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Alison Bumke
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i
John Donne’s Language of Disease
John Donne’s Language of Disease reveals the influence of medical know-

ledge –a rapidly changing field in early modern England –on the poetry
and prose of John Donne (1572–1631). This knowledge played a crucial
role in shaping how Donne understood his everyday experiences, and
how he conveyed those experiences in his work. Examining a wide range
of his texts through the lens of medical history, this study contends that
Donne was both a product of his period and a remarkable exception to it.
He used medical language in unexpected and striking ways that made his
ideas resonate with his original audience, and that still illuminate his ideas
for readers today.
Alison Bumke is Assistant Professor of Seventeenth-Century Literature

and Drama at the University of Nottingham.
ii
Routledge Studies in Literature and Health Humanities
Shakespearean Drama, Disability, and the Filmic Stare

Grace McCarthy
Pregnant Bodies from Shakespeare to Ford

A Phenomenology of Pregnancy in English Early Modern Drama
Katarzyna Burzyńska
Posthuman Pathogenesis
Contagion in Literature, Arts, and Media
Edited by Başak Ağın and Şafak Horzum
Health, Literature and Women in Twentieth-Century Turkey

Bodies of Exception
Şima İmşir
The Poetry of Loss

Romantic and Contemporary Elegies
Judith Harris
John Donne’s Language of Disease

Eloquent Blood
Alison Bumke
To learn more about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/

Routledge-Studies-in-Literature-and-Health-Humanities/book-
series/RSHH
iii
John Donne’s Language of

Disease
Eloquent Blood
Alison Bumke
iv
First published 2023

by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2023 Alison Bumke
The right of Alison Bumke to be identified as author of this work has been
asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised
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ISBN: 978-1-032-44877-0 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-44879-4 (pbk)
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DOI: 10.4324/9781003374305
Typeset in Sabon
by Newgen Publishing UK
v
Contents
Conventions and Notes vi
Introduction: Exploring Donne’s Dynamic Comparisons 1
PART I
1 More Than Skin Deep: Dissecting Donne’s Imagery of

Humours 23
2 Cures and Currency in Donne’s Letters to Patrons 53
3 Swollen Desires: Dropsy and Donne’s Writing 72
PART II
4 ‘We May Have Recourse’: Describing Illness in

Donne’s Devotions 93
5 ‘Sinfull Inough to Infect’: Donne’s Imagery of

Contagion 108
6 ‘Holy Perfume’: The Fragrance of Cures in Donne’s

Sermons 128
Conclusion: ‘How Lame a Picture’: Depicting the

Sick Body 145
Bibliography 149
Index 157
vi
newgenprepdf
Conventions and Notes
Citations from Donne’s sermons are to volume and page number of The
Sermons of John Donne, ed. George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson,
10 vols. (Berkeley, 1953– 1962), except for sermons included in The
Oxford Edition of the Sermons of John Donne: Volume 1: Sermons
Preached at the Jacobean Courts, 1615–1619, ed. Peter McCullough
(Oxford, 2015), and The Oxford Edition of the Sermons of John
Donne: Volume III: Sermons Preached at The Court of Charles I, ed.
David Colclough (Oxford, 2013). All citations from the sermons are
included in the footnotes.
Citations from Donne’s verse are to The Online Variorum Edition of
the Poetry of John Donne, ed. Jeffrey Johnson, Gary A. Stringer, et al.
donnevariorum.tamu.edu. Titles and line numbers are included in the
text. For the numbering of Donne’s Holy Sonnets, I rely on Divine Poems,
ed. Helen Gardner (Oxford, 2000).
Individual entries from the online editions of the Oxford English
Dictionary (OED) and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
are cited in the footnotes, with access dates, but not in the Bibliography.
All biblical citations are from The Holy Bible (London,
1611) [Authorised or ‘King James’ version], accessed via Early English
Books Online eebo.chadwyck.com, unless otherwise indicated.
Chapters 1 and 2 form the basis of my articles ‘More Than Skin
Deep: Dissecting Donne’s Imagery of Humours’ in The Review of English
Studies (September 2015) and ‘Cures and Currency in John Donne’s
Verse Letters to Patrons’ in Studies in English Literature (February 2017).
1
Introduction
Exploring Donne’s Dynamic
Comparisons
Death and disease were everywhere around Donne. In early modern

England, life expectancy at birth was only 36, and more than a quarter of
people died before reaching adulthood.1 When Donne was 19, his younger
brother Henry died of the plague during an epidemic that left London’s
‘Theaters … fill’d with emptines’ and streets ‘lancke & thin’, as Donne
wrote to a friend.2 The outbreak’s severity was devastating, but also com-
monplace: epidemics of plague occurred in London about once every
decade between 1499 and 1665, killing as many as one in five residents
during each onslaught.3 Typhus, typhoid fever, and smallpox were even
more common, and Donne himself nearly died of typhus in 1623.
Because illness was so pervasive in early modern England, there was
widespread interest in theories about identifying and treating it. Medical
language seeped into everyday conversations, widely read plague tracts,
sermons, and plays. Physicians, meanwhile, started to pay closer attention
to their patients’ experience of illness as they tried to find more effective
remedies. Their observations contributed to an evolving understanding
of the natural world that mixed empirical evidence with medieval and
Classical theories.
Donne claims that the ‘new Philosophy calls all in doubt’ in his
First Anniversary (l. 205). He is referring to the astronomer Nicolaus
Copernicus’s theory that the earth orbits the sun, which Copernicus
advanced in his book De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (Nuremberg,
1543).4 That same year, Andreas Vesalius’s De humani corporis fabrica
(Padua, 1543) was published, offering innovative theories about human
anatomy. These works both responded and contributed to changing
views of the natural world, which had an impact on medicine.5 ‘By
1550, the attempt of learned, that is university-educated, physicians to
reform English medicine was well under way, as was the printing of ver-
nacular medical books which sought to spread medical knowledge widely
amongst lay people and practitioners’, Andrew Wear argues.6 Despite the
growing accessibility of these medical texts, however, Wear stresses that
there was ‘little significant change in medical knowledge and practice
from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth century’.7 During Donne’s
lifetime, classical and medieval theories continued to inform how people
DOI: 10.4324/9781003374305-1
2
2 Introduction
understood their own physiology, as well as their bodies’ responses to
illness and cures.
The main objective of this book is to reveal the multilayered ways
in which medical knowledge shaped Donne’s thinking and writing. It
addresses a fundamental gap in our understanding of Donne’s writing
as it argues for the significance of medical metaphor in his work: for its
importance relative to the other types of metaphor he featured, and its
difference from the medical imagery found in contemporary texts. Donne
used medical language in unexpected and striking ways that made his
ideas resonate with his original audience, and that can illuminate his ideas
for readers today. Examining a wide range of his texts through the lens
of medical history, this study contends that Donne was both a product of
his period and a remarkable exception to it. More than his literary peers,
Donne used each stage of a medical process to highlight specific aspects
of his experiences, resulting in comparisons that are extraordinarily pre-
cise and vivid.
This book identifies the key concerns that motivated Donne’s
references to disease. He was interested in the body’s vulnerability at
times of illness and used this vulnerability to raise questions about how
much humans can control their fate. Only a few decades earlier, in The
Thirty-Nine Articles of 1563, the Church of England had asserted that
individuals cannot earn salvation, since God will award it randomly. In
sermons, Donne uses medical language to respond –in disparate and
sometimes contradictory ways –to his congregation’s anxieties about
whether they would be saved. In other texts, he uses medical language
to express the sense of powerlessness that pervades his writing, whether
he is describing his attempts to identify his vocation, adopt a set of reli-
gious beliefs, elicit patronage, or support his family. From this sense of
powerlessness emerged his fascination with agency –which, for Donne,
was about perceived control over one’s fate as much as actual control.
Medical analogies were a way for him to preside over, and make sense of,
his experiences of love, religion, politics, and courtly dynamics. They also
spoke to a major preoccupation of his readers and listeners. People were
fascinated with emerging medical theories because they offered a new
view of the world, but also –and perhaps more importantly –because
they offered potential cures.
The past three decades have seen a significant rise in scholarship on
early modern writing’s medical themes. Literary criticism by Pender
(2003) and Guibbory (2015) examines how Donne interpreted his fever
symptoms in his Devotions but does not discuss how his approaches
were part of wider medical trends. Likewise, Preston’s work on Thomas
Browne (2005) and Lund’s study of Robert Burton (2010) focus on one
author’s responses to medicine in his literature, instead of exploring
that author’s broader medical contexts. Scholarship in the modern-
day field of medical humanities, including texts by Brody (2003)
3
Introduction 3
and Charon (2006), analyses seventeenth- century literary accounts
of disease through the lens of current medical practices, and not as
a way to understand early modern medical culture. Sawday (1995),
Schoenfeldt (1999), and Paster (2004) trace how several seventeenth-
century authors responded to specific medical subjects, but do not ana-
lyse, as I do, the development of one author’s modes of thinking and
expression.
John Donne’s Language of Disease: Eloquent Blood opens new lines
of dialogue between literary and medical history. It is the first study to
explore the medical contexts of Donne’s entire body of work, and to
argue for the primacy of his medical metaphors relative to the other
types of metaphor he used in his writing. Each chapter begins with a case
study: a representative example of how Donne builds a metaphor with a
particular medical theory. I explore his claims that ethical behaviour is
similar to regulating bodily fluids; that flattering verse resembles alchem-
ical cures; that finding comfort after plague epidemics is like applying
medicinal balms. The focus of each chapter then expands to address
Donne’s contexts, tracing the medical theory’s origins and the role it
played in contemporary culture.
Donne acquired his medical knowledge from diverse sources, ranging
from public dissections to highly specialised textbooks. Many of the the-
ories he invokes are the type that appeared in widely read pamphlets,
shaping how people understood and responded to disease. Even if the
medical theories were commonplace, Donne’s use of them was not. After
establishing a theory’s source and contexts, each chapter provides a wide-
ranging account of how, in various texts, Donne reworked the theory to
suit specific genres and audiences.
Two distinct but related arguments propel this account. The first argu-
ment is that Donne and his poetic personas think through medical lan-
guage: they imagine abstract concepts in terms of medical processes. The
second argument is that Donne used medical theories to construct his
extended metaphors, revealing startling similarities between these the-
ories and his experiences. Whereas the first argument addresses Donne’s
thinking, the second addresses the act of crafting a comparison. Almost
as a physician would approach a patient, Donne approached medical
imagery with an exacting gaze, focusing on specific details to better illus-
trate his claims. Medical culture influenced his writing’s form as much
as its content. He mirrored the experience of illness –with its jarring
transformations and harrowing uncertainties –in the paradoxes and
contradictions for which his work is famous.
The extent to which medical knowledge shaped how Donne perceived
the world around him, and how he translated those perceptions into
writing, remains underexplored in modern criticism. This book addresses
this gap by revealing the full scope and significance of Donne’s engage-
ment with medical matters, offering new insights into his work.
4
4 Introduction
I Early Modern England’s Medical Culture

People in early modern England faced numerous health risks, ranging
from high infant mortality rates (peaking at 30 per cent in marshy south-
east England) to famine, malaria, typhus, syphilis, water-borne diseases,
and gastroenteric and respiratory infections.8 But plague, with its fre-
quent outbreaks and agonising symptoms, was especially feared. Sufferers
experienced inflamed lymph nodes, called plague sores or ‘buboes’, which
gave the bubonic plague its name. These buboes sometimes burst, causing
intense pain. Plague also caused fever, insomnia, impaired breathing and
speech, weak limbs, and vomiting.9 As the disease progressed, patients
often became delirious before dying from heart failure. The process was
horrific to witness –so much so that Thomas Brasbridge, a Church of
England clergyman, claimed that God used the plague to ‘punisheth not
so muche those, whom he taketh therby out of this life: as those that
remaine aliue’.10
Why, and how, did people get sick? The period’s explanations varied
widely, but the consensus was that God was behind all illnesses. He
wanted diseases to punish sinners and test the devout’s faith.11 God was
believed to work through secondary causes that were directly responsible
for infection. In the case of the plague, as Brasbridge explains, ‘Sinne
is a principal cause’, while the second cause is ‘an evill constellation’
and the third cause is ‘the corruption of the ayre’. Certain astrological
configurations were thought to produce expanses of putrid air, known
as miasmas, that could infect individuals. ‘The fourth cause’ was ‘the
aptnesse of mans body, through evill humors’, or imbalanced bodily
fluids, ‘to receive the effecte of a venomous aire’.12 Some individuals
were considered more prone to disease than others, as a result of their
physiology.
The bubonic plague’s actual means of infection –via fleas that have
bitten infected rats –is absent from early modern accounts of the illness.
A bacterial disease, it is still found in isolated cases, especially in the
southwestern United States. Cases were discovered, for example, in June
2017 in New Mexico, where several people have contracted the disease
in recent years.13 The disease kills 50 to 60 per cent of infected humans
when not treated quickly with antibiotics.
Plague was one of only two diseases –the other being ‘the pox’, or
syphilis –that prompted the early modern English government to inter-
vene with public health initiatives.14 Local authorities were responsible for
implementing these, since there were no national health organisations.15
London officials imposed quarantines, fired muskets to purify the air,
drained pools of putrid water, and killed stray animals thought to carry
the disease.16 However, the plague’s high mortality rate –coupled with
officials’ reluctance to visit areas deemed highly contagious –limited
the city’s ability to carry out these health measures. Decaying bodies of
plague victims were often left unburied in houses and on the streets, since
5
Introduction 5
they were considered too infectious to handle.17 Hospitals existed in small
numbers, but they were unable to accommodate the majority of infected
individuals.18 Limited public support during epidemics meant that people
tended to experience serious illnesses at home, relying on family members,
friends, or themselves for treatment. Women, in particular –and regard-
less of social class –were responsible for serving as amateur healers.19
‘In such a setting’, Andrew Wear contends, ‘it made sense for med-
ical knowledge to be accessible to laypeople as well as practitioners,
whereas today institutions such as hospitals, the state, or professional
organisations claim to assess the medical expertise and practical skill on
behalf of patients’.20 Widely circulated medical tracts outlined treatments
for plague and other illnesses that readers could apply themselves. These
pamphlets were written in English and offered an eclectic sampling of
practical advice, classical Greek theories, and religious and magical cures.
Recipes for medical treatments tended to feature inexpensive herbs and
spices that readers could easily obtain. In a tract published in 1578,
Brasbridge distinguishes his remedies from those of ‘learned men’, who
prescribe ‘many preservatives, curious, and costly: as choice of meates,
and drinkes, perfumes, … purgations by pouders, pilles, and electu-
aries [medicinal pastes]’.21 Brasbridge’s text, by contrast, is typical of the
period’s medical tracts as it claims to be designed for everyone, ‘whether
thou be rich or poore’.22
People believed that they needed to care for their soul’s health –through
prayer and repentance –before any other treatments could be effective.
‘Runne quickly and make an atonement: for there is wrath gone out from
the Lord; the Plague is begun’, the physician Stephen Bradwell urges in the
opening pages of his A watch-man for the pest (1625), published during
one of London’s worst plague years.23 After a cursory discussion of God’s
role in the current epidemic, Bradwell offers pragmatic guidelines for
avoiding infection. He shows how the period’s tracts merged popular and
learned medicine as he promises to provide advice that he has ‘collected
out of the best authors’, such as Galen and Hippocrates, and ‘moulded
into a new and most plaine method’.24
Some of the advice offered in tracts such as Bradwell’s ‘may have had
an indirect effect’, Paul Slack argues: for example, ‘airing or burning the
bedding and clothing of the infected, and burning fumigants, especially
those with an arsenic or sulphur content’, might have killed infected
fleas.25 Other tactics were less successful, such as Bradwell’s recommen-
dation to stay inside the home, with the doors and windows shut.26 Since
the rats carrying infected fleas often lived in the walls and beneath the
floors of homes, staying inside could increase a person’s risk of infection.
To meet the needs of those treating illnesses at home, there was an
expanding medical marketplace open to men and women across society.
‘There was no medical profession in seventeenth- century England’,
Lucinda McCray Beier argues, but rather an ‘open market’ where
‘providers of medical services, licensed and unlicensed, competed’.27 Only
6
6 Introduction
three types of provider were licensed: physicians, who were certified by
bishops, universities, and London’s College of Physicians; surgeons, who
were approved by bishops and universities; and midwives, who were
licensed by bishops.28 Physicians served only an elite clientele, while sur-
geons and midwives were more numerous and offered more affordable
services. The Barber-surgeons’ Company of London –which regulated
the city’s surgical practice –also hosted public dissections, making ana-
tomical knowledge accessible to a wider audience.29
Unlicensed medical providers far outnumbered licensed ones in early
modern England. These unlicensed providers ranged from university-
educated healers to charlatans, to ‘empirics’, who claimed that their
first-hand experience of treating patients was more valuable than any uni-
versity training.30 Village charmers were also in high demand. ‘Charming
is in as great request as physic, and charmers more sought unto than
physicians in time of need’, the Church of England clergyman William
Perkins observed in a 1608 treatise.31 Charmers were known as ‘magi’, or
wise men, in a reference to the Magi who attended Christ’s birth. Magical
and spiritual healing methods were often linked, with religious language
believed to possess mystical healing powers. Incantations featured Latin
text borrowed from Catholic prayers, as well as language describing
dubious religious episodes.32
Alongside charmers, practitioners of alchemy, a precursor to modern
chemistry, competed for clients. These alchemists claimed to be able
to turn base metals into a magical elixir that could cure the sick and
offer immortality. Although many, including Donne, were sceptical of
alchemists’ claims, Elizabeth I was intrigued enough to feature alchemy in
her court’s Christmas celebrations of 1594.33 In addition, some members
of London’s College of Physicians –a society founded in 1518 to regu-
late medical practice within London and its environs –endorsed the
alchemy taught by Paracelsus (c. 1493–1541), a prominent Swiss phys-
ician and philosopher. But the College condemned the form of alchemy
promoted by self-styled ‘chymical physicians’ in London’s street markets.
These vendors attempted to sell gullible customers a range of fake ‘pills,
powders, and waters promising universal, immediate, and gentle effects’.34
By contrast, the College –which was led at one stage by Donne’s
stepfather, John Syminges –endorsed humanist medicine, based on the
theories of Galen, Aristotle, and Hippocrates.35 Its founder and first presi-
dent, Thomas Linacre (c. 1460–1524), translated key Galenic texts from
Greek into Latin in the early sixteenth century, reviving interest in clas-
sical medicine.36 Linacre was aiming not to educate the general public, but
rather to make classical texts accessible to other physicians, so they could
maintain their prestige and authority within London’s medical culture.
His translations reached a wider audience than he had intended, however,
as physicians such as Sir Thomas Elyot, who had studied with Linacre,
summarised key Galenic theories in vernacular texts aimed at a general
readership.37 Elyot’s hugely influential The Castel of Health (1539) was
7
Introduction 7
responsible for making Galen’s concept of the humours –the four bodily
fluids thought to determine appearance, behaviour, and health –‘a basic
part of the intellectual make-up of Renaissance Britain’.38
Although physicians cared for primarily wealthy clients, no ‘separate
spheres’ affected the medical treatment of rich and poor, Margaret Pelling
argues. ‘Social barriers remained intact’, she writes, ‘but networks of
information about cures and practitioners ramified across divisions of
gender, age, and class’.39 Whereas medieval medicine had offered gen-
eral accounts of disease, emerging theories –based on classical texts and
the writings of Paracelsus, among others –proposed that monitoring
a patient’s symptoms could yield more accurate assessments of illness.
Paracelsus’s emphasis on empiricism ‘had something to offer all levels
of practitioner’, from privileged to impoverished.40 It empowered
people, regardless of their medical background, to rely on their own
observations to identify diseases and gauge the effectiveness of rem-
edies. Casebooks, medical tracts, letters, diaries, and literary texts show
that the growing interest in recording and interpreting symptoms was
changing how people made sense of disease.41 The emerging focus on
empiricism also reinforced the period’s general fascination with theories
about disease, which Donne took for granted when writing for various
audiences.
II Donne’s Medical Metaphors

