The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose

by John Donne, Denis Donoghue (Introduction), Charles M. Coffin (Editor)

This Modern Library edition contains all of John Donne's great metaphysical love poetry. Here are such well-known songs and sonnets as "A Forbidding Mourning," "The Extasie," and "A Nocturnall Upon S. Lucies Day," along with the love elegies "Jealosie," "His Parting From Her," and "To His Mistris Going to Bed." Presented as well are Donne's satires, epigrams, verse letters, and holy sonnets, along with his most ambitious and important poems, the Anniversaries. In addition, there is a generous sampling of Donne's prose, including many of his private letters; Ignatius His Conclave, a satiric onslaught on the Jesuits; excerpts from Biathanatos, his celebrated defense of suicide; and his most famous sermons, concluding with the final "Death's Duell." "We have only to read [Donne]," wrote Virginia Woolf, "to submit to the sound of that passionate and penetrating voice, and his figure rises again across the waste of the years more erect, more imperious, more inscrutable than any of his time."

Genres: Poetry, Classics, Literature, Fiction, Religion, British Literature, Philosophy

736 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1929

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

[B. P. Rinehart · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ask not for whom this review tolls...

John Donne may be one of the best kept secrets of English literature. I never knew such a man could exist. A poet, writer, and theologian who does his own thing and has a hell of a vendetta against death.

This book gives us all of his poetry and a lengthy selection of his prose (which I think is better). I read this as a library book but now I know I will have to buy this book (hopefully the paperback will be an updated publication).

The book includes letters (many written in rhyming-verse), elegies, Essays of various things, prose of various things, and naturally sermons which are his strongest works (most of them from late in his life including his magnum opus Death's Duell[sic].

My favorite works were from his Juvenilia: Or Certaine Paradoxes, And Problems, it shows definitively for me that this is the era where "British wit" was codified and he was a master at it. I also have reviewed his 17th meditation from his Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions which has changed the way I think of death in a sense; a lot of proto-existential in that meditation.
Because some of the events in his life and his very lengthy terminal cancer, that he must have had for 20 years before dying of it, death became a big theme of most of his work. It was a muse and a burden for him and he treated it like an annoying enemy or thorn that was in his side. I think his strongest writing is his contemplation on death and his faith in the resurrection that gave him a cockiness towards death that is amazing to behold (think of him as not playing chess with Death but instead flipping over the chessboard and telling him to fuck off).

But death was not the only thing he talked about. He had been from a prominent Catholic family and when King James I came to power restrictions on Catholics were eased some. Despite this James wanted Donne to convert to Anglicanism and after a long thought, his devotion to the King won out and he became an Anglican Priest and was appointed Dean of Saint Paul's Cathedral in London.

His independent nature, though, was strong. He wrote quite uncensored about erotic love, divine love (which is why he is often labeled a metaphysical poet), women's rights (to be fair he wasn't as forthright in public as he wanted to be, but he did feel personally that women needed to have a bigger role in society especially when it came to jobs, than they were getting), everyday societal life, and God.

Now I want to take a little time to discuss a very controversial essay he wrote (one that is still controversial now) and that is his essay Biathanatos which is still shocking that a theologian would stake out such a position on such a subject. I have read the excerpt of it that was printed here but I have not seen the whole thing. Here is the sub heading of the work: "A Declaration of That Paradoxe[sic] Or Thesis, That Selfe[sic]-Homicide is not so Naturally Sinne[sic], That it May Never Be Otherwise." Yeah that came out of left-field amongst the other works in this book, though there are several letters included that discuss this work as he only sent it to a few of his friends and it was not published until long after he was dead.

I often wonder why he is not referenced more as he is a late contemporary of Shakespeare, but then again a lot of people who were unluckily enough to write at the Bards time have been neglected. Well I will say that he is a writer worth reading for the expertise, wit, passion, conviction, and amazement of his words and ideas. I can't say much more right now but if I can think of more I will add it, but I will say that if you consider yourself a serious reader of English literature don't skip out on John Donne!

I'd keep writing but I think i hear a bell...

