‘Hope not for minde in women; at their best / sweetnesse’ is exceedingly jarring to read as a feminist in the 21st Century. Worse still, the words of this seemingly misogynistic, intellectual snob (who deliberately attempted to make his poems inaccessible in order to bar them from all but those esoteric few with sufficient wit) somehow manages to seduce and allure us, with their crude explicitness and bawdy energy. Yet, given 500 milliseconds to catch up with our consciousness’s, and the subsequent endorphin-rush generated when the poem is ‘undone’, the reason one is so mesmerized by Donne crystallises. One finally deciphers the hieroglyphics of that pervasive, blinking siren, begging for your perseverance as you wade through the lengthy, ‘hot eyed, unescapable’ ‘worst kind of bore[dom]’ C.S Lewis slated, as that oft-cited Kierkegaard quotation – ‘we live forward, but we understand backward’. The pleasure, and awakening gleaned at the undoing of a Donnean knot which triggers gratifying sensations is well worth mental strain, occasional discomfort or temporary unease. His potency is deeply enhanced by this process. Reading Donne is an exercise of the mind, its harmonies and dissonances literally playing with the brain, playing on existing neural tensions between a rigid drive for pattern and constancy versus a pliable drive for flexibility and an openness to change. To understand the forms his mind-games take, and their impact on readers, one must probe deeper into his mind, and thus neuroscientific and neurolinguistic approaches to his poetry are fundamental. In short however, Donne’s power is words, and he wields this power quite exquisitely and abhorrently – appealing to what makes us human in a prophetic role as he is both caveman and craftsman.
In order to understand the mind games Donne played, one must first attempt to understand the mind-set reflected in his poetry. His mind was immensely distressed by anxiety and instability, not least from his persecuted religious beliefs and subsequent apostasy, nor his secret marriage to Anne More, but by the huge shift in the world around him. His world, shaped by medieval scholasticism, and seemingly secure in its physical and spiritual boundaries, was entirely restructured by the discoveries of Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo. Indeed, it has been said that ‘the breakup of a whole system of thought is reflected in his pages’, and that one can see in them ‘the effort of the late Renaissance mind to make adjustments to its world of changing values without the scientific discoveries of his time’. This upheaval seems remarkably similar to that of Post-modernist works after the cataclysmic events and new technologies of the 20th century, such as nuclear developments. Donne’s desperate search for stability and fulfilment in an age of constant socio-political conflict, revolution in thought and irrevocable change due to the New Sciences is heavily documented in his poetry; the texts and their contexts are intertwined and interdependent. For example, The Anniversary is practically unintelligible except in the light of the sense of uprooting by the New Sciences:
‘And new philosophy calls all in doubt, / the element of fire is quite put out; The sun is lost, and th’earth, and no man’s wit… When in the Planets, and the Firmament….’Tis all in peeces, all coherarance gone’.
Donne channels his insecurity as a result of this scientific upheaval of order, into something far more primeval and eternal; the knowledge that for all our developments, man is still that caveman, and when ‘the element of fire is quite put out’, rid of the illuminating façade of fire, light, and the culture it represents, our ‘nasty, brutish, and short’, bestial nature is all that remains.
A fundamental mind-game Donne plays with readers is that of metaphor. For example, Donne regularly employs solar imagery and metaphors for love e.g. his famous aubade, ‘The Sunne Rising’. Clearly in his brain a strong neural connection forged between love and the sun. It is important to understand Hebb’s law – ‘neurons that fire together, wire together’ in order to understand the intricate neuroanatomy behind his artistry. These synaptic connections are perhaps unsurprising given the heliocentric revolution in astronomy ongoing throughout Donne’s era, and the fact that even today the sun remains a perpetual symbol of love (as referenced by Bill Withers in the classic song ‘Ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone’). Love becomes a girdle, Plato’s famous ‘charioteer’ allegory Socrates talks of whilst discussing the merit of love, binding darker desires and passions, and illuminating spirituality. Thus Donne’s mind is constantly torn between the bodily pleasures he pursued as a rakish youth and the religious desires he later fulfilled as Dean of St. Paul’s. Yet faith and love, spiritual and sexual desire are not as sharply segregated as we think, as shown in poems such as The Extasie, where he argues the body and sex are the medium for the union of the souls, or even his somewhat homoerotic sonnets to God where he begs God to ‘ravish’ him and to ‘batter [his] heart’. Donne believes that only through the material can souls ‘flow’ into each other, and explicitly writes in ‘Aire and Angels’ that ‘love must… take a body’, recalling the divine in Christ and also showing that the bodily vehicle of the metaphor is fundamental to its interpretation, just as the body is necessary for the life and soul.
