In Which I Kiss John Donne's Butt

It's my brother's anniversary today (yes, he of "What Do I See in the Clouds Above?" fame) and I thought I'd post this in honor of the happy occasion.

The Anniversary

John Donne

    All kings, and all their favourites,
    All glory of honours, beauties, wits,
The sun it self, which makes time, as they pass,
Is elder by a year now than it was 
When thou and I first one another saw.
All other things to their destruction draw,
    Only our love hath no decay ;
This no to-morrow hath, nor yesterday ;
Running it never runs from us away,
But truly keeps his first, last, everlasting day.


    Two graves must hide thine and my corse ;
    If one might, death were no divorce.
Alas ! as well as other princes, we
—Who prince enough in one another be—
Must leave at last in death these eyes and ears,
Oft fed with true oaths, and with sweet salt tears ;
    But souls where nothing dwells but love
—All other thoughts being inmates—then shall prove
This or a love increasèd there above,
When bodies to their graves, souls from their graves remove.


    And then we shall be throughly blest ; 
    But now no more than all the rest.
Here upon earth we're kings, and none but we
Can be such kings, nor of such subjects be.
Who is so safe as we? where none can do
Treason to us, except one of us two.
    True and false fears let us refrain,
Let us love nobly, and live, and add again
Years and years unto years, till we attain
To write threescore ; this is the second of our reign.




If I haven't already mentioned it, Donne is one of my heroes. 


Here's the thing about him: his verbiage is dense. Ridiculously so, sometimes bordering on Miltonian. Fortunately, though, he forgoes the ridiculous Latinisms that have prompted some to claim Milton wrote poems in his head in Latin, then translated them into English.


Donne always has complex thoughts to match the complex grammar. He's kind of like St. Paul in that way, where once you can sort out all the clauses and participles, you see there's a deeper thrust to what he's getting at. (I'm not going to say John Donne is divinely inspired, but I won't say he's not, either.) 


It's not just the tangled knot of sentence structure, it's not just the intricacy of the thought that gets me, though. It's his imagery, his tightly-plotted conceits that can make a flea or a compass into a rich metaphor for what literary critics and other blowhards like to call "the human experience." Birth, passion, marriage, faith, sickness, loss, death. There's sex, violence, greed, despair and at the end of it an assuredness that's neither smug nor trite, not holier-than-thou or can't-we-all-just-get-along.


There's a certain kind of Zen to him: a passion that's learned self-control, a joy that's learned grief, this balance of feeling and form. If the Middle Way is really the path to truth, Donne walks that road. And he walks hard.