John Donne: England’s Greatest Love Poet

Not Just the Tudors

History Hit

History

4.8 • 3K Ratings

🗓️ 17 April 2023

⏱️ 48 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

John Donne was a scholar of law, a sea adventurer, an MP, a priest, the Dean of St Paul's Cathedral - and perhaps the greatest love poet in the history of the English language. He converted from Catholicism to Protestantism, was jailed for marrying a high-born girl without her father's consent, struggled to feed a family of ten children and was often ill and in pain.

In this episode of Not Just the Tudors, Professor Suzannah Lipscomb meets Katherine Rundell, author of the acclaimed book Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne, which won the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction 2022. Together they explore the life and work of a man who, despite a life of extreme challenges, expressed in his verse electric joy and love.

This episode was edited by Joseph Knight and produced by Rob Weinberg.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	As virtuous men pass mildly away, whisper to their souls to go.
0:15.9	What some of their sad friends do say the breath goes now, and some say, no, so let us
0:22.2	melt and make no noise.
0:24.9	No tear floods nor side tempests move for profanation of our joys to tell the laity our love.
0:32.6	Moving of the earth brings harms and fears, men reckon what it did and meant, but trepidation
0:39.7	of the spheres, the greater far, is innocent.
0:44.6	Dole sublunery lovers love, whose soul is sense, cannot admit absence, because it doth
0:49.6	remove those things which element it, but we by love so much refined that ourselves
0:56.4	know not what it is.
0:58.5	Into a sure of the mind, kelesse eyes, lips and hands to miss.
1:04.4	Our two souls therefore, which are one, though I must go, endure not yet a breach, but an
1:11.4	expansion, like gold to airy, thinness beat.
1:16.3	If they be two, they are two so as stiff twin compasses or two.
1:21.5	Thy soul, the fixered foot, makes no show to move, but doth if the other do.
1:27.4	And though it in the centre sit, yet when the other far dohthroam, it leans and harkens
1:32.5	after it, and grows erect as that comes home.
1:37.0	Such will thou be to me, who must, like the other foot, obliquely run.
1:43.4	Thy firmness makes my circle just.
1:46.6	It makes me end where I begone.
1:51.2	That gorgeous poem, a valediction forbidding morning, is by one of the greatest poets ever
1:57.6	to write English.
1:59.6	John Dunn.
	...

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