John Donne ... Anne Donne ....undone .... on the wireless

 I first discovered John Donne in the October of 1966.

Andrew at 16, 1966

I was just 16 and fell for his love poems which pretty much swept me up and have stayed with me ever since.

Never underestimate the power of such poems as The Sun Rising, A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning and the Flea to work on a love struck teenager.

So, as I write I am listening to the latest In Our Time programme featuring John Donne.

"Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Donne (1573-1631), known now as one of England’s finest poets of love and notable in his own time as an astonishing preacher. 

He was born a Catholic in a Protestant country and, when he married Anne More without her father's knowledge, Donne lost his job in the government circle and fell into a poverty that only ended once he became a priest in the Church of England. 

As Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral, his sermons were celebrated, perhaps none more than his final one in 1631 when he was plainly in his dying days, as if preaching at his own funeral.

John Donne, 2014

With Mary Ann Lund, Associate Professor in Renaissance English Literature at the University of Leicester, Sue Wiseman, Professor of Seventeenth Century Literature at Birkbeck, University of London, and Hugh Adlington, Professor of English Literature at the University of Birmingham"

Picture;John Donne Memorial by Nigel Boonham, 2012, St Paul's Cathedral Churchyard, Matthew Black, 2014, this file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

*John Donne, In Our Time, Radio 4, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001gx0k