In her new book Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne (Bookshop|Amazon), Oxford University scholar Katherine Rundell notes that the 17th-century cleric’s love poems are famously difficult to unravel, but well worth the effort. “Meditation XVII” from Donne’s 1624 work Devotions upon Emergent Occasions and seuerall steps in my Sicknes is the source of the now-familiar English phrases No man is an island and for whom the bell tolls, the latter of which became the title of an Ernest Hemingway novel. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Donne: More Than Kisses, Letters Mingle Souls”
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette. In the late 16th and early 17th century, John Donne wrote about love, sex, and death. His love poems have been described by some people as the greatest in the English language, but they’re famously difficult to unravel. Author Catherine Rundell compares this process to trying to crack a locked safe. And she’s written a new book about Dunn. It’s called Super Infinite. And she describes it as a biography and an act of evangelism because she’s passionate about what she calls Dunn’s burning originality. And she writes about it with a lot of zest and wit.
From an early age, Dunn was intimately acquainted with death. He was born into a Catholic family in London at a time of fierce anti-Catholicism. Close relatives were imprisoned and killed for their beliefs. Dunn also survived a plague that ravaged London, and he joined an expedition against Spain in the Anglo-Spanish War. Back home, he was briefly imprisoned for marrying a girl without her father’s consent, and they later had 12 children, but six of them died young, and he was forever struggling to earn enough to feed the rest, and he was writing all the while. And eventually he converted to the Church of England, he joined the clergy, and he became dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral, where he became something of a celebrity. Thousands of people would come to hear his sermons.
His poetry is hard to characterize. It can be satirical, gloomy, carnal, exuberant. He broke from tradition by using jagged lines and jarring imagery. One of his love poems actually likens lovers to the legs of a compass used to draw circles, and other poems are downright misogynistic. But Rundell insists that if you tease out his larger themes, if you work to crack that safe, you’ll be richly rewarded. She writes, he was a man who walked so often in darkness that it became for him a daily commute. But there are also few writers of his time who insisted so doggedly and determinedly on awe. He was often hopeless, often despairing, and yet still he insisted at the very end, it is an astonishment to be alive, and it behooves you to be astonished.
Dunn wants us to see the connections around us, our connections with infinity, or as he calls it, the super infinite, and also the connections with each other.
Yeah, there’s the famous Meditation 17 from his Devotions upon Emergent Occasions and Several Steps in My Sickness. What a title that is. From 1624 that has, well, a couple phrases in it I think everyone will recognize. It’s probably his most famous work. It starts, no man is an island entire of itself. Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as any manner of thy friends or of thy own were. Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never sin to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.
And so we have not only a famous Hemingway novel, probably one of his best works, but we have, O Man is an Island, which became a proverbial phrase in English because of Dunn.
Yeah, that’s far and away his most accessible poem, as far as I can tell. And the rest of his work, as Rondell says, is really challenging, but her book itself is really fascinating, if nothing else, for the texture of life during that time. So that book, again, is Super Infinite by Catherine Rondell. We’ll link to that book on our website.
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