John Donne's Command - 'Pay Attention'

Katherine Rundell's wonderful biography of one of England's greatest poets - Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne - comes towards its close with a clarion call:

"The difficulty of Donne's work had in it a stark moral imperative: pay attention. It was what Donne most demanded of his audience: attention. It was, he knew, the world's most mercurial resource."

This is welcome advice and with it a timely recalibration. Often, I find myself going for a few weeks without reaching for a favourite poet. And particularly when springtime, that perennial theme of English verse-makers, moves towards its zenith, I can feel a sense of guilt that I'm not making enough time and space for great poetry. Donne, in particular, is a poet that can stop you in your tracks (and not always in the desired way). You can find yourself frustrated, turning away from a poem before you've fully grasped it or made inroads, vowing to try again, yet coming up against the same barriers and bugbears when you return, sometimes years later. Rundell offers a consolation, and then follows it up with a rousing poetry pep-talk.

"He is at times almost impossible to understand, but, in repayment for your work, he reveals images that stick under your skin until you die. Donne suggests that you look at the world with both more awe and more scepticism: that you weep for it and that you gasp for it. In order to do so, you shake yourself out of cliché and out of the constraints of what the world would sell you. Your love is almost certainly not like a flower, nor a dove. Why would it be? It may be like a pair of compasses. It may be like a flea. His startling timelessness is down to the fact that he had the power of unforeseeability: you don't see him coming."

Portrait of John, c 1595, by an unknown artist

Leaving aside Rundell's gloriously correct assessment on Donne - her comments on 'The Flea', a startling, daring and unique poem, certainly fall into the territory, rather aptly considering its subject matter, of 'sticking under your skin' - nevertheless, I felt a real sense of shame about the 'pair of compasses'. For years, and with every return to 'A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning', the poem that contains the extended metaphor, I've felt like I'm missing something. Furthermore, this sheepishness has been heightened with the knowledge that the compasses are one of Donne's most celebrated conceits. Before I go on, here's the poem in full:  

A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning
 
As virtuous men pass mildly away,
   And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say
   The breath goes now, and some say, No:
 
So let us melt, and make no noise,
   No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move;
'Twere profanation of our joys
   To tell the laity our love.
 
Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears,
   Men reckon what it did, and meant;
But trepidation of the spheres,
   Though greater far, is innocent.
 
 Dull sublunary lovers' love
   (Whose soul is sense) cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
   Those things which elemented it.
 
 But we by a love so much refined,
   That our selves know not what it is,
Inter-assured of the mind,
   Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss.
 
 Our two souls therefore, which are one,
   Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
   Like gold to airy thinness beat.
 
If they be two, they are two so
   As stiff twin compasses are two;
Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show
   To move, but doth, if the other do.
 
 And though it in the center sit,
   Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans and hearkens after it,
   And grows erect, as that comes home.
 
 Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
   Like th' other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
   And makes me end where I begun.

*

Careful reading - remember, three or four times at least in your first sitting - eventually opens-up a rather straightforward theme: two lovers parting and the speaker proclaiming that there is no need to feel sad about the situation. Easy enough, and the loveliness of certain lines do have a wonderful feel on the lips: 'So let us melt, and make no noise', and 'trepidation of the spheres', and then the simpler extended metaphor, about expansion, in the sixth stanza - 'Like gold to airy thinness beat' - which settles gorgeously and without difficulty in your mind. So far so good. But then come those compasses.

At high school - and I suspect that I am not the only one who suffered with this - double maths not only brought on the grind of statistics and algebraic equations, but the painful addition of a fellow student stabbing me in the top of the hand with his compass. Maybe then, trying to grasp an elaborate metaphor, involving not one but two of these near-deadly weapons, might well have gotten in the way of clarity of thought. Still, I returned to the poem and the image again. The awkwardness of picturing the action of two compasses and trying to substitute two lovers with them, would not work. Rundell's words rang out: "Pay attention!" But I was. I'd read these lines over and over again. What was I missing that others found so easy to grasp? I know of the slipperiness of language, the shifts across the ages that turn definition upon its head, but the words here were not complicated.   

I looked up the image of a compass on my computer. There it was, simple and striking, the short, brutal spike making the back of my hand wince. If only that pair of compasses were singular. That each of the two feet - the one that rests and the one that travels - made up the pair. That is each leg was a singular compass. A sharp prickle at the back of my neck. I closely checked the definition online. It was all there in the first line of the Wikipedia entry. "A compass, more accurately known as a pair of compasses." Good grief! A feeling of stupidity blazed through me. It passed though. Donne's extraordinary and beautiful metaphor at last made sense, thus softening the blow to my pride. 

It had taken its time. Decades in fact. I would always read that poem and then find my way to safer ground with more familiar poems: 'The Broken Heart' (the first poem of Donne's that I loved); the perfect thesis, antithesis and synthesis of 'The Sun Rising'; and my favourite Donne poem of all, 'A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy's Day' (I read this every December 13th and regard St Lucy's Day as my Winter Solstice).  

This morning I took a breath and settled into a third coffee before I started work and opened 'A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning' afresh. I glided through it, passing over the beaten gold - mouthing the words and no doubt looking foolish to the other punters in Pret - and then onto the compass passage. 'Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show / To move, but doth, if the other do'. How had I missed it? The gorgeous yet extravagant simplicity of the image. And then, at last, letting myself revel in the sudden bawdiness of 'grows erect' (have I mentioned how great Donne is when it comes to writing about sex? And this from a soon-to-be Dean of St Paul's Cathedral). And finally, the eloquence of that last stanza: 'And makes me end where I begun'. It almost feels - and if I knew more about mathematics, or indeed, if I hadn't been brutalised by it - as if it is actually mirroring the elegance of the perfect equation. Either way, St Lucy has, at last, got competition.