Comparative Essays on the Poetry and Prose of John Donne and George Herbert: Combined Lights 9781644532256

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COMPAR ATIVE ESSAYS ON THE POETRY AND PROSE OF JOHN DONNE AND GEORGE HERBERT

COMPAR ATIVE ESSAYS ON THE POETRY AND PROSE OF JOHN DONNE AND GEORGE HERBERT Combined Lights

edited by

Russell M . Hillier a nd Robert W. Reeder

Newark

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Hillier, Russell M., editor. | Reeder, Robert W., 1974– editor. Title: Comparative essays on the poetry and prose of John Donne and George Herbert : combined lights / edited by Russell M. Hillier and Robert W. Reeder. Description: Newark : University of Delaware Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021016587 | ISBN 9781644532263 (paperback) | ISBN 9781644532270 (hardback) | ISBN 9781644532287 (epub) | ISBN 9781644532256 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Donne, John, 1572–1631—Criticism and interpretation. | Herbert, George, 1593–1633—Criticism and interpretation. | Christian literature, English—Early modern, 1500–1700—History and criticism. | Christianity and literature—England—History—17th century. | LCGFT: Literary criticism. | Essays. Classification: LCC PR2248 .C645 2021 | DDC 821/.3—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021016587 A British Cataloging-­in-­Publication rec­ord for this book is available from the British Library. This collection copyright © 2021 by the University of Delaware Individual chapters copyright © 2021 in the names of their authors All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact University of Delaware Press, 200A Morris Library, 181 S. College Ave., Newark, DE 19717. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law. References to internet websites (URLs) ­were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Rutgers University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared. The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—­Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. udpress​.u­ del​.­edu Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press Manufactured in the United States of Amer­i­ca

CONTENTS

Acknowl­edgments

Introduction russell m. hillier and robert w. reeder

vii 1

part i: negative theology, po­l iti­c al theory, and the lyric 1

Donne’s Negative Theology of the Cross kirsten stirling

2

Prayer as Po­liti­cal Theory: Conscience, Sovereignty, and Natu­ral Law in Donne and Herbert angela balla

17

34

part ii: encounters: exchange and collaboration 3

“Resplendence of ­Women, Men’s Means to Zeal”: Fashioning Female Sanctity in Donne and Herbert’s Commemoration of Lady Danvers anne-­m arie miller-­b laise

4

Crossings: Sacramental Signs across the Verse of Donne and Herbert kimberly johnson

5

Crucifying Craft: A Donne-­Herbert Dialogue greg miller

71

91 105

part iii: sin, salvation, and assurance 6

“Extreme Audacity of Penitential Humility”: Devotions 10 and the Donne-­Herbert Dichotomy robert w. reeder

119

7

Imagining Prayer in Donne’s Devotions and Herbert’s Poems of Complaint kate narveson

137

v

vi

Contents

8

Recuperating the Incapacities of the Fallen Self in Donne and Herbert: Possibility and Promise danielle a. st. hilaire

157

part iv: appraisals 9

Donne’s “Comedy of Eros” and Herbert’s “World of Mirth” christopher hodgkins

1 0

“The dot over the i”: How Donne and Herbert Close Their Poems helen wilcox

205



Appendix: Donne’s and Herbert’s Latin Poems on the Seal of Christ on the Anchor CATHERINE FREIS AND GREG MILLER , TRANS.

221

177

Notes on Contributors 225 Index 229

ACKNOWL­E DGMENTS

This proj­ect has taken half a de­cade to come to fruition. Consequently, we are indebted to the nine contributors to this volume for their laudable loyalty and patience, as well as their unflagging belief in the value of the collection. O ­ thers who supported and encouraged the proj­ect in vari­ous ways, and to whom we are especially grateful, include Gregory Kneidel, Patrick Gray, Achsah Guibbory, Charles Moseley, and James Nohrnberg. We are grateful to Julia Oestreich, the director of the University of Delaware Press, for supporting the proj­ect and shepherding the collection through its vari­ ous stages of revision and improvement. We would like to thank the three anonymous peer reviewers who offered perceptive and helpful suggestions both to enhance individual essays and to ensure that the collection as a ­whole would be more robust and coherent. We would also like to express our gratitude to Alissa Zarro, our production man­ag­er at Rutgers University Press, and to our production editor Sherry Gerstein and our copy editor Katherine Woodrow at Westchester Publishing Ser­vices, for all their hard work in helping to bring this proj­ect to fruition. Fi­nally, we are thankful to the dean and chapter of Salisbury Cathedral for their permission to reproduce in this book an image of John Donne’s seal of Christ on the cross-­anchor. Since we completed work on the manuscript during the age of COVID, we had unwelcome occasion to recall a shared experience of our subjects, John Donne and George Herbert, who spent the summer of 1625 sheltering from the ravages of plague in lockdown mode at Chelsea House, London. In such times, we are all inescapably reminded of what ­matters most. In that connection, the editors wish to thank Myung, Lucy, and Gabby Reeder and Alyssa, Serafina, and Laurence Hillier, and to dedicate this volume to them.

vii

INTRODUCTION R U S S E L L M . H I L L I E R A N D R O B E RT W. R E E D E R

“Oh that I knew how all thy lights combine” —­George Herbert, “The H. Scriptures II”

The original impulse that gave rise to the following volume was, quite simply, our sense of the need for more scholarship that considers John Donne and George Herbert, two of the most carefully studied writers of the British Re­nais­sance, conjointly and comparatively. Indeed, ­there has been—so far as we are aware—no attempt to bring together a collection of essays dedicated exclusively to this pair of poet-­priests. This gap by no means reflects, however, a waning of interest in Donne and Herbert. They continue to attract international attention in the two socie­ties and journals that bear their names, and scholarship on them proceeds apace both in individual articles and book-­length scholarly monographs in which, in ­whole or in part, the two figures are treated. Innovative inquiries into early modern lit­er­a­ture that incorporate or are singly focused on Donne and Herbert individually continue to flourish. However, although t­ here have been essay collections on seventeenth-­century “metaphysical” or devotional poetry more generally, we still have not seen a volume of essays focused entirely on Donne and Herbert. ­There are relatively few books of any kind to marry the two, and none that offer the sustained but varied attention that an essay collection can afford.1 This lacuna is all the more striking given the degree of association between Donne and Herbert, both personally and artistically. We may reject the credibility of Izaak Walton’s perhaps rather saccharine statement in the 1658 edition of his Life of John Donne, published separately to Donne’s LXXX Sermons, that “betwixt [George Herbert] and Dr. Donne ­there was a long and dear friendship, made up by such a Sympathy of inclinations, that they coveted and joyed to be in each ­others Com­pany.”2 And yet, even if we mistrust Walton’s account, t­ here is sufficient historical and material evidence of concord existing between ­these two men. First of all, we know that Donne was close to members of Herbert’s ­family. He enjoyed a friendly bond with George’s accomplished elder ­brother Edward. 1

2

Introduction

Donne’s long-­standing admiration for Magdalen Herbert, George’s ­mother, is apparent in the epistolary exchange between them and in the poetry he addressed to her, or that is associated with her—­the sonnet “To the Lady Magdalen Herbert, of St. Mary Magdalen,” the verse epistle “To M.M.H.,” “The Primrose,” debatably “The Autumnal,” and perhaps even “The Relic.” Moreover, Donne bore further witness to the high regard in which he held Magdalen Herbert in his “Sermon of Commemoration of the Lady Danvers,” which he delivered in Chelsea on July 1, 1627.3 Secondly, for an extended period, Donne and George Herbert stayed with Magdalen and her second husband, Sir John Danvers, at Chelsea House when they sought refuge from the plague of 1625. Also, we have Donne’s intriguing verse epistle to the younger poet, stamped with Donne’s seal of the anchor and the cross, and Herbert’s returned poetic reflections on that seal.4 Lara M. Crowley has recently made the case that a verse translation of Psalm 137, which shares a line with Herbert’s “Deniall,” is attributable to Donne rather than to the more commonly preferred candidate Francis Davison. As Crowley observes, “Herbert knew Donne, read Donne’s poems in manuscript, exchanged verses with Donne, and (in an unusual move for Herbert) echoed Donne’s poetry in his own.”5 Th ­ ere clearly was a relationship between t­ hese two major figures, and its precise contours warrant further study. The pre­sent volume represents a step in that direction. A representative sample of recent monographs in the field can usefully illustrate the enduring vitality of Donne and Herbert studies. Brian Cummings’s The Literary Culture of the Reformation: Grammar and Grace explores, among much ­else, the ways in which the cultural change brought about by Reformed thought influenced humanist literary practices in Tudor and early Stuart ­England so that “the new lit­er­a­ture of religion identified new differences, new contradictions, and new limits.”6 Cummings includes rewarding readings of the religious discourse of Donne and Herbert’s writings, which abound in theological tensions and paradoxes, so that Donne’s Holy Sonnets “try out faith and faithlessness by turns,” while the voices of Herbert’s lyr­ics in The ­Temple resist “any ethic of the certainty of salvation” and give expression to “the strangeness of the gift” of grace.7 A second, equally ambitious study, Paul Cefalu’s The Johannine Re­nais­sance in Early Modern En­glish Lit­er­a­ture and Theology, ranges over a broad spectrum of early modern poets, including Robert Southwell, Richard Crashaw, Thomas Traherne, John Milton, and, of course, Donne and Herbert. Cefalu makes a case for the shaping influence of the Johannine texts (the Fourth Gospel, or the Gospel of John, and the First Epistle of Saint John the Evangelist) upon early modern lit­er­a­ture. Fundamentally, Cefalu maintains that, within this period, ­these texts enjoyed “pride of place as leading apostolic texts on m ­ atters Christological, sacramental, pneumatological, and po­liti­cal.”8 In par­tic­ul­ar, Cefalu shows how the Gospel of John’s privileging of the Holy Spirit as Paraclete or comforter informs Donne’s definition of the Trinity in the sermons and the Holy Sonnets. Similarly, Cefalu demonstrates how Herbert’s theology and poetics are subtended by

Introduction 3

Johannine sacramentalism and an idea of love that has much in common with the same gospel’s ontological-­metaphysical conception of agape or love. Fi­nally, Cefalu also reveals how one of Herbert’s major literary strategies, in which a stable irony undergirds a speaker’s misunderstanding, draws inspiration from the techniques of the Fourth Gospel. Two other major books published in recent years and already prominent in the field, by David Marno and Gary Kuchar, are wholly dedicated to Donne and Herbert, respectively. In Death Be Not Proud: The Art of Holy Attention, Marno proposes that understanding the tradition of holy attention, the cultivation of a prayerful, intransitive attitude ­toward God, is the key to interpreting the Holy Sonnets. According to this account, Donne’s poems comprise “poetic meditations in preparation for prayer” by which the speakers of the Holy Sonnets disburden themselves of distraction, even as they also cultivate it, in order to attend to God in pure prayer.9 The scope of Marno’s study has alerted scholars to a wide array of potential influences upon Donne’s devotional poetry. In a similar vein, Kuchar’s George Herbert and the Mystery of the Word: Poetry and Scripture in Seventeenth-­Century ­England demonstrates the value of new critical approaches to Herbert’s verse. Kuchar charts an increasing insistence within post-­Reformation thought, arising in part both from Martin Luther’s doctrine of sola scriptura, according to which the Bible is the sole authority for determining religious doctrine, and an attendant rationalism, that the verities of Scripture are available to the instrument of reason. Herbert responds to this new stress on attaining certitude and assurance, what Kuchar styles “a post-­Elizabethan eclipsing of mystery,” by valorizing mystery and celebrating nondogmatism in his lyr­ics.10 One implication of Kuchar’s monograph is an understanding that the efflorescence of the devotional lyric in early seventeenth-­century ­England might have owed something to this critique of hairsplitting logic and rationalism, to “the softening of reformed theology,” the embrace of mystery, and “the spiritually productive role of error” and discovery endorsed by Herbert, and ­others similarly minded, in this age.11 To be sure, the pre­sent collection of essays does not mark the first occasion of any kind in which Donne and Herbert have been considered together. As we have already noted, the pair has inspired monographs—­although, we again submit, not nearly as many as one might expect—as well as articles and, perhaps most richly, classroom discussions.12 Linked together in the list of metaphysical poets, they have also served as foils for one another in temperament and ­sensibility. Louis  L. Martz, favoring Donne, states the traditional contrast ­memorably: if Herbert’s poems “dance and pirouette” gracefully above a contentious climate, Donne’s poetry “conquers by . . . ​violent grasping of the terrible ­prob­lems of the age and the self.”13 Martz’s distinctions depend upon obvious ­biographical differences: Donne produced a wide-­ranging corpus of “secular” writing, while Herbert’s verse is almost exclusively religious; Donne traveled a

4

Introduction

thorny path from his Roman Catholic rearing to his position as priest and preacher in the En­glish Church, while Herbert, to paraphrase Augustine, drank in the Church of ­England with his ­mother’s milk.14 According to this line of thinking, Donne had a history of being “enthralled”—to the “brave loves” of a ceremonial Roman Church, like Myrius, in contrast to the sullen, puritanical Crantz in “Satyre 3,” and to mistresses ­going to bed—­that complicated and enriched his devotional verse.15 Herbert, on the contrary, was “crosse-­bias[ed]”: dedicated almost from the outset to poetic piety.16 ­Those who prefer Herbert express the same contrast differently, setting Donne’s anxious sensationalism against Herbert’s subtlety, understated virtuosity, and earned serenity. Herbert’s most recent biographer, John Drury, ­after remarking how much Herbert learned from Donne, suggests that within the compass of the devotional mode, Herbert’s oeuvre expresses “an even greater variety of moods and forms” than that of the poet who was more promiscuous and wide-­ranging in subject ­matter.17 Many of the essays in this volume similarly juxtapose Donne and Herbert, even if the lines of comparison and contrast are less starkly drawn. At the same time, this collection also reflects the fact that, as Frances Cruickshank observes, “the poets are now more often treated together as representatives of an unsettled and imaginatively fruitful religious moment than as representing opposite ends of a devotional or aesthetic spectrum.”18 ­These essays tend to take Donne and Herbert as equally, albeit differently, unsettled and imaginative voices in an unsettled and imaginative age. Both are enthralled, captivated by earthly and heavenly beauty, and both are cross-­biased, si­mul­ta­neously compelled and confounded by religious faith.19 The essays that comprise this collection offer current, even cutting-­edge approaches to interpreting Donne and Herbert and, in addition, propose pos­si­ ble new directions that f­ uture inquiries into t­ hese two major Re­nais­sance figures might take. For instance, one chapter boldly substantiates Donne’s commitment in his devotional verse to a Lutheran species of negative, or apophatic, theology. Another chapter offers a reinvigorated understanding of Donne and Herbert’s poetic strategies to claim agency in the face of Protestant formulations of fallen subjectivity. One author undertakes compelling new readings of the two poets’ sophisticated neo-­Latin verse in the context of symbolic theory, while another provides an enlightening, tactful reading of Donne and Herbert’s personal exchange of Latin verse epistles on the seal of the cross-­anchor, not to mention a fresh translation of ­these epistles, in addition to alternative interpretations of related pairs of poems such as Donne and Herbert’s calendar poems. Two other contributors furnish the reader with novel surveys of Donne’s sacred and profane verse as well as Herbert’s devotional poetry, one exploring the richly expressive capacity of Donne’s erotic comedy and Herbert’s comedy of forgiveness, the other analyzing and celebrating a near-­exhaustive taxonomy of the variety of means by which the two poets close their lyr­ics.

Introduction 5

Some chapters break new ground through the choice of texts that they bring into conversation. One scholar demonstrates that the individual stations of Donne’s Devotions upon Emergent Occasions merit critical scrutiny in their own right, while si­mul­ta­neously showing how Donne’s devotional prose can legitimately be brought into relation with Herbert’s devotional poetry in The ­Temple. Another scholar proves, by a similar methodology but to dif­fer­ent effect, that Donne and Herbert’s formulations of prose prayer and verse complaint in the Devotions and The T ­ emple, respectively, when solidly contextualized within the tradition of prayer manuals, are mutually enriching. Still a third scholar illustrates how as apparently recalcitrant and uninviting a treatise as Donne’s Pseudo-­Martyr can yield a complex and provocative po­liti­cal theory that, assuming clearer contours when compared with ideas of sovereignty and natu­ral law in the works of Jean Bodin and Richard Hooker, complicates and deepens our appreciation of ­Donne’s Holy Sonnet “Since she whom I loved” and Herbert’s “To all Angels and Saints.” Last but by no means least, another chapter pre­sents an original reading of the small commemorative volume consisting of Donne’s memorial sermon for Magdalen Herbert and George Herbert’s Memoriae Matris Sacrum, a series of nineteen Latin and Greek elegies composed in memory of his m ­ other. According to this interpretation, Donne and Herbert’s dual-­authored volume, evaluated as a consistent w ­ hole, displays through poetic and homiletic means a common ecclesiology and, through the Church of E ­ ngland’s Marian tradition and Lutheran thought, an intriguing gendering of sanctity. While t­here are certain points of commonality and convergence in t­hese essays—­among them, an interest in Donne and Herbert’s neo-­Latin verse; a sense that Luther may represent a more congenial Reformer for Donne than Calvin; attention to the theological question of assurance (a tendency that has also been brought to the forefront in the previously mentioned work of Cummings, Kuchar, and Cefalu)—­what unites the essays above all is the desire to find fresh ­angles of vision on ­these four-­hundred-­year-­old poet-­priests.20 Our arrangement of the volume’s ten chapters into four logical sections accentuates the vari­ous approaches—­contextual, biographical, comparative—­enabled by a collaborative volume such as this, although t­ here are also thematic clusters within sections and thematic threads that stretch across the entire book. Part 1, “Negative Theology, Po­liti­cal Theory, and the Lyric,” pairs Kirsten Stirling’s work with that of Angela Balla, since both offer newly contextualized close readings of Donne and Herbert’s verse. Both Stirling and Balla ask us to consider Donne and Herbert’s poetry anew by aligning the two poets with significant theological and po­liti­cal traditions. The first chapter, “Donne’s Negative Theology of the Cross,” is the only essay in the collection that does not address both Donne and Herbert. Stirling nevertheless sets the tone for the volume in several significant ways. Anticipating Danielle St. Hilaire’s contribution in chapter 8, she explores the nature of revelation

6

Introduction

and the search for God. She also draws a parallel between Donne and Luther, a correlation Anne-­Marie Miller-­Blaise makes in her contribution in chapter 3, and examines the relationship between sacramental and spiritual understandings of the cross, a major issue in subsequent chapters by Kimberly Johnson and Greg Miller.21 Indeed, Stirling initiates the volume’s per­sis­tent engagement with the Donne poem “The Crosse.” At a pivotal moment halfway through the lyric, she observes, Donne makes use of a key meta­phor also deployed by Pseudo-­ Dionysius in The Mystical Theology, in which the sculptor’s subtractive pro­cess illustrates the via negativa, or the attempt to understand God by recognizing what God is not. As Stirling shows, Donne boldly adapts the meta­phor to a dif­fer­ent purpose, focusing on the negating work performed by “crosses,” or afflictions that conform a person to Christ. Stirling then turns to “Goodfriday, 1613. Riding Westward,” arguing that h­ ere, too, Donne applies an apophatic motif to the cross. This time, Donne provides a Christological understanding of the Deus absconditus, or “hidden God,” of the thirty-­third chapter of the Book of Exodus, in which Moses is only granted a vision of God’s back parts. In both of Donne’s poems, Stirling argues, an internalized crucifix replaces the material devotional image and burns off the deformities obscuring the imago Dei within ­humans. With chapter 2, Angela Balla’s “Prayer as Po­liti­cal Theory: Conscience, Sovereignty, and Natu­ral Law in Donne and Herbert,” we turn from negative theology to po­liti­cal theory. Balla argues that, while critics have long recognized Herbert’s indebtedness to Donne’s verse, they have not adequately appreciated Herbert’s awareness of how Donne’s polemical prose s­ haped his religious poetry. According to Balla’s innovative reading, Herbert followed Donne’s lead in crafting religious poetry as a meditation on monarchical authority bounded by natu­ral law. Balla first examines Donne’s Pseudo-­Martyr, that daunting and little-­read work, and interprets it, in agreement with Tom Cain, as Donne’s most overt expression of po­liti­cal theory.22 In Balla’s account, Donne espoused a “situational absolutism,” a label that appears less oxymoronic when one sets Donne’s position alongside the theories of sovereignty offered in the thought of Bodin and Hooker. If Donne was a situational absolutist, however, Balla observes that he was one who sometimes masqueraded as an absolutist proper for strategic reasons. In the latter part of her essay, Balla addresses the verse of Donne and Herbert, first exploring the sonnet speaker’s conscientious objections to the abuses of his divine sovereign in Donne’s Holy Sonnet “Since She whom I loved.” This poem both stages the speaker’s protest and enables us to consider a perspective in which the absolute authority acts within the bounds of natu­ral law. Fi­nally, Balla juxtaposes this sonnet with Herbert’s “To all Angels and Saints,” which responds provocatively to the tensions between sovereignty and conscience that Donne dramatized. Indeed, Herbert h­ ere builds on and surpasses Donne’s example of suavely coopting poetic prayer as nascent po­liti­cal theory.

Introduction 7

The essays in part 2, “Encounters: Exchange and Collaboration,” examine a­ ctual points of contact between the historical figures of Donne and Herbert—or, perhaps more accurately, the literary output resulting from such contact. This section offers refreshing perspectives on Donne and Herbert’s poetry ­because it also places special weight on the poets’ neo-­Latin verse. Indeed, we might speculate that some of the most evident traffic between the writers remains underexplored ­because it is, at least in part, conducted in Latin. In “ ‘Resplendence of ­women, men’s means to zeal’: Fashioning Female Sanctity in Donne and Herbert’s Commemoration of Lady Danvers,” Anne-Marie MillerBlaise argues that the critical tradition has, in effect, overlooked an impor­tant collaboration between the two figures. In 1627, one month a­fter the death of Magdalen Herbert, Herbert’s series of nineteen Latin and Greek elegies, known as Memoriae Matris Sacrum, was published together with Donne’s aforementioned commemorative sermon. While this volume superficially resembles a typical memorial collection, Miller-­Blaise makes a compelling case that it can be received as a coherent entity and an expression of dual authorship. Such collections rarely involved immediate ­family members of the deceased and seldom featured only two contributors. It is striking that Donne and Herbert joined forces for the ­volume, to the exclusion of other potential authors, including Edward Herbert, who was himself a poet, phi­los­o­pher, and theologian as well as an old friend of ­Donne’s. Besides the anomalous nature of this two-­author memorial collection, the other evidence for collaboration between Donne and Herbert is internal, lying in the complementarity of the collection’s homiletic and poetic components. What brought the two men together on this occasion, Miller-­Blaise proposes, was a common vocational commitment to the En­glish Church, even as both ­were experiencing complications and uncertainty within their vocation. They offer a vision for their Church as embodied by Magdalen Herbert herself, who is presented in a manner that both recalls Luther’s understanding of the Virgin Mary and is in keeping with the En­glish Church’s development of an increasingly robust Marian tradition of its own. Donne’s sermon embodies sanctity through Magdalen’s personal example such that, ­whether its excellence relates to ­women or men, sanctity is defined as a feminine quality. In turn, Herbert’s elegiac sequence complements and enhances Donne’s cele­bration of Lady Danvers as a Marian figure by presenting her as a model of faith worthy of active imitation. In Miller-­Blaise’s essay, the memorial volume appears in a startling and renewed light: both priests and writers, mourning the loss of a beloved ­woman, are understood to be striving together for a Church not yet lost to division and discord. In the following two chapters in this section, the collection turns to fresh readings of the fascinating and yet slightly perplexing interchange of Latin verse epistles between Donne and Herbert. We should note that, in the appendix to this volume, Greg Miller and the classics scholar Catherine Freis, regular

8

Introduction

collaborators on editions of Herbert’s neo-­Latin verse, provide translations of ­these two poems.23 The verse epistles address, as their main subject, the seal Donne ­adopted for himself, which depicts Christ crucified on an anchor. This focus on the seal offers a clue to the circumstances of the dialogue, but questions persist.24 Donne’s verse epistle implies a date close to his ordination in 1615, and indeed the first prose letter we possess that bears the seal was sent to Edward Herbert on the very day Donne was ordained. The anchor is an apt symbol for ordination, since the Bible’s most famous “anchor” passage describes hope as priestly in its access to God: “Which hope we have as an anchor of the soul, both sure and stedfast, and which entereth into that within the veil; whither the forerunner is for us entered, even Jesus, made an high priest forever ­after the order of Melchisidec” (Heb. 6:19–20).25 On the other hand, Walton, in the 1658 Life of John Donne, claims that Donne sent signet rings bearing this seal to George Herbert and o­ thers nearer to the end of Donne’s life in 1631—­and, indeed, some of Herbert’s verses in response to Donne arguably imply that his friend has died. Are the poems that we have the product of two widely separated occasions?26 A related complexity involves the seal: Did Donne only send Herbert the letter sealed by the signet ring or did he actually send a ring? We recall that the speaker of Herbert’s witty lyric “Hope” receives an anchor from his friend, Hope itself— an allusion to the same passage from Hebrews. In this poem, Herbert’s speaker eventually proves to be disappointed ­because he “did expect a ring” (8). Despite ­these uncertainties, the verse epistles remain significant, since they constitute a material, artistic, and spiritual exchange between Donne and Herbert. In chapter 4, “Crossings: Sacramental Signs across the Verse of Donne and Herbert,” Kimberly Johnson brings to ­these epistles the inventive approach she developed in Made Flesh: Sacrament and Poetics in Post-­Reformation ­England (2014). Johnson observes in the poems a materialist semiotics of the sacred that Donne elsewhere espouses and that the younger poet shared to a surprising degree. Donne’s verse epistle calls the seal of the cross-­anchor a sigillum, a Latin word that invokes a crucial term from Calvin’s sacramentology; contra Calvin, however, this nomination suggests that sealing efficacy inheres in the sign itself rather than in the faith of the recipient. In his response, Herbert confirms that the seal of the cross-­anchor can indeed “fix” Christ in place. The seal does not merely point to the historical Cross; it also more successfully keeps Christ pre­ sent for the touch of the worshipper. Johnson’s argument does not necessarily align ­these poets with one precise confessional party. In fact, both Donne and Herbert pre­sent the material sign as the site of an irresistible encounter with God, thereby blending a high sacramentalism with a Reformed conception of how grace operates. Greg Miller, who is, like Johnson, an accomplished critic, poet, and translator, argues in chapter 5, “Crucifying Craft: A Donne-­Herbert Dialogue,” that the En­glish versions of ­these Latin verse epistles that w ­ ere published in the seven-

Introduction 9

teenth c­ entury do not fully and adequately convey the deep ways in which t­ hese two poems are in conversation. Donne connects the cross-­anchor to his couplet form, while Herbert’s Latin meter mimes the movement of waves, even as the poem assumes the shape of an anchor. According to Miller, however, Donne ultimately cautions against treating the seal and the poem itself as magical objects of devotion. Herbert even more clearly checks this impulse, ­gently correcting any effort on his friend’s part to “fix” Christ within his verse. Miller’s interpretation of ­these epistles thus differs radically from that of Johnson. Indeed, since both critics widen their scope to consider other relevant lyr­ics, Miller and Johnson provocatively offer opposing accounts of the proj­ect common to Donne and Herbert. For Johnson, ­these poets lovingly refuse to heed Christ’s noli me tangere (“Touch me not,” John 20:17);27 for Miller, they direct their spiritual gaze to the Cross, on which they have crucified their own worldly interests, and even their own literary art. Part 3, “Sin, Salvation, and Assurance,” contains theologically oriented comparisons between Donne and Herbert. In chapter 6, “ ‘Extreme Audacity of Penitential Humility’: Devotions 10 and the Donne-­Herbert Dichotomy,” Robert W. Reeder concentrates on a single passage from Donne’s prose masterpiece, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624), arguing that this passage offers a prime opportunity to reflect on the Donne-­Herbert dichotomy. H ­ ere, Donne exhibits what Helen Wilcox has elsewhere called his “extreme audacity of penitential humility,” the precise quality that in the critical tradition tends to distinguish him from Herbert, whose humility often seems more truly unassuming.28 A close reading of this moment thus affords insight into the motives for and merits of this characteristically Donnean stance, his self-­presentation as chief sinner. The passage proves open to another reading, however, one in which Donne displays a quality frequently associated with Herbert: namely, a keen awareness of the sinful impulses hidden within such dramatic displays of penitence. Taken together, t­ hese readings suggest a double bind in our reception of Donne and Herbert, whose devotional writing si­mul­ta­neously invites and frustrates contrastive analy­sis. Reeder’s essay also demonstrates the subtlety of Donne’s religious prose, which stands up against, and bears comparison to, Herbert’s lyric art in The ­Temple, as well as does Donne’s own divine poetry. Fittingly, in the next chapter, “Imagining Prayer in Donne’s Devotions and Herbert’s Poems of Complaint,” Kate Narveson focuses her comparison of the prayerful imagination in Donne and Herbert on the Devotions and the lyr­ics in the central section of The T ­ emple entitled “The Church.” Narveson engages Marno’s work only briefly, but her argument raises the question of ­whether his influential account of Donne’s poetics in the Holy Sonnets—in which, through a complex blend of attention and distraction, the  speaker pursues the event of prayer, the experience of “specific Christian doctrines as his own thoughts”—­applies more readily to the prose exercises of the Devotions.29 More specifically, Narveson considers a pressing concern in

10

Introduction

post-­Reformation ­England: the question of how to pray, and how to teach ­others to pray, with understanding. Rather than treating the Donne and Herbert pair in isolation, Narveson sets their approaches to this question against ­those models of prayer represented in the period’s prayer manuals, and even in manuscript notebooks, to revealing effect. Narveson’s study thus embraces figures ranging from clergymen Samuel Hieron, John Downame, and Robert Hill to laypersons such as Anne Twysden and Nehemiah Wallington. Donne and Herbert shared with ­these fellow believers the effort “to pray aright,” but Donne in his Devotions more openly foregrounds the interpretive and imaginative work involved in prayer, while Herbert’s lyr­ics of complaint dramatize the ideal pro­cess by which the expostulating speaker comes to understand his situation and breaks through to regenerate, properly ordered petition. In this context, then, Narveson ultimately distinguishes Donne’s assured but provisional prayers from Herbert’s repre­sen­ ta­tions of reliable spiritual discovery. Narveson’s study of prayer thus also squarely addresses the theological ­question of assurance, picking up from Miller-­Blaise’s discussion of Donne’s soteriological vision of “modest infallibility” in chapter 3. The issue of assurance carries over into the volume’s eighth chapter, “Recuperating the Incapacities of the Fallen Self in Donne and Herbert: Possibility and Promise,” in which Danielle St. Hilaire develops an ingenious contrast between the possibility of salvation in Donne’s Holy Sonnet “As due by many titles” and the promise of salvation in Herbert’s lyric “The Search.” According to St. Hilaire, Herbert’s poem relies on temporal narrative and finds assurance in the ­future; the speaker’s failed search for God leads, by a kind of via negativa, to the promise that God ­will do what the speaker could not. Donne’s Holy Sonnet, by contrast, exploits atemporal paradox and finds assurance in the ability to forestall what­ever the f­ uture may bring. The speaker of “As due by many titles” resigns himself to God, an act that is possibly a sinful display of agency and possibly a gesture of submission, but never resolves into ­either one of ­these states. St. Hilaire perhaps uncovers a motive for Donne’s audacious humility. In her analy­sis, Donne proves a “Schrödinger’s sinner,” deliberately suspending himself between salvation and reprobation in order to keep his final destiny at arm’s length. Working within a theological milieu that places an emphasis upon the incapacity of the self, both Donne and Herbert, according to St. Hilaire, manipulate poetic form and grammar in order to discover surprising forms of agency.30 The fourth and final part of the volume, “Appraisals,” consists of two chapters that provide developed aesthetic comparisons between Donne and Herbert’s verse. Given the predominantly devotional character of Herbert’s proj­ect, the essays in this collection turn, for comparative purposes, most naturally to Donne’s religious poetry and prose. The essays in this concluding section, however, expand the scope of the volume by taking into consideration the significant achievement of the older poet’s secular verse. As Christopher Hodgkins demonstrates, in par­

Introduction 11

tic­u­lar, the juxtaposition of Donne’s lyr­ics and Herbert’s sacred poems can be especially illuminating. In chapter 9, “Donne’s ‘Comedy of Eros’ and Herbert’s ‘World of Mirth,’ ” Hodgkins offers up a lively essay which sets the variety of humor on display in the erotic poetry of Donne’s Songs and Sonets against that in the devotional lyr­ics of Herbert’s The ­Temple. In the first half of the essay, Hodgkins surveys Donne’s satire on the ways in which erotic folly afflicts the soul, and he opens our eyes to new resonances in Donne’s familiar, and less familiar, love lyr­ics. Hodgkins demonstrates how Donne’s sexual comedy in t­hese poems reverberates with a cruel and unsparing laughter and denies access to kindness or sympathy. On the other side, Herbert, while not excluding eros, nevertheless re­orients his devotional poems ­toward other kinds of love. The world of mirth described in Herbert’s lyr­ics rings with transformative and often tragicomic laughter, akin to that of William Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale or the disciples’ post-­Resurrection encounter with the risen Christ on the road to Emmaus (Luke 24:13–35), that expresses h­ uman felicity and spiritual joy.31 In the essay’s second half, Hodgkins traces the unexpected manifestations of spiritual felicity in four Herbert lyr­ics, opening up how each poem ends, often surprisingly, in laughter. Hodgkins reviews Herbert’s recognitions of mirth as a social or psychic balm in his verse and determines that t­ hese instances are, in the end, always secondary to Herbert’s portrayal of mirth as a power­ful spiritual force. Poetic endings serve as the central focus of the tenth and last chapter, Helen Wilcox’s “ ‘The dot over the i’: How Donne and Herbert Close Their Poems.” In her essay, which stands as a fitting coda to the collection, Wilcox offers illuminating close readings of the diverse ways in which Donne and Herbert conclude their poems. Wilcox finds that, rather than merely coming to rest at the end of his lyr­ics, Herbert’s practice is instead to achieve “a rediscovery of direction,” by which a poem’s close productively opens up to further contemplation and a fresh perspective. In her consideration of Donne’s technique, Wilcox takes her lead from a pertinent numismatic meta­phor that Donne coined in a sermon of 1623, which describes poetic closure as a “stamp” of recognition that gathers up the force of the entire poem into “the shutting up” of the composition. Building upon this piece of literary criticism embedded in Donne’s sermons, Wilcox maintains a view of his endings as characterized by “a retrospective finality” that brings his lyr­ics to “a defiant completion.” To establish the poets’ dif­fer­ent approaches, Wilcox’s survey comprehends an array of Donne and Herbert’s lyrical closes and brings the two poets’ compositions into new and often surprising relationships. While Herbert may more visibly f­avor conclusions that are “forward-­looking, purposeful and open,” both poets in fact invite us to revisit and begin again, as readers and scholars of Donne and Herbert unflaggingly continue to do ­after four centuries of reception of ­these absorbing lyr­ics. In that spirit, it is our hope that this book w ­ ill not be the last word in sustained reflection on the myriad points of contact between Donne and Herbert, and that

12

Introduction

this collection ­will open a prospect on, rather than close a door to, ­future comparative work on the devotional poetry and prose of ­these two remarkable seventeenth-­century writers. As editors, the more time we spent in conversation with our contributors on the many potential lines of inquiry ­running between ­these two writers, the more apparent it became that the collection would leave many paths yet untrodden. Our intention is that the essays included in this volume ­will prompt o­ thers to travel down just such paths, affording new views of ­these two poet-­priests whose words still retain the evocative power, in our con­ temporary moment, to leave their readers with as many tantalizing questions as suggested resolutions.

notes The quote presented in the chapter epigraph comes from The En­glish Poems of George Herbert, edited by Helen Wilcox (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Subsequent references to Herbert’s poetry in the introduction ­will derive from this edition and, when appropriate, ­will be cited parenthetically by line number. 1. ​Monographs on Donne and Herbert include: Robert B. Shaw, The Call of God: The Theme of Vocation in the Poetry of Donne and Herbert (Cambridge, MA: Cowley, 1981); Daniel  W. Doerksen, Conforming to the Word: Herbert, Donne, and the En­glish Church before Laud (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1997); Robert Whalen, The Poetry of Immanence: Sacrament in Donne and Herbert (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002); and Frances Cruickshank, Verse and Poetics in George Herbert and John Donne (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Press, 2010). For a classic study of the influence of Reformation theology and Augustinianism on British religious seventeenth-­century poetry, which includes discussion of Donne and Herbert, as well as Andrew Marvell, Henry Vaughan, and John Milton, see William H. Halewood, The Poetry of Grace: Reformation Themes and Structures in En­glish Seventeenth-­Century Poetry (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970). 2. ​Izaak Walton, The Life of John Donne (London, 1658), 82. 3. ​Walton furnishes a fairly detailed account of the history of Donne and Magdalen Herbert’s relationship in his twinned “Lives” of Donne and Herbert, which was published in a single volume in 1670, and provides additional information about Magdalen in his yet further amended “Life of Donne.” A very good overview, albeit more than seventy years old, of Magdalen’s influence upon Donne remains H.  W. Garrod’s concise, no-­nonsense essay, “Donne and Mrs. Herbert,” in The Review of En­glish Studies 21 (1945): 161–173. 4. ​For other brief accounts of the biographical and creative links between Donne and Herbert, see Cruickshank, Verse and Poetics, 8–11 and 13, and John Drury, ­Music at Midnight: The Life and Poetry of George Herbert (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 24. 5. ​Lara M. Crowley, Manuscript ­Matters: Reading John Donne’s Poetry and Prose in Early Modern E ­ ngland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 170–171. She refers to a direct echo, in Herbert’s “Church-­porch,” to Donne’s verse epistle “To Mr. Tilman ­after he had taken ­orders,” which Herbert could only have read in manuscript. 6. ​Brian Cummings, The Literary Culture of the Reformation: Grammar and Grace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 417. 7. ​Cummings, Literary Culture of the Reformation, 406, 325, and 327. 8. ​Paul Cefalu, The Johannine Re­nais­sance in Early Modern En­glish Lit­er­a­ture and Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 2.

Introduction 13 9. ​David Marno, Death Be Not Proud: The Art of Holy Attention (Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 2016), 2.

10. ​Gary Kuchar, George Herbert and the Mystery of the Word: Poetry and Scripture in Seventeenth-­

Century ­England (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 27. 11. ​Kuchar, George Herbert and the Mystery of the Word, 120 and 190. 12. ​Comparative articles or chapters on Donne and Herbert include: Jerome Mazzaro, “Striking through the Mask: Herbert and Donne at Sonnets,” in Like Season’d Timber: New Essays on George Herbert, ed. Edmund Miller and Robert DiYanni (New York: Peter Lang, 1987), 241–253; Louis L. Martz, “Donne and Herbert: Vehement Grief and S­ ilent Tears,” John Donne Journal 7, no. 1 (1988): 21–34; P. G. Stanwood, “The Vision of God in the Sonnets of John Donne and George Herbert,” John Donne Journal 21 (2002): 89–100; and Helen Wilcox, “Herbert and Donne,” in The Oxford Handbook of En­glish Lit­er­a­ture and Theology, ed. Andrew  W. Hass, David Jasper, and Elisabeth Jay (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 398–412. 13. ​Martz, “Vehement Grief,” 32–33. 14. ​Augustine, The Confessions, trans. Maria Boulding, O.S.B. (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1997), III.4.8: “Only one consideration checked me in my ardent enthusiasm [for Cicero’s Hortensius]: that the name of Christ did not occur t­ here. Through your mercy, Lord, my tender ­little heart drunk in that name . . . ​with my ­mother’s milk.” 15. ​John Donne, The Complete Poems of John Donne, ed. Robin Robbins (Harlow, UK: Pearson, 2010), 391. Subsequent references to Donne’s poetry in the introduction w ­ ill derive from this edition and, when appropriate, ­will be cited parenthetically by line number. 16. ​In “Affliction” (I), Herbert writes, “Thus doth thy power crosse-­bias me” (53). 17. ​Drury, ­Music at Midnight, 24. 18. ​Cruickshank, Verse and Poetics, 11. 19. ​As Helen Wilcox notes, “The term ‘bias’ refers to the weight on one side of a bowling ball which makes it swerve off line”; En­glish Poems, 167. 20. ​For the issue of assurance, see especially Cummings, Literary Culture of the Reformation, 287–296 and 319–327, Cefalu, The Johannine Re­nais­sance, 131–170, and Kuchar, George Herbert and the Mystery of the Word, 101–121. 21. ​In the introduction and throughout the volume, “the Cross” designates the a­ ctual, historical object on which Jesus died, while “the cross” refers to a religious symbol, sacrament, or theological concept, although the complexity of this distinction is at stake in several of the essays collected ­here. 22. ​Tom Cain, “Donne’s Po­liti­cal World,” in The Cambridge Companion to John Donne, ed. Achsah Guibbory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 83–99. 23. ​Greg Miller and Catherine Freis offer a dif­fer­ent translation of Donne’s poem, as well as a literal construe of the same, in The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne, vol. 5, The Verse Letters, ed. Jeffrey S. Johnson, et al. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019), 431–432. 24. ​For a complete discussion of the poem’s textual history, see The Verse Letters, 424–427. The same volume also includes a thorough digest of the critical commentary on this poem and a short discussion of the textual history of Herbert’s response. See 1227–1238 and 507, respectively. 25. ​Biblical references are to the Authorized King James Version of 1611 (KJV), and ­will be cited parenthetically in the text by chapter and verse. 26. ​For the possibility that Herbert’s verses themselves reflect dif­fer­ent occasions and may not constitute a single poem, see John Donne: The Divine Poems, ed. Helen Gardner (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), Appendix G (138–147), and The Verse Letters, 507. In chapter 5 of the pre­sent volume, Greg Miller argues for the coherence of Herbert’s poem and suggests that the exchange may indeed date closer to Donne’s death, as Walton claims.

14

Introduction

27. ​The phrase “touch me not” or, in Latin, noli me tangere, comes from the response of the

resurrected Jesus to Mary Magdalene upon her recognition of Him: “Touch me not; for I am not yet ascended to my F ­ ather: but go to my brethren, and say unto them, I ascend unto my ­Father, and your ­Father; and to my God, and your God.” As such, in the Western tradition, the phrase has come to suggest the bittersweetness of deferred embrace. 28. ​Helen Wilcox, “Devotional Writing,” in The Cambridge Companion to John Donne, 151. 29. ​Among the works Marno discusses at some length in order to contextualize Donne’s art of holy attention in the Holy Sonnets is the medieval Liber soliloquiorum animae ad deum, attributed to Augustine: “Coined by Augustine . . . ​the original meaning of soliloquy is a philosophical and theological preparation for prayer.” See Marno, Death Be Not Proud, 80 and 124–132. In somewhat parallel fashion, Narveson elsewhere claims that this work “offers one of the closest formal parallels to Donne’s Devotions.” See Kate Narveson, “The Devotion,” in The Oxford Handbook of John Donne, ed. Jeanne Shami, Dennis Flynn, and M. Thomas Hester (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 310, as well as Kate Narveson, “Piety and the Genre of Donne’s Devotions,” John Donne Journal 17 (1998): 107–136. 30. ​In her responsiveness to the way in which tense and voice in Donne’s lyr­ics negotiate soteriological ­matters, St. Hilaire operates critically in the spirit of Cummings’s tactful close readings in Literary Culture of the Reformation, 385–417. 31. ​The disciples’ meeting with Christ on the road to Emmaus is the most sustained biblical account of Jesus’s post-­Resurrection appearance and, in the Christian tradition, conveys a message of faith as the two men, nourished and strengthened by Jesus’s presence and instruction, gradually pro­gress from a state of grief and despair over Jesus’s execution to one of joy and hope over his resurrection.

NEGATIVE THEOLOGY, PO­L ITI­C AL THEORY, AND THE LYRIC

part 1

1 • DONNE’S NEGATIVE THEOLOGY OF THE CROSS KI RSTEN STI RLI N G

John Donne’s two occasional poems on the cross, “The Crosse” and “Goodfriday, 1613. Riding Westward,” both seem at first sight to be concerned with “Materiall Crosses” as symbols or as iconographic repre­sen­ta­tions of the Crucifixion scene.1 Even though the cross in his “Goodfriday” poem is not physically pre­sent, the speaker’s detailed description of the iconographic details he does not see conjures up, for many readers, the familiar image of the crucifix, suspended, if immaterially, in the East. Yet the ends of both poems see the cross transformed from a static repre­sen­ta­tional icon into an active instrument that “work[s] fruitfully / Within our hearts” (“Crosse,” 61–62), burning off rusts and deformities (“Goodfriday, 1613,” 40). What is more surprising, perhaps, is that this transformation is achieved in both poems through engagement with the ­traditions of mystical and apophatic theology. “The Crosse” makes use of a key meta­phor also deployed by the sixth-­century theologian Pseudo-­Dionysius in his Mystical Theology, while “Goodfriday, 1613” evokes the Deus absconditus of Exodus 33.2 Such references do not make Donne a mystical poet, but they do indicate one way in which the ideas of the mystical theologians allowed him to accommodate both the material, physical world of devotional visual art and the internalized crucifix that actively works in the heart. Donne’s evocation of the hidden God and the via negativa (the attempt to define God by establishing what God is not) enables the speakers of both poems to move beyond the attempt to represent Christ; but rather than moving ­toward a Pseudo-­Dionysian darkness of unknowing, they embrace a very Lutheran theology of the cross, in a combination of apophatic and Lutheran theology that corresponds to what Paul Rorem has described as the “incarnational apophatic.”3

17

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Co mpa r ati v e Ess ays on Donne a nd Herbert

Negative Theology and “The Crosse” “The Crosse” is often read as an anti-­iconoclastic defense of the “image,” the “picture,” the cross as physical devotional object, opening as it does, “Since Christ embrac’d the Crosse it selfe, dare I / His image, th’image of his Crosse deny?” (1–2). Helen Gardner describes the poem as Donne “defending the cross as a pious and proper personal possession.”4 The opening part does insist on the physical form of the cross, yet this is qualified by the following lines: Materiall Crosses then, good physicke bee, And yet spirituall have chiefe dignity. ........ And cure much better (25–26, 28)

This shift to “spirituall” crosses is often used to link the poem’s defense of the cross to the controversy surrounding the Puritan ministers’ call to abolish the sign of the cross in baptism in 1603–1604.5 At the precise midpoint of the poem, however, in line 33, Donne evokes a material artwork of quite a dif­fer­ent sort: “As perchance, Carvers do not ­faces make, / But that away, which hid them t­ here, do take” (33–34). This condensed, oblique reference to the sculptor’s practice of removing, rather than adding, material from his medium to create the work of art has been paralleled with Michelangelo’s evocation of the art of the sculptor in his “Rima 151”: “Non ha l’ottimo artista alcun concetto / c’un marmo solo in sé no circonscriva” [The best of artists can no subject find / That is not in a single block of stone].6 No one, however, to my knowledge, has made the connection with another highly influential reference to the subtractive art of the sculptor of wood or stone, which is used by Pseudo-­Dionysius in his treatise The Mystical Theology to illustrate the via negativa. ­Here, the mystical method of approaching knowledge of God through an acknowl­edgment of what He is not is compared to the practice of the sculptor, who chips away extraneous material from the marble to reveal the work of art: “For this would be r­ eally to see and to know: to praise the Transcendent One in a transcending way, namely through the denial of all beings. We  would be like sculptors who set out to carve a statue. They remove ­every obstacle to the pure view of the hidden image, and simply by this act of clearing aside they show up the beauty which is hidden.”7 Lines 33 and 34 of “The Crosse,” quoted above, concisely sum up Pseudo-­ Dionysius’s statue image, which Donne also referred to at more length in a ­sermon preached at St. Dunstan’s on Trinity Sunday, 1627: To make repre­sen­ta­tions of men, or of other creatures, we finde two wayes; Statuaries have one way, and Paint­ers have another: Statuaries doe it by Substraction;



Donne’s Negative Theology of the Cross 19

They take away, they pare off some parts of that stone, or that timber, which they work upon, and then that which they leave, becomes like that man, whom they would represent: Paint­ers doe it by Addition; . . . ​Sometimes we represent God by Substraction, by Negation, by saying, God is that, which is not mortall, not passible, not moveable: Sometimes we pre­sent him by Addition; by adding our bodily lineaments to him.8

This passage is frequently cited as evidence of Donne’s familiarity with early modern visual culture, and L. E. Semler and Ann Hollinshead Hurley quote it in their overviews of Donne’s knowledge of the visual arts, both finding parallels in Giorgio Vasari’s description of Michelangelo’s method in his Lives and, more specifically, in Henry Wotton’s Ele­ments of Architecture.9 The language of the Wotton passage is indeed remarkably close to Donne’s: “[T]he Plasterer doth make his Figures by Addition, and the Caruer by Substraction.”10 But although Wotton may have been a source for Donne’s knowledge, his Ele­ments describes the a­ ctual practice of plasterers and carvers in carry­ing out their craft, as does Vasari’s Life of Michelangelo. Donne’s comparison of addition and negation in the context of h­ uman attempts to represent the divine points ­toward the influence of mystical theology, and his “statuary,” or maker of statues, who pares off bits of the stone would seem to have his source in Pseudo-­Dionysius’s Mystical Theology. In what is still the most developed consideration of Donne’s attitude ­toward negative theology to date, Arnold Stein argues that while “Donne’s formal positions as theologian have l­ittle sympathy with the negative approach to God,” he was nonetheless “honestly attracted to some of the doctrines of unknowing,” although they did “not engage [his] mind so deeply as other prob­lems of ­consciousness.”11 He cites “A Nocturnall upon St. Lucie’s Day” as Donne’s fullest exploration of the implications of the via negativa.12 Although recent criticism has argued that mystical writers such as Pseudo-­Dionysius and Nicholas of Cusa exerted a much profounder influence on Donne’s thought and work, Stein’s balanced and cautious assessment remains convincing.13 Donne’s demonstrated interest in the work of both writers is undeniable, however. He returns repeatedly in the sermons to a meta­phor, drawn from Nicholas of Cusa’s De Visione Dei, of a painting on a wall whose eyes follow the viewer around the room.14 Michael Martin identifies a direct reference to what is prob­ably the Cusan’s most influential work, De Docta Ignorantia (On Learned Ignorance), in a Whitsunday sermon preached prob­ably in 1630, wherein Donne mentions “a learned ignorance, which is a modest, and a reverent abstinence from searching into t­ hose secrets which God hath not revealed in his word,” while a 1625 sermon cites Pseudo-­Dionysius by name.15 Donne’s most extended discussion of Pseudo-­Dionysius’s negative theology is in the Essays in Divinity, in which he directly refers to Pseudo-­Dionysius’s On the Celestial Hierarchies, describing its author as “a devout speculative man.” Although Donne acknowledges that attempting to draw “knowledge of God . . . ​

20

Co mpa r ati v e Ess ays on Donne a nd Herbert

from effects” is inadequate, the via negativa does not provide a fully satisfactory alternative: Canst thou rely and leane upon so infirm a knowledg [sic], as is delivered by negations? And b­ ecause a devout speculative man hath said, Negationes de Deo sunt verae, affirmationes autem sunt incon­ve­nientes, w ­ ill it serve thy turn to hear, that God is that which cannot be named, cannot be comprehended, or which is nothing e­ lse? When ­every negation implyes some privation, which cannot be safely enough admitted in God; and is, besides, so inconsiderable a kind of proofe, that in civill and judic[i]all practice, no man is bound by it, nor bound to prove it.16

The ambivalent attitude t­oward the apophatic h­ ere supports Stein’s view that Donne’s undoubted knowledge of and interest in negative theology did not make him a mystical poet or theologian. I would, however, dispute Stein’s conclusion that Donne’s lack of engagement meant simply that his imagination was more stimulated by “other prob­lems of consciousness.” Donne repeatedly invoked the language and imagery of negative theology not as an end in itself but b­ ecause ­doing so allowed him to develop his own arguments. In d­ oing so, he both adapted apophatic thought to his own purposes and used it to challenge and expand his ideas. This is precisely how he uses the statue image in “The Crosse.” Donne’s reference to the carver who removes rather than creates certainly evokes the via negativa of the mystics, but the way he develops it takes the princi­ ples of negation in quite a dif­fer­ent direction. In “The Crosse,” Donne takes the negation, the subtraction illustrated by the art of the carver or sculptor, and applies it not to the knowledge of God but rather to the soul of man. His reinterpretation of the statue analogy is developed in the couplet immediately following: As perchance, Carvers do not f­ aces make, But that away, which hid them t­ here, do take: Let Crosses, soe, take what hid Christ in thee, And be his image, or not his, but hee. (33–36)

The image in question is no longer—or not only—­the image of Christ on the Cross but the image of God in man that is to be revealed, and the cross takes on the role of the carver, or the carver’s chisel, working on man in order to erase “what hid Christ in thee” (35). The internal idols that obscure the imago Dei are chipped away as “the Crosse of Christ work[s] fruitfully / Within our hearts” (61–62). From this midpoint in the poem onward, the cross is transformed. No longer simply a passive icon of Christ, it becomes an active participant in the redemptive pro­cess. This brings it much closer to a Lutheran kind of apophatic theology than to the original Pseudo-­Dionysian meta­phor.



Donne’s Negative Theology of the Cross 21

The opening of “The Crosse” seems at first sight to be an affirmation of the material cross rather than any kind of negation, the list of crosses to be found in nature functioning to reinforce the visual validity of the “image of the cross.” Yet although Donne’s speaker asks “Who can blot out the Crosse . . . ?” (15), the rapid succession of cruciform examples in lines 17 to 32 serves, if not exactly to blot out, then certainly to blur the image he has summoned up. The first half of the poem also introduces the standard transferred use of “cross” to mean “affliction,” and this double meaning contributes to the blurring repetition of the word, as the “crosses” borne by the Christian are celebrated alongside the array of man-­made and natu­ral crosses to be perceived in the world around us. This distorting multiplication of cross-­like shapes leads into the “spirituall” and internal cross of the second part of the poem and prepares the reader for Donne’s play with the word form “cross,” creating a much more complex engagement with the symbol than the opening of the poem might lead us to expect. It is only in the second half of the poem, however, following the Pseudo-­Dionysian sculptor meta­phor of lines 33 and 34, that the cross itself is grammatically transformed from noun into verb, beginning to act rather than simply be. The cross becomes the carver’s tool that chips away to remove or scratch out “what hid Christ in  thee,” and it does so by becoming a verb of negative action, taking on the meaning of cancel or erase (OED cross v. 4. a.): “Crosse / Your joy in crosses” (41–42); “crosse thy senses” (43); “crosse the rest, / Make them indifferent” (47–48); “Crosse ­those dejections” (53); “Crosse and correct concupiscence of witt” (58); and “crosse thy self in all” (60). The idea that the action of the cross works on the sinner to reveal God’s grace within him is very Lutheran, the basis of Luther’s theology of the cross. And Donne’s move in this poem from the statue analogy to the action of the cross is highly reminiscent of Luther’s own adaptation and appropriation of the terms of Pseudo-­ Dionysian apophatic theology. As Rorem has shown, despite his statements rejecting negative theology as practised by Pseudo-­Dionysius, “Luther explic­itly moves from a Pseudo-­Dionysian apophatic to a ‘negative theology’ of the cross.”17 Luther was fairly abrupt in dismissing Pseudo-­Dionysius’s ideas, writing in 1520 in the treatise The Babylonian Captivity of the Church, “So far, indeed, from learning Christ in [Pseudo-­Dionysius’s works], you ­will lose even what you already know of him. I speak from experience. Let us rather hear Paul, that we may learn Jesus Christ and him crucified.”18 Although Pseudo-­Dionysius and Luther both rejected intellectual or metaphysical knowledge as a way to approach the divine, finding God rather in darkness, for Pseudo-­Dionysius this meant “plung[ing] into that darkness which is beyond intellect” to become “speechless and unknowing,” whereas for Luther the darkness was to be found in Christ’s suffering on the Cross.19 Some fifteen years ­later, Luther explic­itly moved from a dismissal of Pseudo-­Dionysius to a reappropriation of the term “negative theology” in the

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light of the theology of the cross: “Therefore Dionysius, who wrote about ‘negative theology’ and ‘affirmative theology,’ deserves to be ridiculed. . . . ​If we wish to give a true definition of ‘negative theology,’ we should say that it is the holy cross and the afflictions [attending it].”20 Even the phrase that has become a kind of motto for Luther’s theology of the cross, “Crux sola est nostra theologia,” or “The Cross alone is our theology,” derives not from the Heidelberg ­Theses, as is commonly assumed, but from a passage in Operationes in Psalmos (1519–1521) in which Luther disputes the mystical theologians’ interpretation of “­going into the darkness, ascending beyond being and non-­being,” adding, “truly I do not know ­whether they understand themselves, if they attribute it to [humanly] elicited acts and do not rather believe that the sufferings of the cross, death and hell are being signified. The CROSS alone is our theology.”21 Such an “incarnational apophatic,” as Rorem terms it, did not originate with Luther but can be seen as part of a tradition that includes the writings of the seventh-­century Byzantine theologian Maximus the Confessor and St. Bonaventure in the thirteenth ­century.22 What is more specifically Lutheran, however, is the idea of the cross acting on man to improve him. As another Lutheran theologian puts it: “Luther was an apophatic (negative) theologian of a dif­fer­ent sort. . . . ​ Luther did not understand the negation only as a moment in one’s use of analogy to ‘unsay’ what cannot rightly be said of an infinite being. Instead, the negation is always the act of God applying the cross to our very persons in this world.”23 In a sermon preached at St.  Paul’s, Donne described a similar shift from the desire for metaphysical knowledge of God to the knowledge that comes only from Christ’s Passion, insisting on the importance of applying this to the self and referring, like Luther, to Paul’s famous statement to the Corinthian Christians: “I determined not to know any t­ hing among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified” (1 Cor. 2:2). Donne begins by noting that one “may have as much knowledge, as is presently necessary for [their] salvation, and yet have a restlesse and unsatisfied desire, to search into unprofitable curiosities, unrevealed mysteries, and inextricable perplexities,” and then observes that “on the other side, a man may be satisfied, and thinke he knowes all, when, God knowes, he knowes nothing at all; for, I know nothing, if I know not Christ crucified, And I know not that, if I know not how to apply him to my selfe.”24 It is precisely this shift from the Pseudo-­Dionysian apophatic to the application of the cross that we see in Donne’s poem, as “crosses” are applied to “take what hid Christ in thee” and reveal the image of God in man. This shift in the second part of “The Crosse” not only moves the poem away from being a defense of the cross as a physical, visual work of art to be looked at but also strongly suggests that the corrective and erasing action of the cross is inherent to, indeed constitutive of, the cross itself. The poem splits precisely into two parts and the shift in focus is marked both by the introduction of the Pseudo-­Dionysian carver in line 33 and, as Theresa DiPasquale has suggested, the printed cruciform letter x,



Donne’s Negative Theology of the Cross 23

which, as she persuasively points out, appears at the poem’s center in the word “crucifix” at the end of line 32.25 This central x is iconically appropriate since the change of direction in the second half of the poem means that structurally, the ­whole poem can be said to take on the form of the cross. As “cross” becomes a verb and takes on this canceling and corrective role, it is noteworthy that its corrective function is particularly applied to the sense of sight and the appreciation of icons—­the appreciation of the cross itself—­precisely what seemed to be celebrated in the first part of the poem: therefore Crosse Your joy in crosses, ­else, ’tis double losse. And crosse thy senses, ­else, both they, and thou Must perish soone, and to destruction bowe. ........ But most the eye needs crossing, that can rome, And move (41–44; 49–50)

Significantly, while all the senses need to be checked, “the eye needs crossing” most of all. While the first part of the poem establishes the cross as the “chosen Altar” (4) of Christ’s sacrifice, and rhetorically demands how it could be despised, the second half of the poem warns that in the case of an excessive “joy in crosses,” both idol and idolater ­will potentially perish. Such an evenhanded consideration of the image question is characteristic of Donne’s judicious approach to the religious image throughout his work. As he puts it in “Satyre 3”: To’adore, or scorne an image, or protest, May all be bad; doubt wisely, in strange way To stand inquiring right, is not to stray (76–78)26

Indeed, the move in “The Crosse,” from an apparent criticism of iconoclasm to a warning about the dangers of idolatry, can be read as an inverted version of his ­later, much-­quoted, balanced take on the image question in a sermon from 1627: “Væ Idolalatris, woe to such advancers of Images, as would throw down Christ, rather then his Image: But Væ Iconoclastis too, woe to such peremptory abhorrers of Pictures, and to such uncharitable condemners of all t­hose who admit any use of them, as had rather throw down a Church, than let a Picture stand.”27 If our eyes cannot distinguish good crosses from bad, the speaker of “The Crosse” continues, we should treat them all as indifferent—­“Make them indifferent” (48)—an expression which, in this context, clearly refers to the debates of the iconoclastic controversy and Luther’s identification of images and other contentious rituals as “adiaphora”: neither essential to salvation nor harmful.28

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The cross, like “The Crosse,” contains the potential for both idolatry and iconoclasm, as the crosses of the first half of the poem, both material images and afflictions, are “crossed”—­canceled or erased—by the second half of the poem. Indeed, the second half of the poem can be seen to correct the first half in more ways than one, calling into question not only the speaker’s initial defiant justification of the physical image but also his somewhat self-­flagellating plea­sure in tribulation. “Better ­were worse,” the speaker asserts in the first half of the poem, “for, no affliction, / No Crosse is so extreme, as to have none” (13–14), which reads almost as a caricature of a Christian willing ac­cep­tance of suffering, and recalls the similarly ambiguous lines on martyrdom in “A Litany”: “Oh, to some, / Not to be Martyrs, is a martyrdome” (89–90). The second half of “The Crosse,” in contrast, warns against the risks of undue plea­sure in adversity: “so may a selfe-­dispising, get selfe-­love . . . ​Soe is pride, issued from humility” (38, 40). This “joy in crosses,” too, must be “crossed.” The heart must also be crossed, “for that in man alone / Points downewards, and hath palpitation” (51–52). ­These lines have been interpreted as referring to lusts and base desires, but the following lines gloss this downward tendency of the heart as “dejections,” which are as  potentially dangerous to its owner as upward aspirations to “forbidden heights” (54).29 This again corrects the rather self-­aggrandizing image of the speaker in the first half of the poem stretching his arms to become his own cross: “Who can deny mee power, and liberty / To stretch my armes, and mine owne Crosse to be?” (17–18). The poem is thus created by the contradictory, canceling logic that opposes its first half to its second half. It is a “Crosse,” just as a cross is made of one line crossed out by another line. The first half of the poem asserting the primacy of the material image is si­mul­ta­neously pre­sent and canceled out by the second half, an act of erasure in the Heideggerean or Derridean sense of the term.30 The two halves of the poem intersect at the central statue image drawn from Pseudo-­ Dionysius’s Mystical Theology, which appears to generate Donne’s play with the word “cross” that permits the canceling action of the verb. The cross both visually and verbally carries within itself the erasing and destructive action that ­Donne’s poem wittily mimics, and so is an apt sign for the paradoxical nature of Christ’s sacrifice, a paradox that is contained within Luther’s theology of the cross, where God is both revealed and hidden in the Cross of Christ.31

The Deus Absconditus and the Cross in “Goodfriday, 1613. Riding Westward” In “Goodfriday, 1613. Riding Westward,” a similar tension between the pre­sent and the absent cross is spatially enacted in the conceit of the speaker being “carryed ­towards the West / . . . ​when [his] Soules forme bends t­oward the East” (9–10), and the verbal paradoxes of the “Sunne, by rising set” (11) and “Christ on



Donne’s Negative Theology of the Cross 25

this Crosse, [who] did rise and fall” (13) reinforce a similarly cruciform logic. In the 1613 poem, too, as in “The Crosse,” an apophatic context is signaled and then adapted. The poem’s geo­graph­i­cal conceit superimposes the meta­phor of life ­running from east to west onto the spatial symbolism of church architecture in which the crucifix traditionally hangs over the altar in the east of the building. The speaker, “whirld” westward for business or for plea­sure, does not contemplate Christ on the Cross, and admits to being “glad” that he “do[es] not see / That spectacle of too much weight for mee” (15–16). He continues, “Who sees Gods face, that is selfe life, must dye; / What a death ­were it then to see God dye?” (17–18). As most of the poem’s commentators note, line 17 refers directly to God’s reply to Moses’s request to see God’s glory: “You cannot see my face; for no one s­ hall see me and live” (Exod. 33:20), the scriptural basis for the idea of the hidden God, or Deus absconditus. But Donne adapts the warning in Exodus 33 by adding his own—­“ What a death w ­ ere it then to see God dye?”—­thus rhetorically, at least, placing the sight of the Crucifixion in the same category as the unimaginable, uncontemplable sight of God’s face in glory. This juxtaposition of the hidden revelation of Exodus 33 with the Crucifixion is also central to Luther’s theology of the cross, as laid out in the ­theses of the Heidelberg Disputation of 1518. ­Theses 19 and 20 are of par­tic­ul­ ar interest as they contain key statements on the central question of how we look at God: 19. Non ille digne Theologus dicitur, qui invisibilia Dei per ea, quae facta sunt, intellecta conspicit. 20. Sed qui visibilia et posteriora Dei per passiones et crucem conspecta intelligit. [Anyone who observes the invisible ­things of God, understood through ­those ­things that are created, does not deserve to be called a theologian. But anyone who understands the vis­i­ble rearward parts of God as observed in suffering and the cross does deserve to be called a theologian.]32

The En­glish translation ­here is taken from Alister McGrath’s Luther’s Theology of the Cross b­ ecause, as McGrath points out, Jaroslav Pelikan’s standard En­glish translation of thesis 20 does not highlight Luther’s reference to a key moment of divine self-­revelation.33 Luther’s use of the word posteriora, McGrath argues, is a direct allusion to the use of the word in God’s warning to Moses at Sinai in ­Exodus 33. Having told Moses “­there ­shall no man see me, and live,” God goes on to say, “Thou shalt see my back parts, but my face s­ hall not be seen,” which in the Vulgate is “videbis posteriora mea faciem autem meam videre non poteris” (Exod. 33:23). McGrath’s translation of visibilia et posteriora Dei as “vis­i­ble rearward parts of God as observed in suffering and the cross,” as opposed to Pelikan’s “vis­

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i­ble manifest ­things of God,” insists on the reference to Exodus 33 and therefore on the fact that this is a hidden revelation. According to McGrath, “it is clear that this is precisely what Luther intended to convey by the phrase.”34 Luther’s bringing together of the hidden revelation of Exodus 33 and Christ’s Crucifixion is central to his theology of the cross. For Luther, Christ’s Incarnation (specifically, his suffering on the Cross) is the “back side of God” or the “vis­i­ble rearward parts of God,” and it is all we can see. McGrath also points out that the theological engagement implied in the theology of the cross involves not merely rational engagement but visual engagement. A theologian of the cross “understands what is seen” rather than “observing through what is understood.” The paraphrase of Exodus 33:20 in line 17 of “Goodfriday, 1613” (“Who sees Gods face, that is selfe life, must dye”)—­immediately followed by Donne’s development of this, “What a death ­were it then to see God dye”—­seems to invoke the logic of Luther’s theology of the cross as expressed in his twentieth Heidelberg thesis: that the “vis­i­ble rearward parts of God” are to be found in Christ’s Passion and death on the Cross. This reference to the Deus absconditus in the context of the Crucifixion highlights the opposition Luther makes between seeing God and understanding God as observed in suffering and the Cross. Recent scholarship has demonstrated that Donne’s couplet referencing ­Exodus 33 has a somewhat unstable status in the poem’s history. The couplet (17–18) is not included in two manuscript versions of “Goodfriday, 1613” in the hand of Nathaniel Rich, discovered in the 1970s, one of which is missing the following couplet as well.35 Although bibliographical evidence cannot conclusively determine w ­ hether the version of “Goodfriday, 1613” recorded in t­hese two manuscript versions is the result of scribal error or if it rec­ords an e­ arlier authorial version, vari­ ous circumstances lead Margaret Maurer and Dennis Flynn cautiously to conclude that the Rich manuscripts rec­ord an ­earlier stage in the poem’s composition, prior to the manuscript tradition recorded in the 1633 Poems. Donne’s close relationship to the Rich ­family at this period reinforces this hypothesis, but the most compelling, though circumstantial, evidence that ­these manuscripts rec­ord an e­ arlier “tentative authorial trial” is the internal coherence of the variant readings found in them: none of the “missing” couplets leads to an obviously faulty reading.36 Maurer and Flynn demonstrate how, if we accept this chronology of authorial revision, the addition of the reference to Exodus 33, combined with other changes made to the poem, charts a shift from an e­ arlier emphasis on the Crucifixion as a past, biblical event to a revised version that recognises the Crucifixion as a “pre­ sent possibility” in the life of the speaker.37 This is most noticeable in a marked change of tense in line 15 (the couplet that would immediately precede the lines referencing Exodus 33), which in the ­earlier version of “Goodfriday, 1613” reads: “Yett am I almost glad, I did not see / That spectacle, of too much weight for me” (P2, 15–16; emphasis added). In the l­ater canonical version, the couplet is: “Yet dare I’almost be glad, I do not see / That spectacle of too much weight for mee”



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(15–16; emphasis added). The revised poem, Maurer and Flynn argue, thus emphasizes the life journey of the speaker as “a mortal being”—­a mortality which is emphasised by the “dye / dye” rhyme of the added couplet—­who, though constrained by life’s duties to pursue business or plea­sure, “can only trust that God’s grace w ­ ill find in time some means to restore God’s image in him for that final reckoning.”38 The juxtaposition of the pre­sent tense “spectacle” of the Crucifixion with the added reference to the divine self-­revelation of Exodus 33 means that the poem progresses ­toward an assertion of the presence of the cross in the life of the speaker which corresponds closely to Luther’s theology of the cross. Yet, having apparently established this parallel between the Deus absconditus and the Crucifixion, Donne immediately goes in another direction. The fact that his speaker is “almost . . . ​glad” not to “see / That spectacle of too much weight for mee” (15–16) seems to run ­counter to the logic of Luther’s twentieth thesis. While for Luther, God is “hidden” in the Crucifixion and so the Crucifixion with all its suffering must be observed, Donne’s speaker in “Goodfriday, 1613” seems to shy away from looking at this critical site of revelation. God seems to be “hidden” in Donne’s poem ­because the speaker does not engage visually with the Crucifixion. He does, however, engage with the Crucifixion through the faculty of memory: “­these t­hings . . . ​are pre­sent yet unto my memory” (33–34). As Maurer and Flynn highlight, the speaker of the revised version of the poem “takes comfort in an assured assertion that . . . ​the faculty of memory has been and ­will always be available to assist his meditation on that event.”39 Read in the context of Donne’s fascination with memory in his sermons, the insistence on memory in “Goodfriday, 1613” may point ­toward a new way of understanding the posteriora Dei, the vis­i­ble rearward parts of God.40 A sermon preached by Donne at Hanworth to James Hay, Earl of Carlisle, and com­pany in 1622 contains many parallels to his Goodfriday poem, and particularly illuminates the role played by the memory in this scheme of salvation. Rather as he does in “The Crosse,” in this sermon Donne evokes some of the ideas of mystical theology only to adapt them to a more Christological kind of negative theology. The sermon opens by juxtaposing two verses from the Psalms—­“God hath made darknesse his secret place” (Ps. 18:11) and “God covers himself with light as with a garment” (Ps. 104:2)—in order to oppose darkness and light as ways of seeing God.41 While the first part of the sermon rejects the idea that God is only to be found in darkness, the second part proposes darkness as a corrective to our sight and a means to prepare for the vision of God in glory.42 This paradox sounds like textbook mystical theology, but, despite using a language that strongly evokes the mystical darkness of unknowing and the via negativa, Donne shifts to a focus on the sufferings of Christ: Man sees best in the light, but meditates best in the darke; for our sight of God, it is enough, that God gives the light of nature; to behold him so, as to fixe upon him

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in meditation, God benights us, or eclipses us, or casts a cloud of medicinall afflictions, and wholsome corrections upon us . . . ​that man, who through his owne red glasse, can see Christ, in that colour too, through his own miseries, can see Christ Jesus in his blood, that through the calumnies that have been put upon himself, can see the revilings that ­were multiplied upon Christ, that in his own imprisonment, can see Christ in the grave, and in his owne enlargement, Christ in his ­resurrection, this man . . . ​beholds God.43

To view Christ through the lens of ­human suffering is to find a par­tic­u­lar understanding of Christ’s suffering. While the language of crosses and afflictions used h­ ere strongly echoes “The Crosse,” Donne goes on in the passage immediately following to develop the sight of “Christ Jesus in his blood” into a vision of God that has many linguistic and thematic parallels with “Goodfriday, 1613,” including an explicit reference to the hidden God of Exodus 33:23: [H]e hath manifested himselfe to me in his Sonne, being mounted, and raised by dwelling in his Church, being made like unto him, in suffering, as he suffered, I  can see round about me, even to the Horizon, and beyond it, I can see both Hemi­spheres at once, God in this, God in the next world too. I can see him, in the Zenith, in the highest point . . . ​and I can see him in the Nadir, in the lowest dejection; I can see him in the East, see how mercifully he brought the Christian Religion amongst us, and see him in the West, see how justly he might remove that againe . . . ​I can see him in all a­ ngles, in all postures; . . . ​Abraham saw God coming [to him]; Moses saw God ­going, his glory passing by; he saw posteriora, his hinder parts; so I can see God in the memory of his blessings formerly conferred on me.44

This passage, situating the crucified Christ visually in space, in the Zenith and the Nadir, in the East and in the West, parallels “Goodfriday, 1613” both iconographically and linguistically. In the poem, the speaker contemplates the cross through a series of questions, an approach that is apophatic in the rhetorical as well as the theological sense: Could I behold ­those hands which span the Poles, And tune all spheares at once, peirc’d with ­those holes? Could I behold that endless height which is Zenith to us . . . ? (21–24)

In the sermon, however, Donne confidently asserts, “I can see him, in the Zenith . . . ​ I can see him in the East . . . ​and see him in the West . . . ​I can see him in all a­ ngles.” Poem and sermon, though, come to the same point, asserting that the sight of



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God is to be found in the memory. In the poem, this is what resolves the prob­lem of not seeing, or of looking in the wrong direction: “Though t­hese t­hings, as I ­ride, be from mine eye, / They’are pre­sent yet unto my memory” (33–34). And in the sermon, the realization “so I can see God in the memory of his blessings formerly conferred on me” is directly paralleled with the hidden revelation of Exodus 33:23. Like Luther in his twentieth thesis, Donne quotes the Vulgate’s “posteriora,” translating it himself as “hinder parts”: “Moses saw God ­going, his glory passing by; he saw posteriora, his hinder parts; so I can see God in the memory of his blessings.” This paralleling of Moses’s vision of God’s hinder parts and God as seen in the memory of His blessings may be related to the theory, to be found in the writings of Galen and Avicenna, that the memory is anatomically located in the rearmost chamber or “ventricle” of the brain.45 Donne himself referred to this tradition when he preached on memory in his “Sermon of Valediction at my ­going into Germany” on April 18, 1619: “Remember therefore, and remember now, though the Memory be placed in the hindermost part of the brain, defer not thou thy remembring to the hindermost part of thy life, but doe that now in die, in the day, whil’st thou hast light.”46 The association of the memory with the hinder parts (of the brain, of God) helps to resolve what might seem to be a contradiction in Donne’s “Goodfriday, 1613.” Although a Lutheran interpretation of Exodus 33:20 implies that the only way to approach God would be through the contemplation of Christ’s suffering on the Cross, the speaker of “Goodfriday, 1613” seems to turn away from a Lutheran theology of the cross as he shies away from the Crucifixion, “glad [not to] see / That spectacle of too much weight for mee” (15–16). But if we read the poem in the light of the Hanworth sermon and the revelation that looking backward in time, into the memory, may be equated to Moses looking at God from ­behind, then the speaker’s convoluted refusal to look at the scene of the Crucifixion reveals a new understanding of the Deus absconditus. The memory represents the posteriora Dei, and it is ­there that the sight of Christ’s Passion is located. This reinterpretation of Exodus 33:23  in “Goodfriday, 1613” is marked by a pointed reversal of the dynamics of the Exodus verse: whereas God showed Moses His back, in the poem it is the speaker, the sinner, who turns his back to God “to receive / Corrections” (37–38), asking the Savior to “Burne off my rusts, and my deformity, / Restore thine Image” (40–41). This corrective and corrosive action of the image of Christ crucified at the end of “Goodfriday, 1613” can be directly paralleled with the application of the cross to the person of the sinner to remove “what hid Christ in thee” in “The Crosse” (35). The negative, erasing action of the cross in both poems is ultimately positive, creative like the sculptor’s tool as it restores the imago Dei.

