John Carey, Emeritus Merton Professor of English Literature at Oxford, died at the age of 91 on 11 December. He’d been on my mind because few days before I had been revisiting his lecture “Reversals transposed: An aspect of Marvell’s imagination” which he delivered in 1978 on the tercentenary of Andrew Marvell’s death. That lecture, I was suggesting, is where any attempt to appreciate Marvell’s poetry should start. John Creaser, who was the first (of four, eventually) supervisors of my thesis, and himself a former student of Carey’s, said that it “must be the most acute essay on the poet since T. S. Eliot’s classic of 1921 — an agile and lucid essay matching the poet’s ingenuities” (Creaser 1999, 147). The lecture begins with the assertion that it’s impossible to write about Marvell’s poetry “without feeling that you have flattened or coarsened it” (Carey 1978, 136).

When I first read the Marvell lecture in the mid 90s, it came as a pleasant surprise to me because I had approached it with suspicion, having read Carey’s book on John Donne a few years earlier and been shocked and repelled by it. I wasn’t the only one. In a review of the first edition (1980) in the New York Review of Books, “There Is No Penance Due to Innocence” (1981), William Empson had attacked the book and its author intemperately. Empson’s review opens:

This long, hammering book amounts to saying that no one need bother any more about Donne, because the admiration for his love poems was based on a delusion. The love poems are brief but very various and quite large in number, and they are much his best work; for most readers, they are the only memorable part of it.

I didn’t reread the Donne book until this week. I rediscovered my copy some months ago, having thought it had been lost years earlier, and intended to read it alongside Katherine Rundell’s Super-Infinite (of which I still haven’t bought a copy). But, nudged by the announcement of Carey’s death, I thought the time had finally come for me to take another look at what he had to say about Donne. I found that my first impressions had been wrong and unfair — and so had Empson’s review.

Donne was brought up as a Catholic, which put him under serious legal disabilities in Elizabethan England, and even constituted a threat to his life: his brother Henry died of plague in Newgate while waiting trial for harbouring a Catholic priest. But Donne himself converted to the Church of England, somewhat reluctantly took holy orders under pressure from King James himself, and eventually became Dean of St Paul’s cathedral, where among other things, he preached against Catholicism. Carey tells us that guilt at his apostasy coloured Donne’s writing throughout his life. The first two chapters of the book are titled “Apostasy” and “The Art of Apostasy”.

The other factor that shaped Donne’s writing, according to Carey, was his ambition. After university and Lincoln’s Inn, Donne became secretary to Sir Thomas Egerton, who would later become Lord Ellesmere and Master of the Rolls. His marriage to Ann More, daughter of a wealthy landowner, led to his dismissal from Egerton’s service and his career stalled for several years.

I came away from Carey’s book with the distinct impression that Donne had been an unprincipled (though initially none too successful) careerist, changeable and uncommitted in his beliefs, a cynic, and that Carey had viewed the subject of his book with contempt rather than admiration. I hadn’t been reading it attentively enough. Neither had Empson. As I mentioned above, Empson believed that Carey had written off Donne’s love poetry which, for Empson, was “much his best work” and “for most readers … the only memorable part of it”. In fact, Carey is not dismissive of the love poetry, but emphasizes the continuity — of language, ideas and preoccupations, for a start — between early and late Donne. In his Introduction, Carey writes:

This study will try to show … that Donne’s opinions on such furiously controverted issues as original sin, election, resurrection and the state of the soul after death, were generated by recognizably the same imagination as the poems about love and women. They are not dull side-tracks but members of an animated whole in which every part illuminates and is illuminated by every other. (p. xiv)

But he roused Empson’s anger (to the point where the reviewer referred to him as “panting, bug-eyed Carey”) by his admittedly questionable reading of Elegy XIX, “To his Mistris Going to Bed”. Much of the first part of Empson’s review is taken up by Empson’s outraged reaction to this particular reading.

