Donne sends the reader on a life-long pilgrimage to find a beautiful, honest woman who, once discovered, will quickly turn dishonest. His point is that "nowhere lives a woman true and fair," as beauty and truth in females do not co-exist. He reinforces this idea with the elegy "Jealousy," a poem about the death of jealousy in a wife when, her husband dead, she finds another man.
Donne's works also include songs to commemorate marriages, such as "Epithalamion Made at Lincoln's Inn," epigrams such as "Pyramus and Thisbe," satirical works, Latin translations and, most tellingly, poems he called "divine and holy sonnets" such as "Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions.
He has taught English at the level for more than 20 years. English philosopher John Locke's works lie at the foundation of modern philosophical empiricism and political liberalism. British serial killer John Christie murdered at least six women, including his wife, before being arrested and hanged in Mathematician John Venn developed George Boole's symbolic logic and is best known for Venn diagrams, which pictorially represent the relations between sets.
John Stuart Mill, who has been called the most influential English-speaking philosopher of the 19th century, was a British philosopher, economist, and moral and political theorist. Educator John Dewey originated the experimentalism philosophy. Chemist John Dalton is credited with pioneering modern atomic theory. He was also the first to study color blindness. John Donne, leading English poet of the Metaphysical school, is often considered the greatest loved poet in the English language.
Olivia Rodrigo —. The embassy travelled from Calais to Antwerp, Brussels, and then Mariemont, where they met the archduke. After this they went on to Heidelberg to meet Frederick , the elector palatine, and Princess Elizabeth James I's son-in-law and daughter , before whom Donne preached a sermon.
Doncaster then proceeded to meetings with allies of the emperor, travelling to Ulm, Augsburg, and Munich, where he met the duke of Bavaria. In Salzburg he met Ferdinand himself, and attempted to put the case for treating with the Bohemians, but to little avail.
The imperial elections took place at Frankfurt, and Doncaster and many of his party were present, though when he saw that his diplomacy was having no effect he moved on to the Spa, with Donne in attendance. Meanwhile, Frederick was chosen as king of Bohemia and Ferdinand as emperor. In the final stages of his mission, Doncaster pursued the new emperor to Graz, where he was granted an audience, and then set off on his return journey, again having failed to sway Ferdinand towards peace.
The embassy travelled to The Hague, where Donne preached, and was given a medal commemorating the Synod of Dort: this gift could be seen as acknowledging his status as a moderate and sympathetic member of the European protestant movement. Finally, the party reached London on 1 January James's ambitions as peacebroker had been disappointed, and Donne and his companions had experienced the frustration of seeing their embassy exploited as a delaying tactic by the emperor while the protestant forces suffered and remained unassisted by the English.
He was actively seeking promotion, however, and it is known that twice in —21 his hopes were frustrated. Late in August , though, the bishop of Exeter died, and was succeeded by Valentine Cary , dean of St Paul's: it was decided that Donne would take Cary's place, and he was formally elected and installed on 22 November.
Donne resigned from his living at Keyston in October , and also from his readership at Lincoln's Inn though it is first recorded only in early As a parting gift to the inn he donated the six-volume edition of the Vulgate with Nicholas de Lyre's commentary.
Information on Donne's deanship is scarce; the act-books of the chapter for his incumbency do not survive and recent researches have failed to uncover more material. On being appointed Donne moved his residence to the deanery of St Paul's and, according to Walton , ' immediately after he came to his Deanry, he employed work-men to repair and beautify the Chapel ' Walton , As dean, Donne's preaching duties were not onerous: he was obliged only to preach on Christmas day, Easter day, and Whit Sunday.
But he certainly did more than this bare minimum, and a number of sermons on other occasions survive. Nor did he preach only in the cathedral. In February Donne was appointed to the living of Blunham in Bedfordshire, in the gift of the earl of Kent , and it seems that he spent time there each summer, as had been his custom with his other livings. Moreover, he continued to preach at court, and elsewhere. In August he preached before Doncaster , the earl of Northumberland Doncaster's father-in-law , and the duke of Buckingham at Hanworth, and later that year he was chosen to deliver a sermon on a highly sensitive political occasion.
During the protestant forces had been suffering defeats in Germany, and at the same time the negotiations for a Spanish marriage for Prince Charles were progressing; there was a degree of popular unrest, and James's policies were being criticized from the pulpits.
On 4 August the king issued directions to preachers, severely restricting the subjects, political and doctrinal, that could be treated by ordinary clergy, and ordered Donne to justify the directions in a sermon at Paul's Cross on 15 September. The sermon is a consummate example of orderly preaching which also has the ability to offer implicit counsel, but it received mixed reactions when it was delivered: Chamberlain suspected that Donne was not committed to his task Letters of John Chamberlain , 2.
