PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK

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1 PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK MENTIONED IN A WEEK AND IN WALDEN: In the 1840s Thoreau seems to have read Donne on two distinct occasions, without acquiring Emersons s or Lowell s enthusiasm for him. Albert James Smith s JOHN DONNE: THE CRITICAL HERITAGE (1964), Vol. I ANATOMY OF THE WORLD CHALMERS, VOLUME V CHALMERS DONNE NARRATIVE HISTORY AMOUNTS TO FABULATION, THE REAL STUFF BEING MERE CHRONOLOGY People of A Week and Walden Stack of the Artist of Kouroo

2 WALDEN: The other day I picked up the lower jaw of a hog, with white and sound teeth and tusks, which suggested that there was an animal health and vigor distinct from the spiritual. This creature succeeded by other means than temperance and purity. That in which men differ from brute beasts, says Mencius, is a thing very inconsiderable; the common herd lose it very soon; superior men preserve it carefully. Who knows what sort of life would result if we had attained to purity? If I knew so wise a man as could teach me purity I would go to seek him forthwith. A command over our passions, and over the external senses of the body, and good acts, are declared by the Ved to be indispensable in the mind s approximation to God. Yet the spirit can for the time pervade and control every member and function of the body, and transmute what in form is the grossest sensuality into purity and devotion. The generative energy, which, when we are loose, dissipates and makes us unclean, when we are continent invigorates and inspires us. Chastity is the flowering of man; and what are called Genius, Heroism, Holiness, and the like, are but various fruits which succeed it. Man flows at once to God when the channel of purity is open. By turns our purity inspires and our impurity casts us down. He is blessed who is assured that the animal is dying out in him day by day, and the divine being established. Perhaps there is none but has cause for shame on account of the inferior and brutish nature to which he is allied. I fear that we are such gods or demigods only as fauns and satyrs, the divine allied to beasts, the creatures of appetite, and that, to some extent, our very life is our disgrace. How happy s he who hath due place assigned To his beasts and disaforested his mind! * * * Can use his horse, goat, wolf, and ev ry beast, And is not ass himself to all the rest! Else man not only is the herd of swine, But he s those devils too which did incline Them to a headlong rage, and made them worse. All sensuality is one, though it takes many forms; all purity is one. It is the same whether a man eat, or drink, or cohabit, or sleep sensually. They are but one appetite, and we only need to see a person do any one of these things to know how great a sensualist he is. The impure can neither stand nor sit with purity. When the reptile is attacked at one mouth of his burrow, he shows himself at another. If you would be chaste, you must be temperate. What is chastity? How shall a man know if he is chaste? He shall not know it. We have heard of this virtue, but we know not what it is. We speak conformably to the rumor which we have heard. From exertion come wisdom and purity; from sloth ignorance and sensuality. In the student sensuality is a sluggish habit of mind. An unclean person is universally a slothful one, one who sits by a stove, whom the sun shines on prostrate, who reposes without being fatigued. If you would avoid uncleanness, and all the sins, work earnestly, thought it be at cleaning a stable. Nature is hard to be overcome, but she must be overcome. What avails it that you are Christian, if you are not purer than the heathen, if you deny yourself no more, if you are not more religious? I know of many systems of religion esteemed heathenish whose precepts fill

3 PEOPLE OF A WEEK AND WALDEN: PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK I hesitate to say these things, but it is not because of the subject, I care not how obscene my words are, but because I cannot speak of them without betraying my impurity. We discourse freely without shame of one form of sensuality, and are silent about another. We are so degraded that we cannot speak simply of the necessary functions of human nature. In earlier ages, in some countries, every function was reverently spoken of and regulated by law. Nothing was too trivial for the Hindoo lawgiver, however offensive it may be to modern taste. He teaches how to eat, drink, cohabit, void excrement and urine, and the like, elevating what is mean, and does not falsely excuse himself by calling these things trifles. A WEEK: The Boteman strayt Held on his course with stayed stedfastnesse, Ne ever shroncke, ne ever sought to bayt His tryed armes for toylesome wearinesse; But with his oares did sweepe the watry wildernesse. SPENSER. Summer s robe grows Dusky, and like an oft-dyed garment shows. DONNE. PEOPLE OF A WEEK A WEEK: Undoubtedly, countless reforms are called for, because society is not animated, or instinct enough with life, but in the condition of some snakes which I have seen in early spring, with alternate portions of their bodies torpid and flexible, so that they could wriggle neither way. All men are partially buried in the grave of custom, and of some we see only the crown of the head above ground. Better are the physically dead, for they more lively rot. Even virtue is no longer such if it be stagnant. A man s life should be constantly as fresh as this river. It should be the same channel, but a new water every instant. Virtues as rivers pass, But still remains that virtuous man there was. PEOPLE OF A WEEK

4 A WEEK: I dreamed this night of an event which had occurred long before. It was a difference with a Friend, which had not ceased to give me pain, though I had no cause to blame myself. But in my dream ideal justice was at length done me for his suspicions, and I received that compensation which I had never obtained in my waking hours. I was unspeakably soothed and rejoiced, even after I awoke, because in dreams we never deceive ourselves, nor are deceived, and this seemed to have the authority of a final judgment. We bless and curse ourselves. Some dreams are divine, as well as some waking thoughts. Donne sings of one Who dreamt devoutlier than most use to pray. PEOPLE OF A WEEK A WEEK: Think of the importance of Friendship in the education of men. He that hath love and judgment too, Sees more than any other doe. PEOPLE OF A WEEK It will make a man honest; it will make him a hero; it will make him a saint. It is the state of the just dealing with the just, the magnanimous with the magnanimous, the sincere with the sincere, man with man. And it is well said by another poet, Why love among the virtues is not known, Is that love is them all contract in one.

