John Donne

Pipsyys, podcast, ja poltiaan äänsä. Olikysymys sitten omasta tai kaverin projektiista. Itse asiassa. Katsomallista, katsomallista ja poltiaan äänsä. Katsomallista ja poltiaan äänsä. ja huomioon. to something to a celestial body. Why would it take you there? Will it take you there? Let me think about my own body. Would anybody get to heaven by looking at this baked bean tin? Or will you just remain with the thing of the body? Is it just a thing? - Good bear, I'm a shoe. In your view, Dunn's a love poetry is the most wonderful body of work anyone can imagine. Can you tell us why? - Marianne mentioned the opening lines. And I think that speaks to the sheer force of poetic personality. This is really what comes across to us over the centuries for God's sake hold your tongue and let me love. I do not die for I shall hate all women and so when they are gone. These are incredibly compelling. But it's not only that. It is that all of the force combined with Dunn's education in rhetoric and logic and disputation which he got at Oxford and Cambridge and then at the ends of court, the sheer audacity of the attempt is what strikes us. I think what's really remarkable is the combination of that argumentative style with then that the sheer originality of the imagery. Just to give you an example from valediction for bidding morning, you get this argument about why it's better for souls, two souls to be intertwined than merely two bodies and two lovers who are parting, whose souls are one, then in a sense don't suffer the effects of parting. And what Dunn goes on to say is our two souls, therefore, which are one, though I must go, and you're not yet a breach, but an expansion like gold to airy, thinness beat. It's a fantastic, tangible image, the idea of metal beaters beating out a plate of gold, me thinner and thinner and faster and faster, but for something that is entirely abstract and conceptually idea of two souls mingling. Marianne Lund, there's love poetry taking his mistress, his wife, to bed on dressing up. Then there's divine love. Can you develop that a rather more? To think about the merging from one to the other, and how they move. One of the fascinating things about the poems of human love is that Dunn is always calling on religious imagery, on sacred imagery, as part of the making the world of the lovers and everywhere a universe in his poem, The Relic, for instance. He imagines that the time when his grave will be opened again will be broken up in order to reuse it for another body. And the people who dig him up find the skeleton with a bracelet of bright hair around the bone, which is the hair of the lover. And then this becomes a relic. And they imagine that as they don't know who the corpse belongs to, they think perhaps the hair is the relic of Mary Madeline. So that will be a Mary Magdalene, and I, as something else, thereby, which is a sort of teasing and borderline blasphemous suggestion that perhaps he has himself Christ or something or other, why has he got the bracelet of Mary Magdalene around him? And so he calls on those things, and another one in the poem Twickenham Garden, which is a poem about grief and failure in love. He says about what the spider love, which transubstantiates all, and why you would bring a word-- the word transubstantiates into a love poem, is it quite extraordinary? Transubstantiation? Yes, transubstantiation, of course. It's the theology of the sacrament of, to what extent the bread and wine becomes the body and bird of Jesus Christ, which in Roman Catholicism transubstantiation is about it. It's becoming it. He's playing with those religious ideas, as part of the daring of erotic poetry. But then what's interesting about the human love poetry is he doesn't write sonnets sequences. He's not in that craze of Elizabethan sonnets sequence writing that so many are going in. He doesn't do that at all. He does, however, use the sonnet form, the form of romantic love to address God. And he consciously calls on his reputation, writing about loving women. If I may read just a little bit of one out of X, me, "Country is meeting one," the poem goes on. And he says, he's inconstant, as humorous in my contrician, as my profane love, and as soon forgot, as riddlingly, destempered, cold and hot, as praying, as mute, as infinite, as not. So by humorous, he means that he sort of moody. In his contrician and his penance towards God, he changes just as much as he did in his love of women. It's extraordinary conjunction, the carnal and the Christian, especially the Catholic Christian. Sue, what's an audience for what he was writing at the time? With his poems, there are definitely two kinds of audience. And the one I want to talk about first is the way the poems make a very intimate landing place for the reader, even at the same time as they're grabbing the reader's attention. And although these aren't sonnets sequences, people have often tried to put them into a sequence, haven't they? Because they're very drawn in by the mise en scène of the poem. And Colouridge said, if you read it one way, you get the arrestingness. And if you read the sonnets another way, you get the feeling that you become he. So part of the seductiveness of the poems is for you, the reader. Like, it's really paying a lot of attention to your reading of it. And you go through it. And you can be in multiple positions of identification and disidentification with what's going on. And who's doing what to who? So