Selected Poetry

by John Donne, John Hayward

John Donne is very much a poet for our time.

Although his reputation has suffered periodic eclipses, it has increased steadily since the publication in 1633 of POEMS BY J.D. WITH ELEGIES ON THE AUTHOR'S DEATH. This century, however, has been remarkable for the broadening and deepening of interest in his work.

A poet of love and friendship, Donne also employed dialectic, monologue and psychological analysis to wrestle with his religious, philosophic and personal doubts and with 'the wearisome condition of humanity' in a world that appeared as puzzling and riven as ours does today.

From his early Songs and Sonets, Elegies, Ephithalamions and Satyres to Verse Letters, Anniversaries, Epicedes, Obsequies and Divine Poems, Donne's extraordinary, rich, complex and demanding poetry expresses, as John Hayward comments in his introduction, 'for us our hopes and fears of an analogoous human condition'.

Genres: Poetry, Classics, Literature, School, English Literature, British Literature, 17th Century

182 pages, Paperback

First published February 4, 1950

About the author

John Donne was an English poet, preacher and a major representative of the metaphysical poets of the period. His works are notable for their realistic and sensual style and include sonnets, love poetry, religious poems, Latin translations, epigrams, elegies, songs, satires and sermons. His poetry is noted for its vibrancy of language and inventiveness of metaphor, especially as compared to that of his contemporaries.

Despite his great education and poetic talents, he lived in poverty for several years, relying heavily on wealthy friends. In 1615 he became an Anglican priest and, in 1621, was appointed the Dean of St Paul's Cathedral in London.

Reviews

[Jacob Hurley · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Study me then, you who shall lovers be
At the next world, that is, at the next spring;
For I am every dead thing,
In whom Love wrought new alchemy.
For his art did express
A quintessence even from nothingness,
From dull privations, and lean emptiness;
He ruin'd me, and I am re-begot
Of absence, darkness, death: things which are not."
-from A Nocturnal Upon St Lucy's Day

Go read 'The Flea' and 'The Cross' and 'Forbidden Mourning', and you'll want to go read this all.

Donne is definitely one of the all time greats of the English language - more focused than any of the romantics, more lyrical than the long-form essays of Pope and Milton, vastly more striking than any of the Victorian babblers. To me he represents a golden mean between the articulate analogies of the Shakespearean sonnets and the pure metaphysics of Paradise Lost; I highly recommend reading TS Eliot's book of lectures on Donne, "The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry", which is a deep study on only really a couple metaphors and motif in Donne in an almost perfectly complete analysis. Really, I'm mostly going to eschew writing a proper review so as not to waste your time or mine in summarizing Eliot's arguments, as I already have in my review of that book . . . . I do suggest buying and reading a general anthology of the Jacoban Metaphysical Poetry before reading all of Donne for, as Eliot's book demonstrates, a great deal of explaining Donne's greatness comes from comparison with the failures on the same devices by his imitators and contemporaries.

This signet collection, at least this old edition from the 70s, seems to be pretty much everything a complete works has, just sans much commentary, footnotes and the duller miscellany. The ~75 page collection of Love Songs, and to a lesser extent the ~30 pages of late religious verses, are most of what you'd want from Donne and find in any anthologized volume. His efforts at other genres of poesy hit far less often than miss, although perhaps worth reading for the scattered moments of Donnean imagination and some successes as a witty narrativist, such as the Elegies 'Jealousy' and 'Perfume'. Mostly you want a full anthology like this for his semi-trilogy of lengthy poems, the two Anniversaries and The Progress of the Soul; these incredibly dense and intricate poems, especially the latter of the three, seem to me to be a climactic moment bridging Elizabethan dreaming with the Jacobian era of metaphysical poetry to come, and are in my opinion as essential to any reader of English verse as are Paradise Lost or the works of Shakespeare.

