‘Tis the year’s midnight, and it is the day’s,

Lucy’s, who scarce seven hours herself unmasks;

         The sun is spent, and now his flasks

         Send forth light squibs, no constant rays;

                The world’s whole sap is sunk;

The general balm th’ hydroptic earth hath drunk,

Whither, as to the bed’s feet, life is shrunk,

Dead and interr’d; yet all these seem to laugh,

Compar’d with me, who am their epitaph.

Study me then, you who shall lovers be

At the next world, that is, at the next spring;

         For I am every dead thing,

         In whom Love wrought new alchemy.

                For his art did express

A quintessence even from nothingness,

From dull privations, and lean emptiness;

He ruin’d me, and I am re-begot

Of absence, darkness, death: things which are not.

All others, from all things, draw all that’s good,

Life, soul, form, spirit, whence they being have;

         I, by Love’s limbec, am the grave

         Of all that’s nothing. Oft a flood

                Have we two wept, and so

Drown’d the whole world, us two; oft did we grow

To be two chaoses, when we did show

Care to aught else; and often absences

Withdrew our souls, and made us carcasses.

But I am by her death (which word wrongs her)

Of the first nothing the elixir grown;

         Were I a man, that I were one

         I needs must know; I should prefer,

                If I were any beast,

Some ends, some means; yea plants, yea stones detest,

And love; all, all some properties invest;

If I an ordinary nothing were,

As shadow, a light and body must be here.

But I am none; nor will my sun renew.

You lovers, for whose sake the lesser sun

         At this time to the Goat is run

         To fetch new lust, and give it you,

                Enjoy your summer all;

Since she enjoys her long night’s festival,

Let me prepare towards her, and let me call

This hour her vigil, and her eve, since this

Both the year’s, and the day’s deep midnight is.

Donne’s contemplation on the death of his love, is written with such energy and wit that it belies his stated position. Thought Donne is “none”, his poem is my inspiration this and every dead day of the year.

1621, Donne was appointed the Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral in London. I pass his statue as I go to work. I think of his lecherous smile for Donne wasted his inheritance on whoring.

The bust of him outside St Paul’s Cathedral shows his head turned to the east, to the place where he was born.

But the East is where the Holy Lands are. They are a place of resurrection. And just as John Donne’s memorial statue rose from the ashes of St Paul’s Cathedral, burned in the Great Fire of 1666, so his poetry and sermons live again, four hundred years after his death.

Not marble nor the gilded monuments
Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme;
But you shall shine more bright in these contents
Than unswept stone, besmear'd with sluttish time

William Shakespeare (who lived next door to where I write this blog)