5 PEOPLE OF A WEEK AND WALDEN: PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK 1572 John Donne was born in London to a prominent Roman Catholic family at a time when anti-catholic feeling in England was near its height and Catholics were subject to constant harassment by the Elizabethan secret police (he would be a convert to Anglicanism during the 1590s). THE BISHOP S BIBLE was printed by Richard Jugge in London (there had been a previous edition of this Black Letter Bible in 1568). It was an attempt of English ecclesiastics to replace the Geneva (or Breeches ) version of Miles Coverdale, of the popularity of which they were jealous. The ornate Woodcut Initials, some showing scenes from the Classics, had been originally intended for an edition of Ovid and caused such a storm of criticism that they would not again be used in a Bible. This would sometimes be referred to as the Leda Bible because it used a Leda-and-the-Swan woodcut at the opening of the Book of Hebrews (and sometimes as the Treacle Bible because in Jeremiah 8:22 the word treacle was used instead of balm ). TROSTSPIEGEL was printed in Frankfort by Christian Egenolff, a German translation of Petrarch s prose treatise De Remediis (the woodcuts in this volume were by Hans Weiditz of the Ausburg school, had been in existence since 1520, and had already been used in 1532). HISTORY OF THE PRESS Bartholomew Gosnold was born in Grundisburgh in Suffolk, England to Anthony Gosnold and Dorothy Bacon Gosnold, a family whose seat was at Otley, Suffolk. He would graduate from the University of Cambridge and then study law at the Middle Temple of London. John Ferne matriculated at St John s College of Cambridge University (he is said to have afterward studied at Oxford University).

6 ST JOHN S COLLEGE NOBODY COULD GUESS WHAT WOULD HAPPEN NEXT People of A Week and Walden Stack of the Artist of Kouroo

7 PEOPLE OF A WEEK AND WALDEN: PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK 1582 March 3, Sunday (1582, Old Style): Edward Herbert was born at Eyton, Shropshire, the 1st son of Richard Herbert (circa ), Sheriff of Montgomeryshire and member of Parliament, and Magdalen Herbert (later Lady Danvers), a patron of John Donne and other literary lights. Lord Herbert would confide in his autobiography that he has sweet-smelling sweat and married women find him so irresistible that they keep portraits of him between their breasts. Donne would be said by Ben Jonson to have supposed Herbert s poetry to be overcomplex, threatening to write a poem about Prince Henry that match d Sir Edward Herbert in obscurity. Herbert would become, in the Robert Burton sense, the personification of melancholy. LIFE IS LIVED FORWARD BUT UNDERSTOOD BACKWARD? NO, THAT S GIVING TOO MUCH TO THE HISTORIAN S STORIES. LIFE ISN T TO BE UNDERSTOOD EITHER FORWARD OR BACKWARD. People of A Week and Walden Stack of the Artist of Kouroo

8 1583 John Donne matriculated at the University of Oxford at the age of 11, where he would study for three years but take no degree. Presumably that was because a degree would have involved taking an oath of allegiance which as a Catholic he couldn t do.

9 PEOPLE OF A WEEK AND WALDEN: PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK

10 1584 Christmas Eve: Jasper Heywood had been incarcerated for his failure to abandon the Catholic religion, initially at Clink Prison and then in the Tower of London. Heywood was a nephew of Sir Thomas More, who suffered similarly. His sister Elizabeth Syminges brought her eldest son, the 12-year-old John Donne, and an undercover Catholic priest, William Weston, to the Tower, by passing this off as a family visit at Christmas. The priest who was with Mrs. Syminges and the young Donne wrote in his memoirs, 27 years later, that: I accompanied her [Mrs. Syminges] to the Tower, but with a feeling of great trepidation as I saw the vast battlements, and was led by the warder past the gates with their iron fastenings, which were closed behind me. So I came to the cell where the Father [Jasper Heywood, SJ] was confined. We greeted one another, and then, as was natural, exchanged the information we had about the affairs that concerned us... At last, when I had finished talking to Father Heywood we spent almost the whole day together I embraced him and said goodbye. Then I returned the same way that I had come; and the moment I reached safety outside the walls I felt as if I had been restored to the light of day. THE FUTURE IS MOST READILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT People of A Week and Walden Stack of the Artist of Kouroo

11 PEOPLE OF A WEEK AND WALDEN: PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK 1586 Some say that after leaving the University of Oxford without a degree, John Donne would study for three years at the University of Cambridge but also there take no degree. (Presumably that was because a degree would have involved taking an oath of allegiance, which as a Catholic he couldn t do.) CHANGE IS ETERNITY, STASIS A FIGMENT People of A Week and Walden Stack of the Artist of Kouroo

12 1591 After doing both Oxford and Cambridge without benefit of degree, John Donne became a member of Thavies Inn. DO I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION? GOOD. People of A Week and Walden Stack of the Artist of Kouroo

13 PEOPLE OF A WEEK AND WALDEN: PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK 1592 John Donne began the study of law at Lincoln s Inn in London. Robert Greene s A DISPUTATION BETWEEN A HEE CONNY-CATCHER AND A SHEE CONNY-CATCHER. CONNY-CATCHING, PART II This year the plague struck London, killing an estimated 1 out of each 10. THE FUTURE CAN BE EASILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT People of A Week and Walden Stack of the Artist of Kouroo

14 1594 At about this point, presumably, John Donne relinquished the Roman Catholic faith of his upbringing and signed up instead for Anglicanism. His first collection of poems, SATIRES, circulated in manuscript form in London during this period. His love poems, SONGS AND SONNETS, date to this period as well.

