Anglican Commemoration
Priest & Poet
March 31 · d. 1631
also known as John Donne the Elder
John Donne, born in London in 1572 into a recusant Catholic family and dying there as Dean of St Paul's on 31 March 1631, was a poet before he was a priest and remained both. He was ordained at forty-two after refusing orders for years, preached for sixteen more, and composed his own death with the same care he gave a sonnet. The Church of England and the Episcopal Church both commemorate him on the day he died.
John Donne was born in London in 1572, into a family that had already paid for its faith. His mother, Elizabeth Heywood, was Thomas More's great-niece; her brother Jasper Heywood ran the Jesuit mission in England after Edmund Campion's death. One great-uncle died in exile for the old religion, another was executed for saying Mass. There was no baptismal record, because the family worshipped in private, as recusants did. His father, a prosperous ironmonger, died when John was about four.
He went up to Hart Hall, Oxford, at eleven or twelve, with his brother Henry, and afterwards, it is said, to Cambridge, and took a degree from neither. To graduate you had to swear the Oath of Supremacy, and a Donne could not swear it. Then in 1593 Henry was arrested for hiding a seminary priest named William Harrington. Harrington was executed. Henry died in Newgate of plague or fever, nineteen years old.
So the young man who sailed with Essex against Cádiz in 1596, and to the Azores in 1597 (where he wrote two verse letters to his friend Christopher Brooke, "The Storme" and "The Calme"), and who then became secretary to the Lord Keeper of the Great Seal with the whole state before him, was a man who already knew exactly what belief cost. He climbed fast. Then, just before Christmas in 1601, he married Anne More, seventeen years old, the niece of his employer's wife, without telling her father. Her father had him thrown into the Fleet prison along with his brother and the friend who had performed the ceremony, and had him dismissed. Egerton would not take him back. Walton hands down Donne's own summary of it, six words: "John Donne, Anne Donne, Un-done."
That was the end of the career and the beginning of the poverty. Twelve children came in sixteen years, of whom seven lived to grow up. He wrote for patrons because he had to; two long elegies for a rich man's fourteen-year-old daughter he had almost certainly never met bought his family a roof for a decade. In 1607 Thomas Morton offered him a living in the church and urged him toward ordination, and Donne said no, giving as his reason the irregularities of his life, which other people could see. He said no for eight years. It took King James, who told him flatly that he would get nothing from the crown except through the Church, to move him. He was ordained deacon and priest in January 1615 by John King, Bishop of London, at forty-two.
Anne died on 15 August 1617, five days after delivering their last child, stillborn. She was about thirty-three. He never married again.
What he became then was a preacher, and the Church of England has never had a better one. Reader in Divinity at Lincoln's Inn, where he laid the foundation stone of the chapel; Dean of St Paul's from November 1621; vicar of St Dunstan-in-the-West alongside the deanery. Late in 1623 a fever nearly killed him, and from the sickbed he wrote the Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, twenty-three meditations, expostulations and prayers, one of which contains the most quoted sentence in English devotional prose. It is not the sentiment people take it for. He is arguing from the catholicity of the church: "The church is Catholic, universal, so are all her actions… all mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language." Then: "No man is an island, entire of itself." And a little further on, the line nobody quotes: "affliction is a treasure, and scarce any man hath enough of it."
He had been preaching the grave for years. "We have a winding-sheet in our mother's womb which grows with us from our conception," he told his hearers, "and we come into the world wound up in that winding-sheet, for we come to seek a grave." So when the dying Dean of St Paul's had a wooden pedestal carved in the shape of a funeral urn, stood on it wrapped in his own winding-sheet with just enough of the cloth turned back to show his face, shut his eyes, and had a life-size drawing made of him in that posture, it was not theatre. It was the sermon, in his own body. He kept the drawing by his bed until he died.
Five weeks before the end he got up and preached at Whitehall before King Charles, on the text "And unto God the Lord belong the issues of death." Walton says that many in the congregation, seeing his tears and hearing how faint and hollow his voice had grown, said among themselves that Dr Donne had preached his own funeral sermon. It ends where he wanted to be left: "There we leave you in that blessed dependency, to hang upon him that hangs upon the cross, there bathe in his tears, there suck at his wounds, and lie down in peace in his grave, till he vouchsafe you a resurrection."
He died on 31 March 1631 and was buried in the choir of Old St Paul's. Within about eighteen months Nicholas Stone had carved the shroud figure from his drawing, and it was standing over him. In 1666 the Great Fire took the cathedral down and the shroud figure came through it, one of the very few things that did; it lay in the crypt among burnt fragments for over two centuries before it was carried back up into Wren's new church, where it stands today. The man who wrote "One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally, / And death shall be no more, death, thou shalt die" put it in stone that he meant it, and the stone outlasted the fire.
