John Donne - Metaphysical Poet and Destroyer of Feminine Virtue

John Donne Portrait, Artist Unknown

Writer of passionate love poetry, devotional verse and brilliant sermons, John Donne's work and life made a mockery of the conventions of his age.

Poet, John Donne, (1572-1631) had no difficulty in reconciling his two great loves, religion and womanising. Because he was equally comfortable with both, the two subjects frequently inform each other in his poetry. His love poems sometimes contain religious imagery, while the religious and spiritual poems are often steeped in sexual metaphors.

"Donne perplexes the minds of the fair sex with nice speculations of philosophy, when he should engage their hearts, and entertain them with the softness of love," claimed John Dryden.

Early Life of John Donne

Donne was born in Bread Street, London. His father was an ironmonger, his mother was the daughter of John Heywood, the dramatist. He was also related, on his mother's side, to Sir Thomas More. Sadly his father died when he was four years old and his mother married again six months' later to a Catholic physician, Dr. John Syminges.

Donne was educated at Hart Hall, Oxford, which he left in 1584 and it's believed he later attended Cambridge, but his religion prevented him from taking a degree at either university. He entered Lincoln's Inn in 1592, but shortly after he renounced his faith when his brother, Henry, was imprisoned for protecting and harbouring a Catholic priest.

It is believed Donne travelled extensively, and in 1596, he sailed with the Earl of Essex to sack Cadiz. The following year, he hunted Spanish treasure ships in the Azores with Sir Walter Raleigh. Two poems commemorate these events, "The Storm" and "The Calme". Steady employment followed, when Sir Thomas Egerton, Keeper of the Great Seal, engaged Donne as his secretary. The poet was moving up in the world, and in 1601, he became MP for Brackley, Northamptonshire.

Marriage - on the Sly

Later, that year, he married, in secret, Lady Egerton's niece, Ann More and as a result, was dismissed from his post with Egerton and thrown into prison for a brief period of time. The disgrace prevented him finding decent employment and he had to rely on his friends for his living for around fourteen years.

For a while the growing family lived in Mitcham in Surrey but in 1612, they moved to London to a house in Drury Lane. Around three years later, King James I put pressure on Donne to enter the church. This proved a good career move when he became a chaplain. Cambridge University, much to its disgust, was forced by King James I to make Donne a DD (Doctor of Divinity.) By 1621, he had become the Dean of St. Paul's, a celebrated preacher, a great poet and a highly-esteemed writer of brilliant sermons. He also continued to be a great womaniser, although by now he was a widower, his wife having died in 1617 giving birth to their twelfth child, who was stillborn.

A Poetry of Puns, Conceits, Sex and Religion

One of his most popular poems today (among others) is "The Sun Rising" with its irreverent lines: "Busy old fool, unruly sun, / Why dost thou thus, / Through windows, and through curtains call on us? / Must to thy motions lovers' season run? / Saucy pedantic wretch, go childe / Late school-boys and sour prentices." The poem is literally an impudent rant against the sun for waking up the lovers after their night of blissful sexual indulgence. "You don't need to follow all the niceties of Donne's metaphysical conceit to appreciate this poem as a glorious celebration of sexual fulfilment," says Daisy Goodwin.

Another poem, "Song" begins: "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." This poem is another rant, but of a different nature. Donne is expressing his anger at faithless women. The reference to a mandrake is a sexual one, as people truly believed that a woman could become pregnant by this strange plant with its divided root. (They also believed that a mandrake root screamed when wrenched from the ground.) In the third stanza of the poem Donne expresses the wish to find a faithful woman, and says, "If thou findst one, let me know, / Such a pilgrimage were sweet." He sees this search for faithfulness almost as a "holy" project - a pilgrimage.

(A conceit is a term that establishes a relationship between two things that are remote from each other. It is meant to surprise the reader with this bizarre, outrageous and elaborate relationship. However, conceits, although they begin in absurdity, should be seen to become appropriate.)

A Sermon Fit for a King

Little of his poetry was published in his lifetime, although his son published his Collected Poems in 1633. He wrote most of his love poetry in his youth and his religious poetry in his middle and old age. His love poetry is passionate, intellectual, energetic and indulges in punning and wordplay. His devotional verse reveals uncertainties and his struggles to suppress his doubts and achieve true faith.

After James I died on 27 March 1625, John Donne achieved the distinction of preaching his first sermon before the new king, Charles I. Following a period of ill-health including a series of debilitating infections of the mouth, Donne died on 31 March, 1631.

