In his poem ‘Jordan’,
George Herbert criticises the convoluted nature of Renaissance poetry and urges
poets towards straightforward expressions of emotion, particularly religious
emotion. He questions ‘Is there in truth no beauty?’ and opens the poem’s third
stanza with the memorable line: ‘Shepherds are honest people; let them sing…’
With the pastoral reference and the use of the word ‘honest’, Herbert also
seems to be condemning the insincerity of 17th Century courtly life
contrasted with a sense of rustic innocence. John Donne himself was acutely
aware of this artificiality, evident in his sonnet ‘Oh, to vex me…’ (often
printed as the last sonnet in the sequence) in which he reveals the variety of
masks he adopts in his poetry. He questions whether he can really demonstrate
the real truth of his soul ‘By circumstances, and by signes that be / Apparent
in us…’ He looks back at his past and sees only a succession of
skilfully-adopted poses: ‘to day
/ In prayers, and flattering speaches I court God: / To morrow I quake with
true feare of his rod.’ He showed a similar awareness in his sermons, as when
he discussed the dangers of rhetoric and the power of words ‘to shape that
beliefe’ and ‘to powre it into new molds… to stamp and imprint new formes, new
images, new opinions in it.’ In his Holy
Sonnets, Donne does exactly that: he uses his poetic skill to shape various
different identities for himself.
Indeed, Donne’s whole life seems to have been divided into a dual
identity. A clear split has been forged between the young and lustful Donne of
the Songs and Sonnets and the old and
devout Donne of the Divine Poems.
This division was partly driven by the mature Donne’s desire to distance
himself from the sensuousness of his early poetry, a distance reinforced by
Izaak Walton’s biography of Donne, in which he compared the poet to a
latter-day Augustine, the saint whose conversion at the hands of St. Ambrose
became an influential Christian paradigm. But this division is unhelpful in a
number of ways, not least because it is based on the false assumption that the
religious poems were written much later than the Songs and Sonnets, an assumption with very little evidence to
support it. Moreover, the poems themselves undermine the so-called ‘myth of two
Donnes’ in that, throughout the Holy
Sonnets, we see the same wit and performance for which the Songs and Sonnets are renowned. As P.M.
Oliver points out, ‘Donne’s religious writing… demonstrates a striking
continuity with the amatory and satirical verse he had already written.’ True,
the matter of the religious poems may be different, but their manner and style
are very similar. Like the love poems, the divine poems are often ‘witty,
individualistic performances.’ This does, however, leave us with some problems:
the idiosyncratic wit and rhetorical skill of the poet often undermines the
masks he is attempting to adopt, and to that extent the authenticity of emotion
in the Holy Sonnets must be called
into question.
Donne adopts two major poses in the
Holy Sonnets: the first is that of the submissive and despairing sinner,
terrified that his transgressions will lead to his damnation. The second mask
he adopts is that of a man assured of his own election, unafraid and almost
swaggering. The first mask, that of fear, despair, and melancholy, is typical
of devotional verse: Gerard Manley Hopkins adopted a similar personality in his
‘Terrible Sonnets’. The melancholy pose was also typical of the Renaissance
man, hence the abundance of young men painted as forlorn youths tortured by
unrequited love. Donne himself had one of these portraits commissioned in which
he is depicted in darkness with his arms folded – a standard symbol of
melancholy – and a large-brimmed hat shading his face. Just as he adopted this
pose as a pitiful lover, so in the Holy
Sonnets he adopts the pose of pitiful sinner. For example, the fourth
sonnet opens with the impassioned exclamation: ‘Oh my black Soule!’ and ends
with the embracing of a mournful pose: ‘Oh make thy selfe with holy mourning
blacke, / And red with blushing, as thou art with sinne…’ His repentance, then,
seems to be a mask in itself, and thus we can infer that the poem’s opening
exclamation is no more than an artificiality. Indeed, a number of the poems
seem to come across as theatrical and dramatic representations rather than
sincere expressions of despair. In her introduction to the divine poems, Helen
Gardner notes this ‘almost histrionic note’ and attributes it to ‘the
meditation’s deliberate stimulation of emotion.’ The emotions of the poems seem
almost fabricated at points, as is suggested by the repetition of ‘oh’ and
‘alas’ in the sequence. These exclamations seem particularly out of context when
they follow relatively collected and rational meditations, as in ‘Father, part
of his double interest…’ After meditating on the doctrine of the Bible and the
various commandments God has given, Donne exclaims: ‘thy last command / Is all
but love; Oh let this last Will stand!’ The ‘oh’ makes it seem like the speaker
is emotionally involved, but as Oliver points out, ‘the level rationality of
the preceding lines’ makes it hard to see the speaker as ‘desperate or
hysterical.’