[Alan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Here's where I started, as a Freshman at Amherst College, an enthusiasm for verse I did not entirely comprehend; a classmate of mine, Schuyler Pardee, and I went to our wonderful professor, G Armour Craig, with a proposal: Could we perhaps translate Donne for modern students? He was genial, did not laugh at us, though our project never got off the drawing board. Perhaps he recommended further courses, I cannot recall. What I do recall is that my classmate was one of the dozen fellow "poets" in my class, but he also was the first person I knew to commit suicide, a few years after graduation.
When I got to U MN grad school, I took Leonard Unger's 17C English Poets seminar, wherein we read Donne and his heirs. I wrote on Herbert and Andrew Marvell; the latter I later pursued in my Ph.D., This Critical Age: Deliberate Departures from Literary Conventions in 17C English Verse, advised by Leonard Unger. When I told him I wanted to write on Marvell, Leonard suggested the broader topic which proved so fruitful to me. Though one might not know it from his criticism, especially in American lit like TS Eliot, Leonard Unger I considered a professor of comparative literature. For example, his good friend Saul Bellow and he once composed, during lunch at the U MN Faculty Club on the top floor of the Student Union, a verse translation of the first lines of the Wasteland--in Yiddish.

At a postdoctoral seminar at Princeton I first encountered the Donne First Edition, 1633. I was befuddled, like its first readers, by the intermix of body/ bawdy and religious poems. Having just completed my dissertation which noted Donne's having lifted "The Indifferent" wholesale from Ovid, (Amores II.iv), among the things Donne borrows is his shocking and dramatic shift of pronouns from third to second person, "I can love her and her, and you and you..." Ovid has "sive aliqua est," and six lines later, "sive es docta," then a couplet later, back to third person, "est quae," then back to "you," "tu, quia tam longa es"(line 33). He took his surprising shifting of tones, from distant connoiseur to precipitant lecher: his "dramatic" pyrotechnics.
In my community college teaching career, I would recite a couple of Donne's poems from memory,
his Song, "Go and catch a falling star," illustrating adunata, the catalog of impossibilities, and sometimes his holy sonnet, "At the round earth's imagined corners, blow / Your trumpets, Angels, and arise, arise..."
Now for your delectation, an "adunata," list of impossibilities:

Go, and catch a falling star
Get with child a mandrake root
Tell me where all past years are
Or--who cleft the Devil's foot.
Teach me to hear mermaid's singing--
Or to keep off Envy's stinging
Or find
What wind
Serves to advance and honest mind.

Note: an Impossibility for an Honest Mind to advance-- even more true now four centuries later, with criminals, international money-launderers in Federal offices, including, we suspect, the Launderer-in-Chief (if Putin, then: the Chief Launderer's buddy). It may also be true in academics, to my relief, an explanation of how my "advancement" has come pretty late. In grad school, another of Leonard Unger's students was advanced, because he flattered a different, declining professor, quoted him verbatim to his face on his Ph.D. orals. The early-onset professor admired his own insights, from a student's mouth, and advanced him to a job at his own graduate institution, Princeton. I was very happy to get a community college job, where I spent 40 years engaging the heart of America: hygienists, nurses, firemen, police, teachers, actors, movie house directors, managers of restaurants and cultural performance centers.

[Eliza · Rating 1 out of 5]

Read for class.

[Megan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Um, it's Donne. There's not a lot to say without writing a thesis. I've read some of his meditations and sonnets and sermons but remember mostly just the famous stuff; Meditation XVII, "The Canonization" and "Hymn to God, My God, in my Sickness" to name a few. I particularly like the Holy Sonnets. I'm a big fan of 17th century poetry in general but of all poetry, ever, Donne has written some of the best. His poems are inventive with their imagery and intensely personal, though they remain true to metrical forms. Personally I think free verse has made everyone think they can be a poet by simply emoting in incomplete sentences. When you're tired of reading poetry that's little more than someone whining over their last breakup a la William Shatner, read "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" and experience some of the most timeless, universal, and creative images describing lovers parting that were ever written.

[Jessica · Rating 5 out of 5]

John Donne's poetry is fantastcally beautiful. I could live for days in the worlds his words create in my mind. The depths of emotion Donne has made me feel, and the questions about myself, religion, love, and loss he has forced me to ask, are the most basic, yet also the most profound. Donne is much more than his quotable texts--look beyond the island and you will find the man.

