Widowed: John Donne, Meet Leonard Cohen — And Send Us a Song, Please, From the Mystery Beyond

When Jon was alive, I often spent evenings with him, watching TV. He in his recliner, I in mine.

But this past week, I’ve been spending my evenings with Leonard Cohen. And going to bed with John Donne.

That is to say, I’ve been starting my evenings reclined on my recliner in the den with the documentary “Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, a Journey, a Song” on Netflix. And I’ve been finishing them up by crawling into bed with an audiobook recording of Katherine Rundell’s “Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne.”

The alignment of these two poets of libido and transcendence was a coincidence, serendipity. I happened upon the book and the documentary in the course of the same week.

John Donne, Meet Leonard Cohen

But it seems to me that these two poets were — are? — destined to meet, if not in my den, then perhaps in the great, shrouded Mystery beyond.

(Donne died in 1631. Cohen, in 2016. If there is a There, they’re there, I’m pretty sure. In which case, would they like to send us a song? Tell us where Jon is? Let us know that, yes, all shall be well and death be not proud?)

I’m not the first observer to make the Donne-Cohen connection. Edward Docx spotted the similarities and listed them with lucidity in an article for The Guardian a few years ago.

And Carolyn Oliver published a poem on Booth in 2018 about a Donne-Cohen encounter, wherein an orange peel “falls forever on its knees.”

So clearly — technically, theoretically, and in terms of literary criticism — I’m on to something here. I’ll let Docx elaborate on the similarities between the two poets — the upper class backgrounds, the religious persecution suffered, the youthful eroticism, the professional failures and humiliations, the lush intimacy with the English language, the disciplined writing, the jaw-dropping brilliance.

What grips me, batters me by the work of these two poets, leaping across the centuries, is their fierce love of a God that they are not even sure is there, and, if there, may or may not give a darn.

Thus, the irony of the opening lines of “Hallelujah,” which mention a chord that King David played:

 . . . and it pleased the Lord
But you don’t really care for music, do you?

David’s psalm pleases the Lord. But two lines later, we learn the Lord doesn’t actually care that much for music, and we are left with Cohen, “a baffled king composing Hallelujah.”

Holy Sonnets

Cohen sang the ambiguity of things. He loved God. He was pretty sure God loved him back. Except God kept turning up missing.

Same goes for Donne. Longing for a sign from God that will put an end to his uncertainty, Donne prays for a radical, unambiguous rescue, “Batter my heart, three-personed God . . . ”

By poem’s end, rescue has still not arrived, and Donne looks to his libertine past for a metaphor with sufficient oomph:

Take me to you, imprison me, for I

Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,

Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

Whew. These two men, from their 17th- and 2oth-century perspectives, are pulling out all stops to get God’s attention. Nearly four hundred years may have washed over the human condition, but certainty continues to elude the poet.

Back to Jon

Which brings me back to Jon.

Jon and I courted, flirted, dated, broke up and got back together for a full six years before we finally married. I wasn’t sure I wanted to marry Jon. Jon wasn’t sure he wanted to marry me.

One day, standing in the composing room at the San Francisco Chronicle, waiting with my favorite printer Cecil Tyce for some type — lead type! — to arrive so he could put it in the page and I could check it for typos, I sought my colleague’s counsel.

Should I marry Jon, I wondered out loud. I wasn’t sure. What did Cecil think?

Cecil was a good man, long married. I thought he might know something.

Cecil went straight to the point. “If you aren’t sure, the answer is no.”

I wasn’t sure. I married Jon anyway.

Like John Donne and Leonard Cohen, I am a person who’s better off not waiting around for certitude. It doesn’t show up for the likes of us.

Cohen sings it this way in “Anthem:”

There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.

More confessions re: John Donne at “John Donne: A Love Affair With a Poet Long Dead.”  Thoughts on Rumi, the poet, at “Coleman Barks and Rumi: What a Few Lines of Poetry — and a Witch — Taught Me.”

“Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne,” by Katherine Rundell, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2022.