Donne had a memento mori, lest he forget even briefly that we are born astride the grave – he left it to a friend in his will, ‘the picture called The Skeleton which hangs in the hall’.Īrtists and writers especially were expected to contemplate death: there were rumours (probably mad and unfounded) that Michelangelo murdered a man and watched him die in order to be able to paint the agonies of Christ more accurately. They prepared intensively for it, contemplated it Donne discussed it in letters that were otherwise about horses and dentistry. Donne lived in a time more familiar with the details and look of death than we almost every adult was likely to have seen a dead body. Scarcely anything exists, Donne wrote with relish in the Devotions, which has not caused the death of someone once: ‘a pin, a comb, a hair pulled, hath gangrened and killed.’ A grim truth, and one which makes our modern attempts to avoid the topic of death look malarially unhinged. The world is made up entirely of things that can kill you. “Spiritually speaking, many of us confronted with the thought of death perform the psychological equivalence of hiding in a box with our knees under our chin: Donne hunted death, battled it, killed it, saluted it, threw it parties,” writes Katherine Rundell in her new biography of the English poet, Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne.ĭid you know? The Folger Shakespeare Library collection includes about a third of John Donne’s surviving letters.
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