Play On, the recent jazz version of Twelfth Night) and, most important, as an inescapable cultural presence. As a synecdoche for the literary imagination, for creativity itself, and as the source for iconic representations of the human condition, his figures at once mythical and recognizable, Shakespeare seems to demand response. There has rarely been, for example, so profound an engagement by one writer of another as by Joyce of Shakespeare, not only in Ulysses but also in Finnegans Wake.(3) Joyce certainly admired Donne, too, especially the Donne who "is Shakespearian in his richness," as Arthur Power records Joyce remarking in an account of his conversations with Joyce,(4) but unlike the case of the Shakespeare encounter there was little at stake there and few traces in the Writing.(5)

Moreover, it is usually Shakespeare's Hamlet or his Rosalind one talks about, less often "Shakespeare himself" (a phrase that is as much trope as historical identity); the biographical Shakespeare remains, for the most part, monumentally anonymous.(6) But it is Donne in his texts, this strange yet still somehow contemporary figure from the past, whom the later writer greets, trying on his language and looking inside his imagination. It is an audacious language, certainly, and it inscribes a vision no less so, but it is oddly transportable over the centuries, its time and place specifities notwithstanding. Donne's syntax of desire, which allows, too, for loss--of love, of God, of self--is somehow renewable in its own terms. The encounter happens less in the manner of a Bloomean agon or an overreaching than simply as a willingness to listen, to re-imagine, to make over as one's own. In many of the encounters recorded here, it is not Donne as the name for high art whom we meet, but Donne as a writer who has to be read. There is a psychology to map and a linguistic system to parse that remain ongoing provocations, resources, and recourses.

There is an apt and very recent example of just such imaginative listening by the Canadian poets Doug Beardsley and Al Purdy, in their The Man Who Outlived Himself: An Appreciation of John Donne. Indeed, one could believe that the book's publication had been staged by Donne, for its title briefly stood in for the obituary of one of its authors. Al Purdy died on Friday, April 21, 2000, but his death had not yet been announced when the newspaper review appeared on April 22. This not quite posthumous book (who has outlived whom?) consists of an ongoing conversation about Donne, "the strangest poet in the English language,"(7) and of twelve of his poems, followed by a rewriting of five of Donne's elegies in which Donne's language merges through translation, adaptation, and explanation with Purdy's and Beardsley's ("blood transfusions from Donne to us" 63), and this is followed by a poem from each to Ann More. "I vision her as a girl so tender / and heartbreaking in the way she was / you couldn't look at her without tears / and I can't write about her / without a peculiar kind of love," Purdy wrote, concluding