Rice University
Donne's Discoveries
Author(s): Carol Marks Sicherman
Source: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 11, No. 1, The English Renaissance
(Winter, 1971), pp. 69-88
Published by: Rice University
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/449819
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Donne's Discoveries
CAROL
MiARKS SICHERMAN
Over a dozen of Donne's greatest poems or sequences of poems, various
in tone and topic, manifest a common developmental pattern: after a
confident or at least decisive opening, the speaker moves from initial
certainties to new perceptions and emerges finally to an assured conclusion, making discoveries about himself which neither he nor we his
readers have fully anticipated. Although involved in an inward crisis,
the speaker always conducts his self-examination in relation to another
being, either a woman or God. The language in which he conveys his
search and discovery is necessarily continuous; metaphors (e.g. compasses) serve the development and may not be excised for separate
scrutiny. "Goodfriday" modulates from intellectual jugglery masquerading as logical argument (and intended to justify his dereliction of
religious duty in "Riding Westward"), through specious humility and
anguished questioning, to a profoundly understood humility which enables him at last to interpret correctly the meaning of his westward
direction. Under an increasingly bumpy surface of urbane compliment
to middle-aged Mrs. Herbert, "The Autumnal" moves through a consideration of Age itself towards a final discovery of the speaker's
hitherto veiled concern: his own deathward progress. Other poems discussed at some length include "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,"
"A Nocturnal," and the sequence of twelve Holy Sonnets; the Anniversaries also receive attention.
I
IF "PLEASUREOR BUSINESSE"had not impelled Donne westward towards Wales on Good Friday, 1613,
he would have spent the day meditating in church, facing
eastwards towards the altar and its image of Christ crucified,
eastwards towards Golgotha where "Christ on this Crosse, did
rise and fall" (1. 13). But instead of performing eastward
meditation he rode on his journey westward, and as he rode
he thought. The intellectual and emotional range and progression of this thought he recorded in "Goodfriday, 1613.
Riding Westward."
Throughout the poem Donne makes successive attempts to
interpret the meaning of the direction he and his horse are
taking. He starts with an astronomical analogy; drops that;
fills out the body of the poem with a series of statements
about the crucifixion speciously related to rhetorical questions
about his proper attitudes towards that event; and suddenly
turns to a self-abasing prayer which rejects all that has gone
before. As in so many of Donne's divine poems, faulty argu-
70
DONNE'S
DISCOVERIES
ment gives way-or gives up-to contrite submission to God.
The initial approach is that of a rational and informed man
accustomed to logical argument. He reasonably suggests a
proposition-"Let mans Soule be a Spheare"-a proposition
which all educated readers could instantly accept, for the
comparison had been familiar for centuries.1 In the development of the metaphor, "devotion" is "the intelligence that
moves" the sphere of the soul, as angelic "intelligences" move
or control the celestial spheres.
The first couplet is clear enough, but the next two pairs are
not. The modern reader needs an explanation of the Ptolemaic
astronomy that would have been understood by the contemporary reader of lines 3-6:
the other Spheares, by being growne
Subject to forraigne motions, lose their owne,
And being by others hurried every day,
Scarce in a yeare their naturall forme obey....
"Their owne" natural motion is from west to east, and left to
their own devices that is how the spheres would move in their
revolutions around the earth. But there are "forraigne motions"-of the Primum Mobile and of other spheres as wellwhich make the individual spheres "lose their owne" eastward
motion. In fact the Primum Mobile, or outermost sphere, so
affects their motion that they are "hurried every day" from
east to west, as we observe when we see the sun rise in the
east. Fortunately for the spheres, that is not the end of the
story, for they describe not only a diurnal but an annual path
around the earth; and on this annual path-in other words, on
the zodiac, which extends eight or nine degrees to either side
of the sun's path, the ecliptic-they triumph over the impediSee A. B. Chambers, " 'Goodfriday, 1613. Riding Westward': The Poem
and the Tradition," ELH, XXVIII (1961), 32-42. Most of the quotations in this essay come from Helen Gardner's two Oxford editions:
The Divine Poems (1952) and The Elegies and the Songs and Sonnets
(1965). The Progresse of the Soule is quoted from W. Milgate's edition: The Satires, Epigrams and Verse Letters (Oxford, 1967); the
Anniversaries, from Frank Manley's edition (Baltimore, 1963); and
the "Elegie on Mris Boulstred," from H. J. C. Grierson's edition, The
Poems of John Donne, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1912), I. Unless otherwise
noted, these editions are the authorities for statements of historical
fact. I have not engaged in critical controversies; readers familiar with
criticism on Donne will know what books and articles lie behind this
essay, whether snarling or approving, and readers indifferent to critical quarrels will happily be spared.
CA R O L MARKS
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71
ments of contrary motion to take an eastward direction, so
that they "scarce in a yeare their naturall forme obey." This
behavior is likewise a matter of common observation: because
the ecliptic is obliquely inclined to the equator, night and day
are unequal except at the spring and autumn equinoxes, when
it crosses the equator. The whole business is summed up by
George Herbert as,
this notion,
That Life hath with the sun a double motion.
