Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne by Katherine Rundell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I first met poet John Donne
There where in the century just gone
Every Irish not yet -man and -woman
Was made to memorise his sonnets:
On the bescribbled pages of Soundings,
That schoolbook greatest English hits
With tea stains on it.
I’ll confess he had on me the same effect
As on those his peer detractors
Who felt his metre to erratic,
His imagery too obtuse
For comfort or for ready use.
But sure, what more my story tell
Than of inner city youth?
In truth, no match for soaring
high-boned biographess
Katherine Rundell,
Whose dashing image squats a third
Of th’ rear cover sleeve in hardback.
(Her verso lips appear in colour lurid,
While Donne’s own recto, a pallid white and black)
What could I know of Souls
Like those that Donne proffered?
I who unlike her was never Fellow
Of All of them in Oxford?
With every syllable she writes she fools
Through heavy weight of accent,
Of chevron and three cinquefoils gules.
For ‘tis not her pride the deadly sin
That makes Kate’s lips so bright against the pages dun.
Our sin’s a sort of rabble pride,
We buy ‘cause we aspire
To transform two weeks in Croyde
Into something higher
Than pricey meals and a long slow, A-road, trafficked, need to stop and wee at the next station car ride.
She peddles for another sort of pride
An inconstant poet fraud
Who sold his faith and stole his bride
As transformation. Why?
Because if Donne can use fine words to hide
His sins of greed, and sloth and lust,
So surely can our Kate use this pulpit of a kind
To sell her stinking English upper crust
And all the sour history in it
As something more than what it is:
Sub-infinite.
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