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Conclusion Donne, like Luther, wrote in a society that found the material image highly suspect, and in both “The Crosse” and “Goodfriday, 1613” one of his apophatic moves was to replace the cross as a material devotional image with an internal cross that works on ­humans to reveal the image of God within them. The “spectacle” of Christ crucified in “Goodfriday, 1613” is “from [the speaker’s] eye” but “pre­sent . . . ​ unto [his] memory” (33–34), just as “the Crosse of Christ work[s] fruitfully / Within our hearts” (61–62) in “The Crosse.” The material world of the visual artwork is recontextualized through Donne’s appropriation of Pseudo-­Dionysius’s statue meta­phor from The Mystical Theology, which enables him to establish an opposition between seeing and not seeing. The statue meta­phor, drawn from the world of visual art, allowed Pseudo-­Dionysius to illustrate the move beyond the repre­sen­ta­tional and rational conception of God. E ­ very figurative stroke of the chisel removed one ­human and material way of understanding God, and moved us t­oward an understanding of God as transcendent, beyond all being. Donne followed Luther in the theological tradition that sees the via negativa as leading more fruitfully to active engagement with the cross and Christ’s Passion, and, like Pseudo-­Dionysius, he found the practice of the visual artist an appropriate illustration of the relationship between God and ­human beings. The crosses of both “The Crosse” and “Goodfriday, 1613” are transformed from static icons, standing on an altar or hanging on a wall, into active crosses that participate in the creative pro­cess, burning, scraping, and revealing the hidden beauty in the raw material of humanity.

notes 1. ​John Donne, The Divine Poems, ed. Helen Gardner (Oxford: Clarendon, 1952), 26. Subse-

quent references to Donne’s poetry w ­ ill derive from this edition, and w ­ ill be cited parenthetically in the text by line number. 2. ​A s explained below, this passage, in which God allows Moses a glimpse of His back parts but not His face, was central to Luther’s understanding of the Deus absconditus, or hidden God. 3. ​Paul Rorem, “Negative Theologies and the Cross,” Harvard Theological Review 101, no. 3–4 (2008): 458–463. With this term, Rorem refers to theologians’ Christological application of Dionysian apophatic theology, their yoking of negative theology to the doctrine of the Incarnation. According to Rorem, where Maximus the Confessor understood the apophatic grasp of divine transcendence, not in the Dionysian “­union with the unknown God” (460) but in the mystery of “Christ as the incarnate revelation of God” (460), Bonaventure the Franciscan and, ­after him, Luther extended this “christological proclamation” (461) to “a ‘negative theology’ of the cross” where “God is not so much ‘unknown’ as ‘hidden’ in Christ” (462). For more on the affinity between Donne’s theology and that of Luther, see chapter 3 of the pre­ sent volume; in chapter 4 of the pre­sent volume, Kimberly Johnson also briefly implies a kinship between Donne and Luther’s theologies of the cross. 4. ​Donne, The Divine Poems, 92.



Donne’s Negative Theology of the Cross 31

5. ​William A. McQueen, “Donne’s ‘The Crosse,’ ” Explicator 45, no. 3 (1987): 9. See also Bar-

bara Kiefer Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-­Century Religious Lyric (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1979), 255. 6. ​Michelangelo, Poems and Letters, trans. Anthony Mortimer (London: Penguin, 2007), 151. This identification is made by both A. J. Smith, ed., in John Donne: The Complete En­glish Poems (Harmonds­worth, UK: Penguin, 1971), 648, and A. B. Chambers in Transfigured Rites in Seventeenth-­Century En­glish Poetry (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1992), 207. 7. ​Pseudo-­Dionysius, The Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibheid (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), 138. 8. ​John Donne, The Sermons of John Donne, ed. Evelyn M. Simpson and George R. Potter (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1953–1962), 8:54. See also Sermons, 2:276. 9. ​L. E. Semler, The En­glish Mannerist Poets and the Visual Arts (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1998), 47–48; Ann Hollinshead Hurley, John Donne’s Poetry and Early Modern Visual Culture (Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 2005), 176. 10. ​Henry Wotton, The ele­ments of architecture, collected by Henry Wotton Knight, from the best authors and examples (London, 1624), 107–108, quoted in Semler, The En­glish Mannerist Poets, 47. 11. ​Arnold Stein, John Donne’s Lyr­ics: The Eloquence of Action (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1962), 175, 180, and 181. 12. ​On the influence of Pseudo-­Dionysian negative theology on “A Nocturnall upon St. Lucie’s Day,” see the more recent studies by Sean Ford, “Nothing’s Paradox in Donne’s ‘Negative Love’ and ‘A Nocturnal upon S. Lucy’s Day,’ ” Quidditas 22 (2001): 99–113, and Jennifer  L. Nichols, “Dionysian Negative Theology in Donne’s ‘A Nocturnall upon S. Lucies Day,’ ” Texas Studies in Lit­er­a­ture and Language 53, no. 3 (2011): 352–367. 13. ​See, for example, Michael Martin, Lit­er­a­ture and the Encounter with God in Post-­Reformation ­England (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2014). 14. ​Donne, Sermons, 2:237–238; 4:130; 5:299; and 9:368. See Eugene R. Cunnar, “Illusion and Spiritual Perception in Donne’s Poetry,” in Aesthetic Illusion: Theoretical and Historical Approaches, ed. Frederick Burwick and Walter Pape (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1990), 331, and Kirsten Stirling, “Dr Donne’s Art Gallery and the Imago Dei,” John Donne Journal 27 (2008): 71. 15. ​Donne, Sermons, 9:234 and 6:232, the latter cited by Nichols, “Dionysian Negative Theology,” 353. 16. ​John Donne, Essays in Divinity, ed. Evelyn M. Simpson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1952), 21. The writings of Pseudo-­Dionysius circulated widely in Latin translation in the sixteenth ­century. According to Karlfried Froehlich, the version most read among humanists, including Protestant Reformers, was the 1436 Latin translation by Ambrogio Traversari, first printed in Bruges in 1480. See Froehlich, “Pseudo-­Dionysius and the Reformation of the Sixteenth ­Century,” in Pseudo-­Dionysius, The Complete Works, 34. Donne may also have been aware of the translation by Marsilio Ficino (Florence, 1496). According to Philippe Chevallier’s Dionysiaca, sixty-­four editions of Pseudo-­Dionysius’s Mystical Theology w ­ ere produced in the course of the sixteenth ­century, seventeen of which ­were based on Traversari’s Latin translation and sixteen on Ficino’s; Philippe Chevallier, ed., Dionysiaca (Stuttgart-­Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-­ Holzboog, 1989), 1, lx. 17. ​Rorem, “Negative Theologies and the Cross,” 462. 18. ​ Luther’s Works, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan and Helmut  T. Lehman, 55 vols. (Philadelphia: Muehlenberg and Fortress, 1955–1986), 36:109 (hereafter LW). Luther’s Latin reads, “Christum ibi adeo non disces ut, si etiam scias, amittas. Expertus loquor. Paulum potius audiamus, ut Iesum Christum et hunc crucifixum discamus.” D. Martin Luthers Werke. Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. J. F. K. Knake, 67 vols. (Weimar: Hermann Bohlaus Nachfolger, 1883–1997), 6:562.8–13 (hereafter WA [Weimarer Ausgabe]).

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19. ​Pseudo-­Dionysius, The Complete Works, 139. 20. ​LW 13:110–111, quoted by Rorem, 462 n. 51. “Quare merito ridetur Dionysius, qui scripsit de

Theologia Negativa et Affirmitiva. . . . ​Nos autem, si vere volumus Theologiam negativam definire, statuemus eam esse sanctam Crucem et tentationes, in quibus Deus quidem non cernitur, et tamen adest ille gemitus, de quo iam dixi”: Enarratio Psalmi 90 (1534–1535 [1541]); Ps. 90:7 (WA 40, 3:543.8–13). 21. ​Rorem, “Negative Theologies and the Cross,” 462. “Hunc ductum Theologici mystici vocant In tenebras ire, ascendere super ens et non ens. Verum nescio, an scipsos intelligant, si id actibus elicitis tribuunt et non potius crucis, mortis infernique passiones significari credunt. CRUX sola est nostra Theologia”: Operationes in Psalmos (WA 5:176.27–33). 22. ​Rorem, “Negative Theologies and the Cross,” 460–461. 23. ​Stephen D. Paulson, “Luther on the Hidden God,” Word and World 19, no. 4 (1999): 364. 24. ​Donne, Sermons, 5:276. Biblical references are to the Authorized King James Version of 1611 (KJV) and ­will be cited parenthetically in the text by chapter and verse. 25. ​Theresa  M. DiPasquale, Lit­er­a­ture and Sacrament: The Sacred and the Secular in John Donne (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1999), 40. I find DiPasquale’s point about the x marking the midpoint of the poem more persuasive when the word “crucifix” ends in x, as it does in just over a third of the extant manuscript versions of the poem. Other manuscript versions and all the early printed versions before 1669 have “crucifixe.” 26. ​John Donne, The Complete Poetry of John Donne, ed. John T. Shawcross (Garden City, NY: Anchor Doubleday, 1967), 24. 27. ​Donne, Sermons, 7:433. 28. ​Joseph Leo Koerner, The Reformation of the Image (London: Reaktion, 2004), 157. 29. ​For the interpretation of ­these lines as referring to lust, see, e.g., The Complete Poems of John Donne, ed. Robin Robbins (New York: Routledge, 2014), 473. 30. ​See Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 60–61, and Spivak’s translator’s introduction to the same volume, xv–­xviii. 31. ​Alister E. McGrath, Luther’s Theology of the Cross (Oxford: Blackwell, 2011), 149. 32. ​WA 1:362–363; translation by McGrath, Luther’s Theology of the Cross, 204–205. 33. ​Jaroslav Pelikan’s translation of Luther’s twentieth Heidelberg thesis in Luther’s Works is: “He deserves to be called a theologian, however, who comprehends the vis­i­ble and manifest ­things of God seen through suffering and the cross” (LW 31:52; emphasis added). 34. ​McGrath, Luther’s Theology of the Cross, 204. 35. ​Margaret Maurer and Dennis Flynn, “The Text of Goodf and Donne’s Itinerary in April  1613,” in Textual Cultures: Texts, Contexts, Interpretation 8, no.  2 (2013): 84–87. Beal, Index, DnJ 1430 (P2), in private hands; Beal, Index, DnJ 1431 (PT2), Robert Taylor Collection, Prince­ton University Library. 36. ​Maurer and Flynn, “The Text of Goodf,” 60 and 66. 37. ​Maurer and Flynn, “The Text of Goodf,” 77. 38. ​Maurer and Flynn, “The Text of Goodf,” 82. 39. ​Maurer and Flynn, “The Text of Goodf,” 8. 40. ​On memory and salvation in Donne, see Achsah Guibbory, “John Donne and Memory as the ‘Art of Salvation,’ ” Huntington Library Quarterly 43, no. 4 (1980): 261–274, and Donald M. Friedman, “Memory and the Art of Salvation in Donne’s Goodfriday Poem,” En­glish Literary Re­nais­sance 3, no. 3 (1973): 418–422. 41. ​Donne, Sermons, 4:164. 42. ​Donne, Sermons, 4:168–169.



Donne’s Negative Theology of the Cross 33

43. ​Donne, Sermons, 4:174–175. The opening phrase (“Man sees best in the light, but meditates

best in the darke”) strongly recalls the last stanza of Donne’s most explic­itly apophatic poem, “A Hymne to Christ, at the Authors last g­ oing into Germany”: “Churches are best for Prayer, that have least light: / To see God only, I goe out of sight” (26–27). ­There are a number of connections to be made between this poem and sermon, not least that “A Hymne to Christ” seems indeed to have been composed around the time of Donne’s departure to Germany with the embassy headed by James Hay, then Viscount Doncaster. 44. ​Donne, Sermons, 4:175. 45. ​Donne, Sermons, 2:235; see Andrew Hiscock, Reading Memory in Early Modern Lit­er­a­ture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 28–30; 183. 46. ​This sermon also contains the most developed reference to the image, drawn from Nicholas of Cusa’s De Visione Dei, of a painting on a wall whose eyes follow the viewer around the room; the image is used in the context of a discussion of memory as “the gallery of the soul” (2:237–238).

2 • PR AYER AS PO­L ITI­C AL THEORY Conscience, Sovereignty, and Natu­ral Law in Donne and Herbert ANGEL A BALL A

Partly ­because of the lasting influence of T. S. Eliot, who, along with Herbert J. G. Grierson, helped to reestablish Donne as a central figure in literary studies, critics still tend to think of the relationship between Donne and Herbert in poetic terms.1 A ­ fter all, Eliot applied his famous formulation that “in Donne thought seems in control of feeling, and in Herbert feeling seems in control of thought” to both men’s verse, although he speculated that his formulation could hold true for both men’s sermons if Herbert’s had survived.2 ­Because Eliot’s observation is so arrestingly memorable, provoking Donne critics especially over the de­cades, it has overshadowed Eliot’s ­later tie between Donne’s prose and Herbert’s poetry in his undeveloped claim that “Donne, learned in the works of the scholastics, and also in the writings of such Roman theologians con­temporary with himself as Cardinal Bellarmine, set a standard of scholarship which Herbert followed.”3 Since Eliot did not clarify what he meant by Donne’s “standard of scholarship” such that readers might grasp exactly how and what Herbert emulates in his verse, Eliot left readers to won­der ­whether that standard refers to the quality of Donne’s learning, its specific content, its form, or some combination of ­these. Intriguingly vague though it is, Eliot’s suggestion that Herbert so admired Donne’s intellectual prowess that he incorporated some of Donne’s scholastic training into The T ­ emple has gone largely unexamined for over fifty years.4 Attending to Eliot’s link between Donne’s scholasticism and Herbert’s poetry enables readers to see how Herbert learned from Donne to work through po­liti­cal controversy using the devotional lyric. 34



Prayer as Po­liti­cal Theory 35

The scholastic standard to which Eliot referred appears arguably clearer in Donne’s prose than in his poetry, registering in his sermons and especially his polemical prose: Biathanatos (1608, published posthumously), Pseudo-­Martyr (1610), and Ignatius His Conclave (1611). Of ­these, Pseudo-­Martyr offers the most sustained, serious example of scholarly argument, for though it is “the first published (and prob­ably the least read) of his works,” it is nonetheless “his most explicit statement of po­liti­cal theory.”5 While Pseudo-­Martyr’s dense prose repels some critics, neglecting it obscures how Donne’s equivocal approach to monarchical authority underpinned his vexed figurations of divine sovereignty in some of the Holy Sonnets.6 I argue that Pseudo-­Martyr’s consideration of the tensions between the conscience and the crown permeated Donne’s poetic depictions of God as King in ways that Herbert took to head and heart in The ­Temple. Although many critics have situated the work of Donne and Herbert within Catholic and Protestant religious contexts, none that I know of have examined how Donne and Herbert utilized po­liti­cal theory for spiritual ends in their lyr­ics.7 Consequently, critics have missed the ways in which Herbert followed Donne’s lead in crafting religious poetry as a meditation on kingly authority bounded by natu­ral law.8

Natu­r al Law in Pseudo-­M artyr: The Sovereign Conscience? To appreciate how Donne built his lyric study of divine sovereignty on the ground of his polemical prose, and thus to begin to perceive better Herbert’s intellectual debt to Donne, readers must first turn to Pseudo-­Martyr, where Donne theorized the nature of royal prerogative in response to King James I’s concern about Catholic threats to state security, thereby contending that En­glish Catholics who refuse the Oath of Allegiance out of the mistaken belief that taking it compromises their faith are tragically treasonous pseudo-­martyrs. Critics who brave Donne’s crabbed prose contest w ­ hether and to what extent he truly sided with James I in arguing for the validity of the king’s demand for sworn obedience from his subjects. Johann P. Sommerville, the only scholar I know of who reads Pseudo-­Martyr in light of Donne’s ­career as a poet, divides this debate into three camps: one comprised of older critics who see Donne as “the confident defender of the king and the established church”; another containing t­ hose “modern critics” who view Donne as “the subversive, guilt-­ridden, semi-­Catholic”; and the last populated by ­those who “have ­adopted a nuanced position, arguing that the poet did indeed broadly agree with the king on major questions, but that in many sermons he discreetly criticized par­tic­ul­ ar royal policies.”9 Sommerville aligns himself staunchly with the first camp for two reasons. First, he declares that, “On this crucial question [of royal “prerogatives to act outside the law if need be”], as on the linked question of unlimited sovereignty, Donne sided definitively with the

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king.”10 Second, even as Sommerville acknowledges that “­there w ­ ere differences between Donne and James” (such as “their attitudes to Thomas More”), he avers that “on fundamental questions of po­liti­cal thought, t­here seems to have been ­little to distinguish them.”11 This characterization conceals the complexity of Donne’s ideas about kingship primarily ­because it rests on an inadequate consideration of how Donne employed natu­ral law to check the king’s power. Though I agree with t­ hose in the third camp who argue for “a nuanced position” on Donne’s beliefs about sovereignty, I assert that evidence for that position appears well before the sermons, in Pseudo-­Martyr itself.12 That text’s subtle and tantalizingly brief discussion of natu­ral law delineates the limits of sovereignty in ways that Sommerville bypasses, and that James I would surely have found problematic. As I w ­ ill show, Donne and Herbert l­ater exploited that ambiguity for their own ends in their religious verse. But to reveal how Herbert learned from Donne to deploy that ambiguity in a more volatile po­liti­cal context, I first need to parse Pseudo-­Martyr’s natu­ral law argument for sovereignty. At the heart of Donne’s argument for the moral and spiritual responsibility En­glish Catholics have to take the Oath of Allegiance is the idea of natu­ral law informing the conscience. ­Because he proposes that natu­ral law prepares the ­conscience to recognize divinely ordained uses of power, Donne ensures that individuals have the moral, religious, and po­liti­cal grounds to challenge even absolute authority when it opposes their consciences. Aware of how controversial this proposal is, Donne initially defines the relationship between the conscience and the crown in ways that accord with James I’s notion of kingship, a move that appears to justify Sommerville’s view of Donne’s uncomplicated absolutism. To Donne, “Nothing in the world is more spirituall and delicate, and tender then the conscience of a man; yet by good consent of Divines, other­wise diversly persuaded in Religion, the civill lawes of Princes doe binde our consciences: and ­shall the persons of any men, or their temporal goods, be thought to be of so sublime, and spirituall a nature, that the civill constitutions of Princes cannot worke upon them?”13 Despite Donne’s poignant declaration of the conscience’s sensitivity, he seems to concur that “the civill lawes of Princes doe binde our consciences.” Yet the rest of the passage offers less a statement of personal conviction and more an account of what divines believe by “good consent.” The fact that he frames the last idea in the passage as a question adds to readers’ uncertainty about what he r­ eally thinks, for readers must decide w ­ hether or not the question is rhetorical. Should readers try to pin Donne down by turning to the implicit scriptural basis for the divines’ agreement, a proof text from Romans on the power of the secular sword, they may well strug­gle, since that text trou­bles the m ­ atter of ­Donne’s sense of the relation between conscience and sovereignty. Paul’s teaching that Christians o­ ught to obey the laws of their regime concludes with a strange verse about the conscience:



Prayer as Po­liti­cal Theory 37

LEt euerie soule be subiect vnto the higher powers: for t­ here is no power but of God: & the powers that be, are ordeined of God. Whosoeuer therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist, shal receive to them selues iudgement. . . . ​For he [“the power”] is the minister of God for thy wealth: but if thou do euil, feare: for he beareth not the sworde for noght: for he is the minister of God to take vengeance on him that doeth euil. Wherefore ye must be subiect, not ­because of wrath onely, but also for conscience sake.14

The picture that emerges here features God as King, ordering His realm by empowering earthly ministers to carry out His rule using divine and civil laws, all with consequences He sanctions. At the picture’s margins are subjects thrown ­under God’s power, whose only good choice, it seems, is to obey that power in what­ever h­ uman form it takes. But Paul’s last verse suggests that the authority of laws within regimes, though originating in God, lies partly in rulers and partly in subjects. Admittedly, the “not . . . ​onely, but also” construction obscures how the authority of a ruler works with the authority of the individual conscience: does Paul—or God—­favor obedience more for wrath’s sake or conscience’s sake, or for both equally? The issue of how and especially where authority manifests itself gets confused further when seen from another a­ ngle. Instead of associating the ruler exclusively with the “wrath” of God and the subject exclusively with the “conscience,” one may also associate the ruler with the conscience and the subject with the wrath of God. In this reading, the ruler is subject to God’s authority along with ­those governed, and part of the ruler’s subjection involves paying attention to their conscience out of a fear of the wrath of God that may flow through them as a subject, and possibly through other subjects as God’s ministers if their consciences suffer injury due to “euil” governance. In attending to this passage theorizing po­liti­cal power in a Christian context, a passage so influential that it enabled medieval and early modern divines to teach that sovereignty trumps the conscience, I emphasize the oft-­ignored but subtle ambiguities in Paul’s text, and suggest that they inform Donne’s nicely camouflaged hesitation in the above passage from Pseudo-­Martyr. If readers pull back and allow the biblical context for Donne’s words to include an ­earlier passage in Paul’s letter to the Romans, then they see more clearly that all consciences are spiritually equal, a point that renders Donne’s quoted hesitation in Pseudo-­Martyr positively Pauline, and thus above any local definition of Christian orthodoxy (and by extension, heresy). In this chapter of Romans, pivotal for its theorization of natu­ral law, Paul explains how God as Lawmaker extends His moral order by promulgating it in and through right reason—­the nature of the conscience—­and eventually in and through Mosaic law. Paul’s effort to explain universal accountability for sin leads him to depict ­human beings as law books inscribed by God:

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For ­there is no re­spect of persones with God. For as manie as haue sinned without the Law, shal perish also without the Law: & as manie as haue sinned in the Law, shalbe iudged by the Law (For the hearers of the Law are not righ­teous before God: but the doers of the Law shalbe iustified. For when the Gentiles which haue not the Law, do by nature the t­ hings conteined in the Law, they hauing not the Law, are a Law vnto them selues, Which shewe the effect of the Law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witnes, & their thoghts accusing one another, or excusing,) At the day when God shal iudge the secretes of men by Iesus Christ, according to my Gospel. (Rom. 2:11–16)

God, ­here figured first as Lawmaker and then as Judge, ensures that all ­people have immediate access to the ethical instruction His laws provide. His sovereignty is absolute since no one escapes the inscription of His signature. What Thomas Aquinas l­ater termed God’s eternal law, the order that God is and ­follows, h­ ere gets published in ­people as natu­ral law through right reason.15 While the need to heed the conscience—­the collected wisdom God imparts to humanity—is urgent in light of the Last Judgment, Paul stresses that divine judgment is actually ongoing, for p­ eople’s “thoghts [are in the meanwhile] accusing one another, or excusing.” B ­ ecause natu­ral law functions as a living word speaking to all ­people constantly, it has a socially leveling effect that Donne utilizes shrewdly when he eventually defines the conscience’s relation to sovereignty at the midpoint of his treatise. In that strategically delayed section, Donne deftly exploits the ambiguity he created ­earlier regarding his own belief about which authority is higher, the conscience or the crown. His more developed position on the issue of how God’s power flows through a ruler and their subjects, and what response to that power is truly faithful, situates him adroitly between, on the one hand, t­ hose po­liti­cal and natu­ral law theorists who contended that subjects owed allegiance to a ruler ­because their power derived directly from God and, on the other hand, t­hose theorists who averred that such obedience stemmed from an agreement between a ruler and his subjects. Indeed, Donne acknowledges his location between t­ hese camps well before he articulates his more developed position. To prepare readers to understand the complexity of that position when it arrives, he avers: “Certainely all power is from God; And as if a companie of Savages, should consent and concurre to a civill maner of living, Magistracie, & Superioritie, would necessarily, and naturally, and Divinely grow out of this consent (for Magistracie and Superioritie is so naturall and so immediate from God, that Adam was created a Magistrate, and he deriv’d Magistracie by generation upon the eldest ­Children).”16 Pivotal to Donne’s compromise between protomonarchical absolutism and contract theory is his sense of the immediacy of “Magistracie,” a point so impor­tant that when he does state his fuller position, he explains that God



Prayer as Po­liti­cal Theory 39

infused a sense of power within humanity such that each person is capable of recognizing when that power has appropriate authority: I would pronounce no farther therein, then this, That God hath Immediately imprinted in mans Nature and Reason, to be subject to a power immediately infus’d from him; and that hee hath enlightned our Nature and Reason, to digest and prepare such a forme, as may bee aptest to doe ­those ­things, for which that Power is infus’d; which are, to conserve us in Peace and in Religion: And that since the establishing of the Christian Church, he hath testified abundantly, that Regall Authoritie, by subordination of Bishops, is that best and fittest way to ­those ends.17

The incisive subtlety of Donne’s nugget of po­liti­cal theory is worth parsing. The repeated stress on immediacy signals God’s unflinchingly intimate sovereignty as He presses into humanity—­collectively and individually, body and soul—­the need and desire for outside governance. But what exactly is “Regall Authoritie,” and how should it conduct itself given the spiritual equality of all consciences? Even though Donne is halfway through a deliberately unfinished treatise over two hundred pages long, he can barely bring himself to specify the precise relation between sovereignty and conscience. Yet he does so with a poet’s semantic density, communicating with remarkable efficiency one of the period’s most trenchant and elliptical statements on the bounds of secular and religious authority empowered by God. In less than ten syllables, Donne declares that God has instructed humanity “to digest and prepare such a forme” of sovereignty to which they naturally and reasonably subject themselves in good conscience. Donne’s phrase h­ ere is odd, for first he suggests that h­ umans “digest” or accept “a forme,” that is, an external order or command, that enables them to obey as subjects to “Power,” but then he suggests that ­humans “prepare” that form themselves as an internal creation or configuration against which to mea­sure any “Power.” The unclear relation between external and internal authority recalls the imbricated ambiguities I considered above in the thirteenth chapter of Romans, where readers must decide, first, w ­ hether the necessity of obeying secular authority stems from God’s wrath or the conscience, or from both equally, and second, ­whether God’s wrath can flow through the consciences of subjects as well as the conscience of the ruler, such that subjects have immediate recourse if they need to challenge the ruler on a point of “euil” governance. Insofar as readers hear in Donne’s phrase “to digest and prepare such a forme” echoes of the Digesta seu Pandectae, that part of Justinian’s Corpus Iuris Civilis condensing and revising key portions of Roman law, they perceive more clearly the tension between receiving and producing laws inherent in the act of ­legal codification.18 The tension within the verb “digest” is all the more acute if readers

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recall that Justinian aimed not only to simplify Roman laws, but also to reconcile conflicts between them.19 For Donne to use the word “digest,” then, suggests that ­there are apparent conflicts within God’s law that p­ eople need to resolve in their consciences, a task involving considerable strain and thus demanding assiduous pastoral care. The subtle ambiguity that Donne packs into the phrase “to digest and prepare such a forme” makes ­every po­liti­cal difference, for he asserts a divine-­ right sovereignty that includes monarchical absolutism, all while enabling subjects to respond freely to their earthly ruler. Donne thereby insinuates that subjects may question the use of their ruler’s power using their own “enlightened . . . ​ Nature” if they perceive that ruler as failing to “conserve us in Peace and in Religion,” that is, e­ ither departing from a divinely given jurisdiction or promulgating spiritually perverse laws. In fact, subjects must question a monarch’s use of power in ­these cases ­because the natu­ral law of self-­preservation (ius se preservandi) obligates them to do so. In using natu­ral law both to awaken the conscience to “Regall Authoritie” and to shape any response to that authority, Donne effectively ensures that individuals have the moral, religious, and po­liti­cal grounds to challenge even absolute sovereignty whenever it opposes their consciences. Such a challenge may lead to po­liti­cal transformation, for his claim that monarchy is the “best and fittest” form of sovereignty leaves room for other forms of rule, if ever the crown should bind the collective conscience too tightly. Donne says nothing ­here about what form that challenge may take within the bounds of natu­ral law, if not also within t­hose of civil law. But b­ ecause he left room for such a challenge through his exquisitely calibrated rhe­toric in Pseudo-­ Martyr—­long before the “discrete preaching” of his sermons, as examined by Jeanne Shami and Marla Lunderberg—­I cannot agree with Sommerville that, “On this crucial question [of royal “prerogatives to act outside the law if need be”], as on the linked question of unlimited sovereignty, Donne sided definitively with the king.”20 If Donne was an absolutist, as Sommerville, Debora Shuger, and ­others have argued, he was what I call a situational absolutist, a label that would be oxymoronic except for its logical coherence within the terms of natu­ral law.21 In other words, Donne preferred and submitted to absolute monarchical authority provided that the monarch in question fulfilled his God-­given responsibilities to the realm, namely, preserved it in peace and true religion. However, if that monarch failed to fulfill ­those responsibilities, then the monarch undermined his authority, and his conscience, along with ­those of his subjects, bore divine witness against the monarch, leaving him open to God’s wrath on the Day of Judgment, if not before. In calling Donne a situational absolutist, I distinguish my reading of Donne’s absolutism in Pseudo-­Martyr from Shuger’s most recent interpretation of that text, wherein she labels Donne a “casuistical absolutist.”22 ­Because our nomenclature appears to be similar, it is impor­ tant to clarify the differences between our views so as to perceive Donne’s conviction about sovereignty in his polemical prose, and to appreciate how



Prayer as Po­liti­cal Theory 41

that conviction played out in his religious poetry in ways that Herbert engaged in The ­Temple. ­Because Shuger concerns herself ultimately with “The Politics of the Preacher” in her recent study of Donne’s absolutism, she treats Pseudo-­Martyr in only one paragraph, a brevity both laudable and problematic insofar as it leads her to read the text with an eye ­toward Donne’s sermons alone rather than also ­toward his religious poetry.23 Shuger’s interest in pinning down Donne’s politics in Pseudo-­ Martyr through intellectual history more than literary history or literary criticism leads to her focus on his prose in a way that glosses over its poetics.24 Yet the latter are essential to his understanding of sovereignty generally and absolutism particularly. To illustrate the differences in our positions on Donne’s politics in this text, and thus to justify the distinction between our labels of Donne at this moment in his ­career, I quote Shuger at length: Against the traditional idealization of mixed or constitutional monarchy, [Donne] defends [ Jean] Bodin’s position on the indivisibility of sovereign power, for “God inanimates ­every State with one power, as e­ very man with one soule” (Pseudo-­ Martyr 133; see also Sermons 4.240–1). Somewhere in e­ very regime must reside ‘that sovereignty, which is a power to doe all ­things availeable to the maine ends’ for which po­liti­cal power exists.25 Donne, however, says nothing about royal legislative sovereignty. This omission of the hallmark of Bodinian absolutism suggests that Pseudo-­Martyr’s understanding of sovereignty belongs rather to the ambit of casuistical absolutism, as does its claim that, since po­liti­cal order exists so that we might live peaceably and religiously, God endows rulers with the ‘power to use all ­those meanes, which conduce to t­ hose ends’ (133). As the ‘all’ implies, sovereign power is solutus legibus; the ruler is accountable to God for the welfare of his realm, but he is not accountable to its laws.26

Two main points h­ ere warrant attention. First, I agree with Shuger that, in Pseudo-­Martyr, Donne upholds Bodin’s belief in the indivisibility of sovereignty, but Donne stretches that concept of indivisibility to its outer limits (rather “Like gold to ayery thinnesse beate”), insofar as he locates God-­given sovereignty in “Regall Authoritie” (perhaps a single royal person, perhaps not).27 Following the logic of Donne’s simile, that “one soule” of “Regall Authoritie” is spiritually indivisible, but not necessarily materially indivisible, for sovereignty may ideally inhabit one person, the ruler, but it may well also, in the fullness of God’s time, stretch to inhabit the bodies of “­every man” in and through the conscience inscribed by natu­ral law. This ultimately “ayery” extension of sovereignty leads me to my second main point about the similar extension of legislative sovereignty. I also agree with Shuger that in a strict, literal sense, “Donne . . . ​says nothing about royal legislative sovereignty,” but that silence is easier to understand if Donne aims for royal

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legislative sovereignty in a more figurative sense. Thus, in the fullness of God’s time, all consciences within a ruler’s jurisdiction, including the ruler’s own, have “digest[ed] and prepare[d] such a forme” of “Regall Authoritie” by resolving conflicts between natu­ral law on the one hand and the “civill lawes . . . ​and . . . ​the civill constitutions of Princes” on the other. As ­these consciences individually and collectively resolve ­these conflicts, and then codify new, hybridized, or mutually implicating forms of natu­ral and civil law inwardly and outwardly, ­these consciences, increasingly together, “inanimate” the realm with the sovereign, even absolute “power to use all t­ hose meanes, which conduce to t­ hose ends” of peace and true religion. As Bodin himself recognized, and as I intend to show, the sovereign and even absolute ruler is thus accountable to some of their regime’s ­legal agreements, if not laws, in addition to natu­ral and divine laws. So, as a result of the importance I place on attending to Donne’s figurative language in his po­liti­ cal theory, on the assumption that figures are themselves theoretical, I cannot agree that Donne is a “casuistical absolutist” for his stance on sovereignty in Pseudo-­Martyr. That label does not attend precisely enough to what I wish to stress, namely, the initially literal and material but increasingly figurative and spiritual ways in which Donne’s po­liti­cal theory actually works. If the contrast between Shuger’s interpretation of Donne’s notion of sovereignty in Pseudo-­Martyr and my own is sometimes difficult to distinguish, that is ­because she is exactly right when she states, “In turning to the question of Donne’s absolutism, one needs to keep in mind both that the relevant distinctions are often between shades of grey and also that against certain backgrounds some shades of grey clash.”28

Setting Donne’s Lyric Stage: Secular and Sacred Sovereignties in Bodin and Hooker To demonstrate more fully how fine but significant distinctions in interpretations of Donne’s po­liti­cal theory sometimes clash, I need to contextualize his ideas about sovereignty with the work of two of his contemporaries, Catholic Politique Jean Bodin and Anglican apologist Richard Hooker. Their theories of sovereignty, one largely secular, one largely religious, illumine the idiosyncratic path that Donne forges between them in his efforts to protect En­glish Catholics’ embodied consciences in the immediate ­future, and, by logical extension, to safeguard the embodied consciences of Protestant subjects at a l­ ater time, if necessary. Bodin’s and Hooker’s theories highlight how natu­ral law limns the bounds of sovereignty in ways that inform Donne’s dramatization of a lyric speaker’s conscientious wrestling with their divine monarch in the Holy Sonnets, a dramatization that Herbert restaged to unnerving po­liti­cal effect in The ­Temple. Although Donne’s indebtedness to Bodin’s and Hooker’s works varies, he knew well Bodin’s Les six livres de la république (Paris, 1576; En­glish translation 1606), having cited it in Biathanatos, and Donne surely knew Hooker’s Of the Lawes of



Prayer as Po­liti­cal Theory 43

Ecclesiasticall Politie (1593), sharing with Hooker the belief that God as King deserves a materially beautiful, sacred space in which to dwell, a space amply provided by the Church of E ­ ngland.29 Of the two theorists, Bodin more clearly illustrated how absolute sovereignty is compatible with a ruler’s subjection to natu­ral law, for he declares that sovereignty is inextricably governed by natu­ral law in accordance with God’s ­will: But as for divine and natu­ral laws, ­every prince on earth is subject to them, and it is not in their power to contravene them u­ nless they wish to be guilty of treason against God, and to war against Him beneath whose grandeur all the monarchs of this world should bear the yoke and bow the head in abject fear and reverence. The absolute power of princes and of other sovereign lordships (seigneuries souverains), therefore, does not in any way extend to the laws of God and of nature.30

Bodin’s unequivocal claim that “­every prince is subject” to “the laws of God and of nature” offered his readers, Donne among them, the sense that the most power­ ful ­people are subordinate to God’s utmost and utter sovereignty, which reigns over and penetrates their spirits and bodies. Of all the dictates given to the embodied conscience by natu­ral law, the most impor­tant for grasping Bodin’s absolutism is that law of self-­preservation (ius se preservandi) that I referred to ­earlier, when discussing what Donne saw as the natu­ral law obligation to challenge a ruler who fails to uphold ­those main ends of government, peace, and true religion. Although ancient, medieval, and early modern natu­ral law theorists regularly acknowledged the law of self-­preservation, the imperative to pursue good and to avoid harm, Bodin innovated in this area by referring to the concept of interest, understood as a personal stake in a set of circumstances and be­hav­iors that support life, ­whether individual or collective.31 More specifically, Les six livres de la république links interest to contracts such that the latter ensures that the former gets fulfilled. Soon a­ fter he proclaims that all sovereigns are subject to divine and natu­ral laws, Bodin states that rulers must uphold what­ever promises or contracts they have made with their subjects, provided that ­those agreements are fair and right: “The prince is not subject to his own laws or to the laws of his pre­de­ces­sors, but only to his just and reasonable contracts in the observation of which his subjects in general or par­tic­u­lar subjects have an interest.”32 Natu­ral law binds rulers twice in t­ hese contracts: agreements must be “just and reasonable” and they must facilitate the satisfaction of an individual or collective interest in self-­preservation, broadly defined. Since contracts necessarily and mutually bind the parties they concern, contracts have a leveling function in Bodin’s thought that corresponds to and informs Donne’s efforts in Pseudo-­Martyr to level the relationship between sovereign and subject using the conscience of the subject, if not also of the sovereign. The leveling function of the contract thus facilitates the conscientious communication of

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truth to power, even when the latter is absolute. Should the ruler fail to fulfill their part of the contract, then that ruler is subject to the just but again notably unspecified protest of their subjects.33 To produce this legally leveling effect on which Donne capitalized in Pseudo-­ Martyr and the Holy Sonnets, Bodin theorized how interest in contracts works. Should circumstances change enough to jeopardize the contract from the ­perspective afforded by the natu­ral law of self-­preservation, Bodin proposes in Les six livres de la république, then the ruler may rethink the contract: It is essential, therefore, not to confuse a law and a contract. Law depends on him who has the sovereignty and he can obligate all his subjects {by a law} but cannot obligate himself. A contract between a prince and his subjects is mutual; it obligates the two parties reciprocally and one party cannot contravene it to the prejudice of the other and without the other’s consent. In this case the prince has no advantage over the subject except that, if the justice of a law that he has sworn to keep ceases, he is no longer bound by his promise, as we have said, which is a liberty that subjects cannot exercise with re­spect to each other u­ nless they are relieved [of their obligations] by the prince.34

The diplomacy of Bodin’s language is impor­tant. On the one hand, if a contract starts out well by safeguarding the parties’ interests and helping thereby to satisfy the natu­ral law of self-­preservation, then all parties are, of course, obligated to fulfill the contract; even an absolute ruler must obey the subject’s wishes expressed in and through the contract. On the other hand, if that contract becomes unjust over time, then the sovereign must break the contract to remain a righ­ teous ruler in terms of natu­ral law. The ruler thus has an added interest in self-­ preservation that competes with that of any party with whom he or she contracts. Ever a sensitive reader, Donne applied Bodin’s argument in the Holy Sonnets, revealing in arguably his most intimate sonnet how God shatters the smaller contract of sacramental marriage in order to uphold the larger one of personal salvation, all ultimately to guarantee God’s legitimacy before a doubting, even defiant realm. Following Donne, Herbert took up Bodin’s argument indirectly, showing in perhaps his most po­liti­cal poem the danger of jeopardizing one’s life by following one’s conscience in breaking with the effective contract for worship provided by The Book of Common Prayer as interpreted by the current archbishop, that royally sanctioned head of the Church of E ­ ngland. Yet to perceive how richly Donne and Herbert utilized Bodin’s notion of interest in contracts to circumscribe the bounds of sovereignty using natu­ral law, especially the first princi­ ple of natu­ral law, self-­preservation, I must contextualize Donne’s and Herbert’s awareness of the leveling function of natu­ral law using Hooker’s Of the Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie. Whereas Bodin’s primary focus on secular sovereignty and civil order approached natu­ral law more often from the earth up, as it ­were, Hook-



Prayer as Po­liti­cal Theory 45

er’s primary focus on sacred authority and religious governance approached natu­ral law more often from the heavens down. Consequently, Hooker went beyond Bodin in showing how God restrains sovereigns not only through natu­ ral law, but also through divine law, God’s revelation through Scripture, which agrees with and develops natu­ral law. More specifically, Hooker’s development of Thomist thought on the relation between divine law and natu­ral law led him to emphasize the socially leveling function of divine law when the latter appeared in a Christian context, a development that both Donne and Herbert deployed in their religious lyr­ics to intensify and to expedite the po­liti­cally leveling function of natu­ral law. The fact that Donne and Herbert incorporated aspects of Thomist l­ egal architecture buttressed in Hooker’s Lawes while renovating them necessitates a brief sketch of that original architecture. In book 1, “Concerning Lawes, and their severall kindes in generall,” Hooker largely follows Aquinas in outlining the types of laws that together span the divide between God and humanity, distinguishing between God’s eternal law (“The law wherby he worketh”), natu­ral law (“That part of it [eternal law] that ordereth naturall agents”), celestial law (“that which Angels doe clearely behold, and without any swarving observe”), divine law (“the law of reason that which bindeth creatures reasonable in this world, and with which by reason they may most plainly perceive themselves bound . . . ​not knowen but by speciall revelation from God”), and h­ uman law (“that which out of the law e­ ither of reason or of God, men probablie gathering to be expedient, they make it a law”).35 Hooker h­ ere envisions eternal law extending through natu­ral law into divine law in ways that blur the bound­aries between natu­ral and divine law, as did Aquinas, who argued that, since natu­ral law only gives h­ umans partial moral direction, God offers them further instruction in Scripture: “By the natu­ral law the eternal law is participated proportionately to the capacity of ­human nature. But to his super­natural end man needs to be directed in a yet higher way. Hence the additional [i.e., divine] law given by God, whereby man shares more perfectly in the eternal law.”36 The key words h­ ere are Aquinas’s framing verbs: natu­ral law “participate[s]” eternal law to humanity, imparting and mediating eternal law to p­ eople so that they may conduct themselves rightly, while divine law “shares” eternal law with ­human reason, clarifying and deepening the princi­ ples of natu­ral law so that ­humans may see themselves as subjects of God as King and obey their sovereign fully.37 No doubt Donne’s dangerous b­ ecause volatile phrase “to digest and prepare such a forme” draws from Aquinas’s and Hooker’s shared sense that natu­ral law shapes and, to a lesser extent, is also ­shaped by ­humans in their respective po­liti­cal contexts. Since ­these po­liti­cal contexts have an inextricably social dimension, Hooker explains that part of being an obedient subject to God as King, especially ­after Jesus’s example, is being a true neighbor, that is, one full of loving-­kindness and spiritual closeness. So, when Hooker shows natu­ral law—­and, within it, the

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natu­ral law of self-­preservation—­read through Mosaic law, especially Jesus’s summation of the latter, Hooker underscores the ontological basis for equality between ­humans of any rank: t­ hese axiomes and lawes naturall concerning our dutie, have arisen . . . ​the utmost of that we can doe to honour him we must: which is in effect the same that we read, Thou shalt love the Lorde thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soule, and with all thy minde. Which lawe our Saviour doth terme the First and the g­ reat Commaundement. Touching the next, which as our Saviour addeth, is like unto this . . . ​the like naturall inducement hath brought men to knowe, that it is their dutie no lesse to love ­others then themselves.38

By itself, admittedly, Hooker’s conviction that natu­ral law and divine law agree that ­people ­ought to love their neighbors as themselves barely rises above ­scriptural paraphrase.39 Still, his emphasis on “dutie” En­glishes the moral and spiritual obligation by articulating it in a culturally recognizable way, and that po­liti­cally inflected diction of neighborliness becomes increasingly surprising as he explicates Jesus’s revision of Mosaic law, working from divine to natu­ral law in order to show that radical neighborliness is essential to righ­teousness. As I ­will show, Donne weaponized this radical idea of neighborliness in his sonnet rebellion against his sovereign, and Herbert, in his turn, tried to defuse it in his mostly thwarted rebellion against his sovereign. Indeed, Hooker’s minisermon on the passage from Matthew is startling ­because it contains incendiary language, particularly when l­ater sparked by Donnean wit. Taking as his premise “we all being of one, and the same nature,” Hooker explains: “My desire therefore to be loved of my equals in nature as much as possiblie may be, imposeth on me a naturall dutie of bearing to them-­ward fully the like affection. From which relation of equalitie betweene our selves and them that are as our selves, what severall rules and canons naturall reason hath drawne for direction of life, no man is ignorant.”40 Fascinatingly, the pos­si­ble superfluity in Hooker’s phrasing appears to have provided argumentative fuel for Donne, for Hooker refers to a “relation of equalitie betweene our selves and them that are as our selves” (emphasis added). Of course, on one reading, it is pos­si­ble to construe Hooker aligning “me” with “our selves” and “them” with “them that are as our selves,” such that no redundancy exists. But, on another reading, it is pos­si­ble to hear Hooker aligning “me” and “them” with the first use of “our selves,” such that the second phrase, “and them that are as our selves,” seems, if not redundant, then oddly provocative. On this second reading, what gets emphasized is the combustible potential of “as,” and particularly the way it invites figurative understandings of ­those who are not in “a relation of equalitie betweene our selves” but who seem to be or who could be, who function or who could function as if they are. This interpretive option greatly expands how and to whom the princi­



Prayer as Po­liti­cal Theory 47

ple of neighborliness applies. Hooker’s equivocation on this part of divine law develops the arresting potential of two natu­ral law imperatives: to use o­ thers “as we our selves would by them,” and to choose the greater over the lesser good.41 More than anyone e­ lse before him, Donne was acutely mindful of the insight available in Hooker’s text about the meta­phoric potential of neighborliness revealed by divine law as a clarification of basic ­human equality u­ nder natu­ral law. I thus disagree with Shuger when she claims that, “Unlike Hooker, Donne has ­little interest in divine law, in law as a mediating structure between transcendent w ­ ill and temporal phenomena,” ­because, as Donne puts it in a passage she herself quotes, “God is pleased to proceed with us, according to that Contract which he hath made with us, and that Law which he hath given to us, in t­ hose two ­Tables.”42 In fact, Donne uses the meta­phoric potential of neighborliness contained in the Second ­Table to bold effect in his awareness that God as King, for all His regal mystery and awesome power, is also Donne’s near neighbor due to the Incarnation, bound as a h­ uman king by multiple contracts, not the least of which is the covenant of salvation.

Faith as Feudalism in Donne’s “Since She whome I lovd” In the Holy Sonnets, Donne’s appropriation of Hooker’s broad view of neighborliness allows Donne’s lyric speaker to try to limit God’s absolute sovereignty through divine law as well as natu­ral law. So where, in Jesus’s summation of the Second ­Table of the Decalogue, h­ umans are bound by divine law to treat one another as themselves by virtue of their shared nature, as Hooker demonstrated, ­humans are also bound by natu­ral law to follow their consciences in obeying God-­given authority and in protesting any abuse of that authority, inwardly if nowhere ­else, as Bodin argued. Donne in the Holy Sonnets imaginatively figures the overlap of ­these laws, focusing on the point where God as King joins God as Incarnated Neighbor. That point has a par­tic­ul­ ar signification, namely, God as feudal Lord. Donne f­ avors that figuration since throughout the Holy Sonnets he employs ­legal language, and especially the princi­ples of property law, as a means of exploring God’s contracted interest in, and ­legal obligations to, his subjects, who are depicted variously, and sometimes even within the same sonnet, as parcels of land, royal heirs, buildings, and tenants. (Witness, for example, “As due by many titles,” “­Father, part of his double interest,” “Wilt thou love God,” and “Batter my hart.”) No sonnet more subtly draws on ­those princi­ples of property law, showing how they are linked to divine law but ultimately rooted in natu­ral law, than “Since She whome I lovd.”43 In this sonnet, composed ­after Donne’s wife, Anne More, died on August  15, 1617, due to complications from childbirth, Donne’s lyric speaker, who is at once a property owner, subject to a royal lord, and that lord’s

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own property, delivers to his divine monarch what initially seems to be a bland status report on the territorial outpost of the speaker’s self, one that, u­ ntil recently, has been largely ignored by that monarch. Upon inspection, however, the muted tone of that public report—­which is also, of course, a private prayer—­barely conceals a furious, conscientious objection to the sovereign’s theft of the speaker’s prized possession: his wife. Aware that, insofar as he is subject to utterly absolute authority, he has no recourse to change his circumstances and can only protest them with utmost decorousness, the speaker attempts both to console and to protect himself by justifying his monarch’s theft with the thought that such regal be­hav­ior is natu­ral. Notably, his attempts fail completely: Since She whome I lovd, hath payd her last debt To Nature, and to hers, and my good is dead And her Soule early into heauen rauished, Wholy in heauenly ­things my Mind is sett. (1–4)44

The nauseating twists and turns of the speaker’s emotional logic—­his feeling thought—as he announces publicly the most private of news, namely, that his beloved wife has died in childbirth, thereby fulfilling the most basic demands of ruthlessly impersonal, personified Nature, arise in large part ­because he attempts to hold off for as long as pos­si­ble his charge of theft against the One he perceives has robbed him. God as feudal Lord has raped his wife, and has thereby seised earthly territory in a tyrannically insecure power grab. On this view, the Lord has coveted Donne’s wife, his real property, the ground in which he planted his seed, and has stolen her in doubly transgressive be­hav­ior that is hardly becoming for a king or a neighbor. But the quatrain reveals that the larger prob­lem, at least from the sovereign’s perspective—­which is also, provocatively, the reader’s—is the speaker’s perilous understanding of “my good.” More is at once a possession of Donne’s, a material good, and a purpose for Donne, an ethical good. To be sure, ­these understandings are essential to romantic love. As Donne’s sermon to Lords of the Council ( James I being notably absent) at Paul’s Cross, March  24, 1617, just months before More died, powerfully illustrates, “Love is a Possessory Affection, it delivers over him that loves into the possession of that that he loves; it is a transmutatory Affection, it changes him that loves into the very nature of that that he loves, and he is nothing ­else.”45 Katrin Ettenhuber, drawing a connection between this sermon and Donne’s Holy Sonnet, astutely acknowledges that “The poem pre­sents love . . . ​in the absolute sense,” but, in averring that “The poem is best understood . . . ​as a comment on the literary treatment of grief ” without probing the lyric’s meta­phoric framework for understanding absolutism, she misses the po­liti­cal significations of that grief.46 This passage from the sermon shows that the social, po­liti­cal, and spiritual risks in allowing eros to overtake oneself are



Prayer as Po­liti­cal Theory 49

profound: the lover becomes a possession of his beloved, and, as Donne’s lyric illumines, he, in turn, sees his beloved as a possession, “my good.” Beyond the misogynistic legalism of the material connotation of that quoted phrase lies the uxorious idolatry of the ethical connotation. ­Because Donne’s lyric speaker has perversely tipped himself off-­balance with a simultaneous undervaluation and overvaluation of his wife, he has not only trespassed against her, his neighbor ­under divine and natu­ral law, but also against himself, and especially against his sovereign. Within the richly meta­phoric po­liti­cal framework of the sonnet, such trespass amounts to treason. To make ­matters worse, the speaker willfully persists in this fundamental betrayal ­because he thinks and feels that he himself has been fundamentally betrayed. Like a suavely treacherous courtier or a practiced casuist, he declares, “Wholy in heauenly t­ hings my Mind is sett,” si­mul­ta­neously revealing and concealing his massive grief and rage over losing not only his wife, but also what­ever belief he had in a good sovereign. Or at least that is how it appears. If readers assume that Donne’s speaker has given up entirely on his corrupt Lord, it is worth noting that the speaker’s prayerful and thus safely inward protest has, at its root, the natu­ral law justifications of self-­preservation and the preservation of the common good.47 Demonstrating his faith in an Absolute Good at work in his awful Lord, the speaker conscientiously objects to his treatment at the hands of that Lord for the speaker’s sake, his sovereign’s sake, and especially for the realm’s sake. His logic appears to be that, if subjects are faithful to natu­ral law and divine law, and to the God whose eternal law works in and through both, then subjects must not allow their Neighbor-­King to take their property “early,” even though, according to feudal law, He owns it ultimately. As Donne the trained ­lawyer well knew, and as readers surely recognized, such be­hav­ior violates the most vital clauses of Magna Carta, a clear instance of civil law grounded on natu­ral law: “No ­free man ­shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any way, nor w ­ ill we proceed with force against him, or send ­others to do so, except by the lawful judgment of his equals or by the law of the land. To no one w ­ ill we sell, to no one deny or delay right or justice.”48 On the ­legal logic operating within the images of the sonnet’s first quatrain, the speaker has a moral and po­liti­cal responsibility to protest abuses of sovereign authority, and so he uses his Christian liberty as an En­glish subject ­under Magna Carta to register his sense of his ruler’s injustice in stripping him of his “good,” his wife. Donne ­here follows Bodin, who, for all his emphasis on the absolutism of En­glish sovereignty evident in his assertion that “other kings have no more power than the king of E ­ ngland,” conceded that “the ­great charter . . . ​ [is] a document in virtue of which the ­people have always prevailed against their kings.”49 Of course, in rising up against his supposedly unjust Lord, the speaker shows his presumption, for he does not ­really get to decide ­whether his Lord’s seisure of his wife is “early.” The fact that he does so anyway evinces his headstrong

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cluelessness, but it also attests to his awareness of his own dignity, which is separate from and bound up in the sacred contract of marriage. Within Donne’s worldview, that dignity demands right governance at the ontological level, and so, in the next quatrain, the speaker’s focus shifts from considering his wife as property, even real property, to treating himself similarly. While he resists figuring himself explic­itly as territory, as does the speaker of “I  ame a litle World,” who is “made cunningly / Of Ele­ments” (1–2) awaiting flood or fire, or the speaker of “Batter my hart,” who appears “like an vsurp’d towne to’another dew” (5), the speaker of “Since She whome I lovd” nevertheless indirectly appears as terrain that is subject to occupation both native and foreign, though it is unclear w ­ hether, for him, native occupation means that God or More guides him. In fact, the speaker’s status report on the outpost of the self suggests that he is dually occupied: ­Here the admyring her my Mind did whett To seeke thee God; so streames do shew the head, But though I haue found thee,’and thou my thirst hast fed, A holy thirsty dropsy melts mee yett. (5–8)

Just as the speaker si­mul­ta­neously reveals and conceals his grief at the end of the previous quatrain, ­here he at once praises and threatens his Lord, who has not ruled the speaker adequately b­ ecause He has failed to provide for him. Donne not only depicts himself as a victim of divine theft when God takes More in death by using Nature as an accomplice, but also confesses that remembering her “did whett” the blade of his resentment against God, causing him to turn to his Lord in a way that fuses revolt and repentance.50 Moreover, the rich significations of “whett” transform the speaker, figured so far as a wronged subject plotting against his corrupt king, into land suffering from drought, and fi­nally into a physically ill man. The “streames” of his wife’s continuing influence on the speaker’s life, especially now that her soul is in heaven, render it hard to discern Donne’s “head,” a word understood variously as his “Mind,” the source of beautiful and nurturing “streames,” and the one who is truly sovereign in his affections. Mitigating the forceful image of Donne as land neglected by a wasteful Lord is the image of a sick man laboring with dropsy, edema caused perhaps by heart failure. But Donne’s awareness that, at some level, he is drowning from his wife’s influence does not prompt him to halt the flow in ­favor of God’s more moderate spiritual sustenance, which he receives only to find it wanting. Donne underscores the seriousness of his speaker’s spiritual revolt against his Lord in the second quatrain in ways that alerted Herbert to the potential of poetic prayer to function as po­liti­cal theory.51 Whereas, in the first quatrain, More is subject to divine seisure as a “good” that both beautifies and extends her Lord’s holdings, in the second quatrain, More operates both as a subordinate to that



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Lord and as a sovereign in her own right. Her shifting roles within the sonnet, perhaps even more than the speaker’s, suggest the complicated ontological status of “Saints and Angels, ­things diuine” (12), and thus the complications surrounding their proper function in prayer. To see how Herbert absorbed the implications of Donne’s complex figurations of his speaker, his wife, and God in this Holy Sonnet into The ­Temple, specifically the lyric “To all Angels and Saints,” it is critical to glance at Donne’s third satire, for its famous closing analogy helps to illustrate the po­liti­cal and spiritual consequences of the sonnet speaker’s contemplation of More a­ fter her death: As Streames are, power is: ­Those blest flowers which dwell At the rough Streames calme head thrive and proue well: But hauing lefte their rootes, and themselues giuen To the Streames tyrannous rage, Alas, are driuen Through Mills, rocks, and woods, and at last allmost Consum’d in ­going, in the Sea are lost. (103–108)52

­ ere Donne, ­eager to stress the importance of knowing the bounds of power so H as not to become an idolater, advocates staying near the source of that power as a close neighbor; he wants readers to “dwell” where t­ here is maximum nourishment and protection so that they may “thrive and proue well.” Richard Strier rightly calls attention to the connection between Donne’s “dwell” and Ben Jonson’s use of the same word in “To Penshurst,” where Jonson enthuses, “thy lord dwells,” for, according to Strier, “To ‘dwell’ in this sense is an action, not a state; it is something that one consciously does, so that to say that ­those who act in this way ‘prove’ (or ‘do’) well is not merely to say again that they ‘thrive.’ The image takes its place with the other images in the poem of virtuous immobility, of figures who stand,” especially “Truth, who ‘stands’ on her hill.”53 In contrast to the speaker of “Satyre 3,” then, the speaker of “Since She whome I lov’d” allows himself to get carried away by his erring conscience in leaning ­toward More as his heavenly sovereign and away from a Lord who has failed to husband him.54 As I have shown, in the first two quatrains the sonnet’s speaker conscientiously objects to what he believes is his Lord’s abusive rule, for that rule appears to transgress several natu­ral laws: the speaker’s right to self-­preservation, defined partly, with Magna Carta’s help, through property owner­ship; the speaker’s right to an upheld contract, defined in and through sacramental marriage; and the sovereign’s responsibility to pursue the common good, defined narrowly and wittily in terms of the speaker’s familial well-­being. That the speaker structures his barely loyal complaint—at once a dangerously public protest and a safely private prayer—­using stream imagery that Donne borrows from “Satyre 3” provocatively suggests that the speaker may not be rooted enough in his true nature, that is, not mature enough spiritually, to know fully what he is d­ oing, and thus

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that he may not be fully responsible for his rebellion.55 The ambiguity on this point creates a tense atmosphere for the poem so far, particularly given God’s silence surrounding it, for readers may sense an awe-­inspiring grace if they imagine an indulgent, divine King tolerating the tantrum of a youthful subject who is also His child, arguably the nearest neighbor of all. Yet readers may also experience a sense of unease at the subject’s “tyrranous rage” if they imagine a dread sovereign waiting to mete out deserved punishment for treasonous idolatry. Hope for the speaker’s case emerges in the sonnet’s final sestet, even as he coyly suggests his willingness to reverence More as his sovereign ­after her soul has entered heaven, for he hovers in indecision about his ­future: But why should I begg more Love, when as thou Dost woe my Soule, for hers offring all thine: And dost not only feare least I allow My Love to Saints and Angels, t­ hings diuine, But in thy tender iealosy dost doubt Least the World, fleshe, yea Deuill putt thee out. (9–14)

Admittedly, hope that the speaker ­will realize that his perception or his conscience (or both) is in error does not initially appear in this last sentence within the sonnet. Indeed, the pun on More’s name—­“more Love”—­combined with the fact that the speaker “begg[s]” her for it, indicates that she outranks God as far as the speaker is concerned.56 Although the speaker does not come out and announce More directly as his sovereign, he continues to needle God with His inadequacy, for while God woos the speaker’s soul, “for hers offring all thine,” that offer is not yet enough to satisfy the speaker. The spiritual prob­lem that the speaker ­faces ­here is rendered more intelligible by a commonplace of medieval and early modern po­liti­cal theory: the idea that sovereignty acts like a soul entering a body.57 ­Those theories affected how Donne and Herbert treated saints and angels in their verse and, as a result, ­those theories shed light on what Herbert learned from Donne about how poetic prayer functions as po­liti­cal theory. According to Donne in Pseudo-­Martyr, then, b­ ecause the nature of sovereignty is spiritual (cf. Rom. 13), it acts like a soul entering a body. In a passage surrounding his e­ arlier quoted claim about the tenderness of a person’s conscience, Donne compares spiritual and temporal jurisdictions as a way of placing limits on the latter: But howsoever ­these two functions, since the establishing of Chris­tian­ity, have for the most part beene preserved distinct, and o­ ught so to be; yet they are at most, but so distinct as our Body and Soule: and though our Soule can contemplate God of herself, yet she can produce no exterior act without the body. . . . ​So, ­after this Soule is entred into this Body, this spirituall Jurisdiction into this temporall, it



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produces such effects, as neither power alone could worke, nor they naturally would unite and combine themselves to that end, if they ­were not thus compressed, and throng’d together like wind in a Cave. Such are the . . . ​­great Earthquakes of transferring Kingdomes.58

This passage offers two additional ways of understanding the sonnet speaker’s predicament, both of which are tied to Donne’s figurations of this speaker as a subject and as owned land. As I have argued, the experience of romantic love, that “Possessory Affection,” compels Donne’s speaker to deliver himself to More as a possession, thereby transmuting himself “into the very nature of that that he loves,” such that “he is nothing e­ lse.” As a result of her death, her soul and, with it, in some sense, Donne’s, has entered the realm of heaven as a unified, partly faithful, partly rebellious saint or angel, and perhaps even as a joint pretender sovereign to God’s throne as a “[­thing] diuine.” In the context of lyric poetry, that pretender status has all the more resonance, for lyr­ics enact i­magined per­ for­mances. When Donne’s speaker threatens to continue to pray to More for Love to repair the damage inflicted and allowed by a criminally negligent Lord, that speaker illustrates the turmoil, “the ­great Earthquakes,” within him. So g­ reat is his emotional and intellectual upheaval that he threatens to transfer the kingdom of his self from one sovereign to another. ­Here, again, the risk of spiritual treason appears, and yet it is perhaps clearer how Donne ensures that it is a risk, not a “proue[n]” actuality. Th ­ ere is still a chance, however slim, that the speaker clings bravely to the bank as one of ­those “blest flowers” of Donne’s “Satyre 3.” But the presence of hope in the sonnet does not entirely depend on what the speaker does; it depends also on the be­hav­ior of his Lord. Viewed from a dif­fer­ ent perspective, which is arguably Donne’s, the Lord acts like a true sovereign by obeying natu­ral and divine laws. First, He acts out of self-­preservation in defending His scriptural reputation as Love by enlivening the speaker’s paradoxically drowning and drought-­ridden soul and “woe[ing]” the speaker; He thereby seeks the fully common good and not only that which pertains to the speaker and his ­family. Fi­nally, this Lord upholds the one contract that ­matters most to Him as the Absolute Good and that still m ­ atters, barely, to the speaker: the covenant of salvation. Lest readers think that this God, rather like Milton’s God in Paradise Lost, is only concerned with Himself and how He appears to ­others, Donne takes pains to clarify that this sovereign is actually highly sensitive to His subjects, for He “dost not only feare,” but also in his “tender iealosy [He] dost doubt.” While this God knows His worth, He does not presume, in His omniscience, that the speaker w ­ ill choose Him b­ ecause He has a conscience, too. Fascinatingly, Donne connects the tenderness within a divine sovereign to the tenderness within the h­ uman conscience, only to pit ­these two tendernesses against one another. In Pseudo-­Martyr, Donne avers, “­there is nothing more tender then honour, which as God ­will give to none from himselfe, being a jealous

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God, so neither ­ought his Vicegerents to doe.”59 That claim recalls the one I quoted above: “Nothing in the world is more spirituall and delicate, and tender then the conscience of a man.” Heavi­ly indebted to t­hese passages from Pseudo-­Martyr, “Since She whome I lovd” shows Donne staging a Jacobean wrestling match between the speaker and his angel-­like sovereign. In this match, conscience accords with sovereignty through Nature and Scripture, yet this accord occurs even as conscience faithfully competes with sovereignty by “prou[ing]” itself smart, sensitive, mature, and strong, capable of standing.60 One who possesses such a conscience dwells not only like a blessed flower rooted in good earth, but also and especially serves as a t­emple for true worship built by God on earth, a t­emple that  improves rather than wastes God’s terrain. Devotional poetry helps with that improvement, especially insofar as it dissolves the bound­aries between private and public expression, and thus opens the door to more worshippers.61 My point h­ ere ultimately, then, is that Donne’s theorization of the relation between conscience and sovereignty in Pseudo-­Martyr, informed by the work of Bodin and Hooker, is dramatized in “Since She whome I lovd” as an astonishing strug­ gle between sovereign and subject, a strug­gle that also animates Herbert’s “To all Angels and Saints,” yet in more tightly compacted and prudently muted ways.

Po­liti­c al Airs and Angels in Herbert’s “To all Angels and Saints” Surprisingly, I have not discovered any scholarship that links “Since She whome I lovd” with “To all Angels and Saints,” even though Herbert was deeply committed to responding to the imagery and logic in Donne’s sonnet with his own poetic choices. Indeed, Herbert’s lyric, which is notably not a sonnet but a thirty-­ line, six-­stanza hieroglyph, with each stanza ­shaped like an angel or a saint with wings, offers in its form at once a pointedly affectionate but reserved salute to “­things diuine,” to borrow Donne’s phrase, and a rebelliously obedient homage to the Lord who made them. Where Donne’s speaker threatens to pray further to Anne More, but addresses God, Herbert’s speaker confesses his thwarted desire to pray to saints and angels, and especially to the Virgin Mary, while addressing ­those “glorious spirits” themselves (1). And, where Donne portrays a speaker wrestling conscientiously with his sovereign, Herbert depicts a speaker conscientiously refusing to wrestle by standing firm spiritually, religiously, po­liti­cally, and socially on the one place available to him, the bank of the whitewater river created by the confluence of true and sometimes false authorities manifested in types of law. Working heavenward, t­ hese types include ecclesiastical, civil, divine, natu­ral, celestial, and eternal law. Like Donne’s speaker, though planted farther downstream, Herbert’s speaker clings to the bank, but, unlike Donne’s speaker, Herbert’s does so with more grace, and grace meant in e­ very sense of the word:



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spiritual, social, and aesthetic. The arresting upshot of Herbert’s poetic argument, informed as it is by Scripture readings and prayers used for the feast days of St.  Michael on September  29, All Angels on September  29, and All Saints on November 1, is that the speaker, a fully reformed Protestant and therefore one unwilling to be a pseudo-­martyr, protests the fusion of heavenly sovereignty with earthly sovereignty even as he obeys both in his recognition of the pure flow, or “the silk twist,” of the eternal law r­ unning through them.62 While he questions the validity of the ecclesiastical and po­liti­cal injunctions against prayers to saints and angels, the speaker nevertheless submits to the earthly authorities ­behind ­these injunctions ­because all power is of God. In rendering his conscientiously protesting obedience, the speaker yearns for a heaven beyond politics of ­every kind, where communion is not performed through ceremony, however lovely and good that ceremony is, and where firm standing, clinging, and h­ olding give way, fi­nally, to complete freedom of movement at e­ very level, resulting in an ecstatically serene flight that currently only saints and angels enjoy.63 That angelic, saintly freedom stems from God’s grace, which partly manifests itself in a resolution of the tension between conscience and sovereignty. Startlingly, Herbert shows that the resolution of that tension occurs ­because sovereignty appears to be shared not only among all saints and angels, but also and especially between God and His celestial ministers. As a result, it is difficult to differentiate between saints, t­ hose h­ uman spirits who have been redeemed and established in their new, heavenly home, and angels, t­hose ministering spirits who have returned to their native, celestial home: Oh glorious spirits, who ­after all your bands See the smooth face of God, without a frown Or strict commands; Where ev’ry one is king, and hath his crown, If not upon his head, yet in his hands. (1–5)

To Herbert, all spirits in heaven are “glorious,” all have been liberated from “bands,” the constraints of h­ uman life, not the least of which are physical and civil laws. Even beyond the blurring of the distinction between saints and angels in the hieroglyphic form of each stanza and the spirits’ former subjection to earthly laws, ­these spirits share a similar function: they receive and deliver messages of divine truth. While angels receive t­ hese messages by unclear means, perhaps by a disembodied interplay between eternal and celestial law, saints acquire such messages in their consciences through right reason. As a result, saints effectively are angels, a word whose etymology derives from the Greek word angelos, or “messenger.” It is worth stressing ­here that, when Herbert equalizes all “glorious spirits” as reigning celestial vicegerents (an oxymoronic phrase ­were it not for the

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mysteriously coherent w ­ ill of God), he offers a notion of sovereignty that flies in the face, as it w ­ ere, of the period’s notions of sovereignty, with the exception of the most extended, “ayery” notion of sovereignty offered by Donne in Pseudo-­ Martyr. God is not threatened by ­those who possess legitimate crowns ­because they received ­these crowns from Him. In Herbert’s lyric, God’s “face” is “smooth” and unruffled, “without a frown” (2). Where Donne’s speaker imagines a feudal Lord negligent of His divine holdings, Herbert’s speaker trusts in a sovereign who stewards His realm by giving it to saints and angels to rule, at least when the time comes for them to put their crowns on their heads.64 Perhaps the oddest feature of Herbert’s lyric is how, unlike Donne’s sonnet, his poem blurs divine and earthly sovereignty literally, not figuratively, on the Pauline understanding that all power comes from God. Like Donne, Herbert warns readers how not to commit heavenly treason, but, unlike Donne, as the poem proceeds, Herbert increasingly stresses the danger of earthly treason. And, like Donne, Herbert’s overall poetic aim accords with natu­ral and divine law. His speaker acts out of self-­preservation, so, insofar as readers identify with that speaker, Herbert contributes to the common good. Essentially, he treats readers as himself, like neighbors, warning them against earthly as well as heavenly treason so that the t­ emple of their souls is not confiscated or destroyed, now or l­ ater, by a justly destructive Lord. B ­ ecause Herbert stresses that the way to heavenly obedience is through earthly obedience to a sovereign, wrongheaded in comparatively smaller points though that sovereign may be, Herbert proves that saintly faithfulness begins on the ground. To that end, Herbert’s poem reworks the imagery and logic of Donne’s sonnet, substituting the Virgin Mary for Anne More. Instead of figuring Mary as an above­ground “good” and source of goodness, and thus, in some sense, the speaker’s head (as More is for Donne), Herbert figures the “blessed Maid” (9) as a good, but an under­ground source of goodness, since Mary, the “­Mother of my God” (10), is “the holy mine, whence came the gold” (11). Herbert’s speaker addresses Mary, in her capacity as “the cabinet where the jewell lay” (14), as a safe place, a living confessional, and so he confesses, “Chiefly to thee would I my soul unfold” (15). The subjunctive “would” reveals his fear in ­doing so, even though, in a sense, he is already unfolding his soul to her, at least on this point. While Donne’s speaker is not afraid to address More—­although he never actually does so in the poem—­Herbert’s speaker recoils from praying to Mary, and to all “glorious spirits,” for good reason: But now (alas!) I dare not; for our King, Whom we do all joyntly adore and praise, Bids no such ­thing: And where his plea­sure no injunction layes, (’Tis your own case) ye never move a wing. (16–20)



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Herbert’s use of “now” shows that he refers more to earthly sovereignty than its heavenly source, even as he recognizes how heavenly power flows through the latter. The British monarch, using divine authority, now forbids prayers to saints and angels, although in the past that Prince, ­whether male or female, bid “no such t­ hing.”65 More importantly, with a subtle nod to Donne’s “Satyre 3,” the speaker’s sigh—­that “one good grone” (“Sion,” 18)—­signals his conscientious objection to changes in ecclesiastical discipline that, at their worst, become coded as shifts in church fashion.66 Given the personal vulnerability displayed in the parenthetical admission “(’Tis your own case),” Herbert stresses that individuals ­ought not to jeopardize their saintly, angelic natures in formation on earth; they need, in response to injunctions from earthly sovereigns, “never [to] move a wing.” Perhaps ­because Herbert as pastor, and not merely as poet, was sensitive to the directions in which the po­liti­cal and ecclesiastical winds w ­ ere blowing in the 1620s and early 1630s, as King Charles I revamped church governance in ways increasingly at odds with Herbert’s own priorities (as appears markedly in his lyric “Sion”), Herbert, in “To all Angels and Saints,” apparently found comfort in Donne’s “Satyre 3.”67 That satire, which, as I have shown, Donne alluded to in “Since She whome I lovd,” helped Herbert to bear witness to the danger in any earthly use of the power of the sword: All worship is prerogative, and a flower Of his rich crown, from whom lyes no appeal At the last houre: Therefore we dare not from his garland steal, To make a posie for inferiour power. (21–25)

In yet another angel-­shaped stanza, and so through another heavenly, perhaps saintly, minister, Herbert offers a densely equivocal set of messages along two interpretive poles. Underwriting ­these messages is Donne’s quietly explosive belief in Pseudo-­Martyr that “Regall Authoritie” is expansive, for that “ayery” sovereignty may manifest itself in the body of one ruler or in the bodies of a corporate ruler, as well as in some or all of the consciences of a ruler’s subjects. In Herbert’s first message, Christian believers are pseudo-­monarchs—­vicegerents or viceroys—­empowered by God, and so they ­ought not to worship an earthly sovereign above their heavenly sovereign, especially when that heavenly sovereign communicates to them through the l­egal casebook of their sovereign consciences. The “we” h­ ere may well be the speaker’s bold appropriation of the royal “we.” In Herbert’s second message, an earthly monarch stands poised to execute judgment, a monarch from whom lies no appeal in that immediate po­liti­cal and religious moment, so that “we,” the speaker and his i­magined audience, do not dare to disobey that monarch to make “a posie” for our own “inferiour power” as subjects.

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­Because Herbert boldly declares that “All worship is prerogative,” he recognizes that each individual must choose, of their own ­free ­will, who and what to worship in any given moment. That choice takes place as ­there reigns both a heavenly sovereign who is worthy of reverence (though He does not demand it, for Herbert too believes in a conscientious Lord), and an earthly sovereign who demands reverence, partly through the usage of what­ever ecclesiastical form of worship, such as The Book of Common Prayer, the monarch sanctions via what Donne in Pseudo-­Martyr calls the “subordination of Bishops.” At stake in choosing the wrong form of worship is injury, death, and even damnation. Perhaps ­because Herbert is painfully aware of how vital bodily life is to the growth of the spirit, he arguably puts more emphasis on this second message. On this reading, Herbert takes language that in Donne’s satire is applied to God and instead applies it also and especially to a British sovereign poised to execute punishment. This earthly sovereign has plucked a blessed flower from its bank and treated it as a  merely ornamental good, rather than as a neighbor, a soon-­to-be beatified, sovereign soul with a crown in her or his hands. With that flower, this earthly ­sovereign has made for “his rich crown” that sign of “inferiour power,” a ­dying “garland.” The fact that the speaker uses the first person plural pronoun “we” to warn himself and ­others against violating earthly and divine sovereignty ­ought not to exclude Herbert’s suggestion that such a warning applies to all of ­those, including the British monarch, who trespass against their neighbors in a violation of natu­ral and divine law at work in the consciences of all. In perhaps the most spectacular moment of the poem, Herbert’s speaker refuses to “court” (26) what, on one level of signification, is the British monarch, and announces that he has a higher allegiance to the Source of all sovereignty. Although he is unhappy about living u­ nder what his language suggests is an increasingly corrupt regime, and although he feels real fear, as seen in the previous stanza, he also trusts that all w ­ ill ultimately be well. The speaker believes that his God possesses a realm ruled by paradoxically shared absolute monarchy. Moreover, the speaker waits, a bit like an exhausted card player, for more divine messengers to indicate his God’s ­will, “Since we are ever ready to disburse, / If any one our Masters hand can show” (29–30). The speaker’s evident irritation, even exasperation, demonstrates that he feels as if he is still in “bands,” particularly ­those of an “inferiour power.” But, like Donne’s sonnet speaker, Herbert’s speaker is also impatient with God, wondering what his eternal King is up to, and aware that his readiness to play his part, “to disburse” his own po­liti­cal and religious hand, prob­ably w ­ ill not influence the larger moves of his sovereign. Yet, given the loving nature of this sovereign—­God as King and God as Neighbor— it is pos­si­ble, Herbert suggests, that God ­will use the speaker’s obedient readiness, especially since he may one day be among ­those “glorious spirits” with his own crown in hand.



