Whatever else is involved when a poem makes good on the promise of the imagination, for a poem to become itself at all, it needs to coax and wrest the imagination into the public sphere. As a work of art, the imagination exists for others who, whether or not they know the artist personally, relate to it from a public vantage point. There is private beauty, but no private art. The awareness of publicness[i] will vary from poem to poem, but even the most intimate lyrics anticipate publicness in the medium of language itself; in some intensely private lyrics the language will subtly, briefly glance at public judgments, as when Thomas Hardy plays on the word “fair” in “The Voice.” The public is not the political, but it is a precondition for politics and is strengthened or weakened by political activity, just as a thinned out or distorted understanding of public life can corrode political discourse.

John Donne, regularly recognized as one of the masters of English lyric poetry, is not as often thought of as a political poet. Nor would it be easy to say that he is political in any simple sense, but he is a poet whose awareness of publicness has been understated—probably because his poetry is alive to public life as something to be escaped and even transcended. Nonetheless, in writing poems that respond negatively to publicness, turning from and rejecting it in favor of an idealized privacy, he registers its pressure with unusual sensitivity. In Donne’s poetry, we see how even where poetry does not participate in the arena of civic affairs and public life, it may powerfully contribute to the construction of that arena.

Having said “his poetry,” I need immediately to narrow my claim. For in one set and genre of poems, Donne immerses himself wholly, with irked loathing and prickled irritation, into public life: Donne’s satires do not receive the attention of his lyrics, but they provide a densely elaborated accounting of the worldly affairs that the lyrics would shut out, at least for a brief time. An admiration for Donne’s lyrics resembles admiration for the interior calm and grandeur of a cathedral: impressive on its own, but all the more impressive when entered from sweltering streets on a busy day. Donne’s satires are the streets; in them, Donne shows himself to be fully a London poet and to be immersed in both passing fashions and in contemporary learning. Whereas in the lyrics we find a somewhat narrow range of images and metaphors—ingenuity of the conceits[ii] coming from Donne’s full commitment in applying them to a situation, the perversity of those same conceits coming from the insistence that they reveal something fundamentally true about the situations to which they are applied—in the satires, we encounter polyphonic diction drawn from all walks of life, and rhyming couples cluttered with parentheticals, enjambments, and abrupt shifts of syntax. In the satires, the speed of language matches the pace of London life and also bristles uncomfortably against it, denying itself calm. 

Satire IV[iii] goes furthest in getting the grit of London within its lines, as it recoils at the behaviors and performances of courtiers. In the first half of the poem, Donne had visited the court and been ensnared in tedious conversations with courtiers. Having escaped, he retires home where his “precious soul began the wretchedness | Of suitors at court to mourn,” before the second half of the poem commences. It is now past ten o’clock and the courtiers, having spilled over into the city, return to “the presence” of the King, where Donne finds himself once more—but this time he encounters the courtiers at a remove, an observer rather than a participant, though he ultimately flees, eager “to wash the stains away.” Here are the lines when the poem turns in its second half:

‘Tis ten o’clock and past; all whom the mews,

Balloon, tennis, diet, or the stews

Had all morning held, now the second

Time made ready that day in flocks are found

In the presence, and I (God pardon me),

As fresh and sweet their apparels be, as be

The fields they sold to buy them. For a king

Those hose are, cry the flatterers, and bring

Them next week to the theatre to sell;

Wants reach all states. Me seems they do as well

At stage as court; all are players. Whoe’er looks

(For themselves dare not go) o’er Cheapside books

Shall find their wardrobe’s inventory. Now

The ladies come. As pirates which do know

That there came weak ships fraught with cutchannel,

The men board them and praise, as they think, well,

Their beauties; they the men’s wits; both are bought. 

