We do those shadows tread

As Virginia Woolf noted, so many of Donne's poems begin abruptly, with peremptory commands. “Batter my heart!”, “Hold your tongue!”, "Stand still!" This last begins a little poem both sweet and bleak: “A lecture upon the shadow.” The lovers walk together all one morning. He doesn't linger on that scene, but it echoes another of his love poems, “The Ecstasy” in which the lovers “like sepulchral statues lay...And we said nothing all the day.” Some of his most erotic poetry is not about bed but hours of quiet communion - lying on a violet-strewn river bank, walking together on a sunny morning. But the morning ends, and the shadowless moment of noon gives rise to this lecture, really a warning, about the phases of love. In its infancy, love casts shadows in order to hide from others; Donne's clandestine courtship of his employer's niece, Anne More, would have been full of such shadows. But after the noon of “brave clearness” in which the love is acknowledged and blessed, the shadows fall and lengthen the other way. Left to themselves at last, he predicts, the lovers disguise and mislead one another, and love declines into a night of mutual blindness and deceit. The power of this poem is the chill of dark it casts over the bright meridian of day; the sudden eclipse of love's morning. Like Hamlet grabbing Ophelia's elbow and muttering “Get thee to a nunnery: why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners?" Donne here stands in front of his lover - in her face, probably in her light - to issue the doom of their love. Love's only possible moment of truth, he says, is impossible to keep. With the last word, now like Othello, direfully he puts out the light. 

Stand still, and I will read to thee 

A lecture, love, in love's philosophy. 

         These three hours that we have spent, 

         Walking here, two shadows went 

Along with us, which we ourselves produc'd. 

But, now the sun is just above our head, 

         We do those shadows tread, 

         And to brave clearness all things are reduc'd. 

So whilst our infant loves did grow, 

Disguises did, and shadows, flow 

From us, and our cares; but now 'tis not so. 

That love has not attain'd the high'st degree, 

Which is still diligent lest others see.

Except our loves at this noon stay, 

We shall new shadows make the other way. 

         As the first were made to blind 

         Others, these which come behind 

Will work upon ourselves, and blind our eyes. 

If our loves faint, and westwardly decline, 

         To me thou, falsely, thine, 

         And I to thee mine actions shall disguise. 

The morning shadows wear away, 

But these grow longer all the day; 

But oh, love's day is short, if love decay. 

Love is a growing, or full constant light, 

And his first minute, after noon, is night. 

The poetic close-talking of John Donne

Somewhere CS Lewis says that, as poets, Donne and Robert Browning share a tendency to “buttonhole” their readers - or, as we might say, “get in their face.” This is the same quality Lewis's near contemporary, Virginia Woolf, praised in Donne and what, for her, made him modern. Here's Woolf, in The Common Reader (1925, 1935):

“But the first quality that attracts us is not his meaning, charged with meaning as his poetry is, but something much more unmixed and immediate; it is the explosion with which he bursts into speech. All preface, all parleying have been consumed; he leaps into poetry the shortest way.”

Some first lines come to mind: “Death be not proud”...“Stand still, and I will read to thee”...“For God's sake hold your tongue and let me love.” He’s a consummately bossy poet, always forestalling argument or dissent, his finger on the lapel, or on the lips, of his hearer. Much of his poetry reads like Browning's dramatic monologues, but there's no assumed persona. It's Donne bursting from the poem, exploding in your face. And not only does he explode in your face, he cuts off your escape. 

“The world, a moment before, cheerful, humdrum, bursting with character and variety, is consumed. We are in Donne’s world now. All other views are sharply cut off. In this power of suddenly surprising and subjugating the reader, Donne excels most poets. It is his characteristic quality; it is thus that he lays hold upon us”.

This massive poetic egotism - the eclipse of other worlds, the drowning out of argument, the importunate seduction - is what made Donne's verses leap out of the seventeenth century into modernity, and makes Donne himself burst out of his verses, into our faces.

Resurrection, imperfect

Sleep, sleep old sun, thou canst not have repass'd,
As yet, the wound thou took'st on Friday last;
Sleep then, and rest; the world may bear thy stay;
A better sun rose before thee to-day;
Who—not content to enlighten all that dwell
On the earth's face, as thou—enlighten'd hell,
And made the dark fires languish in that vale,
As at thy presence here our fires grow pale;
Whose body, having walk'd on earth, and now
Hasting to heaven, would—that He might allow
Himself unto all stations, and fill all—
For these three days become a mineral.
He was all gold when He lay down, but rose
All tincture, and doth not alone dispose
Leaden and iron wills to good, but is
Of power to make e'en sinful flesh like his.
Had one of those, whose credulous piety
Thought that a soul one might discern and see
Go from a body, at this sepulchre been,
And, issuing from the sheet, this body seen,
He would have justly thought this body a soul,
If not of any man, yet of the whole.
Desunt Caetera.

