John Donne, a contemporary of Shakespeare, grew up in a crowded and often plague-riddled London. He surely knew well what it was like to shelter in a tiny set of rooms while the watchmen ensured that no one was out on the street except for essential services.
Being unemployed much of his early life, Donne presumably did not count as “essential.” Decades later, he became respectable and was Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral, where his preaching attracted thousands and was a major part of the cultural life of the city. But this is earlier . . .
This wonderful painting shows Donne as a young man, full of the fashionable “melancholy” attitude (in modern terms, “Goth” or “emo,” maybe?). Hamlet might have looked like this.
One way to try to make a career, for a brilliant but not well-connected young man, was to write poetry, and particularly love poetry. And at the end of the Elizabethan era, the more outrageous the poetry, the more it would be read aloud by other young gents looking for positions, and copied out and handed around, and maybe eventually some patron would be interested in how smart you were, and give you a job.
It might have worked for Donne: he wrote a lot of flashy, wonderful poems, and got quite a name for himself. And he got a position as secretary (that was an important job at the time: the “keeper of secrets”) to Sir Thomas Egerton, the queen’s Lord Keeper of the Great Seal. But Donne blew it: he fell in love with Egerton’s niece, Ann More (a descendant of Sir (Saint) Thomas More), and secretly married her.
This was a marriage WAY over Donne’s social status. Ann’s father and uncle made sure there were consequences. One poor friend who signed as witness to the marriage was thrown in jail. Donne was fired, and he and Ann and their many children moved to the country and laid low for a decade.
“John Donne, Ann Donne, Un-Done,” he supposedly wrote.
Sir Thomas Egerton–
apparently not a man to mess with.
No picture of Ann More is known.
Donne’s early poems were often erotic, sometimes misogynistic in the manner of young male poets of the age, always cheeky and irreverent. (He’s also famous for his later, passionately devout “Holy Sonnets”). He doubted everything — and this in a period where you needed to profess your faith regularly, in God, king, church, law . . .
The poem I’m bringing in to this post, “The Sun Rising,” openly mocks the supposed hierarchies of Renaissance thought– that the sun is the most noble thing in the natural world, that the king is wise, that education is important, that living IN the world is a crucial duty of every ambitious young man. It essentially postulates that sheltering at home is the most noble thing anyone can do, far more important than the distractions of the world outside. .
Imagine a wood-paneled Tudor room, with a small lead-paned window, perhaps a writing table covered with an oriental rug, and strewn with manuscripts and books and maps– and in one corner, a big four-poster bed with curtains. In the bed, a couple. The time: dawn; the sun begins to shine through the window, and eventually to penetrate the embroidered bed-curtains; the poet wakes up.
The poem comes from the Poetry Foundation website.
This is a Tudor bedroom, probably fancier than Donne’s, that was in the collection of the Victoria and Albert museum, and is now in a house in Cumbria, northern England. From an article in The Guardian.
- The sun is supposed to “rule” all our lives. Here it’s “unruly.” The seasons are not for lovers!
- Morning, out there in the world, is full of reluctant workers–schoolboys and apprentices, farmers, courtiers forced to hunt with the king at dawn.
- The world is full of multiplicity, but love is “all alike,” undifferentiated by season or region or time. People in the world, dependent on time’s divisions into hours, days, and months, are beggars, dressed in “the rags of time.”
- If the sun represents the world of busy clock-watching activity, let’s show how trivial that world is.
- Blink, and you disappear! (but I won’t because I love to look… at her).
- Go on, spin your way around the world, busy sun (as long as you don’t bother us) and –tomorrow, not today! — report on the East Indies (spices) and the West Indies (silver and gold), and the kings of all the empires around the world. You’ll confess: they are right here, in this bed! (Donne surely knew how ludicrous was the picture of all those kings in one bed, like something from Alice in Wonderland.)
Donne knew the Copernican theory that the earth travels around the sun — very recently promulgated, with enormous controversy (think Galileo and the Inquisition) — but he chooses to stick with the old Ptolemaic system since it makes for such a “busy” sun.
Notice how proud Donne the poet seems to be about writing this poem, how prominent are its intricate meter and rhyme. The form of the stanza, repeated exactly three times, is not only complicated, but also NEW, invented as it were on the spot, a matrix of lines of 4, 6, 8, and 10 syllables, in a rhyming pattern of a b b a c d c d ee.
“Stanza” in Italian literally means “room.” Each of these little rooms is a place unto itself, a little shelter from the world. Here’s the last room:
- all states, all princes: all that complicated, intricate diplomacy that preoccupied Early Modern Europe as it does us, all compressed, transferred to the lovers.
- “Nothing else is” — one of the greatest hyperboles in poetry. “Nothing” is the recurring word in Shakespeare’s King Lear, perhaps written and staged about the same time as this poem, but here Lear’s bleak existential nihilism becomes an astounding, confident, joyful feat of the imagination.
- The pedantic, unruly sun–berated at the start of the poem–is now tenderly cared for by the poet and his lover: you have nothing else to do but to warm us, so come in. The bed-curtains are pulled back. . .
What is at the center, the earth or the sun? Well, neither: this bed is the center. The circumference, the “sphere” (we would say “orbit”) is this room.
Nothing else is. What a way to imagine sheltering.