I suppose the main topic of dispute about Donne is just how serious he is about the content of his poems, ie, when he does things like invoke transubstantiation as a metaphor for sex or when he denounces natural rights at the end of Progress of the Soul. TS Eliot is of the opinion that his works are purely imaginative and literary, judging by the inconsistency of metaphor across poems and the general atmosphere of skepticism towards Scholasticism within the late Renaissance. I can get behind this view, and don't have the St Aquinas chops to really say much more, but I also find that a great deal of Donne's power as a poet is the fully confident idiosyncracy coupled with the obvious personal investment: the depth of focus to imagine an atheistic future in which he and his lover become an heterosexual reiteration of the Christ (The Relic) is a type of nigh-psychotic sincerity to which neither the Romantics nor the Symbolists could ever aspire. Seeing such articulate expressions of such abstract emotions within one's life is something you should never discount, so take what he says seriously; the power to master philosophy coupled with a stridency of application is the very rare mark of a world-historically intelligent mind.

Another thing I don't see mentioned often in Donne is his prosody; he has neither the mastery of iambics of Milton nor the nuances of Shakespeare, and indeed his meter is often awkward with weird ellisions, seemingly unnatural stresses, and a pretty blasé attitude towards compact stanzas and line endings. Nevertheless, Donne seems fascinating to me metrically given that his dictum is neither that of a singerly prophet nor of a proper rhetorician . . . . rather, his tone reflects pretty genuinely who is he, as an overly erudite theologian prone to intense sectarian interests and amours. It's best to read his sounds with reference to French alexandrines - he often will substitute two anapests for three iambs, as has always been customary across the channel. It's hit or miss whether the effect translates well into English, but it helps free up language for a poetry that's pretty close to plainspoken free verse in a way, when you discard attempts to force his more dubious lines into iambics. Very often his poetry becomes pure thought, comparable strangely to Marianne Moore or even Ashbery in certain respects (although Donne's intricate sallies are intellectual as opposed to those modernists' sonority), which is totally appropriate for a poet whose singular focus is on metaphysical ideas and complex grammar. In that respect, he more perfectly than perhaps anyone fulfills the Eliotic ideal of poetry, a fixed monument of fully captured intellectual motion to which the reader can fully surrender themselves.

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

Look at that cover. I didn't read every poem but read some of his stuff.. He's a difficult poet. Sometimes I wonder if one of my past, way past, TA's also was like what the hark is he on about. 3.5. I don't believe he's first year level more like third. Anyhow.

[Sunny · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked these poems. They were written a long time ago and the English is a little tricky to read but you soon get used to the old’s cool English spellings. I have to admit that the majority of the poetry I didn’t have a clue about but the lines I did understand were very moving.

Here are some of my favourite bits:

• “ 'Tis much that glass should be
As all-confessing, and through-shine as I ;
'Tis more that it shows thee to thee,
And clear reflects thee to thine eye.
But all such rules love's magic can undo ;
Here you see me, and I am you.”
I am you > I love you –
• “ ’tis true, then learne how false, feares bee” – so true and how beautifully summed up in one line – how false almost all of our fears are – almost all.
• As our blood labours to beget
Spirits, as like soules as it can,
Because such fingers need to knit
That subtle knot, which makes us man” – indeed what an amazing way to describe man – as a knot.
• “sir more than kisses, letters mingle souls” – so true – the power of letters on the souls of mankind is pretty much unparalleled.
• “for they are in heaven on earth who heaven’s work do” – what a beautiful way to describe true philanthropy.
• “the end crowns our works; but thou crowns our ends” – the thought of the end of life as a crowning or a beautiful coronation is incredible.

[Sparrow .]

A goddam kingly poet, rather unknown in his lifetime, who perhaps invented the avant-garde, in English? His mind has coral-like involutions (you can see it even in his TITLES: "Nature's Lay Idiot", "Upon Mr. Thomas Coryate's Crudities"). Why doesn't everyone read him now? He was the Frank Zappa of the early 17th century. (Somehow, you feel that you're reading him IN COLOR, when most poets are in black-and-white.)

[Rosamund · Rating 4 out of 5]

Donne was such a mercurial poet that rating a collection of his work is a nonsensical idea. Some of my favourite poems ever written and some that make we want to tell him he is too clever for his own good.