Why good wits ne’er wear scarlet gowns, I thought

This cause: these men, men’s wits for speeches buy,

And women buy all reds which scarlets dye.   (ll. 175-191)

This, as I said, is extreme in its play of syntax against line, phrase against sentence (or period), and in its interlacing of voice, action, argument, and simile. The turbulence is contained only barely within the verse, as his focus is drawn now one way, now another; ours is not the only era where public life fragmented our powers of attention. At the same time, the lines register his inability to find a point of rest; he cannot extricate himself from the fray, even as an observer. That this is not just a public, but also Donne’s public—the potential public of his poetry—is suggested in the satire’s closing lines:

                                                            Though I, yet

With Maccabee’s modesty, the known merit

Of my work lessen, yet some wise man shall,

I hope, esteem my writs canonical.                (ll. 241-44)

.

This is tongue-in-cheek, since that wise man is nowhere in evidence in the scenes he has presented, and since he compares his “writs” with Maccabee, a Biblical book that was not Canon for English Protestants. But whatever the jokes and ironies, he does grant here that he writes, and the writ might even be this poem (the further joke being that this would not be the most esteemed or anthologized of Donne’s poems). Donne risks marring the poem in order to dramatize the forces that he is up against ; whereas on other occasions those forces are kept at greater bay by the bounds of the poetry.

In the more celebrated and measured Satire III, Donne allows himself to find a greater poise, didactically commenting on how best to rise against the fray in the religious controversies of his time. The poem reaches, within itself, a stable vantage from which to oppose not this side or that, but the tussle of religious controversy in general and the political ends it serves:

Keep the truth which thou hast found; men do not stand

In so ill case, that God hath with his hand

Sign'd kings' blank charters to kill whom they hate;

Nor are they vicars, but hangmen to fate.

Fool and wretch, wilt thou let thy soul be tied

To man's laws, by which she shall not be tried

At the last day? Oh, will it then boot thee

To say a Philip, or a Gregory,

A Harry, or a Martin, taught thee this?

Is not this excuse for mere contraries

Equally strong? Cannot both sides say so?

That thou mayest rightly obey power, her bounds know;

Those passed, her nature, and name is changed; to be

Then humble to her is idolatry.

As streams are, power is; those blest flowers that dwell

At the rough stream's calm head, thrive and do well,

But having left their roots, and themselves given

To the stream's tyrannous rage, alas, are driven

Through mills, and rocks, and woods, and at last, almost

Consum'd in going, in the sea are lost.

So perish souls, which more choose men's unjust

Power from God claim'd, than God himself to trust.  (ll. 89-end)

Perhaps Donne intends for us to see that here he is resisting being “driven,” or returns from having been “driven,” “through mills, and rocks, and woods, and at last, almost | Consum’d in going.” He is not lost, but the poem struggles against the “rough stream” and cannot be said to be at its “calm head.” Though this is less frenetic than Satire IV, it argues with an impassioned urgency that testifies to an equally intense opposition, culminating in a question that risks turning back on the poem: “Cannot both sides say so?” Whereas Donne, in the lyrics, disarms the opposition by the wildness of his elaborate similes (who would be so preposterous as to argue back when to do so would mean attempting to re-bend them to one’s own end?), here the argument is exhortation-of-the-pub. The answer to the question that Donne wants to hear is, “yes, both sides can say that they follow one creed because they were taught thus,” but the question admits another response: “true, but there is another side here also.” This satire is open to the push-and-pull of argument.

It ultimately is an argument about how to refuse participation in the (Reformation era) politics of faith. The final simile is not about belief, but about power. It begins with “bounds”: know the bounds of power, because if power passes its proper bounds, it becomes idolatry, changing before one knows what it has become. The “bounds” become the banks of a river in the simile that follows, where power is a river that carries to perdition those drawn into its currents.

In this simile, something interesting is happening that I think is a key to the relation of the satires and the lyrics. In the passage from Satire IV, we see Donne quote Heraclitus as the stock figure of the weeping philosopher. Heraclitus is present in the figures here too, as the image power that changes when it exceeds its boundaries becomes an image of power as a river—a river that, for Heraclitus, represented the flux of things. Controversy, politics, public life, the court: all of these, for Donne, embody the threat posed by change itself. The satires are the poems where Donne accommodates that change into the form of the verse, allowing it to suffer the coarsening and shapelessness that any exposed to such a degree of change must suffer. Donne’s lyrics are built against this change—a change that for Donne is everywhere present in public life.