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As one of the most astute and thorough readers of Donne, Herbert discerned the influence of Pseudo-­Martyr upon Donne’s poetic disputations with God, principally in “Since She whome I lovd,” and, in “To all Angels and Saints,” Herbert responded provocatively to the tensions between sovereignty and conscience dramatized by Donne. Relying heavi­ly on Donne’s poetic insights, and yet departing markedly from them, Herbert offered a vision of spiritual power that defies categorization within the terms of po­liti­cal theory, w ­ hether ancient, medieval, or early modern. That vision of shared absolute monarchy, where saints and angels as well as God w ­ ill effectively, if not ontologically, be “all in all,” takes its inspiration from eternal law.68 But that vision comes into view from a ­temple of the self that is founded upon the bedrock of natu­ral law using divine law, with the immea­ sur­able help of celestial law as Hooker defines it, namely, “that which Angels doe clearely behold, and without any swarving observe.” In offering this spiritually, religiously, po­liti­cally, and socially leveling vision to his readers as a humbling and emboldening devotional aid, Herbert built on and surpassed Donne’s example of suavely utilizing poetic prayer as nascent po­liti­cal theory.

notes I thank this volume’s editors as well as the anonymous press reviewers for their helpful feedback. 1. ​Peter Porter, for example, follows Eliot when he asserts that “He [Herbert] got much of his

intellectual machinery from Donne, his m ­ other’s admired friend and encomiast.” See Porter, introduction to George Herbert by T. S. Eliot (Plymouth, UK: Northcote House, 1994), 4. For a book-­length study of the poetic relation between Donne and Herbert, see Frances Cruickshank, Verse and Poetics in George Herbert and John Donne (London: Routledge, 2010). 2. ​Eliot, George Herbert, 24. When Eliot in this essay applies his famous formulation about both men’s poetry to their preaching, he distinguishes between Donne’s style as an “orator” utilizing “wit” and Herbert’s inferred “more intimate tone of speech” utilizing “a more homely style” that is nevertheless “magical” (24, 25). Eliot’s overall comparison between the works of Donne and Herbert h­ ere develops his similarly famous argument for “a dissociation of sensibility” in seventeenth-­century verse, in which he contended that “a fidelity to thought and feeling” exhibited by poets such as Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, Crashaw, Marvell, and Milton demands “a direct sensuous apprehension of thought, or a recreation of thought into feeling”; see Eliot’s review of Metaphysical Lyr­ics and Poems of the Seventeenth C ­ entury: Donne to Butler, ed. Herbert J. C. Grierson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1921) in the Times Literary Supplement, October 1921, https://­www​ .­uwyo​.e­ du​/­numimage​/­eliot​_­metaphysical​_­poets​.­htm, accessed 16 May 2021. 3. ​Eliot, George Herbert, 28. Eliot’s observation about the relationship between feeling and thought regularly recurs in Donne scholarship, appearing in more recent book chapters and articles; for example, see A.S. Byatt, “Feeling Thought: Donne and the Embodied Mind,” in The Cambridge Companion to John Donne, ed. Achsah Guibbory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 247–257; and Charis Charalampous’s chapter, “Thinking (of) Feelings: Reaching for the Divine in Donne’s Poetry,” in Rethinking the Mind-­Body Relationship in Early Modern Lit­er­a­ture, Philosophy and Medicine: The Re­nais­sance of the Body (New York: Routledge, 2015), 67–96.

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4. ​I have not yet found any citations of Eliot’s undeveloped claim about Herbert’s indebted-

ness to Donne’s scholasticism. Surely aiding the obfuscation of Eliot’s insight is the assumption that Herbert abjured academic controversies when he left his post as the public orator of Cambridge University and took sacred ­orders. The assumption derives from an interpretive legacy far older than Eliot’s, namely that of Izaak Walton, who sees Herbert as a veritable saint for renouncing worldly advancements within the acad­emy and the court in ­favor of the heavenly pursuits of pastoral care and religious poetry, a conversion best exemplified through “The Pearl. Matth. 13.” See Izaak Walton, The Lives of John Donne, Sir Henry Wotton, Richard Hooker, George Herbert and Robert Sanderson (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), 288–292; for an illustration of the per­sis­tence of this assumption, though one that seeks to complicate it, see Christopher Hodgkins, “ ‘ Yet I love thee’: The ‘Wayes of Learning’ and ‘Groveling Wit’ in Herbert’s ‘The Pearl,’ ” The George Herbert Journal 27, nos. 1–2 (Fall 2003-­Spring 2004): 22–31. Although Hodgkins declares more than once that “Herbert’s quarrel with learning is a lover’s quarrel” (23), he still suggests that “Herbert was a devoted scholar who nevertheless distrusted scholarship” (30) ­because the speaker of “The Pearl” believes that “­human learning has at most only a relative, not an absolute, value” (29–30). 5. ​Tom Cain, “Donne’s Po­liti­cal World,” in The Cambridge Companion to John Donne, 91. 6. ​Perhaps the best expression of distaste for Pseudo-­Martyr comes from Augustus Jessop, an editor of Donne’s prose, who wrote in a private letter, dated 1910, to fellow editor Evelyn Simpson, “Who but a monomaniac would read Pseudo-­Martyr through?” See Evelyn Simpson, A Study of the Prose Works of John Donne (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), 179n1. Determining the dates of the vari­ous Holy Sonnets is, of course, a vexed issue: one may well ask how much, if at all, the reading that contributed to Pseudo-­Martyr ­shaped a par­tic­u­lar sonnet. For a full consideration of the challenges involved in dating vari­ous sonnets, see “Introduction to Volume 7.1,” specifically “The Dates of the Holy Sonnets and their Relationships to Other Poems,” in John Donne, The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne, vol. 7.1, The Holy Sonnets, ed.  Gary  A. Stringer, et  al. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), LXXXVIII–­CI, particularly C. 7. ​The lit­er­a­ture situating Donne and Herbert within vari­ous religious contexts is vast. For monograph studies, see, for example, Louis  L. Martz, The Poetry of Meditation: A Study in En­glish Religious Lit­er­a­ture of the Seventeenth C ­ entury (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1954); Stanley E. Fish, Self-­Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-­Century Lit­er­a­ ture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972); Patrick Grant, The Transformation of Sin: Studies in Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, and Traherne (Amherst: University of Mas­sa­chu­setts Press, 1974); Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-­Century Religious Lyric (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1979); John N. King, En­glish Reformation Lit­er­a­ ture: The Tudor Origins of the Protestant Reformation (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1982); Alan Sinfield, Lit­er­a­ture in Protestant ­England, 1560–1660 (Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1983); Ernest B. Gilman, Iconoclasm and Poetry in the En­glish Reformation: Down Went Dagon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); Arthur L. Clements, Poetry of Contemplation: John Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, and the Modern Period (Albany: State University of New York, 1990); A.  B. Chambers, Transfigured Rites in Seventeenth-­Century En­glish Poetry (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1992); Debora Kuller Shuger, Habits of Thought in the En­glish Re­nais­sance: Religion, Politics, and the Dominant Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997); Daniel  W. Doerksen, Conforming to the Word: Herbert, Donne, and the En­glish Church before Laud (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1999); R. V. Young, Doctrine and Devotion in Seventeenth-­Century Poetry: Studies in Donne, Herbert, Crashaw, and Vaughan (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000); Robert Whalen, The Poetry of Immanence: Sacrament in Donne and Herbert (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002); Ceri



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­Sullivan, The Rhe­toric of the Conscience in Donne, Herbert, and Vaughan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); and Reuben Sánchez, Typology and Iconography in Donne, Herbert, and Milton: Fashioning the Self ­after Jeremiah (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014). Of ­these studies, Debora Shuger’s Habits of Thought in the En­glish Re­nais­sance shares my interests in Richard Hooker as well as Donne and Herbert, yet her focus on theological hermeneutics within orthodox ideology leads her away from my focus on natu­ral law; moreover, she is not invested in tracing Donne’s scholarly influence on Herbert insofar as she places her chapter on Herbert before her chapter on Donne, the latter of which primarily examines Donne’s sermons, not his poetry or his polemical prose, such as Pseudo-­Martyr. 8. ​In contending that selected religious lyr­ics of Donne and Herbert theorize the nature and limits of po­liti­cal authority, I am indebted to Sharon Achinstein, whose study of Milton’s Samson Agonistes within “a Restoration context of religious persecution of dissent” highlights the dramatic poem’s status “as po­liti­cal theory.” Yet where she seeks “to draw Milton into that larger philosophic conversation known as the liberal tradition,” I locate Donne and Herbert within overlapping debates about po­liti­cal rule and freedom of conscience, at the heart of both of which lie evolving understandings of natu­ral law. In ­doing so, I show how Donne and Herbert together poetically laid some of the philosophic groundwork upon which Milton ­later relied. See Sharon Achinstein, “Samson Agonistes and the Drama of Dissent,” Milton Studies 33 (1996): 134, 135, and passim. 9. ​Johann P. Sommerville, “John Donne the Controversialist: The Poet as Po­liti­cal Thinker,” in John Donne’s Professional Lives, ed. David Colclough (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2003), 76 and 73–74. While Sommerville’s title suggests that his essay places Donne’s verse in conversation with his polemical prose, leading readers to won­der ­whether Sommerville examines the profane poetry as a precursor to Pseudo-­Martyr or the l­ ater sacred lyr­ics as an offshoot of that treatise, in fact Sommerville uses Donne’s poetic ­career as a rhetorical springboard for a study of Pseudo-­Martyr. About all that Sommerville has to say on that subject involves his observation, “We tend to think of Donne as first and foremost a poet, but it is worth reminding ourselves that he wrote far more in prose than in verse, and that he came to regard poetry as a rather undignified form of expression. . . . ​His nice sense of irony might have appreciated that modern scholars devote so much time to writings he thought ­were ephemeral, and so ­little to ­those he took seriously” (74). B ­ ecause Sommerville does not probe the relationship between Donne’s poetry and polemical prose, I want to focus on one aspect of that relationship, namely, how Donne’s first publication set the ideological stage for one of his ­later lyric dramas. 10. ​Sommerville, “John Donne the Controversialist,” 89. 11. ​Sommerville, “John Donne the Controversialist,” 89. 12. ​Notably, the only critic whom Sommerville places in the second camp is Jeanne Shami, whose early work on the sermons he cites briefly in a footnote. See Sommerville, “John Donne the Controversialist,” 74n1. 13. ​John Donne, Pseudo-­Martyr, ed. Anthony Raspa (Montreal: McGill-­Queen’s University Press, 1993), 46–47. 14. ​ The Geneva Bible: A facsimile of the 1560 edition, with an introduction by Lloyd E. Berry (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1981), Rom. 13:1–2 and 4–5. Subsequent biblical references derive from this edition, and ­will be cited parenthetically in the text by chapter and verse. 15. ​Thomas Aquinas, The Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas, trans. F ­ athers of the En­glish Dominican Province, vols. 1–3 (New York: Benziger B ­ rothers, 1947–1948). For a study of the concept of God as Lawmaker in Thomistic thought received by medieval and early modern writers, see Jean-­Robert Armogathe, “Deus Legislator,” in Natu­ral Law and Laws of Nature in

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Early Modern Eu­rope: Jurisprudence, Theology, Moral and Natu­ral Philosophy, ed. Lorraine ­Daston and Michael Stolleis (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2008), 265–277; especially 266–269 and 273. 16. ​See Donne, Pseudo-­Martyr, 79. For a survey of ancient, medieval, and early modern accounts of the foundation of kingdoms, see Annabel S. Brett, Changes of State: Nature and the Limits of the City in Early Modern Natu­ral Law (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2011), 115–141. 17. ​Donne, Pseudo-­Martyr, 131. 18. ​I am grateful to Gregory Kneidel for identifying the lexical connection between Donne’s verb “digest” and the Digesta in his feedback on my paper, “Prob­lems of Conscience and Natu­ ral Law in Donne and Herbert,” The John Donne Society Session: “Donne and Certainty,” Modern Language Association Annual Convention, Philadelphia, PA, January 7, 2017. 19. ​M. Shane Bjornlie explains: “Justinian entrusted the proj­ect to his court quaestor, Tribonian,” who needed “to simplify imperial law by removing or reconciling contradictions pre­ sent in all extant statutes and judgements. The resultant Corpus Iuris Civilis was a massive overhaul of the Roman ­legal tradition never before attempted on this scale.” See M. Shane Bjornlie, Politics and Tradition between Rome, Ravenna and Constantinople: A Study of Cassiodorus and the Variae, 527–554 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 68. 20. ​For Donne’s po­liti­cal discretion as a preacher, see Jeanne M. Shami, “Donne on Discretion,” ELH 47, no.  1 (Spring 1980): 48–66; and Marla Hoffman Lunderberg, “Donne’s ­Strategies for Discrete Preaching,” SEL 44, no. 1 (Winter 2004): 97–119. For Donne’s absolutism, see, for example, Sommerville, “John Donne the Controversialist,” 89. 21. ​See Shuger, Habits of Thought in the En­glish Re­nais­sance, 167 and 168; and more recently, Shuger’s essay, “Donne’s Absolutism,” in The Oxford Handbook of John Donne, ed. Dennis Flynn, M. Thomas Hester, and Jeanne Shami (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 690–703. 22. ​The term belongs to Michael Mendle, whom Shuger credits; see Shuger, “Donne’s Absolutism,” 695–697; for variations on this theme of “casuistical absolutism,” see also 700 and 702. 23. ​Shuger, “Donne’s Absolutism,” 696–703. 24. ​Elsewhere, even in the paragraph a­ fter the one devoted to Pseudo-­Martyr, where Shuger moves to Donne’s sermons, she does appreciate how his literary qualities shape his po­liti­cal theory; yet the fact that she does not apply that awareness to her brief treatment of Pseudo-­ Martyr indicates that her understanding of Donne’s notion of sovereignty differs from mine. 25. ​I cannot find the citation in Shuger’s essay. 26. ​Shuger, “Donne’s Absolutism,” 697. Shuger cites Raspa’s edition of Pseudo-­Martyr and John Donne, The Sermons of John Donne, ed. G. R. Potter and E. M. Simpson, 10 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1953–1962). 27. ​John Donne, “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning,” in The Complete En­glish Poems, ed. C. A. Patrides (London: J. M. Dent, 1994), 47. 28. ​Shuger, “Donne’s Absolutism,” 696. 29. ​For Donne’s reliance on Bodin in Biathanatos, see John Donne, Biathanatos, ed. Ernest W. ­Sullivan II (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1984), xxxin6, 3, 40nb, 73na, 191–192, and 209. For Donne’s indirect agreement with Hooker, see Achsah Guibbory, Christian Identity: Jews and Israel in Seventeenth-­Century ­England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 78–79 and 261. Guibbory indirectly connects Donne with Hooker when she observes that “At the consecration of a new chapel at Lincoln’s Inn, for which he had laid the first ‘material stone,’ Donne defended the legitimacy of this ceremony by reminding his audience that the ancient tabernacle, Solomon’s ­Temple, the Second ­Temple, and the new altar erected by Judas Maccabeus all w ­ ere ‘anointed and sanctified’ ” (79); Guibbory l­ater asserts that “All who had defended the En­glish Church’s continuity with Jewish ceremony relied on Hooker” (261). Notably, on page 79, she quotes from Donne, The Sermons of John Donne, 4:372.



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30. ​Jean Bodin, On Sovereignty: Four chapters from The Six Books of the Commonwealth, ed. and trans. Julian H. Franklin (1992; repr., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 13. 31. ​For Aquinas, that profoundly influential theorist of natu­ral law, “in man ­there is first of all an inclination to good in accordance with the nature which he has in common with all substances. . . . ​by reason of this inclination, what­ever is a means of preserving h­ uman life, and of warding off its obstacles, belongs to the natu­ral law”: see Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 1a2ae.94.2. In the Thomist tradition, according to Annabel S. Brett, the natu­ral law of self-­preservation, what Aquinas refers to as se conservare in esse, is “the natu­ral inclination of all entities qua entities, and the first substantive precept of the natu­ral law for man”: see Brett, Liberty, Right, and Nature: Individual Rights in ­Later Scholastic Thought, rev. ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 112. 32. ​Bodin, On Sovereignty, 14. 33. ​­There is a tension in Bodin’s thought on this point. While he states outside of the context of contracts that “­there is no prince in all the world who has the power to levy taxes on the ­people at his plea­sure any more than he has the power to take another’s goods,” implying that subjects have recourse to and responsibility through natu­ral law at least to bear witness to ­these transgressions of natu­ral law, Bodin also says much ­later in his treatise that “if the prince is sovereign absolutely, as are the genuine monarchs of France, Spain, ­England, Scotland, Ethiopia, Turkey, Persia, and Moscovy—­whose power has never been called into question and whose sovereignty has never been shared with subjects—­then it is not the part of any subject individually, or all of them in general, to make an attempt on the honor or life of the monarch, ­either by way of force or by way of law, even if he has committed all the misdeeds, impieties, and cruelties that one could mention.” It is pos­si­ble that Bodin allows for internal protest and, if so, prayer is one clear form of such a protest. See Bodin, On Sovereignty, 21 and 115. As I aim to show, Donne’s Holy Sonnets dramatize this tension in Bodin’s thought. 34. ​Bodin, On Sovereignty, 15. 35. ​Richard Hooker, The Folger Library Edition of the Works of Richard Hooker, ed. Georges Edelen, vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1977), 54, 62, and 63. Of the five kinds of laws Hooker delineates, all but the celestial derive from Aquinas. See Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 1a2ae.91.1–5. 36. ​Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 1a2ae.91.4. 37. ​The royal language appears when Aquinas says, “Now the w ­ hole of mankind is compared to God as to one king, according to Ps. xlvi. 8: God is the King of all the earth,” a claim that allows him to conclude provisionally, “Therefore t­ here is but one Divine law”; yet Aquinas explains that, while “the Divine law seems to be more akin to the eternal law, which is one, than the natu­ral law, according as the revelation of grace is of a higher order than natu­ral knowledge,” in actuality, “the Divine law is twofold, namely the Old Law and the New Law.” Hooker expanded on Aquinas’s distinction in ways that Donne appropriated in the Holy Sonnets. See Aquinas, 1a2ae.91.5. 38. ​Hooker, Works, 1:87–88. 39. ​See, for example, Matt. 22:37–40: “Iesus said to him, Thou shalt loue the Lord thy God with all thine heart, with all thy soule, and with all thy minde. This is the first and the g­ reat commandement. And the second is like vnto this, Thou shalt loue thy neighbour as thy selfe.” 40. ​Hooker, Works, 1:88. 41. ​Hooker, Works, 1:86. 42. ​Shuger, Habits of Thought, 167 and 168; Shuger quotes from Donne, The Sermons of John Donne, 1:434–438. 43. ​­Here I build on the insights of Jeremy Maule, who finds “the idea of law” in Donne “in the ‘pecuniary and bloudy Laws’ in which he justifies a regime’s control of its citizens’ personal

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religion; in the ‘ideations’ of ‘Utopian’ republicanism, or Plato’s Laws and Republic, with which he strug­gled in the ­earlier years of the seventeenth ­century; and in his Divine Poems, and Essays in Divinity, and sermons, as they too continue to grapple and negotiate between the law of God, the law of man.” Maule also finds in Donne a special focus on property law, borrowing Claude Lévi-­Strauss’s dictum that some animals are good to think with (“bonnes à penser”) in order to claim, “So too with laws and Donne: he thinks best with the laws of property.” See Jeremy Maule, “Donne and the Words of the Law,” in John Donne’s Professional Lives, 24 and 28. Whereas Maule goes to the Holy Sonnets largely in order to read “­Father, part of his double interest” as “a ­legal pleading,” I visit them primarily to read “Since She whome I lovd” as a po­liti­cally savvy conscientious objection to a ruthless and insecure sovereign teetering t­ oward tyranny (26). 44. ​Donne, Variorum Edition, vol. 7.1, The Holy Sonnets, 19. Subsequent references to Donne’s Holy Sonnets w ­ ill derive from this edition, and w ­ ill be cited parenthetically in the text by line number. In highlighting the sonnets that I do, I follow the West­moreland manuscript sequence, as it alone includes all the sonnets I mention, and places “Since She whome I lovd” near the end of the sequence. This poem and “Show me deare Christ,” which also only appears in the West­moreland manuscript, together figure a potential culmination to Donne’s lyric uses of property law. 45. ​Donne, Sermons, 1:184–185. 46. ​Katrin Ettenhuber, “ ‘Tears of Passion’ and ‘Inordinate Lamentation’: Complicated Grief in Donne and Augustine,” in Passions and Subjectivity in Early Modern Culture, ed. Brian Cummings and Freya Sierhuis (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 216. 47. ​Notably, Donne’s speaker is not wishing his Lord dead, and so is not guilty of treason as Bodin defined it: “A subject is guilty of treason in the first degree not only for having killed a sovereign prince, but also for attempting it, advising it, wishing it, or even thinking it.” See Bodin, On Sovereignty, 115. 48. ​“Magna Carta, 1215,” clauses 39–40, The National Archives, accessed 16 May 2021, https://­ www​.n­ ationalarchives​.­gov​.u­ k​/­education​/­resources​/­magna​-c­ arta​/­british​-­library​-m ­ agna​-c­ arta​ -­1215​-­runnymede​/­. 49. ​Bodin, On Sovereignty, 21. 50. ​It is tempting to won­der ­whether Herbert relied on Donne’s dual association of “whett”— to sharpen and to moisturize—­when, in “Affliction” (IV), Herbert offers his own status report on the soul, this time one that turns the blade of the mind back on itself rather than on its Maker: My thoughts are all a case of knives, Wounding my heart With scatter’d smart, As watring pots give flowers their lives. (7–10) See George Herbert, The En­glish Poems of George Herbert, ed. Helen Wilcox (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 328. Subsequent references to Herbert’s poetry ­will derive from this edition, and ­will be cited parenthetically in the text by line number. 51. ​For an alternative approach to Donne’s and Herbert’s understanding of prayer, see chapter 7 of the pre­sent collection, where Kate Narveson examines the early modern practice of prayer and the role of the prayerful imagination both in Donne’s Devotions and in the lyr­ics of Herbert’s “The Church.” 52. ​John Donne, Variorum Edition, vol. 3, The Satyres, ed. Gary A. Stringer, et al. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015), 93. Subsequent references to Donne’s Satyres ­will derive from this edition, and ­will be cited parenthetically in the text by line number. 53. ​Richard Strier, Resistant Structures: Particularity, Radicalism, and Re­nais­sance Texts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 160.



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54. ​Donne’s wit in using property law, particularly real property law, ­here and throughout the

Holy Sonnets is essential for spotlighting his speakers’ spiritual states, for, as Maule recognizes: “The power ­behind such apparent conceits rests on a better understanding of property than that now held—­property conceived not just as an object, a ­thing, but as a relationship to that object. For the same reason, it is not a play on ­legal terms alone . . . ​that marks Donne’s feeling intelligence, but his strong passion for expressing the juncture (Donne would have said ‘jointure’) of opposites in terms which insist on retaining their conjoining as vis­i­ble, as knotty.” See Maule, “Donne and the Words of the Law,” 30. Maule’s last thought recalls John Carey’s brilliant insight that the “dual function [of “conceptual corners” that “unite[] divergent lines or planes, but . . . ​also intrusively separate[] them”] was impor­tant to Donne, ­because though he liked joining ­things he also liked the joint to show.” See John Carey, John Donne: Life, Mind and Art (London: Faber and Faber, 1990), 247; emphasis added. 55. ​I draw on Gregory Kneidel’s insightful reading of the stream imagery in “Satyre 3,” which he performs to situate the poem within a historical “shift in informed consent law.” Kneidel argues, “Satyre 3 might . . . ​be thought of as a document in the early stage of the monumental shift in ­children’s ­legal capacities” involving “two types of dominant po­liti­cal theories . . . ​the patriarchal system and the liberal, consent-­based system.” As Kneidel further observes: “[In] the patriarchal po­liti­cal system u­ nder which Donne wrote and which privileged birth or status, ­children w ­ ere presumed to be able to consent to all manner of ­legal contracts: ­children could be married at seven, draft ­wills at five, indenture themselves at four or even two, and be executed for capital crimes at eight. But, ­under a liberal po­liti­cal system that demands the consent of the governed and that grew . . . ​substantively out of Reformation debates over marriage law and church membership, all ­children, regardless of status or birth, are excluded from entering l­ egal obligations before they reach an official age of reason.” Kneidel’s legal-­historical contextualization of “Satyre 3” makes it pos­si­ble to understand Donne’s employment of the satire’s stream imagery in “Since She whome I lovd” as a way of signaling the speaker’s immaturity as a spiritual subject. See Gregory Kneidel, John Donne and Early Modern L ­ egal Culture: The End of Equity in the Satyres (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2015), 111, 110, and 110–111. In making his last observation, Kneidel relies on the work of Holly Brewer, By Birth or Consent: ­Children, Law, and the Anglo-­American Revolution in Authority (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005). 56. ​Donne thus appears to engage wittily with 1 John 4:8: “He that loueth not, knoweth not God: for God is loue.” 57. ​For a survey of ancient, medieval, and early modern po­liti­cal theories exploring the soul-­ body relation as a way of thinking about sovereignty, see Brett, Changes of State, 122–134, especially 130–134. 58. ​Donne, Pseudo-­Martyr, 46 and 48. 59. ​Donne, Pseudo-­Martyr, 60. Bodin’s treatise notably highlights honor as a chief concern for any sovereign in making decisions: “But this objection still remains: if the prince is bound to the laws of nature, and if the civil laws are equitable and reasonable, it follows that princes are also bound to civil law. . . . ​I answer that the law of a sovereign prince deals e­ ither with a public or a private ­matter, or with both of ­these together, and that in any case it looks ­either to advantage (proffit) at the price of honesty (honneur), or to advantage not involving honesty, or to honesty without advantage, or to advantage joined with honesty, or even to something involving neither advantage nor honesty. When I say honesty (honneur), I mean that which is honest according to the laws of nature. It is well settled that to t­ hese the prince is obligated.” Given the sacrifices that God makes on behalf of Donne’s speaker—­and, by extension, the rest of humanity—­God intriguingly illustrates, effectively through eternal law, the validity of

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Bodin’s princi­ple, “If advantage is at odds with honesty, it is only reasonable that honor should prevail.” See Bodin, On Sovereignty, 32 and 33. 60. ​See Gen. 32:24–30: “When Iaakob was left him selfe alone, t­ here wrestled a man with him vnto the breaking of the day. And he sawe that he colde not preuaile against him: therefore he touched the holow of his thigh, & the holow of Iaakobs thigh was losed, as he wrestled with him. And he said, Let me go, for the morning appeareth. Who answered, I wil not let thee go except thou blesse me. Then said he unto him, What is thy name? And he said, Iaakob. Then said he, Thy name shal be called Iaakob no more, but Israel: ­because thou hast had power with God, thou shalt also preuaile with men. Then Iaakob demanded, saying, Tel me, I pray thee, thy name. And he said, Wherefore now doest thou aske my name? And he blessed him ­there. And Iaakob called the name of the place, Peniel: for, said he, I haue sene God face to face, and my life  is preserued.” My point in citing this passage is to illumine how, for Donne, prayer—­ especially in verse, given its intensely strategized linguistic moves—­functioned as a wrestling match, and the sonnet “Since She whome I lovd” best exemplifies this approach of all the Holy Sonnets, given its reliance on Pseudo-­Martyr, a work prompted by that other Jacob, King James I. 61. ​This point is one that Herbert well recognized, as he demonstrates in “Obedience”: How happie w ­ ere my part, If some kinde man would thrust his heart Into ­these lines. (41–43) For an investigation of “the ways in which the lyr­ics of The ­Temple seem designed to represent common devotional experiences,” see Ramie Targoff, Common Prayer: The Language of Public Devotion in Early Modern ­England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 99; see also 85–117. 62. ​See Herbert’s lyric “The Pearl. Matth. 13”:

Yet through the labyrinths, not my groveling wit, But thy silk twist let down from heav’n to me, Did both conduct and teach me, how by it To climbe to thee. (37–40) For a survey of vari­ous interpretations (“classical, biblical [OT and NT] and theological”) of the “silk twist” in “The Pearl. Matth. 13,” see Wilcox, The En­glish Poems of George Herbert, 326n38. Significantly, the Old Testament interpretation involves the silk twist’s connection to Jacob’s ladder connecting heaven and earth, which Jacob first viewed in a dream sent by God, and which angels of God traversed (see Gen. 28:10–22); that dream became the basis of Jacob choosing the Lord as his God and establishing Bethel, the ­house of God. ­These events occurred before Jacob wrestled with the angel of God (again, see Gen. 32:24–30). 63. ​In its focus on saintly or angelic flight as a manifestation of spiritual triumph, “To all Angels and Saints” usefully recalls Herbert’s other hieroglyphic poem, “Easter Wings,” a lyric that precedes “To all Angels and Saints” in The ­Temple, and a lyric that combines two stanzas, or more properly, two poems, each s­ haped like an angel or saint with wings. The closing ­quatrain in each stanza or poem forms a single wing, and anticipates the hopeful message of “To all Angels and Saints”: Let me combine And feel this day thy victorie: For, if I imp my wing on thine, Affliction ­shall advance the flight in me. (17–20) O let me rise As larks, harmoniously, And sing this day thy victories: Then ­shall the fall further the flight in me. (7–10)



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64. ​­Here is where Herbert’s imagery is particularly odd, for, as Herbert well knew, Scripture

indicates that the saints w ­ ill rule, and, as part of that rule, judge the angels in heaven: “Do ye not knowe, that the Saintes shal iudge the worlde? If the world then shalbe iudged by you, are ye vnworthie to iudge the smallest m ­ atters? Knowe ye not that we shal iudge the Angels? how muche more t­ hings that perteine to this life?” See 1 Cor. 6:2–3. Part of the reason why Herbert clouds over his awareness that saints w ­ ill judge angels may be his investment in cultivating humility in himself and his readers. 65. ​I am ­here indebted to Louis L. Martz, who argues that Herbert offers “a lurking suggestion of another, earthly King, who now, alas, ‘bids no such t­ hing’ for the Anglican.” See Martz, Poetry of Meditation, 98. Consequently, I disagree with Richard Strier when he contends (partly against Martz) that “The ‘alas’ [in Herbert’s lyric] is a gesture of politeness and humanity,” given that “In a situation like this, an expression of regret is neither disingenuous nor fully serious—­especially if ‘circumstances’ could not be dif­fer­ent.” As I see the poem, it’s precisely ­because the situation is so serious that the “alas” offers a heartfelt sigh or groan. At stake in my reading is my conviction that Herbert, following Donne, looks t­ oward a notion of sovereignty in heaven that operates differently than Strier contends, for it ­doesn’t correspond to “a demo­cratic realm” or “a single absolute monarch reigning equally over both heaven and earth” (135). See Richard Strier, “ ‘To all Angels and Saints’: Herbert’s Puritan Poem,” Modern Philology 77, no. 2 (1979): 135. 66. ​The “one good grone” of true worship appears in “Sion,” a poem defining how ­human ­temples—­individuals, rather than buildings—­ought to work by producing “musick for a king” (24). ­Here, too, I think of Donne’s sartorial meta­phors for describing difference in ecclesiastical discipline, ­whether, for example, the “raggs” of Catholic religion associated with “The State Cloth wher the Prince sate yesterday,” or the “playne, s­imple, . . . ​/ . . . ​vnhandsome” appearance of Calvinist religion (“Satyre 3,” 47, 48, and 51–52). 67. ​Christopher Hodgkins still offers the most precise identification of Herbert’s theology as it ­shaped his ecclesiology and thus his liturgical preferences, for he labels Herbert a “Calvinist nonabsolutist lower-­church Episcopalian”; see Hodgkins, Authority, Church, and Society in George Herbert: Return to the ­Middle Way (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993), 11. 68. ​This vision registers in scripture when the Apostle Paul writes, “And when all ­things shalbe subdued vnto him, then shal the Sone also him self be subiect vnto him, that did subdue all ­things vnder him, that God may be all in all.” See 1 Cor. 4:28. Borrowing from this verse while perhaps also engaging with Herbert’s understanding of shared absolute sovereignty, ­Milton in Paradise Lost describes God declaring to the Son, “Then Thou thy regal scepter shalt lay by, / For regal scepter then no more s­ hall need: / God s­ hall be All in all” See John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Gordon Teskey (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), 3.339–341. For a study of this key Miltonic phrase as it relates to Donne as well as Milton, see Raymond B. Waddington, “ ‘All in All’: Shakespeare, Milton, Donne and the Soul-­in-­Body Topos,” English Literary Renaissance 20, no. 1 (1990): 40–68.

ENCOUNTERS

part 2

Exchange and Collaboration

3 • “RESPLENDENCE OF W ­ OMEN, MEN’S ME ANS TO ZE AL” Fashioning Female Sanctity in Donne and Herbert’s Commemoration of Lady Danvers A N N E -­M A R I E M I L L E R-­B L A I S E

On July 7, 1627, the title of the small volume containing John Donne’s Sermon of commemoration of the Lady Danvers as well as George Herbert’s nineteen Latin and Greek elegies in memory of his deceased ­mother was entered in the Stationer’s Register.1 Magdalen Herbert had died a month ­earlier and Donne, a longtime friend, had been prevented by prior commitments from attending and preaching at the burial ser­vice in the Church of Chelsea.2 Only a few weeks separated Lady Danvers’s death on June 8 from the commemoration ser­vice on July  1 and the publication of the joint volume by the booksellers Philemon ­Stephens and Christopher Meredith in London, but the lapse of time would ­certainly have allowed Donne and Herbert to share not only their grief over the loss of their beloved friend and m ­ other but also to correspond and discuss their thoughts, hopes, and fears regarding the state of their ­Mother, the Church, whom Lady Danvers in many ways is made to embody in their commemorative volume. Donne’s sermon and Herbert’s Memoriae Matris Sacrum have each benefited from their own critical traditions. For its part, Donne’s sermon has often been quoted for its biographical value and the moving portrait Donne draws in it of an admirable and accomplished w ­ oman.3 While biographers have used the sermon to map aspects of Donne’s friendship with the Herberts, theological approaches have shown how the sermon discusses the question of the signs of election and sets forth the soteriology of the dean of St. Paul’s, which Daniel W. Doerksen, for example, defines as moderately Calvinist.4 Jeanne Shami has also drawn upon the sermon in her reassessment of the role of ­women in the religious life of early modern E ­ ngland. As listeners, annotators, 71

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collectors, circulators, patrons, or the subject of sermons, ­women participated indirectly in the art of preaching, which was, in Shami’s view, “the most significant official expression of the En­glish Church’s values and authority” at the time.5 Funeral sermons in par­tic­ul­ar, with their appended biographical notices, turned still recently living w ­ omen into tangible examples of biblical types, w ­ hether Miriams, Marthas, Marys, or even, beyond the gender divide, Jobs, as is the case in Donne’s commemoration of Lady Danvers.6 This transformation of “real” ­women into typological, and therefore what may seem to be impersonal, models of faith and action testifies to the ambiguous position of ­women in relation to religious authority. As I suggest further in the pre­sent essay, however, it appears that Donne moves his listeners and readers beyond a ­simple masculine and ecclesial appropriation of female sanctity to instead define, through the vibrant and personal example of Magdalen Danvers, sanctity, ­whether that of ­women or men, as a feminine quality—an idea echoed by Herbert’s apostrophe to his ­mother in the first line of the fifteenth of his elegies: “­Mother, resplendence of ­women, men’s means to zeal” (“Μῆτερ, γυναικῶν αἴγλη, ἀνθρώπων ἔρις”).7 Herbert’s elegies to his m ­ other have been less frequently explored than Donne’s sermon, primarily for linguistic reasons, but also for aesthetic and theological ones. For readers accustomed to the “plain style” of Herbert’s vernacular poetry, the neo-­Latin and Greek verse sounds at once uncomfortably baroque in its poetic sensibility and secular in its expression of untempered grief. In one of the few articles devoted to Herbert’s collection of verse, Deborah Rubin, who focuses on Greek allusions in the poems and attempts to rehabilitate Herbert’s elegies, nevertheless remarks that: “Memoriae Matris Sacrum . . . ​shifts Herbert’s object from the numinous to the ­human and carnal. In The ­Temple ­human frailty and mortality are locked in combat with a grace-­dispensing God; in Memoriae Matris Sacrum, forgiveness and salvation recede in the face of crushing grief, and the capacity of men and ­women to suffer takes on a secular dimension.”8 Catherine Freis, Richard Freis, and Greg Miller’s 2012 edition of Memoriae Matris Sacrum (MMS), which offers a new translation of the poems, has done a ­great deal to help revise associations of the Latin and Greek poetic forms with a presumably purely secular strain within Herbert’s poetic output. Not only does the edition evidence the virtuosity of Herbert’s elegies, but it also shows how Herbert’s careful choice of metrical form in each of the poems displayed his keen knowledge and sense of the propriety of forms available for the expression of public grief and the cele­bration of his m ­ other’s virtues in post-­Reformation ­England.9 Herbert’s elegies demonstrate his mastery of the poetic, cultural, and mythological codes of Latin and Greek poetry, which, in the rich humanist tradition to which he was an heir, could implicitly translate into equivalent Christian values for the educated readership of his elegies. Miller had already drawn attention to this aspect of the collection in an ­earlier analy­sis of Herbert’s use of classical pastoral codes, by which his ­mother is turned into a new Astraea (MMS 7.12):



“Resplendence of W ­ omen, Men’s Means to Zeal” 73

“He places his lament for his m ­ other firmly in a classical pastoral tradition, though that sequence takes on a Christian framework when we consider the artists and ­family whom Magdalen shepherded. . . . ​If Herbert meant t­ hese references literally, he would of course be idolatrous; instead, we should read ­these mythological references within a Christian framework. Magdalen is immortal b­ ecause of her virtue through God’s grace.”10 Freis, Freis, and Miller’s careful analy­sis of form in their commentary on the elegies helps t­hose of us with “small Latin, and less Greek” to revise further hasty psychological or even misplaced erotic readings of the collection of poems, which had sometimes relied on Mark McCloskey and Paul  R. Murphy’s ­earlier imprecise translation.11 The groundbreaking work of Freis, Freis, and Miller, which also influenced Victoria Moul’s translation for John Drury’s recent edition of Herbert’s Complete Poetry, has paved the way for fresh interpretations of Herbert’s elegies. To the best of my knowledge, however, the commemorative, dual-­authorship book originally published in 1627 has not been read as forming a single, and perhaps even consistent, volume, nor has it been republished as such. It is my purpose ­here to suggest not only that such a reading is made pos­si­ble by a web of echoes and the complementary modes of grieving to be found in the sermon and in the elegies but that it also sheds light on Donne and Herbert’s common vision of the Church, and their common understanding of (female) sanctity, which lays the grounds for a soteriology that appears to be more Lutheran than Calvinist in inspiration. Considering the commemorative volume as a book of dual, concerted authorship is, of course, subject to some debate. The full title of the volume as it appears on the title page of the editio princeps highlights the collected rather than common nature of the texts it contains: A Sermon of Commemoration of the Lady Danvers, late Wife of Sr John Danvers. Preach’d at Chilsey where she was buried. By Iohn Donne  D. of St Pauls . . . ​Together with other Commemorations of Her; by her Sonne G. Herbert. Herbert’s poems are presented as appended (“Together with”) to the sermon by the better-­known “D. of St Pauls,” which printers Stephens and Meredith would prob­ably have had l­ittle trou­ble selling at “their shop at the golden Lion in Pauls Church yard.” The collected aspect of the elegies themselves is further suggested by the fact that their now currently accepted title, Memoriae Matris Sacrum, might in fact have been a s­ imple line of dedication commonly used in many epitaphs at the time and reemployed by Herbert at the beginning of his own series of poems.12 In setting forth this volume, in other words, Donne and Herbert seem, at first sight, to have done nothing ­else than pay a traditional tribute to a deceased lady, ­whether benefactress, friend, or ­mother. Publishing the memorial sermon of a deceased person of wealth and standing was a common practice in early modern Protestant E ­ ngland. It grew out of the model of the typical sixteenth-­century Lutheran burial sermon, which consisted of the sermon per se and an appended biographical sketch, or personalia.13 The

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En­glish Short Title Cata­logue contains quite a few examples of published funeral sermons from the first quarter of the seventeenth c­ entury, accompanied by a biographical account or “testimony” of the deceased’s life, as is the case, for instance, in Nathanael Cannon’s A casket of ievvells and precious pearles Set forth in a funerall sermon, preached in Heckfield Church, at the buriall of a religious young gentleman, Mr. Barnabas Creswell.14 Gathering Latin elegies was no more unusual. As a ­matter of fact, Herbert’s only published poems at the time of his ­mother’s death ­were the Latin elegies he had written on the occasion of the deaths of Prince Henry (1612), Queen Anne (1619), and his friend Francis Bacon (1626).15 ­These w ­ ere particularly apt coming from one who was an outstanding student, then deputy, and eventually ­actual public orator at Cambridge (from 1619 on), and they w ­ ere all included in collective eulogies, freely blending similar mythological references to ­those found in Memoriae Matris Sacrum and a more or less explicit Christian framework. The 1627 volume for Lady Danvers is, however, anomalous in several re­spects. First, it was unusual to contribute such elegies for an immediate parent or f­ amily member—an anomaly to which Herbert himself seems to allude at the end of his longest elegy, poem 2.16 At tu qui ineptè haec dicta censes filio, Nato parentis auferens Encomium, Abito, trunce, cum tuis pudoribus. Ergo ipse solùm mutus atque excors ero Strepente mundo tinnulis praeconijs? [But you who judge ­these improper for a son’s speech, Depriving a child of the Cele­bration of a parent, Shove off, cripple, with your codes and cant. So ­will I be the only one mute and senseless While the world blasts broadcasts?] (MMS 2.52–56)

Secondly, if one son wrote elegies, why was he not joined by his b­ rothers, especially Edward Herbert, himself a poet and perhaps an even closer (or at least an older) friend to Donne, and Henry Herbert, who would ­later occupy the position of Master of the Revels? Commemorative volumes of elegies, ­whether for a prince or a gentlewoman, ­were seldom the work of only one or two ­people, but brought together members of a broader social community within which the deceased was to be remembered and honored, as suggested, for instance, by the title of an “anonymous” 1620 volume, The honour of vertue. Or the monument erected by the sorowfull husband, and the epitaphes annexed by learned and worthy men, to the immortall memory of that worthy gentle-­woman Mrs Elizabeth Crashawe.17 The fact that Donne and Herbert’s volume for Lady Danvers was printed by Philemon Stephens, who dealt almost exclusively in theological lit­er­a­ture, the



“Resplendence of W ­ omen, Men’s Means to Zeal” 75

absence of a special title apart from the mention of the sermon on the title page, and the lexical erasure of a clear qualitative separation between Donne’s sermon, a “Commemoration,” and Herbert’s elegies, “other Commemorations of Her,” are indicative, I believe, of a slightly dif­fer­ent agenda and design from ­those found in traditional memorial publications.18 That Donne and Herbert should have come together, to the exclusion of other potential authors among the educated circles of friends and f­amily Lady Danvers frequented, is prob­ably not gratuitous. Though the two men had known each other ever since Donne had met Magdalen Herbert when George was only seven, their relationship must have taken on new depth given their respective ecclesial trajectories. As early as 1625, during an outbreak of the plague in London, they had both found refuge for several months in the home of John and Magdalen Danvers in Chelsea. Donne had used this time to couch some of his sermons in writing, while Herbert, who was suffering from ill health, had only very recently renounced more worldly functions to devote himself to the Church. It is pos­si­ble to conjecture that the two men may have used this occasion to exchange views on their understanding of the Church and their own ministry. In 1627, when Lady Danvers died, both men found themselves in somewhat peculiar situations with regard to the question of their pastoral vocation. Though Herbert had taken holy ­orders at the end of 1624, retiring from his oratorship in Cambridge and his parliamentary appointment, and had already been installed to his canonry of Lincoln and inducted at Leighton Bromswold by 1626, he was a strikingly inactive deacon.19 This situation was due to his poor health but also, possibly, to doubts about his own worthiness as a minister of God. I have argued elsewhere that the poems in memory of his ­mother may dramatize Herbert’s crisis and may have helped him move beyond it to embrace his pastoral calling more fully, si­mul­ta­neously transforming his poetics in the ­later poems of The ­Temple in order to make his En­glish volume better reflect his new faith in the distributive, pastoral value of poetry.20 The point of importance ­here, however, is that Memoriae Matris Sacrum would have enabled him to articulate, however indirectly, what sort of Church he hoped to serve at this transitional point in his life. Donne, on the other hand, was already at the height of his ecclesiastical c­ areer but had encountered an unexpected setback a ­couple of months ­earlier in 1627 when, in the context of the Forced Loan (controversially levied by King Charles I in support of his war efforts), he had preached a sermon that had displeased both Laud and the King. His oblique allusion to “impressions of errour, which [Kings’ wives] may have sucked in their infancy, from another Church” had not gone down very well, not any more than his suggestion that the Forced Loan could only be justified as a “counsel of necessity” rather than of right.21 Though Donne made amends, Charles I declined to have the sermon printed, and the episode would certainly have heightened Donne’s sense that he belonged to a Church rife with growing tensions and conflicting theological views. His sermon

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of commemoration of Lady Danvers testifies to his and Herbert’s forceful quest for peace and unity in the Church by setting forth a par­tic­u­lar soteriological agenda and turning Magdalen into a model for a unified Church. Before looking more closely at Donne’s soteriological proposition and the ways in which Lady Danvers’s special form of sanctity comes to embody it, however, it is impor­tant to notice how the sermon consciously offers a framing, containing device for vari­ous expressions of grief, and notably for Herbert’s “other Commemorations.” In bringing together two types of discourse, the homiletic and the poetic, the 1627 volume works in dif­fer­ent ways to temper the grief of loss, ­whether it be the loss of Magdalen, the implicit threats of division in the Church, or even the everyday experience of despair with which the believer is confronted. The sermon is divided into two parts: the first part seeks to “instruct the Living” with regard to the questions of death, judgment, and salvation, while the second “commemorate[s] the Dead,” that is, Lady Danvers. Throughout t­ hese two parts, which w ­ ere traditional to Protestant memorial sermons, Donne’s homily is also structured around a pivot point to which the preacher returns relentlessly. This pivot point is linguistically embodied by the adversative conjunction “neverthelesse” that opens the biblical verse Donne chooses to expound, 2 Peter 3:13—“Neverthelesse, we, according to his promise looke for new heavens, and new earth, wherein dwelleth Righteousnesse.” In the first, longer section of his sermon, which is devoted to “instruct[ing] the Living,” the current that the conjunction “neverthelesse” needs to work against is, first of all, that which issues from the fountain of scorn of the heretics or disbelievers who pretend that death and judgment hold no sway upon them.22 Donne ­here interestingly identifies the scorn of disbelievers and atheists in terms of literary genres or forms of discourse: “Epigrams, and Satyres, and Libells, and scurrill and scornful jests, against any point of Religion.” He commends instead the dolorous complaints of Job, Samson, and Christ—­Christ “was, (as the Prophet calls him) Vir dolorum, A man compos’d, and elemented of sorrowes”—­carving out a legitimate space, as it ­were, for Herbert’s own, highly plaintive elegiacs.23 The biblical antecedents Donne calls up are all male, suggesting e­ ither that t­ here is no gender divide in ­matters of grief or, perhaps, that grief in this case is best meta­phorized as masculine. Herbert’s poems build on ­these suggestions but also expand the expression of sorrow poetically in ways that seem to regender it. As in his poem written in memory of Francis Bacon, Herbert claims in his elegies to spill as many tears as the one-­hundred-­eyed Argus (MMS 16.8–12) and defends, against the “Stoica plebs” [“Stoic rabble”] (12.1), his right to sing and cry his grief. His poems are themselves fluxive, spilled t­ hings, whose ink “dissolves” in “bright liquid” tears (9.17–18). Humorously mocking foreign travelers’ preconceived ideas concerning En­glish weather, Herbert claims that, now that Magdalen is dead, the “Sky” is indeed “overcast ­because of excessive wetness / And the mud of Britain” (10.3–4), “sending a general flood” [nunc inundat omnes]



“Resplendence of W ­ omen, Men’s Means to Zeal” 77

(10.14). The “white-­topped waves of the Thames” (18.1) overflow the river’s banks. Out of this diluvian topography, Lady Danvers emerges almost as a ­Mother of Sorrows. This, at least, is the suggestion of the very first line of poem 1. Though the poem describes the tears of the mourning son, the line is carefully structured in the original Latin to intimate a form of symmetry between the initial address to “Mater” and the term “Dolores,” isolated syntactically at the end: “AH Mater, quo te deplorem fonte? Dolores / Quae guttae poterunt enumerare meos?” [“Ah M ­ other, from what spring might I draw / My Sorrows’ w ­ aters? What drops could count my griefs?”] (1.1–2). But, thanks to the use of just as neat a symmetrical pattern and another enjambment, the final lines of the poem in turn propose to transform the grief for a “­mother” (Mater) into “meters” (Metra): “ne tu mihi tantùm ­/ Mater: & ista Dolor nunc tibi Metra parit” [“you’ll be to me not only / ­Mother: & so Sorrow for you gives birth now to Meters”] (1.7–8). The “Dolor” of the poet’s grief is framed in the m ­ iddle of the last line, buttressed between “Mater” and its anagram “Metra,” mea­sured and contained by verse, just as it is contained by the discourse of comfort of Donne’s homily. The last poem of Herbert’s sequence further testifies to the way grief may and must ultimately be alleviated by pastoral comfort and even by pastoral vocation as Herbert lets go of the “pipes” (calamos, 19.1) of pastoral complaint to pick up instead the georgic “scythe” ( falcé[m], 19.1), embracing, as it ­were, the prospect of his ecclesiastical (or pastoral, in the other sense of the word) commitment.24 If in his sermon Donne speaks out against the scorn of atheists and jesters, he also warns against other “perilous men,” “Seducing Spirits, and Seducing by the doctrine of Dev­ils, forbidding meats and mariage,” who “pretend Miracles” by teaching false hopes and false means to salvation. More importantly yet, Donne inveighs against the detrimental effects of excessive fear of God’s judgment, of the “very many, infinite . . . ​terrours of that day.”25 As if to soothe Herbert’s lachrymose out-­spilling, Donne states that “all that floud, and deluge of teares, ­shall not put out one coale, nor quench one sparke” of God’s “fire.”26 Returning to the pivotal point of his sermon, he reminds his auditors and readers that “Neverthelesse, saies our Text; though ­there bee ­these scornfull jests, though ­there bee ­these reall terrours, Neverthelesse, ­there are a Wee, certaine privileged persons . . . ​who have seene the markes of his Election.”27 Donne’s sermon, in other words, draws the perimeters of a communal identity, “Wee,” the true Church, a “Gens Sancta” that defines itself si­mul­ta­neously against disbelievers, teachers of false beliefs who pretend that t­ here are “Christs kneaded into peeces of bread,” and teachers of hopeless beliefs, or a “sinfull melancholy,” who claim that ­there is an “irrevocable Judgement” and “Extermination of all my succours.”28 In the first, longer ­section of his sermon, destined to “instruct the Living,” Donne thus unravels his soteriological agenda, showing that the “Gens Sancta” or “Wee” he belongs to is one that refrains both from Roman Catholic errors, especially Cardinal Robert Bellarmine’s teachings on a self-­confident “Infallible Church,” and the utter

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despair of ­those who believe in infallible damnation.29 His sermon turns into a defense of what he calls, in several other places, a “modest infallibility,” and refers to this time as a “holy cheerfulness,” that is to say, a holy confidence in God’s saving grace and the signs thereof.30 Lady Danvers, whose character is described in  particularly personal terms when compared with other funeral sermons, becomes the very embodiment of this conception of salvation, in which fears are not denied but joy and hope never lost: This being the Aire, and the Complexion of the Wit of her Times, and her inclination, and conversation, naturally cheerfull, and merry, and loving facetiousnesse, and sharpnesse of wit, Neverthelesse, who ever saw her, who ever heard her countenance a prophane speech, how sharpe soever, or take part with wit, to the prejudice of Godlinesse? From this I testifie her holy cheerfulnesse, and Religious alacrity, (one of the best evidences of a good conscience) . . . ​And for her, some sicknesses, in the declination of her yeeres, had opened her to an overflowing of Melancholie . . . ​ Occasionall Melancholy had taken some hold in her; Neverthelesse, that never Ecclipst, never interrupted her cheerfull confidence, and assurance in God.31

This “mediocrity” of Lady Danvers, in the etymological sense of moderation, is an aurea mediocritas, a golden mean. It was “[h]er rule,” claims Donne; it should become that of all t­ hose who contemplate her memory.32 Even her second marriage with a man twenty years younger than herself is used by Donne to work out the miraculous arithmetic of the Church of ­England’s golden mean: “as the well tuning of an Instrument, makes higher and lower strings, of one sound, so the in­equality of their yeeres, was thus reduc’t to an evennesse . . . ​I would put their yeeres into one number, and finding a sixty betweene them, thinke them thirty a peece.”33 This golden mediocrity is impersonated not only by Lady Danvers’s character but also by her faith, which is reflective of Donne’s ideal via media: “Shee never diverted ­towards the Papist, in undervaluing the Scripture; nor ­towards the Separatist, in undervaluing the Church.”34 According to Doerksen, Donne’s notion of “modest infallibility” defines him as a “moderate predestinarian, a moderate Calvinist.”35 However, it is prob­ably no coincidence that the only Reformer Donne cares to mention explic­itly in his sermon is Luther rather than Calvin. Luther’s name is, somewhat ironically, introduced as Donne mimics the scornful remarks against the Church of E ­ ngland by the jesters or disbelievers in God’s judgment: “When to all our sober preaching, and serious writing, a scornfull ignorant, s­ hall thinke it enough to oppose that one question of contempt, Where was your Church before Luther? Whereas, if wee had had any t­hing from Luther, which wee had not had before, yet even that, ­were elder than ­those Articles, which they had from the Councell of Trent.”36 Luther, h­ ere, is turned into the heir of e­ arlier Church ­Fathers, such as Augustine and John Chrysostom, whom Donne quotes much more prolixly in the rest of



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his sermon, showing as elsewhere in his works that the Church of E ­ ngland is the ­bearer of a truly Catholic tradition. The Roman Catholic Church as defined by the Council of Trent, on the other hand, is implicitly taxed with unwarranted innovations. But it is worth noticing that Donne seems voluntarily to avoid any reference to Calvin, who could be used as an authority by the teachers of despair and infallible damnation, which Donne equally denounces in his sermon. Luther, in other words, appears to provide a safer common ground for founding a unified Church.37 Richard Strier has called attention to Herbert’s similar indebtedness to a Lutheran perspective with regard to the heated question of justification and his reliance upon the German Reformer as an alternative to the Calvinist covenant theology that was developing during his lifetime in ­England. If Herbert’s reliance upon “faith alone” in God’s “truth” took pre­ce­dence over all forms of “bargaining,” in Strier’s own words, I would like to suggest that this does not only speak to the poet’s relationship to God but also to Herbert’s hope for a more unified and perhaps less judgmental Church.38 The Marian subtext to Donne and Herbert’s volume contributes to endorsing further this Lutheran slant, as distinct from a Calvinist covenantal one, b­ ecause it enables both men to approach the question of female sanctity, and sanctity more generally, in a way that is missing for them in the Calvinist, however moderately predestinarian, salvific design. In what is prob­ably the climax of his soteriological demonstration, when Donne unpacks his understanding of the workings of righ­teousness, he attempts to solve the “dispute” menacing his Church in a particularly subtle way. Donne walks a fine line, describing a righ­teousness that is not “of” one’s w ­ ill but is still “in” one’s ­will: It was an Act of mercy, meerly, that God decreed a meanes of salvation; But to give salvation to them, for whom Christ gave that full satisfaction, is but an act of ­Iustice. . . . ​Iustice dwels t­ here, and ­there dwels Righ­teousnes; Of which t­ here is none in this world; None that growes in this world; none that is mine owne; For, howsoever we doe dispute, or w ­ ill conclude of inherent Righ­teousnes, it is, indeed, rather adherent, then inherent; rather extrinsecall than intrinsecal. Not that it is not in my self; in my w ­ ill; but that it is not of my selfe, nor of my w ­ ill; My w ­ ill was never able to rectifie, to justifie it selfe; But the power of God’s grace cals in a forraine Righ­teousnes, to my succour, the Righteousnesse of my Saviour, and cals his, and makes his, my Righ­teousnesse.39

Though Calvin of course followed Luther in his adherence to justification by faith, it is noteworthy that Donne’s lexis is distinctly Lutheran in this passage, without naming the German Reformer. Donne resorts to the notion of forensic justification (“God decreed a meanes of salvation,” emphasis added) and prefers to speak of “forraine Righ­teousnes” over “imputed righteousness”—­the latter phrase would have sounded more familiarly Calvinist to his listeners—­yet, like Luther,

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he claims that through Christ this foreign righ­teousness is made “my Righ­ teousnesse.”40 While this passage enables Donne to expound in what way exactly the Gens Sancta is justified, it allows him to suggest at the same time the role he attributes to Lady Danvers throughout his sermon, that of an exemplar—­which is in full keeping with the still dominant Calvinist theology of his Church—­but one that is also more distinctly reminiscent of Luther’s deeply admired Mary. While Luther was critical of Catholic Marian devotion that established Mary as a mediatrix, he nevertheless continued to praise her as a model for the faith of the Church in its most exalted form.41 The Reformed Church of E ­ ngland followed suit at an early stage: Archbishop Cranmer contributed to the endurance of Mary’s dignity by including the Magnificat in the liturgy of the Eve­ning Prayer in the 1549 Prayer Book (a place it had not occupied in the Catholic liturgy) and turning it into “the bridge between the Old Testament” (the psalm and first reading) “and the New Testament” of Evensong, even though Psalm 98 was a permitted alternative from 1552 on.42 This positioning of the Magnificat can be said to have acted as a reminder that Mary, by giving flesh and birth to Christ, was the matrix of the Incarnation and a starting point for the unravelling of its soteriological design—­a positioning, however, that also deflected her ­later function as intercessor. By the time Lady Danvers had died and Donne preached her commemoration sermon, the (High) Church of E ­ ngland had developed a fairly solid Marian tradition of its own, as was testified in Lancelot Andrewes’s Christmas preaching and Preces Privatae (the latter was only published in 1648, however), where Andrewes regularly borrowed from the Orthodox tradition in his description of “the eternal Virgin” as “the most holy, pure, and highly blessed” and even as “the m ­ other of God.”43 Despite the strong degree of reverence Andrewes expressed, what a voice such as his highlighted is distinct, however, from the Roman Catholic tradition of the intercession of Mary. It rather signaled Mary’s significance in giving a womb and ­human shape to the divine. Aware of how burning an issue the status of Mary was once more becoming in the early years of Charles I’s reign, Donne, however, appears in the sermon to decouple Magdalen Danvers from any explicit association with the Virgin. He looks back to Luther, an authority who might transcend con­temporary divides within the Church of ­England, extolling this less pure, and therefore also less controversial, “lady” and “­mother” and addressing the question of determining righ­teousness in a characteristically Lutheran language of salvation—­even while he goes so far as to invoke Magdalen, almost like a spirit.44 At the beginning of the second part of his sermon, in which Donne sets about the task of commemoration, he indeed conjures up Lady Danvers, asking her to “Arise,” carefully specifying, however, that she should not “appeare” “as thou art a Saint in Heaven” but rather “as thou didst appeare to us a moneth agoe; At least, appeare in thy history; Appeare in our memory.”45 In so ­doing, Donne conforms to the Protestant and Reformed tradition, according to which the deceased elect



“Resplendence of W ­ omen, Men’s Means to Zeal” 81

belong to a community of saints and stand as exemplary figures but are not intercessors. Yet, as the “best wife,” “best Friend,” and, especially, “best ­mother,” the portrait of this “elect Ladie” becomes reminiscent in places of Luther’s more complex and ambivalent eulogy of Mary.46 As seen above, Donne avoids comparing Magdalen Herbert to Mary, and female biblical characters altogether, in his sermon. However, he does, at the very end, draw an analogy with “another Magdalen” who “ascended . . . ​to [Christ’s] glory.”47 He had been less prudent in his e­ arlier, private correspondence with Magdalen Herbert. In a letter written to her twenty years ­earlier, Donne compares Magdalen to a Virgin land, the recipient of a “colony of letters,” and claims that she is “worthier than that Countrey [­Virginia]” for she has “a better trea­sure, and a harmlessness.”48 In another letter dated June 11, 1607, he elaborates ambiguously on her biblical homonym, testifying to a certain degree of embarrassment about their close friendship. He enclosed with the letter a sonnet praising her devotion and her affinities with the biblical Magdalen who “once knew, more than the Church did know, / The Resurrection.”49 R. C. Bald conjectures that the further sonnets Donne allegedly enclosed with the letter may well have been the sequence “La Corona,” in which Mary, the “faithfull Virgin” (“Annunciation,” 5) and “kinde ­mother” (“Nativitie,” 14), is given an impor­ tant role in the economy of the Incarnation, and thereby in salvation.50 Though in ­these letters and poems Donne never explic­itly turns Magdalen Herbert into a Marian figure, the web of associations is sufficiently suggestive to magnify Magdalen as a model of faith and an allegory of the ­Mother Church. In the commemoration sermon, Donne’s portrait of Magdalen in many ways conforms to traditional Reformed approaches to Mary, both Lutheran and ­Calvinist, which understood her as a model of faith, modesty, obedience, and charity—as well as a “real” w ­ oman, with her own blemishes, such as Lady Danvers’s fits of melancholy. But at other times, the sermon betrays Donne’s sense that Lady Danvers is not just one saint among God’s choir and that, not unlike Mary in Luther’s description of her in the commentary upon the Magnificat, she “rehearses all the works of God that He operates in general in all men, and sings His praises also for them, teaching us to understand the work, method, nature, and w ­ ill of God.”51 Lady Danvers draws strikingly near this Lutheran portrait of Mary, rehearsing on a slightly smaller scale all the works of God that He works in this “Wee” that Donne speaks of in reference to the Church of ­England. At the end of his sermon, Donne apostrophizes his auditors, inviting them to wear the same garb of female sanctity as Lady Danvers and calling them “­daughters of Ierusalem,” what­ever their sex may be: I charge you, O ye d­ aughters of Ierusalem, wake her not. Wake her not, with any halfe calumnies, with any whisperings; But if you wil wake her, wake her, and keepe her awake with an active imitation, of her Morall, and her Holy vertues. That so her example working upon you, and the number of Gods Saints, being the sooner, by

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this blessed example, fulfil’d wee may all meet, and meet quickly in that kingdome, which hers, and our Saviour, hath purchac’t for us all, with the inestimable price, of his incorruptible bloud.52

A ­little e­ arlier in the sermon, Donne explains that, if Lady Danvers has died and has been promised redemption: “yet, shee is in expectation still . . . ​The ­whole world must die, before she come to a possession of this Reversion; which is a Glorified body in the Resurrection. In which expectation, she return’s to her former charity; shee ­will not have that, till all wee ­shall have it.”53 Lady Danvers is truly a tutelary figure, mapping out the “New Heavens” that the rest of the Church ­Militant ­shall someday glimpse as well.54 Whereas Donne’s sermon can be seen to contain the grief of Herbert’s elegiacs within a Christian framework of homiletic comfort, Herbert’s poems reciprocally allow this tutelary function of Lady Danvers to be made more explicit and help to magnify her in ways that “stricter” or covenantal Calvinism would have rendered difficult. Commenting on Herbert’s sequence of elegies, some critics have expressed discomfort, especially with poem 7, in which Herbert describes himself meeting a frightening, “Pallid, bloodless semblance” of his “motherly Guardian Spirit” (MMS 7.1). Rubin speaks of Herbert as engaging in a “kind of Orphic bargaining for the return of the dead,” but Freis, Freis, and Miller’s edition also calls attention to the necessity of contextualizing Herbert’s description of the phantasm in relation to Reformation demonology, which “rejected the idea that ghosts might be the spirits of the dead returning to the world” and asserted instead that demons could take on the appearance of any person at w ­ ill.55 For Freis, Freis, and Miller, the poem reads rather as an act of “self-­parody” on Herbert’s part and an “extravagant, comic, and poignant effort to persuade the spirit to live with him in the likeness of Lady Danvers.”56 It is only gradually that the poet is able to grow ­toward an ac­cep­tance that he ­will have to wait patiently before he may be re­united with his ­mother. ­Here it seems that Donne’s sermon proposes a useful frame and response to the bereaved son’s experience when it teaches that the hope of “Reversion” which “we . . . ​expect,” the “holy impatience” that is rooted in Christ’s promise, also needs to be accompanied by “a holy patience till he be pleas’d to give us New Heavens and new Earth, wherein dwelleth Righ­teousnesse,” and of which Lady Danvers is once more “the best example.”57 Herbert’s elegiac sequence shows the ways in which Lady Danvers can become a shining star, an incentive to climb up her “rays” (MMS 3.2) ­toward the “New Heavens” of righ­ teousness by dramatizing the patient (in both the common and the etymological sense) pro­cess of expectation. According to Rubin, when, in poem 11, Herbert compares himself to “another Ulysses” [alter Vlysses] (MMS 11.13), “Wandering from point to point” (11.13), and equates Magdalen’s death with “a second Iliad” [Alterá . . . ​Ilias] (11.14), Herbert “retreats . . . ​from a Christian perspective and consolations and also from



“Resplendence of W ­ omen, Men’s Means to Zeal” 83

the language of Protestant worship.” The poet’s “sweeping claim” testifies to his psychological crisis and the allusion “remains hermetic” in Rubin’s eyes.58 Yet Donne’s sermon itself weaves in an image that calls to mind Homer’s epic universe when he speaks of the “Voyage” that leads us to “new Heavens, and new Earth, wherein dwelleth Righ­teousnesse”: “in this our Voyage through this Sea, which is truly a Mediterranean Sea, a Sea betwixt two Lands, the Land of Possession, which wee have, and the Land of Promise which wee expect.”59 While Herbert’s explicit reference to the Iliad at the end of poem 11 suggests his sense of utter loss, the “second” voyage and description of Ulysses’s wanderings is more evocative yet of the Odyssey—­itself a long Mediterranean voyage home, to the “Land of Promise.” Herbert’s Homeric allusion is hardly cryptic; it sets into relief Donne’s punning use of the Mediterranean or “med-­terranean” image as well as a cele­bration of Lady Danvers as a model of mediocrity and a model traveler between old and new lands. In Herbert’s poem 13, the only one to bear a title, “Epitaphium,” Lady ­Danvers is also described as “both exalted and low” and “yok[ing] far regions” [Sic excelsa humilísque simul loca dissita iunxit] (MMS 13.5), an idea also articulated in poem 4: “Born into this world by you, / I am born into another by your example [Per te nascor in hunc globum, / Exemplóque tuo nascor in alterum] (4.13–14). If Herbert seemingly “retreats” from the “language of Protestant worship,” this move only enables him, in fact, to elaborate further on the soteriological implications of Donne’s sermon and further magnify Lady Danvers as a model of faith, as the depository of God’s “forraine Righ­teousnes,” and as an example calling for “active imitation.”60 In writing his highly personal poems of lament, Herbert actually joins in the communal voice, the voice of the Church, as it celebrates an “elect Ladie” who is the very metonymy of this Gens Sancta: she is a “­Mother, resplendence of ­women, men’s means to zeal” (MMS 15.1), “a common foremother” (17.3), the “civic face of goodness and a divine mirror” (17.7), a “Genitrix” (9.1), a “Magna Mater” (10.5), and the “Domina” or “Lady” (5.8) of Donne and Herbert’s common “domus,” their “home” or Church (5.8).61 Herbert’s acts of elegiac writing are in fact performative of the “active imitation” encouraged by Donne’s sermon.62 Of all of the t­ hings his m ­ other taught him, writing is the most precious one (MMS 2.52–65). However “mea­sured” by meter Herbert’s words are, they seem to spill out spontaneously: “so much do my letters, by which / You taught me, owe you, they choose to flood the pages” (2.62–63). In the original Latin, Herbert uses, precisely, the adverb “sponte”: “literae hoc debent tibi / Queîs me educasti; sponte chartas illinunt” (2.62–63). The adverb means at once “voluntarily” and “spontaneously.” It again resonates, therefore, with a distinctly Lutheran ele­ment of theology, which is the notion that spontaneous, f­ ree actions that are “in our will” but not “of our will” (as Donne would say) flow from “faith in the salvation accomplished by Jesus Christ.”63 Herbert’s spontaneous acts of writing illustrate Donne’s cele­bration of active imitation, but, more than that, they enable Herbert to make Magdalen “Arise” literally as a “Booke” rather than as a

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ghost, demon, or “Saint in Heaven.”64 They literalize Donne’s plea to Lady Danvers to “Arise thou Booke of Death . . . ​Arise thou, and bee another Commentary to us” (meaning one complementary to the Scriptures), “and tell us, what this new Heaven, and new Earth is, in which, now, thou dwel’st, with that Righ­teousnesse.”65 Herbert’s use of classical language and literary allusion in Memoriae Matris Sacrum does not testify to a secular excursion on the part of the poet, however personal ­these poems may be. Quite the contrary, his appropriation of classical form enables him to further enhance Donne’s implicit cele­bration and appropriation of Magdalen Herbert as a Lutheran Marian figure in a language that is not suspect, precisely b­ ecause it is not overtly Christian. Magdalen offers an alternative model to the Roman Catholic understanding of Mary as an a­ ctual intercessor, which Henrietta Maria, as well as Donne, for that ­matter, may have “sucked” in their “infancy.”66 Donne and Herbert’s Magdalen, very much like Luther’s Mary, is, despite a few blemishes (and perhaps thanks to ­these blemishes), the living testimony of God’s “forraine Righ­teousnes,” the living witness of a “modest infallibility” that could perhaps provide the basis for a unified, accepting Church.67 Her modesty and mediocrity may indeed be taken to echo the notions of “humility” and even “humiliation” so central to Luther’s understanding of Mary, both in his commentary on the Magnificat and in his sermon for the second Sunday ­after Epiphany on the passage from the Gospel of John relating the Wedding in Cana ( John 2:1–11). In the biblical passage, Christ begins by denying his ­mother’s request when she intercedes for, or rather humbly suggests, the need for more wine for the bride and groom’s feast before he actually proceeds to change ­water into wine of his own volition: Iesus saith vnto her, ­Woman, what haue I to doe with thee? mine houre is not yet come. His ­mother saith vnto þe seruants, Whatsoeuer he saith vnto you, doe it. And ­there ­were set ­there sixe w ­ ater pots of stone, ­after the maner of the purifying of the Iewes, conteining two or three firkins apeece. Iesus saith vnto them, Fill the ­water pots with ­water. ( John 2:4–7)68

Though Luther never gave up the belief in Mary’s sinlessness, following Augustine on this point, the main focus of his exegesis of the Magnificat is Mary’s humility or humiliation, which is comparable to Job’s own experience of despair, a type Donne also refers to, as we have seen, in his evocation of Lady Danvers. Yet humiliation, despair, and melancholy do not bar hope; they become, as it ­were, the condition for hope, as well as the best proof that justification is not attained through works (i.e., in the case of Luther’s sermon on the Wedding in Cana, the intercession of Mary in ­favor of the wedded c­ ouple), nor through “bargaining,” but always and only through God’s imparted grace in which Mary,



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above all o­ thers, believes. Luther insists on how “absolutely” Christ refuses “to do God’s work when his own m ­ other wants it,” but also on how “the m ­ other of Christ direct[s] the servants away from herself unto Christ” and his word (“do that, and that alone”), showing how true “faith does not fail.”69 It is this faith, along with her hospitality—­another trait that also characterizes Magdalen Herbert according to Donne’s sermon and George Herbert’s elegies—­ that makes Luther’s Mary the m ­ other of all believers, in the same way that Donne and Herbert turn their m ­ other and friend into the best of examples and “Commentar[ies] to us,” to echo a phrase from Donne’s sermon quoted ­earlier.70 Just like Mary’s, Magdalen’s sanctity derives from her generous humility and caring modesty, qualities which ­were (and still often are) culturally gendered as feminine. Yet we should not be mistaken: the gendering of sanctity as female is meta­phorical of an entirely spiritual disposition both ­women and men alike are called upon to pursue. Donne made this clear in another commemoration sermon preached some two years e­ arlier for the deceased James I, in which he expounds upon Song of Songs 3:11: “Goe forth ye ­daughters of Sion, and behold King Solomon, with the Crown, Wherewith his m ­ other crowned him, in the day of his espousals, and in the day of the gladnesse of his heart.”71 In his exegesis of the verse, Donne insists on the significance of the feminine quality of his addressees, or the “­daughters of Sion,” just as he l­ater apostrophizes the “­daughters of Ierusalem” in the sermon on Lady Danvers.72 ­These ­daughters are none other than the congregation of believers: “the persons to whom the Church speakes ­here, are Filiæ Sion, The d­ aughters of Sion, her owne ­daughters. We are not called, Filii Ecclesiæ, sonnes of the Church: The name of sonnes may imply more virility, more manhood, more sense of our owne strength, then becomes them, who professe an obedience to the Church.”73 While the dean of St. Paul’s unsurprisingly analogizes James I to Solomon—­ himself a prefiguration of Christ—it is striking that he also seeks to feminize the king at the time of his last tribulation as he undergoes the humiliation of death, suggesting a kinship between James and the figure of Mary, who both stand as “blessed example[s]” of h­ umble faith and generous inclusiveness.74 This becomes particularly con­spic­uo­ us when Donne asks his auditors to “Behold King Solomon; Solomon the sonne of David, but not the Son of Bathsheba, but of a better ­mother, the most blessed Virgin Mary.”75 Keeping in mind the e­ arlier comment on the identity of the “­daughters of Sion,” the revised genealogy Donne proposes ­here is not only put at the ser­vice of a traditionally allegorical reading of the Song of Songs; it also suggests that Solomon (and thereby James) is somehow part of a female line of filiation. Though he is a “sonne,” his likeness to his spiritual ­mother makes him a true “­daughter” to Mary, and potentially a “­mother” of the Church of believers. Interestingly, Solomon is also praised at the end of Luther’s reading of the Magnificat as being gifted with a special humility (the humility of a natu­ ral rather than a legitimate son) and with the pureness of heart that earned him

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the privilege of building God’s t­ emple, just as Mary, in her humiliation, was the ­temple of the infinite God. The many echoes of the ­humble “exaltation” and indulgence of Mary that John Donne and George Herbert wove into their collaborative commemoration of Magdalen Herbert situated her firmly within the same spiritual hereditary line.76 ­There seems to be ­little doubt that, for her friend and her son, Lady ­Danvers came to play a similar function, and that her “female” sanctity stood as a model for the sanctity at which the community of believers should aim. Both men, in other words, joined their voices to provide a common text, at once homiletic and poetic, which was more than a ­simple collection of “Commemorations.” They in­ven­ted a mixed or mingled language that could address saintly (and necessarily female) “mediocrity,” that could translate their common vision of their ­Mother the Church through the portrait of a ­woman who stood as the metonymy of this hopeful vision. They sang together of the loss of Lady Danvers and hoped she would become the effective model of “­women’s resplendence” and “men’s means to zeal” (MMS 15.1) so that they would not have to lament the loss of a unified Church.

notes I wish to thank Greg Miller for sharing with me his translation of Memoriae Matris Sacrum at an early stage and for his helpful suggestions and encouragement. I am also grateful to Russell M. Hillier and Robert W. Reeder for their generous dedication to this proj­ect and their particularly careful, considerate work as editors. 1. ​See Hutchinson’s commentary in George Herbert, The Works of George Herbert, ed. F. E.

Hutchinson (1941; rpt., Oxford: Clarendon, 1959), 594.

