Burton and the news of the world
Burton says that every day we hear fresh news: the usual rumors of wars, plagues, fires, floods, thefts, murders, massacres, meteors and comets, prodigies and apparitions, towns taken and besieged in France, Germany, Turkey, Persia and Poland, the daily levying of soldiers, battles, wrecked ships, piracy, sea fights, peace treaties, alliances, stratagems and fresh alarms. Besides, there are vows, wishes, lawsuits, decrees, petitions, complaints, laws, proclamations, opinions, schisms, heresies, weddings, masquerades, feasts, celebrations and funerals.
Burton feels that if one heard the news of a single day, it would serve for the whole year, since only the names and dates change. He doubts that mankind progresses. He says he will build an imaginary world of his own where he may command freely, and then describes it in detail from his own fancy. In truth he prefers study in his corner, or beside the Thames, to reforming humanity. Meanwhile he quotes pleasant passages from every writer in the world. Overwhelmed by his own quotations, he sinks back into gloom, and after blackening 114 pages of small print he resolves to grapple with the causes of melancholy. These he lists as sin, lust, intemperance in food and drink, devils, witches, the stars, constipation and excess of appetite, with symptoms such as wind, belching and troubled dreams. After wandering from his subject some two hundred times, he prescribes cures: prayer, abstinence, medicines, purges, diuretics, fresh air, exercise, games, plays, music, good company, wine, sleep, bloodletting and baths. Then he strays again, so that each page brings both despair and delight.
The metaphysical poets
In poetry the sonneteers withdrew and the metaphysical poets came forward: Richard Crashaw, Abraham Cowley, John Donne, and George Herbert, who wrote with a special beauty of the peace and holiness of an Anglican parson's household. Samuel Johnson called them metaphysical because they leaned toward philosophy and argument. Generally, though, the name stuck because they borrowed a manner from Lyly, Gongora or the poets of the Pleiade, a manner full of fresh conceits and ideas, witticisms, intricacies, classical allusions, and obscure and difficult matter. Yet these inventions did not stop Donne from becoming the best poet of his age.
Donne's early life
Like Jonson and Chapman, Donne lived through three reigns. Under Elizabeth he wrote of love, under James of piety, and under Charles of death. Raised a Catholic as a child, taught by Jesuit priests, and educated at Oxford and Cambridge, he knew the bitterness of persecution and concealment. His brother Henry was arrested for hiding a banished priest and died in prison. At times John eased his depression by reading St. Teresa and Luis de Granada. But by 1592 his proud young mind had rejected the marvels of his faith, and the third decade of his life went to military adventure, love affairs and the philosophy of doubt.
For a time his poetic gift went to frank poems about love, in which he praised variety, as it were, and mocked constancy. He even blended love with natural history, claiming that a flea that had bitten him and his sweetheart had mingled their blood, so that they were joined in it. Then, tired of the surface of things, he turned harshly on the fickleness of women, forgot their beauty, and thought only of the tricks they had learned in a hard world. He advised the reader to choose a simple wife, since love built on beauty dies when the beauty goes. He then wrote a poetic will, in which every stanza deals a blow to love.
In 1596 Donne sailed with Essex and took part in the attack on Cadiz, and again with him to the Azores (1597). On his return to England he became secretary to Sir Thomas Egerton, the Lord Keeper of the Seal. But he ran off with the niece of Egerton's wife, Anne More, and married her (1600, the book's date), and tried to support himself by poetry. Rhymes came easily, and so did children, and he often could not feed and clothe them. His wife's health suffered under the strain.
Afterward he showed regret for his act; Egerton sent money for the family (the book's date, 1680, is clearly a slip), and in 1610 Sir Robert Drury gave him some rooms in his house in Drury Lane. The next year Sir Robert lost his only daughter, and Donne wrote his first great poem, An Anatomy of the World, as an elegy for her, publishing it unsigned. In it he made her death stand for the decay of mankind and the world itself. Thus the world is revealed from its first hour; the new philosophy calls everything in doubt; the element of fire is quite put out; the sun and earth are lost, and no man can say where to look for the earth; men freely confess that this world is spent; when they see new worlds in the planets and the heavens, they perceive that these too crumble; all is in pieces, all coherence gone, all just supply and all relation.
Donne grieved that the world, once the center of divine mercy, was now lame and dumb and in the new astronomy only a suburb of the universe. In one mood he praised the love of learning; in another he feared that science would destroy mankind, since we fight new diseases within us and with the new physic we hold deadlier weapons.
From doubt to the pulpit
That is why Donne turned to religion. His repeated illnesses and the successive deaths of friends, an ominous sign, filled him with fear of God. Though his reason still rejected theology, he also trusted reason and counted it a kind of religion. So he decided to accept the old faith without question, perhaps to bring peace to his soul and bread to his table. In 1615 he became an Anglican priest, preaching in stirring and dignified language and writing the most moving religious poems in English. In 1616 he was made chaplain to James I, and in 1621 Dean of St. Paul's. Donne never published his youthful love poems but had let copies circulate in manuscript. Now, according to Ben Jonson, he deeply regretted this and wished to destroy them all. Instead he wrote the Holy Sonnets and challenged death itself: Death, be not proud, though some have called thee mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so; those whom thou thinkest thou dost overthrow die not, poor Death, nor canst thou kill me. When our brief sleep is past we wake eternally, and death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.
In 1623, recovering from a severe illness, he wrote in his devotions the famous lines that every man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee. On the first Friday of Lent in 1631, Donne rose from his sickbed to preach the sermon that was afterward counted his own funeral oration. His attendants, seeing nothing but skin and bone, tried to stop him, but he would not be moved. After that eloquent sermon, which spoke of his trust in the Resurrection, he hurried home, content that God had let him do his chosen duty, and he never came out again. Pious men carried him to the grave. He died on 31 March 1631, in the arms of his mother, who had borne his sins with patience and listened to his sermons with kindness.
A modern medievalist
His life, full of activity and passion, had known lust, love, doubt and corruption, and in the end Donne returned to the warm embrace of the old religion. Those of us who grow weary of reading Spenser are startled by nearly every page of this realistic and passionate man, who was modern and yet bound to the Middle Ages.
His verses are rough and unmusical, but he meant them to be. He disliked the artificial beauties of Elizabethan speech and preferred unusual words and striking meters. He wanted to turn harsh and jarring sounds into unusual harmonies. Once he had escaped melancholy, his poetry held nothing banal, and he, with a refined frankness like Catullus's, grew so delicate of mind and so deep in sight, and so skilled in handling words and rare moods, that no poet except Shakespeare could rival him in that marvelous age.