15 PEOPLE OF A WEEK AND WALDEN: PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK 1596 John Donne participated in Robert Devereux, 2nd earl of Essex s naval expedition against Cádiz, Spain.

16 1597 John Donne participated in Robert Devereux, 2d earl of Essex s naval expedition against the Azores. From the year of the World Chronological observations of America The voyage to the Azores, Sir Walter Rawleigh Capt. of the Queens Guard Rere-Admiral. Porto Rico, taken by the Earl of Cumberland. BY John Josselyn Gent. to the year of Christ WALTER RALEIGH

17 PEOPLE OF A WEEK AND WALDEN: PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK 1598 From this year into 1601 John Donne would be serving as private secretary to Sir Thomas Egerton, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal. In about this year Donne was preparing his PARADOXES AND PROBLEMS, a collection of playful demonstrations such as A Defence of Women s Inconstancy and Why Puritans Make Long Sermons. By this point Thomas Heywood was regularly engaged as one of the players in the acting company in London known as The Admiral s Men. We suppose, since wages are not mentioned, that he had a share in the proceeds. Later he would play in other companies, including Lord Southampton s, Lord Strange s Men, and Worcester s Men (that would subsequently become known as Queen Anne s Men).

18 1601 John Donne secretly married Anne More, Sir Thomas Egerton s niece. Anne s cousin offered the couple refuge in Pyrford, Surrey and there he wrote his The Progresse of the Soule which ironically depicts the transmigration of the soul of Eve s apple.

19 PEOPLE OF A WEEK AND WALDEN: PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK 1602 When Sir Thomas Egerton found out that his secretary John Donne had secretly married his niece and ward Anne More, he disinherited them and had Donne imprisoned briefly. The poet would later summarize: John Donne, Anne Donne, Undone. Thereafter he would spend several years eking out a meager living as a lawyer. For instance, he would provide legal counsel to an anti-catholic pamphleteer, Thomas Morton. Some of the pamphlets that would appear under Morton s name from 1604 to 1607 might actually be by Donne.

20 John Donne s DIVINE POEMS. 1607

21 PEOPLE OF A WEEK AND WALDEN: PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK 1608 Henry King was chosen to become a student at Christ Church, Oxford. CHRIST CHURCH It was in about this year that John Donne was writing his BIATHANATOS, a half-serious celebration of suicide (published posthumously, in 1644). The poet reconciled with his father-in-law so that his wife could receive her dowry. Thomas Heywood s THE TRAGEDY OF THE RAPE OF LUCRECE. BRITISH CHRONOLOGY

22 1610 Thomas Heywood s FORTUNE BY LAND AND SEA, with William Rowley. Thomas Dekker s play If It Be Not Good, the Devil Is in It. It was in about this year that John Donne s IGNATIUS HIS CONCLAVE satirized the Jesuits: Ignatius de Loyola gets his ass dispatched from hell to colonize the moon. He also wrote a prose argument, PSEUDO-MARTYR, to the effect that actually English Catholics ought to be able to pledge allegiance to King James I without breach of religious affiliation. JAMES I WHAT I M WRITING IS TRUE BUT NEVER MIND YOU CAN ALWAYS LIE TO YOURSELF People of A Week and Walden Stack of the Artist of Kouroo

23 PEOPLE OF A WEEK AND WALDEN: PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK 1611 Thomas Heywood initiated a series of five plays, to be staged respectively as THE GOLDEN AGE, THE SILVER AGE (1613), THE BRAZEN AGE (1613), and THE IRON AGE (1632, in two parts). John Donne s An Anatomy of the World The First Annivrsery elegy for poor pure 15-year-old Elizabeth Drury. A WEEK: The Boteman strayt Held on his course with stayed stedfastnesse, Ne ever shroncke, ne ever sought to bayt His tryed armes for toylesome wearinesse; But with his oares did sweepe the watry wildernesse. SPENSER. Summer s robe grows Dusky, and like an oft-dyed garment shows. DONNE. PEOPLE OF A WEEK When that rich soul which to her heaven is gone, Whom all do celebrate, who know they have one (For who is sure he hath a soul, unless It see, and judge, and follow worthiness, And by deeds praise it? He who doth not this, May lodge an inmate soul, but tis not his) When that queen ended here her progress time, And, as t her standing house, to heaven did climb, Where loath to make the saints attend her long, She s now a part both of the choir, and song; This world, in that great earthquake languished; For in a common bath of tears it bled, Which drew the strongest vital spirits out; But succour d then with a perplexed doubt, Whether the world did lose, or gain in this, (Because since now no other way there is, But goodness, to see her, whom all would see, All must endeavour to be good as she) This great consumption to a fever turn d, And so the world had fits; it joy d, it mourn d; And, as men think, that agues physic are, And th ague being spent, give over care, So thou, sick world, mistak st thy self to be Well, when alas, thou rt in a lethargy. Her death did wound and tame thee then, and then Thou might st have better spar d the sun, or man. That wound was deep, but tis more misery That thou hast lost thy sense and memory. Twas heavy then to hear thy voice of moan, But this is worse, that thou art speechless grown.