[Lee Kuiper · Rating 3 out of 5]

I came into this book with only an exposure to (and love of) "No Man Is an Island" with the hopes of finding more of the same. Instead, I found a mixed bag where even the best poems did not live up to my expectations. In fact, most of these poems -despite often having an enjoyable and sometimes unexpected rhythm when read aloud- are self-indulgent, vain and whiny. The first section of "Songs and Sonnets" is almost entirely about sex, love, women, grief and his relationships; they feel like they were never intended to be more than personal, dramatic, emotional expressions (in fact, Hayward alludes to this in the introduction). Many of these were written in the lust of his youth and do not carry the metaphysical significance of some of his later poems. Even his famous "The Flea" feels rather simplistic and vapid when one is subjected to the tiring onslaught of his youthfully romantic poems. In "The Triple Foole" he, at least, acknowledges this.

"I am two fools, I know,
For loving, and for saying so,
In whining poetry;
But where's that wiseman, that would not be I,
...."

Divine Poems" is this little book's saving grace. These poems are much more tolerable -even enjoyable and meaningful at times. Donne was a different person with age and his writing reflects that fact. There are, however, times when it feels he simply switched the subject of his poems from women to God ("lust of flesh" to "lust of spirit"). Still, his writing improved with age. He developed a lot more depth and seemed to put a lot more intentionality and effort into his poems.

After digging and digging, one occasionally uncovers a dazzling line of brilliance in his writing. But it is never easy. All of Donne's work is just that: work. It is more rewarding the more time you spend reading and rereading it. If you are going to read it, read it twice.

-

I do not possess the adequate understanding of poetry's history to be able to appreciate Donne's influence on other, later poets. Perhaps this would help me to find respect and admiration for more of his work. Also, it is hard not to judge what feels extremely cheesy, clichéd or overdone when I don't understand the context from which he was writing and what may have been fresh or novel at the time. If I do come into a more extensive and detailed framework of poetry's past perhaps I will be able to come back to Donne's work with more serious dedication and arrive at a different conclusion. Until then, I'm somewhat ambivalent.

* It should be noted that I skipped Verse Letters, Anniversaries and a couple other sections of non-poetry. I did skim them a little but could not bring myself to fully commit. The antiquated language can act as a severe barrier at times. There is no easy read here. If you are truly serious about poetry and enjoy rigorous exercise then this book may be for you.

[Gastjäle · Rating 4 out of 5]

To me, John Donne is pre-eminently a poet of wit. Two meanings of wit are meant here: his pen was driven marvellously on the conditions of words themselves, and he was also a man of deep learning. He would spin wonderful paradoxes (through logic, through words, through sciences, through religious dogma) and resolve them with full finesse. Whenever one began a new Donne, one knew it would be a force to be reckoned with—no hand-waved schmaltz or airy hyperbole in here!

(Hyperbole here is—just read his anniversaries to the death of a girl he had never met. But it is not airy. It feels well-developed and apposite.)

Donne makes the reader linger on every word, not only because he is a sparkling wit, but because he also forges quite labyrinthine phrases. One of his trademarks is to add at least three commas per line, and to change the word order at will. This can be at times rather frustrating, but at the same time it also shows his splendid sense of poetic rhythm that seems to be really his own. Based on this collection, he was not very daring with rhyme or with form, but his sometimes staccato, sometimes legato rhythm is something that stands out quite patently.

When I say Donne is primarily a poet of wit, I also mean that his poems shine in other ways than their core ideas. Often it seems that his ideas are rather basic, and it would hardly do justice to sum any of his pieces up. They are about simple themes that are developed with cunning. They convince the reader through craftsmanship, not through philosophical prowess. His diction was also not astoundingly noteworthy, though he was far from incompetent in that regard: what I mean here is that, unlike with Shakespeare or Shelley, Donne's words tend not to halt the reader that often with profound beauty.

No, his effect is more subtle. So subtle in fact, that one might have called him Donne Scotus, had he been born a wee more north. I am particularly fond of the clever peeps in the literary canon, and I am thrilled to have stumbled upon a poet whose words I cannot simply skip at a glance.

[Keith Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

(I have the Hayward edition copyrighted 1950 and printed 1967. My first reading date in here was 1969, which means I've had this book as part of my life for 54 years!)

