In Our Time - John Donne

Episode Date: February 9, 2023

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Donne (1573-1631), known now as one of England’s finest poets of love and notable in his own time as an astonishing preacher. He was born a Catholic in a Protestant country and, when he married Anne More without her father's knowledge, Donne lost his job in the government circle and fell into a poverty that only ended once he became a priest in the Church of England. As Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral, his sermons were celebrated, perhaps none more than his final one in 1631 when he was plainly in his dying days, as if preaching at his own funeral.The image above is from a miniature in the Royal Collection and was painted in 1616 by Isaac Oliver (1565-1617)With Mary Ann Lund Associate Professor in Renaissance English Literature at the University of LeicesterSue Wiseman Professor of Seventeenth Century Literature at Birkbeck, University of LondonAnd Hugh Adlington Professor of English Literature at the University of Birmingham

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoyed the program. Hello, John Dunn is best known now as one of England's finest poets of love, and in his own time as an astonishing preacher, with an exceptional mind and remarkable life.

He was born in 1572, a Catholic, in a Protestant, contrary. And when he married in secret, he fell into poverty that only ended once he became a priest in the Church of England. As Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral, his sermons were celebrated, perhaps none more than his final one in 1631, when he was plainly in his dying days as if preaching at his own funeral. With me to discuss John Donne, poet and priest, are Marianne Lund, Associate Professor in Renaissance English Literature at the University of Leicester, Sue Wiseman, Professor of 17th. century literature at Birkbeck, University of London, and Hugh Adlington, Professor of English Literature at the University of Birmingham.

Hugh Adlington, can you talk about John Donne's early life? Dunn's Catholic upbringing and ancestry was profoundly formative. He was descended on his mother's side from the Catholic martyr, Sir Thomas Moore. His grandfather, John Haywood, who was a musician and poet at the Court of Henry VIII, fled the country in 1564. His uncles, Jasper and Ellis Hayward, were Jesuit priests, and he experienced then the risks and the dangers that were attendant on Catholics in Elizabeth and England.

And perhaps the most intense experience of anti-Catholicism that Dunn encountered was when his own younger brother, Henry, died in Newgate prison from plague in 1593, having harboured a Catholic priest, William Harring, What signs were the worthy signs that he had a gift for writing? According to Isaac Walton, who is his earliest biographer, Dunn, went to Oxford very young, age of 12, partly so that he could avoid having to swear the oath of allegiance at the age of 16. You'd be swearing allegiance to the king where he would want to swear allegiance to the Pope. Very early on, he was a prodigious reader, that turned into writing.

There's just a sheer faculty there for language, which is very evident for me. early on. The other driver, I think, for him to become a writer is it's a calling card. He is inhabiting a coterie of clever, witty, male friends at Oxford, at Cambridge, and then later at the ends of court in London. And so there's a desire to impress, and also in his verse epistles to wealthy potential patrons, there's a need to flatter, to seduce, to persuade and cajole. Throughout his writing, a strong sense of loss and valediction and parting. And we find that throughout his early writing. He often adopts a pose of somebody who is either grieving for somebody who has died

or he himself has died. So he was setting this scene for himself out of this Catholicism, in this Protestant country, England, to have a career in the traditional way, really, for a clever young man from Oxford. I have it in law, in diplomacy, His studies took him into the service of Sir Thomas Edgerton, the Lord Keeper, who was engaged in a project to reform legal procedures

and all look fair for Dunn. In his middle and late 20s, he had achieved a very good position, the secretary to Lord Edgerton. And so at that point, the future looked bright. Thank you. Marianne Lund. Let's talk about the private poems to kick off with. Can you give us a taste of their boldness? Don indicates to his reader.

is the boldness and daring of them right from the beginning. One of the remarkable things about the lyric love poetry is the opening lines. They have these opening gambits which throws something out to the rea that makes us sit up straight, brings us up short. They can even be rude, busy old fool, unruly sun, not just addressing the sun as it rises and telling it to go away because he wants to stay in bed

with his lover for a little bit longer, but almost showing no shouting at it, bringing it down to sun, He often will start a verse with an imperative verb with some kind of order, not just to the addressee, but to grab the reader's attention to, or to address a lover on his mistress going to his bed, come, madam, come, or rest my powers defy. There's a kind of deliberate gathering through his poetry,

of pulling together into the moment that is the poem. Another poem that's an old bird, which is a poem of the night coming to the end and feeling melancholy that your time with your own. lover has ended, tis true, tis day, what though it be. Why should we get out of bed? Because it's daytime now, because the sun is rising. And also, I think current readers will be surprised at the precocity of the canality. I want that. He goes through it, doesn't he? He does. And I suppose we're emphasising the daring of the poetry there and the boldness and the kind of masculine confidence. Of course, that's also there sitting over and above a vulnerability. And I think

that's important to the poetry to his mistress going to bed, for instance, which is addressing her directly, come, madam, come, you know, until a labour eye and labour lie, which is a very frank and open invitation to get to bed, to take her clothes off. But at the end of the long poem, the only person who has his clothes off is him. He stands there kind of naked and shivering in the cold waiting for her. The boldness and the outward confidence is hiding, but only just, something that's a little more fragile. Don married a 17-year-old woman. and according to Isaac Walton it was the biggest mistake he made

