Free A Little History of Literature by John Sutherland

child or servant; ‘you’ was used more formally. Here, then, these words indicate disrespect. It is a confrontational opening challenge – come on and fight me, then, if you think you're so tough – which hinges, as does much of Donne's poetry, on a paradox, something that means two things simultaneously. Here the paradox is that those whom death ‘thinks’ it kills actually go on to eternal life. Death, as we would say, is a loser, and always will be.
    Donne also hoped to be remembered for his sermons and solemn meditations on religious subjects. Brilliantly written as they are, few people nowadays read them in their entirety, although parts of the sermons can be read for pure literary pleasure. (Donne, however, would probably be angry that we were treating his work in this way.) The following wonderfully long, looping sentence from his ‘Meditation XVII’ is a good example of Donne taking a religious truth and expressing it in a way that hits home as only truly great literature can. (I've kept the original spelling here which, I think, adds to the effect.)
    No man is an Iland, intire of itselfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Manor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; and therefore never send to know for whom the [funeral] bell tolls; It tolls for thee.

    Everyone will die: there is no way out of this world alive. Yet we should see it not as a personal tragedy, but something that connects us, intimately, with the fate of every other person on earth. Put that way, as I've put it, it's trite. As Donne puts it, it's wonderful.
    Great as the religious verse and prose is, it is the early Songs and Sonnets , written in Donne's wild youth, which have been most influential and are nowadays most often included in anthologies. They were originally circulated in manuscript form for the enjoyment of a small group of similarly clever, intellectually daring friends. Donne's was a highly refined branch of poetry. It is challenging – at times fearsomely so. Modern readers may feel at times that they are not reading the poems, but solving difficult puzzles. Approached in the right way, that adds to the pleasure.
    The Metaphysicals were deeply learned but, above all, ‘witty’. Wit – meaning smartness – was the essence of their project. And none of the group was wittier than John Donne. The device they most valued was what they called the ‘conceit’ – the daring idea or ‘concept’ that no one had ever come up with before. Often these conceits bordered on the extravagantly far-fetched. As always in literature it's something easier demonstrated than described. A prime example is Donne's short poem ‘The Flea’, written, we assume, in his youth:
    Mark but this flea, and mark in this,
How little that which thou deniest me is;
It suck'd me first, and now sucks thee,
And in this flea our two bloods mingled be.

    What is the poet getting at here? One must unravel the poem a bit to solve the puzzle. The unnamed young lady to whom the poem is being addressed is, we gather, stubbornly resisting the poet's urgent overtures that she surrender to him. For his part, the poet is using all the resources of his poetry as an instrument of winning her over.
    Donne asks what their coming together would mean, and explains it by the insignificance of a flea. A tiny thing. Nothing ofgreat consequence. He urges his request by pointing to the flea that he has just seen (and probably crushed between his thumbnails, spurting blood). The flea, he presumes, has sucked on both their bodies – so their bodily fluids have already been united. Elsewhere in the poem there are hints, verging on the outrageous, of the Anglican communion service and the communion wine, representing Christ's blood.
    Why, the poem wittily argues, shouldn't the two of