that brought him readers long after he fell into dishewitude. But at the same time, he was writing for people, often, for money. And in that regard, he was really much less than deafed. He made some considerable mistakes. I think everybody would agree, particular poems, he would write at exactly the wrong time. The car Howard married was particularly a time when he was writing for one audience, which was the people who were going to make him get on it court. But they were absolutely on the very cusp of being put in prison for poisoning. So there was the poem hanging about, afterwards, memorializing the wrong people. So all the way through, there's a mixture of a very deafed address to a reader and a much more problematic relationship to the public world he so much wants to be in, and often just slightly misreads. Hugh, thank you. Hugh, I think, John. When and why did you turn to the priesthood? This is a much-- You've been in prison for a while, but only a few weeks. But he was sort of banished from this career ladder that he'd been climbing very steadily and very well. Yes. And you started out lots of children, and they moved out of London. Eventually, he handed up a prisoner to Joseph England. How did that happen? Yes. He married in 1601 and then the impact of that marriage on his career for several years. He sought secular employment for many years through the first decade of the 17th century. He applied to be secretary of the Virginia company and other positions and failed in all of his attempts. He also had a beard as an adventure, didn't he? He got on ships and shot at other ships. Yes, he did. He did. He went with the Earl of Essex against the Spanish to Cadez and the Azores. That was in the late 1590s before his marriage. That was one of his most successful career moves. Because at that point, he appeared like a promising young man. They were all men together. And wasn't that where he met Edgerton's son, who then must have introduced him to Edgerton Papar, who happened to be running the entire legal system? So in fact, although Cadez went quite badly for done, it was really a very fast moving career, possibly. Yes, but you. It also informed two very good poems, The Storm and the Corms. So it benefited his literary career. Whilst he was in his career wilderness, as it were, he was taking on various jobs that came his way. Some were around offering opinions on diplomatic questions, but some were around the questions of controversial divinity. And he was commissioned by Thomas Morton, a bishop to assist in Protestant controversy against Catholics. And I think it's probably through that route that he got noticed in higher places. And there's certainly from Walt Woulton suggest that he was commissioned by the King, James I, to write his anti-Catholic treatise, Sudamata, in 1610, which was an argument against Catholics not taking the oath of allegiance and suggesting that they should. And then Walt Woulton goes on to say that it was really that the kings behest that Dunes should take up a career in the ministry, which eventually he did in 1615, but there were many delays and hesitations along the way. I think we can absolutely explain that form. On one level, his hesitation about his qualification to be a minister, he says that in his letters and embarks on his essays in divinity, which is a sort of self-training programme in exegesis to train himself to be qualified. Another though, I think, is his sense of his past and what the optics are for becoming a minister in the Church of England, having been a member of a Woulton Catholic family and also his own notoriety, you should say, as an author of the kind of licentious poetry that we've been discussing. So all of those reasons may be played into his hesitation. I think it was pragmatic and also a decision out of conscience. Mary-Anlond, what did you mean then? To be a high-profile priest because he was allowed to preach him before the king. He began to claim the letter that he had been kicked off before. He was back on it and going up while he's speedily. What does it mean? What did you have to do? First and foremost, it was about preaching. As a Protestant minister, preaching was at the heart of worship. He had a thoroughgoing commitment towards preaching as the central means by which salvation worked for people. Did you take his lead from Sermon on the mountain that Christ being a preacher? That's part of it, but it's also through the Paul Liner Pistols as well, hearing as the means towards salvation. Now a Sermon in this period means a large scale rhetorical exercise. It's typically one hour except on special occasions where it's up to two hours and it's usually preached on a single verse or a couple of verses. So you don't have a large number of lessons in the gospel. You are kind of riffing, expanding on a very small passage from the Bible which you compose. We know that that Don would write these. Get started on the Sunday evening after having preached one in the morning or the afternoon and then we're taking most of the week to produce. It was a feat of memory as well. He's not reading from a script but learning the places of the rhetorical structure which is an astonishing feat in itself. It's also about preaching knowing your own. Through all of the talents of language, of persuasion and rhetoric which are there in the poetry and throughout the prose as well, that brilliant often in terms of the opening gambit as well. A famous funeral Sermon on Sir