Donne and the women

 

In 1980, Sarah Wintle, in the London Review of Books, wrote:  “Any close criticism of Donne’s poetry has, it seems inevitably, to be an account of oppositions in action.” The phrase sweeps up the critical dictum under which Donne has been read at least since Johnson’s phrase about the yoking together of opposites, and Eliots reflection on the  discordia concors.

There is a lot to be said for Donne’s attraction to opposites – black and white, East and West, constant and inconstant, etc. And one of the things to be said is that such opposites, resting on essence terms, are vulnerable to the inverting of those essences – an inversion that remains within the essentialist camp in order to create the paradoxes that Donne’s mind played with.  Donne’s paradoxes are never advances towards relativism, because he needed the essences to make sense of the paradoxes he could make out of them.

I am a great fan of Donne’s prose. Flannery O’Connor said she read Henry James to tone up her own prose; I use Donne, sometimes, for the same reason, although the sermons can become a bit too plummy as one wades through the intricate (and I often think bogus) philology and etymology to get to the redemptive point. Which, I think in the greatest of paradoxes, is also the generative point, redemption being another mask of creation.  Donne’s earlier prose, the Devotions, the Biathanatos, the paradoxes, are not meant as trials of hermeneutical weightlifting in the service of the King, but are to an extent ludic exercises – although of course the devotions and the Christian pamphlets have a more serious purpose. They are essays, but tend towards deforming or parodying the essayist’s usual intent. To my mind the Paradoxes, which were in vogue in the Renaissance, should be included in the pre-history of prose poetry: they are a poetry of pure opposition, of opposites as being, in that space between rhetoric and ideation,  themselves poetic tropes.

What you can do with such play, in early 17^th century England, is to make the essences approved of in common and scholastic life dance to it.

I would not defend the value of all the paradoxes, but, unlike Helen Peters, who condemns certain of the paradoxes – most notably the defence of the inconstancy of women – to the shadow realm of the Dubia, although the evidence for making the judgment that Donne didn’t write it seems pretty shallow to me. I just don’t think Helen Peters liked it.

Donne often took on the role of railer against women and as a railer, he permitted himself the rhetoric of extremism that Christianity as he conceived it permitted him. Yet, in Donne’s afterlife in the twentieth century, one notices that it is the company of women, academics and poets, that have not only gathered his works together with extraordinary scholarship, but who as well are the great arguers for his poetry. The last biography of Donne, by Katherine Rundell, is the heir of the work of Helen Gardner, Evelyn Simpson, and Helen Peters, among others. In particular, certain Catholic writers, such as Dorothy Sayers, have made a cult of Donne.

Perhaps it is the way in which Donne seems so dashing. To dash is to break out, to draw a line through, to thow away, and it is also, since the 18^th century, about making a brilliant show. Both means seem to mark Donne’s persona – and no matter how often, in a classroom, one is assured that the poem’s I is not identical with the biographical person, the mental superposition of one over the other happens, and happens as part of the poetic process. The moreso in Donne, who sent his poems privately, and never collected them himself.

The Defence of Woman’s Inconstancy is the longest of the paradoxes, and seems the most thought out, as a piece of prose. It launches itself with the same kind of gymnastic tonguework as many of the love poems:

“For every thing as it is one better than another, ſo is it fuller of change; The Heavens themſelves continually turne, the Starres move, the Moone changeth; Fire whirleth, Ayre flyeth, Water ebbs and flowes, the face of the Earth altereth her lookes, time ſtayes not; the Colour that is moſt light, will take moſt dyes: so in Men, they that have the moſt reaſon are the moſt alterable in their deſignes, and the darkeſt or moſt ignorant, do ſeldomeſt change; therefore Women changing more than Men, have alſo more Reaſon. They cannot be immutable like ſtockes, like ſtones, like the Earths dull Center; Gold that lyeth ſtill, ruſteth; Water, corrupteth; Aire that moveth not, poyſoneth; then why should that which is the perfection of other things, be imputed to Women as greateſt imperfection?”

The brilliance of this requires a convention that still dominates the discussion of gender: a type, which is woman, and a type, which is man, pieces upon a chessboard. The token never runs away with the type, never ruins it. Rather, in this game, we only drive to logical paradox the attributes of the type. But what a glorious length of the universe is trailed behind the attributes of the type – the air, the stars, water, color, the inventory of the world. As in Donne’s poetry, where love becomes not just a matter of the attraction of the poet to the woman he loves, but rather a microcosm of the macrocosm, a proof and reflection of the largest order, the All. Even if Donne’s poet casts an evil eye, a certain violence:

But O, self traitor, I do bring

The spider love, which transubstantiates all

And can convert manna to gall;

Transubstantiation is a powerful word in this place – and the spider love that inhabits the speaker has an anti-Christ’s cast. The spider, the flea, worms, all the little and somewhat disgusting beasts are always at Donne’s beck and call, which is part of the dash of the poetry and the poetic persona. Here there is no sparing of the excremental side of life, blood and piss and shit. In the 1920s, when Donne became faddish, there was a larger sense of the excremental side of life among the cultivated – who’d splashed through four years of it at the front.

One of the great things about Donne is that he has never been wholly accepted as canonical. The excremental life, the imbalance as it might be seen by those who require balance to block out crouched man, taking a dump – that is the other side of the dashing persona. In this respect, Donne could be considered in the terms Orwell uses about Ulysses:

“The truly remarkable thing about Ulysses, for instance, is the commonplaceness of its material. Of course there is much more in Ulysses than this, because Joyce is a kind of poet and also an elephantine pedant, but his real achievement has been to get the familiar on to paper. He dared – for it is a matter of daring just as much as of technique – to expose the imbecilities of the inner mind, and in doing so he discovered an America which was under everybody’s nose.” The “America” under everybody’s nose – one feels a link to Donne’s numerous uses of America to speak of bodies, discoveries, intimate space. Most famously in his account of getting naked with his lover:

 

O my America, my new-found-land,

 

My kingdom, safeliest when with one man manned,

 

My mine of precious stones, my empery,

 

How blest am I in this discovering thee!