Estimation of John Donne as a poet: John Donne’s Method: Donne’s rhythmic effect: Religious poems

Estimation of John Donne as a poet

Introduction:

The English writer and Anglican cleric John Donne is considered now to be the preeminent metaphysical poet of his time. He was born in 1572 to Roman Catholic parents, when practising that religion was illegal in England. His work is distinguished by its emotional and sonic intensity and its capacity to plumb the paradoxes of faith, human and divine love, and the possibility of salvation. Donne often employs conceits, or extended metaphors, to yoke together “heterogenous ideas,” in the words of Samuel Johnson, thus generating the powerful ambiguity for which his work is famous. Donne’s poetry is marked by strikingly original departures from the conventions of 16th-century English verse, particularly that of Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser. Even his early satires and elegies, which derive from classical Latin models, contain versions of his experiments with genre, form, and imagery.

John Donne’s Method:

He coined new images which were the outcome of popular belief of scientific discoveries. His vocabulary was rich and diversified. It scrupulously avoids the hackneyed poetical and colourful words and expressions. He exploits the resources of the colloquial, trite and plebeian words which may be unhesitatingly yoked with a set of learned technical terms, with a genius vision of verbal eccentricities, ambiguity, and confusion. Consequently, there is production of a bizarre effect. The vigour of colloquialism is evident in his poem The Good Morrow as the opening lines given below show:

I wonder by my troth, what thou and I

Did till we lov’d…

In addition, he was the first poet to use facts of scientific discoveries of his time in the poetry, the objects which are utilised in the laboratories such as compasses, and the globe with the maps of earth pasted on it, and various other objects derived from various branches of science like biology, physics, and chemistry etc.

Donne’s rhythmic effect:

Grierson has described him as one of ‘ the first masters of elaborate stanza or paragraphs in which the discords of individual lines and phrases are resolved in the complex and rhetorically effective harmony of the whole group’. He plays with rhythmical effects as with ‘ conceits’ and words and seems to be bent upon startling or even shocking the readers into alertness necessary for threading the labyrinth of his thoughts and arguments. His rhythm is an irritant of gadfly which goads the readers continually to move forward and then, all of a sudden, pulls up sharp with some arresting turn. 

Religious poems

Donne’s sonnets are the most well known of his devotional poems. They comprise the sequence of seven linked sonnets called ‘La Corona’ [the crown] and the 19 Holy Sonnets. The sonnet form is traditionally associated with love poetry, and Donne’s religious poems use some of the same techniques as his love poems. The speakers in the Holy Sonnets also make passionate demands of their addressees: ‘Batter my heart, three-personed God’, implores the speaker in Holy Sonnet 14, urging God to enter his heart, like a siege-engine entering a ‘usurped town’; while Holy Sonnet 10, addressed to Death, demands ‘Death! be not proud… | … for thou art not so’. Paradoxes are arguably even more important than they are in the love poems. Holy Sonnet 14 closes with perhaps Donne’s most infamous and bold paradox: I will never be ‘chaste’, the speaker claims, ‘except you [God] ravish me’. The whole of Holy Sonnet 10 is dedicated to the Christian paradox that Death’s victims will in the end ‘die not’.

In 1621, he became dean of Saint Paul's Cathedral. In his later years, Donne's writing reflected his fear of his inevitable death. He wrote his private prayers, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, during a period of severe illness and published them in 1624. His learned, charismatic, and inventive preaching made him a highly influential presence in London. Best known for his vivacious, compelling style and thorough examination of mortal paradox.

Conclusion:

It can be said with no exaggeration that John Donne was probably one of the pioneers in the field of poetry who was brave enough to cut ties from the conventions followed at that time by other writers and pave his own path to please his readers of that age even of this age as well. He had the knack for catching his reader’s attention with his way of presenting ideas which made them immerse into his poetry. He has been praised by so many great poets like Ben Johnson and Grierson. So, these were some of the reasons why John Donne is so famous for his poetry.