The first Is straight, our diurnal friend,
The Other Hid, and doth obliquely bend.2
The central astronomical fact for Donne is that the Primum
Mobile makes the spheres go in the opposite direction from the
one they want to go in; it makes them go daily from east to
west. "So,"the speaker resumes, "our Soules admit" as "their
first mover" not God but "pleasure or businesse"; and this is
the reason why, despite the impetus of his "Soules forme,"
devotion, towards the east, he is nevertheless "carryed towards
the West / This day" (11. 7-10). "Carryed": passive, the
speaker pictures himself as the unwilling but helpless victim
of "pleasure or businesse." One must object: this passivity
seems unnecessary, improperly motivated; he can, after all,
control his "pleasure or businesse" and need not be controlled
by them. There may be, one suspects, a flaw in the analogy,
and moral-astronomical reflection quickly reveals what it is:
the diurnal westward motion caused by the Primum MobileGod's agent and his sometime type-is not bad but good:
"natural, uniform and direct."3 To ride westward "this day"
or any other is, in the terms of the metaphor, to ride in the
right direction. It is the direction the spheres go in anyhow:
God, the "first mover," not "pleasure or businesse," endorses
daily westward motion.
"'Coloss. 3.3," Works, ed. F. E. Hutchinson (Oxford, 1941), p. 84.
3Francesco da Buti, cited by Chambers, p. 32. My exposition of 11. 1-10
draws not only upon Chambers but upon Dame Helen Gardner (Divine
Poems, pp. 98-99) and, most heavily, upon the generous and lucid
knowledge of my former colleague Robert Kaske. It is worth noting
that in this poem Donne translates Primum Mobile not as "prime
mover" but as "first mover," making it explicit that he regards it as a
type of God, not simply as his agent. Lydgate's translation of The
Pilgrimage of the Life of Man contains an interpretation of heavenly
motions similar to Donne in 11. 1-10: Rosalie Beck, "A Precedent for
Donne's Imagery in 'Goodfriday, 1613. Riding Westward, " RES, XIX
(1968), 166-169.
72
DONNE'S
DISCOVERIES
Donne's speaker has tried to disguise the fault in his
analogy by a thin surface of intellectual swagger, and for
most modern readers, bemused by the archaic learning, he
succeeds in his obscurantist intention. More important, he
succeeds in distracting himself from his problem. He knows
there is something wrong with himself but does not know-or,
at the start, wish to know-what the trouble is. Portraying
himself as moved by devotional ardor, he blames outside forces
for his failure to enact his devotion. The falsity of the astronomical analogy betrays him to the alert reader, but not yet
to himself.
Unaware of his error, the speaker continues as if nothing
at all were wrong. He appears to make a transition from his
devout assertion that his "Soules forme bends towards the
East" to a depiction of the "Sunne" he would see in the
East, if only he could follow his inclination (11.11-14). What
is actually continued is the tone of intellectual command, as
the speaker expertly juggles paradoxes of night and day, of
rising and falling. But these lines, their rhythm jerking towards doggerel, show facile wit rather than the religious
feeling they purport to enshrine.
The patness of this passage goes almost unnoticed; the
lines are little more than a bridge between the spherical and
geographical analogy of lines 1-10 and the central part of the
poem, a meditation on the crucifixion that ingenuously claims
not to be doing what it does. The attempt to elude the radical
problem, the problem from which these distortions and evasions grow, remains constant, while the speaker's tone and
tactics vary and shift.
The couplet which introduces the central section combines
uncertain braggadocio with a too easy humility: "Yet dare
J'almost be glad, I do not see / That spectacle of too much
weight for mee" (11. 15-16). The next couplet, the first of
five questions, typifies the procedure used in lines 17-32. The
speaker presents a statement which is undeniably true (because it is a paraphrase of God's own words in Exodus 33: 20):
"Who sees Gods face, that is selfe life, must dye.
. .
." Having
made this unimpeachable proposition, he asks in line 18:
"What a death were it then to see God dye?" Wait, though: it
is not God the Father on the cross but God the Son; and some
four years previously, in Holy Sonnet 9 (XIII), Donne had
no difficulty in seeing God's face. The paraphrase of Exodus
does not apply; the logical connective "then" in line 18 is
CAROL
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SICHERMAN7
73
being asked to do dishonest work.
Self-deception continues in the increasingly obvious appeals
that follow. "Could I behold [Christ on the Cross] ?" he asks;
and one might recall that in "The Crosse," some years before,
Donne delightedly saw crosses everywhere. But now there is
not delight but rather fear. No longer even pretending to ask
questions, the speaker makes statement and question coalesce;
as his anguish increases, as he sees ever more clearly what he
says he cannot see, the rhythmic tempo intensifies, overriding line-ends and recommencing patterns half-way through
lines:
Could I behold that endlesse height which is
Zenith to us, and to'our Antipodes,
Humbled below us? or that blood ...
Make durt of dust, or that flesh which was worne
(11.23-28)
By God, for his apparell, rag'd, and torne?
A moment's pause, then one last try at justification; yet now
the tone contains a note of quiet confession: dare he even
"Upon his miserable mother cast mine eye . . . ?" (11. 29-32).