Carey quotes the poem (48 lines) it its entirety. A male speaker tells a woman to take off all her expensive, luxurious clothes, until she arrives at “Full nakedness” (l. 33). In the second-last line he reveals, to the reader if not to his addressee, “To teach thee, I am naked first”. It’s not clear whether he has been naked all along or has undressed at high speed. Carey characterizes the speaker as “despotic” and the woman as his “submissive” victim (p. 91), presenting the events described in the poem as a cruel exercise of power. The speaker is in the grip of an “urge to dominate” (p. 92: the discussion of the poem is in the chapter titled “The Art of Ambition”). Carey suggests that the speaker is more interested in the woman’s fine clothes and possessions (including a chiming watch) than in her person, or her physical attributes:

The salivating survey of female physique which was de rigueur in most Elizabethan pornography (see, for instance Thomas Nashe’s enjoyable “The Choice of Valentines”) has vanished. By comparison, Donne is rarefied and abstracted. He hardly seems to see the woman, though his appraising eye dwells on the clothes she takes off. (p. 93)

In the next paragraph, indeed the next sentence, Carey refers to “This lack of purely visual contact”, a comment about which I’ll have more to say below. In the meantime, Empson accepts Carey’s description of the poem as “pornographic” but assures us that

… it is not sadistic — the girl has chosen to come to him; the speaker insists upon that at the end, and it is part of the story all along.

Empson places great stress on the third-last line of the poem which exists in three variants, one of which is evidently a corrupt running together of the other two. Carey has printed “Here is no penance, much less innocence”, while Empson uses the other as the title of his review: “There is no penance due to innocence”. According to Empson, Carey’s preferred variant if accepted, would indeed make the speaker a vile brute.

On Carey's view, the man seduces an innocent girl by arguments purporting to prove that yielding will not be sinful, and then triumphs over her, at the very moment of penetration, by telling her she will go to hell for it. This is sadistic pornography, a very evil thing which Carey is right to be indignant about, but it has emerged from his own mind.

I find both variants difficult to interpret. In his notes to the Wordsworth edition of Donne’s poems, Roy Booth (another of the supervisors of my thesis) says that the sense is that “the Lady, in this blameless love-making, does not need white linen, as worn by (say) adulterers sentenced by a Church court to acts of public penance”. With this clarification, we can see that Carey’s version of the line is much more innocuous than Empson thinks. If we read it in the context of the previous line, the obscurity disappears.

… cast all, yea this white linnen hence.
Here is no pennance, much lesse innocence. (ll. 45–6)

In other words, there is no reason for her to wear a white shift because she is neither an adulteress doing penance, nor a virgin. “Innocence” in this context is taken as meaning virginity, not (as Empson has read it) as freedom from sin, so that the denial of her innocence merely implies that she is not a virgin, not that she is in danger of being condemned to eternal punishment. (Her accoutrements lead Empson to speculate that she is married, perhaps to a lord.)

Carey’s and Empson’s mutual incomprehension is remarkable. As we have seen, Empson opens his review with the claim that Carey dismisses Donne’s love poetry and thereby effectively implies that Donne’s poetry is not worth paying attention to. This is directly contradicted by what Carey says plainly in his Introduction, which Empson must have read. Carey, on the other hand, writes about Empson that

He believed all his life that John Donne was interested in space travel, and in the theological problems of extra-terrestrial life forms … (quoted by John Haffenden in Empson, 1993, 1)

The fact that Empson had written an essay titled “Donne the Space Man” might lead the unwary reader to take this at face value, though Carey was presumably joking. In fact, Empson’s argument was that Donne understood that the discovery that there were many more planets than had previously been known, some of them presumably habitable, and perhaps inhabited, called into question the uniqueness of Jesus’s atonement for the sins of humankind and the value of the Bible as the revelation of the truth to God’s creation. It also raised the possibility of escape (as to America) from the oppressive jurisdiction of a single church. (Of course, this is all rendered hypothetical by the fact that no other inhabited planet has been discovered in the 400 years since Donne lived.)

If Carey had addressed Empson’s opinions about Donne directly, he would presumably have answered that, while Donne may have entertained doubts about Jesus’s uniqueness, or ideas about the implications of life on other planets from time to time, they did not consistently form part of his thought. He shows that Donne went back and forth between an acceptance of Copernican astronomy and older ideas, so that it is not possible, for example, to date a poem based on heliocentric assumptions as necessarily being later than one that asserts geocentric notions. Donne didn’t change his mind about astronomy once and for all:

But we should not imagine that this represents Donne’s consistent attitude, or that he had one. The fact is, he did not care whether the new theories were true or not, so long as they supplied material for his speculation. He wanted to feel free to entertain or dismiss them and to play them off against his existing patterns of thought, as mood or occasion prompted. They were grist to his mill, whether he denounced them or drew on them for images. (p. 235)

