John Donne - Festival Gardens, London, UK
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John Donne was an English poet, satirist, lawyer and a cleric in the Church of England being Dean of St Paul's. The bust of Donne is located immediately to the south east of St Paul's Cathedral.
Waymark Code: WMJ779
Location: London, United Kingdom
Date Posted: 10/05/2013
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The bust of John Donne was unveiled on 15th June 2012 and the
St Paul's Cathedral website tells us:
A statue of John Donne, one of England’s foremost
poets and priests, and a Dean of St Paul's, has been unveiled in the newly
completed garden to the south of the cathedral.
The bronze bust, by artist Nigel Boonham FRBS, points almost due west but
shows Donne turning to face east towards his birthplace on Bread Street,
just yards from the cathedral.
The directions of the compass were important to Donne in his metaphysical
work: east is the Rising Sun, the Holy Land and Christ, while west is the
place of decline and of death.
Underneath the bust is inscribed the Donne text:
Hence is't, that I am carried towards the West,
This day, when my Soul's form bends to the East
The Reverend Canon Mark Oakley, Treasurer of St Paul's, said: "Nigel
Boonham's dignified bust of John Donne places the former Dean in the heart
of the City that was so dear to him and very close to his places of birth,
work and death. The memorial includes words from Donne’s Good Friday, 1613,
Riding Westward, considered by some to be one of the finest devotional poems
of the Renaissance period, and these poignantly interrogate the directions
we take in life and the frightening tendency of human beings to end up
living lives which conflict with their soul’s understanding of what is true
and good.
"To be challenged with these thoughts in an energetic, busy and too often
anonymous City is timely. Our recent study event in St Paul’s on Donne
attracted over 1,600 people to attend and clearly showed how people continue
to be drawn to his resonance as both poet and preacher. To have the pre-Fire
statue of Donne in the cathedral and now a contemporary one outside displays
his importance to both church and world in his own times and in ours today."
The new sculpture was commissioned by the City of London, led by Alderman
Hall, who wanted to create the first fully public memorial to Donne. It was
unveiled by the artist and Professor Peter McCullough, one of the
cathedral's Lay Canons.
John Donne (1572-1631)
Renowned both as an extraordinarily sensual poet and a great priest and
preacher who coined the phrases ‘No man is an island’ and ‘For whom the bell
tolls’, John Donne’s work remains as powerful today as when lived and worked
at St Paul’s in the early years of the 17 century. Today, visitors to the
cathedral are still reminded of his time at St Paul’s by his imposing statue
- the only one to survive, unscathed, from the Great Fire of 1666.
The life-size bust, cast from bronze, sits atop a stone column on which is
inscribed:
John / Donne / poet and divine / 1571 - 1631
Around the base of the stone plinth is marked the cardinal points of the
compass with and inscription at each point:
North: Dean / St Paul's Cathedral
East: Birthplace / Bread Street
South: Married / Anne More of Losely
West: Reader / Lincoln's Inn
On the back of the bust is an inscription that reads:
City of London
2012
Alderman Robert Hall Patron
Nigel Boonhan FRBS Sculptor
Andre Whittle Lettering
The Poets website
carries a biography of Donne:
John Donne was born in 1572 in London, England. He is
known as the founder of the Metaphysical Poets, a term created by Samuel
Johnson, an eighteenth-century English essayist, poet, and philosopher. The
loosely associated group also includes George Herbert, Richard Crashaw,
Andrew Marvell, and John Cleveland. The Metaphysical Poets are known for
their ability to startle the reader and coax new perspective through
paradoxical images, subtle argument, inventive syntax, and imagery from art,
philosophy, and religion using an extended metaphor known as a conceit.
Donne reached beyond the rational and hierarchical structures of the
seventeenth century with his exacting and ingenious conceits, advancing the
exploratory spirit of his time.
Donne entered the world during a period of theological and political unrest
for both England and France; a Protestant massacre occurred on Saint
Bartholomew's day in France; while in England, the Catholics were the
persecuted minority. Born into a Roman Catholic family, Donne's personal
relationship with religion was tumultuous and passionate, and at the center
of much of his poetry. He studied at both Oxford and Cambridge Universities
in his early teen years. He did not take a degree at either school, because
to do so would have meant subscribing to the Thirty-nine Articles, the
doctrine that defined Anglicanism. At age twenty he studied law at Lincoln's
Inn. Two years later he succumbed to religious pressure and joined the
Anglican Church after his younger brother, convicted for his Catholic
loyalties, died in prison. Donne wrote most of his love lyrics, erotic
verse, and some sacred poems in the 1590s, creating two major volumes of
work: Satires, and Songs and Sonnets.
In 1598, after returning from a two-year naval expedition against Spain,
Donne was appointed private secretary to Sir Thomas Egerton. While sitting
in Queen Elizabeth's last Parliament in 1601, Donne secretly married Anne
More, the sixteen-year-old niece of Lady Egerton. Donne's father-in-law
disapproved of the marriage. As punishment, he did not provide a dowry for
the couple and had Donne briefly imprisoned.
This left the couple isolated and dependent on friends, relatives, and
patrons. Donne suffered social and financial instability in the years
following his marriage, exacerbated by the birth of many children. He
continued to write and published the Divine Poems in 1607. In Pseudo-Martyr,
published in 1610, Donne displayed his extensive knowledge of the laws of
the Church and state, arguing that Roman Catholics could support James I
without compromising their faith. In 1615, James I pressured him to enter
the Anglican Ministry by declaring that Donne could not be employed outside
of the Church. He was appointed Royal Chaplain later that year. His wife,
aged thirty-three, died in 1617, shortly after giving birth to their twelfth
child, a stillborn. The Holy Sonnets are also attributed to this phase of
his life.
In 1621, he became dean of Saint Paul's Cathedral. In his later years,
Donne's writing reflected his fear of his inevitable death. He wrote his
private prayers, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, during a period of
severe illness and published them in 1624. His learned, charismatic, and
inventive preaching made him a highly influential presence in London. Best
known for his vivacious, compelling style and thorough examination of mortal
paradox, John Donne died in London in 1631.
Wikipedia tells us of
two phrases coined by Donne that are still in use today:
One of these meditations, Meditation XVII, later
became well known for its phrases "No man is an Iland" (often modernised as
"No man is an island") and "...for whom the bell tolls".
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