He married the niece of his employer of Lord Edgerton and Moore and he married in a clandestine ceremony It did ruin his career He lost his job, he was thrown into prison temporarily But once he came out He did prove that the marriage was legal It was a match of love

But not one that was successful in career terms at all Sue Wiseman Are there themes emerging then Which stay with him for the rest of his career As Mary-Anne was saying In those opening lines You see a lot of stuff And there's the body

There's usually the body of the mistress at the beginning And his body as a wrecked thing A sack of bones He says imagine me as a sack of bones He follows that trajectory Right from the early poems Of the abject male body really I think that's one of the characteristics

Of his love poetry he goes back to the generation before and he takes what they were doing which is loosely called Petrarchan and it would involve images of the female body highly idealised and he takes them and puts them in different contexts really and pushes the forms they're in really right to the limits

and part of that is that he puts his body in there all the time too so he opens it he unpacks it he anatomises it most of these poems end with the place he's initially interested in, which is a pity more ejaculation, evacuation, with one man manned. So there is the reign of the body, but exactly as Maryam was saying, there's a terrible vulnerability underneath, and he also wants to unpack that. And I think as his work goes on,

his subject comes to be not so much desire and death chasing each other as death. he's very, very happy to fill his poem with the lumber of the graveyard. Skeletons, it's a veritable dance of death with jewellery. But that turns into what increasingly drives his work, which is the problem of dying. That whirlpool, the grave, he says, and it's about the process of dying.

Would you say that Don, as a younger poet, meant by the word beauty, what question did it pose for him? That's a great question, actually, with regard to it. because he is completely interested in it. And he probes earlier ideas of beauty. So if Petrarch and Dante wanted to move from earthly love for a perfect mistress to divine love, partly by making that mistress divine,

and that's a constant tension in the early sonnet sequences, Dunn picks up that tension and really asks, can you move from a worldly obsession? to something to a celestial body. Why would it take you there? Will it take you there? Let me think about my own body. Would anybody get to heaven by looking at this baked bean tin?

Or will you just remain with the thing of the body? Is it just a thing? In your view, Duns and love poetry is the most wonderful body of work anyone can imagine. Can you tell us why? Marianne mentioned the opening lines, and I think that speaks to the sheer fore. of poetic personality. This is really what comes across to us over the centuries. For God's sake,

hold your tongue and let me love. Oh, do not die for I shall hate all women. So when thou art gone. These are incredibly compelling. But it's not only that. It is that there's all of the force combined with Dunn's education in rhetoric and logic and disputation, which he got at Oxford and Cambridge, and then at the ends of court. The sheer audacity of the attempt is what strikes us. I think what's really remarkable is the combination of that argumentative style with then the sheer originality of the imagery. Just to give you an example, from valediction forbidding mourning, you get this argument about why it's better for two souls to be intertwined than merely two bodies and two lovers who are parting whose souls are one,

then in a sense don't suffer the effects of parting. What done goes on to say is our two souls therefore, which are one, though I must go, endure not yet a breach, but an expansion like gold to airy thinness beat. It's a fantastic, tangible image, the idea of metal beaters beating out a place of gold, making it thinner and thinner and vaster and vaster, for something that is entirely abstract and conceptual, the idea of two souls mingling. Mary Ann Lund, there's love poetry taking his mistress's wife to bed on Dresinger. Then there's divine love. Can you develop that a rather more?

To think about the merging from one to the other, yeah, and how they move. One of the fascinating things about the poems of human love is that Dunn is always calling on religious imagery, on sacred imagery, as part of the making the world of the lovers and everywhere, a universe. his poem, The Relic, for instance, he imagines that the time when his grave will be opened again will be broken up in order to reuse it for another body. And the people who dig him up find the skeleton with a bracelet of bright hair around the bone, which is the hair of the lover. And then this becomes a relic. And they imagine, as they don't know who the corpse belongs to, they think perhaps the hair is the relic of Mary Magdalene. So thou shall be a Mary Magdalene.

