How to write poetry like John Donne

by Abby Shelley

Poetry exercises: Revered poet John Donne made quips about dildos and possibly invented the first 'your momma' joke. Check our poetry exercise for writing in his inflammatory style.

John Donne was a sixteenth-century clergyman and poet. I know, I know, you can already smell the chalk dust in the classroom and the sharpened number 2 pencils. But John Donne is a poet so modern, dirty-minded and just plain bizarre, he'd make the stereotypical teacher have a cardiac arrest.

"Batter My Heart, Three-Personed God" is a sonnet about how John Donne wants really badly to be a good Christian, but he can't stop with this whole "sinning" thing, so he wants God to take over his soul. Pretty standard for a clergyman, right?

Except that he says that he's a captured city, and he wants God to invade him. Remember, in those days, there were no Geneva Conventions; invading a city meant pillaging, fire and massacre of women and children. He wants God to destroy everything about him for faith.

Then he switches metaphors, saying that he wants to marry God, but is engaged to sin, and he beseeches God to 'enthrall' him. The idea of marriage to God was fairly common (it started with the Song of Songs in the Bible), but no-one ever did it in as messed up a way as John Donne did. You see, in John Donne's time, the words "enthrall" and "ravish" were euphemisms for rape.

On a more secular and slightly less messed up level, there is John Donne's The Anagram, sadly unknown to most people, as it is possibly the only classical poem ever to end with a Biblically allusive dildo joke.

I'm not making this up.

The poem starts by saying that John Donne's friend's girlfriend is quite beautiful. After all, yellow and red are pretty, so it doesn't matter if they mean yellow hair and red cheeks, not the other way around. Same deal for her light eyes and dark teeth, big mouth and small eyes, and so on. And since virginity is important, if he loses his to her, it'll totally work out.

That's the source of the title, by the way. The girlfriend is an "anagram" because she has all the ingredients of beauty in the wrong places.

John Donne concludes the poem with a few one-liners, including that she's so ugly that old age won't deform her and an elaborate pun revolving around "husband" also meaning farmer, barren (applying to both wombs and fields), and pretty fields being useless for farming. Then he decides to go for broke.

The girlfriend is so ugly that her boyfriend never has to worry about her cheating on him. She is so ugly that notions of her having sex are as unbelievable as witch trials. She is so ugly she could work as a prostitute for seven years and become a nun afterward. She is so ugly that if she was giving birth, the midwife wouldn't believe she was pregnant. She is so ugly that, like Joseph of the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat from his master's wife, her dildo runs away from her.

See? I told you I wasn't kidding.

Proof that even being a priest doesn't mean you can't have an incredibly dirty mind.

And also, perhaps, the first written documentation of the "your momma" joke, albeit in this context it's a girlfriend.

Writing Exercise: How to write poetry like John Donne

John Donne used lots of interesting sexual, theological and scientific metaphors.

Write a poem around a standard poetic theme - like nature or love - but use a metaphor that seems to be completely unrelated. How can you draw the connection between the two different ideas?

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