Sources:

• John Donne Selected Poems, Editor: Richard Gill, Oxford University Press, 1990.
• Poems to Last a Lifetime, Editor: Daisy Goodwin, Harper Collins Publishers, London, 2004.
• The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English, Editor: Ian Ousby, Cambridge University Press, 1988.
• The Oxford Companion to English Literature, Editor: Margaret Drabble, Oxford University Press, 1985.

Emily Dickinson, Poems 108 and 303

Emily Dickinson, Public Domain

Emily Dickinson, was born in Massachusetts in 1830 and by the time she was thirty years old, had withdrawn from society and lived as a recluse. She was known for her eccentricity, always dressing in white and maintaining friendships by correspondence. She found a mentor and critic, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who corresponded with her, but Higginson  believed her poetry was not good enough for publication and discouraged her. Dickinson, accepting his verdict, may have had insufficient confidence to send her poems to another critic.

Poem 108

Surgeons must be very careful
When they take the knife!
Underneath their fine incisions
Stirs the culprit - Life!

At first glance, Poem 108 seems merely an amusing comment on the responsibility of being a surgeon. The poem is a metaphor; the surgeon surely represents the patriarchy, while the culprit is the 'victim', woman, or woman-poet, whose life or creativity is in jeopardy. There is something sinister in the choice of the world 'culprit' rather than 'patient'. One might even stretch the allusion as far as the Biblical Eve and her temptation of Adam. As always, Dickinson turns traditional assumptions around, for the accusation in the poem is implicit (although blurred by humour) in mocking the so-called benefactor of powerless women whose creativity is suppressed. It's a matter of conjecture whether Dickinson was thinking of Higginson when she wrote it and whether she showed it to him. If she did, would he have recognised himself?

In the third line of the poem, the choice of the word 'fine' in 'their fine incision' is particularly powerful. 'A fine incision is much more dangerous than a blunt incision; it does more damage more quickly with little surface pain but it gets much deeper.'

Poem 303

The Soul selects her own society -
Then - shuts the Door -
To her divine Majority -
Present no more -

Dickinson's focus on the danger and pain inherent in the external world is further explored in Poem 303. The poem begins very directly: 'The Soul selects her own society - Then - shuts the Door -...' It is possible the latter line might be read differently, as a defensive statement, involving erecting a barrier against the possibility of threat.

Unmoved - she notes the Chariots - pausing -
At her low Gate -
Unmoved - an Emperor be kneeling
Upon her Mat -

This second stanza contains two lines beginning with the word 'Unmoved' as the Soul rejects what does not interest her.

I've known her - from an ample nation -
Choose One -
Then - close the Valves of her attention -
Like stone -

This is final and unyielding, contrasting, as it does, the Valves (possibly alluding to the heart) with the totality, hardness and finality of enduring Stone. The juxtaposition is powerful. The poem is, therefore, about choice and the responsibility of choosing, a responsibility that rests with the chooser, not the chosen.

'A poor role model for modern women' (Val Smith)

In 'Interview with Val Smith', 1996, the poet says: 'She is writing from the closed, domestic, interior position, which is socially gendered, not biologically gendered... It seems to me she's become a kind of icon for the woman writer, for the solitary soul who shuts herself away from society, who chooses to write and to do nothing else but to look after her own soul.'

Smith continues by comparing Dickinson unfavourably with Elizabeth Gaskell, who wrote with the door open so that she could look after her children. Of course, this willingness to assume many roles is true of modern-day women poets, who want to be in the world as a pro-active force. But, perhaps Smith is being prescriptive about women's role, for surely it is a woman's choice whether or not she has children and whether or not she chooses to shut herself away to write poetry.

Sources:
The Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson, 3 volumes, Cambridge, Mass. 1955
'Gender and Poetry', by Angus Calder and Lizbeth Goodman, Literature and Gender, The Open University, London, 1996

Percy Bysshe Shelley – The Unconventional Love-Life of one of Britain's Most-Loved Poets

Dover, (c) Janet Cameron

Romantic poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley had a short, but intense life. Shelley was a rebel and an eccentric, whose outrageous behaviour shocked society.

    

When the Dover steam packet was introduced and crossed regularly from Dover to Calais in the 1780s, it proved a great success with the aristocracy, who began writing about their travels, describing them as "Grand Tours."