So thou should be a Mary Magdalene, an eye as something else thereby, which is a sort of teasing and borderline blasphemous suggestion that perhaps he has himself Christ or something or other. Why has he got the bracelet of Mary Magdalene around him? And so he calls on those things. And another one in the poem Twickenham Garden, which is a poem about grief and failure in love. He says about he's brought the spider love, which transubstantiates all. why you would bring the word transubstantiates into a love poem is quite extraordinary. What do you mean by the? Yes, transubstantiation, of course, it's the theology of the sacrament.

To what extent the bread and wine becomes the body and blood of Jesus Christ, which in Roman Catholicism, transubstantiation is about it becoming it. He's playing with these religious ideas as part of the daring of erotic poetry. But then what's interesting about the human love. poetry is he doesn't write sonnet sequences. He's not in that craze of Elizabethan sonnet sequence writing that so many are going in. He doesn't do that at all. He does, however, use the sonnet form, the form of romantic love to address God. And he consciously calls on his reputation writing about loving women. If I may read just a little bit of one, Ota Vexme, Contraries, Meet in One.

The poem goes on and he says, he's inconstant, as humorous in my contrition as my profane love and as soon forgot, as riddlingly distempered, cold and hot as praying, as mute, as infinite as not. So by humorous he means that he's sort of moody, in his contrition, in his penance towards God, he changes just as much as he did in his love of women. It's an extraordinary conjunction of the carnal and the Christian,

especially the Catholic Christian. Sue, was there an audience for what he was writing at the time? With his poems, there are definitely two kinds of audience. And the one I want to talk about first is the way the poems make a very intimate landing place for the reader, even at the same time as they're grabbing the reader's attention. And although these aunt sonnet sequences, people have often tried to put them into a sequence, haven't they? Because they're very drawn in by the Mison Sen of the poem. And Coleridge said, if you read it one way,

way you get the arrestingness, and if you read the sonnet's another way, you get the feeling that you become he. So part of the seductiveness of the poems is for you, the reader, like it's really paying a lot of attention to your reading of it, and you go through it, and you can be in multiple positions of identification and disidentification with what's going on and who's doing what to who. So that brought him readers long after he fell into disheuit. But at the same time, he was writing for people, often for money. And in that regard, he was really much less than deft. He made some considerable mistakes. I think everybody would agree particular poems he would write at exactly the wrong time. The car, Howard married, was particularly a time when he was writing for

one audience, which was the people who were going to make him get on at court, but they were absolutely on the very cusp of being put in prison for poisoning. So there was the poem hanging about afterwards memorialising the wrong people. So all the way through, there's a mixture of a very deft address to a reader and a much more problematic relationship to the public world he so much wants to be in and often just slightly misreads. Hugh, thank you, Hugh, I think, turn. When and why did he turn to the priesthood? This is a much... He'd been in prison for a while, but only a few weeks, but he was

sort of banished from this career ladder that he'd been climbing very steadily and very well. Yes. And he started to have lots of children and they moved out of London. Eventually he handed up a priest in the Church of England. How did that happen? Yeah, so he married in 60101 and then the impact of that marriage on his career, followed for several years. He sought secular employment for many years through the first decade of the 17th century. He applied to be secretary of the Virginia company and other positions and failed in all of his attempts. He also had a period as an adventure, didn't it? He got on ships and shot at other ships

and looted and all that. He went with the Earl of Essex against the Spanish to Cadiz and the Azores. That was in the late 1590s before his marriage. That was one of his most successful career moves because at that point he appeared like a promising young man, they were all men together. And wasn't that where he met Edgerton's son, who then must have introduced him to Edgerton Papa, who happened to be running the entire legal system? So in fact, although Cadeas went quite badly for Dunn, it was really a very fast-moving career prospect. Back to you. It also informed two very good poems, the storm and the calm. So it benefited his literary career too. Whilst he was in his career wilderness, as it was,

he was taking on various jobs that came his way. Some were around offering opinions on diplomatic questions, but some were around the questions of controversial divinity. And he was commissioned by Thomas Morton, a bishop to assist in Protestant controversy against Catholics. And I think it's probably through that route that he got noticed in higher places. And there's certainly from Walton suggests,

that he was commissioned by the king, James I, to write his anti-Catholic treatise, pseudomata in 1610, which was an argument against Catholics not taking the oath of allegiance and suggesting that they should. And then Walton goes on to say that it was really at the king's behest that Dunn should take up a career in the ministry, which eventually he did in 1615, but there were many delays and hesitation. along the way. I think we can absolutely explain that from, on one level, his hesitation about his qualification

to be a minister. He says that in his letters and embarks on his essays in divinity, which is a sort of self-training program in exegesis to train himself to be qualified. Another, though, I think is his sense of his past and what the optics are for becoming a minister in the Church of England,

having been a member of a well-known Catholic family and also his own notoriety, you should say, as an author of the kind of licentious poetry that we've been discussing. So all of those reasons may have played into his hesitation. I think it was pragmatic and also a decision out of conscience. Marianne Lund, what did he mean then to be a high-profile priest because he was allowed to preach him for the king? He began to climb the ladder that he had been kicked off before.