Donne’s new explicitness about sexual desire and appetite, and his irreverent attitude towards authority figures such as monarchs and God, further consolidate this arising dichotomy within Donne, between spiritual and earthly, harmony and dissonance. He somehow manages to intertwine these polarities such that they cannot be separated from the other. For example in aggressively asserting that his be the defining voice of love, Donne seems both imperious and commanding, whilst retaining an intensely intimate and religious tone. This can be seen within The Sunne Rising, which moves with greater iambic regularity with less trochaic and spondaic substitution as the poem develops from the open impertinent imperatives to the ‘busie old foole’, ‘sawcy pedantique wretch’ that is the sun, towards the increasingly warm riches of the lovers’ boudoir, while retaining both qualities that seem to hang like a continuous rhythm, existing in and across time – the present rhythm comprising both the poem’s past and future words. He views the present as a philosophical and metaphysical problem, a problem he addresses through his frequent organization of his poems around a moment which T. Doherty called ‘the revolutionary present’, sandwiched between an imagined future and a posited past. Donne’s command of words enables him to control space and time, he contracts the entire earth to the ‘nuclear couple’, making love is ‘all’ and ‘nothing else is’, aided by the prosopopoeia in stanza two which reduces the sun to human size whilst the speaker grows in inverse proportion to a heavenly body capable of producing eclipses.
Another game Donne plays with readers is the metaphor of the unfaithful woman. I’d call metaphor a ‘mind game’ because it has extreme cognitive power, constructing new understandings through semantic disjunctions that rebuild new neural connections. We can’t grasp his mind; no matter what new neurobiological discoveries emerge, yet his ideas can be illuminated through the insight of Goodman who claims ‘where there is metaphor, there is conlict’, and Ricoeur whose description of metaphor as ‘a bringing-together of terms that first suprises’, ‘bewilders’, enabling the reader to ‘finally uncover a relationship’ and solve ‘the paradox’. Donne celebrates and chastises women somehow without distinction, swearing that ‘no where / Lives a woman true and fair’, yet his enigmatic language and shifting attitude towards their sexual liberty makes it impossible to identify his abiding view. It seems another game of struggle between the caveman and the craftsman within him, his elegies challenging the patriarchal control of women by fathers and husbands, yet desperate to use the poet’s ‘masculine pervasive force’ to assert his power over his mistress, as is most evident in ‘Come, Madam Come’.
Carey interprets his fear of infidelity to be sparked by his apostasy, and Nicolson interprets his obsession with mutability in terms of the paradigm alterations he was living through. Yet I would argue there remains a reason better understood through the lens of evolutionary psychology, as the poem ‘Love’s Growth’ implies he is acutely aware of human love as controlled by biology, ‘which unite it with the sky and the weather, the sun’s “working vigour” and the growth of the grass. It belongs with the mindless system of nature’. It involves him confronting his own fragile male pride, and anxiety over competition, and again that primal part of human culture, ongoing for millennia and deeply embedded into the brain; the selective, often fickle breeding of females, with the best available mates in order to maximize the fitness of their progenies. For example, in his poem ‘A Jet Ring Sent’, that is given an analogue in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, where rings are circulated and come to symbolize fidelity / apprehension over cuckoldry. Essentially, the poem’s central conceit is that this ring resembles their hearts, beginning ‘thou art not so black, as my heart / nor half so brittle, as her heart, thou art’, and Donne animates it with cathartic significance. Perhaps of greater interest is Donne’s questioning of representation itself, which is also evident in ‘Elegy: The Bracelet’ and ‘The Token’; again his power lies in causing a meta-awareness in the minds of the reader. It seems there exists a conflict once more between the harmony the aesthetic metaphor implies and the dissonant reality. The varying iambic tentrameter / pentameter / heptameter / pentameter throughout each quatrain almost seems to illustrate Donne’s right side of the brain, implying a mathematic attempt to control the flow of thought, or even a form of free indirect discourse as he interprets the lady’s response to his ring. Furthermore, Donne’s metaphors themselves disrupt, jar and jam our brain’s desire for constancy, in order to gain new ‘cohearance’ and insight.