2. ​Donne’s sermon is quoted throughout from George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson’s

edition, The Sermons of John Donne, 10 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, ­1953–1962), 8:61–93. 3. ​See Evelyn  M. Simpson, “The Biographical Value of Donne’s Sermons,” The Review of En­glish Studies, 2, no. 8 (1951): 339–357. In his recent biography of George Herbert, John Drury resorts to the sermon for similar biographical information; see Drury, ­Music at Midnight: The Life and Poetry of George Herbert (London: Penguin, 2013), legend to illustration 2. 4. ​See, in par­tic­u­lar, Daniel W. Doerksen, “Polemist or Pastor?: Donne and Moderate Calvinist Conformity,” in John Donne and the Protestant Reformation: New Perspectives, ed. Mary Arshagouni Papazian (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2003), 12–34, especially 19. 5. ​ Jeanne Shami, “Reading Funeral Sermons for Early Modern En­glish ­Women: Some ­Literary and Historiographical Challenges,” in Religious Diversity and Early Modern En­glish Texts: Catholic, Judaic, Feminist, and Secular Dimensions, ed. Arthur  F. Marotti and Chanita Goodblatt (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2013), 282. 6. ​Donne strikingly refrains from comparing Magdalen to any female biblical character in the sermon. He draws an analogy with Job ­because, like her biblical antecedent, Magdalen “multiplied into ten ­Children; Iob’s number; and Iob’s distribution, (as shee, her selfe would very often remember) seven sonnes, and three ­daughters” (8:87). 7. ​The text is quoted a­ fter Greg Miller’s translation of the original Greek. I w ­ ill be citing Herbert’s poems a­ fter Miller’s translation throughout, in Memoriae Matris Sacrum. To the Memory



“Resplendence of W ­ omen, Men’s Means to Zeal” 87

of my ­Mother: A Consecrated Gift, ed. Catherine Freis, Richard Freis, and Greg Miller, George Herbert Journal, 33, nos. 1–2 (Fairfield, CT: Sacred Heart University, 2009–2010): 42–43. Subsequent references to Herbert’s poems in Memoriae Matris Sacrum (MMS) w ­ ill derive from this edition, and ­will be cited parenthetically in the text by line number. 8. ​Deborah Rubin, “ ‘Let your death be my Iliad’: Classical Allusion and Latin in George ­Herbert’s Memoriae Matris Sacrum,” in Reconsidering the Re­nais­sance, ed. Mario A. Di Cesare (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Re­nais­sance Texts and Studies, 1992), 431. 9. ​See notably Freis, Freis, and Miller’s comments on Herbert’s use of invective forms in Memoriae Matris Sacrum, 63. 10. ​Greg Miller, George Herbert’s “Holy Patterns”: Reforming Individuals in Community (New York: Continuum, 2007), 4 and 9. 11. ​Greg Miller, George Herbert’s “Holy Patterns,” 61. For an erotic reading of poem 5, see Rubin, “ ‘Let your death be my Iliad.’ ” Freis, Freis, and Miller argue against this interpretation in Memoriae Matris Sacrum, 81. Their edition has led me to reconsider part of my own previous analy­sis and evaluation of Herbert’s praise of his m ­ other as “idolatrous.” See Anne-­Marie Miller-­Blaise, “George Herbert’s Distemper: An Honest Shepherd’s Remedy to Melancholy,” George Herbert Journal 30, nos. 1–2 (2006–2007): 59–82. 12. ​See Freis, Freis, and Miller’s commentary on the layout and significance of ­these words on the first page of the poetic collection, Memoriae Matris Sacrum, 56. 13. ​See notably André Gounelle, La mort et l’au-­delà (Geneva: L ­ abor et fides, 1998), chapter 1, and Cornelia Niekus Moore, Patterned Lives: The Lutheran Funeral Biography in Early Modern Germany (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2006). 14. ​The volume was printed in London in 1625 by T. Snodham for Nathanael Newbery: En­glish Short Title Cata­logue (ESTC), 2nd ed., 4575.7. 15. ​The first of ­these editions, published in honor of Prince Henry, is Epicedium Cantabrigiense, in obitum immaturum, semper deflendum, Henrici, illustrissimi principis Walliae (Cambridge, 1612), which contains two poems by George Herbert, who was then nineteen, the same age as Prince Henry. The second, in honor of Queen Anne, is Lacrymae Cantabrigienses in obitum serenissimae Reginae Annae (Cambridge, 1619). Herbert was prob­ably instrumental in the publication, in honor of Francis Bacon, of Memoriae honoratissimi Domini Francisci, Baronis de Verulamio, Sacrum (London, 1626). The volume was published in London rather than in Cambridge, where such a publication would have been impossible a­ fter Bacon’s impeachment in 1621. See Cristina Malcolmson, George Herbert: A Literary Life (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 81. 16. ​See Freis, Freis, and Miller, eds., Memoriae Matris Sacrum, 69. 17. ​The volume was printed in London in 1620. It contains a prose relation of the funeral sermon, as well as a series of En­glish and Latin elegies: ESTC, 2nd ed., 6030. 18. ​See Henry R. Plomer, A Dictionary of the Booksellers and Printers Who ­Were at Work in ­England, Scotland and Ireland from 1641 to 1667 (London: Bibliographic Society, 1907), 172. 19. ​See Drury, ­Music at Midnight, 171–173, and Amy  M. Charles, A Life of George Herbert (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 104–135. 20. ​See Miller-­Blaise, “An Honest Shepherd’s Remedy to Melancholy,” and Miller-­Blaise, “ ‘O  write in brasse’: George Herbert’s Trajectory from Pen to Print,” Études Épistémè 21 (2012), available online at http://­episteme​.­revues​.o­ rg​/­402. 21. ​Donne, Sermons, 7:409. The sermon was preached at court in April 1627. Simon Healy, “Donne, the Patriot Cause, and War, 1620–1629,” in The Oxford Handbook of John Donne, ed.  Dennis Flynn, M.  Thomas Hester, and Jeanne Shami (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 616–631; see 626 for the pre­sent quote. 22. ​Donne, Sermons, 8:63.

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23. ​Donne, Sermons, 8:65. 24. ​For further analy­sis of the last poem in relationship to Herbert’s pastoral vocation, see

Miller-­Blaise, “An Honest Shepherd’s Remedy to Melancholy” and Le Verbe fait image: iconoclasmes, écriture figurée et théologie de l’Incarnation chez les poètes métaphysiques. Le cas de George Herbert (Paris: Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2010), 175–176. 25. ​Donne, Sermons, 8:67 and 8:69. 26. ​Donne, Sermons, 8:69. 27. ​Donne, Sermons, 8:69–70. 28. ​Donne, Sermons, 8:70, 8:67, and 8:68. 29. ​Donne, Sermons, 8:63 and 8:73. 30. ​The expression is found in several of Donne’s sermons, from the beginning to the end of his ­career as a preacher. See notably an early 1615 sermon (1:164), and his last sermon, “Death’s Duell” (10:237). In another 1627 sermon, the Fifth Prebend Sermon, preached shortly before the commemorative sermon for Lady Danvers, Donne also elaborates on the notion of infallibility (8:110–129). For more discussion of Donne’s and Herbert’s approaches to the theological question of assurance, see Kate Narveson’s and Danielle A. St. Hilaire’s essays in chapter 7 and chapter 8 of the pre­sent volume. 31. ​Donne, Sermons, 8:86–87. 32. ​Donne, Sermons, 8:89. 33. ​Donne, Sermons, 8:88. 34. ​Donne, Sermons, 8:90. 35. ​See Doerksen, “Polemist or Pastor?,” 21. 36. ​Donne, Sermons, 8:67. 37. ​For more on the affinity between Donne’s theology and that of Luther, see Kirsten Stirling’s essay in chapter 1 of the pre­sent volume. 38. ​Richard Strier, Love Known: Theology and Experience in George Herbert’s Poetry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 84–113 in par­tic­ul­ar. See also Strier’s essay “John Donne and the Politics of Devotion” in Religion, Lit­er­a­ture and Politics in Post-­Reformation ­England, 1540–1688, ed. Donna  B. Hamilton and Richard Strier (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 93–114. 39. ​Donne, Sermons, 8:84. 40. ​ See notably Martin Luther, Luther’s Works, American edition, 55 vols, ed. Helmut T. Lehmann (Philadelphia: Muehlenberg and Fortress, and St. Louis, MO: Concordia, 1955–1986), 25:126 and 51:28. For a synthetical explanation of Luther’s understanding of righ­teousness, see Hans J. Iwand, The Righ­teousness of Faith According to Luther (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2008), 69ff. 41. ​See notably Alain Joblin, “Les protestants, Marie, et le culte marial,” in La dévotion Mariale de l’an mil à nos jours, ed. Bruno Béthouart and Alain Lottin (Arras: Presses Universitaire d’Artois, 2005), 323–336. 42. ​Roger Greenacre, Maiden, ­Mother and Queen: Mary in the Anglican Tradition (1988; repr., Norwich: Canterbury Press, 2013), 69. 43. ​J. Bliss and J. P. Wilson, eds., The Works of Lancelot Andrewes, 11 vols. (Oxford: L.A.C.T., 1841–1854), 11:295. See also in par­tic­u­lar his 1609 and 1614 Nativity sermons in vol. 1. 44. ​With regard to the question of purity, it is worthwhile comparing Donne’s sermon for Lady Danvers to one he preached most likely only a few months ­earlier for Candlemas 1626/27. He h­ ere uses the feast of the purification of the Virgin meta­phor­ically to deconstruct simplified and erroneous definitions of purity of heart, attacking at once the “Catharists that think no ­things pure,” the “Cathari that think no men pure but themselves,” and the “Super-­ Cathari, in the Romane Church, that think ­these men as pure, as the Saints, who are in posses-



“Resplendence of W ­ omen, Men’s Means to Zeal” 89

sion of the sight of God in heaven” (7:335). Against the misconceptions of nonconformists and Roman Catholics, Donne notes with Saint Bernard that true purity of heart and of the Church is mirrored by the beauty of Mary, the w ­ oman: “when the Church is highliest extolled for her Beauty, yet it is but Pulcherrima inter mulieres, the Fairest amongst ­women . . . ​She is not compared with her owne state in Heaven” (7:340–341). 45. ​Donne, Sermons, 8:85. 46. ​Donne, Sermons, 8:85 and 8:86. 47. ​Donne, Sermons, 8:91. 48. ​Quoted in Izaak Walton, The Life of Mr. George Herbert (London, 1670), 141–142, and in The Life and Letters of John Donne, ed. Edmund Gosse, 2 vols. (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1959), 1:164–165. For further analy­sis of this letter, see M. Thomas Hester, “Donne’s (Re) Annunciation of the Virgin(ia Colony) in ‘Elegy 19,’ ” South Central Review 4, no. 2 (1987): 49–64. 49. ​The poem is quoted in Drury, ­Music at Midnight, 75. 50. ​R. C. Bald, John Donne: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 182. “La Corona” is quoted h­ ere ­after Helen Gardner’s edition, The Divine Poems, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1978), 1–5. 51. ​Luther, Luther’s Works, 21:331. The Magnificat was first translated by John Hollybush, alias Miles Coverdale, for a print edition in E ­ ngland in 1538 u­ nder the full title An exposicion vpon the songe of the blessed virgine Mary, called [H] Magnificat Where vnto are added the songes of Salue regina, Benedictus and Nu[n]c dimittis (Southwark: J. Nicholson, 1538). 52. ​Donne, Sermons, 8:92–93. 53. ​Donne, Sermons, 8:92. 54. ​Donne, Sermons, 8:80. 55. ​Rubin, “ ‘Let your death be my Iliad,’ ” 440; Freis, Freis, and Miller, eds., Memoriae Matris Sacrum, 93. 56. ​Freis, Freis, and Miller, eds., Memoriae Matris Sacrum, 94. 57. ​Donne, Sermons, 8:92, 8:80, and 8:85. 58. ​Rubin, “ ‘Let your death be my Iliad,’ ” 444. 59. ​Donne, Sermons, 8:64. 60. ​Donne, Sermons, 8:84 and 8:93. 61. ​Donne, Sermons, 8:86. 62. ​Donne, Sermons, 8:93. 63. ​Matthieu Arnold, “Luther on Christ’s Person and Works,” in The Oxford Handbook of Martin Luther’s Theology, ed. Robert Kolb, Irene Dingel, and Lubomír Batka (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 278. 64. ​Donne, Sermons, 8:85. 65. ​Donne, Sermons, 8:85. 66. ​Donne, Sermons, 7:409. 67. ​Donne, Sermons, 8:84. 68. ​Biblical references are to the Authorized King James Version of 1611 (KJV), and are cited parenthetically in the text by chapter and verse. 69. ​Martin Luther, Luther’s Works, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan and Helmut T. Lehman, 55 vols. (Philadelphia: Muehlenberg and Fortress, and St. Louis, MO: Concordia, 1955–1986), 22:212. 70. ​The portrait Donne draws of Magdalen Danvers intersects in many ways with the Lutheran praise of Mary as a modest h­ ouse­wife, one who is happy to take up the part that has been given to her. Though Lady Danvers was not of as modest a social background as the Blessed Virgin described to us in the Lutheran commentary of the Magnificat, she “propos[ed] to her selfe, as her principall care, the education of her ­children” (8:87) and extended her generosity

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to the poor, “distribut[ing]” and “impart[ing]” “her daily bread” to ­others (8:89), in the same way as Mary remained a modest h­ ouse­wife, a generous neighbor among her neighbors. Magdalen, too, is a ­mother, a neighbor, a friend, and “more then all they . . . ​the best example” (8:85). Herbert echoes this description in the second poem of his collection. See in par­tic­ul­ ar MMS 2.18–28 and 2.45. 71. ​Donne, Sermons, 6:280. 72. ​Donne, Sermons, 8:92. 73. ​Donne, Sermons, 6:283. 74. ​Donne, Sermons, 8:93. 75. ​Donne, Sermons, 6:286. 76. ​Donne, Sermons, 6:287.

4 • CROSSINGS Sacramental Signs across the Verse of Donne and Herbert K I M B E R LY J O H N S O N

The lines of interpersonal connection between John Donne and George Herbert have been established for centuries, since their early biographer (perhaps the more accurate term would be hagiographer) Izaak Walton enshrined their relationship as a sacred exchange of poetic and spiritual inspiration: “betwixt him [Herbert] and Dr. Donne,” Walton rhapsodizes, “­there was a long and dear friendship, made up by such a Sympathy of inclinations, that they coveted and joyed to be in each ­others Com­pany; and this happy friendship was still maintained by many sacred indearments.”1 Among the “indearments” that passed between Donne and Herbert in Walton’s florid narration w ­ ere a signet ring depicting an anchor and a cross, ­adopted by Donne as his new emblem upon his ordination, and a poem by each writer in both En­glish and Latin ­versions.2 Walton recounts the occasion of Donne sending this seal ring to Herbert: “[A] ­little before [Donne’s] death, he caused many Seals to be made, and in them to be ingraven the figure of Christ crucified on an Anchor, which is the emblem of hope, and of which Dr. Donne would often say, Crux mihi Anchora. ­These Seals, he sent to most of ­those friends on which he put a value, and, at Mr. Herberts death, ­these Verses ­were found wrapt up with that Seal which was by the Doctor given to him.”3 Donne’s gift of the signet ring points up his special devotion to a symbol that went to the heart of a simmering controversy in the Jacobean Church. Many Reformers inveighed against the potential for the idolatrous veneration of the cross, and they raised heated objections to the ritual inclusion of the sign of the cross. But in both sermons and poems, Donne defended the cross as an exceptional symbol whose value transcends its status as a sign that serves a conventionally referential function. In Donne’s treatment, the cross functions as a sign that becomes sacramental in itself, a very seal of grace. 91

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For his part, Herbert seems to have received something more than gifts and endearments from Donne. His own poems on the cross explore its operation as a sign in terms that align precisely, and sometimes surprisingly, with the symbolic theory articulated in the older man’s poems and sermons. Herbert, like Donne before him, posited in his poems a view of the cross in which its symbolic force inheres in its flouting of mere referentiality. In other words, Herbert followed Donne in identifying the cross’s efficacy as a sign in its objective apprehensibility. Such a reading strategy, I w ­ ill argue, promoted a symbolic system whose very defiance of referential interpretation values the sign as sacramental, a sacralization that ultimately redounds to the textual ­matter of poetry itself. The liturgical status of the cross was a ­matter of live debate in the dynamic religious culture of the late sixteenth ­century. ­After much development, Martin Luther had arrived at a theology of the cross that understood the symbol as “the supreme paradigm of divine self-­disclosure,” a paradigm firmly rooted in the material world, in the specifics of space and time.4 And, indeed, Luther championed visual repre­sen­ta­tions of the Crucifixion. With his support, Lucas Cranach the Elder completed a number of altarpieces that depict the events of the Passion in sometimes gruesome detail, the Cross serving as a site of divine revelation. Still, graphic depictions of Jesus’s Crucifixion provoked increasing concern in Protestant communities about ­whether the material devotions prompted by such images constituted idolatry, and while many Reformed communities w ­ ere content to replace the crucifix with a plain and unadorned cross, some Reformers, among them Huldrych Zwingli and Heinrich Bullinger in Zu­rich, insisted that all such images encourage idolatrous veneration and blasphemously presume to depict boundless divinity within the confines of time and space.5 John Calvin, for his part, complained that, “Interea quum hic brutus stupor totum orbem occupaverit, ut visibiles Dei figuras appeterent, atque ita ex ligno, lapide, auro, argento, aliave mortua & corruptibili materia formarent deos, tenendum nobis est hoc principium sic, impio mendacio corrumpi Dei gloriam quoties ei forma ulla affingitur” [Meanwhile, since this brutish stupidity has spread across the w ­ hole world, that p­ eople hunger for vis­i­ble forms of God, and so of wood, stone, silver, and gold, or of any other dead and corruptible ­matter construct gods, we must maintain this princi­ ple, that the glory of God is corrupted by an impious lie whenever any form is forged for it].6 Calvin held adoration of the cross in special contempt. Inspired by widespread Reformed theological objections to iconographically based habits of worship, iconophobes of late sixteenth-­and early seventeenth-­ century ­England voiced their opposition in the highest po­liti­cal and ecclesiastical arenas. The 1552 edition of the Book of Common Prayer extended anx­i­eties about crosses beyond their presence as church adornments, eliminating the making of the sign of the cross as part of sacramental worship; the very symbol of the cross was caught up in the Reformist insistence that deity is properly located “in heaven and not h­ ere.”7 But the hurly-­burly of En­glish religion was not yet settled

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on this m ­ atter (or indeed on any m ­ atter), and Anglican churchgoers continued to incorporate the cross into liturgical use. The Church of ­England’s 1604 Canons, drawn up u­ nder the imprimatur of both church leaders and King James, registered the ongoing controversies over the appropriateness and the efficacy of the cross in ritual worship in an attempt both to acknowledge the dangers of iconic idolatry and to defend the liturgical use of the cross. “The abuse of a ­thing does not take away the lawful use of it,” the bishops wrote, urging that “­those who are indeed rightly religious” ­ought not to impugn its use, since this use is merely “following the royal steps of our most worthy king.”8 With this needle threading, the authors of the Canons sought to describe a form of veneration that would avoid granting substantive or material efficacy to the sign of the cross, thus heading off accusations of misplaced devotion; the sign of the cross, they argued, “doth neither add any t­ hing [to baptism] . . . ​nor being omitted doth detract any ­thing.”9 Such assurances did not placate Puritan advocates like Robert Parker, who loudly inveighed against the potential for the idolatrous veneration of the cross and raised heated objections to including the sign of the cross in worship.10 It was in this context, in which the meaningfulness of the cross both as a sign and as a material artifact was in question, that Donne undertook his poetic meditations on the nature of the cross’s operation as a symbol. Some years before Donne’s poetic endearments, e­ ither u­ nder his seal or with his ring, arrived in Herbert’s hands, the older poet had begun to approach the cross as a symbol in which objective efficacy inheres. Indeed, the inextricability of the cross’s material real­ity from its symbolic force serves as the thematic focus of Donne’s long poem entitled “The Crosse,” which from its first lines suggests a special correspondence between the sign of the cross and the spiritual term it signifies:11 Since Christ embrac’d the Crosse it selfe, dare I His image, th’image of his Crosse deny? Would I have profit by the sacrifice, And dare the chosen Altar to despise? It bore all other sinnes, but is it fit That it should beare the sinne of scorning it? Who from the picture would avert his eye, How would he flye his paines, who t­ here did dye? (1–8)12

­Here, “th’image of his Crosse” is not just a symbol of the Crucifixion but is itself “His image,” the very image of Christ. And this image—or, as Donne terms it a few lines further on, this “picture”—of the Cross is worthy of veneration b­ ecause it cannot be distinguished from Christ himself. In t­hese introductory lines, repre­sen­ta­tional ­matter—­“th’image of his Crosse”—is collapsed into that which it represents, the substantial meaning of “His image” incorporated into the sign itself. Donne repeats this re­distribution again halfway through the poem when

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he refers first to the cross as Christ’s “image” and then revises to remove even that repre­sen­ta­tional distinction midsentence: “Let Crosses, soe, take what hid Christ in thee, / And be his image, or not his, but hee” (35–36). As Donne depicts the cross in ­these passages, he transposes the materially absent referent of Christ into the materially pre­sent object of the sign of the cross, and in so ­doing sacralizes the cross not as a sign of something sacred somewhere e­ lse but as itself a site of divine immanence.13 This approach to the symbolic operation of the cross does not just provide the argument, but also informs the aesthetic method, of Donne’s poem; for, as “The Crosse” proceeds, Donne identifies signs of the cross everywhere in the material world: Swimme, and at ­every stroake, thou art thy Cross, The Mast and yard make one, where seas do tosse. Looke downe, thou spiest out Crosses in small ­things; Looke up, thou seest birds rais’d on crossed wings; All the Globes frame, and spheares, is nothing ­else But the Meridians crossing Parallels. (19–24)14

As the cruciforms accumulate in Donne’s poem, the cross comes to be more and more pre­sent in the poem not as a transparent sign pointing to the ever-­distant Christic signified but as an artifact whose thoroughgoing immanence the world at large communicates. This thematic investment in the cross’s material presence is reified by the textual surface of the poem itself. Theresa DiPasquale has observed shrewdly that Donne’s poem is a veritable “cross-­filled vis­i­ble universe”: Donne uses the word “cross” in vari­ous noun and verb forms (crosse, crosses, crossing, crosse[’]s) 31 times in 64 lines, ensuring that when readers of the poem “Looke downe” they ­will indeed “sp[y] out Crosses in small ­things” (21); that is, they ­will see the cross in the print on the page . . . ​and they w ­ ill also see it in the individual cruciform letters x (which appears at the poem’s center—­line 32—in the word “Crucifixe”) and t (which appears e­ ither in lower case or, as a Tau cross—­uppercase T—at least once in e­ very line of the poem).15

DiPasquale’s orthographic commentary recognizes that the poem’s investment in perceptually apprehensible signs not only seeks to establish the effectual meaningfulness of the sacred sign at the heart of its attention but also registers the implications of Donne’s sacred semiotics for all signs, including the signs of which his poem is composed.16 As the poem offers itself as an “image” or “picture” of its sacred subject, by its own logic its status as a repre­sen­ta­tional instrument

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serves to manifest Christic presence, offering to our awareness “his image, or not his, but hee.”17 It may fairly be said that, in this regard, Donne’s approach inverts the formulation articulated by Stanley Fish, who describes the early modern sacramental perspective as an engagement with the world by which “every­thing we encounter is to be interpreted (and valued) not with reference to the appearance it makes in any earthly configuration, but with reference to its function in the larger design,” all earthly commitments being merely “temporary or as a shadow” of the s­ piritual.18 But as “The Crosse” demonstrates, the temporary or earthly “shadow” of the material world is, for Donne, the very site in which divinity is manifest, essentially and substantially, to our perception. Donne returned to and expanded the theory of signs that informs “The Crosse” in a ­later poem, the “Verses” mentioned by Walton as having accompanied Donne’s gift of the signet ring to Herbert. This poem, preserved both in Donne’s Latin and in the poet’s own En­glish, opens by narrating the poet’s decision to supplement, or perhaps even to replace, his ­family crest: Qui prius assuetus Serpentum fasce Tabellas Signare, (haec nostrae symbola parva Domus) Adscitus domui Domini, patrióque relicto Stemmate, nanciscor stemmata jure nova. [A sheafe of Snakes used heretofore to be My Seal, The Crest of our poore ­Family. ­Adopted in Gods ­Family, and so Our old Coat lost, unto new armes I go.] (“To Mr. George Herbert, with my Seal, of the Anchor and Christ,” 1–4)19

His newly ­adopted seal, as Donne’s poem reports, combines a crucifix with an anchor, an emblem that nods to Hebrews 6:19: “Which hope we haue as an anker of the soule both sure and stedfast.”20 Donne’s poem continues in terms that explic­itly link the cross impressed on the front, or face, of the signet ring to the cross impressed on the forehead at baptism: “Hinc mihi Crux primo quae fronti impressa lavacro, / Finibus extensis, anchora facta patet” [The cross first stamped upon my forehead from the basin / expands at last, growing to be an anchor]. Donne’s Latin makes the forehead, or frons, of the catechumenate a medium upon which the ­matter of the sacred sign is expressed, such that the body of the worshipper becomes a physical device, an explicit part of the material world serving to manifest the divine symbol of the cross.21 However, Donne’s En­glish translation of ­these lines mutes the force of that comparison: “The Crosse (my seal at Baptism) spred below, / Does, by that form, into an Anchor grow” (5–6). Donne’s Latin term impressa, which indicates

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something pressed or stamped and which his En­glish version translates as “seal,” is particularly appropriate given the reference to the signet ring, but his terminology changes as the poem develops. As in “The Crosse,” Donne goes on to suggest that the formative spiritual task of the worshipper is to recognize the pervasive apprehensibility of the cross in the material world. Such l­abor transforms the cross from an impressa to another Latin term for seal, this one freighted with a theological significance that Donne teases out in his En­glish translation: “Omnia cum Crux sint . . . ​sigillum / Non tam dicendum hoc, quam Catechismus erit,” he writes: “When all is Cross . . . ​This Seal’s a Catechism, not a Seal alone” (17–18). Donne’s use of the Latin word sigillum for seal echoes rather conspicuously the language John Calvin used to describe the operation of sacraments. For Calvin, sacraments w ­ ere without efficacy in the absence of faith, which by sealing the sacramental act conferred the status of a sigillum or ratification on the other­wise empty sign of the sacrament—­and in this re­spect Calvin’s sigillum functioned much like the seal of a signet ring.22 But Donne transfers the location of efficacy from faith (which exists externally to the sign) to the sign itself, with the effect that the sign itself is transformed into a sigillum and given the edifying potency of a sacrament. By the logic of Donne’s verbal sleight on “Seal,” in other words, the material expression of the cross is where its effectual force inheres. This conceptual shift authorizes the sacred sign as a site of spiritual immanence, the sign not merely referential and empty of substance but rather itself a plenum of meaningfulness. The essential plenitude of the cross was, for Donne, what qualified that sign as sacramental. In a 1619 sermon, Donne described the sign of the cross traced in ­water on the forehead during the sacrament of baptism as the very “dew of [God’s] grace” conveyed unto the Christian by “vis­i­ble sacraments.”23 As DiPasquale notes, by identifying the image of the cross as a vis­i­ble sacrament, Donne asserted its continuity with other sacraments including the Eucharist, about which he admonished, “Whatsoever that is which we see, that which we receive, is to be adored, for we receive Christ. He is Res Sacramenti, The forme, the Essence, the substance, the Soule of the sacrament.”24 As Donne has it ­here, the sign itself is worthy of veneration and adoration ­because it is significant, substantial in and of itself as a manifestation of Christ. The cross does not pre­ sent itself as a sign that emptily and endlessly refers to some meaningful elsewhere but mysteriously joins itself to its spiritual referent without ceasing to be its material self, endowed in the transaction with meaning in form, essence, and substance. Herbert’s own poetic response to Donne’s dispatched endearments finds the younger poet appropriating Donne’s notion of the substantively efficacious seal. In the poem that Herbert sent to the older man in response to his gifts—­ conveniently entitled “To Doctor Donne upon One of his Seals: The Anchor, and Christ”—­Herbert playfully picks up Donne’s assertion of a meaningful materiality and offers his own expansion. Herbert’s poem begins, in both the Latin

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and the En­glish versions, by contrasting the historical Cross with the image of the cross on Donne’s signet ring: Quod Crux nequibat fixa, Clavíque additi, (Tenere Christum scilicet, ne ascenderet) Tuive Christum devocans facundia Vltra loquendi tempus; [Although the Crosse could not Christ ­here detain, Though nail’d unto’t, but he ascends again, Nor yet thy eloquence ­here keep him still, But onely while thou speak’st;] (1–4)25

­ fter delaying the main verb of this opening sentence for four suspenseful lines A that reflect upon the failures of both material Cross (with its conventionally Catholic associations) and finely preached word (echoing Reformed views of the gracious effects of sermons26) to fix Christ against the threat of his perceptual absence, Herbert declares the unqualified and triumphant success of another method: “This Anchor,” he distinguishes, referring to the cross-­anchor emblem on Donne’s ring, “addit Anchora” [This Anchor w ­ ill] (4). For to the anchor image on Donne’s signet ring is added, as Herbert’s poem goes on to explain, a seal—­both the seal that gives the signet ring its documentary function and the fixing image of the cross depicted upon that signet ring. Indeed, it is precisely the perceptual presence of the sign of the cross in par­tic­ul­ar that adds force to Donne’s seal: “Nec hoc abundè est tibi, nisi certae Anchorae / Addas sigillum” [Nor canst thou be content, unlesse thou to / This certain Anchor adde a Seal] (5–6). As Herbert asserts that material efficacy is achieved through the addition (“addas”) of a seal, he emphasizes yet again—­using a form of the verb addere ­here for the third time in six lines—­the additive force of accumulating materiality: the nails (“Clavi”) added to the Cross in line 1, the anchor added to the crucifix in line 4, and then, in line 6, the sigillum or “seal” added upon the anchor to achieve, fi­nally, an assurance of presence. As if to underscore the consequential, and sacramental, impression of this seal, Herbert follows Donne’s punning echo of Calvin’s sigillum, and Herbert likewise follows the elder poet in asserting that the image of the cross on the ring lodges Christ in place by virtue of its being material. That is, it is through its fusion of the physical and the repre­sen­ta­tional that the symbol of the cross becomes a sacramental seal that succeeds in keeping Christ pre­sent to the worshipper even beyond the capacity of the historical Cross to do so. Herbert takes care to make the point that from that ancient cross of wood, the original of which the signet’s image is a symbol, Christ ascended (“ascenderet”), the Resurrection having supplanted the historical Cross as a site of Christ’s continued presence. But on Donne’s ring, it is through its very status as a symbol that the cross effectually seals Christ, making his presence, as

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Herbert closes his En­glish translation, “secure” (18). In Herbert’s account, it is not simply by virtue of its reference to a historical site but also in its status as a pre­sent and apprehensible material site that this image of the cross becomes a seal. Given the similarities between Herbert’s treatment of the cross and Donne’s over the course of their exchange of gifts and verse, we should perhaps not be surprised to find the younger poet returning to some of the same arguments about the cross’s function as a sign that Donne makes. Heather Asals, Daniel Doerksen, and Frances Malpezzi, among o­ thers, have done wonderful work on the central position of the cross in The ­Temple, Herbert’s collection of En­glish lyr­ics.27 However, far less critical attention has been paid to Herbert’s Latin verses, most of which are the product of the period of his ­earlier acquaintance with Donne and follow the 1615 ordination that may have occasioned Donne’s epistle to ­Herbert.28 Among t­hese e­ arlier works we find a poem entitled “De Signaculo Crucis” [“On the Sign of the Cross”], which is included in Herbert’s 1620 series of Latin lyr­ics, Musae Responsoriae: Cur tanta sufflas probra in innocuam Crucem? Non plùs maligni daemones Christi cruce Vnquam fugari, quàm tui socij solent. Apostolorum culpa non leuis fuit Vitâsse Christi spiritum efflantis crucem. Et Christianus quisque piscis dicitur Tertulliano, propter vndae pollubrum, Quo tingimur parui. Ecquis autem brachijs Natare sine clarissimâ potest cruce? Sed non moramur: namque vestra crux erit, Vobis fauentibúsve, vel negantibus. [Why breathe you such abuses against the blameless cross? Never ­were dire dev­ils driven from Christ’s cross More than your friends tend to be. Heavy the Apostles’ guilt to have shunned The cross upon which Christ sighed out his spirit. And Christians all are fishes, so says Tertullian, for the laving ­water That washed us as ­children. Who is able To swim without his arms most clearly in a cross? No hemming and hawing: It w ­ ill be your cross, ­W hether you want it or not.] (1–11)29

In this poem, Herbert weighs in on the practice of making the sign of the cross during baptism, just as Donne does in his ­earlier poem “The Crosse.” Accord-

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ingly, Herbert’s central lines assert a direct connection between the cross and the transforming properties of baptismal w ­ aters. Such transformation is reified in the lines that follow, as Herbert’s contemplation of the effects of baptismal ­water develops into a surprisingly familiar argument: “Ecquis autem brachiis / Natare sine clarissimâ potest cruce?” [Who is able / To swim, without his arms most clearly in a cross?]. H ­ ere, Herbert appropriates both the argument and the language of Donne’s insistence in “The Crosse” that the body becomes its own manifestation of divinity, itself a sign whose sacramental force is a product of its material form. And, again following the model of Donne’s, Herbert’s poem pivots from this image of the cross inscribed on the material world into a declaration of its force: “namque vestra crux erit, / Vobis fauentibusve, vel negantibus” [It ­will be your cross, / ­W hether you want it or not]. In Herbert’s poem, as in Donne’s, the swimmer’s body manifests the cross, but Herbert’s poem adduces to the sacramental immanence of this sign a suggestion of the incapacity of the ­will in the face of its power. The cross becomes a literally irresistible sign, its irresistibility an effect of its physical expression. The notion of irresistible grace arises, of course, out of the teachings of Calvin, and it is striking to note that both Donne and Herbert engaged with Calvinist princi­ples as they wrote in oblique sympathy with the ritual use of the sign of the cross. Calvin himself was ambivalent on the ritual use of the sign. In his lengthy discussion of sacraments in the Institutio, Calvin meditates on a passage from Augustine: “Habes, inquit, per signum crucis, per Baptismatis sacramentum, per altaris cibúm & potum. Quàm rectè superstitiosum ritum inter symbola praesentiae Christi numeret, nόn disputo: sed qui praesentiam carnis comparat crucis signo, satis ostendit se Christum bicorporem non fingere, ut occultus sub pane lateat qui in caelo visibilis sedet” [“You have [Christ],” says Augustine, “by the sign of the cross, by the sacrament of baptism, through the meat and drink of the altar.” How rightly he counts a superstitious rite among the symbols of Christ’s presence, I do not dispute; but when he compares the presence of the flesh to the sign of the cross, he shows sufficiently enough that he does not conceive of a twofold body of Christ, one secretly concealed u­ nder the bread and another sitting vis­i­ ble in heaven].30 Calvin objects to Augustine’s inclusion of the “superstitious rite” of the Supper of the Altar “among the symbols of Christ’s presence,” a phrasing that would seem to identify the sign of the cross as a legitimate, nonsuperstitious instrument for manifesting Christ’s presence. However, as Doerksen explains, Calvin’s emphasis on the sufficiency of the scriptural text to the rule of religious observance classifies the sign of the cross as beyond the pale of observance explic­itly stipulated by Scripture and thus “not to be considered necessary for salvation.”31 While this latter position of Calvin’s ­will be amplified and concretized by his iconoclastic, Reform-­minded heirs in the En­glish Church into a rejection of all such ritualized symbols, Calvin himself seems to offer a more flexible view of the cross as a sign manifesting Christ’s presence.

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Herbert continued to develop his position regarding the legitimate force of the cross in other Latin poems. In the Passio Discerpta, Herbert’s series of lyr­ics on the events of the Passion that appears in the Williams manuscript in the poet’s own handwriting, we find a brief epigram titled “In Clauos” [“On the Nails”]: Qualis eras, qui, ne melior natura minorem Eriperet nobis, in Cruce fixus eras; Iam meus es: nunc Te teneo: Pastórque prehensus Hoc ligno, his clavis est, quasi Falce suâ. [How excellent you!, who, that your greater nature Might not rip away your lesser from us, ­were fastened on the Cross; Now you are mine. Now I hold you: the Shepherd seized By this wood, by ­these nails, as by his own scythe.] (1–4)32

Herbert’s argument declares the perceptual per­sis­tence of Christ through the Cross, the function of which was, as Herbert puts it h­ ere, to fasten Christ’s presence to our apprehension. The wood of the Cross “seized” [prehensus] Christ in place for the holding. But Herbert’s triumphant exclamation at the center of this short poem—­“Iam meus es: nunc Te teneo” [“Now you are mine. Now I hold you”]—­ suggests not the historical Cross so far removed from Herbert’s seventeenth-­ century En­glish grasp but an emblem of the cross, an image or crucifix that can be clasped in the palm of the hand. Herbert’s logic repeats the claim in Donne’s “The Crosse” that the cross is Christ’s “image, or not his, but hee” (36). Herbert’s sign theory surrounding the cross, like Donne’s, fuses signified to sign, and promotes an interpretation of the cross which literalizes the symbolic. As each of ­these two poets describe the cross, they bring the sign of the cross to our attention not for what it signifies but as a substantial end in itself, as itself a site of presence. In the poems of both Donne and Herbert, the cross is i­magined as an object whose efficacious plenitude of meaningfulness is coincident with its materiality, its availability to the senses, its possibility of being held. As such, the image of the cross does not function in the referential mode of conventional signs. It is not offered by ­either poet merely as a figure to be interpreted but also as an object to be encountered and venerated. As each poet suggests, that encounter is irresistible; for just as Herbert’s swimmer cannot help becoming her own c­ rucifix, so too Donne proclaims that our engagement with the cross is not to be avoided: “It s­ hall not, for it cannot: for the loss / Of this cross ­were to me another cross” (11–12), he writes in “The Crosse.” By the logic of Donne’s pun, any attempt to withdraw from the cross merely substitutes one manifestation of the sign for another, and reaffirms the universal presence of the cross, its ubiquitous and resistless efficacy.

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­These poetic instances are too few to prove definitively any par­tic­u­lar confessional agenda for ­either Donne or Herbert, nor would such a schematic approach, for all its obvious attractions of classification and certainty, provide for what Molly Murray has described as “the more fluid and provisional real­ity” of Christian experience in the early modern period.33 As if to epitomize the complexity of religious thought in seventeenth-­century E ­ ngland, Donne and Herbert each staked out a semiotic position that flouts easy confessional divisions and distinctions, delineating a rather more fluid and provisional set of theological propositions. On the one hand, by defending the cross against its puritanical detractors within the Jacobean Church, Donne and Herbert would seem to have plighted their respective troths to a distinctly High Church sacramentalism, a stance which might have been objectionable to some con­temporary Puritans as downright papist. On the other hand, their shared crucifictive poetics, by reconceiving the material sign as an irresistible instrument of encounter with the divine, seems in sympathy with assumptions about both the operation of grace and the effects of textual encounter within more Reformed strains of Chris­tian­ity. The interanimations of grace and sacramental worship ­were certainly no settled question in post-­ Reformation ­England, and in their literary engagements with such devotional ­matters Donne and Herbert each registered the ritual dynamism of their era. As ­these two poets understood the sign of the cross to function as a symbol—­ that is, as a potent, meaningful object of devotional encounter—­they asserted si­mul­ta­neously the legitimacy of signs as sacramental instruments and, by extension, reading itself as a fundamentally sacramental activity. By the logic of their treatment of the cross, their poetic offerings, so attentive to the “picture of Christ crucified,” themselves offer “his image, or not his, but hee.”34 That is to say, in both Herbert’s and Donne’s literary renderings of the cross, Christ is incarnated no less than in the emblem of a signet ring, for the text of the poem itself serves as a sign that presents Christ to the contemplation of the worshipper and thereby manifests divinity. Our understanding of the “Sympathy of inclinations” Walton celebrated between t­hese two poets must include their shared willingness to view signs as objects worthy of veneration, a perspective which transforms the sharing of poems within their “dear friendship” into a kind of Communion.

notes I am grateful to Gregory Kneidel and Jay Zysk, and to the editors and anonymous external reviewers of the pre­sent volume, for the direction and feedback they provided during the drafting of this essay. 1. ​See Izaak Walton, The life of John Donne, Dr. in divinity, and late dean of Saint Pauls Church (London, 1658), 82. 2. ​Donne’s poem appeared in both En­glish and Latin in the 1650 edition of his Poems (London: Printed for John Marriot, 1650), 378–379, and was reprinted with some slight alteration in

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Walton’s 1658 text. Herbert’s poem likewise appeared in the 1650 edition of Donne’s Poems, in facing En­glish and Latin versions (376–377). Walton’s citation of Herbert’s poem was more ­free; its first ten lines appeared in his 1658 Life of Donne, while an alternate rendering of its last four lines was included in his The Life of Mr. George Herbert (London, 1670), 39. For a somewhat dif­fer­ent reading of ­these verse epistles than the one I offer below, see chapter 5 of the pre­sent volume. 3. ​Walton, Life of Mr. George Herbert, 39. Helen Gardner’s edition of Donne’s Divine Poems (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952) spends several pages on the problematic dating of the poems, cautioning against Walton’s maudlin myth that Donne’s poem and ring ­were a deathbed gift to the younger poet and identifying Donne’s ordination as the occasion of the exchange that is more supported by the poems themselves; see Gardner’s Appendix G (138–147). On the more material issue of the signet ring, in A Life of George Herbert (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), Amy Charles devotes an appendix to this “intimate token” and its whereabouts in modernity. She follows J. J. Daniel in tracing it first to Cambridge, and thence to Warminster, where, she writes, “It is now kept in a bank vault, along with the church plate” (see 217–218). However, in personal correspondence, I received the following note, dated February 23, 2016, from G. Alwyn Hardy, curator of the Warminster Museum and History Society: “I have to admit that I have never heard of the signet ring you mention and it is most definitely not in our collection at the museum.” Robin Robbins’s recent edition of Donne’s poems accepts Gardner’s suggestion that Donne “sends his gifts sub, ‘­under’ his seal, not cum, ‘with’ ” the gift of a ring—­that is to say, “simply in a letter which bore the impression of D.’s new seal”; see The Complete Poems of John Donne (Harlow, UK: Longman, 2008), 567–568. 4. ​Alister E. McGrath, Luther’s Theology of the Cross: Martin Luther’s Theological Breakthrough, 2nd ed. (Chichester, UK: Wiley-­Blackwell, 2011), 210–211. For more on Donne’s relationship to Luther’s theology of the cross, see chapter 1 of the pre­sent volume. 5. ​Fine historical surveys of Reformation-­era controversies surrounding the cross include Robin M. Jensen, The Cross: History, Art, and Controversy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), especially 179–203, which provides an overview of the complicated and often contradictory iconographic commitments of En­glish Protestantism; and Sergiusz Michalski, Reformation and the Visual Arts: The Protestant Image Question in Western and Eastern Eu­rope (New York: Routledge, 1993). 6. ​ Institutio Christianae religionis, in libros quatuor nunc primum digesta, certisque distincta capitibus, ad aptissimam methodum: aucta etiam tam magna accessione ut propemodum opus novum haberi possit (Geneva, 1559), 1.11.1; translation mine. 7. ​ The Book of Common Prayer, in Religion and Society in Early Modern ­England: A Sourcebook, ed. David Cressy and Lori Anne Ferrell (New York: Routledge, 1996), 48. 8. ​ The Book of Common Prayer, 129. 9. ​ The Book of Common Prayer, 129–130. 10. ​Robert Parker, A Scholasticall discourse against symbolizing with Antichrist in ceremonies: especially in the sign of the Crosse (Middleburg, 1607). 11. ​But see chapter 1 of the pre­sent volume, in which Kirsten Stirling argues that the poem’s second half corrects its initial emphasis on the material cross. 12. ​John Donne, “The Crosse,” from Gardner, 26. Subsequent references to Donne’s poetry ­will derive from this edition, and ­will be cited parenthetically in the text by line number. 13. ​A number of works of recent criticism have explored the sacramental valences of Donne’s symbolic method; see, among o­ thers, Judith Anderson, Translating Investments: Meta­phor and the Dynamic of Cultural Change in Tudor-­Stuart ­England (New York: Fordham University

Crossings 103 Press, 2005); and Sophie Read, Eucharist and the Poetic Imagination in Early Modern E ­ ngland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 14. ​Gardner’s edition notes that the figure in line 20 of “The Crosse” can be traced back as far as Justin Martyr, a figural lineage that J. A. W. Bennett expands on as he documents a number of texts by early Church ­Fathers that likewise identify expressions of the cross in the physical world. Bennett suggests that Donne may have become familiar with the tradition by way of Justus Lipsius’s De Cruce Libri Tres, Ad sacram profanamque historiam utiles, Unà cum Notis, ac Figuris (Antwerp, 1594), which cata­logued this recurrent patristic topos; see Bennett, “A Note on Donne’s Cross,” Review of En­glish Studies 5, no. 18 (1954): 168–169. 15. ​Theresa M. DiPasquale, Lit­er­a­ture & Sacrament: The Sacred and the Secular in John Donne (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1999), 39–40; DiPasquale elaborates on this argument in a long note on the relationship between the letter T as it appears in Donne’s orthography and the hieroglyphic symbolism of cruciform letters in antiquity (273). 16. ​For reading itself as a sacramental activity, see Ryan Netzley, Reading, Desire, and the Eucharist in Early Modern Religious Poetry (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011). 17. ​R amie Targoff establishes Donne’s tendency to describe text as an instrument for embodying persons in the first chapter of John Donne, Body and Soul (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), and she contextualizes this view within contemporaneous writings that imagine letters as revealing the “presence self ” of the correspondents (28). Targoff is h­ ere quoting a sixteenth-­century treatise on epistolary writing by William Fulwood, The Enimie of Idlenesse (London, 1568). Germane to our purposes ­here, Donne describes his letters as “friendships sacraments,” for, as he famously writes elsewhere, “more then kisses, letters mingle souls”; “To Sir Henry Wotton,” 1, in John Donne: The Satires, Epigrams, and Verse Letters, ed. W. Milgate (Oxford: Clarendon Press), 1967. 18. ​Stanley E. Fish, Self-­Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-­Century Lit­er­a­ture (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1994), 25. Robert Whalen’s helpful corrective to Fish characterizes Donne’s relationship to sacramental signs instead as an “identification with an ultimately stable, nontransitory power.” See The Poetry of Immanence: Sacrament in Donne and Herbert (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 74. 19. ​Both Latin and En­glish versions of Donne’s poem are from Gardner’s edition of The Divine Poems. Not all agree that Donne himself authored the En­glish translation. See Greg Miller’s argument against Donne’s authorship in chapter 5 of the pre­sent volume, as well as the discussion in The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne, vol. 5, The Verse Letters, ed. Jeffrey S. Johnson, et al. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019), 424–427. 20. ​ The Holy Bible, Conteyning the Old Testament, and the New: Newly Translated out of the Originall tongues: & with the former Translations diligently compared and reuised, by his Maiesties speciall Comandment (London, 1611). 21. ​I am grateful to Russell M. Hillier for pointing out this association in the Latin poem. 22. ​Calvin directly addressed the function of faith’s sealing power in his Commentarius in Acta Apostolorum 8.37: “Est enim baptismus quasi fidei appendix . . . ​Deinde si datur sine fide, cuius est sigillum, et impia et ni­mis crassa est profanatio” [Baptism is an appendix to faith . . . ​If it be given without faith whose seal it is, it is both a vile and very base profanation]. John Calvin, Opera Quae Supersunt Omnia, ed. William Baum, Edward Cunitz, and Edward Reuss, vol. 48 (Braunschweig, 1892), 180; translation and emphasis mine. For a fuller survey of Calvin’s view of the operation of faith in the sacrament of baptism, see chapter 15, “Baptism and Faith,” in Ronald Wallace, Calvin’s Doctrine of the Word and Sacrament (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 1997). 23. ​John Donne, The Sermons of John Donne, ed. Evelyn M. Simpson and George R. Potter, 10 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1953–1962), 2:242.

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24. ​Donne, Sermons, 7:320. See also DiPasquale, Lit­er­a­ture & Sacrament, 32–35. 25. ​Herbert’s text is reprinted in both Latin and En­glish, with commentary on its dif­fer­ent

seventeenth-­century versions, in Gardner’s edition of Donne’s The Divine Poems; see Appendix G, especially pages 144–145. 26. ​See J. Mark Beach, “The Real Presence of Christ in the Preaching of the Gospel: Luther and Calvin on the Nature of Preaching,” Mid-­America Journal of Theology 10 (1999): 77–134. 27. ​See Heather Asals, Equivocal Predication: George Herbert’s Way to God (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981), especially chapter 1; Daniel W. Doerksen, Conforming to the Word: Herbert, Donne, and the En­glish Church Before Laud (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1997), especially chapter 2; Doerksen’s essay “Bearing the Cross: The Christian’s Response to Suffering in Herbert’s The ­Temple,” in Through a Glass Darkly: Suffering, the Sacred, and the Sublime in Lit­er­a­ture and Theory, ed. Holly Faith Nelson, Lynn R. Szabo, and Jens Zimmermann (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2010), 97–110; and Frances M. Malpezzi, “Thy Cross, My Bower: The Greening of the Heart,” in “Too Rich to Clothe the Sunne”: Essays on George Herbert, ed. Claude J. Summers and Ted-­Larry Pebworth (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1980), 89–100. 28. ​For two examples of recent scholarship that attend productively and revealingly to Herbert’s Latin poems, see Doerksen, Conforming, and chapter 1 of Greg Miller’s George Herbert’s “Holy Patterns”: Reforming Individuals in Community (New York: Continuum, 2007). 29. ​F. E. Hutchinson, ed., The Works of George Herbert (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941), 389. The En­glish translation is mine. Subsequent references to Herbert’s Latin poetry w ­ ill derive from this edition, and ­will be cited parenthetically by line number. 30. ​ Institutio Christianae religionis, 4.17.28; translation mine. Calvin begins this passage by quoting Augustine’s Tractatus in Joannem 50. 31. ​Doerksen, Conforming, 30. Doerksen quotes from Calvin’s Institutio 4.10.27. 32. ​My translation. The last word of the Latin text, falx, refers specifically to a scythe or sickle—­a harvesting implement. While the theological aptness of that term is clear enough, I confess to being disappointed that Herbert d­ idn’t opt instead for the word crocia, which is the term for a shepherd’s curved crook and ­adopted l­ ater as the term for a bishop’s or pastoral staff, and has the added benefit of eye-­rhyming with Crux, but alas. 33. ​Molly Murray, The Poetics of Conversion in Early Modern En­glish Lit­er­a­ture: Verse and Change from Donne to Dryden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 24–25. 34. ​Donne’s “picture of Christ crucified” appears in the Holy Sonnet that begins “What if this pre­sent,” line 3.

5 • CRUCIFYING CR AFT A Donne-­Herbert Dialogue GREG M ILLER

Close attention to the craft in John Donne’s and George Herbert’s Latin anchor poems, to the ways in which the two poems comment and reflect upon one another, gives us a win­dow into the poets’ dialogue about the nature of sacrifice and art. An appendix to this volume contains a new translation of this dialogue, on which I collaborated with the classicist Catherine Freis. Critical commentary too often takes the mid-­seventeenth-­century translations of the Latin as the equivalents of the poems they translate, while the metrical and tonal—­and even literal—­differences between the translations and the Latin originals are left unexamined; some modern editors have even altered the Latin to correspond neatly with the meanings found in the En­glish translations. Herbert’s Latin poem has a compelling artistic and conceptual unity, a unity seen more clearly when it is read against Donne’s Latin poem and when we do not equate t­ hese verse letters with the En­glish translations that (usually) accompany them. As they meditate on Donne’s new seal (a crucifix-­turned-­anchor) and former seal (a sheaf of snakes), the Latin poems propose that the serpent of sin becomes, through Christ’s Crucifixion, the healing serpent of wisdom on which the faithful can gaze and be healed, safely anchored through storms (see Genesis 3:1 and John 3:12–14).1 The nature and function of the gaze itself, the poet’s gaze as well as the i­ magined and felt gaze of God, are central to both poems. Herbert’s poem meditates on Christ’s mangled love letter to the world, on which we are invited to gaze and in which we can rest, the voice of Christ in the poem inviting us to read as we are read. Indeed, Anne-­Marie Miller-­Blaise’s groundbreaking study of the divine gaze in Herbert’s poetry, his distinctive poetics of seeing and being seen, provides a resonant context for this poetic conversation.2 The anchor poems are also part of an imaginative dialogue between Donne and Herbert on the nature and importance of Christ’s sacrifice. A comparison of Donne’s “Upon the Annunciation and Passion falling upon one day. 1608” with 105

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Herbert’s “In Natales et Pascha Concurrentes” [“On my Birthday and Good Friday Coinciding”] ­will flesh out the two poets’ shared vision of the general harmony of the world, of what Raymond-­Jean Frontain has called “the hidden appropriateness of seemingly contrary actions,” when seen through the reconciling C ­ rucifixion.3 Fi­nally, following on an article by Chauncey Wood, and building on the comparisons of the Latin poems, this discussion ­will conclude with a brief comparison of Donne’s “Goodfriday, 1613. Riding Westward,” composed as Donne traveled to see Edward Herbert in Wales, with Herbert’s “Easter.”4 We ­will thus take a new look at an old topic, the topic of Christ’s sacrifice, finding harmonies and evidence of a long dialogue on a central concern for both priest-­poets. Let us begin with the anchor poems themselves.5 John Donne sent George Herbert a Latin poem, “Qvi prius assuetus Serpentum fasce Tabellas,” which appeared in print in the 1650 edition of Donne’s poems with the appended En­glish title, “To Mr. George Herbert, with one of my Seals of the Anchor and Christ.” Herbert responded to Donne’s Latin with “In Sacram Anchoram Piscatoris,” Izaak Walton adding in his 1670 Life of Mr. George Herbert two En­glish couplets, reportedly wrapped with the seal of a cross and anchor given to Herbert by Donne.6 Helen Gardner’s speculations about the Latin poems’ history, and her biographical speculations about the exchange between the two poets, remain attractive; nevertheless, ­there is evidence yet to be considered within the text of the poems.7 Instead of being sent to Herbert in 1615, at the time of Donne’s ordination (as Gardner suggests), Donne’s poem very well may have been sent to Herbert in 1630 or 1631, when Donne was ill and Herbert was pursuing ordination to the priesthood (as Walton claims), prompting Herbert’s response. We are not bound to conclude that the earliest print testimony is in error. Herbert’s reference to the anchor as “Piscatoris,” belonging to the fishermen, is particularly apt. As pastors, both poets would become “fishers of men” (Mark 1:17; Matt. 4:19). ­These exchanges between Donne and Herbert—­their “anchor” poems—­merit attention as literary texts, their language, m ­ usic, rhe­toric, and allusiveness richly awarding our attention. We have, with each Latin poem, a roughly con­temporary En­glish translation. When we look closely at the two Latin originals themselves, however, we discover them to be intertwined, in conversation with one another in form, sound, thought, and tone in ways not fully conveyed by ­these translations. Helen Wilcox sees “To Doctor Donne upon one of his Seals: The Anchor, and Christ” as Herbert’s En­glish translation of his own Latin poem, and notes that “Another version” is a parallel, shortened version of lines 8 to 18 “said by ­Walton . . . ​ to have been found at H[erbert]’s death ‘wrap’t up with that Seal which was by the Doctor given to him.’ ”8 However, one might do best to maintain a respectful skepticism about ­these translations’ authorship. The plodding regularity of relative stress in any given line, and the tendency to invert syntax to achieve a rhyme,



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are but two of the habits in t­ hese poems that should give us pause. The translations sound more like their con­temporary, plain-­speaking poet and statesman Fulke Greville at his weakest than Donne or Herbert. And why, one might ask, would Donne and Herbert have translated their poems for one another, given their obvious fa­cil­it­ y with Latin? Even if Donne and Herbert did in fact write translations of their own Latin poems, the En­glish does not stand in for, or replace, the Latin. In seeking to imitate the Latin’s musical richness, its melopoeia, the En­glish sense strays considerably. It is worthwhile, then, to examine as closely as pos­si­ble the craft, tone, and meaning of the Latin poems.9 Donne’s poem dwells on “Seals,” contrasting the stamp of “a Sheaf of Snakes” (1) and a wolf used by his f­ amily with his new “arms” (4), a cross and anchor.10 The poem implies that the verse epistle itself has been stamped with Donne’s new emblem and seal. (The sheaf of snakes it replaces, it is in­ter­est­ing to note, like the wolf, is historically associated with the city of Rome.) Lines 5 to 6 refer to the sign of the cross with which the young Donne was “marked” and “sealed” in baptism: “From this, the Cross—­with my first bath marked on my forehead, / Its low lines drawn out—­lies exposed as an anchor.” Donne also likely refers h­ ere to the poem’s composition in couplets, the second line of each couplet indented, if we follow standard Latin usage. The reference to the “low lines” corresponds, also, with Walton’s description of Donne’s drawings of the anchor during his illness.11 Christ’s mediating agency, his death on the Cross, animates the i­magined cross and brings it to life for a purpose—­here devotional and personal—in order to serve as the speaker’s anchor. Still, Christ’s death on the Cross does not leave Donne sinless: neither original sin nor his ­family—­his “Natal snakes” (11), as we translate “Natalitiis . . . ​serpentibus”—is taken from him altogether, he reminds us. The faithful Donne is si­mul­ta­neously a “sinner” and “redeemed.” The couplet that follows is the key to both Latin poems, and, in it, we hear a series of scriptural resonances: “Insofar as the snake is wise, it’s a Gift; Insofar as it licks and circles the earth, / It is Ruin; But on a Cross, it is a Cure” (13–14). The reference to a wise snake as “a Gift” likely comes from the Gospel of Matthew: “Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves; be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves” (10:16). The reference to “Ruin” is to the Fall of humankind, ­after which the serpent is cursed: “dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life” (Gen. 3:14). In the Gospel of John, we find a reference to the Cross as “a Cure”: “And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up: That whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life” (3:14–15). John’s Gospel in turn invokes Numbers 21: “And the LORD said unto Moses, Make thee a fiery serpent, and set it upon a pole: and it ­shall come to pass, that ­every one that is bitten, when he looketh upon it, ­shall live” (21:8). The imagery implies that setting one’s eyes on the prize, on Christ’s sacrificial atonement, offers healing, a cure to sin and death. The serpent is both

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an emblem of fallenness and, once lifted on the Cross, a sign or seal of Christ’s living sacrifice on the Cross for humankind. Sin dies with Christ on the Cross, in Christ’s taking on the sins of the world. In a sermon on Genesis 3:14 delivered at St. Dunstan’s, Donne explicates ­these interrelated passages: “The creeping Serpent, the groveling Serpent, is Craft; the exalted Serpent, the crucified Serpent, is Wisdom. . . . ​Creeping wisedome, that still looks downward, is but craft; Crucified wisedome, that looks upward, is truly wisedome.”12 Donne makes use of biblical references to a “crafty serpent” that, through Christ’s Crucifixion, becomes the healing serpent of wisdom on which the faithful can gaze and be healed.13 The lines that follow swerve from a reading that might give to the Cross a magical or super­natural power in itself. The Latin gives us a conditional: “If all Nature ­were fixed to the Cross, all Grace / Would flow to us from the one fixed to the Cross” (15–16). In the aforementioned sermon, Donne emphatically repeats “all” through a series of parallel clauses: “All your worldly cares, all your crafty bargaines . . . ​savour of the craft of that Serpent that creeps upon the earth: But crucifie this craft of yours, bring all your worldly subtilty u­ nder the Crosse of Christ Jesus,” we are told.14 All must be fixed to the Cross, Donne insists in sermon and poem; and if we keep our eyes and heart thus fixed—­“fixus” being recycled in both Donne’s and Herbert’s poems repeatedly—­then “all Grace / Would flow to us.” Again, if “all t­ hings are the Cross,” then the Cross becomes “a fixed Anchor” and “a seal” (17), not as a reified embodiment of a quality, a talismanic object to be adored or venerated, but as a “Catechismus,” or “a Teaching” (18).15 The last four lines of Donne’s poem move from a per­for­mance of a devotional act in language to a personal “small seal” of friendship (19), with “small” not referring to his f­ amily seal, as at the poem’s opening, but rather to Donne’s poem itself that we are reading, perhaps, in a letter marked with the physical seal to which he refers in the poem, as well as to Donne’s concluding prayers for ­Herbert: “Friendship’s pledges, and ­favors; Votive Offerings, prayers.” (Walton relates that the poem arrived with a small seal of an anchor.)16 Donne prays that Saint George—­the patron saint of ­England and the slayer of a ­great serpent, “That Saint / Who seals Kingly Gifts with a Horse in gold” (21–22)—­bring f­avor to George Herbert. The conclusion, to my ear, is complicated. Interpreted in context, John Donne’s Saint George may function ­here, as many have argued, as the seal on the G ­ reat Seal, an emblem of temporal wealth and power, the odd culmination of a meditation on Christ’s atonement and the seal of faith in baptism through Christ’s atoning power. Th ­ ere is, at the very least, a tension between the “teachings” of Christ’s Cross and the obverse side of the ­Great Seal, where Saint George himself “seals Kingly Gifts with a Horse in gold.” Saint George was one of the g­ reat early martyrs of the Church, who was venerated throughout Christendom and whose story was included in the late medieval The Golden Legend. Given his scriptural allusions, Donne implicitly encourages Herbert to be “wise like a serpent,” while also warning against mere “[c]reeping wisdom” that self-



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ishly seeks its own advancement. We may perhaps read the “Kingly Gifts” for which Donne prays as t­ hose of Christ the king. The ­Temple itself, through a series of lyr­ics, comes to reject worldly advancement, “The Rose” being a prime example of that rejection. George Herbert was likely drawn to respond to Donne’s Latin poem on the seal of the anchor and Christ for a variety of conflicting reasons. His Latin response to Donne’s poem appeared without an En­glish translation in Herbert’s Remains (1652).17 Both the Latin and En­glish version appeared in Poems, By J. D. (1650) and subsequently in Poems (1654 and 1669). The Latin meter of Herbert’s poem is highly unusual, one of the main reasons why editors such as Hutchinson and Gardner, following Walton’s order in his Life of John Donne (1658), have altered the poem’s order from the arrangement of the lines of verse in Herbert’s Remains.18 In all early editions, t­ here is a space left between lines 10 and 11. Hutchinson’s and Gardner’s editions reject as untenable the way in which Herbert’s meter alternates in Remains, beginning with seven lines in iambic trimeter, followed by three lines in hendecasyllabics, three lines in hexameter, and an elegiac couplet. But ­there is a metrical function to such an arrangement: the effect is to move from slow to quick, slow to quick.19 The poem’s movement mimes the action of waves, culminating in an emphatic couplet, the short, final line beginning with three spondees (not required by, though optional within, the metrical form), followed by dactyls. What is more, the spacing between stanzas, in conjunction with the indented final couplet, give the ­whole the appearance of an anchor, though not of Donne’s emblematic cross-­anchor. It is not unreasonable to speculate that Herbert runs with line 6 of Donne, the reference to “Finibus extensis”: “the Cross . . . ​Its low lines drawn out—­lies exposed as an anchor” (5–6).20 The initial seven lines of Herbert’s poem can be heard as correcting the se­nior poet, albeit perhaps ­gently and intimately.21 All the focus on “fixing” Christ, on bringing Christ’s seal of love into the poem itself and rendering it as an object of devotional scrutiny, is represented as presumptuous. The “holding,” “adding,” and “inserting” would, through an act of ­will, Herbert’s poem implies, bring God down to us: If the Cross, though fixed, with added Nails, ­can’t Hold Christ securely, so he ­can’t ascend, And your eloquence in calling Christ down ­can’t Last longer than your speech, this Anchor can: (1–4)

The final eight lines of Herbert’s poem function as a sweet corrective. I use the adjective “sweet” intentionally. The speaker, wearied Love, is referred to as “suauis” (11), which can mean “pleasant,” “sweet to the taste, or senses,” “kind,” “delightful,” “darling,” and many other t­ hings difficult to convey in one good En­glish word. The

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Latin of two three-­line stanzas, lines 8 to 10 and 11 to 13, invokes the Song of Songs in its tone and language, echoes that are muted in the En­glish translation. “Amato” (8) is best translated as “Beloved”: “Friend” in some contexts can have a similar resonance in seventeenth-­century En­glish, although it is a fluid word, sometimes referring, too, not only to what we would call friends but also to ­family members (as Amy Charles argues is the case for the “friends” who “die” in “Affliction” [I] [32]).22 In ­these two stanzas of Herbert’s Latin, we also have references to “Amor” (8) and “Amoris” (12), as well as to the related word “amica.” In this context, the reference in line 8 to the “Beloved” invokes the language of the Song of Songs and par­tic­ul­ ar scriptural verses that illuminate the poem: “Set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm: for love is strong as death. . . . ​Many ­waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it” (8:6–7). This scriptural resonance gives to Herbert’s final concluding couplet a resolute plangency. Gardner offers a dif­fer­ent reading. She concludes that the “sweet” friend (11) in the Latin of “In Sacram Anchoram Piscatoris” refers to Donne and that “Herbert speaks of Donne as dead.”23 It seems far more likely, however, that the “sweet” friend in this lyric is Christ. If Donne truly sent Herbert a copy of his new seal shortly before his death, as Walton claims, Herbert may (if anything) have ­imagined Donne’s final gift of the seal as a culminating imitatio Christi; Donne has “taken up his cross” and followed Christ (Matt. 16:24–26). Regardless, the  focus in Herbert’s reply is on God’s loving gift of faithful, self-­giving love, a “seal” taken from Christ’s Cross that preserves us, even in the midst of change. In Herbert’s poem, we have no reference to worldly gain or power, only to Christ’s sacrificial death. What is at stake in this discussion of the anchor poems? A comparison of two other poems by Donne and Herbert—­Donne’s “Upon the Annunciation and Passion falling upon one day. 1608” and Herbert’s “In Natales et Pascha Concurrentes” [“On my Birthday and Good Friday Coinciding”]—­will help to tease out some of the implications. Their contemplation upon where Christ’s Passion falls on the calendar—on the Feast of the Annunciation or on Herbert’s birthday, respectively—­gives us a vision of the two poets’ sense of a felt harmony in the world between grief and joy, death and (re-)birth, both focused again on Christ’s sacrificial death. As Daniel Rubey writes in his discussion of Herbert’s “Affliction” poems, “they [joy and grief] can be understood intellectually (and emotionally through the identification with Christ’s suffering gained in meditation) as two aspects of the same ­thing, and they can be intelligibly related as parts of God’s effort to draw us to him.”24 Before turning from the anchor dialogue to Donne’s and Herbert’s calendar poems, however, we might note that several of Herbert’s Latin poems in Lucus and Passio Discerpta explore the mixing of ele­ments in “Christ’s seal” in ways that parallel the mixing, universalizing doublet of “Vnda & Terra” [“Wave & Land”]



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(7) in Herbert’s response to Donne—­the “seal” as a mixture of ­water and clay hardened to stamp a letter’s seal. In yet another poem, Herbert imagines himself as a “living Altar”: Lucus XXIX. Λογική Θυσία. Ararúmque Hominúmque ortum si mente pererres, Cespes viuus, Homo; mortuus, Ara fuit: Quae diuisa nocent, Christi per foedus, in vnum Conueniunt; & Homo viua fit Ara Dei. [Sacred Grove 29. “A Reasonable Sacrifice.” If you pondered the origins of both Altars and ­Humans, Living Earth was a Man; dead Earth, an Altar: ­Those which apart do harm, through Christ’s seal, in one ­Thing co-­align; & Man is made God’s living Altar.] (1–4)25

What is the “seal”? We recall the lover in the Song of Songs, frequently allegorized as God, the soul’s lover, who asks of his beloved to be set as “a seal upon thine heart” (8:6). Donne’s “Upon the Annunciation and Passion falling upon one day. 1608” implies that returning the gaze and setting one’s eyes on the prize, on Christ’s loving sacrifice, offers healing, a saving response to sin and death. Reflecting on the coinciding of the feasts of the Annunciation and the Passion in 1608, on a day of bodily abstinence and fasting, Donne’s soul twice eats, since this is a “double” feast day, meditating both on Gabriel’s proclamation of God’s conception by Mary and Christ’s death for the sins of the world. Mary, on the same day, is at home privately receiving the archangel Gabriel and also at the foot of the Cross at Golgotha: “Sad and rejoyc’d shee’s seen at once, and seen / At almost fiftie, and at scarce fifteene” (13–14). The coincidence of the feast days is i­ magined spatially, as well. As in “Goodfriday, 1613. Riding Westward,” West and East meet at the same point: “Ave” and “Consummatum est” (22) bring the two together, and we as readers are joined by, and in, this coincidence of the church year. The Church again teaches this old lesson—­“Death and conception in mankinde is one” (34)—­with a new twist. And the m ­ atter is further complicated. God, who had made the world, h­ umbles Himself to be made man; the Last Judgment is but “one period” (38), one part of God’s simultaneity, His presence in any moment of time in all time. The point of Donne’s wit is to trip us up, surprise us, and bring us to the point of the purpose of the atonement, which, he argues, is pre­sent in all time: redemption. God’s plan, pre­sent throughout and before time, is to bring good out of evil, life from death, ultimate joy from pre­sent suffering: “This trea­sure then, in grosse, my Soule uplay, / And in my life retaile it ­every day” (45–46).

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Herbert’s Latin poem “In Natales et Pascha Concurrentes” [“On my Birthday and Good Friday Coinciding”], a much briefer lyric, sings a very similar song, also focusing on the day of the atonement, of Christ’s death on the Cross: In Natales et Pascha Concurrentes. Cvm tu, Christe, cadis, nascor; mentémque ligauit Vna meam membris horula, téque cruci. O me disparibus natum cum numine fatis! Cur mihi das vitam, quam tibi, Christe, negas? Quin moriar tecum: vitam, quam negligis ipse, Accipe; ni talem des, tibi qualis erat. Hoc mihi legatum tristi si funere praestes, Christe, duplex fiet mors tua vita mihi: Atque vbi per te sanctificer natalibus ipsis, In vitam & neruos Pascha coaeua fluet. [“On my Birthday and Good Friday Coinciding.” As you, O Christ, die, I am born: one ­little hour Fixed both my soul to my frame, and you to the cross. O me, born to disparate destinies with the divine! Why give me life, O Christ, which you deny yourself? But indeed with you I’ll die: life, which you yourself despise, ­Here take: ­unless you grant one like you led. If by your sad death you should leave this testament for me, O Christ, a double life your death ­shall be for me: As on my very birthday too I’m made holy through you, Into my life and sinews Good Friday, my age-­mate, s­ hall flow.] (1–10)26

In comparison with Donne’s “Upon the Annunciation and Passion falling upon one day. 1608,” Herbert’s poem is more explic­itly autobiographical, less ostentatiously or ornately witty, though equally baroque, especially in its concluding lines. Imaginatively, Herbert is twice born, and on his birthday is given life both by his ­mother and his savior. (One hears an echo of a poem in Memoriae Matris Sacrum: “Born into this world by you, / I am born into another by your example: / Twice you ­were ­mother to me, / So your glory flies with twin flutes” [4.13–16].)27 Herbert’s poem ­here feels less like a corrective or “parody” of Donne’s than is the case with the anchor poems. Herbert’s poem instead registers the paradox at the core of Donne’s meditation on coinciding feast days; the poem should be seen as an example of what Cristina Malcolmson calls an “answer poem,” “a form basic to coterie exchange.”28 Chauncey Wood gives us reason to think of Herbert’s “Easter” and Donne’s “Goodfriday, 1613. Riding Westward” as just such an exchange, both poets playing



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with the idea of alchemical transformation.29 Donne asks Christ to “[b]urne off [his] rusts, and [his] deformity” (40), while Herbert speaks of the heart “calcined” (5) and turned to gold. This dynamic is at work in Herbert’s “The Elixir,” as well. Wood observes that “[c]alcination in alchemy is only the first of the twelve steps needed to produce the Phi­los­op­ her’s Stone, but in Herbert’s poem it is the only step needed b­ ecause Christ is the elixir—­a term used interchangeably with the Phi­los­o­pher’s Stone.”30 For Herbert, the question in art is the direction of one’s art. To repeat from Donne’s St. Dunstan’s sermon, “Creeping wisedome, that still looks downward, is but craft; Crucified wisedome, that looks upward, is truly wisedome.”31 But how do we look rightly? Herbert’s God frequently takes him by the hand in leading him ­toward wisdom from craft. “Love took my hand” (11), says the speaker in “Love” (III), the Lover of Herbert’s soul grasping the speaker in an assertive sign of kindness and friendship. In the lyric “Clasping of hands,” a dizzying fugal play on the sense of identity between lover and beloved, we end with the desire for u­ nion, for ecstatic connection that erases the sense of individuation: “Or rather make no Thine and Mine!” (20). In “Easter,” God’s ­imagined hand is once again a defining ele­ment of His divine identity: Rise heart; thy Lord is risen. Sing his praise Without delayes, Who takes thee by the hand, that thou likewise With him mayst rise: That, as his death calcined thee to dust, His life may make thee gold, and much more, just. (1–6)

In the final line of the first stanza, in the emphasis on being “much more, just,” one thinks of the modern prayer in the American Book of Common Prayer: “Deliver us from the presumption of coming to this ­Table for solace only, and not for strength; for ­pardon only, and not for renewal.”32 The image is startlingly fraternal. The speaker and Christ stand up together in Resurrection. The speaker is invited to stand with his God, to get up, and for a purpose. ­Here we come again to the title of this essay, “crucifying craft.” Herbert’s song, ­here as elsewhere, is about God’s love. None of the “flowers” the poet gets “to straw thy way” (19), none of the “boughs” taken from a tree is needed, since Christ, Herbert sings to Christ (and us), “brought’st thy sweets along with thee” (22). Anything art might bring in “contest” (25), as it ­were, would “presume” (26). So the poem asserts that its sole craft lies in praising God. The poet gives up the ­whole world, in a sense, for the Cross. His poem therefore is a sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving (Heb. 13:15): “O let thy blessed Spirit bear a part, / And make up our defects with his sweet art” (17–18). Herbert longs to be part of God’s consort, as at the Resurrection: “Lord, thy broken consort raise, / And the musick

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s­ hall be praise” (“Dooms-­day,” 29–30). In Herbert’s “Easter,” “all t­ hings are the Cross” (17), to return to Donne’s Latin poem on the seal. Pain and praise are brought together, craft “crucified.” In Donne’s “Goodfriday, 1613. Riding Westward,” the poet yearns for just such a transformation. He asks God to “[b]urne off my rusts, and my deformity” (40) before he can turn to God’s gaze. The poem ends, however, before that happens. The gaze is central in all of ­these poems: being seen by a loving God, directing one’s gaze rightly, seeing the world rightly, so that we may be not crafty but wise, not dead but alive. In “The Temper” (II), the Holy Spirit “sudden dost raise and race / And ev’ry day a new Creatour” is (7–8). As Gary Kuchar writes, in keeping with Acts 17:28, Herbert’s speakers must continually discover that they are in God, “­behind, before, and within the Word.”33 Both poets thrive on a paradoxical understanding of the world in which pain and joy are intermingled, part of a greater plan to knit humankind closer to what is good and true. Herbert’s poems confront us with an intimate friend who anticipates our sense of unworthiness and insists on refusing to accept that sense, a “friend” who takes the poet’s hand, becomes the “Cross” on which the musician plays, and who is the patron of the consort to be raised at the Last Day. Donne, in ending his “Goodfriday” poem before the envisioned moment of transformation, makes a similar poetic argument in a wildly dif­fer­ent tone. He aims his battering engine at God’s mercy, in the name of transformation.34 Herbert’s “Easter” poem reflects on Donne’s cry—as Herbert’s other poems appear to have responded to other poems by his friend—­and offers an intimate corrective by a friend in the name of Christ, their mutual friend. In Herbert’s poems, we learn as readers, as Miller-­Blaise describes in her work on Herbert, to “substitute the milder look of Christ” for the “terrifying look of an omniscient and nevertheless invisible God.”35 For Herbert, as in his anchor dialogue with Donne, God’s “seal” is a love that no storm can drown.

notes 1. ​Biblical references are to the Authorized King James Version of 1611 (KJV), and ­will

be cited parenthetically in the text by chapter and verse. 2. ​Anne-­Marie Miller-­Blaise, Le Verbe fait image: iconoclasmes, écriture figurée et théologie de l’Incarnation chez les poètes métaphysiques. Le cas de George Herbert (Paris: Presses Sorbonne Nouvelles, 2010). 3. ​Raymond-­Jean Frontain, “Donne’s Biblical Figures: The Integrity of ‘To Mr. George Herbert . . . ,’ ” Modern Philology 81, no. 3 (1984): 288. References to Herbert’s Latin and En­glish poetry derive from George Herbert, The Works of George Herbert, ed. F. E. Hutchinson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941), and, with the exception of In Sacram Anchoram Piscatoris, line references follow Hutchinson. References to Donne are from John Donne, The Divine Poems, ed. Helen Gardner, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978). The text of Donne’s Latin poem relies on the version in The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne, vol. 5, The Verse Letters, ed. Jeffrey S. Johnson, et al. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019). Herbert’s In Sacram Anchoram Piscatoris restores the line order of Poems, By J. D. (1650), bringing the cou-



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plet back to the end of the poem. All references to Donne’s and Herbert’s verse w ­ ill be cited parenthetically in the text by line number. 4. ​Chauncey Wood, “ ‘Patterns of Thought and Feeling’ in Herbert’s Easter Poems,” George Herbert Journal 38, nos. 1–2 (2014–2015): 135–144. See chapter 1 and chapter 10 of the pre­sent volume for other appreciations of Donne’s “Goodfriday, 1613. Riding Westward.” 5. ​See the previous chapter of the pre­sent volume for an alternative reading of ­these poems. 6. ​Herbert’s couplets are as follows: When my dear friend could write no more, He gave this seal, and so gave ­o’er. When winds and waves rise highest, I am sure: This anchor keeps my faith, that me, secure. The En­glish is too far in sense from the Latin to conclude, as Gardner argues, that the lines are from a separate poem. 7. ​Donne, Divine Poems, 52–53, 111–113, and 138–174. 8. ​George Herbert, The En­glish Poems of George Herbert, ed. Helen Wilcox (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 31, 33. Victoria Moul in her translations of Herbert similarly takes the translation as Herbert’s and reproduces it in lieu of a modern translation. See George Herbert, The Complete Poetry, ed. John Drury, trans. Victoria Moul (New York: Penguin Books, 2015), 344–347. 9. ​The ensuing discussion relies heavi­ly upon the insights of my collaborator Catherine Freis, professor emerita of classics at Millsaps College. 10. ​For a discussion of the arms, see Donne, Divine Poems, 138–139. 11. ​Walton’s Life of John Donne (1658) refers to Donne’s practice of drawing the figure seemingly described in this poem: “Not long before his death, he caused to be drawn the figure of the body of Christ extended upon an anchor, like ­those which paint­ers draw when they would pre­sent us with the picture of Christ crucified on the cross, his varying no other­wise than to affix him not to a cross but to an anchor, the emblem of hope. This he caused to be drawn in ­little, and then many of ­those figures thus drawn to be engraved very small in Heliotropium stones, and set in gold; and of ­these he sent to many of his dearest friends, to be used as seals or rings, and kept as memorials of him and of his affection to them”; John Donne, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, Together with Death’s Duel: Introduction by Izaak Walton (New York: Cosimo, Inc. 2007), xxx. 12. ​John Donne, The Sermons of John Donne, ed. George Potter and Evelyn Simpson, 10 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1953–1962), 10:189. 13. ​In chapter 6 of the pre­sent volume, Robert W. Reeder explores yet another instance in which Donne considers good and evil scriptural serpents, this time in Donne’s prose work Devotions upon Emergent Occasions. 14. ​Donne, Sermons, 10:189. 15. ​Grierson emends the Latin in this line, changing “fixa” to “facta” in order to align with the En­glish of the con­temporary translation. We restore “fixa” in our translation. 16. ​In A Life of George Herbert, Amy Charles describes Herbert’s ring, embossed with Donne’s seal, at Warminster (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 217–218. But see note 3 to chapter 4 of the pre­sent volume. 17. ​See George Herbert, Herbert’s Remains (1652), 182. 18. ​Catherine Freis provided the following metrical analy­sis, as well as the observation about the visual shape of Herbert’s Latin poem. 19. ​If the change in meter from stanza to stanza is to be seen as evidence against the integrity of the poem, the same could be said of the two tercets, if they are considered as intended to stand on their own, distinct from the rest of the poem. Their meters differ, one from the other.

