Life, Mind and Art
E-Book, Englisch, 532 Seiten
ISBN: 978-0-571-28078-0
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
John Carey is an Emeritus Professor at Oxford University. His books include studies of Donne, Dickens and Thackeray, The Intellectuals and the Masses, What Good Are theArts? and a life of William Golding.
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Introduction
Donne’s contemporaries recognized him as a totally original and matchless poet. He was ‘Copernicus in Poetrie’: greater than Virgil, Lucan and Tasso put together.1 Even embittered traditionalists, who found Donne upsetting, acknowledged his revolutionary impetus. William Drummond, the Scots poet, evidently had Donne in mind when he complained about ‘transformers of everything’ who had destroyed the Ornaments’ of poetry and replaced them with ‘metaphysical ideas’.2 Donne’s uniqueness has, it’s true, been sometimes questioned. Dr. Johnson alleged that he had borrowed from Marino, and some modern critics, improving on this hint, have striven to confuse his poetry with baroque architecture, mannerist painting, gongorismo, preciosité, Euphuism, and other late-Renaissance developments. Such theories depend for their credibility on vagueness and muddle, and they quickly evaporate under analysis. Marino’s poetry, for instance, examined alongside Donne’s, has been shown to differ from it in every important respect.3 But if, like his contemporaries, we accept that Donne was unique, we still need to explore, before we can understand him, the structure of his imagination and see what makes it individual. That is the aim of this book. It will not do to ignore Donne’s limitations, for they are part of his peculiar excellence. Ben Jonson thought him ‘the first poet in the World in some things’,4 and the things he is by no means first in have often been accusingly listed. His poems lack colour and music. We don’t go to him for flowers, pastoral, myth, warm humour or serene joy. He is not tranquil and sustaining like, say, Matthew Arnold, nor does he love the English countryside. He complained, on the contrary, of its ‘barbarousness and insipid dulness’.5 These shortcomings, together with the suspicion that his love poetry would have embarrassed Juliet or Perdita, have earned him the disapproval of C. S. Lewis,6 among others. In some respects, Donne isn’t a love poet at all. The physical characteristics of the girl he’s supposed to be talking to don’t concern him. Nor does her personality: it is completely obliterated by Donne’s. He doesn’t even seem to feel sexually excited. As sensualists the Victorian poets far outclass him. Take Browning, for instance: There you stand, Warm too, and white too: would this wine Had washed all over that body of yours Ere I drank it.7 Donne never rises to single-minded lust like that, though other poets in his day managed it. Barnabe Barnes wished he could turn into the wine trickling down his girl’s throat.8 Campion jocularly retorted that he’d come out at the other end as her urine,9 but as Barnes’s poem shows he’d already thought of that, and found it a ravishingly intimate prospect. He makes us feel, like Browning, what it means to ache for female flesh. Donne does not. The unusualness of Donne’s poetry was quite apparent to Donne. He admitted he was Startling’,10 but stuck defiantly to his own rhythms and perspectives.’ I sing not, Siren-like, to tempt; for I/ Am harsh’,11 he informed his friend Samuel Brooke. He took a disdainful view of what other poets were doing, criticizing their hackneyed nature imagery in a verse letter to the Countess of Salisbury. Their metaphors, he reports, have made the very sun stale: … his disshevel’d beames and scatter’d fires Serve but for Ladies Periwigs and Tyres In lovers Sonnets.12 Typically, Donne renovates the tired poeticism even as he throws it aside. His word ‘disshevel’d’ creates a confusion of fiery tresses, and it was three centuries before Yeats awakened the image again with his ‘dishevelled wandering stars’.13 Surveying current literature, Donne evidently felt, too, that the Elizabethan fashion for chivalric romance, which engendered Spenser’s Faerie Queene, was absurd. In his ‘Essay of Valour’ he makes comic capital out of an imaginary era ‘before this age of wit’ when there was no known way of winning a lady ‘but by Tylting, Turnying, and riding through Forrests’.14 In tracing the distinctive structure of Donne’s imagination, I shall use the sermons and other prose works as well as the poems. It’s