Heavenly Hackwork

John Donne was a mystic in bed and a mystic in the pulpit.

-  James Parker

If you were a gentleman in Elizabethan London, a gentleman of more or less regular means and habits, your typical day went something like this: You rose at 4 a.m., you wrote 14 letters and a 30-page treatise on the nonexistence of purgatory, you fought a duel, you composed a sonnet, you went to watch a Jesuit get publicly disemboweled, you invented a scientific instrument, you composed another sonnet, you attended the premiere of As You Like It, you romanced someone else's wife, and then you caught the bubonic plague and died.

They packed a lot in, the Elizabethans, is my point. Maybe posterity, considering our own age, will judge that are packing a lot in, with the fascism and the COVID and the melting glaciers. Maybe. But there was a peculiar paradoxical ugly-beautiful density to life as the Elizabethans lived it. The Reformation was just behind them; the civil war was coming; Elizabeth, the virgin queen, may have been semi-celestial, but her subjects lived in a police state. They had a passion for virtue and a genius for cruelty. They had wonderful manners and barbaric inclinations, lovely clothes and terrible diseases. They oscillated madly between the abstract and the corporeal. And among his contemporaries, nobody oscillated more madly than John Donne.

Donne was made of contradiction, or of transformation. Born an outsider, a Catholic at a time when being Catholic in England was illegal-his uncle and then his brother went to prison for their faith, and his brother would die there-Donne worked his way in, into the inside, shifting and shedding as he went.