super infinite the transformations of john donne by katherine rundell

He positioned the pommel of his sword to be just visible, an accessory more than a weapon. The painting was of a man who knew about fashion he wore a hat big enough to sail a cat in, a big lace collar, an exquisite moustache. It laid out, with painstaking precision, how often its author dreamed of killing himself.Ī decade or so before, the same man, then about twenty-three years old, sat for a portrait. The book was called Biathanatos a text which has claim to being the first full-length treatise on suicide written in English. It was a book written in illness and poverty, to be read by almost no one. He was living in obscurity in Mitcham, in a cold house with thin walls and a noxious cellar that leaked ‘raw vapours’ to the rooms above, distracted by a handful of gamesome and clamouring children. He knew as he wrote it that it could be dangerous to him were it to be discovered. Just fifteen years before that, the same man finished a book and immediately put it away. ‘Two or three were endangered, and taken up dead for the time.’ There’s no record of Donne halting his sermon so it’s likely that he kept going in his rich, authoritative voice as the bruised men were carried off and out of sight. ‘There was a great concourse of noblemen and gentlemen’, and in among ‘the extreme press and thronging’, as they pushed closer to hear his words, men in the crowd were shoved to the ground and trampled. Word went out: wherever he was, people came flocking, often in their thousands, to hear him speak. That morning he was not preaching in his own church, but fifteen minutes’ easy walk across London at Lincoln’s Inn, where a new chapel was being consecrated.

His words, they said, could ‘charm the soul’. He often wept in the pulpit, in joy and in sorrow, and his audience would weep with him. His congregation – merchants, aristocrats, actors in elaborate ruffs, the whole sweep of the city – came to his sermons carrying paper and ink, wrote down his finest passages and took them home to dissect and relish, pontificate and argue over. He had been appointed the Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral two years before: he was fifty-one, slim and amply bearded, and his preaching was famous across the whole of London. It was the late spring of 1623, on the morning of Ascension Day, and Donne had finally secured for himself celebrity, fortune and a captive audience. The power of John Donne’s words nearly killed a man.

Super infinite the transformations of john donne by katherine rundell