often assumed that early and late Donne, poet and preacher, were different people. Donne, as he grew older, wanted to believe this, and talked as if he did, which is how the illusion got about. Sending Biathanatos to Sir Robert Ker, for instance, he stressed that it was ‘Jack Donne’ not ‘Dr. Donne’ who wrote it.15 But there weren’t two people. The more we read the poems and sermons the more we can see them as fabrics of the same mind, controlled by similar imaginative needs. That’s not to deny that Donne changed. At the level of opinions and social attitudes he clearly changed a great deal. He grew repressive, as people generally do with age and success. ‘Lascivious discourses’ and satires, such as he had written when young, were, he came to believe, instruments of the devil.16 The poet of ‘Going to Bed’, having entered the pulpit, became a devout advocate of virginity. Sexual intercourse, even in marriage, is, he admonishes, gravely suspect.17 The poet of Satire III, who had pleaded the individual’s need and right to search for the true religion irrespective of kings and governments, insists after taking orders that every subject must remain in the church in which he has been baptized, and that kings and governments are perfectly justified in compelling him to do so by ‘pecuniary and bloudy Laws’.18 But to express this new opinion Donne, significantly enough, uses the image he had used to express its contrary. Satire III imagines Truth standing eminent ‘On a huge hill’,19 and in a sermon of 1622 Donne maintains that the Church of England stands on ‘such a Hill, as may be seene every where’.20 The implications Donne draws from his two hills are contradictory. In the satire he argued that, since Truth was on a hill, it was necessary to take a circuitous route, investigating the claims of different churches, before reaching it. In the sermon his point is that the true church’s hill site allows it to be seen unmistakably from all sides, so there is no need to investigate the claims of different churches. Donne’s argument is a reversible coating, but the imaginative kernel remains constant: the simplified, surreal landscape, void except for one looming feature. This landscape is recurrent in Donne. Its starkest appearance comes in that weirdly lit nightmare which the waking girl describes to her nurse in ‘On his Mistris’: oh, oh, Nurse, oh my love is slaine; I saw him goe Ore the white Alpes, alone.21 If, reading Donne, we watch the shaping imagination instead of the transient opinions, we shall find this appearance of the same lonely crag in different settings quite unsurprising. His grasp of the world did not basically change, so his master-images had to be adapted to meet the new subject matter which his career threw in their way. In ‘Loves Progress’, for instance, Donne is a celestial sphere floating up the ‘empty and etheriall way’ between a girl’s legs. In ‘Goodfriday, 1613. Riding Westward’ he is a sphere again, but his orbit takes him past Christ on the cross.22 Sphere-motion—superior, mathematical and angelic—satisfied some of his deepest apprehensions, so he found pretexts for writing about it whatever his topic. The same goes for gold and wombs, which he could seldom stop thinking about for long. ‘Loves Progress’ depicts the womb and ‘Centrique part’ of the girl whom Donne is about to delve into as a gold mine.23 A sermon of 1624 shows the Almighty taking the girl’s place. ‘Centricall Gold, viscerall Gold, gremiall Gold’, Donne informs his congregation, is ‘in the Matrice and womb of God’.24 The same sermon makes God into the ‘Eastern Hemispheare’ of spices as well as the ‘Western Hemispheare’ of gold—‘both the India’s of spice and Myne’,25 in fact, as Donne’s sweet golden girl had been in ‘The Sunne Rising’. The bringing together of east and west—an idea Donne endlessly nags at—is, we see, like mountains, spheres, gold and wombs, adaptable to God or girls indiscriminately. Perhaps it was awareness of this imaginative continuity in himself which made Donne notice it in others. He observes in an early sermon how the prophets and other biblical writers have retained the metaphors and turns of phrase appropriate to their worldly jobs.26 When he preaches, phrases from his love poems keep escaping from him. The ‘midnights startings’ of the nightmare-shocked girl reappear as the ‘midnight startlings’ of the atheist in God’s presence. The ‘rags of time’ from ‘The Sunne Rising’ turn up in contrast with God’s eternity. The transplanted flower which...
