An Apposite Portrait

...Our familiarity with a poem like “The Good Morrow,” wherein the speaker dilates on the primacy of romantic love, is apt to obscure its deep structure...

...Examining the early love poems—like all Donne’s verse, they appeared in print only posthumously—he purloins details from “The Perfume,” a work dealing with a clandestine love affair, to furnish a vivid conjecture of Donne’s own early sexual career...

...by association he is the nun, in fact...

...No matter how high it soared, Donne’s imagination always remained tethered to the real...

...Quoting one of the sermons he delivered as Dean of St...

...Paul’s Cathedral from 1621 until his death, 10 years later...

...Donne’s struggle, though— and to his mind it was for nothing less than the eternal fate of his soul—is of perennial interest because he believed his salvation depended on how rigorously and expansively he thought...

...Instead of a fixed center, therefore, we encounter an accumulation of various selves as Stubbs pursues Donne’s mercurial personality through its various phases...

...He molded his experiences and imaginings into fabulously complex verse schemes, and also tried to give a regular shape to the varying activities of his days...

...Beyond his careful and undogmatic biographical use of Donne’s verse and sermons, Stubbs is a worthy literary guide...

...Stubbs’ respect for the difference between art and life is such that he is able to provide broad insights into the ways they can sometimes overlap: “[Donne] liked structure, and demanded much of it...

...Which is not to say that Stubbs— something of a wunderkind, at age 29— neglects his subject’s context...

...This applies to Donne as much as to Marvell...

...Indeed he reassuringly remarks that none of the perspectives offered in the early poems “can be said to define Donne or his conduct, or to form a journal of actual encounters...

...To the modern reader this may sound like a rarefied and ultimately academic story, intriguing but without obvious relevance today...

...John Carey’s widely admired John Donne: Life, Mind and Art (1981) is frequently guilty of this...

...It straightforwardly infers the “confessional” nature of, say, Holy Sonnet XVII (“Since she whom I loved hath paid her last debt”) or “A Nocturnal upon S. Lucy’ s Day” in a manner that fudges the gap between lawless life and scrupulously regulated art...

...Whereas some critics consider the poet a mere engineer of miraculously subtle ironies and paradoxes, Stubbs perceives a greater breadth in Donne’s vision...

...The nun discovering holiness after a life of marital and carnal enjoyment is his muse, his own poetic imagination...

...The Reformation was almost 40 years old when Donne was born to Catholic parents in 1572...

...Open recusancy meant fines, imprisonment, even execution...

...Stubbs responds by pointing out that, in marrying Ann More, the niece of his employer Sir Thomas Egerton, the Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, he sacrificed his social standing and his prospects: “all the tangible benefits, in short, that his conversion brought him...

...Paul’s, “chastity is not chastity in an old man, but a disability to be unchaste,” Stubbs comments: “The great thing . . . about Donne’s social observation is that he could always see his own part in the vice or little dishonesty of the heart that he pointed out...

...Rather, [they] show him testing out the different tones and registers suggested by a variety of situations...

...If, as a result, the life of Donne that emerges is more diffuse and chaotic than the portraits we are used to, it should be reckoned a gain in authenticity...

...Reviewed by Giles Harvey Contributor, the “Village Voice,” the “American Book Review,” the “Believer” RECENTACADEMIC treatments of John Donne have largely been devoted to “recovering” the sociopolitical context of early modern England—an approach that tends, perhaps inadvertently, to immure the Monarch of Wit behind the bars of history...

...With his younger brother Henry (who would later expire in the plague-ridden Newgate jail after being arrested for harboring a Catholic priest), Donne attended Oxford and then Cambridge, skipping town when it came time to take the Oath of Allegiance to the Queen and the Reformed Church—“something his family simply would not allow...

...So when John Stubbs, at the outset of his new life of Donne, offers the noble proposition that “His biography is worth studying not only because he was a splendid writer, but also because he was a brave and principled man,” it sounds a faint yet unmistakable note of defiance...

...Since we are usually in the dark as to the factual bedrock of what we are being told the effect is sometimes disorienting...

...This compulsive self-reflection happily forestalls dreary sententiousness, which is one of the qualities that make Donne modern...

...The biographer is alive to the magnitude of his subject, and aware that such a character will necessarily evade definitive explanation...

...This cagey method—in John Ashbery’s phrase, “fence-sitting/Raised to the level of an esthetic ideal”—results in extended portions of The Reformed Soul being written in the subjunctive mood...

...We learn the larger story of England’s break with the Roman Catholic Church as well as the effects of the schism on the country and its people...

...The Central Arc of Donne’s life, as Stubbs tells it, is the reformation of an anguished self-conscious Catholic thinker into a fierce defender of English Protestantism who served as the Dean of St...

...Within this frame there is plenty of room for philandering, financial destitution, and even a plundering romp into Catholic Spain with the charismatic and indefatigable Earl of Essex, Robert Devereux...

...Compelling hypotheses are set forth—perhaps the young Donne was smuggled out of the country to do his bit in the religious wars then raging in the Low Lands, and there wrote a number of Latin epigrams, his first attempts at verse—only to be discredited or at least severely qualified by the chapter’s end...

...Eliot ventured this definition of Marvell’s facility: “It involves, probably, a recognition, implicit in the expression of every experience, of other kinds of experience which are possible...

...Previous studies of Donne have often taken an uncharitable view of his “reformation,” seeing it as the triumph of cynical expediency, rather than the impulse of a ceaselessly inquisitive mind to revise...

...But Stubbs can be counted on to own up whenever he engages, however plausibly, in a flight of fancy...

...As though he were a character in one of his own poems, the Monarch of Wit has undergone an augmentation, “like gold to aery thinness beat...

...Reason, of course, soon enough intrudes to remind us that this is not actually the case—precisely the task that marvelous “an” performs...

...Such “an every where” exists wherever two people are in love and come to see each other as the only two people who authentically exist...

...Occasionally it reads like a piece of richly convoluted metafiction, as unlikely subplots sprout and wither within the space of a few pages...

...WRITING of Andrew Marvell, one of Donne’s poetic heirs, T.S...

...That Donne belongs to the present Stubbs asserts explicitly only in his Introduction and Afterword (where we discover that J. Robert Oppenheimer’s decision to christen the first nuclear explosions in the New Mexico desert “Trinity” was a bleak allusion to Holy Sonnet XIV: “Batter my heart, three person’d God”), but it is a conviction that informs the entire work and makes for an invigorating and apposite portrait...

...it also applies, in an important sense, to Stubbs...

...Here is the start of the poem’s second stanza: And now good morrow to our waking souls, Which watch not one another out of fear...

...Stubbs is more skeptical, more tentative in his inductions...

...Because scant letters or diaries exist that reveal Donne’s inner life, many previous biographers have succumbed to the post-Romantic temptation of reading the poems autobiographically...

...It can be found in almost every line he wrote...

...The indefinite article in the last phrase adds a finely oxymoronic flavor...

...The style proclaims the man, but in more oblique ways than one might imagine...

...F o r love, all love of other sights controls, And makes one little room, an every where...

...Thus, Stubbs’ book is an account of how one of the subtlest minds of the era dealt with our moral obligation to be intelligent, as Lionel Trilling would have put it...

...Probably in the early 1590s, having embarked on a study of law at Thavies Inn in London, he began writing the most original and intellectually sophisticated lyric poetry of the age...