John Donne's evolving conception of death and grief

John Donne

There can be no question that one of the central themes of John Donne's work, in poetry and prose, is death. Not for nothing did a recent academic biographer of Donne devote an entire chapter to his subject's attitude towards, uses of, and presentation of, the theme of death (Carey 229ff). As a writer concerned with both the intensely spiritual and the intensely physical, death was a natural focus of Donne's thought and work throughout his life; as a Christian, convinced of the reality of resurrection and salvation, death was in a sense the fixed point around which his world-view revolved. Donne's fixation with the body, with its physical substance, its relationship to the outside world and its role as an expression of the divine, relates powerfully and inevitably to his conception of the significance of the body's physical dissolution in death and the consequences of this for the soul (Selleck 150-1). Given this context, one very particular death, that of his wife Anne in 1617, can be seen as a traumatic and tragic event capable of giving a sharply personal quality to his attitudes to death subsequently. This is by no means a simple matter to establish, however, given that death is a theme throughout his work, rather than preponderating after 1617, that his views of death did not themselves remain constant, and given the intimate connection between his perceptions of death and his religious position (which itself was not fixed). How far these factors can be reconciled, and to what extent an assessment of the role of Donne's wife's death in influencing his views of death itself can therefore be reached, is the question to be addressed in this essay.

It is important to note that, although he was consistently possessed of death's importance, Donne's view of death itself was not fixed and unchanging. Change and changeability were essential to Donne's self-perception; as John Carey notes, Donne understood that to talk about himself 'was to talk about change, and to change as he talked' (Carey 153). On the subject of death, however, this mutability is particularly marked. At times he seems in awe of the power of death, at other times he treats it as insignificant, and even mocks and rebukes death for its pretension. Some of his writing seems to convey fear of annihilation, while elsewhere he speaks of death as welcome and desirable.

The marriage of John Donne and Anne More can be seen as the defining event of Donne's younger life. He met her some time around 1598 and eloped with her, illegally, in 1601 - an act which severely damaged his prospects and from which, in a sense, his career never fully recovered. Anne bore twelve children in their sixteen-year marriage, five of whom died in infancy, before dying of puerperal fever at the birth of her twelfth, stillborn, child, at the age of thirty-three in 1617. The marriage appears to have been a love-match, and was certainly an important stabilizing factor for Donne during the difficult years that followed (Bald, 326). Donne's friend Izaak Walton commented in his life of Donne, published 1670, that the death of Donne's wife in 1617 had 'crucified him to the world' (Parfitt 103). Walton portrayed the death of Ann Donne as a traumatic event for John Donne, which had left him deeply effected by grief and which influenced every part of his life and work. Walton had his own reasons for emphasizing those aspects of Donne's character and life that best fitted in with the view he was putting forward in his biography of Donne the devout Anglican clergyman and writer of sacred verse. For this reason Walton was chiefly concerned with what he called Donne's 'last, best Dayes' (Bottrall 31). It is not necessary, however, to accept uncritically Walton's view of Donne to accept that his wife's death did affect him severely, and that its consequences can be seen in his work. As a man of his time, Donne reflected the contemporary attitude that 'death [was] and important event in one's religious life' and 'the very fact of death was more generally accepted than it now is' (Roberts 960-1), but even given the high visibility and even celebration of death around him, Donne's concern with mortality is particularly strong, from his earliest poems to his final meditations. Part of the reason for this can arguably be found in the fact that death touched him very directly and personally. Of his twelve children, seven died in infancy, and his wife died in childbirth at the age of only thirty-three (Parfitt 102-3). Given the centrality of his marriage in his life, and his concern with mortality, it might reasonably be expected that these events would be reflected in his writings.

In 1947 the scholar Donald Ramsey Roberts observed that 'there is abundant evidence in the poems, letters, sermons, and other works, that the desire for death was a permanent element in [Donne's] psychic life' (Roberts 959), and it is true that references to death and articulations of what amounts to a longing for death appear in Donne's work long before the death of his wife in 1617. In 'A Nocturnall upon Saint Lucie's Day', probably written during the 1590s, the notion of the desirability of death as the only means through which new creation can occur is present:

Study me then, you who shall lovers bee

At the next world, that is, at the next Spring:

For I am every dead thing,

In whom love wrought new Alchimie. (Complete Poetry 32)

In 'The Computation', from the same period, Donne asks 'Yet call not this long life; but thinke that I / Am, by being dead, Immortall; Can ghosts die?' (Complete Poetry 51). There is an ambiguity about this line - this state of immortality, Donne implies, is barely true existence but the insubstantial condition of a ghost. However, there is still a suggestion that such a condition is more desirable than mortal life without love.

