Author: John Donne

This week we’re marking the American Memorial Day with eleven readings of a John Donne poem. Memorial Day was conceived as a time to remember military men and women who had lost their lives in war. Kings and presidents come and go and some of the reasons that wars have come about are now lost from memory or are obscured in our history texts.<br /><br /> A consistent aspect of war is that those who fight them are not those who arrange them. The soldiers and sailors who suffer loss of limb, scarred minds or forfeit their lives mostly come from the lower and middle rungs of our societal ladder. They are our sons and daughters, husbands and wives, fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters.<br /><br /> Once gone, it is the family who notices the empty chair at the family table while society at large knows not their name. Death has captured them and taken them forever from our midst. It has become personal and not a vague philosophical idea. The theme of Donne’s poem is that, though Death is irresistible, it has no cause to be proud. The human spirit and its hope for redemption is indomitable. This was the weekly poetry project for the week of May 27th, 2006.<br /> (Summary by Robert Garrison)

LibriVox volunteers bring you seven different readings of the short poem Song by John Donne, a weekly poetry project. Song is a bitter little poem on the falsity of women: search the world for ages, see mythical wonders, but you’ll not find a true woman. Deep hurt is the bane of the loving heart. (Summary by Peter Yearsley)

John Donne (1572 – March 31, 1631) was a Jacobean poet and preacher, representative of the metaphysical poets of the period. His works, notable for their realistic and sensual style, include sonnets, love poetry, religious poems, Latin translations, epigrams, elegies, songs, satires and sermons. His poetry is noted for its vibrancy of language and immediacy of metaphor, compared with that of his contemporaries. Towards the end of his life Donne wrote works that challenged death, and the fear that it inspired in many men, on the grounds of his belief that those who die are sent to Heaven to live eternally. One example of this challenge is his Holy Sonnet X, from which come the famous lines “Death, be not proud, though some have called thee mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so.” (Summary from Wikipedia)

4Devotions upon Emergent Occasions

By John Donne

Devotions upon Emergent Occasions is a 1624 prose work by the English writer John Donne. It is a series of reflections that were written as Donne recovered from a serious illness, believed to be either typhus or relapsing fever. (Donne does not clearly identify the disease in his text.) The work consists of twenty-three parts describing each stage of the sickness. Each part is further divided into a Meditation, an Expostulation, and a Prayer.<br><br>The seventeenth meditation is perhaps the best-known part of the work. It contains the following passage:<br>"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 manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee." (Summary by Wikipedia)

LibriVox volunteers bring you 6 recordings of <em>A Nocturnall Upon St. Lucies Day</em> by John Donne. This was the fortnightly poetry project for winter solstice 2008.

John Donne was an English Jacobean preacher, sometime lawyer, later in life a Member of Parliament and Royal Chaplain. Marrying for love against the wishes of his influential father-in-law; Donne's career was cast into shadow: forcing him to support his wife, Anne, as best he might under a specter of unforgiving penury. <br /><br />Despite such hardships - perhaps because of them - Donne's writings demonstrate a mastery of poetry layered with metaphysical meaning and mystery: which continues to delight and challenge modern-day readers. Donne's "divine poems" - the focus of this collection - present profound theological insights using absorbing allegories and beautiful imagery.<br /><br />At the end of Donne's life - as his health deteriorated under illnesses of increasing severity - his poetry served him as: distraction, consolation, and even "public confession". With them, Donne cheerfully but soberly faces the limits of his own mortality: and contemplates the mysteries that lie beyond the grave.<br />(Introduction by Godsend)

LibriVox volunteers bring you 14 recordings of A Burnt Ship by John Donne. This was the Weekly Poetry project for September 17th, 2010.

LibriVox volunteers bring you 17 recordings of The Dream by John Donne. This was the Fortnightly Poetry project for July 17, 2011.<br><br>John Donne was an English poet, satirist, lawyer, and priest who is considered a prominent representative of the metaphysical poets of the period. His works are notable for their mimetic and sensual style and include sonnets, love poetry, religious poems, Latin translations, epigrams, elegies, songs, satires and sermons. His poetry is noted for its vibrancy of language and inventiveness of metaphor, especially as compared to that of his contemporaries. (summary from Wikipedia)

9Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions Together With Death's Duel

By John Donne

Devotions upon Emergent Occasions is a 1624 prose work by the English theologian and writer John Donne, Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. It is a series of reflections that were written as Donne recovered from a serious illness. The work consists of twenty-three parts ('devotions') describing each stage of the sickness. Each part is further divided into a Meditation, an Expostulation (or objection) , and a Prayer. The work is an excellent example of seventeenth century English spirituality and sometimes feels a bit dated. Yet much solid nourishment can be found. “Death’s Duel” is Donne’s last sermon prepared for presentation before the King during Lent; it is commonly seen as Donne’s own funeral oration. The biographical material is from Izaak Walton’s Lives. The most famous part of the Devotions is number XVII (17), containing these lines: 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 manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee. (Summary by Wikipedia and David Wales)>/p>

The Holy Sonnets—also known as the Divine Meditations or Divine Sonnets—are a series of nineteen poems by the English poet John Donne (1572–1631). The sonnets were first published in 1633—two years after Donne's death. Summary from Wikipedia.

