John Donne and Friends

Grimm1

Christie Grimm

John Donne and Friends

Professor Guibbory

Senior Thesis

Meditations Upon Grief

InDevotions Upon Emergent Occasions, an ill John Donne, who believes himself on the very edge of death, takes to chronicling his newfound physical and spiritual awareness through this almost ritualistically repetitive series of meditations, expostulations, and prayers. Only once in the whole of Donne’sDevotions Upon Emergent Occasionsdoes the word ‘grief’ appear. So how is it then that this text, which makes no direct connections or statements, is in a sense, completely concerned with and driven by grief?

To simply look at the definition of “to grieve,” in order to analyze what is exactly meant by of the action of grieving, it is related that one of the many understandings of to grieve is “to make heavy” (“grief, n.”).At the particular moment of his writing, Donne is in a world that is weighing very heavily on him, with his illness being his biggest concern. In another sense, there is a secondsort of heaviness to Donne in this specific work, more so perhaps than in much of his other poetry, as every word and phrase used here seems to be incredibly important, so carefully chosen, so intently invested with the desperateness of this hope of his to communicate something to the reader. And as you read, and as he writes, there is this sense that we, reader and author, are both finding out what it is that he is so desperate to tell us, to make us know. It cannot help but seem that he does not take up his pen with a preconceived idea of what it is that he is supposed to write, which places both author and reader in a similar role of presentness with regards to the text. We are finding out together, as the text is driven by this intense relationship of presence, and asking each other the same questions along the way.

As Donne goes about identifying and naming in the title, this collection is one of emergent occasions; when faced with the increasingly relevant promise of death, his words do not simply take the form of reflections, looking back on some state in the hope of finding illumination for the present, yet they instead take the form of meditations, meditations on and very much rooted in his present, a present of which he is made aware as his grasp on the now is so inescapably heightened, what with its threatened state. And so there is this very important dichotomy at work, where in reflecting upon the present, Donne ventures outside of himself to look at himself in order to be in himself, not that that makes any sense, though I hope it will come to.

So what is it then that Donne is grieving here in this piece of prose, and even more specifically, in his meditations? Can it be said that he even knows or acknowledges this idea of grief? Though he may not acknowledge it directly, I argue that indirectly, much is being grieved throughout the meditation sections of his Devotions. The Oxford English Dictionary holds various definitions for the term ‘grief,’ including “hardship, suffering,” “a bodily injury or ailment,” “the seat of disease,” and “mental pain, distress, or sorrow” (“grief, n.”). In this work, Donne is obviously sick. And so the obvious grief that he is facing is his illness itself. But it is this grief, this sickness of his, which actually goes on to inform and breed his larger griefs throughout hisDevotions. In the opening meditation, Donne meditates on this sickness that has come upon him, seizing him, possessing him, and aiming to destroy him.

But this literal illness is not his only grief, as he turns from contemplating the general “miserable condition of man,” a phrase referring to our frustrated mortality, to the more indirectly related idea that we are actually “pre-afflicted, super-afflicted with these jealousies and suspicions and apprehensions of sickness” before we are ever even sick at all (8). And thus do we come to join “an artificial sickness of our own melancholy, to our natural, our unnatural fever” (9). Donne is very aware that he is dying, yet this physical self-consciousness that he has developed has also begotten a separate awareness, as the illness that has taken hold of him, the one with which he is more concerned, seems to be this larger, wide casting net of grief, the main catches of which are to come.

But before speaking of the specific griefs on which I will focus, I believe it to be an important aside to ask what the relationship is between meditations and grief, as I will be focusing on his meditations. Is grief an inherent part of a meditation? To look at a meditation, the very act and necessity of meditating, of grounding yourself in a moment, planting yourself in the now, carries these implications of an anticipatory sort of anxiety. There is a definite relationship, be it preventative or offensive, in which a meditation’s dedication to the present combats, and thus aligns itself, against states of anxiety or unsettledness, as one implies the other. It is an act in which a person sets out to ratify or illuminate some specific subject, some grief or other. Sure, one can meditate upon some more peaceful or calming subject in a quest for a type of enlightenment. Yet does not the fact that someone feels the initial need or finds the drive at all to meditate imply some pre-existing grief from which they are either attempting to escape, or to entertain in the hopes of understanding? In this thinking, there is very much a direct relationship between meditation and grief, as the former implies the latter.

