‘The Relic’ had imagined a gravedigger coming across the bodies of himself and his lover, buried together. Rest of their bones, and souls’ delivery.Īs a young man he had imagined his death in extravagantly sexual terms. Much pleasure, then from thee much more must flow,Īnd soonest our best men with thee do go,
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so įor those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrowĭie not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.įrom rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be, His poetry explicitly about death is rarely sad: it thrums with strange images of living.ĭeath! be not proud, though some have called thee Spiritually speaking, many of us confronted with the thought of death perform the psychological equivalence of hiding in a box with our knees under our chin: Donne hunted death, battled it, killed it, saluted it, threw it parties. When Donne wrote about suicide there was urgent pain: but when he wrote about death in itself, there is great serious joy, and occasional rampant glee. Poets and playwrights, meanwhile, were killed and killing at a far greater rate of frequency than their percentage of the population seems to merit: Thomas Wyatt killed a man in an affray, Ben Jonson stabbed a man in a duel, Christopher Marlowe was murdered, probably in a tavern brawl, though possibly in an elaborate intrigue. Donne had a memento mori, lest he forget even briefly that we are born astride the grave – he left it to a friend in his will, ‘the picture called The Skeleton which hangs in the hall’.Īrtists and writers especially were expected to contemplate death: there were rumours (probably mad and unfounded) that Michelangelo murdered a man and watched him die in order to be able to paint the agonies of Christ more accurately.
They prepared intensively for it, contemplated it Donne discussed it in letters that were otherwise about horses and dentistry. Donne lived in a time more familiar with the details and look of death than we almost every adult was likely to have seen a dead body. Scarcely anything exists, Donne wrote with relish in the Devotions, which has not caused the death of someone once: ‘a pin, a comb, a hair pulled, hath gangrened and killed.’ A grim truth, and one which makes our modern attempts to avoid the topic of death look malarially unhinged. The world is made up entirely of things that can kill you. “Spiritually speaking, many of us confronted with the thought of death perform the psychological equivalence of hiding in a box with our knees under our chin: Donne hunted death, battled it, killed it, saluted it, threw it parties,” writes Katherine Rundell in her new biography of the English poet, Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne.ĭid you know? The Folger Shakespeare Library collection includes about a third of John Donne’s surviving letters.
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