Some of the best twentieth-century critics of Donne, William Empson and his occasional interlocutor James Smith, suggest that Donne is a true metaphysical poet because his poetry so frequently attempts to resolve the problem of the one and the many, one of the original metaphysical puzzles. In the lyrics, eroticism is a vehicle for Platonic union between two separated individuals. Without denying the place of this metaphysical puzzle in Donne, it’s worth recognizing that it exists alongside, interrelated with, a fundamental question of stability and change, wherein the notion of a unified Being is undone by the constant changes undergone by particular beings (and if all Being is Change, then is Change itself a permanent unchanging entity?) and whereby the identities of particular beings is itself always already undone, their having become something else.

If we begin with the Satires, we see that Donne encounters this metaphysical experience of change immediately in his experience of public life. There is not a writer I can think of about whom it would not be worthwhile to ask, “What do they make of change?”, just as there is not a writer I can think of about whom it could not be valuably asked, “how does their work accommodate an awareness of its publicness?” In the case of Donne, these two questions converge: privacy for Donne is sought after because it holds out against change, because it represents something permanent in the world, upon which the self can ground itself, even as the self exists for and in the world that changes. This privacy is, in the first phase of Donne’s career, erotic and then, in the second, religious. It is interesting also to consider that during his lifetime, Donne’s poetry circulated only in manuscript, as if Donne both admitted the need for a public and refused the full publicity of print that his great contemporary, Ben Jonson, exploited to self-classicizing effect. It should not be thought that the printed editions would have provided a more stable textual copy (McKitterick), and that manuscripts were more liable for variants and mistranscription; the significance, I think, lay elsewhere in what Donne wanted his poetry to be to others, something that would be less public than it might have been.[iv] In light of Donne’s relation to the change that is the public world, we might also place his misogynist fixation on women’s susceptibility to inconstancy, their being worth so little because they can be trusted only to leave, to be with others—strange men, out there.

From this perspective, we can read Donne’s lyrics as achieving a stasis against the world, where the world is very much a public and potentially political (in courtly climbing, religious imprisonment, as Donne’s parents, Roman Catholics, would have known); Donne’s lyrics are not merely something other than political poems;I instead they are not-political poems, active in their resistance to political affairs.

“The Flea” is a dazzling showpiece of Donne’s powers of comparison and persuasion. The poem seems to recognize itself as such, priding itself on showing off, and even the argument itself must ultimately, if we ask whether it succeeds, be considered a triumph not because of its reasoning but because it establishes the brilliance of the seducer. It is a seduction poem, in which the speaker (Donne) is attempting to persuade a woman to sleep with him. She is already in bed, perhaps already partially unclothed, when he notices a flea, common enough to the time, and probably even more common in an inn, where he would have met her; the flea has bitten them both, he supposes, and in so doing, their blood is mingled in it, an equivalent of sexual intercourse by theories of the day. Given that this caused so little loss of shame to her, why would she mind doing the real act with him. It is oblique to my argument, but I want to talk about it before turning to clearer and more direct instances because there is, within “The Flea,” something that might be termed a counter-poem, or a hypothetical poem that Donne does not pursue but might have. It occurs in the second stanza, where Donne whips up his argument into sacred terms, the flea being compared to a cloister, and then, in the third stanza, when she kills it, the flea being compared to Christ, containing three selves in one (his, her, itself) and dying by a nail (the one on her finger). Sacrilegious and funny—but tinctured, in this middle portion, with more yearning than lust. Here is the poem in full:

Mark but this flea, and mark in this,

How little that which thou deny’st me is;

It sucked me first, and now sucks thee,

And in this flea, our two bloods mingled be;

Thou know’st that this cannot be said

A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead;

            Yet this enjoys before it woo,

            And pampered swells with one blood made of two,

            And this, alas, is more than we would do.

O stay, three lives in one flea spare,

Where we almost, yea more than married are.

This flea is you and I, and this

Our marriage bed, and marriage temple is;

Though parents grudge, and you, we’are met

And cloistered in these living walls of jet.

