this subtle knot - Collection des thèses et mémoires électroniques

ISABELLE GUY
"THIS SUBTLE KNOT"
The Metaphysical Conceit in John Donne's Prose and Poetry
Mémoire présenté
à la Faculté des études supérieures de l'Université Laval
dans le cadre du programme de maîtrise en littérature d'expression anglaise
pour l'obtention du grade de Maître es arts (M.A.)
DEPARTEMENT DES LITTERATURES
FACULTÉ DES LETTRES
UNIVERSITÉ LAVAL
QUÉBEC
2007
© Isabelle Guy, 2007
I
Abstract
The présent thesis seeks to define the rôle played by the Metaphysical conceit in the
formulation of John Donne's vision of a unified cosmos. The conceit is hère regarded as an
élément of style that probes into the nature of relationships, as well as a unifying élément in
Donne's works that enables him to translate into verse the intangible ties that bind a man to other
human beings and to the Divine so as to render an abstract reality more apprehensible to the
mind. To him, the individual self is indeed defined almost exclusively in terms of the manner in
which it relates to other human beings, to the divine, or to the political and religious institutions
that regulate his society. In most of the works scrutinized in the présent thesis, Donne is in fact
concerned with the représentation of an idéal of communion that involves the dissolution of the
individual self into a greater whole. In the works analyzed in the présent thesis, Donne almost
invariably formulâtes this idéal in terms of the relationship that unités body and soûl in an
individual, which he conceives as a reflection of the way in which the material and the spiritual
interact in the universe. In his exploration of the ties that bind human beings together and to the
Divine, the Metaphysical conceit is vital to the expression of his idéal of interrelatedness. This
thesis therefore focuses on the way in which the conceit, as a literary device that compares
relationships, reinforces his vision of a unified cosmos.
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Résumé
Ce mémoire a pour but d'explorer l'utilisation que le poète anglais John Donne fait d'une figure
de style appelée « Metaphysical conceit » dans sa description des relations entre individus ainsi
qu'entre l'homme et le divin. L'intention de ce mémoire est de faire émerger le caractère
unificateur de la «Metaphysical conceit» dans l'œuvre de Donne. En effet, cette figure de style
permet à cet auteur de traduire en langage poétique les liens intangibles qui unissent les êtres
humains les uns aux autres ainsi qu'à Dieu dans le but précis de rendre plus tangible une réalité
abstraite. Pour Donne, l'être humain se définit presque exclusivement à travers les rapports qui
l'unissent à ses semblables, à Dieu, ou aux institutions politiques et religieuses qui gouvernent la
société au sein de laquelle il évolue. Dans la plupart des oeuvres analysés dans ce mémoire,
Donne tente d'exprimer sa vision d'un idéal qui implique la dissolution de l'être dans un tout
beaucoup plus vaste. Il illustre cet idéal à travers la formulation d'une image, celle de la relation
qui unit le corps à l'âme chez l'homme, qui reflète en soi l'interaction qui allie le matériel au
divin dans l'univers. L'étude des œuvres de prose et de poésie de Donne révèle le rôle
prépondérant joué par la « Metaphysical conceit » dans la formulation de son idéal de
communion. Par conséquent, l'objet de ce mémoire est l'étude de la manière dont la
« Metaphysical conceit » renforce la vision qu'avait Donne de l'univers comme d'un tout uni.
iii
Acknowledgements
I would like to express my most sincère gratitude to ail those who made it possible for me to
complète this thesis.
1 wish to thank, first and foremost, my thesis director, Professor Anthony Raspa, both for his help
and guidance and for accepting to share his love of literature and of John Donne with me. I could
not hâve dreamed of having a better director for the writing of this thesis and 1 am most grateful
to him for accepting to supervise me. His rigour and insight hâve enriched my growth as a
student and I am indebted to him in more ways than 1 could possibly express. 1 would also like to
extend a heartfelt thank you to Professor Elspeth Tulloch for her encouragement, and to the
Département des littératures for accepting this project.
My warmest thanks go to my family for their unwavering faith in me.
1 would like to express my most sincère gratitude to my dear Marc-André, whose love and
patience enabled me to complète this work.
Finally, 1 wish to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for its
financial support.
iv
7 o my dearest Marc-A ndré...
Who makes my circle just,
And makes me end where I begun.
V
And you want to travel with him
And you want to travel blind
And you ihink maybe you'Il trust him
For he's touchedyourperfect body with his mind.
Léonard Cohen
vi
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
iii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
vi
CHAPTER I -
THE METAPHYSICAL CONCEIT AND THE CRITICAL WORLD:
A DEFINITION
1
CHAPTER II - "SO WE SHALL/BE ONE, AND ONE ANOTHER'S ALL":
THE AMOROUS MICROCOSM
25
CHAPTER III - "I AM A L1TTLE WORLD MADE CUNMNGLY":
THE POET AND HIS GOD
51
CHAPTER IV - "NO MAN'S AN ISLAND, ENTIRE IN 1TSELF":
MAN AND SOCIETY
76
CONCLUSION - "THAT SUBTLE KNOT, WHICH MAKES US MAN"
105
BIBLIOGRAPHY
108
Chapter 1
The Metaphysical Conceit and the Critical World
A Définition
The Metaphysical School of poetry in England can be considered as having been
inaugurated by the Jesuit poets Jasper Heywood and Robert Southwell in the late sixteenth
century. Yet it is only a génération later through the works of Heywood's nephew, John Donne,
that poetry in the Metaphysical style acquired the vitality, soulfulness, and wit that allowed for its
triumphant revival in the beginning of the twentieth century. Donne's appeal as a poet lies
mostly in his particular handling of the Metaphysical conceit, an élément of style which has corne
to be perceived as the hallmark of the Metaphysical tradition. Early in the twentieth century, it
was this élément of Donne's style that attracted T.S. Eliot. For décades after the publication of
Eliot's influential review of Grierson's anthology of Metaphysical poetry in 1921 and the
argument it contained, the conceit was perceived as a literary device that joined together
unrelated éléments in a far-fetched comparison for greater imaginative effect. At the same time it
had corne to be considered as representing a dissociation of sensibility. However, since Eliot's
time, perceptions of the conceit and Donne's style hâve changed and evolved. At the end of the
last century and at the beginning of ours, new approaches to the conceit appeared that at least,
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historically-speaking, can be thought of as doing more justice to its complexity and its beauty
than the approach to conjoined unrelated éléments that Eliot's criticism employed.
Technically speaking, historically, the conceit owes its structure to Aristotle's metaphor
of proportion in which of "four things the second is to the first as the fourth is to the third"
(Poetics, 41). As for the term 'metaphysics', it usually refers to a branch of philosophy
concerned with first principles which probes into the nature of things (Webster New World
Dictionary and Thésaurus, electronic version). The Metaphysical conceit may therefore be
regarded as a literary device that investigates relationships in order to find out what defines their
nature. The conjunction of the meaning of thèse two terms, "conceit" and "metaphysical", not
only describes the functioning of a literary device, but may also serve to define Donne's
epistemological approach to the created universe. In fact, in both his verse and in several of his
prose texts, Donne's manner of investigating the world seems concerned with the exploration of
the ties that bind a human being to other individuals, and to the divine.
This assessment of Donne's epistemology contrasts sharply with the views expressed by
several prominent authors of the earlier twentieth century such as Carey, Leishman, Parfitt, and
Eliot himself, who hâve described Donne as being sometimes a self-centered, egoistical man - as
an apostate and an abject flatterer who was strongly motivated by his pursuit of advancement.
Nevertheless, récent critical assessment has refuted thèse views. The second part of the twentieth
century has been in fact characterized by a shift of interest on the part of Donne scholars from his
rhetoric to the epistemological discourses that hâve influenced his poetry. This change of focus
has led the critical world to the considération of the poet's philosophical conception of man and
création. As a resuit, critics such as Kaskela, McKevlin, and Presti-Russel hâve defined Donne
in terms of his quest for relatedness and his faith in humanity.
3
Whereas récent criticism conveys a more accurate understanding of Donne's
philosophical outlook on the world and men, none of the critics previously mentioned has
concentrated on an in-depth investigation of his use of the Metaphysical conceit in his description
of the relationships available to human beings. Following upon the works of the twentieth
century scholars who hâve investigated either Donne's handling of the conceit or his interest in
the ties that unité men to each other and to the divine, this thesis will explore Donne's use of the
Metaphysical conceit in his description of three différent clearly identifiable types of
relationships: between men and women, among human beings in gênerai, between man and the
Divine.
From the beginning of the twentieth century to the 1960s, numerous théories of
Metaphysical poetry were advanced, yet even after décades of intense scrutiny, critics still could
not seem to agrée on a définition of the most striking feature of the style: the Metaphysical
conceit. This first chapter of the présent thesis thus présents an overview of the évolution of
critical perceptions of the Metaphysical conceit from Eliot's influential review of Grierson's
anthology to van Hook's article "'Concupiscence of Witt': The Metaphysical Conceit in Baroque
Poetics", published in 1986.
In his essay entitled "The Metaphysical Poets", Eliot expresses views on Metaphysical
poetry that influenced the way the style was to be perceived for générations. To him, the
Metaphysical style appeared as a resuit of a désire to compel unrelated expériences into unity
(283). In his essay, his perception of the Metaphysical conceit seems to revolve around the belief
that poets of the seventeenth century used this literary device to reproduce through verse a "direct
sensuous appréhension of thought" (286). In other words, Eliot explains that through the
Metaphysical conceit, English poets of the late Renaissance could bridge the gap that had settled
in towards the beginning of the modem era between thought and sensibility. Moreover, he
4
explains that the Metaphysical poets' "mode of feeling was directly and freshly altered by their
reading and thoughts" (286). Hence, the poets' learned thoughts, applied to their sensibility,
would modify their way of feeling. This of course would account for the "heterogeneity of
materials" (283) that characterizes the conceit. In the conceit, through this heterogeneity, images
springing from the poet's disparate knowledge of astronomy, alchemy, history, or any other
domain of learning, would be used in his description of emotional states. According to Eliot, the
connections established between thèse seemingly unrelated éléments in the conceit would be
"forced upon it by the poet" (282). Eliot in fact argues that this amalgamation of "disparate
expérience" (287) confers uniqueness and richness to poetry in the Metaphysical style and makes
it the perfect médium for the description of man's expérience which he defines as "chaotic,
irregular, fragmentary" (287). Consequently, he describes the effect of the Metaphysical conceit
as "something permanently valuable, which subsequently disappeared, but ought not to hâve
disappeared" (285). Thus, to Eliot, the Metaphysical conceit encapsulâtes the essence of what
poetry ought to hâve been in 1921, and should be today, as it was in Donne's day.
The image of the compass that ends "A Valediction: forbidding mourning" would
certainly constitute an excellent example of the forced likening of unrelated materials that Eliot
perceives in the Metaphysical conceit. In this famous image, the lovers' soûls are compared to
the two ends of a compass used in geometry, whose movements remain irrevocably linked ("A
Valediction: forbidding Mourning", 11. 25-36). The image may serve to illustrate Eliot's idea of
dissimilar éléments compelled into unity and held together by an incredible show of ingenuity on
the part of the poet. Such a compass is indeed rarely associated with the subject of romantic love.
Following Eliot's reasoning, the likening of two soûls with the two ends of a compass could
therefore be said to convey a sensé of incongruity. In addition, the passage would also represent
how the poet's learned thoughts, by being applied to the description of an emotional state, would
5
influence and alter his "mode of feeling" (Eliot, 286). That is, Eliot would hâve seen in this
conceit "a récréation of thought into feeling" (286) - an émotion modified by reason.
Thus, in his review of Grierson's anthology, Eliot recognizes the heterogenetic variety of
materials that charactenzes the Metaphysical conceit, and at the same time emphasizes the poet's
successful création of a sensé of unity through his use of the conceit. However, in a later essay
published in ,4 Garlandfor John Donne and entitled "Donne in Our Time", Eliot altered his
approach somewhat. There, for the first time he stressed the "manifest fissure between thought
and sensibility" that, according to him, charactenzes the verse of John Donne, "a chasm which in
his poetry he bridged in his own way" (8). Hence, in the years that hâve separated the
publication of Eliot's essays, his focus has shifted. That is, while Eliot's earlier essay
emphasized Donne's successful recovery of a sensé of unity through his use of the conceit, his
later work stresses the poet's apparent failure to reconcile the parts of his fragmented expérience.
If Eliot's analysis of the Metaphysical conceit may seem just at first sight, it remains
historically fragmentary. His "misunderstanding" of Donne's use of the conceit - historically,
we must call it that - is due in great part to his failure to recognize the poet's indebtedness to
Aristotle's "metaphor of proportion". Although the conceit in "A Valediction: forbidding
Mourning" may be regarded, on the surface, as a literary device that compares unrelated
éléments, its functioning reflects that of the metaphor of proportion in which the poet shows the
similarities between the relationships that unité two sets of things. Thus, Donne does not equate
the lovers with a compass, but rather employs the relationship that unités the two ends of the
compass to illustrate what unités two lovers' soûls. Therefore, this Metaphysical conceit does not
merely yoke unrelated things together, but rather seeks to represent the intangible ties that, in
reality, bind physically distant éléments.
6
Furthermore, Eliot's définition of the conceit conveys an impression of strain and fails to
account for the fluid rhetoric that characterizes some of Donne's finest love poems. In fact, the
critic in "Donne in Our Time" even goes so far as to state that in Donne's verse, "it is not, as it is
with the Elizabethans in their worst excesses, the word, the vocabulary, that is tormented - it is
the thought itself ' (Eliot, 12). As a resuit of his constant focus on the disparity of objects forced
together in the conceit, Eliot overlooks Donne's extraordinary capacity at finding, through those
seemingly forced comparisons, the very essence of the expérience he seeks to describe. The
image of the compass may perhaps seem incongruous when applied to the description of two
lover's soûls, but it nevertheless sums up precisely the way thèse soûls interact in Donne's mind.
Thus, the conceit in "A Valediction" does not uniformly hâve to appear as the représentation of a
tormented thought. It could also be considered as the attainment of a successful expérience. In
this famous image of the compass, Donne skilfully brings the reader to embrace his point of view
as each line flows fluidly into the other. If Donne's conceit asks for a certain amount of
concentration on the part of the reader, its ingenuity lies precisely in the fact that the poet's
reasoning seems just and unconstrained and créâtes unity rather than disunity. Eliot was perhaps
unwilling to make the leap that the Metaphysical conceit demands from the reader to a
transcendent truth existing beyond the physical realities attached to the words. Today, now that
we hâve moved into another critical era than Eliot's, we may perhaps feel that a more historically
oriented approach could hâve enabled him to corne to a better understanding of Donne's thinking.
In Metaphysical andElizabethan Imagery of 1947, Rosemond Tuve's focus on the
historical facts that may hâve influenced the Metaphysical conceit brought new and enlightening
éléments to the debate. Unlike Eliot, who twenty-five years earlier avowedly measured
Metaphysical poetry according to "modem" ideals of the first half of the twentieth century,
seeing in it the epitome of what poetry ought to be (289), Tuve warns against the danger of trying
7
to force seventeenth-century poetry "into the narrow pattern defined by modem criteria" (7).
Instead, she advocates an approach that takes into account the standards against which poems
were measured in the Renaissance (229). Accordingly, she bases her analysis on the dictâtes of
the two disciplines that established the standards of perfection in both written and spoken
language in the Renaissance - those of logic and rhetoric - devoting most of her attention to
those precepts that Aristotle sets forth in his Metaphysics. Tuve in fact states that young men in
Renaissance England had learned how to apprehend the world by using Aristotle's theory of the
ten catégories, which she lists as follows: "substance, quality, relation, manner of doing, manner
of suffering, when, where, si tus, and habitus" (284-285). Tuve explains that "the first step in
disciplined thinking" for young scholars "was to know what a thing is by référence or application
of the ten Aristotelian catégories or predicaments" (284). According to her, logical training thus
influenced the works of poets who were, generally, men of learning.
In fact, Tuve explains that poets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, by "thinking
from certain ones of the predicaments" (285), generated the images that adorned their verse. To
her, then, the Metaphysical conceit is one of the literary devices that sprung from the poets'
application of logic to the writing of poetry. She thus defines the conceit as "an image based
simultaneously on a number of predicaments or commonpiaces in logic (...) framed with especial
subtlety" and through which the poet pursues the idea of a likeness based on "several logical
parallels" (294). Applied to the image of the flies in "The Canonization", Tuve's theory gives the
impression of falling very close to the mark. Following her argument, one may indeed consider
that Donne, through his use of the Metaphysical conceit in this poem, establishes parallels
between the sets of things he compares. Let us take an example from the image of flies and
tapers in Donne's "The Canonization". In the verses: "Call us what you will, we are made by
such love;/ Call her one, me another fly,/ We are tapers too, and at our own cost die" (11. 19-21),
8
Donne may be said to highlight the similarities that unité three sets of things - 1) two lovers
drawn to each other, 2) flies attracted by the light of a flame, and 3) a taper slowly consumed by
its own flame. By drawing parallels between thèse sets of éléments, Donne therefore seems to
describe his beloved and himself as irresistibly drawn to each other like two flies attracted by a
flame and as burning from a love that devours them like a taper slowly consumed by its own
flame. Following Tuve's reasoning one could therefore consider that the poet bases himself on
the Aristotelian predicament of quality and, from it, builds intricate images that enable him to
define the type of relationship in which he is involved.
If Tuve's assessment seems close to the mark, she may still be thought of as falling short
of Aristotle's 'metaphor of proportion', for if Donne draws parallels between sets of things, it is
not the things in themselves that are compared, but the very relationships that unité them. That
is, in "The Canonization", Donne does not merely draw parallels between the lovers and two flies
attracted by a flame, and between thèse same two lovers and a taper consumed by a flame, but he
rather attracts the reader's attention to the relationships, to the intangible ties, that unité thèse sets
of things. Hence, the lovers are not like two flies attracted by a flame, but are to each other the
same as a flame is to a fly. While the distinction may seem insignificant, the second option
accentuâtes the reader's focus on the relationship itself instead of on the things being compared.
Thus, if Tuve's criticism points to important éléments that appear to hâve been overlooked by
Eliot, such as the rôle of logic and the influence of the Classics on the Metaphysical conceit, she
fails to identify a very important influence that has contributed to shape the most distinctive
feature of poetry in the Metaphysical style and, as a resuit, her criticism may be seen as
constituting a most interesting but yet incomplète analysis of this conceit.
