This novel is a fictionalized biography of the Elizabethan poet John Donne, one of my favorite poets. Wikipedia speaks of the “strong, sensual style” and “abrupt openings and various paradoxes, ironies and dislocations” in Donne’s poetry, and I tend to enjoy the surprises and disconcerting changes that appear in much of Donne’s poetry.

Donne himself was a courtier, trying for most of his life to find an influential and rich patron who would make his fortune and get him the appointments he needed for a diplomatic career. He rather spoiled his chances such a career when he fell in love with the niece, Anne More, of his patron and employer, Sir Thomas Egerton, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal under Queen Elizabeth I. Donne, who was pushing thirty, and Anne, still a teenager, secretly married, and when the marriage was discovered, Donne got fired from his position with Sir Thomas and Anne’s father disowned the pari and tried to have their marriage declared invalid. Oh, and John Donne spent a short time in prison where he wrote a succinct poem about his fate:

John Donne

Anne Donne

undone.

John and Anne went on to spend most of their sixteen years of married life in financial difficulties. Donne wrote both prose and poems, sometimes for pay and sometimes to get the attention of those he hoped would advance his career. Anne gave birth to twelve children in sixteen years, two of them stillborn. The couple, as portrayed in the book and seemingly in real life, remained deeply in love despite their difficult circumstances until Anne died in 1617, five days after giving birth to a stillborn baby.

I kept waiting as I read the story of Donne’s life for John Donne to experience Christian conversion of some sort and to become an Anglican priest. I knew that he did become a minister and a believer at some point. It turns out that Donne only became a cleric finally because James I practically ordered him to do so. Donne had no other way to support his growing family, so he was ordained in 1615, only a couple of years before the death of his wife.

This novel has Donne’s actual conversion coming after Anne’s death in the very last chapter of the book. You can tell from his poetry, especially his Holy Sonnets, and from some of his sermons that he truly did trust in the Lord for forgiveness and salvation (or else he was an awfully good faker). I remember going to see a play about John Donne’s life many years ago when Engineer Husband and I were dating. I also remember watching the movie version of the Pulitzer prize winning play, Wit with Emma Thompson as the main character, an English professor who is dying of ovarian cancer and what also has a predilection for the poetry of John Donne.

Other posts about John Donne and his poetry:

• A Valediction Forbidding Mourning by John Donne, 1611
• Holy Sonnet X (Death Be Not Proud) by John Donne
• The Sunne Rising by John Donne
• Song (Go and Catch a Falling Star) by John Donne
• Hymn to God, My God, in my Sickness by John Donne
• Poetry and sermons of John Donne
• The End of the Alphabet, Wit and John Donne