William Cucayne which he starts the God made the first marriage and man the first divorce which is if you're attending a funeral doesn't seem like a very obvious place to start. He's talking about the marriage of body and soul and then the divorce which is the divorce of body and soul through death throughout the mean. It was the thing to do on a Sunday. Absolutely. But also those who didn't have to went. Indeed it was a popular past time. We think about the way that people went to the theatre to watch Shakespeare but they went to watch celebrated preachers and to hear them as well. So Dunno was certainly one of those. And he's also somebody who's deeply skilled at gearing his rhetoric and he's preaching towards particular auditories. So preaching to the King at court in the cathedral or to legal students in Lincoln's Inn. One of the reasons I think for his fame and appeal is the drama of the films that he creates. It's both through performance, Walton describes him preaching from the pulpit like an angel from a cloud weeping an earnest and so on. But it's also a self-dramatising. Self-dramatising. Absolutely. And in Dunno's. Moving the audience because of that. Yes. And in Dunno's sermons you find more of a sense of the eye rather than the we, the first person pronoun. And that's very powerful in the way that Dunno uses it. He figures himself as a sinner often and attempts to move his auditory that way. What sort of jeopardy might you've been in? Preaching these ideas of salvation in public and known to be previously a Catholic. There's the one time he seemed to have got in trouble in his preaching within a sermon to the new King Charles I. And it did seem as though they're all of Dunn's experience at treading that very careful political religious line. Slightly ill-judged with with the new regime of of Lorde's archbishop. What I think this reminds me of is his sense of being fugitive in some way as a as a Catholic. There's some evidence or at least speculation that Dunn's family and his letters were being intercepted by the state by Cecil orders under the order of Robert Cecil. And Dunn was aware of this or suspected it. There's a quite a famous article that describes Dunn's letters as newsless letters. They're very philosophical and abstract. Part of the reason might well be that Dunn is very careful in those letters not to give any hostage to fortune by mentioning things that would have been in the wrong eyes have been taken the wrong way. So it's part of this this continuing story about the tightrope that he walks throughout his life I think. Thinking about the letter as a form where you know paper is very expensive in this period and you have to squeeze everything into quite a small space but of course in his lyric poetry he's doing that all the time at the time and he plays with that idea of small space quite a bit doesn't he? Building in sonnets pretty rooms almost as thinking about the boundaries between the public and the private as a part of his frustration you know the lovers will not be you know not for a chronicle but we can we'll be enough for a sonnet indeed almost to that kind of complete extreme with the poem The Flea. Yeah this is our marriage bed our marriage temple which is which is a flea which has sucked the blood of the of the both of us and mingled our fluids mark but this flea it starts and I it writes a reasonably long poem about a tiny creature that I think is not just concentrated in space but also in time you know as soon as you say mark but this flea it hops off and yet he's he's stilling time and space in that poem and that's something he does in so many different forms doesn't he? Is writing perhaps something that unifies them? Did he for do he feel he felt that he was in danger ever or not? He goes over and over questions and he doesn't always stop in quite the right place for the Church of England and he said fairly publicly repeatedly that he doesn't think there's only one way to God and I think it wasn't so much that he was outside the Church but that to make public a certain set of decisions was to be only ending in one place and that was what he was prepared to do in the second half of his life though even then he seemed to have fallen foul of Charles I but possibly for totally secular reasons. I think we should also remember that the pulpit is a mouthpiece for political views as well as a civic place particularly at St Paul's Cathedral and it pulls across the great outdoor pulpit and there is an expectation that preachers will engage with politics which are you know so deeply intertwined with religion in this period but very very very very careful done for instance is called to preach on James's directions for preachers which are about restricting preaching and there were various attempts in this period royal declarations whereby ministers had to stick to the fundamentals because they were talking too much about things like predestination but also touching on very hot political topics. He was trying to steer between Catholicism and Puritanism and and someone in the middle was the very little church well was the Anglican thing and he had a flashpoint at either end I don't know yeah he often talks about conformity and what what can what it means to be part of the Church of England and to conform and it's in terms of of public conformity about going to church about observing the rights and rituals of the Church of England and avoiding the the poles of what he saw as Catholics