Poetry and the art of seduction

BOOKS do furnish a room. And they furnish people too, as author Emma Smith pointed out on Start the Week on Monday morning (Radio 4).

“We use books to prop up our identities, to project the image of ourselves that we want the world to see,” she said, recalling all those Zoom meetings we’ve seen where books have been conspicuous in the background over the last couple of years.

But there’s nothing new about this. Smith, whose new book, Portable Magic is subtitled A History of Books and their Readers, pointed to the example of the “redoubtable” Lady Anne Clifford in the 17th century.

“She has herself painted with a complete library of the books that have been important to her,” Smith explained.

“Each one is labelled, and it tells us something about where she’s been, who she wants to be associated with. And it also tells us something about her history. … It’s a wonderful snapshot of where she’s been and how she wants to present herself.”

I’m not sure what my books say about me. Other than I either have too much money (hah!) or too much time (the only lesson growing older teaches you, surely, is that time is not infinite). No one needs this many books, I find myself saying on a regular basis. And yet there they are.

But then why would you not love books? One of the themes of Monday’s Start the Week was the book as a physical object and how gorgeous the bloody things are these days.

Books as fetishistic objects, in other words.

This was perhaps a slightly tenuous link to the programme’s other theme, which was the poetry and life of John Donne. That said, Donne knew all about the physical.

At one point Kirsty Wark put on her best Aunt May voice to talk about just how “lewd” Donne’s poetry could be, before quoting lines from one of his lewdest. To His Mistress Going to Bed: “Licence my roving hands, and let them go …”

As Smith suggested, that’s exactly why we still read him, of course, and not, say, Philip Sidney, “because they give us an image of a Renaissance that is just sexier, more physical, less romanticised and cliched than the poetry that followed Petrarch, I guess.”

In this sense Donne is just one in a long, long line of Renaissance poets, Pre-Raphaelite painters, and 1960s rock stars who used their art as a seduction technique.

There was a bit more to him than just that, however. Donne was also a religious shapeshifter, a pretty lousy diplomat and, it seems, a bit of a rock star preacher.

Worth a Netflix TV series then, surely. If only for the scene in which Donne’s mother carries around the head of the Catholic martyr Thomas More in her handbag.

The poet’s latest biographer Katherine Rundell suggested that this particular story was an urban myth. A lie in other words. There have been a few of those about this week.

Usually accompanied by some obsequious Tory MP defending the Chancellor and the Chancer next door from being caught out in one (at least) over Partygate. None of them came out of it looking very good.

By contrast, two women who had lost loved ones during the pandemic just about held it together as they described what they suffered during the pandemic on Good Morning Scotland (Radio Scotland) on Wednesday.

“I feel guilty every day,” one of them said, heartbreakingly. But we know who the real guilty parties are in this story.

English poet and cleric John Donne