Furthermore, by focussing so much on logic, Tuve fails to designate correctly the élément
in Donne's peculiar use of the conceit which allows for the création of the sensé of wonder so
9
characteristic of the Metaphysical style. In a comment on the period that saw the decay of the
Metaphysical conceit, she indeed déclares that what makes a "real différence between this [a
médiocre conceit] and a poetically successful conceit of any date is not the extent of the ingenuity
- ( . . . ) The real différence is, rather, this complète irrévérence with respect to the demands of the
subject" (Tuve, 319). In other words, she attributes the success of a conceit to the poet's yoking
together of éléments that seem incongruous with regard to the subject being discussed. Hence,
Tuve may be thought of as repeating Eliot's approach of reducing the appeal of the Metaphysical
conceit to its treatment of heterogeneous materials. Donne's conceit in "The Canonization" may
speak of Aies and tapers, of objects that are not normally associated with a subject like love, yet
its true power lies in the sensé of immediacy that the reader dérives from the successful
comparison of relationships that unité sets of things - in the impression that through verse, the
poet has succeeded in defining the indefinable. Hence, the appeal of Donne's conceit lies mostly
in its Metaphysical character rather than in the disparity of the éléments it compares.
Like Tuve, Dame Helen Gardner stresses the strong élément of logic that characterizes the
conceit. Yet, if Tuve sees the Metaphysical conceit as a literary device based on rhetorical
precepts, Gardner views it rather as a central élément in a rhetorical argument. This change of
focus leads Gardner to describe the conceit as an instrument of définition or of persuasion in a
poem that "has something to say which the conceit explicates or something to urge which the
conceit helps to forward" (xxvi). Hence, to Gardner, the Metaphysical conceit plays a major rôle
in the articulation of the poet's reasoning and may thus be regarded more as a rhetorical than a
literary device. Accordingly, the poet through his use of the conceit may be said to establish a
"proof by analogy" which in fact constitutes the "body of a metaphysical poem" (Gardner, xxvi).
The third stanza of Donne's "The Good Morrow", if we wish to take it as an example of what
Gardner argues, could therefore be seen as revolving around an argument that aims at proving
10
that the two lovers' feelings are immune to change. That is, through the conceit comparing the
eye of each lover containing the reflection of the other lover to two perfect hémisphères on a map
("The Good Morrow", 11. 15-21), the poet skilfully argues his case. He represents by analogy
how the two lovers complète each other perfectly just as a picture of one side of the planet
compléments the picture of its other side on a map of the world. In the perfection of the
représentation of the planet by the pictures of its two sides, one may see how the union of the
lovers confers immortality on their affection. The aim of the conceit's whole argument is
therefore to persuade the reader of the justness of its central thesis. Following Gardner's
reasoning, then, the Metaphysical conceit may be compared to "the beating out by which the
métal is shaped to receive its final stamp, which is the point towards which the whole has moved"
(xxvi). Thus, in Gardner's mind, the conceit's sole aim is to make the reader accept the thesis it
défends and ought to be regarded as a tool of persuasion.
Although Gardner's définition of the Metaphysical conceit may seem reductive, the
argumentative and rhetorical dimension to which it points is significant. For, Gardner does not
limit her comments on the conceit to its rhetorical effect. Indeed, in a later work she directs her
attention from the conceit's rhetorical character to its inner-workings. In an analysis of Donne's
"The Extasie" published in Elizabethan andJacobean Studies, Gardner does identify the
mechanism of the "metaphor of proportion" as présent in the poem's image of the two armies
suspended in battle by fate (11. 13-16). Even though she does not term it as such, her description
of Donne's famous conceit clearly corresponds to the définition of Aristotle's "metaphor of
proportion". In this conceit, Gardner sees more than a simple simile. In fact, she explains that by
expanding the "as", one may corne to the realization that "The parallel is not between Fate's
action and the soûls hanging in the air. The connexion hère is purely verbal - between the
Homeric metaphor of the scales of battle 'hungout' in the heavens and the soûls being
11
'suspended' above the bodies" (Gardner, 297). Although Gardner fails to point out Donne's
indebtedness to the Classics, she nonetheless provides an enlightening analysis of a conceit in
which she successfully identifies the éléments being compared. That is, by expanding the "as",
as she suggests (297), the comparison in the image takes a new form: the soûls are to each other
as the two armies are to each other, when the gods suspend them in time and space intermingled, and yet utterly still. She thus identifies the four éléments, the two loving soûls and
the two warring armies, being compared in this conceit. Although she does not explicitly equate
the Metaphysical conceit to the metaphor of proportion and fails to account for its sensé of
wonder, Gardner's analysis demonstrates a yet unequalled understanding of its inner-workings in
the development of twentieth-century criticism.
Unlike the critics previously mentioned, J.B. Leishman in The Monarch ofWU (1951)
does not provide his readers with an explicit définition of the Metaphysical conceit. Still, his
treatment of the poetry of Donne reveals much on his views regarding this most elusive literary
device. Interestingly, he does not identify much in Donne's verse that could be termed
'metaphysical'. The reason may be that he imposes strict parameters on the nature of
metaphysics probing into the existential nature of things and its possible relationship to poetry.
Leishman explains that only those poems in which the poet "has introduced (...) something of
the rigorously logical and syllogistic method of the académie and theologian disputations, and
only in so far as such disputations, because of their philosophical and semi-philosophical subjectmatter, might be loosely described as metaphysical" (89). This passage encapsulâtes the main
tenet of his whole argument on the metaphysical aspect of Donne's verse. That is, to Leishman,
a Metaphysical poem must treat of a metaphysical subject - a désignation for which the topics
that Donne exploits in his most outrageous and light-hearted poems do not qualify. While
Leishman remains gênerai regarding his définition of what constitutes a metaphysical topic, he
discusses the non-metaphysical in Donne's verse in détail. He therefore explains that several of
Donne's poems in Elégies and Sangs and Sonnets are works in which the poet was merely
"displaying his wit, maintaining, with the most sequacious but only half-serious logic (...) the
most outrageous paradoxes" (148). Consequently, in the hundred pages Leishman dévotes to
those poems, he never mentions the word 'metaphysical'. On the other hand, he readily
acknowledges the présence of metaphysical éléments in those poems in which the poet addresses
what he regards as some higher, more philosophical topic, such as in "The Sun Rising" (190).
Therefore, he draws a line between Donne's argumentative and yet outrageous poems and his
"Metaphysical" verse which he generally considers more serious. Leishman thus bases his
approach on what makes a poem "Metaphysical" on its subject-matter. His approach results
therefore in great part from his concern with the philosophical ideas possibly contained in the
conceit as well as from his disregard for the rôle played by the image's structure.
Let us establish a contrast to Leishman and consider the conceit as a literary device that
compares the relationships uniting two pairs of objects using the same pattern as that of the
'metaphor of proportion' (A is to B as C is to D). With this approach, our aim is to investigate
the nature of relationships, and one may easily corne to think of the conceit as a literary device
capable of describing a wide variety of relations. Indeed, there is no reason why such a structure
for the conceit could not be applied to several types of relationships. Furthermore, a seemingly
trivial subject treated in a light-hearted fashion may sometimes, through Donne's skilful use of
the Metaphysical conceit, that is, "relations", reveal a truth that transcends its triviality.
Moreover, as Hugh Lawson-Tancred observes in his introduction to Anstotle's Melaphysics, the
input upon which metaphysicians usually based their reasoning was "simple, even banal, features
of our daily dealings in the world", whereas the output was often "an extraordinary and dramatic
reassessment of the fondamental structure of that world" (xiii). It therefore follows that despite
13
the frivolity of some of Donne's topics, his handling of the Metaphysical conceit seems
consistent with the methods used by metaphysicians in their investigation of the world. Thus,
one cannot restrict Donne's use of the Metaphysical conceit only to those poems in which he
expresses openly heavy philosophical matters.
In the context of his approach therefore, Leishman does not identify Metaphysical
éléments in several of Donne's poems. For instance, he sees nothing in "The Flea" that, in his
view, could deserve to be termed "Metaphysical". To Leishman, the appeal of this poem lies
solely on "the very triviality of the subject" and on Donne's miraculous triumph as a poet who
wrote "three stanzas, twenty-seven Unes, of close-knit, consécutive argument on such an
apparently unpromising subject as a flea-bite" (165). To him, "The Flea", because of its subjectmatter, cannot be rated as a Metaphysical poem. Thus, Leishman predictably fails to identify the
Metaphysical conceit in the passage that describes the union of the two lovers in a flea that
"swells with one blood made of two" ("The Flea", 1. 8). In thèse lines, the lover tries to convince
his beloved that the union of their blood in the flea is much as will be their physical union
through sexual intercourse. If what happens in the flea and what happens to them may be
regarded as similar, the mingling of their blood through physical union ought no more to cause
the lady to lose her honour than a flea-bite. Consequently, the poet expresses his belief that his
beloved's honour is in no way imperilled by the loss of her virginity. The pattern of connexions
in this image is similar to that established through the "metaphor of proportion". While the
conceit developed in "The Flea" may be said to deal with a trivial subject, it nevertheless remains
a Metaphysical conceit that probes into the essence of the relationship that two lovers may enjoy
through physical contact. Hence, Leishman's great emphasis on the philosophical character of
Metaphysical poetry might be considered as causing him to misinterpret seriously a poem like
14
"The Flea" in which Donne's treatment of a trivial subject reveals a truth that reaches far beyond
the syllogistic and insignificant.
If Leishman's approach to the Metaphysical élément in Donne's verse is due in great part
to his view that only philosophical discourse can make "Metaphysical" poetry "metaphysical", it
may also be explained by the subjectivity of the critical thinking of his era. Leishman indeed
states that modem readers value poetry only when it is characterized by "self-expression, selfrevelation, [and] sincerity" (165). Since Donne wrote at a time when, according to Leishman,
audiences paid little attention "to différences in substance and in seriousness" (147), he questions
the sincerity of several of his poems that he distinguishes from the poet's more "serious, more
impassioned, more tender, and, one cannot help but feel, more personal" (179) works. For
reasons which he does not state, Leishman seems more inclined to attach the term 'metaphysical'
to those poems which measure up to this idéal of authenticity. "The Sun Rising" is one such
serious poem he treats as truly Metaphysical. In his analysis of the famous passage in which the
lover compares the relationship that his beloved and himself enjoy to that which ties a monarch
to a wealthy state, he identifies the image used by Donne as "a conceit which (...) combines
naturally with the far profounder, more deeply felt (...) idea that he and his beloved are a world
in and for themselves" (Leishman, 190-191). Leishman's favourable outlook on the poem is hère
due to his belief in the poet's sincerity. He indeed explains that one could, on reasonable
grounds, argue that "the tenderness in it [the poem] was inspired by Ann" (191), Donne's wife,
and that consequently, the feel.ings expressed in it may be regarded as authentic. Thus, Leishman
can successfully identify a Metaphysical conceit in those poems that he considers serious. Yet,
he treats the same literary device in Donne's supposedly insincere verse as a mère effect of wit.
Clearly, Leishman's outlook on the conceit might be said to speak for his, Leishman's, own time.
15
Still fairly early in the twentieth century in The Donne Tradition (1930), George
Williamson's views on the Metaphysical conceit incorporate éléments from the discourses of
most critics who preceded him and yet introduce some interesting personal innovations. In the
first chapter of his book, he defines the Metaphysical conceit as a literary device that présents a
"rational perception of relations" (31). Williamson explains that through the conceit, Donne
"wove the fabric of his thought, and gave the pattern by which he united his most disparate
knowledge into an image witty or imaginative, novel or compelling, but always rising from a
tough reasonableness and often attaining startling insight, with moments of breath-taking beauty"
(32). Like Gardner and Tuve before him, Williamson highlights the logical and argumentative
aspect of the Donnean conceit to translate his thought process through verse. He also stresses the
sensé of wonder that the literary device achieves under the influence of Donne's genius by
causing readers to reach for a truth that transcends the boundaries of the earthly and physical.
Furthermore, unlike most of his predecessors, he explicitly identifies the conceit as a device
which compares relationships in a logical way.
If Williamson récupérâtes Eliot's idea of the unification of disparate materials, he
therefore gives it an interesting new dimension. While he acknowledges the heterogeneity of
knowledge that characterizes Donne's use of the conceit, he brings Eliot's reasoning into another
area of cultural thinking by identifying the two types of expérience the poet joins through verse.
Williamson indeed explains that to himself, the Metaphysical conceit primarily appears as a
device that brings together the spiritual and the secular, saying: "In his [Donne's] life, as in his
poems, ail his moods are implicit in the mood dominant at a given moment: the priest is in the
lover, and the lover in the priest; the divine poem is implicit in the love song, and the love song is
in the divine poem" (51). Donne's joining of materials pertaining tothe secular and lowly in a
single image to define relationships touching upon the spiritual and the Divine may be regarded
16
as the union of dissimilar expériences. Still, through the Metaphysical conceit, the poet shows
the physical world as imbued with spirituality and the spiritual world as permeated with
sensuousness. In this respect, Williamson considers the conceit as the product of a "unified
sensibility" (51), not so much because of its yoking together of disparate knowledge, but because
of the unity of feeling conveyed through the description of seemingly unrelated expériences.
That is, to Williamson, the worshipper and the lover corne together through the conceit because
the poet lived both expériences in similar ways.
Williamson's reasoning can easily be applied to a poem like "The Extasie" in which the
lovers' expérience may be compared to a spiritual révélation. In this poem, the lovers' soûls
leave their bodies and, suspended in utter stillness, corne to the realization that when love
"Interinanimates two soûls,/ That abler soûl, which thence doth flow,/ Defects of loneliness
controls" ("The Extasie", 11. 42-44). The lovers united in contemplation then "are this new soûl",
which the poet describes as composed of atoms "whom no change can invade" (11. 46, 48). As a
resuit of this ecstatic expérience, the lovers reach an extra-sensorial level of consciousness
through which they understand that the union of their soûls through perfect love has made them
immune to change. Yet, this révélation is accompanied by another realization - that of the
relationship between the spiritual and the physical in love. The lovers' soûls thus suspended over
their bodies in ecstatic, almost religious contemplation, recognize that if love is a thing of the
mind, it must be enacted in the body, for "On man heaven's influence works not so,/ But that it
first imprints the air,/ So soûl into the soûl may flow,/ Though it to the body first repair" ("The
Extasie", 11. 57-60). In this conceit, the soûl is to the body as the sphères are to the air. That is,
as the sphères that revolve in the universe must imprint their trajectories on the galaxy before
they manifest their influence on the physical world, so must the spiritual part of man influence
the beloved through the body before touching her mind. In this image, the poet therefore mingles
17
notions of astronomy, science, and spirituality with the aim of depicting an expérience of human
love that resembles a religious one, and through this expérience the two lovers realize that
perfect, spiritual love must find its expression in the body. Hence, "The Extasie" exemplifies
Williamson's belief that the unified sensibility in Donne's use of the conceit brings together the
worshipper and the lover in a single figure. Through the conceit, the reader gets "the exact curve
of Donne's mode of thinking and feeling", a mode which "embraced intense passion, intellectual
difficulty, and unusual imaginative connections" (84). Therefore, Williamson's assessment of
the Metaphysical conceit encapsulâtes both its function as a literary device that recréâtes the
poet's thoughts and a sensé of wonder that encompasses both the secular and the spiritual.
Although further inquiry would be required to verify the applicability of Williamson's views to
the coriceits présent in Donne's light-hearted poems, he seems to hâve captured the sensé of the
indefinable, elusive, and yet breath-taking quality that characterizes the poet's use of this literary
device.
The critical world's shift away from Donne's rhetoric to his epistemological discourses in
the later twentieth century resulted in the relegation of the Metaphysical conceit to an inferior
position among its concerns. In the years following the publication of Williamson's The Donne
Tradition, Donne's critics seem to hâve built largely upon Williamson's most comprehensive
study, adding little to the debate surrounding the structure of the conceit. Nonetheless, the few
studies that hâve treated of the conceit at length from the publication of Williamson's work tothe
end of the 1980s hâve yielded valuable insight on its aesthetic effect upon the mind of the reader.
This is notably the case with Murray Roston's The Son/ of Wit (1974). In this work, Roston
attempts to identify the mechanisms of the Metaphysical conceit that enable Donne to create the
sensé of wonder that Williamson refers to as the "Metaphysical shudder" (90). He rejects the
idea of a logical basis for the conceit promoted by Tuve and her followers, seeing through its
18
outward appearance of a logical development nothing more than an exercise of equivocation
inspired by Jesuit poetics (81). Already at the beginning of this chapter, we mentioned the Jesuit
poets Jasper Heywood and Robert Southwell. Indeed, to Roston, Donne's poetry originates from
the poetics developed by the Christian writers of the early Counter-Reformation, who used
equivocation and paradox as weapons "in the struggle to subvert the intimidating authority of
Reason" (85). Hence, according to Roston, Donne's poetics are a reflection of the concerns of
his era - a means to challenge precepts that appeared to him as inappropriate to express certain
realities. Roston indeed points to Donne's dissatisfaction with right reason in matters of faith in
his analysis of a passage from Essayes in Divinity, in which he highlights the poet's "realization
that empirical démonstration cannot attain to ultimate truths" (81). Consequently, Roston
identifies the Metaphysical conceit as "a means for gesturing towards a transcendent verity" (76)
situated far beyond the reach of right reason.
Applied to a poem such as "The Sun Rising", Roston's reasoning seems, to a certain
extent, accurate. The conceit that compares the lovers to the centre of the Ptolemaic universe
around which the sun revolves indeed appears as sweet nonsense that nevertheless points to a
truth far greater than the reality of the lovers' situation. In fact, the lover who compares himself
to "ail princes" and his mistress to "ail states" ("The Sun Rising", 1. 21) is merely translating
through verse a feeling that reaches beyond the apparent irrationality of his argument - simply
that his beloved means the world to him. According to Roston, "A close reading of almost any
poem by Donne will confirm the centrality of such lightly camouflaged illogicality which the
perceptive reader (at whom Donne invariably aims his verse) is intended to grasp, whether at the
conscious or subconscious level" (73-74). Certainly, the speaker of "The Sun Rising" challenges
the rules governing the universe in order to express a feeling that cannot be illustrated through
19
any reasonable disputation. Hence, to Roston, through a witty and yet nonsensical argument,
Donne may be regarded as gesturing towards a truth that transcends reason and reality.
That Donne's conceits challenge the rules of logic to a certain degree cannot be denied.
