A Little History of Literature (9 page)

William Tyndale would never get a fair trial, and was given no opportunity to argue his case. Charles V simply ordered that the troublesome fellow be executed. This, he instructed, should be done in the cruel fashion laid down for heretics: burning alive at the stake. The sentence was carried out at Vilvoorde in October 1536. Humanely (in the unspeakably brutal circumstances), and in defiance of the emperor's command, his executors strangled Tyndale before his body was burned, to spare him pain. His last words on earth, reportedly, were: ‘Lord, open the King of England's
eyes.’ Henry VIII's eyes never were opened. He never could stand those who opposed his marital arrangements.

Henry VIII, in his momentous break with Rome, had meanwhile commanded the preparation of a Great Bible in English, and allowed the Tyndale Bible to form the backbone of the text. Between this first English Bible and the KJB of 1611, there intervened the reign of the fanatically Catholic Mary I, who proscribed such Protestant texts as heretical. The five years of Mary's rule (1553–58) ushered in a new period of religious terror. When the accession of Elizabeth saw a return to Protestantism, English translations, including Tyndale's, were again tolerated.

Elizabeth's successor, James, who ruled Scotland as James VI before becoming King James I of England, had long wanted to authorise a new, official English Bible. The increasingly powerful, and politically disobedient, Puritan sect also called for a translation without the inaccuracies they had found in previous versions. James outlined his great project at the Hampton Court Conference of 1604. It was made clear from the first that the eventual authorised version would not belong to any sect, denomination, elite or special interest group (certainly not to William Tyndale) but would be the property of the king, the head of the established church. It would forge a link between earthly and spiritual power, politics and religion, while splitting England, forever, from Rome's authority. In short, it would make the monarch's hold on the throne more secure. To this day newly ‘authorised’ versions of the Bible in Britain may be printed only by licence of the English Crown.

The Authorised Version was the work of six learned companies, combining the expertise of some fifty scholars. Despite this amassed brainpower – more of an army than a committee – it has been estimated that 80 per cent of the King James version is verbally unaltered from Tyndale's translation of eighty years earlier. A comparison of the opening lines of Genesis, first as translated by Tyndale, and then as they appear in the KJB, will make the point obvious:

So it goes for five Old Testament books more. William Tyndale's determination had been fully vindicated and he would have had an unanswerable charge of plagiarism – word-for-word imitation – to bring against those six companies of scholars in a modern law court.

In addition to making the book of books accessible to the ploughman and everyone else, as Tyndale had wanted, the 1611 Authorised Version triumphantly achieved the goals James had set down for it. It cemented the structure of the established church in England, which would, with the monarchy and Parliament, be one of the foundation stones of what was to become the modern British state. It also served to create a version, or ‘dialect’, of the English language which was heard by the population at least once a week (James made church-going compulsory). The weekly lessons read from the Authorised Version permeated the intellectual and cultural fabric of England – particularly its writers – for hundreds of years to come. It's not always audible and not always visible, but it's always present.

In our respect for the Authorised Version – the only truly great work of literature in English for which we can thank a king – we should never forget William Tyndale. He is an author of equal standing, one might claim, with the greatest in his language. And that does not exclude Shakespeare.

CHAPTER
9

Minds Unchained

T
HE
M
ETAPHYSICALS

Ask poetry-lovers who is the finest creator of short ‘lyric’ poems in English literature and chances are the name that comes up time and again will be John Donne (1572–1631). Donne led a school of poets called the ‘Metaphysicals’. Ignore that name, by the way: no one has satisfactorily been able to work out why these poets should be so called. If you need to be precise it's best to settle, as do most literary historians, for ‘school of Donne’. But ‘Metaphysicals’ has a more interesting sound to it.

Donne did not write for the opinion of posterity – at least, not the verses for which he is nowadays most admired, the love poems he wrote as a young man. In his later years – his ‘penitential years’, as his friend and biographer, Izaak Walton, called them – when he regretted the wildness of his youth, he had become a respectable churchman and did his best to suppress these early works. He would, he said, be glad to see their ‘funeral’.

Donne hoped in later life that he would be most admired for his religious poems, which are indeed wonderful – particularly the so-called ‘Holy Sonnets’, of which the most famous is ‘Death Be Not
Proud’ in which the poet defiantly asserts that the true Christian need not fear death, but should confront it as an enemy to be fought and defeated. This is how the poem (fourteen lines long, like most sonnets) opens:

‘Thou’ and ‘thee’ sound old-fashioned now, but back then they were informal ways of addressing someone of lesser standing than yourself, like a 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.)

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:

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 of
great 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 them be united if their blood has already run together? We do not know if the young woman to whom this poem was addressed was persuaded to give in to her witty lover or not. But few objects of youthful desire can have received a finer literary compliment. And we, hundreds of years later, can enjoy it simply as a poem.

After Donne's death and the victory of the Puritans under Cromwell in the English Civil War (1642–51), poems celebrating ‘libertine’ (immoral) love were sternly censored and discouraged. That included poems such as ‘The Flea’, since the young man and woman are clearly not married. The eighteenth century which followed – called the ‘Augustan Age’ of literature for its fashion of imitating of refined classical (Latin and Greek) models – disapproved of the intellectual recklessness of the metaphysical imagination. For them, the moral impropriety did not matter. It was just, in a literary sense, too wild.

Samuel Johnson, the most authoritative of Augustans, complained that in Donne's poetry ‘the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together’. By that he meant, for example, linking a flea's blood with religious imagery. In another famous example Donne compared separated lovers as being like a pair of compasses, joined at the head. It was ‘indecorous’ – it lacked polish. It was all over the place. Johnson believed that poetry should follow rules, not flout them.

Despite such objections, the reputation of the Metaphysicals has risen over the centuries since they were writing. They came to be regarded as an increasingly significant movement in the development of English poetry, not merely in themselves but for the influence they exercised on their modern successors. It was the
great twentieth-century poet T.S. Eliot who most effectively argued for the greatness and importance of his seventeenth-century predecessors. A poet such as Donne had what Eliot recognised as an ‘undissociated sensibility’. What Eliot meant by this very strange phrase was that for Donne and his school, there were no such things as ‘poetic subjects’ which could be written about and ‘unpoetic subjects’ which could not be written about. A poet could write about fleas as lyrically as he or she could write about nightingales or turtle doves. Eliot valued metaphysical poetry for its ability to unite high and low. All life is in their verse; nothing is excluded. That was a lesson poets like himself could carry away with them.