You know what Donne knew: that you are going to die, and that knowing it and living as though you knew it are two different things. He refused ordination for eight years because he could see his own life too clearly to think himself fit for it, and when he finally consented he did not become a different man, only the same man aimed differently. That is worth noticing, because most of us are waiting to be worthy before we begin. He was not, and he began anyway, and then spent sixteen years telling other people that the grave was not the end of the argument. When he came to write his own petition he did not rest it on his feeling but on God's promise: "Swear by thy self, that at my death thy Son / Shall shine as he shines now and heretofore; / And, having done that, thou hast done, / I fear no more." What would you begin this week, if you stopped waiting to deserve it?
Donne is unusual among the figures in this calendar in that the documentary base is mostly his own: a large body of poetry, roughly 160 surviving sermons, the Devotions, Pseudo-Martyr, and one autograph letter to his furious father-in-law now at the Folger Shakespeare Library, written in the immediate aftermath of the marriage crisis. Against that stands Izaak Walton's Life of Dr John Donne, first published in 1640 as the prefatory life to the folio LXXX Sermons, expanded in 1658 and again for the Lives of 1670. Walton knew him, and is the richest source for the marriage, the deathbed, the shroud portrait and several famous sayings; he also wrote frankly as moral biography, shaping his subject toward edification and organising the whole life as a movement from "Jack Donne" the young wit to "Dr Donne" the grave dean. Modern biographers, chiefly R. C. Bald and Helen Gardner, treat him as indispensable and correct him on chronology and on the conversion narrative he imposed.
Several dates in the standard chronology are less firm than they look. No baptismal register survives, so his birth is given as a range between 24 January and 19 June 1572. Walton gives only "January 1615" for the ordination; the day-specific claims are all later and uncited, 23 January being the reading of Bald's biography, though 25 January circulates. The chaplaincy to Viscount Doncaster is dated 1618 in one account and May 1619 in another, and nothing consulted resolves it. He is usually said to have become Dean of St Paul's on 22 November 1621, which the cathedral's own account calls his installation; the Latin epitaph on his monument gives 27 November for the investiture, and those five days have no explanation. That epitaph also dates his ordination to 1614, which is not a contradiction but a calendar: under the Old Style reckoning used in England until 1752 the legal year began on 25 March, so a January date we call 1615 fell, for the man cutting the stone, in 1614. The publication of Biathanatos, his early defence of self-homicide withheld in his lifetime and published by his son, is genuinely tangled: a licence dated 20 September 1644, a Stationers' Register entry in 1646, printing around 1647, and surviving title pages of both 1644 and 1648.
Two questions in his life are actively contested and should not be tidied. The first is what his conformity to the Church of England meant. He was raised in a family that suffered under the penal laws and had a brother die in Newgate for sheltering a priest, and he rose through royal and ecclesiastical patronage after a decade of desperation. A 2023 article in the Review of English Studies, "Was John Donne a Catholic?", sets out the field: some read the change as a knowing apostasy for advancement, while others argue that the period category of conformity, a spectrum rather than a switch, fits his religious identity better than any single decisive conversion event. The documents support the sequence and do not support certainty about his interior state; what they do carry is his own anxiety about exactly that question, all through the sermons and the Holy Sonnets. The second is Pseudo-Martyr (1610), in which he urged English Catholics that they might in conscience swear the Oath of Allegiance imposed after the Gunpowder Plot. It can be read as the state's argument in a convert's mouth, and it can be read, as scholarship in the journal Reformation has argued, as a careful middle position asking civil allegiance to James without demanding that anyone change churches. Both readings run from the same facts.
Donne was never canonised, and there is no cause, no relic, no shrine and no pilgrimage; the honour paid to him runs in three channels that have no continuity between them, and the distinction is worth keeping. The first is the monument. Nicholas Stone's marble figure of Donne upright in his shroud on a funerary urn, carved within about eighteen months of his death, survived the Great Fire of 1666 that destroyed the cathedral around it, lay half-forgotten in the crypt for over two centuries, and was restored to the choir of Wren's St Paul's toward the end of the nineteenth century, roughly where it had stood. It set a small English fashion for upright resurrection shroud effigies; the Slingsby monument at Knaresborough of 1633 and John Dutton's at Sherborne in Gloucestershire follow it directly.
The second is Walton's Life, which is the literary ancestor of every later commemoration. The third is the calendar. Both the Church of England and the Episcopal Church keep him on 31 March, his death day, each having arrived there by ordinary liturgical revision rather than by any act of canonisation; Common Worship names him "John Donne, Priest, Poet, 1631" and ranks the day a Commemoration, the lowest of its three ranks, and Lesser Feasts and Fasts names him "Priest and Poet, 1631." The Church of England's collect asks that our eyes be opened to see, with God's servant John Donne, "that whatever has any being is a mirror in which we may behold you." One further object carries his memory quietly: the seal he adopted late in life, Christ crucified upon an anchor, which replaced his family's sheaf of snakes. He sent copies to his dearest friends, George Herbert among them, with a poem of his own beginning "A sheaf of snakes used heretofore to be / My seal, the crest of our poor family." Another went as a bloodstone ring to Izaak Walton, and at Walton's death in 1683 it passed by bequest, inscribed "For my brother, Dr. Ken. A friend's farewell. I. W.", to his brother-in-law Thomas Ken, Bishop of Bath and Wells, who sealed nearly all his later letters and his own will with it.