Desire for control is ubiquitous in his poetry, and is most evident in his frustrated attitude to women, highlighted in ‘The Comparison’s’, and ‘Nature’s Lay Idiot’s’ scathing diatribes. Donne battles female promiscuity, fearing women ‘receive’ several partners, similar to the ‘sea’ which ‘receives the Rhene, Volgo, and Po’. In fact Donne’s constant depiction of women as warm and wet, and his focus on bodily fluids, ‘Ranke sweaty froth thy Mistresse brow defiles, / like spermatique issue of ripe menstrous boiles’, serves as a metaphorical representation of his frustrating inability to ever fully grasp that ‘cherishing heat’ of his mistress’s ‘best lov’d part’, and to gain anything more satisfying than sweat. His desire to retain patriarchal control is reflected in the imperialistic tone of ‘Come, Madam, Come’ a poem charged with Ovidian dynamism and desire as he makes his lover undress, casting himself ruler and the lady his occupied terrain;
Licence my roaving hands, and let them go
Before, behind, between, above, below.
O my America! My newfoundland!
She is conquered, his property and territory most brazenly described as ‘my kingdome, safeliest when one man’d, / my myne of precious stones, my Emperie’, an image of overwhelming imperial colonization. Furthermore the outpouring of prepositions in rapid rhythmic succession, and the sense that Donne is discarding the rules of grammar and sentences which seem as irrelevant as the garments they wear implies a loss of control and excitement that somewhat jars with the militaristic, dominating tone throughout, perhaps suggesting a dichotomy between cold reason and passion within him, the inviting, irresistible and harmonious rhetoric battling with and constrained by the mathematical desire to control. This calls to mind another successful metaphoric mindgame Donne plays in ‘The Comparison’, his fusing fire, molten metal, scratchy ‘burnt’ ‘grasse’ for pubic hair and the ‘dread mouth of a fired gunne’, with sex, the intimate and the insentient become yet again irrevocably tied together. Yet our minds cannot help but be captivated by the rhetoric, arguably because of the mirror neurons we possess which fire in response to certain perceived actions / bodily states, including that of arousal. As Elaine Scarry writes ‘John Donne addresses his mistress for permission to let him move his hands across her undressed body – (…) but it is also the imaginer who is being solicited to make the picture of Donne’s hand move across the picture of a woman’s body, a sense of movement achieved by a sequence of five stills, five locations of the woman’s body’. The mirror neurons that respond to ‘before, behind, between, above, below’, and to his adverbs of movement, briefly fire as we imagine motion in the body, and appeal to other emotions, fulfilling existing inconsistencies about the human experience of love. Furthermore, the abrupt exclamation of ‘O my America’ confirms and alerts us, as Scarry writes ‘its as if he had said to the reader, please do this, and a moment later, thank you for doing that, and in the momentum of being thanked we had the impression of the pictures having been successfully made’.
More examples of this can be seen in Donne’s epigrams which wittily play with verbs, and seem to replicate in a microcosmic way the conflict between the caveman and the craftsman in Donne, showing him engrossed in London life with its temptations and STD’s, yet also alive in a world of transcendental ideas and books. His poetry’s artistry is created from the friction in the language. For example: ‘Thy sinnes and haires may no man equall call, / For, as thy sinnes increase, thy haires do fall’ – a wordplay on the genesis of venereal disease and its consequences, with its punning on hair, heirs, and possibly whores. According to Von Neumann, we enjoy puns because our neuronal connections are provoked by the dual input that comes with accumulated information from two artbitrarily joined things. In The Canonization, the celebration of the mythical ‘phoenix’ creature that rises after they ‘dye’ (a clear pun on ‘die’ as both expiration and meaning to reach sexual climax) endows Donne’s lovers with the ‘likenesse’ and mutuality that makes Sapho and Philaenis’ same-sex love so wondrous, as sexual ecstasy is depicted as transformative, reshaping gender roles and dissolving sex differences. Sexual love is shown to be sacred, offering a taste of the divine, a sacred relation that doesn’t need the church, perhaps E.E Cummings’ A Pretty How Town offers a clear illustration of this type of relation in its celebration of two lovers living beyond ‘everyones’ and ‘no ones’ and their society, as different and immortalized because they are both spiritual and sexual, unlike the Neoplatonic lover who leaves the woman’s earthly body behind as he climbs up the ladder to heavenly love and thus ‘sow’d their isn’t’ ‘reaped their same’ and ‘slept their dream’. In fact, Donne’s earthly love was one of the few constants in a chaotic and changeable world. Another poem in which Donne’s skilful combination of tone and substance is particularly obvious, is ‘The Extasie’, which relates the superficial to the profound through elevating their ‘soul’s language’ and ‘dialogue’ into something both material and spiritual. This connection is exemplified through its immediate depiction of the pastoral, which clearly frustrates the general higher ideas ‘Extasie’ implies, hiding an allegorical message within the superficial simplicity of the familiar locus amoenus setting with it’s ‘pregnant banke’ and ‘violets reclining’, which is entirely at odds with its substance. As with the phoenix in The Canonization, the lovers become ‘one’ through their union, creating a ‘new soule’ as their souls can communicate and they don’t have to speak: ‘wee like sepulchral statues lay’.