who've just issued on the one hand but also the real danger to him and to the established Church of England of kind of private conventacles and of kind of inventing religion as he saw it through nonconformity. Yeah absolutely one of the things that I think marks his preaching is a celebration of the broad ecumenical ecclesia Christiana and he's very very keen to steer that middle path always having said that and and the Catholics that he really aims his his weaponry out of the Jesuits and and it's the papacy the loyal Catholic that that's not really in the firing line on the other end of spectrum the schismatics absolutely but what is there's a great irony of course because in Dunn's composition of his sermons he draws on a lot of commentary and one of the his main source of commentary or Jesuit commentators which he really he never attributes or he says there's a Jesuit and then he corrects them but but so much this is what the addition of the sermons is throwing up so much of what he is saying is is drawn from their learning their every addition but of course it's not attributed. Can we just emphasize the impact of his preaching in London at the time? I think it frizz does at St Paul's Cathedral he when he was dean of St Paul's Cathedral he deliberately expanded and enhanced the preaching provision there so in during the the term time universe legal terms he established this program so that he would preach along with the other Rosadon tree cannons and to really up St Paul's Cathedral's homiletic motor that there'll be I don't we I think we know as well that from a lot of the allergies that remember him as a preacher as he has been mentioning earlier that that sense of a kind of performance which of course is now lost to us completely was deeply skillful the sense of having his listeners in the palm of his hand and emotionally moving but also I think with a very strong pastoral sense that you get it in a lot of the sermons. One other thing I think you could say about it is around the rumor that he was dead and we find out about because he says they're saying that I'm dead already and then people said that they wrote down that they had been to see his sermon and that it was as he was dead preaching, but there was a tremendous set of people discussing whether or not he was dead in alive in relation to his preaching during the period of his death. So that was big news and brought people to his sermons, but also re-circulated it in the gossip networks. I mean, bring you back in, Maryanne. When he was ill, particularly, he wrote his devotions upon emergent occasions. Can you tell us about them and why they're significant? I'd love to. So Dunne had several periods of ill health in his life and one of them was in late 1623. So he'd been deemed for a couple of years. He was deemed in 1621. Early 50s wasn't he? Yeah. And there was a viral illness going around London, the spotted fever, which was probably typhus, which Dunne caught. Again, as Sue's just been saying, it's a mark of how famous he was that people, there are other records of Dunne, but Dean Dunne has is ill and they think he's going to die. He was very, very ill and near death for a couple of weeks. And then in early January 1624, he composed the devotions upon emergent occasions, which is this remarkable sifting through all the stages of his illness from the first symptoms right through to recovery, sitting up in bed again, being able to get out of bed. I think we think of modern illness narratives as something rather new, but in fact, they go right back to Dunne's timeness. There's a really unique document. It's divided up into these stages, but within them, they are meditations, expostulation and prayer. So it becomes this devotional exercise. It starts with this idea of this minute, I am well and I'm ill this minute. I'm surprised with the sudden change. So the idea of the body giving you these first little indications that you're sick and then from that you feel the gradual onset of illness and he says, "Why does the soul not do the same?" And then addresses God with this. So it's the most remarkable performance and indeed an achievement for someone who's just getting better from serious illness. At the heart of it is of course a famous sequence of the bells, which is well known. He is in the denri of St Paul's Cathedral, isolated from the world that he is desperate to be back in, and he is the bells of London ringing. And it causes him to meditate, because bells, a church bells ring, to say that someone in the parish is going to die. And then they ring out when the person is dead, in order to tell everybody else to pray for the person who is unwell and then they have gone. And so done wonders whether this is going to be him. If I may read the passage that perhaps is the most celebrated, no man is an island in Tyre of itself. Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a maner of their friends or of their own were. Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never sent to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee. So the sense there of hearing the ringing, and he wonders if it's actually for him, if he is the dying man that everyone is praying for, but also that sense of inherent connection to the rest of the world. That brings us to London soon, not to have really left it, but he felt he was deeply embedded in London, wasn't he? He was, and if you look at a map of where he ended up, he keeps being sent to places about a day away, to Mitchum or to Croydon or to Pijford, and they're not as close as he wants to be, so he takes lodgings there. But in his writing, he's not like Ben Johnson, he doesn't take it as an overt topic, but it comes up in all sorts of different places. So the three main periods are the early period Lincoln's in, then I think maybe when he's out of town, but that's slightly different, whereas when he's in his very earliest poetry in the satires, he's quite located, I think, in Lincoln's in, and the first one begins, notely when he's coffined in his study with a lot of ancient authors who are terribly good for him, but they're sort of looming over him and oppressing him, and somebody unnamed, a fondling, motley humorist. So again, somebody of unreliable disposition, essentially turns up his door and says, "Let's go clubbing." And he says, "Absolutely not." And then off he goes, clubbing, and this person takes him through the muddiest streets and keeps running off and leaving him and coming back and experience we've all had. I think we've ever been out with a friend, goes off to more interesting people, better moneyed people, and eventually they end up, "I'm sorry to say, at a brothel." And this person says, "I've seen my love in a window, and then abundance this done figure and goes off into the brothel and comes back and hangs his head." And there's one critic who's done a really rather convincing reading that this is done spending Saturday night out with his penis and imagining being led astray. And then at the end the penis hangs its head and becomes, if you like, the ultimate woe-be-gone penitential organ. So this is really very, very different from the other penitential experiences of the body. When he's writing the devotions, he's been deprived of books, and he's at a dense connection of London parishes, many of which were so small, they didn't even have room to bury their dead outside their walls. So you can imagine the density of the bells of several different places. Again and again we get the sort of intimate intertwining of sacred and paper-fain, doesn't really matter much. Carnel is a better word. He's going from one to the other so quickly that they become one, don't they? Yes, for done, there's a big debate in the period about whether there's a hierarchy between souls or bodies and what you need for salvation, and for done, and in love. And for done you need both. The soul love between two bodies, without the souls, is insufficient and love between two souls in the platonic sense is also not sufficient. So they're knitted together in this subtle knot that makes man, he says. You need both elements, the material and the spiritual. Let's see what we can do with the last sermon, the famous last sermon, a month before he died. People said he was telling about his own death and he looked like, "Well, you tell me about it." This sermon is known as Death's Dual, it's probably Dunsmell's famous sermon, and in it he has been done, he's dying. He takes himself up from his sick bed to come to preach one last time before the King, Charles I, on the first Friday in Lent in Whitehall. And it's a big occasion. It's a big occasion, and Walton reports that those who saw Dunn were shocked, and I'll quote, "Many of that then saw his tears and heard his faint and hollow voice, thought that Dr Dunn had preached his own funeral sermon." And the sermon itself is as unsparing as Dunn has ever been about the subject of death. He starts it with the very bleak suggestion that life from its very beginning is a constant process of dying. We have a winding sheet in our mother's womb before we come to seek a grave. This is done unshirking as ever in the face of mortality. And he even dwells on the horror of being eaten by were worms, which he calls vimiculation. But the ending is the thing that really makes this an extraordinary performance. Having impressed upon his listeners with his own appearance and with his exegesis of his text, the unescapability of death, and it's a physical decay that comes with it, he then creates this extraordinary image of Christ dying on the cross to grant us resurrection. But you or us, the listener, hanging on to Christ, hanging on the cross. And he says, "I can just say it, there we leave you in that blessed dependency, to hang upon him that hangs upon the cross. There bade in his tears, there suck at his wounds, and lie down in peace in his grave, till he vouchsafew a resurrection and an ascension into that kingdom which he hath prepared for you with the inestimable price of his incorruptible blood. Amen." Wow. Hey, Mary, how far did he see himself as part of this process towards salvation? He's absolutely, of course, considering his own salvation amongst that. I think Dunn's own faith is theology. It saw salvation as something that was simple, not as a kind of a complicated wrangling, am I saved or am I not saved, which you might identify more with sort of nonconformist belief in this period. He was keen to reject that and say, in his sermons that, you know, you come to church, you are penitent, you listen to sermons and conduct yourself properly in life, and if you're Christian life and take communion, that is the path to salvation. Nonetheless, there is this kind of sifting of the conscience. He's sifting as a wonderful image of how you work through your life and a contrite. If I might turn back to that poem, I talked about earlier, O to Vex, me, Contraries, meet in one, which is from before he was