A question that then arises with regards to Donne’s meditations upon his griefs would be, returning back to the multiple definitions of grief, can it be said that he is meditating in an attempt to escape the heaviness of his grief, to try and find some sense of lightness outside of himself, with regards to his situation, that he can then bring back and incorporate within himself? As previously mentioned, in his opening meditation, Donne’s attention is drawn to the mortal frustrations he is left feeling due to the extreme variability he has come to realize with regards to his health. He is openly grieving the “miserable condition of man,” which is not only the “sickness” that he is presently experiencing, yet also, as he articulates, the “artificial sickness” that has so suddenly befallen him as a result of his physical illness, both of which he realizes in the present moment of writing to have always been present, looming over his life. There are many things being grieved by Donne, but the main griefs, which seem to weigh most heavily upon his inconstant breath, are the ironic variability of life, the inherent loneness and solitariness of existence, and lastly, what appears to him to be his active role in his own death.

But surely, there must also be some ends to the state of grief. In Donne, the very words themselves seem so intent, intent on seeking some state of knowledge, of communicating to and convincing us of some concept which they themselves are pawing at and coming to touch just as we are. So what is this resolution of grief then? To simply explicate this within the lines of Donne’sDevotionsperhaps would not reveal all, leaving too much to be inferred within the marginalia for a truly comprehensive understanding. Then, to more deeply meet these ends of his griefs, and grief in general, I will place Donne’s words in conversation with those of Lord Alfred Tennyson, as his heart broken and woe stricken explorations of grief in his epic poemIn Memoriam A.H.H.prove to be more direct confessions than Donne’s, supplementing and supporting the inferences that will be made as to his grieving variability, solitude, and mortal action.

In his first meditation, Donne looks at his ill state and moans, “O multiplied misery! We die, and cannot enjoy death, because we die in this torment of sickness; we are tormented with sickness, and cannot stay till the torment come, but pre-apprehensions and presages prophesy those torments which induce that death before either come” (8). It is clear that Donne is bothered in this moment, frustrated by his situation. But he is also frustrated by a larger idea. He is frustrated by the variability of men’s lives, the naturally ironic existences of theirs which can change so quickly. The irony of his present existence, of his variable state, is that, in a brilliantly bizarre method of rationalizing, he finds that he is dying before he dies. “We die in this torment of sickness,” he says in this moment of directly confronting his health’s larger effect. In his newly found illness, his life becomes to him a death, a death leading up to a death, that ultimately, when it comes, he will not be alive to experience.

And so, in following this reasoning, we may not only die while we live, but we may die before we die. And in dying while living, yet we may not live to experience dying. “Our dissolution,” he continues, “is conceived in these first changes, quickened in the sickness itself, and born in death, which bears date from these first changes” (8). In referring to “our dissolution,” he refers to our death, our degenerative dissolve out of life, a process which is caused by the inherently variable state of man, his vulnerable nature which is given to change, and then only realized and quickened by a physical change which we may notice as it impairs us. It is “our dissolution” that is “born in death.” Our recognition of this fact of our variability is the true beginning of our dissolution, and thus the first moment that we can conceive of this dissolution is also the first moment that we begin to die, as the two are so interweaved in this complex and relationally dependent connection. And so misery is multiplied. “We die, and cannot enjoy death,” because we die in this torment of “dissolution,” where our own fragility takes aims against its poor host, and we begin the process of dying whilst living.

But perhaps this concept is still too confusing to understand fully in this singular instance. To continue then, in the hopes of further clarifying and exploring this particular concept of ironic variability, I’ll turn to a more general and simple comment on this idea. In a chapter of his book entitled “Mourning and Melancholia,” Sigmund Freud identifies mourning as the expression of the emotion grief (Freud 164). From this identification, he then sets about with the aim of explicating the correlations between mourning and melancholia. While doing this, Freud also infers that grief, when it refers to a permanent loss such as death, can often begin to develop in its evolution a mimetic relationshipwith death. A similar sentiment is expressed more generally, and less metaphysically, in Tennyson’s In Memoriam, as he writes,

“Ah yet, ev’n yet, if this might be,

I, falling on his faithful heart,

Would breathing thro’ his lips impart

The life that almost dies in me;

That dies not, but endures with pain” (Canto XVIII, ll. 13-17)

In these lines, while contemplating the dream of an idea that he should once again be able to behold and see his deceased friend, Tennyson admits that he himself, as result of the grief with which he has been stricken, is dying. Having lost his friend, and found himself now alone in the world, haunted by the memory of a relationship which may never be revisited, he finds that life itself is almost dying within him. The grief that he feels and the mourning that he is undertaking have such a fast hold upon him, that he would sooner trade the small bit of life that he has left to call his own should he be able to give it back to his lost friend. Grief at once brings him to die in living, and in his particular instance, to desire to die completely, to rid himself of the life he is left to live, a life that only “endures with pain.”