Would I have gone back to a complete (re?)reading of this collection without Katherine Rundell's wonderfully enthusiastic "Super-Infinities"? Probably not. And I'm glad I did. Other than the quotable quotes, Donne hasn't really opened up for me before, and I went into the poems much further this time through. There are still many parts of many poems that are closed to me. That I haven't spent the time with, time to decipher the syntax of those sentences, or to look up the elevated diction of the early 17th century.

The poems reflect Donne's journey, spiritual and sometimes physical, from lusty young man to the devout Dean of St. Paul's cathedral. And he thought deeply about everything all along the way. How many lines in here became titles for other writers? 10? 20? And this doesn't even include the Sermons! But what I was most taken by were the lines I didn't know or didn't remember.

In this edition of Hayward's the editor has divided them into sections that only partially reflect the chronology of Donne's life. I admit that I was most dreading the section entitled "Verse Letters to Severall Personages," where I thought my eyes might just be moving over the pages but registering nothing. But that became the most interesting. I realized that some of the contemporary poems as letters that I had admired (Harrison's, Richard Hugo's, etc) were simply a variation on this practice. Here are some wonderful lines to a Mr. I.L., whom we don't know, apparently, but from the two "letters"/poems we know was a farmer far from London:

So may all the sheepe bring forth Twins; and so
In chace and race my thy horse all out goe;
So may thy love and courage ne'r be cold;
Thy Sonne ne'r Ward; Thy lov'd wife ne'r seem old;
But maist thou wish great things, and them attaine,
As thou telst her, and none but her, my paine.

[Colin Cloutus · Rating 4 out of 5]

In his dullest points Donne still stuns with his graceful, slightly off-kilter verse; in his finest he is almost a patron poet for the Christian man [not the faith], simultaneously arousing grandiose images and appreciations of God and Christ, while expressing intense suffering in his fluctuating faith and fear of what the (perhaps more than normal) sin within him will result in upon his death. His metaphysical wit became legendary among his contemporaries, and its sly humour is elevated to the extreme in his early bawdy ballads.

Where his contemporaries are floral and occasionally stiflingly courtly, Donne's poetry is of mud and wood and hardship.

[Tori · Rating 4 out of 5]

not four stars as in 'sure it was fine, three seems harsh' but four stars as in 'some of this stuff is genuinely brilliant, but not quite all of it'

[Frankie · Rating 2 out of 5]

My earliest memory of Donne is "Death Be Not Proud" and 10th grade stanza and personification lessons in a Christian school that exemplified his simplest work. Donne wit and medievalism was always embraced by my Christian educators, who harkened fondly back to the stark moral contrasts of the morality-play/inquisition era. They raised Donne up next to Milton, Bunyan and other Johns of letters sanctioned by the Church-State, not to mention his healthy bit of luck being male, white and born into the upper class. Who knows what classics we'll never read, written by the supposed inferior populations of the past? But anyway, we have Donne. For me, his sonnets – even the frenetic ones – mostly conjure Renaissance-fair-esque courtly cheesiness - plucking psalteries and dulcimers and tinny recitations of sing-song nausea.

Aside from the misogynist vibe and the blatant Protestant vs Catholic scramble, Donne has interesting albeit crude ideas. One poem my schoolmarms never discussed in class is "The Flea." Taking a Sadean theme, Donne subtly conjures bestiality, the exchange of fluids, bloodletting, sacrificial rites, vampyric occult, etc. or maybe those are just the misperceptions of my guttered mind. At its most innocent, it evokes the crucifixion metaphor and marriage. In either case, it's a strange and fascinating piece of "metaphysical conceit" as they say.

I'd say his best works are his elegies. It's difficult to be critical of flowery verse when it's as final and honorific as an epitaph in stone. "The Second Anniversary" is the most beautiful elegy of any written in metered verse. Also "Elegie XVI - On His Mistress" is a lovely work, and a rare break from his sexist/chivalric theme. My favorite of all his work is "The Triple Fool." This is a modest but clever look at the mirroring effect of readership.

