The Lives of Donne and Herbert

Overview

About one hundred and ten pages, two short biographies by the author of The Compleat Angler, who knew Donne and had friends who knew Herbert. The life of Donne, first printed with his sermons in 1640, follows him from his Catholic upbringing through his secret marriage and years of poverty to his ordination, his deanship of St Paul’s, and his death, for which he posed in his shroud.

The life of Herbert, published in 1670, tells of a courtier who gave up preferment to become the rector of Bemerton and died at forty. Both are affectionate portraits of holy dying.

What happens

Donne’s youth and marriage. Walton describes Donne’s Catholic family, his studies at Oxford, Cambridge and Lincoln’s Inn, his voyages with Essex, and his secret marriage to Anne More, which cost him his post with the Lord Keeper and brought years of poverty and dependence.

Donne’s ordination. After long reluctance, and at King James’s urging, Donne takes orders in 1615, and Walton tells of his preaching, his grief at his wife’s death, and his rise to the deanship of St Paul’s.

Donne’s death. Walton gives the famous account of Donne’s last sermon, Death’s Duel, preached as his own funeral sermon, and of his rising from his sickbed to be drawn standing in his shroud for the monument that still stands in St Paul’s.

Herbert’s youth and court. Walton tells of Herbert’s mother, his brilliance at Cambridge, his post as public orator, and his hopes of court preferment, which the deaths of his patrons ended.

Herbert at Bemerton. Herbert takes orders, marries, and becomes rector of the small parish of Bemerton near Salisbury, where he rebuilds the church, keeps the daily offices, walks to hear the cathedral music, and writes the rule of the country parson.

Herbert’s death. Dying of consumption at forty, Herbert sends the manuscript of The Temple to Nicholas Ferrar with instructions to print it if it might do good to any dejected poor soul, and otherwise to burn it, and Walton closes with his last hours.

How to read it

Read the lives as the first biographies of English poets written from affection rather than scandal, by a tradesman who had known one subject and sat with friends of the other.

Pay close attention to how the life of Donne fixes the story of the rake turned divine, and ask how far the poems support it and how far it has been imposed on them.

Notice how the life of Herbert makes the rector of Bemerton the type of the Anglican saint, and consider what the portrait leaves out of a man who wrote the poems of The Temple.

Consider the book’s date, the lives published while the Church of England was suppressed and restored, and read the holy dyings as a quiet argument for that church.

Read these lives alongside Boswell’s Life of Johnson to compare the biography as an act of piety with the biography as a record of talk.

Questions it raises

• How much of what we think we know about Donne, the rake turned divine, comes from the poems and how much from Walton, and does it matter?
• Is Walton’s Herbert the man who wrote The Temple, whose poems record such struggle, or a saint the biographer needed?
• What does it mean that the earliest lives of English poets were written to edify rather than to inform, and what did the genre lose when it changed?
• Why does Walton dwell so on the deaths, and what did a holy dying mean to readers in the 1640s and 1670s?
• How did an angler and linen-draper come to write the lives of two great poets, and what does his position outside the university and the court give the books?
• Should a reader of the poems read Walton first, or last, or not at all?