Satire IV

Satire 4 is a rewriting of the Satire 1 but in a much darker tone. It was written some few years later but it is also dealing with the unstable and full of rumour political climate of the Elizabethan court. It is also the longest and the most complex of the Donne’s Satires. With its complicated narrative and diverse strands of imagery the Satire is framed as a traditional meditatio mortis. Donne begins invoking death:

Well; I may now receive, and die; my sin

Indeed is great, but I have been in

A purgatory, such as feared hell is

A recreation, and scant map of this.

The satirist confesses that he committed a sin of going to ‘purgatory’ – to Court. The Satire serves as the last confession, preparing him to the Extreme Unction, wiping away all his sins and bringing him closer to salvation. It reveals the cathartic power of poetry, the last resort of cleaning one’s conscience. The Court is represented as purgatory, the place in between, where people come and go, either to hell or heaven. Significantly, the satirist compares the Court to the purgatory and not to hell, although later in the poem Donne poses a rhetorical question: ‘why is it hung with the seven deadly sins?’ It indicates that the poet does believe in the possibility of redemption for those at Court, like himself. In the Satire Donne takes the reader on a Dantesque tour of the purgatory. He paints it as more gruesome and fear imposing than the image of hell described by Dante. The ‘feared hell’ is just a ‘scant map’, a ‘recreation’ compare to the Court. At home the satirist recollects the scenes he witnessed at Court:

(…) in wholesome solitariness

My precious soul began, the wretchedness

Of suitors at Court to mourn, and a trance

Like his, who dreamed he saw hell, did advance

Itself on me, such men as he saw there,

I saw at Court, and worse, and more.

The circular mode of the Satire brings the satirist back to his chamber at the end of the poem. There, he wishes to ‘drown the sins of this place’ and ‘wash the stains away.’ In doing so Donne criticizes the negative freedom of doing as one pleases and endorses an ideal of positive freedom. He challenges his world by withdrawing from its social structures. He speaks out against the corruption and legal oppression of Court.

The satirist washes away his sins of entering Court by confessing them through the medium of the poem:

To wash the stains away; though I yet

With Maccabee’s modesty, the known merit

Of my work lessen: yet some wise man shall,

I hope, esteem my writs canonical.

The Satire, thus, is a canonical purgation, absolution received from the ‘wise man,’ the reader of the poem. Similarly to the beginning of the poem, through the finishing lines Donne seeks to receive, and to escape the purgatory of the known world.The "wise man" is someone like Donne who can be in the world but not of the world. It is someone who can preserve his or hers interiority and moral guidance. The ‘wise man’ is someone whose integrity serves as a guide and norm in a world where corruption and moral degradation prevail.

 

Satire IV on Digital Donne – 1633 edition

Satire I by John Donne

 

Satire 1 is the first in a series of five satires by John Donne. He wrote them in the 1590s, in his twenties, while  studying law at the Inns of Court and later seeking employment at the Court. The Satire I opens with the words:

Away thou fondling motley humorist,

Leave mee, and in this standing woodden chest,

Consorted with these few bookes, let me lye

In prison, and here be coffin’d, when I dye.

The satirist compares his study to the ‘standing wooden chest,’ the prison in which he would rather die and ‘be coffined’ than abandon it. There, he is able to confer with ‘grave divines; (…) Nature’s secretary, the Philosopher; [a]nd jolly statesmen.’ They teach him how to ‘tie [t]he sinews of a city’s mystic body’. The metaphor is obviously an exaggeration. If the satirist died and ‘be coffin’d’ in the study as he wishes, he would not be able to escape its confines and to explore the city and court, as he later does in the Satire. Moreover, if the study is a prison to the satirist, it raises the question about the reason of his imprisonment and the nature of the sentence. The line ‘let me lie / In prison, and here be coffin’d, when I die’ implies that the satirist is sentenced for life.

