http://hubpages.com/hub/For-Whom-the-Bell-Tolls-Human-Mortality-in-the-Poetry-and-Theology-of-John-Donne-Part-2
In April 1602, Donne was released from prison. He was thirty years old. He and Anne went to live with her cousin, Francis Wooley. For the next few years, Donne had irregular work and little income. It was a time of struggle and change. In 1603, Queen Elizabeth I died and was succeeded by King James I. That same year there was a deadly outbreak of the plague. Donne and his wife survived and Anne gave birth to their first child, a daughter, Constance. In 1604, she gave birth to their second child, a son, John. Their third child, George, was born in 1605. However, as Donne and his family were forced to live off the gifts of friends and relatives, he became increasingly depressed by the inability to resume his professional career.
During those years, the despair experienced by Donne was reflected in the plays of Shakespeare such as Hamlet (1601), Othello (1604), King Lear (1605) andMacbeth (1606). In Donne's awareness of life's troubles, he could easily have identified with the words of Macbeth:
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.[ii]
In 1606 Donne began to assist Thomas Morton, a royal chaplain involved in controversies with Roman Catholics. Morton urged Donne to become ordained as an Anglican priest. Yet Donne persisted in efforts to attain social and professional success. His friends John Egerton, Edward Herbert, Henry Goodyer, FrancisWolley and Henry Wotton had been knighted. Donne was not so fortunate. In 1607, Donne's fourth child, a son, Francis, was born. Donne sought employment in the household of Queen Anne, but without success. In 1608, his fifth child, Lucy was born, and he sought appointment as secretary to Ireland, but was rejected. In 1609, his sixth child, Bridget, was born, and he failed to obtain appointment as secretary to Virginia.
In 1610, conditions began to improve for Donne. He published Pseudo-Martyr, a work in which he argued that Jesuits who sought to be arrested were not true Christian martyrs and that English Catholics should take the oath of allegiance to the King. This treatise won him favor with King James I. As a result, he was awarded an honorary Master of Arts degree from Oxford. He also became associated with patrons such as Mrs. Magdalen Herbert; Lucy Harrington, Countess of Bedford; and Sir Robert Drury, who hired him as his secretary.
The following year, Donne's seventh child Mary was born, and he publishedIgnatius His Conclave, a satire of the Jesuits. He also published a long poem entitled "Anatomy of the World," later called "The First Anniversarie." The subject of this poem was Sir Robert Drury's fourteen year old daughter, Elizabeth, who had died one year before. In November, Donne accompanied Sir Robert and Lady Drury on a trip to France, Germany and Belgium. They would not return to England until December of the next year. During their trip, Donne's wife went into labor with their eighth child, but it was stillborn. When Donne returned to England, he and his family moved into a house on the Drury estate. He republished "Anatomy of the World" as "The First Anniversarie" and combined it with another poem in honor of the deceased Elizabeth, "Of the Progresse of the Soule" or "The Second Anniversarie." In addition to these two commemorative poems, Donne wrote many elegies in honor of individuals who had died. In these he often describes death as an ever present threat to human beings. In a passage from his "Elegie on Lady Marckham," cousin to the Countess of Bedford, Donne wrote:
Man is the World, and death th' Ocean,
To which God gives the lower parts of man.
This Sea invirons all, and though as yet
God hath set markes, and bounds, twixt us and it,
Yet doth it rore, and gnaw, and still pretend,
And breaks our bankes, when ere it takes a friend.[iv]
The next year, 1613, Donne's wife gave birth to a ninth child, Nicholas. Donne and his family were all ill for months and this youngest child died in August. In 1614, Donne served as a member of Parliament while continuing to work for Sir Drury. He also applied for the position of ambassador to Venice, which he did not receive. That year brought tragedy with the death in May of his three year old daughter, Mary, and the death in November of his seven year old son, Francis.
Donne began considering entering the Anglican priesthood. This was something which friends and even King James I had encouraged him to do. To assist in preparing for taking holy orders, Donne wrote and published his Essays in Divinity, an exposition of the first verses of the biblical books of Genesis and Exodus. On January 23, 1615, the forty-two year old John Donne was appointed deacon and priest in the Church of England at Saint Paul's Cathedral. Within a few months he was made personal chaplain to King James I and granted an honorary Doctorate of Divinity from Cambridge. That same year, his wife gave birth to their tenth child, Margaret. The next year she gave birth to their eleventh child, Elizabeth. In October of 1616, Donne was appointed Reader in Divinity at Lincoln's Inn, a position which required him to preach almost every Sunday for the next six years. Immediately, Donne became the most popular preacher in England.