In the works that date from before the death of Anne Donne, death is, as we have seen, addressed, but there is a certain remoteness and abstraction in Donne's conception of death. That can be seen to change after 1617. The conception of death that we find in the Divine Poems and Holy Sonnets and the works of prose that Donne wrote after the death of his wife is as something more concrete, more directly apprehended and engaged with, than is the case in the earlier writings; and, coupled with that, there is a powerful sense of Donne wrestling with the reality of death in his own life, as a man of faith, a man of intellect, and a man of feeling. This new realization of death goes hand in hand with a new and vivid sense of the divine and of the workings of God's will in the world, but this religious sense itself can be partly attributed to the effects of Anne's death on her husband. The epitaph that John Donne wrote to his wife itself lays out the religious trajectory which he is clearly already following in dealing with his loss in spiritual terms.

This epitaph, written in Latin, is the one work which can be identified specifically as having been written by Donne in direct response to his wife's death (Hester 513-4). In this piece of Latin verse we can see Donne's efforts to make sense of the great fact of death, and its relationship with human love and the divine love of which it is an echo, as well as its significance in terms of the more earthly passions which had been one of the younger Donne's abiding concerns. The poem is an eloquent testimony to the violent disruption of human affairs by death, the untimely loss of a loved one, and the challenges such a death poses to the poet's conception of the meaning of life and love. Donne conveys the abrupt and violent way in which her life was snapped off, 'By a savage fever hurriedly carried off' and describes himself as 'by grief made speechless'. He asserts the continuity of their marriage, however, seeking to transcend death by pledging their union anew, 'His own ashes to these ashes weds / in a new marriage' which echoes the divine union between Christ and his Church and thus carries the promise of salvation and eternal life, a point emphasized by the parallels Donne implies between the life and death of Anne and the life of the Virgin Mary and her son. Anne is described in life as 'A mother most pious, most indulgent' who died 'in the 33rd year of age, hers and Jesus's (Hester 521-2). M. Thomas Hester notes that Donne in this poem depicts himself as undergoing the sacrifice of accepting Anne's sacrifice of her life 'for the truth of the eternal Marriage that she and their fifteen years of loving union mirror' (Hester 526). A parallel is drawn between the union of marriage and the union of body and soul, and Donne seeks to find meaning for the breaking of these unions in his Christian faith as well as his belief in the value of his own marriage.

The Holy Sonnet 'Death be not Proud' (Complete Poetry 283-4) seems to show Donne's mind grappling anew with the reality of death in the wake of his wife's demise. The form of the poem gives an impression of thinking aloud, as if the reader overhears the poet's thoughts as he engages directly with death in an attempt both to cut it down to size and to understand its true nature - by such understanding, Donne's words strongly imply, fear of death will be banished, for death will be seen in its true colors as a place of passage from one, unsatisfactory, existence, to another, equally real but more complete and joyful. The opening lines reflect the fact that Donne himself has been among those who have been in awe of death: 'Death be not proud, though some have called thee / Mighty and dreadful...'. Donne immediately argues against that perception, stating flatly that 'thou art not soe' and asserting the reality of life after death, rendering death itself powerless: 'For those whom thou think'st, thou dost overthrow, / Die not, poore death, nor yet canst thou kill mee.' Donne goes on to integrate death into the divine pattern of existence, reflecting that it, too, is part of God's creation and has a purpose, even to be considered desirable and pleasant: 'From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures bee, / Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow'. Just as rest and sleep restore the body, so the sleep of death has its purpose in restoring the soul and preparing it for new life. But the poem seems to find its center of gravity in the assurance that death is, ultimately, powerless; the theme to which Donne returns with his observation that death is dependent upon external agents to have any effect, 'Thou art slave to Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men,' and is rivalled by sleeping draughts and charms for effectiveness: 'why swell'st thou then?' Donne ends with a firm declaration that it is the lot of the human soul to 'wake eternally' after the short sleep of death, 'And death shall bee no more; death, thou shalt die.' The sonnet is not so much an attack upon death or a lament as a reckoning of death's power in the light of Christian assurances of resurrection and the afterlife. In the aftermath of his wife's death it seems Donne needed to seek, and to articulate, such reassurance as much for himself as for others: 'nor yet canst thou kill mee.'

Donne himself declares in another of his Holy Sonnets, Sonnet XVII (Complete Poetry 286-7), that it is his wife's death that has set him to thinking about matters of the spirit more, and with greater intensity, than was the case before:

Since she whom I lov'd hath payd her last debt

To Nature, and to hers, and my good is dead,

And her Soule early into Heaven ravished,

Wholly on heavenly things my mind is sett.

There is a double meaning in these lines. They can be read as meaning that, with the death of his wife, Donne is able to concentrate 'wholly' on spiritual things, now that the competition for love of God which his wife represented is gone, and indeed that is one way in which Donne understands that he could find a resolution for his grief over his dead wife: 'though I have found thee, and thou my thirst hath fed'. But it is clear that Donne is dissatisfied with this explanation, and finds it insufficient in the light of his own feelings over the loss of Anne. Perhaps before her death he would have exercised this rationalization in abstract and found it satisfactory, but now that death and loss is such a reality to him he is unable to do this: 'why should I begg more Love, when as thou / Dost wooe my soule for hers; offring all thine' is his bitter rejoinder, and he goes on in an extraordinary final passage, effectively, to rebuke God for small-minded jealousy, in finding it necessary to take away his wife in order to be sure of all his love:

And dost not only feare least I allow

My Love to Saints and Angels things divine,

But in thy tender jealosy dost doubt

Least the World, Fleshe, yea Devill putt thee out.

