The individual and the state

Although Donne’s third satire (D, pp. 29–31) has never been printed among his Divine Poems, it nevertheless contains his most sustained and direct poetic treatment of the subject of religion. None of the satires written earlier in Elizabeth’s reign – Gascoigne’s The Steel Glass, for example, or Lodge’s Truth’s Complaint over England ¹ – would have prepared Donne’s readers for the strength of his attack on irreligion and casual religion. The earlier writers formally signal their wish to be read as poets by their use of allegorical names (False Semblant, Vain Delight) and deferential communings with their Muses. But after a short spell of self-consciousness, Donne’s third satire plunges into a recognisably contemporary world of naval expeditions and religious dissent whose evocation makes the imagined worlds of Gascoigne and Lodge seem literary and artificial.