John Donne

Ninth Friend: Edmund Spenser, "Amoretti LXXV: One Day I Wrote her Name"

Richard Carroll
100 Friends (100 Poems 100 Poets), literature, poetry
No, I didn’t forget about my goal of making a hundred friends by memorising their poems. I just took a break to reconsider the feasibility of this project, but have decided to go forward. So, today we meet Edmund Spenser. You know Mr. Spenser, right? He was born in 1552 or 1553, the son of a journeyman clothmaker, went to Pembroke College but required financial assistance to do so (apparently, doing menial work for the college), and as an adult spent much of his career as a government official in Ireland.

Third Friend: John Donne, "Holy Sonnets: Death, be not proud"

Richard Carroll
100 Friends (100 Poems 100 Poets), poetry
Our next acquaintance is with John Donne, who lived about a century before Alexander Pope, having been born in 1572 and passing away in 1631, and like Pope his family’s Catholic faith caused him some trouble early in his life. Interestingly, his mother was a direct descendent of St. Thomas More, and though he was able to study at Oxford and Cambridge, he couldn’t receive a degree there because his religion prevented him from swearing a required oath of allegiance to Queen Elizabeth.