Illness and Poetry

Pulter wasn’t the only seventeenth-century poet for whom illness was an occasion to contemplate mortality and to make verse. The poems gathered here suggest the different ways her contemporaries linked sickness and poetry. Donne’s speaker, like Pulter’s, writes in the first person, depicting illness as preparation for death and salvation, but he addresses God directly. Jonson’s poem addresses Disease itself, blaming it for preying especially on ladies; the poem moves from concern for these preyed-upon ladies to a list of women whom disease should choose instead. His poem suggests that women and disease go together. Herbert describes “mortification” at a remove, in the third person, bringing home the message that aging and illness instruct us in how to die.

John Donne
Hymn to God, My God, in My Sickness

Since I am coming to that holy room,
Where, with thy choir of saints forevermore,
I shall be made thy music; as I come
I tune the instrument here at the door,
And what I must do then, think here before.

Whilst my physicians by their love are grown
Cosmographers, and I their map, who lie
Flat on this bed, that by them may be shown
That this is my southwest discovery
Per fretum febris,* by these straits to die,
*through fever

I joy, that in these straits I see my west;
For, though their currents yield return to none,
What shall my west* hurt me? As west and east**
*death **sunset/sunrise, death/birth
In all flat maps (and I am one) are one,
So death doth touch the resurrection.

Is the Pacific Sea my home? Or are
The eastern riches? Is Jerusalem?
Anyan, and Magellan, and Gibraltar,
All straits, and none but straits, are ways to them,
Whether where Japhet dwelt, or Cham, or Shem.*
*Noah’s sons

We think that Paradise and Calvary,
Christ’s cross, and Adam’s tree, stood in one place;
Look, Lord, and find both* Adams met in me:
*i.e., Christ and Adam
As the first Adam’s sweat surrounds my face,
May the last Adam’s blood my soul embrace.

So, in his purple* wrapped, receive me, Lord;
*his passion or sacrifice
By these his thorns, give me his other crown;
And as to others’ souls I preached thy word,
Be this my text, my sermon to mine own:
“Therefore that he may raise, the Lord throws down.”

Source: John Donne, Poems, by J. D. With Elegies on the Author’s Death (London, 1635), sigs. Bb8r-v, modernized. [Three collections of Donne’s poetry were published after his death; this poem appeared in the second printing. It might describe either his final illness (he died in 1631) or an earlier one.]

Ben Jonson, VIII, To Sickness

Why, Disease, dost thou molest
Ladies? and of them the best?
Do not men enow of rights
To thy altars, by their nights
Spent in surfeits, and their days,
And nights too, in worser ways?
Take heed, Sickness, what you do;
I shall fear you’ll surfeit too.
Live not we, as all thy stalls,
Spittles, pest-house, hospitals,
Scarce will take our present store?
And this age will build no more.
’Pray thee, feed contented then,
Sickness, only on us men.
Or if it needs thy lust will taste
Womankind, devour the waste
Livers, round about the town.
But, forgive me: with thy crown
They maintain the truest trade,
And have more diseases made.
What should yet thy palate please?
Daintiness, and softer ease,
Sleeked limbs, and finest blood?
If thy leanness love such food,
There are those that, for thy sake,
Do enough, and who would take
Any pains. Yea, think it price,
To become thy sacrifice.
That distill their husbands’ land
In decoctions, and are manned
With ten emp’rics, in their chamber,
Lying for the spirit of amber.
That for the oil of talc dare spend
More than citizens dare lend
Them, and all their officers.
That, to make all pleasure theirs,
Will by coach, and water go,
Every stew in town to know;
Dare entail their loves on any,
Bald or blind, or ne’er so many.
And for thee, at common game,
Play away health, wealth, and fame.
These, Disease, will thee deserve,
And will, long ere thou should’st starve,
On their beds most prostitute
Move it, as their humblest suit,
In thy justice to molest
None but them, and leave the rest.

Ben Jonson, from The Forest in The Works of Benjamin Jonson (London, 1616), sigs. ZZZ6r-v, modernized.

George Herbert, Mortification

How soon doth man decay!
When clothes are taken from a chest of sweets
To swaddle infants, whose young breath
Scarce knows the way;
Those clouts are little winding sheets,
Which do consign and send them unto death.

When boys go first to bed,
They step into their voluntary graves.
Sleep binds them fast; only their breath
Makes them not dead.
Successive nights, like rolling waves,
Convey them quickly, who are bound for death.

When youth is frank and free,
And calls for music, while his veins do swell,
All day exchanging mirth and breath
In company,
That music summons to the knell,
Which shall befriend him at the house of death.

When man grows staid and wise,
Getting a house and home, where he may move
Within the circle of his breath,
Schooling his eyes:
That dumb enclosure maketh love
Unto the coffin, that attends his death.

When age grows low and weak,
Marking his grave, and thawing ev’ry year,
Till all do melt, and drown his breath
When he would speak:
A chair or litter shows the bier,
Which shall convey him to the house of death.

Man, ere he is aware,
Hath put together a solemnity
And dressed his hearse, while he has breath
As yet to spare.
Yet Lord, instruct us so to die
That all these dyings may be life in death.

Source: George Herbert, The Temple: Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations (Cambridge, 1633), sigs. D9v-D10, modernized