Soon the Dover cutters were so highly regarded that they were patronised by bankers, politicians, merchants and lawyers, as well as a love-struck poet. Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) who had good reason to be glad of Dover's efficient port. The great poet, who is famous for such sublime poetry as "To a Skylark," was already married when he fell in love with sixteen-year-old Mary Godwin, daughter of publisher, William Godwin and women's rights champion, Mary Wollstonecroft.

Born in Horsham in Sussex, Shelley was a rebel and a rabble-rouser, intense, imaginative and unconventional. At school he was known as "Mad Shelley" or the "Eton Atheist."

Percy Shelley's First Elopement – Harriet Westbrook

Harriet was the daughter of the proprietor of a coffee-house, and when she was sixteen, she and Shelley eloped to Scotland and were married in Edinburgh in August 1811. For three years, the two young people led a nomadic existence. Their relationship was far from conventional, as apparently Shelley tried to share her with his friend T.J. Hogg. It's not too clear from literary references whether he was successful in persuading Harriet to comply.

By 1814, the marriage collapsed – which is unsurprising since Shelley disapproved of marriage, along with eating meat, religion and royalty. The couple had two children and the effect of Shelley's abandonment of them had dire effects on the whole family. Harriet became suicidal, making distressing scenes to try to get her husband to remain with her.

Ménage à Trois with Mary Godwin and Jane Clairmont

In 1814, when he was twenty-two, Shelley and Mary decided to elope. But first, Shelley invited along Mary's stepsister, Jane (Claire) Clairmont, who was just fifteen years old. The three of them made for Dover, boarding the first steam packet they could find. The carefree threesome travelled through France to Switzerland, where Shelley wrote to his wife, Harriet Westbrook, naively suggesting she should join them.

Instead, in 1816, Harriet threw herself into the Serpentine in London, leaving her unfaithful husband free to indulge his scandalous ménage à trois. His second wife, Mary Shelley, was the author of Frankenstein, and she began to write her great work in the summer of 1816, by Lake Geneva, where she spent her time with her husband and the poet, Lord Byron. Their ménage à trois continued until Percy Shelley's death in 1822 aged thirty-years.

In his essay "On Love," composed in July, 1818, Shelley says: "What is love? Ask him who lives, what is life; ask him who adores, what is God? The poet concludes: "So soon as this want or power is dead, man becomes the living sepulchre of himself, and what yet survives is the mere husk of what once he was."

Sources:

• "On Love," Percy Bysshe Shelley, Romanticism An Anthology, Ed. Duncan Wu, Blackwell, 1994.
• Oxford Companion to English Literature, Ed. Margaret Drabble, Oxford University Press, 1985.

The Mouse's Petition - Anna Laetitia Barbauld

The Mouse's Petition, Found in the TRAP where he had been confin'd all Night [by Dr. Priestley.]

Anna Barbauld calls for liberty from patriarchal restraints.

Photo: Copyright Janet Cameron

"If women tended to see differently from men, it was axiomatic in the eighteenth century that they felt differently too," says Stuart Curran in "Romantic poetry - the I altered." From this, and the rise of the woman-poet, emerged the cult of sensibility which Curran regards as "largely a female creation."  We should acknowledge, of course, that men can "feel" too, but what women needed to prove was that they, like men, could also "think." There was, at the time of Romanticism, a great divide, and a conviction that the female mind was defective. From this followed strong resistance against learned women, which hardly provides a "natural atmosphere in which intellectual development is fostered and shaped," as described in Curran's article. Sensibility, as it succeeded in becoming a cultural norm, made it easier for women to assert themselves as writers.

Sensibility Equal to Rationality

Anna Laetitia Barbauld's sad poem, The Mouse's Petition is, in fact, a fable, with many layers of meaning:

"O HEAR a pensive prisoner's prayer / For liberty that sighs; / And never let thine heart be shut / Against the wretch's cries! / For here forlorn and sad I sit, / Within the wiry grate: / And tremble at the approaching morn, / Which brings impending fate."

Stuart Curran says: "Even if addressed with youthful affection to an admired family associate, the poem is a direct assertion of the claims of feminine sensibility against male rationality."  It is a plea, even a demand, that woman should be released from the prison that is imposed upon her due to her gender. It upholds, like other female writing of that time, the assertion that sensibility is, at least, equal in value, to rationality.

"Let Nature's commoners enjoy / The common gifts of Heaven, / The well-taught philosophic mind / To all compassion gives; / Castes (sic) round the world an equal eye / and feels for all that lives."

