The power of John Donne’s words nearly killed a man.

It was the spring of 1623, on the morning of Ascension Day, and Donne, long a struggling poet, had finally secured for himself celebrity, fortune and a captive audience. He had been appointed dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral two years before. He was 51, slim and amply bearded, and his preaching was famous across the whole of London. His congregation — merchants, aristocrats, actors in elaborate ruffs, the whole of the city’s elite — came to his sermons. Some carried paper and ink to write down his finest passages and take them home to relish and dissect them. Donne often wept in the pulpit, in joy and in sorrow, and his audience would weep with him.

That morning he was not preaching in his own church but 15 minutes’ easy walk across London at Lincoln’s Inn, in the center of town. Word went out: Wherever he was, people came flocking to hear him speak. But too many flocked, and as the crowd pushed closer to hear his words, some men were shoved to the ground, trampled and badly injured. A contemporary wrote in a letter, “Two or three were endangered, and taken up dead for the time.” There’s no record of Donne halting his sermon; so it’s not impossible that he kept going in his rich, authoritative voice as the bloodied men were carried off and out of sight.

A certain amount of ease around death would have been in character. John Donne was honest about death and its place in the task of living, just as he insisted on joy. Both his life and his work tell us the same thing: It is only by keeping death nearby that one can truly live.

Death — the looming fact of it, its finality and clarifying power — calls us to attention and wakes us up to life. Donne spoke it from the pulpit, in a passage from a sermon he gave in his late 40s:

Now was there ever any man seen to sleep in the cart, between Newgate and Tyburn? Between the prison, and the place of execution, does any man sleep? And we sleep all the way; from the womb to the grave we are never thoroughly awake.

Awake is his call. And Donne’s work laid out how: He insisted on the vivid, the alert, the original. His poetry is famously difficult, and the images can sometimes take all your sustained focus to untangle. That is deliberate. In repayment for your effort, you will look at the world with both more awe and more skepticism.

First, though, you must shake yourself out of cliché. In a time when other poets were still largely engaged in the “my lady is a perfect dove” game, he refused to play. Love was almost certainly not like a flower, nor a dove. Why would it be? But it might be like a pair of compasses. It may be like a flea. His women are never roses, birds or fawns, but they might be compared to a mythic sucking fish: They thrum with idiosyncratic life.

Bodies, doomed to decay, delighted him. He kicked aside the Petrarchan traditions of idealized, sanitized desire and joyfully brought the body to collide with the soul. His writing about sex is explicit, joyful and strange: a bodily salute to life:

License my roving hands, and let them go
Behind, before, above, between, below!
O my America! My new-found land!
My kingdom, safeliest when with one man manned!

He also loved the “trans-” prefix: It’s scattered everywhere across his writing — “transpose,” “translate,” “transport,” “transubstantiate.” In this Latin preposition — meaning “across, to the other side of, over, beyond” — he saw both the chaos and potential of us. We are, he believed, creatures born transformable.

And Donne reimagined and reinvented himself, over and over: He was a poet, lover, essayist, lawyer, pirate, recusant, preacher, satirist, politician, courtier, chaplain to the king, dean of the finest cathedral in London. He worked his way from failure and penury to recognition within his lifetime as one of the finest minds of his age.

If the human soul was visible, he believed, it would be larger than the world itself. “It is too little to call Man a little world; except God, man is a diminutive to nothing. Man consists of more pieces, more parts, than the world doth, nay, than the world is,” he wrote in “Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions.” Tap humans, he believed, and they’d ring with the sound of infinity.

But humans, he also knew, are unique in their capacity to ruin themselves and one another: “Nothing but man, of all envenomed things,/Doth work upon itself with inborn stings,” he wrote at age 37 in an elegy for a friend.

Donne was born into a Roman Catholic family in a time when the religion was illegal in England. One of his great-uncles was arrested in an anti-Catholic raid and executed; another was locked inside the Tower of London, where Donne visited him as a small boy, venturing fearfully in among the men sentenced to death. His younger brother, caught harboring a priest, was locked in a plague-ridden jail, where he died alone and in agony.

Donne married a young woman, Anne More, clandestinely and hurried by love, which derailed his early career and got him thrown in an ice-cold prison. Even after his release he and Anne were often poor and at the mercy of richer friends and relations. He knew what it was to be jealous and thwarted and bitter. He lost, over the course of his life, six children. And he lost Anne when she was just 33.

In his life, Donne walked so often in darkness that it became for him a daily commute. And as he grew older, he grew drier and harsher, but he always insisted determinedly on awe. Donne believed our minds could, with work, be forged into citadels against the world’s chaos: “be thine own palace, or the world’s thy jail,” he wrote in a verse letter to his friend Henry Wotton, when they were both still young men in their 20s.

We humans are both miracles and catastrophes. We must, he demanded, acknowledge both death and joy, horror and awe. It is an astonishment to be alive, and life calls on you to be astonished; but lifelong astonishment will take iron-willed discipline.

And if a skeleton in the hall helps, well then: Bring on the skeletons.