The prospects of escaping the walls of the coffin-like prison, are greatly reduced by the hint of unavoidability of the confinement. Significantly, the satirist states ‘when’, not ‘if’ ‘I die.’ It can only lead to the conclusion that the Inns of Court were not the desired destiny for the satirist, or in fact, Donne himself.

The poet creates juxtaposition between the tranquillity of the study and the busyness of the city, between the ‘constant company’ of the divines and muses and the uncertainty of the company of humourist and the people on the streets. The grave, sepulchre-like image of the study, the ambiguity of the prison metaphor, helps to create the dissonance between the inner world of the scholar-poet and the un-poetic, shallow outside world without which, paradoxically, the poet cannot create. In the ‘wooden chest’ the satirist enjoys the everlasting company of ‘Giddy fantastic poets of each land’ and ‘equitable relationship’ with the Muses. Nevertheless, the true inspiration for writing lies outside the door of the study.

The satirist’s ‘coarse attire’, required by the Inns of Court regulations forbidding the wearing of long hair and swords, distinguishes him from the ‘motley humorist’. It also resembles the clothing of the first man just after the Fall, at the intermittent state between the bliss of paradise and the banishment on sinful earth. The satirist is visibly concerned with the spiritual significance of man’s past and future.

But, after the long protestations, the satirist says: ‘I shut my chamber doore, and come, lets goe’. What happens next is for you to explore. You can do this by reading the whole satire below:

Satire I on Digital Donne – 1633 edition

Waiting for Godot and Existentialism

Something completely different: a brief presentation on ‘Waiting for Godot’ and existentialist philosophy in the Samuel Beckett’s play that my group made few years back as undergraduates.

Love’s War

It is, for me, one of the most beautiful love elegies. John Donne’s Elegy XX Love’s War: – simple beauty, any comments?:

 

Till I have peace with thee, war other men,
And when I have peace, can I leave thee then?
All other Wars are scrupulous; Only thou
0 fair free City, mayst thyself allow
To any one. In Flanders, who can tell
Whether the Master press. or men rebel?
Only we know, that which all Idiots say,
They bear most blows which come to part the fray.
France in her lunatic giddiness did hate
Ever our men, yea and our God of late;
Yet she relies upon our Angels well,
Which ne’re return; no more than they which fell.
Sick Ireland is with a strange war possessed
Like to an ague, now raging, now at rest,
Which time will cure, yet it must do her good
If she were purged, and her head –vein let blood.
And Midas’ joys our Spanish journeys give,
We touch all gold, but find no food to live.
And I should be in that hot parching clime,
To dust and ashes turned before my time.
To mew me in a ship, is to enthral
Me in a prison, that were like to fall;
Or in a cloister, save that there men dwell
In a calm heaven, here in a swaggering hell.
Long voyages are long consumptions,
And ships are carts for executions.
Yea they are deaths; is’t not all one to fly
Into another world, as ‘tis to die?
Here let me war; in these arms let me lie;
Here let me parley, batter, bleed, and die.
Thine arms imprison me, and mine arms thee,
Thy heart thy ransom is, take mine for me.
Other men war that they their rest may gain,
But we will rest that we may fight again,.
Those wars the ignorant, these th’ experienced love,
There wee are always under, here above.
There engines far off breed a just true fear,
Near thrusts, pikes, stabs, yea bullets hurt not here.
There lies are wrongs; here safe uprightly lie;
There men kill men, we’will make one by and by,
Thou nothing; I not halfe so much shall do
In these wars, as they may which from us two
Shall spring. Thousands wee see which travel not
To wars; but stay swords, arms, and shot
To make at home; And shall not I do then
More glorious service, staying to make men?

