Read The Lady and the Poet Online
Authors: Maeve Haran
At that my hand strayed downwards until I found out what I sought. And I whispered, ‘Husband.’
And he, his eyes seeking mine, answered, ‘Wife.’
That night, our first alone when none could spy on us, nor stop us enjoying the fruits of one another’s bodies, passed like the wink of an eye and I awoke to find the sun’s rays lighting the motes of dust that danced all around us in our great curtained bed.
‘Pay no mind to the sun,’ my husband told me. ‘We went not to bed last night because it was dark, so why should we arise now because it is day?’
So we passed another hour in great delight until Wat and the innkeeper banged upon the door to tell us that our horses were ready and waited down below to carry us to Pyrford and my cousin Francis.
It was late in the day when we arrived there, each smiling and dreaming of the night before. Francis, his young wife Mary upon his arm, a babe and springer dogs playing about their feet, waited outside his timbered manor house.
IN ALL THE
time we stayed there Francis was never less than welcoming and, although our fortune was indeed a narrow one, our days at Pyrford were happy ones. The next year the Queen died after so many on the throne that many had known no other monarch than she, and with her death came the end of an era.
The Scottish king succeeded her and all scrambled for honour and position. I was truly happy that Francis was made a knight, along with the husbands of both Mary and Margaret and my brother Robert. Mary’s naughty Nick did indeed inherit a great estate and became a worthy citizen and eschewed his gambling ways. My father had a greater honour still, being made Treasurer to the Household of the Prince of Wales. And though I knew my husband envied their advancement, and sometimes sighed at the life he had lost, yet he was content for their sake.
When the new King James set out on a summer progress with his Court, his first night was spent here at Pyrford, and after that two nights with my father at nearby Loseley, where the works were finished just in time with a fine new chamber entitled the King’s Room, complete with painted ceiling in his honour.
Our beloved daughter arrived that year also.
Our life here is quiet, yet my husband fills it with study and writing letters to his many friends on divers topics of the day. At times they try to summon him back to the city and the Court, yet he says he prefers to spend his time here in the country. He even wrote to his old friend Henry Wotton that God is near him here. Perhaps it is to comfort me.
And most of all, we each have one another.
Busy old fool, unruly sun, Why dost thou thus,
Through windows, and through curtains call on us?
Must to thy motions lovers’ seasons run?
Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide
Late schoolboys and sour prentices,
Go tell court-huntsmen, that the King will ride,
Call country ants to harvest offices;
Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.
Thy beams, so reverend, and strong
Why shouldst thou think?
I could eclipse and cloud them with a wink,
But that I would not lose her sight so long:
If her eyes have not blinded thine, Look, and tomorrow late, tell me,
Whether both th’ Indias of spice and mine
Be where thou left’st them, or lie here with me.
Ask for those kings whom thou saw’st yesterday,
And thou shalt hear, All here in one bed lay.
She is all states, and all princes,
I, Nothing else is.
Princes do but play us; compared to this,
All honour’s mimic; all wealth alchemy.
Thou sun art half as happy as we,
In that the world’s contracted thus;
Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be
To warm the world, that’s done in warming us.
Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere;
This bed thy centre is, these walls, thy sphere.
‘
WE HAD NOT
one another at so cheap a rate, as that we should ever be weary of one another,’ wrote John Donne in 1614, twelve years after he and Ann were married.
Their marriage lasted fifteen years and produced twelve children, ending only when she was carried off days after a final still-birth by ‘a savage fever’ at the tragic age of thirty-three. Highly unusually for the time, John Donne never remarried, writing:
Since she whom I loved hath paid her last debt
To nature, and to hers, and my good is dead,
And her soul early into heaven ravished,
Wholly in heavenly things my mind is set.
Materially they did not have an easy time. After their marriage was declared valid Sir George More handed over his daughter with bad grace, refusing until some years later to pay any of her dowry. They survived thanks to a legacy from her aunt, swiftly granted by Lord Keeper Egerton, who seems to have forgiven more easily than Ann’s father the sins they had committed against canon law and social convention, although he did not restore Donne’s employment. Fortunately Ann’s cousin, Francis Wolley, offered them a home at Pyrford, not far from Loseley in Surrey.
Some of John Donne’s most moving poetry was almost certainly inspired by Ann, verse that was different in tone from the defiant,
sexy, occasionally misogynistic poems of his youth. The poems with Ann in mind are still witty, sensual, challenging, full of the old cleverness and enjoyment of sex, and yet there is a sense that he is sharing the experiences with another person rather than writing simply about himself.
Only with Ann does Donne seem to have achieved the longed-for union of body and soul.
One explanation is that, unlike most women of her time, Ann was ‘curiously and plentifully educated’, according to Donne’s biographer Izaak Walton.