Donne’s medical metaphors are dynamic. The theories he invokes shape
how we view a text’s themes, even as those themes inform how we see
the medical theories. Some of this dynamism might be inevitable. ‘Any
society’s understanding and management of its sick bodies is constituted
within a network of competing beliefs and interests’, Margaret Healy
writes, noting that ‘this is a two-way process, and perceptions of sick
bodies can influence the way we imagine and order social structures too’.42
The Princeton Encyclopaedia of Poetics goes further, suggesting that the
‘two-way process’ Healy describes is not limited to metaphors about dis-
ease. Any metaphor’s ‘tenor’ and ‘vehicle’ –the thing being compared
and the thing to which it is compared, according to I.A. Richards’s ter-
minology –can be seen as ‘invok[ing] a transaction between words and
things, after which the words, things, and thoughts are not quite the
same’.43
Donne was particularly alert to his metaphors’ verbal transactions. ‘In
Donne’s lyric poetry, which argues through images’, Achsah Guibbory
writes, ‘the vehicle of the metaphor is important. It is never discarded
or diminished but leads to and is in turn illuminated by the tenor of the
figure’.44 Donne’s comparisons support Aristotle’s claim, in his Rhetoric,
that metaphors can expand knowledge and ‘give names to things that
have none’.45 At the same time, Donne’s analogies are often ‘far-fetched’ –
something Aristotle explicitly discourages –in the sense that they compare
8
8 Introduction
seemingly disparate things.46 This tendency prompted Samuel Johnson to
call Donne’s poetry ‘metaphysical’, a derogative term referring to how
‘the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together’ in his
work.47
Donne was not, of course, the only writer in early modern England
making ‘far-fetched’ comparisons. ‘Menne counte it a poynte of witte to
passe ouer suche wordes as are at hande, and to vse suche as are farre
fetcht and translated’, Thomas Wilson writes in The Arte of Rhetorique
(1553).48 The period’s rhetorical manuals offer a range of views on the
function of metaphors, in particular. The term ‘metaphor’, which derives
from the Greek words ‘meta’ (beyond, over) and ‘pherein’ (to carry),
refers literally to transporting or translating words from one context
to another.49 It ‘is a kinde of wresting of a single word from his owne
right signification’, George Puttenham writes in The Arte of English
Poesie (1589), ‘to another not so natural, but yet of some affinitie or
conueniencie with it, … it is called by metaphore, or the figure of trans-
port’.50 The resulting comparison, made by referring to one thing as
another, can be purely a ‘poynte of witte’; alternatively, it can be more
expressive than a direct description. In the latter case, ‘The hearer …
thinketh more by remembraunce of a word translated, then is there
expreslye spoken’, as Wilson argues. Henry Peacham offers a similar
distinction between the various uses of metaphors. They can ‘give light’
and be ‘well remembered’, ‘move affections’ and ‘perswade’, or merely
be ‘pleasant’.51
How ‘farre fetcht’ can comparisons be before they become ostenta-
tious –or ‘conceited in more ways than one’, as Katrin Ettenhuber puns –
rather than expressive?52 Rhetorical manuals distinguish sharply between
illustrative and merely showy types of comparison. When there is a ‘just
correspondence’ between the things being compared, Puttenham notes,
‘The Greekes call it Analogie or a conuenient proportion’, and it is ‘that
which the Latines call decorum’.53 This type of trope is ‘lovely’, revealing
the inherent ‘comelynesse’ of the comparison.54 While Puttenham frames
this ideal in the language of good taste and propriety, Peacham’s own
description focuses on purity. ‘The similitude [must] be not farre fetched,
as from strange things vnkowne to the hearer’, he writes, echoing Wilson;
additionally, it must not be ‘uncleane or unchaste’.55
Donne exploits ‘uncleane’ images in his writing, selecting those –such
as dropsy –that will shock and disgust his readers, so he can advance a
particular moral or pastoral message. Such metaphors are still acceptable
to Quintilian, who contends that a trope is ‘improper’ only when inef-
fective: when it is not necessary, or when it fails to express a meaning
better than non-metaphoric language.56 Quintilian argues, like Aristotle,
that metaphor used properly can ‘supply its [language’s] deficiencies, and
(hardest task of all) it ensures that nothing goes without a name’.57 Donne
is particularly adept at supplying language’s deficiencies when it comes
to illustrating processes. He focuses in analogies on the mechanism of
9
Introduction 9
medical concepts: on how different elements work together to achieve a
certain outcome.
Illness lends itself to the type of metaphoric thinking in which Donne
specialises. Against society’s tendency to view disease through analo-
gies, Susan Sontag stresses ‘that illness is not a metaphor, and that the
most truthful way of regarding illness –and the healthiest way of being
ill –is one most purified of, most resistant to, metaphoric thinking’.58
Donne’s writing demonstrates, however, that metaphors about disease
are not necessarily reductive. He draws attention to how figurative lan-
guage can open up new ways of viewing both society and illness. ‘It is
but a homely Metaphor, but it is a wholesome, and a usefull one’, he
writes in his sermon on Psalm 32:5 –which I discuss in Chapter 5 –as he
introduces the idea that confession is like a type of medicinal vomiting.59
He is fascinated by methods: by the method of crafting comparisons,
and of reading and interpreting them. Both reflect his interest in trying to
order and make sense of what he observes and experiences.
Donne was aware that his analogies’ medical ideas could elicit strong
emotional responses. Sontag argues that, when she was writing in the
1970s, people viewed cancer as ‘obscene’, while ‘cardiac disease implies a
weakness, trouble, failure that is mechanical; there is no disgrace, nothing
of the taboo that once surrounded peoples afflicted with TB and still
surrounds those who have cancer’.60 Early modern readers were equally
sensitive to medical conditions’ cultural connotations. They would have
associated dropsy with drunkenness, good hygiene with responsible con-
duct, and contagion with corruption, to name a few of the multilayered
responses to such conditions. Donne was aware also that medical theories
could express differing attitudes towards human agency. A purge –which
requires that a person wait patiently while the medicine takes its course –
imbues that person with less agency than, for example, a medical regimen
requiring constant vigilance. Finally, Donne was aware of how the indi-
vidual reader participates in a metaphor’s ‘transaction[s]‌’.61 He tailors his
medical imagery to his audience, offering more sophisticated theories for
more learned readers.
The various relationships that Donne’s metaphors express –between a
text’s themes and specific medical ideas, cultural connotations, attitudes,
and readers –do not lend themselves to paraphrasing. Rather than
making explicit how a text’s subject matter interacts with a medical
theory, Donne shows us the details so we can draw out the complex
interactions between them, through the process of reading.
III Donne, Robert Burton, and Thomas Browne

This book is part of a larger shift towards reading literary and medical his-
tory alongside each other. In recent years, critics have sought to trace the
intersections of literary and medical language in early modern England.
Irma Taavitsainen and Päivi Pahta (2011) look closely at early modern
01
10 Introduction
medical diagnoses and treatment prescriptions, noting how physicians
relied on non-medical language to describe a patient’s ailments.62 David
Shuttleton (2012) argues similarly that in the early modern period, ‘pro-
fessional medical commentators often employed self-consciously poetic
language’.63 The overlapping of medical and poetic vocabularies points
to the ‘intimate link between poetics and therapeutics’, which were ‘not
distinct categories of knowledge’ but rather a ‘continuum of explan-
ation’ for comprehending the horrific, everyday reality of epidemics
and pandemics.64 Early modern physicians were often poets, Shuttleton
observes. Rhetoric, too, played a role in the period’s medical language.
Even Thomas Sprat’s ‘supposedly “anti- rhetorical”, “anti-poetic” ’
History of the Royal Society (1667) relies, inevitably, on rhetorical
devices, such as the simile he uses to compare his depiction of science
to how ‘the noblest Buildings are first wont to be represented in a few
Shadows, or small Models’.65
The exchange went the other way, also, with literary writers such as
Milton, Shakespeare, and Margaret Cavendish using scientific analogies
in their work. Recent criticism has addressed this trend, as well. Joad
Raymond (2010) notes that ‘critics have debated Milton’s familiarity
with seventeenth-century natural philosophy and astronomy, suggesting,
for example, that Paradise Lost articulates sympathy for the “old” –or
medieval –“science” ’.66 Roberta Mullini (2013) focuses on Shakespeare’s
‘skill in transforming –rather than inventing –old popular [medical]
terms’.67 Shakespeare’s medical terms could fill a book, as Sujata Iyengar
(2011) has shown with her dictionary dedicated to them. Recent work
by Bronwen Price (1996) and Elizabeth A. Spiller (2000; 2004) traces
how Margaret Cavendish’s interest in contemporary science informed her
writing as much as her thinking.68
But Donne’s approach to forming medical analogies differs from that
of his contemporaries. The brief case study that follows will compare
his writing with that of Robert Burton and Thomas Browne. Burton,
the author of The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), was Donne’s con-
temporary; Browne came slightly later, with a pirated version of his first
major work, Religio Medici, published in 1642. Critics have observed
how the period’s medical knowledge informed both authors’ literary
styles and themes.69 More than either, however, Donne is interested in
featuring each stage of a medical process in his analogies. Rather than
making a quick comparison and moving on, he tends to deepen his med-
ical metaphors, drawing out the various ways that tenor and vehicle can
shed light on each other.
Both Burton and Donne were scholars and self- described
melancholics –two things that often went hand in hand, as Burton
would argue –living in London in the 1620s.70 Both were dedicated,
also, to the pastoral responsibilities of their respective careers as med-
ical writer and preacher.71 They were talented prose writers: although
Burton’s Anatomy is partly a ‘self-help’ book offering practical medical
1
Introduction 11
advice, it is also an accomplished literary text, as Mary Ann Lund
argues.72 Unlike Browne, a physician trained in medicine into his late
twenties, neither Donne nor Burton received a formal medical educa-
tion.73 When writing his Anatomy, Burton relied on ‘the wide-ranging,
though not well-organised, course of reading which he states he had
followed’, on the basis of which he ‘was competing for recognition as a
serious scholar’.74 However, Burton and Donne were addressing different
types of audience in the 1620s. As Dean of St Paul’s, Donne tailored
his sermons to a diverse congregation with ranging levels of education.
Burton was interested in appealing to a more specialised, learned reader-
ship. He claims –perhaps apocryphally, as Lund notes –that he would
have written his Anatomy in Latin instead of English, had he found a
publisher for the Latin version.75
In terms of this book’s focus, Burton and Donne diverge most signifi-
cantly in their respective approaches to medical analogies. In a chapter
on cures for despair in his Anatomy, Burton introduces the familiar idea
that repentance is a cure for sinning:
Repentance is a sovereign remedy for all sins, a spiritual wing to

erear us, a charm for our miseries, a protecting amulet to expel sin’s
venom, an attractive loadstone to draw God’s mercy and graces
upon us.76
Burton offers a list to describe repentance, merging religious, medical,

magical, and metallurgical imagery. Repentance is ‘sovereign’, or God-
sent;77 it is also a medical ‘remedy’, an ‘amulet’ worn as a magical charm
against evil,78 and a ‘loadstone’ made of the magnetic oxide of iron.79
Rather than developing any one of these ideas, Burton mentions each only
briefly, perhaps in an attempt to convey the magnitude of his subject.
Sophie Read –writing about the method of describing a scent by listing
its attributes –notes that ‘the illusion of comprehensiveness generated by
the list fast gives way to a sense of its terminal incompleteness’.80 That
might be part of Burton’s goal here. In offering a range of metaphors, he
highlights the impossibility of conveying the complex relationship between
repentance and God’s mercy. For readers, however, it means that his ana-
logy does not particularly elucidate any one part of that relationship.
Donne takes a different approach in the following passage from his
first sermon on 1 Corinthians 15:29, which he delivered soon after
London’s 1625 plague epidemic. He offers a more extended metaphor
for repentance:
So the Lord of heaven, … may have smelt from us the savour of

medicinall hearbes, of Remorse, and Repentance, and Contrition,
and Detestation of former sins, And the savour of odoriferous, and
fragrant, and aromaticall hearbes, works worthy of Repentance,
amendment of life, edification of others, and zeale to his glory, …81
21
12 Introduction
Donne views repentance, and the imagery that figures it, as relational –
‘the Lord … smelt from us’ –whereas Burton depicts it as essentially a
private process. The remedies Burton lists are designed to ‘draw God’s
mercy and graces upon us’, but God remains distant as we apply them.
In Donne’s analogy, by contrast, God monitors the process of repenting,
diagnosing the state of our spiritual health. I will discuss Donne’s quota-
tion in detail in Chapter 6, which explores his imagery of smells and
smelling in his post-epidemic sermons. I present it here to highlight a
characteristic feature of his writing: his tendency to break down a med-
ical concept into its constituent parts, to consider how each operates.
Donne alludes in this passage to the contemporary belief that the fra-
grance of spices could fill the nasal passages, preventing contagion from
entering the body through the nostrils. His analogy first breaks down
these fragrances into two types: medicinal and sweet. He next uses these
two types to distinguish between acts of repentance and acts ‘worthy’
of repentance. The former is merely curative, while the latter signals a
more profound change: an ‘amendment of life’. Moreover, its pleasing
fragrance can draw others to piety, in a metaphor for ‘edification’. Donne
uses medical language to make the concept of repentance as vivid as the
various scents –of spiced pomanders and decaying corpses –associated
with a plague epidemic.
Donne’s characteristic interest in the mechanism of medical theories
can be seen also in the following comparison between his writing and
Browne’s. The prose styles of Donne and Browne are similar enough that
critics have sought to distinguish them. Coleridge argues that Religio
Medici should be ‘considered as in a dramatic & not a metaphysical
View’, arguing that Browne is interested more in adopting various dra-
matic personae than in crafting Donne’s type of extended analogy.82
Subsequent readers have recognised more similarities in the two authors’
writing styles. Browne ‘shares with Donne the tendency surprisingly to
juxtapose heterogeneous ideas’, C.A. Patrides writes, although he notes
that ‘Browne is manifestly not Donne’. Still, he adds, ‘Browne is like
Donne –as Donne is like Milton and Marvell –exceedingly partial to
dramatic literature which, they all judged, best externalises not positive
truth but truth in its several concurrent manifestations internal to one
and the same mind’.83 Preston observes likewise that, in Browne’s Religio
Medici, ‘there is more than a little of the self-dramatising’, ‘like Donne’s
various poses in undone lover’s laces or winding-sheet, or Burton’s vocal
antics and histrionic attitudes’.84
The excerpt that follows, from Religio Medici, shows Browne using
medical imagery similar to that of a Donne sermon. Browne fears that,
unlike poisons, the corruption within him –original sin –contains no
antidote:
I ground upon experience, that poysons containe within them-

selves their owne Antidote, and that which preserves them from the
31
Introduction 13
venom of themselves; without which they were not deletorious to
others onely, but to themselves also. But it is the corruption that
I feare within me, not the contagion of commerce without me. ’Tis
that unruly regiment within me that will destroy me, ’tis I that doe
infect my selfe, … I feele that originall canker corrode and devoure
me, ... .85
Browne offers a dynamic comparison: he refers to society’s ‘contagion’

and to the body’s ‘corruption’, using medical language to describe a social
phenomenon and vice versa. In a sermon on Psalm 32.5 that he delivered
in early 1626 at St Paul’s, Donne draws a similar distinction between the
external and internal ailments as he discusses original sin:
Depart from me, O Lord, for I am sinfull inough to infect thee; …