[Marcos Augusto · Rating 5 out of 5]

Because almost none of Donne’s poetry was published during his lifetime, it is difficult to date it accurately. Most of his poems were preserved in manuscript copies made by and passed among a relatively small but admiring coterie of poetry lovers. Most current scholars agree, however, that the elegies (which in Donne’s case are poems of love, not of mourning), epigrams, verse letters, and satires were written in the 1590s, the Songs and Sonnets from the 1590s until 1617, and the “Holy Sonnets” and other religious lyrics from the time of Donne’s marriage until his ordination in 1615. He composed the hymns late in his life, in the 1620s. Donne’s Anniversaries were published in 1611–12 and were the only important poetic works by him published in his lifetime.

Donne’s poetry is marked by strikingly original departures from the conventions of 16th-century English verse, particularly that of Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser. Even his early satires and elegies, which derive from classical Latin models, contain versions of his experiments with genre, form, and imagery. His poems contain few descriptive passages like those in Spenser, nor do his lines follow the smooth metrics and euphonious sounds of his predecessors. Donne replaced their mellifluous lines with a speaking voice whose vocabulary and syntax reflect the emotional intensity of a confrontation and whose metrics and verbal music conform to the needs of a particular dramatic situation. One consequence of this is a directness of language that electrifies his mature poetry. “For Godsake hold your tongue, and let me love,” begins his love poem “The Canonization,” plunging the reader into the midst of an encounter between the speaker and an unidentified listener. Holy Sonnet XI opens with an imaginative confrontation wherein Donne, not Jesus, suffers indignities on the cross: “Spit in my face yee Jewes, and pierce my side….”

From these explosive beginnings, the poems develop as closely reasoned arguments or propositions that rely heavily on the use of the conceit—i.e., an extended metaphor that draws an ingenious parallel between apparently dissimilar situations or objects. Donne, however, transformed the conceit into a vehicle for transmitting multiple, sometimes even contradictory, feelings and ideas. And, changing again the practice of earlier poets, he drew his imagery from such diverse fields as alchemy, astronomy, medicine, politics, global exploration, and philosophical disputation. Donne’s famous analogy of parting lovers to a drawing compass affords a prime example. The immediate shock of some of his conceits aroused Samuel Johnson to call them “heterogeneous ideas…yoked by violence together.” Upon reflection, however, these conceits offer brilliant and multiple insights into the subject of the metaphor and help give rise to the much-praised ambiguity of Donne’s lyrics.

The presence of a listener is another of Donne’s modifications of the Renaissance love lyric, in which the lovers lament, hope, and dissect their feelings without facing their ladies. Donne, by contrast, speaks directly to the lady or some other listener. The latter may even determine the course of the poem, as in “The Flea,” in which the speaker changes his tack once the woman crushes the insect on which he has built his argument about the innocence of lovemaking. But for all their dramatic intensity, Donne’s poems still maintain the verbal music and introspective approach that define lyric poetry. His speakers may fashion an imaginary figure to whom they utter their lyric outburst, or, conversely, they may lapse into reflection in the midst of an address to a listener. “But O, selfe traytor,” the forlorn lover cries in “Twickham Garden” as he transforms part of his own psyche into a listener. Donne also departs from earlier lyrics by adapting the syntax and rhythms of living speech to his poetry, as in “I wonder by my troth, what thou, and I/Did, till we lov’d?”. Taken together, these features of his poetry provided an impetus for the works of such later poets as Robert Browning, William Butler Yeats, and T.S. Eliot.

Donne also radically adapted some of the standard materials of love lyrics. For example, even though he continued to use such Petrarchan conceits as “parting from one’s beloved is death,” a staple of Renaissance love poetry, he either turned the comparisons into comedy, as when the man in “The Apparition” envisions himself as a ghost haunting his unfaithful lady, or he subsumed them into the texture of his poem, as the title “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” exemplifies. Donne’s love lyrics provide keen psychological insights about a broad range of lovers and a wide spectrum of amorous feelings. His speakers range from lustful men so sated by their numerous affairs that they denounce love as a fiction and women as objects—food, birds of prey, mummies—to platonic lovers who celebrate both the magnificence of their ladies and their own miraculous abstention from consummating their love. Men whose love is unrequited feel victimized and seek revenge on their ladies, only to realize the ineffectuality of their retaliation. In the poems of mutual love, however, Donne’s lovers rejoice in the compatibility of their sexual and spiritual love and seek immortality for an emotion that they elevate to an almost religious plane.

