THE REVEREND JOHN DONNE

53 Pages·1991·2.05 MB·English

PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN
PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK
MENTIONED IN A WEEK AND IN WALDEN: REVEREND JOHN DONNE
“In the 1840s Thoreau seems to have read Donne on two distinct
occasions, without acquiring Emersons’s or Lowell’s enthusiasm
for him.”
— Albert James Smith’s JOHN DONNE:
THE CRITICAL HERITAGE (1964), Vol. I
ANATOMY OF THE WORLD
CHALMERS, VOLUME V
CHALMERS — DONNE
“NARRATIVE HISTORY” AMOUNTS TO FABULATION,
THE REAL STUFF BEING MERE CHRONOLOGY
People of A Week and Walden “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo”
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PEOPLE OF A WEEK AND WALDEN: REVEREND JOHN DONNE
PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN
WALDEN: The other day I picked up the lower jaw of a hog, with white and
sound teeth and tusks, which suggested that there was an animal health
and vigor distinct from the spiritual. This creature succeeded by other
means than temperance and purity. “That in which men differ from brute
beasts,” says Mencius, “is a thing very inconsiderable; the common herd
lose it very soon; superior men preserve it carefully.” Who knows what
sort of life would result if we had attained to purity? If I knew so wise
a man as could teach me purity I would go to seek him forthwith. “A command
over our passions, and over the external senses of the body, and good
acts, are declared by the Ved to be indispensable in the mind’s
approximation to God.” Yet the spirit can for the time pervade and control
every member and function of the body, and transmute what in form is the
grossest sensuality into purity and devotion. The generative energy,
which, when we are loose, dissipates and makes us unclean, when we are
continent invigorates and inspires us. Chastity is the flowering of man;
and what are called Genius, Heroism, Holiness, and the like, are but
various fruits which succeed it. Man flows at once to God when the channel
of purity is open. By turns our purity inspires and our impurity casts us
down. He is blessed who is assured that the animal is dying out in him
day by day, and the divine being established. Perhaps there is none but
has cause for shame on account of the inferior and brutish nature to which
he is allied. I fear that we are such gods or demigods only as fauns and
satyrs, the divine allied to beasts, the creatures of appetite, and that,
to some extent, our very life is our disgrace.–
“How happy’s he who hath due place assigned
To his beasts and disaforested his mind!
* * *
Can use his horse, goat, wolf, and ev’ry beast,
And is not ass himself to all the rest!
Else man not only is the herd of swine,
But he’s those devils too which did incline
Them to a headlong rage, and made them worse.”
All sensuality is one, though it takes many forms; all purity is one. It
is the same whether a man eat, or drink, or cohabit, or sleep sensually.
They are but one appetite, and we only need to see a person do any one
of these things to know how great a sensualist he is. The impure can
neither stand nor sit with purity. When the reptile is attacked at one
mouth of his burrow, he shows himself at another. If you would be chaste,
you must be temperate. What is chastity? How shall a man know if he is
chaste? He shall not know it. We have heard of this virtue, but we know
not what it is. We speak conformably to the rumor which we have heard.
From exertion come wisdom and purity; from sloth ignorance and
sensuality. In the student sensuality is a sluggish habit of mind. An
unclean person is universally a slothful one, one who sits by a stove,
whom the sun shines on prostrate, who reposes without being fatigued. If
you would avoid uncleanness, and all the sins, work earnestly, thought it
be at cleaning a stable. Nature is hard to be overcome, but she must be
overcome. What avails it that you are Christian, if you are not purer than
the heathen, if you deny yourself no more, if you are not more religious?
I know of many systems of religion esteemed heathenish whose precepts fill
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I hesitate to say these things, but it is not because
of the subject, –I care not how obscene my words are,– but
because I cannot speak of them without betraying my
impurity. We discourse freely without shame of one form
of sensuality, and are silent about another. We are so
degraded that we cannot speak simply of the necessary
functions of human nature. In earlier ages, in some
countries, every function was reverently spoken of and
regulated by law. Nothing was too trivial for the Hindoo
lawgiver, however offensive it may be to modern taste. He
teaches how to eat, drink, cohabit, void excrement and
urine, and the like, elevating what is mean, and does not
falsely excuse himself by calling these things trifles.
A WEEK: PEOPLE OF
The Boteman strayt A WEEK
Held on his course with stayed stedfastnesse,
Ne ever shroncke, ne ever sought to bayt
His tryed armes for toylesome wearinesse;
But with his oares did sweepe the watry wildernesse.
— SPENSER.
Summer’s robe grows
Dusky, and like an oft-dyed garment shows.
— DONNE.
REVEREND JOHN DONNE
A WEEK: Undoubtedly, countless reforms are called for, because PEOPLE OF
society is not animated, or instinct enough with life, but in the
A WEEK
condition of some snakes which I have seen in early spring, with
alternate portions of their bodies torpid and flexible, so that
they could wriggle neither way. All men are partially buried in
the grave of custom, and of some we see only the crown of the head
above ground. Better are the physically dead, for they more lively
rot. Even virtue is no longer such if it be stagnant. A man’s life
should be constantly as fresh as this river. It should be the same
channel, but a new water every instant.
“Virtues as rivers pass,
But still remains that virtuous man there was.”
REVEREND JOHN DONNE
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A WEEK: I dreamed this night of an event which had occurred long PEOPLE OF
before. It was a difference with a Friend, which had not ceased
A WEEK
to give me pain, though I had no cause to blame myself. But in my
dream ideal justice was at length done me for his suspicions, and
I received that compensation which I had never obtained in my
waking hours. I was unspeakably soothed and rejoiced, even after
I awoke, because in dreams we never deceive ourselves, nor are
deceived, and this seemed to have the authority of a final
judgment.
We bless and curse ourselves. Some dreams are divine, as well as
some waking thoughts. Donne sings of one
“Who dreamt devoutlier than most use to pray.”
REVEREND JOHN DONNE
A WEEK: Think of the importance of Friendship in the education of PEOPLE OF
men.
A WEEK
“He that hath love and judgment too,
Sees more than any other doe.”
It will make a man honest; it will make him a hero; it will make
him a saint. It is the state of the just dealing with the just,
the magnanimous with the magnanimous, the sincere with the
sincere, man with man.
And it is well said by another poet,
“Why love among the virtues is not known,
Is that love is them all contract in one.”
REVEREND JOHN DONNE
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1572
John Donne was born in London to a prominent Roman Catholic family at a time when anti-Catholic feeling
in England was near its height and Catholics were subject to constant harassment by the Elizabethan secret
police (he would be a convert to Anglicanism during the 1590s).
THE BISHOP’S BIBLE was printed by Richard Jugge in London (there had been a previous edition of this Black
Letter Bible in 1568). It was an attempt of English ecclesiastics to replace the Geneva (or “Breeches”) version
of Miles Coverdale, of the popularity of which they were jealous. The ornate Woodcut Initials, some showing
scenes from the Classics, had been originally intended for an edition of Ovid and caused such a storm of
criticism that they would not again be used in a Bible. This would sometimes be referred to as the “Leda Bible”
because it used a Leda-and-the-Swan woodcut at the opening of the Book of Hebrews (and sometimes as the
“Treacle Bible” because in Jeremiah 8:22 the word “treacle” was used instead of “balm”).
TROSTSPIEGEL was printed in Frankfort by Christian Egenolff, a German translation of Petrarch’s prose treatise
“De Remediis” (the woodcuts in this volume were by Hans Weiditz of the Ausburg school, had been in
existence since 1520, and had already been used in 1532).
HISTORY OF