Depart, in withholding thy Sacrament, for I am leprous inough to
taint thy flesh, and to make the balme of thy blood, poyson to my
soule; … I must not be alone with my selfe; for I am as apt to take,
as to give infection; I am a reciprocall plague; passively and actively
contagious; I breath corruption, and breath it upon my selfe; … . 86
The two excerpts’ similarities are striking. Both Donne and Browne high-
light poison’s mutability: Browne notes that it can contain something
curative, while Donne argues that a healing treatment –a ‘balme’ –can
become poisonous. Both present, as well, the idea that spiritual sickness
can be transferred, contagion- like, between individuals, and that the
speaker is infecting himself. The two passages even have similar parallel
syntax (for example, ‘within me, … without me’ in Browne’s case, and
‘for I am sinfull inough … for I am leprous inough’ in Donne’s).
Donne is more precise than Browne, however, in describing the mech-
anism of the medical theory he invokes. He uses the idea that humans
inhale contagion to discuss how he both catches and transmits his soul’s
infection. In Chapter 5 of this book –which will discuss Donne’s quotation
above more fully –I argue that he is interested in the process by which the
soul becomes corrupted, and not just the fact of its corruption. To that
end, his analogies tend to focus on one medical theme or theory, rather
than several. In the passage above, for example, each medical image –
of leprosy, poison, corruption, infection, plague –relates to the theme
of contagious disease.87 Even the healing treatment Donne mentions, a
balm, is the type suited to treating the sores left by a contagious disease,
such as leprosy or the plague. Browne, meanwhile, introduces the idea
that poisons contain antidotes before moving quickly to the fact that he
is infected with original sin, and finishing with a reference to cankers, a
type of chronic, non-healing ulcer.88 If Donne had started with the same
premise, he might have proposed that the soul, too, has an innate remedy.
He does this, in fact, in his sermon on Psalm 6:2-3, a text I discuss in
Chapter 6.89
41
14 Introduction
This example of Browne’s medical imagery is not necessarily repre-
sentative. Preston argues that Religio Medici is a somewhat experi-
mental work, trying out different styles and tones.90 Even so, the excerpt
highlights a key element of Donne’s medical imagery: his fascination with
the details of medical theories, and with how those details might reveal
the soul’s operations. This is a recurring feature of his sermons, but it
predates his preaching career. It is something that runs through his entire
body of writing, as I will argue in this book.
IV Reading Donne’s Medical Language

Most scholarly discussions of Donne’s medical contexts have centred on
his Devotions (1624). These studies tend to focus on the text’s religious
and political implications, rather than on Donne’s medical language as
he describes his experience of typhus. Murray Arndt reads the Devotions
as ‘an instructive paradigm of his [Donne’s] lifelong failure to resolve
some wrenching inner pain’, building on John Carey’s argument that
Donne’s ‘betrayed’ Catholicism defined his works.91 Other critics seek in
the Devotions proof of either Jesuit or Anglican influences on Donne’s
personal theology. Mary Arshagouni Papazian argues, for example, that
Donne presents the speaker in the Devotions as ‘elect from the begin-
ning’, rather than ‘an Everyman who undergoes an experience common
to all mankind’. Recognising the speaker’s special status sheds light on
‘the overall focus and movement of the work, the unusual open-ended
conclusion, and the nature of Donne’s self-presentation’.92
An exception to this tendency to focus on the religious implications
of Donne’s Devotions is Stephen Pender’s chapter in David Colclough’s
John Donne’s Professional Lives (2003). ‘Rarely has the Devotions been
examined for Donne’s attitudes towards medical thought’, Pender argues.93
For Donne, medical thought ‘encompassed clinical practice, therapeutics,
anatomy, surgery, and hygiene’, and each of these categories offered a
distinctive way to ‘read’ the body and its ailments. However, Pender’s
analysis addresses only the Devotions. Medical readings of Donne rarely
examine his other texts, except in multiple- author contexts, such as
Jonathan Sawday’s study of literary responses to medical dissections.94
This is true of most of the period’s writers: there remain few sustained
studies of a single author’s contributions to literary-medical writing.
Donne’s work calls for this type of study. As I explore his medical
imagery, I consider his reasons for using it, its meaning for contemporary
readers, and its originality. His passages featuring scientific language are
notable for their eloquence as much as their arguments. As Schoenfeldt
observes of Donne’s verse, ‘Other writers of the time were of course
exposed to the same physiological embodiment of intellect and emotion,
but with far less spectacular aesthetic results, so it cannot be the physi-
ology alone that produces Donne’s remarkable regeneration of English
verse’.95
51
Introduction 15
This book’s chapters are grouped into two parts, organised by genre
and chronology. The first part focuses on Donne’s verse letters and holy
sonnets that he wrote between the early 1590s and mid-1610s.96 Medical
language instructs patrons and illustrates speakers’ dilemmas in these
works, in ways that anticipate his sermons’ longer medical analogies. The
second half of the book focuses on texts Donne wrote soon after his crit-
ical illness in 1624 and London’s outbreak of plague in 1625. Comparing
these texts with Donne’s earlier writing, this section argues that Donne’s
medical language evolved during the mid-1620s, becoming more detailed
and more graphic in response to his own sickness and his congregation’s
suffering. In these texts, Donne embraces his role as ‘minister’ to his con-
gregation, a term he uses in a medical sense as much as a religious one.97
He tells his congregation that, as Dean of St Paul’s, his role is to admin-
ister God’s spiritual cures.98 His sermons use precise medical terms to
demonstrate how his listeners can improve their souls’ health, offering an
inclusive and reassuring message of salvation.99
Both parts of the book return often to the love poems Donne wrote
in the 1590s and 1600s, which were published posthumously in 1633.
Many of his recurring medical images –of contagious odours, dropsical
swelling, and alchemical cures –make their first appearance in these
poems, playfully proving his speakers’ claims. These images tend to be
fleeting, in contrast with the more systematic analogies of his later works.
Still, reading Donne’s early verse in conversation with his later texts
reveals how these poems identified themes and questions that he would
revisit later, in more extended comparisons. Achsah Guibbory’s recent
article on Donne’s ‘relatively understudied libertine amatory poems’
argues that these poems ‘defined problems of religious freedom –the dif-
ficulty of faith, skepticism about religious institutions and dogma, the
search for true religion –that would trouble Donne throughout his life,
even as his situation and the English church changed’.100 To illustrate
these problems, Donne draws on medical images and concepts that high-
light humans’ limited ability to control their fate.
Notes
1 Andrew Wear, Knowledge and Practice in English Medicine, 1550– 1680
(Cambridge, 2000), 12.
2 R.C. Bald, John Donne: A Life (Oxford, 1970), 58; Donne, ‘To Mr E. G.’,
ll. 8, 9.
3 Paul Slack, The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England (London,
1985), 14–16.
4 Donne also refers to ‘the new philosophy’ in a verse letter to his patron Lucy
Russell (‘T’have written then’, l. 37) and in five sermons that Robin Robbins
identifies in his edition of Donne’s poetry (707 n).
5 Wear notes that Thomas Geminus’s shortened version of Vesalius’s text was
printed in London in 1545, with a reprinting in 1552; see Wear, 41.
6 Wear, 4–5.
61
16 Introduction
7 Wear, 4.
8 Wear, 13–5.
9 Thomas Brasbridge, The poore mans jewel, that is to say, A treatise of the
pestilence (London, 1578), sig. C4r-v.
10 Brasbridge, sig. A5r.
11 David Harley, ‘Spiritual Physic, Providence and English Medicine, 1560–
1640’, in Ole Peter Grell and Andrew Cunningham (eds.), Medicine and the
Reformation (London, 1993), 101.
12 Brasbridge, sig. A5r.
13 Liam Stack, ‘Plague is Found in New Mexico. Again’ in The New York Times
(pubd 27 June 2017) https://nyti.ms/2ti9aOy accessed 8 September 2017.
14 Wear, 16–7.
15 Wear, 25.
16 Stephen Bradwell, A watch-man for the pest (London, 1625), sig. B4r-v.
17 Holly Dugan, The Ephemeral History of Perfume: Scent and Sense in Early
Modern England (Baltimore, 2011), 97.
18 Slack, 152.
19 Lucinda McCray Beier, Sufferers and Healers: The Experience of Illness in
Seventeenth-Century England (London, 1987), 5.
20 Wear, 25.
21 Brasbridge, sig. C3r.
22 Brasbridge, sig. A3v.
23 Bradwell, sig. A4r.
24 Bradwell, sig. A1r.
25 Slack, 35.
26 Bradwell, sig. B3v.
27 Beier, 4–5.
28 Beier, 8–9.
29 Beier, 14.
30 Beier, 19.
31 William Perkins, A Discourse of the Damned Art of Witchcraft (Cambridge,
1608), 153.
32 For a discussion of the role of religious language in healing charms, see Keith
Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (Harmondsworth, 1971).
33 Margaret Healy, Shakespeare, Alchemy, and the Creative Imagination
34 Lauren Kassell, ‘Magic, Alchemy and the Medical Economy in Early Modern
England: The Case of Robert Fludd’s Magnetical Medicine’, in Mark S.R.
Jenner and Patrick Wallis (eds.), Medicine and the Market in England and its
Colonies, c. 1450–c. 1850 (New York, 2007), 90.
35 Bald, 37.
36 Vivian Nutton, ‘Linacre, Thomas (c.1460–1524)’, in The Oxford Dictionary
of National Biography www.oxforddnb.com accessed 6 October 2017.
37 Stanford Lehmberg, ‘Elyot, Sir Thomas (c.1490–1546)’, in The Oxford
Dictionary of National Biography www.oxforddnb.com accessed 5
October 2017.
38 Ibid.
39 Margaret Pelling, The Common Lot: Sickness, Medical Occupations and the
Urban Poor in Early Modern England (New York, 2013), 1.
40 Pelling, 34.
71
Introduction 17
41 Nancy Siraisi, History, Medicine, and the Traditions of Renaissance Learning
(Ann Arbor, 2007), 5–7.
42 Margaret Healy, Fictions of Disease in Early Modern England (Basingstoke,
2001), 3.
43 Alex Preminger and Terry Brogan (eds.), The Princeton Encyclopedia of
Poetry and Poetics (Princeton, 1993), 761.
44 Achsah Guibbory, Returning to John Donne (Farnham, 2015), 10.
45 Aristotle, The Art of Rhetoric, tr. John Henry Freese (London, 1959), 359.
46 ‘Metaphors must not be far-fetched’, Aristotle writes (ibid.).
47 Samuel Johnson, The Lives of the Poets: A Selection, ed. Roger Lonsdale
(Oxford, 2009), 16. This quote is hugely famous but poorly understood,
as Katrin Ettenhuber notes; see Ettenhuber, ‘ “Comparisons Are Odious”?
Revisiting the Metaphysical Conceit in Donne’, RES, 62 (2010), 398.
48 Thomas Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique (London, 1553), sig. Z3r.
49 ‘metaphor’, n., in OED Online www.oed.com accessed 29 September 2014.
50 George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (London, 1589), 148.
51 Henry Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence, 2nd ed. (London, 1593), sig. D3r.
52 Ettenhuber, ‘Revisiting the Metaphysical Conceit’, 395.
53 Puttenham, 219–20.
54 Ibid.
55 Peacham, sig. D4v.
56 Quintilian, The Orator’s Education, tr. Donald A Russell (London, 2001),
Book 8.6, 427–9.
57 Quintilian, Book 8.6, 426. Brian Cummings notes that Quintilian is open
‘to ways in which “proper” and “non-proper” forms of meaning are hard
to distinguish’; see Cummings, ‘Metalepsis: the boundaries of metaphor’ in
Sylvia Adamson, Gavin Alexander, and Katrin Ettenhuber (eds.), Renaissance
Figures of Speech (Cambridge, 2008), 226.
58 Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors (London,
2002), 3.
59 Sermons, 9, 304.
60 Sontag, 9.
61 Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 761.
62 Irma Taavitsainen and Päivi Pahta (eds), Medical Writing in Early Modern
England (Cambridge, 2011).
63 David Shuttleton, Smallpox and the Literary Imagination, 1660– 1820
64 Shuttleton, 12.
65 Sprat claimed to prefer ‘Mathematical plainness’ and ‘naked speech’; see
Juliet Cummins and David Burchell (eds.), Science, Literature and Rhetoric in
Early Modern England (Aldershot, 2007), 106. For Sprat’s simile, see Thomas
Sprat, The History of the Royal-Society of London (London, 1667), 2.
66 Joad Raymond, Milton’s Angels: The Early-Modern Imagination (Oxford,
2010), 278.
67 Roberta Mullini, ‘Shakespeare and the Words of Early Modern Physic: Between
Academic and Popular Medicine’, Journal of Early Modern Studies, 2
(2013), 63.
68 See Bronwen Price, ‘Feminine Modes of Knowing and Scientific
Enquiry: Margaret Cavendish’s Poetry as Case Study’, in Helen Wilcox (ed.),
Women and Literature in Britain, 1500–1700 (Cambridge, 1996), 17–139;
81
18 Introduction
Elizabeth A. Spiller, Science, Reading, and Renaissance Literature: The Art
of Making Knowledge, 1580–1670 (Cambridge, 2004); and Spiller, ‘Reading
through Galileo’s Telescope: Margaret Cavendish and the Experience of
Reading’, Renaissance Quarterly 53 (2000), 192–221.
69 Mary Ann Lund, Melancholy, Medicine, and Religion in Early Modern
England (Cambridge, 2010), 86; Claire Preston, Thomas Browne and the
Writing of Early Modern Science (Cambridge, 2005), 2.
70 In his Anatomy, Burton presents himself as a ‘melancholic amongst
melancholics’, Lund writes (150). Donne notes in his Devotions (1624) that
his physicians have blamed his disease in part on his melancholy: ‘They tell
me it is my Melancholy: Did I infuse, did I drinke in Melancholly into my
selfe? It is my thoughtfulnesse; was I not made to thinke? It is my study; doth
not my Calling call for that?’ (63).
71 Lund, 150; Janel Mueller (ed.), Donne’s Prebend Sermons (Cambridge,
1971), 2.
72 Lund, 96.
73 Preston, 43.
74 John Bamborough, ‘Burton, Robert (1577–1640)’, in The Oxford Dictionary
of National Biography www.oxforddnb.com accessed 30 June 2015.
75 Lund writes, ‘Burton is deliberately following a tradition of vernacular
medical publication while at the same time aligning himself with the pro-
fessional physicians who publish only in Latin. Burton does not wish to
divulge “secreta Minervae” (I, 16), whereas writers like [Sir Thomas] Elyot
pride themselves on their openness, suggesting that medicine is wrongly kept
inaccessible through the use of the classical languages’ (89).
76 Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Holbrook Jackson
(New York, 2001), 413.
77 ‘sovereign’, n., A.1.a., in OED Online www.oed.com accessed 30 June 2015.
78 ‘amulet’, n., 1, in OED Online www.oed.com accessed 27 June 2015.
79 ‘loadstone | lodestone’, n., 1, in OED Online www.oed.com accessed 27
June 2015.
80 Sophie Read, ‘Ambergris and Early Modern Languages of Scent’, The
Seventeenth Century, 28 (2013), 225.
81 Sermons, 7, 109–110.
82 Preston, 47.
83 Sir Thomas Browne: The Major Works, ed. C.A. Patrides (London, 2006), 48.
84 Preston, 47.
85 Browne: The Major Works, 152.
86 Sermons, 9, 310–11.
87 Poison was a common term for contagion in the period’s medical tracts;
see, for example, Thomas Lodge, A treatise of the plague (London, 1603),
sig. B2V.
88 ‘canker’, n., in OED Online www.oed.com accessed 29 June 2015.
89 Sermons, 5, 348– 9. Browne also mentions the Paracelsian notion of
‘balsamum’ in the passage I cite above, but he does not develop it in such
detail; see Browne: The Major Works, 151–2.
90 Preston, 2.
91 Murray Arndt, ‘Distance on the Look of Death’, Literature and Medicine, 9
(1990), 38–49.
91
Introduction 19
92 Mary Arshagouni Papazian, ‘Donne, Election, and the Devotions upon
Emergent Occasions’, in Huntington Library Quarterly, 55 (1992), 603–19.
By contrast, Gerald H. Cox suggests that the three-part sequence of medita-
tion in the Devotions ‘is an example of what ‘Louis Martz considers char-
acteristic of a “formal meditation” used by writers outside the Jesuit order’,
which Donne has ‘reshaped … to serve his own strategic intention’. Reinhard
Friederich claims that the Devotions is marked by ‘vivid immediacy and a
closely circumscribed sense of place’, and this claustrophobia is more central
to the work than Jesuit influences. The speaker in the Devotions generalises,
‘but what happens does happen to him alone’, and ‘the forced intimacy with
himself makes him discover his bewildering separation from others’.
93 Pender, ‘Essaying the Body’, 217–8. Pender’s doctoral dissertation explores
more of Donne’s work, focusing on Donne’s hermeneutics. Pender argues
that ‘medical thought provides Donne with a ground on which to build an
understanding of textual interpretation’. I will discuss this idea in more depth
in Chapter 4. See Pender, Somiotics: Rhetoric, Medicine, and Hermeneutics
in John Donne (unpublished doctoral dissertation; Toronto, 2000), ii.
94 Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body
in Renaissance Culture (London, 1995).
95 Schoenfeldt, 149.
96 I rely on Robbins’s dating for these texts.
97 ‘minister’, v., 8, 2b., in OED Online www.oed.com accessed 30 June 2015.
98 Sermons, 5, 350.
99 Critics including Achsah Guibbory, Peter McCullough, and David Colclough
have attributed these later sermons’ inclusive message of salvation to various
factors, ranging from Donne’s illness to his pastoral role as Dean of St
Paul’s, to his increasingly anti-Calvinist theology. For an overview of these
critical views, see Guibbory, ‘Reconsidering Donne: From Libertine Poetry
to Arminian Sermons’, Studies in Philology, 114 (2017), 586–7. I will argue
in Chapters 5 and 6 that London’s 1625 plague epidemic played a key role in
shaping both Donne’s inclusive message and the language he uses to express
this message.
100 Guibbory, ‘Reconsidering Donne: From Libertine Poetry to Arminian
Sermons’, 564; 561.
02
12
Part I
2
32
1 More Than Skin Deep

