Death comes equally to us all and makes us all equal when it comes. The ashes of an oak in the chimney are no epitaph of that oak to tell me how high or how large that was; it tells me not what flocks it sheltered while it stood nor what men it hurt when it fell. – John Donne (1572-1631), Anglican minister and poet
Category Archives: John Donne
John Donne’s Last Sermon
“The Dean has preached his own funeral sermon!”
In early March, 1631, the Rev. John Donne (1572-1631), the famous poet and Anglican priest, traveled to Whitehall, in London, to preach before King Charles I. As the Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral, in London, Donne was privileged to preach before royalty several times per year. On this occasion, Donne was seriously ill. In fact, he was dying. The sermon he preached was from Psalm 68:20 (Our God is a God of salvation, and to God, the Lord, belong deliverances from death). Donne looked very haggard, drawn, and worn as he struggled to preach in the pulpit before the King. His sermon lasted nearly an hour. Donne looked so ill that the King turned to a member of his entourage and said, while Donne preached, “The Dean has preached his own funeral sermon!”
And so it proved to be. This was Donne’s last sermon. He died on March 31, 1631, at the age of 59 – less than a month after preaching this sermon. The sermon was published the next year under the title, “Death’s Duel, or, A Consolation to the Soul Against the Dying Life and Living Death of the Body” (London: Thomas Harper, 1632). It has become one of the best known sermons of the 17th century.
A Short Biography
Donne, John (1572-1631), the son of a London ironmonger and of a daughter of J. Heywood (q. v.) was, in the early part of his life, a Roman Catholic. He was secretary to T. Egerton, keeper of the great seal, from 1598-1602, but alienated his favour by a secret marriage with Ann More, niece of the lord keeper’s wife. He sailed in the two expeditions of Essex to Cadiz and to the Islands, in 1596 and 1597, an episode of which we have a reflection in his early poems “The Storm” and “The Calm.” He took Anglican orders in 1615 and preached sermons which rank among the best of the 17th century. From 1621 to his death, he was dean of St. Paul’s and frequently preached before Charles I.
In verse, he wrote satires, epistles, elegies, and miscellaneous poems, distinguished by wit, profundity of thought and erudition, passion, and subtlety, coupled with a certain roughness of form (“I sing not Syren-like to tempt; for I am harsh”). He was the greatest of the writers of “metaphysical” poetry, in which passion is interwoven with reasoning. His best-known poems are some of the miscellaneous ones: “The Ecstasie,” “Hymn to God the Father,” the sonnet to Death (“Death, be not proud”), “Go and catch a falling star,” etc. They include also a fine funeral elegy (in “Anniversaries”) on the death of Elizabeth Drury. Thomas Carew described him as
A king who ruled as he thought fit
The universal monarchy of wit
and Ben Jonson wrote of him that he was “the first poet in some things.”
A biography of Donne was written by Izaak Walton (1640). His name should be pronounced, and was frequently spelt “Dunne.” Most of his work, though known in MS in his lifetime, was not published until after his death.
From: The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Literature (Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1939), pp. 138-139.