Yet ail imagery hovers slightly beyond the boundaries of strict reality in order to illustrate a
mood, a perception, or a feeling. Certainly, Robert Burns's love was not a literal "red, red rose"
("Red, Red Rose", 1.1) any more than the lovers of "The Sun Rising" were the centre of the
universe. If, to use Roston's words, Donne's imagery establishes its point by "blurring the line
between metaphor and fact" (74), it does so precisely because the relationships that unité the sets
of things being compared are so similar that their reality cannot fail to merge almost perfectly.
When Gardner, Tuve, or Williamson allude to the logicality of the Metaphysical style, they may
in fact be referring more to its argumentative aspect than to strict scholastic logic. Donne's
poems indeed almost invariably lead the reader through a séries of intellectual acrobaties that
culminate in the acceptance of its central thesis. Roston's over-reading of the conceit's logical
and discursive éléments may perhaps be thought of as having led him to demand of Donne more
than can generally be expected from a poet. Nevertheless, one may intuitively sensé Roston to be
heading in the right direction when he describes the complex movement of Donne's poems, most
of the time enacted through the conceit, as creating "a spring-board for the leap into the
mysterious or the transcendental" (75). Two lovers' feelings for each other, a worshipper's faith
in his God, or a man's sensé of belonging to a community, are realities that élude définition. Yet
Donne's strength lies precisely in his capacity, through his handling of the conceit, to cause his
readers' to accept the reality of thèse relationships on a rational basis and, simultaneously, to feel
the truth that transcends the boundaries of the written text. Therefore, in his représentation of a
reality that sometimes éludes reason, Donne blends the rational and irrational in conceits that
gesture towards a verity that descends upon the reader as a révélation.
In '"Concupiscence of Wit': The Metaphysical Conceit in Baroque Poetics" (1986), an
article published in Modem Philology, J.W. van Hook also réfutes Tuve's theory of the ten
Aristotelian predicaments as the basis for the Metaphysical conceit. Yet unlike Roston later, he
does not discard the logical élément of the conceit altogether. Van Hook in fact makes the best
of Tuve and Roston's approach by fusing them. He thus bases his assessment of the conceit on
the writings of Baroque continental theorists such as Peregrini and Tesauro, whose texts
constitute valuable sources of contemporary insight on both its structure and the aesthetic
response it générâtes. He defines the conceit as a figure of speech based on a central metaphor
"building around its fondamental image a distinct rhetorical structure with unprecedented poetic
and epistemological aims of its own" (van Hook, 24). Concretely, what he means is that the
conceit provides the reader with a play on hypothetical correspondences. Van Hook explains
how Baroque theorists perceived metaphors essentially as products of the ingegno or "logical
intellect" (28), a dual faculty that fused intellect and imagination. Tesauro, he writes, conceived
of the ingegno as a faculty which probed "the most remote and minute circumstances hidden
within things" and "rapidly [brought] together ail thèse circumstances, tentatively joining or
dividing them" (28). According to van Hook, Peregrini himself referred to the ingegno as "that
faculty which seeks and spéculâtes on the true (...) the power of mind that marvels at whatever is
beautiful and efficacious" (28). Accordingly, Baroque theorists viewed metaphor essentially as
"the record of the spéculative exploration by which the ingegno probes expérience and fuses it
into intelligible wholes" (28) - hence the hypothetical correspondences to which van Hook points
in the conceit. Like other critics before him, van Hook also conceives of the conceit as arising
out of seventeenth century psychology, and figurative language as originating primarily from
man's attempts to explain the world to himself. Yet, he réfutes the théories of critics like Tuve
who try to measure the conceit according to some external reality. To him, metaphors are not
based on one or several Aristotelian predicaments, but allow for the mind's "flight between the
analytical catégories" (29) so as to enable the reader to distinguish correspondences which he
would otherwise hâve missed.
If the Metaphysical conceit is, according to van Hook, based on a central metaphor, he
explains that this literary device differs substantially from the simpler or ordinary metaphor. The
ordinary metaphor, he argues, directs the reader's attention to a pretty image, whereas the conceit
directs his aesthetic response to the comparison it establishes. The conceit indeed "records the
ingegno's experiment with the catégories of judgement" (van Hook, 34). In other words, the
conceit differs from a simple metaphor because it does not simply create corrélations between
différent objects but represents rather the intellect's play with hypothetical correspondences. The
Metaphysical conceit therefore takes the reader one step further than the objects of the simple
metaphor and enables him to connect with the poet's ingegni and to follow the movement of his
thought. Hence, in this study, van Hook explicitly identifies the aesthetic effect of the
Metaphysical conceit on the reader's mind to which Williamson was intuitively pointing in The
Donne Tradition, within the texts of Baroque theorists.
Van Hook illustrâtes the Baroque theorists' reasoning with an analysis of the three last
Unes of Donne's "The Good Morrow". In thèse Unes, the poet-speaker attempts to persuade his
lover that their unchanging feelings for each other will confer immortality upon them, and to do
so he uses a syllogism inspired from the precepts of alchemy: "What ever dyes, was not mixt
equally;/ If our two loves be one, or, thou and 1/ Love so alike, that none doe slacken, none can
die" ("The Good Morrow", 11. 19-21). Donne's argument, like any other valid syllogism, is
constituted of a major and a minor premise that convey an impression of logic. Still, the attentive
reader cannot fail to perceive the hole in Donne's argument, for love can in no way guarantee
immortality. Yet, as van Hook emphasizes, thèse Unes "appeal most directly to what Tesauro
22
called the 'third opération of the intellect'", (36) which replicates every step of the poet's
syllogistic thought from one analytical category to the other. The major premise indeed présents
the popular Renaissance belief that the imbalances between the four humours in an object or
being caused its decay, whereas the minor premise uses the idea of an equal mixture as a
metaphor for constancy in love. The reader is therefore guided through every step of the poet's
thought process and finally embraces the natural conclusion that reciprocal love confers
immortality. If this conclusion may appear to the attentive reader as a fallacy, the truth it points
to does not lack in logic, for a couple of lovers will tend to remain so only if both partners love
each other equally. Commenting on Donne's use of the conceit, therefore, van Hook explains
that this literary device generally effects a "passage from déception to insight" which in itself
constitutes "an unexpected and therefore fascinating way of learning" (37).
Van Hook then describes the conceit primarily as a literary device that "drive[s] the mind
toward a new mode of awareness and vision" (38). For him, it mingles logic, intellect and
imagination in a novel and compelling way. Although he does not mention the influence of
Aristotle's metaphor of proportion on the underlying structure of the Metaphysical image, his
assessment of its aesthetic effect enables him to identify the émotion that Williamson tentatively
named "the Metaphysical shudder" (90) attached to Donne's verse. Moreover, van Hook's
analysis of the conceit does not rule out its indebtedness to the metaphor of proportion, for his
emphasis on the ingegno's flight between catégories could allude to the comparison of the
relationships that unité sets of things. Certainly, his study of the Baroque continental theorists'
conception of the Metaphysical conceit could hâve yielded more insight on this much debated
literary device had it been extended into a book. Although van Hook could hâve developed his
study of the historical origins of the Metaphysical conceit to a greater degree, his assessment of
23
the way in which the conceit was perceived in Baroque poetics produced novel information on its
aesthetic effect.
From Eliot's influential review of Grierson's anthology to van Hook's '"Concupiscence
of Wit': The Metaphysical Conceit in Baroque Poetics", critical views of the Metaphysical
conceit hâve changed and evolved. While the earliest définitions of the conceit emphasized its
immédiate material implications, critics hâve extended their views of the objects in the conceit,
devoting attention both to its inner-workings or its philosophical aspect. Finally, more recently,
some critics hâve coupled both dimensions of inner-workings and philosophy to deliver a broader
picture of what the Metaphysical conceit means. Certainly, the critical world has corne a long
way in its study of the works of the Metaphysical poets.
Against the background of the évolution of Donne criticism in the last hundred years that
I hâve hoped to describe hère, the main concern of this thesis is to focus on Donne's use of the
Metaphysical conceit in his description of human relationships and of man's relation with the
Divine. By doing this the thesis aims to demonstrate how Donne's handling of the conceit
enabled him to develop through both verse and prose his vision of a unified cosmos. In Chapter
11,1 shall seek to define the rôle of the conceit in Donne's manner of conveying his vision of the
relationships that unité men and women in the "Songs and Sonnets". In Chapter III, 1 will
attempt to analyse Donne's handling of the conceit in his search for a sensé of unity in divine
worship in both his "Holy Sonnets" and in some passages selected from his Dévalions ripon
Emergent Occasions. Finally, in Chapter IV, 1 will investigate the way Donne envisioned man's
relationship to the rest of mankind in Pseudo-Martyr, Essayes in Divinity, and Dévotions npon
Emergent Occasions. This last chapter will also attempt to define the way in which ail the
relationships discussed in the preceding chapters corne together in his investigation of the ties
that unité mankind as a whole, thus culminating in a unified vision of création. Throughout the
présent thesis, Donne's représentation of the ties uniting the soûl to the body shall also be
scrutinized as a central élément of his epistemology that contributes to define his approach to the
three other types of relationships. This thesis will of course discuss both the aesthetics and the
structure of the Metaphysical conceit. Yet, I intend to concentrate on the analysis of the manner
in which the conceit, as a literary device that compares the relationships that unité two sets of
things, is used in both Donne's poetry and prose to médiate his epistemological approach to
human expérience, which he conceived as a unified whole evolving under the ever-watching eye
ofGod.
Chapter II
"so we shall/ Be one, and one another's Ail": The Amorous Microcosm
Donne's portrayal of amorous relationships in his Songs and Sonnets has
perplexed many critics over the years following the revival of his works at the end of the
nineteenth century. Several among Donne scholars hâve questioned the sincerity of his most
exalted love poems whereas others hâve expressed réservations regarding the apparent
detachment of the poet-speaker in works such as "The Indiffèrent" and "Goe, and catche a falling
star", seeing the lusty braggadocio as a persona that could not be reconciled with the real Donne.
In addition, some critics hâve taken offence at Donne's portrayal of women in his lighter lyrics,
which they perceived as degrading and revolting. Others hâve even criticized his représentation
of women in his poems of mutuality, seeing in his treatment of the amorous microcosm a form of
négation of the female other through its intégration into the maie persona (Hodgson, 14).
lnterestingly, in this respect, voices hâve been raised defending Donne in the feminist
camp that has formed one strong branch of literary criticism in récent générations. For instance,
llona Bell in "The Rôle of the Lady in Donne's Songs and Sonnets" (1983) explains that empathy
towards the lady constantly "informs the witty, lusty braggadocio" (116) who, unconsciously,
26
struggles to attune himself to his partner, to fbresee her objections, and to convince her to
embrace his views. In a more récent study (1996), Lunderberg explains that the women
addressed in Donne's poetry contribute to shape not only the speaker's argument, "but also his
person" (164). Thus, whereas some critics still perceive Donne's treatment of female characters
as degrading, some more récent criticism has emphasized the poet's primarily empathetic attitude
to the female other. Certainly, thèse latest feminist assessments of Donne's poetry are consistent
with the récent critical trend among Donne scholars which emphasizes the poet's désire for
relatedness in an essentially unified création.
In their attempt to reconcile the two seemingly opposed views of love conveyed in the
Sangs and Sonnets, other scholars hâve turned to the différent epistemological discourses that
may hâve influenced Donne's perception of human relationships. Until the end of the 1980s, the
theory of correspondences seems to hâve been particularly popular in the critical world. The
theory of correspondences posits the unity of a création in which ail contradictions are reconciled
in God's immanence in the universe. In A Lecture in Love 's Philosophy (1984), Me Kevlin
applies this theory to Donne's lyrics. He thus explains that in the Songs and Sonnets, Donne
créâtes a "vision of a world of human love in which the divine and human are brought together
analogously through man's capacity to actualize the potentialities inhérent in the System of
universal correspondences" (3). Tn other words, Donne's imagery in the Songs and Sonnets
would be the fruit of his capacity to establish analogies between the visible and the invisible, the
little and the great, the earthly and the heavenly, in order to define better and understand the
expérience of human love. Since Donne draws his analogies from a fallen création and describes
the feelings that animate a highly complex and imperfect créature such as man, the world of
human love he depicts "must be broad enough to include selfishness, inconstancy, and deceit"
(Me Kevlin, 7) along with mutuality and self-sacrificing love. Following Me Kevlin's reasoning,
the Songs and Sonnets ought therefore to be regarded as descnbing the alpha and oméga of
human love, hence the existence side by side of poems such as "The Indiffèrent" and "The
Canonization".
Other théories hâve of course been applied to the Songs and Sonnets in order to explain
the contradictory views Donne seems to express regarding human love. In an article entitled
"Love, Poetry, and John Donne in the Love Poetry of John Donne" (2000), R..V. Young
hypothesizes that the so-called duality that marks the Songs and Sonnets is in fact due to the
tension existing between two opposed conceptions of love in the Renaissance: Eros and Agapé
(252). Young explains that in Donne's times, Eros designated a form of possessive and lustful
love, whereas Agapé was a term applied to a form of love which involved self-sacrifice and
charity (252). Following Young's reasoning, Donne in the Songs and Sonnets would be
dramatizing the opposition between thèse two divergent, and yet complementary, visions of love.
Although both Young and Me Kevlin's théories may seem appealing, it is hard to limit Donne's
philosophical conception of human relationships to a single epistemological approach. Love is a
highly complex feeling which involves contradiction and reversai - a feeling that Donne perhaps
understood better than anyone else, for as he aptly put it in "Love's Growth", "Love's not so
pure, and abstract, as they use/ To say, which hâve no mistress but their muse" (11. 11-12). It is
therefore not surprising for a man with an intellect as penetrating as Donne's certainly was, to
deliver a highly perplexing assessment of an equally perplexing feeling.
Of course, the purpose of this thesis is not to settle a debate that has been going on for
décades among Donne scholars, but to examine Donne's use of the Metaphysical conceit in his
investigation of human relationships, and in this chapterthe spécifie love relationship between a
man and a woman. The study of Donne's handling of this literary device in the Songs and
Sonnets indeed reveals an important dimension of his conception of mutual love. The conceit
28
tends to appear less frequently in Donne's most light-hearted poems, with a few exceptions such
as "The Flea" and "The Relie". Yet in both his lighter lyrics and more serious poems, Donne's
conceits almost invariably describe states of perfect merging between two individuals, either
spiritually, physically, or both. Although he frequently satirizes the behaviour that could prove
harmful to a love relationship through the use of rhetorical devices associated with the
Metaphysical conceit, such as paradox and antithesis, the images which, structurally, establish a
comparison between two sets of things are almost invariably used to describe states of perfect
unity.
That Donne was hostile to behaviour that could induce séparation and enmity is obvious,
not only from the reading of the Songs and Sonnets, but also from the examination of his other
works. In "Circles of Love" (1991), Kaskela notably remarks that the condemnation of selfcenteredness is central to "The First Anniversary", in which "the speaker déplores extrême
individualism, perceiving it to be indicative of the continuing fall of humanity away from God's
original unified and interrelated création" (6). Donne's divergent views expressed in the Songs
and Sonnets could therefore be regarded as being reconciled in his search for relatedness in a
world he conceived primarily as a unified whole. Whether or not one agrées with Kaskela, in
Donne's verse, the conceit nevertheless appears as the tool par excellence for the investigation of
the ties that unité. It is indeed through this literary device that the poet most frequently develops
his vision of beauty and fulfilment in mutual love. As Helen Gardner observes in her
introduction to The Metaphysical Poets, to Donne, there was no such thing as unrequited love
(xxx), for as he himself stated, "it cannot be/ Love, till 1 love her that loves me" ("Love's Deity",
11. 13-14). Hence, one must separate those poems in which Donne célébrâtes mutuality from
those that lack it and that concern its opposite. It is in the poems celebrating fully mutual love
that he provides the most valuable insight into the way in which he conceived of amorous
29
relationships, and in which he most frequently employs the conceit as the device to explore ail
their aspects.
In Donne's poems of mutuality, the image of the lovers as a microcosm reflecting the
macrocosm of the created universe is central to his handling of the conceit. Through the
microcosm, he depicts amorous relationships as a séries of concentric circles that reconcile the
spiritual and the secular in the lovers and brings the whole universe in relation to them. Donne's
représentation of the microcosm seems to resuit from the combination of both Aristotle's
conception of the human soûl and of some notions of contemporary alchemy. Following upon
the works of Anaxagoras, Aristotle in De Anima attempts to provide a satisfactory explanation of
the way in which man's cognition enables him to perceive the world surrounding him. In this
work, he defines the human mind as a microcosm or small-scale représentation of the universe.
He thus explains his conception of the nature and mode of functioning of the human soûl, saying:
"If, then, thinking is like perceiving, it will either be some kind of affection by the thought object
or some such thing. It must then be something unaffected which yet receives the form and is
potentially of the same kind as its object but not the same particular, and the intellect must stand
in that relation to the objects of thought in which the perceptive faculty stands to those of
perception" (111. 4, 201-202). In this passage, Aristotle seems to conceive of the human intellect
- the spiritual part of man - as a kind of a small-scale représentation of Plato's realm of eternal
forms. That is, for man to apprehend the world surrounding him the thinking intellect must take
the form of the objects it perceives and, since everything in the universe is available to man's
perception, the intellect must hâve the capacity to contain ail forms in the universe.
However, unlike Plato's realm of eternal forms, the thinking part of the soûl is not ail
things at ail times. That is, to Aristotle, the intellect cannot hâve "any nature of its own except
just this, to be potential" (III. 4, 202). It therefore follows that the intellect is, "before it thinks in
30
actuality none of the things that exist" (III. 4. 202). Hence, according to Aristotle, if everything
in the created universe may be food for thought, then man's intellect must necessarily hâve the
capacity to take the form of ail things that exist. Yet, the soul's potentiality to encompass the
entire universe is présent only on a latent level and must be called upon to manifest itself.
Nevertheless, to Aristotle, the human soûl, and especially the intellect, has the capacity to
represent to itself the alpha and oméga of the cosmos, which is why he sums up his conception of
the intellective soûl as, "in a way ail the things that exist" (III. 8, 210).
Aristotle's belief that the soûl is, in a sensé, représentative of ail things in the universe is
echoed in the works of several Renaissance thinkers, notably Marsilio Ficino. In his study of the
microcosm in Donne's poetry, Me Kevlin quotes a passage from Ficino, in which the Italian
philosopher describes the soûl as "the bond and juncture of the universe" (19). Although
primarily a Neo-Platonist, Ficino stressed the centeredness of the soûl in création in a way which
is highly reminiscent of Aristotle's depiction of the human intellect as "ail things that exist"
(Aristotle, III. 8, 210). Man's ail encompassing intellect, because of its capacity to envision ail
things, was thus seen in the Renaissance as a microcosm of the created universe, a notion
reflected in Donne's Holy Sonnet V, "1 am a little world made cunningly" (and the word
"cunning" we must remember originates in the Old English verb "cunnan" meaning "to know").
