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       5. The Indifferent

      Rob me, but bind me not, and let me go.

      Must I, who came to travel through you,

      Grow your fixed subject, because you are true?

      I wasn’t lying to Cécile when I said that I came to John Donne for the most part in ignorance – a few ill-informed suppositions and some half-remembered misapprehensions were all I had. I vaguely recognized the highlights: ‘Death be not proud, though some have called thee/Mighty and dreadful …’ (‘Holy Sonnet 6’); ‘… never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee …’ (‘Meditation XVII’); ‘No man is an island …’ (‘Meditation XVII’). But I had never really taken the time to read his work properly. Nor did I know much about his life, other than that he was a contemporary of Shakespeare and that he wound up as Dean of St Paul’s.

      However, one of the many plusses of being a calligrapher is that you get to hang around with some quality writers. And you do start to know their work quite well – more intuitively, perhaps, than the academics and certainly more intimately than the average reader. (It’s letter-by-letter stuff after all.) I suppose the bond is something like that between the musician and the composer: the audience loves to listen to the piece, the professors love to analyse and deconstruct the piece, but only the musician really lives within its dynamic energy.

      Seeking to fuel what was fast becoming a genuine enthusiasm, I remember that it was during my work on ‘The Indifferent’ – the third poem I tackled after ‘The Sun Rising’ and ‘The Broken Heart’ – that I decided I must know more. And so I duly braved the throng and journeyed down to the Charing Cross Road to purchase a good biography.

      As far as I could glean, the two most important facts of Donne’s life were these. First, that in 1601, aged twenty-nine, he married in secret; and second, that he betrayed his birthright as a Catholic when he took holy orders in the Anglican Church.

      Ann, his wife, was the daughter of a wealthy Surrey landowner, whom Donne met while serving as secretary to the Lord Keeper. Unfortunately, Donne was not of fit rank or estate to merit the match. Worse, he found he had disastrously miscalculated when he later confessed of the deed in a letter to his father-in-law: instead of the forgiveness and reprieve he was gambling on, he was summarily dismissed and disgraced. (He was even imprisoned for a short spell.) Thereafter, his career prospects were effectively ruined. He spent the next twelve years fretting a living on the fringes of the very society in which he had looked so certain to advance himself. When finally he was ordained into the Church of England, in 1615, it was not least because he could find no other way of regaining suitable employment. Almost immediately, James I appointed him a royal chaplain.

      Which brings us to religion. Donne was brought up in a devout and well-known Catholic family at a time when being a Catholic could easily mean gruesome (and often public) death – disembowelling, stringing up, that sort of thing. On his mother’s side he was descended from the family of Sir Thomas More; his uncle became head of the secret Jesuit mission to England and was caught trying to flee the country during a storm and sent to the Tower; and his younger brother was arrested for sheltering a priest and subsequently died in prison when Donne himself was only twenty-one. The twin legacies of martyrdom and ultramontane loyalty therefore framed his existence; for most days of his life, he must have been acutely conscious of the implications of his Catholicism.

      These linchpins notwithstanding, I should admit (if I am to be honest) that the biographical discovery which sealed my affinity for John Donne was a matter less intense. In the course of my reading, I also came across a first-hand account of the twenty-something man, left to us by Sir Richard Baker. This report relates how on ‘leaving Oxford, [Donne] lived at the Innes of Court, not dissolute, but very neat; a great visiter of Ladies, a great frequenter of Playes, a great writer of conceited verses’. Naturally enough, this description appealed: the portrait of a serial philanderer, who was ‘not dissolute, but very neat’. Here was a man, I thought.

      As well as marking the beginning of my pilgrimage of discovery, and aside from the intimate punch of the poem itself, ‘The Indifferent’ also presented some difficult technical challenges. With ‘The Sun Rising’ and ‘The Broken Heart’, I had followed a similar textual scheme to that which I had employed for one of the earlier, single-sonnet Shakespeare commissions – a scheme derived, I happily admit, from the hand of my favourite calligrapher and personal hero, Jean Flamel, secretary to the Duc de Berry in the early fifteenth century. Now, however, with this poem, I had a problem.

      Bâtarde, the hand that Saul, Wesley and I had agreed on for the Donne, is one of the most elastic scripts; and there are as many rules concerning the precise rotation and relative dimensions of the letters as there are examples of the form. These rules the good scribe will know, then disregard, then cleverly reinterpret. But even such ingenious reinterpretations are themselves to be cast aside when it comes to the lawless land of poetry. Let us ignore the vexed question of the versals; let us also forget the potential confusion of the lettering particulars (cursive or textura feet? cojoins? ligatures? serifs and hair-lines?); and let us look instead at the wider problem of layout. How, for example, does one legislate for margins, spacing or letter discretion when the lines of text are all different lengths? Good poets have good reason for fashioning their lines the way they do and it is not for the calligrapher to go barging in and breaking them up. And yet, so often the overall aesthetic effect of so much irregularity – even when written out well – is somehow to clutter and stifle, detracting from

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