Dissecting Donne’s Imagery of
Humours
Donne’s verse letters to female patrons depict addressees who are remark-
able, and remarkably similar. All are stunning, virtuous, generous, and
humble: so humble, in fact, that they need Donne to reveal their virtues to
them in verse. Critics tend to cringe at these relentlessly flattering epistles,1
dismissing them as products of Donne’s struggle to regain prestige at court
after his illicit marriage to Ann More in 1601.2 This chapter argues, how-
ever, that they reward a closer look. With their striking analogies and deft
wordplay, they aim to invigorate –and substantiate –overused praise.
This is particularly true of letters’ references to patrons’ complexions.
When discussing these complexions, Donne uses bodily imagery to depict
abstract concepts such as virtue and vice. He parodies prevailing health
theories, providing a mock-scientific defence of the praise he offers. He
is trying to pique patrons’ interest, suspending their incredulity just long
enough to secure their financial and social support. In the process, he
crafts some of his verse letters’ most inventive, compelling writing.
In the early 1610s, when Donne wrote many of these letters, the term
‘complexion’ referred to two things: to the appearance of a person’s skin
and to the body’s unique mixture of humours.3 The humours were the
four fluids of the body –blood, phlegm, yellow bile or choler, and black
bile or melancholy –that were thought to determine a person’s behav-
iour and appearance, based on the degree to which each was present.
Contemporary medical tracts argued that careful health regimens would
keep one’s humoral complexion balanced and prevent disease. Donne
refers to these regimens in his writing, using them as a metaphor for
other types of responsible conduct.4 He mentions them, and complexions,
most often in verse letters and in the sermons he delivered several years
later, starting in 1615. This distribution was not coincidental. In both
genres, he uses the trope of humoral complexions and regimens to raise
questions about moral responsibilities, culminating in a call for action: for
patronage in verse letters and for repentance in sermons.
In verse letters, Donne equates balanced complexions with patrons’
virtuous behaviour, which should, he implies, include sponsorship of
himself. In sermons, meanwhile, he equates balancing complexions with
rejecting sin. Both actions –giving patronage and seeking repentance –are
DOI: 10.4324/9781003374305-3
42
24 Dissecting Donne’s Imagery of Humours

ethical obligations, as essential as caring for one’s body, he suggests. To
contemporary audiences, regulating one’s complexion was a familiar
metaphor for conducting oneself responsibly.5 Knowledge of how to
monitor humours was commonplace: there were many medical tracts
on the subject, responding to readers’ anxieties about preventing disease
during the period’s frequent epidemics.6
Characteristically, Donne’s writing offers much more than a simple
equation of regulating humours with behaving well. He builds elaborate
analogies that use complexions as their starting point, blending corporeal
imagery and dexterous wordplay. Gradually, he uses these analogies
to demonstrate the moral necessity of whichever action –patronage or
repentance –he recommends. His imagery of complexions forges an unex-
pected link between his verse letters and his sermons. Both genres fea-
ture similar themes, reasoning, and wordplay as he uses the complexions
metaphor to outline a particular mode of conduct.
Critics such as David Aers, Gunther Kress, Heather Dubrow, and
Arthur Marotti have analysed the language of Donne’s verse letters,
looking at how he adapted the conventions of requesting patronage in
seventeenth-century England.7 Other critics, including Stephen Pender,
Nancy Selleck, and Katharine Craik, have examined Donne’s humoral
imagery in his Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions (1624), an account
of his near-fatal case of typhus.8 More recently, Kimberly Coles has traced
how Donne incorporated humoral theories in his Holy Sonnets. ‘The
humoral language that frames the central concerns of body and soul is no
accident’, Coles argues: ‘The Holy Sonnets are shot through with Galenic
terminology in order to underscore the instability of the soul’s condi-
tion’.9 No critic yet, however, has explored Donne’s imagery of humoral
complexions in his verse letters. This imagery revamps clichéd advice,
fuelling Donne’s complex analogies. It conveys the period’s interest in
empirical knowledge as it proves his claims in playfully absurd ways.
And it gives us, as modern readers, insights into medical knowledge that
now seems foreign, enabling us to appreciate his inventive allusions to
this knowledge.
To contextualise Donne’s imagery of complexions, I will first sum-
marise the period’s theories about how to regulate humours. I will turn
next to Donne’s writing, performing close readings of verse letters to
Lucy Russell (‘T’have written then’) and Elizabeth Carey (‘Here where
by All’) before analysing his second sermon on Ezekiel 34:19, delivered
at Whitehall.10 Like his sermons, his verse letters were a type of public
performance. They were not necessarily written for one recipient, even
though they addressed specific patrons. Rather, they were designed to
be shared with others through the coterie circulation of Donne’s verse.11
With his imagery of complexions, Donne deftly blends irony about his
patrons’ virtues –intended as much for this coterie as for the patron
herself –with earnestness about his needs. Whether he seeks a patron’s
support or his congregation’s repentance, he realises he must charm
52
Dissecting Donne’s Imagery of Humours 25

before he can persuade. His imagery of humoral complexions presents
commonplace theories in unexpected ways. This chapter attempts to
restore an appreciation for the rhetorical merits of this imagery, and of
Donne’s verse letters, in general.
This chapter also introduces the Galenic theories of the humours that
underlie so many of Donne’s medical analogies. Humours were thought
to possess an agency of their own, making them difficult to control. In
his verse letters and, especially, his sermons, Donne relates the elusive
quest for bodily health to the process of seeking spiritual redemption.
His sermons confront the lingering anxieties that had resulted from the
Church of England’s assertion, in The Thirty-Nine Articles of 1563, that
‘good works’ alone could not ensure salvation.12 Although you cannot
earn your deliverance –which will be awarded randomly to ‘elect’ indi-
viduals –you can still attempt to monitor, regulate, and protect your
soul’s health, Donne argues in his second sermon on Matthew 18:7,
which I discuss in the next section of this chapter. Likewise, humans can
take steps to balance their humoral complexions, in ways that promote
bodily health. Such proactive attitudes can have real effects on bodily
and spiritual health. Just as importantly, at least for Donne, they offer
psychological comfort, giving speakers the sense of being able to control
their bodies and souls.
I Early Modern Theories of the Humours

‘Good dyet makes the best Complexion’, Donne observes in his sermon
on Job 19:26, alluding to Galenic health regimens.13 Both ‘diet’ and
‘dietetics’ –the early modern term for hygiene –derive from the Greek
word for ‘regimen’, diaita. Early modern medical tracts prescribed health
regimens modelled on those of Galen (129–99), the Greek physician
whose writings form the basis of humoralism. These regimens offered
advice on regulating one’s sleep, exercise, diet, air, excretions, and
emotions: the six factors Galen called ‘non-naturals’ because they were
distinct from the natural, human body. These non-naturals could dis-
rupt an individual’s humoral balance and cause disease if not carefully
monitored.14 Individuals could influence their humours by regulating
non-naturals –but to what extent?
John Fage’s The sicke-mens glasse (1606) voices the traditional view
that the constellations at a person’s birth would determine her complexion.
Each humour was linked to a specific season’s astrological signs and wea-
ther conditions. Choler, for example, ‘hath power in Summer, from the
25. of April vntill the 17. of September’, Fage writes; accordingly, it ‘is
hote and dry in temperature like the fire’, and like the season’s weather.15
An individual would be choleric if she was born under summer’s ‘fierie’
astrological signs. Humans were thought to have no control over their
initial complexions, which were ‘infused’, or poured, into their vessel-like
bodies at birth.16
62

Donne uses the same verb, ‘infuse’, in his second sermon on Matthew
18:7 as he describes the link between humoral complexions and sin.
He delivered this sermon at Lincoln’s Inn, to a congregation of lawyers
versed in defining guilt. His subject here –deciding how much blame one
deserves for sinning –seems tailored to his listeners. He explains how
sinful impulses are tied to humoral complexions:
The Devill did not create me, nor bring materials to my creation;
The Devill did not infuse into mee, that choler, that makes me ignor-
antly and indiscreetly zealous, nor that flegm that choakes mee with
a stupid indevotion; Hee did not infuse into mee that bloud, that
inflames mee in licentiousnesse, nor that melancholy that dampes me
in a jealousie and suspicion, a diffidence and distrust in God. The
Devill had no hand in composing me in my constitution. But the
Devill knows, which of these govern, and prevail in me, and ministers
such tentations, as are most acceptable to me, … .17
We cannot change complexions ‘infused into’ us at birth by our creator,

God. And we cannot change the fact that humours incline us towards cer-
tain traits: blood makes us lustful, for example, while melancholy makes
us suspicious. Donne suggests that the degree to which we follow these
inclinations determines the extent of our guilt.
Donne features medical analogies in this sermon because he is talking
about humans seeking control –of their souls and, analogously, of their
bodies.18 He refers to other types of sickness, in addition to that caused by
imbalanced humours, as metaphors for various transgressions. Encouraging
someone to sin by your example is ‘morbus complicatus’, a pseudo-medical
term indicating a disease that spawns other diseases,19 while ‘applicare
passivis activa’ refers to taking advantage of another’s weaknesses to
tempt him or her into wrongdoing.20 He argues that everyone, even those
predestined to salvation, must actively reject sin. ‘Howsoever the elect shall
rise again, the elect may fall by these scandals’, he claims, using ‘scandals’
to refer to moral transgressions.21 In other words, humans cannot rest on
their laurels: they must constantly check their actions to ensure salvation,
just as they must routinely monitor their humours to maintain health.
In the following passage, Donne describes the process of actively
seeking salvation that even the elect must undergo:
our election admits an outward tryall, that is, Sanctification: … God

hath elected you to salvation, says S. Paul, to the Thessalonians; but
how? To salvation through sanctification; that’s your hill, there opens
your prospect. … but still, how elect? as he tels you, elect if she walk
in the Commandments of God, elect if she lose not her former good
works, that she may receive a full reward; elect, if she abide in the
doctrine of Christ. Always from the mount of sanctification arises
our prospect to election; ...22
72

Seeking salvation is an uphill battle –literally, in Donne’s analogy. ‘Prospect’
is a pun: it refers both to the view from a mountaintop and to the possi-
bility of humans being saved. This passage recalls Donne’s Satire 3, written
decades earlier, in which he asserts that ‘on a huge hill, /Cragg’d, and steep,
Truth stands, and hee that will/Reach her, about must, and about must
goe’ (ll. 79–81). The lines’ convoluted syntax and irregular metre reinforce
Donne’s claim that truth is not easily reached. In his sermon, the prospect
of salvation is similarly remote. Salvation cannot be sought without God’s
assistance; even with that assistance, it cannot be earned.23
To be saved, humans require the ‘grace of God by Christ’ and are
selected randomly, as stated in the tenth article of The Thirty-Nine
Articles (1563).24 The prospect of salvation ‘arises’ –as of its own accord –
before those whom God elects, Donne writes, taking agency away from
humans. The word ‘sanctification’ also implies a lack of human agency,
as it refers to Christian graces that are passively ‘implant[ed] within’ the
believer.25 Still, elected individuals must prove themselves worthy of sal-
vation through continual, rather than ‘former’, good works. According
to the tenth article –and to the Augustinian theories on which it is
based –seeking salvation is a gradual, deliberate process of monitoring
one’s actions and avoiding sin, the soul’s sickness.26
Contemporary medical tracts promoted an equally rigorous regimen
of monitoring humours to prevent bodily illness. ‘It standeth euery man
vpon, perfectly and thorowly to know the habite & constitution of his
owne bodye, which consisteth in a temperament a mixture of foure qual-
ities’, Thomas Newton writes in his translation of The touchstone of
complexions (1576).27 Newton’s language alludes to the impossibility of
ever acquiring complete control over one’s humours. We shall ‘be a great
deale better able’ to maintain health, he writes, if we monitor our humoral
complexions; still, such careful monitoring cannot ensure health.28 Even
if we cannot protect ourselves completely from either sickness or sinning,
we are most vulnerable when we stop trying. ‘It is almost as great a sin to
be shaked by a scandall given, as to give it’, Donne argues in his sermon.29
Submitting passively to a temptation –instead of trying to resist it –is
nearly as deplorable as causing another to sin.
In his sermon on I Peter 1:7, Donne again uses humoral complexions
to explore questions of control and culpability. In this sermon, delivered
at Lincoln’s Inn, he argues that an individual’s behaviour should not be
blamed on a particular humour but taken for conscientious choice. As
in his second sermon on Matthew 18:7, he tailored his focus on defining
guilt to a congregation of lawyers. He writes:
Let no man therefore think to present his complexion to God for an

excuse, and say, My choler with which my constitution abounded,
and which I could not remedy, enclined me to wrath, and so to blood;
My Melancholy enclined me to sadnesse, and so to Desperation, as
though thy sins were medicinal sins, sins to vent humours.30
82