Overall, much of the verse is clever and capable of deeper interpretations than a first read can reveal. However apt and even ahead of his time Donne's work seems, it still fails in many ways to remain readable. The stilted meter, forced rhyme, the extreme bias and heavily censored content, all make me wary of spending more time with Donne than this work has given me.

[Erik Graff · Rating 4 out of 5]

In Grinnell College's freshman humanities course we were assigned a great deal of reading by a rather eccentric, old-school English professor, Maurice Lieberman. He had not adjusted to the sixties generation and likely never did, regarding us with considerable disdain and suspicion while he tried to teach his course the way he always had.

The class met thrice weekly, in the afternoons just after the Star Trek reruns were over on "The Floppy Show", with new reading assignments for each. One spring Wednesday or Friday we were expected to have finished the love poems of John Donne. As ever, pressed for time, I had read them all silently--not the way to handle poetry.

Opening the class, Lieberman asked what we thought of the sonnets. No one spoke. Avoiding his gaze, I recall the sun pouring through the windows of our Alumni Recitation Hall classroom building. It was truly a beautiful day. He asked again, more heatedly. Silence. God, I hoped he wouldn't call on me.

As it happened, he didn't call on anyone. Instead, he launched into a tirade. "I assigned Donne and these poems particularly because they are about the one subject you seem to care about: Sex!" he said, now shouting. I blushed as I always did when sex was mentioned in those virginal days. God, dear God, don't let him call on me, I prayed . . .

He didn't call on anyone. Instead, he dismissed the class.

And, yes, Donne does write, rather explicitly and very well, about sex.

[Katrina Becker · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's John Donne- I think that says it all.

[Matthew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Unlike John Donne I have no belief in an afterlife. If there is an afterlife (assuming it is not hell), and I have an eternity to spend how I like, then I would like to dedicate more time to appreciating poetry in the way that it should be appreciated.

In an ideal world, every poem in this collection should have half an hour, or perhaps a full hour dedicated to it, as a way of teasing out its many complex meanings. Perhaps the time could be partly spent reading what other analyses of the poem say, and the rest of the time could be devoted to reading the poem several times over.

As it is, with over 150 poems in this selection I do not have the time to justice to Donne’s work, especially since his style is dated (late 16th and early 17th century), and employs very complex poetical techniques. Poetry is not really meant to be read in huge blocks. By rights readers should be reading a poem at a time and contemplating it. Had I but world enough and time, that is what I would do.

John Donne has produced mixed reactions over the years. He is not as accessible as Wordsworth or Hardy or Keats. His work lies halfway between the courtly conceits of Elizabethan love poetry, and the emotionalism of the Romantic period.

This is partly intentional. Donne wanted to move away from the rigidities of earlier poetry, and create something more freeform and personal. Nonetheless his poetry is not as intimate as that of later writers.

Donne uses complex conceits and clever wordplay. The poems all have an object to whom Donne addresses the poem. He does not directly write about himself, and we only learn about him from what he says about others. However it is unclear how many of the poems are about Donne himself, or whether they are merely witty poems that describe love situations remote from the life of Donne.

Still even in spite of the distancing effects of Donne’s stylistic gymnastics, there is a curious warmth about his poetry. Elizabethan poets usually do not sound like they are describing any real relationship, which is why they constantly talk about ‘sighs and tears’, rather than anything sincere. Sighs and tears are mentioned in Donne’s poetry too, but he seems to move far beyond such clichés to create something that is his own unique vision.

In some ways Donne reminds me of Cecil B DeMille. Half the time DeMille was making films in his Sunday best, churning out bloated Bible epics. The other half of the time, DeMille took a curious pleasure in prurient and salacious material that contrasted oddly with his religious movies.

Similarly Donne is a pious poet who often writes about religion, but he is also writing in a sexually frank manner that seems to anticipate the Restoration period. Donne is not that blunt or crude, and often does not even mention the female body. When he does we get descriptions of a woman’s private parts as a ‘hairy diadem’.

The poet does seem fascinated with sex though, and his love poems are as explicit as the age allowed him. Fleas and compasses stand in as metaphors for the erect penis. Epithalamiums (wedding poems) often take a weird turn with Donne making allusions to the bride being naked in bed that night. I am not sure if Donne wrote the poems for actual weddings, but I do wonder what the groom would have made of them.