Donne’s devotional lyrics, especially the “Holy Sonnets,” “Good Friday 1613, Riding Westward,” and the hymns, passionately explore his love for God, sometimes through sexual metaphors, and depict his doubts, fears, and sense of spiritual unworthiness. None of them shows him spiritually at peace.

The most sustained of Donne’s poems, the Anniversaries, were written to commemorate the death of Elizabeth Drury, the 14-year-old daughter of his patron, Sir Robert Drury. These poems subsume their ostensible subject into a philosophical meditation on the decay of the world. Elizabeth Drury becomes, as Donne noted, “the Idea of a woman,” and a lost pattern of virtue. Through this idealized feminine figure, Donne in The First Anniversarie: An Anatomie of the World laments humanity’s spiritual death, beginning with the loss of Eden and continuing in the decay of the contemporary world, in which men have lost the wisdom that connects them to God. In The Second Anniversarie: Of the Progres of the Soule, Donne, partly through a eulogy on Elizabeth Drury, ultimately regains the wisdom that directs him toward eternal life.

Donne’s earliest prose works, Paradoxes and Problems, probably were begun during his days as a student at Lincoln’s Inn. These witty and insouciant paradoxes defend such topics as women’s inconstancy and pursue such questions as “Why do women delight much in feathers?” and “Why are Courtiers sooner Atheists than men of other conditions?” While living in despair at Mitcham in 1608, Donne wrote a casuistic defense of suicide entitled Biathanatos. His own contemplation of suicide, he states, prompted in him “a charitable interpretation of theyr Action, who dye so.” Donne’s Pseudo-Martyr, published in 1610, attacks the recusants’ unwillingness to swear the oath of allegiance to the king, which Roman Catholics were required to do after the Gunpowder Plot (1605). The treatise so pleased James I that he had Oxford confer an honorary master of arts degree on Donne. In 1610 Donne also wrote a prose satire on the Jesuits entitled Ignatius His Conclave, in both Latin and English.

In 1611 Donne completed his Essays in Divinity, the first of his theological works. Upon recovering from a life-threatening illness, Donne in 1623 wrote Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, the most enduring of his prose works. Each of its 23 devotions consists of a meditation, an expostulation, and a prayer, all occasioned by some event in Donne’s illness, such as the arrival of the king’s personal physician or the application of pigeons to draw vapours from Donne’s head. The Devotions correlate Donne’s physical decline with spiritual sickness, until both reach a climax when Donne hears the tolling of a passing bell (16, 17, 18) and questions whether the bell is ringing for him. Like Donne’s poetry, the Devotions are notable for their dramatic immediacy and their numerous Metaphysical conceits, such as the well-known “No man is an Iland,” by which Donne illustrates the unity of all Christians in the mystical body of Christ.

[Ben Davis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Donne is the poet of resurrection par excellence. And his poetic imagination gives his preaching a transformative charge; he has given me an entirely new vision of what preaching can and should be.

[Becca McCulloch · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favorite poet. His words are a sweet breath released after a turbulent day. He's witty and wise and romantic and perfect.

[Patrick\ · Rating 5 out of 5]

A poet for all time in the English-Refined Celtic tradition. Never disappoints.

[Mary Ann · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I was thirteen, I wanted two things for Christmas: John Donne's poetry and a bottle of Chantilly cologne; my eldest brother, Dick, gave me both. The Chantilly is long gone, but the book has been by my side and within reach all my life wherever I have lived and traveled. I know it's heretical, but I love Donne's poetry more than Shakespeare's Sonnets. There are many editions of Donne, but I love this 1952 Modern Library for its preservation of Donne's 17th century spelling and for Michael Coffin's introduction. I didn't put a "finished" date because I've never stopped.