            Though use make you apt to kill me,

            Let not to that, self-murder added be.,

            And sacrilege, three sins in killing three.

Cruel and sudden, hast thou since

Purpled thy nail in blood of innocence?

Wherein could this flea guilty be,

Except in that drop which it sucked from thee?

Yet thou triumph’st, and say’st that thou

Find’st not thyself, nor me, the weaker now;

            ‘Tis true; then learn how false, fears me;

            Just so much honour, when thou yield’st to me,

            Will waste, as this flea’s death took life from thee.

Here and elsewhere (“The Sun Rising”; “The Good Morrow”) the bed is a special place for Donne—not only because it is the site of erotic interaction, but also because it contains the Platonic unity that such interaction represents. In the second stanza, Donne approaches just this familiar conceit, with the statement of identity: “the flea is you and I.” In this instant, another poem comes into view, one that admits not only the unity of flea and the two people, but of all entities: if the flea can be identified with both of them, then anything could be. The diminutive size of the flea makes it patently absurd to say “the flea is you and I,” but the possibility of the absurdity points to something sublime and grand, and this is recognized by Donne when he develops the image: “cloistered in these living walls of jet.” “Cloistered” offers two relevant meanings: it might be the cloisters of a cathedral, in which case Donne is transforming what is small into what is large, or else it might be the cloisters of a monastery (a piquant comparison in the Reformation), with the attendant suggestion of chastity, as if the lovers were purer in their mutual embrace than otherwise. In either case, this is the image that satisfies Donne’s yearning for privacy, for an enduring calm, and for a small and private space to contain space greater than seems possible and yet permitted only to few. The tiny flea is made large because they come together within it, and they come together within it because it is so small as to escape public notice; it exists in the most private of places, bedlinens (or hair or bodies), and is an emblem of the privacy Donne seeks. In the comparison it is mock-sacred, but it can only be mock-sacred because it has something in common with the sacred: an existence apart, a potential to defy the rules of space and time (the trinity), whereas the public is subject to what Donne, in Satire IV, refers to as “Durer’s rules.” The lyrics are the place of impossibilities—alchemy and the like—because such impossibilities are as private as imaginative conceits.

Nowhere is the perfect tranquility of perfect love better represented than in “The Ecstasy,” the title of which refers to the state of being outside-of-oneself, here in a joy that is without excitement. I’ll quote the lines that clarify not only Donne’s idealization of a unchanging union of lovers, but also his accommodating within that idealization the understanding that the body, and the changing world of which it is a part, cannot be rejected outright: the former (the idealized union) requires the latter, as the promise of the latter (bodily erotic life) is perfected in the former:

We then, who are this new soul, know

         Of what we are composed and made,

For, th' atomies of which we grow,

         Are souls, whom no change can invade.

But O alas, so long, so far,

         Our bodies why do we forbear?

They are ours, though they are not we, we are

         The intelligences, they the spheres.

We owe them thanks, because they thus,

         Did us, to us, at first convey,

Yielded their forces, sense, to us,

         Nor are dross to us, but allay.    (ll. 45-56)

The frequent subordinate clauses and the dense interlacing of pronouns across the stanzas should make for a knotty reading experience. Instead, by virtue of their dense regularity, these features ensure the virtue of balance and calm. The poem, in other words, reveals in its form what it might be for the lovers to transcend the ungainly and divided condition of worldly life, without abandoning those conditions. “Souls, whom no change can invade,” does not insist that souls are not in some sense (the force of souls being the body’s senses!) sustained by change.

I’ve mentioned “The Good Morrow” and should quote it now since it does entirely what I suggest “The Flea” only almost does, or glancingly does, in its middle stanza. “The Good Morrow” is beautifully relaxed; rather than work for a moment of calm, actively clearing space from the public (as happens in “The Sun Rising”[v]), it luxuriates in the space it has been afforded. It exists in a moment, and the moment, like Kierkegaard’s moment, the focal point and origin of subjective transparency, exists apart from the normal measures of social time:

The Good Morrow

I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I

       Did, till we loved? Were we not weaned till then?

But sucked on country pleasures, childishly?