He was back on it and going up while he speedily. What does it mean? What did you have to do? First and foremost, it was about preaching. As a Protestant minister, preaching was at the heart of worship. He had a thoroughgoing commitment towards preaching as the central means by which salvation worked for people. Did he take his lead from a sermon on the mountain that then? Christ being a preacher.

That's part of it, but it's also through the Pauline Epistles as well. hearing as the means towards salvation. Now a sermon in this period means a large, a large scale rhetorical exercise. It's typically one hour, except on special occasions where it's up to two hours. And it's usually preached on a single verse or a couple of verses. So you don't have a large number of lessons in the gospel. You're kind of riffing, expanding on a very small passage from the Bible, which you compose.

We know that Dunn would write these. get started on the Sunday evening after having preached one in the morning or the afternoon, and then we're taking most of the week to produce. It was a feat of memory as well. He's not reading from a script, but learning the places, the kind of rhetorical structure, which is an astonishing feat in itself. It's also about preaching, knowing your audience. Why can you become so famous as a preacher?

Through all of the talents of language, of persuasion and rhetoric, which are there in the poetry and throughout the prose as well. that kind of brilliant often in terms of the opening gambit as well one of the famous funeral sermon on Sir William Cocaine which he starts, you know, God made the first marriage and man the first divorce, which is, if you're attending a funeral, doesn't seem like a very obvious place to start.

He's talking about the marriage of body and soul and then the divorce, which is the divorce of body and soul through death, through Adam Lehmannister. Surely these attracted big audiences. They did, yeah. It was the thing to do on a Sunday. Absolutely. I had to if you're a Christian, but also those who didn't have to went.

Indeed, it was a popular pastime. We think about the way that people went to the theatre to watch Shakespeare, but they went to watch celebrated preachers and to hear them as well. So Dunn was certainly one of those. And he's also somebody who's deeply skilled at gearing his rhetoric and his preaching towards particular auditory. So preaching to the king at court in the cathedral or to legal students in Lincoln's Inn. One of the reasons, I think, for his fame and appeal is the drama of the sermons that he creates.

It's both through performance. Walton describes him preaching from the pulpit like an angel from a cloud, weeping in earnest and so on. But it's also... So, weeping, and self-dramatising. Self-dramatising, absolutely. And in Dunn's... And moving the audience because of that. Yes.

And in Dunn's sermons, you find more of a sense of the eye rather than the we, the first person pronoun. And that's very powerful in the way that Dunn uses it. He figures himself as a sinner often and attempts to move his auditory that way. What sort of jeopardy might have been in preaching these ideas of salvation in public and known to be previously a Catholic? There's the one time he seemed to have got in trouble in his preaching was in a sermon to the new king, Charles I. And it did seem as though they were there all of Dunn's experience at treading that very careful political, religious line, slightly ill-judged,

with the new regime of Lord as archbishop. What I think this reminds me of is his sense of being fugitive in some way as a Catholic. There's some evidence, or at least speculation, that Dunn's family and his letters were being intercepted by the state, by Cecil, orders under the order of Robert Cecil. And Dunn was aware of this. or suspected it.

There's quite a famous article that describes Dunn's letters as newsless letters. They're very philosophical and abstract. Part of the reason might well be that Dunn is very careful in those letters

not to give any hostage to fortune by mentioning things that would have, in the wrong eyes, have been taken the wrong way. So it's part of this continuing story about the tightrope that he walks throughout his life, I think.

Thinking about the letter as a form where paper is very expensive in this period and you have to squeeze everything into quite a small space but of course in his lyric poetry he's doing that all the time and he plays with that idea of small space quite a bit doesn't he building in sonnets pretty rooms almost as thinking about the boundaries between the public and the private is a part of his frustration you know

the lovers will not be enough for a chronicle but we can will be enough for a sonnet indeed almost to that kind of complete extreme with the poem The Flea. This is our marriage bed, our marriage temple, which is a flea which has sucked the blood of the both of us and mingled our fluids. Mark but this flea it starts and it writes a reasonably long poem about a tiny creature that I think is not just concentrated in space but also in time. You know, as soon as you say Mark but this flea, it hops off. and yet he's stilling time and space in that poem. And that's something he does in so many different forms,

doesn't he in his writing? It's something that unifies them. Do we feel he felt that he was in danger ever or not? He goes over and over questions, and he doesn't always stop in quite the right place for the Church of England. And he said fairly publicly, repeatedly, that he doesn't think there's only one way to God.