Donne, or his speaker, has been undergoing one of his
"devout fitts," when he "durst not view heaven" (Westmoreland Sonnet 3 [XIX]). Through argument he tries to stave
off the painful effects of the "fantastique Ague" (Sonnet
XIX) that afflicts him, presenting a latter-day version of the
"curious Rebell" who disputed with God in The Progresse of
the Soule (st. XI) and who more recently had complained
of God's "sterne wrath" in Holy Sonnet 5 (IX). In the sonnet
he had suddenly realized his error: "But who am I, that dare
dispute with thee ?" A similar pattern appears in "Goodfriday." Simultaneously desiring yet not daring to "view
heaven," he manages to elicit in himself such fear that he can
at last break through his storm of thin defiance to reach a
haven of humble penitence. As in Holy Sonnet XIX, "those
are my best dayes, when I shake with feare."
Finally he admits what he has been doing:
Though these things, as I ride, be from mine eye,
They'are present yet unto my memory,
For that looks towards them.
(11.33-35)
Willy-nilly, he has been performing a meditative exercise, as
Louis L. Martz remarks.4 These are two results for the poem:
'The Poetry of Meditation (New Haven, 1954), pp. 54-56.
74
DONNE'S
DISCOVERIES
a final, correct interpretation of his riding westward, sustaining the usual understanding of westward motion as good;
and a contrite prayer to Christ, which is the expected consequence of such an exercise. The two results are really one: he
perceives that he rides with his back to Christ "but to receive /
Corrections"; he then prays to receive that purgative punishment. Instead of the specious passivity of the first ten lines,
Donne's speaker attains at the end the true passivity of
humility. He does not cast blame for his helplessness, as he
does at the start; rather, he acknowledges his helplessness as
the hateful accompaniment of his sins. The passionate plea
for punishment-"O thinke mee worth thine anger, punish
mee, / Burne off my rusts, and my deformity" (11. 39-40)recalls his urgent appeal to God in Holy Sonnet XIV "to
breake, blowe, burn and make me new." Corrected, burned,
reformed, the speaker can replace fear with love, responding
to the attraction of Christ, meeting him face to face.
The process of discovery through which the speaker of
"Goodfriday" moves is highly individual: it is his discovery.
But the making of discoveries is not his private prerogative:
speakers of poems otherwise very different from "Goodfriday" pass through a process of discovery similar in many
ways to that in "Goodfriday." What each discovers varies
from speaker to speaker, for each retains his individuality;
the ways each comes to his discovery are alike in so many
particulars that the process appears to be less a fully deliberate plan of the poet than a partly subconscious development
issuing from within Donne's private mind. One hardly expects
to find parallels to "Goodfriday" in a poem of secular compliment, in, for example, a poem such as Elegy IX, "The
Autumnal"; yet this poem, according to legend a tribute from
Donne to Mrs. Herbert, reveals a speaker who, like the speaker
in "Goodfriday," comes to some unexpected realizations about
his life.
"The Autumnal" opens with a series of charming and confident statements as firmly-and as falsely-based on accepted classical tradition as the equally assured axioms at the
start of "Goodfriday" are founded on accepted scientific facts.
Just as the learned speaker of the religious poem knows how
to make a logical point through an astronomical analogy, so
the urbane speaker of the secular poem knows how to turn a
graceful compliment through literary allusions. And as learn-
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ing in "Goodfriday" is actually a means of avoiding essential
knowledge, so urbanity in "The Autumnal" serves as a mask
for private fears. In both poems the fusion of the speaker's
tone with his underlying concern comes gradually. Nonetheless, despite these notable similarities there is a major difference in the psychological structure of the two poems:
whereas in "Goodfriday" the speaker's concentration on his
subject-his relation to Christ crucified-remains constant
throughout, in "The Autumnal" the subject itself alters from
Mrs. Herbert's beautiful middle age to Age itself to, finally,
the speaker's own deathward progress.
The lady celebrated in the first few couplets of "The Autumnal" is one who appreciates intelligent wit in others
and calm wisdom in herself. Perceiving her values, the speaker
exercises his wit and unobtrusively demonstrates his literary
education, while at the same time praising her grace, counsel,
dignity, and tact. Then something odd happens. After comparing Mrs. Herbert's youth to the torrid zone and her present
time of life to the "tolerable Tropique clyme," the speaker
goes on to declare: "Faire eyes, who asks more heate then
comes from hence, / He in a fever wishes pestilence" (11.10-12).
If the parallels so carefully maintained to this point continue
to hold, then Mrs. Herbert's youth is like pestilence, her middle age like fever. Were this line an isolated instance of unflattering analogy one might pass over it as no more, or no
less, than the poet's carelessness-or, taking the case more
lightly, one might suppose that wit here ran away with sense.
The line has not in fact been much remarked, but one overlooks it not because it is a momentary slip but rather because
its peculiarity is overshadowed by the eccentricity of the following three couplets comparing Mrs. Herbert's wrinkles to
"Loves graves." Mrs. Herbert, J. B. Leishman complains, here
becomes "a mere topic for wit, a mere broomstick."5
Broomstick or no, Mrs. Herbert is on the way to becoming
the occasion instead of the subject of the poem. We attend
not to her but to ingenious variations on Greek epigrams by
a poet who dares transmogrify Love from a youthful Cupid
to an aged "Anachorit" building a tomb in the lady's wrinkles.
In revising the analogy-Love "doth not digge a Grave, but
build a Tombe"-the speaker attempts to retrieve his tone at
the start of the poem; he means us to think of a brightly
"The Monarch of Wit, 7th ed. (London, 1965), p. 99.