In a small aside, Donne too touches on this mimetic concept, writing, “he that hath seen his friend die to-day, or knows he shall see it to-morrow, yet will sink into a sleep between” (98). Donne takes note here of the habit of this sort of mortal mimesis, this desire of ours, once we have been opened to the overwhelming awareness of death’s presence, whether it be that which patiently waits for us, or that which has taken action and claimed another, “to sink into a sleep,” a sleep which is both an escape of our waking pain, yet also an attempt to claim a death for ourselves in this mimetic coping mechanism.

To return to the grieving of variability in Donne’s Devotions, the poet and author further details this anxiety at dying before his death, relating, “in the grave I may speak through the stones, in the voice of my friends, and in the accents of those words which their love may afford my memory; here I am mine own ghost, and rather affright my beholders than instruct them” (18). As he begins to further consider the effects of his illness, Donne takes this question of the irony of his existence and the variability of his state even farther. In death, he believes he will be allotted a life of articulation and communication, by way of his loved ones and the epitaphs that he will leave behind, presumably including his poetry and writings as well as his physical gravestone, a life that will far outweigh that which he finds himself in presently. He looks at himself, in his sickly state, and cannot help but see a ghost of himself. And in specifying that he is now a ghost in life, he is making this connection again to himself existing and living within this deathly context.

“Miserable,” he continues, “and (though common to all) inhuman posture, where I must practise my lying in the grave by lying still, and not practise my resurrection by rising any more” (18). Just as Tennyson’s melancholia led him to this mimic the very death that brought about his grief, so does Donne here find himself physically mimicking the still state of death. He turns the act of lying still in his sickbed into an exercise, a rehearsal. And particularly interesting here is the fact that he is not merely noting the similarity between his current pose to that which he knows will be his final pose, but that he finds that he “must” practice this inevitable event. There is an activeness to this exercise, an agency of imagining one’s self dead. And this activeness seems to find its impetus in the overall anxiety of his grief, as he tries to accept his state, and relinquish himself to the mortal inevitability of death. But not only does he reconcile himself to this certain fate that all must eventually come to face, yet he also participates and practices and prepares himself, all of which can only seem to be done by mimicking that grim repose itself.

And so, by lying still, he finds himself braced for the unshaking stillness of death. Yet, even as he comes to propose this, Donne does take care to draw distinction between the human action of sleep compared to the divine action of death. “Natural men,” he begins in his fifteenth meditation, “have conceived a twofold use of sleep; that it is a refreshing of the body in this life; that is a preparing of the soul for the next” (96). “Sleep is an opiate,” he later on continues, “which gives us rest, but such an opiate, as perchance, being under it, we shall wake no more” (96-97). Donne here takes the most human of instincts, of needing to rest each day, to close our eyes and dissolve our senses in a release from this overwhelming world of motion and sound which constantly begs processing, and turns it into our daily visitation of death. That in each night taking his seat in his bed, he is not simply loosening his grasp on his cognitive facilities, yet he is actually finding comfort, as in an opiate or drug, that slows him down but to lay lie next to death, so close to touching, separated only by this thin divider which may be at any grim moment plucked by God. And so sleep is our daily visitation of death, yet one which we need to make, as one cannot hope to continue on in their life without sleep, as “and then we need sleep to live out our threescore and ten years, so we need death to live that life which we cannot outlive” (97). As humans we are bound not only to this life of consistent variability, yet also a life that is so conditioned and limited. That we cannot live without the release of sleep, and cannot live without the promise of death to bookmark and by ending, create this time that we recognize as life to begin with.

Yet Donne cannot end his meditation here, he cannot end with a statement, an assertion of some sort, yet must instead end in entertaining the very variability of even his own questions. “But why rather, being entering into that presence where I shall wake continually and never sleep more, do I not interpret my continual waking here, to be a parasceve and a preparation to that?” (98). In the presence and state of death, it is, as Donne identifies, that we shall come to “wake continually,” and lose the variable condition which we are chained to now, and “never sleep more.” But in admitting this and holding this true, Donne cannot help but question whether it is not truly the action of repose and sleep itself which is our mimicking of death, yet more specifically, that it is our “continual waking here,” this transitionary moment of waking, this plight that we must face as long as we be living, and thus waking souls, whose interrupted dreams, dreams that have been shaken lose by the sun’s insistent morning call to life, were those of death and that eternal life in which we may never come to wake again, being constantly woken in that dream itself.