“Write not” like the mother of John Donne’s children
She bore 12 children for thee…
John Donne lost his wife a few days after she bore their 12th child. The baby also died.
I am thinking about his deceased wife on Mother’s Day 2022. Or maybe thinking about all the words she never wrote.
Donne also wrote “For whom the bell tolls.” We don’t know when he wrote it. The final three lines read:
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.
Hemingway appropriated this title for an also impressive (crypto-Communist) novel.
Running Donne’s line through “Hemingway” — or a similar algorithmic checker — might yield helpful recommendations, like
- Remove ‘therefore’ (superfluous/wordy)
- Replace ‘send not to know’ with ‘don’t ask’
- Run-on sentence alert. Consider replacing comma after ‘tolls’ with question mark. Or consider placing entire parenthetical question, “Don’t ask for whom the bell tolls” inside quotation marks to separate clauses.
- Replace ‘thee’ with ‘you.’
- Consider simpler syntax generally.
Such writing considerations would mutilate the original. But in the world of monetizing content, for every story about writers, one thousand copy cat copy writers contentedly churn content. Hemingway would frown.
Modernized spelling, however, is an improvement. Today, readers frown at ‘illand.’ :-(
The algorithms and contemporary values easily ignore that patriarchal conceit of the first sentence of this ‘story.’
Intentionally misdirecting through a prism of cognitive distraction, one ‘buries the lede’ — like the burial of the wife of John Donne — by rendering her an object attached to a famous writer.
Better: “The wife of John Donne died in childbirth. He wrote many poems about his grief.”
At least that puts her first. But…that sucks.
Perhaps referring to the name of the ‘wife of John Donne’? Thank you, Google, for helping me discover “Anne More.” Wikipedia even includes a witty John Donne pun he sent her in a love letter after they were married, after her father disinherited her and her uncle destroyed Donne’s career. At least his wit remained intact:
John Donne, Anne Donne, Un-done
Cute. Witty.
Anne More’s father/uncle ignored Anne’s wishes. Encyclopedists appear not to have cared either. And the Wikipedia authors de l’instant note:
His [John Donne’s] wife died on 15 August 1617, five days after giving birth to their twelfth child, a still-born baby. Donne mourned her deeply, and wrote of his love and loss in his 17th Holy Sonnet.
Of course, they wrote their entry about John, not Anne.
Meditating on her on Mother’s Day, after learning how 6 or 7 Catholic-trained judges had overturned Roe v. Wade in America, I pondered Anne More Donne. How odd. Donne repudiated his Catholic upbringing. It was a big deal back then. Maybe Anne More had something to do with it?
Impetuous? The sort of woman who would run off with a man she found brilliant after only a brief meeting? Who would marry him clandestinely — defying her own powerful family? When she was 17?
What happened to Anne? She bore 12 children, 5 of whom died before maturity. John Donne, mostly unemployed for over a decade after marrying her and being denied any employment beyond meager lawyering and polemic-writing (in an era when a meager living meant starvation for children), noted
Because I have transplanted [her] into a wretched fortune, I must labour to disguise that from her by all such honest devices, as giving her my company, and discourse.
The gift of his company amounted to 12 children in 16 years. Anne died when she was 33. Or did she give those children to him, and proceed to nurse, feed, clothe, and struggle mightily to save as many of them as she could?
We don’t know much about Anne More Donne’s writing. Hence the title of this story: “write not” mimics John Donne’s famed line, but the point is to acknowledge how much she meant, even in a world where I know so little about who she was, what she thought, or wrote, and despite having spent quite a few hours pondering John Donne’s poetry.