76
DONNE'S
DISCOVERIES
painted, elaborate memorial. But if such a monument is not a
grave, it remains a symbol of a dead person, and the speaker
wisely shifts to a new metaphor, comparing Love this time to
a monarch who makes Mrs. Herbert his permanent dwellingplace, his "standing house."
The speaker's conscious effort to recapture his opening tone
is apparent in the use of the imagery of natural cycles. In his
very first words he told us that "no Spring, nor Summer
Beauty" can match Mrs. Herbert's "Autumnall face"; now
he reports that "not noone, nor night" but "still Evening"
reigns in her-"no voluptuousnesse, yet all delight" (11. 2122). The natural analogies continue; the mellow grace of the
passage exactly fits the subject.
Yet no sooner has the speaker restored the tone of serene
wit with which he began than a contrary note intrudes. Two
bizare couplets (11.29-32) recall "Xerxes strange Lydian
love, the Platane tree" and propose that the tree attracted
Xerxes by one or the other of two attributes of age: either by
its immense girth (if it was old) or by its barrenness (if it
was young). The former subject of the poem, Mrs. Herbert,
has silently disappeared; these strange lines are a transitional
distraction leading to the next subject, age itself, which is the
topic of the following pair of couplets (11.33-36). Witty, these
couplets differ from the initial wit; for whereas the playful
affection with which the poem begins points explicitly to her,
to this face, these faintly desperate if clever hypotheses have
become impersonal, abstract: "Age is a thing . . . Age must be
lovelyest...."
Abstractions prove dangerous here to a mind accustomed
to visual symbols. The suggestion that age is "lovelyest at the
latest day" reminds the speaker both that the latest day of
our earthly cycle occurs not in mellow autumn but in dark,
cold winter, and that the latest day of our spiritual cycle occurs at the end of time, at the Last Judgment and Resurrection. Concerned with autumnal beauty, the speaker couldshould, if he is consistent-suppress the thought of winter
and death, or save it for another poem. He himself knows
that is what he should do: "But name not Winter-faces . . .
Name not these living Deaths-heads unto mee" (11. 37, 43).
Nonetheless, quite forgetting Mrs. Herbert, he surrenders to
his fearful fascination to dwell upon the most grotesque aspects of old age, exaggerating the horror to the utmost. "I
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hate extreames," he says piteously, and then pulls himself
together to insist that he would "rather stay / With Tombs,
then Cradles, to weare out a day" (11.45-46). He knows he is
going "downe the hill" and determines finally to behave in a
manner fitting his descent, "not panting after growing beauties" (11.48-49).
In his concluding lines the speaker's subliminal concern
surfaces to become conscious statement: thinking about the
autumn of Mrs. Herbert's life has made him think about his
own, has made him acknowledge that he too is over the hill.
For forty-two lines he keeps himself out of it; until the fortythird, the only use of the first-person singular is in line two,
when he establishes his credentials for praising Mrs. Herbert
by stating:
"I have seen . . . [her] Aztumnall
face." In the
final eight lines of the poem the first-person singular appears,
significantly, five times. Furthermore, the last pronominal
reference to Mrs. Herbert occurs in line twenty-five, exactly
half-way through the poem; thereafter she is subsumed in a
class of persons whose condition the speaker realizes he himself approximates, so that at the end he identifies not with
her but with "them, who home-ward goe" (1. 50; my italics).
Distressed by the abandonment of Mrs. Herbert as subject,
J. B. Leishman read "The Autumnal" as a telling refutation
of Donne's alleged "unified sensibility."0 Whatever one may
think about Donne's own sensibility, there can be no doubt
that his speaker in "The Autumnal" suffers initially from a
dissociation between his explicit and implicit concerns, a dissociation resolved by his final discovery of the fundamental
likeness between his ostensible and his underlying subjects.
The tonal inconsistencies are there, part of the speaker's attempts to elude a deeply personal admission through the light
juggleries of wit and compliment. His nervousness reaches a
climax in the unwilling, obsessive lines about death's-heads,
those "Antiques" that mock the living, fellows of the grotesquely grinning monarch that Richard II imagined perching
upon his own "mortal temples": "there the antic sits" (III.ii.
161-163). Pushed to a paroxysm of disgust, the speaker purges
his fear by objectifying it; having shuddered, he regains his
calm. We recognize, from the admission of personal pronouns
as well as from the quietly conclusive rhythms, that this calm
is far deeper than the gentle ease in which the poem began,
'The Monarch of Wit, pp. 97-104.
78
DONNE'S
DISCOVERIES
for it is a calm born of painfully achieved emotional understanding.7
II
In "The Autumnal" and in "Goodfriday" we hear a speaker
forced by his own acuity and honesty to abandon a false
confidence and to recognize and accept an unwelcome truth
about his personal situation. A confident opening, a middle in
which initial certainties give way gradually to new perceptions, and a conclusion manifesting a clear and profoundly
rooted assurance: the pattern obtains in many of Donne's
greatest serious poems and sequences of poems-among them
"A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning," "A Nocturnal Upon
St. Lucy's Day," the Anniversaries, and the dozen Holy Sonnets that form a sequence. In both youth and middle age,8 in
poems of love and compliment, in elegies and in religious meditations, Donne created speakers with a particular psychological kinship among themselves and with their reading audiences, speakers who gradually and thoughtfully arrive at conclusions neither they nor we fully anticipate. Each of these
poems reflects an inward crisis; each speaker makes discoveries about himself which crucially contribute to his selfunderstanding. Reading with sympathetic attention, we may
perceive the speaker's doubt and fears and his ultimate attainment of a deeper self-knowledge.
