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John Donne 'A Letter to the Lady Carey, and Mrs Essex Riche, from Amyens' [intended for an unfinished book on poetical manuscripts]

That 'Picture of myne w[hi]ch is taken in Shaddowes' is how Donne described in his will the portrait of himself reproduced here, which he bequeathed to his friend Robert Ker. Entitled 'Duns Scotus' in splendid misconstruction of the punning 'John Duns' inscribed on the picture, it remained unknown until 1959 when it was discovered in the possession of Ker's descendants. A legend on the panel with an irreverent appeal to a Lady ['Illumina tenebr[as] nostras Domina' -- Lighten our darkness O Lady] and Donne's own apologetic explanation that the portrait 'was made very many yeares before I was of this profession' (perhaps as much reflecting his conversion from Catholicism as his ordination in the Church of England) help to enrich the conceit. The portrait depicts the raffish 'Jack' Donne lurking in shadows in his guises as 'a great visiter of Ladies, a great frequenter of Playes, a great writer of conceited Verses' before emerging more boldly, when a light is held up to the picture, in his huge hat, elaborate collar and gaudy colours.

The portrait and its history typify much in Donne -- his relish for puns, riddles, obscurities and conceits. He is one of the most startlingly original and revolutionary of English poets, whose thrilling pyrotechnical skills have all the deftness and surprise of a conjurer. Although only ten of them were published in his lifetime, his poems were widely enough circulated in manuscript for him to be recognised by contemporaries as 'The universall Monarch[y] of Wit' and 'the Copernicus in Poetrie.' The father (and the best) of the metaphysical poets, his work combined great metrical variety with an innovative use of colloquial speech rhythms, and powerful emotion within a knotty intellectual framework -- thick with abstruse analogy, convoluted argument, tortuous syntax, and dazzlingly ingenious images and concepts. It is a paradox entirely consistent in Donne that he is seen as at once the most self-absorbed though not the most self-admiring of poets.

'I...am not in darkness but in shadow' is how Donne described to one of his patrons, Sir Robert Drury, his prolonged failure to achieve public office. In fact he spent twenty wilderness years, the disastrous consequence of his clandestine marriage to Ann More ('John Donne, Anne Donne, Vndone'), trying to attract the attention and favour of the wealthy and influential. No man, he claimed, 'attends court fortunes with more impatience than I do.' The Satires, the Epicedes and Obsequies, the Epithalamions, the Anniversaries and most of the verse letters, which together constitute over one third of his poetic output, as well as a substantial proportion of his extant correspondence, were dedicated, more or less overtly, to the pursuit of patronage and place.

The only poem by Donne in English to have survived in his own handwriting is such a verse-letter, intended with its disquisition on virtue to flatter the recipients. It was discovered in 1970 among the papers of the Manchester family. Written during Donne's residence in Amiens as the guest of Sir Robert Drury and probably after his meeting there with Sir Robert Rich, the brother of Lettice Carey and Essex Rich, between January and March 1612, it has been assumed that Rich persuaded Donne to address laudatory verses to his sisters. The evidence of the successive horizontal folds in the paper, and then a single vertical one, to form a tiny packet and of Donne's direction of it 'To the Honorable lady the lady Carew' [the more usual form of Carey] on the address panel show that this verse-letter was actually intended for dispatch. Since it was not sealed or directed to a specific place it can be assumed that it was carried with other letters, as was quite normal, by a courier familiar to Donne, the Drurys or the recipients. Its presence in the Manchester archives confirms that it was indeed delivered. It may be that Lady Carew handed it on to her sister Essex, to whom, from the text and the title of the poem in the 1633 edition, the verse-letter is known to have been jointly addressed. It could thus have been through the marriage of the latter's daughter and namesake to Edward Montagu, second Earl of Manchester, that the manuscript ended up with the Manchester papers, although there were other marital ties between the Rich and Montagu families and therefore alternative routes for its descent. Too little is known about the Rich sisters to visit on them the indiscretions of their mother, Penelope, herself the sister of Robert second Earl of Essex and Philip Sidney's 'Stella', in the way that R.C. Bald does in his standard modern life of Donne. Moreover, there is no real evidence to establish whether Donne knew them personally, although it does seem unlikely that he would have sent an unsigned letter to aristocratic ladies whose acquaintance, at least, he had not made -- unless, of course, the courier was also his intermediary.

It was strangely perverse of that great scholar of Donne, Dame Helen Gardner, to promote the idea that the present manuscript was anything but a fair copy made by Donne from one or more earlier drafts. It is very doubtful that a draft would have been written on such fine gold-edged writing paper. Her description of the writing as neat and characterised by 'ease and fluency' precisely denotes the qualities of a fair copy rather than of a draft. To interpret one of the two amendments to the manuscript (line 53) as anything but a scribal anticipation of the last two words of the following line was to argue against an explanation that had probability overwhelmingly on its side. The other, more significant change (line 41) was best accounted for by Peter Croft, who discovered the manuscript:

'...All other texts contain the new reading here, where Donne's revision seems to show him reforming a metrically irregular line. This however, since there are no syllables capable of elision, supposes an original line containing an extra foot, which would be quite out of keeping. I believe therefore that he began to write, with perfect regularity, "wch ys but litle lesse, as shee could doe," but that on reaching lesse he stopped and decided to recast the line in order to clarify the sense: he then made the necessary alteration to what he had already written before proceeding. There is a little hole in the paper here removing the stem of b in the deletion just before the point where the interlined scarse crosses it: this is undoubtedly Donne's own meticulous erasure to free scarse from entanglement...'

