John Donne is, after Shakespeare, perhaps our most familiar poet of the English Renaissance. Yet his best known insight – “that no man is an island” – comes not from his poems, nor even from his sermons, but from his private meditations.
This is perhaps how Donne would have wished it. Despite the urging of his admirers, he felt that his early poems were “Satrique thornes … growne/ where seeds of better Arts, were early sown”. These were the poems of a young man observing the world as he tried to find his place in it, and whose career, first as a government administrator, and later as a clergyman, might be damaged by their erotic and satiric tone. Yet, as this new biography suggests, this private thought was the “great thought at the heart of Donne’s life,” and one by which we can understand the man and his poems.
For young man and elderly clergyman alike finding a place in the world was difficult. Born in 1572 to a Catholic family of saintly pedigree (the corporeal relics of his ancestor, Thomas More, were macabre heirlooms), he was part of a growing middle-class which sought to distinguish its sons from unruly apprentices with a university education. Despite diligence at Oxford, the Oath of Allegiance to the Reformed Church prevented Donne from graduating. After a spell at Lincoln’s Inn, where he was both studious and a frequenter of plays, writing those “Satirique thornes” in the bargain, he fought with the glamourous but ill-fated Earl of Essex against the Spanish. Surviving these wars, he seemed to find a place as secretary to Elizabeth’s favourite lawyer.
Yet Donne was not immune to exacerbating his ambiguous social position. The scandal of his marriage to Ann More without her father’s consent cost him his job and, briefly, his liberty. For fifteen years his talents were wasted as stigma mired him and his family in shabby penury. With the “Pseudo-Martyr,” ironically a treatise on Catholics who make their lives in England more difficult that it need be, he wrote himself into the clergy and rapidly ascended to the most prominent pulpit in the land as Dean of St Paul’s where he navigated the religious controversies the past Reformation and the coming Civil War.
Stubbs strategy of ordering the precarious complexity of his subject by treating him not as an island but as part of the historical mainland allows him tell “the story,” taking us from our familiar London and bringing to life the concerns of Donne’s. Thus, as much as he evokes the solace Donne found in letter writing and letters, which “more than kisses … mingle souls,” the adventures with Essex and the machinations of the court read with the pace of a good thriller, while comedy is to be found in Donne’s apoplectic father-in-law.
The portrait that emerges from this detailed research is one from which our multitasking, Ritalin-deficient age has much to learn, and Donne is presented much as we might wish to see ourselves: tolerant, socially responsible, progressive even, hardworking, while also possessed of the meditative resources to see beyond momentary personal circumstance.
But however apt Stubbs’ approach may be to telling a life’s story, it leaves him at a disadvantage when placing the poetry in that story. As much as his reading of “Love’s Exchanges” as a subtle protest against the torture practiced by the government Donne served fits with his general portrait, a lot depends on the suggestion that “it was possibly written during his [Donne’s] time as apparatchik”. While Stubbs acknowledges the difficulties of dating Donne’s poetry, with no argument to tie specific poems to specific times, significant aspects of his portrait, however attractive, are confined to possibility.
The question is do you buy the picture knowing that it may not be entirely accurate. For me the answer is yes. After rejecting the “Satirique thornes” of his earlier days, Donne urges that we “seek ourselves in ourselves”. Significantly this urging takes place in a verse-letter, and above all Stubbs’ biography is a profound commitment to writing as a process of knowing one’s self and knowing that we are not so many islands.
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