THE PRESS
Bartholomew Gosnold was born in Grundisburgh in Suffolk, England to Anthony Gosnold and Dorothy Bacon
Gosnold, a family whose seat was at Otley, Suffolk. He would graduate from the University of Cambridge and
then study law at the Middle Temple of London.
John Ferne matriculated at St John’s College of Cambridge University (he is said to have afterward studied at
Oxford University).
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ST JOHN’S COLLEGE
NOBODY COULD GUESS WHAT WOULD HAPPEN NEXT
People of A Week and Walden “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo”
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PEOPLE OF A WEEK AND WALDEN: REVEREND JOHN DONNE
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1582
March 3, Sunday (1582, Old Style): Edward Herbert was born at Eyton, Shropshire, the 1st son of Richard Herbert
(circa 1554-1596), Sheriff of Montgomeryshire and member of Parliament, and Magdalen Herbert (later Lady
Danvers), a patron of John Donne and other literary lights. Lord Herbert would confide in his autobiography
that he has sweet-smelling sweat and married women find him so irresistible that they keep portraits of him
between their breasts. Donne would be said by Ben Jonson to have supposed Herbert’s poetry to be over-
complex, threatening to write a poem about Prince Henry that “match’d Sir Edward Herbert in obscurity.”
Herbert would become, in the Robert Burton sense, the personification of melancholy.
LIFE IS LIVED FORWARD BUT UNDERSTOOD BACKWARD?
— NO, THAT’S GIVING TOO MUCH TO THE HISTORIAN’S STORIES.
LIFE ISN’T TO BE UNDERSTOOD EITHER FORWARD OR BACKWARD.
People of A Week and Walden “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo”
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1583
John Donne matriculated at the University of Oxford at the age of 11, where he would study for three years
but take no degree. Presumably that was because a degree would have involved taking an oath of allegiance
— which as a Catholic he couldn’t do.
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1584
Christmas Eve: Jasper Heywood had been incarcerated for his failure to abandon the Catholic religion, initially at
Clink Prison and then in the Tower of London. Heywood was a nephew of Sir Thomas More, who suffered
similarly. His sister Elizabeth Syminges brought her eldest son, the 12-year-old John Donne, and an undercover
Catholic priest, William Weston, to the Tower, by passing this off as a family visit at Christmas. The priest who
was with Mrs. Syminges and the young Donne wrote in his memoirs, 27 years later, that:
I accompanied her [Mrs. Syminges] to the Tower, but with a
feeling of great trepidation as I saw the vast battlements, and
was led by the warder past the gates with their iron fastenings,
which were closed behind me. So I came to the cell where the
Father [Jasper Heywood, SJ] was confined. We greeted one
another, and then, as was natural, exchanged the information we
had about the affairs that concerned us.... At last, when I had
finished talking to Father Heywood –we spent almost the whole
day together– I embraced him and said goodbye. Then I returned
the same way that I had come; and the moment I reached safety
outside the walls I felt as if I had been restored to the light
of day.
THE FUTURE IS MOST READILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT
People of A Week and Walden “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo”