Dan Snow's History Hit - John Donne: Poet of Love, Sex and Death

Episode Date: May 2, 2022

John Donne (1572-1631) lived myriad lives. Sometime religious outsider and social disaster, sometime celebrity preacher and establishment darling, John Donne was incapable of being just one thing. He was a scholar of law, a sea adventurer, an MP, a priest, the Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral – and perhaps the greatest love poet in the history of the English language.Katherine Rundell, author and academic, joins Dan on the podcast. They discuss Donne’s conversion from Catholicism to Protestantism, his imprisonment for marrying a high-born girl without her father’s consent, and his often ill health and familial struggles.Produced by Hannah WardMixed and Mastered by Dougal PatmoreIf you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History. Today we'll be learning all about one of the most brilliant poets in the history of the English language, a poet who's been compared, as you'll hear, favourably, to William Shakespeare. I'm talking to one of my favourite people in the world, Catherine Rundell. She's an author, but she's also an academic. She writes children's literature. She's been very, very highly praised, won all the big awards, all that kind of stuff for children's literature. I read them to my kids. But she's also fantastically talented. She's also a brilliant academic. And thankfully, thankfully, she's chosen to write about the life of John Donne, late 16th, early 17th century poet, but also rake, wild man, pirate. He's got it all. You're going to love this guy. And the best thing of all is that Catherine's

got one of the greatest voices in the world. And when she recites his poetry, it's fantastic. You're going to absolutely love it. Catherine is putting John Donne back where he belongs, at the very top of the list of great English poets. If you want to hear more about this period, late Tudor, early Stuart period, then I've got good news for you. You can go to History Hit TV. We just made a documentary about Warwickshire in that period, about Shakespeare's country and how it coped with the transition from Catholicism to Protestantism and how it gave us the gunpowder plot as well. Exciting stuff. That programme is now available on History Hit TV, as well as lots of podcasts about the period, including a whole podcast strand, Not Just the Tudors, with Professor

Susanna Lipscomb. We've got a lot of Tudor content on there, folks. So you head over to History at TV. It's like Netflix. There's documentaries and audio shows all about history right there, available anywhere in the world on the internet at any time. If you click the link in the description of this podcast, it will take you there right away as if by magic. John Donne would have loved it. Just click on there. You get two weeks free if you sign up today. And for a mere pittance, you get a lifetime's enjoyment of history. True history for true history fans, you're going to love it. So please head on there and do that. But in the meantime, just enjoy yourself listening to Catherine Rundell talking about Donne.

Catherine, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Thank you so much for having me. It's a delight. Well, it's a very great delight for me because I've been looking for an excuse to get the podcast for years, but I just felt children's fiction was a bit of a stretch. Even though lots of it has got wonderful historic context and stuff going on. And I'm reading Rooftoppers for the third time to my children at the moment, third child. So thank you for all that. But then you presented me this unbelievable fully grown up book.

And quite grown up, by the way. Very much not for my usual age range. I usually write for nine to 12. So I would say this has a sort of 18 age certificate. A lot of plague, a lot of sex. I know. It's just a lot of killing and death and sex. It's great.

You know, I think we think about people like Dunn and poets in their literary context and not enough in the historical context and vice versa. It's so great to read about this man. Many of us will know his poetry, but like, what a life. Why did you choose him? Well, I think for two reasons. One of them is that I have loved his poetry since I was much too young to understand just how edgy it was. I used to be paid 50p a poem when I was a child. And my mother used to pin it up to the bathroom wall where we brushed our teeth. And 50p for a John Donne poem.

And I had very expensive taste in puppy-in-my-pocket figurines. So it was partly that, but it's also partly that I think John Donne... And so I'm going to interrupt you there, Catherine. 50p to do what? To learn it? 50p to learn it by heart. Okay, interesting. Yeah.

How many can you still remember? None of them all through, a lot of them halfway. Yeah, which now means you just can litter your conversation with sprinkles of great poetry. I mean, it's like, you know, everyone thinks you're super clever if you do that. I have refrained from doing that. My friends have already put up with a lot of John Donne

over the last decade. Okay, so you were learning him as a kid and then when did you sort of re-engage with him? So he was the subject of my doctoral thesis and it was in part because I think that there is nobody like him. I do think that he is the greatest poet of desire in the English language. greatest poet of desire in the English language. There's a play called Wit by Margaret Eppinson in which she says, Dunn makes Shakespeare look like a hallmark greeting card. And although I think that's not completely fair, I think it is true that John Dunn really acknowledged not just the heights and intensities of passion, but also the strangeness of it. If you think that John Dunn was living at a time when we were still very much playing the kind of,

my lady is a perfect white dove game. John Dunn absolutely refused to play that game. He exploded out of these traditions of the kind of rarefied female. And instead we get fleas and mythic sucking fish and he compares women to America and to the world itself and I think that he refused to make desire seem tidy and small and pretty. He knew it was a wild thing and therefore needed this slightly untamed poetry. Not something we usually associate with preachers these days. not something we usually associate with preachers these days. Yes, well, that's the thing, of course. John Donne himself went to great efforts to bifurcate himself into Jack Donne and Dr. Donne, to imply that there was the past and the present Donne, and that while there had once been a rake who had, you know, gone off to be a soldier and

had fought and stormed Cadiz, Now there was a sort of measured, intensely intellectual Dunn. But the argument of my book is that the bifurcation was never quite as absolute as that, and that the Jack Dunn leaks all the way through his life into the Dr. Dunn, and that you can find the poetry in the sermons, once he was a very stately, well-dressed, heavily bearded Dean of St Paul's. All right, Kate slash Dr. Catherine, let's get into it. Let's talk about the young man. Let's talk about his life. It's so amazing and you bring it alive so fantastically in your book. I loved it. He was born a Catholic, which I think is so fascinating. And he was born in 1572, not a great time to be born a Roman Catholic. Terrible time to be born a Roman Catholic. And

not just living at a moment in which Catholic persecution was so strong, but living at a time when so many of his parents' generation would have known those who had died. And we generally say, although there's not great paperwork to back this up, that he probably was taken to see his great uncle hung, drawn and quartered. And it's certainly true that he saw people hanged for their religion. We know that as a child. And we also know that his mother, who was from a sort of upper middle class Catholic intelligentsia, her ancestor was Sir Thomas More.

At one point, she took him into the Tower of London to see his uncle when he was imprisoned, to sort of make the whole escapade look more familial and less as if she might be taking information or smuggling messages. So this little boy was taken, probably around the age of 12, we don't really know, sort of shivering into this dungeon to see what could happen if you were a Catholic. So he knew very vividly what it might be to follow a religion that was a dangerous one. As soon as he was old enough to do so, he didn't take the oath of supremacy, so he couldn't take part in lots of aspects of Tudor English life, including gladuration.

Was he a child prodigy, or did he just go to university very young because it was all a bit loose back then? It's very difficult to know. Most of the information we have about John Donne comes from the biography by Isaac Walton. Isaac Walton has claimed writing the first literary biography in the English language, but he very much is invested in the perfection of John Donne, and it's sort of a hagiography. And so, according to Isaac Walton, John Donne was a staggering child genius comparable to the grit minds of the Renaissance. But his little brother also enrolled at Oxford. They enrolled at 11 and 10, or rather 11 and 12, and gave their ages as one year younger

than they actually were, respectively, in order to avoid having to sign the oath. And so I think he was probably very brilliant because he turned out very brilliant. And so it's easy to believe that some of that will have been showing when he was a child. But whether or not he was a sort of absolute staggering wunderkind, we have no way of knowing. He was super hot. He grew up to be super hot. Super hot. That feels like it's important. I really think it is. I think it isn't insignificant that the greatest poet of desire was

incredibly good looking and very invested in being good looking. If you look at the portraits that we have of him, there are several. The famous one is the Lothian portrait that a lot of people have seen with the big hat and the cherry red pout. Those are images of someone who is invested in image making. He dressed like the kind of cutting edge melancholic man. And of course, as you know, in the Elizabethan period, the Socrates regulations meant that you could only dress in certain cloth according to your class. So for instance, you could only wear gold lace if you were the daughter of the youngest son of a baronet or up. You could only wear purple silk if you were an earl or up. And John Donne, when he was at the Inns of Court, was wearing clothes that were absolutely forbidden

by students at the Inns of Court because he was one to slightly fly out regulations. He knew that when you get dressed, you ask something of the world. And he was asking the world to see that he was someone who knew what he was about. What does he do, excluded from some of the more traditional things, jobs, lifestyles, what does he do? So first of all, he was a student at Oxford and then a student at the Inns of Court, where he studied law but had no intention at all of becoming a lawyer. A lot of very bright young men went at the time not to study law so much as to meet other people, to learn how to protect their land from lawyers and to go around town looking extremely handsome and telling good jokes. But then a great tragedy befell him and his little brother was found to be harbouring a priest at the age of 19 in his rooms.

And you'd have to be very young to believe that you would be able to get away with that. It was, of course, illegal to be a Catholic priest at the time, and the penalty for it was death. You know, if you think of it, Dunn was 21 and he was supposed to be protecting his little brother. he was supposed to be protecting his little brother. And one day there was a raid on the chambers and Henry, the little brother, under torture, gave away the priest and said that he was a priest and did shrive him. And so Henry was thrown into jail and plague was racing through the jail at the time. And John Donne did not visit his little brother because perhaps he didn't know how urgent it was to do so but within days it was too late and Henry died horribly and alone in jail and it was very shortly after that that it seems as if as far as we can tell John Donne had had enough and so he

made the move to become instead a, I mean, I say pirate, that's being provocative, obviously a privateer, a legal pirate on the high seas going after the Spanish. And that was his, you know, step back into the kind of swashbuckling element that he had previously been inhabiting. So his response is to actually take up arms for Elizabeth's estate in a way, right? At arm's length, but certainly to steal Catholic treasure on the high seas. Exactly that. And of course, we don't know. John Donne famously converted from Catholicism to Protestantism. We don't know when and we never will. Some people believe that it was never a real conversion and that it was more politic than will. Some people believe that it was never a real conversion and

that it was more politic than that. Some people believe that it was real and potentially in some ways fuelled by what happened to Henry, that he blamed the Jesuits for Henry's death. Certainly by the time he was fighting for queen and country, there must have been some element, perhaps a sort of shift towards nationalism. And with that, there would be a requisite deference to Elizabeth as the head of the church. So perhaps that's something to do with his conversion. And also perhaps some element that he was in his very early 20s and wanted to go to sea. So Walter Riley was going, the Earl of Essex, most glamorous man in England. And there were tales which made going to sea sound absolutely extraordinary and exquisite,

even though when you actually got there, it was boring, hot, sweaty, deadly, diseasey, and just very, very dull. Super diseasey, super diseasey. And I guess the Tudor state, when you converted, they were quite happy to just go with it. Like he wouldn't have suffered long-term consequences of being a recent convert. Like there was no suspicion around, was there? I mean, they were like, go on, sign the piece of paper, just get on with it, right? I think to an extent, almost everyone was willing to acknowledge the fact that conversions did happen. And confessions happened a lot. I think one of the things that we've sort of increasingly

recognised in the last 20 years of scholarship is that a lot of people changed religion several times in their lives. There is some sense that perhaps when John Donne fell in love, the father of the woman he fell in love with was unthrilled by his Catholic past, by the sense that it might dog him in some way. And also that when he first came to the attention of King James, King James was a little bit wary about the kind of wife of past Catholicism. And of course, his mother never converted. So there is an element... Well, hang on, King James, look to your own mother, for goodness sakes. What's he on about? I mean, exactly. Horrible hypocrisy. Yeah, exactly. God. But mostly, you converted and people acknowledged that you were now a member of the team.

You converted and people acknowledged that you were now a member of the team. Hey, listen to Downstairs History. I'm talking about John Dunn. More coming up. Hi, I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb. And on my podcast, Not Just the Tudors, we talk about everyone from Thomas Cromwell to Oliver Cromwell, from Catherine Parr to Catherine de' Medici. Not, in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. Subscribe from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Eleanor Janaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries.

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Find out who we really were by subscribing to gone medieval from history hit wherever you get your podcasts so he has a heck of a life. He does the catastrophic expedition to Spain in the late 16th century, does all sorts of amazing things. Has it been glamorised by his hagiographer, or do you think he saw a quill of action and had quite a lot of exciting experiences? We know very little. We have some letters from other people and we have the poetry.

It sounds like he had a very dull time. Some people did do some fighting, but a lot of people waited around and then marched into Qadith with, you know, a pack on their back in the hot sun and didn't really do very much. But he did go a second time, so there must have been enough in it for him to feel that it was worth a second go. And he did certainly see action in the sense of see it with his eyes rather than necessarily engage in it, because at one point, they set fire to a ship and he saw sailors jumping in flames into the water to drown. And he wrote a sort of jaunty ditty about it. So he clearly wasn't completely traumatised, but it must have been a striking and

memorable thing to have seen so young. So talk to me, when he gets back, what's he get up to? He starts to feel, I think, that his star is rising. He meets the son of Sir Thomas Edgerton. Sir Thomas Edgerton was Keeper of the Great Seal and, as such, one of the most important men in government in England. And he goes to work for him as probably his secretary. We don't know exactly what he did. His handwriting wasn't very good, which was very important,

so he couldn't be the person writing out all the treatises and notes. But he was working with and very close to Sir Thomas Edgerton and at the time Sir Thomas Edgerton had a niece. She was the daughter of a man called Sir George Moore, her name was Anne and she arrived to stay with them on the banks of the river when she was a teenager around 15 and we know very little about their courtship but what we have is the poetry and the fact that when she was 17 and he was in his late 20s they married secretly illegally during lent outside the confines of the city at what is now the savoy hotel and then just absolutely everything went wrong for them but, but for posterity, it makes a hell of a

story as you relate it. But you mentioned poetry there. When do we start to get poetry out of the man? We start to get poetry in his very early 20s, largely when he is at the ends of court, surrounded by some very hyper-educated men known as his coterie. And he would have been writing poetry that you have to sort of picture written down on scraps of paper, folded into four, folded into eight, tucked into someone's pocket, into someone's sleeve, passed around, copied out. And in that way, his poetry started to spread first among his friendship group and then rippling outwards. It means, of course, it's a nightmare for people trying to establish the text because people were copying it out with mistakes. for people trying to establish the text because people were copying it out with mistakes. But a lot of that early verse is either this very brilliant, biting satire, or the kind of rakish verse that we associate with him, like the flea, or go and catch a falling star, which is

sort of anti-women verse. And then we know that as the years go on, when he was writing for Anne, there are very few poems that we know that they're for Anne. But occasionally you can work it out because John Donne loved a pun and her name was Anne Moore. And so he puns on more and more. His most famous Love's Growth goes, I scarce believe my love to be so pure as I had thought it was, because it doth endure by vicissitudes in season as the grass. Methinks I lied all winter when I swore my love was infinite, if spring maketh it more. Which, of course, was just there for her. 50p your mum's 50p was safe well done Catherine still there still in there my dad made me learn like tiresome 19th century like Tennyson sort of chest beating imperial nationalist poetry which has proved a lot less versatile in my adult life than learning like super sexy poetry yes but it's weird when a nine-year-old is reading The Flea. I mean, so, you know, there's swings and roundabouts. That is weird. Oh, Ma Rundell, that is weird. But at this stage, he kind of knocks around a bit, doesn't he? In the first 15 years of the 17th century,

as you say, it all goes wrong. There's money problems. He's trying to find something that can support him, I guess, right? Exactly that. So he gets thrown into jail. And then when he gets out of jail, eventually, and his marriage is declared legal, they go, first of all, to stay with one of Anne's relatives. And then for a long time, he's trying to make some money, first of all, by writing some poetry for the Drury family, who are very wealthy. He tries perhaps to get a potentially ambassador's job, he's seeking out a way to make his mind work. He knows that he is brilliant and he knows that perhaps he's more brilliant than a knot of his compatriots, but he's not sure what to do with that brilliance, where to lay it down. He writes two big anti-Catholic

polemics. One of them is called Pseudomata and one Ignatius's Conclave. Ignatius's Conclave is sort of funny and edgy and very strange satire, which I love. Pseudo-Martyr is high on the list of one of the most boring things ever written. And there are professors of John Donne who haven't read it because it's just so dull, which argues that Catholics who refuse to sign the oath and are therefore put to death are not martyrs, but are committing suicide and therefore do not deserve the martyr's crown. So he does that. And then very slowly, in increments that we still don't quite understand, perhaps spurred on by the loss of several of his children, he turns towards the church.

On the death of children, though, this is the question I ask every brilliant historian who comes on this podcast. What is the impact? Did they love their children less because so many children died and it was so common? Or was it as unbelievably traumatic as it is today, the loss of a child? What impact do you think that did have on him? It's so hard to know, isn't it? I have a theory, but you could argue the opposite. My theory is that loss is a loss and a vacuum is a vacuum and the horror was the horror, at least for Anne. For Dunn, I just don't know. She bore 12 children, two of them were stillborn children. Two of them were stillborn and four died. And I cannot but think that the child that you produce that is born of your body, that his loss is just a staggering loss. John Donne, it's hard to know. He was probably a bad father, or at least a bad father by today's light, which are an entirely unfair way to judge