Donne's poem is imperfect because unfinished, but also because our analogues of resurrection are imperfect: the rising of the sun, the transmutation of minerals. Our understanding is dim, fixed on the separation of body and soul; our fires are indeed pale. There's another sense, which Donne might not have meant, of the resurrection itself as unfinished, not because incomplete but because it was the beginning, not the end - as the rising sun is the prelude of day.

Gold oft tried and ever new

For my mother, at whose knee I learned to love John Donne. He wrote this 9th of his Elegies, “The Autumnal,” for George Herbert's mother Magdalen, his patroness, to whom he also dedicated his Holy Sonnets. Happy Mothers' Day, Ma.

No spring nor summer beauty hath such grace

As I have seen in one autumnal face.

Young beauties force our love, and that's a rape,

This doth but counsel, yet you cannot scape.

If 'twere a shame to love, here 'twere no shame;

Affection here takes reverence's name.

Were her first years the golden age? That's true,

But now she's gold oft tried and ever new.

That was her torrid and inflaming time,

This is her tolerable tropic clime.

Fair eyes, who asks more heat than comes from hence,

He in a fever wishes pestilence.

Call not these wrinkles, graves; if graves they were,

They were Love's graves, for else he is no where.

Yet lies not Love dead here, but here doth sit

Vow'd to this trench, like an anachorit;

And here till hers, which must be his death, come,

He doth not dig a grave, but build a tomb.

Here dwells he; though he sojourn ev'rywhere

In progress, yet his standing house is here:

Here where still evening is, not noon nor night,

Where no voluptuousness, yet all delight.

In all her words, unto all hearers fit,

You may at revels, you at council, sit.

This is Love's timber, youth his underwood;

There he, as wine in June, enrages blood,

Which then comes seasonablest when our taste

And appetite to other things is past.

Xerxes' strange Lydian love, the platane tree,

Was lov'd for age, none being so large as she,

Or else because, being young, nature did bless

Her youth with age's glory, barrenness.

If we love things long sought, age is a thing

Which we are fifty years in compassing;

If transitory things, which soon decay,

Age must be loveliest at the latest day.

But name not winter faces, whose skin's slack,

Lank as an unthrift's purse, but a soul's sack;

Whose eyes seek light within, for all here's shade;

Whose mouths are holes, rather worn out than made;

Whose every tooth to a several place is gone,

To vex their souls at resurrection:

Name not these living death's-heads unto me,

For these, not ancient, but antique be.

I hate extremes, yet I had rather stay

With tombs than cradles, to wear out a day.

Since such love's natural motion is, may still

My love descend, and journey down the hill,

Not panting after growing beauties. So,

I shall ebb on with them who homeward go.

Good Friday, 1613

On its 400th anniversary, what better poem to choose today than John Donne's "Good Friday, 1613: Riding Westward." While his body travels west, his mind and soul look toward Easter. There are echoes of Ignatian meditation in his attempts to see with the mind's eye what the mind itself cannot comprehend. Yet the sheer weight of imagery in the spectacle of Christ's death is overwhelming. He prays to be made worthy to turn, and see. 

Let man's soul be a sphere, and then, in this, 

The intelligence that moves, devotion is; 

And as the other spheres, by being grown 

Subject to foreign motion, lose their own, 

And being by others hurried every day, 

Scarce in a year their natural form obey; 

Pleasure or business, so, our souls admit 

For their first mover, and are whirl'd by it.

Hence is't, that I am carried towards the west,

This day, when my soul's form bends to the East.

There I should see a Sun by rising set,

And by that setting endless day beget.

But that Christ on His cross did rise and fall,

Sin had eternally benighted all.

Yet dare I almost be glad, I do not see

That spectacle of too much weight for me.

Who sees Gods face, that is self-life, must die;

What a death were it then to see God die?

It made His own lieutenant, Nature, shrink,

It made His footstool crack, and the sun wink.

Could I behold those hands, which span the poles

And tune all spheres at once, pierced with those holes?

Could I behold that endless height, which is

Zenith to us and our antipodes,

Humbled below us? or that blood, which is

The seat of all our soul's, if not of His,

Made dirt of dust, or that flesh which was worn

By God for His apparel, ragg'd and torn ?

If on these things I durst not look, durst I

On His distressed Mother cast mine eye,

Who was God's partner here, and furnish'd thus

Half of that sacrifice which ransom'd us ?

Though these things as I ride be from mine eye,

They're present yet unto my memory,

For that looks towards them; and Thou look'st towards me,

O Saviour, as Thou hang'st upon the tree.

I turn my back to thee but to receive

Corrections till Thy mercies bid Thee leave.

O think me worth Thine anger, punish me,

Burn off my rust, and my deformity;

Restore Thine image, so much, by Thy grace,

That Thou mayst know me, and I'll turn my face.