And I think it wasn't so much that he was out, outside the church, but that to make public a certain set of decisions was to be only ending in one place. And that was what he was prepared to do in the second half of his life. Though even then he seemed to have fallen foul of Charles I first, but possibly for totally secular reasons. I think we should also remember that the pulpit is a mouthpiece for political views as well. It's a civic place, particularly at St Paul's Cathedral and it pulls across the great outdoor pulpit. And there is an expectation that preachers will engage with politics, which are, you know, so deeply intertwined with religion in this period.

I was about to say religion was politics. Very, very, very careful. Dun, for instance, is called to preach on James's directions for preachers, which were about restricting preaching. And there were various attempts in this period, royal declarations whereby ministers had to stick to the fundamentals because they were talking too much about things like, destination, but also touching on very hot political topics.

But he was trying to steer between Catholicism and Puritanism. And somewhere in the middle was the very old church of world. Was the Anglican thing. Yeah. And he had a flashpoint at either end, haven't they? Yeah. At both ends. He often talks about conformity and what it means to be part of the Church of England

and to conform. And it's in terms of public conformity about going to church, about observing the rights and rituals of the Church of England and avoiding the poles of what he saw as Catholic superstition on the one hand, but also the real danger to him and to the established Church of England of kind of private conventicles and of kind of inventing religion as he saw it through nonconformity. Absolutely. One of the things that I think Marx is preaching

is a celebration of the broad ecumenical ecclesia Christiana. and he's very, very keen to steer that middle path always. Having said that, and the Catholics that he really aims his weaponry at are the Jesuits and it's the papacy, the loyal Catholic, that's not really in the firing line, on the other end of the spectrum, the schismatics, absolutely. But there's a great irony, of course, because in Dunn's composition of his sermons, he draws on a lot of commentary, and one of the, his main source of commentary are Jesuit, commentators, which he really, he never attributes, or he says there's a Jesuit, and then he

corrects them. But so much, this is what the addition of the sermons is throwing up, so much of what he is saying is drawn from their learning, their erudition, but of course it's not attributed. Can we just emphasise the impact of his preaching in London at the time? I think it, for instance, at St. Paul's Cathedral, when he was dean of St. Paul's Cathedral, he deliberately expanded and enhanced the preaching provision there. So during the term time, legal terms, he established this programme so that he would preach along with the other residential canons and to really up St. Paul's Cathedral's homiletic mode

so that there'll be, I think we know as well that from a lot of the elegies that remember him as a preacher, as Hugh has been mentioning earlier, that that sense of a kind of performance, which of course is now lost to us completely, was deeply skillful, the sense of having his listeners in the palm of his hand and emotionally moving, but also I think with a very strong pastoral sense that you get in a lot of the sermons. One other thing I think you could say about it is around the rumour that he was dead and we find out about it because he says they're saying that I'm dead already

and then people said that they wrote down that they had been to see his sermon and that it was as he was dead preaching. But there was a tremendous set of people discussing whether or not he was dead and alive in relation to his preaching during the period of his death. So that was big news and brought people to his sermons but also recirculated it in the gossip networks.

Maybe you can bring you back in, Marianne. When he was ill, particularly ill, he wrote his devotions upon emergent occasional occasions. Can you tell us about them and why they're significant? I'd love to. So Dunn had several periods of ill health in his life and one of them was in late 1623. So he'd been dean for... How old was he then? So he'd been dean for a couple of years. He was dean in 1621, early 50s, wasn't he? Yeah. And there was a viral illness going around London, the spotted fever, which was probably typhus, which Dunn caught. Again, actually, as Sue's just been saying, it's a mark of how famous he was, that people, there are other records of Dean Dunhers is ill and they think he's

going to die. He was very, very ill and near death for a couple of weeks. And then in early January 1624, he composed the devotions upon emergent occasions, which is this remarkable sifting through all the stages of his illness from the first symptoms right through to recovery, sitting up in bed again, being able to get out of bed. And I think we think of modern illness, narratives as something rather new, but in fact they go right back to Dunn's time. This is a really unique document. It's divided up into these stages, but within them they are meditations, expostulation, and prayer. So it becomes this devotional exercise. It starts with this idea of, you know, this minute, I am well and I'm ill this minute. I'm surprised with the sudden change. So the

