SOURCE: Erne, Lukas. “Donne and Christ's Spouse.” Essays in Criticism 51, no. 2 (April 2001): 208-29.

In the following essay, Erne focuses on the poem “Show me deare Christ” as evidence of Donne's feelings about Catholicism.

The life of John Donne is more fully documented than that of any other English poet before the eighteenth century. Its principal stages are well known and uncontested: birth in 1572 into a family of eminent recusants and martyrs; childhood in a devoutly Catholic home; apprentice years at university, the Inns of Court, and in military expeditions; employment by Sir Thomas Egerton, the Lord Keeper, in 1598; fall from grace following his marriage to Ann More in 1601/2; years of frustrated ambition and hope; ordination to the priesthood in the Church of England in 1615; appointment as Dean of St. Paul's in 1621; and death in 1631. Not even the abundance of documents, however, can fully reveal the history of Donne's...