24 Thou hast forgot thy name thou hadst; thou wast Nothing but she, and her thou hast o erpast. For, as a child kept from the font until A prince, expected long, come to fulfill The ceremonies, thou unnam d had st laid, Had not her coming, thee her palace made; Her name defin d thee, gave thee form, and frame, And thou forget st to celebrate thy name. Some months she hath been dead (but being dead, Measures of times are all determined) But long she ath been away, long, long, yet none Offers to tell us who it is that s gone. But as in states doubtful of future heirs, When sickness without remedy impairs The present prince, they re loath it should be said, The prince doth languish, or The prince is dead; So mankind feeling now a general thaw, A strong example gone, equal to law, The cement which did faithfully compact And glue all virtues, now resolv d, and slack d, Thought it some blasphemy to say sh was dead, Or that our weakness was discovered In that confession; therefore spoke no more Than tongues, the soul being gone, the loss deplore. But though it be too late to succour thee, Sick world, yea dead, yea putrified, since she Thy intrinsic balm, and thy preservative, Can never be renew d, thou never live, I (since no man can make thee live) will try, What we may gain by thy anatomy. Her death hath taught us dearly that thou art Corrupt and mortal in thy purest part. Let no man say, the world itself being dead, Tis labour lost to have discovered The world s infirmities, since there is none Alive to study this dissection; For there s a kind of world remaining still, Though she which did inanimate and fill The world, be gone, yet in this last long night, Her ghost doth walk; that is a glimmering light, A faint weak love of virtue, and of good, Reflects from her on them which understood Her worth; and though she have shut in all day, The twilight of her memory doth stay, Which, from the carcass of the old world free, Creates a new world, and new creatures be Produc d. The matter and the stuff of this, Her virtue, and the form our practice is. And though to be thus elemented, arm These creatures from home-born intrinsic harm, (For all assum d unto this dignity So many weedless paradises be, Which of themselves produce no venomous sin, Except some foreign serpent bring it in) Yet, because outward storms the strongest break, And strength itself by confidence grows weak, This new world may be safer, being told The dangers and diseases of the old; For with due temper men do then forgo, Or covet things, when they their true worth know. There is no health; physicians say that we At best enjoy but a neutrality. And can there be worse sickness than to know That we are never well, nor can be so?

25 PEOPLE OF A WEEK AND WALDEN: PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK We are born ruinous: poor mothers cry That children come not right, nor orderly; Except they headlong come and fall upon An ominous precipitation. How witty s ruin! how importunate Upon mankind! It labour d to frustrate Even God s purpose; and made woman, sent For man s relief, cause of his languishment. They were to good ends, and they are so still, But accessory, and principal in ill, For that first marriage was our funeral; One woman at one blow, then kill d us all, And singly, one by one, they kill us now. We do delightfully our selves allow To that consumption; and profusely blind, We kill our selves to propagate our kind. And yet we do not that; we are not men; There is not now that mankind, which was then, When as the sun and man did seem to strive, (Joint tenants of the world) who should survive; When stag, and raven, and the long-liv d tree, Compar d with man, died in minority; When, if a slow-pac d star had stol n away From the observer s marking, he might stay Two or three hundred years to see t again, And then make up his observation plain; When, as the age was long, the size was great (Man s growth confess d, and recompens d the meat), So spacious and large, that every soul Did a fair kingdom, and large realm control; And when the very stature, thus erect, Did that soul a good way towards heaven direct. Where is this mankind now? Who lives to age, Fit to be made Methusalem his page? Alas, we scarce live long enough to try Whether a true-made clock run right, or lie. Old grandsires talk of yesterday with sorrow, And for our children we reserve tomorrow. So short is life, that every peasant strives, In a torn house, or field, to have three lives. And as in lasting, so in length is man Contracted to an inch, who was a span; For had a man at first in forests stray d, Or shipwrack d in the sea, one would have laid A wager, that an elephant, or whale, That met him, would not hastily assail A thing so equall to him; now alas, The fairies, and the pigmies well may pass As credible; mankind decays so soon, We are scarce our fathers shadows cast at noon, Only death adds t our length: nor are we grown In stature to be men, till we are none. But this were light, did our less volume hold All the old text; or had we chang d to gold Their silver; or dispos d into less glass Spirits of virtue, which then scatter d was. But tis not so; w are not retir d, but damp d; And as our bodies, so our minds are cramp d; Tis shrinking, not close weaving, that hath thus In mind and body both bedwarfed us. We seem ambitious, God s whole work t undo; Of nothing he made us, and we strive too, To bring our selves to nothing back; and we Do what we can, to do t so soon as he.

26 With new diseases on our selves we war, And with new physic, a worse engine far. Thus man, this world s vice-emperor, in whom All faculties, all graces are at home (And if in other creatures they appear, They re but man s ministers and legates there To work on their rebellions, and reduce Them to civility, and to man s use); This man, whom God did woo, and loath t attend Till man came up, did down to man descend, This man, so great, that all that is, is his, O what a trifle, and poor thing he is! If man were anything, he s nothing now; Help, or at least some time to waste, allow T his other wants, yet when he did depart With her whom we lament, he lost his heart. She, of whom th ancients seem d to prophesy, When they call d virtues by the name of she; She in whom virtue was so much refin d, That for alloy unto so pure a mind She took the weaker sex; she that could drive The poisonous tincture, and the stain of Eve, Out of her thoughts, and deeds, and purify All, by a true religious alchemy, She, she is dead; she s dead: when thou knowest this, Thou knowest how poor a trifling thing man is, And learn st thus much by our anatomy, The heart being perish d, no part can be free, And that except thou feed (not banquet) on The supernatural food, religion, Thy better growth grows withered, and scant; Be more than man, or thou rt less than an ant. Then, as mankind, so is the world s whole frame Quite out of joint, almost created lame, For, before God had made up all the rest, Corruption ent red, and deprav d the best; It seiz d the angels, and then first of all The world did in her cradle take a fall, And turn d her brains, and took a general maim, Wronging each joint of th universal frame. The noblest part, man, felt it first; and then Both beasts and plants, curs d in the curse of man. So did the world from the first hour decay, That evening was beginning of the day, And now the springs and summers which we see, Like sons of women after fifty be. And new philosophy calls all in doubt, The element of fire is quite put out, The sun is lost, and th earth, and no man s wit Can well direct him where to look for it. And freely men confess that this world s spent, When in the planets and the firmament They seek so many new; they see that this Is crumbled out again to his atomies. Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone, All just supply, and all relation; Prince, subject, father, son, are things forgot, For every man alone thinks he hath got To be a phoenix, and that then can be None of that kind, of which he is, but he. This is the world s condition now, and now She that should all parts to reunion bow, She that had all magnetic force alone, To draw, and fasten sund red parts in one;