       Or snorted we in the seven sleepers’ den?

   ’Twas so; but this, all pleasures fancies be.

   If ever any beauty I did see,

Which I desired, and got, ’twas but a dream of thee.

And now good morrow to our waking souls,

       Which watch not one another out of fear;

For love, all love of other sights controls,

       And makes one little room, an every where.

   Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone,

   Let maps to other, worlds on worlds have shown,

Let us possess one world, each hath one, and is one.

My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears,

        And true plain hearts do in the faces rest,

Where can we find two better hemispheres

       Without sharp north, without declining west?

   What ever dies, was not mixed equally;

   If our two loves be one, or, thou and I

Love so alike, that none do slacken, none can die.

“And now good morrow to our waking souls”: that word “now” announces the moment of this poem, which suspends time and change alike, even if, paradoxically, it only does so briefly. They wake to one another, and they wake to a new reality in which they fill one another’s eyes, each sufficient for the gaze of the other, a world unto themselves, but “without sharp north, without declining west,” without spatial direction or passing days.

The contrast with the satire is a matter of style and tone as much as anything: the opening questions dally with hypotheticals, rather than pressing arguments on an interlocutor. How rare for Donne to include, as he does in the first line of this poem, what would seem to be a phrase of colloquial interjection and hearty approval: “by my troth.” He has the time, and he takes the time, to say it. But it is also, in “troth,” an acknowledgement that in this moment he has reached the “troth” of his being and life, the unchanging core of himself: it’s a tempered epicurean appreciation for a life of the senses, suspending the anxiety of loss and change (they watch not one another “out of fear”), but it is a surer truth than we find elsewhere in Donne.

Coleridge, in his epigram on Donne, says the latter’s poems “wreathe iron-pokers into true-love knots.” But the temperature here is cool to touch, the phrasing is supple, and there are no knotted figures or similes. The closest we come is: “For love, all love of other sights controls | And makes one little room, an every where.” But rather than a complex geometry of parts and whole, the syntactical ripple is occasioned by the unity of love controlling love: a reduction of elements rather than a proliferation, and the change that is occasioned is a change from a particular to a universal. When the little room becomes everywhere, place ceases to matter. In the final line of the second stanza, Donne could be said to dramatize an indifference to conceit, as we are offered its ingredients but without any interest in constructing them into a dish: “Let us possess one world, each hath one, and is one.” Bald assertion is possible because the reality is present; it does not have to be brought about by force of argument or rhetoric.

This is also how the poem ends: the final three lines mark a transition that feels more nonchalant than abrupt—like the stray brushstroke of Frans Hals or Van Dyck, exemplifying the studied indifference of sprezzatura. They are not entirely unconnected to what comes before: “declining west” is the west where the sun sets, but “declining” suggests death. It is not a developed line of thought that we usually find in Donne’s conceits, not least because the final three lines are content to express the abstract idea without any concrete correlative. In other poems, the “if” of “if our two loves be one” might have quivered with anxiety, but here that anxiety is subdued, and the hypothetical is an inverse of the questions at the start. Donne does not need to meet the possibility of death with a violent assertion. Rather than intimate anxiety, the “if” suggests that Donne does not even need to concern himself with death as a reality; it is too far off, so excluded from the moment that even a discussion of it is a fantasy.

Almost nothing in the poem is political or even public, but that exclusion is what gives the poem its relevance to an understanding of publicness: the failure to imagine privacy and the failure to imagine public life go hand in hand. Like the lovers in the poem, they are separate bodies but, conceptually, one.

In his persona in the love lyrics, Donne can seem a precursor to Byron: a bit mad, bad, and dangerous to know. He can be impudent, defiant, and excessive. But it would be wrong—though also easy—to think him shameless. In fact, “The Canonization,” the poem that contains the famous “well-wrought urn” image, is very much an attempt at pushing back against those who would judge his love life. It is as dramatic a demarcation of privacy from publicity as takes place in any of the lyrics:

            The Canonization

For God’s sake hold your tongue, and let me love,

         Or chide my palsy, or my gout,

My five gray hairs, or ruined fortune flout,

         With wealth your state, your mind with arts improve,

                Take you a course, get you a place,

                Observe his honor, or his grace,

Or the king's real, or his stampèd face

         Contemplate; what you will, approve,

         So you will let me love.