Moreover, the idea that each individual was a small-scale représentation of the cosmos was then
reinforced by the belief in man's uniqueness in création as the only créature born out of the
conjunction of the animal and the spiritual. In his analysis of the Sangs and Sonnets, Me Kevlin
in fact explains that "Philosophically, the composition of body and soûl made man the
appropriate Connecting link between the spiritual and the material éléments in the chain of being"
(15). Renaissance thinkers thus conceived of man as existing halfway between the animal and
the angel, and of the joining of spirituality and physicality in a single créature as a microcosmic
représentation of the way in which God's spirit pervaded the universe. Hence, in body and soûl,
man was indeed thought of as ail existing things.
However, in the Songs and Sonnets, it is not man, but rather the conjunction of maie and
female in mutual love that symbolizes the bond of the spirit and matter in the universe to which
both Ficino and Aristotle refer. In this respect, Donne's conception of the amorous microcosm
seems to hâve been influenced by either hermeticism, contemporary alchemy, or both. Indeed,
both disciplines held that ail creational processes resulted from the union of maie and female
principles. In a discussion on the différent epistemologies that hâve influenced Donne's poetry,
Anthony Presti Russel notes particularly the poet's indebtedness to hermeticism, seeing in his
imagery echoes of the hermetic belief that "female and maie principles pervade ail being" (291).
Alchemists in Donne's time also thought that the union of maie and female principles was central
to ail création. In fact, the transmutation of base metals to gold was conceived of as resulting
from two alchemical processes to which Donne alludes explicitly in "The Canonization": the
'eagle' and the 'dove'. In addition to figuring as common symbols for maie strength and female
meekness, the 'eagle' and the 'dove' were alchemical terms for processes involving maie and
female principles which supposedly combined into the stage of transmutation called the
'phoenix' (Norton Anthology of Poetry, 179). Still, the transmutation of metals was only
symbolic of alchemy's real aim, which was the transubstantiation of the soûl - "a kind of
spiritual transformation and rebirth" (Robinson, 9). Hence, tothe Renaissance alchemist, the
perfect joining of maie and female principles led tothe refinement of one's being.
Donne's depiction of the amorous microcosm can therefore be considered as indebted to
both Aristotle's conception of the human intellect as a small-scale représentation of the universe
and to the possibly Hermetic belief in the association of maie and female principles as the basis
for ail création. Through the metaphor of the amorous microcosm, Donne conveys a sensé of
32
unity between both parts, maie and female, of the microcosmic world which he represents as
superior to the macrocosm of the created universe. Under the poet's pen, the lovers expérience
the joining of their soûls as a sensuous expérience and the union of their bodies as a spiritual one,
and they become each other's alpha and oméga in a relationship that refînes them. In the Songs
and Sonnets, I wish to argue in this thesis, it is mainly through the Metaphysical conceit that
Donne conveys his vision of mutuality in love. The conceit indeed is the means by which he
utters his philosophical conception of shared love. Moreover, it is also the tool he uses to render
apprehensible to the mind the intangible and invisible ties that unité two beings. For example, in
"A Valediction: forbidding Mourning", Donne develops his thème through a séries of conceits,
each image adding précision and emotional intensity to his vision of the relationship that unités
the two parting lovers. The poem ostensibly relates Donne's discourse to his wife on his
departure on a diplomatie mission across the Channel onto the Continent in 1612. In it, he uses
the conceit as an instrument to probe the expérience of leave-taking and to assert his belief that
true love of both body and mind will resist the trials imposed by distance. The poem's first
conceit seeks to define the nature of the relationship that unités the lovers and poignantly gives
expression to their pain:
As virtuous men pass mildly away,
And whisper to their soûls, to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say,
The breath goes now, and some say, no:
So let us melt, and make no noise,
No tear tlood, nor sigh tempest move,
'Twere profanation ofourjoys
To tell the laity our love. ("A Valediction: forbidding Mourning", 11. 1-8)
In the first stanza of the above, the relationship that unités the parting lovers is compared to that
which binds a dying, virtuous man to his soûl. More than a mère attempt to urge a solemn
parting, this stanza provides valuable insight into how the poet-speaker conceives of his
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relationship with his beloved. They are as closely tied to each other, as merged with one another,
as the soûl is with the body. Through its représentation of the strong intimacy that unités the
parting lovers, the conceit of the dying man invests the expérience of leave-taking with a rare
emotional intensity. Although the lovers' séparation ought not to be as définitive as the soul's
departure to heaven is to the dying man, roads in Renaissance Europe were often perilous and so
was the crossing of the English Channel to the Continent that lay before Donne. Keeping thèse
simple, and yet easily forgotten facts in mind, the comparison established between the dying
m a n ' s relationship to his departing soûl and that which joins the two parting lovers seems highly
appropriate. In spite of the hazards that the maie lover's departure condemns him to confront,
both lovers must take their séparation solemnly as a virtuous man allows for his soûl to départ
serenely, confident of its safe journey to heaven. Through this first conceit, Donne therefore
defines the nature of the bond that unités the lovers in such a way as to do justice to the émotions
the expérience of leave-taking stirs in two beings so thoroughly committed to each other.
In addition, if the parting lovers are to each other as the departing soûl is to the dying
man, through this conceit, Donne may in fact be attempting to utter a statement on the
connectedness of physicality and spirituality in love. The conceit of the departing soûl indeed
attracts the reader's attention to m a n ' s dual nature. That is, through this image, Donne seems to
catch as in a net this fleeting moment during which the dying man exists simultaneously in the
worlds of the living and the dead. By highlighting this particular aspect of the nature of man,
Donne could also be making a statement on the equally dual nature of human love - an aspect
which he treats more analytically in "The Extasie". As the relationship that binds a man to his
soûl involves the interaction of the soûl with the sensés, the love that lies behind the existence of
the amorous microcosm may therefore be regarded as one which involves both sensuousness and
spirituality.
34
The part of the poem that follows (11. 9-36) présents the solution to the problem of
séparation introduced in the first two stanzas. It does so by expanding the feelings incorporated
in the microcosm to bring them to a cosmic level. Donne indeed now handles the conceit in such
a way as to demonstrate how the ties that unité the lovers will alter and extend the scope of their
existence so as to resist the effects of distance. The poet-speaker thus compares what the
amorous microcosm will be during his absence to the condition of the planets as they influence
men.
Moving of th'earth brings harms and fears,
Men reckon what it did and meant,
But trépidations of the sphères,
Though greater far, is innocent.
("A Valediction: forbidding Mourning", 11. 9-12)
The lovers' motions at a distance from each other are hère likened to the movements through
which the heavens were thought to influence the earth. Tn the Renaissance, the motions of the
sphères, although of a far greater magnitude than the earthquakes that disturb the surface of the
planet, were believed to cause subtle altérations in the atmosphère. In "Living Magnets,
Paracelsian Corpses, and the Psychology of Grâce in Donne's Religious Verse", Angus Fletcher
explains that, through the atmosphère, the sphères of the solar System would affect both the
humours or vapours travelling through the body and the faculties of the mind (5-9). In "A
Valediction", therefore, Donne refers to the complex movements through which the heavens
influence the human body and mind in order to create a direct correspondence between them and
those of the lovers. Through this conceit, the poet is in fact describing how the love that unités
the lovers keeps them attuned to one another in both body and soûl until the speaker's return.
Moreover, because this conceit compares the relationship Connecting both parts of the
amorous microcosm to the relationship between the planets and the earth, Donne's explicit
référence to the "trépidations" ("A Valediction", 1. 11) of the sphères is meant to explain the
35
nature of the affection that binds the lovers. The "trépidations" were a heavenly movement
induced on the planets on the outer circle of the Ptolemaic System. It resulted from their
proximity to the eternal and the infinité that lay just beyond it. Through this conceit, not only
does the poet-speaker stress the futility of great shows of grief, but he also élevâtes the love that
unités the lovers to the level of the infinité and the eternal. Through this conceit, the microcosm
is thus expanded beyond the boundaries of the cosmos. Donne's use of the metaphysical conceit
in this instance therefore enables him, as Ferry writes, to "demonstrate his power over changing
expérience" (96). Through this image, the poet-speaker of "A Valediction" asserts his authority
over the passage of time and, within the bounds of the microcosm, defeats mutability. Hence, the
conceit of the sphères in "A Valediction" confers a cosmic magnitude to the feelings that unité
the lovers, for as Ebreo, the ltalian philosopher-critic, stated in his dialogue between Sophia and
Philo, the love that ties a man and a woman to each other is like the principle that fuses the parts
of the mutable uni verse together and that also maintains this universe in touch with the eternal
(McKevlin, 16).
Through the conceit of the sphères. Donne therefore describes a love of such magnitude
that it can withstand the effects of séparation. The lovers of "A Valediction" are thus
distinguished from "Dull sublunary lovers" (1. 13) whose feelings for each other are confined to
physical contrast and so diminish as soon as the beloved is out of sight. By contrast, the lover's
soûls, "which are one,/ (...) endure not yet/ A breach, but an expansion" (11. 21-23). This soûl
born of the lovers' union extends itself upon the surface of the globe to cover the distance
scparating them, "Like gold to aery thinness beat" (1. 24). Although this image is a simile and,
structurally speaking, does not exactly constitute a conceit as we hâve defined it for the purposes
of this thesis, it nevertheless reinforces the thème of the lovers' power over expérience. More
importantly, as Donne uses it, the image extends the love existing in the microcosm to the
36
planetary macrocosm beyond it, using alchemical figures to stress the purifying effect of mutual
love upon the soûl. As contemporary alchemists conceived of the transmutation of base metals to
gold as a symbol for the purification of the soûl, Donne's use of alchemical imagery may
therefore be regarded as symbolic of the refinement of the one soûl, or "world soûl" (Fletcher, 2),
resulting from the lovers' union. Commenting on this image, Presti Russel explains that to
Renaissance alchemists, "Gold leaf was associated with an even more subtle refinement of the
spirit" (299) - to a higher stage of spiritual purification. Thus, through the image of "gold to aery
thinness beat" (1. 24), Donne not only asserts the relationship's résistance to changing expérience,
but he also highlights its purifying effect upon the mind. The ties that bind together both parts that is, both lovers - of the microcosm are thus as pure as gold, the only métal that could then be
beaten into a thin leaf. It is thus the purity of the lovers' feelings that allows for its expansion
across time and space and guards it against the breach of séparation. To the poet-speaker, love is
therefore endowed with an aura of mysticism - it is the spiritual expérience through which the
soûl is refined.
The extended conceit of the compass that then follows the poem's figure of the beaten
gold brings the microcosm and the macrocosm together in an extraordinary image of the conquest
of distance. In an image that not only reaffirms the unity of the couple, the conceit of the
compass also addresses a reality far greater than its constituents - their dominance over space.
While the poet-speaker begins the seventh stanza by conceding that the two parts of the
microcosm, namely the lovers, may be regarded as distinct from each other, yet they are so "As
stiff twin compassés are two" ("A Valediction", 1. 26). For in reality, like the two ends of a
compass, the lovers remain irremediably tied to each other and conquer distance at the saine time.
As such, they add purpose and usefulness to their mutual union:
Thy soûl the fixed foot, makes no show
37
To move, but doth, if th'other do.
And though it in the centre sit,
Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.
Such wilt thou be to me, who must
Like th'other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end, where I begun. ("A Valediction", 11. 27-36)
Hère, Donne uses an apparently common élément of the macrocosm, namely its universality, to
describe one aspect of the microcosm, namely the lovers, that assumes the proportion of the
macrocosm itself. What is little becomes universal. If the lovers are to each other as the two feet
of a compass are to one another, then the beloved's thoughts lean towards the poet-speaker,
following his movements across the macrocosm as the fixed foot of the compass moves in
accordance with the other foot. In turn, the poet-speaker dérives his strength from the knowledge
that the beloved's love and thoughts are upon him even as he is wandering abroad figuratively
tracing a circle around the circumference of the earth. The conceit of the compass hence
symbolizes the expansion of the bond that unités the lovers across time and space as they seem to
assume the dimension characteristic of the larger macrocosm itself. In the process of becoming
larger than itself, so to speak, the microcosm represented by the two lovers takes upon itself the
appearance of the macrocosm of the uni verse.
Kurthermore, Donne's choice ofthe circle, inhérent in the conceit ofthe compass, to
describe the lovers' motions in the universal macrocosm bears an important significance with
regard to their représentation of love. The image ofthe circle in which Donne draws the entire
journey from and to his lover, is indeed accepted almost universally "as the symbol of eternity
and never-ending existence" and, in some instances, even connûtes perfection (Kaskela, 57).
Certainly, Donne must hâve been conscious ofthe symbolic meaning of circularity. His choice
of the compass, and thus of the circle, to represent the motions of the very parts of the microcosm
highlights the lasting perfection of the relationship of the lovers and reinforces their sensé of
unity. Once more, in the poem, following the earlier image of "trépidation", the lovers' motions
seem attuned to those of the sphères in the Ptolemaic System as, by Donne's departure and return,
they seem to become as infinité as the macrocosm itself In his analysis of this famous conceit,
Presti Russel points to an interesting passage in the literary criticism of the Italian theorist
Feccero, who states with regard to the compass image that "This [circular] motion is the
archetypal pattern of Love's universe, the principle of cohérence joining matter and spirit
throughout ail levels of reality" (299). In other words, the circularity of the lovers' motions is the
very expression of the love that unités them to the cosmos. Therefore, through the image of the
compass, Donne not only reasserts the unity of the microcosm but also how mutual love may lead
two individuals to embrace a higher form of love. In this respect, one may find faint echoes in
"A Valediction" of Plato's ladder of love, which starts with the love of an individual at the
bottom and ends with the love of eternal beauty itself at the top, appearing "always single in
form", ail other beautiful things sharing its character (Plato, 49). Certainly, Donne's final conceit
points to a reality far greater than man's understanding and invests mutual love with a sensé of
mystery.
Thus, as Williamson notes in The Donne Tradition, the Metaphysical conceit, or rather the
succession of conceits in "A Valediction: forbidding Mourning" forms the body of the poet's
thought (24). In this poem as in many others, Donne indeed employs the conceit to probe the ties
that unité the lovers and, in "A Valediction" particularly, to explore the expérience of parting for
two individuals so completely committed to each other. Through the conceit, he célébrâtes a love
in which both body and soûl play a part - a relationship in which each partner finds fulfilment,
strength, and purpose. Yet, Donne's imagination functions on a cosmic level as he juxtaposes the
30
whole universe in relation to the lovers. The man and the woman united in mutual love hence
appear as an intégral part of the cosmos and move with the stars.
Donne's other poem "The Good-Morrow" at once strengthens our view of his use of the
microcosm of the lovers and the macrocosm of the universe in "A Valediction: forbidding
Mourning" while exploring yet another aspect of their relationship. In this poem, his treatment of
the conceit serves to lend sensuality to the spiritual union of the lovers, who expérience the
awakening of their soûls to a new reality that surpasses in beauty and immediacy the reality of
those who live a love of a lesser dimension. Thus, the poem repeats notions présent in "A
Valediction: forbidding Mourning", such as the lovers' isolation from the rest of the world and
the union of body and soûl within the microcosm. But if the line separating the microcosm of the
lovers from the macrocosm of the universe at times seems to become gradually indistinct in "A
Valediction", so closely do the lovers approach the spiritual, the lovers of "The Good Morrow"
exist in a reality that at first sight almost completely excludes the macrocosm. They are in fact so
thoroughly immersed in each other that their life prior to their encounter acquires the texture of a
dream:
I wonder by my troth, what thou, and I
Did, till we loved? were we not weaned till then,
But sucked on country pleasures, childishly?
Or snorted we in the seven sleepers' den?
'Twas so; but this, ail pleasures fancies be.
If ever any beauty 1 did see,
Which 1 desired, and got, 'twas but a dream of thee. ("The Good Morrow", 11. 1-7)
Whereas the lovers of "A Valediction" appeared simultaneously as secluded from, and integrated
into the macrocosm, in "The Good Morrow" love shapes the lovers' reality and sets them apart
from the externat world. Donne thus addresses love's peculiar capacity to influence one's
perceptions of the hère and now, and therefore to affect both the mind and the sensés so as to
create a new temporal reality revolving exclusively around the beloved. Indeed, to the poet-
40
speaker, love "ail love of other sights controls" and, because of its influence on human
perception, has the power to make "one little room, an every where" (11. 10-11). Thus, love in
"The Good Morrow" is ultimately again represented as a thing of both body and mind as in "A
Valediction", for it fuses the lovers' soûls, and this fusion in turn points to the expansion of their
little world emotionally beyond themselves. Through this expansion of the amorous microcosm
in "The Good Morrow", the lovers appear to apprehend in a sensuous way the infinity of the soûl,
to which Aristotle referred as "ail the things that exist" (111. 8, 210). To Aristotle, body and soûl
could not be divorced from each other, for as he observes in De Anima, the affections of the soûl,
"insofar at least as they are such things as anger and fear, are in this way inséparable from the
natural matter of living things" (1. 1. 130), and Donne's lovers in "The Good Morrow" solive
their émotions (11. 15-21). Their rapture reflects Aristotle's principle of the intricate relationship
uniting body and soûl through which most affections of the soûl are "shared with the ensouled
thing" (1. 1. 128).
Accordingly, the later conceit in "The Good Morrow" depicting the similarity of the
relationships of the lovers with the pictures of the world on a Renaissance map, and the next
conceit (11. 15-21) describing the reflection of each lover in the eyes of the other, probe
sensuously through literature into the spiritual union of two beings in love. Hère as in "A
Valediction", the poet-speaker uses the image of the microcosm to represent himself and his lover
as a little world, born of the fusion of two smaller worlds: "Let sea-discoverers to new worlds
hâve gone,/ Let maps to others, worlds on worlds hâve shown,/ Let us possess one world, each
one hath one, and is one" (11. 12-14). In this first conceit, each individual is in essence a
microcosm reflecting the greater macrocosm. Yet love fuses thèse two microcosms, thus making
them the two halves of a greater, indivisible whole, a new single microcosm that reflects the
■ 11
universe. The lovers are therefore to each other as the two opposite faces of the earth pictured on
a Renaissance map, "worlds on worlds" (1. 13), complementary and inséparable:
My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears,
And true plain hearts do in the faces rest,
Where can we find two better hémisphères
Without sharp north, without declining west? ("The Good Morrow", 11. 1518)
Then, in the later conceit probing into the présence of one lover into the eye of the other, the
lovers' reflections in each other's eyes seem to materialize the ties that bind them in mutual love.