him. But he writes very little that is joyful about his children, whereas some people did. John Dee, for instance, wrote down his children's first words in his diary. And John Donne really mostly mentions them when they are being loud and distracting, or when they are ill and he is afraid for them, or when they are dead. There are very few moments of great effusive adoration. And even so, I think that the loss was still the loss. Even if you had 12 children, I just don't believe that the sudden disappearing of a soul that you held in your arms, I just don't think it could be anything other than a devastation. What do you think? What's your theory? I agree with you. We do get little snatches, don't we, in diaries and letters in the past

when we think people must be so hardened to it. And then we do just get these little chinks of light opened up. And it makes you go, my God, they did feel exactly as we feel. And yet it's happening to them several times over. And it drives people to, as they describe at the time, insanity, as we know and yet it's happening to them several times over and it drives people to as they describe the time of insanity as we know so I think you're right but um I would hate ever to be in a different camp to Catherine Rundell so so he becomes eventually becomes a priest and it's a very good one but it's his greatest poetry coming from his time of poverty and struggle when's's he most productive? So he ceases to be a poet pretty much, but he remains a spectacular writer. So he becomes a

priest in 1615, and the Holy Sonnets could have been written at any point, either 1610 or way towards the end of his life, we're not sure. His poetry does sort of seep into his sermons, but Renaissance sermons are hard to suggest that people read on the tube. They tend to be about two hours long, and because people were coming with pen and paper wanting to write them down, they always involve a lot of repetition, saying the same thing over and over, often in three different ways. And so they're not easy reading but they do have spectacular force and a kind of architecture of intelligence in them which is pretty breathtaking and then of course it was after he became a priest that he wrote some of his most famous you know ask not for whom the bell tolls

and no man is an island it was after he had turned to the church that he was writing these sort of meditations on a sense of humanity as deeply intertwined, this sense that it is only in each other that we will find our meaning, else there is no meaning to be found. And he is spectacularly successful. Your descriptions of his sermons are extraordinary. I just love that. Was it entertainment? What is sermonising in this period? Exactly that. So it's so easy for us now to think of sermons as something that you sort of sit through. But people went on purpose. Of course, it was also mandated you had to go to church by the law, by the state. But sermons had everything in them. They had state propaganda. They had news from abroad. They had news of wars from abroad. They had information. They had state propaganda. They had news from abroad. They had news of wars from abroad. They had information. They had teaching. Occasionally, they had jokes. They had a sense of the world still burgeoning.

And if you were a person who couldn't really read that much or didn't have access to that much literature, sermons could go for a place for a taste of something large. And so people flocked to his sermons. Often he would preach outside St. Paul's. St. Paul's, of course, would have looked very different because the original St. Paul's burned in the fire of London. But some academics did an experiment because we have tales of thousands of people coming to hear him. So people tried to work out how on earth they would have been able to hear him. And the acoustics were such that at least 600 people closest to him, as long as he went slowly, the echo would have reached them. So his words were just reaching both those immediate

people and the people who then went home and told the story of his sermon. They were blockbusting events, as my book opens with the story of one of the sermons he preached, which was so popular that two men were crushed almost to death in their bid to get close to him to hear his words. He was a rock star. It now feels to us so different to go from writing racy poetry to preaching the gospel. By saying he's a rock star, you're implying that transition was probably easier in that period. They weren't inconsistent with each other. I think they weren't. I mean, there was certainly some anxiety that he had. When he first started to think about taking orders,

he tried to gather in his poetry, especially, we assume, the younger stuff, the more licentious stuff. This is a man who was writing, you know, license my roving hands and let them go above, behind, before, between, below. And he tried to get them back. But of course, by then he couldn't, because the sort of plastic nature of the way that poetry spread in the Renaissance, the way people were passing these letters on to their friends and saying, oh, copy this out and pass it on to Jane, meant that he had no control of his poetry. But it certainly didn't stop him being given one of the four most important ecclesiastical positions in the whole country. So I think there must have been either an element of ignorance or an element of forgiveness of the

poetry. I assume a mixture of the two. It says a lot for the Stuart court, a bit more relaxed than some of the periods that followed. That's very nice. What about his death and sort of legacy? Why does he, where is John Donne at the moment? Where's his stock compared to other... You mentioned his comparison with Shakespeare earlier. Like, is Donne popular still? I think John Donne has never quite recovered the same position that he held.