11Anniversary Poems

By John Donne

Elizabeth Drury, daughter of Donne's patron, Sir Robert Drury, died in 1610. A year later Donne laments her hyperbolically as the soul of the created universe. In "An Anatomy of the World: The First Anniversary," he poetically scrutinizes that year-old corpse, the world, as if he were performing an autopsy (an "anatomy"). He finds it corrupt in every part, the dead woman having carried with her every spark of goodness it once contained. To commemorate the second anniversary of Miss Drury's death, Donne's "Progress of the Soul" (1612) celebrates her liberation from this world, urges readers to follow her example, and performs a cheerful spiritual meditation upon the process of death, burial, and corruption—cheerful because death frees us from the inconveniences of this life and serves as a portal to the next. Each poem is introduced by an encomium that, though purporting to be written by another hand, appears to be the poet's own work. (Summary by Thomas Copeland)

John Donne was an English poet and cleric in the Church of England. He is considered the pre-eminent representative of the metaphysical poets. His works are noted for their strong, sensual style and include sonnets, love poems, religious poems, Latin translations, epigrams, elegies, songs, satires and sermons. His poetry is noted for its vibrancy of language and inventiveness of metaphor, especially compared to that of his contemporaries. Donne's style is characterised by abrupt openings and various paradoxes, ironies and dislocations. These features, along with his frequent dramatic or everyday speech rhythms, his tense syntax and his tough eloquence, were both a reaction against the smoothness of conventional Elizabethan poetry and an adaptation into English of European baroque and mannerist techniques. - Summary by Wikipedia

John Donne was an English poet and cleric in the Church of England. Despite his great education and poetic talents, Donne lived in poverty for several years, relying heavily on wealthy friends. He spent much of the money he inherited during and after his education on womanising, literature, pastimes, and travel. In 1601, Donne secretly married Anne More, with whom he had twelve children. In 1615, he became an Anglican priest, although he did not want to take Anglican orders. He did so because King James I persistently ordered it. In 1621, he was appointed the Dean of St Paul's Cathedral in London. He also served as a member of Parliament in 1601 and in 1614. (Wikipedia)

14John Donne's Satires

By John Donne

Donne’s Style<br> In John Donne’s day, a satire was such a poem as a satyr might compose. Satyrs were rough, savage creatures in Greek mythology, human to the waist but goat from there down. That is the reason that Donne’s style in these poems exceeds his normal difficulty in syntax, vocabulary, thought, and meter. His age enjoyed untangling such puzzles, and some poets cultivated obscurity as an art, called asprezza. Wordplay like “while bellows pant below” (Satyre 2), where the same syllables, stressed differently, produce two different words almost side by side, entertained them.<br> An acoustical analogue to obscurity, Donne’s rhymes are often deliberately lame, while his rhythms nearly defy scansion and yet refuse to become mere prose. By keeping the drum beat just barely audible, he makes us feel that we are stumbling, out of step—neither marching nor merely walking.<br> Why was this abuse of the reader enjoyable? Perhaps for the same reason that grafitti appeals to some people. At first glance Donne appears lax, but in fact he is naughty; not undisciplined but rebellious; he does not fail to abide by the rules but rather gives the impression of breaking them.<br> Metempsychosis<br> The poem appears to be incomplete, its “First Song” having no counterpart, no “Second Song.” Similarly its promise to end by identifying what celebrity the soul in question now inhabits is never fulfilled. On the contrary, the poem’s initial epic pretentions founder at the second generation of mankind rather than tracing human history from the Garden of Eden to modern England, as was proposed. In view of the author’s mock-heroic tone, however, the poem’s apparent incompletion may be part of the satire, so it does no harm to suppose it as complete as necessary to accomplish its purpose.<br> What it accomplishes is to demonstrate, by means of the Pythagorean doctrine of the transmigration of souls, the depravity of the object of the satire (identity unknown but perhaps easily guessed by Donne’s audience). According to this doctrine, also called metempsychosis, the various guises that a soul takes in its travels are rewards or punishments for its conduct in each of its incarnations. It is debatable whether this process always leads to purification. In this poem it appears rather to be simple unfolding, dilation, the full realization of the soul’s potential. This soul has an appalling capacity for evil, beginning ominously as the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge and never rising higher than the moral neutrality of a fish. (A modern reader unfamiliar with The Bhagavad Gita may rely on Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as background to the concept of the dilation and degradation of a soul.)<br> The style of the poem reflects the theme of shape-changing, for Donne loves to employ words’ multiple senses in close proximity: <br> . . . Make my darke heavy Poëm light, and light . . . [not dark + not heavy]<br> . . . to heare / Whose story, with long patience you will long . . . [adjective + verb]<br> . . . Her, her fates threw . . . [object of verb + possessive]<br> . . . Her sinne had now brought in infirmities . . . [verbal particle + prefix]<br> . . . Ill steward of himself, himselfe in three yeares ends. . . . [object of preposition + object of verb]<br> . . . Yet them all these unkinde kinds feed upon . . . [adjective + noun]<br> Such wordplay is common in Donne’s satires, but in a poem chronicling the exploits of fishes, a sparrow, a wolf, and a mouse—all being the same individual in different forms—it seems especially appropriate. - Summary by Thomas Copeland

John Donne’s Holy Sonnets are a meditation on faith, loss, doubt and divine mercy. This recording uses the sequence of 19 sonnets as edited by Herbert Grierson. - Summary by Newgatenovelist