[Lisa (Harmonybites) · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'd read some poems by Donne before, but it's amazing reading all his collected poems and being able to appreciate how consistently good they are--at least the sonnets and elegies which stand up being compared to those of Shakespeare. They're erudite, but accessible, although the edition I read didn't regularize the spelling--and frankly I think you only gain in readability if that's modernized and can't see what you'd lose unless you have a scholarly interest. Almost all the "Songs and Sonets" and "Elegies and Historical Epistle" that begin the Poetry section are love poetry, but they really run the gamut in tone. They're all witty and clever, and some are passionate and gorgeously romantic. Among those I particularly loved "The Good-Morrow," "The Sun Rising" and "Canonization." Others though are outrageous but funny ("The Flea") or bawdy ("Love's Progress") or surprisingly sensual, even erotic ("To His Mistress Coming to Bed"). Some are irreverent, cynical, even misogynist, and I'm not sure at times whether to take as tongue in cheek such humorous verse as "Go and Catch a Falling Star," "Woman's Constancy" or the last lines of "Love's Alchemy." "Hope not for mind in women: at their best sweetness and wit, they are but Mummy possessed." However, so many of the love poems seem to so strongly imply mutual love based on a respect for the beloved, it's hard to take seriously Donne's sometimes twitting of the female sex. (And reading his prose, which often speaks on topics concerning women, somehow doesn't clarify but only complicates the issue.) I have to admit grinning though at his epigram, "A Self Accuser:" Your mistress, that you follow whores, still taxeth you/'Tis strange that she should thus confess it, though 't be true.

The best of the poetry are definitely amazing "five star" reads, but I wasn't enchanted by all of his poetry. I can't say I found any of the "Satyres" or "Verse Letters" all that winning. The next section in which I could say I could list favorites were among his "Holy Sonnets" which included XVII "At the round earth's imagin'd corners," the famous X "Death Be Not Proud" and XIV "Batter my heart, three perso'd God." The believing Christian may find the section of Divine Poems even more appealing, but even an unbeliever like me could appreciate their brilliance and passion as every bit as extraordinary as the love poetry. All in all, I'd rate the poetry section about four or even four and half stars in terms of how much I loved them, despite some I wasn't taken with.

But then there's Donne's prose. It was moving, or at least interesting, reading some of his letters that dealt with his marriage, and there's the famous Meditation #17 From Devotions upon Emergent Occasions with its famous "no man is an island" passage. But I have to admit, I found most of the prose works a true slog I soon was skimming. It's not that I couldn't see there was a first rate mind still at work. But in the end I'm not a believing Christian, and the bulk of his prose works--half of them in the book are sermons--deal with very esoteric and dated religious issues I just couldn't care less about--and I'm the kind of person who actually read Lewis' Mere Christianity from beginning to end and counts Dante a favorite. So unless a reader has a scholarly interest in 17th century Christian theology, I'd find it hard to believe they would find reading these prose works interesting in the same way as, for instance, Montaigne's Essays written in the century before Donne which range wider in their topics and are still relevant and accessible to the modern reader. So unless you're a Donne scholar or have a particular interest in his times, you might actually be best off seeking a book with a selection of his poetry rather than this more comprehensive collection of his works of both his poetry and prose.

[Casey · Rating 4 out of 5]

I got superduper into this poet when I was twenty. I love that some of his poems are so explicitly sexual, and others so religious. He also seems so sure about faith and redemption at one moment, and totally full of doubt the next. In this collection, you'll find a portrait of an incredibly thoughtful, passionate, and frequently conflicted man.

[Bruce · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love to read "The Good-Morrow" to Anna:

I wonder by my troth, what thou, and I
Did, till we lov'd? were we not wean'd till then?
But suck'd on countrey pleasures, childishly?
Or snorted we in the seaven sleepers den?
T'was so; But this, all pleasures fancies bee.
If ever any beauty I did see,
Which I desir'd, and got, t'was but a dreame of thee.

[Kris Hill · Rating 5 out of 5]

John Donne writes erotic poetry. I have an extreme love of old-timey sexual references so I love John Donne. His conceits are really well constructed, interesting and so fun. This is a great book for lovers to share, as long as both lovers are comfortable enough with themselves that getting turned on by a compass won't bother them.

[Gilbert Wesley Purdy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mine is the 1952 edition, therefore does not include the introduction by Denis Donoghue. The creator, for all intents and purposes, of Metaphysical Poetry. A lot of eccentric and strangely musical poetry. The "complete poetry" here is the complete English language poetry. None of the Latin poems are included.