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20. ​See note 13. 21. ​For a comparable corrective, see Herbert’s letter “To his ­Mother, in her sickness.” The Works

of George Herbert, 372–375. 22. ​Charles, A Life of George Herbert, 85. 23. ​Donne, Divine Poems, 146. 24. ​Daniel Rubey, “The Poet and the Christian Community: Herbert’s Affliction Poems and the Structure of The ­Temple,” Studies in En­glish Lit­er­a­ture, 1500–1900 20, no. 1 (1980): 117–118. 25. ​The translation of this poem, h ­ ere and elsewhere in this essay, is rendered by Catherine Freis and Greg Miller. 26. ​George Herbert, George Herbert’s Latin Verse: Musae Responsoriae, Passio Discerpta, Lucus, and Alia Poemata Latina, ed. and trans. Catherine Freis, Richard Freis, and Greg Miller (Fairfield, CT: George Herbert Journal Special Studies and Monographs, 2017), 180–181. 27. ​George Herbert, Memoriae Matris Sacrum (To the Memory of my M ­ other)—­A Consecrated Gift: A Critical Text, Translation, and Commentary, ed. and trans. Catherine Freis, Richard Freis, and Greg Miller (Fairfield, CT: George Herbert Journal Special Studies and Monographs, 2012), 14–15. 28. ​Cristina Malcolmson, George Herbert: A Literary Life (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 2. 29. ​Donne’s “Resurrection (imperfect)” also seems pertinent. 30. ​Wood, “ ‘Patterns of Thought and Feeling,’ ” 143. 31. ​Donne, Sermons, 10:189. 32. ​Episcopal Church in the United States, The Book of Common Prayer and Administration of the Sacraments and Other Rites and Ceremonies of the Church Together with the Psalter or Psalms of David (New York: Church Publishing Incorporated, 2007), 372. 33. ​Gary Kuchar, George Herbert and the Mystery of the Word: Poetry and Scripture in Seventeenth-­ Century ­England (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 137. 34. ​Not all critics have seen Herbert as milder than Donne. William Empson argued, in a letter to Rosemond Tuve, that in “The Sacrifice,” Herbert “unconsciously exposed the deep evil which he himself ­imagined himself to praise” (26), the “belief in a Supreme God who takes plea­sure in giving torture” (13–14). Tuve had written, “I guess I see, and accept, the strain of unembraceable to-­us-­opposites in the mystery itself, and you see it in Herbert and ­don’t accept it” (19). Quoted in Thomas P. Roche, Jr., “Empson-­Tuve Letters,” The George Herbert Journal 32, nos. 1–2 (2008–2009): 7–30. John Drury’s ­Music at Midnight: The Life and Poetry of George Herbert (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013) addresses the question of Herbert’s relation to God in this way: “Divinity was the cause and the sum of how ­things are, without remainder. Herbert’s profound sense of this can be called mystical. . . . ​The issue, confronting him in his experience over and over again, was how you could trust—­‘ believe in’ in a more existential and urgent way than mere assent to a doctrine or notion—­the ­Father God whose absences ­were as unpredictable as his irresistible actions too often belied his reputation for justice. Herbert, in his continual searching for a clear and stable reciprocity, found plenty to complain about ­there. . . . ​Fortunately t­here was more to divinity than that. Th ­ ere was the divine Christ, Son of the F ­ ather, whose essence was love, and whose love was invincible even by the direst affliction” (11). For Herbert, that love is most clearly evident in Christ’s self-­sacrifice. 35. ​Miller-­Blaise, Le Verbe fait image, 347; translation mine.

SIN, SALVATION, AND ASSUR ANCE

part 3

6 • “EX TREME AUDACIT Y OF PENITENTIAL HUMILIT Y ” Devotions 10 and the Donne-­Herbert Dichotomy R O B E RT W. R E E D E R

At one point in the Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624), the prose masterpiece he composed in response to a life-­threatening illness and subsequent recovery, John Donne pre­sents a staggering petition: “O Lord ­pardon me, me, all ­those sinnes, which thy Sonne Christ Jesus suffered for, who suffered for all the sinnes of all the world.”1 Donne both builds up to and qualifies this prayer in elaborate ways that I w ­ ill explore in this essay, but his embrace of guilt ­here remains outsized and outrageous. The moment has not received much scholarly consideration, Brooke Conti’s reading in Confessions of Faith in Early Modern ­England serving as a notable exception.2 At least at first glance, however, Donne’s sensational petition ­here is precisely the kind of move that has inspired critical distinctions between his devotional temperament and that of George Herbert. On this issue, Louis L. Martz and Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, the mighty opposites of mid-­to late-­twentieth-­century scholarship on Donne and Herbert, offer remarkably parallel analyses. Martz contrasts Donne’s greater “sense of sinfulness” and “anguished fear of damnation” with Herbert’s assurance—­although he modifies his argument, l­ater in the same piece, by asserting that, for Herbert, “the temptation of pride in showing his cleverness as an artist” is “as serious a threat to the soul” as Donne’s sexual sins.3 Lewalski, meanwhile, proposes that Donne “is not very anxious about” the question of “the devotional poet’s proper stance,” a question that dominates Herbert’s proj­ect; instead “[h]is anxiety is reserved for the more critical ­matters of his own radical sinfulness and peril of damnation.”4 Both critics at least flirt with the notion that Donne’s is the more profound awareness of sin. This verdict is also reversible, however, since Herbert, according to 119

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their interpretation, apprehends sin’s capacity to infiltrate even one’s devotional gestures, perhaps especially ­grand protestations of unworthiness that (as in “Love” [III]) keep God at arm’s length.5 While Herbert remains alert to the dangers of spiritual and artistic pride, then, Donne characteristically exhibits—in Helen Wilcox’s fine formulation—­ “extreme audacity of penitential humility.”6 Seeking an analogue for this paradoxical stance, Donne scholars have found themselves drawn to Paul’s pre­sen­ta­tion of himself as “chief ” sinner in 1 Timothy 1:15. Thus, Donald M. Friedman refers to “the Donne . . . ​who can never assume the pose of penitence without reminding God that he is, a­ fter all, the very worst of sinners.”7 Achsah Guibbory, noting that “it is a kind of pride for a person to believe that he is beyond God’s power to rescue,” claims that Donne often appears “convinced that he is the worst of all sinners” (Guibbory’s emphasis).8 Against this biblical phrase, perhaps most familiar to us from John Bunyan’s Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666), we might set the biblical motto Herbert apparently chose for himself, “Less than the least of Gods mercies,” which combines Genesis 32:10 and Ephesians 3:8.9 Rather than assume an air of sinful grandeur, the writer of this posy diminishes himself in relation to the deeper real­ity of divine mercy. Herbert’s is, perhaps, a more ­humble style of humility. Of course, to any rule about the tendencies of ­these capacious poet-­preachers, exceptions are sure to multiply. Donne preached on both 1 Timothy 1:15 and Genesis 32:10, taking pains in t­ hese sermons to define genuine humility: “a man must not . . . ​accuse himself against his own conscience . . . ​An undiscerning stupidity is not humility, for humility it self implies and requires discretion”; “even humility it self is a pride, if we think it to be our own.”10 Similarly, in “The Crosse,” Donne acknowledges that “a self-­despising” can beget “self-­love; . . . ​So is pride issued from humility” (38, 40), while also cautioning against “concupiscence of wit” (58).11 At times, then, Donne keenly perceives the sinful pride that can inhabit religious attitudes and inspire religious art. As for Herbert, he is no stranger to dramatic “Self-­Condemnation,” to cite the title of one of his lyr­ics.12 Indeed, so audible is “the voice of extreme self-­abnegation” in Herbert’s poetry that Bruce A. Johnson spends an entire essay demonstrating that it is neither the only nor the most characteristic of the poet’s penitential registers.13 Troubling the distinction further, the very passage in which Donne requests ­pardon for all of the sins that caused Christ to suffer, seemingly a textbook instance of his “extreme audacity of penitential humility,” may itself permit a “Herbertian” reading. As I hope to show, it is pos­si­ble that Donne quietly corrects his grandiose exaggeration of guilt, dramatizing the dangers of this posture. I w ­ ill also offer another reading, however, according to which Donne never questions his extravagant prayer. With this second, “Donnean” reading, I attempt to indicate how the humility he displays h­ ere, while certainly audacious, may in fact be true humility rather than a symptom of spiritual immaturity or imbalance. I thus supply two



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interpretations of a single passage, working at cross-­purposes, in order to illustrate a larger point about the Donne-­Herbert dichotomy: namely, that it is si­mul­ ta­neously elusive and inevitable.

The Serpent’s Curse The Devotions, a highly structured work, contains twenty-­three stations, each comprised of three sections: a Meditation inspired by an episode in the course of Donne’s illness, an Expostulation or debate with God over the spiritual application of this episode, and a Prayer of submission to God’s ­will. The tenth station, Devotions 10, is a fairly representative example. The occasioning event, in this case, is somewhat paradoxical: the doctors “see, that invisibly,” and the patient “feel[s], that insensibly the disease prevails.”14 In the Meditation, Donne recognizes that the advance of his sickness is no less dangerous for being difficult to detect, since “[t]hose are the greatest mischifs, which are least discerned.” He pursues this point in relation to nature, society, and the individual, primarily preserving the secular focus that is characteristic of the Meditation sections. Briefly, however, he also alludes to imperceptible sin: the most serious trespass of the Israelites, Donne writes, consisted of “murmuring in their hearts, secret disobediences, secret repugnances against [God’s] declar’d wil.” The Expostulation further extends this spiritual dimension to the prob­lem of hidden evil, lamenting that Satan or “the Serpent” operates as invisibly as does Donne’s physical sickness.15 In the Prayer section, fi­nally, Donne apprehends that God’s unseen grace has been countering Satan’s unseen malice, and he summons a dif­fer­ent serpent to his aid: “let thy brazen Serpent, (the contemplation of thy Sonne crucified for me) be evermore pre­sent to me, for my recovery against the sting of the first Serpent.”16 Donne alludes h­ ere to a passage in the Gospel of John that, in turn, alludes to a memorable incident from the Book of Numbers. When God sends “fiery serpents” (Num. 21:6) to plague the Israelites for murmuring, in this case openly rather than in secret, God also institutes the means of healing: should Moses build a bronze snake and set it on a pole, all who look on it w ­ ill recover.17 Just two verses before the famous verse of John 3:16, the Johannine Jesus appropriates the symbol of the bronze snake: “And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wildernesse: even so must the Sonne of man be lifted up.” In Devotions 10, Donne pits the satanic serpent of Genesis 3:14 (“upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life”) against the proleptically crucified Christological serpent of John 3:14, thereby adding a spiritual dimension to the “warring serpent” motif that is already pre­sent in Numbers. Donne’s typological allusion thus manages to suggest the entire narrative of the Devotions, a narrative of ­affliction and restoration, at once physical and spiritual. Nevertheless, Donne’s interest in the bronze serpent typology, which, given the presence of the antitype in the Fourth Gospel, may be further evidence of

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his participation in what Paul Cefalu has termed the period’s “Johannine Re­nais­ sance,” carries beyond the context of the Devotions.18 In chapter 5 of the pre­sent volume, Greg Miller demonstrates that this typology lies at the heart of Donne’s Latin verse epistle to Herbert and calls attention to an elaborate passage, in a sermon preached at St. Dunstan’s, in which Donne distinguishes “[t]he creeping Serpent” from “the exalted Serpent, the crucified Serpent.”19 This imagery subtly pervades Donne’s divine poetry: Theresa DiPasquale notes a short but suggestive allusion to the competing serpents in “The Crosse,” while Evelyn Simpson explicates Donne’s odd comparison of the Trinity to a serpent in “The Litanie.”20 The motif has an in­ter­est­ing past life in “Metempsychosis,” which features “the then climbing serpent, that now creeps / For that offence for which all mankind weeps” (84–85). A single serpent h­ ere combines climbing and creeping, even as Donne invokes a tradition whereby the Cross “[s]tood in the self same room in Calvary, / Where first grew the forbidden, learned tree” (77–78).21 Recently, biblical scholar James  H. Charlesworth has argued at length that the serpent functions as a positive symbol of Jesus in John’s Gospel.22 This notion would have come as no surprise to Donne, who, as Raymond-­Jean Frontain observes, per­sis­tently revisits the serpent’s “dual implication of perdition and salvation.”23 In the Expostulation section of Devotions 10, Donne concerns himself with the “creeping,” damning serpent rather than the “exalted,” saving one. In fact, he confronts the phenomenon of “creeping” itself. Since God condemns the serpent to creep along the ground on its belly, Donne takes Genesis 3:14 to imply that serpents formerly went erect. Donne even follows Josephus, whom he cites in the margins of the text of Devotions, in supposing that snakes not only used to travel vertically but also used to speak.24 While Donne relies on this very literal reading, the overall thrust of his thought nevertheless identifies the serpent as Satan and interprets the creeping as an allegory for stealth. Hence the central complaint in this station, which Donne voices in the form of a counterfactual wish: “may I not . . . ​wish, That if the Serpent before the tentation of Eve, did goe upright, and speake, that he did so still, ­because I should the sooner heare him, if he spoke, the sooner see him, if he went upright? In his curse, I am cursed too; his creeping undoes mee.”25 Why would God punish the serpent’s successful deception, Donne questions, by making him more stealthy and therefore more capable of deception? Why would God’s response to the Fall render ­humans even more vulnerable to satanic subterfuge? Of course, traditional Christian interpretation has perceived in the rest of the serpent’s doom a g­ reat benefit to ­humans: “And I w ­ ill put enmitie betweene thee and the ­woman, and betweene thy seed and her seed: it shal bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel” (Gen. 3:15). Read as a prediction of Jesus’s triumph through suffering—­bruising the head of Satan and receiving a reciprocal bruise in the process—­this is the protoevangelium. Unlike ­those exegetes who have heard in Genesis 3:15 the first statement of the Christian gospel, however, Donne



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c­ onsiders no part of the serpent’s curse to be good news: “In his curse, I am cursed too; his creeping undoes mee: for howsoever hee begin at the heele, and doe but bruise that, yet he, and Death in him is come . . . ​into our Eyes, and Eares, the entrances, & inlets of our soule.”26 Satan nips at our heels with subtle and oblique attacks that are difficult to detect at first, but no less disastrous in the end. The serpent’s curse in Genesis 3:14 furnishes the text of the aforementioned sermon at St.  Dunstan’s, in which Donne adopts a radically dif­fer­ent view. “Gods mercy is so large,” Donne declares, “as that even in his Judgement upon the Serpent, he would provide mercy for man.”27 ­Here, he construes the entire malediction on the serpent as a blessing for h­ umans and a threat to the dev­il.28 Donne offers an allegorical reading of the creeping clause that is much more optimistic than—­and, indeed, diametrically opposed to—­the one proposed in Devotions 10. The devil “does but creep,” Donne preaches: “He does not fly; He is not presently upon you, in a pre­sent possession of you; you may discern the beginning of sin, and the ways of sin, in the approaches of the Serpent, if you ­will.”29 In this case, Donne considers the serpent’s creeping to afford an advantage to h­ umans: the slow, sidelong movement of Satan makes it pos­si­ble to spot his advances.30 According to the more downbeat deliberations of Devotions 10, on the other hand, it is ­simple for Satan to seduce us: his approach is hidden, like that of the proverbial snake in the grass, leading us imperceptibly into temptation. Donne’s aversion to the serpent’s curse ­here not only opposes his own stance in the ­later sermon; it also conflicts with the stance Herbert develops in the lyric “Frailtie.” The poem’s first stanza does not name the serpent, but arguably lends it a subliminal presence, if its final lines suggest the protoevangelium: Lord, in my silence how do I despise What upon trust Is styled honour, riches, or fair eyes; But is fair dust! I surname them guilded clay, Deare earth, fine grasse or hay; In all, I think my foot doth ever tread Upon their head. (1–8)

The God of Genesis anticipates the bruising of the serpent’s head, of course, rather than of the “dust” to which the serpent is newly consigned. Herbert compounds the snake with the dust and evokes it only by means of its being trampled, as if to dramatize the essential point: that it is properly subjected, surveyed from an appropriately belittling perspective, which is to say, hardly vis­i­ble at all. The abject serpent’s lowness poses no special danger, as it does in the passage from the Devotions, but rather reflects the taming vision of the speaker.

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The serpent’s ascent in the following stanza, therefore, signifies the loss of this controlling perspective. When the speaker considers the world and God’s offerings from “abroad” (9), rather than “in my silence” (1), the former comes to seem much more attractive: “That which was dust before, doth quickly rise, / And prick mine eyes” (15–16). The word “prick” makes the serpent imagery much bolder ­here than in the previous stanza, much more threateningly pre­sent. This “exalted Serpent” is not “the crucified” one Donne celebrates in the sermon at St. Dunstan’s; on the contrary, it is a figure of the flesh’s phallic presumption.31 In the poem’s fascinating final stanza, Herbert’s allusion to the Tower of Babel, which also rears its head in another Herbert lyric, “Sinnes Round” (14–15), confirms the link between rising and rebellion. H ­ ere the name of “Frailtie” becomes w ­ oman: God has married and impregnated the speaker’s soul, but worldly dust may a Babel prove Commodious to conquer heav’n and thee Planted in me. (22–24)

This bride may bear the promised seed of the protoevangelium (“And I w ­ ill put enmitie betweene thee and the w ­ oman, and betweene thy seed and her seed: it shal bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel”), but, ­until the pregnancy comes to term, the serpent seems more like a “tower, whose top may reach to heaven” (Gen. 11:4) than a dust-­doomed animal awaiting a bruise.32

A Sweeping Confession In Expostulation 10, by contrast, the serpent’s closeness to the earth enables it to sting us in secret, and then to infect us with this same quality of secrecy: “And one ­great work of his upon us, is to make us so like himselfe, as to sin in secret, that ­others may not see us.” The infection can penetrate even farther, “mak[ing] us sin in secret so, as that we may not see our selvs sin.” When this happens, we undergo a transformation, not merely resembling the sly serpent but in some sense becoming him: “the hiding of sinne from our selves, is Hee himselfe . . . ​as thy blessed Sonne said of Judas, Hee is a dev­ill, not that he had one, but was one, so we . . . ​ have not only a Serpent in our bosome, but we our selves, are to our selves that Serpent.”33 Estranged from ourselves, we suffer a sinful sea-­change. This transfiguration, moreover, carries us perilously beyond the reach of sin’s cure. ­Here, as elsewhere in the Devotions, Donne pre­sents confession as a form of spiritual medicine: “As Phisicke works so . . . ​, so thy Spirit returns to my Memory my former sinnes, that being so recollected, they may powre out themselves by Confession.”34 But how, Donne now queries, can one confess and find healing for offenses of which one is unaware?35 Donne is not the first to consider this issue, which is addressed in the Augsburg Confession and the Council of Trent, in



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both instances in the context of sacramental confession to a priest. The emphasis in the Augsburg Confession falls on the impossibility of listing all of one’s sins: “Private Absolution ­ought to be retained in the churches, although in confession an enumeration of all sins is not necessary. For it is impossible according to the Psalm [19:12]: Who can understand his errors?”36 Trent, meanwhile, stresses the need to confess all of the mortal sins that one can remember: “nothing ­else is required . . . ​but that, ­after each has examined himself diligently, and searched all the folds and recesses of his conscience, he confess t­ hose sins by which he ­shall remember that he has mortally offended his Lord and God.” Any remaining sins which do not occur to the penitent are “understood to be included as a ­whole in that same confession.”37 In the Prayer section of Devotions 10, Donne neither consoles himself with the impossibility of a complete enumeration of his sins, in the spirit of Augsburg, nor simply puts in a diligent effort, in the spirit of Trent. Instead, he resorts to a desperate thoroughness. He confesses to e­ very type of sin—­original sin, sins of his youth, sins of thought, word, and deed, omission and action, to name a few—­only to acknowledge, in the end, that he still might have more. This, then, is the dramatic context for the startling petition with which this essay began. Since heaping category upon category of sin proves to be insufficient, Donne replaces them with a single, all-­embracing classification for sin: “O Lord ­pardon me, me, all t­ hose sinnes, which thy Sonne Christ Jesus suffered for, who suffered for all the sinnes of all the world.” Lest this seem too broad a brushstroke, Donne explains how this colossal confession might indeed be appropriate: “for ­there is no sinne amongst all ­those which had not been my sinne, if thou hadst not beene my God, and antidated me a ­pardon in thy preventing grace.”38 Donne has readied us for this moment, “antidated” it, in the Expostulation. Th ­ ere, he suggests that God sometimes, and without Donne’s knowledge, ­pardons his mere inclinations to sin and stops him from acting on them. ­These sins “­were done in our inclination to them. . . . ​And t­ hese are most truly secret sins, b­ ecause they ­were never done.”39 Perhaps Donne employs his wonted onomastic pun as he describes ­these potential transgressions, which ­were both “done” and “never done.” In the Prayer, then, he attaches a name to this imperceptible divine protection: “preventing grace.”40 The tenth of the Thirty-­Nine Articles asserts, “we have no power to do good works pleasant and acceptable to God, without the grace of God by Christ preventing us, that we may have a good w ­ ill, and working with us when we have that good ­will.”41 Donne seems to shift the word “preventing” ­toward the usage more familiar to modern readers when he claims that, but for God’s anticipatory ­pardon and preventing grace, “­there is no sinne amongst all ­those” for which Jesus suffered “which had not been” his.42 In other words, Donne has in mind the sins which God prevented from happening rather than the good works His predisposing or prevenient grace enabled. God’s concealed grace trumps Satan’s concealed malice.

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A “Herbertian” Reading of Prayer 10 Depending on one’s interpretation, I propose, Donne’s striking prayer exhibits ­either a “Herbertian” or a “Donnean” dynamic, based on the critical distinction introduced above. While critics often comment that Donne’s penitential humility, in its excess, verges on pride, Herbert is thought to be genuinely humbled by an apprehension of a divine Love, a Love which offers him both affliction and affection. If Herbert seems perhaps in this sense less preoccupied than Donne with the sinful self, he does not therefore lack self-­knowledge. On the contrary, he proves keenly aware that sin can adopt a devout disguise, and indeed his vigilance on this front further explains why many readers have found his religious posture to be credible. In this context, we do well to remember that Andrew Marvell’s “The Coronet,” a brilliant devotional poem about the perils of devotional poetry, distills Herbert’s proj­ect instead of discrediting it. The speaker’s pious but misguided attempt to repurpose the “flowers” (6) of love poetry may appear to send up Herbert’s intention of taking “sweet phrases” and “lovely meta­phors” “to Church” (“The Forerunners,” 13 and 17). However, Marvell’s discovery of “the serpent old” (13) within the garland he has composed for the Savior, corrupting it “[w]ith wreaths of fame and interest” (16), recalls Herbert’s realization about his “heav’nly” poetry (1) in “Jordan” (II): “As flames do work and winde, when they ascend, / So did I weave my self into the sense” (13–14).43 Herbert, no less than Marvell, fears that religious “art,” which includes sacred poetry but may also be understood broadly as any ­human activity aiming to renounce sin and honor God, in fact serves only to swell the practitioner’s ­competitive ego.44 The passage from Devotions 10 demonstrates a “Herbertian” character, accordingly, if Donne’s efforts to resist sin threaten to entangle him further—­and, crucially, if Donne himself recognizes this risk. It is not hard to construe Donne’s devotional l­ abors in this passage as a display of the competitive ego. The ­grand gesture, as Donne pursues a personal ­pardon for all the sins for which Christ died, remains surprising and even suspect, despite Donne’s explanatory reference to potential sins. For one t­ hing, as Conti shrewdly remarks, this prayer seems to defeat the point of confession: it is not the same as coming clean. A blanket confession, in other words, could ironically disguise some par­tic­u­lar sin that Donne fears to face.45 More to the point of this discussion, this penitence seems especially exaggerated, perhaps even for Donne. Donne h­ ere inflates his personal responsibility to the size of Jesus’s sacrifice, ­making himself a paradoxically culpable Christ figure, truly (or at least potentially) guilty of all the sins of the world instead of d­ ying innocently for them. Donne’s massive mea culpa threatens to become rivalrous emulation, an effort to match the Savior’s sacrifice instead of relying on it. Several Herbert poems express the same agonistic attitude ­toward Christ’s “mighty passion” (“The Reprisall,” 2), but they always operate at some level of critical distance from this attitude.46



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On the surface, Donne does not signal any such suspicion in Devotions 10: he neither retracts, nor illustrates the futility of, his shocking prayer. The ­matter at hand in this passage might give us pause, though: Donne wrestles, ­after all, with the prob­lem of unconscious sin. It is pos­si­ble that he intends for us to detect a transgression that stays hidden from the speaker. In the Expostulation, Donne insists that any “hiding of sinne from our selves” involves a metamorphosis: “we have not only a Serpent in our bosome, but we our selves, are to our selves that Serpent.”47 That this is more than a passing thought is made more likely by the wealth of literary associations between snakes and transformation, associations on which Milton also draws when he turns Satan and his crew into an anguine brood in Book Ten of Paradise Lost.48 In his Inferno, Dante links serpents with both deception and metamorphosis. Thieves, a subset of the fraudulent, find themselves harassed by snakes and subject to bizarre alterations.49 Ovid’s Metamorphoses, meanwhile, features a scene in which Cadmus and Harmonia change into snakes, in part b­ ecause Cadmus gazes at the enormous snake he has vanquished: “Why do you gape at the slain serpent,” a voice tells him, “when you yourself are fated to become / A spectacle, a serpent well worth seeing?”50 The Cadmus episode therefore offers a partial analogue to the bronze snake episode from Numbers, except that in Ovid, looking is forbidden rather than commanded and its consequence is transformation rather than healing.51 Donne’s Expostulation 10 effectively blends ­these two tales, combining the classical metamorphosis topos with the biblical injunction to look. ­Because the person with hidden sins fails to behold the work of the serpent, he becomes one. Donne’s speaker might himself undergo this snaky make­over in Prayer 10, as he takes on all the sins of the world without seeing the pride this stance entails.52 If we accept the logic of the Expostulation, it is only as a serpent that Donne could climb onto the Cross with such blindly insistent boldness: “O Lord p­ ardon me, me, all ­those sinnes, which thy Sonne Christ Jesus suffered for.” Perhaps it is no coincidence that now, for the first time, Donne introduces the typology of Jesus as the serpent lifted up in the wilderness: “let thy brazen Serpent, (the contemplation of thy Sonne crucified for me) be evermore pre­sent to me, for my recovery against the sting of the first Serpent.”53 It is as if Donne slides his way up the solemn tree only to find, not only that Christ is ­there before him, as he might have expected, but that Christ is ­there before him in the very form of a snake. In this way, Donne dramatizes, instead of simply invoking, “preventing grace,” a grace that blocks sin by ­going ahead of it. We might imagine that Donne discovers the category of potential-­but-­prevented sins in the pro­cess of embracing the world’s guilt, rather than having been prompted by this category to embrace the world’s guilt. (For this reading to work, one must forget that Donne has already broached the topic of potential sins in the Expostulation.) If so, the notion of preventing grace actually performs a preventative function in this passage, canceling the scandal of Donne’s confession by revealing how the complete sum of sins could

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indeed properly be his to claim. God insensibly erases the secret sin Donne ­commits—or almost commits—in his effort to overcome the prob­lem of secret sins.

A “Donnean” Reading of Prayer 10 According to this “Herbertian” interpretation, Donne reproves his own pious histrionics, however silently. If we accept the terms of the traditional contrast, the passage is only truly “Donnean” if he never blushes at, or backs away from, his “extreme audacity of penitential humility.” In a “Donnean” reading, the outrageous confession stands, qualified only by Donne’s suggestion that among the vast multitude of sins to which he owns up are some that God s­ topped him from committing. This is the Donne who, in the Holy Sonnet “At the round Earths imagin’d corners,” commands the apocalyptic uprising of “nomberless infinities / Of Soules” (3–4), only to entertain the possibility that his own “sinnes abound” “aboue all ­these” (10).54 This is Donne the chief sinner. Thinking about another chief sinner, Adam, might provide the key to such a reading, allowing us to distinguish Donne’s drastic prayer from indulgent self-­ flagellation. The doctrine of the Fall implies that ­there are t­ hose who might naturally seek ­pardon for the entirety of sin: namely, Adam and Eve. According to Augustine’s influential formulation of this doctrine, the first ­humans ­were initially more capable than we of avoiding evil. Mysteriously, they transgressed anyway, transferring a newfound tendency to sin—­and in fact, sin itself—­onto the rest of us. For Adam and Eve, sin was pos­si­ble; ­because of them, it is inescapable. While Eve and her d­ aughters have proven to be seductive scapegoats, Paul’s Christ-­ Adam typology in Romans 5 has sometimes encouraged a par­tic­ul­ar emphasis on Adam’s trespass: “by one man sin entered into the world. . . . ​For as by one man’s disobedience many w ­ ere made sinners, so by the obedience of one s­ hall many be made righ­teous” (Rom. 5:12 and 19).55 Taken a certain way (that Paul himself in this passage strives to resist), this typology also exaggerates Adam’s significance for his successors, as if h­ uman history w ­ ere determined by two opposite but almost equally extraordinary persons.56 In the pro­cess, a single individual comes to bear special blame for the universality of sin. In Prayer 10, Donne possibly pushes against this blame-­shifting dynamic, humbly positioning himself as an original sinner rather than presumptuously usurping the place of Christ on the Cross. He momentarily identifies with the first Adam when he requests mercy for the sins which led the last Adam to die: we can “find both Adams met” in this colossal confession.57 It is only God’s spiritual protection, Donne proceeds to clarify, that keeps him, or perhaps anyone, from being this supremely guilty, negative type of Christ. But why would Donne be thinking about Adam or Eve in the first place? Arguably he is correcting his desire, expressed in the Expostulation, that the serpent still go upright. This wish hints that he would have fared better than did Eve



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in her situation and that the serpent only defeats him now by means of its increased subtlety.58 Donne does not h­ ere engage in conventional, misogynistic finger-­ pointing, as he does in “Metempsychosis” and in “The First Anniversary.” In fact, he deliberately defuses the ­battle of the sexes by pairing his wish about the serpent, which reflects poorly on Eve, with an Augustinian wish that reflects poorly on Adam: “as thy servant Augustin, wisht that Adam had not sinned, therefore that Christ might not have died, may I not to this one purpose wish, That if the Serpent before the tentation of Eve, did goe upright, and speake, that he did so still. . . .”59 In the Prayer section, then, Donne may recognize that ­there is something evasive about such fantasies: but for God’s preventing grace, he himself could be infinitely culpable. This counterfactual, in which he is exceptionally responsible for sin and completely c­ auses the death of Christ, replaces the other counterfactuals, which imply that our ancestors are exceptionally responsible for sin and completely cause the death of Christ. The overall result is that Donne stares more steadily, with his mind’s eye, at the sufferings of Christ on his behalf. Pertinent h­ ere is Donne’s brief treatment of the serpent typology in “The Crosse”: “For if the eye seek good objects, and ­will take / No cross from bad, we cannot scape a snake” (45–46). As DiPasquale argues, the unpleasant, “bad” object the eye should nevertheless pursue is the Cross itself. Such a sight is painful to see, she suggests, b­ ecause it is the consequence of our offenses. Only by confronting this “horrible scenario of one’s own making,” “the sacramental image of the crucified serpent,” can we defeat the serpent of sin; as “in the story of the bronze serpent, one must look upon the emblem of one’s guilt in order to escape destruction.”60 Donne’s prose prayer in Devotions 10 exhibits less concern with the physical crucifix than does the occasional poem, but the impulse to face one’s responsibility is the same.61 Donne enters more fully into “the contemplation of th[e] Sonne crucified for” him, of the brazen serpent, since the supposedly greater blame of Adam and Eve no longer blocks his ­mental view. In other words, the fact that he swallows the world’s guilt ­whole is not an indication that the serpent of sin is “insensibly insinuating it selfe” into him, as in the first reading.62 Rather, this confession is a brave raising of his gaze to the serpent lifted up in the wilderness. He hoists all sins onto the Cross as his sins, so that, as Donne expresses his hope in the Latin verse epistle to George Herbert, “all Grace” w ­ ill “flow to [him] from the one fixed to the Cross” (15–16).63 Donne neither ironizes his extreme penitence nor simply fails to appreciate its audacity; instead, his prayer reflects an au­then­tic devotional logic.

Conclusion Where does this leave us, fi­nally, with re­spect to the distinction between Donne and Herbert? Close attention to this single passage affirms two potentially

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conflicting intuitions many share when reading ­these devotional authors: first, that ­there is indeed some meaningful contrast to draw between them, and second, that it is nearly impossible to define the contrast when the art is so richly textured. It is perhaps ­because of my sense of this contrast that I prefer, slightly, the “Donnean” reading outlined above to the “Herbertian” one. Nevertheless, each writer is expansive enough, it seems, to contain the other. The Donne-­Herbert dichotomy si­mul­ta­neously shows itself to us and slips away from us. Perhaps more importantly, the essay has something to say about just where we should look as we go on attempting, and failing, to distinguish Donne and Herbert. In short, Donne’s devotional prose stands as fitly alongside Herbert’s poetry in The ­Temple as does his verse. Recently, Guibbory has confessed to having “long thought that the Devotions upon Emergent Occasions was due for more attention” and has called it “relatively neglected in Donne scholarship.”64 Most existing scholarship on the Devotions, I would add, addresses the work as a whole—­ finding pre­ce­dents for its overall structure, for example, or gauging its religiopo­ liti­cal stance.65 With this essay, I hope to have shown that the individual stations also deserve critical scrutiny and display the complexity we associate with Donne’s and Herbert’s religious lyr­ics. As such, the Devotions provides fertile ground for comparison between the two devotional artists, as Kate Narveson further demonstrates in the volume’s next chapter. Indeed, Devotions 10 possesses depths of suggestiveness which this double reading does not reach—or, perhaps I should say, heights of suggestiveness, for Donne mentions the serpent’s fate once more in the Devotions, in Expostulation 19’s celebrated praise of God’s powers of meta­phor. In Scripture, “­there is such a height of figures . . . ​such Curtaines of Allegories, such third Heavens of Hyberboles,” that Donne likens its divine author to “the dove, that flies.” By comparison, “all prophane Authors, seeme of the seed of the Serpent, that creepes.”66 This literary version of the serpent’s curse, which sentences writers to an earthbound flatness of meaning, is one that Donne’s devotional prose entirely surmounts.

notes 1. ​John Donne, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, ed. Anthony Raspa (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 55. 2. ​Brooke Conti, Confessions of Faith in Early Modern ­England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 69–70. 3. ​Louis L. Martz, “Donne and Herbert: Vehement Grief and S ­ ilent Tears,” John Donne Journal 7, no. 1 (1988): 22, 26, and 30. 4. ​Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-­Century Religious Lyric (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1979), 226. 5. ​I owe this point to my coeditor, Russell M. Hillier. 6. ​Helen Wilcox, “Devotional Writing,” in The Cambridge Companion to John Donne, ed. Achsah Guibbory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 151. In her essay on “Donne



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and Herbert” in The Oxford Handbook of En­glish Lit­er­a­ture and Theology, ed. Andrew W. Hass, David Jasper, and Elisabeth Jay (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), Wilcox once again speaks of Donne’s “typical combination of audacity and humility,” observing that “Herbert’s persona is generally not so bombastically terrified as Donne’s” (408). In the final chapter of the pre­sent volume, too, Wilcox writes of the “striking combination of aggression and humility” at the start of the Holy Sonnet “Spit in my face.” Margaret Fetzer, in John Donne’s Per­for­ mances: Sermons, Poems, Letters, and Devotions (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), contends that a “Donnean religious speaker . . . ​conflates aggression and humility into aggressive humility and ­humble aggression” (150). 7. ​Donald M. Friedman, “Memory and the Art of Salvation,” En­glish Literary Re­nais­sance 3, no. 3 (1973): 441. 8. ​Achsah Guibbory, “Donne’s Religious Poetry and the Trauma of Grace,” in Early Modern En­glish Poetry: A Critical Companion, ed. Patrick Cheney, Andrew Hadfield, and Garrett A. ­Sullivan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 235–236. 9. ​Edward Le Comte modifies Bunyan’s phrase in the title of his biography, Grace to a Witty Sinner: A Life of Donne (New York: Walker, 1965). Herbert’s motto is identified in the note from “The Printers to the Reader” of the first edition of The ­Temple, which most scholars believe to have been written by Nicholas Ferrar. Herbert employs this quasi-­biblical phrase in the poem “The Posie.” See the notes in The En­glish Poems of George Herbert, ed. Helen Wilcox (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 43–44 and 631. Subsequent references to Herbert’s poetry w ­ ill derive from this edition, and w ­ ill be cited parenthetically in the text by line number. 10. ​John Donne, The Sermons of John Donne, ed. Evelyn M. Simpson and George R. Potter, 10 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1953–1962), 1:316 and 1:271. For more on the 1 Timothy 1:15 sermon, see Robert W. Reeder, “John Donne’s Self-­Murdering Adam and the ‘Relapsarian’ Condition,” Philological Quarterly 97, no. 3 (2018): 287–305. 11. ​John Donne, The Complete Poems of John Donne, ed. Robin Robbins (Harlow, UK: Pearson, 2010), 472. Subsequent references to Donne’s poetry, excluding the Holy Sonnets, derive from this edition, and ­will be cited parenthetically in the text by line number. 12. ​This poem seems primarily to warn that judging o ­ thers amounts to self-­condemnation, but also arguably promotes the practice of deliberate self-­condemnation. See Wilcox’s note on the “Title” in The En­glish Poems of George Herbert, 585. For a complex and compelling reading of the poem, see Russell M. Hillier, “ ‘Tyes of Gratefulness’: Learning to Say Thank You in George Herbert’s Lyr­ics,” En­glish 64, no. 247 (2015): 284–291. 13. ​Bruce A. Johnson, “Penitential Voices in Herbert’s Poetry,” George Herbert Journal 9, no. 2 (1985): 2. 14. ​Donne, Devotions, 52. 15. ​Donne, Devotions, 51, 52, 53. 16. ​Donne, Devotions, 55. According to Mary Arshagouni Papazian’s “The Latin ‘Stations’ in John Donne’s Devotions upon Emergent Occasions,” Modern Philology 89, no. 2 (1991): 200–201, Donne cues us to the importance of serpents in the Latin heading to Station 10: “Lentè & Serpenti satagunt occurrere Morbo” (51). The text provides a loose En­glish translation: “They find the Disease to steale on insensibly, and endeavour to meet with it so.” A more accurate rendering might be, “They are troubled by the disease creeping slowly and gradually and meet with it so.” “Serpenti,” in any case, comes from serpens (“creeping”), and Station 10 concerns the creeping evil that besets body and soul. Indeed, this example strongly supports Papazian’s argument that the Latin headings, as opposed to their En­glish counter­parts, effectively constitute the fourth section of each station. I am grateful to Russell M. Hillier for his assistance with the Latin translation.

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17. ​Biblical references are to the Authorized King James Version of 1611 (KJV) and w ­ ill be

cited parenthetically in the text by chapter and verse. 18. ​Paul Cefalu, The Johannine Re­nais­sance in Early Modern En­glish Lit­er­a­ture and Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). 19. ​Donne, Sermons, 10:189. 20. ​Theresa M. DiPasquale, Lit­er­a­ture and Sacrament: The Sacred and the Secular in John Donne (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1999), 35–39, and Evelyn  M. Simpson, “Two Notes on Donne,” The Review of En­glish Studies 16, no. 62 (1965): 140–150. To my knowledge, Simpson was the first to address Donne’s preoccupation with the “good-­and-­evil-­serpent” motif. 21. ​The poem shows Donne’s interest in early Christian heresiology, as demonstrated by Janel M. Mueller, “Donne’s Epic Venture in the ‘Metempsychosis,’ ” Modern Philology 70, no. 2 (1972): 109–137. As such, it is pos­si­ble that Donne was familiar with the snake-­worshipping Ophite sect, some members of which claimed, according to Irenaeus, “that Wisdom herself was the Serpent” in Genesis, “that for this reason she implanted knowledge in men, and that this is why the Serpent was said to be wiser than all.” See St. Irenaeus of Lyons, Against the Heresies, book 1, trans. Dominic J. Unger, The Works of the ­Fathers in Translation, vol. 55 (New York: Paulist Press, 1992), 102. 22. ​James H. Charlesworth, The Good & Evil Serpent: How a Universal Symbol Became Christianized (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010). Charlesworth offers an exhaustive treatment of serpent symbolism, based on both literary and archaeological evidence, in the ancient Near East and the Greco-­Roman world of John’s Gospel. 23. ​Raymond-­Jean Frontain, “Donne’s Biblical Figures: The Integrity of ‘To Mr. George Herbert . . . ,’ ” Modern Philology 81, no. 3 (1984): 286. Wilbur Sanders proposes that “one is bound to take note, in the Divine Poems, of a studious attempt to repress the idiosyncratic, and an effort, sometimes very vis­i­ble, to bend an individualist temper to bear the yoke of a common faith. The poetic effect, as might have been predicted, is often to give us the idiosyncratic, oddly distorted by the strains of self-­abasement, wreathed in strange distracting shapes around the familiar doctrines—­like a serpent round a crucifix.” In this remark, Sanders seems unaware that “a serpent round a crucifix” is itself a traditional figure, one that clearly fascinated Donne. See Sanders, John Donne’s Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 121. 24. ​Donne, Devotions, 53. 25. ​Donne, Devotions, 53. 26. ​Donne, Devotions, 53. 27. ​Donne, Sermons, 10:179. 28. ​By contrast, Calvin, for example, reserves only the protoevangelium for Satan and does not think the creeping punishment has anything to do with him. See John Calvin’s Commentary on Genesis (Middletown, DE: Legacy Publications, 2018), 44. Satan himself understands the curse this way in book 10 of Paradise Lost, as John Steadman observes, u­ ntil he suddenly becomes a “monstrous Serpent on his Belly prone” (10.514), experiencing the clause that he had assumed only pertained to the “brute” animal he had possessed (10.495). See John Steadman, “ ‘­Bitter Ashes’: Protestant Exegesis and the Serpent’s Doom,” Studies in Philology 59, no. 2, part 1 (1962): 202–203, and Roy Flannagan, ed., The Riverside Milton (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Com­pany, 1998), 639. 29. ​Donne, Sermons, 10:184. 30. ​For an excellent discussion of the positive and negative connotations of the term “creep” in the period, with par­tic­u­lar reference to Herbert’s “The H. Communion,” see Cefalu, The Johannine Re­nais­sance, 73–75. 31. ​Donne, Sermons, 10:189.



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32. ​For relevant readings of this lyric, see Janis Lull, The Poem in Time: Reading George Her-

bert’s Revisions of The Church (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1990), 37–38; Michael  C. Schoenfeldt, Prayer and Power: George Herbert and Re­nais­sance Courtship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 244–246; and Greg Miller, George Herbert’s “Holy Patterns”: Reforming Individuals in Community (New York: Continuum, 2007), 139–142. 33. ​Donne, Devotions, 53. 34. ​Donne, Devotions, 54. In Devotions 20, Donne compares the doctors’ purgation of his body to the priest’s hearing of his confession (104–109). He undergoes this formal confession in accordance with the recommendation, but not outright requirement, of the Prayer Book’s Order for the Visitation of the Sick. 35. ​Herbert’s lyric “Confession” also confronts the dangers of secrecy, upholding the paradoxical claim that “[o]nely an open breast / Doth shut” divine correction “out” (19–20), “since confession p­ ardon winnes” (27). Herbert’s poem does not, however, address the peculiar dilemma created by sins hidden from oneself. 36. ​ The Book of Concord: Confessions of the Lutheran Church, The Augsburg Confession, 1530, Article XI, http://­bookofconcord​.o­ rg​/­augsburgconfession​.­php#article11, accessed May  24, 2016. See also Article XXV. 37. ​ The Council of Trent, 1545–1563, Session 14 (1551), chapter V, http://­www​.­thecounciloftrent​ .­com​/­ch14​.­htm, accessed May 24, 2016. 38. ​Donne, Devotions, 55. 39. ​Donne, Devotions, 54. Donne cites Augustine’s Confessions on this point and a larger quotation of the passage is appropriate ­here: “I confess that Thou hast forgiven all alike—­the sins I committed of my own motion, the sins I would have committed but for Thy grace. . . . ​If any man has heard Thy voice and followed it and done none of the ­things he finds me h­ ere recording and confessing, still he must not scorn me: for I am healed by the same doctor who preserved him from falling into sickness, or at least such grievous sickness”; trans. F. J. Sheed, 2nd ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Com­pany, 2006), 2.7.15 and 32–33. See also Sermons 2:102. 40. ​Donne, Devotions, 55. 41. ​ The Book of Common Prayer: The Texts of 1549, 1559, and 1662, ed. Brian Cummings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 676. 42. ​Donne, Devotions, 55. 43. ​Andrew Marvell, The Complete Poems, ed. Elizabeth Story Donno (New York: Penguin Books, 2005), 54. 44. ​Thus Wilcox observes that “Herbert’s speakers strug­gle to let go of their role in the pro­ cess of redemption,” the poems thereby showing Herbert’s heightened awareness of the impulse to compete even with God. See “Donne and Herbert,” 408. 45. ​Conti, Confessions of Faith, 70. An excellent student of mine, Caroline DeLuca, made a similar observation during class discussion. I am not fully persuaded by Conti’s sense of what is ­going on ­here and throughout the Devotions: namely, that what Donne ­really wants to confess is a temptation to revert to Roman Catholicism, a temptation of which an impulse ­toward sacramental confession is itself a symptom. That Donne is “working hard to c­ ounter any suspicion of continued adherence to—or backsliding into—­the old religion” (162) seems hard to reconcile with the work’s emphasis on sacrament and ceremony, a feature Conti herself recognizes. On the other hand, as she notes, her reading makes sense of other­wise puzzling passages such as Donne’s confession, in Prayer 10, of “sins against the laws of that Church, & sinnes against the lawes of that State, in which thou hast given mee my station” (55). 46. ​In a discussion of “The Thanksgiving” and “The Reprisall,” Schoenfeldt describes the uneasy relationship between imitation of Christ and rivalry with him, as well as the danger

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that “confession . . . ​entails the prospect of impertinent self-­assertion” (51). Schoenfeldt, Prayer and Power, 37–53. 47. ​Donne, Devotions, 53. 48. ​Roy Flannagan, The Riverside Milton, 639–640. 49. ​In Canto 25, a snake and a ­human fuse, while another snake (who was once a ­human) trades form and m ­ atter with another h­ uman. The blurring of bound­aries, as Anthony Esolen observes, is “a fit condition for sinners who never respected what is proper to (what is the property of) the individual or ­family.” See Dante, The Inferno, trans. Anthony Esolen (New York: Random House, 2002), 468. What is the contrapasso involved in punishing thieves with serpents? “As t­ hese thieves are the most underhanded of the fraudulent, Dante recalls what was said about the deceitful serpent in Eden: ‘Now the serpent was more cunning than any beast of the field’ [Gen. 3:1]” (466). 50. ​Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Charles Martin (New York: W.W. Norton and Com­pany, 2004), 3:116–119 and 94. Also in book 3, Tiresias changes sexes when he disturbs mating snakes and then changes back when he finds the same snakes mating again. It is as if the sight ­causes him to participate in both sides of the reptilian ­union, and therefore of course uniquely qualifies him to ­settle Jove and Juno’s debate over ­whether the male or female receives more plea­ sure from sex. 51. ​The association between serpents and metamorphosis is not absent from the Bible: “And the Lord said unto him, What is that in thine hand? And he said, A rod. And he said, Cast it on the ground. And he cast it on the ground, and it became a serpent; and Moses fled from before it. And the Lord said unto Moses, Put forth thine hand, and take it by the tail. And he put forth his hand, and caught it, and it became a rod in his hand” (Exod. 4:3–4). Augustine, by way of the brazen serpent typology from Numbers 21 and John 3, connects the rod of Moses to Christ: “For by the serpent is to be understood death,” while the Resurrection “is signified by the tail of the serpent which Moses held, in order that it may be turned again into a rod”: The Trinity, trans. Stephen McKenna, The ­Fathers of the Church, vol. 45 (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of Amer­ic­ a Press, 1963), 3.10 and 117. 52. ​The issue of “vision” is even more acute if Donne absorbs such universal guilt in order to avert his soul’s gaze from a very par­tic­u­lar sin, as Conti implies. 53. ​Donne, Devotions, 55. 54. ​ The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne, vol. 7.1, The Holy Sonnets, ed. Gary Stringer, et al. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 22. Donne appears to be comparing the number of individuals who ­will populate the Last Judgment with the number of sins that comprise his own busy inner world. For an excellent reading of this sonnet, see David Marno, Death Be Not Proud: The Art of Holy Attention (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 156–158. 55. ​For example, in A Treatise of Paradise (London, 1617), Donne’s con­temporary John Salkeld proposes that “it seemeth more probable, that the ­whole cause of originall sinne in vs ­ought to bee reduced vnto Adam, so that by Adams consent onely, and not by Eues we w ­ ere to be borne in originall iniustice” (305). Famously, the Latin Vulgate translation of Romans 5:12 indicates that sin and death entered the world through one man “in whom all sinned” rather than (as the Greek original would have it) “­because all sinned.” This (mis)rendering inspired the theological speculations of Augustine and other Latin ­Fathers about precisely how all of humanity fell “in Adam.” See Tatha Wiley, Original Sin: Origins, Developments, Con­temporary Meanings (New York: Paulist Press, 2002), 51 and 61–62. 56. ​Both Erasmus (in his 1517 Paraphrases on Romans) and Karl Barth (in his 1952 Christ and Adam) underscore Paul’s fears about this reading. Paul Ricoeur criticizes the consequent



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understanding of the Adam story: “speculations on the super­natural perfection of Adam before the fall are adventitious contrivances which profoundly alter the original naïve, brute meaning; they tend to make Adam superior and hence a stranger to our condition, and at the same time they reduce the Adamic myth to a genesis of man from a primordial superhumanity.” See The Symbolism of Evil, trans. Emerson Buchanan (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), 233. 57. ​Donne, “Hymn to God my God in my Sickness,” 23. For more on Donne’s identifications with (the first) Adam, see Alma B. Altizer, Self and Symbolism in the Poetry of Michelangelo, John Donne, and Agrippa D’Aubignè (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), 83, 86–88, 98, and 100; and Reeder, “John Donne’s Self-­Murdering Adam.” 58. ​An especially sharp student, Brian Sweeney, first suggested this point to me. Sir Thomas Browne comes close to this posture at the start of Pseudodoxia Epidemica, wondering how Adam and Eve fell into error despite their prelapsarian faculties. They ­were “so weakly deluded in the clarity of their understanding, that it hath left no small obscurity in ours, how error should gain upon them. For first, they w ­ ere deceived by Satan; and that not in an invisible insinuation, but an open and discoverable apparition, that is, in the form of a Serpent”: The Prose of Sir Thomas Browne, ed. Norman J. Endicott (New York: W.W. Norton and Com­pany, 1972), 102. 59. ​Donne, Devotions, 52–53. Compare Donne’s comments in a 1618 sermon at White-­Hall: “Adam is fallen, and we in him; and therefore though we may piously wish with St. Augustine, utinam non fuisset miseria ne iste misericordia esset necessaria, I would man had not been so miserable, as to put God to this way of mercy; yet since our sins had induced this misery upon us, and this necessity (if we may so say) upon God, let us change all our disputation into thanksgiving” (Sermons 1:304). The scholastic “disputation” in question is w ­ hether, if Adam had not sinned, the Son would have become incarnate anyway as an expression of love. Donne answers in the negative, but calls the issue “a frivolous interogatory, a lost question, an impertinent article” (Sermons 1:304). The Augustinian reference is to a passage in On Nature and Grace, Against Pelagius, chapter 25, as noted in The Oxford Edition of the Sermons of John Donne, Volume 1: Sermons Preached at the Jacobean Courts, 1615–1619, ed. Peter McCullough (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 255, n. 111–112. 60. ​DiPasquale, Lit­er­a­ture and Sacrament, 36–37. 61. ​See, in this volume, the contrasting views on the poem presented by Kirsten Stirling and Kimberly Johnson in chapter 1 and chapter 4, respectively. 62. ​Donne, Devotions, 55. 63. ​I quote from Catherine Freis and Greg Miller’s translation of Donne’s Latin poem on the seal of Christ on the anchor, as found in the appendix to the pre­sent volume. 64. ​Achsah Guibbory, Returning to John Donne (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015), 3. Her own attention to the Devotions yields the excellent first chapter of her book, entitled “Figuring ­Things Out: Donne’s Devotions upon Emergent Occasions.” 65. ​Interestingly, one of the few exceptions to this trend is another study of this same station: Jie-­Ae Yu, “John Donne’s Devotions upon Emergent Occasions X: A Spiritual Diagnosis of Degeneration and Its Remedy,” Studies in British and American Lit­er­a­ture 117 (2015): 69–85. I discovered Yu’s essay ­after completing this proj­ect and have been unable to secure a translation from the Japa­nese. For the structure and genre of the Devotions, see, for example, Thomas F. Van Laan, “John Donne’s Devotions and the Jesuit Spiritual Exercises,” Studies in Philology 60, no. 2 (1963): 191–202; Kate Gartner Frost, Holy Delight: Typology, Numerology, and Autobiography in Donne’s Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ ton University Press, 1990); and Kate Narveson, “The Devotion,” in The Oxford Handbook of

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John Donne, ed. Jeanne Shami, Dennis Flynn, and M. Thomas Hester (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 308–317. For the polemical aspect of the Devotions, see Dave Gray and Jeanne Shami, “Po­liti­cal Advice in Donne’s Devotions,” Modern Language Quarterly 50, no. 4 (1989): 337–356, and Richard Strier, “Donne and the Politics of Devotion,” in Religion, Lit­er­a­ ture and Politics in Post-­Reformation ­England, 1540–1688, ed. Donna B. Hamilton and Richard Strier (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 93–114. 66. ​Donne, Devotions, 99.

7 • IM AGINING PR AYER IN DONNE’S DEVOTIONS AND HERBERT ’S POEMS OF COMPL AINT K AT E N A RV E S O N

“We know not what we should pray for as we ­ought.” —­Romans 8:26

In the Devotions upon Emergent Occasions and in the lyr­ics of “The Church,” John Donne and George Herbert use the mode of “complaint” and “expostulation” in ways that suggest both ­were interested in an aspect of prayer particularly challenging for a theology that stressed salvation by grace alone: the prob­lem of knowing how to pray aright. From this theological perspective, prayer does not earn grace and yet it is a duty. It pre­sents petitions, but not petitions that make anything happen, since God determines all. Rather, the petitions can be seen as passionate stories that believers tell of who they are and what they envision for themselves: growth in grace, strength against temptation, love of their neighbor. The challenge is to know how to tell that story when both one’s addressee and one’s heart are elusive. As Donne, discussing confession, complains in Prayer 10 of his Devotions, “how s­ hall I bring to thy knowledg by that way, ­those sinns, which I my selfe know not,” and yet, u­ nless he knows his own condition, how can he pray aright?1 In a number of Herbert’s psalm-­like lyr­ics, the speaker’s complaint that God is deaf or unresponsive registers the other side of the prob­lem: that t­ here is no way to confirm that God has heard his prayer.2 ­Because of ­these prob­lems, for adherents of the early Stuart En­glish Church, prayer required the use of the narrative imagination. Believers had to develop an account of their spiritual estate in order to frame expectations and hopes. Then, since one purpose of prayer was to lead the petitioner to say “thy w ­ ill be done,” he or she needed an account of what it meant to conform their ­will to God’s: it 137

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was a commonplace in post-­Reformation E ­ ngland that one was to “pray with understanding.” In their repre­sen­ta­tions of prayer, Donne and Herbert had to address its challenges: the task of figuring out where one stands with God; the prob­lem of knowing what to ask; and the awareness of the contingency of any story one tries to tell.3 The yoking of complaint with prayer registers t­ hese challenges clearly. Both Donne and Herbert ­were concerned with the exemplarity of the prayers they might offer, and both sought to show that expostulation and complaint could lead to breakthroughs in understanding that would kindle the appropriate godly affections and allow rightly framed prayer. B ­ ecause the speaker’s interpretation of self in relation to God is a narrative, though, the speaker is in a sense scripting their own story. Prayer could seem a mystification of social or po­liti­cal self-­ fashioning, a means to position oneself advantageously, as right with God.4 But early modern pastors w ­ ere well aware of this trap, as evident in Herbert’s concern about the danger of “weav[ing the] self into the sense.”5 How could the petitioner feel confident that their account of where they stand and what results of prayer might follow was not illusory? In their repre­sen­ta­tions of complaints that issue in prayer, Donne and Herbert deal with the hermeneutic prob­lem differently. Choosing to rec­ord devotions on his par­tic­ul­ar experience, Donne tells a story that models devotional method and accepts contingency. Herbert’s poems of complaint, on the other hand, dramatize an ideal: exemplary instances of prayer issuing from a regenerate heart. In focusing on method, Donne’s Devotions directly engages the prob­lem of how one may come to pray with sufficient assurance even while accepting that any prayer one frames is the product of imperfect ­human exegesis of God’s signs.6 Herbert’s complaints, by contrast, depict the knowledge of ­whether one prays aright as experiential: distress and uncertainty give way to true prayer as the speaker’s quickened sense of need emerges organically in rightly ordered petitions and affections.7 The poems downplay the speaker’s role as an active framer of prayer; the prayer issues from a purged and corrected heart. The proliferation of prayer manuals in early Stuart E ­ ngland points to the perceived challenge of praying aright. One must know what to ask for, on what grounds, and with what spirit and expectations. Alec Ryrie finds that while sixteenth-­century writers offered a variety of loose definitions of prayer, by the seventeenth ­century “a l­ ittle more precision was creeping in,” citing William Perkins: to pray is “to put uppe request to God according to his worde from a contrite hearte in the name of Christ with assurance to be heard,” a definition that was, Ryrie notes, “so packed with theological detail that you could preach a series of sermons expounding it, which is more or less what some divines did.”8 Both disposition and request must be properly grounded. Though when we cannot find words “the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings that cannot be uttered” (Rom. 8:26), ideally believers should understand how to pray



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aright. Samuel Hieron, for instance, worried about “what apprehension [Christians] have of their owne wants, what conceit of the Majestie and presence of God, what knowledge and understanding of his promises.” Too often, he observed in ­people a “want of exercised wits, of knowledge in the Scriptures, and . . . ​[of] a lively sense and distinct conceiving of their owne personall necessities.”9 Donne and Herbert shared this belief that understanding is essential to prayer. Donne insisted that any prayer must have “a Quia, a Reason upon which it is grounded,” while Herbert, in The Country Parson, urged that ­people should “meditate as they speak,” so that they “speak not as Parrats” but “use [their] reason.”10 In this context, lack of sound understanding is crippling ­because each of the aspects of prayer Perkins noted requires the believer to parse self and situation. One needs to take stock of thoughts, words, and deeds so that the sight of one’s state w ­ ill kindle godly affections and so that one can pre­sent one’s true account to God, crafting petition and praise accordingly. This effort requires a delicate management of one’s affections. Erica Longfellow notes, for instance, that t­ here is a “fine Augustinian balance between knowing the self in its dependence on God and rejecting the self ’s sinfulness.”11 We see this sort of balancing act in Prayer 22 of Donne’s Devotions, which ends with a request that God “[t]emper” His mercy so that Donne may “neither decline to any faintnesse of spirit . . . ​nor presume so of [God’s grace], as . . . ​to thinke this pre­sent mercie an antidote against all poisons.”12 Herbert’s lyric “Bitter-­sweet” explic­itly thematizes prayer as balancing, and Herbert, as Richard Strier has shown, was also keenly attuned to another sort of balance: the danger that self-­denial would tip over into self-­assertion.13 ­Because self-­understanding involved such fine balancing, pastors published “set forms” that could express, instruct, or shape the believer’s devotion.14 A written prayer “might remaine as a helpe in Prayer for t­ hose, who should at any time fall into the like occasion.”15 At the same time, though, individuals ­were expected to pray for their own par­tic­ul­ar needs. John Downame distinguished between the “private prayer of one” and prayers that are “common and publick.”16 Robert Hill declared that believers should be able to pray for their own needs: “everie one ­ought to stirre up, and whet the Spirit, and exercise the grace, and power received, to be fitted not only to repeate or reade, but even to endite any good m ­ atter.”17 Even in using the Lord’s Prayer, Hieron instructed, a believer may, “as his spirituall feeling ­shall increase, enlarge anie par­tic­ul­ar request . . . ​or insert his owne more personal concernements.” The believer should pray that God “give me alweis sense of mine own personal wants, and a distinct understanding” of mercies and blessings, becoming able “out of mine own feeling, to poure out my soule aboundantlie before thee.”18 The provision of set prayers and the value placed on a sense of “personal wants” ­were not at odds since each believer followed a trajectory; they began with individual sin and need and sought to end in a shared conformity to an ideal Christian disposition.19 The ability to consider one’s particulars required the believer

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to apply general Christian teachings to their individual case, a pro­cess that David Marno describes as “translating the abstract thought of doctrine into living experience,” whereby a believer may “appropriate specific Christian doctrines as his own thoughts.”20 As I have argued elsewhere, Scripture provided a source of stories, moral dicta, figures, and characters that allowed believers to practice imitation in a Jonsonian sense, whereby they w ­ ere able “to concoct, divide, and turn all into nourishment,” each converting “the substance, or riches, of [Scripture], to his own use.”21 Other p­ eople’s prayers could also be models for imitation, exemplary ­because they modeled what it meant to pray aright. As Ryrie relates, when Elizabeth Melville sought privacy for prayer b­ ehind her bed-­curtains, o­ thers gathered in the room to listen. Longfellow has shown that, as “a necessary part of the ­whole of worship,” private prayer was expected to be both holy and useful.22 Writers like Donne and Herbert shared their repre­sen­ta­tions of prayer in that spirit. Their repre­sen­ta­tions accord with what prayer manuals called for in terms of disposition, desire, and effort. Along with the need to pray with understanding, one must persevere and pray in the right spirit. Hill urged his readers, “as Jacob would not let the Angell goe till he ­were blessed, so let not us let him go till we be heard,” for God “loveth most, willing and importunate sutors.”23 Yet what if p­ eople found themselves empty of spiritual motions, or filled with grief and longing but no sense of God’s presence? This is, in part, where practice and imitation proved beneficial: ­people in such a condition could nevertheless come to pray in the right spirit “through Gods assistance, by use and frequent exercising themselves in Prayer, and observation and imitation of other good Prayers heard or read, and by keeping a good method and order in praying.”24 But spiritual imitation also stressed an ele­ment that took imitation beyond the Jonsonian model, and manuals provided an emotion script. As Cynthia Garrett demonstrates, En­glish Protestants followed Calvin in expecting to strug­gle with conflicting feelings, but the strug­gle was complexly choreographed, the ­causes of the affections carefully parsed and the effects of each explained, humility balanced by confidence, fear by hope.25 Each believer needed to realize for themselves this shared hermeneutic and emotion script. In the Devotions and in the lyr­ics of “The Church,” Donne and Herbert offered per­for­mances of this choreography. To do so required the shaping work of the imagination. The confession of one’s spiritual state depended on acts of se­lection and structuring. Even more, petitions involved a construal of the hoped-­for, a story of a desired disposition and relationship with God and the world. This construal of the hoped-­for was to be grounded in God’s promises. The petitioner inhabited a space defined by the intersection between “hope that,” requiring the use of the narrative imagination, and “hope in,” requiring knowledge of God. The believer applied the evidence of what God had already said and done to their par­tic­ul­ ar circumstances, which could be located within the shared script of godly experience. The optative, then, was a narrative anchored in retrospective knowledge of one’s spiritual estate and God’s



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ways.26 Hieron was typical in advising meditation on God’s promises as preparation for prayer. In a prayer for strength in affliction, his petitioner asks, “give me faith in thy promises, so firme that it may not bee shaken by the storme,” for “[Thou art] bound by thy owne promise never to forsake me.”27 Such a prayer scripts both the believer’s emotions and God’s response. When, in “Gratefulnesse,” Herbert dramatizes importunity, his speaker concludes by imagining a desired disposition and divine action, requesting that God give him a heart whose “pulse may be / Thy praise” (31–32). The modal verb expresses what can in fact be but is not yet. Prayer imagines narrative resolution, at least for this episode, and if only prospectively.28 ­Because printed prayer collections offer generic forms, they do not capture the “application to self ” of the salvation narrative. Prayers recorded in manuscript notebooks, though, occasionally give a sense of the self-­narration involved in composing a prayer.29 Anne Twysden, for instance, first situates herself in relation to God’s call; God has bidden, “drinke whosoever ­will take of the w ­ ater of life freely; I havenge heard the sweete Sound of this voice . . . ​come unto thee.” This self-­positioning allows a petition that is a projection based on God’s past action: “powre into my thirsty soule that ­water that it may . . . ​make ­those comforts growe in me which only ­great mercyes and gratious promises doth give me assured cause of.” She acknowledges “that the true feeling of them, w ­ ere to g­ reat a happiness to be on Earthe enjoyed,” which allows a further, properly moderated petition, narrating a story of spiritual development: “yet heare I beseech thee in such mea­sure, to let me feele the worke of thy speritt in me, that it increase my joyes in thee, and keepe me ever in thy truth.” The “application to self ” called for by prayer books requires not only accounting for one’s pre­sent condition in biblical terms but describing a transformed self that ­will conform to an ideal pattern of Christian affectivity. Even while it is prospective, prayer for spiritual benefits can be clear on what is to be desired, but ­there is a further degree of provisionality in prayer for temporal benefits, as we see in another of Twysden’s prayers, this one for a sick girl. Twysden first sets out one scenario: she asks that God strengthen the faith of “this thy sicke Servant, and also to her form[er] health, if it be thy w ­ ill[,] restore her, in the meane time giveinge her patience to endure what thou shalt be pleased to lay on her.” She then continues with the alternative: “but if thou our god and Saviour, beest determined to make this sickenesse her passage to thee, Seele in her all comfortable assurances, in thee, that her heart may with true joy welcome it, fix in her memorye all thy mercyes, and generall promises to all beleevers, drawe her wearye and laden to thee to have ease.”30 Both scripts align with God’s ­will as far as she can understand it. Prayers in affliction thus require the petitioner to set out more than one continuation of their story. Yet suffering can make it hard to align one’s ­will with God’s. Complaint and expostulation are allowable responses to the difficulty of

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arriving at a clear narrative as believers try to make sense of affliction, feel themselves spiritually dry, or find God unresponsive.31 Complaint is natu­ral but must be checked so that it does not turn into murmuring against God. Hieron’s afflicted man laments his grief but prays that God ­will make him know that it comes “by thy providence and certaine appointment, that so I may be dumme and not open my mouth to murmure.” Thomas Tuke points to the example of Job: “How much complaineth hee of the providence and justice of God?” And yet, “the light of the holy Ghost had no sooner illuminated him, but how did he plucke up his spirits again?” For Tuke, complaints register the crookedness of our nature but, “God giving us strength,” we are patient, so that “in the very suffering, wee have greater trial and proofe of the goodnesse of God ­towards us: whereupon we conceive the greater hope.”32 Tuke thus offers the full emotion script—­first the regenerate person murmurs but then the Spirit gives strength and assurance and the person becomes patient; thereupon they can address God aright. In representing the response to affliction, Donne and Herbert drew on the Church’s most basic model of prayerful expression, the Psalms, one subset of which ­were labeled complaints. Chana Bloch notes the “double purpose” of complaint “to move God to compassion and to bring relief to the speaker’s burdened heart.”33 She quotes Calvin’s characterization of the Psalmist complaining: “To thentent he may move god to succor him, he setteth forth the grevousnes of his misery and greef with many complaints: not for that ­there needeth reasons to perswade god, but bycause he giveth the faithfull leave to deale familiarly with him, that they may disburthen themselves of theyr care.”34 B ­ ecause God allows this disburdening, complaint is not sinful, even though it could seem to be a murmuring against God’s ­will. As Bloch points out, for early modern Protestants, the foes that oppress the believer are within the mind and heart. Further, believers are to embrace suffering as that which awakens them to their sinful condition. The psalm then allows an unpacking of grief that “affords a kind of healing, a mea­sure of detachment from the toils of the self.”35 Given that pain drives one to turn to God, complaint employs argument, pleading with God to give relief. The argument’s main effect, however, is on the speaker. Both Donne and Herbert appealed to God’s nature and promises. At the same time, they confessed their own debility, for, though known by God already, it is essential for the one voicing the complaint to articulate their miserable ­condition.36 Further, complaint witnesses desire and, in the expression of desire, the believer gains clarity about what to ask for. Hieron was typical in seeing prayer as the culmination of devotional activity, “an argument of mans effectual profiting by other godly exercises” that allow him to know how to ask aright.37 Diarists recorded long sessions of seeking God in meditation and prayer before they came to feel the presence of the Holy Spirit. Nehemiah Wallington, for instance, recorded his efforts at prayer following “very sade news out of the north parts.” He went to his study “to wrestle with the Lord (in holy prayr) as Jaakob did.” He



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was grieved that he could not “lay more to heart the dishonours don to my God.” At last, though, “watters gushed out of the stony Rocke,” opening the way to new self-­examination: “I am now full of distractions in the sight of my own vilnesse for the nearer the Fier the more I am scorched[,] so the nerer I draw to the glorious God (in holy duties) the more viller I ame.” Yet he embraced this new awareness, painful as it was.38 “Observing the self,” Elizabeth Clarke and Erica Longfellow find, “could lead the believer whose experiences did not fit prescribed salvation narratives to explore emotions in greater depth than the writers of Puritan guides anticipated.” Elizabeth Isham, for instance, detailed emotional turmoil, “in par­ tic­u­lar her confusion about her suicidal thoughts.” She “depicts herself as submitting, or attempting to submit, herself to God, thus returning to the appropriate stance of a Christian, but si­mul­ta­neously recording how she failed to maintain that stance for long.” This confession “is part of her posture as a h­ umble sinner, but it also requires her to document her ever-­changing inward state in ­great detail.”39 Such documentation was a story that the believer constructed. Complaint voiced spiritual distress even while the attempt to make sense of affliction required interpretation of experience. Affliction led to confession and then to the clearer self-­understanding that was needed to pray aright. Ultimately, a narrative emerged that aligned the par­tic­ul­ar with the general pattern of salvation. Donne and Herbert shared this conception, and both used the rhe­toric of complaint. Both shared the idea that their devotional writing could and should be exemplary. At the same time, they differed in their repre­sen­ta­tion of the source and nature of the prayer that follows complaint, and of how one could know if one prayed aright. In Donne’s case, the Expostulations and Prayers in his Devotions upon Emergent Occasions dramatize the role of the narrative imagination with striking explicitness. Having confronted evidence of the miserable condition of humankind in the Meditations, Donne turns, in the Expostulations, to the spiritual significance of what he has observed. His attempts to understand lead to crises of distress and anxiety ­until he breaks through to a new understanding made pos­si­ble by God’s “voices” in Scripture, above all, but also in the book of Creation.40 Only ­after reaching this new understanding can he pray. Donne, then, pre­sents a narrative in which prayer only happens ­after an intense effort to see the pattern in one’s unfolding experience.41 Thus, despite the gap in theological sophistication between Donne and laypeople like Wallington and Isham, t­ here is a basic kinship, for all of them strug­gled to find a way to place a godly construction on experience, and all arrived at power­ful, if provisional, accounts that allowed them to feel a clearer direction and relief in prayer.42 Donne, though, foregrounds the interpretive act he performs when he positions himself to pray. In Prayer 7 of the Devotions, for instance, he asks, “Let me think no degree of this thy correction, casuall, or without signification; but yet when I have read it in that language, as it is a correction, let me translate it into another, and read it as a mercy; and which of ­these is the Originall, and which is the

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Translation, ­whether thy Mercy, or thy Correction, ­were thy primary, and originall intention in this sickness, I cannot conclude.”43 Donne comments explic­itly on his interpretive activity; it is an aspect of the godly person’s condition. As a  result, each prayer originates in what could be seen as an act of ­human imagination. Recognizing the way in which Donne foregrounds the interpretive activity so clearly helps to explain why the Devotions was one work that he saw through the press.44 Scholars have seen the Devotions variously as exemplary and idiosyncratic. Jeffrey Johnson argues that Donne “holds himself up as an example of the corporate body of Christ” when prayers “stemming from Donne’s personal suffering also articulate the petitions of and for the common body of Christ.”45 Yet, if not irredeemably idiosyncratic, the work, as Ramie Targoff shows, is unusually personal and nonrepresentative. Targoff argues that, despite seeking to resign his ­will, Donne retained control by scripting his spiritual condition, and she concludes that the Devotions is “a personal narrative, engaged with a par­tic­u­lar experience of illness and recuperation,” is “more preoccupied with the realities of Donne’s world than with contemplation of scriptural passages,” and is “never fully released from the intensity of [the disease’s] grip.”46 This perspective would seem to make Donne’s Devotions irreducibly personal. Why, then, given the remarkable degree of particularity with which Donne observed his illness as well as his unusual yoking of his physical and spiritual condition, did Donne nonetheless see the work as exemplary, one of the rare works he chose to publish? We should, I believe, regard each Devotion’s achievement of a new narrative as the feature that Donne offered for imitation, locating the exemplarity not simply in the shared Christian pattern Donne embodies but in what Janel Mueller has called an “exegesis of experience.”47 The exegetical pro­cess in each Expostulation creates a narrative adequate to minister comfort and hope, and to ground the Prayer that follows. Donne questions God, as though he does not like the story that God seems to be authoring, and he seeks out the details, from God’s voice in Scripture and signs in the world, that allow him to tell a dif­fer­ent story. Any par­tic­u­lar Expostulation resolves only when Donne finds a way to piece together the details into an account that places him among the elect, following the master plot detailed in Protestant prayer books.48 Each Devotion also operates as a narrative in the way reader and speaker experience the story on dif­fer­ent levels. As Mary Papazian points out, we follow the story from crisis to crisis, but we never feel the anxiety the speaker expresses ­because we know that he ­will “regain his feelings of assurance.”49 The Expostulations model allowable complaint, addressing affliction by reinterpreting Donne’s situation, and the Prayers take their cue from the consequent narrative. Thus, in its method, the Devotions is exemplary. Donne directly confronts the fictive quality of narrative; he represents both the examination of self and situation and the optative script of the Prayer proper



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as, in the final analy­sis, not just prospective but provisional, at least from his standpoint as petitioner. In Prayer 9 of the Devotions, he emphasizes that he does not know God’s exact meaning but he is able to imagine two pos­si­ble construals, ­either of which is “phisick” and to be embraced: “If it bee a long, and painful holding of this soule in sicknes, it is phisick; if I may discern thy hand to give it, and it is phisick, if it bee a speedy departing of this Soule, if I may discerne thy hand to receive it.”50 Uncertainty characterizes the individual’s pro­cess of working out an interpretation that brings together and imposes some kind of order on recollection and hope. Similarly, in Prayer 2 of the Devotions, Donne desires that God play along with a par­tic­u­lar construction of real­ity. He rehearses what he wants his own perspective to be: let me hear and see and remember. This perspective requires asking God to “appear” in certain ways to Donne, so that Donne can see God “so.” Donne’s desired version is presented as a kind of fiction—­let us suppose t­ hings are such and such a way. What Donne prays for is that God w ­ ill “[i]nterpret thine own worke” according to the version Donne arrives at in the course of the Expostulations and pre­sents in detail in his Prayers.51 In Prayer 13, he similarly pre­sents his interpretation but disavows knowledge of God’s precise meaning: “­These spots are but the letters, in which thou hast written thine owne Name, and conveyed thy selfe to mee; w ­ hether for a pre­sent possession, by taking me now, or for a ­future reversion, by glorifying thy selfe in my stay ­here, I limit not, I condition not, I choose not, I wish not.”52 The Prayers in Donne’s Devotions function to pre­sent his story for divine ratification. In Prayer 2, for instance, Donne grants that the Psalmist cries “­there is no soundness in my flesh, ­because of thine anger,” and yet, Donne tells God, “Interpret thine owne worke, and call this sicknes, correction and not anger, & ­there is soundness in my flesh.”53 In one sense, Donne’s situation remains inconclusive: the miserable condition of humanity has not changed. Yet the Prayers achieve a sober confidence that God ­will realize Donne’s hoped-­for account. As he declares, “I know, O my gracious God, that for all ­those sinnes committed since, yet thou wilt consider me, as I was in thy purpose, when thou wrotest my name in the booke of Life, in mine Election.”54 To work out the details of the new script is not to assert absolutely that it represents God’s w ­ ill. Yet the Expostulations dramatize the hatred of sinfulness and the desire for grace characteristic of the elect, and the Prayers, consequently, model what faith makes pos­si­ble: a confidence that God can make true what Donne can only imagine and desire to be true. The fallibility of Donne’s interpretation of signs is not cause for fear or despair b­ ecause, what­ever the right construal, God ­will see the signs in a saving manner, so that salvation is sure. As Donne insists in Expostulation 19, “­Every ­thing is immediately done, which is done when thou wouldst have it done. Thy purpose terminates e­ very action.” Therefore, “the assurance of f­uture mercy, is pre­sent mercy.” Donne can have confidence in God’s narrative, ­because “thou makest thy signes, seales; and thy Seales, effects; and thy effects, consolation, and

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restitution, wheresoever thou maiest receive glory by that way.”55 What God sees is by definition what is true and real. Donne, therefore, offers a model in which the provisional nature of prayer is presented as integral to the experience. ­Because the Expostulations function only to discover a pos­si­ble salvific perspective, the Prayers must perform a careful balancing act, neither too presumptuous nor too fearful about God’s ratification of the interpretation Donne has reached. ­W hether God ­wills one possibility or another, Donne resigns himself into God’s hands. Thus, in Prayer 6 he tells God, “bee pleased, O Lord, as one, made so by thee, to thinke me fit for thee; And ­whether it be thy plea­sure, to dispose of this body, this garment so, as to put it to a farther wearing in this world, or to lay it up in the common wardrope, the grave, for the next, glorifie thy selfe in thy choyce now.”56 Donne shapes the narrative possibilities that he pre­sents in the Prayers, and he does not try to hide that, while his petitions represent his best attempt to read God’s signs, his readings are fallible. Donne represents how it is pos­si­ble for prayer to embrace a tension between holding out a script and at the same time professing a resignation of self. Donne’s interpretation is provisional while God’s is performative. Frances Cruikshank points out that devotional poetry must resign authorial control and invite “the divine Author and Reader to determine the value and the ultimate destiny of each textual fragment,” and thus Donne and Herbert operated with a “fundamental assumption” that God is pre­sent as Reader and that “meaning is always deferred ­until the final reading and reception by God.”57 For Donne in the Devotions, God’s assent is what w ­ ill make the provisional narrative of petition into the believer’s true spiritual story. Herbert’s poems of complaint, while they represent unflinchingly the believer’s anguish at an absent or unresponsive God, also represent that experience as leading to a new self-­understanding that issues in right prayer. As Michael Schoenfeldt argues, Herbert’s “task as a religious poet is to make sense of the intense pain he suffers without censoring it or disguising its divine source.”58 Though critics generally discuss the complaint poems as Herbert’s own self-­expression, many of the poems are closer to the minidrama of “Love” (III), representing the experience of a Christian Everyman; the speaker’s initial responses are natu­ral and not to be condemned, but he needs to come to a clearer understanding of what to desire. Although the complaint poems do not have an interlocutor, they have a fully ­imagined addressee whose apparent withdrawal is the cause of the conflict. The speaker laments, pleads, and argues, pointing out God’s nature and pre­ce­dents. In some cases, the complaining comes across as a misguided, even sinful motion, yet the urgency and intensity are not criticized. Schoenfeldt has traced the way Herbert’s poems of complaint register spiritual pain as physical torment, highlighting the experiential rather than the existential. The relief is similarly experiential, a corrected and renewed spirit expressed in rightly conceived prayer.