Alas, alas, who’s injured by my love?

         What merchant’s ships have my sighs drowned?

Who says my tears have overflowed his ground?

         When did my colds a forward spring remove?

                When did the heats which my veins fill

                Add one more to the plaguy bill?

Soldiers find wars, and lawyers find out still

         Litigious men, which quarrels move,

         Though she and I do love.

Call us what you will, we are made such by love;

         Call her one, me another fly,

We're tapers too, and at our own cost die,

         And we in us find the eagle and the dove,

                The phoenix riddle hath more wit

                By us; we two being one, are it.

So, to one neutral thing both sexes fit

         We die and rise the same, and prove

         Mysterious by this love.

We can die by it, if not live by love,

         And if unfit for tombs and hearse

Our legend be, it will be fit for verse;

         And if no piece of chronicle we prove,

                We’ll build in sonnets pretty rooms;

                As well a well wrought urn becomes

The greatest ashes, as half-acre tombs,

         And by these hymns, all shall approve

         Us canonized for love:

And thus invoke us; ‘You, whom reverend love

         Made one another’s hermitage;

You, to whom love was peace, that now is rage;

         Who did the whole world's soul contract, and drove

                Into the glasses of your eyes

                (So made such mirrors, and such spies,

That they did all to you epitomize,)

         Countries, towns, courts: beg from above

         A pattern of your love!’

What’s interesting is the reversal that takes place over the poem. In the first two stanzas, the poet rejects the thought that love should or could be blamed for the world’s alterations and misfortunes. Love alters nothing, being unalterable in its own perfection—but in its own perfection, it cannot be a source of life, but must remove lovers from the world: the world is a place of change, imperfection, and loss, which the lovers refuse. Hence “We can die but, if not live by love.” They possess instead the same otherworldly perfection of apotheosized saints or martyrs. Then, in the final stanza, we find them being invoked by those for whom love “now is rage” (this could also mean that love was peace to them once but is rage to them now, but this cannot be reconciled with anything else); the contrast matters since “love is rage” for those because they remain on the world, subject to the tumults of passion. But what is peculiar is that they are held to be a pattern not simply because of the unchanging eternal calm they exemplify, but also because in that calm they were capable of absorbing the world. In their perfection, they did not turn away from the world but “did the whole world’s soul contract” and “drove | into the glasses” of their eyes “countries, towns, courts.”  The pattern of their love was one that separates from the flux of worldly existence, but the pattern removes them in order to subsume and contain that existence; it does not pretend to remove the world from its sights. Private and public gaze upon one another, the former contracting the latter within its confines, and the latter aspiring to the condition of the former: Donne’s celebration of privacy does not entail any claim that what is public can or should be abandoned, or that the mutual dependence of the two can be severed.

Donne does not reject public life, but he knows it is not enough. Healthy publicness demands healthy privateness and vice-versa. In yet another genre of poetry, the elegies, Donne wrote a poem, his third elegy, titled “Change.” It is a defense of fleeting monogamous relationships, a change that nonetheless finds occasional moments of rest. In its closing lines we find motion and stasis reconciled:

To live in one land, is captivity,

To run all countries, a wild roguery;

Waters stink soon, if in one place they bide,

And in the vast sea are worse putrefied:

But when they kiss one bank, and leaving this

Never look back, but the next bank do kiss,

Then are they purest; change is the nursery

Of music, joy, life and eternity.    (ll. 30-36)

“Music, joy, life and eternity” are grown from change, and in part consist of change—music and life especially—but they also possess an essence that defies change. The repeatability of a piece of music exists only in time but also as a form that masters time Life is a series of discrete moments, but also a nexus in which time is unified. Joy is fleeting but is also ecstatic in it shedding all but the present (the Kierkegaardian “moment” might be relevant here too). And eternity, which is here admitted to be grown from change, even as it is diametrically opposed.