The self which is understood in these poems is never ex7See Robert Ellrodt's acute comments on the final lines, as well as his
refutation of Leishman's complaint about Mrs. Herbert's disappearance: L'Inspiration personnelle et l'esprit du temps chez les poetes
metaphysiques anglais, Pt. II (Paris, 1960), p. 345 and n. 72 on that
page.
8Without engaging in debate about dating, one can note that there is
"general agreement of the MSS." that "Goodfriday" was written when
the title of the first printed version says it was, in 1613 (Gardner,
Divine Poems, p. 98), and that the Songs and Sonnets were written
years before-Dame
Helen Gardner argues
(The Elegies
. . ., p. xxix)
that "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" was almost certainly
written before Donne's marriage in 1601. These questions are much
controverted at present, but it is reasonable to say that Donne evolved
the pattern at least by his late twenties and was still using it in his
early forties, after which he wrote few poems. The tripartite pattern
described here is akin to the "ternary form" analyzed by Arnold Stein
in John Donne's Lyrics (Minneapolis, 1962) pp. 135 ff.; Stein, however, limits his discussion to Songs and Sonnets of three stanzas and
is interested more in the poems' intellectual argument than in their
psychological evolution (but see pp. 161, 186, and 190-91).
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amined solipsisticly but always as it relates to another being,
either a woman or God. Frequently the poem is precipitated
by a separation, physical or metaphorical, between the speaker
and the other being. Three of the four poems entitled "A Valediction . . ." approximate, in differing
degrees, the pattern
under discussion; only the speaker of "A Valediction: Of the
Book," losing sight of his tender subject to pursue a satiric
quarry, ends little wiser than he began. The other three "Valedictions" can be arranged according to the degree to which
they fulfill the pattern, which is to say the degree or kind of
wisdom the speaker attains. In "A Valediction: Of My Name
in the Window" he reaches a baffled wisdom; in "A Valediction: Of Weeping" he gains a painful wisdom; and in "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" he reaps the fruit of much
thought of death and love, emerging with a ripe, comprehensive wisdom fully satisfying his inquiring soul.
The speaker of "Mourning" begins where his "Weeping"
colleague ends; he knows at the outset that "teare-floods" and
"sigh-tempests" do not suit the climate of love he and his
lady enjoy. In the first stanza he appears to know so much
that one expects him to report truths already fully perceived;
instead, he moves through the poem into a final discovery of
the fullness of his feeling. It is a poem whose development is
so subtle, whose conclusion so perfect, that one may remain
unaware of while responsive to the pattern of discovery. It
is nonetheless a perfect example of the paradigm we can
more easily trace in "Goodfriday" or "The Autumnal."
The analogy presented in the first stanza leads one to anticipate a speaker "Forbidding Mourning" for an ultimate
separation by death. As the link between soul and body in a
good man "mildly," noiselessly dissolves, so should these lovers
part; aware of death, fearful of real and conclusive floods
and tempests, they renounce ordinary lovers' Petrarchan play
with tears and sighs. The lovers of "Mourning," although
sorry to be apart, "care lesse" than sublunary lovers "eyes,
lips, and hands to misse," for they are "inter-assured of the
mind" (11.13-20).
In five stanzas the speaker progresses from his opening sublimated fear that he will die; but, although he has enhanced
the significance of his love through geological and astronomical metaphors, he has yet to explain very clearly the nature
of his love. The fourth and fifth stanzas, bare of metaphors
80
D ONNE ' S D IS C O VERIES
except for some scientific commonplaces ("elemented," "refin'd"), contain statements which move us by their quiet
assurance but still do not permit the speaker fully to articulate his feeling about the relationship. The final four stanzas
explore and clarify that feeling entirely through metaphors;
this is a speaker urged on by feeling who cannot know exactly
what he feels until he finds the precisely appropriate metaphor. By necessity he engages in a simultaneous search for
metaphor and meaning.
The final search begins as a logical demonstration based on
known facts:
Our two soules therefore, which are one,
Though I must goe, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion....
Sublunary lovers, subject to harmful earthquakes, endure
breaches. These two, however, experience an expansion whose
qualities are best conveyed by comparison with the most precious metal: they are "like gold to ayery thinnesse beate."
One might think this line would end the matter, but the
speaker is not satisfied. Perhaps he reflects that finely beaten
gold is as fragile ("ayery") as it is valuable and is for that
reason an imperfect image for his love, the strength of which
he increasingly senses.
In order to resume the search for a metaphor the speaker
must first reduce the firm assertion that "our two soules . . .
are one" to no more than a hypothesis. He can then introduce
an alternative (equally Neoplatonic) hypothesis: "If they be
two, they are two so / As stiffe twin compasses are two" (11.
25-26). A compass is a compass, he notes, by virtue of the
union of its two feet, which are together even while apart.