Donne expresssed similarly inconsistent beliefs about what happens to the soul after death. He argued strongly against the notion that the soul could have any existence apart from the body, implying it could not go independently to heaven or hell after the death of the body, but both would be resurrected together on the last day. This is a version of the mortalist “heresy”, which Milton also held. According to Carey:

At one stage in his religious development Donne certainly believed that the soul died, or slept, with the body, and remained with it in the grave until the Last Judgment. Even though he seems to have relinquished this belief, in the interests of orthodoxy, before he took orders, he continued to assert in his sermons, as he had in his Paradoxes, that the soul depended on the body and could not properly exist without it. (p. 148)

I’ve suggested before that “heresy” is a bit strong: the belief was just mildly heterodox, was compatible with the doctrine of the resurrection of the body and at least avoided the need to explain how a disembodied soul could suffer bodily torments in hell while waiting for the final judgment. But, as Carey points out, Donne’s “contemporaries tended to brand as atheistic a whole host of political and religious ideas from communism to doubts about the soul’s immortality” (p. 240). So perhaps it is not surprising to find Donne later preaching the opposite view: that the soul does indeed continue to exist after the body has died, and is rewarded in heaven or punished in hell in the period between the body’s death and the last day.

In the final chapter of Carey’s book, where he shows the conclusions to be drawn from what has gone before, he says:

Donne liked imagining opposites which combined, while remaining opposites. He cultivated conjunction and disjunction equally and at the same time. (p. 248)

Towards the end of the chapter, he describes the poet’s “habits of mind” as being “simultaneously dualistic and synthesizing” (p. 264). This makes me wonder whether, instead of regarding Donne as vacillating or alternating between mutually contradictory ideas — betweem Copernican and Ptolemaic conceptions of the cosmos, or mortalist and orthodox Christian beliefs about the (im)mortality of the soul — we should think of him as attempting to hold incompatible views together simultaneously. Is he attempting to synthesize these antithetical elements, to make of them an admittedly self-contradictory world-view, and thereby to achieve a completeness that is not available otherwise? Something like that is happening in the poems where he asserts that the lovers’ separation is at the same time their unity:

Our two soules therefore, which are one,
   Though I must goe, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
   Like gold to ayery thinnesse beate. (“A Valediction: forbidding mourning”, ll. 21–4)

Here the enjambment (“endure not yet | A breach”) immediately followed by the caesura before “but an expansion”, seem at once to contradict and to underline what the words assert. The word “expansion” is itself stretched to four syllables, imitating the precious substance in the next line, beaten out almost to the point of insubstantiality. Then “thinnesse” is slightly drawn out by the need to distinguish between the “n” that ends its first syllable and that which begins the second.

I mentioned above that Carey refers to a “lack of purely visual contact” in “To his Mistris Going to Bed”. What might be called the visual poverty of Donne’s poetry comes up again in Chapter 5, “Bodies”. Rupert Brooke is quoted as complaining that Donne “never visualizes, or suggests that he has any pleasure in looking at things … His poems might all have been written by a blind man in a world of blind men” (p. 117). Carey doesn’t endorse Brooke’s objection. He ends that chapter like this:

The shallowness of mere vision is what his poems struggle to supervene. Whether he is writing about the human body, or animals, or plants, or inanimate objects, his effort is to engage us on other, and deeper levels than the visual; to sensitize us, rather than to please our eyes; and to enhance our awareness both of organic life and of the solid, intransigent materials in which it inheres. (pp. 151–2)

I wrote some time ago about Empson’s aphantasia, or inability to form visual images in his mind, and suggested that it may have affected both the kind of poetry he wrote and his criticism of the poetry of others. Partly on the basis of my own experience, it seems to me that poetry which is not attempting to evoke visual images is more likely to appeal to a reader with aphantasia than the kind of poetry that Rupert Brooke would prefer. There is little doubt that Donne has been a deeper and stronger influence on Empson’s writing than any other of the many poets that Empson has written about. If so, it would be worth investigating whether it was the relative absence of visual interest in Donne’s work that appealed to Empson and whether other poets with a similarly lacking visual sense would have been equally appealing to him. Such an enquiry would, of course, be far beyond the scope of the present post.

Works cited

Booth, Roy, ed. The Collected Poems of John Donne (Wordsworth Editions, 1994);

Carey, John. John Donne: Life, Mind and Art, revised edition (Faber and Faber, 1990);

Empson, William. Essays on Renaissance Literature, 1: Donne and the New Philosophy, ed. John Haffenden (Cambridge University Press, 1993).