The primary texts are all public domain and freely readable. The quotations from Meditation XVII, including "No man is an island, entire of itself" and "affliction is a treasure, and scarce any man hath enough of it," come from Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624), Meditation XVII of XXIII, at Wikisource (https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Devotions/Meditation_17) and in full at CCEL (https://ccel.org/ccel/donne/devotions/devotions); the Wikisource text silently modernises the 1624 spelling. The three passages from Death's Duel, the winding-sheet ("we have a winding-sheet in our mother's womb") from the first division of the argument, and the peroration ("There we leave you in that blessed dependency") from the final paragraph, together with the sermon's text, Psalm 68:20, "And unto God the Lord belong the issues of death," are taken from the CCEL edition (https://www.ccel.org/ccel/donne/deaths_duel.i.html), lightly modernised; note that an original-spelling transcription gives "purchas'd for you" where CCEL reads "prepared for you," and the reading of the 1632 printing has not been checked against a facsimile here. "One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally, / And death shall be no more, death, thou shalt die" closes the Holy Sonnet beginning "Death be not proud" (Wikisource, https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Holy_Sonnets/Holy_Sonnet_10), in original spelling. The four lines quoted in the Reflection are the close of A Hymn to God the Father, third stanza (https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_Hymn_to_God_the_Father). "John Donne, Anne Donne, Un-done" and the congregation's judgement after the last sermon are both Walton's report, in his Life of Dr John Donne (1640; expanded 1658; Lives, 1670), available at anglicanhistory.org (https://anglicanhistory.org/walton/donne.html). "A sheaf of snakes used heretofore to be / My seal, the crest of our poor family" is printed under Donne's name at Luminarium (https://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/donne/sheafsnakes.php); the inscription on the ring Walton left to Thomas Ken is given by Agnes Strickland, The Lives of the Seven Bishops (https://anglicanhistory.org/nonjurors/strickland/ken1.html), a nineteenth-century compilation drawing on Walton family papers. For the text of the poems the standard modern edition is The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne, general editor Gary A. Stringer (Indiana University Press, in progress by genre); Herbert J. C. Grierson's The Poems of John Donne (Oxford, 1912) is superseded but freely available (https://www.gutenberg.org/files/48688/48688-h/48688-h.htm). Peter Beal, Index of English Literary Manuscripts, Vol. I, Part 1 (Mansell, 1980), is the census of the manuscripts. On the epitaph and its dates, see Theresa M. DiPasquale, "Ways of Reading Donne's St Paul's Epitaph," Connotations. On the conversion question, "Was John Donne a Catholic?: Conversion, Conformity, and Early Modern English Confessional Identities," Review of English Studies 74.313 (2023). The Common Worship collect is quoted from the Church of England's calendar for 31 March; the Episcopal Church's commemoration is in Lesser Feasts and Fasts (2018).
The poetry has its own textual history, and it is a manuscript history. Donne wrote for a coterie and did not authorise print publication of his secular verse; the poems were copied by hand and recopied into commonplace books, one surviving copy made by an Oxford undergraduate in 1743, well over a century after his death. Peter Beal's Index of English Literary Manuscripts counts sixty-nine main manuscripts on the criterion of more than ten Donne poems apiece, and the count still grows. The earliest and most authoritative is the Westmoreland manuscript, in the hand of his friend Rowland Woodward and datable to roughly the first decade of the seventeenth century, now in the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library; it is close to Donne, but it is still a copy. The first collected Poems appeared posthumously in 1633, printed by Miles Flesher for John Marriot, with five further editions by 1654; his son took an editorial hand in those later editions. E. K. Chambers observed great divergence of reading between copies, and attributed it not to careless printing but to multiple authorially revised forms of the same poem circulating at once, which is the central textual fact about Donne: there is often no single original to recover. The standard modern text is the Variorum Edition under Gary A. Stringer, whose volume of the Satyres won the twelfth MLA Prize for a Scholarly Edition. One practical consequence for any reader: the Holy Sonnets carry at least three competing numbering schemes, and are best cited by first line.
Almighty God, you gave your servant John Donne special gifts of grace to understand and teach the truth revealed in Christ Jesus: Grant that by this teaching we may know you, the one true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
British (Received Pronunciation): Privatae /prɪˈvɑːtiː/; Pseudodoxia /ˌsjuːdoʊˈdɒksiə/
Readings for a Teacher of the Faith
Proverbs 3:13–26Psalm 119:89–1061 John 1:1–10Matthew 13:47–52