Under the Sign of Donne - John Donne - Critical Essay

Criticism, Wntr, 2001 by Judith Scherer Herz

And the close

   Feign then what's by a decent tact believed
   And act that state is only so conceived,
   And build an edifice of form
   For house where phantoms may keep warm.

   Imagine, then, by miracle, with me,
   (Ambiguous gifts, as what gods give must be)
   What could not possibly be there,
   And learn a style from despair.

(32-33)

The "edifice of form" to warm the phantoms, the miraculous in possibility's despite, the style learned from despair--these get at something essential in Donne's writing as well as in Empson's.

It is not only for poets writing in English that this encounter has been crucial. Joseph Brodsky claimed he learned English in order to be able to translate Donne and when he left the Soviet Union for England in 1972 he had a copy of Donne in his pocket. At his 1964 trial (it was at hard labor after that, when he wrote the 200 line "Elegy to John Donne"), he was asked his profession, "I am a poet," he answered. Not a good answer: "Tell us why you refused to work," the judge demanded. "I did work. I wrote poems," said Brodsky.(40) "Elegy to John Donne" is in some measure a justification of that claim. "John Donne fell asleep, and all around him slept. / The pictures slept, the wall, the floor, the bedding." In the elegy, the world sleeps, God sleeps, Donne sleeps, his poems sleep:

   ..., all lay sleeping.
   All was asleep. The window, with its snow,
   the white slope of the rooftop like a blanket,
   its ridge and the whole quarter lie asleep
   slit open by a window mortally.

   A boat sleeps in the port. The snow and water
   under its hull sleep wheezily and cough
   merging far-off with heavens, long asleep.
   John Donne lay sound asleep. The sea slept with him,
   the chalky shore asleep above the sea.

The snow keeps falling ... on the speaker in his Archangel exile (Archangel! ... there are no coincidences), on the imagined London of the past poet's life and death. It's a difficult poem, a dialogue of poet to poet--Donne/Brodsky--it's not always clear who speaks, who listens, who weeps, who reads the tears. Is it the cherubim who weep? Paul? Gabriel? "No, it is I, John Donne. `Tis I, your soul." Thus elegist becomes subject (something of a "Lycidas" turn):

   ... You climbed the roof-top's ridge.
   You saw the ocean, all the lands far off,
   and Hell you saw by image, and then real.

   And God you saw, then hastened back again.

(63-69)

Through Donne, Brodsky is a poet both living and dead: "For though we can with others share our life, / whom can we find to share death equally?" Later, in the West, his poems still caught the Donnean sense of miracle, for example, "25.XII.1993" published in 1999:

   For a miracle, take one shepherd's sheepskin, throw
   In a pinch of now, a grain of long ago,
   And a handful of tomorrow. Add by eye
   a little bit of ground, a piece of sky.

   And it will happen. For miracles, gravitating
   To earth, know just where people will be waiting,
   And eagerly will find the right address
   And tenant, even in a wilderness.(41)