Young Donne had an inflamed libido, old Donne an inflamed conscience. He had a slicing, dicing, predatory mind that he applied with equal force to sex, to politics, and finally to a religious vocation. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.”) He was a splenetic satirist, all-observing, all-condemning, who was also a world-class flatterer/ingratiator. (His Rutger Hauer–in– Blade Runner moment: “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. He was a bookish lover-poet who went to sea with the doomed and dashing Earl of Essex and caught a vision of hell when he watched Spanish sailors being burned alive in the harbor at Cádiz. English verse is not the same after Donne. Born an outsider, a Catholic at a time when being Catholic in England was illegal-his uncle and then his brother went to prison for their faith, and his brother would die there-Donne worked his way in, into the inside, shifting and shedding as he went. And among his contemporaries, nobody oscillated more madly than John Donne.ĭonne was made of contradiction, or of transformation.

They oscillated madly between the abstract and the corporeal.

They had wonderful manners and barbaric inclinations, lovely clothes and terrible diseases. They had a passion for virtue and a genius for cruelty. The Reformation was just behind them the civil war was coming Elizabeth, the virgin queen, may have been semi-celestial, but her subjects lived in a police state. But there was a peculiar paradoxical ugly-beautiful density to life as the Elizabethans lived it. Maybe posterity, considering our own age, will judge that we are packing a lot in, with the fascism and the COVID and the melting glaciers. They packed a lot in, the Elizabethans, is my point. I f you were a gentleman in Elizabethan London, a gentleman of more or less regular means and habits, your typical day went something like this: You rose at 4 a.m., you wrote 14 letters and a 30-page treatise on the nonexistence of purgatory, you fought a duel, you composed a sonnet, you went to watch a Jesuit get publicly disemboweled, you invented a scientific instrument, you composed another sonnet, you attended the premiere of As You Like It, you romanced someone else’s wife, and then you caught the bubonic plague and died.

Rundell super infinite