He condemns ‘medicinal sins’: sins defended as a type of purge, committed
to vent excessive levels of a particular humour. People who act, or claim
to act, in response to their humours have failed to take responsibility for
their actions.
Still, humours were thought to compel individuals to behave in cer-
tain ways. Fage personifies each of the four humours to illustrate the
behaviour that each was thought to encourage. Blood, for example, is
a ‘nourisher and preserver’ that ‘hath dominion’ at particular times of
the day and ‘is knowne to abound’ when certain physiological signs are
present.31 Henry Peacham’s Minerva Britanna (1612) similarly personi-
fies the humours, offering a poetic portrait of each and an accompanying
illustration. According to Peacham, ‘aierie Sanguine’, or blood, is gentle
and studious, but also merry, musical, and lustful. A ‘bashfull’ humour,
its ‘youthfull cheeke’ blushes as blood rushes to its face.32 When a par-
ticular humour abounds in a person’s body, that person will tend to
assume the characteristics associated with the humour. For example, san-
guine individuals –in whose bodies blood dominates –will have reddish,
blood-hued complexions. The ‘rednes’ of their skin reveals ‘venes great
and full’ of blood, Fage writes.33 It also signals their dominant moods, as
they tend to be flushed with merriment or blushing with embarrassment.
Hygiene, whether good or bad, and purges are the main ways humans
can alter their humoral levels, according to Fage. While a ‘good dyet’ is
natural, non-invasive, and gradually effective, purges are violent and inva-
sive, but efficient. Both have the same goal: to re-establish an individual’s
humoral balance. Neither is designed to change an individual’s humoral
complexion. If black bile typically dominates this complexion, for
example, it is challenging –and undesirable, moreover –to reduce its
presence in the body. The body tries constantly to restore its humoral
complexion, to minimise its vulnerability to disease.34 Individuals can
compromise their bodies’ natural defences, however, if they practice
poor hygiene, neglecting the regimens prescribed for their complexions.
Poor hygiene enables one humour to ‘inuade/The other three’, as Donne
writes in his Second Anniversary, creating a humoral imbalance that
compromises health (l. 124–5).
When Donne claims that ‘good dyet makes the best complexion’,
he argues that good hygiene is the most natural, non-invasive way for
humans to maintain or restore their humoral balance. Although purges
achieve rapid results, they do not support health in the long run. By con-
trast, a ‘good dyet’ is preventative medicine: it works with the body,
strengthening its disease-fighting mechanisms over time and producing
the ‘best’ complexion.
In verse letters to female patrons, Donne compliments addressees’
physical perfection as an expression of their balanced humours, a result
of their ‘good dyet’. More than their daily intake of food, this diet is an
exemplary way of living. ‘Be content/With cordiall vertue, your knowne
92

nourishment’, he tells Lucy Russell, Countess of Bedford, a frequent
addressee (‘T’have written then’, ll. 89–90). Russell’s diet consists of
virtue: a fact ‘knowne’ to everyone, because virtue expresses itself in her
perfectly balanced complexion. Like good hygiene, virtue requires strong
willpower to maintain. It deserves praise, then, because it is a deliberate
choice of ‘nourishment’. The next section of this chapter focuses on
Donne’s letter to Russell, exploring his claim that she is in complete con-
trol of her humours. This stance, at odds with humoral theories, suits his
flattering purposes. His letter toys briefly with the idea that Russell might
have too much virtue, akin to too much of one humour. But he quickly
rejects this notion, reassuring his addressee that she should not change
a thing.
Donne delivered such excessive, absurd praise with a knowing wink,
at least when addressing Russell. He had been writing to her since 1607,
cultivating her friendship through multiple verse letters. Russell was
in high demand as a patron, not just for her wealth –she could offer
clients only small sums –but for her influence over Jacobean cultural
life.35 As Queen Anne’s favourite lady-in-waiting, she could direct the
queen’s patronage and shape the court’s literary tastes.36 Donne was
eager to secure her endorsement in the wake of his illicit marriage to Ann
More. When his marriage was made public in 1602, he lost his secre-
taryship to Sir Thomas Egerton, More’s uncle. Losing that place stalled
Donne’s attempts to advance his career at court or in the law, Michael
Donnelly notes.37 He was forced to retreat from courtly life to his home in
Mitcham –his ‘dungeon’, as he called it –where he spent the next decade
writing to would-be patrons, trying to revive his reputation.38 He took
special care to address Russell with the right tone. Mixing flattery with
irreverence could ensure her affection and loyalty; too much irreverence,
on the other hand, could offend her. His letter to her (‘T’have written
then’), probably written in 1610, is a collection of strategic choices, from
its jocular claims to its use of the complexions analogy.39 With his elab-
orate, semi-plausible medical conceits, Donne tries to entertain Russell
just long enough to make a case for himself.
II ‘Too Many Vertues’: Writing to Lucy Russell, Countess of

Bedford
Donne’s letter to Russell is characteristically ‘newsless’: it flatters her
using a range of conceits, rather than providing any updates on his own
life.40 He begins by claiming Russell is virtue itself. ‘Your, or you vertue’,
he writes: she has so much of the quality that she cannot be distinguished
from it (l. 25). He twists this claim in his poem’s last fifteen lines, just
when his praise is becoming monotonous. All this virtue might not be
desirable, he teases Russell, invoking humoral theories in a pseudo-
scientific defence:
03

Even in your vertues best paradise,
Vertue hath some, but wise degrees of vice.
Too many vertues, or too much of one
Begets in you unjust suspition.
And ignorance of vice, makes vertue lesse,
Quenching compassion of our wrechednesse.
(ll. 75–80)
Donne claims that an entirely virtuous state would be akin to having ‘too
much of one’ humour, which erodes the balance of one’s humoral com-
plexion (l. 77). It could limit Russell’s ability to feel compassion for the
human frailty of others, since she would have none herself. This abun-
dance of virtue could also make others suspect Russell of ulterior motives.
Moreover, virtue means less when a person is unaware of temptations: it
develops by default, not in response to resisting sin in the constant, uphill
process Donne describes in his second sermon on Matthew 18:7.41 So,
paradoxically, Russell needs vice to develop Christ-like ‘compassion of
our wrechednesse’ through participating in humanity’s struggles (l. 80).
Not much vice is needed: just a sprinkling, or ‘aspersion’, to temper exces-
sive amounts of virtue and produce a more balanced complexion (l. 81).
But Donne assures Russell in the same mock-serious tone that ‘Vice
hath no office, or good worke to doe’ in her (l. 88). Her complexion
remains balanced, despite its excess of virtue. He concludes:
Take then no vitious purge, but be content

With cordiall vertue, your knowne nourishment.
(ll. 89–90)
Russell should not attempt to expel some of her virtue as if it were a

disease-causing humour. Virtue sustains her, and she can never have too
much of it.
His analogy –if not his tone –recalls his sermon on Psalm 38:2, in
which he asks God, ‘Give us our Cordials now, and our Restoratives, for
thy physick hath evacuated all the peccant humour, and all our naturall
strength’.42 ‘Cordials’ referred to medicine that stimulated the heart, while
‘restoratives’ indicated any food or liquid that restored health.43 In Donne’s
metaphor, God’s ‘physick’, afflictions, has forced humans to reject ‘the
peccant humour’, sin. Donne suggests that God should now administer
the spiritual equivalent of the reviving heart medicines and restoratives
given after a purge; in other words, God should reassure humans that
they can seek salvation. In his verse letter, by contrast, he claims Russell
has nothing corrupt or ‘peccant’ to purge. Again speaking figuratively, he
counsels her to skip the purging phase of medical treatment and proceed
straight to her restoratives. She need not reduce her virtue because she is
perfect as is. Donne’s conclusion is generic, and expected, in a flattering
letter to a patron, yet he magnifies its impact through deferring it.
13

Why describe virtue in these graphic terms, as an engorged mass that
would have needed purging, had Russell not been perfect? Donne and his
peers were fascinated by the public dissections in anatomy theatres that
revealed the body’s inner workings, as Jonathan Sawday has argued.44
Donne’s lurid portrait of Russell’s virtue is another type of dissection. He
is not as interested in her outward appearance as in the physiological basis
of her virtue and beauty. As he observes in his poem’s middle section,
What ere the world hath bad, or pretious,

Mans body can produce, … .
(ll. 62–3)
In early modern England, the human body was indeed thought to

‘produce’ virtue and sin (l. 63). Various internal organs and fluids were
seen as responsible for certain emotions, thoughts, and behaviours, as
Michael Schoenfeldt has shown.45 Donne realises that, for his praise to
work, he has to persuade Russell to go along with it: to ‘admit or chuse’
his ‘hymns’ (l. 15). Here, as in many of his medical conceits, he focuses
on mechanisms –on the underlying processes that yield specific character
traits. As he imagines the humour-like parts of Russell’s virtue, playfully
regretting their uniformity and lack of vice, he supplies empirical evi-
dence to support his hyperbolic claims. This evidence –however absurd –
gives his flattery a precision and degree of plausibility lacking in more
generic compliments.
Donne also wants to convince Russell that he alone can decipher her.46
Humble Russell ‘can never know’ her own virtue, and virtue ‘suffers an
Ostracisme’ in the hearts of courtiers, making them unfit for the job (ll.
29, 22). Again, his tone is tongue-in-cheek. Although he writes from his
‘dungeon’ in Mitcham, he is asking for her patronage so he might resume
being a courtier. He asserts, however, that he is an outsider: a ‘Pagan’
and a ‘nothing’ who is uniquely able to understand her (ll. 16, 7). True to
his word, his final lines interpret her in a singular way, focusing on her
physiology.
Previous lines set the stage for his distinctive, medical approach,
aligning his verse with recent innovations in a number of fields, including
medicine. The poem’s digressive middle section refers to Copernicus’s
‘new Philosophy’, about the orbits of the earth and sun; to ‘mixt engines’,
a term used since 1538 for ‘a complicated machine with moving parts’;47
to the settlement of Virginia in 1607; to the French surgeon Ambroise
Paré’s claim that ‘stones, worms, frogs, and snakes in man are seen’48;
and to many other theories (ll. 37; 43; 67; 64). He uses these allusions to
comment, loosely, on others’ ‘ills’ and lack of virtue, a subject on which
he invites her ‘to meditate with mee’ (l. 32).
In the process, he flatters Russell with his assumption that she will
understand his medical and scientific allusions. His letter presumes both
generalist and specialist knowledge. Anyone familiar with the period’s
23

ubiquitous plague tracts would have understood his reference to purges
and cordials, but only the well-informed would have known the Paré
theory he mentions, which was not published in English until 1634.49
Rather than sounding earnest, Donne retains his playful tone in his
poem’s middle section. He was sceptical about some of the theories he
mentions. When he refers to the ‘dead, low earth’, for example, he rejects
the ‘new Philosophy’ in favour of the pre-Copernican view that a static
Earth sits at the bottom of the universe (l. 41).50 He also uses wordplay to
keep his tone light, as when he deplores anyone ‘who prayer-lesse labours,
or, without this, prayes’. His language puns on his assertion: ‘prayes’ is
literally ‘without’ the words of the longer phrase, ‘prayer-lesse labours’
(l. 46). Referring to the monastic ideal of orare et laborare, ‘to work and
to pray’, he suggests that anyone who does ‘one halfe’ of this maxim –
who either works or prays –might as well be doing ‘none’ of it (l. 47).51
His jocular tone invites Russell to not take the theories he mentions
too seriously. He is whetting her appetite for when he will, inevitably,
turn his attention back to her, examining her with an equally exacting
gaze. As he closes the middle section, he pretends he got carried away by
his various metaphors. ‘But I must end this letter’, he writes, and make
it ‘true to you’ (ll. 71–2). He will be precise when analysing Russell, he
suggests, as per the empiricism of the theories he has mentioned. But
he will execute this precision with tongue in cheek. If he could be play-
fully irreverent about Copernicus’s widely accepted ‘new Philosophy’, he
implies, he will hold no punches when describing his close friend.
In his verse epistle’s final section, Donne narrows his focus to one ana-
logy, complexions, and one subject, Russell. His choice of imagery was
strategic. After presenting arcane, theoretical material in previous lines,
he wanted to end his letter on a more intimate note. Copernicus’s the-
ories might have been compelling, but they were abstract and distant
compared to the daily, hygienic rituals Russell would have used to regu-
late her humours. Perhaps the most central of these rituals is the one he
mentions in his last line, ‘nourishment’, which she would have considered
several times a day (l. 90). It was also a term ripe with religious overtones,
which Donne and his contemporaries invoked to suggest the daily dili-
gence needed to sustain faith and resist sin.
The concept of spiritual nourishment appears, for example, in
Donne’s second sermon on Micah 2:10. Notably, his primary audience
for that sermon was another woman, Lady Frances Hobart, Countess of
Bridgewater.52 He delivered the sermon in 1622 at her ‘churching’, a cere-
mony in which women gave thanks after giving birth. Donne’s allusions to
hygiene speak to the ceremony’s focus on purifying new mothers, and to
the need to monitor health during and after childbirth. As in his epistle
to Russell, he talks about nourishing the soul in terms of balancing one’s
humours. St Augustine made a ‘good diet’ of contemplating God, ‘feeding
upon’ God’s teachings, his sermon claims.53 Like food, this spiritual diet
had a direct impact on Augustine’s humours, giving him ‘such a degree
3

of health, and good temper’. By relating this abstract spiritual quest to
monitoring humours, a daily routine, Donne makes it more tangible and
relatable.
One of the three ways Augustine escaped sin, Donne writes in this same
passage, was through ‘affectionis sanitate’, or sanitising his affections.54
‘Affections’ in this context refers to ‘the faculty concerned with emotion
and will’.55 Katrin Ettenhuber argues that the concept of will ‘plays a
crucial part in Augustine’s doctrine of grace and salvation’, according to
which ‘original sin is seen to cause a perversion of man’s will and converts
charity into self-love’.56 To secure salvation, one must seek to reverse
this process and align one’s will with God’s –to ‘sanitize’ one’s desires,
in other words. In his sermon, Donne is again being quasi-literal when
he relates this process of seeking salvation to regulating one’s humours.
What you ate, and how you tempered your humours, was indeed thought
to affect your affections.57 This passage recalls Donne’s reference in his
second sermon on Matthew 18:7 to the continual, uphill process of being
saved. Spiritual health, like its bodily counterpart, requires constant
monitoring: even if given the ‘opportunity’ to sin, you must try actively
to reject it.58
In his verse letter to Russell, meanwhile, Donne concludes by saying
virtue is his addressee’s ‘knowne nourishment’ (l. 90). It does the spiritual
equivalent of balancing her humours, keeping her soul healthy. The fact
it is ‘knowne’ is important. After ninety lines of alluding to diverse areas
of knowledge, he ends with jocular reassurance: rely on your instincts.
‘Knowne’ also reassures her that her virtue is universally recognised,
despite his earlier warning that it ‘suffers an Ostracisme’ with courtiers
(l. 22). As usual in his appeals, his compliment has a subtext related to
patronage. Donne, too, is ‘knowne’ to Russell, having sent her verse
letters for the past three years. His closing lines urge her implicitly to ‘be
content’ with him, as well. With its playful allusions to a range of fields,
including humoral medicine, his letter has shown how he can subvert the
rules of patronage pleas and offer innovative, affectionate praise. Now,
he implies, Russell should rely on her instincts and continue to endorse
his verse.
III ‘Free From Flattery’? Writing to Lady Elizabeth Carey

Donne’s verse letter to Lady Elizabeth Carey (‘Here where by All’) offers
its addressee more conventional praise. Donne appears to have written
Carey only one verse letter, in 1612.59 It proceeds carefully, if playfully,
without presuming any advanced scientific or medical knowledge. The
one medical metaphor Donne uses is his complexions analogy, a safe and
tactical choice. It draws on commonplace theories about the humours,
which Carey could have understood without medical expertise. It also
departs from conventional flattery, offering Carey semi-plausible proof
of her own worth. Donne is trying again to offer tangible evidence of
43

intangible virtue. He claims Carey is physically made of the stuff: it is
her ‘substance’ and in ‘her materials’ (ll. 15, 17). Unlike other courtiers
‘whom we call virtuous’, she does not don virtue like an ‘ornament’
(l. 15).
As Donne delivers these compliments, he refrains from teasing Carey
in the way he does Russell: he does not joke, for example, that Carey
might need some vice to temper her virtue. This virtue is fixed and above
scrutiny, he suggests. He is trying to validate his praise, providing quasi-
scientific evidence to make it somewhat plausible. Part of the game is for
him to claim that he believes his praise, too. He concludes:
May therefore this be enough to testifie