27 PEOPLE OF A WEEK AND WALDEN: PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK She whom wise nature had invented then When she observ d that every sort of men Did in their voyage in this world s sea stray, And needed a new compass for their way; She that was best and first original Of all fair copies, and the general Steward to fate; she whose rich eyes and breast Gilt the West Indies, and perfum d the East; Whose having breath d in this world, did bestow Spice on those Isles, and bade them still smell so, And that rich India which doth gold inter, Is but as single money, coin d from her; She to whom this world must it self refer, As suburbs or the microcosm of her, She, she is dead; she s dead: when thou know st this, Thou know st how lame a cripple this world is... ANATOMY OF THE WORLD

28 1612 John Donne s Of the Progress of the Soul elegy for Elizabeth Drury, still 15 years of age and holding (she dead). Thomas Heywood s long essay, AN APOLOGY FOR ACTORS, CONTAINING THREE BRIEF TREATISES.

29 PEOPLE OF A WEEK AND WALDEN: PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK 1615 John Donne was ordained in the Anglican church and later in the year become chaplain to King James I. His beloved Anne died. At about this point Francis Higginson became minister at the parish church of Claybrooke in Leicester. He would, through acquaintance with Arthur Hildersham and Thomas Hooker, become disenchanted with the conformity required by the Church of England and begin to involve himself with the dissenting Puritan congregations.

30 1618 The Reverend John Donne s HOLY SONNETS, most of which would remain unpublished until 1633.

31 PEOPLE OF A WEEK AND WALDEN: PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK 1621 The Reverend John Donne became dean of St. Paul s Cathedral, a post he would hold until his death.

32 1623 During this year and the next the Reverend John Donne was writing his DEVOTIONS UPON EMERGENT OCCASIONS, in which his serious illness was cast as a local version of the world s spiritual disease. This is the text that includes the celebrated snippet No man is an island entire of itself... Any man s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee. Having received his preparatory education at Winchester College, Thomas Browne matriculated at Oxford University.

33 PEOPLE OF A WEEK AND WALDEN: PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK 1624 In about this year Anne King, wife of Archdeacon Henry King, died at the age of 23. The body would be buried at St. Paul s Cathedral. The initial volume of the prose and poetry of Thomas Heywood, entitled GYNAIKEION OR NINE BOOKS OF VARIOUS HISTORY CONCERNING WOMEN. From this year forward, at The Phoenix Theatre, he would be producing new plays such as THE CAPTIVES, THE ENGLISH TRAVELLER, and A MAIDENHEAD WELL LOST, and reviving old plays. It was at this point that the Reverend John Donne s friendship with Izaak Walton began.

34 1630 King Charles I raised Sir William Alexander to the Scottish peerage as the Viscount of Stirling. It would have been at about this point that Thomas Carew became the server, which is to say the taster-inordinary, to King Charles I. It would have been in this period, also, that he became friends with Sir John Suckling, Ben Jonson, and Clarendon. The Reverend John Donne, as a minister of the court, had a considerable

35 influence over him. PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK

36 1631 March 31, Thursday (Old Style): Fully prepared, John Donne died. He had made his close friend, Archdeacon Henry King, D.D., one of his executors, and had presented him with his sermons in manuscript, and notes from his reading on over 1,400 authors. BRITISH CHRONOLOGY Only two months earlier he had preached his so-called funeral sermon, Death s Duell, and upon returning home from this delivery, had posed for a nice charcoal sketch attired in his funeral shroud (this would have been a long white linen or cotton garment with open back and long sleeves) and perched atop the urn he had purchased for his ashes. Most of his poetry was published only after his death, so I don t really know under what date to file the To Sir Edward Herbert at Iulyers from which Henry Thoreau would extract as follows in WALDEN, How happy s he who hath due place assigned To his beasts and disaforested his mind! * * * Can use his horse, goat, wolf, and ev ry beast, And is not ass himself to all the rest! Else man not only is the herd of swine, But he s those devils too which did incline Them to a headlong rage, and made them worse. a poem which Donne had written in honor of Edward, Lord Herbert of Chirbury (1582/3-1648): [following screens]

37 PEOPLE OF A WEEK AND WALDEN: PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK I hesitate to say these things, but it is not because of the subject, I care not how obscene my words are, but because I cannot speak of them without betraying my impurity. We discourse freely without shame of one form of sensuality, and are silent about another. We are so degraded that we cannot speak simply of the necessary functions of human nature. In earlier ages, in some countries, every function was reverently spoken of and regulated by law. Nothing was too trivial for the Hindoo lawgiver, however offensive it may be to modern taste. He teaches how to eat, drink, cohabit, void excrement and urine, and the like, elevating what is mean, and does not falsely excuse himself by calling these things trifles.