It was quickly published with a dedication to Buckingham , the first of Donne's sermons to appear in print. This was the first of several important public sermons Donne delivered in autumn He preached the annual Gunpowder Plot sermon at St Paul's on 5 November, and James demanded to see it—though this time it was not printed. Just over a week later, on 13 November, he preached to the Virginia Company of which he had been made an honorary member on 22 May and an honorary member of the council on 3 July , at St Michael Cornhill.
This sermon was printed, and was dedicated to the company. The next of Donne's sermons to be printed was preached and published in , on the occasion of the consecration of the new chapel at Lincoln's Inn.
Delivered on Ascension day, it was printed with the title Encaenia. As in his defence of the directions to preachers, in this sermon Donne characteristically engages with discretion in a highly controversial subject. Not only the issue of outward displays of worship addressed by Donne in his dedicatory epistle to the masters of the bench , but also the more specific question of what the function of consecration was in a reformed church, are discussed with a polemical force that derives precisely from Donne's choice of a moderate and moderating voice.
In October Donne preached at the law serjeants' feast, although this sermon does not survive. However, the occasion is a reminder that during his time as dean Donne also had occasion to use his legal training.
He served as a justice of the peace in Kent and Bedford, and he was appointed thirteen times to hear appeals from lower ecclesiastical courts and sit in the court of delegates. During Donne was engaged in negotiations for the marriage of his daughter Constance to the former actor and founder of Dulwich College, Edward Alleyn ; the wedding took place on 3 December. During this winter, however, Donne was seriously ill with what seems to have been a combination of ' relapsing fever ' with the less grave ' rewme ' Donne , Devotions , xiii—xvii.
This illness he used as the foundation of the Devotions upon Emergent Occasions , printed in early it was entered in the Stationers' register on 9 January and dedicated to Prince Charles. The book, organized into a series of twenty-three meditations, expostulations, and prayers, follows the progress of the illness through Donne's body as he observes himself and considers himself as a type of mankind.
It is striking in its dogged pursuit of the possible meanings, spiritual and physical, of the symptoms Donne observes as he works away at the questions of the relation between internal and external, the corporeal and the intellectual, the human and the divine.
In March Donne was appointed to the living of St Dunstan-in-the-West, whose incumbent had recently died and which was in the gift of the earl of Dorset. The parish was in the centre of the legal district as well as being surrounded by stationers' shops, and Donne's congregation there must have contained many lawyers, judges, and printers as well as other citizens.
As with his personal chapel at the deanery of St Paul's, Donne initiated renovations at St Dunstan's soon after his appointment.
In Donne composed the only poem that can be dated with certainty from this period of his life—and it may well have been his last. The same year saw the death of James I on 27 March and the accession of Charles I : Donne preached the first sermon before the new king, on 3 April, and a sermon before the body of James on 26 April.
He was ill once more, and was forced to leave London because of the plague that swept the city from the summer; staying in Chelsea with Sir John and Lady Danvers until December, he made use of his temporary exile by writing out many of his sermons—he refers to having completed eighty in a letter to Sir Thomas Roe of 25 November Bald , After the plague was over, Charles was crowned in and called his first parliament.
Convocation also met, and Donne was chosen prolocutor. He preached the annual Lent sermon at court, and at Charles's suggestion it was printed, with a dedication to the king. Donne clearly retained the royal favour he had enjoyed under James. The following year his royal favour slipped briefly, as the king—via William Laud —demanded to see a copy of the sermon Donne had preached at court on 1 April.
It appears that they suspected him of joining with Archbishop Abbot's criticism of James Montagu and Robert Sibthorpe , who had recently preached sermons in support of Laud's ceremonial innovations. Donne would thus, by extension, be criticizing Laud himself. The sermon was scrutinized, and Donne was cleared. He preached the latter's funeral sermon, and it was subsequently printed. Little detailed information is available about Donne's activities during the final years of his life, aside from his attendance at various meetings for instance, the vestry meetings at St Dunstan's and the meetings of the governors of the Charterhouse , his presence as judge or signatory in legal cases, and his preaching of several datable sermons at Paul's Cross, St Paul's, and the court.
It is known that he continued to suffer from ill health: from August he was unwell with a quinsy, and he seems to have been frequently ill with fever during —possibly a symptom of the stomach cancer that eventually killed him.
Had he lived, Donne would almost certainly have been appointed to a bishopric: by summer he was listed as a candidate for a see whenever a vacancy should open. However, his health was failing, and when his daughter Constance remarried in June Alleyn had died in , he went to stay with her at Aldborough Hatch in Essex and remained there until early His mother, who had been living with him at the deanery, and who had accompanied him to Aldborough Hatch, died in January Donne had already made his will, on 13 December , and he would only live for another three months.
Donne returned to London, scotching rumours of his death, and on 25 February he preached his final sermon, at Whitehall. This is an extended meditation on mortality and resurrection, later printed as Deaths Duell it was entered in the Stationers' register on 30 September ; according to Walton many of his auditors at the time said ' that Dr.