My true devotion, free from flattery;
He that beleeves himselfe, doth never lie.
(ll. 61–3)
Like his letter to Russell, his poem anatomises Carey’s ‘materials’, or

virtue, in verse. If this poetic dissection is persuasive enough, the praise
it offers will be truth, not flattery –if only for a few moments. Donne
reduces the act of lying to a question of intent. Questions of fact and truth
are less important, he suggests, than whether the person making the claim
believes what he says. He makes his argument plausible by redefining
what constitutes a lie, in a subversion of logic that pokes fun at his claims
to pseudo-scientific precision.
Carey is composed entirely of unchanging virtue, Donne asserts; as
such, she is ‘a firmament/Of virtues’:
That is, of you, who is a firmament

Of virtues, where no one is growne, or spent,
They’are your materials, not your ornament.
Others whom wee call vertuous, are not so
In their whole substance, but, their vertues grow
But in their humours, and at seasons show.
(ll. 13–18)
Carey’s virtues are fixed, not ‘growne, or spent’. They are the unchanging
‘materials’ of the heavenly vault, not its ornaments, or stars, that con-
stantly shift.
Donne’s cosmological language was not coincidental. Stars were
thought to create a miasma –an oppressive, infectious atmosphere –
that would enter the body, corrupting the humours and causing illness.
‘If the Starres be pestilently bent against vs’, the pamphleteer Stephen
Bradwell wrote in 1625, ‘neither Arts, nor Armes; perfumes, nor prayers,
can prevaile with them’.60 Donne compares Carey’s virtue to the firma-
ment, not to shifting, miasma-causing stars. But ‘others’ in the court have
virtue that appears ‘at seasons’, such as constellations (ll. 16, 18). Donne
53

uses his complexions analogy to illustrate this claim. Only a part of these
courtiers is made of the physical stuff of virtue. One person has phlegm
that is ‘Vertuous, and not Hee’; another has ‘Vertue in Melancholy, and
only there’ (ll. 21, 27). Moreover, their virtue ‘grow[es]’: unlike Carey’s,
it is not fixed and pervasive (l. 17). They are literally less virtuous than
Carey because their bodies contain a fraction of the virtue that permeates
her ‘materials’ (l. 15).
Carey’s virtue, meanwhile, is too fixed to fluctuate in response to
whims or humours. Donne’s idealised portrait of Carey defies the con-
ventional view that humours control all people to some extent, influen-
cing their personalities, behaviour, and physical constitution. Again, he
is being playful. His claim would have appeared absurd to even the most
vain reader. But rather than move on, he expands his complexions ana-
logy to further illustrate and defend his flattering claims. Far from being
didactic, his proof is an extended attempt to divert her, charming her into
accepting his praise.
His next argument builds on the contemporary belief that virtuous
people’s humours are perfectly balanced, creating a spiritual complexion
that is gold in both colour and value. Their balanced humours enable
them to contemplate virtue, rather than focus on immediate, bodily
experiences. By contrast, ‘those who distemper and misdiet them selues
… dull and stupefie their quicker intelligence, nay, disable all the facul-
ties both of soule and body’, Walkington argues.61 Such people might act
nobly on occasion, but their ‘misdiet[ing]’ prevents them from focusing
exclusively on virtue.
Donne alludes to these beliefs when he puns that courtiers are ‘but
parcel guilt’:
We’are thus but parcel guilt; to Gold we’are growne

When Vertue is our Soules complexion;
Who knowes his Vertues name or place, hath none.
Vertue’is but aguish, when ’tis severall,
By occasion wak’d, and circumstantiall.
True vertue is Soule, Alwaies in all deeds All.
(ll. 31–6)
‘Parcel’ means ‘a part, portion, or division of something’,62 and ‘guilt’ is

a homophone of ‘gilt’, a gold covering. So, a ‘parcel gilt’ complexion is
gold only in one of its parts, or humours. Moreover, that humour is only
superficially gold, like a gilded object. ‘Parcel’ is also a contemporary
spelling of ‘partial’, or biased: a state of mind linked to imbalanced
humours and literally intemperate behaviour. Meanwhile, ‘guilt’ refers
also to spiritual guilt, or awareness of ‘our wretchednesse’, as Donne
writes in his verse letter to Russell. ‘Partial guilt’, then, suggests biased
guilt –guilt experienced only when convenient, or in response to par-
ticular things. Carey’s ‘true vertue’, by contrast, ‘is Soule, Alwaies in all
63

deeds All’. Pervading her thoughts, actions, and emotions, it is not partial
or parcel.
Donne next uses humoral theories to argue that Carey’s virtue is a
Platonic ideal as well as a courtly one. According to Plato, virtue does
not have ‘severall’ parts, unlike humoral complexions that are composed
of four humours. In Protagoras (380 B CE ), Plato argues that justice
without temperance is not truly virtuous; nor is holiness without justice.63
Similarly, Cicero argues in De Finibus (45 B C E ), ‘Virtues are so closely
united that each participates in every other and none can be separated
from any other’.64 Donne alludes to Plato and Cicero in a letter from July
1614, addressed to Henry Goodyer, his close friend:
Virtue is even and continual and the same, and can therefore break
nowhere, nor admit ends nor beginning. It is not only not broken,
but not tied together: he is not virtuous out of whose actions you can
pick an excellent one.65
A virtuous person’s actions express all virtues, always; as such, no single

action should stand out as unusually virtuous. Donne argues likewise in
his letter to Carey, ‘Who knowes his Vertues name or place, hath none’
(l. 33). Individuals can ‘name or place’ their virtues if they grow only in
a particular humour, creating ‘a sanguine Vertuous man’, for example, or
a person whose ‘flegme’ is ‘Vertuous, and not Hee’ (ll. 24, 21). This type
of limited, fluctuating virtue abounds at court, making Carey’s constant
virtue exceptional. Donne’s elaborate proof confirms that Carey is both a
Platonic and a courtly ideal. His assertion of her timeless virtue –of her
warm-hearted ‘influence’ that is not merely ‘circumstantiall’ –seems con-
veniently strategic here, as he asks implicitly for her routine financial and
social support (l. 35).
Donne’s image of locating virtue revives questions about morality
and agency: questions to which he returned a decade later, in a sermon
he preached on John 1:8 at St Paul’s in 1621, at Christmas. Whereas
his letter praised Carey’s passive virtue, his sermon commands listeners
to take action: to anatomise their souls, separating sin from virtue. As
he addresses the large, diverse congregation of St Paul’s, he speaks as a
spiritual physician, not as a flatterer. He claims it is best when the ‘dis-
temper’, sin, is confined to a single part of the soul –the equivalent of
a single humour –where it can be targeted and cured. Donne tells his
congregation,
as long as there is in you a sense of your sinnes, as long as we can

touch the offended and wounded part, and be felt by you, you are not
desperate, … But when you feele nothing, whatsoever wee say, your
soule is in an Hectique fever, where the distemper is not in any one
humor, but in the whole substance; nay, your soule it selfe is become
a carcasse.66
73

The ‘we’ here refers to preachers, like Donne, who help listeners identify
and reject their sin. Unlike in his letter to Carey, his goal is to caution,
not to reassure. But his logic mirrors that of his letter to Carey. Virtue
in your ‘whole substance’ is the ideal in the Carey letter (l. 17); similarly
here, sin in the ‘whole substance’ is the worst-case scenario. In both texts,
Donne claims that virtue or sin is ‘felt by you’ only when it deviates from
your normal state. When it is no longer exceptional –‘when you feele
nothing’ –it has permeated your entire being.67 For Carey, this conclu-
sion invites complacency: she cannot ‘name or place’ her virtue because it
is pervasive, a Platonic ideal (l. 33). For Donne’s congregation at St Paul’s,
though, this claim offers a warning. Sin that pervades the soul causes a
‘Hectique fever’, a term used in both religious and medical writing of the
period to describe fevers ‘which are neuer discerned perfectly till they kill
mortally’.68 If you do not constantly assess and care for your soul, Donne
suggests, you risk succumbing to sin without realising it.
IV Interpreting the ‘Churches Complexion’

Donne’s second sermon on Ezekiel 34:19, preached at Whitehall for
King James and his court, offers a strangely tolerant view of differences
between the Catholic Church and the Church of England, considering
that Donne’s audience included the head of the latter church. He assures
listeners that, of course, James’s church is superior to the Catholic Church
in many ways. Still, all Christians are part of God’s flock. To develop
this argument, he takes his flock metaphor and runs with it, describing
sheep with wool of different colours. He draws on humoral theories to
offer one explanation for these colours. Donne crafted this rich, extra-
ordinary passage to inspire listeners to actively interpret scripture and
assess their own soul’s health. With his humoral imagery, Donne forges
a surprising link between offering patronage and rejecting sin. Both are
morally responsible actions, he suggests, analogous to taking good care
of your body.
In his second sermon on Ezekiel 34:19, Donne imagines Christians as
red, white, and black sheep. His listeners would have recognised sheep as
an analogy for the devout –for God’s ‘flock’, as stated in the biblical verse
Donne takes as his sermon’s subject.69 His listeners would have believed,
also, that humoral complexions determined the colour of an animal’s
skin, fur, or wool.70 Donne suggests, accordingly, that the ‘Churches
complexion’ dictates the colour of its individual members, or sheep.
Each colour or shade that Donne mentions –red, white, and black –is
associated with a certain humour. But these are also three of the four
colours of the horses in Revelation 6:1–8, and of the horses in Zechariah
6:1– 3. With these overlapping frames of reference, he discourages
listeners from instinctively linking red sheep to choler, for instance, or
the Catholic Church to sin. Instead, he urges listeners to perform careful,
deliberate acts of interpretation. ‘Let us reason together’, he tells listeners
83

halfway through his sermon.71 In the words of his sermon on John 1.8,
he is trying to help them to ‘touch the offended and wounded part’: to be
introspective and alert, analysing their own souls and those of others.72
Significantly, this sermon about interpreting signs takes place at court,
the context where, according to his verse letters, virtue is ‘circumstantiall’
and fleeting (‘Here where by All’, l. 35). In a world obsessed with
appearances, he urges listeners to look more closely and more deeply.
Like the sermons mentioned above, this one calls for agency: for active
interpretation rather than passive acceptance of received knowledge.
Not coincidentally, this is a goal associated with the Church of England,
which condemned the Catholic Church for filtering scripture through
intermediaries, such as priests.73
The concept of red sheep would have been bizarre, even to an audi-
ence versed in humoral theories. Describing the changes that God’s flock
experience, Donne writes,
But the strangest change is, that some waters change sheep into red,
the most unlikely, most extraordinary, most unproper colour for
sheep, of any other.74
In a literal sense, red sheep would be extraordinary, indeed –and com-

ical, as Donne suggests with his series of superlatives. But Donne ties
the diverting image to a moral message. Red is an ‘unproper’ colour for
sheep because it denotes sin, as he will explain here and in other sermons.
Moreover, this sin is pervasive: it permeates the entire fleece, as though
the sheep had been soaked in dye instead of water.
Donne builds on the assumption that an animal’s physical appearance
responds to its humoral makeup. This logic was applied frequently to
horses in the early modern period, as Gail Kern Paster has shown.75
Donne implies that the red sheep of his sermon might behave like chol-
eric, red-hued horses that are quick to anger. Conversely, they might
behave like sweet-tempered, red and white sanguine horses. It all depends
on their shade of red. Although red is the ‘most improper colour for
sheep’ in some cases, one type of red is, in fact, ‘naturall’ –‘the rednesse
of blushing, and modesty, and selfe-accusing’.76 Routine ‘selfe-accusing’
is essential for salvation, he asserts; without it, morality slackens. The
skin of the virtuous, then, tends towards the pinkish hue of a blush.
This shade corresponds with that of ‘a sanguine pure complection’,
with its ‘sweet mixture’ of red and white, Walkington argues:
… hee which is possessed with a sanguine pure complection is