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Hence, the poems function like sermon exempla. They instruct by dramatizing the model emotion script. With one exception, the complaint poems culminate in a prayer that is represented as the rightly ordered expression of the heart in response to clarified understanding.59 This direct response stands in contrast to the “fictions onely and false hair” (“Jordan” [I], 1), the “[c]urling” and “burnish[ing]” (“Jordan” [II], 4–5) that hamper address to God in Herbert’s poems about poetry. Herbert’s speakers resemble Donne in modeling what it means to appeal to the promises, but differ in that the speakers’ strug­gles bear fruit in prayer as seamless responses of the heart.60 Where Donne thematized the interpretive work of the narrative imagination and the provisional nature of self-­understanding in his complaints, Herbert did not problematize the corrected self-­understanding as provisional or fallible. What allowed Herbert to represent unproblematized self-­expression, I would argue, is that, in a sense, he was not presenting his own self-­expression so much as a repre­sen­ta­tion of a regenerate Christian’s experience as it leads to the mending of the heart and to true prayer as its expression. As a repre­sen­ta­tion, the poem could pre­sent an ideal picture of prayer in a way that no par­tic­u­lar Christian could ever claim. A narrative imagination creates the poem but narration is not its subject. Herbert’s lyr­ics of complaint, in other words, offer exemplary anecdotes. Omitting the attention to particulars that would characterize the private prayers of an individual, poems such as “Deniall,” “Frailtie,” “The Temper” (I), “Complaining,” and “Longing” are like Psalm 102, which in the Geneva Bible is titled “A prayer of the afflicted, when he s­ hall be in distress, and pour forth his meditation before the Lord,” and in which readers may find their own spiritual experience voiced. Th ­ ese poems represent the full unfolding of complaint in time, the trajectory by which pain breaks out in complaining, which leads to spiritual clarity and then issues in prayer; thus they have the qualities of ­shaped story. They are fictions of the sort Philip Sidney argued for, representing a truth, not in the ­limited way of history or the thorny way of philosophy but the lively way of poetry, a depiction of an ideal Christian that could shape the understanding and desire of the reader.61 As ­imagined ideal, the poem can represent the dramatized speaker’s petition as the regenerate spirit’s direct response to their situation, undistorted by art or ego. In “Deniall,” for instance, the speaker reports on his experience, describing it in the past tense: When my devotions could not pierce Thy ­silent eares; Then was my heart broken, as was my verse: My breast was full of fears And disorder. (1–5)

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The speaker’s experience of God’s failure both to hear and to respond is compressed into one plaintive epithet; this experience, in the second stanza, leads his disorderly thoughts to desert his attempts at prayer. Though “[e]ach took his way” (8), the dispersing thoughts nonetheless unite in the next stanza in rejecting the futility of “benum[bing]” body and spirit in prayer (12) when ­there is “no hearing” (15). In presenting that sentiment as what “they say” (11), as the utterance of his “bent thoughts” (6), the speaker dissociates himself from it; he is beleaguered. Given this account of his condition, he responds with fresh immediacy, in the pre­sent tense, echoing Psalm 94:9: O that thou shouldst give dust a tongue To crie to thee, And then not heare it crying! (16–18)

His complaint acknowledges utter debility; the fifth stanza is a confession of his condition, his soul like an instrument “[u]ntun’d, unstrung” (22) or “[l]ike a nipt blossome” (24), head hanging.62 The speaker is not the storyteller but is in the midst of affliction, articulating his experience, and it is Herbert as poet who is the storyteller, dramatizing the speaker’s experience as articulation of pain draws him to insight and confession. That achieved perspective then grounds and shapes the prayer with which the poem closes. Though the speaker gives way to expostulation for a brief moment, the poem represents the experience of distress at divine absence as an effective lesson in spiritual dependence that teaches him what to pray. The concluding prayer responds to the recognition of the self as an unstrung instrument: “O cheer and tune my heartlesse breast” (26). His breast needs a heart, and needs tuning, both a motive force and a right ordering of life.63 This recognition allows what Helen Vendler calls “an envisaged happiness,” an i­magined and hoped-­for prospect, that “thy favours granting my request, / They and my minde may chime” (28–29).64 The relation between need, prayer, and God’s action is seamless. Within the fiction of the poem, the speaker does not express confusion about how to read God’s signs; he is able to articulate what is wrong. The utterance of the heart’s condition and desire is immediate and unproblematic. “Frailtie” offers a similar picture of right prayer issuing from complaint. In the first two stanzas, the speaker sets out the situation against which he complains: he has experienced a rightly ordered disposition but it has come u­ nder threat. In his godly, meditative, disengaged “silence,” he declares: how I do despise What upon trust Is styled honour, riches, or fair eyes; But is fair dust! (1–4)



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He pre­sents this as an ongoing state; with his eyes on heaven, his “foot doth ever tread” (7) upon that “guilded clay” (5) and “fine grasse” (6). But, he confesses, when he compares God’s “Regiment” (9) with this world’s, the “glorie and gay weeds, / Brave language, braver deeds,” then “[t]hat which was dust before, doth quickly rise, / And prick mine eyes” (13–16). This contemplation of the animated illusory forms that dust assumes, and of dust’s ability to injure his right vision, prompts the prayer with which the poem concludes. Complaining about the threat is at the same time an analy­sis of it, so that the speaker’s understanding of the situation informs the petition: “O brook not this, lest if what even now / My foot did tread, / Affront ­those joyes” (17–19) with which God had married the soul to Himself. The prayer pulls together multiple senses of “dust”—­transient mortality, the vanity of gaily clad p­ eople and their brave deeds, that which blinds and disfigures—­into the image of Babel, that aspiring and vain symbol of the ­human ego without God, ironically “Commodious” (23), that is, convenient and accommodating, to conquer the speaker. ­Here, the hy­po­thet­i­cal ­future, against which the speaker prays, is a kind of fiction; yet, as in “Deniall,” it follows seamlessly from the speaker’s recognition and confession of his situation and articulates a request that is properly and directly responsive to his insight. Further, in asking that God “brook not” what would “[a]ffront” his joys, the appeal to God’s sense of decorum is also an appeal to a narrative decorum; the eventuality against which the speaker prays would offend the proper narrative. The clarity of the speaker’s self-­accounting issues in clarity about what to ask for, even when the speaker uses his imagination to narrate a deprecated possibility. Other poems of complaint dramatize the interpretive strug­gle and efforts at scripting that are part of the work of prayer, yet in contrast to Donne’s Devotions, the ultimate self-­understanding is depicted not as provisional interpretation but as a breakthrough to true insight. Herbert opens by presenting the believer wrestling with his distress and forming prayers that reflect an application of God’s promises to Himself, as he crafts arguments persuading God to accept his script. “Complaining,” for instance, begins with deprecations—­“Do not beguile my heart” (1); “Put me not to shame” (3)—­that follow from the sense of what dependence on God means developed in “The Holdfast,” the previous poem. Petition, in other words, responds to self-­knowledge. But in this case, the initial petition is a point of departure, suggesting that the speaker’s understanding still requires clarification. The verb “beguile,” for instance, is ambiguous. What does the speaker fear—­deception, disappointment of hope, the charming away of something disagreeable? Furthermore, in the speaker’s reasoning, “­Because thou art / My power and wisdome” (2–3), the logical force of “­because” is unclear. It could assert a relationship on which grounds the appeal rests: “you are my power and wisdom; therefore, do not beguile my heart.” Yet we usually read “­because” as setting up cause and effect: “do not deceive my heart, ­because you are wise and power­ful,” a reading that would observe the parallel with “do not shame me,

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b­ ecause I am dust and clay.” Yet, taken that way, the request seems problematic, as if accusing God of mistreating him arbitrarily just b­ ecause God is so able. The prayer stalls. To move forward, the speaker must return to the kind of meditation on his own and God’s attributes that ­will lead to greater clarity of understanding and desire and thereby ground a fitter petition. The second stanza, therefore, restates the attributes referred to in the first. As a statement, “Thou art the Lord of glorie; / The deed and storie / Are both thy due” (6–8) unites “power and wisdome” in the attribute of glory and recognizes that God is both the actor and the one celebrated in stories of the action. The “clay that weeps” and “dust that calls” (5) of the opening stanza are recast as “a silly flie, / That live or die / According as the weather falls” (8–10). That recasting shifts the emphasis to the speaker’s complete de­pen­dency. The next stanza then remonstrates with God: “Art thou all justice, Lord? . . . ​Am I all throat or eye, / To weep or crie?” (11, 13–14). This complaint, unlike the opening of the poem, sharpens the focus on what it means to suffer what­ever “weather falls” (10). He laments that he feels nothing but God’s justice, and yet his questions are rhetorical, protesting the experience, in contrast with the genuine questions, expressing perplexity, in Donne’s Expostulations. Herbert’s questions in “Complaining” represent something the speaker does know: while justice is certainly part of God’s “glorie,” it is not all. “Shows not thy word / More attributes?” (12–13), he asks, and in so asking he does what devotional manuals prescribe: he appeals to Scripture, the Word that allows him to imagine a dif­fer­ent story and thus formulate a new petition. The final stanza is composed of a deprecation, “Let not thy wrathfull power / Afflict my houre, / My inch of life” (16–18), and a supplication, “or let thy g­ racious power / Contract my houre, / That I may climbe and finde relief” (18–20). Both are spoken from the clarified articulation of his experience seen next to God’s attributes. He experiences complete pain, wondering “Have I no parts but ­those of grief?” (15); but he also knows from Scripture, and points out by means of his expostulation, that God does in fact have attributes other than wrathful power and that he may fitly appeal for relief on that ground. That the lyric is titled “Complaining,” as Helen Wilcox points out, suggests an ongoing, “continuous state of mind”; but the act of complaining is presented as a part of devotion that can advance believers to rightly conceived prayer.65 Complaint purges the oppressive affections (“the aire . . . ​within the breast” [“The Storm,” 18]) and yields insight and assurance. The prayer that closes “Complaining” does not pre­sent God with one script but two, pointing to another feature of the scripting involved in prayer. Couched in the optative, it pre­sents a provisional script or scripts. In Herbert’s complaint prayers, the repre­sen­ta­tion of the believer’s trajectory in understanding and feeling his situation means that we see his culminating pleas to be rightly conceived even though he does not know which represents God’s w ­ ill. The prayer imagines



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two pos­si­ble outcomes, but t­here is no uncertainty that the speaker is right to deprecate one and desire the other. As story, the poem represents part of the experience of the Christian, the experience of prayer as utterance in response to need that one has come to understand and feel aright. Thus in “The Discharge,” which follows “Complaining,” the speaker is able to take his heart to task for its murmuring and confidently pre­sent a corrected perspective on how the heart must banish distrust: “Away distrust” (54). Complaint poems such as “Dulnesse,” “Employment” (I), and “Affliction” (I) stand closer to Donne’s Devotions in their traces of autobiography, and in them, Herbert did not shortchange the experience of perplexity about how to understand his own experience and God’s actions. As poems about employment and serving God through words, they led Herbert into difficult questions about God’s ­will for his life in time and history. Nonetheless, like the more general exempla among the complaint poems, they tend to conclude with newly clarified and rightly ordered appeals to God: “Lord place me in thy consort; give one strain / To my poore reed” (“Employment” [I], 23–24); and “Lord, cleare thy gift, that with a constant wit / I may but look t­ owards thee” (“Dulnesse,” 25–26). Herbert envisioned concord, clarity of focus, and constancy as the ideal condition of the Christian. Both Donne and Herbert depicted speakers who give voice to hyperbolic ­distress, question God, and plead for relief, but their complaints differ in the way they represent the speaker’s experience. By setting the Expostulations off from the Meditations, Donne foregrounded the need for petitioners to exercise a narrative imagination. Devotion entails working gradually ­toward a more adequate but still tentative perspective, unavoidably perplexed and yet assured, which Donne offered to God to ratify and thereby make true. The provisionality of Donne’s Devotions reflected not only his uncertain return to health and preoccupation with relapsing; it also reflected his hermeneutics of prayer as a product of ­human effort, and therefore unavoidably fallible.66 For Herbert, the narrative imagination at work was his, as poet, offering a repre­sen­ta­tion of Christian experience. He ­imagined a speaker who, by expressing his distress, comes to a clearer understanding of his situation, which results in spontaneous and rightly couched prayer. He does not represent that prayer as the product of h­ uman imagination but of the regenerate heart; thus, what­ever anxious uncertainty the speaker feels initially, prayer purges that anxiety. Despite this difference, both men’s repre­sen­ta­tions of complaint and prayer involve narrativity. The elect status of the speaker is a given for the writer but not for the speaker, creating a disjuncture between the poet’s perspective and the speaker’s as he experiences the path to prayer.67 ­Because the narrative is, in Herbert’s case, the poet’s creation and, in Donne’s case, his own interpretation of God’s text, their repre­sen­ta­tions of devotion offer a dif­fer­ent sense of closure. In Donne’s Devotions the narrative conflict arises ­because of the “miserable condition

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of man”; closure requires the speaker to accept that he ­will find himself thinking and behaving perversely despite his best intentions. But unlike the Holy Sonnets, the Devotions does not show a strug­gle with the Dev­il; Donne’s prose devotions explore the perversity of folly rather than evil. Therefore, Donne was able to dramatize our miserable condition without despair. The Devotions is a story, fi­nally, that accepts life in the flesh, despite its glimpse of the library of heaven. In Herbert’s narrative of prayer, by contrast, the central conflict, which takes place in the heart, is the result of God’s apparent absence. The prayers that issue from complaint show rightly ordered desire, but, as is testified by the number of them that set out ­union with God as the desired of two alternatives, the conflict can only fi­nally be resolved by death. For Herbert, the story of the regenerate Christian is a divine comedy: the heart’s desire is, ultimately, rightly directed. But the complaints point to an attitude that in fact recurs throughout “The Church”: the longed-­for firmness, the quieting of emotion and fixed focus on God, the bones stronger through breaking; all these components of godly constancy ­will never be more than fleeting in this life. This attitude informs not only complaints like “Home” and “Complaining” but also a mininarrative like “Time.” The attractive images of Time—­a gardener by whose pruning knife we “grow . . . ​better” (12) by cutting, and “[a]n usher to convey our souls / Beyond the utmost starres and poles” (17–18)—­domesticate death, but they also prompt a shift into complaint mode: And this is that makes life so long, While it detains us from our God. Ev’n pleasures ­here increase the wrong, And length of dayes lengthen the rod. Who wants the place, where God doth dwell, Partakes already half of hell. (19–24)

Surprisingly, when we look at the way each writer engaged the narrative imagination inherent in prayer, we find that Herbert, more than Donne, saw this life as the site of tribulation and yearned for the comedy’s consummation, the marriage of the soul to God.

notes Biblical references are to the Authorized King James Version of 1611 (KJV), and ­will be cited parenthetically in the text by chapter and verse. 1. ​Donne, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, ed. Anthony Raspa (Montreal: McGill University Press, 1975), 55. Robert W. Reeder explores this passage in chapter 6 of the pre­sent volume. 2. ​For an excellent account of the problematics of prayer, see Cynthia Garrett, “The Rhe­toric of Supplication: Prayer Theory in Seventeenth-­Century E ­ ngland,” Re­nais­sance Quarterly 46, no.  2 (1993): 328–357; https://­www​.­jstor​.­org​/­stable​/­3039064. Garrett finds that the clergy



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acknowledged “the contingent and imperfect nature of communication with the divine” and that “how the pray-er is to determine God’s response” was a “per­sis­tent prob­lem.” Prayer manuals show “an intense ambivalence over God’s nature, ­human emotional experience, and the possibility of true communication between ­human and divine beings” (329). Ideas about the purpose of prayer are explored in Alec Ryrie, Being Protestant in Reformation Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 118–122. 3. ​I treat Donne’s prose devotions and Herbert’s lyric poems together ­because both seek to represent what devotion involves. In subject m ­ atter, neither is straightforward self-­expression; both aim at edification and use the resources of rhe­toric to do so. 4. ​Ramie Targoff argues that, in the Devotions, Donne “wants to claim for himself the rhetorical if not the a­ ctual power of determining his salvation.” See Ramie Targoff, John Donne, Body and Soul (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 138. Michael C. Schoenfeldt offers a parallel account of the way social and po­liti­cal discourses of power inform Herbert’s thought in Prayer and Power: George Herbert and Re­nais­sance Courtship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). 5. ​George Herbert, The Works of George Herbert, ed. F.  E. Hutchinson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941), 103; the quotation is from “Jordan” (II), line 14. Subsequent references to Herbert’s poetry ­will derive from this edition, and w ­ ill be cited parenthetically in the text by line number. 6. ​For more on Donne’s approach to the complex theological issue of assurance, see chapter 3 and chapter 8 of the pre­sent volume. In chapter 8, Danielle A. St. Hilaire argues that Herbert’s lyr­ics offer narratives in which pre­sent failure implies f­ uture promise, while Donne’s Holy Sonnets resort to atemporal paradox in order to sustain, perennially, the possibility of salvation. 7. ​Gary Kuchar makes a similar argument that highlights the way that, for Herbert, both prayer and poetry entail outcomes beyond the speaker’s control or, sometimes, conscious awareness, representing the work of the Holy Spirit. See Kuchar, “Prayer Terminal and Interminable: George Herbert and the Art of Estrangement,” Religion and Lit­er­a­ture 42, no. 3 (2010): 132–140, especially 137. 8. ​Ryrie, Being Protestant, 100. 9. ​Samuel Hieron, A helpe vnto deuotion containing certain moulds or forms of prayer (London, 1610), sig. A4v. 10. ​John Donne, The Sermons of John Donne, ed. George Potter and Evelyn Simpson, 10 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1953–1962), 5:345; Herbert, The Works of George Herbert, 231–232. Herbert is h­ ere speaking of conduct in public worship, but he elsewhere calls for h­ ouse­hold and private prayer, presumably with the same expectation. To point out the stress on understanding is not to discount that fervency is the sine qua non of prayer, as Elizabeth Clarke has shown in her work on spiritual motions. See Theory and Theology in George Herbert’s Poetry: “Divinitie, and Poesie, Met” (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), especially chapter 2. See also Garrett, “The Rhe­toric of Supplication,” 338–339. 11. ​Erica Longfellow, “Poetry, the Self, and Prayer,” Religion and Lit­er­a­ture 42, no. 3 (2010): 186–187. 12. ​Donne, Devotions, 120. 13. ​Richard Strier, Love Known: Theology and Experience in George Herbert’s Poetry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 74. 14. ​Ramie Targoff and Peter Iver Kaufman have detailed how En­glish Protestants conceived the use of set forms, believers shaping their minds and affections accordingly, so that a prayer penned for a specific kind of circumstance could serve anyone in like need. See Targoff, Common Prayer: The Language of Public Devotion in Early Modern E ­ ngland (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), and Kaufman, Prayer, Despair, and Drama: Elizabethan Introspection (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996). Longfellow notes that Julia Palmer gave her devotional poems titles such as “a soul’s complaint” that indicated the universality of the sentiments

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they utter, even as she also insisted on the particularity of the experience by including the date in the title. See Longfellow, “Poetry, the Self, and Prayer,” 187. See also my discussion of how it was conceived to be pos­si­ble to conform the self to a shared ideal through application of Scripture to oneself in Kate Narveson, Bible Readers and Lay Writers in Early Modern ­England: Gender and Self-­Definition in an Emergent Writing Culture (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2012), chapter 4. 15. ​Hieron, A helpe vnto deuotion, sig. A10v. 16. ​John Downame, A godly and learned treatise of prayer (London, 1640), 139. 17. ​Robert Hill, The path-­way to prayer and pietie (London, 1613), 4 and 137. 18. ​Hieron, A helpe vnto deuotion, sig. A7v; 2–3. 19. ​In his introduction to Herbert’s Prayerful Art (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989), Terry Sherwood argues that Herbert’s “prayerful art” seeks conformity to Christ. However, the force of poems such as “The Thanksgiving” makes clear the incommensurability between the believer and Christ, as Constance Furey demonstrates in Poetic Relations: Intimacy and Faith in the En­glish Reformation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 66. 20. ​David Marno, Death Be Not Proud: The Art of Holy Attention (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 27. See also my discussion in chapter 3 of Bible Readers and Lay Writers of “application to the self ” as a set of devotional disciplines that involved both contemplation and production of godly affections. 21. ​See Narveson, Bible Readers and Lay Writers, 104–105. 22. ​Erica Longfellow, “Public, Private, and the House­hold in Early Seventeenth-­Century ­England,” Journal of British Studies 45 (2006): 319–323. For the account of Elizabeth Melville, see Ryrie, Being Protestant, 158. 23. ​Hill, The path-­way to prayer and pietie, sig. A4r. 24. ​Hill, The path-­way to prayer and pietie, 137. For imitation as a means to develop skill in composition, see Narveson, Bible Readers and Lay Writers, 37–38. 25. ​Garrett, “The Rhe­toric of Supplication,” 341. 26. ​The question of ­whether prayer should be seen to employ a fictional or nonfictional narrative is vexed, since the petitioner adheres to the implicit contract of nonfiction that what they say is rooted in the real, and, to some degree, the self-­representation offered in prayer is falsifiable—­they may or may not have in fact committed the sins for which they beg forgiveness. However, the self-­representation is an account of inwardness and a satisfaction of narrative expectations that reflects the Calvinist master plot with its i­ magined world of meaning. 27. ​Hieron, A helpe vnto deuotion, sig. B3r, 107–108. 28. ​“Confession” similarly ends with a petition that imagines narrative resolution, but only prospectively: “[T]ake thy plagues away,” the speaker asks, “[f]or since confession p­ ardon winnes,” even “the brightest day, / The clearest diamond . . . ​­shall be thick and cloudie to my breast” (26–30). “Love II” tells a wholly prospective story of what ­shall happen if God’s “greater flame” (1) kindles “true desires” (4). “[S]hall” (3) is the operative verb; examples could be multiplied. 29. ​Published prayers assumed a godly ideal that exercised a homogenizing pressure on prayers. 30. ​Anne Twysden, Certayn comfortable places of Scripture And three prayers collected and made by Lady Anne Twysden, Kent History and Library Centre, MS U1655/F.8, fol. 48–49. 31. ​Sarah Covington argues that the Reformation brought an increasingly psychological conception of a believer’s strug­gle with doubt, fear, sorrow, and powerlessness in the face of a ­silent God. Christ’s agony and complaint in Gethsemane came to be seen as indicative of his ­human fear in the face of death, a state that believers could identify with, so that Donne in the Devotions writes, “I see [ Jesus] feares, and I feare with him” (29). Jesus’s example licensed complaint; see Covington, “The Garden of Anguish: Gethsemane in Early Modern ­England,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 65 (2014): 280–308.



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32. ​Hieron, A helpe vnto deuotion, 112; Tuke, A Silver Watch-­bell (London, 1608), 190. Using

the analogy between affliction and illness, Tuke declares that the “sicke man b­ ecause hee hath confidence in the Physitian, suffereth the impostume to be cut: afterward as he feeleth himself relieved, he putteth confidence more and more in the Physitian” (191). Hope and patience constitute a feedback loop, a steady-­state response to affliction appropriate to the godly. 33. ​Chana Bloch, Spelling the Word: George Herbert and the Bible (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 261. For other discussions of the Psalms as devotional exempla, see Clare Costley King’oo, Miserere Mei: The Penitential Psalms in Late Medieval and Early Modern E ­ ngland (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012) and Hannibal Hamlin, Psalm Culture and Early Modern En­glish Lit­er­a­ture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 34. ​Bloch, Spelling the Word, 262. 35. ​Bloch, Spelling the Word, 265. For the ele­ment of self-­therapy in prayer, see Ryrie, Being Protestant, 140–143. 36. ​Given the contradiction between an impassible, perfect God and a personal, merciful God, prayer manuals, Garrett finds, managed to have it both ways. The standard account stated that “we may not be able to teach God or better him in intellectual or moral argument, nor can we expect to please him in the conventional sense of moving or surprising him, but though philosophical arguments for God’s impassibilitas may suggest other­wise, scriptural example encourages us to believe that God responds favorably to per­sis­tent emotional appeals.” Garrett, “The Rhe­toric of Supplication,” 338. 37. ​Hieron, A helpe vnto deuotion, sig. A3v. 38. ​David Booy, ed., The Notebooks of Nehemiah Wallington, 1618–1654 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007), 199. 39. ​Elizabeth Clarke and Erica Longfellow, “ ‘[E]xamine my life’: Writing the Self in the Early Seventeenth C ­ entury,” introduction to the online edition of Elizabeth Isham’s Autobiographical Writings, http://­www2​.­warwick​.­ac​.­uk​/­fac​/­arts​/­ren​/­projects​/­isham​/­texts​/­, accessed August 9, 2016. 40. ​For Donne’s attention to God’s “voices,” see Daniel Doerksen, “Discerning God’s Voice, God’s Hand: Scripturalist Moderation in Donne’s Devotions,” in Centered on the Word: Lit­er­a­ ture, Scripture, and the Tudor-­Stuart M ­ iddle Way, ed. Daniel Doerksen and Christopher Hodgkins (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004), 148–172. 41. ​Jeffrey Johnson characterizes Donne’s conception of prayer as the “strug­gle of the believer to conform the ­will with God’s,” a strug­gle that takes place not only in the congregation where we “besiege God with our prayers” but also in private where “we wrestle with him hand to hand.” This emphasis on strug­gle means that Donne’s prayers have an “idiosyncratic and personal ‘impudency.’ ” Johnson argues that, in the Devotions, Donne offers prayers that model “a coming to terms with one’s own propensity to sin in relation to the grace and mercy of God.” See Jeffrey Johnson, The Theology of John Donne (Rochester, NY: D. S. Brewer, 1999), 45–57. 42. ​The kinship between Donne and Elizabeth Isham has a textual basis, since Isham, like Donne, was influenced by Augustine’s Confessions. See Clarke and Longfellow, “ ‘[E]xamine my life.’ ” 43. ​Donne, Devotions, 40. 44. ​In his dedicatory epistle to Prince Charles, Donne invokes Hezekiah’s exemplary pre­ce­ dent. Donne also touches on the edifying nature of other ­people’s actions in Prayer 4. See Devotions, 3 and 24. 45. ​Johnson, The Theology of John Donne, 60. 46. ​Targoff, John Donne, Body and Soul, 131–132. 47. ​Janel Mueller, “The Exegesis of Experience: Dean Donne’s Devotions upon Emergent Occasions,” The Journal of En­glish and Germanic Philology 67, no. 1 (1968): 1–19.

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48. ​For a valuable account of how the Devotions fits the way Protestants ­imagined the experi-

ence of the elect as an ongoing conflict between sin and grace, see Mary Arshagouni Papazian, “Donne, Election, and the Devotions upon Emergent Occasions,” Huntington Library Quarterly 55, no. 4 (1992): 603–619. 49. ​Papazian, “Donne, Election, and the Devotions upon Emergent Occasions,” 211. 50. ​Donne, Devotions, 50. Similarly, in Prayer 16, Donne declares “if this bee the houre of my transmigration, I may die the death of a sinner, drowned in my sinnes, in the bloud of thy Sonne; And if I live longer, yet I may now die the death of the righ­teous, die to sinne; which death is a resurrection to new life. Thou killest and thou givest life: which soever comes, it comes from thee” (85). 51. ​Donne, Devotions, 14. 52. ​Donne, Devotions, 70. Downame explains that while “wee may lawfully pray against afflictions before they come, or for deliverance out of them when they are inflicted; yet not absolutely and without any condition or exception” ­because absolute petitions may only be against sin, evil in itself, or for spiritual graces. Afflictions may be to our benefit, and therefore the promises, in re­spect of temporal benefits or deliverances from affliction, are not “absolute and without limitation” but “alwaies restrained to the condition of his owne glory, and our spirituall good”; Downame, A godly and learned treatise of prayer, 164–165. 53. ​Donne, Devotions, 14. 54. ​Donne, Devotions, 81. 55. ​Donne, Devotions, 102–103. 56. ​Donne, Devotions, 34. 57. ​Frances Cruikshank, Verse and Poetics in George Herbert and John Donne (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010), 33–37. 58. ​Schoenfeldt, Prayer and Power, 125. 59. ​The exception, “Longing,” is followed by “The Bag,” which serves as the answer. Bloch also stresses the often “abrupt and unmotivated” turn to assurance at the end of the complaint poems, arguing that it represents the “power of faith.” See Bloch, Spelling the Word, 272–273. 60. ​For a cata­loging of the appeals, see Bloch, Spelling the Word, 265–270. 61. ​For parallels between Protestant devotion and Sidney’s sense of fiction as a re-­presentation of an ideal to be imitated, see chapter 1 of Nandra Perry’s Imitatio Christi: The Poetics of Piety in Early Modern ­England (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2014). 62. ​In the imagery of bent thoughts and nipped blossom, the speaker expresses the sin and affliction described retrospectively in “The Flower,” the soul “[s]till upwards bent” (30). The pre­sent tense of “The Flower” is the joyful experience of having “recover’d greenness” (9) and budding again; the speaker offers not prayer but grateful reflection on past pain, telling a story that is complete. 63. ​As Strier argues, the final line is a prayer “that God do something to him analogous to what he has done in the poem,” namely, mend his rhyme; it does not represent the answer to his prayer as something achieved ex opere operato. See Strier, Love Known, 191. 64. ​Helen Vendler, The Poetry of George Herbert (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 260. 65. ​George Herbert, The En­glish Poems of George Herbert, ed. Helen Wilcox (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 501. 66. ​And in Expostulation 19 of the Devotions, Donne implies that he works “­after [God’s] Copie” (100). I thus find the provisional nature of prayer in the Devotions to be something Donne can embrace, in contrast to the lack of resolution Danielle A. St. Hilaire, in the following chapter, perceives in the way the Holy Sonnets are open to “possibility” rather than promise. 67. ​Papazian, “Donne, Election, and the Devotions upon Emergent Occasions,” 611.

8 • RECUPER ATING THE INC APACITIES OF THE FALLEN SELF IN DONNE AND HERBERT Possibility and Promise D A N I E L L E A . S T. H I L A I R E

“For if we believe it is true that God foreknows and foreordains every­thing and that he can be neither deceived nor hindered in his foreknowledge and foreordination, and then if we believe that nothing happens ­unless he w ­ ills it—­which even reason is forced to concede—­then reason itself likewise testifies that ­there is no f­ ree w ­ ill, w ­ hether in man, angel, or any creature.” —­Martin Luther, “The Enslaved W ­ ill”

For Protestant writers of the En­glish Re­nais­sance, the experience of h­ uman life was largely the experience of incapacity and limitation. The fallen individual strug­gles both with a very small, partial understanding of the universe they inhabit and with an agency that has been rendered useless by original sin. For Luther, who saw freedom of the w ­ ill as a zero-­sum game in which God already owns all the pieces, basic logic dictated that h­ uman beings have no f­ ree w ­ ill in a universe governed by an omnipotent, omniscient God. Calvin provided perhaps a more fine-­grained understanding of h­ uman agency, but made a clear distinction between the possession of the ­will and the possession of freedom of the ­will: “simply to w ­ ill is of man; to w ­ ill ill, of a corrupt nature; to w ­ ill well, of grace.”1 ­Humans always have w ­ ill, but its freedom—­which is to say, its freedom to do good—is the work of grace alone, not of ­human beings. Thus, for writers working within this theological framework, praising God was often bound up with a recognition of the incapacities of the self. As Gary Kuchar notes, quoting from John Donne’s Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, “the metaphysically comforting 157

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promise that God is ‘all ­things unto us’ is first revealed through the narcissistically traumatic and thus anxiety-­producing insight that ‘we are nothing in our selves.’ ”2 This essay w ­ ill examine how Donne’s religious poetry and George Herbert’s The T ­ emple cope differently with the incapacities of the fallen subject in the face of the God each speaker seeks to find. In par­tic­u­lar, I ­will show how, in two specific poems, each speaker transforms his “nothingness” into a strategy, and how the failures and disabilities of fallen subjectivity are, for both poets, a means to conceive of their own agency in their relationship with God. This strategy, however, takes two distinctive forms. On the one hand, for Herbert’s speaker, the experience of fallen negativity unfolds in time, creating a pro­cess in which the absence of God in the pre­sent becomes a means whereby the speaker gains the promise of God’s presence in the ­future. On the other hand, for Donne’s speaker in the Holy Sonnets—­who seeks per­sis­tently to divorce himself from temporal continuity—­this experience finds expression in the atemporal ambiguities and contradictions of Donne’s language. ­These ambiguities open the door to the possibility of salvation without allowing that possibility to resolve into an actuality, the statistical one or zero, saved or not saved. Whereas Herbert finds assurance in the f­ uture, Donne finds assurance in his ability to forestall what­ever the f­ uture may bring. The difference between ­these two approaches, between promise and possibility, proves to be less a ­matter of disparate theologies and more a ­matter of poetic strategy, of dif­fer­ent uses of the resources offered by language for thinking through (in both senses of the phrase) fallenness.3 Critics of both Donne and Herbert have long pointed to the ways in which both poets strug­gle with the relationship between h­ uman and divine agency in their works. While the question of identifying specific doctrinal influences for each poet remains largely a ­matter of debate, both writers w ­ ere working against a theological backdrop that itself strug­gled to reconcile h­ uman action with God’s omniscience and omnipotent ­will. Luther offered a particularly hard-­line stance against h­ uman agency in his debate with Erasmus, asserting that “all ­things ­human are vanity and lies.”4 For him and, perhaps to a lesser extent, for Calvin, if the sinner is redeemed sola fide (by faith alone), then it is impossible for a h­ uman being to do anything that would redeem them—­they are not able to merit forgiveness, which means that their actions in the world are meaningless with regard to the most impor­tant question t­here is: “Am I saved?”5 Yet for Calvin, this position led to some minute dissection of what is meant by “­will” and its freedom or lack thereof. He recognized that the doctrine of predestination potentially opens the door to the complaint that God is unjust for punishing ­those who do evil when God has willed it so, a complaint brought by Erasmus against Luther and an issue for Arminius in the seventeenth ­century.6 As such, Calvin differentiated between “­free ­will” on the one hand and the actions of a “willing slave” on the other: “Man w ­ ill then be spoken of as having this sort of f­ ree decision, not b­ ecause he has f­ ree choice equally of good and evil, but b­ ecause he acts



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wickedly by w ­ ill, not by compulsion. Well put, indeed, but what purpose is served by labeling with a proud name [i.e., “­free w ­ ill”] such a slight t­ hing? A noble freedom, indeed—­for man not to be forced to serve sin, yet to be such a willing slave that his ­will is bound by the fetters of sin!”7 For Calvin, ­human beings voluntarily ­will the evil that they do, which is why God’s punishment is just; at the same time, however, they have no ability to ­will other­wise—­they cannot w ­ ill to do good—­and so their ­will is not compelled but also not truly f­ ree. In addition to this hairsplitting over what constitutes a truly “­free” ­will and what kinds of actions ­human agency is capable of producing, theologians also had to contend with the psychological effects of a soteriology that told the faithful that they could play no part in their own salvation. As Catherine Gimelli Martin has discussed, the emotional despair that could be prompted by the logical entailments of sola fide led some of Calvin’s followers, and particularly William Perkins (whom she identifies as an impor­tant influence on Donne), to make certain allowances for h­ uman agency: “strict Calvinists never acknowledged ­free ­will as a ­factor in attaining grace, but they silently granted it some sufficiency. . . . ​ Without denying that in its natu­ral state the ­human ­will was utterly depraved, preparationists allowed its strug­gles to play a very real role in revealing God’s presence in the hearts of the chosen.”8 This same concern over the moral effects of Calvinist doctrine led Arminius and his followers simply to revolt against the notion that h­ uman beings played no part in their own salvation. Claiming that the Calvinist doctrine of predestination is “hurtful to the salvation of men” ­because it, among other ­things, “produces within men a despair both of performing that which their duty requires and of obtaining that ­towards which their desires are directed,” Arminius declared of “the f­ree ­will of man” that “when he is made a partaker of this regeneration . . . ​, he is capable of thinking, willing, and d­ oing that which is good, but yet not without the continued aids of Divine Grace.”9 All of this is just to say that, when Herbert and Donne w ­ ere writing, the question of ­whether h­ umans had agency in their relationship with God and, if so, what that agency looked like, was far from settled and was in fact a point over which con­temporary theologians strug­gled, both with each other and within their own writing. As readers of Herbert’s and Donne’s poetry, then, we do not necessarily need to begin with a specific doctrinal position to examine how their poems also strug­gle with questions of h­ uman agency, as so many studies of Donne and Herbert do; we might instead begin from the position that the question of h­ uman agency is for both poets just that—­a question.10 One of the proj­ects of both the Holy Sonnets and The T ­ emple, I believe, is to try to find solutions to this question, to look for room for h­ uman agency—­and specifically the ­human agency of the poetic voice—in each speaker’s relationship with God. To undertake a full-­ scale comparison of both textual bodies, however, is beyond the scope of this essay. Instead, I w ­ ill compare two poems that work through a similar concern with the speaker’s incapacity to create a relationship with God: Donne’s Holy

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Sonnet “As due by many titles” and Herbert’s “The Search.” While t­ hese two poems cannot be said simply to represent their larger texts, close examination of each reveals two dif­fer­ent modes of grappling with the prob­lem of agency that open a way into thinking about what is at stake in seventeenth-­century religious poetry.11

Salvific Possibility in Donne’s “As due by many titles” Throughout most of the Holy Sonnets, Donne’s speaker seeks an immediate, intimate relationship with God. Rejecting God’s actions in the past as sufficient to assure him of his salvation, he repeatedly asks God to be pre­sent specifically to him, in the ­here and now. At the same time, the speaker expresses uncertainty about his ability to do anything that would make this relationship happen. For instance, in “Thou hast made me,” the speaker notes that he can only rise to meet God “when ­towards thee / By thy leave I can look” (9–10).12 On the one hand, the speaker is the one who is able to look, and he would be the agent of looking; on the other, he only gains this agency “by [God’s] leave,” and he notes that on his own, “not one hour [he] can [himself] sustain” (12). The relationship between God’s “leave” ­here—­His grace—­and the speaker’s ability to raise himself up to God’s level by looking upward evokes Reformation debates over the relationship between ­human agency and grace, but without offering a position on the ­matter. Augustine was clear that no ­human could achieve salvation without the grace of God, a point from which even the Catholic Erasmus began his explanation of ­human w ­ ill. The real argument was over ­whether the h­ uman internal activity that was upheld by grace was the work of God or the sinner.13 While Donne in “Thou hast made me” points to the complex relationship between grace and his own ability to come into God’s presence, he does not clearly pronounce on how that relationship works. “As due by many titles” takes up this question of agency more fully. Whereas “Thou hast made me” provokes questions about the relation between the speaker’s actions and God’s in the speaker’s salvation, “As due by many titles” both interrogates the cause of his need for God’s immediate presence and attempts to repair the relationship between him and God. In ­doing so, however, the speaker creates a paradoxical success-­by-­failure that suspends him between mutually contradictory possibilities: his salvation versus his reprobation, and his agency versus his helplessness. The sonnet describes a complex relationship between three dif­fer­ent agents: As due by many titles I resign Myself to thee, O God, first I was made By thee, and for thee, and when I was decayed Thy blood bought that, the which before was thine,



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I am thy son, made with thy self to shine, Thy servant, whose pains thou hast still repaid, Thy sheep, thine image, and, till I betrayed My self, a ­temple of thy Spirit divine; Why doth the devil then usurp on me? Why doth he steal, nay ravish that’s thy right? Except thou rise and for thine own work fight, Oh I ­shall soon despair, when I do see That thou lov’st mankind well, yet wilt not choose me, And Satan hates me, yet is loth to lose me.

­ ere the speaker, God, and Satan all participate in a fight over the speaker’s soul. H The difficulty the speaker ­faces is revealed in the vari­ous actions of ­these three parties, expressed in the poem’s verbs. Despite the fact that the speaker is the grammatical subject of the plurality of verbs used in the poem, ­these verbs largely show how incapacitated he is in both his previous relationship with God and his pre­sent one, an incapacity that accounts for the frustration and sense of helplessness that pervade the sonnet. A ­ fter the first line, the sonnet’s octave describes the close relationship the speaker used to have with God. He was God’s “sheep,” a creature in God’s care; His “image”; and His “­temple,” a locus of worship for his divine creator who was ­housed within him. As the verbs show, in ­these better days the speaker was passive in this relationship: the verbs of which the speaker is the subject—­“was made,” “was decayed,” and “made . . . ​to shine”—­are in the passive voice and describe e­ ither God’s actions on him or his own incapacities as a sinner.14 The only actions of which the speaker is an agent in the octave are apparently moments of giving up agency: his frustrated resignation in the opening line, and his self-­betrayal expressed in the seventh and eighth lines. In the sestet, in which the speaker agonizes about his current situation now that he has lost this intimacy with God, the speaker only “­shall . . . ​despair” and “sees.” While ­these verbs are grammatically active, they impart to the speaker very ­little action or agency, designating his abdication of hope and situating the speaker as merely a spectator in the arena of his own salvation. In contrast, God and Satan, the other agents in the poem, dominate the action. Though they receive fewer verbs, theirs are all active and describe their power over the speaker. In addition to t­ hose actions of which He was the implied agent in the octave, God also has “repaid” the speaker’s pains, and His blood “bought that, the which before was” His. In the sestet, Satan is truly busy, usurping, stealing, ravishing, and hating the speaker. Part of the speaker’s prob­lem ­here is less his own lack of agency and more the fact that God and Satan operate in dif­fer­ent tenses. God acts in the octave (in the sestet His verbs describe what He is not ­doing—­rising, fighting, and choosing), but only in the past tense, whereas

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Satan’s actions in the sestet are all present-­tense.15 Calvin wrote, “­those whom the Lord does not make worthy to be guided by his Spirit he abandons, with just judgment, to Satan’s action,” and this is very much what the speaker fears has happened to him.16 Whereas in the past the speaker enjoyed a close relationship with God in which God was the sole agent of the speaker’s existence, the speaker’s betrayal in the seventh and eighth lines consigns him to Satan’s agency, so that he can only watch and despair as Satan claims him and God neglects to fight for him. To the question of who is to be the agent of his salvation, “As due by many titles,” as opposed to “Thou hast made me,” appears to make no room for the speaker to act in a manner that might repair his relationship with God. The poem, however, does in fact depict two moments in which the speaker displays a more active agency, moments that suggest the speaker is not willing to give up all possibility of participating in his own salvation. The poem opens with the speaker’s announcement, “I resign / Myself to thee, O God.” As opposed to other sonnets where the speaker demands that God be pre­sent to him, h­ ere the speaker attempts to effect a reconciliation between himself and God by an action of his own, placing himself in God’s hands. The reason the speaker does this, however, is to repair the damage done when, he says, “I betrayed / Myself.” Within the story that the speaker tells in this poem, the betrayal is the first action of which the speaker is an agent, and it is this action that destroys the previous relationship he had with God, both narratively and syntactically interrupting his ­status as God’s “­temple.” Given the passivity of the speaker in that ­earlier relationship, this interruption suggests that the speaker’s transition from a passive to an active state is part of the prob­lem. As long as he remained the object of God’s agency, the speaker was in a good place, but once he became an agent in his own right, the subject of action rather than its object, he fell away from God and into the hands of Satan. To resign himself is thus to attempt to return to that previous passive state, to being God’s object once again. At the same time, however, “resign” occupies the same final place in the line as “betrayed,” and both take the same object—­“Myself ”—­which hints at a connection between the two actions that calls into question what the speaker is trying to do by resigning himself in the first line of the sonnet. Both “resign” and “betray” have multiple definitions that w ­ ere available when Donne was writing that open up a variety of ways of understanding the speaker’s actions in the poem. In one reading, t­ hese verbs are roughly synonyms: “resign” can mean “to relinquish, give up (an office, position, right, claim, ­etc.); to yield (a position, right, ­etc.) to another person,” which comes very close to the common definition of “betray” as meaning “to give up to, or place in the power of an ­enemy, by treachery or disloyalty.”17 While “betray” implies a more specific indirect object—­one betrays oneself to an ­enemy—­both words signify a handing over and abdication to another party. If this is the case, however, then the speaker reveals a potential prob­lem with his act of resignation in the first line of the lyric: if the speaker has,



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as he claims, betrayed himself to his ­enemy—­which, as the sestet appears to affirm, means handing himself over to Satan’s agency rather than God’s—­how can he then relinquish himself a second time, on this occasion giving himself back to God? If now Satan has all the power over the speaker, from where does he derive the ability to resign himself to God? This question points to one way in which “betray” and “resign” are not in parallel, and trou­bles the idea that Satan has total power over the speaker in the sestet. Whereas the direct object of both verbs is “myself,” the speaker only designates an indirect object for “resign”—­“I resign / Myself to thee”—­while, in the seventh and eighth lines, the speaker does not say to whom he betrayed himself. And though the introduction of Satan in the sestet seems to suggest that the indirect object was Satan, that easy implication is troubled by the volta: “Why doth the devil then usurp on me?” If the speaker is implying in the octave that he betrayed himself to Satan, then it seems curious that he would so quickly forget that fact at the start of the sestet. But “betray” does not always require or imply an indirect object: it can also mean “to reveal or disclose against one’s ­w ill or intention the existence, identity, real character of (a person or ­thing desired to be kept secret).”18 The action that disconnected the speaker from God is, on this reading of the verb, a revelation of the speaker’s “real character.” If this is the case, this cannot be a revelation to God, since even Donne would be unlikely to imagine God being deceived by the nature of His own creatures. Instead, we might understand Donne’s speaker as describing an action by which the speaker became aware of his own nature as a sinful, fallen h­ uman and thereby fell out of his internal relationship with God—­his faith—by doubting. The action that pulled the speaker away from God, in other words, is a self-­recognition—or, perhaps in a nonreflexive sense, a recognition of himself as a self. By betraying himself, the speaker loses the immediacy of his relationship ­because he realizes that he is, indeed, a self of his own, something separate from God.19 To act on his own rather than to be the passive recipient of God’s activity is to see himself as a separate agent, to recognize the capability for action within himself. To borrow a phrase from Anthony Low in a discussion of Milton’s verse, what Donne’s speaker describes in the octave of “As due by many titles” is a “fall into subjectivity”: by being an agent in his own right rather than by being God’s object, Donne’s speaker has revealed to himself a sinful selfhood that has agency—­the agency to shut God out.20 By opening the poem with “I resign / Myself to thee,” the speaker thus attempts to hand himself over to God—to “re-­sign” his “title” back to his creator—­and thereby cancel that agentive self.21 Exploiting the parallelism between “resign” and “betray,” the poem suggests that, in an arena in which God and Satan are the only real actors, the only agency the speaker has is the very minimal power to give himself up (in multiple senses of the phrase). If the speaker can betray himself, surely then he can also resign himself and fix the prob­lem? But t­ here is, as in so much of Donne’s poetry, something tricky in the logic h­ ere.

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The speaker ignores the fact that the act of betrayal is for him the very ­thing that distances him from God—­not, as I have suggested, ­because of the nature of the act itself but ­because by acting the speaker becomes a subject and no longer God’s object, and thereby loses the relation to God he once had. By being the grammatical and semantic subject of “resign,” the speaker is repeating the same pro­cess. Canceling the speaker’s “self,” subjecting his agency to God appears necessary for him to be saved; but how does one resign one’s ability to act without acting? The poem is in this sense an interrogation of the prob­lem of agency that was so much at issue in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, focused through the lens of one frustrated individual turning over in his head how exactly it could have all gone so wrong. Having defined his own agency as a barrier between himself and God—­the kind of agency Calvin claimed did not deserve the “noble” name of “freedom” b­ ecause it could only do ill—­the speaker then uses that agency to try to undo the significance of having exercised it in the first place. But are we, as readers, to see this as a path to salvation, or are we to see it as an exercise in futility? On the one hand, “I resign” is a performative statement: one resigns by announcing that one resigns. By beginning his poem in this way, the speaker thus does what he sets out to do. On the other hand, if any exercise of agency “betrays” the speaker, then to resign himself now is no dif­fer­ent from betraying himself then, and the speaker ends exactly where he started: with the door of his “­temple” barred against God. This is what Stanley Fish, in an analy­sis of Herbert’s poetics, describes as the “impossibility” of “the putting away of the self ”: “­every success is si­mul­ta­neously a defeat.”22 For Donne, I suggest, this is exactly the point. Kuchar has argued that Donne on some level resists “the narcissistically traumatic and thus anxiety-­producing insight that ‘we are nothing in our selves,’ ” a phrase I quoted above, so that Donne’s speaker in the Holy Sonnets tries to leverage the solipsism of Petrarchan discourse “to avoid full contrition in the very gesture of petitioning God for the prevenient grace necessary for the ‘godly sorrow that worketh repentance.’ ”23 The act of repentance is at odds with Donne’s language of repentance. Along similar lines, I have argued elsewhere that Donne’s anxiety about the relationship between divine and h­ uman time leads him in the Holy Sonnets to use poetic apostrophe to disrupt temporal progression in order to hold at bay the question of ­whether God ­will save him and instead construct himself as one whom God can save—­a tactic I term a “poetics of possibility.”24 Faced with a question whose answer is potentially terrifying, Donne’s strategy is always to find ways to p­ revent that answer from arriving by undermining the conditions of its arrival. In addition to the larger strategy of temporal disruption, the paradox the speaker creates in “As due by many titles,” in which he both succeeds and fails to give himself over to God, is another way Donne achieves this goal of being neither damned nor saved but simply possibly saved, without allowing space for possibility to resolve into certainty. On the one hand, by resigning himself to God the speaker uses the



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l­ imited, sinful agency he has—­the ability to give himself up through a performative speech act—to reenter a relationship with God, resigning himself in the act of announcing it. On the other, by defining that agency as the force that separates him from God in the first place, his act of resignation maintains that agency by the very act of giving it up. It is a repetition of the same double betrayal the speaker describes at the end of the octave, both giving himself over to another and betraying, in the sense of revealing, his own agency. With the same hard, unforgiving wit Christopher Hodgkins identifies in Donne’s “comedy of eros” in this volume’s next chapter, Donne h­ ere converts religious despair into a kind of logical trickery. A “Schrödinger’s sinner,” the speaker creates through his verbal paradoxes a space in which he is both saved and not saved, having turned the sinfulness of his fallen agency into the means by which he can comprehend the conditions of his salvation while si­mul­ta­neously forestalling it.

Salvific Promise in Herbert’s “The Search” While God is much more of an active presence in Herbert’s poetry than in Donne’s, the question of the poetic voice’s agency is, as critics from Fish to Barbara Lewalski to Michael Schoenfeldt have argued, a central prob­lem in The ­Temple, just as it is in the Holy Sonnets.25 While readers of Herbert’s book tend to see him seeking a way to unite his language with God’s, Schoenfeldt has noted “the vestiges of aggression lurking within the terms of the surrender the poet extends to God,” arguing that Herbert’s speaker is “interested in the pro­cess by which his own sincere gestures of tribute and submission mask aggression and manipulation.”26 Just as Donne’s speaker finds a way to wrest agency from surrender, so too does Herbert’s poetic voice explore the double edge of self-­resignation. Unlike Donne’s “As due by many titles,” which uses atemporal performative contradiction to suspend the speaker between two opposing possibilities, however, ­Herbert’s The ­Temple more often exploits the temporality of pro­cess to find connection with God while developing a poetic agency distinct from God. This is particularly the case in “The Search,” a poem that bears certain striking similarities to the Holy Sonnets. As in “As due by many titles,” ­here we have a speaker grappling with the failures of his agency to work on a God whose ­will appears unreachable by h­ uman efforts. Herbert’s speaker opens by remarking that his searches for God “never prove” (4), indicating the futility of his attempts to achieve u­ nion with God.27 His inability to find God leads the speaker to cry out in a voice that sounds very much like that of the Holy Sonnets: O take ­these bars, t­ hese lengths away; Turn, and restore me: Be not Almighty, let me say, Against, but for me. (49–52)

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At the same time, however, this failure of the speaker’s searching nevertheless leads to faithful certainty at the conclusion: When thou dost turn, and wilt be near; What edge so keen, What point so piercing can appear To come between? For as thy absence doth excel All distance known: So doth thy nearness bear the bell, Making two one. (53–60)

Herbert’s speaker does not talk about what w ­ ill happen if God turns, but what happens when He does turn and ­will be near. Despite the searches that “never prove” (4), the speaker ends the poem certain that the distance ­will eventually be closed, that he ­will eventually have a ­union with God in which the distinction between him and God ­will dis­appear: “Making two one.” The fact that the speaker achieves this certainty out of the inability of his ­limited h­ uman agency to find God makes this poem notably dif­fer­ent from “As due by many titles,” which relies on the impossibility of resolution to cling to the possibility of salvation. But this dif­fer­ent ending nevertheless, as in Donne’s poem, relies upon the conversion of the weakness of ­human agency into something potent. The speaker of “The Search” is able to take this extra step b­ ecause, rather than creating a paradox, Herbert’s poem narrates a process—­specifically, it narrates the pro­cess of searching. ­After asking God where He has gone, Herbert’s speaker describes all the places he has looked for Him. Lines 5 to 16 show the speaker searching out the natu­ral world for God. While both the “herbs below” (9) and the “stars above” (13) seem to give evidence of their awareness of God, the speaker finds that “the sphere / And centre both to [him] deny” (6–7) that God is pre­sent—­the herbs and stars may know that God is, but they cannot show the speaker where God is. That his “knees pierce th’ earth” (5) and his “eyes the sky” (5) furthermore suggests that God is not to be found in some physical location beyond the known natu­ral world, e­ ither. The word “pierce” indicates penetration through and beyond the ground in which the herbs grow and the sky in which the stars shine. Just as God is not to be found on earth or in the sky, He is likewise not to be found in some heaven that is just above the stars or below the earth’s surface. The notion that God does not dwell anywhere physically becomes the speaker’s greatest anxiety in lines 29 to 44. The question, “what hidden place / Conceals thee still?” (29–30) suddenly gives way at the end of the stanza to the possibility



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that it is in fact God’s “­will” (32) that keeps God absent, a possibility that steals the speaker’s attention and prompts him to cry out: O let not that of anything; Let rather brass, Or steel, or mountains be thy ring, And I ­will pass. (33–36)

Physical bound­aries are negotiable; they can be passed. But if God is hidden by His w ­ ill, by something absolutely other than the physical world, then t­ here is no way that the speaker can come physically into God’s presence; indeed, he cannot even think God’s presence, for God’s w ­ ill, the speaker tells us, “passeth thought” (38). Having exhausted the physical and imaginative worlds, the speaker realizes that God can exist only in an absolutely other space that is neither physical nor even ideal, since it cannot be thought by the ­human mind. This “space” (46) which God inhabits, the subsequent stanzas claim, is both “large” (45) and a collapsing of breadths and lengths in which “East and West touch, the poles do kiss, / And parallels meet” (43–44); in other words, it is no real “space” at all, and is thus at an absolute distance from the speaker who lives in the physical world. When Herbert’s speaker begins to pray for God’s presence, he does so not, as is so often the case in Donne’s poetry, as a primary tactic but ­because he has exhausted all other possibilities. Through searching—­and the failure of that search—­the speaker has discovered that God is beyond his experience and beyond his capability to reach. As a result of recognizing the failure of his agency, the speaker uses the last ability he has—­the ability to give up and ask for help: “O take ­these bars, ­these lengths away; / Turn, and restore me” (49–50). This is a submission that goes a step beyond that of Donne’s speaker in “As due by many titles,” insofar as Herbert’s speaker does not give up with a show of his power by performatively resigning. Instead, the speaker turns to prayer, putting himself in the position of supplicant. Having recognized that no agency of the speaker’s own can allow him to find God if God does not ­will it, he asks God to do the work that is beyond the abilities of the speaker. It is this recognition that precipitates his sudden expression of certainty that God w ­ ill, in fact, “[t]urn” (50). The pro­cess of exhausting his agency, of fully exploring his own powerlessness, leads to assurance that God ­will do what the speaker cannot. This assurance does not come, as Richard Strier argues, from a recognition that the speaker’s search “was misguided from the beginning” but rather arrives ­because the failure of the search is itself a way of knowing.28 Kuchar notes that, for Augustine, “learning the righ­teousness of God necessarily involves an experience of error, weakness, and even failure,” such that “genuine understanding often arises at the very limit of comprehension.”29 We see Herbert’s speaker reaching

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that limit of his comprehension in lines 43 to 46, in the recognition that God’s ­will puts Him at an absolute distance from the speaker. But in reaching that limit, he is also able to understand something comforting about God. As Kuchar argues, in ­these lines, Herbert’s speaker “realizes that God transcends all forms of perceptual and conceptual difference, including the difference between immanence and transcendence.”30 God may be at an absolute distance, but Herbert’s speaker discovers that distance is not a prob­lem for God in the same way that it is for him; the differences the speaker perceives between himself and God are “transcended” by God’s nature. In exhausting e­ very ave­nue by which he might discover God’s presence, what Herbert’s speaker is able to achieve is a real knowledge of God’s absence; and it is precisely this knowledge that, in the final stanza of the poem, gives him knowledge of God’s presence. For in knowing completely what it is for God to be absent, in confronting the limits of his ability even to approach God through his own understanding, the speaker realizes that he has experienced in a negative way what it would be for God to be pre­sent: For as thy absence doth excel All distance known: So doth thy nearness bear the bell, Making two one. (57–60; emphasis added)31

At the same time, by thoroughly exploring his own helplessness to find God, Herbert’s speaker transforms his powerlessness into an agency that enables him, if not to make God respond to him, at least to participate in the pro­cess of his own salvation, and thereby to see that salvation as a promise rather than as just a possibility. Herbert’s speaker is able to be assured that God ­will “be near” eventually ­because his searching has enabled him to see his salvation as a pro­cess; just as even his incapacity to find God moves him ­toward an understanding of God, so the fact of God’s absence means that the speaker w ­ ill experience ­union with God eventually. As Michael Martin explains, “In the poem (and in a good deal of Christian mysticism) God’s presence underlies his absences—­the one implies the other.”32 The act of speaking to God in this way thus becomes a pro­cess whose end point is ­union with the divine and the dissolution of the searching self into God. In the pre­sent moment, however, the speaker finds that his agency—­the power to fail—is part of that pro­cess; thus the speaker recognizes even at the opening of the poem, “My searches are my daily bread” (3). What sustains the speaker from day to day is searching and failing, and the fervor and failure of that search are what allow him to exist as a subject in God’s world. What he learns by the end of the poem, however, is that ­these searches are his daily bread ­because they “never prove” (4). Herbert’s speaker sustains himself in searching by discovering each day a f­ uture reconciliation with God promised by the experience of God’s absence and the speaker’s failure.



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As with the speaker of “As due by many titles,” Herbert’s speaker succeeds by failing. Unlike Donne’s poem, however, “The Search” does not rely on paradox to hold out the possibility of the speaker’s agency while si­mul­ta­neously undoing it; rather, Herbert’s speaker simply understands the ability to fail as power­ful—­not ­because it changes God but ­because it changes the speaker’s understanding of God to one that promises salvation. The pro­cessual quality of this search introduces a temporality that is not to be found in the Holy Sonnets. Herbert’s speaker in “The Search” describes a series of actions and thoughts that cannot happen si­mul­ta­neously; the speaker must first fail to find God in the physical world before he can discover the nonphysical nature of God’s ­will—­just as he must try to ask for God’s help before he can realize that he has no power to make God act. This pro­cess of trial and error casts the end of this search always into the ­future. Instead of a poetics of possibility, the speaker in “The Search” develops a poetics of promise, in which the poetic voice uses the narrative of its own incapacity as a way to be assured of a ­future in which that incapacity is undone. What ­these two poems give us, then, are two models for thinking through fallenness, both in the sense that they are able to conceive of what salvation would look like and that they are able to do so by working through the very limitations that seemed to make that comprehension impossible. Donne’s speaker finds that he can create a selfhood by suspending it in a paradoxical relation between his agency and God’s; Herbert’s speaker discovers his ability to find the promise of his salvation by exploring fully his inability to make that salvation happen. On the one hand, the poetics of possibility and of promise are opposing methods for finding room for h­ uman agency in questions of salvation. Whereas the one relies on frustrating the ability to resolve the question of ­whether or not one is saved, the other requires finding the answer already implied in the question, or rather in the act of questioning. The two poets’ formal choices reflect this difference: the lyric, personal space of the sonnet affords Donne room to meditate upon and vex himself over what he perceives to be a paradox of h­ uman agency, while Herbert’s variation on the ballad form generates a narrative that allows him to unfold the potentialities of ­human agency as a pro­cess ending in God. On the other hand, however, for both methods the interrogation of ­human limitedness, of the incapacities of fallen experience, becomes a way to recuperate that experience, through techniques of speech act and paradox in Donne and of narrative in Herbert. In both “As due by many titles” and “The Search,” the poetic voices grapple with the damaged, sinful agency that Calvin dismissed as unworthy of the name “­free ­will,” and they find ways to make that agency power­ful—­not to effect salvation but to see themselves as at least able to act on themselves, on their own self-­ understanding, in a way that places them in a more comforting relation to God. A recent body of scholarship on Re­nais­sance devotional poetry focuses attention on ways in which the expressions of pain and limitedness in t­ hese texts are themselves ways of moving closer to God. As Esther Gilman Richey argues, in

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this period, “Only by coming to terms with one’s body in all its limitations does one approach God.”33 Similarly, I have argued h­ ere that, by grappling directly with the inability to achieve their own salvation, the speakers of ­these poems find for themselves at least the ­limited power to construct an understanding of themselves within the soteriological drama. They find ways to convert their “nothingness” into a “something”; but that “something,” I would fi­nally propose, is ultimately less about approaching God and more about discovering a subjectivity that has a power over itself within the time and space in which that closeness with God has not yet been achieved. On some level, what both t­ hese speakers achieve is a form of autonomy—­not an ability to give the law to themselves but an ability to construct their self-­understanding within the framework of God’s universe. This is specifically a poetic autonomy to the extent that it relies upon the imaginative and linguistic tools available to a poetic voice, but also b­ ecause ­these speaking voices are engaging in a kind of poesis, a self-­making, in which they are able to construct themselves within the space of a poem not just as God’s objects but also as God’s subjects.

notes 1. ​John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, vol. 1, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis

­Battles (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006), 2.3.5. 2. ​Gary Kuchar, “Petrarchism and Repentance in John Donne’s Holy Sonnets,” Modern Philology 105, no. 3 (2008): 536. Kuchar’s reference is to John Donne, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, ed. Anthony Raspa (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 39–40. 3. ​In chapter 10 of the pre­sent volume, in her survey of the ways in which Donne and Herbert end their poems, Helen Wilcox similarly contrasts the provisional mood or grammatical state of Donne’s last lines with the clear assurance or confidence in redemption upon which Herbert’s closing lines are predicated. For more on Donne’s and Herbert’s approaches to the question of assurance, see Anne-­Marie Miller-­Blaise and Kate Narveson’s essays in chapter 3 and chapter 7 of this collection, respectively. 4. ​Martin Luther, “The Enslaved ­Will,” in Desiderius Erasmus and Martin Luther, The B ­ attle over ­Free W ­ ill, ed. Clarence H. Miller, trans. Clarence H. Miller and Peter Macardle (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2012), 35. Luther cites Eccles. 1:2 and Rom. 3:4 as the basis for his assertion. 5. ​For Luther in par­tic­ul­ar, the question of merit was bound up with the conviction that, if God’s grace is absolutely f­ ree, then it cannot be obligated by any ­human action. Thus, he asked in his discussion of merit in “The Enslaved ­Will,” “How can endeavor and merit be compatible with justice freely given and bestowed?” (102). Calvin similarly argued on the basis of Scripture, “You see that Paul has taken every­thing away from ­free w ­ ill in order not to leave any place for merits” (2.5.2). Daniel W. Doerksen, in Picturing Religious Experience: George Herbert, Calvin, and the Scriptures (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2011), has argued that Calvin’s positions on this m ­ atter w ­ ere less extreme than they have sometimes been made out to be, and certainly subsequent Calvinists took a somewhat softened stance on the question of action in the world—­see, for instance, Catherine Gimelli Martin, “Experimental Predestination in Donne’s Holy Sonnets: Self-­Ministry and the Early Seventeenth-­Century ‘Via Media,’ ” Studies in Philology 110, no. 2 (2013): 350–381.



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6. ​See, for example, Erasmus’s claim that h ­ uman beings must have at least some f­ ree w ­ ill “to

clear God of the false accusation of cruelty and injustice” in “A Discussion or Discourse concerning F ­ ree ­Will,” in Erasmus and Luther, The ­Battle over F ­ ree W ­ ill, 29; and Arminius’s claim in his “A Declaration of the Sentiments of James Arminius, Part 1” that Calvin’s doctrine of predestination led to the conclusion that “God ­really sins” and that, furthermore, “God is the only sinner,” in James Arminius, Arminius Speaks: Essential Writings on Predestination, F ­ ree ­Will, and the Nature of God, ed. John D. Wagner (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2011), 46 and 47. 7. ​Calvin, Institutes, 2.2.7. 8. ​Martin, “Experimental Predestination,” 354. 9. ​Arminius, Arminius Speaks, 47–48, 68. 10. ​­Until fairly recently, a major battleground in studies of Donne had been the attempt to locate the Holy Sonnets within a specific doctrine. Thus, Louis Martz, in The Poetry of Meditation: A Study in En­glish Religious Lit­er­a­ture of the Seventeenth ­Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1954), reads the sonnets in an Ignatian tradition, while Patrick Grant, in “Augustinian Spirituality and the Holy Sonnets of John Donne,” ELH 38, no. 4 (1971): 542–561, focuses on a medieval Franciscan practice. Barbara  K. Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-­Century Religious Lyric (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1984), 264–275, famously (and perhaps definitively) argues against reading seventeenth-­century En­glish poetry, including Donne’s and Herbert’s, within the medieval tradition and instead delineates a specifically Protestant poetics; John Stachniewski, in “John Donne: The Despair of the ‘Holy Sonnets,’ ” ELH 48, no. 4 (1981): 677–705, reads Donne as specifically Calvinist; Gary Kuchar, “Petrarchism and Repentance,” reads Donne alongside Luther; and Catherine Gimelli Martin, “Experimental Predestination,” reads the Holy Sonnets in light of the influence of William Perkins. At the same time, ­there has been a tradition of reading the Holy Sonnets as a product of the conflict between dif­fer­ent doctrines: see Richard Strier, “John Donne Awry and Squint: The ‘Holy Sonnets,’ 1608–1610,” Modern Philology 86, no. 4 (1989): 357–384; and Anthony Low, “Absence in Donne’s Holy Sonnets: Between Catholic and Calvinist,” The John Donne Journal 23 (2004): 95–115. On Herbert, Ilona Bell, “Herbert’s Valdésian Vision,” En­glish Literary Re­nais­sance 17, no. 3 (1987): 303–328, provides a succinct survey of dif­fer­ent attempts to identify Herbert with par­tic­ul­ ar doctrines, noting, “Scholars have placed Herbert at e­ very point along the spectrum of En­glish Protestantism” (304). See, for example: Richard Strier, Love Known: Theology and Experience in George Herbert’s Poetry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), which places “the doctrine of justification by faith,” a doctrine Strier identifies largely with Luther, at the heart of The ­Temple (xi); Doerksen, Picturing Religious Experience, which argues for a Calvinist reading of Herbert; and Hillary Kelleher, “ ‘Light thy Darknes is’: George Herbert and Negative Theology,” The George Herbert Journal 28, nos. 1–2 (2004–2005): 47–64, which looks for evidence of the via negativa in The ­Temple. Though he does not identify it with a specific doctrinal system but only notes that it was “a seventeenth-­ century commonplace,” Stanley Fish bases the entirety of his reading of The T ­ emple on the doctrine that God’s “word is all” in Self-­Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-­ Century Lit­er­a­ture (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1994), 156. 11. ​­Because I am working primarily with a single poem from the Holy Sonnets, I am sidestepping ­here issues of the appropriate sequencing of the sonnets and am referring to the sonnets by their first lines rather than by number. For analy­sis of the sequencing of ­these sonnets, see The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne, vol. 7.1, The Holy Sonnets, ed. Gary A. Stringer, et al. (Bloomington: Indiana University, 2005), LXXXVIII–­CI. 12. ​A. J. Smith, ed., John Donne: The Complete En­glish Poems, rev. ed. (1971; repr., New York: Penguin Books, 1996), 309. Subsequent references to Donne’s poetry ­will derive from this edition, and ­will be cited parenthetically in the text by line number.

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13. ​See Augustine, “On Grace and ­Free Choice,” in On the ­Free Choice of ­Will, On Grace and

­ ree Choice, and Other Writings, ed. and trans. Peter King (Cambridge: Cambridge University F Press, 2010), 141–184; in his survey of theological positions on grace and f­ ree ­will at the beginning of “A Discussion or Discourse,” Erasmus refers to Augustine’s position without explic­itly citing it and calls it “highly probable,” and by the end he states that he “­favor[s] the opinion of ­those who attribute something to ­free w ­ ill but most to grace” (11 and 29). 14. ​­Whether some of ­these are passive verbs or passive past participles could be debated. What is impor­tant for this argument, however, is that they all describe some kind of action of which the speaker is the object and in which the speaker is passive. 15. ​I have discussed at greater length the significance of verb tenses in the Holy Sonnets, including in “As due by many titles,” in Danielle A. St. Hilaire, “The Grammar of Salvation and the Poetics of Possibility,” Studies in Philology 114, no. 3 (2017): 591–608. 16. ​Calvin, Institutes, 2.4.1. 17. ​ OED, 3rd ed. (2010), s.v. “resign,” dictionary​.­oed​.­com, 1a; OED, 1st ed. (1887), s.v. “betray,” dictionary​.­oed​.­com, 1a. For an elaboration of other pos­si­ble meanings of “resign” in this sonnet, see Kate Gartner Frost and William J. Scheick, “Signing at Cross Purpose: Resignation in Donne’s ‘Holy Sonnet I,’ ” The John Donne Journal 19 (2000): 139–161. 18. ​ OED Online, 1st ed. (1887), s.v. “betray,” v., dictionary​.­oed​.­com, 6. 19. ​M. Thomas Hester makes a similar observation in his close reading of the sonnet in “Re-­ signing the Text of the Self: Donne’s ‘As due by many titles,’ ” in “Bright Shootes of Everlastingnesse”: The Seventeenth-­Century Religious Lyric, ed. Claude J. Summers and Ted-­Larry Pebworth (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1987), 64. 20. ​Anthony Low, Aspects of Subjectivity: Society and Individuality from the M ­ iddle Ages to Shakespeare and Milton (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2003), 153–282. 21. ​It is worth noting that the word “resign” is from the Latin root resignare, which most literally means to unseal or to open (where signare means to seal a document and the prefix re-­ indicates the undoing of that action); in its transferred sense, the verb can also means to cancel or destroy, since to unseal certain documents is to nullify them. See Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short, A Latin Dictionary Founded on Andrews’ Edition of Freund’s Latin Dictionary, rev. ed. (1879; repr., Oxford: Clarendon, 1958), 1578: s.v. “re-signo,” I, B.2. 22. ​Fish, Self-­Consuming Artifacts, 174. 23. ​Kuchar, “Petrarchism and Repentance in John Donne’s Holy Sonnets,” 536 and 551. 24. ​See St. Hilaire, “Grammar of Salvation.” Compare this position to that of Esther Gilman Richey, “The Intimate Other: Lutheran Subjectivity in Spenser, Donne, and Herbert,” Modern Philology 108, no.  3 (2011): 343–374, who argues that Donne “mediates divine presence through the God who clothes himself in the errancy of the speaker in order to be read through the God who rights him. That possibility remains open, remains potential, in pounding rhythms that invite but never reach climax” (374). 25. ​Fish argues that “a vision which denies to created ­matter an existence apart from God, also denies the separate existence of f­ree and autonomous agents. The tension between the two visions in Herbert’s poetry—­one dividing and specifying, the other resolving and unifying—is a tension between the ‘I’ of the speaker and the reader and the ‘all’ of God; and the moment of recognizing and entering into this wider, sacramental vision is also a moment in which the ‘I’ surrenders its pretense to any in­de­pen­dent motion and even to an in­de­pen­ dent existence” (173). Lewalski similarly claims, in somewhat less dramatic terms, that “Herbert wrestles constantly with the paradox of his responsibility to create poems of praise, yet his inability to do so u­ nless God w ­ ill enable him and participate with him in t­ hose praises” (302). Michael C. Schoenfeldt, in Prayer and Power: George Herbert and Re­nais­sance Courtship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), looks at the way Herbert uses “a discourse of



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social control [courtesy] and finds in it a lexicon for investigating his own subjectivity and expressing his bond with God” (4). 26. ​Schoenfeldt, Prayer and Power, 10 and 184. Works that see Herbert uniting (or attempting to unite) his voice with God’s include Fish, Self-­Consuming Artifacts; William Shullenberger, “Ars Praedicandi in George Herbert’s Poetry,” in “Bright Shootes of Everlastingnesse,” 96–105; Regina Mara Schwartz, Sacramental Poetics at the Dawn of Secularism: When God Left the World (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010); John Savoie, “The Word Within: Predicating the Presence of God in George Herbert’s The ­Temple,” The George Herbert Journal 23, nos. 1–2 (1999–2000): 55–79; and Jennifer David Michael, “Silence and ‘Wounded Speech’ in George Herbert’s Poetry,” The Sewanee Theological Review 52, no. 4 (2009): 343–364. 27. ​ The Complete En­glish Poems, ed. John Tobin (New York: Penguin, 1991), 154. Subsequent references to Herbert’s poetry ­will derive from this edition, and ­will be cited parenthetically in the text by line number. 28. ​Strier, Love Known, 238. 29. ​Gary Kuchar, George Herbert and the Mystery of the Word: Poetry and Scripture in Seventeenth-­Century ­England (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2017), 204–205. 30. ​Kuchar, George Herbert and the Mystery of the Word, 42. 31. ​Other critics have found aspects of negative theology at work h ­ ere. Quoting Thomas Aquinas’s assertion that “we cannot know what God is . . . ​but only what he is not,” Hillary Kelleher explains that this “theological stance leads to a deliberate practice of ‘unknowing,’ a letting go of any concept of the divine as rationally apprehensible”(“‘Light thy Darknes is,’” 49). On Herbert’s use of the via negativa, see also Schwartz, Sacramental Poetics, esp. 126. Kuchar argues that Herbert’s approach rejects methodology as such, including the methodology of negative theology: “rather than being a practiced instance of negative theology, in which one systematically approaches God by means of verbal negations, this stanza [in “The Search”] shows the speaker suddenly discovering the under­lying exigency for such forms of prayer: that God is a mystery, not a prob­lem” (George Herbert and the Mystery of the Word, 42). For Donne’s relationship to negative theology, see chapter 1 of the pre­sent volume. 32. ​Michael Martin, “George Herbert and the Phenomenology of Grace,” The George Herbert Journal 36, nos. 1–2 (2012–2013): 57. 33. ​Richey, “The Intimate Other,” 346. See also Gary Kuchar, The Poetry of Religious Sorrow in Early Modern ­England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), and Kathleen Quiring, “ ‘Mourne with Some Fruit’: John Donne and the Redemptive Power of Religious Melancholy,” The John Donne Journal 28 (2009): 31–51.

