"We die, and cannot enjoy death."
-- from Devotion I: Insultus Morbi Primus, Meditation (p, 3)
"How manifold and perplexed a thing, nay, how wanton and various a thing, is ruin and destruction."
-- from Devotion 9: Medicamina Scribunt, Meditation (p. 52)
"This whole world is but an universal churchyard, but our common grave, and the life and motion that the greatest persons have in it is but as the shaking of buried bodies in their grave, by an earthquake."
-- from Death's Duel (p. 160)
I've always felt about John Donne's writings the way I do about the films of Guillermo del Toro: I respect them, and admire the obvious artistry in them, but I just don't love them. I wish I did, but despite their often Goth flavor, I don't have the wild enthusiasm for them that I do for sometimes obviously lesser works. There's something about them that puts me at a remove.
Since I knew Donne as a poet from my undergraduate days, I'd always meant to give his prose a fair trial, and settled on the Devotions, written during a serious illness in 1623, along with his final sermon "Death's Duel," preached in 1631. This particular edition, from the Vintage Spiritual Classics series, with biographical material by Izaak Walton, quietly edits the words into modern spelling. While there are, of course, some doozies of beautiful language, and some fantastically quotable stuff -- the "no man is an island" passage is worth its fame -- in the end, I still didn't love Donne the way I hoped I would.
Each devotion is in three segments, an opening "Meditation," a middle "Expostulation" (be aware that this is the part where he quotes and paraphrases scripture, so it's the most like the traditionally boring parts of church), and a closing "Prayer." My favorite bits tend to come from the Meditations, where Donne ponders illness and mortality from all sorts of angles.
As a fan of the Friday the 13th films, I was amused by this quote: "There is scarce anything which hath not killed somebody; a hair, a feather hath done it" ( 40). And as a fan of The Matrix, I found an echo of Agent Smith: "Man hath no center but misery; there, and only there, he is fixed, and sure to find himself" (133).
There are also a few places where I wrote "thank you!" in the margins, for their theological value; for example, "If there had been no woman, would not man have served to have been his own tempter?" (132). Thank you! There's also a great section about how, while God may be a literal God, "thou art a figurative, a metaphorical God too ... How often, how much more often, doth thy Son call himself a way, and a light, and a gate, and a vine, and bread, than the Son of God, or of man? How much oftener doth he exhibit a metaphorical Christ, than a real, a literal?" (118, 119). Again, thank you!
(This famous portrait of Donne appears to be solidly in the public domain).
Overall, I'd say I have a more grounded respect for Donne now, and am glad I had the Classics Club to prod me to read more of his work.
Donne, John, and Izaak Walton. Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions and Death's Duel. New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1999.
-- from Devotion I: Insultus Morbi Primus, Meditation (p, 3)
"How manifold and perplexed a thing, nay, how wanton and various a thing, is ruin and destruction."
-- from Devotion 9: Medicamina Scribunt, Meditation (p. 52)
"This whole world is but an universal churchyard, but our common grave, and the life and motion that the greatest persons have in it is but as the shaking of buried bodies in their grave, by an earthquake."
-- from Death's Duel (p. 160)
I've always felt about John Donne's writings the way I do about the films of Guillermo del Toro: I respect them, and admire the obvious artistry in them, but I just don't love them. I wish I did, but despite their often Goth flavor, I don't have the wild enthusiasm for them that I do for sometimes obviously lesser works. There's something about them that puts me at a remove.
Since I knew Donne as a poet from my undergraduate days, I'd always meant to give his prose a fair trial, and settled on the Devotions, written during a serious illness in 1623, along with his final sermon "Death's Duel," preached in 1631. This particular edition, from the Vintage Spiritual Classics series, with biographical material by Izaak Walton, quietly edits the words into modern spelling. While there are, of course, some doozies of beautiful language, and some fantastically quotable stuff -- the "no man is an island" passage is worth its fame -- in the end, I still didn't love Donne the way I hoped I would.
Each devotion is in three segments, an opening "Meditation," a middle "Expostulation" (be aware that this is the part where he quotes and paraphrases scripture, so it's the most like the traditionally boring parts of church), and a closing "Prayer." My favorite bits tend to come from the Meditations, where Donne ponders illness and mortality from all sorts of angles.
As a fan of the Friday the 13th films, I was amused by this quote: "There is scarce anything which hath not killed somebody; a hair, a feather hath done it" ( 40). And as a fan of The Matrix, I found an echo of Agent Smith: "Man hath no center but misery; there, and only there, he is fixed, and sure to find himself" (133).
There are also a few places where I wrote "thank you!" in the margins, for their theological value; for example, "If there had been no woman, would not man have served to have been his own tempter?" (132). Thank you! There's also a great section about how, while God may be a literal God, "thou art a figurative, a metaphorical God too ... How often, how much more often, doth thy Son call himself a way, and a light, and a gate, and a vine, and bread, than the Son of God, or of man? How much oftener doth he exhibit a metaphorical Christ, than a real, a literal?" (118, 119). Again, thank you!
(This famous portrait of Donne appears to be solidly in the public domain).
Overall, I'd say I have a more grounded respect for Donne now, and am glad I had the Classics Club to prod me to read more of his work.
Donne, John, and Izaak Walton. Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions and Death's Duel. New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1999.
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