Beware the Worm you Crush

The poems claims an interconnectedness between all the creatures of the Universe: "Beware, lest in the worm you crush, / A brother's soul you find." This, says, Curran, "... is a literature of psychological exploration, and it is the foundation on which Romanticism was reared."  It gave rise to debates among the literati and bluestockings, as to the comparative values of stoicism and sensibility. Eventually, it became a subgenre, an independent, analytical, feminist poetic tradition encompassing fine-feeling and the sharing and valuing of female experience.

The poem serves a double-purpose, by also countering the work of Dr. Joseph Priestley, a theologian with a strong interest in science and scientific experiments, see article summary. Barbauld took a similar approach to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, with dire consequences for her.

Source:

• Curran, Stuart, "Romantic Poetry, the I Altered," Romantic Writings,Routledge,1996.
• Barbauld, Anna, "The Mouse's Petition," The Poems of Anna Letitia Barbauld, Ed.W. McCarthy and E. Kraft, University of Geogia Press.

Seamus Heaney - Funeral Rites

A look at how the language in Heaney's poem contemplates the futility of violence, past and present.

Copyright Janet Cameron

This poem reveals the poet consciously seeking an answer to a modern-day problem on two distinct levels, his own remembered past and that of antiquity. It could be read as a cry for the return of traditional Catholic ritual and ceremony, eroded by modern-day life and not so greatly valued by Protestant tradition. It seems Heaney is trying to establish unity of some kind, between Catholic and Protestant belief from a much older tradition, that of stone-age religion.

Funeral Rites begins realistically and personally in the first instance, and is a memorial to Heaney's past, dead relatives. Since the poem compares the natural and consoling ritual of death in the past, it is, essentially, an historical insight, for example: "the dough-white hands / shackled in rosary beads" with the present day lack of ceremony, "the coffin lid / its nail-heads dressed / with little gleaming crosses."  The following lines: "Dear soapstone masks / kissing their igloo brows," are a reference to Eskimo culture and, also, to soapstone, which was a soft stone with a bluish tinge, used in Viking times.

The Absence of Ritual

Further allusions in Part II include: "I would restore / the great chambers of Boyne, / prepare a sepulchre."  This is a reference to stone-age tombs, and Heaney seems to be hinting that society discourages the natural human need for ritual to help to allay grief. The Vikings knew better. For Heaney, no Christian ceremony would satisfy both Catholic and Protestant, so the dead must be offered up to an older deity than Christ. He remarks on the "purring family cars" and "muffled drumming" which evokes further associations of ritual.

From Futility to Resurrection

In Part III, the poet speaks of the futility of seeking vengeance: "the cud of memory / allayed for once, arbitration / of the feud placated." The final three stanzas refer to resurrection, as Gunnar, "who lay beautiful / inside his burial mound," and eventually  "...turned / with a joyful face."  Gunnar was a mythological hero, also known as "Gunther".  Through Gunnar, the poem, manages to combine Christian and Pagan resurrection, through a portrait of a hero joyful in death, unavenged yet happy. For both Gunnar and  Heaney, there is something great, fitting and, indeed, joyful, about an honourable ending.

A touching, historical insight has been spelled out for us, and tells us that revenge achieves nothing, only an endless cycle of violence. Humankind needs to seek beauty, as Gunnar sought beauty, and not revenge.

Heaney, Seamus, "Funeral Rites" North, Faber and Faber, 1993.

With acknowledgement for several allusive, handwritten notations in my second-hand copy by an anonymous author, duly verified.

Moniza Alvi - A Poet Caught Between Two Cultures

A Sense of Isolation Informs Alvi's Work - Image copyright J Cameron

Moniza Alvi was born in Lahore, Pakistan's second largest city. She moved to England when she was a baby in 1954. She grew up in Hertfordshire and went on to study at the University of York and the University of London. Her first collection, The Country at my Shoulder was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot and Whitbread poetry prizes. She has also worked as a teacher.

Her poem, Presents from my Aunts in Pakistan from her collection Carrying My Wife, refers to her father and family of aunts who remain in Lahore. A variety of colourful presents of Pakistani clothing heightens her sense of alienation and makes the mixed race poet question her Westernisation.

'They sent me a salwar kameez / peacock-blue / and another 'glistening like an orange split open...'

The split-open orange may be a metaphor for the separation that Alvi feels from her Asian country of birth. It heightens the importance of how belonging to a specific group constitutes a basic human need, without which the psyche is fractured and bewildered. After describing the fine Pakistani clothing, whose bright colours portray a sense of the exotic and of 'otherness', she tells of her aunts' appeal:

'My aunts requested cardigans / from Marks and Spencers...'