APPR AISALS

part 4

9 • DONNE’S “COMEDY OF EROS” AND HERBERT ’S “ WORLD OF MIRTH” C H R I S TO P H E R H O D G K I N S

What’s in a laugh? Merriment runs quite a spectrum, from cruel mockery and cynical scorn, through scabrous levity and hilarious satire, to friendly gaiety, childlike delight, and an upwelling, inbreaking joy that smiles through tears. So to speak of “comedy” and “mirth” in the poetry of John Donne and George Herbert is to expand the field of discussion as much as to narrow it; tragic grief and hot rage may be excluded, but a striking range of emotions remain in play, from awestruck bliss to dev­ilish derision. In his influential Prayer and Power, Michael Schoenfeldt writes provocatively about Herbert’s climactic lyric “Love” (III), which “transforms a comedy of errors into a comedy of eros,” and Schoenfeldt ­labors long and ingeniously to tease out erotic implications and insinuations right through The ­Temple—­despite Herbert’s reputation for a relative disinterest in the topic of sexual love.1 Herbert’s “relative disinterest” has been gauged primarily in relation to the frank eroticism of Donne in both his “profane” verse and in the sacred lines of his Divine Poems. This essay aims to redirect Schoenfeldt’s phrase by revisiting the much more fulsome sexual comedy of Donne’s Songs and Sonets with an eye t­ oward their still undiminished power to generate laughter, and to compare that often earthy amusement to the heavenly cheer flowing from Herbert’s “The Church” and his ­Temple.2 We ­will find that Donne’s extraordinary gift lies in satirizing all of the follies, humiliations, and self-­serving absurdities that eros inflicts on the soul; this satire enforces laughter sometimes uproarious, sometimes bawdy, and sometimes grimly sardonic. Yet, while Donne’s erotic verse sometimes turns to earnest won­der, it is never further from merriment than when it yields to awe. In contrast, Herbert, while aware of the worldly possibilities of mirth, conceives of a heavenly joy akin to innocent merriment, spritely satire, and the discovery of sheer, unexpected 177

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grace. For him, laughter and won­der go hand in hand. In this essay we ­w ill trace two contrasting comic trajectories: Donne’s from effervescent, indecent hilarity through cynical farce to sardonic malice, and Herbert’s from quirky indecorum through punctured piety to tragicomic bliss. A ­great deal has been written about the “combined lights” and internal “constellations” of Herbert’s poetry, especially within The T ­ emple. Indeed, in “The H. Scriptures II” Herbert applies ­these phrases memorably to the sacred intertextuality of the Bible itself: Oh that I knew how all thy lights combine, And the configurations of their glorie! Seeing not onely how each verse doth shine, But all the constellations of the storie. ........ Such are thy secrets, which my life makes good, And comments on thee: for in ev’ry ­thing Thy words do finde me out, & parallels bring, And in another make me understood. (1–4, 9–12)3

But surely it is also true that Donne and Herbert, ­those two brightest stars in the “metaphysical” firmament, are in one another better understood? ­These men ­were “[i]nterinanimate[d]” (“The Ecstasy,” 42), as Donne would say, not only by a common era, faith, and clerical calling but also by closely woven connections of f­amily and friendship.4 The pre­sent set of collected essays shows that, a­ fter a ­century of modern scholarship, we have only just begun to find out the myriad “interstellar” parallels, motions, and configurations that still intertwine Donne’s and Herbert’s destinies. Furthermore, since both poets would have agreed with Donne’s words that souls and bodies “knit / That subtle knot, which makes us man” (“The Ecstasy,” 63–64), we need not hesitate to trace the sympathies, both secret and explicit, between sacred and profane, and particularly between Herbert’s heavenly comedy and Donne’s more earthbound “comedy of eros.” Donne’s comic trajectory begins with what seems an irreverent youthful lark. In her essay “John Donne at Play in Between,” Anna K. Nardo observes that “[e]ven in such a self-­consciously witty age as the seventeenth ­century, Donne’s poetry and prose stand out as exceptionally playful.”5 Donne aims at more than his trademark ingenuity and intellectual scintillation; he frequently aims to stir overt laughter, and often succeeds. Very occasionally, a Donne poem achieves harmonious, smiling happiness—as in the morning-­after bliss of “The Good Morrow”—­but far more often the merriment has a satirical edge that imagines even a positive situation in oppositional terms. Thus, in “The Sun Rising,” Donne visits the same Ovidian lente currite noctis equi setting as “The Good Morrow” (two lovers waking to a bright, postcoital morn), but in this case casts the speaker



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not as a glowing, gobsmacked amoroso but rather (at first) as an angry ­house­holder scolding an aged Peeping Tom, the voyeur being the sun himself. We are invited to see old Sol as a slavering pantaloon pawing the curtains, a “[s]aucy pedantic wretch” who is also a kind of lecherous schoolmaster told to “[g]o chide / Late school-­boys,” a randy busybody better employed by disturbing the sleep of “sour prentices,” “court-­huntsmen,” and (most unnecessarily) “country ants” (5–8). If the image of a libidinous meddler ogling an anthill ­doesn’t stir a chuckle, then the smirking scenario of the last two stanzas may. Like the speaker in “The Good Morrow,” the lover of “The Sun Rising” cherishes the shared solipsism of his bedchamber, enacting t­ oward the sun the childish fantasy of the narcissist’s almighty eyelids: “if I c­ an’t see you, y­ ou’re not t­ here!” “Thy beams, so reverend, and strong, / Why shouldst thou think?” (11–12), he says, turning a respectful exclamation into an insolent question. “I could eclipse and cloud them with a wink / But that I would not lose her sight so long” (13–14), he continues. His compliments to his lady grow ever more extravagant—­she is “both th’Indias” (East and West) (17), “[s]he’is all states” (21), a warm nubile microcosm prone in his bed—­but not as extravagant as his praise of them together: Nothing ­else is. Princes do but play us; compared to this, All honour’s mimic; all wealth alchemy. (22–24)

Reaching this climax of panegyric, a kind of linguistic and syntactic orgasm, the speaker suddenly mellows in the afterglow: no longer mock-­outraged at the intruding sun, he turns mock-­exhibitionist by inviting the hot eye of heaven to get an eyeful. ­After all, “we are the world”: “Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be / To warm the world, that’s done in warming us” (27–28). As a ­favor to the lucky old sun, he and his beloved ­will bask nude in the nakedly ­eager solar gaze. This risqué personification of the “reverend” sun reveals much about Donne’s comic technique, which is often wittily oppositional and confrontational. (In contrast, as we ­will see below, Herbert’s technique in a poem like “Death” is more affectionately facetious.) In a poetic oeuvre often about ­angles of vision, Donne skews the perspective and scrambles our expectations. In this par­tic­ul­ar case, he plays against classical pre­ce­dent: K. W. Gransden observes that, by poem’s end, Donne has reversed the Ovidian original, which ends with “love’s agonies, not love’s triumphs”; in “The Sun Rising,” Donne’s lovers “triumph over myth by creating their own alternative world.”6 And, as Ronald Draper notes, Donne “is brilliantly ­adept in taking a debater’s role for or against almost any notion that might be proposed”—­a cheerfully sophistic device featured in his comic tour de force, “The Flea.”7 As Steve Larocco writes, that famous seduction poem has suffered over the years from being taken as serious male chauvinism. While many critics have

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regarded “The Flea” as an earnest attempt at sexual proposition, ­others have seen in it something darker: as showing “a manifest patriarchal urge to subdue the ­woman as Other,” an urge that “requires that the man coerce the ­woman into fulfilling his language and desires, that he usurp her freedom.”8 On the contrary, says Larocco, “in seduction, [Donne] imagines a w ­ oman whose appearance, mobility and ­silent initiative can engender a circulation of power, signs and contentious intimacy which can depose, momentarily, the ­father’s law.”9 But however right Larocco may be—­however much Donne may have leaned ­toward the side of the egalitarian angels—­the main reason we care about the poem is that, first of all, it is outrageously funny. Much of its gaiety is generated by sheer chutzpah: it plays with natu­ral revulsion at insects, with smutty intimations about bodily hygiene, and with the shock value of sexual candor, and it ups its voltage with breezy blasphemies on the natures of Christ and the Holy Trinity. But its richest humor is situational and satirical, entering the realm of carpe diem from a cockeyed ­angle and then exposing the speaker’s rhetorical opportunism and his chopped logic by the end. “Mark but this flea,” our rakish logician begins, landing us in medias res with the debate already underway, indeed in one sense already over: apparently the ­woman he seeks to seduce has said “No!” to his suit for her quelque-­chose. Yet, optimistically, he seeks to reopen the dispute by way of an impromptu object lesson. Grasping for common ground, the speaker lights on a microcosm ready-­ to-­hand, the littlest of ­little worlds: a shared parasite. Stressing his physical proximity to her—­she’s only a flea’s jump away—he begins to deploy his metaphysical method, reading the flea as a verminous allegory: “mark in this, / How ­little that which thou deny’st me is” (1–2). In the annals of diminishing meta­phors for love, this flea prob­ably bears the bell (though the “buzzard love” [25] of Donne’s “Love’s Diet” comes close). Creatures that crawl on our flesh generally make our flesh crawl, and the speaker “marks” the flea in order to intimate the exchange of bodily fluids and insinuate the grossness of fellatio and cunnilingus—­“Me it sucked first, and now sucks thee” (3)—­“sucks” being a word to avoid in polite conversation, especially when the intent is to charm. This impoliteness deepens when we remember the liberties proverbially taken by fleas with ­women. In Doctor Faustus, during Lucifer’s parade of the Seven Deadly Sins, Pride describes himself as “like to Ovid’s flea: I can creep into e­ very corner of a wench; sometimes, like a periwig, I sit upon her brow; or like a fan of feathers, I kiss her lips; indeed I do—­what do I not? But, fie, what a scent is ­here! I’ll not speak another word, except the ground w ­ ere perfum’d, and covered with cloth of arras” (2.2.117–118).10 Marlowe alludes to the pseudo-­Ovidian poem Elegia de Pulice, which has since been attributed to Ofilius Sergianus, but which in the Re­nais­sance was believed to be au­then­tic. As Robin the ostler puts it e­ arlier in Faustus, if he w ­ ere offered the chance of magical metamorphosis, “let it be in



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the likeness of a l­ittle, pretty, frisking flea, that I may be h­ ere, ­there, and everywhere. Oh, I’ll tickle the pretty wenches’ plackets!” (1.4.66). But before t­hese shocking verbal liberties and innuendoes can be fully absorbed, our speaker forges ahead to his conclusion: since, in this flea our two bloods mingled be; Confess it, this cannot be said A sin, or shame, or loss of maidenhead, Yet this enjoys before it woo, And pampered swells with one blood made of two. (4–8)

Eying the still sucking insect anchored in her flesh (Her arm? Her neck? Her bosom?), he pushes home his point that, pun intended, they are now of the same blood without any sin committed. Admit it, he implies, as in Christ’s virginal conception, this flea is already pregnant from our shared bloods. Then comes the kicker: “And this, alas, is more than we would do” (9)—as if to say, I’m not asking that we suck each other’s blood—­more’s the pity—­just help me to make this pregnant flea an honest flea by accepting from me some other, harmless juices. The speaker declares semen innocent b­ ecause blood is guilty, a false-­binary fallacy if ever ­there was one. Another source of humor in the poem is its superbly implicit reference to offstage action, to what happens between the lines and stanzas. Although the poem’s ­woman in question has no direct dialogue, we nevertheless get a strong sense of her personality based on the speaker’s responses to her actions and reactions. “Oh stay, three lives in one flea spare” (10), he exclaims at the start of the second stanza, indicating that the lady has plucked the flea from her skin and has, in effect, taken it hostage—as if she w ­ ere saying, Stop right t­ here or the flea gets it! But, of course, our interlocutor i­sn’t the type to stop, for “we almost, nay more than married are” (11) and t­ here are now “three lives” at stake: This flea is you and I, and this Our marriage bed, and marriage ­temple is; Though parents grudge, and you, we’are met, And cloistered in ­these living walls of jet. Though use make you apt to kill me, Let not to this, self murder added be, And sacrilege, three sins in killing three. (12–18)

The sheer looniness of this argument is intensified by its barmy religious references. If it w ­ eren’t enough for him to insist that t­ hey’ve somehow become man and wife in the guts of a flea, his “three-­in-­one” language parodies the Holy Trinity,

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while he sanctifies the bug’s keratinous exoskeleton, its “living walls of jet,” as a sacred space, a “marriage ­temple.” He asserts that, what­ever the objections of busybodies like parents—­and incidentally the ­woman herself!—­the marriage is a fait accompli, and t­ hey’ve now fled, like a more successful Romeo and Juliet, to their own private Mantua in this wee insect’s intestines: Who cares what they think! Who cares what YOU think! W ­ e’ll always have my love to live on! Th ­ ey’ll never reach us in our sanctuary! One also remembers Petruchio’s “rescue” of the loudly reluctant Kate from her own wedding feast in The Taming of the Shrew, act 3, scene 2. Then, from this scenario of elopement, we shift suddenly back to the hostage situation. The speaker now recasts the unwilling lady as a deadly madwoman threatening to kill not only her lover and herself but to destroy a ­whole church with them. The speaker’s t­ riple foolery reaches a climax as he tries to reason with her: It’s one ­thing to kill me, but ­there’s no ­going back on suicide; and worst of all, ­don’t compound murder-­suicide with sacrilege, “three sins in killing three.” The moments tick away . . . ​the tension grows unbearable . . . ​a terrible silence falls . . . ​and tragedy strikes—­parasite’s lost! “Cruel and sudden, has thou since / Purpled thy nail, in blood of innocence?” he cries (19–20). For in the fermata between the second and third stanzas, she has done it—­the merciless, remorseless Jezebel has slaughtered the flea with one deadly pinch, and from the ex-­flea spills a mort of innocent blood. “In what could this flea guilty be, / Except in that drop which it sucked from thee?” he asks, as if horror-­struck and incredulous (21–22). In this massacre, she has out-­Heroded Herod; she has become Death, the destroyer of worlds. Or maybe not. For, as it happens, “thou triumph’st, and say’st that thou / Find’st not thyself, nor me the weaker now” (23–24). ­Here, in a neck-­jolting volta, Donne implicitly passes judgment on ­every lusty syllogism ever inflicted by man on ­woman: ’Tis true, then learn how false, fears be; Just so much honour, when thou yield’st to me, ­Will waste, as this flea’s death took life from thee. (25–27)

­ ou’re right, he concedes; Who cares about a worthless flea? It m Y ­ atters about as much as the virginity that y­ ou’re about to yield to me. Like a politician trying a set of sequentially contradictory campaign slogans, the speaker’s naked rhetorical pragmatism draws a knowing laugh from the reader, who recognizes that the ­whole exercise has been a climax in search of a reason. But perhaps the man also has forced a smile from the lady in question? Though the poem ends inconclusively, our flea-­bitten speaker has kept her listening, and responding, and gesturing, and has in fact made her complicit in his entire bizarre scenario and the related ­horse­play. Many ­women, when asked why they fall in



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love, or at least fall into bed, respond, “He makes me laugh”; so perhaps this carpe diem spoof that begins with a No concludes on the verge of a Yes? Or perhaps not—­because ultimately, “The Flea” is not a ­little primer in the art of seduction; it is, like most of Shakespeare’s romantic comedies, a joke on ratiocinating male inconstancy. Love song parody of a dif­fer­ent sort is found in “The Bait,” though in this case it is, arguably, not the speaker’s self-­aware rhetorical agility but (perhaps) his overearnestness that is on display. Most commentary on “The Bait” begins, rightly, by noting Donne’s antecedents: Christopher Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” and Walter Ralegh’s “The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd.” Thus Donne comes late to the scene, so to speak, ­there already being a masterful piece of parody preceding his: Marlowe’s deliriously golden romantic poem has been brought soberly back to ironic earth by Ralegh’s sadder-­but-­wiser riposte from a disillusioned ex-­ingenue. J. R. Brink and L. M. Pailet observe correctly that if ­these three poems are read out of their compositional sequence, “the effect on the reader or listener ­will not be the same.”11 But what is Donne’s intended effect? How can he top t­ hese two masters? Anthony Low argues that in “The Bait,” Donne “first draws his reader in, leading him to expect yet another smooth pastoral song,” but then “[g]radually he disillusions him, as ­under the poet’s hands, pastoralism is exaggerated, then twisted, depersonalized, mocked, and rejected.”12 To this explosion of illusion, Eva Feder Kittay adds that the poem’s dominant parodic devices are its “absurdities and reversals,” and Lynn Hamilton says that “The Bait” “parts com­pany” with Marlowe and Ralegh in its “rejection of conventional sentiment and the exploration of paradox.”13 While all of ­these observations are true and welcome—­“The Bait” certainly is mock-­pastoral, absurdist, and subversive of conventional romantic reverie and melancholy—­there is more to be said about its special mad mirth. Though Izaak Walton wrote long ago, in The Compleat Angler, that the often rough-­cut Donne composed “The Bait” to prove “that he could make soft and smooth verses, when he thought them fit and worth his labour,” the poem’s smooth style is its matrix, not its message; it is like the bass line laid down by a jazzman around which the soloist scats in syncopation and surprise.14 The poem’s first lines clearly announce its extension of—­and its challenge to—­the Marlowe-­R alegh dialogue: “Come live with me, and be my love, / And we ­will some new pleasures prove” (1–2; emphasis added). A hybrid is in the offing—­what about “The Passionate Angler to His Love”?—­speaking “[o]f golden sands, and crystal brooks, / With silken lines, and silver hooks” (3–4). The suitor w ­ ill coax his lady to a dif­fer­ent, watery locus amoenus, opening a new array of meta­phor, and an erotic conceit to match. What could go wrong? Indeed, at first the love language literally flows: “­There w ­ ill the river whispering run / Warmed by thy eyes, more than the sun” (5–6)—­the lady’s omnipotent gaze, the streams of living ­water, personified to match the lover’s mood. And the

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next lines remind us, perhaps, of a similar pathetic fallacy in locodescriptive poems like Jonson’s “To Penshurst,” where the eels are e­ ager to be caught, though Donne adds a romantic twist: “And ­there the’enamoured fish w ­ ill stay, / Begging themselves they may betray” (7–8). We are entering a realm in which usually chaste ­water creatures suddenly long to escape their cool ele­ment, breathe the fatal air, and feel the heat of passion. It is also a realm where ­women can expect sexual attention from pike and carp: When thou wilt swim in that live bath, Each fish, which ­every channel hath, ­Will amorously to thee swim, Gladder to catch thee, than thou him. (9–12)

When she bathes, presumably naked, ­whole schools ­will gather to her, around her, swirling and churning the ­water, poking, probing, fish eyes rolling with desire, mouths agape . . . Yikes! the lady might well say, and beg to be let out of this par­tic­u­lar bath, however flattering the attention. But the amorous speaker is insistent. “If thou, to be so seen, be’st loth / By sun, or moon, thou darkenest both” (13–14); in other words, You n­ eedn’t worry about immodesty, b­ ecause ­you’re so blindingly bright that you’ll be clothed in light; “[a]nd,” he continues, “if myself have leave to see, / I need not their light, having thee” (15–16)—­that is, You ­needn’t mind if I stare; it’s just at your general glory (not your anatomical glories), by which I see every­thing e­ lse. Having sought to beguile her with the promise of a riverside outing, our amorous angler seeks to close the transaction by denigrating all traditional fishing methods as ­either foolish or dishonorable: Let ­others freeze with angling reeds, And cut their legs, with shells and weeds, Or treacherously poor fish beset, With strangling snare, or windowy net: Let coarse bold hands, from slimy nest The bedded fish in banks out-­wrest, Or curious traitors, sleavesilk flies Bewitch poor fishes’ wandering eyes. (17–24)

Poles, worms, lines and hooks; wading, traps, weirs and nets—­all rubbish! Noodling and fly-­fishing, even worse! Only the open, honest use of live, bare bait ­will do: “For thee, thou need’st no such deceit, / For thou thyself art thine own bait” (25–26); and it seems that, as a lure, her allure is overwhelming: “That fish, that is not catched thereby, / Alas, is wiser far than I” (27–28). Who could resist?



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Prob­ably the lady—­and not only b­ ecause she might find nude bathing uncomfortable and concupiscent carp alarming but also ­because in most female vocabularies, to be called “bait” is the very opposite of a compliment. Thus the poem’s most pervasive comic effect is its earnest tone deafness, its too-­clever-­by-­half-­ ness. The poem reads as if the speaker thinks that he has discovered the proper formula for a wooing poem—­romantic setting + ambitious attractiveness conceit  = success!—­but then gets one of the ingredients just wrong enough to make the difference between lightning and the lightning bug. He is rather like Marvell’s Damon complaining that Juliana takes no notice even though he has gone to the trou­ble of defanging the pretty snakes that he gives her; except that Damon is pathetic and disturbing, while our romantically incomplete angler is merely wonkish and a bit Pythonesque.15 If in “The Flea” the lady prob­ably ends laughing with her admirer, in “The Bait” she’s prob­ably laughing at him. If ­these three poems—­“The Sun Rising,” “The Flea,” and “The Bait”—­display an increasing ironic distance between the poet and his desiring personae, that distance is even greater in “The Indifferent,” as is its rhetorical and comic complexity. Rita Chaudhry details the nontraditional speakers in Songs and Sonets who are scorned or scornful lovers, and this lyric, I propose, offers us the former in the guise of the latter.16 The Donnean “strong lines” that open the poem pre­sent the voice of the outrageously arch lady-­killer who, like Shakespeare’s Benedick, declares himself beloved of all ladies; yet unlike Benedick, who “love[s] none,” this lad: can love both fair and brown, Her whom abundance melts, and her whom want betrays, Her who loves loneness best, and her who masks and plays, Her whom the country formed, and whom the town, Her who believes, and her who tries, Her who still weeps with spongy eyes, And her who is dry cork, and never cries. (1–7)17

Blonde, brunette; plump, svelte; pensive, vivacious; rural, urban; pious, skeptical; tender, tough—it makes no odds, as long as they answer to a feminine pronoun. Gregory Machacek has argued plausibly that the poem is addressed to “two ­women who have discovered that they are both lovers of the speaker.”18 Yet we might expand this intended audience to include an i­ magined assembly of all womankind. This amplified reading—­a notional crowd as well as a pair of aggrieved female rivals—is suggested by the scope of the next lines: “I can love her, and her, and you and you, / I can love any, so she be not true” (8–9). Gesturing to the ­whole sex, he admits that his affections range ­free, l­imited only when his lovers express an illiberal sense of entitlement. This passage’s humor derives from its very open excess and its nonchalant cynicism about the speaker’s own motives and commitments, and indeed about

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“love” itself. As he is “indifferent” t­ oward so many feminine variables, he implies that none of ­these options is essential to ­woman herself. That essence the speaker of the Elegy “Love’s Pro­gress” describes memorably: Although we see celestial bodies move Above the earth, the earth we till and love: So we her airs contemplate, words and heart, And virtues; but we love the centric part. (33–36)

This “centric part”—­the elegy’s “under­ground . . . ​where gold and fire abound,” its “pits and holes” (29–30, 32)—is the object of our “indifferent” speaker’s “love,” with love defined as desire for ­woman’s—­practically any ­woman’s—­organ of difference. Yet in “The Indifferent” the speaker’s amusingly candid confession of objectifying male lust, and his overt dismissal of fidelity, open the way to a shift in tone ­toward the more aggressive and accusatory. Having been caught in duplicity, he uses the old l­awyer’s trick of turning the t­ ables and blaming the very mores, and the moralizing females, which indict him. Suddenly it’s their perversions, not his, in the dock: ­ ill no other vice content you? W ­Will it not serve your turn to do, as did your ­mothers? Have you old vices spent, and now would find out ­others? Or doth a fear, that men are true, torment you? Oh we are not, be not you so, Let me, and do you, twenty know. Rob me, but bind me not, and let me go. (10–16)

Like the weathercock sophist of “The Flea,” this champion debater turns his eloquence on any target to serve his immediate desire, in this case against a monstrous regiment of ­women conspiring over the generations to entrap ­free men with the old monogamistic quid pro quo. ­He’ll have none of it; not from ­these huntresses, nor from their predatory “­mothers”: “Must I, who came to travail thorough you, / Grow your fixed subject, ­because you are true?” (17–18). In other words, just because you put me to such hard l­abor in bed, am I now your perpetual servant ­because ­you’ve declared yourselves “faithful”? The best defense is a strong offense, and this fellow is most offensive; scorned by furious ­women, he counterscorns. Yet, as in many a metaphysical poem, we are in for a dramatic twist, a rhetorical surprise, this time in the form of a dea ex machina: “Venus heard me sigh this song” (19), he admits.19 What had sounded in lines 1 to 18 like a manifesto-­cum-­ diatribe directed to accusers turns out to have been something less direct, a “song,” indeed a “sigh”—­recasting the preceding two stanzas as a more wounded and



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perhaps more private utterance than we had first been led to imagine. W ­ hether directed at two incensed amorosi or sighed out in his own bedchamber, the confrontational assurance of this would-be rake appears, on further reflection, to have been mainly bluster; this critic of ­women actually needs divine help—­ divine female help—to answer his complaint. Ironies multiply, for Venus interrupts not so much as the Love Goddess but as the ­Grand Inquisitress: by love’s sweetest part, variety, she swore, She heard not this till now; and that it should be so no more. She went, examined, and returned ere long, And said, “Alas, some two or three Poor heretics in love ­there be, Which think to establish dangerous constancy.” (20–25)

Denounced by the Torquemada of Love, ­these apostates are apprehended seeking to overthrow the nonbinding religion of sweet variety, and to replace it with “dangerous constancy”: dangerous first to all men (and w ­ omen) who wish to retain their sexual liberty, and second to all who have tried fidelity, been betrayed, and vowed never to be victims again. So, says Venus, the punishment ­will fit the crime: “But I have told them, ‘Since you ­will be true, / You s­ hall be true to them, who are false to you’ ” (26–27). Thus this comic poem brushes up against seriousness, indeed threatens to prove piercingly earnest. Certainly it is amusing to watch a cornered Lothario trying to talk his way out of his two-­timing with all the verbal ingenuity in his power. Yet “dangerous constancy” might well be a motto for Donne’s ­later romantic life (cast out of preferment and into jail for his secret marriage to Anne More), and the phrase captures a dark paradox in Donne’s divine poetry, as he longs for the very spiritual permanence that makes him most vulnerable. And, indeed, it is pos­si­ble to read this poem’s conclusion as revealing the speaker to be a jilted lover, swearing from now on to be the user rather than the used. Pos­si­ble, but not necessary; it’s equally pos­si­ble to come away from “The Indifferent” with a headshaking chuckle. (In e­ ither case, compare this scenario of lost love with Herbert’s, below, of interrupted friendship in “Love unknown”; while in “The Indifferent” the under­lying real­ity is revealed to be one of embittered romantic alienation, in the latter we discover that, a­ fter all, the complaining speaker’s “Friend” is truly loyal and intends him only good.) The darker follies of the heart are to be explored more fully in “Love’s Alchemy,” and, darkest of all, “The Apparition”—­ yet not without some cruel wit and a sardonic smile. At first blush, “Love’s Alchemy” seems as clever a bag of dyspeptic tricks as ever was opened at a pub or a club. Though George W. Nitchie has tried to exonerate the poem of its misogynist reputation by arguing that its speaker satirizes not w ­ omen but intellectualizers of desire, is exoneration r­ eally necessary?20 Once

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we conceive of Donne as a brilliant dramatic miniaturist, who created in nearly ­every lyric a new l­ittle theater with its own cast of players, then our question becomes, not the shocked “How could Donne say this?!” but the inquiring “Why and how does Donne portray this?” And the speaker portrayed sounds like he has given up on womankind, or at least on any hope of happiness with or from them: Some that have deeper digged love’s mine than I, Say, where his centric happiness doth lie: I have loved, and got, and told, But should I love, get, tell, till I ­were old, I should not find that hidden mystery; Oh, ’tis imposture all: And as no chemic yet the elixir got, But glorifies his pregnant pot If by the way to him befall Some odoriferous ­thing, or medicinal, So, lovers dream a rich and long delight, But get a winter-­seeming summer’s night. (1–12)

Immediately we see the title’s alchemical conceit realized (“love’s mine,” “elixir,” “pregnant pot”), and directly thereafter we see this network of meta­phor given a sexual charge, as the speaker advances his peevish complaint about his failed quest for “centric happiness,” a quest into the mysterious places of the female body. Put euphemistically, he has dug deep and often, sought to transform his findings into lasting trea­sure, but has only confirmed alchemy’s reputation for flimflammery: “Oh, ’tis imposture all.” He claims to have exposed the self-­deceiving boasts of other men, who brag about their ­women’s attributes—­their “odoriferous” and “pregnant pot[s]”—­but who actually experience only the most transient pleasure—­“a winter-­seeming summer’s night,” a cold, brief bedding. ­Here we see humor deployed no longer to persuade a w ­ oman, as in our previous lyr­ics, but to degrade w ­ omen as a group. The ingenuity of the conceit still amuses, but the mood is so sour and the attitude so reductionist that the speaker does not seem very lively or agreeable com­pany, even among men of a similar mind. Yet he makes an appeal as to a male group: Our ease, our thrift, our honour, and our day, ­Shall we, for this vain ­bubble’s shadow pay? Ends love in this, that my man Can be as happy as I can; if he can Endure the short scorn of a bridegroom’s play? That loving wretch that swears



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’Tis not the bodies marry, but the minds, Which he in her angelic finds, Would swear as justly that he hears, In that day’s rude hoarse minstrelsy, the spheres. (13–22)

Setting aside the alchemical conceit for the moment, his erotic complaint verges upon an elitist grumble—­he’s put out that “my man” (his servant) would dare to presume equal happiness with his master merely for ­going through the motions of a wedding, the “short scorn of a bridegroom’s play.” Rejecting marriage as an empty form for uppity plebs, he proceeds to dismiss the pretentious rhe­toric of the fool who claims to be interested in ­women’s minds (rather than their “centric” parts): this “loving wretch,” he says, would be just as likely to hear something heavenly in the raucous wedding night charivari. This speaker’s own scorn is practically universal, encompassing the g­ rand disappointment of coitus, the farce of Christian matrimony, and the even grander absurdity of spiritual, intellectual love. ­There’s not much left for this man to like, let alone love. To conclude this devastating assessment of man’s chance for romantic happiness, and of ­woman’s value, the speaker turns back to alchemy, and to one of its bleakest formulae: “Hope not for mind in ­women; at their best / Sweetness and wit, they are but ­mummy, possessed” (23–24). Critics have debated the varied punctuation of ­these lines, which can result in one of two readings: D ­ on’t hope for intelligence in w ­ omen; at their sweetest and brightest, ­they’re merely reanimated corpses; or, ­Don’t hope for intelligence in ­women; at their best they seem sweet and bright, but once you possess them, the illusion crumbles to dust. Yet however construed, nothing can be done to alleviate the insult of a w ­ oman’s comparison to “­mummy,” e­ ither a compound derived from a corpse, or the ­thing itself. The protagonist of this ­little drama has proved himself thoroughly disagreeable, taking his revenge with the lowest of comic weapons. Though we need not blame Donne as actually having harbored the views expressed by this character, his comedy of eros has grown decidedly blacker. But for truly ghoulish wit, “The Apparition” carries the day. James Egan has described both this poem and “Love’s Alchemy” as displaying “Donne’s Wit of Death,” a style that is “harsh, morbid and macabre,” with its focus on “alienation, self-­mockery, victimization, vulnerability, loss and humiliation.”21 Laurence Perrine writes that ­there is a kind of “ingenious” quality in “The Apparition,” which he calls a “dark and menacing” attempt “to win his lady’s ­favors by maximizing her fears of what w ­ ill happen to her if she refuses.”22 Yet a closer look reveals that this vengeful ghost blames her not for being too icy but quite the opposite: When by thy scorn, O murderess, I am dead And that thou think’st thee ­free

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From all solicitation from me, Then ­shall my ghost come to thy bed, And thee, feigned vestal, in worse arms ­shall see. (1–5)

Though most morbid romances end with someone ­dying for love, this one begins beyond the grave, threatening a spectral visitation to expose the true nymphomaniac nature of the pseudo-­virgin who teased him to death. Ghost story conventions meet erotic satire: Then thy sick taper ­will begin to wink, And he, whose thou art then, being tired before, ­Will, if thou stir, or pinch to wake him, think Thou call’st for more, And in false sleep ­will from thee shrink. (6–10)

When the terrified ­woman tries to waken her man for help, he, drained by her insatiable appetites, “shrinks”—in all senses—­away from her, feigning sleep and leaving her to face the horror alone: And then poor aspen wretch, neglected thou Bathed in a cold quicksilver sweat wilt lie A verier ghost than I. (11–13)

­ ere could scarcely be two better phrases than “poor aspen wretch” and “cold Th quicksilver sweat” for conveying her ­imagined condition: quaking like an aspen, breathless, frozen with fear and yet flowing with dread, and somehow poisoned by her guilty sexual uncleanness—­“quicksilver” or mercury being a common “cure” for the venereal diseases. As in most thrillers, the apparition of the dead leads to a momentary, high-­ pitched pause in which the visitant absorbs the full shock of the situation while the perturbed spirit gloats: “What I w ­ ill say, I w ­ ill not tell thee now, / Lest that preserve thee” (14–15), he whispers, waiting. The i­magined vengeance is not for one moment alone, but for years of remorse; rather than helping her to make a clean breast, this jilted lover hopes to see her suffer long, perhaps even kick her heels at heaven and be damned: and since my love is spent, I had rather thou shouldst painfully repent, Than by my threatenings rest still innocent. (15–17)

The full metaphysical malice shown h­ ere resembles Hamlet’s intent for his u­ ncle Claudius, whom he hopes to catch “in th’incestuous plea­sure of his bed” (3.3.90)



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and send howling to hell. Funny? Only in the most caustic sense: skulls ­can’t help smiling. Though we can trace an arc through the humorous poems of Donne from effervescent high spirits to the most ghastly irony, yet only rarely do we come across anything like tender laughter. I said above that the effect of “The Bait” was Pythonesque; and if I may be allowed to expand on the anachronism, the comic Donne shares in common with the Flying Circus an almost complete lack of softer emotion in the funniest of his work. It is not cruel exactly, but unsparing, conceding nothing to the kindly and sympathetic side of experience. I hasten to add that t­ here is deep gentleness and tenderness to be found in Donne’s sadder moments, ­whether profane or sacred: in his “Valediction” poems, in “The Relic,” in his St. Lucy’s Day nocturnal, and in his Elegies “His Parting from Her” and “On his Mistress,” not to mention his tribute to his dead wife in the Holy Sonnet “Since she whom I loved.” I would not blame something so perfect in its kind for not being of another kind; but Donne’s supreme achievement as an unsweet wag marks his comedy of eros as young man’s poetry—­not only b­ ecause he wrote most of ­these poems when young but also ­because their “masculine persuasive force” (“On his Mistress,” 4) shows the youthful tendency to strike out from, or against, the realm of the maternal and domestic, to embrace the female only as a means of escape and mastery rather than as the way home. If ever ­there was a poet of joyous homecoming, it was George Herbert. Yet the home to which Herbert’s poetry so regularly returns is not the ­house­hold of his beloved and formidable m ­ other Magdalen—­believed by most scholars to be Donne’s chaste but still alluring “Autumnal Beauty,” we should note—­but the ­house­hold of God the ­Father, and the surprisingly lighthearted companionship of God the Son. I have written elsewhere of Herbert’s characteristic demotion—­ not denial—of Cupid, about his pervasive redirection of devotional imagery from the erotic t­ oward other, equally h­ uman, kinds of love: above all, the love of parent and child, but also the loves of king and subject, master and servant, landlord and tenant, patron and client, host and guest, artist and creation, and friend for friend.23 This is not to portray Herbert as relentlessly sunny or sentimental, for ­there is not a dram of cliché or unearned emotion in The ­Temple. The laughter that keeps breaking out in, or breaking into, Herbert’s lyr­ics is not insipid but robustly tragicomic, in the manner of The Winter’s Tale or the Road to Emmaus in the Gospel of Luke (24:13–35): it is the laughter of grace, of sheer unmerited embrace ­after long estrangement or death, the comedy of forgiveness raised to the power of infinity. Herbert’s personae are at first often sadly far from home, as in the parable of the Prodigal Son; yet with a twist, for ­these personae are often more like the Older ­Brother, delivered in the end not from their scarlet sins but from their sour righ­teousness, rediscovering the world of mirth near the heart of God. In Herbert’s poetry, “mirth” is generally a positive term, associated not only with ­human happiness and merriment but with transcendent spiritual joy. No doubt,

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mirth can be abused: infamously, the seeker in “Redemption” hears “a ragged noise and mirth / Of theeves and murderers” (12–13) before discovering his ­dying Lord; in the opening fool’s paradise of “Affliction” (I), “both heav’n and earth / Payd me my wages in a world of mirth” (11–12); the speaker of “Ephes. 4.30” warns, “When sawcie mirth ­shall knock or call at doore, / Cry out, Get hence, / Or cry no more” (13–15); and in “The Pearl,” “mirth and musick” (24) keep worldly com­pany with “the wayes of plea­sure, the sweet strains, / The lullings and the relishes of it; / The propositions of hot bloud and brains” (21–23). But abuse can be redeemed by right use: “Pick out of tales the mirth, but not the sinne,” and “Pick out of mirth, like stones out of thy ground, / Profanenesse, filthinesse, ­abusivenesse,” Herbert advises in “The Church-­porch” (63, 235–236), assuming ­wholesome mirth to be a blessing among good com­pany and a refreshment to the mind akin to the “heart-­easing mirth” of Milton’s “L’Allegro.”24 And Ronald Cooley discovers a touch of jeu d’esprit in Herbert’s Countrey Parson chapter on the topic: “ ‘The Parson in mirth’ begins with the playful assertion that ‘The Countrey Parson is generally sad.’ ”25 But mirth, for Herbert, is more than a good social lubricant or psychic balm; it is a power­ful spiritual force. Sunday is “a day of mirth” (“Sunday,” 57); in “The Dawning,” the worshipper exclaims, “Awake, sad heart, whom sorrow ever drowns; . . . ​/ Thy Saviour comes, and with him mirth” (1, 4); in “Dullnesse,” the gloom-­afflicted speaker begs God, “O give me quicknesse, that I may with mirth / Praise thee brim-­full!” (3–4); in “The Glance,” the smallest glimpse of God is “A mirth but open’d and seal’d up again” (18), and a foretaste of cosmic won­der “when we ­shall see / Thy full-­ey’d love!” (19–20); and in “Peace,” mirth is a “secret vertue” (35) that comes with peace in divine communion (31–36). In short, at its best and truest, mirth attends the summum bonum, the very presence of God; but it is joy experienced as unquenchable laughter. More impor­tant than ­these mentions of mirth, however, are its ­actual eruptions into the poetry. Many of the above references are calls to experience a gaiety or joy that is often absent; but more striking are the moments and seasons of joy’s unexpected presence. The signal quality of heavenly gaiety is its superb surprise: inappropriate, indecorous, sometimes bizarre, and generally preempting the dull self-­pity and self-­importance of the world-­bound soul, divine merriment takes, and gives, its greatest plea­sure in benign disruption. So, in “Conscience,” it is something of a shock to find the moralist who composed the rather stringent “Church-­porch” presenting a speaker who scolds his nagging conscience and threatens to silence him permanently: Peace pratler, do not lowre: Not a fair look, but thou dost call it foul: Not a sweet dish, but thou dost call it sowre: Musick to thee doth howl.



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By listning to thy chatting fears I have both lost mine eyes and eares. (1–6)

Most of us have been in the presence of a chattering killjoy; the topic may be religion, but it might as well be health food, film mores, plea­sure reading, or automotive ­horse­power. The self-­appointed conscience is afraid—as H.  L. Mencken said of the ste­reo­typical puritan—­“that somewhere, somehow someone may be happy.”26 In Herbert’s “Conscience,” the speaker has listened far too long to his inner heckler and sounds, simply, fed up; yet within this humorous conceit of a domestic squabble, he engages a profound theological issue, the proper extent and limitations of self-­judgment. So he returns for another round of bickering with the meddler in his head: Pratler, no more, I say: My thoughts must work, but like a noiselesse sphere; Harmonious peace must rock them all the day: No room for pratlers ­there. If thou persistest, I ­will tell thee, That I have physick to expell thee. (7–12)

The busybody conscience seems to have forgotten his proper function; rather than spurring the speaker to love and enjoy the good, this overactive referee has both compromised the man’s ability meta­phor­ically to see and hear clearly (i.e., to think soundly) and ruined his capacity for enjoying truly good t­ hings, like food and ­music. In short, the cure has become the disease, and ­will require some “physic” or medicine of its own: And the receit ­shall be My Saviours bloud: when ever at his board I do but taste it, straight it cleanseth me, And leaves thee not a word; No, not a tooth or nail to scratch, And at my actions carp, or catch. (13–18)

The “receit,” or prescription, is the “Saviours bloud” taken at the Holy Communion “board,” or t­ able; t­ here a healthy conscience should rejoice that it has brought a sinner to the altar and reconciled him to God. However, the speaker ends with a direr warning of what ­will happen if the renegade ­hasn’t learned his lesson: Yet if thou talkest still, Besides my physick, know ­there’s some for thee:

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Some wood and nails to make a staffe or bill For ­those that trou­ble me: The bloudie crosse of my deare Lord Is both my physick and my sword. (19–24)

The speaker escalates beyond the “spiritual cure” meta­phor with a rare (for Herbert) and rather shocking military image: a weaponized cross—­a violent religious conceit more typical of Donne’s divine battering rams and holy rapes. Look out! He’s got a crucifix! Thus a poem about seeking inner peace ends, paradoxically and perhaps absurdly, with the speaker at daggers drawn with himself. Sidney Gottlieb has suggested that the opponent is an inner puritan, a personification of the “non-­conforming, radical Protestant”; yet the mutinous conscience might as well represent any brand of asceticism or moralism which forgets that, in the end, the broken bones ­shall rejoice (Ps. 51:8).27 Significantly, “Conscience” is followed immediately by “Sion,” which celebrates the rejuvenating power of remorse: “All Solomons sea of brasse and world of stone / Is not so deare to thee [God] as one good grone” (17–18). Like the psalmist, Herbert sees grief as the threshold to joy. If “Conscience” recasts an inner spiritual strug­gle as an extreme form of situation comedy, as the speaker interrupts a tedious, droning voice, “Love unknown” leavens its comic situation with droll interruption in the other direction—as an increasingly tedious speaker is repeatedly brought up short by an interlocutor. Many modern critics, most notably Barbara Lewalski, have focused helpfully on this poem’s relation to the Re­nais­sance emblem tradition, which combined allegorical or symbolic images with explanatory texts, often portraying the pictured heart u­ nder varying kinds of duress, to represent the purifying ­trials endured by the believer.28 However, ­little has yet been said about the wry byplay that gives this allegorical discourse such lively colloquial resonance. For, from the start, the poem pre­ sents another common h­ uman predicament: a nominal dialogue that degenerates into a monologue, as the speaker prepares to unburden himself to (or on) a sympathetic companion: Deare Friend, sit down, the tale is long and sad: And in my faintings I presume your loue ­Will more complie, then help. (1–3)

Most readers ­will recognize the setting with a rueful smile: one person overflowing with a woeful story, the other conscripted into more or less silently absorbing that woe. The roles are ­simple: Let’s talk; you listen. And so the tale begins: A Lord I had, And have, of whom some grounds which may improve,



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I hold for two lives, and both lives in me. To him I brought a dish of fruit one day, And in the ­middle plac’d my heart. (3–7)

Already we get a sense of the speaker’s loquacity—­a fussy, thinking-­out-­loud voice, proud of his noble associations, e­ ager to curry further f­ avor, and so he brings to his lordly master a gift bowl containing fruit—­and his heart. His WHAT?? His heart? As with that knock on the heavenly manor door in “Redemption,” suddenly we discover that we have left the realm of ordinary probabilities and relations and entered an allegorical, parabolic frame, though the speaker seems not to notice, nattering on with his complaint:

But he (I sigh to say) Lookt on a seruant, who did know his eye Better then you know me, or (which is one) Then I my self. The servant instantly Quitting the fruit, seiz’d on my heart alone And threw it in a font, wherein did fall A stream of bloud, which issu’d from the side Of a ­great rock: I well remember all, And have good cause: ­there it was dipt and di’d, And washt, and wrung: the very wringing yet Enforceth tears. (7–18)

In the first of three such parenthetical pauses, the speaker literally halts his chatter to “sigh” over his suffering—in some sense physical, to be sure, but more ­mental, for this fellow had expected much better treatment at the hands of this exalted Lord. He seems shocked not so much by the bizarre sight of blood gushing from a “­great rock” as by the rude rejection of his fruitful gift, and the unmannerly laundering of his heart. Yet when he turns fi­nally to his listener, expecting some commiseration, the Friend seems not to enter fully into his sense of grievance: “Your heart was foul, I fear” (18). Instead of flowing empathy or at least a feeling nod and a compassionate murmur, the laconic reply surprises with its very terseness. We can imagine a few beats as the speaker absorbs this underwhelming response, then grudgingly concedes that nobody’s perfect—­before forging ahead with further sighing and racontage: Indeed ’tis true. I did and do commit Many a fault more then my lease ­will bear; Yet still askt ­pardon, and was not deni’d.

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But you ­shall heare. ­After my heart was well, And clean and fair, as I one even-­tide (I sigh to tell) Walkt by my self abroad, I saw a large And spacious fornace flaming, and thereon A boyling caldron, round about whose verge Was in ­great letters set AFFLICTION. The greatnesse shew’d the owner. (19–29)

Admitting in passing that his poor heart was improved by its recent “wringing,” he stumbles across another obtrusive allegorical object. What most impresses him about this prodigious “boyling caldron” is not the meaning of its rather alarming title but the size of its letters; for in a perverse way he takes a kind of pride in mistreatment by so august a personage—­rather like Jane Austen’s Mr. Collins truckling before Lady Catherine de Bourgh. So I went To fetch a sacrifice out of my fold, Thinking with that, which I did thus pre­sent, To warm his love, which I did fear grew cold. But as my heart did tender it, the man Who was to take it from me, slipt his hand, And threw my heart into the scalding pan; My heart, that brought it (do you understand?) The offerers heart. (29–37)

The speaker grows increasingly exasperated, both at this Lord and at his Friend: though he has made the pious and courtly gesture of offering up his heart promptly and sincerely, the tendered organ is snatched away and summarily tossed into the seething pot. Worse yet, he perceives that his tale ­isn’t having its intended effect on the hearer, his frustration suggested by vehement repetitions and a mounting confrontational tone—as if to say, Are you listening? ­Don’t you care? But again comes the emphatically unemphatic reply: “Your heart was hard, I fear” (37). And again, ­after a deliberative pause, our speaker seems to take heed, allowing that his heart has indeed needed further treatments—­and congratulating himself for obtaining them in the best pos­si­ble way: Indeed ’tis true. I found a callous ­matter Began to spread and to expatiate ­there: But with a richer drug, then scalding ­water, I bath’d it often, ev’n with holy bloud, Which at a board, while many drunk bare wine,



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A friend did steal into my cup for good, Ev’n taken inwardly, and most divine To supple hardnesses.  (38–45)

Granting that he suffers from a kind of heart condition, he nevertheless reminds us that when he takes the holy cup, he is one of the elect faithful who receive the Real Presence in communion (according to Anglican Article 28) rather than mere “bare wine,” and that “holy bloud” softens his hard heart. In short, even his afflictions are all very proper. Yet, having made this new concession, he turns immediately to reciting a further grievance: But at the length Out of the caldron getting, soon I fled Unto my ­house, where to repair the strength Which I had lost, I hasted to my bed. But when I thought to sleep out all ­these faults (I sigh to speak) I found that some had stuff ’d the bed with thoughts, I would say thorns. Deare, could my heart not break, When with my pleasures ev’n my rest was gone? Full well I understood, who had been ­there: For I had giv’n the key to none, but one: It must be he. (45–56)

The case against his master escalates; the sufferer’s very home has been invaded, his bed vandalized, his rest and peace shattered, and only one Person can be responsible, the only One who had the key to his heart. His Friend’s reaction to this cascade of betrayals? “Your heart was dull, I fear” (56). True to his now established form, the speaker absorbs this implicit rebuke, then prepares one more strategic retreat. He confesses to a certain spiritual lethargy of late, but reasserts his orthodox belief nonetheless: Indeed a slack and sleepie state of minde Did oft possesse me, so that when I pray’d, Though my lips went, my heart did stay behinde. But all my scores ­were by another paid, Who took the debt upon him. (57–61)

Acknowledging his merely formal piety, he has recourse to what by now sounds like a rote recital of the gospel atonement formula. The questions naturally arise: ­Will he ever learn? Can he?

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And then, abruptly, every­thing is changed as his taciturn Friend turns the ­tables, stands, and delivers: Truly, Friend, For ­ought I heare, your Master shows to you More favour then you wot of. Mark the end. The Font did onely, what was old, renew: The Caldron suppled, what was grown too hard: The Thorns did quicken, what was grown too dull: All did but strive to mend, what you had marr’d. Wherefore be cheer’d, and praise him to the full Each day, each houre, each moment of the week, Who fain would have you be, new, tender, quick. (61–70)

Who is this reticent, somewhat contrarian, suddenly eloquent, italicized Friend? In an intervention that essentially commandeers the poem—as in such Herbertian lyr­ics as “Jordan” (II), “The Holdfast,” and especially “The Collar”—­this calmly assured, coolly prescriptive, and, above all, knowing voice steps in to correct the (now silenced) speaker’s g­ reat unknowing, asking, essentially, ­Don’t you recognize Me? Like the unsuspecting disciples’ dialogue with the risen Christ on the road to Emmaus in the twenty-­fourth chapter of Luke, the conversation in “Love unknown” draws its comic effects from the believer’s downcast, self-­pitying account of terrible disappointments while failing to recognize the Savior himself walking or sitting beside him. So the poem’s title describes the speaker’s failure to understand God’s love demonstrated through t­rials; it also describes his failure adequately to know Love Himself. Notably, the poem ends unresolved. ­Will the Complainant—­will we—­embrace the Presence that is better than a thousand explanations? Christ ­will laugh with him, not at him, if he w ­ ill only take the joke and smile. Two final lyr­ics illustrate the full range of Herbert’s spiritual ars comedia, and fittingly, they belong to the sequence that concludes the lyric collection of “The Church” within The ­Temple. They also provide illuminating points of comparison and contrast with Donne, for while taking up quite similar theological topics, they ­handle ­these topics—­and the device of humor—in stylistically and temperamentally dif­fer­ent ways. The first of ­these two poems, “Death,” begins a climactic series of poems meditating in sometimes unexpected ways on the Four Last ­Things of Christian spiritual destiny: Death, Judgment, Heaven, and Hell. Like Donne’s “Death be not proud,” this poem is a Christian variation on the classical consolatio mortis which consists in some rational argument ameliorating the perceived evils of death. However, unlike Donne’s wonderfully histrionic Holy Sonnet, this one recasts Death not as an arrogant and brutal fool overthrown by his own attempts to destroy humankind but rather as a misunderstood figure of



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pathos and, indeed, of ultimate goodwill. Thus Helen Wilcox contrasts Herbert’s “calm, almost ‘jesting’ treatment of death . . . ​with the dread found in Donne’s meditations on the subject”—­though in the case of “Death be not proud” this is a dread that is dispelled as David dispels Goliath.29 Like Donne, Herbert begins with a direct, personifying address, and yet, unlike Donne, immediately introduces a touch of facetiousness into it: Death, thou wast once an uncouth hideous ­thing, Nothing but bones, The sad effect of sadder grones: Thy mouth was open, but thou couldst not sing. (1–4)

While nominally describing “an uncouth hideous ­thing,” he closes the stanza with the amusing image of a death’s-­head skull, its gaping mouth a grotesque parody of a choral singer’s—­minus the ­music. He also intimates that ­there is something obsolete about Death’s disgrace; explaining his formerly fearsome reputation, he continues: For we consider’d thee as at some six Or ten yeares hence, ­After the losse of life and sense, Flesh being turn’d to dust, and bones to sticks.

We lookt on this side of thee, shooting short; Where we did finde The shells of fledge souls left behinde, Dry dust, which sheds no tears, but may extort. (5–12)

For Herbert, the common misperception of Death is a prob­lem in short-­term perspective, and he admits that Death’s direct, vis­i­ble handi­work is unattractive and sad-­making, while subtly changing the terminal “bones” of line 8 for the more hopeful “shells” of line 11—­shells releasing their “fledge souls” like newly hatched birds. This Christian, liberatory view of Death is amplified in the following stanzas by a reconsideration of Death as restorer of health and, strangely, beauty: But since our Saviours death did put some bloud Into thy face; Thou art grown fair and full of grace, Much in request, much sought for, as a good.

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For we do now behold thee gay and glad, As at dooms-­day; When souls ­shall wear their new aray, And all thy bones with beautie ­shall be clad. (13–20)

In the shocking wordplay of lines 13 and 14, the speaker juxtaposes the common phrase for something that renews health—­This w ­ ill put some blood into your face!—­with the image of Jesus’s face beaten bloody in the Passion. Thus Christ’s blood, shed on the Cross, enlivens Death’s pale visage, and Christ in his Resurrection restores life to a body of death. And in lines 17 and 18 Herbert has chosen the grimmest name for the Day of Resurrection—­“dooms-­day” (again, to place it in jarring juxtaposition with the festive language of gaiety and gladness)—­ stressing the ­great difference between Death’s infamy and his ­actual goodness. Turning to the final stanza, the quiet tone of ­these concluding lines imbues another other­wise negative image with attributes of virtue and ­simple domestic comfort, and epitomizes the attitude of preternaturally happy irony struck by the poem as a ­whole: Therefore we can go die as sleep, and trust Half that we have Unto an honest faithfull grave; Making our pillows ­either down, or dust. (21–24)

Speaking as if Death ­were tucking a darling child in for the night, Herbert gives us la pe­tite mort not of carnal sex but of innocent sleep, as we bed down snugly on a pillow of “down” to picture our longer, but still temporary, rest reclining on a pillow of “dust”—­again transforming a word of horror into one of hope, and the “honest faithfull grave” into a comfortable respite before a g­ rand Resurrection. ­Handling such grave ­things with the lightest of touches, Herbert consoles not only the mortal believer seeking immortality but Death himself seeking vindication. All ­shall be well; the Beast s­ hall restore Beauty; the Last E ­ nemy is our Friend; and we should approach our final end no longer thinking Death, be not proud, but Death, be not discouraged. Appropriately, Herbert’s divine comedy comes to a climax in his last and prob­ably most famed poem, “Love” (III). Much as “Death” takes up the same issue raised by Donne’s “Death be not proud”—­coming to the same theological destination by a more lighthearted route—so “Love” (III) addresses the same thorny issue raised by Donne’s Holy Sonnet “Batter my heart”: the Reformed concept of Irresistible Grace. More specifically, the poem dramatizes the irresistibility of divine love—­yet in terms so quietly humane as practically to evade notice as Augustinian and Calvinist theology. Put simply, the guest is aggressively (and thus unsuccessfully) self-­effacing, forcing what both Schoenfeldt and Richard



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Strier have called “a comedy of manners.”30 The guest refuses to enter any place that ­will allow him entrance, or to join any society that ­will accept him as a member. It ­will be impossible in the brief remaining space to do justice to the marvelous interweaving of the theological, Eucharistic, po­liti­cal, sociocultural, and erotic in this culminating poem—or to the extensive critical lit­er­a­ture; I w ­ ill only add a further note on how this mannered comedy gives Herbert’s transcendently Last Laugh. From the start, the poem’s humor is, like that of ­those discussed above, pervasively situational: Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back, Guiltie of dust and sinne. But quick-­ey’d Love, observing me grow slack From my first entrance in, Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning, If I lack’d any ­thing. (1–6)

If anything wonderful is to come of what follows, the reader must understand that throughout the poem, the speaker is resolutely trying to evade the welcome that the host resolutely wants him to accept. As in much situation comedy, the humor is generated by extended misunderstanding; but in this case, the misunderstanding is intensified by its being one-­sided and somehow willful on the speaker’s part. The host not only wants the speaker to come in; more than that— he wants him to want to come in. The speaker not only wants to stay out; he wants the host to want him to stay out. Thus the speaker, “[g]uiltie” of both his general mortality (“dust”) and his specific misdeeds (“sinne”), finds himself initially drawn to the place where he ­doesn’t wish to be wanted, and finds himself in a pitched courtesy contest in which loss means victory and victory, defeat. Thus to the host’s question of “What d’ye lack?”—­the standard greeting at an early Stuart inn—­the speaker answers not by naming any specific item or ser­vice but desiring a better self: “A guest, I answer’d, worthy to be h­ ere” (7). In other words, I d­ on’t have a lack, I am a lack. The host’s reply is similarly existential: “Love said, you ­shall be he” (8). Instead of bandying compliments or diminishing the visitor’s wrongdoings, Love pockets the speaker’s admission of inadequacy and promises a worthy f­uture self. Not that the speaker is ready yet to believe or accept the offer; he ­counters with further self-­abnegation, which is met by further outreach and clever grace: I the unkinde, ungratefull? Ah my deare, I cannot look on thee. Love took my hand, and smiling did reply, Who made the eyes but I? (9–12)

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To “make eyes” is a form of lovers’ flirtation, often accompanied by hand-­holding; it is also the creative act of the sovereign God, mending and overruling the handicaps in his creatures, as he does with Moses’s speech impediment in Exodus 4:10–11. That Herbert blends the language of romantic courtship with the scene of the Burning Bush suggests a God both alluring and potentially forbidding—in other words, a God who could compel, but who chooses to woo. Not to be gainsaid, Love is determined to keep up his side of the competition by repeating the invitation. Yet the determinedly guilty speaker is not yet ready to yield in his game of witty one-­downmanship. He agrees, only to disagree: “Truth Lord, but I have marr’d them: let my shame / Go where it doth deserve” (13–14). Love parries this assertion of unfitness with a question about atonement: “And know you not, sayes Love, who bore the blame?” (15). The implicit answer to this question scores a palpable hit, and a concession from the speaker: “My deare, then I w ­ ill serve” (16). Forced to admit that Love has paid the penalty for his guilt, he for the first time agrees to enter, but only as a servant. He wants it clear that he still has his ­standards, even if Love does not. But the endgame approaches, and the host plays his trump card, fi­nally asserting his droit du seigneur, though in reverse: rather than commanding ­humble ­ser­vice within his doors, he commands the outcast manqué to accept the leisure of an honored guest. “You must sit down, sayes Love, and taste my meat” (17). It is ultimately in obedience to his Lord that the speaker agrees to be served: “So I did sit and eat” (18), he declares, his actions speaking louder than his few, monosyllabic words. The sublime understatement of ­these last lines has powerfully affected innumerable readers over the centuries; this understatement allows us to imagine multiple tones of voice and expressions of face. Does Love speak his “must” sternly (That’s an order!) or with deepest tenderness (It w ­ on’t be a party without you, dear)? Does the visitor accept his guestly status with a grudging shrug (Alright, already, you win, I’ll eat!) or with the awe of a sinner fi­nally allowing himself to be loved and saved (This is what I ­really wanted—­what I longed for!)? Most readers have favored the kinder interpretation, and with reason: for the tendency of the entire ­Temple has been to mock the sort of piety that takes pride in its ostentatious unworthiness, and which refuses to take the divine Yes for an answer. Having ­pretended to be morally more sensitive than God, the speaker of “Love” (III) has exposed his own spiritual pride by bargaining, with increasing absurdity, against himself. In the divine figure of Love, Herbert reimagines the irresistible, battering ram God of Donne’s Holy Sonnet “Batter my heart” as an irresistible host, or a lover, who simply refuses to listen to No—­and whose ­silent power is, as Herbert says elsewhere in “The Call,” “[s]uch a Strength, as makes his guest” (8). So when the stubbornly h­ umble voice falls s­ ilent at the end of “Love” (III), it is most prob­ ably the silence of a hungry man at a feast. It is only the angels who are laughing.



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As with our discussion of Donne’s erotic comedy, t­ hese instances of Herbert’s heavenly humor are merely representative, not exhaustive. From the speaker’s silly attempt to outgive God in “The Thanksgiving” and his Donne-­like banter with the title character in “Time,” through his cheeky beggar demanding more gratitude in “Gratefulnesse” and the bizarre repurposing of Jesus’s side wound as a mail pouch in “The Bag,” to the outbreak of divine freshness in “The Flower” and the insouciant back talk to the heavenly judiciary in “Judgement,” a stroll through “The Church” h­ oused within The ­Temple frequently opens onto sudden scenes of levity and cheer. ­These scenes are in no way “comic relief,” as if the sequence ­were other­wise dreary; rather, they are upsurges of the poetry’s general effervescence. Like fine, bottle-­aged champagne, Herbert’s poetry is infused, even in the darkness and ­under g­ reat pressure, with a rising airiness, a power that ­will out when it is uncorked and tasted and felt—­yet which is not easily seen u­ ntil opened. Donne’s wit, as we have seen, pre­sents more candidly and more carnally, but is in its own way as pervasive in earthly and heavenly reference. For Donne refuses to distinguish absolutely between profane and sacred meta­phor, somehow confident that the Divine Wit, like the Divine Word, is also made flesh. To conclude with one of Herbert’s own meta­phors: in ­these two poets’ work, “All t­ hings are bigge with jest: nothing that’s plain, / But may be wittie, if thou hast the vein” (“The Church-­porch,” 239–240). Donne and Herbert indeed saw a world “bigge with jest,” no mere bawdy interlude or farce but full tragicomedy, with weeping for a night, and joy in the morning.

notes 1. ​Michael C. Schoenfeldt, Prayer and Power: George Herbert and Re­nais­sance Courtship (Chi-

cago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 264, and see 230–270. See also Schoenfeldt’s “George Herbert’s Divine Comedy: Humor in The ­Temple,” George Herbert Journal 29, nos. 1–2 (2005): 45–66. 2. ​In chapter  10 of this collection, Helen Wilcox likewise broadly surveys the manner in which the two poets close their poems, in Donne’s secular lyr­ics and divine poems as well as in the devotional lyr­ics of Herbert’s The T ­ emple. 3. ​George Herbert, The En­glish Poems of George Herbert, ed. Helen Wilcox (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 210. Subsequent references to Herbert’s poetry ­will derive from this edition, and ­will be cited parenthetically in the text by line number. 4. ​John Donne, The Complete Poems, ed. A. J. Smith (Harmonds­worth, UK: Penguin, 1971), 55. Subsequent references to Donne’s poetry ­will derive from this edition, and ­will be cited parenthetically in the text by line number. 5. ​Anna K. Nardo, “John Donne at Play in Between,” in The Ea­gle and the Dove: Reassessing John Donne, ed. Claude J. Summers and Ted-­Larry Pebworth (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1987), 157. 6. ​K .  W. Gransden, “LENTE CVRRITE, NOCTIS EQVI: Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde 3.1422–70, Donne, The Sun Rising and Ovid, Amores 1.13,” in Creative Imitation and Latin Lit­er­a­ ture, ed. David West and Tony Woodman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 171.

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7. ​Ronald Draper, “The Intellectual Ingenuity of John Donne,” in The Metaphysical Poets,

ed. Linda Cookson and Brian Loughrey (Harlow, UK: Longman Group, 1990), 45.

8. ​Steve Larocco, “Contentious Imitations: John Donne, Richard III, and the Transgressive

Structures of Seduction,” Exemplaria 7, no. 1 (1995): 240. 9. ​Larocco, “Contentious Imitations,” 267. 10. ​Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, ed. Roma Gill (New York: Hill and Wang, 1965). Subsequent references to Marlowe’s play w ­ ill derive from this edition, and ­will be cited parenthetically in the text by act, scene, and line number. 11. ​J. R. Brink and L. M. Pailet, “Rhetorical Stance: The Epideictic Mode as a Princi­ple of Decorum in the En­glish Re­nais­sance Lyric,” San José Studies 9 (1983): 89. 12. ​Anthony Low, “The Complete Angler’s ‘Baite’; or, The Subverter Subverted,” John Donne Journal 4 (1985): 10. 13. ​Eva Feder Kittay, Meta­phor: Its Cognitive Force and Linguistic Structure (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 275; Lynn Hamilton, “Donne’s ‘The Bait,’ ” Explicator 46, no. 3 (1988): 12. 14. ​Izaak Walton, The Compleat Angler (London, 1653), 184. 15. ​“Damon the Mower,” lines 35–36, in Andrew Marvell, Complete Poems, ed. Elizabeth Story Donno (Harmonds­worth, UK: Penguin, 2005), 106. 16. ​Rita Chaudhry, The Dramatic Experience in Donne’s Songs and Sonets (Amritsar, India: Gura Nanak Dev University Press, 1989), 21–55. 17. ​ Much Ado About Nothing 1.1.49, in William Shakespeare, The Complete Works, ed. David Bevington (New York: Pearson, 2014). Subsequent references to Shakespeare’s plays ­will derive from this edition, and w ­ ill be cited parenthetically in the text by act, scene, and line number. 18. ​Gregory Machacek, “Donne’s ‘The Indifferent,’ ” Explicator 53, no. 4 (1995): 193. 19. ​In the final chapter of this volume, Helen Wilcox explores the ways in which Donne’s and Herbert’s endings to their poems frequently ambush or surprise the reader with the unexpected. 20. ​George W. Nitchie, “Donne in Love: Some Reflections on ‘Loves Alchymie,’ ” The Southern Review 15 (1978): 17. 21. ​James Egan, “Donne’s Wit of Death: Some Notes ­Toward a Definition,” Selected Papers from the West ­Virginia Shakespeare and Re­nais­sance Association 10 (1985): 26. 22. ​Laurence Perrine, “Explicating Donne: ‘The Apparition’ and ‘The Flea,’ ” College Lit­er­a­ ture 17, no. 1 (1990): 7. 23. ​Christopher Hodgkins, “ ‘Outstrip Their Cupid’: F ­ amily Relations, Aesthetic Anxiety, and Redirected Desire in Herbert’s Poetry,” in “Locating George Herbert: F ­ amily, Place, Traditions,” special issue, George Herbert Journal 37, nos. 1–2 (2013–2014): 26. 24. ​“L’Allegro,” line 14, in John Milton, Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2003), 69. 25. ​Ronald W. Cooley, “Full of all knowledge”: George Herbert’s Country Parson and Early Modern Social Discourse (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 4. 26. ​H. L. Mencken, A Mencken Chrestomathy (New York: Vintage Books, 1982), 624. 27. ​Sidney Gottlieb, “Herbert’s Case of ‘Conscience’: Public or Private Poem?” SEL 25, no. 1 (1985): 113–114. 28. ​Barbara K. Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-­Century Religious Lyric (Prince­ ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1979), 206. 29. ​Herbert, En­glish Poems, 647. 30. ​Richard Strier, Love Known: Theology and Experience in George Herbert’s Poetry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 78–80; Schoenfeldt, Prayer and Power, 199.

