| JOHN DONNE (1572-1631), poet and priest, was raised a Roman Catholic. After studying at Oxford and on the Continent, he was admitted to Lincoln’s Inn.
WE KNOW him first for his urgent lust, the tumbled sheets and naked mistress: “License my roving hands, and let them go Before, behind, between, above, below. O, my America, my new-found-land, My kingdom, safeliest when with one man mann’d” — all those brilliant verses of youth, incandescent and unashamed.
We know him last for his slow and public dying: the coffin placed in his bedroom at the Deanery weeks before; the final portrait showing him wrapped in a funeral shroud, already purchased; his last sermon preached on Ash Wednesday 1631 before the Court: “those bodies that are the temples of the Holy Ghost [must] come to this dilapidation, to ruin, to rubbidge, to dust.”
King Charles I, looking up at the preacher’s emaciated face, thought “The doctor preached his own funeral sermon.”
Between those two — the young lover and the dying priest — came the courtier, the soldier, the poet, the Anglican apologist, the husband and father, the preacher, the friend. There was no sudden change of direction, no conversion on the road to Damascus, only a progression: from Rome to Canterbury, from frenzied liaisons to settled matrimony, from court to church.
Ordination was the result partly of persuasion by others (King James, no fool in this case, saw in Donne priestly gifts), and partly because his career at court had foundered.
People spoke of his gentleness, and loved him. They remarked upon his musical voice. The King enjoyed his company at table, relished his wit, and would ask him to read aloud.
Later, it was his sermons that so moved them; his poems, both sacred and profane, were not as widely known. Izaak Walton wrote of his preaching that it “showed his own heart was possessed with those very thoughts and joys” that he spoke about. He was “a preacher in earnest; weeping sometimes for his auditory, sometimes with them . . . and all this with a most particular grace and an unexpressible comeliness”.
There are in his sermons passages so densely crammed with scriptural texts and references to the Fathers as to be now unreadable. But there are others of such vivid intensity that they grab the mind. “He that will die with Christ upon Good Friday, must hear his own bell toll all Lent,” he preached to the Court on 29 February 1628.
He went on to refer to the half-heard sound of the night watchman’s bell, which lingers in the memory throughout the day beneath the cheerful noise of London’s street musicians outside and the “blessed music” of the choir of the Chapel Royal.
“It may be of use, that a poor bell-man waked you before, and though but by his noise, prepared you for their music.”
The melancholy note of the night watchman, like the tolling of the passing bell, resonates beneath the surface of his prose and poetry (“Send not to ask for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee”). In his love poetry, there sounds a sadness beneath the frenzy.
In his devotions, Donne prayed for release, to be brought “at my last awakening into the house and gate of heaven, to enter into that gate and dwell in that house, where there shall be no darkness nor dazzling but one equal light, no noise nor silence but one equal music, no fears nor hopes but one equal possession, no ends nor beginnings but one equal eternity in the habitations of God’s majesty and glory”.
The Revd Adrian Leak is Priest-in-Charge of Withyham in the diocese of Chichester. |
back to Faith
previous story
|
next story 