The sleep of a labouring man is sweet

‘Thou passest out of the world, as a hand passes out of a bason, or a body out of a bath, where the water may be fouler for thy having washed in it, else the water retains no impression of thy hand or body; so the world may be the worse for thy having liv’d in it, else the world retains no marks of thy having been there.’ (Donne, A Sermon Preached at Whitehall. 29 February 1627)

What do we live for? What lasting impressions do we leave throughout our lives? Is it worth carrying-on and trying to develop ourselves? These are the questions that every one of us have asked. And these are the questions that Donne’s sermon tries to answer. Based on the reading from Acts 7.60 the preacher ponders on the meaning and purpose of life. For him, ‘every man is bound to be something, to take some calling upon him (…), every man is bound to do seriously and scedulously, and sincerely the duties of that calling’ and to perform those duties in a best possible way, ‘every man shall do well to propose to himself some person, some pattern, some example whom he will follow and imitate in that calling.’

Firstly, then, to live our lives in full we have to have a passion for something. Secondly, whether it is writing, music, poetry, dance, acting, accountancy, law, medicine, we have to be dedicated to it. Donne preaches: ‘He that stands in a place and does not the duty of that place, is but a statue in that place; and but a statue without an inscription; Posterity shall not know him, nor read who he was.(…) The person must actuate it self, dilate, extend and propagate it self according to the dimensions of the place, by filling it in the execution of the duties of it.’ Thirdly, one to leave a lasting legacy must, according to Donne, aspire to be somebody, ‘be like somebody, propose some good example in thy calling and profession to imitate.’

To follow Donne’s guidance and to live a happy life which, as Horace famously wrote, exegi monumentum aere perennius, one must do what he loves, and do it with all his best abilities so others may follow his example. As the preacher quotes: ‘dulcis somnus operanti, The sleepe of a labouring man is sweete. To him that laboureth in his calling, even this sleepe of Death is welcome.’

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Donne, John, A Sermon Preached at  Whitehall. 29 February 1627. http://contentdm.lib.byu.edu/cdm4/document.php?CISOROOT=/JohnDonne&CISOPTR=3245&REC=5

Links

I have added a new page to the blog with useful links to the several interesting websites.The Society’s page contains online forum and information about the annual conference. Other websites host the digital archives of John Donne‘s works.

And Now for Something Completely Different

And Now for Something Completely Different:

Toni Morrison’s Jazz as a migration narrative. For those interested in contemporary literature.

http://issuu.com/kacalar/docs/african_american_presentation

‘in the womb we are taught cruelty’

In many of his sermons Donne talks about death, the most famous of them being ‘Deaths’ Duel’. There, the preacher states that even the very moment of birth is an ‘exitus á morte, an issue from death, for in our mother’s womb we are dead, so as that we do not know that we live’. Idiosyncratically for Donne the terror of the womb is greater than the terror of the tomb. The position in which the foetus finds itself in mother’s womb is much more vulnerable than the position of a dead person in relation to the prospect of salvation and deliverance from death. Donne argues that the mother’s womb for an unborn child would be as close to it as a grave, ‘or so putrid a prison, (…) if we stayed in it beyond our time, or died there before our time’. Unlike a dead person in the grave, whose carcass becomes nourishment for worms, the dead child in the womb is ‘a murderer, nay, a parricide’ of its mother, ‘her that gave us our first life, our life of vegetation’. In his peculiar way Donne mixes Latin phrases with the ‘vulgarity’ of English words to make his stance and to emphasise the dangers of not-living. He compares the dead-like state of the unborn to the Pharisees when paraphrasing Christ’s words from Mark 8.18: ‘In the womb we have eyes and see not, ears and hear not’. Nevertheless, his main concern is the danger of a prenatal or a postnatal death of an unbaptized baby. The promise of salvation for a Christian soul lies in the sacrament of baptism and therefore an unborn child is deprived of the prospect of achieving eternal life. While in the womb the foetus exists in a state between life and death; as Donne explains in the sermon: ‘There in the womb we are fitted for works of darkness, all the while deprived of light; and there in the womb we are taught cruelty, by being fed with blood, and may be damned, though we be never born’.

Although the moment of birth is an exitus á morte and brings the prospect of salvation, it is only another stage in the cycle of deaths in what Donne regards as life. To read more of that, check out John Donne, 1631,’ Death’s Duel’.