It was while he was married to Ann that John Donne wrote ‘A Valediction Forbidding Mourning’, containing one of the greatest images ever written about a loving relationship, recognizing both the lovers’ interdependence as well as their individual differences. He imagines that he and she are ‘twin compasses’ and when one roams the other ‘hearkens after it’, growing erect as it comes home.
Such wilt thou be to me, who must
Like th’ other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just;
And makes me end, where I begun.
John Donne was both ambitious and clever and undoubtedly life away from London and the Court must have frustrated him, yet this frustration also fuelled the angry distinctiveness of his poetic voice. At times he longed for both career advancement and masculine company, yet his unusual empathy and concern for Ann are clear and constant. Theirs was no fairytale romance with an easy happy ending. Yet there was true tenderness and deep affection in their life together.
To the shock of some he took holy orders in 1615 and after Ann’s early death he did indeed focus himself on ‘Heavenly things’, eventually becoming Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral and delivering the most famous sermon in the English language: ‘No man is an island.’ He was also reconciled with Ann’s father, Sir George.
Frustratingly, no letters from or portrait of Ann survive.
It is often pointed out what John Donne gave up for Ann, yet rarely
acknowledged what she, superior in social status and financial position, willingly sacrificed for love of him.
The Lady and the Poet
, based on fact and also on imagination, tells an extraordinary and little-known love story and attempts to paint a picture, my picture, of the Ann who is absent from history.
JOHN DONNE
has been my lifelong passion but it has taken the immense help and enthusiasm of my agent, Judith Murray, and my delightful editor, Imogen Taylor of Macmillan, and Charles Spicer of St. Martin’s Press, magnificently assissted by Allison Caplin, to turn that passion into a novel.
I would like to thank the Surrey History Centre, a model of preserving local documents; the Surrey Archaeological Society for their original work on ‘George More’s Other House’; the staff at Loseley, especially Nicola Cheriton-Sutton, and of course its owners, the More-Molyneux; M. Thomas Hester for his insightful introduction to
John Donne’s Marriage Letters;
to Patricia de Vekey for first lighting the spark; Valerie Clayton, for nagging me over three years to finish the book; Professor Neil Rhodes, Director of Postgraduate Studies at the School of English of St Andrews University who directed me to the Oxford Authors edition of John Donne’s work, edited by John Carey, which attempts to publish the undated poems chronologically, and of course to John Carey’s own seminal
John Donne: Life, Mind and Art.
I greatly enjoyed listening to Donne’s love poems read erotically or abrasively (sometimes both at the same time) by the late Richard Burton and to the delightful musical collection ‘O Sweet Woods’ featuring Donne’s love songs and sonnets set to the lute by Dowland and others, which Donne himself would probably have hated.
A final thanks to my family who have become fed up with me quoting Donne on every occasion, and to my friend Carol Kelly for the gift of the seventeenth-century sampler which has found its place in the novel, and to Professor Dennis Flynn of Bentley University for reading and correcting my manuscript.
The following books have been incredibly useful in re-creating this
fascinating period: John Oglander: The Commonplace Book of Sir John Oglander; R.C. Bald:
John Donne: A Life
(OUP 1970); Hilary Spurling:
Elinor Fettiplace’s Receipt Book
(Penguin 1986); Izaak Walton:
The Life of Dr Donne Late Dean of St Paul’s, London
(written 1640, OUP 1946 edition); G.R. Elton:
England Under the Tudors
(Routledge 1977); Lytton Strachey:
Elizabeth and Essex: A Tragic History
(Chatto 1930); Anna Beer:
Bess: The Life of Lady Ralegh
(Robinson 2004); Henry Shelley:
The Inns and Taverns of Old London
(Wildside Press); Alison Sim,
The Tudor Housewife
(Sutton 2005); D.J.H. Clifford:
The Diaries of Lady Anne Clifford
(Sutton 2003); Joyce Youings:
Sixteenth-Century England
(Pelican 1984); James Shapiro:
1599
(Faber 2005); Liza Picard:
Elizabeth’s London
(Phoenix 2003); Derek Parker:
John Donne and His World
(Thames & Hudson 1975); Anne Somerset:
Ladies in Waiting from Tudors to the Present Day
(Weidenfeld 1984); John Stubbs:
Donne: The Reformed Soul
(Viking 2006); M. Thomas Hester:
John Donne’s Desire of More
(Delaware 1996); A.L. Rowse:
The England of Elizabeth
(Macmillan 1951); Malcolm Airs:
The Tudor and Jacobean Country House
(Bramley Books 1995); M. Thomas Hester, Robert Parker Sorlien & Dennis Flynn:
John Donne’s Marriage Letters
in the Folger Shakespeare Library (Folger Library 2005).