graced with the princeliest and best of all … being most deckt with
beautie which consists in a sweet mixture of these two colours white
and redde, and for the gifts of the minde it is apparent likewise to
our vnderstanding that they do surpasse al hardly incensed with
anger … .77
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“Hysterical!” she repeats, after a pause, in a low key of suspicion. “Why
was she hysterical? How did she show that she was hysterical?”
A slight flush, or so she fancies, passes over his hollow cheeks.
“Oh, I don’t know. How do people usually show it?”—with impatient
evasion.
“Laughing? Crying?”
“Yes, yes; that sort of thing!” Then, with an upbraiding accent, that
escapes him against his will, “Why should we talk about her, poor soul?”
“Why not?” she answers. “What else is there to talk about? There is
nothing else.”
The words, extravagant as they are, represent to Lavinia the exact truth.
He! She! There is nothing else in God’s universe; and before both him and
her stands the prohibitory angel, the flame of whose waved sword blinds
them to all creation also. She looks straight before her in dogged despair,
and a caught half-sobbing breath beside her tells her with what a strangling
grip the temptation is taking him by the throat. Yet this time she puts out no
finger, utters no wisely trivial commonplace to help him. The mental picture
of Féodorovna clinging sobbing round his neck, even though she knows
with what repellant grudgingness that embrace had been met, has robbed
Lavinia of all further power of fight than what lies in silence. He does not
leave her even that.
“We shall hear of each other indirectly, I suppose?” he says by-and-by, in
a voice not the clearer for the lump in his throat, which is clearly past his
power to swallow.
Her cup of misery runs over. “No doubt,” she answers with a shuddering
distinctness. “If you ask Féodorovna, she will write you a long account of
my wedding! She is a great letter-writer!”
As if the words possessed some paralyzing spell over their feet, both of
them stop dead short; and, turning round, stare full in each other’s faces,
conversation shrivelling up its thin fabric in that fiery moment; and then—
the inevitable happens. The gasping lips draw nearer, nearer, nearer; the idly
hanging arms stretch themselves out, enfold, embrace, crush; and, with no
apparent initiation on either side, Fate hurls them upon one another’s
forbidden breasts. Their kisses are frantic with the haste of six wasted
weeks, and have their edge given by the knowledge that, for these sad two,
there is only one little dreg at the bottom of the wine-cup of life and love,
and that if they do not make haste to drain it, it will be poured out on the
desert ground that is soaked with the lost vintages meant to appease the
thirst of parched humanity.
They have thrust away the irksome apparition that had officiously flitted
between them. For such a ghost’s thin body there is no room between his
heart and hers. Out of both those hearts all their former long-established,
deep-rooted inhabitants are turned, driven by the flail of the one supreme
scourge. In those hearts Honour had held her high court, Duty had wielded
her sceptre, unselfish Family Affection been warmly nested. Now, of none
of them is there a trace left in either consciousness. For neither of them does
anything exist but the omnipotent primal instinct—the instinct that drove
the first man and woman into each other’s throbbing arms.
It is not for long—not for more than a few moments—only for one kiss-
length, that that mad, dumb, clinging oblivion endures. Then the old ejected
law-givers begin to gather up their sceptres and return; boldly ejecting, in
their turn, the furious rebel that had ousted them; and the two that God has
not joined together stagger apart. As in the impulse of embrace neither was
earlier or later than the other, so is the shock of disunion common and
simultaneous. They find themselves standing apart, uncertainly staring at
each other in the imperfect consciousness of an enormous joint crime. It
was only a kiss—an utter, scorching, lover’s kiss, it is true—yet still only a
kiss that has so seared their re-awakening consciences; but had their
disloyalty gone to the extremest pitch of unfaithfulness, it could hardly have
branded them with a deeper sense of guilt. Her white lips frame three
scarcely audible words, which he yet hears—“This—day—week!”—and he
whispers, in horrified ejaculation, “Rupert! Bill!”
There is a terrible silence—at least, it seems so to them—though the
nightingale, scarcely scared, and having taken but a short flight to the
branch of a youngling chestnut, is finishing his epithalamium with even
bettered music. The reinstated judges have taken their seats, and are holding
a dread assize.
“It is only I who am to blame!” says Lavinia, by-and-by, in a key a little
above her former one. “You did really struggle. If I had helped you honestly,
you would have pulled through; but I did not. I never really meant you to
hold out! I see now that I meant it all along to happen! I meant you to kiss
me! I thought—God forgive me!—that I should be able to bear my life
better afterwards if you did!”
“If I had been honest,” he says hoarsely, “shouldn’t I have accepted your
offer of taking me to the Rectory? You know you did offer. If I had meant
honestly, should I have come here?” casting a glance of despairing reproach
round at the blue and green and silver accessories to his fall—smiling water
and curtsying sedge and sky-coloured blue-bells.
“But I brought you here!” cries the other culprit, in a heart-rending
eagerness, of which he will not suffer her to have the monopoly—to assume
all the weight of their “most mutual” lapse.
“It was a pity that Bill did not leave the Boers to finish me!”
Then there is silence again. This time it is the man who breaks it, though
his tone is so low as to constitute scarcely an infringement of the crushing
guilty stillness.
“And you will still marry him this day week?”
At that she veils her face with both hands. “What am I?” she says
indistinctly, through the relief of their shield. “What have I become? I have
lived for twenty-three years, and I never suspected that there was a bad
woman inside me!”
“And for twenty-eight years I have imagined that I was a gentleman!”
CHAPTER XVII
“Even thus two friends condemned
Embrace and kiss and take a thousand leaves,
Loather a hundred times to part than die;
Yet now farewell, and farewell Life with thee.”
They look at each other in a sort of terror, with a renewal and immense
increase of that fear of their own and each others’ possibilities of frailty,
which, looked back upon now, is seen to have been so inadequately weak
and so abundantly justified. Since there is no longer any barrier of
innocence between them, what is there to hinder them from a repetition—a
hundred repetitions—of that tasted, and therefore now senselessly
abstained-from, ecstasy? What more of guilt can there be in ten or twenty
score kisses than in that one which they have drunkenly given and taken?
They see the sophistry dawning in one another’s hungry eyes; and once
again their rebel arms half reach out reciprocally across a dwindled interval;
but this time, to balance her former misleading of him, salvation—if that
bitter abstinence can be called so—comes from her that at first was
weakest. She tears her eyes away from him, and snatches a look round, as in
preparation for flight.
“We must not stay here any longer!” she says with an accent of
ungovernable fear; and he as wildly acquiesces.
“No,” he says; “you are right. I do not know what has come to me; but
you are right not to trust me!”
“It is I, I, I!” she repeats in distraught self-accusation. “You do not
understand what a monster I am! I am to marry Rupert next week! I have
been engaged to him all my life! I am all they possess in the world! Since I
was a week old my uncle has overwhelmed me with his generous love;
every one has said that I was more to him than even the boys. Now the one
hope that is left for him lies——”
Her rapid flow of self-accusation breaks off abruptly, stemmed by the
awful obstacle placed by memory in its torrent course; and her face turns
ghastly under his miserable eyes, as once more for the thousandth time, but
with immeasurably deepened repulsion, she realizes the nature of the hope
which is her uncle’s one remaining tie to life, and by whom to be fulfilled.
It is by bearing children to Rupert that her intolerably heavy debt to them
both is to be paid. For one insane moment her look flies to the pool. It must
be under the little circles that the dancing flies are making on its surface
that she can best cut the knot that is so far past untying. The broken voice of
her fellow-sinner and fellow-sufferer calls her back.
“And I! Do you forget that it was through me they lost poor Bill?”
Possibly it is a relief to each to pile the chief weight of their common guilt
on his and her own head respectively, in unconscious contrast to the shabby
recriminations of our first parents; but of even this little alleviation they are
soon robbed, all other consciousness merged in the killing sense of instant
and eternal parting.
“You had better stay here for a few minutes—till I am well away,” says
Lavinia, speaking very fast, but not incoherently. After a little gasping
pause, with a fresh rush of utter horror and woe, “Must I tell Rupert?” Then,
giving herself that answer of which her lover is quite incapable, “No! I must
not! if I did, it would be in the hope—the certainty that he would cast me
off. No, no; I must not—I must not tell him, whatever happens: it would
never do to tell him.” She rambles on, half to herself, repeating the phrases,
as of one whose hold on her own intelligence is slipping away; then
recovering it with a sudden snatch, she says brusquely, “Well! it is done,
and it can’t be undone, and there is an end of it. Good-bye! I—I would say
‘God bless you’ if I had any business to.”
Without giving him time for any answering benediction—as, indeed,
why should he bless her?—she breaks into a stumbling run, which carries
her blindly on, till at the curve which will finally hide him from her sight,
the curve whose distance from him guarantees her safety, the dully raging
passion within her arrests her feet, and turns her head to see once more in
crowning farewell torment the figure, in loosely hanging clothes, of him
whom she has ironically helped back to life only to make him taste the
sharpness of death.
* * * * *
“But I told you to say that I was not at home to any one?”
“I did say so, ’m.”
“It is not eleven o’clock yet?”
“No, ’m; it wants five minutes of eleven.”
“I am too busy: I have too much to do. It is impossible that I should see
any one this morning.”
“So I told Miss Prince, ’m; but she said she was sure that you would see
her.”
“Miss Prince always says that.”
“Yes, ’m.”
There is sympathy in the assent of the elderly unsmart butler, who has
reached the third stage in the usual progress of valuable servants to their
goal—that progress marked by the successive milestones of “servant,”
“treasure,” “tyrant,” “pensioner;” for Féodorovna is not popular with his
class.
“Will you go back and tell Miss Prince that I am very sorry, but I am
afraid I must ask her to put off her call till to-morrow, as Sir George and Mr.
Rupert are coming down by the 4.38 train, and I have a good many
arrangements to make before they arrive?”
The old butler regards her with a respectful pity for the weakness of
reasoning power that can imagine the visitor in question to be kept at bay
by the means proposed.
“Yes, ’m; but I do not think it will be any use, for Miss Prince said she
would like to take a turn in the garden until you were disengaged. And I beg
your pardon, ’m—your eyes are better than mine—isn’t that Miss Prince
opening the iron gate?”
Of course it is Miss Prince—Miss Prince come to surprise Lavinia in her
utter dishevelment of soul, though the habit of a lifetime keeps her
unnerved body in its simple raiment neat and dainty—come to verify the
staring facts that sleep has mocked her; that hope has bid her an eternal
good-bye; that her despair is beyond the depth that any leaded line can
plumb; that she is wretched and guilty beyond the sin-and-sorrow compass
of any woful malefactor since the world began; come to spy and comment,
before she has begun to make up spirit and flesh for that ghastly play-acting
which is to last her life. These are the thoughts—if such mental orts and
fragments can be called so—that knock against each other in a vertigo of
fear in Miss Carew’s brain, as her visitor, with a graceful flitting gait that
has yet sufficiently proved the determination beneath it, floats up the
kitchen-garden walk, that had yesterday witnessed poor Mrs. Darcy’s
discomfiture. Féodorovona is dressed in a delicate Court mourning, and a
certain elevation of expression tells Lavinia that she has come to proclaim
some action on her own part that to most persons it would appear more
judicious to conceal.
“Gathering flowers?” she says, with a chastened smile, and with no
attempted apology for overriding her listener’s efforts to elude her. “If I had
only thought of it, I would have brought you any number from our Houses.”
There is a touch of the comfortable maternal brag in the words, but it
appears only to vanish as she adds with a quiet sigh, “As you may imagine,
I had other things to think of!”
“Had you?”
Lavinia has scarcely interrupted her flower-cutting, since it enables her
to present only a profile to her visitor’s observation, and the reflection is
passing through her mind with a foggy comfort that, since she has not shed
one tear, there can be no swollen eyelids to give her away, and that, even if
there were, Féodorovna’s panoply of perfect egotism would protect her
from the sight of them.
“Had I?” repeats Miss Prince, the suavity of her high sorrow touched by
a ruffle of indignation. “Who can know that better than you?”
The shape of the question gives Lavinia an inward convulsion of new
terror. Is it possible that she can have heard, or learnt, or divined?
“Do you mean that Captain Binning is gone?” she asks, bending over a
long-stalked bronze tulip, which she snips off nearer the bulb than she
would have done in a more rational moment.
“Yes; he is gone!” After a moment of reverent ruminating, “It went off
quite quietly.”
“Did it?”
“Our real farewell was yesterday. We had a very important interview
yesterday morning. I asked for it.”
“Did you?”
“As you know, I have never been tied by the conventions. I have always
overridden them.”
“Yes.”
“In my case such unusual action is a necessary postulate of happiness.
You are in the enviable position of knowing that you can never be loved for
anything but yourself; that no man can be accused of mercenariness in
approaching you, but in my case there is always the danger that the millions
with which I am credited should keep away from me any man of
particularly delicate feeling and high honour.”
It seems incredible to Lavinia that at such a moment she herself should
be able to entertain so sordid a speculation; yet there is no doubt that the
wonder flashes through her mind as to whether the profits of the Dropless
Candle have really amounted to the figure so superbly indicated by the
daughter and goddaughter of that great invention?
“Such being the case,” continues Miss Prince, in a tone of modest pride
at the about-to-be-related exploit, “there was only one course open to me,
and as it was perfectly consonant with my views of life and ethics, I took it
without reluctance. I offered myself to him.”
“As you did to General —— three months ago?”
The recalled action—recalled by the very white lips of the heroine’s one
hearer—would put most people out of countenance, and even Miss Prince’s
once more admirably white surface shows a pink stain.
“You speak as if you were convicting me of inconsistency—of infidelity
to my ideal,” she says, with a little haste of wronged modesty. “And
superficially it may appear to be so; but it is only in appearance; as you
know it has always been my creed that whenever and wherever I met what I
conceived to be the highest and noblest qualities of humanity embodied in
one man, I ought to offer myself unreservedly to him. If I have failed, it is a
failure more glorious than most successes.”
Lavinia has stopped her flower-cutting, and forgotten her misgivings as
to the tell-tale tragedy of her own face; she looks sullenly and with what she
knows to be a baseless rage of jealousy at her, the manner and
accompaniments of whose declaration of love she is in dull torment trying
to reconstruct, while memory adds its sting by recalling to her the high, cool
apartness of virginal indignation which had been her own attitude of mind
towards Féodorovna’s former achievement.
“Circumstances were against me,” pursues Féodorovna, presently,
looking away in a sort of dreamy protest towards the horizon. “That
unlucky illness! If I had had your opportunities, the opportunities which
were wasted on you, he might have decided differently.”
It is lucky that Miss Prince is still upbraiding the skyline; for Lavinia
gives a sudden wince at the allusion to that safely preoccupied heart of her
own which has rendered her, as a matter of course, danger-proof. To defend
herself against that passionate repudiation of her own immunity, which
seems fighting its mad way to her lips, she frames a needless question.
“He refused you?”
Féodorovna bends the chastened elegance of her black-and-white toque
in dignified acquiescence.
“Yes.”
A stinging curiosity goads the other on to a second question—
“And you—how did you take it?”
“I told him how greatly I admired his disinterestedness,” replies Miss
Prince, with perfectly regained equanimity, adding, with a touch of the
hereditarily commercial spirit, shrewd even in adversity. “It would, of
course, have been very advantageous for him from a material point of
view.”
“And—and that was all? It ended there?”
To only the sharpened eye of jealous suspicion would the tiny hesitation
that precedes the answer to this question be perceptible.
“Ye—es, it ended there.”
Past the power of even Féodorovna is it to confess to the precise method
in which she had closed the interview; and Lavinia knows that she will
never learn at what stage of the indubitably offered and as indubitably
refused embrace—whether at that of mere intention or ripe accomplishment
it had been arrested by its object. Féodorovna had given her last response
without looking her questioner quite in the face, and her eye now rests on
the church tower and the blossoming horse-chestnuts with a real, if
exasperating, sadness in it.
“I told him if ever he reconsidered his decision, that whatever might be
the lapse of time, whatever else changed, I should not.”
The unassuming fidelity that voice and words claim is clearly felt by
their possessor to be so beautiful that Lavinia asks herself, in a topsy-turvy
whirl of confused wretchedness, whether it is not really so? but the thought
—if it deserves such a name—is chased a few moments later, as with a
whip of small cords, out of her soul by a far more smarting suggestion.
“Well, good-bye. I am going away this afternoon to a quiet little fishing
village in Suffolk, to be quite alone with myself; so perhaps I shall not see
you again till the wedding. But, after all, that is only six days off!”
CHAPTER XVIII
Only six days off! And the return of her “men” is only five hours off!
Between these two dates how can any one be expected to keep their sanity?
There would have been a better chance for her if Féodorovna had not come
to stir the furnace of her misery into whitest heat, with the elegant drawing-
room poker of her fatuous confession. Among preoccupations of such
incomparably deeper gravity, it adds one more pang to Lavinia’s horror of
herself to find that the wonder whether or how nearly Miss Prince
accomplished that embrace which Lavinia looks upon as a dastardly theft
upon herself, keeps a foremost place in her mind. Yet meanwhile she goes
machine-like through her preparations, attending with nice accuracy to
every detail that forecasting affection could plan and execute for the
comfort of a dear home-coming invalid. She even carries out a little surprise
—devised a while, how miraculously little a while ago!—to lighten her
uncle’s sombre spirit, always specially inclined to fault-finding and
depression after any small absence. And when it is finished, she regards it
with a feeling of being a very Judas, inwardly classing it with his kiss, and
with Jael’s draught of milk.
The five hours have dwindled to four, to three, to two, to one. The time-
measure has changed to that of minutes, and of even them how few are left!
For the solitary “once” of its shambling existence, the 4.38 must have been
punctual, and the young horse must have flown! With this last reflection
mixes itself another little one, odious in its spitefulness, that perhaps Rupert
is less nervous as to that animal’s shying properties when they are hidden
from him by his being in the brougham, or that at all events, his superior
fear of his father will hinder him from betraying alarm. Her latest thought
of him before meeting is an uncharitable one; and now they are here! With
her Judas-face dressed in false smiles—this is the position as inwardly
classified by herself—she meets them on the doorstep. It is her betraying
arm that Sir George chooses to lean upon, as he gets, with the feeble
deliberation of ill-shaken-off sickness, out of the carriage.
“No, no; you may be off!” he says, ungratefully pushing away his son’s
gently offered aid. “You never were anything but a makeshift!”
Sir George’s pleasantries have always had a disagreeable flavour, and to
be known as pleasantries only by experts; but that this is meant for one
neither of the young people, intimately acquainted with the hall-mark, and
not for a moment to be taken in by imitations, however close, fails to
recognize; so they all smile. It is on Lavinia’s left arm that her uncle is
leaning—a circumstance to which is due a comment on his part which she
could well have spared.
“Why, your heart is knocking like a hammer! I did not know that a
mosquito had a heart.”
The touched intonation with which he utters the phrase shows her that he
attributes her palpitation entirely to the joyful emotion caused by his return,
and how absolutely unsuspicious he is of any other possible cause for it;
and her impersonation of Judas appears to herself more lifelike than ever, as
she answers with a desperate playfulness—
“You have learnt a new fact in natural history.”
Rupert does not immediately follow the slow little procession to the
study, whither Sir George, with a nostalgia for his own chair, chooses to be
led, occupied, doubtless, with directions to the servants; and there is time
for the “surprise” to be detected and admired, and for several anthems of
thanksgiving, not worded exactly as the rector would have done them in
church, on the part of Sir George on having at last escaped from the d——d
pot-house before his son rejoins them. As he enters the room, Rupert’s
father is in the act of asking how the newly papered “nurseries” look; and,
on Lavinia’s faltering avowal that she has not seen them since they were
finished, starts irritably up, announcing his intention of immediately visiting
them, to see whether the papers are well hung, or exhibit seams between the
strips, as had been the case with Hodges’ work in the offices last year.
It is in vain that both Rupert and Lavinia entreat him to defer his survey
till after tea. With a reproachful observation, that “if you want a thing done
you must do it yourself,” he sets off, and the young man and girl follow,
offering him attentions which he ignores. The sight of well-executed work
restores him to good humour, and he keeps his young people dancing
attendance on him for some time, to admire at their leisure, and with what
countenances they may, the airy spaces where their problematical offspring
are to sport. Fear of betraying the loathing that the idea of her own possible
motherhood brings with it, perhaps partially dulls Lavinia’s sense of that
repulsion. Tea-time brings another ordeal with it.
“I cannot say that you do much credit to the Princes’ cuisine,” says Sir
George, taking stock of his niece more closely than he has yet done, having,
in fact, ordered her to move the skilfully interposed tea-kettle, or her own
chair, so as to enable him to do so. “You must have lost quite a stone in
weight since I left home.”
“Don’t you know, sir, that there is nothing that the young woman of to-
day dreads so much as putting on an ounce of superfluous flesh?” asks
Rupert.
Lavinia is thankful to him for his timely interposition; yet it frightens
her. Why should he come to her help? Can he have any intuition or
knowledge of her sore need of it? and by what creepy coincidence has he
used the exact phrase employed by Binning yesterday in connection with
himself: “An ounce of superfluous flesh”? There is in reality nothing to
excite wonder in the employment of so common a turn of expression; but to
a soul so guilty the most ordinary sentence seems heavy with ominous
significance, and she hurries out her own less tactful repartee with needless
treading on the heels of her cousin’s.
“And how many stone have you lost?”
Sir George looks bored. “Thank you, my dear; but we need not bandy
civilities on the subject of our infirmities.” Then with a quick and
determined return to amiability, “Come, let us hear all about poor Binning?
He went yesterday?”
“No; this morning.”
“Poor chap! I should like to have shaken his hand again before he went. I
tried to persuade this slug of a fellow to run down and see the last of him,
but he pretended that he was afraid to leave me. I must tell you that his filial
piety has become a most appalling nuisance, and that he is like nothing in
the world but an old hen with one duckling.”
“I proudly own to the ‘old hen,’ but I fail to see the duckling,” replies
Rupert, with a pleasant slight smile.
Formerly he would have been far too nervous to bandy jokes with his
father, and they would have been stamped upon if he had; but the answering
smile on the elder man’s grim sick face tells Lavinia upon how much
happier terms son and father now are than in any previous period of their
lives. She is the ribbon that ties their hearts together! She!
“Was he pretty fit? Did he set off in good spirits?” asks Sir George,
holding on as firmly to the Binning theme as if he knew that he was
passionately desired to loose it.
“Féodorovna did not say.”
“Féodorovna!” repeats he, with that snort of disgust with which he has
never failed to salute Miss Prince’s name ever since the day of her storming
his study.
“Yes; she came here this morning.”
“Whom did she come to console this time?” asks he, jeeringly. “You?
Well,” in a changed and softened key, “I dare say she did not make such a
bad shot! I dare say you had grown quite fond of the poor chap from having
nursed him; one does get fond of one’s nurse, with the best intentions in the
world to the contrary,” with a grudgingly affectionate glance at Rupert.
His son smiles again. (How enviable! how miraculous to have such a
cheerful light heart!)
“You are in a fine flow of conversation!” he says, laying his hand on the
old man’s shoulder. “But you know as well as I do that you will have to pay
dearly for it, if you do not take your usual rest before dinner. Your room is
ready, and I am ready; and you are ready, aren’t you?”
There is authority mixed with the pleasant persuasiveness of the tone,
and with a docility which would have filled Lavinia with amazement in any
other circumstances, Sir George hoists himself out of his chair, and saying,
with an appealing lift of his shaggy eyebrows, “See how I am bullied!”
walks slowly but contentedly off on his son’s arm.
Once again Rupert has come to Lavinia’s rescue. Once again, left
behind, she feels the sense of relief coupled with a great fear. How has he
known the exact moment at which the catechism was becoming unbearable
to her? the exact moment at which to step in? She has a quarter of an hour
in which to supply answers “to taste,” in cookery-book phrase, to this
question, and at the end of that time she has the opportunity of putting it, if
she feels so disposed, to the person to whom it refers; for he rejoins her.
“I have left him; he will have a better chance of getting to sleep if he is
alone. He is so excited that he will go on talking if he has any one to listen
to him. I could not stop him.”
“And yet you seem to have wonderful power over him! I never saw such
a change!”
She has got behind a cane chair, and is tilting it up, with her hands
clutching the gilt top. She ought not to let him see the sickly apprehension
in her eyes; and yet if she does not, if she allows him to approach her, if he
kisses her, and expects her to kiss him back, by what hair’s breadth will she
be separated from the outcasts in the street? There is gross exaggeration in
the idea, which is weighted by the offended purity of all her former life; yet
there is truth too. But Rupert’s steps pause far short of her barrier, and there
is neither a claiming of undoubted rights, neither enterprise nor even
entreaty in his eyes.
“Improvement, should you say?” he asks, with cool interest; adding,
“How do you think he looks—better or worse than you expected?”
“Better—worse!” she stammers, contradicting herself, quite put off her
balance by the fraternal ease and matter-of-factness of his tone. It seems
like a return to the blessed brotherly period, before they had been driven
into exchanging the airy chains of their phantom engagement for the gyves
and handcuffs of a real one. After all, he had been driven into it as much as
she! There is balm in the thought. “I mean I cannot quite make up my mind
until he has settled down; he is certainly much thinner.”
“Yes; his clothes hang a bit loose upon him.”
Lavinia starts; imperceptibly, she hopes. Has Rupert given himself the
word to use no phrase that does not bring Binning in very self before her?
Binning’s clothes, too, hang loose upon him. Lest her start should not have
been imperceptible, she covers it quickly with a remark.
“He seems in excellent spirits.”
“Yes; but we all are that, aren’t we?” He says it simply, and without any
special observation of her to note its effect; and yet once again, for the third
time, that nameless suspicious fear of his having found her out lays its
chilly fingers upon her. “Shall we walk off some of our exuberant
cheerfulness? Do you feel inclined for a stroll?”
Her last “stroll” returns upon her memory with dizzying vividness.
“Isn’t the sun rather hot still?”
“We shall not feel him in the woods, or in Rumsey Brake by the pool.”
Her tilted chair—needless defence—falls on its fore legs with a sharp
noise, dropped from her trembling grasp.
“I do not think I feel woody or poolly.”
“We will go along the high-road, then, the road to Sutton Rivers. There
is always a good deal of traffic along that road—nice carts and steam-rollers
and things!”
A spice of the old light mockery flavours his tone, and she knows that he
has read off like print the misgiving in her mind. If he has read that, how
much more may he not have read too?
The road chosen drops down the hill, and runs through the village. They
pass the beautiful old farm that looks like a manor-house, with its bronzing
walnut trees that wear their spring favours differently from most others;
past schools and open cottage doors, Rupert greeting shirt-sleeved men with
the familiarity born of a lifetime of nods, and Lavinia saluting matronly
women with an intimacy sprung from maternity-bags. And as she goes, the
village tragedies present themselves for competition with her own. Can that
girl who has “gone wrong,” and is sitting on her parents’ doorstep with her
unfathered child upon her knees, feel a greater weight of remorse and
shame than one kiss has crushed her under? Can the old widow whose last
surviving son was carried off yesterday to the madhouse, feel a deeper,
more irreparable sense of loss than hers?
“Joe Perry was taken away to the asylum yesterday,” she says, imparting
her lugubrious fact, though not the comparison for which she has used it, to
her companion. “He became so violent that it was unavoidable. His mother,
I believe, fought like a tiger to prevent it!”
“Poor soul!”
What fitter ejaculation can he make in answer to such a tale? and yet her
diseased fancy instantly brings to mind that Binning had applied the same
epithet to Féodorovna! As they pass another cottage—
“Carter has gone on the drink again.”
“Has he?”
Yet a third. “Little Harry Brown has got double pneumonia; the doctor
does not think he can save him! He says he has no constitution.”
“Is it to bring down that exuberant cheerfulness of ours that we were
talking of, that you are telling me all these catastrophes?” asks Rupert,
rebelling at last.
“It does seem rather hard to be greeted by such a list of casualties,” she
answers, confused and confounded; “but you see you have been away a
good while—long enough for more than our usual average of disasters to
happen.”
“And is that all? Does little Harry Brown end the catalogue?”
The question is a perfectly natural one, and put as naturally, yet it sets
her trembling again.
“Yes, I think so.”
“If you remember any more, I would rather hear them.”
To that she seems to think no answer needed. They are beyond the
village now, and on that high-road whose sociability he had vaunted to her.
For the time it seems less frequented than he had promised, the workmen
having gone home, and no market-day enlivening it with uncertainly
driving men and gaily-hatted girls, three on a seat, in returning market-
carts. Their only companion is the Spring, in that gaudiest of her moments
when she is about to lose herself in Summer, daring her elder sister to vie
with her sheeted hawthorn, her “golden chains,” her matchless output of
leaf and blossom. And how blessedly different is each tree and shrub’s idea
of spring! How various their method of expressing it! Some in odorous
flower-bunches, some in green tassels, some in uniformity of colour, some
in motley, their varying thoughts are diversely coloured, bronze and yellow,
and dazzling gold-green.
To pause a while seems almost a necessity, yet Lavinia shivers; for
Rupert has stopped and faced her, and there is no one in sight. Has he lured
her hither with an assurance of publicity, only to make his belated claim
upon her? As before, he reads her fear, and answers it.
“No!” he says, stepping back a couple of feet, yet still holding her at the
disadvantage of commanding that full-face view which is so much less
manageable a thing for the purpose of concealment than a profile; “do not
be afraid: there is not the least cause for alarm! I only wanted to ask you if
you are quite sure that little Johnny Brown’s double pneumonia closes our
casualty list?”
Then she knows that he knows.
CHAPTER XIX
But how? Have not her inward misgivings warned her all along? Yet it can
be only by intuition. Even had any one seen her in Rumsey Brake—the very
fire of hell seems to scorch her at the suggestion—even had any one seen
her, what opportunity has that unknown talebearer had of betraying her to
Rupert? Rupert returned only half an hour ago, and has had speech of no
one but herself and the servants. Is the porter at the station likely to have
conveyed the news of her unfaithfulness to him, as an agreeable item of
local intelligence, while shouldering his portmanteau? or the coachman to
have shouted it through the front window of the brougham? Yet to the
abject terror of the girl’s guilty consciousness, either of these absurdities
seems more likely than that the significance of her fiancé’s tone in
reiterating his question came there by accident? He knows, if not by the
ordinary processes and channels, yet by right of that terrible plate-glass
window into her soul, of which he has always had the monopoly. All her
life he has saved her the trouble of explanations, by a mastery of her
thoughts which makes utterance of them superfluous. If she allows him, he
will save her trouble to-day.
Athwart the darkness of her terror of discovery flashes an arrow of light.
If he knows already, what use is there in further feigning? If he knows by
intuition, he will know by the same means how she has struggled; how
utterly against her own will has been her disloyalty. Already an insidious
sense of relief and comfort is beginning to steal over her in the flashed idea
of how easy he will make it to her; of how perfectly his unselfish insight
will apprehend by what innocent steps she has grown guilty towards him;
and again he will be the brother from whom she has no secrets; together
they will acknowledge the fatal error of their late attitude towards each
other; together they will admire, with easy minds and steadfast
countenances, the cheerfulness of the nursery wall papers. And her uncle?
And her debt?—the debt whose colossal obligation the partner and cause of
her unfaithfulness has so fully admitted; has so little blinked the
overmastering necessity of paying? It is all packed into thirty seconds—
relief, hope, recurring terror and despair; the thirty seconds between his
question, and the one with which—how unlike her in its shiftiness—she
answers him.
“Why shouldn’t it? Do not you think there are enough already?”
“Quite; but all the same there is another.”
“What do you mean?” A sort of false stoutness of heart is coming to her
aid. It is impossible that he can know except by intuition, and what is
known only by intuition may be safely and successfully denied and given
the lie to, if only it is done with enough brazenness and pertinacity.
He answers her with a collected insistence that shows her of how little
use her unworthy subterfuges have been or ever can be, as between these
two.
“We have not been taken away to a madhouse; we have not gone on the
drink; we have not got double pneumonia; but it is to us that this last
casualty has happened!”
She stands before him disarmed, her poor toy weapons knocked out of
her shaking hand; yet she essays one more feeble parry with her helpless
buttoned foil.
“We don’t seem much the worse for it, whatever it is,” she answers,
trying to laugh.
“Don’t we? I think you can’t have looked in the glass lately.”
She puts up her hand with a gesture of futile anger to her face, as if to
chastise it for its blabbing treachery; but speech has gone from her.
“I do not want you to tell me anything about it,” Rupert says in a steady
voice. “It could not be pleasant for you, and it would do me no good. I
wished to bring you out—not on the high-road; that was your own
precautionary measure”—with a faint stinging touch of sarcasm—“but out
of possible eye and earshot, to consult with you.” She turns her woeful
eyes, in a deep humiliation of asking upon him; but words are still denied
her. “To consult you as to how we are to get ourselves out of this impasse.”
Once again her dumb look seeks to penetrate his meaning. “It would be
perfectly simple if it were only we two; we might settle it between
ourselves. It is, of course, my father who complicates it.”
The voice is still even and quiet, but its matter-of-fact composure affects
her far more than any raving denunciation could do. What does it take for
granted? And why? She must speak, must protest, must find out how much
he knows.
“You are implying that you wish our engagement to end? Have you—
any—any reason for it?”
“Haven’t I?”
The question thus returned upon her would strike her once more dumb, if
she did not wrench a faint retort out of herself.
“You—you know your own feelings best.”
“And yours?”
Oh, if he would choose any other weapon of torture—any reviling, any
accusation, any sneer, any reproach, anything but these questions that,
terrible in their brevity, seem to lay her helpless soul even more naked
before him than his lifelong habit of divining her, joined to who knows
what added knowledge have already done.
“I had—I have no intention of breaking it!”
“I am quite”—“in the dark as to what you mean,” she would have added,
but the superfluous lie dies unborn. “You meant to marry me—still?” Then
she touches the depth of her degradation; hearing the anguish of an
incredulity that is yet belief in her confession of such an intended treason
against him pierce through his self-control.
“Did I quite deserve that?”
Her wretched head drops on her breast, and she stands at his mercy,
attempting no further denial. But, as she has never in her life appealed to
him in vain for help or sympathy, so, even now, the old habit is too strong
for him.
“We must keep our heads clear!” he says, after a moment or two, in a
voice that is no longer anguished or reproachful, but has regained its level
of colourless quiet. “We must think it out. If we could stave off the marriage
for a few weeks or months, I see a way out of the difficulty.”
Her lips are apart by reason of the shortness of her breath, but she forces
them together to frame the two words—
“What way?”
His face, at whose unfamiliar rigidity her spirit has quailed, softens.