idea of the body giving you these first little indications that you're sick. And then from that you feel the gradual onset of illness. And he says, why does the soul not do the same? And then addresses God with this. So it's the most remarkable performance and indeed an achievement for someone who's just getting better from serious illness. At the heart of it is, of course, a famous sequence of the bells, which is well known. He is in the Dean of St Paul's Cathedral, isolated from the world that he's desperate to be back in and hears the bells of London ringing

and it causes him to meditate. Of course, bells, church bells ring to say that someone in the parish is going to die and then they ring out when the person is dead in order to tell everybody else to pray for the person who is unwell and then they have gone. And so Dun wonders whether this is going to be him, if I may read, the passage that perhaps is the most

celebrated, no man is an island entire of itself. Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manner of their friends or of thine own were. Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never sent to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee. So a sense there of, of hearing the ringing, and he wonders if it's actually for him, if he is the dying man that everyone is praying for,

but also that sense of inherent connection to the rest of the world. That brings us to London soon, not that we've ever really left it, but he felt he was deeply embedded in London, wasn't he? He was, and if you look at a map of where he ended up, he keeps being sent to places about a day away, to Mitchum or to Croydon or to Pfeord, and they're not as close as he wants to be, so he takes lodgings there.

But in his writing, he's not like Ben Johnson. He doesn't take it as an avert topic, but it comes up in all sorts of different places. So the three main periods are the early period Lincoln's Inn. Then I think maybe when he's out of town, but that's slightly different. Whereas when he's in his very earliest poetry in the satires, he's quite located, I think, in Lincoln's Inn.

And the first one begins notably when he's coughing. in his study with a lot of ancient authors who are terribly good for him but they're sort of looming over him and oppressing him and somebody unnamed a fondly motley humorist so again somebody of unreliable disposition

essentially turns up as his door and says let's go clubbing and he says absolutely not and then off he goes clubbing and this person takes him through the muddiest streets and keeps running off and leaving him and coming back an experience we've all had

I think we've ever been out with a friend, goes off to more interesting people, better-moneyed people, and eventually they end up, I'm sorry to say, at a brothel. And this person says, I've seen my love in a window, and then abandons this done figure and goes off into the brothel and comes back and hangs his head. There's one critic who's done a really rather convincing reading that this is done spending Saturday night out with his penis

and imagining being led astray. And then at the end, the penis hangs its head and becomes, if you like, the ultimate woebegone penitential organ. So this is really very, very different from the other penitential experiences of the body when he's writing the devotions. He's been deprived of books

and he's at a dense connection of London parishes, many of which were so small, they didn't even have room to bury their dead out. outside their walls. So you can imagine the density of the bells of several different places. Again and again, we get the sort of intimate intertwining of sacred and, which they profane doesn't really matter much. Carnal is a better word.

He's going from one to the other so quickly that they become one, don't they? Hugh. Yes, for Dunn, there's a big debate in the period about whether there's a hierarchy between souls or bodies and what you need for salvation and for Dun and in love. And for Dunn, you need both. The soul, love between two bodies, without the souls, is insufficient, and love between two souls in the platonic sense is also not sufficient. So they're knitted together in this subtle knot that makes man, he says.

You need both elements, the material and the spiritual. Let's see if we can do the last sermon, the famous last sermon, a month before he died, people said he was telling about his own death, and he looked like, well, you tell me about it. This sermon is known as Death's duel. It's probably Dunn's most famous sermon. And in it, he has been done, he's dying. He takes himself up from his sick bed to come to preach one last time before the king,

Charles I, on the first Friday in Lent, in Whitehall. That's a big occasion. It's a big occasion. And Walton reports that those who saw Dunn were shocked. and I'll quote, many of that then saw his tears and heard his faint and hollow voice thought that Dr. Dunn had preached his own funeral sermon. And the sermon itself is as unsparing as done as ever been about the subject of death. He starts it with the very bleak suggestion that life from its very beginning is a constant

process of dying. We have a winding sheet in our mother's womb for we come to seek a grave. this has done unsurking as ever in the face of mortality and he even dwells on the horror of being eaten by worms which he calls vermiculation but the ending is the thing that really makes this an extraordinary performance having impressed upon his listeners with his own appearance

and with his exegesis of his text the unescapability of death and the physical decay that comes with it he then creates this extraordinary image of Christ dying on the cross to grant us resurrection, but you or us, the listener, hanging on to Christ, hanging on the cross. And he says, I can just say it, there we leave you in that blessed dependency to hang upon him that hangs upon the cross. There bathe in his tears, there suck at his wounds, and lie down in peace in his grave,

