John Donne
... of Cambridge, but took no degree at either university because he would not take the Oath of Supremacy required at graduation. In 1593, Donne’s brother Henry died of a fever in prison after being arrested for giving sanctuary to a proscribed Catholic priest. This made Donne begin to question his faith. In 1601, Donne secretly married Lady Egerton’s niece, seventeen-year-old Anne More, daughter of Sir George More, Lieutenant of the Tower, and thereby ruined his own worldly hopes. Egerton dismissed Donne from his post, and for the next dozen years the post had to struggle to support his growing family. During the next few years Donne made a meager living as a lawyer. Donne’s poetry embraces a wide range of secular and religious subjects. He wrote cynical verse about inconstancy; poems about true love such as The Good-Morrow and Sweetest Love; Napoleonic lyrics on the mystical union of lovers’ souls and bodies, such as Air and Angels and The Ecstasy; brilliant satires; hymns and holy sonnets depicting his own spiritual struggles, such as A Hymn to God the Father, Batter my Heart, Three-Personed God, and I am a Little World Made Cunningly. An Anatomy of the World and Of the Progress of the Soul are elegies for 15-year-old Elizabeth Drury, whose death epitomized for Donne the decay of the ...