There are similarly histrionic notes in the Songs and Sonnets, again showing why the amatory-religious divide
is unhelpful. For example, in ‘The Flea’, when his mistress has crushed the
flea with her nail, Donne melodramatically exclaims: ‘Cruel and sudden, hast
thou since / Purpled thy nail, in blood of innocence?’ Here, Donne is adopting
a tone of sadness in order to inspire the pity of his mistress. Arguably, the Holy Sonnets use a similar tactic,
attempting to inspire the pity of God through a pose of despair which often
comes across as melodramatic. ‘This is my play’s last scene’ opens very
sensationally, with the word ‘last’ repeated four times in the first four lines
alone. It’s no wonder, then, that Gardner pointed out the ‘note of
exaggeration’ which, ‘in stimulating feeling… may falsify it, and overdramatize
the spiritual life.’ But this melodrama is not the only aspect of the Songs and Sonnets which has crept into
the religious verse. Throughout the divine poems there are idiosyncratic
paradoxes, conceits and puns which, though typical of Donne, seem somewhat out
of place in devout religious poetry. For example, in ‘A Hymne to God the
Father’, Donne mourns his sinfulness with an authentic voice of fear and
despair: ‘Wilt thou forgive that sinne where I begunne, / Which was my sin,
though it were done before?’ And yet, the first two stanzas end with a
paradoxical pun on his name, jarring with the serious tone of the previous
lines: ‘When thou hast done, thou hast not done, / For, I have more.’ This
mixture of wit and gloom is something that Wilbur Sanders criticised in the Holy Sonnets as a flaw, though perhaps
it shows the tension in Donne between a yearning towards seriousness and an
inability to completely escape his jocular self. Hence, in the words of
Sanders, ‘the personality becomes the prey of inner division.’
This seems to be the underlying flaw of many of the sonnets: though at
times they present us with an apparently sincere sense of grief, fear and
despair, this is often counteracted by a strange frivolity, as when he plays
verbal games with colours at the end of ‘Oh my black Soule!’ Their other major
drawback is that they are often dominated by what Sanders calls ‘blatant
theological sophistry.’ This is no more evident than in ‘What if this present
were the world’s last night?’ In the octet, the speaker focuses on the picture
of Christ crucified and wonders whether Christ will ‘adjudge thee unto hell’
even though he ‘pray’d forgivenesse for his foes’. The sestet opens with a
direct response: ‘No, no…’ This audacity in itself is odd, and somewhat hard to
believe: perhaps Donne used his poetry as a method of self-assurance. He then
argues that the beauty of Christ’s image on the cross ‘assumes a pitious mind.’
But Donne, as a Calvinist, knew that this could not be true, since Christ could
not be merciful to everybody: the elect would receive God’s pity, whilst the
non-elect would feel his wrath and eventually be damned. Indeed, Universalism
(the theory that everybody could be saved) was condemned as a heresy in
Constantinople in 553 and again at the Protestant Augsburg Confession of 1530,
and so it’s incredibly unlikely that Donne could have believed this sophistic
argument. Thus, Christ’s image cannot assure pity for everybody. Moreover,
Donne’s reference to his idolatrous past is telling since, as Stanley Fish
points out, ‘The assertion that he is not
now in his idolatry is undermined by the fact that he here says the same
things he used to say when he was.’ So it’s clear, then, that as Sanders says,
‘the consolation does not console’ – Donne’s verbal ability to assure himself
of his safety seems to undermine itself, revealing his manifest casuistry. Fish
goes on: ‘as the poem concludes, he is no more assured of what he assumes than
anyone else, neither of the ‘piteous minde’ of his saviour, nor of the
spiritual stability he looks to infer from the saviour’s picture.’
The same can be said for Donne’s famous sonnet ‘Death be not proud’.
Throughout his life, Donne was obsessed with the idea of death: as a young
Catholic in Protestant England, he was taken to see Catholics martyred, an
experience that stayed with him into his elderly years. He also wrote tracts on
the morality of suicide, and, most famously, is said by Walton to have
‘preached his own Funeral Sermon’ known as ‘Death’s Duel’, a sermon he gave in
the final days of his life. He was terrified by the idea that death takes away
our individual essence as humans:
‘[T]hat private and retired man, that thought himself
his own for ever, and never came forth, must in his dust of the grave be
published, and (such are the revolutions of the grave) be mingled with the dust
of every highway and of every dunghill, and swallowed in every puddle and pond.
