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Chapter 5. John Donne’s Emblem of War
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102 5 John Donne’s Emblem of War Not often enough do we think of John Donne’s life as a soldier when evaluating his poetry and sermons. He did not call much attention to his military service, nor was his military service as extensive as Churchyard’s or Gascoigne’s, but a soldier he was. He is depicted in military garb in a 1591 portrait, the earliest known (figure 9).1 He joined the thousand or so ambitious young Englishmen who followed the Earl of Essex to Cadiz in 1596 and volunteered for the expedition to the Azores the following year. Some biographers have placed him in the Low Countries in the 1580s, with Francis Drake in 1589, and in the Low Countries again in the late 1590s, perhaps even as an infantry captain in the employment of the Dutch.2 While there is little evidence corroborating these latter speculations , Donne’s social circle included the most accomplished officers of the late Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, and his reputation among these influential people helped him secure positions of greater responsibility in church and state administration later in his life.3 Although he did not fashion his literary persona on his career as a soldier, Donne the soldier is an essential aspect of his literary and public careers. He drew extensively on images of war in his sermons and poems, as well as in his most famous work, Holy Sonnet 14 (“Batter my heart”). For Donne, war is, on the one hand, a consummate terror that must be avoided, but, on the other hand, a focal point for a country and its citizens, a testing ground for personal valor, and a means of learning true humility not easily replaced in peacetime or even understood outside the context of war (as the speaker in “Batter my heart” makes clear). A sense emerges that in the horror of war or the lethargy of peace human beings are equally lost and Figure 9: Engraving by William Marshall of John Donne in military garb, dated 1591. Frontispiece to the 1635 edition of The Poems. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library. [3.87.209.162] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 10:56 GMT) 104 English Mercuries that each offers the only solution to the problems embedded in the other. In this chapter I suggest that we might better understand this paradox in the context of the emblematic tradition. In that tradition, the spiritual and intellectual enrichment that proceeds from meditation upon contradictions can be its own end. Donne’s conflicted images of war thus do not provide easy answers to the questions surrounding war or peace but invite the reader to confront them and, in the process, to resist the temptation of jingoism, alarmism, pacifism, or any other moral and intellectual simplification at large during the late Elizabethan and Jacobean periods. In one sermon read some twenty years after the end of his military career, Donne calls war an “emblem, a Hieroglyphic, of all misery.”4 By the 1620s, the long and bloody wars with Spain that burdened the last half of Elizabeth’s reign were fading into memory, and Donne would seem to invoke the emblem of war to make certain his audience did not lose sight of war’s grim realities and seek involvement in the religious conflicts that were raging on the continent: I am far from giving fire to them that desire war. Peace in this world, is a precious Earnest, and a fair and lovely Type of the everlasting peace of the world to come: And war in this world, is a shrewd and fearful Emblem of everlasting discord and tumult, and torment of the world to come. (6.4.182–83) In another sermon, Donne invokes the idea of war as an emblem again, calling it an “effigy” that will make the sweetness of peace more evident by contrast: For the first temporal blessing of peace, we may consider the loveliness, the amiableness of that, if we look upon the horror and ghastliness of war: either in Effigy, in that picture of war, which is drawn in every leaf of our own Chronicles, in the blood of so many Princes, and noble families, or if we look upon war itself, at that distance where it cannot hurt us, as God had formerly kindled it amongst our neighbors, and as he hath transferred it now to remoter Nations, whilst we enjoy yet a Goshen in the midst of all...