The poet John Donne (1572-1631) lived four hundred years ago, in Elizabethan England, and yet his voice reaches us with the immediacy of a contemporary. Born into a family of Catholic recusants, he found his way, really rather slowly, into the priesthood in the Church of England (via a youthful elopement, brief stint in Harrogate Prison, and a failed diplomatic career). In his satire, love poetry and religious verse, he speaks to you. Be ‘you’ his wife and lover Anne More, his friend George Herbert, or Christ his God, he often leaves you with the impression you are as present to the poet as he is to himself. (A proposition you are welcome to debate with me in the session!) His love poems are full of religion and his religious works charged, challenged and deepened by human loves. 

Stylistically, his work anticipates many developments of twentieth-century English verse: abrupt opening lines, a conversational tone fostered by irregular rhythms, and using his wit and love of linguistic play to lead him to metaphysical insight and also to question what he has found. Donne has left us with a body of verse startling in its originality, honesty, wit, and passion, as if encouraging us to confront, in each moment of our lives, the very last – and the Other who is at its heart. 

Kathryn Bellhouse is assistant priest at St Peter's Eastern Hill Anglican Church, Melbourne. She grew up in Queenscliff on the Bellarine Peninsula of Victoria. Before undertaking a Masters of Divinity, she studied English & Theatre Studies and Philosophy for a Bachelor of Arts, and a Masters degree in Creative Writing, Editing & Publishing.