Yet these images are only imbued with such significance due to the way in which the very language he explores, analyses and questions, mirrors Donne’s mentality at work, offering a window onto the workings of Donne’s mind and the caveman and craftsman operating within in constant competition. Donne himself knew this, stating in a sermon ‘the soul of a man is incorporate in his words; as he speaks, we think he thinks’. Donne plays with language, infusing it with newness and immediacy through its urgent rhythms, irregular, frequent stresses, constantly confirming how strong his passionate voice is, implying it cannot be constrained within regular iambic feet. And the effect this has is awe-inspiring, stimulating both body and mind through the mirror neurons it causes to fire, but also because of the way we can feel the same things he does, because just like him we have inherited inquisitive caveman minds that still equal, despite cultivation, raw nature, an idea Emily Dickinson perfectly captures in saying ‘The brain is just the weight of God- / for-heft them- pound for pound- / and they will differ – if they do-/ as syllable from sound-’. Sidney battles in Astrophil and Stella, stumbling over ‘other men’s feet’ as he tries to find his own path, but Donne’s poetic language makes it new (to follow the Pound cliché), moulding language to new sensibility out of the clay of emotional tension at the time, creating a form ‘adequate to contain the experience of a man who has awakened to the insufficiency of previous syntheses’ as George Williamson writes. Furthermore, Donne arguably was making English ‘new’, as literature itself was established as an academic discipline at the turn of this century. Donne is obsessed with the icy fit between symbol and referent, and the obscure ‘almost’ of meaning. The idea that language itself is just a system of arbitrary signs, constructed as a vehicle for communications of concepts existing in the intersubjective reality of society. Most apt for Donne, is the description by the contemporary American poet Jack Gilbert in ‘the forgotten dialect of the heart’ where he writes ‘how astonishing it is that language can almost mean / and frightening that it does not quite. Love we say / God we say’. The self-consciousness it inspires as we understand his poetry as ‘almost’ meaning, gives it an unparalleled sense of rawness and immediacy as Donne perpetually explores himself through language, evolving it whilst retaining a voice Jonathan Post calls ‘irremediably Donne’, which speaks in manifold registers and tones and selves, all competing to be the one true self of Donne, and all parts of him, because word flow to Donne is a testimony of life: ‘in bodily, so in spirituall diseases’, ‘tis a desperate state, to be speechlesse’.
In conclusion, Donne not only evolves language, but evolves our brains. The self-consciousness he instils in readers, the way he makes us realize we are thinking, renders the experience of playing one of Donne’s mind games an electrifying experience, for body and mind. T.S Eliot saw Donne as one of the last poets to feel his thought, explaining that ‘Tennyson and Browning are poets and they think; but they do not feel their thought as immediately as the odor of a rose’, and writes that Donne’s poetry is almost therapy, countering the ‘dissociation of sensibility’ which has according to Eliot ‘marred the poetic consciousness of everyone since Milton and Dryden’. His work was not only therapy for us however, but for himself. He attempted to understand his weight of thought, with his densely interconnected neurons, multitude of dendrite-axon links, and more dispersed activation energies, which meant he has hundreds of options to select from in composing a brainchild – and thus gives all of his poems that surprising sense, as it daringly questions, ‘you didn’t think I could fit all this in one poem, could you?’. Donne’s thoughts are experiences in themselves, he tried to capture spirits of sentience that reveal visceral psychosomatic human experiences. Donne feels his thought, but not in the smelling of a rose or the touching of the tree, he delights in the pleasure of the mental activity itself, the impulses that join neurones in our brains. He doesn’t describe images but image making, nor sensations but the process of feeling – the mental tool and its excitement, as we become aware of the effect of the harmonies and dissonances on our brains. His poetry is therapy for the modernist or post modern reader, suffering from split consciousness’s and desperate for the wholeness Donne’s poetry entails as he dislocates language into meaning.