Each lover gazes at his own reflection in the eyes of his partner, each image being in turn
reflected back to the eyes of the person from whom it was issued. The lovers are thus
intermingled in this complex web of reflections on eyes and maps in the two conceits. Their love
appears tangible in their sensés and open to their eyes physically and to their rational intellects at
the same time.
How much this expérience of the sensés and the mind is présent in the poem is discussed
pointedly by Gardner in her introduction to The Metaphysical Poets ( 1961 ). She explains that
poems like "The Good Morrow" raise, "even when they do not explicitly discuss, the great
metaphysical question of the relation of the spirit and the sensés (...) not as an abstract problem,
but in an effort to make the union of two human beings in love, apprehensible" (xxx). She
describes significantly the poet's intent in the passage dealing with the eyes as well as the
aesthetic effect he créâtes with the conceit of the two hémisphères. Under Donne's pen, both
conceits indeed render the indefinable and impalpable more concrète so as to make it available to
the understanding. In an article on the historical origins of the Metaphysical conceit, Mazzeo
similarly stresses the "qualities of précision and strong sensuous élément" (93) that characterize
the Donnean conceit. Certainly, in "The Good Morrow", the extended conceits of the eyes and
the maps contribute to make the invisible available to the reader and point to a very abstract but
42
paradoxically précise reality - that of the lovers' certitude of their feelings for each other. If as
Aristotle explains, affections involve both body and soûl, then through the conceit Donne may be
said to recreate this fleeting moment when the affections of the mind and of the body corne
together as the lovers can feel the union of their two beings sensuously. Hence, through his use
of the conceit in "The Good Morrow", Donne investigates yet another aspect of mutuality in love
- that of the interaction of the soûl and the sensés in the amorous microcosm - and once more
attempts to translate the invisible and impalpable through the written text.
The aura of mystery and spirituality surrounding the lovers' relationship in "A
Valediction: forbidding Mourning" and even in "The Good Morrow" is made nowhere stronger
than in "The Canonization", a poem which exemplifies perfectly Williamson's statement on the
joining of the lover and the priest in a single figure (51). In this poem, the lovers' relationship is
indeed defined as a sacred mystery, as the man and the woman pose as saints canonized by the
love that seals their union. Donne in fact handles the Metaphysical conceit in "The
Canonization" in such a way as to reinforce the parallel established in "A Valediction" between
the love that unités both parts of the amorous microcosm and the force that holds the uni verse
together. The poem begins abruptly as the reader is parachuted into the middle of an argument
that seems well underway. In this first stanza, the poet-speaker serves a well-phrased rebuke to
the (we can only suppose) accusations of his interlocutor, someone who does not like the fact that
he and his lover are in love. After a well-aimed critique of the clichés of the courtly love
tradition, Donne then proceeds to describe the mysterious character of the relationship that unités
him to his beloved, and thus raises their love above that of Petrarchan lovers who aspire to
spirituality and yet fall beside the mark:
Call us what you will, we are made such by love,
Call her one, me another fly,
We are tapers too, and at our own cost die,
43
And we in us find the eagle and the dove,
The phoenix riddle hath more wit
By us; we two being one, are it.
So to one neutral thing both sexes fit
We die and rise the same, and prove
Mysterious by this love. ("The Canonization", 11. 19-27)
The Metaphysical imagery hère is established through the comparison between three
relationships, first that which unités the lovers, secondly that between two flies and the flame that
attracts and destroys them, and thirdly that between a taper and its own flame. Once more,
Donne uses the circle to symbolize the lovers' union - the flies circle around the flame. Like the
image of the twin compassés, the conceit of the flies and the taper draws upon seemingly
insignificant éléments of the material world to symbolize the infinity of the microcosm in which
the lovers appear simultaneously as the centre and the circumference. In his attempt to translate
the mysterious aspect of love into verse, Donne again, as in "A Valediction: forbidding
Mourning", blends religious and alchemical imagery into an intricate conceit. In his use of the
alchemical terms of'eagle, 'dove', and 'phoenix', Donne establishes parallels between the
alchemical process of transmutation of base metals, its spiritual significance, and the Christian
motif of résurrection. Ail of thèse conter a strong aura of mysticism and spirituality to the
amorous microcosm that are the lovers. As God's love pervades the created universe, the lovers'
affections permeate their little world, acting in a way which is analogous to the heliocentricity
that holds the cosmos together.
If the last part of the Metaphysical conceit of the flies and tapers appears to herald the
lovers' doom, Donne's référence to the alchemical process of transmutation and his évocation of
the Christian motif of résurrection in the first part of the conceit together solve the problem.
Since the lovers are to each other as the 'eagle' and the 'dove' in the process of transmutation,
their union refînes them spiritually and by its very nature renders the désire that burns them
harmless. Furthermore, as DiPasquale observes in Literature and Sciemment on the lines "We
die and rise the same, and prove/ Mysterious by this love" ("The Canonization", 11. 26-27), the
word mysterious may in fact pun "on 'mysterion', which is the Greek word for sacramenf" (16).
To her, the mystery of the lovers' union is thus "like the miracle of transubstantiation, a sacred
enigma that the secular mind cannot fully comprehend" (16). Whether or not Donne puns
intentionally on the word mysterious (1. 27), the sacramental undertones of this extended conceit
do contribute to reinforce the idea of the refinement of one's being through love. If love is
indeed to the lovers as the Holy Spirit that invests the Eucharistie bread and wine with its
présence, thus refining them through a miracle greater than man's understanding, then they may
rightly claim to be "canonized for love" (1. 36). Clearly, in the Metaphysical imagery of the
poem, Donne gradually refînes his investigation of the ties that unité the lovers and finally cornes
to the conclusion that love is, after ail, a mystery that éludes reason.
The salvation of the lovers through transubstantiation is explained in the final two stanzas
of the poem. The poet-speaker concèdes that his beloved and himself may indeed die, but only to
invent another form of résurrection: "And if no pièce of chronicle we prove,/ We'll build in
sonnets pretty rooms" ("The Canonization", 11. 31-32). If the lovers cannot find immortality in
history books, then poetry shall be to them much as a "well wrought urn" (1. 33) is to the ashes of
a saint. In this less striking, but nevertheless beautiful conceit, Donne identifies the means by
which the lovers shall find immortality. The written text of poetry will corne to carry their
memory throughout further âges. In addition to the motif of Christian résurrection, the
Metaphysical imagery of the poem posits the perpétuation of the microcosm through verse. The
written text then stands as the spiritual expérience through which both the readers and lovers will
be refined to attain immortality.
45
Although it does not constitute a Metaphysical conceit/*?r se, the last stanza of "The
Canonization" is worth mentioning if only for its explicit description of the amorous microcosm
as Aristotle's "ail things that exist" (III. 8, 210). In thèse lines, the poet-speaker addresses an
unnamed audience, saying:
And thus invoke us; 'You whom révérend love
Made one another's hermitage;
You to whom love was peace and now is rage;
Who did the whole world's soûl contract, and drove
Into the glasses of your eyes
(So made such mirrors, and such spies,
That they did ail to you epitomize,)
Countries, towns, courts; beg from above
A pattern of your love!' ("The Canonization", 11. 37-45)
Through this invocation, the poet-speaker expresses how mutual love unités two individuals into
a little world touched by infinity. Between them, they indeed seem to contract the soûl of the
macrocosmic universe into their physical selves and become its reflection in which ail things are
unified in God's divine présence. Certainly, in "The Canonization", Donne bridges the gap
separating romantic love from a higher form of spiritual, sacred love in a way which is vaguely
reminiscent of Plato's ladder of love. At any rate, "The Canonization" may be regarded as a
prélude to Donne's writings in his later career as Anglican Dean of St-Paul's, when he admitted
to hâve been brought to God by the love of a woman, his wife.
The last poem to be covered in this discussion of Donne's use of the Metaphysical conceit
in his investigation of the love relationship between a man and a woman, "A Valediction: of
weeping", differs significantly from the lyrics previously cited in its handling of the amorous
microcosm. The poem indeed constitutes one of the very few instances in which Donne's
microcosmic représentation of the lovers deals with a problematic relationship. Whereas poems
such as "A Valediction: forbidding Mourning", "The Good Morrow", and "The Canonization"
convey a sensé of serenity and fulfilment in mutual love, the amorous microcosm of the lover and
46
beloved in "A Valediction: of Weeping" appears as deeply unsettled by a threat which the poetspeaker does not completely succeed in defeating. Nevertheless, Donne's use of the
Metaphysical conceit in this poem does not differ much from his treatment of it in his more
exalted love poetry. That is, if the lovers' of "A Valediction: of Weeping" do not appear as
perfectly merged with each other as those of "The Canonization", through the conceit Donne
nonetheless dramatizes the lovers' attempts to reach towards each other and to establish a perfect
sensé of balance and unity within the microcosm that they embody. The entire poem in fact
revolves around yet another aspect of the interaction of body and soûl in the amorous microcosm,
namely the effects of strong émotions or 'affections of the body upon the soûl. In the first stanza,
a poet-speaker attempts to corne to terms with his own grief as he must part from his beloved.
Like the speaker of "A Valediction: forbidding Mourning", he thus tries to assert his command
over changing expérience, yet only to be defeated by mutability:
Let me pour forth
My tears before thy face, whilst I stay hère,
For thy face coins them, and thy stamp they bear,
And by this mintage they are something worth,
For thus they be
Pregnant of thee;
Fruits of much grief they are, emblems of more,
When a tear falls, that thou falls which it bore,
So thou and I are nothing then, when on a divers shore.
("A Valediction: of Weeping", 11. 1-9)
In this passage, the poet-speaker fails to hold back his tears, which bespeak a grief he cannot
contain and his beloved is reflected in them, and eventually she cried too and he also is reflected
in her tears. Yet to him, crying in her présence confers worth upon his tears, for as the King's
stamp bestows value to a coin, so her reflection in his tears makes them valuable beyond their
normal worth. Through this conceit of the image of the beloved in the tears, the poet-speaker
thus attempts to understand the significance of his bodily passion in order to assert his command
47
over changing expérience. What Donne deals with in the poem is described by the critic
Sherwood in his Fulfllling the Circle. Sherwood observes that Renaissance thinkers conceived of
the body "as the 'book' of the soûl", in which man could observe "an effigy of the soul's
condition" (133). Man's ability to interpret the world was then perceived as a means by which he
could assert his dominion over the rest of création. By interpreting expérience to his own
advantage, the poet-speaker of "A Valediction: of Weeping" hence attempts to regain a certain
measure of rational control upon affections of the body which hâve got out of hand. Like the
speaker of "The Sun Rising", he thus consciously manipulâtes language, "turning his weeping
into a decorous act for which he gravely asks permission" (Ferry, 87). Yet as the conceit unfolds,
the poet-speaker's argument turns against him as he cornes to reaiize the transient character of the
tears in which he has hoped to préserve an image of his beloved for himself. For, if the beloved's
reflection in her lover's tears confers them worth, thèse tears will fall, reducing her reflection to
nothing.
Donne's use of the image of the tears as preservers of the microcosm of the lover and his
beloved in the second stanza reinforces therefore the transient character of the lovers'
relationship. The two parting lovers who perceive in each other's tears a reflection of their little
world are indeed conscious that thèse tears are doomed to fall to the ground:
On a round bail
A workman that hath copies by, can lay
An Europe, Afric, and an Asia,
And quickly make that, which was nothing, ail,
So doth each tear,
Which thee doth wear,
A globe, yea a world by that impression grow,
Till thy tears mixed with mine do overflow
This world, by waters sent from thee, my heaven dissolved so. ("A Valediction: of
Weeping", 11. 10-18)
Thèse lines are highly reminiscent of the passage in "The Good Morrow" in which the lovers are
respectively described as two little worlds joined as two hémisphères in an indivisible whole (11.
12-14). Like them as well, the two lovers of "A Valediction: of Weeping" are similarly
represented as worlds reflected in the tears of their respective partners, each tear in turn sending
back this reflection to the tear facing it. However, the images reflected in the lovers' tears in "A
Valediction: of Weeping" are of limited worth, for they will be "valid images only so long as
they remain within the eyes" (Me Kevlin, 71). Unlike the tears in the image of "The Good
Morrow", they are reflections bouncing back and forth between two mirrors facing each other,
seemingly without end and with no purpose. Whereas the lovers of "The Good Morrow" can
discern reflections of their love in each other's eyes and faces (11. 15-21), the lovers' little world
in a "Valediction: of Weeping" never finds its way back to their eyes, and remains confined in
the transient tears that will dissolve as they fall.
The lovers of "Valediction: of Weeping" who hâve made the insignificant tears the alpha
and oméga of the amorous microcosm representing their physical and spiritual union are then left
with nothing. As Cathcart points out, the poet-speaker hence comes to the painful realization that
:
'tears, followed through to logical conclusions, become not simply worthy but even dangerously
valuable because they represent too much" (24). Through the extended conceit of the tears,
Donne is thus attempting to represent the dangers inhérent to relationships relying almost solely
on physical reaction for sustenance. Clearly, the ephemeral nature of the imagery chosen to
represent the microcosm of the lovers identifies them as what he called "dull sublunary lovers" in
"A Valediction: forbidding Mourning" (1. 13). In several poems Donne scorns lovers whose love
cannot last when they are away from each other, and that appears to be the case in "A
Valediction: of Weeping". As Sherwood remarks, the real threat in the poem is not so much "the
annihilation of séparation, but of spiritual death through indulgence in the suffering of sexual
4<)
love" (135) - in the overflowing of tears shed in the mutual knowledge that the spiritual
connection between them does not hâve the strength to sustain séparation. Although the conceit
dramatizes the lovers' attempt to reach towards each other through the distance in order to reestablish a sensé of unity within the microcosm, it also highlights the transient nature of their
love which cannot sustain itself in the absence of the beloved.
How much such a transient uncertain love is disappointing is évident even in the poem's
last conceit. Donne draws a striking image depicting a storm and a tide, describing the
unsteadiness of the affection of the lovers. The maie lover cautions the woman against the
dangers of the future withour proposing a solution to the problem of their séparation. But it must
be immediately pointed out that Donne does not condemn the two lovers of "A Valediction: of
Weeping" to a personal world that suggests no compensation for them beyond their transitory
expérience. His conceit succeeds in re-establishing a certain measure of unity in the microcosm
of their parting. In an image that draws parallels between the stormy picture of the weeping
lovers and the macrocosm of a purposeful world, the poet-speaker urges his beloved to guard
them both against the further emotional tempests that they might be tempted to expérience:
O more than moon,
Draw not up seas to drown me in thy sphère,
Weep me not dead, in thine arms, but forbear
To teach the sea, what it may do too soon;
Let not the wind
Example fmd,
To do me more harm, than it purposeth;
Since thou and 1 sigh one another's breath,
Whoe'er sighs most, is cruellest, and hastes the other's death. ("A Valediction: of
Weeping", 11. 19-27)
The departing lover, who will probably travel out to sea, begs his beloved to refrain from being to
him as the raging océan and bitter wind may prove to be during his trip to the Continent. Within
the amorous microcosm of body and spirit of the poet-speaker and his love, her uncontrolled grief
50
would indeed affect him, dragging his heart to the darkest depths of sadness, and through this
final conceit, Donne thus attempts to show how distress in one of the partners may affect the
other uselessly. The lady's grief threatens to become intense and to make the poet-speaker sink
into the same kind of uncontrolled démonstrations of grief as her. In "A Valediction: of
Weeping" therefore, feeling is represented as having a power "comparable to the vast forces of
nature, whose regular cycles, like the tides, can be disrupted by lawless motions" (Ferry, 89). If
uncontrolled passions can tear the amorous microcosm apart, balance and mutuality may, on the
other hand, sustain it. In an epigrammatic ending highly reminiscent of the final quatrain of "The
Good Morrow", the poet-speaker hence advocates the restoration of a state of balance within the
microcosm of the lovers and a return to passions better controlled by the mind.
In the Sangs and Sonnets, the Metaphysical conceit appears as Donne's tool par
excellence for the investigation of the ties that unité man and woman in mutual love. In the four
poems discussed in this chapter, as in many others of his Unes, Donne uses the conceit to probe
the nature of the feelings that unité two beings and to render thèse feelings available to the
understanding. Through images that mingle spirituality and sensuousness, the infinité and the
insignificant, the microcosm of the lovers and the macrocosm of the universe, he célébrâtes a
mysterious and yet apprehensible love through which two individuals may find fulfilment and
purpose - a union that has the power to refîne the self and to make each lover a better human
being. In the few instances in which Donne employs the Metaphysical conceit to investigate
more problematic relationships, this literary device nevertheless deals, if not with a relationship
of mutuality, at least with a désire for the sensé of perfect unity conveyed by the microcosm.
Certainly, in the Songs and Sonnets, Donne's handling of the conceit appears as consistent with
the désire for relatedness that seems to pervade most of his writings. Through it, he utters his
vision of a world in which ail conflicts and paradoxes may be reconciled in an all-pervasive love.
Chapter III
"I am a little world made ciiniiingly": The Poet and his God
The writings of Dr. Donne, Dean of St-Paul's Cathedral, seem to hâve caused as much
turmoil in the critical world as young Jack Donne's Satires and exalted love lyrics. For décades,
scholars hâve debated Donne's religious allegiance, unable to décide whether he was a sincère
Anglican, or a Catholic in disguise. In fact, critics hâve devoted such an incredible amount of
time and effort to tracing signs of both creeds within Donne's works that today, évidence
abounds to support both positions. Clearly a member of the Protestant camp, Whalen in The
Poetry of Immanence, Sacrament in Donne and Herbert (2002) argues for the primacy of the
influence of Calvinism on Donne's mature writings. To him, Donne's sacred verse indeed
"marks his confessional identification with the doctrinally Calvinist mainstream of the English
Church" (61). Others, like Paul Stevens in "Donne's Catholicism and the Innovations of the
Modem Nation State" (2001), hâve remarked that Protestant individualism somehow clashed
with Donne's search for relatedness and hâve emphasized his distrust of behaviour and beliefs
that could give rise to civil unrest (69). Again, the purpose of the présent thesis is by no means to
52
settle the debate surrounding Donne's true religious allegiance. Yet, thèse récent assessments of
his religious writings indirectly highlight his capacity, in a time of great religious upheavals, to
perceive the shades of grey in a world too often defined as either black or white. Although the
conciliation of his Catholic upbringing with his allegiance to the Church of England must at
times hâve proved difficult, Donne seems to hâve found a middle ground within himself for the
contradictory views expressed by the warring factions of his times. It is in the context of this
middle ground that this chapter examines his relationship with his Christian God. More
particularly, in his Holy Sonnets and his prose work Dévotions upon Emergent Occasions, how
did the aesthetic character of the Metaphysical conceit enable him to achieve his religious and
méditative aims?
