The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
She’s only gone and Donne it!
At last, the swaggering Elizabethan adventurer-poet has met his match – in biographer Katherine Rundell
352pp, Faber, T £14.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £16.99, ebook £6.02 ÌÌÌÌÌ
“Because thou art lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spue thee out of my mouth.” (Revelations 3:16.) Whatever problems God had with his servant John Donne, lukewarmth was not among them. Seldom has a man burned with such fervent intensity. In the company of English love poets, with their cool ironising, their prophylactic mockery, their continence and equivocation, Donne blazes out like a winged unicorn in a dressage stable.
He had no sense of enough: infinity was not enough, hence the title of this wonderful book. Even when writing about death and extinction, he piles absence on absence. “I am the quintessence of nothingness,” he insists, and insists again, until he achieves the very opposite of nothingness: a tomb, yes, but one heaped with dark treasure. As Katherine Rundell says, he arrived in the world “book-hungry” and so he remained: like the “hydroptique (ever-thirsty) earth” of that poem, (“A Nocturnal upon St Lucy’s Day”) he sucked in ideas, impressions, sensations, connections, science, and poured them back transformed into poetic forms, sermons, treatises. He never had to husband his talent: there was always more where it came from.
Donne himself went through multiple iterations. Lawyer, adventurer, secretary, MP, diplomat, priest. When we think of Donne, Dean of St Paul’s, we forget he was once an Elizabethan swaggerer with a beautiful red mouth, sailing under the command of the Queen’s doomed favourite, the Earl of Essex, against an expected resurgence of the Spanish Armada.
Famously, the Donne of the poems is a different man from the Donne of prose: it was said that you fall in love with the one, and can barely tolerate the other. Rundell’s purpose here is to show us where these personae elide and intermix, as part of the universe that was John Donne. And in this, her enterprise follows that of her subject, whose work was always to conjoin those things that are apparently remote, and make a whole: like his image of the world map which, when folded edge to edge, brings the furthest extremities together.
The mixture of abiding concern to him was the cohesion of the soul and the body. He’d been born a Catholic of martyr stock, obliquely descended from Sir Thomas More. When he converted to Protestantism, he retained the old church’s preoccupation with the physical flesh, and married it to his adopted
religion of the mind, to forge his own language for faith and for love.
He possessed a profoundly sensual imagination. He never pursued the puritan’s ideal of subjecting the flesh to the mind, but looked to the body as itself an expression of mind. What could be less puritanical than his concept of feminine perfection: “her pure and eloquent blood/ Spoke in her cheeks, and so distinctly wrought/ That one might almost say, her body thought”?
A body that thought! A beautiful idea; and if Donne were alive in our own scientifically enlightened times, he could know that his perfect woman was an octopus. As it was, he fell in love with the 14-yearold Anne More, whose parents thought she could do a lot better, and married her, a minor, in secret. It was a sad marriage, burdened by poverty and many dying infants. And yet, as Rundell says: “If he took her to bed like he wrote – if he knew how to render bodily his poetry – then he was worth sacrificing all the wall hangings in England for.”
A woman who thinks like that is the biographer Donne has been waiting for. Her energy, intellect and arresting phrasemaking can keep up with her subject’s. Like him, Rundell loves the world and everything in it; like him, she notices everything; and like him, her interest is in cohesion and continuity. More than any preceding poet, Donne conceives of love as connection, not negotiation. Not the courtly dance of “thou” and “I”, but a fusion, through love’s ministry, into we. “Busie old fool, unruly sun, why must thou thus,/ through windows and through curtains call on us.” His last publicly spoken sentence was: “Now we leave you.” We, meaning him and God, united. And this is a book for us.
Donne transformed himself: poet, lawyer, adventurer, secretary, MP, diplomat, priest