Developing, the hypothesis becomes fact as metaphor and
meaning join: her soul, remaining home in England, is the
"fixt foot"; his soul, traveling abroad, is the moving foot;
and when he roams afar, she "leanes, and hearkens after" him,
yearning for full reunion, straightening when he "comes
home" (11.27, 30-32). The metaphor concludes the poem by
conveying the speaker's final realization of their interdependence. Closing up the circle, he achieves perfection in their
relationship while they are apart; closing up the compass, he
achieves perfection when they are reunited.9 The serene con9The clearest explanation of the apparent difficulties of the last two
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fidence of the final rhythm bespeaks an assurance far different from that of the opening simile. Looking back on the
analogy with dying men, we can now see how inadequate it
was to define the emotions the speaker is trying to express.
For this is a poem not about mourning but rejoicing, not about
separation but union, not about death but life.
"A Nocturnal Upon St. Lucy's Day, Being the Shortest Day"
is a poem about death, a valedictory not to the dead beloved
but to the dead self who loved her. The speaker does not
intend to make such a valedictory. In the beginning he perceives only that he is at present a negation of the self that
loved her living; he cannot imagine for himself a positive
revival, for he feels no relation between his spiritual numbness and his biological life. Intense introspection and repeated redefinitions, releasing him from his dead self, lead
him to a rediscovery of the meaning, both for himself and for
his lover, of his continuing existence.
The certainty with which the poem opens comes from an
inclusive despair. "'Tis the yeares midnight, and it is the
dayes," and it is the speaker's, whose figurative darkness
seems to him realized in the literal December darkness. The
whole earth is a deathbed parallel to his lover's, and all life,
"shrunke, / Dead and enterr'd," experiences the mortuary sequence she has undergone. Yet, he says self-mockingly, the
"spent" sun and sunken sap "seeme to laugh, / Compar'd with
mee, who am their Epitaph." But an epitaph, although the last
word, is written by the living; the very fact of his verbal
existence shows that the speaker retains at least a vestigial
link with life.
Through words that fragile link receives strength. In the
second stanza the speaker advises springtime lovers to "study
me," to study the epitaph of love; and he defines the subject
of study through a meditation on a single word, "thing," and
its a-human intensification, "nothing." Beginning with the
proposition: "I am every dead thing," he goes on to declare
himself, repeatedly, no thing, the "quintessence" of "nothingnesse" (1. 15), the "Elixer" of "the first nothing" (1. 29) ; love
stanzas is Marvin Morillo's suggestion that 11. 30 and 35 describe the
closing of the circle (symbolizing spiritual unity), and 11. 32 and 36
the closing of the legs of the compass (symbolizing unity of body and
soul): "Donne's Compasses: Circles and Right Lines," ELN, III
(1966), 173-176.
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has rebegotten him "of absence, darknesse, death; things which
are not," has made him "the grave / Of all, that's nothing"
(11.17-18, 21-22). More than mere repetitions, these obsessive
phrases form an assertive surface beneath which the speaker's
mood is preparing to change.
Two thirds of the way through the poem, the speaker mentions for the first time exactly what troubles him: "her death"
(1. 28).10 Until the fourth stanza the situation could be that
of "Twickenham Garden," in which a grieving lover yearns
for just such a Lucy's day to suit his bitter mood. But the
mournful lecturer of "Twickenham Garden" bemoans only his
lover's fidelity to another and, his pain less absolute, engages in self-analysis but not self-discovery. Death forces the
lover of "A Nocturnal" to a radical examination of the springs
of his grief, of his inner self.
After the first allusion to "death," at the end of the second
stanza, the speaker draws back from the subject, retreating
to a recollection of earlier, less final farewells, when, like
the lovers in "A Valediction: Of Weeping," they wept floods
"and so / Drownd the whole world" (11.26-27, 23-24). Memory of past separations helps him face the final parting and
when he articulates "her death" he has already perceived
that the phrase is inadequate to describe the meaning of her
passing: "But I am by her death, (which word wrongs her) /
Of the first nothing, the Elixer grown" (11.28-29). Alluding
to her rebirth into new life, the parenthesis contains an implicit denial of the clause that contains it. The speaker continues, however, to insist he is an extraordinary "nothing,"
differing from all else on earth. "If I an ordinary nothing
were," he argues, "As shadow, a light, and body must be here"
(11. 35-36). The most poignant line of the poem brings his
despair to a purgative climax: "But I am None; nor will my
Sunne renew" (1. 37).
Recognition of the conclusiveness of her death enables him
to turn from his enclosed world of despairing earthly love
toward the world of divine love his lover now inhabits. At the
same time, he moves to a more balanced appraisal of the
fleshly secular world. He gives his benediction to sublunary
lovers-"Enjoy your summer all"-and perceives that another, eternal enjoyment prevails in his lover's new world:
"Since shee enjoys her long nights festivall, / Let mee prepare
"See A. S. Piege, "The Coffin of Clement Paman," BLO, I (1968), 10.
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towards her" (11. 41-43). His lover and Lucy, his saint and
the day's, coalesce. Echoing, with a difference, his first words,
the speaker prays in conclusion:
let mee call
This houre her Vigill, and her Eve, since this
Both the yeares, and the dayes deep midnight is.
(11.43-45)
Having completed his valediction forbidding mourning, he
can now, on "her Vigill, and her Eve," perform a true service
of devotion.
Who the lady mourned in "A Nocturnal" was-whether
Lady Bedford or Mrs. Donne or an imagined beloved-we do
not and probably never shall know, nor can we know for certain the speaker's biographical relationship with the poet.