Donne's mitigated position in the debates that were soon to tear his country apart between
Puritans and Anglicans and his adhésion to the Anglican Church after several years of
unemployment hâve led a few members of the critical world to question the sincerity of his
vocation. In John Donne, Life, Mind and Art ( 1981 ), a work now notorious for its primarily
hostile attitude towards Donne, Carey déclares that the poet's passage to the Church of England
was motivated by his ambition, his intellectualism, and his reaction against his former teachers
and elders (3 1 ). This assertion was later to be refuted by critics such as Edwards who
emphasized Donne's apparent genuine dedication to his office as Dean of St-Paul's Cathedral in
London (99). For Edwards as for many others, Donne's was a true calling, his move to the
Anglican Church thus springing from a long period of self-questioning and of serious
délibération.
Edwards in John Donne Man of Flesh andSpirit in fact succeeds in reconciling Jack
Donne with the Dean of St-Paul through the poet's vision of mutual love between a man and
woman as a retlection of the Divine love that governs the universe. In "Since she whom I loved
hath paid her last debt", Edwards remarks that Donne présents his late wife, Anne, as she who
"had persuaded him to drink from a river which came from God, with the resuit that '1 hâve
found thee, and thou my thirst hast fed'" (268). Donne's love for his wife thus seems to hâve
contributed to elevate his mind towards heaven. Anne Donne's influence on her husband's
conception of love may perhaps explain why so much of the lover can be perceived in the poetpriest of Donne's devotional writings.
Donne's religious works however differ substantially from his poems of mutuality both in
the level of mastery he demonstrates in the treatment of his subject and in the anxiety they betray
with regard to his relationship with the Divine. The poet's mind, which indulged in exalted
visions of cosmic magnitude in his love lyrics, hère probes the ties that bind a worshipper to his
God anxiously, as if unsure of their présence. Consequently, his handling of the Metaphysical
conceit lacks the confidence conveyed by the microcosmic imagery of his poems of mutuality.
Nevertheless, Donne's attempts to attain the Divine through the Metaphysical conceit bespeak his
longing in his relationship with his Maker for the sensé of communion that had marked his union
with the beloved in lyrics such as "A Valediction; forbidding Mourning".
Although the critical world has devoted more attention to Donne's epistemology than to
his rhetoric in the last two décades, some récent studies hâve stressed the appropriateness of the
Metaphysical conceit as an instrument to represent his relationship to the Divine. This is notably
the case with Brodsky (1982) and Biester (1997) who, in their respective studies of Donne's
handling of the conceit, highlight its aptness to the task of'"preaching the Word'" (Brodsky,
839) that he undertook in his mature years. As a literary device often characterized by paradox,
reversai and hyperbole, the Metaphysical conceit seems to hâve been the favourite instrument of
some Renaissance priests and divine poets for conveying the sensé of wonder the believer may
dérive from his expérience of a divine mystery. When he finally undertook the writing of his
54
devotional works in prose such as Dévotions upon Emergent Occasions, and his religious verse
such as the Holy Sonnets between 1610 and 1620, Donne thus had for long been experimenting
with the conceit and "had already exercised the stratégies for provoking admiration that he knew
were ail the more sanctioned in religious verse" (Biester, 148).
Yet, Donne's soaring mind in his religious lyrics seems impeded in its flight to heaven by
the weight of both original and personal sin. The poet-speaker's relationship with his Maker has
indeed suffered a breach that must be mended for the salvation of his soûl. In order to restore the
ties that once united him to the Divine, the repentant-persona of Donne's devotional works begs
God to invest him with His all-pervasive présence and to purify his flesh and soûl from the foui
taint of sin. Donne thus builds intricate conceits through which he exploits the image of man as a
microcosm purified through the intervention of Divine agency and prays the Lord for the holy
peace of mind one dérives from being joined intellectually to his Creator. As the tormented priest
asks the Lord to ravish his soûl and take him to his bosom, his expérience of the Divine blends
spiritual exaltation with sensuousness. "Holy Sonnet 14" is an example: "Take me to you,
imprison me, for 1/ Except you enthral me, never shall be free,/ Nor ever chaste, except you
ravish me" (11. 12-14). Donne in fact uses the Metaphysical conceit in his attempt to attain the
Divine, and, although several critics hâve questioned his degree of success, he nevertheless
achieves the création of an extraordinary sensé of intensity and of immediacy in his
représentation of man's relationship with God.
The speaker of Donne's Holy Sonnets is an excellent example of his attempt to corne to
terms with God in a viable relationship with Him. The speaker frequently represents himself as a
sinner who repents for his past mistakes and prays the Lord to afford him His grâce and mercy.
Donne indeed seems to conceive of sin as having the power of altering man's capacity to feel
God's immanence in Création and therefore of severing the ties linking him to the Almighty.
The notion of purification against the divisive force of sin is therefore central to the Holy
Sonnets, as thèse primarily dramatize a sinner's attempt to restore the bond that united man to his
Maker before the Fall. In "Holy Sonnet 1", a méditation on man's constant need for divine
sustenance to élude the pitfalls of sin in a fallen world, Donne represents a worshipper's graduai
move from despair to certainty. Concerned with both his immédiate and ultimate destiny, the
speaker begs the Lord to guard his soûl against the threat of spiritual death. The first octet
depicts the poet-speaker's unsuccessful struggle to free himself from the hold of sin:
Thou hast made me, and shall thy work decay?
Repair me now, for now mine end doth haste,
I run to death, and death meets me as fast,
And ail my pleasures are like yesterday,
I dare not move my dim eyes any way,
Despair behind, and death before doth cast
Such terror, and my feeble flesh doth waste
By sin in it, which towards Hell doth weigh; ("Holy Sonnet 1", 11. 1-8)
Although not ail the images in this passage, structurally speaking, constitute Metaphysical
conceits as we hâve defined the figure in the first chapter of the présent thesis, Donne's
description of the sinner's spiritual unrest serves to illustrate the manner in which he conceived of
sin as an obstacle to man's relationship with the Divine. In the octet, the speaker of "Thou hast
made me" présents himself as a dying man who, like his counterpart in the opening conceit of "A
Valediction: forbidding Mo.urning", stands "on the brink of eternity" (Edwards, 5), waiting for
his soul's passage to another world. Yet, unlike the virtuous man of "A Valediction", who may
look upon his approaching death serenely, the speaker of "Thou hast made me" is fraught with
the fear of the torments that await him as a penalty for his sins. Donne's référence to the
expérience of the parting of body and soûl in the octet is concerned, this time in the reader's
mind, with the complication rather than the simplicity of the dual nature of the contingent 'death'
of his spiritual self by eternal damnation. The fear and despair of the sinner that inhabit his
56
feeble flesh over the mortality of his body thus confer an aura of corresponding death-like "cold
sensuality" to his soûl (Williamson, 50). The sinner, without the intervention of God's
redeeming agency, is left with no means of effecting his salvation of the other half of him that is
his spirit. Sin's effect on the spiritual part of man is thus hère depicted in terms of Metaphysical
imagery that renders it apprehensible to the rational intellect. Human consternation is to the
death of the body as moral despair is to the dissolution of the soûl. Certainly, Donne's
description of an affection of the soûl, that is, the fear of damnation, by means of its
corresponding body-passion confers materiality to an otherwise abstract reality.
In her article "Visages de la souffrance chez John Donne", Munoz-Teulié states that the
passivity and anxiety expressed by the speaker of Donne's religious lyrics may be explained by
the poet's shift to Protestantism in his mature years - to a religion which left a sinner with very
little or no certainty with regard to the salvation of his soûl (50-51). In a fallen world left prey to
sin and death, man's only hope of spiritual purification was believed, Munoz-Teulié argues, to
réside in God's redeeming grâce, but according to much Protestant theology, this grâce was not
bestowed on everyone. According to the Calvinist theology of the elect, God chose, it appeared,
to give grâce to some and not to others. The attitude of the repentant-persona in Donne's
devotional or religious poetry may therefore be thought of as reflecting the Protestant belief in the
necessity for further divine assistance to overcome one's weaknesses because he fears that grâce
is not enough. In this poem as in several others, Donne therefore represents the chasm that
séparâtes a man's aspirations from the reality of his condition. To him, the human mind is "a
battlefield between the forces of light and the powers of'lust and envie'" (Edwards, 20) - a battle
of which the outcome, without divine sustenance, will always remain uncertain. Unlike the
speaker of Donne's poems of maie and female mutuality whose oneness with the beloved was
nothing short of a certainty, the tormented worshipper has difficulty to feel God's présence.
57
Although he reaches upwards to his Maker, sin weighs him down and seems to assume that his
spiritual death will occur at the same time as his physical démise.
In the sestet of "Thou hast made me", Donne introduces the solution to the speaker's
predicament described in the octet. He adopts the convention of the sonnet - the octet poses a
problem and the sestet solves it - to the structure of the conceit and the nature of Metaphysical
verse. The speaker's move from despair to hope and confidence is achieved through the sonnet's
graduai pithy, epigrammatic progression towards the condensed conceit of the final line. There, a
sensé of unity between the sinner and his Maker is restored in the poem's speaker. Whereas the
octet ended on a descending note with the ghastly sight of the torments of hell, the sestet afïords
the reader a glimpse of heaven as the poet-speaker turns his gaze upwards:
Only thou art above, and when towards thee
By thy leave 1 can look, 1 rise again;
But our old subtle foe so tempteth me,
That not one hour 1 can myself sustain;
Thy Grâce may wing me to prevent his art,
And thou like adamant, draw mine iron heart. ("Holy Sonnet 1", 11. 9-14)
The sestet hère depicts the speaker's progression towards his complète surrender to God's will.
Caught in the deadly snares of sin and paralyzed by fear and despair, the sinner needs the
intervention of the Lord's grâce to gain heaven. In a conceit that pictures divine grâce as a
magnetic power that attracts the hearts of men hardened by sin, he thus signifies his acceptance of
the only course of action available to him. The sinner therefore yields passively to his Maker as
iron offers itself without résistance to adamant's magnetic attraction. We note the pain in
Donne's use of iron. The sinner's heart has become as unfeelingly hard as iron, but paradoxically
it is this very iron hardiness that allows God's magnet to work on him.
In order to overcome despair and restore a sensé of communion between God and himself,
the speaker must, as DiPasquale has pointed out in her study of sacramentality in Donne's verse,
58
"rely upon his own invention, his own concetti, his own skill as a sonneteer" (102). Di Pasquale
has argued in fact that this self-reliance is a prévalent need for the speaker throughout the Holy
Sonnets: "the poet/speaker is a man alone. His voice - like that of Petrarch in the Rime sparse rings out in a desolate space inhabited only by himself and the projected image of his beloved;
and, like Petrarch, he often speaks as much to himself as to the object of his dévotion" (102). In
"Thou hast made me", the distraught condition of the poet-speaker that DiPasquale describes is
particularly prévalent. It is precisely through the conceit representing God's grâce as magnetic
power acting on a lonely human that Donne achieves a sensé of renewal with the Divine. The
conceit indeed describes the eflfect of God's agency upon the speaker in such a way as to make it
available to the understanding and shows how sinners in a lonely battle willing to surrender to the
Lord's grâce will be cleansed from the foui taint of sin that weighs them down. Donne's use of
figurative language in his délibérations with God hence "bring[s] the spiritual realm closer to
human perception" (Wilcox, 64-65). As in "A Valediction: of Weeping", the speaker's définition
of an abstract reality, hère the influence of grâce upon the soûl, through imagery that renders it
more apprehensible confers on him a certain measure of control over expérience. The conceit
ending "Thou hast made me" thereby appears to assume the character of a sacramental motif that
we find in poems such as "The Cross", which, according to Whalen, facilitâtes the speaker's
"escape from subjective doubt" (74). That is, as a resuit of Donne's skilled use of the
Metaphysical conceit, the speaker's voice, which was wavering with uncertainty in the first octet,
ends the poem on a hopeful note. "Thou hast made me" hence progresses from despair to hope
and finds its resolution in a conceit of flesh, soûl, iron and magnet that, however momentarily,
succeeds in re-establishing a sensé of unity between man and God.
Sacramentality is of course not wholly absent from the possibly Calvinist context of
Donne's Holy Sonnets. Several critics, such as DiPasquale and Whalen, hâve indeed highlighted
59
its centrality to the définition of Donne's devotional idéal expressed in his divine poetic
méditations. For example, "Holy Sonnet 5" ("I am a little world made cunningly") is in fact built
upon a conceit which blends sacramental motifs and metaphysical imagery to represent Donne's
conception of the expérience of purification through divine agency. In the first part of the poem,
the repentant persona is represented as a little world or microcosm made up of matter and spirit,
mirroring Création in both its fate and constituents:
I am a little world made cunningly
Of éléments, and an angelic sprite,
But black sin hath betrayed to endless night
My world's both parts, and, oh, both parts must die.
You which beyond that heaven which was most high
Hâve found new sphères, and of new lands can write
Pour new seas in mine eyes, that so I might
Drown my world with my weeping earnestly
Or wash it if it must be drowned no more ("Holy Sonnet 5", 11. 1-9)
As in the macrocosm of the created universe, the material and the spiritual appear to be blended
in the poet-speaker perfectly. He is therefore represented as a little world in many ways similar
to God's Création. This description of man as a small-scale représentation of the universe,
however, ought not to be taken only pictonally. Commenting on Donne's "Holy Sonnet 19" "Oh
to vex me" and on Alabaster's Sonnet 15, "My soûl is a world by contraction", Anthony Raspa in
The Emotive Image explains that instances of microcosmic imagery in seventeenth century
British poetry ought not to be regarded as a représentation uniquely of "a visual universe" (17),
but also as a référence to the dual émotive nature of the universe. That is, in the Baroque period,
which lasted roughly from the beginning until the end of the seventeenth century, man was
believed to possess "a dual émotive nature" that placed him not only somehow halfway between
the spiritual and the material, but also between sensation and the eternal émotions of love and
hâte embodied in God and Satan (Raspa, 17). In "Holy Sonnet 5" ("I am a little world"),
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Donne's use of Metaphysical imagery again renders an abstract reality, hère the relationship that
unités the sensuous and the spiritual in the sinner, available to the understanding.
In the same sonnet the Baroque conception of the dual character of human nature as a
mixture of temporal and eternal émotions has important implications for the entire poem. The
poem's central conceit represents man as a microcosm reflecting the greater macrocosm of the
universe, and indeed présents the relationship uniting man's body and soûl as both religious and
émotive. That is, as a reflection of the eternal émotions pervading the created universe, man is
therefore the théâtre of the war raging between the eternal forces of love and hâte in the
macrocosm of the universe temporally anchored in him - of a world in which sin was unleashed
in the Fall. The body being the "réceptacle" (Raspa, 17) of man's émotions, the sin that taints the
soûl consequently dooms the body. The image that pictures man as a microcosm in the first
quatrain of "1 am a little world" thus reinforces the notion of the human compound as a battlefield
for the struggle opposing the forces of good and evil introduced in "Holy Sonnet 1" ("Thou hast
made me"), and constitutes a powerful statement on the complexity of the sinner's predicament.
In order to reach God, the speaker must direct his mind and affections to embrace the ways of
immortal love.
Thus, as the created universe bears the foui taint of sin, so does the worshipper who,
without the intervention of God's redeeming agency, will die spiritually as well as physically. In
'Holy Sonnet 5" ("1 am a little world"), it is therefore through a conceit built on such sacramental
interférence in human salvation by God that the sinner fmds his way back to his Maker. The
contrite poet-speaker hence appeals to those who were elevated beyond the stars to send tears of
sincère repentance for his mistakes and wash away the stain of both original and personal sin just
as the world was cleansed of the numerous sins of mankind in the waters of the Flood (11. 5-9).
The sacramental dimension of the conceits of "I am a little world" appears exactly described in
(.1
DiPasquale's Literature and Sacrament. In her discussion of this sonnet, she explains that the
emotional force of the image of the flood may be appreciated only if one recognizes "the water of
the Déluge" as a type or "'figure' of baptism" (106). That is, as the Déluge was sent to destroy
corruption on earth (Genesis, 6:12), baptism washes away the stain of the original sin from the
soûl of an infant. However, the repentant-persona soon realizes the impossibility for him of
finding spiritual purification in the sacrament of baptism again. Did not God promise to Noah
and his sons that the world would be drowned no more (Genesis, 9:1 1)? Accordingly, an
individual cannot receive the sacrament of baptism twice in a lifetime and the poet-speaker's
tears of repentance for his sins are deemed insufficient for the salvation of his soûl!
Therefore in the sestet of the sonnet the poet-speaker turns to another sacrament, the
Eucharist, to cleanse his entire being from the taint of sin. The notion of sacrament itself
revolves around the ideas of sign and signifier, which bear an important significance with regard
to Donne's use of Eucharistie imagery. English Protestants in Donne's time conceived of the
signifier as heavenly grâce whereas the sign was seen as the visible représentation of that grâce
(DiPasquale, 40). Through transubstantiation, the visible sign in the Eucharist would be endowed
with divine grâce which, in turn, would invest the récipient of the sacrament. Donne seems to
hâve shared this conception of the interaction of sign and signifier in the Eucharist for, as he
himself explained in Sermon LXVIII quoted in DiPasquale, "when I hâve received [the
sacrament] worthily, it becomes my very soûle; that is, My soûle growes up into a better state,
and habitude by it, and I hâve (...) the more deified my soûle by the sacrament" (DiPasquale, 1314). In "Holy Sonnet 5", moreover, the poet-speaker describes the annihilation of his being by
fire in a way which is reminiscent of the destruction of the visible sign in the Eucharist:
But oh it must be burnt; alas the fire
Of lust and envy hâve burnt it heretofore,
And made it fouler; let their flame retire,
And burn me O Lord, with a fiery zeal
Of thee and thy house, which doth in eating heal. ("Holy Sonnet 5", 11. 10-14)
Like the macrocosm of the created universe, "reserved unto fire against the day of judgement and
perdition of ungodly men" (Peter, 3:7), the poet-speaker's little world must burn for the balance
of his sins, yet this fire will paradoxically not only consume him but also repair him, healing the
burn left by lust and envy, achieving its end in verse by the effect of antithesis characteristic of
Metaphysical verse. As the world shall be restored and purified by God's fire (as it had been
purified in the dévastation of the Flood), so shall the believer be rejuvenated as a resuit of the
destruction of the visible sign by means of which the power of divine grâce shall be unleashed in
him. Donne in "Holy Sonnet 5" thus finds comfort in a conceit which performs the spiritual
purification effected by the sacrament of the Eucharist - "in the act of receiving, 'in eating'"
(DiPasquale, 113). The speaker therefore ends his holy méditation in the knowledge that through
his surrender to God's divine agency, the battle raging within the self may finally corne to a close
and give way to peace. Through the conceit of "I am a little world", Donne hence fuses notions
of sacramentality with Metaphysical imagery to convey a sensé of hope in the renewal of the ties
binding a man to his God through the sacraments.
