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The Death Wish of John Donne
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
In the darkest time of the long period of poverty, illness, and dependence that followed his imprudent elopement, John Donne wrote in a letter to Sir Henry Goodyer in September, 1608:
Two of the most precious things which God hath afforded us here, for the agony and exercise of our sense and spirit, which are a thirst and inhiation after the next life, and a frequency of prayer and meditation in this, are often envenomed and putrified, and stray into a corrupt disease…. With the first of these I have often suspected myself to be overtaken, which is with a desire of the next life; which though I know it is not merely out of a weariness of this, because I had the same desires when I went with the tide, and enjoyed fairer hopes than now; yet I doubt wordly encumbrances have increased it. I would not that death should take me asleep. I would not have him merely seize me, and only declare me to be dead, but win me and overcome me.
When I must shipwreck, I would do it in a sea where mine impotency might have some excuse; not in a sullen weedy lake, where I could not have so much as exercise for my swimming. Therefore I would fain do something, but that I cannot tell what is no wonder. For to choose is to do; but to be no part of any body is to be nothing. At most, the greatest persons are but great wens and excrescences; men of wit and delightful conversation but as moles for ornament, except they be so incorporated into the body of the world that they contribute something to the sustentation of the whole.1
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1947
References
1 Edmund Gosse, The Life and Letters of John Donne (New York and London, 1899), i, 190-191. Hereafter referred to as Gosse.
2 Gosse, i, 173.
3 Gosse, i, 189.
4 Gosse, ii, 15.
5 Gosse, ii, 45.
6 John Donne, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions together with Death's Duel (London : Simpkin, The Abbey Classics, n.d.), Meditation 16.
7 Hugh I. Fausset, John Donne: A Study in Discord (London, 1924), describes vividly the manner in which Donne's mind was possessed by the image of death in his later years. His explanation of this prepossession, however—that Donne dwelt upon that image in order to mitigate the horror that death held for him—is interesting only for being an exact inversion of the true one.
8 John Donne, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions together with Death's Duel (London: Simpkin, The Abbey Classics, n.d.), p. 176.
9 Ibid., p. 171.
10 Ibid., pp. 167-170.
11 Charles Monroe Coffin, John Donne and the New Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1937), chapter xiv, “A Sensible Decay of the World,” discusses Donne's thought in relation to the conception here described in the popular form which it took in the early seventeenth century of the theory of “cosmic decay.” This theory supplies the main theme of Donne's First Anniversary. But Professor Coffin's conclusion, that “it is … dangerous to regard Donne as an apostle of the doctrine of the world's decay” (p. 279), is based upon a somewhat belabored interpretation of a single passage in a sermon of about 1621, from which the conclusion is drawn that Donne abandoned this theory; it ignores the repeated expressions of the idea, in one form or another, from the Paradoxes and Problems to the last sermon. As will be shown later, it is probably unwise to consider the theory of cosmic decay apart from other cognate elements in Donne's thought.
12 Gosse, i, 184.
13 John Donne, Juvenilia, or Certain Paradoxes and Problems, facsimile edition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936).
14 Reproduced by the Facsimile Text Society (New York, 1930).
15 Henry Alford, editor, The Works of John Donne (London, 1839), v, 461-462 (hereafter referred to as Alford). This sermon is dated 1616.
16 Donne often describes original sin as a principle or cause of spiritual death. It is not the idea, which is a commonplace (“The wages of sin is death”), but the directness of his language, the verbalism, which is interesting.
It is not Adam, which is another name of man, and signifies nothing but red earth; let it be earth red with blood (with that murder which we have done upon ourselves), let it be earth red with blushing (so the word is used in the original) with a conscience of our own infirmity, what wonder that man, that is but Adam, guilty of this self-murder in himself, guilty of this inborn frailty in himself, die too? (Alford, i, 502-503.)
Every sinner is an executioner upon himself. (Mistranslated from Augustine; Alford, II, 105.)
Man by sin induced death upon himself at first … Death then is from ourselves, it is our own. (Alford, vi, 53.)
Of the shadow of death wherein I sit there is no cause but mine own corruption (Alford, v, 472.) death … is produced from me and is mine own creature (Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, Meditation, xv.)
My heart is by dejection, clay,
And by self-murder, red. (The Litany.)
17 Alford, i, 303.
18 Alford, v, 605.
19 See Alfred Adler, The Neurotic Constitution (New York, 1921), p. 208: “The most powerful psychic hold originates from the thoughts of death in childhood which produce a constant predisposition to suicide by shaping the psychic physiognomy under the influence of the egotistic idea.”
20 Alford, i, 149. Cf. also i, 328-329.
21 Dr. Karl A. Menninger, Man Against Himself (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1938), p. 32.