Whatever the case, it is clear that the speaker of "A Nocturnal" is passing through a process recapitulated in the first
quatrain of the sonnet mourning Donne's wife (Westmoreland Sonnet 1 [XVII]). The speaker of the sonnet, Donne
himself at forty-five, has a profound understanding of the interpenetration of the secular and religious world: "Here the
admyring her my mind did whett / To seeke thee God; so
streames do shew the head...." Following the stream to the
head is a journey that never ends on earth; on the waters of a
world of time, one can never be absolutely sure of reaching
the haven. Certainty is at best momentary in Donne's religious poems, temporary relief from the spiritual fears that
haunted him. Two sequences, Donne's last sustained poetic
work, illustrate both his demanding self-analyses and the
recurrent pattern of discovery; the bipartite Anniversaries
and the twelve Holy Sonnets-where, in each case, the pattern
manifests itself not in the component parts but in the whole
poem; and where the conclusions, unlike those in the poems of
secular love, lack an absolute finality.
The Anniversaries were commissioned by Sir Robert Drury
on the occasion of his daughter Elizabeth's death, but if Donne
meant to write orthodox elegies, only faint traces of such an
intention remain. Elizabeth Drury never once appears in her
own person; her place as center of the poems is occupied by a
mysterious and powerful "she." Who "she" is Donne, or his
speaker, does not know. All he knows at the start is that "she"
is that which gives meaning to life, holding together an otherwise incoherent world, and even this certainty soon comes
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into question. Like "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,"
the poem of the Anniversaries is a subtle simultaneous search
for metaphor and meaning.
The first poem, "An Anatomy of the World," ends with the
speaker's realization that his metaphors are failures; the second poem, "The Progres of the Soule," is a revision of the
first. Many of the topics treated in the "Anatomy" reappear
in the "Progres"-sickness and death, intellectual pride, social
corruption, inconstancy in nature, and more. But the attitude
is different, the tone increasingly confident. The second poem
opens in the certainty that, because all knowledge of this world
is trivial, we should "forget this rotten world" (1. 49) and
study instead the "Art of knowing Heauen" (1. 311). Finally,
a thousand lines after he begins, the speaker completes his
discovery. Having likened her in the "Progres" to ideal justice
(1. 70), temperance (11. 123 ff.), beauty (11. 221 ff.), and
learning (11.301 ff.) ; having declared her the embodiment of
the ideal state and church (11.359 ff.), he sums up all metaphors in the circle (11. 507-508): "she" is "full perfection,"
the union of all earthly virtues and spiritual perfections, an
exemplar whom we may emulate if never equal. God's will
has been that "she" should "for life, and death, a patterne
bee" and that he should be the "Trumpet, at whose voice the
people came" to hear the "Proclamation" of her meaning (11.
524, 527-528). The conclusion, triumphal as it seems, is, however, more willed than achieved, for in Donne's poetic world
full certainty is possible in human relations but not in divine.
In these monologues to his soul, the speaker manages a final
tone of assurance only by subduing or sublimating what concerns him throughout: the state of his soul."1
That question is explicitly central in the sequence of twelve
Holy Sonnets, most of them addressed to God, all of them
directed to him. The individual sonnets, as Helen Gardner
says of the divine poems in general, "are not the record of
discoveries."12 But the total sequence of twelve is such a
record. The first sonnet-like "Goodfriday," like "Mourning,"
like the first Anniversary-describes the problem without
quite understanding it. The subsequent sonnets make progressive, self-correcting attempts to find the best answers, and
"See my "Donne's Timeless Anniversaries," UTQ, XXXIX (1970), 127143.
"Divine Poems, p. xxxvii.
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the final sonnet discovers not the right answer-a mortal impossibility-but the right prayer.
The opening sonnet is a conventional submission to God
using the language of lawyers and businessmen. His catalogue
of sins and debts is facile and general, his tone petulant or
passively prayerful; he finds it easy to talk of God's love,
hard to know it. To improve his knowledge he undertakes the
discipline of fear-fear of sickness (Sonnet 2), death (3),
judgment (4), damnation (5). Brilliantly evoking intense
moments of terror in the octaves, the speaker when he turns
to the penitential sestets has difficulty connecting fear with
deeply understood contrition. Word-play substitutes for felt
insight in Sonnet 2; and the sestet of Sonnet 3 relies on
prayer ("Impute me righteous") and liturgical formula ("I
leave the world, the flesh, and devill") without giving any
proofs that he has in fact renounced the world and merited
grace. In this sonnet, furthermore, there is an unwitting
identification of the speaker with his body: when the soul sees
"that face, / Whose feare already shakes my every joynt," the
speaker predicts, "I shall sleepe a space" (italics mine). Properly, that sleep should deprive the body of the first-person
pronoun, of personality, which should reside in the "everwaking part," the soul. The next sonnet revises these implications by embracing the mortalist heresy that both body and
soul "sleepe" until the Last Judgment, a revision which provokes the first signs of felt spiritual change-the sestet recalls, but with a significant difference, the somnolent assertion in the preceding sonnet: "But let them [those already
dead] sleepe, Lord, and me mourne a space" (italics mine). At
last the speaker can humbly pray: "Here on this lowly ground,
/ Teach mee how to repent... ." Deepening his understanding
of God's wrath and mercy, of damnation and forgiveness,
Sonnet 5 at last rejects that human reason which presumes to
measure God by man.