If sacramentalism and the émotions as ways of reaching the Divine in "Holy Sonnet 5"
hâve given rise to a certain polemic among Donne scholars, none of his Holy Sonnets has caused
as much controversy as "Holy Sonnet 14" ("Batter my heart, three-personed God"). Since the
revival of Donne's poetry in the early twentieth century, this sonnet has been harshly criticized
for its main conceit that suggests that Donne wants a divine râpe to take place. However
shocking this image may be to a modem sensibility, it is nevertheless necessary for one to look
beyond its literal meaning to appreciate the subtlety of Donne's thought. In "Batter my heart",
the ideas of surrender, passivity, and redemptive suffering involved in the notion of divine
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aggression by râpe are again central to Donne's idéal of dévotion. The imagery that describes the
speaker's ravishment ought therefore be considered for its significance as Metaphysical poetry
rather than its literal meaning. In his attempt to reach out towards his Maker, the poet-speaker in
fact seems to conceive of suffering as a necessary step on the path of rédemption and spiritual
purification. In this respect, Donne models his devotional idéal on the life of Christ, whose
suffering and death on the cross brought about the rédemption of mankind. Donne indeed seems
to regard spiritual purification as involving the complète oblitération and récréation of the self- a
rebirth of some sort not unlike the résurrection of Christ. The octet of the sonnet "Batter my
heart" thus begins where "1 am a little world" had ended, with the poet-speaker begging his
Maker to create him anew:
Batter my heart, three-personed God; for, you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That 1 may rise, and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend
Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurped town, to another due,
Labour to admit you, but oh, to no end,
Reason your viceroy in me, me should défend,
But is captived, and proves weak or untrue ("Holy Sonnet 14", 11. 1-8)
Donne's imagery in the First quatrain of the octet again brings the relationship uniting the sensés
of the body and the affections of the soûl to the foreground and lends a certain measure of
physicality or tangibility to the ties joining the devotional-poet to his God. As in "Thou hast
made me", a chasm séparâtes the speaker's aspirations from the reality of his condition. While
part of him wishes to surrender to the Lord's grâce, something in his very nature, the stain of
original and personal sin, interfères and prevents him from aspiring towards the Almighty. To
free himself from the grasp of sin, he must tolerate a pain which, spiritually, amounts to the
sexual violation of his physical self. He therefore asks God to descend upon him and invest his
soûl and flesh with His crushing présence. By relying on such physical imagery to describe his
expérience of the Divine, and on diction such as "break, blow, burn" (1. 4), the poet-speaker
addresses this subtle knot that binds the material and the spiritual in man, and mankind to its
Creator. The poem is trying to tell us that this knot finds its perfect expression in Christ himself the symbol of the encounter between the human and the Divine. If, as Aristotle believed,
every affection of the soûl has a corresponding body-passion, then the spiritual expérience Donne
describes in this sonnet must also be felt in the flesh - sensuously.
In the octet's second quatrain, the conceit defining the relationship uniting the sinner to
his Maker once more dramatizes the powerlessness of an individual under the hold of sin. In this
passage, God is to the speaker as the rightful lord of a town is to the enemy who tries to usurp it.
But in the numerous antithèses created by the paradox of the image, God is a rightful town owner
as well as a usurping enemy, and the town that is being fought over is Donne the speaker in the
poem who fights to keep the enemy out ail the time wishing to let him in (11. 5-8). The repentantpersona imaged in the town is thus unsuccessful in his attempt to overcome the weaknesses that
prevent him from yielding to his rightful Lord and paradoxically letting his enemy in. The
conceit of the usurped town again represents a sinner's anxiety about his incapacity to intervene
for the salvation of his soûl. Once more, a gap seems to separate the speaker's aspirations from
the reality of his condition. Certainly, Gardner was right to observe that if the lover and poetpriest persona are in some ways similar, they differ in this that whereas the speaker of Donne's
erotic lyrics frequently célébrâtes a conquest, his devotional writings dramatize the opposite, that
is a sinner's "struggle to surrender" (Edwards, 150).
In the sestet of the sonnet, Donne attempts to bridge the chasm that has formed between
the speaker's aspirations and his actual condition. The dramatization of the divine violation is
actually the sestet's solution to the problem of the sinner's résistance to God that the octet
proposed. The sinner's passage through pain does not appear so much as a breaking of the bond
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uniting man to his Maker, but as its mending or restoration. Still, the sexual imagery contained in
the sestet is stunning to the modem reader:
Yet dearly'I love you, and would be love fain,
But am bethroted unto your enemy,
Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I
Except you enthral me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me. ("Holy Sonnet 14", 11. 9-14)
Donne's conceit hère borders on blasphemy as God is simultaneously depicted as a suitor and a
rapist. Nevertheless, the poet succeeds in making the expérience of violence appear as a
resolution to the speaker's dilemma. That is, God is to the poet-speaker both as a suitor and a
rapist only in so far as His influence upon the sinner may be perceived as an intrusion meeting
with résistance. The imprisonment and enthrallment in God are paradoxically felt as deliverance
by the poet-speaker whose condition is as a resuit finally attuned to his aspirations. Moreover, in
his analysis of "Holy Sonnet 14", Raspa explains that the sexual imagery of this conceit may be
interpreted as a form of "willed expérience" (63). ' Will' in the Baroque period was conceived as
the faculty which "led men as much to God as to anything else" (Raspa, 63). Through the final
conceit of the desired râpe, Donne therefore illustrâtes how the sinner may bridge the chasm that
has formed between his aspirations and the reality of his condition through an act of will even if
he préfigures the expérience in the image of a râpe. Despite the sins that weigh upon his
conscience, the repentant-persona may indeed hope for the reinstatement of the bond that tied
him to his Maker by willingly yielding to Him. Donne hence présents his idéal of dévotion as
willed surrender and, through the final conceit, shows how "ail paradoxes find their suprarational resolution" (Payne, 212) in God. The poet-speaker thus claims his désire to be pure and
free to join his Creator.
Donne's représentation of a spiritual expérience in terms of physicality in the first
quatrain of the controversial "Holy Sonnet 14" constitutes a noteworthy comment by him on his
idea of how humans perceive their existential condition. The poem's movement from the
material world to the eternal realm of the soûl is indeed central to Donne's epistemological
approach to human relationships not only hère but to also elsewhere in his writings. In Dévotions
upon Emergent Occasions, a work which records his reflections during a long illness that had
forced him to take to his bed for a period of 23 days in late 1623, this move from one realm of
existence to another lies at the basis of the structure of each of his devotional exercises. Tapping
constantly on the border where matter and spirit meet underlies his method of investigating the
relationship uniting man to God and création.
In his search for a spiritual significance to human expérience, Donne's penetrating mind
thus hovers between the sensuous and the spiritual realms that constitute our world. Such an
investigation of human condition is représentative of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth
century era in which man was thought to be continually in touch with the spiritual forces that
governed the universe. According to Raspa, Counter-Reformation thinkers in Donne's time
indeed believed that "man was always conscious of a meaningful universe" and was "bound to
recognize its significance" (13). In Dévotions upon Emergent Occasions that Donne composed
after the Holy Sonnets, his search for the spiritual significance of sensuous human expérience
hence reflects the Counter-Reformation belief in a universe charged with spiritual meaning.
Certainly, because of this, Donne's mature thinking betrays signs of his Catholic upbringing.
Of course, Donne's approach to his subject in his devotional writings was not solely
influenced by the Baroque Counter-Reformation world-view. The method of Dévotions also
relies heavily on that of Protestant typology. The metaphysical approach to the world used by
Protestant thinkers revolved around three concepts, namely those of the Book of Créatures, the
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Book of Scriptures, and the Book of Life. The Book of Créatures designated the created universe
whereas the Book of Life referred to the saved spiritual soûls in eternity, a kind of register of the
names of the Elect admitted into heaven after death. For its part, the Book of Scriptures was the
Bible upon which man could rely to "identify the meaning of history in the présent for the benefit
of his salvation" (Raspa, Dévotions, xxix). Protestant thinkers hence believed that the world
could be interpreted and understood through the study of the types and prototypes of the Bible
and by the relationship of thèse to the Book of Créatures and the Register of the Elect. That is,
the events taking place in the Book of Créatures were thought to find their significance in those
of the Book of Scriptures and the person who could find this significance could also succeed in
having his name inscribed in the Register of the Elect. The interprétation of the spiritual meaning
of the events of the Book of Créatures through the médiation of saving knowledge contained in
the Bible was then believed to provide man with the spiritual insight necessary to ensure the
salvation of his soûl by his registration among the Elect. The conjunction of CounterReformation world-view and of Protestant typology thus defines Donne's epistemological
approach to man's relationship with the Divine. Certainly, his reflection on the spiritual
significance of human expérience takes him to higher spiritual considérations by way of the
sensuous. But in Dévotions this passage between the two realms of heaven and earth is mediated
by his pondering on the Book of Scriptures as it informs him about both the natural world of the
Book of Créatures and the spiritual world of the Register of the Elect to which he aspires.
This movement of Donne's thought between the two realms of existence of the universe
in Dévotions in a sensé replicates the aesthetic effect of the Metaphysical conceit that van Hook
describes in "Baroque Poetics". As was explained in the first chapter of this thesis, van Hook
attributes the aesthetic effect of the Metaphysical conceit to its reproduction of the mind's flight
from one to the other of the existential catégories upon which man relies for his analysis of the
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world (van Hook, 36). Whereas metaphor relies on creating similarities in its représentation of
ideas or concepts, the Metaphysical conceit guides the reader's mind every step of the way so as
to force it to get "the exact curve of Donne's mode of thinking and feeling" (Williamson, 84). In
Dévotions, the subdivision of the world between the material and the spiritual, and of the human
condition between the sensés and the soûl, posits the création of analytical catégories such as
those van Hook describes. Thèse catégories thus render possible the délimitation, "in the very act
of structuring, [of] the scope of human awareness" (van Hook, 27). Accordingly, Donne in his
Dévotions juxtaposes temporal expérience in the world of the sensés to its corresponding spiritual
reality in order to decipher the spiritual significance of his physical condition. Each of the
twenty-three dévotions in Dévotions is divided into a "méditation", an "expostulation", and a
"prayer" and the attentive reader may follow the movements of his mind from image to image
through ail three parts of each dévotion as they occur to him and, with him, embrace the natural
conclusion of his reasoning. As Donne himself points out in one of his sermons: "The soûl of
man is incorporate in his words (...) as he speaks, we think he thinks" (VIII, no 15, 11. 220-222).
Donne's words in Dévotions npon Emergent Occasions hence mirror his thoughts by replicating
the progression of his mind from one set of relationships to another. His treatment of the subject
of man's relationship with God in Dévotions may thus be said to follow the method of the
Metaphysical conceit and reproduce its aesthetic effect by attracting the reader.
Although Donne's method for handling the subject of man's relationship with the Divine
may be exemplified by virtually any of his exercises in Dévotions, his fourth dévotion is of
particular interest for the présent thesis because of its use of its imagery of microcosm and
macrocosm. This dévotion records the fourth day of Donne's illness when his condition requires
the assistance of a physician. In the "Méditation" constituting the first part of the dévotion
Donne focuses his attention on a reality of the material world in order to understand his physical
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condition, which will in turn provide him with insight on a corresponding spiritual reality in the
"Expostulation", the second part of the dévotion. Donne hence begins by praising the complexity
of man's body with the now famous phrase: "It is too little to call Man a Utile world; Except God,
Man is diminutive to nothing" (19). Then, he goes on to marvel at the constituents of the human
body, and delivers a very visual analogy that brings the body and the created universe together:
If ail the Veines in our bodies, were extended to Rivers, and ail the Sinewes, to
vaines of Mines, and ail the Muscles, that lye upon one another, Hilles, and ail the
Bones to Ouarries of stones, and ail other pièces, to the proportion of those which
correspond to them in the world, the aire would be too little for this Orbe of Man
to move in, the firmament would bee but enough for this star; for, as the whole
world hath nothing, to which something in man doth not answere, so hath man
many pièces, of which the whol world hath no représentation. (Dévotions, 19)
Hère, Donne's identification of the parts of the human body with physical éléments of the earth
marks his attempt at anchoring man's temporal self in that part of the created universe which
must be experienced sensuously and from which one may dérive higher spiritual wisdom. As
Sherwood notes in Fulfilling the Circle, "Donne's consciousness of the body heightens the
importance of the traditional microcosm-macrocosm notion in his thought" (16). That is, Donne
represents the body as "half of the human composite and the fulfilment of material création", a
création in which "Ail material existence points to the body" (Sherwood, 16). The body therefore
appears as the perfect mediator between a human's spiritual insight into the significance of the
created universe and his understanding of his place in it.
In Donne's view, we may argue, the sensés of the body are indispensable to man's
compréhension of a universe charged with spiritual meaning. They disclose to him the hiclden
messages in the Book of Créatures and hence its relevance to the Bible and salvation. Whereas
the lovers' bodies in Donne's poems of mutuality were represented as essential to the expérience
of spiritual union, for example in the conceit of the unified soûl in "The Extasie" (11. 49-60), in
the passage ofDévotions above, the meditator's sensés enable him to understand the created
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world and at the same time to go beyond it to grasp the nature of the soûl. Not only the human
condition of "The Ecstasie" but the compréhension of the spirit is at stake. In his description of
the human compound, Donne does not neglect man's spiritual part which he places, as is fit,
among the stars. His thoughts are thus identified with the mythical créatures of the earth, "borne
Gyants: that reach from East to West, from earth to Heaven, that doe not onely bestride ail the
Sea, and Land, but span the Sunn and Firmament at once; My thoughts reach ail, comprehend
ail" {Dévalions, 20). One may certainly discern the structure of the Metaphysical conceit in this
analogy which compares the organs of man's body and the thoughts of his mind respectively to
the physical éléments of earth and to giants who could reach the outer limits of the cosmos. In
Donne's little world, the spiritual part of man, although temporally anchored in the body, is
placed among the stars, close to what his era understood as the eternal and infinité in Ptolemaic
cosmology, whereas his temporal self, the body, dwells in the world of the sensés. In his fourth
méditation, Donne is therefore marvelling "at the union of those contrary forces in himself (73)
- at the meeting of the spiritual and the sensuous in him, as he is liberated by the very force that
restrains him.
Thus, in the first part of Donne's fourth méditation, the human body and the world are
juxtaposed in such a way as may remind the reader of many of the Metaphysical conceits in
Donne's poetry. Through a conceit founded on paradox, identifiable by its use of the words 'as'
and 'so', he créâtes an analogy between the human body and many parts of the universal. The
body becomes a microcosm of the macrocosmic universe and the knowledge of one becomes
paradoxically the explanation of the other:
And then as the other world produces Serpents, and Vipers, malignant, &
venomous créatures, and Wormes, and Carlerpillars, that endeavour to devoure
the world which produces them, and Monsters compiled of divers parents, &
kinds, so this world, our selves, produces ail thèse in us, in producing diseuses, &
sicknesses, of ail sorts; venomous, and infectious diseases, feeding & consuming
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diseases, and manifold, and entangled diseases, made up of several ones. And can
the world name so many venimous, so many consuming, so many monstrous
créatures, as we can diseases, of ail thèse kinds? (Dévotions, 20)
Even in the production of malevolent créatures, man's body - small as it is - proves superior to
the world by producing diseases more numerous and oppressive than the monsters that plague the
vast earth. Yet as the vipers, monsters, and venomous créatures are to the earth, so are diseases
to man. Hence, Donne relies on a reality of the material universe to interpret the type and
magnitude of his physical state. Certainly, in this passage, one may easily recognize the structure
of "as" and "so" that underlies the Metaphysical conceit, which fonctions hère as a device joining
the meditator's body and the temporal universe and makes Donne's interprétation of the
expérience of illness possible.
In this image of the monsters of the earth and his body, Donne of course does not suspend
the opération of his reason. He pursues it assiduously in order to understand the spiritual
significance of his physical state. He therefore notes that if animais in the material universe
instinctively know how to take care of themselves, man needs the help of a physician to
administer the treatments necessary to the improvement of his condition (20). From this
observation, Donne extrapolâtes a reflection on the necessity for restorative grâce to purify man
from the disease of the soûl: sin. In the "Expostulation", he therefore describes the relationship
that unités the sinner to his Creator in terms of the other relationship that ties a man to his
physician:
In the voice of thy Sonn, Wilt thon he made whole? That drawes from the patient
a confession that he was ill, and could not make himself wel. And it is thine own
voice, Is there no Phisician? That inclines us, disposes us to accept thine
Ordinance (...) In ail thèse voices, thou sendest us to those helpes, which thou hast
afforded us in that. But wilt not thou avowe that voice too, Hee that hath sinned
against his Make/; tel himfall into the hands of the Phisician, and thou not afford
me an understanding of those wordes? Thou who sendest us for a blessing to the
Phisician, doest not make it a curse for us, to go, when thou sendest. Is not the
curse rather in this, that onely he falls into the hands of the Phisician, that casts
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himself wholly, intirely upon the physician, confides in him, relies upon him,
attends ail from him, and neglects that spiritualphisicke, which thou also hast
instituted in thy Church: so to fall into the hands of the Phisician, is a sirme, and a
punishment of former sinnes; so as Asa fell fell, who in his disease, sought not to
the Lord, but lo the Phisician. Reveale therefore to me thy method, O Lord, & see,
whether l hâve followed it; that thou mayest hâve glory, if 1 hâve, and I, pardon, if
I hâve not, & helpe that I may. (Dévotions, 21-22)
Basing his reflection on a passage taken from the second book of Chronicles (16.12), Donne
understands the importance for him to turn to his Maker in adversity and he interprets his
physical illness as a sign of the spiritual disease that plagues his soûl. He thus cornes to the
realization that, as the patient must acknowledge the dégradation of his physical stateto send for
the physician, so must the sinner rely upon God, the Physician of the soûl, and sincerely seek
forgiveness to be made whole anew. Tn this passage, the structure of Donne's discourse on the
subject of divine grâce is again highly reminiscent of that of the Metaphysical conceit. Donne's
compréhension of the spiritual significance of the Book of Créatures, ofwhich his sick body is a
part, is mediated through two pairs of things as in the Metaphysical conceit: the sensés of the
body are to the expérience of illness as the saving knowledge of the Lord is to the biblical
passages presented in italics in his text. Donne's mind hère proceeds from the material world
through the sensés of the body, then to the saving knowledge of the Bible, and finally reaches
new levels of spiritual insight related to salvation.
