The Cambridge Companion to John Donne
15 Donne’s afterlife
''One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally'': this line from the sonnet, ''Death be not proud,'' has been inscribed on the tombstone of various devotees of John Donne, none of them so fictional as the Victorian poet Randolph Henry Ash, the creation of A. S. Byatt in Possession (1990). In Byatt's romance, Ash's widow, Ellen, incorporates the line into a longer inscription that utters her wish for husband and wife to be joined together at the resurrection, ''where there will be no more parting.'' Her choice of the quotation pays silent tribute to something revealed in her journal, that in the last days of Ash's life they had been reading Donne's poems together, in particular ''The Relique.'' Ellen's fin de siècle fantasy seems just Victorian enough to prompt a pedant to observe that we have no record of any nineteenth-century readers invoking Donne's poetry in this way. Yet, when we consider that in forty-five years of cohabitation Randolph and Ellen never consummated their marriage, the fantasy is just outrageous enough to have interested Donne as a species of the ''mis-devotion'' (13) that might attend his writings after he died. Donne's explicit inscription in ''The Relique'' and other works of an interest in what future audiences might make of his writing suggests a deep longing ultimately to be known and understood.
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Bookmark this entryDigital Object Identifier: 10.1017/CCOL0521832373.015
How to cite (Modern Language Association style):
Haskin, Dayton. "Donne’s afterlife." The Cambridge Companion to John Donne. Ed. Achsah Guibbory. Cambridge University Press, 2006. Cambridge Collections Online. Cambridge University Press. 09 February 2010 DOI:10.1017/CCOL0521832373.015