He’s like a child who plays hide and seek by closing his eyes and shouting out here I am. Everywhere, there is something raw and exposed about him. ‘O my America! My new-found land!’ he greets her, absurdly. One famous poem pictures his mistress undressing, but it is really the speaker who is revealed: in his desperate lust, his foolishness. Donne does something a little different, which is to circumvent this slightly tired question with an invitation to laugh along. Many poets play games with identity, with whether the speaker of the poem is or is not the same as the poet. It is equally because his poems invite us, to an unusual degree, to feel that we might know him. This is in part because of his insistence that even the most pious of prayers might be improved with a penis joke. It is difficult to read Donne and not to like him, at least some of the time.

The couple had 12 children and were, he later said, ‘undone’ by their marriage. His young bride’s family name was More the jokes pretty much wrote themselves. ‘It is irremediably done,’ he wrote to his new father- in-law, and of course he spells it ‘donne’. A lesser man might have chosen to play this fairly straight, but not JD. He sat down to write a letter to the enraged father of the teenage girl he had just married in secret. John Donne: for a poet this must have felt a little like destiny, and even in the most unlikely of moments he couldn’t resist making puns.

Katherine rundell john donne