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John Donne (1572-1631) was the most outstanding of the English Metaphysical Poets
and a churchman famous for his spellbinding sermons.

Donne was born in London to a prominent Roman Catholic family but converted to
Anglicanism during the 1590s. At the age of 11 he entered the University of Oxford,
where he studied for three years. According to some accounts, he spent the next three
years at the University of Cambridge but took no degree at either university. He began the
study of law at Lincoln's Inn, London, in 1592, and he seemed destined for a legal or
diplomatic career. Donne was appointed private secretary to Sir Thomas Egerton, Keeper
of the Great Seal, in 1598. His secret marriage in 1601 to Egerton's niece, Anne More,
resulted in his dismissal from this position and in a brief imprisonment. During the next
few years Donne made a meager living as a lawyer.

Donne's principal literary accomplishments during this period were Divine Poems (1607)
and the prose work Biathanatos (c. 1608, posthumously published 1644), a half-serious
extenuation of suicides, in which he argued that suicide is not intrinsically sinful. Donne
became a priest of the Anglican Church in 1615 and was appointed royal chaplain later
that year. In 1621 he was named dean of St. Paul's Cathedral. He attained eminence as a
preacher, delivering sermons that are regarded as the most brilliant and eloquent of his
time.

Donne's poetry embraces a wide range of secular and religious subjects. He wrote cynical
verse about inconstancy, poems about true love, Neoplatonic lyrics on the mystical union
of lovers' souls and bodies and brilliant satires and hymns depicting his own spiritual
struggles. The two "Anniversaries" - "An Anatomy of the World" (1611) and "Of the
Progress of the Soul" (1612)--are elegies for 15-year-old Elizabeth Drury.

Whatever the subject, Donne's poems reveal the same characteristics that typified the
work of the metaphysical poets: dazzling wordplay, often explicitly sexual; paradox;
subtle argumentation; surprising contrasts; intricate psychological analysis; and striking
imagery selected from nontraditional areas such as law, physiology, scholastic
philosophy, and mathematics.

Donne's prose, almost equally metaphysical, ranks at least as high as his poetry. The
Sermons, some 160 in all, are especially memorable for their imaginative explications of
biblical passages and for their intense explorations of the themes of divine love and of the
decay and resurrection of the body. Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624) is a
powerful series of meditations, expostulations, and prayers in which Donne's serious
sickness at the time becomes a microcosm wherein can be observed the stages of the
world's spiritual disease.

Obsessed with the idea of death, Donne preached what was called his own funeral
sermon, "Death's Duel" just a few weeks before he died in London on March 31, 1631.
http://www.online-literature.com/donne/

Some that have deeper digg'd love's mine than I,

Say, where his centric happiness doth lie.
I have loved, and got, and told,
But should I love, get, tell, till I were old,
I should not find that hidden mystery.
O ! 'tis imposture all ;
And as no chemic yet th' elixir got,
But glorifies his pregnant pot,
If by the way to him befall
Some odoriferous thing, or medicinal,
So, lovers dream a rich and long delight,
But get a winter-seeming summer's night.

Our ease, our thrift, our honour, and our day,

Shall we for this vain bubble's shadow pay?
Ends love in this, that my man
Can be as happy as I can, if he can
Endure the short scorn of a bridegroom's play?
That loving wretch that swears,
'Tis not the bodies marry, but the minds,
Which he in her angelic finds,
Would swear as justly, that he hears,
In that day's rude hoarse minstrelsy, the spheres.
Hope not for mind in women ; at their best,
Sweetness and wit they are, but mummy, possess'd.