till he vouchsafed you a resurrection and an ascension into that kingdom which he hath prepared for you with the inestimable price of his incorruptible blood. Amen. Wow. Mary, Mary Arlon, how far did he see himself as part of this process towards salvation? He's absolutely, of course, considering his own salvation amongst that. I think Dunn's own faith, his theology, saw salvation as something that was simple, not as a kind of a complicated wrangling in, am I saved or am I not save, which you

might identify more with the sort of non-conformist belief in this period. He was keen to reject that and say in his sermons that, you know, you come to church, you are penitent, you listen to sermons and conduct yourself properly in life and live a Christian life and take communion. That is the path to salvation. Nonetheless, there is this kind of sifting of the conscience. He's sort of sifting as a wonderful image of how you work through your life and a contrite. If I might turn back to that poem I talked about earlier, Ote of X-Me, Contraries, Meet in One, which is from before he was ordained, but I think he's so telling about how he saw the idea of the process of salvation. And it ends, so my devout fits. Come and go away like a

fantastic ague, save that here, those are my best days when I shake. with fear. That's not to say that it's a fear-based faith. I think he talks about the love of God a lot in his sermons, but that the paradoxical idea that the best days are the ones where you shake with fear is very much live, I think, throughout Dunn's whole life and career. That sense, not of perhaps linear progress of getting better all the time, but rather always kind of hanging in the balance, looking both ways, and recognising your own fragility. We're near the end now. Sue Wiseman, what impact would you say Dunn's writing has had on other writing over the last few hundred years? I'd like to go somewhere else from the usual narrative in which John Dryden abolishes him and T.S. Eliot resuscitates him, even though that narrative is completely true.

And I think in the generation immediately after Dunn, probably or two generations after, there's a couple of places you might go. One is in the Earl of Rochester, who is an incredibly accomplished poet in terms of the use of the form and who really takes quite a lot of Dunn's masculine objection to the extreme and some of his bodily language. And then poets who know to their cost that you can't get the state or the sun or everything else out of the bedroom. And there I think I would go to Lucy Hutchinson and her elegies, which are always intensely political, but are erotic eleges at the same time. And then I'd like to just jump to the 21st century quickly. And I think one of the most explicit poets uses have done is Carl Phillips, who is a very interesting American poet who began coming of age as a poet during the AIDS epidemic.

and who takes rise in those poems from the devotions. And I hadn't thought of reading it during the AIDS epidemic. But if you think about it, the terror of the doctor trying to keep himself calm is absolutely a wonderful thing to be revisited. And Phillips is really a poet, I would recommend. Yes. We mustn't. You resist the obvious at your peril.

And T.S. Elliot saw him as a precursor of modern. that he himself was practicing and saw him as a great staple for that. Absolutely. He did a tremendous job for the rest of us with Dan as well in making us see how vivid and alive it was. Yes. Well, thanks very much. Thanks to Marianne Lund, Sue Wiseman, Hugh Adlington and our studio engineer Tim Heffer. Next week is the political philosopher John Rawls on his influential theory of justice aimed at building a new, freer and fairer society. Thanks for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now

with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. The easiest way into this, Mary, is to say, what did you not say you liked have said? One thing that probably doesn't get an airing for done so much, he's done the letter writer. When he was preaching, he said that he liked particular books of the Bible and kept coming back to them.

And he said he liked the Psalms because David was a poet, the Psalms are poems and he was a poet so he felt some identification with them and he said he likes St Paul's epistles because he was a letter writer and of course the poems were not published in Dunn's lifetime but nor were Dunn's letters for the most part but he wrote verse letters to his friends

I think that done as friend to female patrons and to his male friends too but also he was a very regular correspondent would write to his great friend, Sir Henry Goodyear, for instance. One of his verse letters starts, Sayer More Than Kisses, Letters mingles, souls. And so he thought of that form as very an important literary thing, which was about connecting people.

And he was so careful, is this right, that sometimes he would say, I'm sending you this under a separate schedule, and he would send one set of information in the letter and the material that made sense of it in a separate letter because that was less risky. I think he says that once or twice, is that? Well, we know that in the circulation of mail in this period,

letters constantly going astray. It's an occupational hazard of correspondence in the period. So a lot of people took precautions. But he is also close to the world of diplomacy at various moments in his life. when he goes on the embassy in 1619 to Germany to try to mediate with Lord Doncaster between who had become the Holy Roman Empire, Emperor Ferdinand of Bohemia. He has a cipher that he uses all the people at the top of the embassy use it.

So he's familiar with this world. Another thing that we have not talked about, none of us have used a word beginning with super and one of his super induction or super structure, or those, Dunn was a great coiner of words. He was inventive with new language, and often that would include putting prefixes on things. Super Infinite, of course, is the title of Catherine Rundell's biography, writing on him.