John Donne’s greatest poem—one of the greatest of all English lyrics—is “A Nocturnal upon S. Lucy’s, being the shortest day.” Its power does not arise because it turns Donne’s usual understanding of privacy on its head, but its power is inseparable from this fact. Rather than finding the stillness of privacy in the perfect union of lovers, the poem is written in the wake of a love affair that was, by its account, tumultuous, exemplifying the turbulence of worldly change rather than an eternal Platonic form. The privacy of their love affair did not afford the calm of “The Ecstasy” where no change could invade. Instead, its pleasure and appeal had been inseparable from “chaos”—but the affair has ended, and its end has occasioned the poem, which finds in the absence of the love affair a privacy nowhere else explored in Donne: the privacy of profound isolation, and the nothingness of solitude that brings with it the total stillness of non-being:

'Tis the year's midnight, and it is the day's,

Lucy's, who scarce seven hours herself unmasks,

         The sun is spent, and now his flasks

         Send forth light squibs, no constant rays;

                The world's whole sap is sunk:

The general balm th' hydroptic earth hath drunk,

Whither, as to the bed's feet, life is shrunk,

Dead and interr'd; yet all these seem to laugh,

Compar'd with me, who am their epitaph.

Study me then, you who shall lovers be

At the next world, that is, at the next spring:

         For I am every dead thing,

         In whom Love wrought new alchemy.

                For his art did express

A quintessence even from nothingness,

From dull privations, and lean emptiness

He ruin'd me, and I am re-begot

Of absence, darkness, death; things which are not.

All others, from all things, draw all that's good,

Life, soul, form, spirit, whence they being have;

         I, by Love's limbec, am the grave

         Of all that's nothing. Oft a flood

                Have we two wept, and so

Drown'd the whole world, us two; oft did we grow

To be two chaoses, when we did show

Care to aught else; and often absences

Withdrew our souls, and made us carcasses.

But I am by her death (which word wrongs her)

Of the first nothing the elixir grown;

         Were I a man, that I were one

         I needs must know; I should prefer,

                If I were any beast,

Some ends, some means; yea plants, yea stones detest,

And love; all, all some properties invest;

If I an ordinary nothing were,

As shadow, a light and body must be here.

But I am none; nor will my sun renew.

You lovers, for whose sake the lesser sun

         At this time to the Goat is run

         To fetch new lust, and give it you,

                Enjoy your summer all;

Since she enjoys her long night's festival,

Let me prepare towards her, and let me call

This hour her vigil, and her eve, since this

Both the year's, and the day's deep midnight is.

Donne’s despair is alloyed (and allayed) by pride, but the pride is not a moral failing so much as a recognition of the publicness of the form of his expression. He writes a lyric poem; his voice is on display; his state of nothingness is sufficiently exceptional to demand attention, and he paradoxically reveals himself to have a core of selfhood capable of withstanding that state and giving imaginative presence to what-is-not. “Study me then, you who shall lovers be” insists on the publicness of his non-being, and though he rues his reduced condition, it provides him with a new anatomy to explore and allows him to articulate a new set of negative relations between self and world. But in all of these, he is assured of the “I,” which signifies nothing but the spoken voice, since only his word remains present against his otherwise absolute absence: that word, bereft of the body, bereft of being in the world, is utterly private, but also, being a word spoken and written for others, represents the publicness of language bereft of all physical origins. In the “I” of this poem, the still of privacy is exposed to the public, but it is entirely secure in the absence from which it sounds. This tangle of being and nothing, of self and body, of word and world, marks “A Nocturnal” as a definitively metaphysical poem—but its metaphysics are, because it is a poem, inseparable from its social existence, its defining and uniting the public and private poles of human life. These days, in 2025, the poles have not only shifted but have ceased to orient discourse and deliberation; the fragmentation of the public into competing private spaces, and the collapse of each private space into publicness, have political consequences. It’s not uncommon to place Donne’s poetry at the birth of modernity: he is nowhere more modern than in this sensitivity to the public and private distinction and co-dependence, which would define theories of liberal democracy, and which are being eroded today.

--By Owen Boynton