ordained, but I think he's so telling about how he saw the idea of the process of salvation. and it ends, "So my devout fits come and go away like a fantastic aegu, save that here, those are my best days when I shake with fear." That's not to say that it's a fear-based faith. I think he talks about the love of God a lot in his sermons, but that the paradoxical idea that the best days are the ones where you shake with fear is very much live, I think, throughout Dunns whole life and career. That sense, not of perhaps linear progress of getting better all the time, but rather always kind of hanging in the balance, looking both ways and recognising your own fragility. We're near the end now. Sue Weisman, what impact would you say Dunns writing us had on other writing over the last few hundred years? I'd like to go somewhere else from the usual narrative in which John Dryden abolishes him and T. S. Eliot resuscitates him, even though that narrative is completely true. I think in the generation immediately after Dunn, probably all two generations after, there's a couple of places you might go. One is in the Earl of Rochester, who is an incredibly accomplished poet in terms of the use of the form, and who really takes quite a lot of Dunns' masculine objection to the extreme and some of his bodily language. Then poets who know to their cost that you can't get the state or the sun or everything else out of the bedroom. And there, I think I would go to Lucy Hutchinson and her allergies, which are always intensely political, but are erotic allergies at the same time. And then I'd like to just jump to the 21st century quickly, and I think one of the most explicit uses of Dunn is Karl Phillips, who is a very interesting American poet, who began coming of ages a poet during the AIDS epidemic and who takes rise in his, those poems from the devotions. And I hadn't thought of reading it during the AIDS epidemic, but if you think about it, the terror of the doctor trying to keep himself calm is absolutely a wonderful thing to be visited, and Phillips, it's really a poet, I would recommend. Yes, we must not, you resist your visit, your peril, and TS Eliot saw him as a precursor of modernism that he himself was practicing and saw him as a great staple for that. Absolutely, he did a tremendous job for the rest of us with Dunn as well in making us see how vivid and alive it was. Yes, well thanks very much, thanks to Mary Ann Lund, Sue Wiseman, Hugh Adlington, and our studio engineer Tim Heffer. Next week is the political philosopher John Rawls on his influential theory of justice, ambit building a new, freer and fara society. Thanks for listening. And the in our time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. The easiest way into this marriage is to say, what did you not say you liked have said? One thing that probably doesn't get an air in for Dunn so much, he's done the letter writer. When he was preaching, he said that he liked particular books of the Bible and kept coming back to them. And he said he liked the Psalms because David was a poet, the Psalms of poems, and he was a poet, so he felt some identification with them. And he said he liked some Paul, some Paul's epistles because he was a letter writer. Of course, the poems were not published in Dunn's lifetime, but nor were Dunn's letters for the most part, but he wrote verse letters to his friends, I think that Dunn as friend to female patrons and to his male friends too. But also he was a very regular correspondent, would write to his great friend, so Henry Goodia, for instance. One of his verse letters starts, "Sir more than kisses, letters mingle souls." And so he thought of that form as very an important literary thing which was about connecting people. And he was so careful, is this right that sometimes he would say, "I'm sending you this under a separate schedule." And he would send one set of information in the letter and the material it made sense of it in a separate letter because that was less risky. I think he says that once or twice, is that? Well, we know that in the circulation of male in this period, letters constantly going astray. It's an occupational hazard of correspondence in the period, so a lot of people took precautions. But he is also close to the world of diplomacy at various moments in his life when he goes on the Embassy in 1619 to Germany to try to mediate with Lord Donkaster between who had become the Holy Roman Empire, Emperor Ferdinand of Bohemia. He has a cipher that he uses, all the people on the top of the Embassy use it. So he's familiar with this world. Another thing that we have not talked about, none of us have used a word beginning with "super", and one of his super-induction or "super-structure", those, "done was a great corner of words", is inventive with new language and often that would include putting prefixes on things. Super-infinite, of course, is the title of Catherine Randell's biography or writing on him. Don employed mottoes in his life, and I think they're a key, in some sense, to some of the things that we've been talking about, the conflicted element of his personality. The motto that he wrote in his books in his own library was a line from Petra, per Rahel has served to a non-perlayer Italian, which is from Genesis about Rachel and Lair. And the medieval symbolism usually aligns Rachel with the contemplative life and Lair with the active life. And what we tend to take from that motto is that Don is saying that