[Colin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like Donne well enough. He's more in my style in his rakish youth, and his later conversion to a religious lifestyle and zealotry doesn't impress me as much as some, but his genius cannot be denied even in his later years.

[Matthew · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is my third attempt to plow through this book, and this time I'm throwing in the towel for good. I just don't get Donne. Maybe I need one of those critical editions where some smart person with an English degree explains everything as I go.

[Philip · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am reading this book as an anthology, and pick it up when I feel like reading some of Donne's work. I've read a lot of his writing, but not nearly all of it. He's the only author I think who approaches Shakespeare & I find myself re-reading many of my favorite poems he's written.

[Jesse Broussard · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my top ten books of all time. Magnificent.

[Brian Koser]

(I recorded which poems were my favorites with notes, but before I bought a notebook just for book notes. So instead of being in the notebook on the chair arm next to me, they are scattered through a notebook on a shelf in another room. Naturally, after spending two years reading, I refuse to spend 30 seconds fetching that notebook. Instead, I spent more than 30 seconds explaining why I'm writing this review from memory.)

A couple years ago I decided to read more poetry. I believe I started with John Donne because he was the oldest poet of which I already owned a complete volume of their poetry.

Probably not the best choice because a lot of Donne's poems were difficult for this novice. Tilyard's "The Elizabethan World Picture" helped, but I still wouldn't call it entry-level.

But I don't regret it. It was interesting to go from his early romantic poems (like "The Flea") through to his masterpieces the Holy Sonnets and past. After I finish the "Top 500 Poems" collection at the end of next year, I want to again read through an entire poet's work.

[Taylor Franson-Thiel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mostly just skimmed the poetry and skipped all the prose. It’s fine. I know he’s like one of the greats and all but I’m not madly enamored with him tbh

[Michi · Rating 3 out of 5]

A few of his poems were obligatory reading at the university - this is what I got out of it when I was done (with Donne):

A Valediction: Forbidden Mourning is a farewell poem. As a speech or a letter to say good bye it was possibly addressed to Donne’s wife. A Ptolemaic world-view is inscribed in the poem, as Donne writes about “trepidation of the spheres” and the “dull sublunary lovers’ love”, which is (unlike the love of God) unstable.

Love between man and God seems to be also a theme for sonnet 14. God’s love is here described as violent and the relationship to God paradoxical. The desire to be enslaved and overwhelmed by God is expressed as the desire for freedom:

Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me. (12-14)

How can God set us free by “enthralling” us, by taking away free will, and how can we be “chaste” when we are “ravished”? The poem also mentions God’s enemy – the devil, to whom the voice of the poem is “betrothed”. The fact that he is only betrothed and not yet married indicates that there is still hope for him left. The ravishing and enthralling god can still save him. Donne plays with these opposites very skillfully and adds great depth to his appealing language, which force can be seen best in the very first lines of the sonnet:

Batter my heart, three-personed God; for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.

Death is defeated in sonnet 10: “Death, thou shalt die”. Death is seen as a short sleep that separates us from eternal life. Once this short sleep is over, death is overcome and “we wake eternally”. The Meditation 17 also deals with the subject of death. The phrases “For whom the bell tolls” and “No man is an island” both make their first appearance in this text.

A Hymn to God the Father includes a joke that is repeated in every stanza. “When thou hast done, thou hast not done” Donne writes, punning on his own name. And in the final stanza: “And, having done that, thou hast done, I fear no more.” However, in this last stanza he goes far beyond punning, since he expresses clearly heretic thoughts and even dares to tempt God. “I have sin of feat, that when I have spun My last thread, I shall perish on the shore;” can be read as the fear to leave the grave but not getting on the boat to paradise. “Swear by thy self, that at my death thy Son Shall shine as he shines now and heretofore;” is an imperative directed at God.

[Taka · Rating 2 out of 5]

Batter my heart, religious Donne--

No, I didn't read ALL of it. I read his "Sonnets and Songs," "Elegies and Heroical Epistle," and "Holy Sonnets." I also took a look at his famous "No man is an island entirely of itself" meditation (Meditation XVII), and tried to tackle his "Death's Duel," but gave up due to a sheer lack of interest in the subject.

