ABSTRACT

Nicholas Hilliard’s 1591 engraved portrait of John Donne, the frontispiece for Donne’s posthumously published Poems (1635), includes the Latin motto, “Antes muerto que mudado,” which means, “Sooner dead than changed.”1 It seems to refer to Donne’s decision to convert from Catholicism to the Church of England, but it also speaks to his preoccupation with death. Donne looked beyond the grave in his poetry, beyond corporeal life, and into the ethereal or the afterlife. The soul reigns for Donne, but the afterlife means the end of the corporeal life, as physical selves become corpses. This leads Donne to acknowledge all aspects of the body, beautiful or otherwise, and to incorporate imagery and commentary on the base, the ugly, and the filthy into his poetry. Donne experimented with the perverse, most particularly in his early poems, the Satyres and the Elegies, and his treatment of the ugly and the disgusting serves no less an important role in understanding Donne’s entire body of work. The Satyres, focused more on Thanatos and Vulcan, and the Elegies, focused more on Eros and Venus, both engage with their generic conventions in a somewhat Dionysian register, and their use of disgusting imagery challenges cultural mores about taboo subjects and complicate Philip Sidney’s Horatian dictum that poetry should “teach and delight.”