During and after his education, Donne spent much of his considerable inheritance on women, literature, pastimes, and travel. Although there is no record detailing precisely where he travelled, it is known that he visited the Continent and later fought with the Earl of Essex against the Spanish and the Azores and witnessed the loss of the Spanish flagship, the San Felipe, and her crew.
By the age of 25 he was well prepared for the diplomatic career he appeared to be seeking, during the next four years he fell in love with Egerton’s 17 year old niece, Anne More, and they were secretly married in 1601 against the wishes of both Egerton and her father, George More, Lieutenant of the Tower. This ruined his career and earned him a short stay in Fleet Prison along with the priest who married them and the man who acted as a witness to the wedding. Donne was released when the marriage was proved valid, and soon secured the release of the other two. Walton tells us that when he wrote to his wife to tell her about losing his post, he wrote after his name: John Donne, Anne Donne, Un-done. It was not until 1609 that Donne was reconciled with his father-in-law and received his wife's dowry [5].
Following his release, Donne had to accept a retired country life in Pyrford, Surrey. Over the next few years he scraped a meager living as a lawyer, depending on his wife’s cousin Sir Francis Woolly to house him, his wife, and their children. Since Anne Donne had a baby almost every year, this was a very generous gesture.
Though he practiced law and worked as an assistant pamphleteer to Thomas Morton, he was in a state of constant financial insecurity, with a growing family to provide for. Before her death, Anne bore him eleven children. The nine living were named Constance, John, George, Francis, Lucy, Bridget, Mary, Nicholas and Margaret. Francis and Mary died before they were ten. In a state of despair, Donne noted that the death of a child would mean one less mouth to feed, but he could not afford the burial expenses.
In the meantime he gave up his catholic faith and became an Anglican, and following king James1’ wish he took holy orders. In 1615 he became chaplain to the king and in 1616 was divinity readers at Lincoln’s inn, and then from 1621 to his death he was dean of St. Paul’s church’s church for ten years, during which time he wrote only religious poems and sermons and other religious writings and was quite a prominent figure both at the court and in the religious circles [5].
2. 2 John Donne’s major works
John Donne wrote love poetry and many satires and occasional poems in his youth and early manhood, and then after he took orders he wrote chiefly divine poems and a great many sermons. Most of the other poems contained either cynical comments on the inconstancy of women in love or fiery utterances of unruly passion mixed with coarse suggestions of sensual love and morbid thoughts of death. These poems were a sort of revolt to the patriarchal tradition of love poetry which had been adopted by many English poets of the late 16 century and which under the influence of Platonism idealized the women loved. on the other hand the expression of fiery passion and morbid thoughts of death in these poems found their parallel in the blood and thunder tragedies in the field of drama and was a sort of reflection of the psychological abnormally and moral degeneracy of the English courtiers of the last years of the 16century that later court of James I and then of Charles I [6].
In The Flea. His purpose is to establish his moral and intellectual mastery by refuting the mistress's reasons for keeping her virginity, and by proving the emptiness of her fears. He rolls over her protests and reaches the conclusion that the loss of maidenhood is nothing more than a fleabite. The argument of the poem begins and ends with a fleabite. The insect has bitten the lover and the mistress in turn and now contains a mixture of their bloods. Thus the flea has brought about the kind of union which the lover desires, yet without raising any moral protest from the mistress; enjoying them both with no longwinded preliminaries, and growing into a compound being as they might if the lady would yield to him. When she threatens to kill the flea, he restrains her: the insect is now them, filled with their two bloods. It is also the marriage-bed in which they were physically united, and the church in which their marriage was celebrated. Despite hostile parents and the lady's own reluctance, they have become a single being within the flea’s body [7]. Although, hardened by custom, she might think nothing of murdering part of him by killing the flea that crime would involve suicide and sacrilege; for she would also kill part of herself and destroy the marriage-temple in which they were united. But she persists in her triple crime; and having ‘purpled her nail’ in the flea’s blood she refutes his argument about murder and suicide by showing that neither of them is any weaker for having lost the particle of life supposedly sucked from them. In this momentary triumph she gives the lover the means of crushing her in a final, unanswerable demonstration by turning her own point against her. She is right, he admits and just as she lost nothing of consequence to the flea, so in surrendering to him her honor she will suffer no more than a fleabite.
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