Reading poetry is difficult. I liked some of his sonnets, but I don't think I understood most of his poetry. I had to keep re-reading the lines and sometimes the whole sonnet multiple times to understand what he's trying to say. I'd like to think that it was worth my time just to find some poems I liked.

What kept me from NOT reading all of his poetry and prose (and thereby violating my categorical imperative) is that I'm just not interested in what he has to say, because I'm not religious and found most of his concerns irrelevant.

I believe that reading is a process of self-discovery. You read and read and read to find what you like, what you can identify with, what resonates with your self, at the same time to expand your horizon. And if a book is not engaging your mind, maybe you're wasting your time. After all, you can get through only so many books in your life, and there are just SO many of them out there. Sometimes you need to be courageous and wise enough to put down a book that might be preventing you from reading some book you will really love and would regret if you didn't read it.

I'm not saying John Donne is a waste of time for everyone. No, that would be just dumb. What I'm saying is that FOR ME, at least at this stage in my life, his works are worthless because they don't interest me, inspire me, or enrich me. Maybe I've picked it up at the wrong time. Maybe I'll find it much more engaging, inspiring, and enriching when I read it when I'm older.

But for now, I'm glad to have found some sonnets I like, and with them fermenting in my mind, I'm putting the rest of it down to continue my adventure.

[Andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

1. Loved the poetry. If poetry then was the pop music of today, no doubt Donne would be a celebrity truly worthy of decades of posthumous 'greatest hits' compilations. Moreso with the latter works.

2. The religious works... eh... he struck me as one of those fatalities of his era where Christianity, post-Renaissance ideas and an incorigsble love for archaic Roman Empire wordsmiths got caught in some real in flagrante delicto if you catch my drift. It's silly but if you want to know the mindset of a religious man of his era then you could probably do much worse.

3. The letters and other things. Some were neat and others just boring. Want to hear Donne talk sbout his gout with a companion in a letter? If so, you're way more hardcore than me. Yet, it was all readable. I was maybe more interested in his era than him, and Donne seems to speak better and with more heart than a lot of the trash from his era.

[Bria]

This ended up on my to-read list one way or another, so I thought I'd give it a shot. But without a serious investment in learning the culture and literary background of the time, and teaching myself how to read the unfamiliar style, I felt that I wasn't doing myself much of a favor slogging through it, and at my age I recognize that I would rather invest in other pursuits. But it wasn't a total loss, as at the very least I got to discover such gems as:
"Already this hot cocke, in bush and tree, in field and tent oreflutters his next hen"
"...whom Dildoes, Bedstaves, and her Velvet Glasse would be as loath to touch as Joseph was"
and of course
"But these do mee no harme, nor they which use
To out-swive Dildoes..."

So at the least I added the word "swive" to my vocabulary.

[Shanna · Rating 3 out of 5]

A hard but rewarding slog, I focused mostly songs and sonnets for my creative writing class. It's interesting the disparate interpretations we came out with, The Flea seemed blatantly obvious to me but others interpreted in a different way. Go and catch a falling star was my hands down favourite, and Holy sonnet 14 was an eye opener...

[Stephen Hull · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm marking this as read, but it's actually an ongoing project. Some utterly wonderful (and wonderfully rude) stuff in here and other bits that are rather monotonous and samey. I think that variation in quality is quite reasonable for a compilation of many things written over many years, however. Definitely worth having on your shelf.

[James Violand · Rating 4 out of 5]

I confess: I read part of this book in 2008 and put it down because it seemed so difficult. The task of reading archaic English was daunting. Then, because I must finish what I began, I revisited it two years later and found it very good. What happened in the interim? I read a lot - A LOT - more and grew to appreciate Donne's obvious talent.

[Kelly · Rating 3 out of 5]

I didn't read the entire book; I was mostly just interested in the poetry.
There's no denying that this man knew how to construct a poem, but I got a little tired of the subject matter after a bit. It seems like half of them are about "the inconstancy of woman" or how he believes that monogamy is immoral, and the other half are about religion. Not much my cup of tea.

[Tracy]

Okay, look, they don't have my copy of Donne's poetry, The Essential Donne selected by Amy Clampitt, so I chose this one --

I hope this is a good copy of his poetry. It's not immediately accessible, but it's a way to understanding how rich poetry can be, how entrancing.