The Poetry of John Donne Trivia Quiz

Answer: Idle princes

Donne concludes the poem by suggesting that for lovers, their bed rather than the sun is at the centre of the orbit!

Answer: Christopher Marlowe

Marlowe's poem is entitled 'The Passionate Shepherd to His Lover' and the first verse is:
'Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove
That valleys, groves, hills, and fields,
Woods or steepy mountain yields.'

Answer: new-found-land

Donne was writing around the time when the first Puritans were leaving England to form settlements in America. Newfoundland had itself been claimed by England in 1497, a hundred or so years earlier.

Answer: rivers

The river Trent runs through the Midlands but the river Lethe was, according to Greek mythology, one of the rivers running through Hades, which brought forgetfulness or oblivion. Donne refers in the same poem to the Po, the Sequan and the Danube rivers. The Sequan is probably an old name for the Seine.

Answer: A marriage poem

Donne describes the poem he wrote for the Lady Elizabeth and Count Palatine as 'an epithalamion or marriage song.' The pair were married on St Valentine's Day and so the poem begins
'Hail Bishop Valentine, whose day this is,
All the air is thy diocese,
And all the chirping choristers,
And other birds are thy parishioners;'

Answer: For Whom the Bell Tolls

Ernest Hemingway took his title from this great, and oft-quoted, observation of Donne's:
'No man is an island, entire of itself;
every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less,
as well as if a promontory were,
as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were:
any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind,
and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
it tolls for thee'

Answer: Good Friday

The poem is entitled 'Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward.' Donne meditated on the events of Good Friday - Christ's crucifixion - and is glad he did not have to suffer watching Christ suffering on our behalf.

Answer: Autumn

He tells us in 'The Autumnal':
'No Spring, nor Summer beauty hath such grace,
As I have seen in one Autumnal face.'
and again:
'But name not Winter-faces, whose skin's slack;
Lank, as an unthrift's purse; but a soul's sack.'
He likes mature, but not actually old, women!

Answer: New England

Instead he is 'coming to that Holy Room'. The last two verses are beautiful, confident prayers for his final salvation:
'As the first Adam's sweat surrounds my face,
May the last Adam's blood my soul embrace.

So, in his purple wrapp'd receive me Lord,
By these his thorns give me his other crown;
And as to other's souls I preached thy word,
Be this my text, my sermon to mine own,
Therefore that he may raise, the Lord throws down.'

Answer: His constancy

He also leaves his tears to women or the sea; his pensiveness to buffoons; his faith to Roman Catholics; his patience to gamesters; his sickness to physicians; and his English tongue to foreigners. The principles by which he gives are: to those who had too much before, to those who have an incapacity, to those that count the gift an indignity, and to those who taught him the gift. I'll leave you to work out which category each gift falls into!

To nature, he left 'all that I in rhyme have writ' and for that we are richly blessed!