Donne punning

I've always loved the Tom Lehrer line, ‘it’s a sobering thought that when Mozart was my age, he had been dead for two years’. 

It was just as chastening for me to discover this morning that I’m the age John Donne was when he died. I’ve thought it through, and on balance he probably achieved more in his 59 years than I have in mine.

Not, of course, that I would in general compare myself to Donne. After all, I don’t have the slightest pretension to be thought of as a poet: whatever I write, and whatever it’s worth, it’s strictly prose not verse.

But in one respect I’m like him: I love the simple pun. My readers can attest that I take great pleasure in puns, perhaps rather more than they do. But Donne was a master where I’m a mere dabbler.

John Donne: master of the pun

Donne was a love poet and he lived his life with the intensity that informs his poems. A promising career in diplomacy beckoned when he fell in love with Anne More, niece of his then patron. Ann and John married with neither her uncle’s blessing nor, more seriously, her father’s.

Though Donne would recover his father-in-law’s goodwill eight years later, his unauthorised marriage killed his career hopes, prompting his punning remark, ‘John Donne, Ann Donne, Undone’.

He continued writing love poetry, including the magical To his mistress going to bed, with the glorious couplet:

License my roaming hands and let them go

Before, behind, between, above, below.

It’s interesting, and not a little attractive, that the ‘mistress’ of his title was his wife.

Following Ann’s death, unsurprisingly after childbirth – when it came to eroticism within marriage they set the bar high, and had twelve children in sixteen years – Donne focused increasingly on divine themes. He wrote often of his sense of sin, and of his hope of winning God’s mercy coupled with his fear of missing it.

You don’t have to be a Christian yourself to be moved by this writing, for instance in the three verses of A Hymn to God the Father. The middle verse goes:

Wilt Thou forgive that sin which I have won

Others to sin, and made my sin their door?

Wilt Thou forgive that sin which I did shun

A year or two, but wallowed in a score?

When Thou hast done, Thou hast not done,
For I have more.

It’s better to listen to the words than to read them, because then you can't tell whether they’re saying ‘when thou hast done’ or ‘when thou hast Donne’.

And is he saying ‘have more’ or ‘have More’? It was his overwhelming love for Ann More that opened his way to great love though, he would doubtless have argued, also distracted him from its divine form.

The last verse is:

I have a sin of fear, that when I have spun
My last thread, I shall perish on the shore;
But swear by Thyself, that at my death Thy Son
Shall shine as he shines now, and heretofore;
And having done that, Thou hast done;
I fear no more.

He appeals to God to give him the light of Christ, his son, who is also his shining sun. If God will do that, then he will have Donne, and the achievement of Donne's hope will banish fear. And is that not also a fear of More? Of the object of an earthly love which might have prevented him achieving the divine love he longed for?

Now that’s the way that I’d like to pun. Sadly, though, I'm not convinced that even another 59 years on Earth could teach me how.

Jeff Hall - another Bin Laden moment

‘Any man's death diminishes me,’ wrote John Donne, ‘because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls: it tolls for thee.’

A noble sentiment. Any death is a blow to mankind as a whole. So, because we are part of mankind, it damages each of us individually too. 

It’s a view that’s sometimes gets tested quite hard. For instance when Osama Bin Laden was taken down. Hey, he was Bin Laden. He died. That diminishes me, sure, but it also leaves me in a world that’s just a little bit safer, a little bit healthier. Doesn't that make it hard to feel any real sense of bereavement or do any actual mourning?

I mean, if anyone can be said to have broken the bond that links man to man, it has to be Bin Laden. He led a campaign of indiscriminate destruction of others, without a thought to whether they were innocent or guilty of any offence against those he claimed to represent.  ‘I am uninvolving myself in mankind,’ he seemed to be saying, so why wouldn’t we respond ‘then don’t expect us to be involved with you’?

Even so, perhaps a little more restraint in the partying that followed his death might have been more,well, becoming. Perhaps we could have adopted an attitude that the bell tolls a bit for us because it tolls for him, and that's no cause of celebration, but because it mainly tolls for him, perhaps we'll learn to live with it.

That’s the same sort of feeling I got when I read about the strange case of Jeff Hall in California. Jeff was one of these selfless people who give up their personal time to unstinting service to their community, though in his case it was more specifically to his race. They expect little in return, satisfying themselves with the right to strut about in a smart black uniform, exercise ruthless authority over their underlings and indulge their taste for unsavoury ideas. Jeff was the organiser for the South Western United States for the National Socialist Movement, which strives selflessly to rid its great nation of the lesser races (non-Whites, Jews and so on).

Well, it seems poor Jeff has been shot by his ten-year old son. Shot and killed. No more shall we enjoy his fine presence bestriding the American political stage.

A child killing his father – it’s the stuff of tragedy. A real horror. How will the child ever come to terms with what he’s done? Even though, apparently, Jeff was already preparing him intensively to follow in his father’s footsteps, inculcating in him all the principles he held dear, including his probably idiosyncratic view of the sanctity of human life.

Despite that invaluable grounding, the child is still going to have to learn to live with having broken one of the great taboos of human society. And we in Europe might seize on this opportunity to bemoan once more the easy access to guns that makes the USA so prone to this kind of terrible event. A bad business, we could say, and shake our heads wisely in despair.

But hold on: he was Jeff Hall. It’s another Bin Laden moment, isn’t it? Take a look at the picture the press carried of him. There he is posing with every sign of pride behind a banner with a swastika on it.

All deaths diminish me, but some a lot less than others

Any man’s death diminishes me. Well, it does. But sometimes that mournful feeling comes tinged with a light touch of relief.

As for Hall Junior, I can’t help feeling that what we should be giving him right now isn’t so much a trial in a juvenile court and a long custodial sentence, but counselling and help to rebuild his life.

And perhaps a medal.