Donne had preach't his own Funeral Sermon ' Walton , Donne spent the time remaining to him preparing for death, practically and spiritually. He dealt with the final remaining cathedral business, he posed in his shroud for a monument the sculpture by Nicholas Stone , funded by Donne's doctor Simeon Fox , remains in St Paul's today, and the sketch for this was also the model for the engraving by Martin Droeshout on the frontispiece of Deaths Duell , and he bade farewell to his friends.
He died at the deanery on 31 March, and Walton gives an affecting portrayal of his end Walton , 81—2. He was buried, on 3 April, in St Paul's, and the Latin epitaph on his monument may well have been written by Donne himself. Among those who survived him was his son John Donne the younger , author and literary executor.
One hundred and sixty of Donne's sermons survive, and they demand reading and study not just as the major productions of his maturity but also as intricate and beautiful pieces of prose.
Donne's religious stance has been much debated from his lifetime on, and the sermons demonstrate that while he continued the controversial interests of his early polemical works, his concern during his ministry was most often to seek edification—of his auditors and of the English church—and, while criticizing those whom he regarded as sectarians, both puritan and Roman Catholic, to find some form of accommodation with elements of both.
As Donne preaches to congregations ranging from the inhabitants of Blunham to the members of the courts of James I and Charles I , he can be seen to be mapping out a middle way that offers at the same time a strong vision of a church still seeking identity and a voice with which its ministers can speak both with and to authority.
Immediately after his death Donne's greatness was celebrated by a host of poets, especially in the collection of 'Elegies upon the Author' contained in the two first editions of the posthumously published Poems ; Although Carew's elegy probably now the most famous singled out for praise Donne's poetic inventiveness, many of the others are notable for their concentration on Donne as a preacher—perhaps surprising in a volume of his poetry.
In fact, Donne's verse was not widely known during his life. The poems were initially circulated among a small coterie of readers and, although they soon moved beyond that circle to be copied and recopied in manuscript collections, the paucity of early manuscript witnesses suggests that they travelled somewhat slowly. By the s Donne's secular poetry was appearing regularly in manuscript miscellanies, but by this time he had been ordained for five years and the time of many of the poems' composition was long past.
It was in the decades immediately following Donne's death that his fame as a poet reached its height. The publication of the Poems in made them available to a wide readership, and the printer's address to the reader emphasized that already it was taken for granted by ' the best judgements ' that Donne's poetry was ' the best in this kinde, that ever this Kingdome hath yet seene '. If this was a puff, it worked: there were six editions in the twenty-three years after Donne's death.
Through the middle decades of the seventeenth century he was read, admired, and imitated, with further works being printed. Although several of the elegy writers of the volume had recourse to the paradoxical topos that after Donne's death it is impossible to write, his successors in fact seized the challenge enthusiastically, finding in Donne a model of a new literary style. However, Donne's fortunes underwent a sudden reversal in the late s.
In place of imitation and celebration, there is a firm rejection of his styles of thought and writing. The challenge that Carew found in Donne's prosodic inventiveness, his ' masculine expression ', was considered by critics of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries to be one not worth taking up. The ' roughness ' of his metre condemned him as old-fashioned, and while his conceits and his wit were praised, they were alleged to overpower the poems and the reader.
Dryden criticized Donne for putting wit above feeling in his love poems, and his most critical comments were taken up with enthusiasm in the eighteenth century. This line of attack was pursued most violently by Samuel Johnson in his Life of Cowley , during the course of a general assault on the ' metaphysical poets '. Putting ingenuity above poetry, wrote Johnson , ' their thoughts were often new, but seldom natural; they are not obvious, but neither are they just; and the reader, far from wondering that he missed them, wonders more frequently by what perverseness of industry they were ever found ' Smith , 1.
You can listen to Richard Burton reading the poem here. Come, Madam, come, all rest my powers defy, Until I labour, I in labour lie. He also briefly introduces, and overturns, the idea of Neoplatonism also seen elsewhere in his poetry : namely, that the body must be left behind in order to love the soul.
Body and soul should not be seen as separate entities, but two complementary elements, both of which are essential in order for true love to be possible. It begins:. Our hands were firmly cemented With a fast balm, which thence did spring; Our eye-beams twisted, and did thread Our eyes upon one double string ….
It comes with very useful annotations and an informative introduction. John Donne is one of the most important poets of the late Elizabethan and Jacobean periods in English literature. In many ways, what is now known as metaphysical poetry began with Donne and his innovative use of imagery, particularly his fondness for extended metaphors and elaborate conceits which draw on what were, at the time, new scientific theories and discoveries.
Key characteristics of metaphysical poetry include: complicated mental and emotional experience; unusual and sometimes deliberately contrived metaphors and similes; and the idea that the physical and spiritual universes are connected.
But after his conversion from Catholicism to the Church of England, and his entry into the priesthood Donne would eventually rise to become Dean of St. He is regarded as a key figure of the Elizabethan and Jacobean literary world and perhaps second only to Shakespeare in terms of the influence a writer of that time had on subsequent English literature.
0コメント