The analogy between sleep and death, broached in Sonnets
3 and 4, forms the subject of Sonnet 6, in which the speaker
claims to have transcended fear of death. His words, however,
smack more of cliche than reflection; the principal analogy
is a hoary one, and the conclusion, that death has no power
over resurrected souls, is of scant comfort to men like the
speaker, as yet unsure of resurrection. To say that death is
"slave to Fate, chance, kings, and desperate men" (Sonnet 6)
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DISCOVERIES
does not allay the anxiety of those liable to flood and fire, to
"warre, dearth, age, agues, tyrannies, / Despaire, law, chance"
(Sonnet 4). Kindly condescension cannot kill "poore death,"
as Donne himself admitted in his elegy on Cecilia Boulstrode,
"Death I recant...."3
Death is a human fact in a spiritual cycle; not sleep but
Christ's death on the cross provides the instructive comparison, a point made by the seventh sonnet. Likening Christ's
death to man's, the speaker finds them incomparable and
resolves simply to admire "his strange love." The second group
of six sonnets replaces fear with love-God's love for man in
the first three, man's for God and his neighbor in the last
three.14 This half of the sequence relates to the first as the
second Anniversary relates to the "Anatomy": it brings up
many of the same topics but interprets them differently. The
speaker discusses our relation to "created nature" (8, 5); imagines "the worlds last night," when the soul faces "that
countenance" (9; 3, 4); begs God to fight for him (10, 1);
meditates on Satan's theft and Christ's redemption of the
"stolne stuffe" (11, 1).15 The purgation of fear in and by the
first six sonnets releases in the speaker's spirit a wondering
admiration for God's loving mercy (7, 8). The querulous,
fearful complaint about the devil in the opening sonnet ("Why
doth he steale, nay ravish that's thy right?") now turns to
the complex plea of a man who knows how "dearely" he loves
God:
for I
Except you'enthrall me, never shall be free,
(Sonnet 10)
Nor ever chast, except you ravish mee.
The speaker knows finally that God's "last command/ Is all
but love" (Sonnet 12). Having started with the conviction
that, as he tells God, "thou lov'st mankind well, yet wilt'not
chuse me" (Sonnet 1), he emerges with faith that Christ
3Poems, ed. Grierson, I, 282.
"Gardner, Divine Poems, p. xli.
"Douglas L. Peterson gives a good account of the way the second half
of the sequence revises the first: The English Lyric from Wyatt to
Donne (Princeton, 1967), pp. 341-343. His argument (pp. 343-344)
that the four sonnets added in 1635 complete the sequence does not
convince me; Sonnet 12 is the clear finale. Don M. Ricks challenges (I
think not successfully) Dame Helen Gardner's ordering of the Holy
Sonnets: "The Westmoreland Manuscript and the Order of Donne's
'Holy Sonnets, " SP, LXIII (1966), 186-195.
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"gives mee his deaths conquest," that God's "all-healing grace
and Spirit" compensate for human insufficiency. The discovery of this spiritual truth reaches the limit of man's necessarily imperfect achievement; understanding that God's sole
command is love, man can only pray in humility: "Oh let
that last Will stand!"
The prayer belongs to all virtuous men, to Donne, to his
speaker-three categories of humanity related in the manner
of Chinese boxes. In poems like these, poet and speaker may
seem to coincide, yet to assume their identity is to deny the
poet's imagination, to deny Donne's own description of poetry
as "a counterfait Creation" which "makes things that are not,
as though they were."'16Donne's fecund imagination created
a whole cast of dramatic speakers: some searching for an
answer, others proclaiming an already discovered truth; some
mocking, others being mocked; some talking for the sheer
pleasure of the game, others heavily conscious of the intransigence of words. Respect for Donne's intellect and artistry requires us to hear these distinctions, to listen to the
speaking voice while remaining aware that it is the creation
of John Donne, who himself once lived and spoke.
Listening to Donne's discovering speakers, we discern their
differing identities and their common psychological paradigm,
a paradigm with private roots extending deeper than literary
or theological tradition. The unfolding pattern, growing from
Donne's mind, manifests itself in over a dozen poems or
sequences, among them many of his most substantial and
serious poems.'7 Organically developmental, these poems must
be read whole: excised for clinical examination, the compasses
lose their life; they must be viewed as part of their poetic
body. A truism, yes; but a truism too little heeded in favor of
analysis of discrete "beauties." Such analysis, breaking down
the poem into separate delectable parts, is (as Coleridge remarked) "too much like coveting your neighbor's goods";
greater delight comes from "tracing the leading thought
thro'out the whole," for in so doing "you merge yourself in
'Sermons, ed. George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson, IV (Berkeley
and Los Angeles, 1962), 87.
7One could add to those already mentioned the "dialogue of one" in
"The Ecstasy," "Air and Angels," "A Lecture Upon the Shadow,"
"Image and Dream" (Elegy X), "Love's Growth," and "Love's Infiniteness" (which, dwelling on "all," is the obverse of "A Nocturnal," dwelling on "nothing").
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the author, you become He."18If you do not "become He," you
miss the poem. Donne has, in writing these poems, "become"
his speaker; imitating his action, we discover his discoveries.
HERBERTH. LEHMAN COLLEGEOF
THE CITY UNIVERSITYOF NEW YORK
1Coleridge on the Seventeenth Century, ed. Roberta Florence Brinkley
(Durham, N. C., 1955), pp. 523.