If the Holy Sonnets are to be read, as one scholar has argued, as evidence not of God as an active presence but rather 'of the presence of God not as an active participant in the dramatized moment but as a silent presence beyond human words and human reason' (Beaston 107), this direct addressing of the deity appears somewhat paradoxical - unless it is seen in the context of a grieving man seeking an orthodox Christian channel of expression for the powerful feelings of anger, powerlessness, guilt and sorrow that grief contains.

A similar psychological explanation, arising entirely from the experience of Anne's death, can be proposed for the very real presence of death throughout the Holy Sonnets. In many of the poems, Donne's sense of the immanent presence of death, and of the reality of his own mortality, is very striking. Sonnet VI (Collected Poetry 281), for example, begins 'This is my playes last scene, here heavens appoint / My pilgrimages last mile', while Donne's tone in Sonnet I (Collected Poetry 279-80) is dramatic and, initially, almost panic-stricken:

Thou hast made me, and shall thy worke decay?

Repaire me now, for now mine end doth haste, runne to death, and death meets me as fast,

And all my pleasures are like yesterday;

dare not move my dimme eyes any way,

Despaire behind, and death before doth cast

You are twice inseparable, great, and one (Complete Poetry 104)

Clearly, if marriage is such a union, paralleling the union of body and soul in lifetime, then the untimely death of a marriage partner - and Donne clearly does regard his wife's death as untimely, speaking of her being 'early into heaven ravished' - is a breaking of that union and a test of faith for one who sees God's work in that union.

In this sense, then, Donne's wife's death was not only the loss of a loved one, but a breaking of a fundamental union conceived in divine terms. The abstractions of death that feature in Donne's earlier poetry were not adequate to this event; hence the sense of someone struggling to make sense of a senseless grief that echoes through the Holy Sonnets. George Parfitt describes this struggle very clearly in his life of Donne:

In many of these poems this 'weighing' seems to bring the persona close to despair and the effect of the confident imagining of sin and death, when set against the conditional and often hectic effort to envisage a counterweight, is often to suggest that only rhetoric and a fear of the consequences of despair keep catastrophe at bay. (Parfitt 124)

It is in Donne's sermons, rather than his poems, that he seem most successfully to have reconciled himself and his faith to his wife's death. In his last sermon, 'Death's Duell, or, a Consolation to the Soule, against the dying Life, and living Death of the Body' (Complete Poetry 738ff), delivered one month before Donne's death in 1631, Donne weighed the rhetoric of hope against that of despair with more balance than is to be found in the poems. He placed the disposition and nature of death firmly in God's hands, but in doing so simultaneously reflected on the powerlessness of man in the face of death:

Unto God the Lord belong the issues of death, that is, the disposition and manner of our death: what kinde of issue and transmigration wee shall have out of this world, whether prepared or sudden, whether violent or naturall, whether in our perfect senses or shaken and disordered by sicknes; there is no condemnation to bee argued out of that, no Judgement to bee made upon that... (Complete Poetry 739-40)

As a Christian Donne is clear that 'our issue in death shall be an entrance into everlasting life' (Complete Poetry 740) and turns to the image of birth - echoing again his abiding concern with sexuality, marriage, and fruitfulness - to convey his conception of death as the gateway to new life, and, furthermore, as death that is a good and necessary thing in its place:

And all our periods and transitions in this life, are so many passages from death to death; our very birth and entrance into this life, is exitus a morte, an issue from death, for in our mothers wombe wee are dead so, as that wee doe not know wee live, not so much as wee doe in our sleepe, neither is there any grave so close, or so putrid a prison, as the wombe would be unto us, if we stayed in it beyond our time, or dyed there before our time (Complete Poetry 741)

But this leads Donne to a piece of imagery shocking in its harshness, that must have been inspired directly by the manner of Anne Donne's death, of puerperal fever associated with the birth of a still-born child: 'In the wombe the dead child kills the Mother that conceived it, and is a murtherer, nay a parricide, even after it is dead' (Complete Poetry 741). This preoccupation with stillbirth and the deaths of mother and child at what should be the moment of giving life is returned to again, as Donne repeatedly rehearses the circumstances of his wife's death:

The wombe which should be the house of life, becomes death it selfe, if God leave us there. That which God threatens so often, the shutting of the womb, is not so heavy, nor so discomfortable a curse in the first, as in the latter shutting, nor in the shutting of barrennes, as in the shutting of weakenes, when children are come to the birth, and there is not strength to bring forth. (Complete Poetry 742)

That this terrible image of the womb as a place of death runs through the sermon as a dark undercurrent, regardless of the message of hopefulness and salvation with which Donne ends, is perhaps the most powerful evidence of the transformation wrought in Donne by the death of his wife, a transformation which left no corner of his faith, or of his work, untouched. It is true to say that Anne's death cast a shadow from which her husband never entirely escaped.