although an active life was forced upon him, he would have preferred a contemplative one. And certainly that seems appropriate for writing into your books, in your library, but it does indicate some of the tension that runs throughout his life about the draw towards philosophy. I'd even say introversion. And then on the other hand, this drive towards performance and being out there in the world. The other motto, if it's not really a motto, is an epigraph that I think is also a key to his personality, is the epigraph to the folio edition of Don's 80 Sermons published in 1640, which is from Matthew 1016, and it's Jesus' encouragement to his disciples to be wise or serpent, innocent as doves. And whenever these arguments come up about done being ambitious or calculating or overly of the world, I think this is a really good reminder of how even for Christ, the directive is to be open-eyed as a pilgrim in this world, but whilst retaining your principle and your virtue. And I think that's there. It's not there by Don's design. This would have been the printer or his editor who put it there. But it does stand as quite an eloquent key, as I say, to some of the conflicts in Don's writing. So I think that's about two interesting things, aren't they? Because they give you the private world of the letters in which he seems to have been tremendously successful and deft and absolutely beloved. His friends did some very stupid things for him, like helping him get married and get put in prison themselves, and his attempt to modulate the external world, like the changing of the morsels. So they seem to take us to two aspects that I would say, I don't know what you two think, but that he never quite managed to adequately align until he became a preacher. And even then, it seems that there possibly was a moment where Lord was almost too much for William Lord as a new archbishop, was almost too much for that careful, politic line and the alignment of the problematic private self that was also beloved and the movement of that into the public. Given the quality that you described here, I'm going to reach. Why was the art of fashion for so long? We're talking in centuries, aren't we? It tastes change, and I suppose we could call the Augustan turn after the restoration heavily classical, at least in form. Dunns poetry seems rude, and I don't mean rude in its subject matter, but in its form, unmetrical, rough-lined masculine forces as a term that's used. And also, I will come to Dryden now. Dryden's critique of Dunn is that he's using metaphysical speculation when he should be using appropriate imagery to engage the minds of his readers, which Dryden presumes are women. And so, he. Dryden's criticism is that the poem is too freighted with heavy intellectual weight, and that makes it an incomplete artifact. Another thing I think you might think, and this is absolutely to agree, I think, with both of you. He takes a huge world as well and shrinks it in a small space. But the genre, he's interested in, and he's interested in a lot of genre. They're not the classical genre that Dryden is reviving in many ways, but there are a lot of ones that were from the generation that preceded him. And one way to see his special place in that and how that might become obstinate. elite is to think the Sonnet sequence done as the Sonnet explosion, if you like. And then after that Milton moves into a vacated house and does the political Sonnet sequence. Then it's gone and then I suppose it's Mary Ty after that who is really interested in that kind of thing. And I think done is really, really very interested in genre and form, but in a way that read dresses what's gone before rather than anticipating the wonderful things you can do maybe with the couplet and is very interested in microcosm and microcosm at the same time. And that leaves him stranded for quite some time possibly. I agree. I mean, the figure who is very important, but in a sense is ahead of his own is knowledge, because the college really gets done. And in some ways, the college's description of Thomas Brown, the twist in the brains, he describes that appetite for abstraction is there in done to it's there in the college certainly. But he reads and reads done his service. So he used that phrase twist in the brain of Brown, did he? He used it of Thomas Brown. And what does he say? Oh, altitude, oh, I love her an abstraction. And I think it applies to done too. But the college is sort of a man on his own and really the revival, the rediscovery of done doesn't, doesn't happen to a lot later. An interesting part of this story that's not often told is how Dayton Haskin tells it is how it really begins in America. And it's there that at the end of the 19th century readers and poets, Emerson, Lowell, they are really keen on done. And then through Charles Eliot Norton, it gets into Harvard and into the syllabus. And it's then we start with Eliot in this country, we say it's in the 1910s, Grierson's edition of the metaphysical poets. But it was really happening in in the US a decade or so earlier. Thank you very much. That was excellent. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tilletson. Sometimes I just can't hear a difference between a standard or a shell in explosions. Documentary adventures that invite a closer listen. We were willing to put not only our bodies on the line, but our whole being a documentary podcast from BBC Radio 4. 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