John Donne is an extraordinary literary figure.  In addition to his fame as a poet, the foremost representative of the Metaphysical poets, he also served as a soldier.   But it was his religious position that made him most famous in his day.  Although he had been born into a Catholic family, after considerable reflection he became one of the foremost Anglicans of his day, serving as Dean of St Paul's Cathedral in London (1621–1631).  Donne's style is characterised by its drama.  Abrupt openings and the use of paradox, irony and syntactic dislocation are commonplace in his writing. These reflect a revolt against the smooth diction and Classical style of Ben Jonson and the Cavalier poets.  Donne's discordant tethering of ideas in metaphysical conceits express the eternal conflict between the life of the Christian and the world.  But that conflict is not new.  What is new are the way he alludes to matters specific to his age, from the ongoing discovery of the new world, to the proto-scientific method of Francis Bacon and the cosmology of Copernicus, to the scepticism of the new philosophy of Rene Descartes