Although the manuscript bears no sign of a break in the flow of transcription at this point, Peter Croft's suggested order of events is supported by the absence of a comma after lesse, which Donne would most likely have placed there had he proceeded further, given that the heavy punctation of this manuscript is one of its most notable features. [There is no indication, incidentally, that any of the punctuation was added as an afterthought in the way that the oblique strokes marking the divisions of the three-line stanzas may well have been]. As Dame Helen noted, the punctuation

' shows a desire to point each rhetorical nuance, and to give each development of the thought and argument its full weight. It is clear that the poet expected this poem to be read slowly and wanted the phrases to be savoured and their relation to each other to be felt. The punctuation is a mode of analysing the poem.'

More scribal manuscripts of poems by Donne survive than for any other sixteenth- or early seventeenth-century poet. It was through the publication of the verse letter in Poems, By J.D. in 1633 by Donne's eldest son and namesake from such a scribal manuscript, now lost, that the text of the letter was known before the discovery of the present manuscript. It was printed there, with only two minor verbal variants (in lines 14 and 26), under the title 'A Letter to the Lady Carey, and Mrs Essex Riche, From Amyens'. While the manuscript is important for its confirmation of the text, its unique interest is in providing the only autograph and therefore only accurate witness of Donne's attitude towards his work in terms of his precision about its layout, the use of capitals, punctuation and elisions. The texts, as printed (by Milgate) and as in this manuscript, are reproduced here side by side for the first time so that the reader can compare the effects of the nuances of punctuation (immediately noticeable in the first line) and of the intricately crafted spelling which, as Dame Helen observed, provides optical as well as aural rhymes.

Where John Carey, with unnecessary harshness, dismissed the verses as 'totally worthless', Helen Gardner gave a more balanced view:

'The poem, so beautifully and fluently written, so adequate to its occasion, so full of intelligence and wit, which mingles with the necessary flattery Donne's own convictions, reveals a poet so much the master of his art that he can...at need produce a finely wrought verse-epistle that combines courtly compliment with moral seriousness.'

At the age of forty-two Donne added the role of priest and preacher to his previous ones as philanderer, papist, poet and place-seeker, when the King finally prevailed on him to take Holy Orders in the Church of England. As a portion of his reward for capitulating to James I's determination that he should enter the Church the King prevailed upon a reluctant University of Cambridge to confer on Donne the honorary degree of Doctor of Divinity. Since so little of his poetry was printed during his lifetime, it was as Dean of St. Paul's and as the giver of electrifying sermons that Dr Donne was most celebrated among his contemporaries (and it was he who insisted on the distinction between 'Jack' and 'the Doctor'). The best-known passage from his sermons begins 'No man is an Iland, intire of itself: every man is a peece of the Continent...' and ends '...And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.'

In his poem entitled 'His Picture', Donne imagines himself as a ghostly shadow when he is dead and estimates that his portrait will then count for more ('Here take my Picture...'Tis like me now, but I dead, 'twill be more / When wee are shadowes both, then 'twas before...'). Donne in fact took no risks with the survival of his mortal image, if credence can be given to the account of his first biographer, Izaac Walton, that just before his death, having had his shroud put on him with knots tied head and foot but his face exposed, Donne stood on an urn with closed eyes while an artist sketched his figure life-size on a wooden plank. This drawing is said to have provided the design for the sculptor Nicholas Stone's astonishing shrouded marble replica of Donne which stands to this day in St Paul's, although, being flat at the back, it no doubt originally lay horizontally as effigies normally do. When the Great Fire of London consumed the Cathedral in 1666 Donne's monument suffered less damage than any other and indeed survived almost intact.

Bibliography: The Satires, Epigrams and Verse Letters of John Donne, edited by W. Milgate, 1967; Geoffrey Keynes, A Bibliography of John Donne, fourth edition, 1973; Izaac Walton, The Life and Death of John Donne, 1640; Peter J. Croft, Autograph Poetry in the English Language, 2 volumes, 1973; Helen Gardner, John Donne's Holograph of 'A Letter to the Lady Carey and Mrs Essex Riche', 1972; Nicolas Barker, 'Donne's Letter to the Lady Carey and Mrs Essex Riche', The Book Collector, Winter 1973; R.C. Bald, John Donne: A Life, 1970; Donne's Poetical Works, edited by H.J.C. Grierson, 2 volumes, 1968; John Carey, John Donne: Life, Mind and Art, 1981 and 1990; John Donne: Selected Poems, edited by R. Gill, 1991; F. Kermode, John Donne, 1978; J. Winny, A Preface to Donne, 1990; Stevie Davies, John Donne, 1994; Roy Strong, Tudor and Jacobean Portraits, 2 volumes, 1969; Arthur Marotti, John Donne: Coterie Poet, 1985