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John Donne's Language of Disease

The Sermons of John Donne: Volume 1

The Sermons of John Donne: Volume 10

The Sermons of John Donne: Volume 8

The Sermons of John Donne: Volume 5

The Sermons of John Donne: Volume 2

The Sermons of John Donne: Volume 3

The Sermons of John Donne: Volume 6

The Sermons of John Donne: Volume 4

John Donne’s Language of Disease

John Donne’s Language of Disease reveals the influence of medical know-

Alison Bumke is Assistant Professor of Seventeenth-​Century Literature

Routledge Studies in Literature and Health Humanities

Shakespearean Drama, Disability, and the Filmic Stare

Pregnant Bodies from Shakespeare to Ford

Health, Literature and Women in Twentieth-​Century Turkey

The Poetry of Loss

John Donne’s Language of Disease

To learn more about this series, please visit: www.routle​dge.com/

John Donne’s Language of

First published 2023

Conventions and Notes vi

Introduction: Exploring Donne’s Dynamic Comparisons 1

1 More Than Skin Deep: Dissecting Donne’s Imagery of

2 Cures and Currency in Donne’s Letters to Patrons 53

3 Swollen Desires: Dropsy and Donne’s Writing 72

4 ‘We May Have Recourse’: Describing Illness in

5 ‘Sinfull Inough to Infect’: Donne’s Imagery of

6 ‘Holy Perfume’: The Fragrance of Cures in Donne’s

Conclusion: ‘How Lame a Picture’: Depicting the

Conventions and Notes

Death and disease were everywhere around Donne. In early modern

I Early Modern England’s Medical Culture

II Donne’s Medical Metaphors

III Donne, Robert Burton, and Thomas Browne

Repentance is a sovereign remedy for all sins, a spiritual wing to

Burton offers a list to describe repentance, merging religious, medical,

So the Lord of heaven, … may have smelt from us the savour of

I ground upon experience, that poysons containe within them-

Browne offers a dynamic comparison: he refers to society’s ‘contagion’

Depart from me, O Lord, for I am sinfull inough to infect thee; …

IV Reading Donne’s Medical Language

1 More Than Skin Deep

24 Dissecting Donne’s Imagery of Humours

Dissecting Donne’s Imagery of Humours 25

I Early Modern Theories of the Humours

26 Dissecting Donne’s Imagery of Humours

We cannot change complexions ‘infused into’ us at birth by our creator,

our election admits an outward tryall, that is, Sanctification: … God

Dissecting Donne’s Imagery of Humours 27

Let no man therefore think to present his complexion to God for an

28 Dissecting Donne’s Imagery of Humours

Dissecting Donne’s Imagery of Humours 29

II ‘Too Many Vertues’: Writing to Lucy Russell, Countess of

30 Dissecting Donne’s Imagery of Humours

Take then no vitious purge, but be content

Russell should not attempt to expel some of her virtue as if it were a

Dissecting Donne’s Imagery of Humours 31

What ere the world hath bad, or pretious,

Alison Bumke is Assistant Professor of Seventeenth-Century Literature

Health, Literature and Women in Twentieth-Century Turkey

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Conventions and Notes vi

Introduction: Exploring Donne’s Dynamic Comparisons 1

2 Cures and Currency in Donne’s Letters to Patrons 53

3 Swollen Desires: Dropsy and Donne’s Writing 72

1 More Than Skin Deep

In a literal sense, red sheep would be extraordinary, indeed –and com-