Revelations of self

A few months before his ordination on 23 January 1615, Donne announced that he was interring his Muse in the grave of the Countess of Bedford’s brother, John, the second Lord Harrington, whose death he was mourning in an elaborate commemorative poem. His Muse has, Donne says, ‘spoke her last’ (D, p. 259). It is very tempting to dismiss this as a device designed to convey the sense that Harrington’s death has made the world a different place: the letter to the Countess which Donne enclosed with the poem is in effect a request for payment for the pains he took over his tribute. ¹ However, in a letter to Goodyer dating from just before Christmas 1614, Donne refers to this public renunciation of poetry as binding: ‘I would be just to my written words to my Lord Harrington to write nothing after that’ (Gosse 1899, ii, p. 69), and there is no indication that he is saying this in the hope that Goodyer will report the comment to Lady Bedford. (Donne knew Goodyer well enough to be able to ask him to do this if such had been his intention.) The fact that he did write poetry after his ordination is, therefore, interesting in itself, and prompts us to investigate the motives which lay behind it in order to reach an estimate of what Donne saw as warranting an infringement of his self-imposed ban. His use of part of his tribute to Harrington to make a statement about himself conveniently anticipates a tactic which he practises much more systematically in the post-ordination poems: all of them – with the exception of his commissioned poem, ‘An hymn to the Saints, and to Marquis Hamilton’ and his scriptural paraphrase, ‘The Lamentations of Jeremy’ – allude directly to his own circumstances at the time of writing. Marotti’s description of the Holy Sonnets as ‘witty performances that exploited a knowledgeable audience’s awareness of their author’s personal situation and history’ (Marotti 1986, p. 251) is much more accurately applied to Donne’s post-ordination poems. This view of them does not amount to a reluctant admission that here at last Donne writes versified autobiography, but it does give sufficient grounds for referring to Donne himself as the speaker of these poems.