There is mischievous humour here, with poems praising ugliness or body parts in the wrong proportionate places like an anagram. In another poem Donne imagines himself as a ghost haunting a former lover. However she cannot appeal to her present partner for help because he is feigning sleep for fear that she is waking him to have sex with him.

The love poems are the highlight of this selection. I am not too enthusiastic for religious poetry, or for poetry praising other people, living or dead. It is in the elegies, songs and sonnets that Donne really comes to life for me.

Here Donne mixes humour and sadness. Death is a constant theme, as Donne lost many loved ones. The poems show us Donne’s complex attitude towards women, both highly sexist and greatly admiring, though it is hard to know how serious Donne is being in either.

It hardly matters. Just as we do not expect that every song reflects the true state of mind of the singer, so we need not expect every poem here to be about the actual opinions or attitudes of the poet. Rather we should see them as momentary moods in the life of Donne, or perhaps moments of inspiration where Donne thought of a clever conceit.

John Donne is certainly a very challenging poet, but his best work is very rewarding. His poetry is difficult, but it can also be very exciting. More than anything he is a true original, a poet who created his own path to walk down. Even today not many poets have chosen to follow him down that path, but I doubt anyone could have improved on Donne’s unique style.

[Shabanah · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5*
Revisiting Donne alongside Katherine Rundell’s very illuminating but slightly infatuated biography ‘Super-Infinite’ was often thrilling. But also a reminder of an inconvenient truth: just how much overt, sometimes revolting misogyny there is in some of his poems (she’s truthful about this, but doesn’t spend long enough on it in my view), especially the too-little studied and published Elegies. For example, this edition misses out Elegy 8, the truly egregious ‘The Comparison’, whose infamously ‘witty’ ending ‘comparisons are odious’ distinctly fails to amuse in 2023.

As an unknown critic once put it, “His brain went to his head”, and however much his intellect dazzles, I wish now there was more wisdom to his wit, and as much heart as head in the poems.

[Stella Marie · Rating 2 out of 5]

i skipped a couple of pages. some of it was really great, some of it made me drowsy.

[Francisca · Rating 2 out of 5]

*2.5*

at uni, i studied donne because of his metaphysical poems (with the conceits and everything) but here i thought his elegies were the best part of the selection.

[Willard Brickey · Rating 5 out of 5]

My new favorite poet.

[Vanessa · Rating 2 out of 5]

I hadn't read any of Donne's poetry since my last year at school, but decided to pick up this little copy of some of his selected works from my classroom bookshelf (schools are good in that way). Although there were certain poems that I remembered and liked, such as The Flea and The Sunne Rising, I didn't warm to a lot of the poetry within this book. Don't get me wrong - there were some lovely lines and some quite humorous poems, and I am still shocked and amused by the candid way in which Donne talks about sex (particularly for the time period in which they were written). Unfortunately however, the language did not really pull me in the majority of the time, and some poems in the book were far too verbose and long-winded for my liking.

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm rediscovering John Donne as the backdrop for hot Summer affairs. This plays well in Paris. The Oxford editions have fewer old English-isms than Penguin.
I'm suddenly realizing my list is all steamy; and my friends' books are about child-rearing and religion. Uh, I'm checking out lots of churches in France and Greece, guys. . . really, I am.

[Julia · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the first poets I studied in literature and I love him. He's use of paradox is genius whilst his ability to speak of both love and faith so ambiguosly is beautiful.

My favourite poems are:

A Hymm To Christ: At the Author's Last Going To Germany
To His Mistress Going to Bed
Song

[Mangrovejane · Rating 4 out of 5]

John Donne...sexy, clever, witty. This is why he is one of my favourite poets. His language and imagery are both beautiful and real. Sometimes I laughed out loud with the things he wrote and other times I simply sighed quietly in complete fan girl delight. I can't comment on the edition, as I got the book simply because I wanted to read the poetry.

[Marian · Rating 5 out of 5]

This edition was originally published in 1950.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm reading a version of this published in 1901 called The Muses Library.

[Kehinde Sonola · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Tapestry of Brilliance.