The theme of the woman poet

 
A recurring theme throughout the tradition of women's poetry is the female poet's sense of isolation. This isolation happens for many reasons, suppression of female creativity and accusations of insanity, as well as patriarchal and social pressures. Alvi's poem decribes this feeling from her viewpoint. Specifically, she writes out of her sense of loss and from a very personal identity crisis caused by the clash of cultures. These vastly contrasting cultures, Asian and British, in opposing each other, actually present Alvi with a sense of being caught between the two and thereby belonging to neither.

Unsurprisingly, the poem has been appropriated for use in a GCSE (General Certificate of Secondary Education) Rapid Revision publication. Clearly its function is to help bridge the gap between the cultures by increasing sensitivity to the problems of people of mixed race. Perhaps the poem serves another purpose, of reader-identification, for those who are in a similar position to Alvi may find comfort in empathising with a fellow-sufferer. The most poignant aspect of the poem is the poet's apparent helplessness, for Alvi seems to have relinquished all hope of changing her situation.

It might be helpful to contemplate specific events that may have heightened Alvi's sensitivity:

'My mother cherished her jewellery - / Indian gold, dangling, filigree, / But it was stolen from our car.'

Of course, thefts must also take place in Pakistan, but the reality that her mother's jewels were stolen injects an emotional and rather hostile element into the poem. The premise seem to be that England has asserted herself and, as a result, Pakistan has been confiscated. Such painful experiences must sour expectations.

Invading male territory

In her book, Women Writing About Men, Jane Miller examines the theme of women's fear in invading men's territory. 'If women cannot justly be regarding as conspiring with men's oppression of them, they have certainly not found it easy to tackle men's determinations of them in quite the same language that men have used to colonise them. Dependence, like a colony, is maintained through fear.' Miller compares women's fear with an immigrant's fear. '[T]he disorientation of anyone who leaves the place where they were born...to enter a foreign country alone.' Possibly an element of Alvi's sense of alienation may be based on this immigrant's fear, compounded by the common fear of being a woman in a patriarchal society.

Therefore, as a woman-poet of mixed race, she suffers a double-bind. Miller says that women remain immigrants for most of their lives, leaving their mothers and entering a world of men whom they must trust yet distrust. If they must also overcome a sense of alienation from a cultural split at the roots of their existence, it is little wonder that they write of their confusion, caught as they are, between the two cultures. Moniza Alvi, detached from both Pakistan, her country of birth, and her current home in England, on receiving presents of colourful, luxurious Asian clothing, writes:

'I longed / for denim and corduroy / My costume clung to me / and I was aflame / I couldn't rise up out of its fire / half-English...'

Perhaps such uncomfortable differences can be more easily overcome when cultures overlap, or share, at least, some common customs. :

Sources:

The Country at my Shoulder, Moniza Alvi, Oxford Univesity Press, Oxford, 1993

Carrying My Wife, Moniza Alvi, Bloodaxe, Northumberland, 2000

GCSE Rapid Revision, English, Mike Royston, published for W.H. Smith by Nelson Thornes Ltd., Cheltenham, 2000

Women Writing About Men, Jane Miller, Virago Press Ltd., London, 1986

Copyright Janet Cameron

7 Ways of Looking at 15 Minutes

I was angry when I wrote this poem, which was published in Acumen No. 54, January 2006.

The title is a play on Wallace Stevens' "7 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird", while the 15 minutes of fame is now a cliche, for which I do not apologise. It works in my title.

If there is a strong element of cynicism, well, yes, you are absolutely right!

Oh, and lovely Mrs. McDowell (Noni) is on the extreme left of this picture.


7 Ways of Looking at 15 Minutes
by Janet Cameron

The author would like to thank
her family - and Mrs. McDowell who actually read her book.

Her agent
who spoke for more than sixty seconds
on the telephone
and signed a card
"With much love."

The author would like to stick a
Long Pin
in the heart of the academic
who remarked, "Oh well, nowadays
they publish
such rubbish.

And the "friend" who asked how much it cost her!

Figments and fragments -
the seeds that gave birth to the composite children
of her imagination,
whom she grew to love.

And her muse,
so insistent, she can't wait
to start her fiction

that lush green field planted
on her side of the fence
where she is producer, director and absolute boss
and can be as
Bloody-Minded as she pleases.