38 WALDEN: The other day I picked up the lower jaw of a hog, with white and sound teeth and tusks, which suggested that there was an animal health and vigor distinct from the spiritual. This creature succeeded by other means than temperance and purity. That in which men differ from brute beasts, says Mencius, is a thing very inconsiderable; the common herd lose it very soon; superior men preserve it carefully. Who knows what sort of life would result if we had attained to purity? If I knew so wise a man as could teach me purity I would go to seek him forthwith. A command over our passions, and over the external senses of the body, and good acts, are declared by the Ved to be indispensable in the mind s approximation to God. Yet the spirit can for the time pervade and control every member and function of the body, and transmute what in form is the grossest sensuality into purity and devotion. The generative energy, which, when we are loose, dissipates and makes us unclean, when we are continent invigorates and inspires us. Chastity is the flowering of man; and what are called Genius, Heroism, Holiness, and the like, are but various fruits which succeed it. Man flows at once to God when the channel of purity is open. By turns our purity inspires and our impurity casts us down. He is blessed who is assured that the animal is dying out in him day by day, and the divine being established. Perhaps there is none but has cause for shame on account of the inferior and brutish nature to which he is allied. I fear that we are such gods or demigods only as fauns and satyrs, the divine allied to beasts, the creatures of appetite, and that, to some extent, our very life is our disgrace. How happy s he who hath due place assigned To his beasts and disaforested his mind! * * * Can use his horse, goat, wolf, and ev ry beast, And is not ass himself to all the rest! Else man not only is the herd of swine, But he s those devils too which did incline Them to a headlong rage, and made them worse. All sensuality is one, though it takes many forms; all purity is one. It is the same whether a man eat, or drink, or cohabit, or sleep sensually. They are but one appetite, and we only need to see a person do any one of these things to know how great a sensualist he is. The impure can neither stand nor sit with purity. When the reptile is attacked at one mouth of his burrow, he shows himself at another. If you would be chaste, you must be temperate. What is chastity? How shall a man know if he is chaste? He shall not know it. We have heard of this virtue, but we know not what it is. We speak conformably to the rumor which we have heard. From exertion come wisdom and purity; from sloth ignorance and sensuality. In the student sensuality is a sluggish habit of mind. An unclean person is universally a slothful one, one who sits by a stove, whom the sun shines on prostrate, who reposes without being fatigued. If you would avoid uncleanness, and all the sins, work earnestly, thought it be at cleaning a stable. Nature is hard to be overcome, but she must be overcome. What avails it that you are Christian, if you are not purer than the heathen, if you deny yourself no more, if you are not more religious? I know of many systems of religion esteemed heathenish whose precepts fill

39 PEOPLE OF A WEEK AND WALDEN: PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK 1663 Bishop Henry King, D.D. prefixed an elegy to POEMS BY J.D. WITH ELEGIES ON THE AUTHOR S DEATH (London: Printed by M.F. for John Marriot, and are to be sold at his shop in St. Dunstan s Church-yard in Fleetstreet), an edition of the poems of John Donne.

40 1719 The Cheam School in Surrey was relocated from Whitehall to Tabor Court (it would be in that locale for more than two centuries). John Donne s POEMS ON SEVERAL OCCASIONS... WITH ELEGIES ON THE AUTHOR S DEATH. TO THIS EDITION IS ADDED SOME ACCOUNT OF THE LIFE OF THE AUTHOR (London: Printed for Jacob Tonson, sold by W. Taylor). This volume would be in the personal library of Waldo Emerson and thus available to be accessed by Henry Thoreau. ON SEVERAL OCCASIONS

41 PEOPLE OF A WEEK AND WALDEN: PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK 1767 John Quincy Adams was born, the 2nd of four children of Abigail Adams and John Adams. Despite the reputations these folks have acquired in historical imagination, it would be Abigail who would prove to be a stern and disapproving parent while John would prove to be the warmer, more loving parent. Alcoholism and related problems would ravage Abigail s brothers, and would later ravage her younger son. To ensure that John Quincy, her 1st-born son, would avoid this fate, she would throughout his life belabor him with a steady barrage of admonitions and criticisms. A biographer, Paul C. Nagel, would accuse Abigail of being a calamity as a mother who forced her own ambitions and apprehensions upon her children. 1 Young John Quincy would temporarily escape his mother s tirades by spending much of his youth in Europe where his father was serving in different diplomatic posts. Europe came to represent to him not only intellectual freedom but also personal freedom from familial expectations and intrusions. However, the almanac which John Quincy kept during his early twenties would describe encounters with prostitutes or lower-class pickups in Boston: my taste in erotics, he would explain to himself, is naturally depraved. His fiancée Louisa Johnson, be it noted, was schooled in Nantes (where, according to a song, the ladies wear no panties). She wrote poetry and played the harp nicely enough, but those were only a couple of her proclivities. The dynamic duo would not limit themselves to reading Chaucer, Spenser, Scott, and Maria Edgeworth aloud to one another, for the swain would draw his young lady s attention to the Reverend John Donne s randy couplet in celebration of pubic hair: Off with that wyerie Coronet and shew / The haiery Diademe which on you doth grow. During the second Continental Congress, Abigail Adams entreated her husband John to remember the ladies in the new code of laws he was writing. FEMINISM 1. Abigail Adams was a racist with a pronounced case of Negrophobia, who could not witness an American white man playing the role of Othello, in the Shakespeare play, wearing dark body makeup, without reporting that her whole soul shuddered as she witnessed the sooty heretic Moor touch the fair Desdemona. I don t think that anyone has to date bothered to evaluate the impact this sort of mindset must have had on her children. (No black American would portray this character until Paul Robeson was cast for the role in 1942, and even then no theater on Broadway in New York City could be found that would book such a production.)