This is the most inglorious and contemptible vilification, the most deadly and
peremptory nullification of man, that we can consider.’ (‘Death’s Duel’)
In the sermon, he defeats this fear by concluding that every man must
‘lie down in peace in his grave, till he vouchsafe you a resurrection…’ The
sonnet ‘Death be not proud…’ follows a similar line, though it is much more
bravado in its argument. He addresses personified mortality as ‘poore death’
and bravely says: ‘nor yet canst thou kill mee…’ Death, he says, is ‘slave to
Fate’ and asks ‘why swell’st thou then?’ This question in itself, though, supposes
that death still assumes a large portion of Donne’s thought, swelling beyond
reason into an irrational fear. The poem ends with a theatrical and yet hollow
flourish: ‘death shall be no more, death, thou shalt die’. Despite the bravado
of this statement, Donne’s declaration is vacuous – as John Stachniewski argues,
the fact that it ends with the word ‘die’ ironically demonstrates that death
still has power in the poem. Similarly, when Donne says ‘valiantly I hels wide
mouth o’rstride’ we see him adopting a peculiarly audacious stance resonating
with the precarious assertiveness of ‘Death be not proud’. Thus, whilst these
sophistic arguments may have worked in seducing mistresses with wit and humour,
they seem incredibly out of place in an eschatological context of salvation or
damnation. They may show Donne’s poetic and rhetorical skill, but as Fish
notes, ‘The effort of self-persuasion… fails in exactly the measure that his
rhetorical effort succeeds.’
In his poem ‘Metempsychosis’ Donne reflects upon the stretching of
‘reasons… to so nice a thinness through a quill / That they themselves break,
do themselves spill…’ This stretching of reason is frequently dramatized in the
Holy Sonnets, the strength of the
sophistic arguments often driven to a ludicrous extent, revealing their
weakness. But this is not to say that the poems themselves are weak: this may
have been part of Donne’s intention. Perhaps the meaning of the poems is to be
found in their note of feigned assurance. As Stachniewski suggests, ‘the
argument of Donne’s poems is often so strained that it alerts us to its
opposite, the emotion or mental state in defiance of which the argumentative
process was set to work. The poem’s meaning lives in the tension between the
argument and the emotion.’ Perhaps in ‘This is my playes last scene’ we are not
meant to believe with such assurance that Donne’s sins will fall away to Hell
whilst he goes up to Heaven. We are, perhaps, urged to question this argument.
And so, this self-conscious casuistry is a subtle and effective way of
establishing the poetry’s dominant emotions, doubt and fear.
It’s clear, then, that Donne’s poetic style largely stayed with him
throughout his career. The same use of wit and paradox can be seen in the Holy Sonnets as was seen in the Songs and Sonnets. It’s also clear that
Donne’s poetry is largely a succession of poses, and this is something he
himself seems to have been aware of. The sonnets often begin with a pose of
despair and then move onto a pose of self-assured certainty. It’s no wonder,
really, that the pose of despairing sinner seems, as Gardner says,
‘exaggerated’ to the modern reader given that we no longer live in a country
dominated by Calvinism and the fear of God’s wrath – perhaps, then, we can look
past this histrionic note as understandable. Moreover, perhaps this tone of
feigned emotion simply demonstrates the impossibility of expressing such strong
feeling in words. It’s somewhat harder to excuse the strange use of wit and
paradox, which seems to undermine Donne’s apparent despair, revealing it to be
just a pose (though that’s not to say he never felt despair, just to say that
the despair expressed in the sonnets comes across as somewhat feigned). Similarly,
the paradoxical sophistry destabilises any sense of self-assurance and comfort,
revealing the mask of boldness adopted by the poet. But, as I argued earlier,
perhaps this sense of failed assurance was intentional. Though Donne forces his
fierce emotions into the restricted sonnet form, and though he apparently
attempts to mitigate his despair with theological sophistry which he surely
cannot fail to doubt, other emotions inevitably seep out. Just as the
highly-wrought passions of ‘Batter my heart…’ seem almost to break free from
the strict rhyme scheme and metre (the initial trochee ‘Batter’ being an
obvious example), so the despair of the other Holy Sonnets is never really soothed. Perhaps Donne was partly
right when he said: ‘Grief brought to numbers cannot be so fierce, / For, he
tames it, who fetters it in verse.’ But, as we read the sonnets, we get the
sense that Donne never truly succeeded in ‘taming’ his grief and his fear
completely. Each line is bursting with tension, uncertainty, and doubt, and it
is this that gives the sonnets their excitement.
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