Where Many Shipwrack

by
• John Donne

images by
• Robert Macdonald

a selection of early poems by John Donne with woodcut images by Robert Macdonald

The poems are taken from Songs and Sonnets and Elegies, the earliest writings of John Donne (1572-1631). This love poetry is intense, rhetorical and energetic . . . using paradox and pun, intellect and passion, written by a young man delighting in life. It includes lines which have become so much part of our language that we sometimes forget that they were written by Donne:

Busie old foole, unruly Sunne,

Why dost thou thus,

Through windows, and through curtaines call on us? . . .

 

and

Goe, and catche a falling starre,

Get with child a mandrake roote,

Tell me, where all past yeares are,

Or who cleft the Divels foot, . . .

 

and

O my America! my new-found-land,

My kingdome, safeliest when with one man man'd,

My Myne of precious stones, My Emperie,

How blest am I in this discovering thee!

He later took holy orders and wrote religious and devotional poems and powerful sermons as Dean of St Paul's.

Robert Macdonald's woodcut images are equally strong, immediate and passionate, sharing the poet's delightfully down to earth approach to sexuality both physical and emotional.

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Unbound Sheet Editions & Inscriptions

Copies of the Main Edition are Numbered and signed by artist