42 1795 All 14 volumes of Robert Anderson s Edinburgh edition of THE WORKS OF THE BRITISH POETS, WITH PREFACES BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL, that occupied him from 1792 into 1807, would bear the nominal date of (It is said that Henry Thoreau would copy poems by Sir William Drummond of Hawthornden, Thomas Carew, George Peele, Samuel Daniel, Richard Lovelace, Lawrence Minot, and the Reverend John Donne from Volumes IV and V of this anthology; I am however unable to locate anything by Peele in these volumes.) WORKS, VOLUME IV WORKS, VOLUME V

43 PEOPLE OF A WEEK AND WALDEN: PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK 1840 July/August: Henry Thoreau quoted two lines from the Reverend John Donne s To the Countess of Bedford : July/August 1840: The brave man is the elder son of creation, who steps boyantly into his inheritance, while the coward, who is the younger, waits patiently until he decease. He is that sixth champion against Thebes, whom, when the proud devices of the rest have been recorded, the poet describes as bearing a full-orbed shield of solid brass, But there was no device upon its circle, For not to seem just but to be is his wish.

44 1843 May: Went to [Judge William Emerson s home The Snuggery at Castleton on] Staten Island, June, 1843, and returned in December, 1843, or to Thanksgiving. 2 Immediately after arrival Henry Thoreau would come down with two and a half weeks of cold and bronchitis, then a month later he would have an attack of the family narcolepsy. Passing back and forth on the ferry between New-York and Staten Island, Thoreau would have repeatedly passed the immigration center at Castle Garden, a repurposed fortress structure which did not even as yet have a roof. 3 Thoreau would visit the picture gallery of the National Academy of Design, but his haunts on Manhattan Island would be the New York Society Library and the Mercantile Library, and his reading list has recently been investigated. W m Emerson During this month, or before the 8th of the following month, Thoreau visited Henry James, Sr. at 21 Washington Place, New-York. Please note that William James was one year old, and Henry James, Jr. an infant, for some commentators in their simplicity and great-manitis have assumed that the Henry James with whom Thoreau talked in 1843 was the novelist Henry James. If Thoreau did talk with the novelist Henry James on 2. Thanksgiving, in November, according to the Universal Traveller, was one of the occasions upon which traditionally apprentices who are not permitted to visit their parental and rural homes more than twice in a year were expected to travel home to renew the bonds of affinity and affection under the paternal roof. 3. Very little of what Henry Thoreau saw now remains, as the building has been demolished back to its 1811 appearance.

45 PEOPLE OF A WEEK AND WALDEN: PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK this occasion, the novelist Henry James did not respond in any sophisticated fashion and did not in later life remember having encountered this Transcendentalist writer. (Thoreau and James Sr. had a 3-hour conversation and, replaying their chat for the benefit of readers of a Boston newspaper many years later after having become a Swedenborgian mystic, this aristocat alleged that Thoreau had been literally the most childlike, unconscious, and unblushing egotist it has ever been my fortune to encounter. ) Professor Walter Harding s take on this meeting was that it transformed the city of New York for Thoreau: whereas previously he had been ashamed of [his] eyes that beh[e]ld it, the metropolis became by this visit to a cultivated gentleman s home naturalized and humanized. Later on in this year Henry James, Sr. took his family plus his wife s sister Catherine Walsh on an extended trip to London and Paris. It seems that Thoreau was reading in the Elizabethan and Jacobean poets (he would quote from the Reverend John Donne in A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS, using lines from Obsequies on the Lord Harrington, Brother to the Countess of Bedford, a line from The Second Anniversary, and lines from Second Letter to the Countess of Huntington ). 4 A WEEK: Undoubtedly, countless reforms are called for, because society is not animated, or instinct enough with life, but in the condition of some snakes which I have seen in early spring, with alternate portions of their bodies torpid and flexible, so that they could wriggle neither way. All men are partially buried in the grave of custom, and of some we see only the crown of the head above ground. Better are the physically dead, for they more lively rot. Even virtue is no longer such if it be stagnant. A man s life should be constantly as fresh as this river. It should be the same channel, but a new water every instant. Virtues as rivers pass, But still remains that virtuous man there was. PEOPLE OF A WEEK 4. Notice that since Staten Island is formed from the extreme terminal moraine of the farthest reaching advance of the ice of our current Ice Age, and that since Henry did not venture beyond Staten Island prior to the publication of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS, in fact prior to the publication of WALDEN Thoreau had not once ever departed from the Walden Pond ice age landscape of detritus and erratic boulders! That landscape was in fact the sole landscape with which he had had any experience at all.

46 A WEEK: I dreamed this night of an event which had occurred long before. It was a difference with a Friend, which had not ceased to give me pain, though I had no cause to blame myself. But in my dream ideal justice was at length done me for his suspicions, and I received that compensation which I had never obtained in my waking hours. I was unspeakably soothed and rejoiced, even after I awoke, because in dreams we never deceive ourselves, nor are deceived, and this seemed to have the authority of a final judgment. We bless and curse ourselves. Some dreams are divine, as well as some waking thoughts. Donne sings of one Who dreamt devoutlier than most use to pray. PEOPLE OF A WEEK A WEEK: Think of the importance of Friendship in the education of men. He that hath love and judgment too, Sees more than any other doe. PEOPLE OF A WEEK It will make a man honest; it will make him a hero; it will make him a saint. It is the state of the just dealing with the just, the magnanimous with the magnanimous, the sincere with the sincere, man with man. And it is well said by another poet, Why love among the virtues is not known, Is that love is them all contract in one. October 22, Sunday: Thoreau expressed, in his journal, an attitude toward Richard Lovelace, that he was what his name expresses of slight material to make a poets fame His goings and comings are of no great account. His taste is not so much love of the good as fear of the bad though in one or two instances he has written fearlessly and memorably. (Thoreau at some point extracted from Lovelace s To Lucasta on Going to the Wars, To Althea from Prison, To His Dear Brother Colonel F.L., The ant, The Snail, On Mrs. Elizabeth Filmer, and Ode into his literary notebook.)

