The following “game” is an excerpt from my book Earnest Games, the e-book version of which will be FREE on Amazon from Wednesday, May 31, through Sunday, June 4. Download your copy today and please remember to rate and review the book on Amazon, Goodreads, and BookBub. Thanks, as always, for your support.
Long before he repented his dissolute past, became an Anglican cleric, and wrote the “Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions,” which ask not for whom the bell tolls, John Donne was something of a playboy. Known as “Jack” to the rowdy companions of his youth, he spent a goodly portion of his substantial inheritance on “womanizing, books, pastimes, and travel abroad,” according to one of his biographers. Though he would later settle down and marry Anne More, upon whom he fathered twelve legitimate children within the confines of respectable monogamy, in his early years he exhibited rather more promiscuous and polyamorous tendencies. It is of course this aspect of his personal history which we find most interesting.
Although it is difficult to calculate with certainty, we may fairly estimate that by his late twenties the man who would eventually become Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral had bedded about one hundred women. One of these ladies—let us call her “Lady Jane”—was no doubt the subject of “To His Mistress Going to Bed,” a lyric poem in which the narrator slowly undresses his paramour in order to heighten the sexual tension, before asking leave to explore her erogenous zones:
License my roving hands, and let them go,
Before, behind, between, above, below.
And when he and his mistress are fully disrobed the poet declares triumphantly:
Full nakedness! All joys are due to thee!
As souls unbodied, bodies uncloth’d must be!
It is lines such as these which have led some commentators to consider Donne the most erotic poet in the English language. Certainly many readers have been titillated and amused by his work, from the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras down to the present day. And the historical record clearly seems to indicate that Donne’s amatory verse was inspired by his own wide-ranging experiences with a multitude of multifarious women.
One lazy summer afternoon in the late sixteenth century, Lady Jane lay naked in her oversized bed. She was in a peevish mood because her young lover, also naked, seemed lost in daydreams yet again. Although she did not realize it at the time, he was composing in his mind a new poem called “The Flea,” in which the narrator attempts to seduce his coy mistress by explaining that since his blood and hers have already commingled inside the body of the insect which has sucked them both anyway, they may as well exchange other bodily fluids in the act of love. The central image was one of those shocking conceits which Dr. Samuel Johnson would later describe as “metaphysical.”
“Jack,” said Lady Jane.
But Jack seemed not to hear.
“I say, Jack,” she repeated.
“Yes, dear lady?” replied the man who would later admonish Death to be not proud.
“Methinks thou art indifferent to me.”
“Nay, ’tis not true. Why sayest thou so?”
“I know thou hast lain this past fortnight with Lady Bridget, Lady Cecily, and Lady Isabel. Dost thou deny it?”
“Why, no, my lady. I do confess it. But didst thou not also during the same period lie with Sir Ralph, Sir Humphrey, and Sir Oliver?”
Blushing, Lady Jane said: “I am a lady, sir. I never kiss and tell.”
“Sweet Jane,” said the sensitive poet, “let us not evade the truth: thou hast thine affairs and I have mine. And though I be indifferent to the details of these affairs of thine—as thou shouldst be to mine—’tis false to say that I am indifferent to thee. When I am with thee, dear lady, I am with thee completely, heart and soul, body and mind.”
“Ha!” countered Jane. “Thou liest forsooth! Even now thou wert lost in thine own imaginings. I fear I am alone in this boudoir of mine, though thou art here beside me.”
“Forgive me, dearest Jane. I admit that I sometimes wander far afield with my thoughts. But I am here with thee now, in this very instant.”
He kissed her tenderly and she seemed to be appeased. Soon they were copulating for the third time that day.
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