In 1617, Donne again faced death close at hand. First, his four year old son, Nicholas, died. Then, on August 10, a tweflth child was delivered stillborn. On August 15, his beloved wife Anne died. She was only thirty-one years old. They had been married sixteen years.
To most people today, Donne is known primarily for his love poems. It is not possible to know how many of his poems were written for or about his wife Anne. But the love which they shared appears to have been the kind of love described in those poems. One of the themes that occurs in those poems is the belief that true love is able to transcend death.[v]
The imagery of mortality occurs frequently in Donne's love poems. At times, he describes the parting of lovers or the end of love as death. In "The Legacy," he tells his lover, "I dye as often as from thee I goe."[vi] In the poem "His Parting from Her," he says:
Since she must go, and I must mourn, come night,
Environ me with darkness, whilst I write:
Shadow that hell unto me, which alone
I am to suffer when my love is gone.[vii]
Yet Donne declares that love is able to transcend death. In his poem "The Good-Morrow," he says to his lover: "If our two loves be one, or, thou and I Love so alike, that none do slacken, none can die."[viii] For Donne, the love which lovers share keeps them bound together even when they are apart and keeps them alive even in death. In his poem "Song," he writes: "They who one another keepe Alive, ne'r parted be."[ix] In "A Valediction Forbidding Mourning," Donne tells his lover that even though separation is like death, their true love unites them together in a bond that cannot be broken.[x] And in his poem "The Anniversarie," he says to his lover:
All other things, to their destruction draw,
Only our love hath no decay;
This, no to morrow hath, nor yesterday,
Running it never runs from us away,
But truly keepes his first, last, everlasting day.[xi]
In a world where death was so familiar, Donne saw love as a way to transcend the limitations and inevitability of human mortality. Such love involved both sexual intimacy and spiritual union.[xii] The intensity and outward expressions of such love anticipated the inevitability of physical death. Thus, Donne wrote of being buried with a wreath of his lover's hair around his wrist, and her picture in his heart.[xiii]
Donne experienced this love most fully in his marriage to Anne. Perhaps it was of her illness that wrote his poem "A Feaver," in which he says: "Oh doe not die, for I shall hate All women so, when thou art gone."[xiv] Probably it was regarding her that he wrote "The Dissolution," saying: "Shee'is dead; And all which die To their first Elements resolve; And wee were mutuall Elements to us, And made of one another."[xv] When Anne died, Donne was forty-five years old. He never remarried.
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[i] For Donne's writings, I have used primarily Essays in Divinity, ed. Evelyn M. Simpson, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952); Sermons, ed. George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson, 10 vols. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1953-1962); Selected Prose, ed. Helen Gardner and Timothy Healy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967); Biathanatos, ed. Ernest W. Sullivan (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1984); The Complete English Poems, ed. C. A. Patrides, Everyman's Library (New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991); The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose, ed. Charles M. Coffin, The Modern Library (New York, NY: Random House, 1994). For Donne's life, I have relied on R. C. Bald, John Donne: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970) and John Carey,John Donne: Life, Mind and Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981).
[ii] Macbeth, act 5, scene 5.
[iii] For an excellent study of Donne's desire for death, see: Donald R. Roberts, "The Death Wish of John Donne," Publications of the Modern Language Association 62 (1947) 958-976.
[iv] "Elegie on the Lady Marckham," Epicedes and Obsequies, The Complete English Poems 378-380.
[v] M. Thomas Hester, ed., John Donne's "desire of more": The Subject of Anne More Donne in His Poetry (Newark, DE: University of Deleware Press, 1996).
[vi] "The Legacie," Songs and Sonets, The Complete English Poems 63.
[vii] "His Parting from Her," Elegies, The Complete English Poems 161.
[viii] "The Good-Morrow," Songs and Sonets, The Complete English Poems 48-49.
[ix] "Song," Songs and Sonets, The Complete English Poems 62-63.
[x] "A Valediction Forbidding Mourning," Songs and Sonets, The Complete English Poems 97-98.
[xi] "The Anniversarie," Songs and Sonets, The Complete English Poems 68-69.
[xii] See Donne's poems: "The Undertaking," "The Sunne Rising," "The Canonization," "Lovers Infinitenesse," "Aire and Angels," "Communitie," "Loves Growth," "Loves Exchange," "The Baite," and "The Extasie."
[xiii] See Donne's poems: "The Dampe," "The Funerall," and "The Relique."
[xiv] "A Feaver," Songs and Sonets, The Complete English Poems 64-66.
[xv] "The Dissolution," Songs and Sonets, The Complete English Poems 114-115.
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