47 PEOPLE OF A WEEK AND WALDEN: PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK October 22: Donne was not a poet but a man of strong sense, a sturdy English thinker Full of conceits and whimsicalities hammering away at his subject be it eulogy or Epitaph sonnet or satire with the patience of a day laboror without the least taste, but with an occasional fine distinction and poetic utterance of a high order. He was rather Doctor Donne than the poet Donne. He gropes for the most part. His letters are perhaps best. WALDEN: Consider first how slight a shelter is absolutely necessary. I have seen Penobscot Indians, in this town, living in tents of thin cotton cloth, while the snow was nearly a foot deep around them, and I thought that they would be glad to have it deeper to keep out the wind. Formerly, when how to get my living honestly, with freedom left for my proper pursuits, was a question which vexed me even more than it does now, for unfortunately I am become somewhat callous, I used to see a large box by the railroad, six feet long by three wide, in which the laborers locked up their tools at night, and it suggested to me that every man who was hard pushed might get such a one for a dollar, and, having bored a few auger holes in it, to admit the air at least, get into it when it rained and at night, and hook down the lid, and so have freedom in his love, and in his soul be free. This did not appear the worst, nor by any means a despicable alternative. You could sit up as late as you pleased, and, whenever you got up, go abroad without any landlord or house-lord dogging you for rent. Many a man is harassed to death to pay the rent of a larger and more luxurious box who would not have frozen to death in such a box as this. I am far from jesting. Economy is a subject which admits of being treated with levity, but it cannot so be disposed of. PEOPLE OF WALDEN RICHARD LOVELACE

48 MAGISTERIAL HISTORY IS FANTASIZING: HISTORY IS CHRONOLOGY People of A Week and Walden Stack of the Artist of Kouroo

49 PEOPLE OF A WEEK AND WALDEN: PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK ELEGY XVIII. 5 by John Donne JOHN DONNE THE heavens rejoice in motion; why should I Abjure my so much loved variety, And not with many youth and love divide? Pleasure is none, if not diversified. The sun that, sitting in the chair of light, Sheds flame into what else so ever doth seem bright, Is not contented at one sign to inn, But ends his year, and with a new begin. All things do willingly in change delight, The fruitful mother of our appetite; Rivers the clearer and more pleasing are, Where their fair-spreading streams run wide and clear; And a dead lake, that no strange bark doth greet, Corrupts itself, and what doth live in it. Let no man tell me such a one is fair, And worthy all alone my love to share. Nature in her hath done the liberal part Of a kind mistress, and employed her art, To make her loveable, and I aver Him not humane, that would turn back from her. I love her well, and would, if need were, die, To do her service. But follows it that I Must serve her only, when I may have choice? The law is hard, and shall not have my voice. The last I saw in all extremes is fair, And holds me in the sunbeams of her hair; Her nymph-like features such agreements have, That I could venture with her to the grave. Another s brown; I like her not the worse; Her tongue is soft and takes me with discourse. Others, for that they well descended were, Do in my love obtain as large a share; And though they be not fair, tis much with me To win their love only for their degree. And though I fail of my required ends, The attempt is glorious and itself commends. How happy were our sires in ancient time, Who held plurality of loves no crime. With them it was accounted charity To stir up race of all indifferently; Kindred were not exempted from the bands, Which with the Persian still in usage stands. Women were then no sooner ask d than won, And what they did was honest and well done. But since this little Honour hath been used, Our weak credulity hath been abused; The golden laws of nature are repeal d, Which our first fathers in such reverence held; Our liberty reversed and charters gone; And we made servants to Opinion; A monster in no certain shape attired, And whose original is much desired, Formless at first, but growing on its fashions, And doth prescribe manners and laws to nations. Here love received immedicable harms, And was despoiled of his daring arms; A greater want than is his daring eyes, 5. Thoreau would copy from this into his Miscellaneous Extracts notebook, and a snippet would make its way into WEEK.

50 He lost those awful wings with which he flies, His sinewy bow and those immortal darts, With which he is wont to bruise resisting hearts. Only some few, strong in themselves and free, Retain the seeds of ancient liberty, Following that part of love although depress d, Yet make a throne for him within their breast, In spite of modern censures him avowing Their sovereign, all service him allowing. Amongst which troop although I am the least, Yet equal in perfection with the best, I glory in subjection of his hand, Nor ever did decline his least command; For in whatever form the message came My heart did open and receive the same, But time will in his course a point descry When I this lovèd service must deny; For our allegiance temporary is; With firmer age returns our liberties. What time in years and judgment we reposed, Shall not so easily be to change disposed, Nor to the art of several eyes obeying, But beauty with true worth securely weighing; Which being found assembled in some one We ll leave her ever, and love her alone. COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others, such as extensive quotations and reproductions of images, this read-only computer file contains a great deal of special work product of Austin Meredith, copyright Access to these interim materials will eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap through hyperspace resulting in navigation problems allows for an utter alteration of the context within which one is experiencing a specific content already being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin Meredith and therefore freely available for use by all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any material from such files, must be obtained in advance in writing from the Stack of the Artist of Kouroo Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC Please contact the project at <Kouroo@kouroo.info>. It s all now you see. Yesterday won t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago. Remark by character Garin Stevens in William Faulkner s INTRUDER IN THE DUST

51 PEOPLE OF A WEEK AND WALDEN: PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK Prepared: September 17, 2014

52 ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT GENERATION HOTLINE This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by a human. Such is not the case. Instead, someone has requested that we pull it out of the hat of a pirate who has grown out of the shoulder of our pet parrot Laura (as above). What these chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of modules which we term the Kouroo Contexture (this is data mining). To respond to such a request for information we merely push a button.