10 • “THE DOT OVER THE I” How Donne and Herbert Close Their Poems H E L E N W I LC O X

In the last two lines of “Lands and Oceans” by the con­temporary Polish poet Julia Fiedorczuk (­here translated by Bill Johnston), bodies and words, ­matter and affect, solidity and liquidity, all mingle strikingly: “Bodies are solid, though we do have tears, and they are in e­ very word: / for salt is on the tongue’s tip and is the dot over the i.”1 The lines use physical meta­phors for metaphysical concerns in a way that is deeply reminiscent of the spiritual aesthetics of John Donne and George Herbert, whose devotional verse was also much concerned with bodies, tears, and words. Like her seventeenth-­century pre­de­ces­sors, Fiedorczuk focuses on the vivid, small-­scale details of language and materiality, ­here summed up in the idea that the salt of oceans is condensed into h­ uman tears, imbuing “­every word” of ­human speech. Her poem recalls the Bible’s concern with salt, which serves as a means of preserving and flavoring food and sacrifices, as well as a meta­phorical seasoning of Jesus’s disciples: “salt is good: but if the salt hath lost his saltness, wherewith w ­ ill ye season it? Have salt in yourselves” (Mark 9:50).2 Fiedorczuk’s last line is particularly focused on that salt in the self, both in the body and in words: “for salt is on the tongue’s tip and is the dot over the i.” Th ­ ese two images deftly encompass the range of the poet’s language use, from body to page and from beginning to end: salt is “on the tongue’s tip,” where words start to be formed, and is “the dot over the i,” a detail carefully placed in the very last act of writing, symbolically completing the pro­cess of expression. It is no coincidence that this last phrase, “the dot over the i,” concludes her own poem. Fiedorczuk’s lines offer suggestive meta­phors for my brief investigation of how Donne and Herbert chose to end their poems. What is the “salt” that forms the “dot over the i,” or closing verbal act, for each poet? To what extent are their methods of concluding a lyric linked with that which was on their “tongue’s tip” at the start of the poem? In what ways, and how consciously, did Donne and Herbert understand the function of last lines? Are ­there fundamental differences 205

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between them in their theory and practice of concluding poems, especially bearing in mind the capacity of lyr­ics to be both an argument and an aesthetic construction? How do they write themselves out of their poems, as it ­were, and what are the relative functions of salt “tears” and solid “bodies” in relation to the words of ­those conclusions? For the purposes of this comparison, my discussion ­will concentrate mainly on Donne’s divine poems alongside the lyr­ics in Herbert’s The T ­ emple—­both published in 1633. However, a small number of passages from Donne’s secular lyr­ics w ­ ill be used as additional examples of some consistent features across his lyric poetry and his art of ending, transcending the par­ tic­u­lar subject ­matter. As I hope to demonstrate, ­there is no shortage of “salt”—in all of its meanings—in the poetic closures of ­these two masters of the tongue and the pen. It may seem strange to focus on the endings of Donne’s poems, since he is so admired for the manner in which he begins many of his lyr­ics. ­There is no shortage of strong flavoring—­the “salt” at the “tongue’s tip,” to use Fiedorczuk’s metaphor—in the voice that seizes our attention as Donne’s poems open. We are frequently confronted by an uncompromising, commanding tone that unsettles both the ­actual and the implied reader: “For Godsake hold your tongue, and let me love” (“The Canonization”), or “Batter my heart, three person’d God.”3 The speaker is often undaunted, taking the risk of offending God or some other superior addressee: “Busie old foole, unruly Sunne” (“The Sunne Rising”), for example, or “Death be not proud.” The arresting, dramatic start is a hallmark of Donne’s verse: witness the vast scale of “At the round earths imagin’d corners, blow / Your trumpets, Angells” (1–2) or the directness of “Show me deare Christ, thy Spouse.” Sheer anger and an outrageous self-­loathing burst through at the beginning of another Holy Sonnet: “Spit in my face you Jewes, and pierce my side, / Buffet, and scoffe, scourge, and crucifie mee” (1–2). The striking combination of aggression and humility in t­hese opening lines, almost to the point of implied blasphemy, gives an impression of a “tongue’s tip” loaded with salty words that are ready to burst onto the ear or page. Herbert, too, though widely praised for the way in which he closes his poems, is also most a­ dept at opening them. Many of his lyr­ics begin with disarming ease, as though a conversation with God ­were already taking place: “I have consider’d it, and finde / ­There is no dealing with thy mighty passion” (“The Reprisall”), or, more chattily, “My God, I heard this day” (“Man”).4 Other poems take up a surprised or puzzled tone from the start: the confusion and hurt of “It cannot be. Where is that mightie joy, / Which just now took up all my heart?” (“The Temper” [II], 1–2), or the delighted amazement in “I cannot ope mine eyes, / But thou art ready ­there to catch / My morning-­ soul and sacrifice” (“Mattens,” 1–3). From the outset of Herbert’s poems, t­ here is often a display of power­ful emotion—­dismay at the unexpected (“What is this strange and uncouth ­thing?” [“The Crosse,” 1]), or overwhelming joy at God’s renewed presence (“How fresh, O Lord, how sweet and clean / Are thy returns”



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[“The Flower,” 1–2]). Most dramatically, in the well-­known opening of “The Collar,” the speaker has had enough of the apparently harsh treatment meted out by God: “I struck the board, and cry’d, No more. / I ­will abroad” (1–2). If such an opening is at the “tongue’s tip” as the poem begins, how can it possibly dot its “i” and find a resolution? The best critic to write on the endings of poems, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, made the vitally impor­tant point that to study the ways in which poems close inevitably involves an analy­sis of the ­whole poem, since conclusions cannot be taken separately from their starting points: “The conclusion of a poem has a special status . . . ​for it is only at that point that the total pattern [of the poem] is revealed.”5 If we are to understand a poet’s full art, then we should, as Herbert himself wrote in “Love unknown,” “Mark the end” (63). In the case of Herbert’s “The Collar,” the violently rebellious opening lines set a challenge that its conclusion has to resolve, thereby enlightening and, perhaps, retuning all the preceding lines. ­Will the speaker continue to reject the thorn-­ridden ser­v ice of God and seek the freedom of the “rode” (4)—or, if not, how and when can a change of view be achieved? The poem appears to be heading for an unresolved ending; the railing continues unabated for thirty-­four lines, and even at that late point the speaker is still becoming “more fierce and wilde / At e­ very word” (33–34). Suddenly, the speaker hears another kind of sound altogether: “Me thoughts I heard one calling, Childe: / And I reply’d, My Lord” (35–36). ­These final lines represent a startling, and humbling, change of direction. Yet, in almost “­every word” of unhappy resentment driving the poem forward to this point, t­ here have indeed been audible but hidden echoes of the sacrificial and redemptive love that God has shown, which the speaker cannot yet perceive: “rode” (the rebel’s “road” but also the “rood” of the Crucifixion); “thorn” (emblem of the sufferings shared by the speaker and Christ); “bloud,” “cordiall fruit,” “wine,” “corn,” and so on (4, 7–11). The conclusion has been anticipated even in the poem’s most discontented lines, and thus, though it comes as a surprise, the final resolution is grounded in the preceding expression of anger. Paradoxically, the ending is unpredictable and yet predicted. This combination of effects is typical of the way in which Herbert closes his poems, introducing a sudden change of direction that at the same time fulfills and resolves every­thing that has gone before. Most notable is the new voice introduced from outside, “calling, Childe” (35), intervening in the speaker’s inner confusion and eliciting a response.6 The restoration of order is also signaled by a truly lyric effect, the completion of the rhyme pattern: the “wilde . . . ​Childe” (33, 35) is brought back to the “Lord” (36) who speaks—­and is—­the ultimate “word” (34). As George Puttenham wrote in his Arte of En­glish Poesie (1589), poetry is “a skill to speake and write harmonically,” and the close or “cadence” of a poem is to choose “­every last word with a certaine tunable sound which being matched with another of like sound do make a [concord].”7 This is a sentiment, both musical and spiritual, with which Herbert would have profoundly agreed.8

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Donne’s most extreme opening line cited above, “Spit in my face you Jewes,” also sets up a challenge to be resolved. As in Herbert’s “The Collar,” the shockingly out­spoken beginning leads the reader to won­der if, or how, the speaker ­will escape from the scenario created at the start. With urgent, almost bullying insistence, Donne’s speaker asks to be punished in place of the crucified Christ, using a vocabulary of intense physical vio­lence: “Spit . . . ​pierce . . . ​/ Buffet . . . ​scoffe, scourge . . . ​crucifie mee” (1–2). The reason for this seeming masochism is revealed to be the speaker’s own guilt: “For I have sinn’d, and sinn’d, and onely hee, / Who could do no iniquitie, hath dyed” (3–4). To emphasize his recurring iniquities, in complete contrast to his savior’s lack of sin, Donne uses the rhetorical effect of repetition that is so often a feature of his devotional poems, including their endings.9 ­Here, the repeated “sinn’d, and sinn’d” echoes the relentless beat of the imperative verbs in the preceding line (“Buffet, and scoffe,” “scourge, and crucifie”), justifying his plea to the biblical Jews to transfer t­ hese harsh actions from his savior to himself. The octave of the sonnet thus turns the scene of the Crucifixion inside out, placing the speaker instead of Christ at its center. How can the sestet find a resolution to such a disturbing idea, acted out amid the horrors of the Passion scene? The answer is that the poem withdraws from this vivid setting ­after the first eight lines, and takes on a calmer purpose, moving into a mood that is almost distant: the speaker resolves to “admire” the “strange love” (9) of Jesus, and does so by showing quite rationally the unusual way in which the redemption came about. Unlike most kings, Jesus bore “punishment” (10) instead of administering a ­pardon to his ­people; unlike Jacob, who put on the “vile harsh attire” (11) of animal pelts in order to pursue a “gainfull intent” (12), Jesus took “vile mans flesh” (13) in order to suffer on behalf of fallen ­humans. The illogicality of Christ’s acts is made clear with unflinching logic, and the paradox that the greatest ­will become the least is spelled out in the final couplet: “God cloth’d himselfe in vile mans flesh, that so / Hee might be weake enough to suffer woe” (13–14). The power of this poetic closure lies in the disconcerting painfulness of Christ’s humility, brought home in the alliteration of “weake” and “woe.” At the heart of the poem’s theology is God’s “strange” (and, to Donne, sometimes estranging) love, but its stress above all is on the enormity of h­ uman guilt. While Donne’s speaker ends by scourging himself with the knowledge that his God died for his sins, Herbert’s rebellious persona in “The Collar” is already forgiven, invited back into a direct, loving relationship with God. Remarkably, both poems end far more quietly than they began, but t­ here is a significant contrast between the dispassionate third-­person account of God in the final lines of Donne’s sonnet and the warm first-­person dialogue with God with which Herbert’s lyric concludes. As ­these initial examples have shown, both poets ­were aware of the importance of rounding off their poems well, ­whether with a surprise, a change of direction, an underlining of meaning, or a challenge to the reader to engage in further



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thought. One of the key questions for a poet, particularly one writing about spirituality, is what ­will reverberate in the silence ­after the poem has ceased. One of Herbert’s earliest poems, the second of his so-­called New Year Sonnets, ends with the succinct statement, “Lord, in thee / The beauty lies, in the discovery” (13–14), and in many cases Herbert’s subsequent poetic closures are discoveries or revelations. It is no accident that he frequently plays on the ambiguity of the word “end” as both conclusion and purpose. “Can both the way and end be tears?” (28), asks the perplexed speaker in “The Pilgrimage,” while “The Church-­porch” asserts that “Praying’s the end of preaching” (410). The sense of something happening afterward—in the latter example, prayer resulting from a sermon—­ suggests that in Herbert’s practice, the end of the poem is not a stopping point but a rediscovery of direction. Poetic closure is not final but forward-­looking, purposeful and open. Donne, however, has a much firmer idea that concluding a poem has a retrospective finality to it, looking back over the poem and bringing it to a defiant completion. As he wrote in a sermon of 1623, “in all Metricall compositions . . . ​ the force of the ­whole piece, is for the most part left to the shutting up; the ­whole frame of the Poem is a beating out of a piece of gold, but the last clause is as the impression of the stamp, and that is it that makes it currant.”10 Like the “gold to ayery thinnesse beate” (24) i­magined in Donne’s love lyric “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning,” the meta­phorical “piece of gold” in the sermon passage is said to be beaten out ­until it is ready to receive the imprint, or “stamp,” of authority. The “last clause” of the poem, like the impression of the royal head on a gold coin, is that which gives the w ­ hole work its currency, meaning, and value. The idea of making the poem, like money, “currant,” certainly suggests that Donne’s poems, too, ­will have an impact on the reader that lasts longer than the poem itself. However, t­ here is a subtle difference between a “stamp” of recognition and a “discovery” of purpose in a poem’s closing lines. ­These contrasting meta­phors for a poem’s final meaning and impact suggest deep distinctions between the two poets’ understanding of how a poem’s “last clause” should function. Th ­ ese differences may be further highlighted by the contrast between the ways in which Donne and Herbert themselves understood death. The lyr­ics of The ­Temple demonstrate Herbert’s awareness that poetic endings can themselves imply or mimic death. As he writes of his poetic refrain in “Vertue,” “My musick shows ye have your closes, / And all must die” (11–12), and the speaker in “The Rose” asserts that, like every­thing prized by “worldlings” (21), including verses, the flower “biteth in the close” (24). As a ­whole, however, the poems in The ­Temple make clear that death is not something to be dreaded but, rather, welcomed and embraced. As a result of Christ’s death and Resurrection, the figure of death in Herbert’s “Death” is said to have become “fair and full of grace”—­indeed, he is “Much in request, much sought for, as a good” (15–16).11 When Herbert himself approached death, he considered the posthumous effect

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of his poems, hoping that they might be of use to a “dejected poor Soul” but instructing that, if this w ­ ere not the case, they should be burned.12 Donne, however, preached publicly and powerfully on the “issues of death” as he himself was ­dying, and then spent his final days contemplating an image of his own body in its shroud.13 Herbert’s sense of last t­ hings is infused with the confident hope of Resurrection and afterlife, while Donne’s endings—­both personal and poetic—­ are profoundly mortal in their dread of what is to come. In Donne’s Holy Sonnet “Oh, to vex me,” the speaker admits in the last line that “[t]hose are my best dayes, when I shake with feare” (14). Donne’s devotional poetry is indeed haunted by a “sinne of feare” and a dread of judgment (“A Hymne to God the F ­ ather,” 13). Only the promise of Christ’s presence on the last day can lead the speaker, in “A Hymne to God the ­Father,” to let go of his anx­ie­ ties and state, fi­nally, in the closing words of Donne’s last poem, “I feare no more” (18). Despite ­these profound contrasts of method and mood, Donne and Herbert do share several technical features as they meta­phor­ically place their “dot over the i” and produce effective poetic conclusions. Both poets, for example, are masters of the deferred resolution. This is already clear in the last example, Donne’s “A Hymne to God the ­Father,” in which he submits himself to God’s care in the last four syllables of the poem. The same is true of Donne’s long meditative poem, “Goodfriday, 1613. Riding Westward,” in which the speaker fears that the “rusts” and “deformity” (40) of sin make it impossible for him to look ­toward Christ on the Cross. Again, only in the last half line (­after more than forty lines of verse) does he relent and agree that he ­will look at God: “I’ll turne my face” (42). Similarly, Herbert’s “Love” (III), the final lyric poem in The T ­ emple, itself defers resolution ­until its very last line. As in Donne’s “Goodfriday, 1613,” Herbert’s speaker is all too aware of being “Guiltie of dust and sinne” (2) and is scrupulously reluctant to accept the welcome and nourishment offered by “Love,” the host who is Jesus himself. Only when Love ­will not hear any more of ­these protests of sinfulness does the all-­too-­human speaker give in, whereby the poem achieves closure with the utmost simplicity: “You must sit down, sayes Love, and taste my meat: / So I did sit and eat” (17–18). The technique of postponed resolution, holding out against God ­until the last few plain syllables that then transform the entire meaning of the poem, is remarkably similar in Donne’s “Goodfriday, 1613” and Herbert’s “Love” (III). As Donne wrote in a sermon on Psalm 32: “all this, the Holy Ghost by the pen of David, seales with the last word of this Text.”14 Both poets seized opportunities to “seal” their poems with the very “last word” or clause at their disposal. However, the contexts and effects of the final “seals” achieved by Donne and Herbert in “Goodfriday, 1613” and “Love” (III) are still significantly dif­fer­ent. In “Goodfriday, 1613,” Donne has been describing the Crucifixion, the moment when “­those hands which span the Poles, / And tune all spheares” (21–22) are pierced on the Cross. He watches from afar, through his mind’s eye—­indeed, even with his



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back turned. His poem ends with submission to the awe-­inspiring power of this event, but not with any real certainty, since “I’ll turne my face” is still in the ­future: the promise is conditional, dependent upon the further punishments from God specifically requested by the speaker. By contrast, in “Love” (III), Herbert creates a scene of hospitality and welcome, making God pre­sent through intense dialogue with the hesitant soul. Furthermore, Herbert’s lyric ends not with a conditional promise but with an event that has already happened: “so I did sit and eat” (emphasis added). The fundamental distinction is that the closure of Donne’s poem remains in a pre-­Resurrection moment, the speaker still unsure about judgment and salvation, whereas Herbert’s speaker has already seen and been accepted at the ­table of the heavenly banquet whose openness to all believers is ensured by the Resurrection.15 It might seem more appropriate to look at one of Herbert’s poems of the Passion alongside Donne’s “Goodfriday, 1613” in order to assess more closely the two poets’ methods of poetic closure at the scene of the Crucifixion. Interestingly, even when a poem such as Herbert’s Good Friday sonnet, “Redemption,” is read in conjunction with Donne’s poem, the contrasts suggested above still obtain. The deferred closure in Herbert’s sonnet is even more pronounced than in Donne’s “Goodfriday, 1613,” since twelve lines of “Redemption” have already passed before the speaker begins to approach the place where the “rich Lord” (1), God, is to be found. Even then the speaker is drawn by “a ragged noise” (12) rather than finding Golgotha for himself, and only at the end of the poem’s penultimate line is Jesus actually “espied” on the Cross, surrounded by “theeves and murderers” (13). In the very last line, an immediate response to the speaker’s as yet unspoken request is given by the crucified Lord: “Who straight, Your suit is granted, said, & died” (14). As in Donne’s “Goodfriday, 1613,” the resolution is saved ­until the last pos­si­ble moment and is startling in its dramatic action. In contrast to Donne’s poem, however, the drama of the ending of “Redemption” is decisive and enacted by God—­not, as in Donne’s case, brought about provisionally by the speaker himself. Herbert’s poem ends with a clear assurance, not that the request for a new covenant w ­ ill be granted in due course but that it “is granted” now (14). Christ’s death has already made pos­si­ble a new and redemptive relationship with God, repeatedly offered in the endings of Herbert’s poems but only glimpsed from a distance in Donne’s. In dif­fer­ent ways, both Donne and Herbert responded to the formal challenge of the sonnet and how to make best use of its structural qualities in concluding a poem’s argument. This intricate fourteen-­line lyric structure was evidently highly appealing to Donne for his religious meditations—he wrote twenty-­six of them—­and although the form was less frequently used by Herbert, the fifteen sonnets in The ­Temple demonstrate the importance of the final couplet in this structure in reinforcing and transforming the poem’s meaning. Herbert’s second sonnet on “The H. Scriptures,” for example, refers to the Bible from the

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outset as a book of “lights” (1) whose stories are a series of “constellations” (4), but only pulls together the meta­phor and its implicit purpose in the closing couplet: “Starres are poore books, & oftentimes do misse: / This book of starres lights to eternall blisse” (13–14). The layout of the sonnet in the 1633 edition pre­ sents the preceding lines as three distinct quatrains, so that the final couplet is visually as well as semantically separated from the rest of the sonnet. Once again, Herbert’s final lines set out on a confident trajectory of redemption: the plural noun “lights” found in the opening line is transformed into a verb as the poem closes, and the Bible becomes the means of lighting up the way to “eternall blisse.” Although Donne’s sonnets are printed more conventionally as a block of fourteen lines, making the final couplet less obviously distinctive, the last two lines are often in­de­pen­dent in their syntax as well as their ideas. Typically, the couplet is the point by which Donne’s speaker has found a way ­toward prayer rather than dramatic confrontation. In the sestet of “At the round earths imagin’d corners,” for example, the speaker realises that repentance is required ­here and now, “on this lowly ground” (12), and it simply cannot wait ­until the hectic moment when the “numberlesse infinities / Of soules” (3–4) are gathered together in the rush of Judgment Day visualised in the octave. The ­sestet in fact turns away from the ­future to focus on the speaker in the pre­sent moment, and addresses God for the first time in the poem. The final couplet begins with a concise, almost blunt, five-­word prayer: “Teach mee how to repent; for that’s as good / As if thou’hadst seal’d my ­pardon, with thy blood” (13–14). Typically, Donne’s speaker does not remain at prayer for long but appears then to set conditions for God, informing Him what w ­ ill be acceptable: “that’s as good / As if . . .” The irony of the poem’s ending is that this condition has already been met—­his ­pardon, like the poem’s end, has been “seal’d”—­but the speaker is apparently not aware of this, or not convinced that this ­great ­pardon ­will extend to him. Once again, Donne’s poem ends with the speaker on the wrong side of the Crucifixion and Resurrection, waiting for ­these redeeming events to happen. By the time another of Donne’s Holy Sonnets reaches its concluding couplet, the idea that the ­human speaker is “a l­ittle world made cunningly” (1), a microcosm in which all the natu­ral ele­ments are mingled together, has been firmly established. The couplet focuses on the most violent and purging of ­those ele­ ments, fire, which the speaker asks to be applied to his sinful self: “And burne me ô Lord, with a fiery zeale / Of thee and thy ­house, which doth in eating heale” (13–14). ­Here we find Donne again using the final couplet as a vehicle for prayer, containing and sealing up into a spiritual intent every­thing that has preceded it in the poem. The “dot over the i,” the very last clause of the poem, takes the form of a paradox, the seemingly impossible idea that something which consumes us can at the same time heal us. The concluding paradox is a recognizable, recurrent characteristic of Donne’s and Herbert’s poetic endings. If a doctrine or devo-



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tional experience is impossibly complex—­the nature of God, for instance, or the enormity of His forgiving love, and the near impossibility of proper submission to it—­then a pithy paradoxical expression is perhaps the only way to perceive and contain it in the closing lines of a poem. Herbert’s long and apparently autobiographical lyric “Affliction” (I) ends with the frustrated speaker’s return to God’s fold, expressed with brilliantly crafted immediacy: “Ah my deare God! though I am clean forgot, / Let me not love thee, if I love thee not” (65–66). The reader is left puzzling over what t­ hese two kinds of love are, how the two negatives can be reconciled, and how it is that this paradoxical final line contains both the deep confusion and the groundedness of the speaker’s relationship with God. While Herbert’s paradox ­here explores the intimate dance of spiritual love between the ­human soul and God, Donne’s most famous concluding paradox confronts the reader with the distressing notion that God must violate the soul in order to preserve its spiritual chastity: Take mee to you, imprison mee, for I Except you’enthrall mee, never ­shall be f­ ree, Nor ever chast, u­ nless you ravish mee. (“Batter my heart,” 12–14)

Unlike Herbert’s intertwined final paradox in “Affliction” (I), Donne’s is provocatively physical yet willfully passive, handing over to God the control of their relationship and rendering any comeback impossible ­after the end of the poem. Clearly, the basis for such holy paradoxes is biblical: the last s­ hall be first; one must lose oneself in order to preserve oneself; and the ser­vice of God is perfect freedom.16 However, Donne’s final line goes even further than t­hese familiarly challenging ideas, using shock tactics to startle his readers into an understanding of God’s radical intervention in ­human experience. This is undoubtedly a poetic closure in which the last clause puts its indelible “stamp” on the impressionable form of the poem and the mind of the reader. The key shared characteristic of ­these final paradoxes is their capacity to ambush the reader with the unexpected. This is true of many more techniques of poetic closure used by Donne and Herbert. Donne had been practicing the sudden final change of tone, for example, since the early days of his secular lyr­ics. “The Relique” is keen to mock the Roman Catholic vocabulary of saints, relics, and miracles as the lovers’ bodies are unearthed (“Thou shalt be a Mary Magdalen, and I / A something e­ lse thereby,” 17–18), but transforms this spiritual language into heartbreaking seriousness in the conclusion: but now alas All mea­sure, and all language, I should passe, Should I tell what a miracle shee was. (31–33)

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The ele­ment of surprise h­ ere has the effect of cooling the poem’s own laughter and shifting it into a mode of serious adoration. Donne’s Holy Sonnet “Show me deare Christ, thy Spouse” moves in the opposite direction, beginning with the search for the true Church but in the end taking the reader’s breath away with the audacity of its closing comparison between the true Church and a prostitute: “Who is most trew, and pleasing to thee, then / When she’is embrac’d and open to most men” (13–14). Apparently delighting in the trump card of the unanticipated thought or paradoxical conceit with which to round off his religious sonnet, Donne crosses promiscuously between secular and sacred love, and between dismissal and re­spect for his spiritual enemies. The greatest of ­these enemies is Death, whom he derides in “Death be not proud” as ­really rather weak and pathetic—­“poore death” (4)—­only to conclude the sonnet by threatening this adversary with Death itself, the very force he has been undermining with his persuasive arguments throughout the poem. “And death ­shall be no more, death, thou shalt die” (14) rings rather hollowly, if ironically, as the last line. More successful in their unpredictable final salvoes are two of Donne’s hymns, “A Hymne to Christ, at the Authors last g­ oing into Germany” and “Hymne to God my God, in my sicknesse.” Th ­ ese manage to surprise the reader by arguing respectively that “Everlasting night” (32) is preferable to “stormy dayes” (31), and that “the Lord throws down” ­those who suffer, only in order to “raise” them (30). Donne always loved a challenge, and the desire to triumph with the paradoxical or unlikely thought in a final line certainly puts the “stamp” on his religious poetry. In general, Herbert’s poems feature unexpected twists in their final lines that are more mea­sured, even understated, than the equivalent turns in some of ­Donne’s hymns and sonnets. In several poems, Herbert achieves closure with an unannounced change of register, clinching his argument by echoing a familiar saying (as in “The Quidditie”) or borrowing a biblical phrase (as in “Jordan” [I]).17 The unanticipated change of direction at the end of Herbert’s “A true Hymne” is achieved by the entry of another voice in order to resolve the poem’s strug­gle between the desire for poetic artistry and the need for spiritual honesty. The speaker asserts that genuine emotion is ultimately more impor­tant for a “true” hymn than technical mastery, and the reader is assured that, in circumstances where the poetry is “somewhat scant” (17), God w ­ ill “supplie the want”—­intervening with His “sweet art,” as Herbert writes in “Easter,” to “make up” any ­human “defects” (18). In “A true Hymne,” however, the poem does far more than simply declare this belief; it enacts the divine intervention in its closing couplet: “As when th’heart sayes (sighing to be approved) / O, could I love! and stops: God writeth, Loved” (19–20). The inscribed voice of God, written rather than heard as it was in “The Collar,” literally has the last word in “A true Hymne,” completing the poem and fulfilling the speaker’s longing for approval with this emphatic, rhyming reassurance.



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As in the last line of “Redemption,” t­ here is a disruptive energy to this conclusion: the syntax comes to an unexpected halt with the word “stops,” and the direction of thought is completely reversed. In Herbert’s “Prayer” (I), the flow of the final line is again unexpectedly broken, and with power­ful effect: ­after thirteen and a half lines of meta­phorical ingenuity describing what prayer might be—­from “the Churches banquet” (1) to “[t]he land of spices” (14)—­the sonnet ends with the radical phrase “something understood” (14). It is almost as though a new voice has entered this poem, too, but the effect is achieved simply by a bold change of style to the absolute simplicity of the final two words. This closing phrase moves not only from audacious meta­phor to plain statement but also from description to pro­cess, and thus to the beginning of prayer itself. Herbert does more than surprise and disrupt with his poetic closures; he invites the reader to take action, interjecting a new perspective. In “Vanitie” (I), the ­human achievements symbolized in the work of the “Astronomer” (1), “Diver” (8), and “Chymick” (15) are shown to be utterly misguided, concentrating on every­thing except God. As the poem’s conclusion pointedly asserts, ­there is something fundamentally awry ­here, which requires the jolting realization given in the final line: “Poore man, thou searchest round / To finde out death, but missest life at hand” (27–28). ­After this daring poetic ending, the implication is that the reader’s life can never be the same again.18 Many poetic conclusions, however, depend upon sameness for their effect. The refrain, for example, is a familiar lyric technique by which a poem establishes, repeats, and confirms a recurring statement, though the implications of the refrain can noticeably shift during the poem as a result of the lines that precede it in each stanza.19 Donne’s “The Litanie” builds on the deliberately repetitive format of liturgical litanies and introduces into the second half of the twenty-­eight-­ stanza poem a pair of recurring phrases: “O Lord deliver us” (125), which is then uttered, in several variants, a further nine times, almost always at the end of a stanza, and “Heare us” (199), used another six times before the end of the poem. Between them, t­ hese two phrases sum up the poem’s under­lying purpose, and the penultimate stanza aptly describes the collective ­human speakers as “weake ecchoes” (243), suggesting that the role of prayer is to repeat, pressing the point over and over again (as Donne does in the poem), but also echoing the words and loving actions of God.20 The poem as a ­whole, however, does not end with ­either of the two internal refrains, “deliver us” or “heare us,” but on a typically defiant and thought-­provoking note: “As sinne is nothing, let it no where be” (252). Donne’s conclusions startle and challenge the intellect, while Herbert’s reinvigorate the soul. The subtly changing refrain of Herbert’s lyric “Vertue,” for example, is focused on mortality in the first three stanzas—­“For thou must die” (4), “And thou must die” (8), “And all must die” (12)—­but the final stanza rejects the anticipated carpe diem conclusion by changing direction entirely. Unlike all the

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Co mpa r ati v e Ess ays on Donne a nd Herbert

transient “sweet” t­hings (the day, the r­ ose, the spring) addressed in the e­ arlier part of the poem: Onely a sweet and virtuous soul, Like season’d timber, never gives; But though the ­whole world turn to coal, Then chiefly lives. (13–16)

Once again, the very last word makes all the difference h­ ere. The firm and s­ imple verb “lives” reestablishes optimism and not only insists that the soul ­will enjoy eternal life but also, by the careful choice of the pre­sent tense, asserts that it is already ­doing so. Strictly speaking, then, Donne’s and Herbert’s poetic endings do not “close” in any narrow sense but open outward onto new perspectives, restating or reestablishing truths that may be obscured at the beginning of a poem. In Donne’s case, that which is reestablished is often a feature of logic rather than an aspect of poetic form. In the Holy Sonnet “Wilt thou love God,” for example, the speaker’s attempts to love God become tangled up in a “wholsome meditation” (2) on the complex history of salvation, ­after which the final couplet comes as a relief with the s­ imple clarity of its logic: “ ’Twas much, that man was made like God before, / But, that God should be made like man, much more” (13–14). H ­ ere, Donne’s conclusion cuts through the preceding detail and difficulty of doctrine to reassert the radical asymmetry of the Incarnation. By contrast, Herbert’s poetic closures embody rather than describe their resolution, often reestablishing a feature of poetic form as an expression of a reconfigured relationship with God. The ending of “Deniall” is a case in point, where the failed rhymes at the end of each stanza (except the last) are a reflection of the unresolved misery of the speaker, whose “heart” is “broken, as [is his] verse” (3). In the last stanza, the expected stanzaic pattern is restored, drawing attention to itself since the rhyming words include “ryme” and “chime”: O cheer and tune my heartlesse breast, Deferre no time; That so thy favours granting my request, They and my minde may chime, And mend my ryme. (26–30)

The “musick” of Herbert’s verse not only contains “closes,” to recall the phrase from “Vertue” indicating the inevitability of death, but also offers a structure of rhythms and sounds that, as h­ ere in “Deniall,” can express prayer and at the same time confirm that it has been answered with immediate and life-­affirming effect.



“The dot over the i” 217

The ending of “Deniall” requires the reader to reconsider the meaning of the poem’s title: instead of referring to the assumed unresponsiveness of God, as the opening of the poem suggests, the title is shown by the conclusion to denote the speaker’s own denial of hope, ­until a prayer of desperation returns them to poetic and spiritual harmony with God.21 This circular pro­cess of devotional reading, by which the poem’s end invites a new reading of its start, is fundamental to many of Herbert’s and Donne’s poems. In the opening of “Goodfriday, 1613,” for example, Donne’s conceit, “Let mans Soule be a Spheare” (1), evokes a series of turning and circling motions that are deftly echoed in the final stage of the poem, when the speaker explains that he is only temporarily turning his back on God and ­will eventually, when sure of “grace,” “turne” his face (41–42). The circle, an emblem of the “cornerlesse and infinite” God, is one of Donne’s dominant religious meta­phors and can be seen structurally underpinning his seven-­ poem sequence “La Corona”: the closing line of each sonnet becomes the opening of the next, ­until with the last line of the final sonnet we are returned to the opening line of the very first, “Deigne at my hands this crown of prayer and praise” (1.1, 7.14).22 Herbert, too, was drawn to the idea of an interwoven “crown” or garland of verse, as in poems such as “A Wreath” or “Sinnes round.” In the second of ­these, the speaker’s sins appear to mock them and “course it in a ring” (2) of entwined thoughts, words, and deeds, and the full circle of the poem is completed by the enclosing line with which it begins and ends, “Sorrie I am, my God, sorrie I am” (1, 18). This merging of the openings and closings of poems, by both Donne and Herbert, calls to mind T. S. Eliot’s “East Coker” from Four Quartets, which begins with the statement “In my beginning is my end,” and ends with the subtle reordering of the idea as “In my end is my beginning.”23 Though especially applicable to the seventeenth-­century poets’ structurally circular poems, Eliot’s folding of time into a continuum, in which the start and the finish are inseparably overlaid, may be applied to almost all the types of endings we have observed in the lyr­ics of Donne and Herbert. W ­ hether the poem consists of an opening question and a closing answer, a dramatic beginning and an understated or prayerful end, a narrative entry and a revelatory exit from the poem, or a controlled exposition followed by a deferred or interrupted conclusion, in all ­these cases, the beginning and end are irrevocably linked in the poem’s discourse and dynamics. This was Herbert’s conclusion in his poem “Paradise,” where a rhetorical trick appears to suggest that the argument is declining as the final word of each line is “pruned,” ready for the heavenly orchard: I blesse thee, Lord, ­because I GROW Among thy trees, which in a ROW To thee both fruit and order OW. (1–3)

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In fact, the cutting back is to make the trees “more fruitfull” (12), and the pro­cess of trimming the rhymes shows that the word ­toward which the poem is heading, the “END,” is already pre­sent within the word from which it is revealed: Such sharpnes shows the sweetest FREND: Such   cuttings rather heal then REND: And such beginnings   touch their END. (13–15)

No doubt Eliot, who was a ­great admirer of Herbert’s verse, had this line and its effect in mind as he wrote the first and last lines of “East Coker.” This consideration of lyric endings in the devotional poetry of Donne and Herbert has suggested that both poets give their final lines, or half-­lines, plenty of “salt”—in the sense of distinctive flavoring as well as profound emotion—­with which to make their final poetic flourish and place “the dot over the i,” to quote the lines by Julia Fiedorczuk with which we began. It is clear that Donne sets a “stamp” on his verse with the final clause, whereas Herbert’s conclusions aim ­toward “discovery.” Donne’s last lines often remain in a fearful mood or a provisional grammatical state, while the majority of Herbert’s are predicated on confidence in redemption that has already been won through Christ’s Resurrection.24 If ­there is theological difference h­ ere, ­there are also contrasting techniques. Both poets delight in surprising and sometimes disruptive conclusions, but while Donne seems quite self-­sufficient in the language and logic of his endings, Herbert’s lyrical closure is often achieved by change of voice, w ­ hether this takes the form of a restored concord of sounds, a phrase from the Bible, or the constructed intervention of a divine voice. The final effect of Donne’s devotional poems is frequently a change of thought, stimulated by the startling succinctness of a paradoxical phrase or a boldly rational summary; the impact of Herbert’s endings may make use of paradox, too, but the effect is generally more relational than intellectual. Whereas Donne tends to sense mortality in his poetic conclusions, just as he did in his final sermon, Deaths Duell, Herbert’s last lines tend to assume that Christ has already gone before or “prevented” us, and therefore anticipate eternity.25 In mood as well as technique, it could perhaps fi­nally be claimed that, while Donne is more in tune with Eliot’s first statement—­“In my beginning is my end”—­with all its implications of embedded mortality, the emphasis on restored harmony and fresh starts in Herbert’s endings aligns him more closely with Eliot’s own closing line, “In my end is my beginning.”

notes 1. ​Julia Fiedorczuk, from “Lands and Oceans,” Oxygen: Selected Poems, trans. Bill Johnston

(Brookline, MA: Zephyr Press, 2017), 3.

2. ​Biblical references are to the Authorized King James Version of 1611 (KJV), and w ­ ill be

cited parenthetically in the text by chapter and verse.



“The dot over the i” 219

3. ​John Donne, The Complete En­glish Poems of John Donne, ed. C. A. Patrides (London: Dent,

1985), 57 and 443. Subsequent references to Donne’s poetry w ­ ill derive from this edition, and, when necessary, ­will be cited parenthetically in the text by line number. 4. ​George Herbert, The En­glish Poems of George Herbert, ed. Helen Wilcox (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 116 and 332. Subsequent references to Herbert’s poetry ­will derive from this edition, and, when necessary, w ­ ill be cited parenthetically in the text by line number. 5. ​Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 13. 6. ​See also, for example, “Jordan” (II) and “Redemption.” 7. ​George Puttenham, The Arte of En­glish Poesie, ed. Gladys D. Willcock and Alice Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936), 64 and 79. 8. ​For further examples, see “Deniall” and “A true Hymne,” discussed below. 9. ​Compare, for example, “Batter my heart,” “Wilt thou love God?,” “The Crosse,” and “A Hymne to God the ­Father.” 10. ​John Donne, The Sermons of John Donne, ed. Evelyn Simpson and George R. Potter, 10 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1953–1962), 6:41. 11. ​See the previous chapter for Christopher Hodgkins’s close reading of Herbert’s “Death.” 12. ​Izaak Walton, The Life of Mr. George Herbert (London, 1670), 74. 13. ​See Alison Shell, “The death of Donne,” in The Oxford Handbook of John Donne, ed. Dennis Flynn, M.  Thomas Hester, and Jeanne Shami (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 646–657. 14. ​Donne, Sermons, 9:294. 15. ​In the previous chapter, Christopher Hodgkins provides a more extensive reading of “Love” (III), one of Herbert’s finest lyr­ics. 16. ​Mark 9:35; Luke 17:33; “The Collect for Peace” from Eve­ning Prayer (1559), The Book of Common Prayer: The Texts of 1549, 1559, and 1662, ed. Brian Cummings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 111. 17. ​See also, for example, “Unkindnesse” and “The Crosse.” 18. ​Compare the suddenness of the life-­changing revelation in the last line of Herbert’s “Miserie.” 19. ​See, for example, Herbert’s “The Sacrifice,” “The Pearl,” and “Grace.” 20. ​Compare Herbert’s use of the echo technique in “Heaven,” a poem that repeatedly finds its conclusions in a distant heavenly voice echoing the last syllable of the preceding word. 21. ​See also poems such as “The Collar” and the two “Jordan” poems for similar circular pro­ cesses by which the title becomes fully understood once the last line has been reached and the reading starts again from the beginning. 22. ​The reference to God being “cornerlesse and infinite” is from Donne’s poem “Upon the translation of the Psalmes by Sir Philip Sydney, and the Countesse of Pembroke his S­ ister” (4). 23. ​T. S. Eliot, “East Coker,” from The Four Quartets, in Collected Poems, 1909–1962 (London: Faber and Faber, 1963), 196, 204. 24. ​In chapter 8 of the pre­sent volume, Danielle A. St. Hilaire establishes a similar contrast between the poets in their dif­fer­ent attitudes t­oward salvation as representing, in Donne’s case, possibility or, in Herbert’s case, promise. Herbert, St. Hilaire maintains, seeks assurance in the ­future, while Donne locates assurance in his capacity to keep the promise of salvation open without allowing ­either salvation or damnation to actualize. 25. ​“Our very birth and entrance into this life is . . . ​an issue from death, for in our m ­ others wombe wee are dead” (Donne, Sermons 10:11); “Oh King of wounds! How ­shall I grieve for thee, / Who in all grief preventest me?” from “The Thanksgiving” (3–4).

APPENDIX Donne’s and Herbert’s Latin Poems on the Seal of Christ on the Anchor T R A N S L AT E D BY C AT H E R I N E F R E I S A N D GREG M ILLER

To Mr George Herbert, with one of my Seal, of the Anchor and Christ1 Qui prius assuetus Serpentum fasce Tabellas Signare, (hæc nostræ symbola parva Domus) Adscitus domui Domini, patrióque relicto Stemmate, nanciscor stemmata jure nova. Hinc mihi Crux primo quæ fronte impressa lavacro 5 Finibus extensis, anchora fixa patet. Anchoræ in effigiem, Crux tandem desinit ipsam, Anchora fit tandem Crux tolerata diu. Hoc tamen ut fiat, Christo vegetatur ab ipso Crux, et ab Affixo, est Anchora facta, Iesu. 10 Nec Natalitiis penitus serpentibus orbor, Non ita dat Deus, ut auferat ante data. Quâ sapiens, Dos est; Quâ terram lambit et ambit, Pestis; At in nostra fit Medicina Cruce, Serpens2; fixa Cruci si sit Natura, Crucíque 15 A fixo, nobis, Gratia tota fluat. Omnia cum Crux sint, Crux Anchora fixa, sigillum Non tam dicendum hoc, quam Catechismus erit. Mitto, nec exigua3, exiguâ sub imagine, dona, Pignora amicitiæ, et munera; Vota, preces. 20 Plura tibi accumulet, sanctus cognominis, Ille Regia qui flavo Dona sigillat Equo. I.D. 221

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Appendix

To Mr. George Herbert, with one of my Seal, of the Anchor and Christ4 He who once Sealed his Letters with a sheaf of Snakes 1 (­These the lowly emblems then of our House), ­Adopted since into the Lord’s ­house, my fatherly line dropped as well, I rightly reap new rights of arms. From this, the Cross—­with my first bath marked on my forehead, 5 Its low lines drawn out—­lies exposed as an anchor. The Cross fi­nally not a cross has become an Anchor’s image, A Cross long-­carried at last becomes an Anchor. But so that this may be, the Cross is brought to life by Christ himself, And through Jesus Affixed becomes an Anchor. 10 Nor are my Natal snakes taken from me altogether, Not so does God give, taking back what he once gave. Insofar as the snake is wise, it’s a Gift; Insofar as it licks and circles the earth, It is Ruin; But on a Cross, it is a Cure. If all Nature ­were fixed to the Cross, all Grace 15 Would flow to us from the one fixed to the Cross. Once all ­things are the Cross, the Cross is fixed an Anchor, a seal, Not so much that it must be thus called, as that it ­will be a Teaching. I send ­under this small seal, gifts that are not small, Friendship’s pledges, and ­favors; Votive Offerings, prayers. 20 May your name saint heap up more for you, That Saint Who seals Kingly Gifts with a Horse in gold. In Sacram Anchoram Piscatoris G. Herbert. Qvod Crux nequibat fixa, Clavíque additi,1 (Tenere Christum scilicet, ne ascenderet) Tuíue Christum deuocans facundia Vltra loquendi tempus; addit Anchora: Nec hoc abundè est tibi, nisi certae Anchorae 5 Addas sigillum: nempe Symbolum suae Tibi debet Vnda & Terra certitudinis. Quondam fessus Amor loquens Amato, Tot & tanta loquens arma, scripsit: Tandem & fessa ma­nus, dedit sigillum. 10 Suauis erat, qui scripta dolens lacerando recludi, Sanctius in Regno Magni credebat Amoris (In quo fas nihil est rumpi) donare sigillum.

Appendix 223

Munde, fluas fugiásque licet, nos nostráque fixi: Deridet motus sancta catena tuos.15

On the Fisherman’s Holy Anchor G. Herbert If the Cross, though fixed, with added Nails, ­can’t Hold Christ securely, so he ­can’t ascend And your eloquence in calling Christ down ­can’t Last longer than your speech, this Anchor can: Still it’s not abundantly yours, till you add To the sure Anchor a seal: Wave & Land Clearly owe you this Sign of their own truth. Once, wearied Love addressing the Beloved, Wrote, conveying so many and such high, loving words; Fi­nally, and with a tired hand, he stamped the Seal.

1

5

10

He was gracious who, grieving what he wrote Would be torn open and mangled, thought it More divinely protected in ­Great Love’s Realm (Where nothing should be broken) to bequeath a seal. O World, go flow and fly, while we and ours are fixed: The holy chain mocks your flux.

15

notes 1. ​The title h ­ ere from the 1650 edition of Donne’s poetry. 2. ​ Serpens, the subject of the sentence that begins at line 13, is withheld ­until line 15, thereby

providing a climax. 3. ​In line 2, Donne characterizes the seal of his ­house as parva (small or insignificant), but in line 19, he chooses the related word exigua (small or scanty) for the seal of his letter and for the gifts he is sending to Herbert, gifts that are not exigua in his poem written in elegiac couplets. Since this poem is written in the meter of elegiac couplets, Donne may have chosen exigua ­because it was a word associated with this meter by Augustan Roman poets who wittily played with the idea that the meter is “scanty” when it loses a metrical foot in the second line of ­every couplet. See Richard Freis, “Exiguos Elegos: Are Ars Poetica 75–78 Critical of Love Elegy?,” Latomus 52, no. 2 (1993): 364–371. 4. ​The 1650 edition includes the following title over its En­glish translation: “A Sheafe of Snakes used heretofore to be my Seal, The Crest of our poore F ­ amily.”

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

angel a ball a is associate professor of En­glish at The University of Alabama in Huntsville. She has published essays on Herbert and Milton in The George Herbert Journal, Re­nais­sance and Reformation, and Milton Quarterly. She is working on a monograph provisionally titled Natu­ral Law and the Poetics of Religious Toleration in Seventeenth-­Century E ­ ngland, which examines the role of the seventeenth-­ century religious poetry of Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, Milton, and Traherne in the rise of toleration. russell  m. hillier is professor of En­glish at Providence College. He is the

author of two books: Milton’s Messiah and Morality in Cormac McCarthy’s Fiction: Souls at ­Hazard. He has published articles on Shakespeare, Milton, Donne, Herbert, Bunyan, Coleridge, Keats, Hawthorne, Dostoevsky, and Cormac McCarthy in journals such as Milton Quarterly, Milton Studies, Studies in Philology, Studies in En­glish Lit­er­a­ture 1500–1900, and The Modern Language Review. He is currently researching in two principal areas of study, Shakespearean drama and Spenserian epic romance. christopher hodgkins is the Class of 1952 Professor in En­glish at the Uni-

versity of North Carolina at Greensboro. He is the author of three books: Authority, Church and Society in George Herbert: Return to the M ­ iddle Way; Reforming Empire: Protestant Colonialism and Conscience in British Lit­er­a­ture; and most recently, Literary Study of the Bible: An Introduction. He is the cofounder and director of the George Herbert Society; coeditor with Robert Whalen of The Digital ­Temple and the forthcoming George Herbert: Complete Works; and the editor of several essay collections on Herbert’s devotional verse. kimberly johnson is professor of En­glish at Brigham Young University. Her

books include Made Flesh: Sacrament and Poetics in Post-­Reformation E ­ ngland; a number of collections of poetry including, most recently, the forthcoming Fatal; and book-­length translations of Virgil’s Georgics and the works of Hesiod. She has served as editor of Before the Door of God: An Anthology of Devotional Poetry and of special issues of Chris­tian­ity & Lit­er­a­ture and The George Herbert Journal. She is the recipient of grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and her work has recently appeared in The New Yorker, PMLA, and the volume John Donne in Context. greg miller , professor emeritus of En­glish at Millsaps College, has published

three books of collaborative translation and commentary on the Greek and Latin poetry and prose of George Herbert. His George Herbert’s “Holy Patterns”: 225

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Notes on Contributors

Reforming Individuals in Community was published by Bloomsbury Continuum in 2007. He has also published several volumes of poetry. anne-­m arie miller-­b l aise is professor in En­glish lit­er­a­ture and cultural stud-

ies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries at the Sorbonne Nouvelle, where she also teaches translation. She is the author of a French monograph on George Herbert, Le Verbe fait image/The Word made Image. She has published articles in both French and En­glish on Herbert, Donne, Philip Sidney, Mary Sidney, Southwell, and Crashaw, with par­tic­u­lar focus on questions of interplay between theology and aesthetics, and poetry and the image, as well as on textual and spiritual circulations in early modern Eu­rope. She is currently working as coeditor on an anthology of Eu­ro­pean Baroque poetry in French translation, as well as on a new edition of Shakespeare’s poetry for Gallimard. Recently, she has also coedited several collective publications on the relation between early modern lit­er­a­ture and the history of material culture, including Objets nomades. kate narveson teaches medieval and early modern lit­er­a­ture at Luther Col-

lege, where she is professor of En­glish. She has published the monograph Bible Readers and Lay Writers in Early Modern E ­ ngland, in addition to articles on Donne, Herbert, and Grace Mildmay, as well as a range of issues in the study of early Stuart devotional lit­er­a­ture. She is a past president of the John Donne Society (2015–2016). robert  w. reeder is associate professor of En­glish at Providence College. He

has published articles on Donne and Shakespeare in Studies in En­glish Lit­er­a­ture 1500–1900, The John Donne Journal, Philological Quarterly, Renascence, and Early Modern Literary Studies. For The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne, he served as commentary editor to volume 4.3, The Songs and Sonets, and as contributing editor to Volume 5, The Verse Letters, and volume 7.2, The Divine Poems. danielle a . st. hil aire is associate professor of En­glish at Duquesne Univer-

sity in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her first book is titled Satan’s Poetry: Fallenness and Poetic Tradition in Paradise Lost. She has additionally published essays on Shakespeare and Donne in Modern Philology, Studies in Philology, and Studies in En­glish Lit­er­a­ture 1500–1900. She is currently at work on a book titled The Art of Pity: Aesthetics, Ethics, and Compassion in Early Modern En­glish Lit­er­a­ture, for which she received a 2019 NEH Summer Stipend. kirsten stirling is associate professor of En­glish at the University of Lausanne,

Switzerland. She is currently researching in the field of John Donne’s divine poems and their relationship to the visual arts, on which she has published several articles. She has served as a contributing editor to The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne, volume 7.2, Divine Poems, and contributed the article “Liturgical Poetry” in The Oxford Handbook of John Donne. She also researches



Notes on Contributors 227

and publishes in the field of Scottish lit­er­a­ture and is the author of Bella Caledonia: ­Woman, Nation, Text and Peter Pan’s Shadows in the Literary Imagination. She is a past president of the John Donne Society (2017–2018). helen wilcox is professor emerita of En­glish lit­er­a­ture at Bangor University,

Wales. Her research interests lie in a broad range of early modern En­glish literary texts, including devotional poetry, tragicomedy, autobiography, and ­women’s writing. She is the editor of the fully annotated En­glish Poems of George Herbert and coeditor of George Herbert: Sacred and Profane, as well as the author of many essays and articles on Herbert and Donne, including the chapter on Donne’s devotional writing in The Cambridge Companion to Donne (edited by Achsah Guibbory), on “The First Anniversarie” in her book 1611: Authority, Gender and the Word in Early Modern ­England, and on Donne and Herbert together in The Blackwell Companion to Re­nais­sance Poetry, edited by Catherine Bates. She recently coedited, with Andrew Hiscock, The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern En­glish Lit­er­a­ture and Religion.

INDEX

absolutism (monarchical), 6, 35–42, 43–45, 48–49, 58–59 Achinstein, Sharon, 61n8 Acts of the Apostles, The. See Bible Adam, 38, 128–129, 134n55, 134–135n56, 135nn58–59 adiaphora, 23 agency, ­human, 157–173 Alia Poemata Latina [Other Latin Poems]: “In Natales et Pascha Concurrentes” [“On my Birthday and Good Friday Coinciding”], 106, 110, 112; “In Sacram Anchoram Piscatoris” [“On the Fisherman’s Holy Anchor”], 4, 7–9, 91, 96–98, 105–110, 222–223 anchor, 4, 8–9, 91, 95–97, 105–110, 221–223 Anderson, Judith, 102–103n13 Andrewes, Lancelot, 80, 88n43; Preces Privatae, 80 angels, 51–57, 59, 140, 157, 180, 189 Anniversaries, The, “The First Anniversary,” 129 Annunciation, 81, 89n48, 105, 110–112 apophatic (or negative) theology, 5–6, 17–33, 171n10, 173n31 Aquinas, Thomas, 38, 45, 61–62n15, 63n31, 63n35, 63n37 Argus, 76 Arminius, Jacobus, 158–159, 171n6 Armogathe, Jean-­Robert, 61–62n15 Arnold, Mathieu, 89n63 Asals, Heather, 98, 104n27 assurance, religious, 138, 141–145, 158, 167, 211 Augsburg Confession, 124–125, 133n36 Augustine, 78, 84, 99, 128, 160, 167; Confessions, 13n14, 133n39, 155n42; On Grace and ­Free Choice, 172n13; On Nature and Grace, Against the Pelagians, 135n59; On the Trinity, 134n51; Soliloquies, 14n29; Tractate on the Gospel of John, 99 Austen, Jane, 196 Authorized (King James) Version of the Bible, 13n25 Avicenna (Ibn Sina), 29

Babel, Tower of, 124, 149 Bacon, Francis, 74, 76, 87n15 Bald, R. C., 81, 89n50 Barth, Karl, 134n56 Beach, J. Mark, 104n26 Bell, Ilona, 171n10 Bellarmine, Robert, Cardinal, 34, 77–78 Bennett, J. A. W., 103n14 Bernard of Clairvaux, 89n44 Biathanatos, 35, 42, 62n29 Bible: Acts of the Apostles, The, 114; Corinthians, First Epistle to the, 22, 67n64, 67n68; Ecclesiastes, 170n4; Ephesians, Epistle to the, 120, 192; Exodus, 6, 17, 25–29, 202; Genesis, 105, 108, 120, 121–124, 132n21, 132n28; Hebrews, Epistle to the, 8, 95; John, First Epistle of, 2, 65n56; John, the Gospel of, 2–3, 9, 84, 105, 107, 121–122; Luke, the Gospel of, 11, 191, 198, 219n16; Mark, the Gospel of, 106, 205, 219n16; Matthew, the Gospel of, 46, 107; Numbers, 107, 121, 127, 134n51; Peter, Second Epistle of, 76; Psalms, 2, 22, 27, 80, 125, 137, 142, 145–148, 194, 210; Romans, Epistle to the, 36–39, 128, 134n55, 134–135n56, 137, 170n4; Song of Songs, 85, 110, 111; Timothy, First Epistle to, 120, 131n10 Bjornlie, M. Shane, 62n19 Bloch, Chana, 142, 155n33, 156nn59–60 Bodin, Jean, 5, 6, 41–45, 47, 49, 54; Les Six livres de la République, 42, 43, 44 Bonaventure, 22, 30n3 Book of Common Prayer, The, 44, 58, 80, 92, 133n41 Brett, Annabel S., 62n16, 63n31, 65n57 Brewer, Holly, 65n54 Brink, J. R., 183, 204n11 Browne, Sir Thomas, 135n58; Pseudodoxia Epidemica, 135n58 Bullinger, Heinrich, 92 Bunyan, John, 120, 131n9; Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, 120 Byatt, A. S., 59n3

229

230

Index

Cain, Tom, 6, 13n22, 35 Calvin, John, 78–82, 140–142, 164, 169, 200; Commentary on Genesis, 132n28; Commentary on the Acts of the Apostles, 103n22; Institutes of the Christian Religion, 92, 99, 104n30, 157, 158–159, 162, 170n1; sacramentology, 8, 96–97; sign of the cross, 99 Cannon, Nathanael, 74 Canons of 1604, 93 Carey, John, 65n54 carpe diem, 180, 183, 215 Catharism, 88n44 Cefalu, Paul, 2–3, 5, 12n8, 13n20, 122, 132n30 Chambers, A. B., 31n6, 60–61n7 Charalampous, Charis, 59n3 Charles, Amy, 87n19, 102n3, 110, 115n16 Charles I (king), 57, 75, 80, 155n44 Charlesworth, James H., 122, 132n22 Chaudhry, Rita, 185, 204n16 Chevallier, Philippe, 31n16 Christology, 2, 6, 27, 30n3, 121 Chrysostom, John, 78–79 Church Militant, 82 Church of ­England, 4–5, 43–44, 78–81, 99, 137 Clarke, Elizabeth, 143, 153n10, 155n39 Clements, Arthur L., 60–61n7 comedy, 4, 10–11, 177–203; in Donne, 165, 177–191, 203; in Herbert, 152, 177–178, 179, 187, 191–203 complaint, 9–10, 51, 77, 137–138, 141–144, 146–152 Comte, Edward Le, 131n9 Conti, Brooke, 119, 126, 130n2, 133n45, 134n52 contract theory, 38, 43–44 contrapasso, 134n49 Cooley, Ronald, 192, 204n25 Corinthians, First Epistle to the. See Bible Country Parson, The, 139, 192 Coverdale, Miles, 89n51 Covington, Sarah, 154n31 Cranach, Lucas, the Elder, 92 Cranmer, Thomas, Archbishop, 80 Crashaw, Richard, 2, 59n2 cross, 17–33, 91–104, 105–116, 127–129, 210–211, 221–223; liturgical status of, 92–101 Crowley, Lara M., 2, 12n5 Crucifixion, 17, 25–29, 92–93, 105–108, 207–208, 210–212 Cruickshank, Frances, 4, 12n1, 12n4, 59n1 Cummings, Brian, 2, 5, 12n6, 13n20, 133n41

Cunnar, Eugene R., 31n14 Cupid, 191 Dante, 127, 134n49; Inferno, 127, 134n49 Danvers, Lady. See Herbert, Magdalen Danvers, Sir John, 2, 73, 75 David (king), 85, 199, 210 Davison, Francis, 2 Decalogue, 47 demonology, 82 Derrida, Jacques, 24, 32n30 Deus absconditus, 6, 17, 24–29, 30n2 Devil, the. See Satan Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, 5, 9–10, 119–136, 137–156, 157–158 DiPasquale, Theresa M., 22, 32n25, 94, 96, 122, 129 Divine Poems: La Corona, 81, 217; “The Crosse,” 6, 17–30, 93–100, 120, 122, 129; “Goodfriday, 1613. Riding Westward,” 6, 17, 24–30, 106, 111–114, 210–211, 217; “A Hymne to Christ, at the Authors last ­going into Germany,” 33n43, 214; “Hymne to God my God, in my sicknesse,” 135n57, 214; “A Hymne to God the ­Father,” 210, 219n9; “A Litany,” 24, 215; “Resurrection (imperfect),” 116n29; “Upon the Annunciation and Passion falling upon one day. 1608,” 105–106, 110–112; “Upon the translation of the Psalmes by Sir Philip Sydney, and the Countesse of Pembroke his ­Sister,” 219n22 Doerksen, Daniel W., 60n7, 71, 78, 98–99, 155n40, 170n5 Donne, John. See individual works Downame, John, 10, 139, 154n16, 156n52 Draper, Ronald, 179, 204n7 Drury, John, 4, 12n4, 73, 86n3, 115n8, 116n34 Ecclesiastes. See Bible Egan, James, 189, 204n21 Elegies: “The Autumnal,” 2, 191; “His Parting from Her,” 191; “Love’s Pro­gress,” 186; “On His Mistress ­Going to Bed,” 191 Eliot, T. S., 34–35, 59nn1–3, 60n4, 219n23; Four Quartets, 217, 218 Emmaus, road to, 11, 14n31, 191, 198 Empson, William, 116n34 endings, of poems, 11, 205–219; Donne’s numismatic meta­phor on, 11, 209

En­glish Short Title Cata­logue, 74 Ephesians, Epistle to the. See Bible Erasmus, Desiderius, 134n56, 158, 160, 171n6, 172n13 Essays in Divinity, 19, 31n16, 63–64n43 Ettenhuber, Katrin, 48, 64n46 Eucharist, 96, 201 Eve, 122, 128–129, 135n58 Exodus. See Bible Fall, doctrine of, 107–108, 128, 134–135n56, 135nn58–59, 157–173 Ferrar, Nicholas, 131n9 Fetzer, Margaret, 130–131n6 Ficino, Marsilio, 31n16 Fiedorczuk, Julia, 205, 206, 218, 218n1 Fish, Stanley, 60–61n7, 95, 164–165, 171n10, 172–173n25, 173n26 Flynn, Dennis, 26–27, 32n35 Ford, Sean, 31n12 Friedman, Donald M., 32n40, 120, 131n7 Froehlich, Karlfried, 31n16 Frontain, Raymond-­Jean, 106, 114n3, 122 Frost, Kate Gartner, 135–136n65, 172n17 Fulwood, William, 103n17 Furey, Constance, 154n19 Gabriel, Archangel, 111 Galen, 29 Gardner, Helen, 13n26, 18, 102n3, 103n14, 106, 109–110 Garrett, Cynthia, 140, 152n2, 153n10, 155n36 Garrod, H. W., 12n3 Genesis. See Bible Geneva Bible, 61n14, 147 George, Saint, 108 Gilman, Ernest B., 60–61n7 Golden Legend, The, 108 golden mean (aurea mediocritas), 78 Golgotha, 111, 211 Goliath, 199 Gottlieb, Sidney, 194, 204n27 Gounelle, André, 87n13 grace, doctrine of irresistible, 8, 16, 99–101, 109, 116n34, 200–202 Gransden, K. W., 179, 203n6 Grant, Patrick, 60–61n7, 171n10 Gray, Dave, 135–136n65 Greenacre, Roger, 88n42

Index 231 Greville, Fulke, 107 Grierson, Herbert J. G., 34, 59n2, 115n15 Guibbory, Achsah, 32n40, 62n29, 120, 130, 131n8, 135n64 Halewood, William H., 12n1 Hamilton, Lynn, 183, 204n13 Hamlin, Hannibal, 155n33 Hay, James, Earl of Carlisle, 27, 33n43 Healy, Simon, 87n21 Hebrews, Epistle to the. See Bible Heidegger, Martin, 24 Henrietta Maria, Queen, 84 Henry, Prince, 74, 87n15 Herbert, Edward, 1, 7, 8, 74, 106 Herbert, George. See individual works Herbert, Henry, 74 Herbert, Magdalen, 2, 5, 7, 12n3, 71–90, 191 Herod (king), 182 Hester, M. Thomas, 89n48, 172n19 Hezekiah, 155n44 Hieron, Samuel, 10, 139, 141, 142, 153n9 Hill, Robert, 10, 139, 140, 154n17 Hollybush, John. See Coverdale, Miles Holy Sonnets: “As due by many titles,” 10, 47, 160–167, 169, 172n15, 172n19; “At the round Earths imagin’d corners,” 128, 134n54, 206, 212; “Batter my heart, three person’d God,” 47, 50, 194, 200, 202, 206, 213, 219n9; “Death be not proud,” 198–200, 206, 214; “­Father, part of his double interest,” 47; “I am a ­little world made cunningly,” 50, 212–213; “Oh, to vex me,” 210; “Show me deare Christ, thy Spouse,” 64n44, 206, 214; “Since she whom I loved,” 5, 6, 47–54, 57–59, 63–64n43, 64n44, 65n55, 66n60, 191; “Spit in my face you Jewes,” 130–131n6, 206, 208; “Thou hast made me,” 160, 162; “What if this pre­sent,” 104n34; “Wilt thou love God,” 47, 216, 219n9 Homer, 83; Iliad, The, 82, 83; Odyssey, The, 83 Hooker, Richard, 5, 6, 42–47, 54, 59, 60–61n7 humility, 9, 10, 24, 84–85, 119–136, 140 Hurley, Ann Hollinshead, 19, 31n9 Hutchinson, F. E., 86n1, 109 iconoclastic controversy, 18, 23, 24, 92, 99 idolatry, 20, 23–24, 49, 52, 92–93 Ignatius His Conclave, 35

232

Index

imago Dei, 6, 20, 22, 29, 30, 31n14 imitatio Christi, 110, 133–134n46 imitation, 81–83, 133–134n46, 135n59, 140, 154n24 Incarnation, 17, 22, 26, 47, 80–81, 216 Irenaeus of Lyons, 132n21 Isham, Elizabeth, 143, 155n39, 155n42 Jacob, 66n60, 66n62, 140, 142, 208 James I (king), 35–36, 48, 66n60, 85, 93 Jensen, Robin M., 102n5 Jessop, Augustus, 60n6 Jezebel, 182 Job, 72, 76, 84, 86n6, 142 Joblin, Alain, 88n41 John, First Epistle of. See Bible John, the Gospel of. See Bible Johnson, Bruce A., 120, 131n13 Johnson, Jeffrey, 144, 155n41 Jonson, Ben, 51, 140, 184; “To Penshurst,” 51, 184 Josephus, 122 Judas, 124 Judas Maccabeus, 62n29 justification by faith, 79–84, 158, 159, 171n10 Justinian, 39–40, 62n19; Corpus Iuris Civilis, 39, 62n19; Digesta seu Pandectae, 39 Justin Martyr, 103n14 Kaufman, Peter Iver, 153–154n14 Kelleher, Hillary, 171n10, 173n31 King, John N., 60–61n7 King’oo, Clare Costley, 155n33 Kittay, Eva Feder, 183, 204n13 Kneidel, Gregory, 62n18, 65n55 Koerner, Joseph Leo, 32n28 Kuchar, Gary, 3, 5, 114, 157, 164, 167–168 Larocco, Steve, 179–180, 204n8 Last Judgment, 38, 111, 134n54 law: celestial, 45, 54, 55, 59, 63n35; divine, 42, 45–47, 49, 53, 56, 58–59, 63n37; eternal, 38, 45, 49, 54–55, 59, 63n37, 65–66n59; ­human, 45; Mosaic, 37, 46; natu­ral, 5, 6, 34–67 Lévi-­Strauss, Claude, 63–64n43 Lewalski, Barbara Kiefer, 31n5, 119, 165, 171n10, 172–173n25, 194 Lipsius, Justus, 103n14 locus amoenus, 183

Longfellow, Erica, 139, 140, 143, 153n11, 153–154n14, 155n39 Lothario, 187 Low, Anthony, 163, 171n10, 172n20, 183, 204n12 Lucus [The Sacred Grove], 110, 111, 116n26; “Λογική Θυσία” [“A Reasonable Sacrifice”], 111, 116n26 Luke, the Gospel of. See Bible Lull, Janis, 133n32 Lunderberg, Marla, 40, 62n20 Luther, Martin, 3–7, 17–33, 73, 78–86, 92, 157–158; The Babylonian Captivity of the Church, 21; Heidelberg Disputation, 22, 25, 26, 32n33; Operationes in Psalmos, 22, 32n21; theology of the cross, 17–33, 92, 102n4; on the Virgin Mary, 81, 84, 85–86, 89n51, 89–90n70 Machacek, Gregory, 185, 204n15 Magna Carta, 49, 51, 64n48 Magnificat, 80–81, 84, 85–86, 89n51, 89–90n70 Malcolmson, Cristina, 87n15, 112 Malpezzi, Frances, 98, 104n27 Marian tradition, 5, 7, 79–81, 84 Mark, the Gospel of. See Bible Marlowe, Christopher, 180–181, 183, 204n10; Doctor Faustus, 180–181, 204n10; “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love,” 183 Marno, David, 3, 9, 13n9, 14n29, 134n54, 140 Martin, Catherine Gimelli, 159, 170n5, 171n10 Martin, Michael, 19, 31n13, 168, 173n32 Martz, Louis L., 3, 13n12, 60–61n7, 67n65, 119, 171n10 Marvell, Andrew, 12n1, 59n2, 126, 133n43, 185; “The Coronet,” 126; “Damon the Mower,” 185, 204n15 Matthew, the Gospel of. See Bible Maule, Jeremy, 63–64n43, 65n54 Maurer, Margaret, 26–27, 32n35 Maximus the Confessor, 22, 30n3 Mazzaro, Jerome, 13n12 McCloskey, Mark, 73 McGrath, Alister, 25–26, 32n31, 92 McQueen, William A., 31n5 melopoeia, 107 Melville, Elizabeth, 140, 154n22 Memoriae Matris Sacrum [A Sacred Gift in Memory of My ­Mother], 5, 7, 71–90, 112;

Poem 1: “AH Mater, quo te deplorem fonte?” [“Ah ­Mother, from what spring might I draw / My Sorrows’ ­waters?”], 77; Poem 2: “Corneliae sanctae, graues Semproniae” [“Oh you who, like Cornelia, are holy; grave, like Sempronia”], 74, 83; Poem 3: “Cvr splendes, O Phoebe?, ecquid demittere matrem” [“Why, O Phoebus, are you shining? Are you able in the least to send”], 82; Poem 4: “Quid nugor calamo fauens?” [“What slight songs do I shape with my reed?”], 83, 112; Poem 5: “Horti, deliciae Dominae, marcescite tandem” [“Gardens, who ­were your Lady’s darling, begin at last to die back”], 83; Poem 7: “Pallida materni Genij atque exanguis imago” [“Pallid, bloodless semblance of a motherly Guardian Spirit”], 72–73, 82; Poem 9: “Hoc, Genitrix, scriptum proles tibi sedula mittit.” [“Your loyal scion sends you, Foremother, this letter.”], 76, 83; Poem 10: “Nempe huc vsque notos tenebricosos” [“Surely up till now the Traveler has at least to a point”], 76, 77, 83; Poem 11: “Dum librata suis haeret radicibus ilex” [“As long as, balanced, the live oak clings with its own roots”], 82–83; Poem 12: “Facesse, Stoica plebs, obambulans cautes” [“Beat it, rambling rock, Stoic rabble”], 76; Poem 13: “Epitaphium” [“Epitaph”], 83; Poem 15: “Μῆτερ, γυναικῶν αἴγλη, ἀνθρώπων ἔρις” [“­Mother, resplendence of ­women, men’s means to zeal”], 72, 83, 86; Poem 16: “Χαλεπὸν δοκεῖ δακρῦσαι” [“It seems hard to weep”], 76; Poem 17: “Αἰάζω γενέτειραν, ἐπαιάζουσι καὶ ἄλλοι” [“I cry for my foremother, and men not her ­people cry”], 83; Poem 18: “Κύματ´ ἐπαφριοῶντα Θαμήσεος, αἴκε σελήνης” [“If, white-­ topped waves of the Thames, you should claim a greater share”], 77; Poem 19: “Excussos minibus calamos, falcémque resumptam” [“By having flung the pipes from my hands, and picked up the scythe”], 77 Mencken, H. L., 193, 204n26 Mendle, Michael, 62n22 Meredith, Christopher, 71, 73 meta­phor, in Scripture, 130

Index 233 Michael, Jennifer David, 173n26 Michalski, Sergiusz, 102n5 Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti, 19, 31n6 Milton, John, 2, 59n2, 61n8, 163; “L’Allegro,” 192; Paradise Lost, 53, 67n68, 127, 132n28; Samson Agonistes, 61n8 Monty Python’s Flying Circus, 185, 191 Moore, Cornelia Niekus, 87n13 More, Anne, 47–54, 56, 187 More, Thomas, 36 Moses, 6, 25, 28–29, 107, 121, 202 Moul, Victoria, 73, 115n8 Mueller, Janel, 132n21, 144, 155n47 Murphy, Paul R., 73 Murray, Molly, 101, 104n33 Musae Responsoriae [The Muses in Response], 98–99, 116n26; “De Signaculo Crucis” [“On the Sign of the Cross”], 98–99 mysticism, 17, 19, 20–22, 27, 116n34, 168 Nardo, Anna K., 178, 203n5 negative theology. See apophatic theology Netzley, Ryan, 103n16 “New Year Sonnets” (II), 209 Nicholas of Cusa, 19, 33n46; De Docta Ignorantia, 19; De Visione Dei, 19, 33n46 Nichols, Jennifer L., 31n12 Nitchie, George W., 187, 204n20 noli me tangere, 9, 14n27 Numbers. See Bible Oath of Allegiance, the, 35, 36 Order for the Visitation of the Sick, 133n34 Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso), 127, 134n50, 178–180, 203n6; Amores, 203n6; Meta­ morphoses, 127, 134n50 Pailet, L. M., 183, 204n11 Palmer, Julia, 153–154n14 Papazian, Mary Arshagouni, 131n16, 144, 156n48 Parker, Robert, 93, 102n10 Passio Discerpta [The Passion Rendered in Parts], 100, 110, 116n26; “In Clauos” [“On the Nails”], 100 Passion, 17–30, 91–101, 105–114, 126, 200, 206–211 Patrides, C. A., 62n27 Paul, the apostle, 21, 22, 36–38, 56, 120, 128

234

Index

Paulson, Stephen D., 32n23 Pelikan, Jaroslav, 25, 32n33 Perkins, William, 138, 139, 159, 171n10 Perrine, Laurence, 189, 204n22 Perry, Nandra, 156n61 Peter, Second Epistle of. See Bible Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca), 164 Phi­los­o­pher’s Stone, the, 113 plague of 1625, 2, 75 Plato, 63–64n43 Plomer, Henry R., 87n18 Porter, Peter, 59n1 possibility, in Donne’s writing, 10, 146, 158, 160–169, 211, 218 Potter, George R., 31n8 prayer, 3, 9–10, 108, 167, 209, 212–217; confession, 119–136, 137, 140, 143, 148–149, 154n28; as po­liti­cal theory, 6, 34–67; with understanding, 137–156 predestination, doctrine of, 78–79, 157–159, 170n5, 171n6 Prodigal Son, parable of the, 191 promise, in Herbert’s verse, 10, 153n6, 158, 165–169, 219n24 protoevangelium, 122, 123, 124, 132n28 Psalms. See Bible Pseudo-­Dionysius, 6, 17–24, 30, 31n7, 31n12, 31n16; meta­phor of sculptor, 6, 18–19, 29, 30; The Mystical Theology, 6, 17–19, 24, 30, 31n16; On the Celestial Hierarchies, 19 Pseudo-­Martyr, 5, 6, 35–44, 52–54, 56–59 Puritans, 4, 18, 93, 101, 143, 193–194 Puttenham, George, 207, 219n7; Arte of En­glish Poesie, 207, 219n7 Quiring, Kathleen, 173n33 Ralegh, Walter, 183; “The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd,” 183 Raspa, Anthony, 61n13, 130n1 Read, Sophie, 102–103n13 Real Presence. See Eucharist Resurrection, 81–82, 97, 113, 200, 209–212, 218 Rich, Nathaniel, 26 Richey, Esther Gilman, 169–170, 172n24 Ricoeur, Paul, 134–135n56 Robbins, Robin, 13n15 Roche, Thomas P., Jr., 116n34

Roman Catholic Church, 35–36, 42, 77–80, 84, 97, 213 Romans, Epistle to the. See Bible Rorem, Paul, 17, 21, 22, 30n3 Rubey, Daniel, 110, 116n24 Rubin, Deborah, 72, 82, 87n8, 87n11 Ryrie, Alec, 138, 140, 152–153n2, 154n22, 155n35 sacramentalism, 91–104, 129, 133n45, 172–173n25 sacrifice, 23–24, 93, 105–116, 126, 196, 205–207 Salkeld, John, 134n55; A Treatise of Paradise, 134n55 Sánchez, Reuben, 60–61n7 Sanders, Wilbur, 132n23 Satan, 121–123, 125, 127, 132n28, 152, 161–163 Satyres: “Metempsychosis,” 122, 129, 132n21; “Satyre 3,” 4, 23, 51, 53, 57 Savoie, John, 173n26 Scheick, William J., 172n17 Schoenfeldt, Michael C., 133n32, 146, 165, 177, 200–201 Schrödinger’s sinner, 18, 165 Schwartz, Regina Mara, 173n26, 173n31 seal, of the cross and anchor, 91, 93, 95–98, 105–111, 114, 221–223 Semler, L. E., 19, 31nn9–10 Sergianus, Ofilius, 180; Elegia de Pulice, 180 Sermons: “An Anniversary Sermon preached at St. Dunstans,” 108, 113, 122, 123; Deaths Duell, 88n30, 218, 219n25; Fifth Prebend Sermon, 88n30; “Second Sermon Preached at White-­Hall, April 19, 1618,” 120, 135n59; Sermon of Commemoration of James I, 85; “Sermon of Commemoration of the Lady Danvers,” 2, 5, 7, 71–90; “Sermon of Valediction at my ­going into Germany,” 29, 96; “Sermon on Trinity Sunday 1627,” 18–19; “Sermon Preached at Hanworth, to my Lord of Carlile,” 27–29, 33n43; “Sermon Preached at Pauls Cross to the Lords of the Council,” 48–49; “Sermon Preached at White-­Hall, Aprill 12, 1618,” 120; “Sermon Preached at White-­Hall, April 19, 1618,” 120; “Sermon Preached to the King, at White-­Hall, the first of April, 1627,” 75; “Whitsunday Sermon 1630,” 19 serpent, 95, 105, 107–109, 121–136 Shakespeare, William, 183; Much Ado About Nothing, 185, 204n17; Romeo and Juliet, 182;

The Taming of the Shrew, 182; The Winter’s Tale, 11, 191 Shami, Jeanne, 40, 61n12, 62n20, 71–72, 86n5, 135–136n65 Shaw, Robert B., 12n1 Shawcross, John T., 32n26 Shell, Alison, 219n13 Sherwood, Terry, 154n19 Shuger, Debora, 40–42, 47, 60–61n7, 62nn21–22, 62n24 Shullenberger, William, 173n26 Sidney, Philip, 147, 156n61 sigillum. See Calvin, John Simpson, Evelyn, 31n8, 31n16, 60n6, 86n3, 122, 132n20 Sinfield, Alan, 60–61n7 “situational absolutism,” 6, 40–42 Smith, A. J., 31n6 Smith, Barbara Herrnstein, 207, 219n5 sola fide (by faith alone), 79, 158, 159 sola scriptura (Scripture alone), 3 Solomon (king), 62n29, 85–86, 194 Sommerville, Johann P., 35–36, 40, 61n9, 61n12 Song of Songs. See Bible Songs and Sonets: “The Apparition,” 187, 189–191; “The Bait,” 183–185, 191; “The Canonization,” 206; “The Ecstasy,” 178; “The Flea,” 179–183, 185–186; “The Good Morrow,” 178, 179; “The Indifferent,” 185–187; “Love’s Alchemy,” 187–189; “Love’s Diet,” 180; “A Nocturnall Upon St. Lucie’s Day,” 19, 31n12, 191; “The Primrose,” 2; “The Relique,” 2, 191, 213–214; “The Sunne Rising,” 178–179, 185, 206; “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning,” 41, 62n27, 209; Valediction Poems, 191 sonnet, 47–54, 160–165, 211–212 soteriology, 71, 73, 76–80, 83, 159, 170 Southwell, Robert, 2 sovereignty, 5, 6, 34–67 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 32n30 Stachniewski, John, 171n10 Stanwood, P. G., 13n12 Steadman, John, 132n28 Stein, Arnold, 19, 20, 31n11 Stephens, Philemon, 71, 73 Strier, Richard, 51, 79, 139, 167, 200–201 ­Sullivan, Ceri, 60–61n7 ­Sullivan, Ernest W., II, 62n29

Index 235 Targoff, Ramie, 66n61, 103n17, 144, 153n4, 153–154n14 The ­Temple: “Affliction” (I), 13n16, 110, 151, 192, 213; “Affliction” (IV), 64n50; “The Bag,” 156n59, 203; “Bitter-­sweet,” 139; “The Call,” 202; “The Church,” 9, 64n51, 137, 140, 152, 198, 203; “The Church-­porch,” 192, 203, 209; “Clasping of hands,” 113; “The Collar,” 198, 207, 208, 214, 219n21; “Complaining,” 147, 149–151; “Confession,” 133n35, 154n28; “Conscience,” 192–194; “The Crosse,” 206, 219n17; “The Dawning,” 192; “Death,” 179, 198–200, 209; “Deniall,” 2, 147–149, 216–217, 219n8; “The Discharge,” 151; “Dooms-­day,” 113–114; “Dulnesse,” 151; “Easter,” 106, 113–114, 214; “Easter Wings,” 66n63; “The Elixir,” 113; “Employment” (I), 151; “Ephes. 4.30,” 192; “The Flower,” 156n62, 203, 206–207; “The Forerunners,” 126; “Frailtie,” 123–124, 147–149; “The Glance,” 192; “Grace,” 219n19; “Gratefulnesse,” 141, 203; “The H. Communion,” 132n30; “Heaven,” 219n20; “The Holdfast,” 149, 198; “Home,” 152; “Hope,” 8; “The H. Scriptures” II, 1, 178, 211–212; “Jordan” (I), 147, 214, 219n21; “Jordan” (II), 126, 147, 153n5, 198, 219n6, 219n21; “Judgement,” 203; “Longing,” 147, 156n59; “Love II,” 154n28; “Love” (III), 113, 120, 146, 177, 200–202, 210–211, 219n15; “Love unknown,” 187, 194–198, 207; “Man,” 206; “Mattens,” 206; “Miserie,” 219n18; “Obedience,” 66n61; “Paradise,” 217–218; “Peace,” 192; “The Pearl. Matth. 13,” 60n4, 66n62, 192, 219n19; “The Pilgrimage,” 209; “The Posie,” 131n9; “Prayer” (I), 215; “The Quidditie,” 214; “Redemption,” 192, 195, 211, 215, 219n6; “The Reprisall,” 126, 133–134n46, 206; “The Rose,” 109, 209; “The Sacrifice,” 116n34, 219n19; “The Search,” 10, 160, 165–169, 173n31; “Self-­Condemnation,” 120, 131n12; “Sinnes Round,” 124, 217; “Sion,” 57, 67n66, 194; “The Storm,” 150; “Sunday,” 192; “The Temper” (I), 147; “The Temper” (II), 114, 206; “The Thanksgiving,” 133–134n46, 219n25; “Time,” 152, 203; “To all Angels and Saints,” 5, 6, 51, 54–59, 66n63; “A true Hymne,” 214, 219n8; “Unkindnesse,” 219n17; “Vanitie” (I), 215; “Vertue,” 209, 215–216; “A Wreath,” 217

236

Index

Thames, River, 77 theology of the cross. See Luther, Martin Thirty-­nine Articles of Religion, 125, 197 Timothy, First Epistle to. See Bible Tiresias, 134n50 Tobin, John, 173n27 “To Doctor Donne upon one of his Seals,” 7–9, 91, 96–98, 105–107, 109, 114 Torquemada, Tomás de, 187 Traherne, Thomas, 2 Trent, Council of, 78–79, 124–125, 133n37 Trinity, the, 2, 18, 122, 180, 181 Tuke, Thomas, 142, 155n32 Tuve, Rosemund, 116n34 Twysden, Anne, 10, 141, 154n30 Van Laan, Thomas F., 135–136n65 Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne, The: The Holy Sonnets, 60n6, 171n11; The Satyres, 64n52; The Verse Letters, 13nn23– 24, 13n26, 103n19 Vasari, Giorgio, 19 Vendler, Helen, 148, 156n64 Venus, 186–187 Verse Epistles: “Qui prius assuetus Serpentum fasce Tabellas” [“He who once Sealed his Letters with a sheaf of Snakes”], 2, 4, 7–9, 91, 95–98, 101, 101–102n2, 102n3, 105–109, 114, 114–115n3, 115nn10–11, 115n15, 122, 129, 221–222; “To M.M.H.,” 2; “To Mr. George

Herbert, with one of my Seal of the Anchor and Christ,” 2, 4, 7–9, 91, 95–96, 101, 105–107, 114, 115nn10–11, 115n15, 122, 129; “To Mr. Tilman ­after he had taken ­orders,” 12n5; “To Sir Henry Wotton,” 103n17 via media, 78 via negativa, 17–20, 27, 30, 171n10, 173n31 ­Virginia, 81 Virgin Mary, 54–56, 72, 80–81, 84–86, 111, 181 Vulgate, Latin, 25, 29, 134n55 Waddington, Raymond B., 67n68 Wallace, Ronald, 103n22 Wallington, Nehemiah, 10, 142, 143, 155n38 Walton, Izaak: The Compleat Angler, 183, 204n14; The Life of John Donne, 1, 8, 91, 95, 101, 107, 109; The Life of Mr. George Herbert, 106, 108, 210 Wedding in Cana, 84 Whalen, Robert, 12n1, 60–61n7, 103n18 Wiley, Tatha, 134n55 ­will, ­free, 157–159, 169, 170nn4–5, 171n6, 172n13 Wood, Chauncey, 106, 112, 115n4 Wotton, Henry, 19, 31n10, 103n17; Ele­ments of Architecture, 19, 31n10 Young, R. V., 60–61n7 Yu, Jie-­Ae, 135–136n65 Zwingli, Huldrych, 92