When he died, he wanted to be buried very quietly and it was impossible. Crowds flocked to his service. He was famous for having this quite macabre desire to die in the pulpit, to topple down as a sort of abrupt corpse upon the listeners below. And he didn't achieve that, but he did preach his final sermon, which is called Death's Duel, looking like a corpse. And he did also pose for his funeral monument, his final sculpture, in his winding sheet. He got someone to come and draw

him and then a life-size image of himself in the sheet he would be buried in. And then he propped it near the bed as a sort of charming memento mori, very personalised, sort of couture version. And as he died, he crossed his arms across his chest as if he had been laid out by an underkaker. And his final words are supposed to have been had been laid out by an underkicker. And his final words are supposed to have been, I would miserable if I might not die. And so he knew, you know, that sort of sense of occasion, that sort of sense of dressing for the occasion, that stayed with him. And then he became very popular when his son released his poetry. Son John Donne Jr. released the first edition a couple of years after his death, and it was blockbusting. It sold brilliantly well. We know

from the number of books that we still have existing. And then he starts to slightly fade out of fashion. Ben Johnson famously said, for not keeping the accent he deserved hanging. Dryden said, though he may be greater wit, yet we are greater poets. He starts to just slightly fade out, although my PhD partly argues that, in fact, he's still there. People are still stealing lines from him. They're just not acknowledging it. So Dryden both dismissed him and stole quite wholesale from him. Pope rewrote him in a bid to make him scan more nicely. And then by the Victorians, I think he was out of fashion, insufficiently sort of effusive, perhaps, in his sentimentality. He

wasn't a sentimentalist. And it was T.S. Eliot who is famously said to have plucked him from a kind of obscurity and introduced him back to us, for which I am very grateful to T.S. Eliot. What is your favourite John Donne poem? I think it is either Love's Growth, the one written for Anne Moore, or To His Mistress Going to Bed, which is the very famously licentious one. But it ends with a joke. People often think, well, this is just a guy trying to get a girl into bed, which it is. But at the end, even though he has exclaimed, you know, my America, my newfound land, the only one who's naked is him. She is fully clothed, watching, and he has stripped and stands bare.

And I love that. Relatable. Relatable. Right. Catherine Rundell, thank you very much indeed. Your superb book is on sale right now. I'm just asking for all the parents out there, what's the situation with your children's? I'm sure any new ones coming? I have a picture book for the sort of five to eight year olds coming out in September called

The Zebra's Great Escape. And I'm just trying to finish my next children's novel, which will be out next year. Brilliant. Okay, well, count me in for those. Thank you very much indeed. Thank you. To his mistress going to bed. Come, madam, come, all rest my powers defy, Until I labour, I in labour lie. The foe oft times having the foe in sight Is tired with standing, though he never fight. Oth with that girdle, like heaven's own glistering, But a far fairer world encompassing.

Unpin that spangled breastplate which you wear that the eyes of busy fools may be stopped there. Unlace yourself for that harmonious chime tells me from you that now it is bedtime. Off with that happy busk, which I envy, that still can be and still can stand so nigh. Your gown going off, such beauteous state reveals, as when from flowery meads the hill's shadow steals. Off with that wiry cornet, and show the highery diadem which on you doth grow. Now off with those shoes, and then safely tread in this love's hallowed temple, this soft bed. In such white robes, heaven's angels used to be received by men. Thou, angel, brings with thee a heaven like Muhammad's paradise. And though ill spirits walk in white, we easily know by this these angels from an evil sprite. Those set our hairs, but these are flesh upright. Licence my roving hands and let them go, before, behind, between,

above, below. Oh my America, my newfound land, my kingdom, safest when with one man manned. My mine of precious stones, my empery, how blessed am I in this discovering thee. To enter in these bonds is to be free, then where my hand is set, my seal shall be. Full nakedness, all joys are due to thee, Full nakedness, all joys are due to thee, as souls unbodied, bodies unclothed must be, to taste whole joys. Gems which you women use are like Atlanta's balls cast in men's views, that when a fool's eye lighteth on a gem, his earthly soul may covet theirs, not them. Like pictures, or like books gay coverings made for laymen, are all women thus arrayed. Then sales are mystic books, which only we, whom their imputed grace will dignify, must see revealed. Then since that I may know, as liberally as to a midwife, show thyself.

as liberally as to a midwife show thyself cast all yea this white linen hence there is no penance due to innocence to teach thee i am naked first why then what needs thou have more covering than a man thanks folks you've met the end of another episode congratulations well done you i hope you're not fast asleep if you did fancy supporting everything we do here history hit we'd love it if you would go and wherever you get these pods give a little rating five stars or it's equivalent a review would be great thank you very much indeed that really does make a huge difference it's one of the funny things the algorithm loves to take into account so please however they do that can seem like a small thing but actually it's kind of a big deal for us so i really appreciate it see you next time you