My Old Friend John

I ran into an old friend from school on the internet a while back … John Donne. We go way back… to my Junior year in High school I think. He’s not an old classmate but an English writer from the 1500’s (Just for the record, I graduated in 1986.) ...we’ve been friends ever since.

I first met Donne through a sappy song we sang in High School Choir which used his “No man is an Island” lyric. It wasn’t a very good introduction. The song was actually inspired by the humanist sprituality writings of Thomas Merton, who had absconded Donne’s famous line as a title for one of his essays. I didn’t know anything about either Merton or Donne back then so I interpreted Donne’s lyric as a kind of early 16th century version of “We are the World” (I went to High School in the 80’s after all.) And I saw Donne himself as another Reniassance humanist…which, I learned later is exactly what he was, and would have remained had he not met the Desire of his heart.

I met the real Donne in English Lit my sophmore year in College. I'll admit it was the racy poetry of his early work that first piqued my ears. It’s sensual stuff in any century. But 20 year old ears dull as quickly as they pique, and I lived in a college dorm after all, where the sonnets were less poetic but more direct. If I were to remember anything about Donne’s life after 2409 numbing pages of my Norton’s anthology, there would have to be something more enduring to learn from his life than “We are the world” and oblique Jacobian sensuality. Thankfully, I kept reading.

Like so much of good literature and great authors Donne's writing and life is both record and mirror of the human experience. Good authors retell the great stories; guilty heroes, elusive beauty...legends of the fall. But in rare and beautiful stories, like Donne's, the plot resolve in Grace. “Jack” Donne, whose poems seduced women, became John Donne who married Anne for love and fidelity, and after her early death, became Doctor (or “Pastor”) Donne, Dean of St Paul's Cathedral (and a pretty good preacher to.) The one who worshiped the creature came to love and worship the Creator and inadvertently recorded the story in beautiful prose for us to read. It’s a great story, a reflection of Great Grace.

I think it was C.S. Lewis who wrote that there is only one story, one archetypal theme in all literature, that of redemption. If that is true and I think that it is, then I might extend that there really is only one poem as well; a love poem. One that begins with God, who is love, and whose meter is written under and through all fallen history, even our own. Written to seduce and woo us for that which we were made: His Love.

From his early sensual lyric through all his prose to his Holy Sonnets and sermons, Donne reveals a heart longing for the One who ultimately battered his heart and won him. The Grace displayed in his life glorifies Christ, and gives people like me who wish they could write poetry a poem to make their own.

It has been a few years since John and I last talked, but after an article I was reading a few months ago referenced his famous Holy Sonnet 14, I have spent some time with my old friend John. I have been re-reading and rediscovering many of the poems he wrote, and making them my own. Here is one of my favorite:

HOLY SONNETS.  XIV.

Batter my heart, three-person'd God ; for you
As yet but knock ; breathe, shine, and seek to mend ;
That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend
Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp'd town, to another due,
Labour to admit you, but O, to no end.
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captived, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,
But am betroth'd unto your enemy ;
Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.