Dunn employed motos in his life, and I think they're a key in some sense to some of the things that we've been talking about, the conflicted element of his personality, The motto that he wrote in his books in his own library was a line from Petrarch per Rachel Hoseervito in non-pelea in Italian, which is from Genesis about Rachel and Leia. And the medieval symbolism usually aligns Rachel with the contemplative life and Leia with the active life. And what we tend to take from that motto is that Dun is saying that although an active life was forced upon him, he would have preferred a contemplative one. And certainly that seems appropriate for writing into your books in your library.

But it does indicate some of the tension that runs throughout his life about the draw towards philosophy. I'd even say introversion. And then on the other hand, this drive towards performance and being out there in a man in the world. The other motto, it's not really a motto, it's an epigraph that I think is also a key to his personality, is the epigraph to the folio edition of Dunn's 80 sermons, published in 1640, which is from Matthew 1016, and it's Jesus' encouragement to his disciples to be wise as serpents, innocent as doves. And whenever these arguments come up about Dunn being ambitious or calculating or overly of the world,

I think this is a really good reminder of how, Even for Christ, the directive is to be open-eyed as a pilgrim in this world. But whilst retaining your principle and your virtue. And I think that's there. It's not thereby Dunn's design. This would have been the printer or his editor who put it there. But it does stand as quite an eloquent key, as I say, to some of the conflicts in Dunn's writing. Sue?

I think those are both two interesting things, aren't there? because they give you the private world of the letters in which he seems to have been tremendously successful and deft and absolutely beloved. His friends did some very stupid things for him, like helping him get married and get put in prison themselves and his attempt to modulate the external world, like the changing of the mottoes.

So they seem to take us to two aspects that I would say, I don't know what you two think, but that he never quite managed to, adequately align until he became a preacher. And even then, it seems that there possibly was a moment where Lord was almost too much for William Lord as a new archbishop was almost too much for that careful politic line and the alignment of the problematic private self

that was also beloved and the movement of that into the public. Given the quality that you described to him, when was he had a fashion for so long? We're cocking in centuries, aren't we? Yeah, tastes change, and I suppose we could call the Augustine turn after the restoration, heavily classical, at least in form, Dunn's poetry seems rude, and I don't mean rude in its subject matter, but in its form, unmetrical, rough, lined, masculine force is a term that's used.

And also, I will come to Dryden now. You know, Dryden's critique of Dunn is that he's using metaphysicals, speculation when he should be using appropriate imagery to engage the minds of his readers, which Dryden presumes are women. And so he, Dryden's criticism is that the poem is too freighted with heavy intellectual weight. And that makes it an incomplete artifact. Another thing I think you might think, and this is absolutely to agree, I think, with both of you, he takes a huge world as well and shrinks it in a small space.

but the genre he's interested in and he's interested in a lot of genre they're not the classical genre that Dryden is reviving in many ways but there are a lot of ones that were from the generation that preceded him and one way to see

his special place in that and how that might become obsolete is to think the sonnet sequence done as the sonnet explosion if you like and then after that Milton moves into a vacated house and does the political sonnet sequence.

Then it's gone, and then I suppose it's Mary Ty after that, who is really interested in that kind of thing. And I think Dunn is really, really very interested in genre and form, but in a way that re-addresses what's gone before rather than anticipating the wonderful things you can do maybe with the couplet and is very interested in macrocosm and microcosm at the same time. And that leaves him stranded for, quite some time, possibly?

I agree. The figure who is very important, but in a sense is ahead of his time, is Coleridge, because Coleridge really gets done. And in some ways, Coleridge's description of Thomas Brown, the twist in the brains, he describes with that appetite for the abstraction.

He's there in Dunn, too. It's there in Coleridge, certainly. But he reads and reads Dunn his sermon. He used that phrase, twist in the brain, of Brown, did he? He used it of Thomas Brown. And what does he say? Oh, altitude.

Oh, how I love an abstraction. And I think it applies to Dunn too. But Coleridge is a sort of a man on his own. And really the revival, the rediscovery of done, doesn't happen until a lot later. An interesting part of this story that's not often told is how Dayton Haskin tells it, is how it really begins in America. And it's there that at the end of the 19th century, readers and poets, Emerson, Lowell, they are really keen on Dunn.

And then through Charles Elliot Norton, it gets into Harvard and into the syllabus. And it's then, we start with Elliot in this country, we say it's in the 1910s, Grieson's edition of the metaphysical poets. But it was really happening in the US a decade or so earlier. Thank you very much. That was excellent. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson. Sometimes I just can't hear difference between thunder or shilling or explosions. Documentary adventures that invite a closer listen.

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