Donne hence seizes the opportunity offered by physical illness to allow his consciousness
to travel between the layers of meaning of human expérience, with each layer easing his passage
into the next. Throughout his reflection, the relationship that unités body and soûl plays an
important rôle as mediator in the assessment of the expérience of suffering. In Ftdfilling the
Circle, Sherwood notes that "human suffering" is "the essential condition of earthly life" (17) for
a créature that has doomed itself to seek rédemption eternally for its past sins. In order to reestablish the bond uniting him to his Maker, man must employ "The assembled powers of
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consciousness" to "evaluate the significance of pain in body and soûl" for pain and death, and
"God's contradictory punishment and purification from sin, convert sinful love for the créature
into love for God" (Sherwood, 17). The insight the devotional writer like Donne thus gains from
his reflection on the expérience of the sensés, and its spiritual significance causes him to turn to
God, to surrender his soûl to Him in order to be purified and elevated. Through the movement of
his mind from the sensuous and temporal in the "Méditation" of the fourth dévotion to the
intangible and spiritual in its "Expostulation", Donne hence remains in touch with the forces
immanent in the universe that contribute to the shaping of human expérience at the same time
that he goes beyond them. In the saving knowledge he dérives from his méditation on the
material world, the teachings of the Bible, and eternal spiritual reality, the reader oï Dévotions
recognizes his insistent pleas as a repentant-persona. Moreover, he succeeds in unity with his
God. As such, in the acquisition of saving knowledge, as speaker oï Dévotions Donne achieves a
sensé of communion with the Divine that distinguishes him from the restless poet-priest of the
Holy Sonnets.
In the "Prayer", the third part of the fourth dévotion in question, Donne synthesizes the
ideas that he developed in both its "Méditation" and the "Expostulation" and prays God to help
him live out the meaning he has discovered through his spiritual exercise. In this final volley of
his dévotion, one may sensé that a change has taken place in the speaker whose whole self is now
turned to good ends. As in "Holy Sonnet 5" ("1 am a little world") and "Holy Sonnet 14 ("Batter
my heart"), the speaker has discovered through affliction the path leading back to God. In a
direct référence to Christ's sufferings, he therefore states: "With his s/ripes we are healed, sayes
the Prophet there; there, before he was scourged, wee were healed with his stripes; how much
more shall 1 bee healed now, now, when that which he hath already suffered actually, is actually,
and effectually applied to me? Is there anything incurable upon which that Balme dropps? Any
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vaine so emptie, as that that bloodcannot fil it?" (23) The speaker's redemptive illness enables
him to corne to terms with his Saviour in whom he finds the key to spiritual rejuvenation. As
Sherwood argues to explain Donne's feelings, Christ's suffering "in the flesh" indeed "points the
way to restoration" (9), for his sacrifice redeemed humanity of its numerous sins. In fact, as
Smith also argues in relation to Donne, Christ symbolizes the encounter between God and
humanity, "for he shared our manhood just so long as he united body and spirit, human élément
and divine" (215). He is the "subtle knot" that ties man to heaven, and whose image is replicated
in man's dual nature. In the "Prayer", by modelling his life on the idéal represented by his
Saviour, the expérience of suffering hence re-establishes in Donne the bond which unités him to
heaven. To him, the relationship joining man to God thus articulâtes itself in the space between
the différent layers of meaning of our uni verse. Through a method analogous to that of the
conceit, he therefore attempts to translate into words the manner in which the temporal and
sensuous interacts with the spiritual and eternal in man to bring him back to his Maker and
recreate the bond severed by sin.
Throughout both his Holy Sonnets and Dévotions upon Emergent Occasions, Donne seeks
to achieve in his relationship with God the sensé of communion that had characterized his union
with the beloved in his exalted love lyrics. Despite his sincère désire for the peace of mind one
may dérive from being joined intellectually with God, the stain of both personal and original sin
create a chasm between his aspirations and the reality of his condition, and thus prevents him
from elevating himself towards his Maker. In his désire to reinstate the ties that joined man to
the Divine before the Fall, the speaker of Donne's Dévotions and Holy Sonnets seeks spiritual
purification through the intervention of divine grâce. In this endeavour, the repentant-persona
uses the Metaphysical conceit to render his expérience of the Divine apprehensible to the
understanding and thus confers materiality on an otherwise abstract reality. Donne's intricate
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conceits, in both the sacred verse and the prose in question, blend poetic wit, metaphysical
imagery, sacramentality, sensuousness, and spirituality to depict the flight of his mind from the
material world to the eternal realm of the soûl. The Metaphysical conceit hence acts as a bridge
that facilitâtes the passage of the speaker's rational intellect from one realm of existence to the
next and allows him to reach new levels of spiritual insight. In the saving knowledge the
repentant-persona dérives from his investigation of human expérience, one may perceive the hand
of the Lord extended towards the pénitent, in Holy Sonnets and Dévotions, showing him the way
back to heaven.
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Chapter IV
"No man's an island, entire in itself': Man and Society
The close scrutiny of Donne's works reveals a man whose outlook on love, religion, and
society is marked, at least on the surface, by the same paradoxes and antithèses as his poetry. As
a resuit, his readers hâve often perceived two différent men in him. To many, Donne is the
womanizer who grew up into the lover celebrating a mutual love of body and soûl. To others, he
is the former young rascal and tormented soûl, who found a certain measure of peace in taking up
the ministry in his mature years. To yet others, he is the satirist whose cynicism and incisive
criticism of men and their times were replaced by the ideals of Renaissance humanism in his
prose works. This last aspect of Donne's gênerai vision of the world is seldom addressed in
critical assessments of his works. Only his most devoted readers seem to be acquainted with the
humanism that has characterized his thought in his mature years perhaps, one may assume,
because this humanism only transpires in his works that are at best challenging to scholars.
Donne's move from romantic love to the love of God nevertheless seems to hâve culminated in a
love of mankind. However, several critics persist in describing Donne as self-centred. Certainly,
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compared to his later humanist prose, the "Satires" Donne wrote, perhaps largely in his student
days in the 1590s, hâve received a great deal more attention from the critical world. Thèse
"Satires" paradoxically show us a man frowning on the baseness of some courtiers striving for
preferment in the very circles that he himself sought to enter and was nevertheless trying to
expose in verse. His disgust for the society of his time évident in the "Satires" may seem, at best,
difficult to reconcile with the humanism of his late forties.
The so-called discrepancies that characterize Donne's gênerai conception of mankind may
contribute to explain why some critics like Carey and Leishman hâve described him as an
unscrupulous hypocrite able to betray even his own conscience in his ruthless pursuit for royal
preferment. Others, while emphasizing his often ambiguous relationship with the Elizabethan
and Stuart establishments, hâve cast a more sympathetic eye upon the young satirist. Certainly,
given his parentage, his middling social status and his original Roman Catholic religious
affiliations, Donne's dealings with the society of his time could not fail to be problematic. Not
only was he a young Catholic, but he was also a descendant of Sir Thomas More's family, and
More had died a martyr in the aftermath of Henry VIII's break with Rome, and he was also the
nephew of Jasper Heywood, the head of the underground Jesuits in England in 1581. Earl Miner
is one of those critics whose views on this particular matter contrast sharply with Carey's. In The
Melaphysical Mode from Donne to Cowley, Miner indeed suggests that Donne's contempt for the
court, which he expresses most unequivocally in the "Satires", might hâve originated from the
necessity for him to rub shoulders with people who scorned his religion in his pursuit of a secular
position. To Miner, Donne's attitude to the establishment was therefore probably only the
expression of "his self-questioning hésitation over his search for preferment - an agony that was
to recur more evidently before him when he was urged by James 1 and by his friends to enter the
Anglican orders" (33). As a young Catholic, Donne must hâve had to struggle harder than
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anyone else to attract preferment, only to watch his bright prospects crumble when he was jailed
after his secret marriage with Anne More in 1602. The ten years of unemployment and financial
precariousness that were to follow must hâve exacerbated his already harsh feelings towards a
political establishment that was hostile to Catholics.
Critics hâve thus frequently contrasted Donne's "Satires" with his later prose works
advocating love and charity in order to highlight his so-called progression from the selfcenteredness that supposedly characterized him in his youth to the humanism of his mature years.
Still, closer scrutiny of Donne's early works reveals that despite his sometimes difficult
relationship with the English establishment, concern for mankind had always been lurking even
under the surface of his most acerbic criticisms. This is notably the case with "Satire IV" in
which Donne's contempt for the court appears to resuit from the encounter of a young idealistic
mind with a world where corruption prevails. Let us note that "Satire" in Donne's day was a
genre of poem written in relatively free verse commenting on practically any aspect of
contemporary public and private life. The genre had been developed by Latin writers like
Juvenal and revived by Renaissance humanists. In "Satire IV" in question, Donne relates a
supposed conversation with a courtier who appears as the very epitome of everything that the
young satirist despises. He describes this courtier as a man of low moral standards, who debases
his human condition by indulging in abject flattery "to win widows, and pay scores" and who, in
slander, finds the means to advance in the world (11. 45, 119-121). To the young satirist, this
courtier is therefore not a man, but "A thing, which would hâve posed Adam to name" (1. 20). In
his analysis of the poem, Miner observes that Donne's attitude towards the courtier in a sensé
honours him, for it reflects the "genuinely ambivalent" feelings (38) of a man resisting the
corruption of a world he has no choice to enter in the pursuit of his aspirations. His attitude also
reveals in him the fear of a young idealist feeling himself "Becoming a traitor", and seeing "One
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of our giant Statutes ope his jaw/ To suck me in" (11. 130-133). Court intrigues in Elizabeth l's
reign certainly did not constitute the most edifying sample of human behaviour in Renaissance
England and could not fail to clash with the moral standards of any man unacquainted with
practices such as the blackmail and calumny that was habituai with courtiers that "Satire IV"
brings up.
Nevertheless, despite his contempt for the practices of courtiers, Donne was no
misanthropist. As Miner observes, his "Satires" "show an absorption with the public world"
(38). Indeed, believed to hâve been written for the most part when he was still a law-student in
London (1593-1595) and in the year that preceded his employment as secretary to Thomas
Egerton (1597) (Patterson, 119-120), the "Satires" are almost invariably situated in an urban
setting, and even when the poet-speaker retreats to the wholesomeness of the private world as in
"Satire 1", the "life envisioned as the alternative to the public is a life of contemplation - but of
the very public world from which he recoils" (39). The young satirist of the poems is depicted as
writing in his study, and consulting the books that adorn his shelves, and he ponders over the
works of "Philosophers;/ And jolly Statesmen, which teach how to tie/ The senewes of a cities
mystique bodie" ("Satire I", 11. 6-8). Thus, as the lovers in "The Sun Rising" would defme the
amorous microcosm in terms of the world they rejected, the satirist retiring in contemplation
allows for the public to invade the private. Clearly, in both his "Satires" and poems of mutuality,
Donne is deeply involved in the society he professes to renounce and cannot shut the outside
world out of his mind.
Moreover, in assessing Donne's "Satires", one ought not to lose sight of the didactic
intent which is always said to lurk at the back of a satirisfs mind. If, as Dryden later claimed,
'the true end of satire [is] 'the amendment of vices'" (Cuddon, 827), then Donne was perhaps
more interested in the fate of his community than he was willing to admit. As Dryden's
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statement suggests, Donne may hâve felt concern on behalf of his society at least to the extent of
wishing for its improvement. At any rate, this is the position defended by Kaskela in "Circles of
Love", who explains that the young poet's "concern for and even love of humanity" together with
his idealistic belief "that human beings will choose to imitate virtue rather than vice" were the
motivating force behind the "Satires" (77). Certainly, both the young satirist and the Dean of StPaul's seem to hâve shared this love of virtue and belief in man's potential for improvement.
Thus, Donne's early works hint at a humanism that would colour his later thought,
notably in works such as Dévotions upon Emergent Occasions, Pseudo-Martyr and Essayes in
Divinity. In fact, an in-depth scrutiny of both his early verse and later prose works shows the
young poet already playing with some of the concepts he would explore more fully in his later
years. The idealistic vision of mankind as forming an indivisible whole conveyed through his
later prose works - notably the breath-taking "No man is an lsland" in Dévotions (87) - seems in
fact to inscribe itself as the logical fulfillment of a long reflection that has taken him from a
considération of the ties that unité two human beings in mutual love to the relationship which
relates a man to the Divine and finally to the love of humanity as a whole. If early signs of
Donne's emerging humanism may be traced as far back as the "Satires", certainly, faint echoes of
it also reverberate throughout the whole body of his love poetry and devotional writings. Be it
through the love of a woman, of his Maker, or of mankind, it is indeed through his connection
with what lies beyond the boundaries that circumscribe the self that John Donne - the lover, the
priest, and the man - finds meaning and purpose. As he once pointed out in a letter to his friend
Henry Goodyer, "to be no part of any body, is to be nothing" (Donne, Complète Works, 338).
This letter, written in the years of unemployment following his marriage to Anne More, reveal
lhat even in his most dejected moments, Donne was already leaning towards this idéal of
interrelatedness and intégration he would take years to formulate - a vision of the individual as
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dissolving into the greater body of mankind, itself an intégral and yet always individual part of an
order encompassing both heaven and earth.
Donne's move from the investigation of the ties that bind in love and worship to the
considération of sociological and political matters in later works like Pseudo-Martyr (1610) and
Essayes in Divinily (1615) was correspondingly marked by a graduai departure from poetry to the
exegencies of discursive texts. With the exception of Dévotions in which, as was argued in the
previous chapter of the présent thesis, the method of the conceit remains central to the
articulation of Donne's thought, the Metaphysical conceit as an élément of style rarely constitutes
the structural backbone of his argument. In thèse works, Donne no longer deals prominently with
the rendering of an aesthetic expérience either secular or religious, but rather with the exposition
of a humanist vision of the world meant to rally others to his views and to quench the already
heated debates then tearing England apart. The balance between the différent religious factions
in Donne's time was indeed critical. As Cain explains, the nation that had lurched between
several religious creeds in the forty years preceding Donne's birth - that is, between Roman
Catholicism, Protestantism, and even "thoroughgoing Calvinism" - was still deeply divided
between more than two camps when Donne took up the ministry (85). His awareness of the
necessity to restore a certain measure of unity in the population if only to avoid civil unrest may
thus hâve prompted his shift to the public mode. In works like, Pseudo-Martyr for instance, he
therefore adopts an argumentative and sometimes editorial style (Raspa, Pseudo-Martyr, xiii).
Although some critics hâve described this style as somewhat "dull" (Keynes, 4), Donne must
hâve thought it better suited to his purpose. Hence, despite a few scattered occurrences, the
conceit in his exploration of man's relationship to the rest of mankind and of society is relegated
to the background. This of course is not true of his sermons in which the characteristics of the
conceit as poetic image recur, but how so is the subject of another study than this thesis.
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Nevertheless, the study of Donne's prose in question hère reveals the lasting influence of
the conceit on his conception of the world and of man's place in it. If the conceit indeed
contributed to shape each exercise in Dévotions in 1625, thus modulating the movements of
Donne's mind from one realm of existence to the next, its influence on his thought in PseudoMartyr and Essayes in Divinity was of another kind. That is, this influence in Pseudo-Martyr and
Essayes is not felt so much in the structure of his argument as in its content. Much of the thought
formerly expressed through the metaphysical conceit in the poems of mutuality and devotional
verse such as the "Holy Sonnets" and "La Corona" is now in a sensé replicated in Donne's
investigation of the ties that unité mankind into a cohérent whole but with a use of the
Metaphysical conceit emphasizing meaning rather than figure in the image. In his prose works in
question, Donne as the Dean of St-Paul's in fact attempts to show how the relationship of a
human being to the divine order détermines his or her relationship with human, social, political,
and even religious organizations with ail the antithesis, the paradox, and the pungency of the
conceit but as content rather than as image. Donne, who had previously described the ties that
bind in mutual love and in worship in similar ways, now seems to envision the relationship
Connecting each member of the mass of worshippers to the whole as a way of being rather than as
a way of imagining. In his considération of a human being's relationship to mankind, Donne
argues for the dual character of body and soûl in the human being and of his or her microcosmic
représentation of the macrocosm of the state. The state itself is constituted of the members of the
nation as body and the king as its soûl in the temporal universe and both the individual human
and the state are each in its own way a microcosm of the macrocosm constituted by Christ and
the whole of humanity.
In fact, to Donne, the body of society is closely related to the divine order presided over
by the Son of God. In the saving knowledge contained in the Scriptures, Donne sees a
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justification for the order that governs the secular state, which he perceives as a replica of the
divine order that groups ail men under Christ. Based on his interprétation of some passages of
the Bible, Donne uses the image of the human compound of body and soûl to depict the complex
web of relationships that relates an individual to the institutions that govern his society and to the
rest of mankind. Through this image, which is central to his epistemological approach to the
world, Donne stresses the manner in which each constituent of the nation and of mankind may
affect the whole to which it belongs. Consequently, he urges his contemporaries to respect the
secular and religious institutions that rule their society, and to lay aside their disagreements in
order to live in accordance with Christ's message of love, peace, and charity. In this way, Donne
demonstrates how one's understanding of the Scriptures and relationship to the divine order
ought to guide one in his interactions with other men. Certainly, texts such as Pseudo-Martyr,
Essayes in Divinity, and Dévalions upon Emergent Occasions testify to Donne's vision of
interrelatedness and inscribe themselves as the fulfillment of a life-long reflection on the ties that
bind in love, worship, and humanity. How so, the méditative structure of the "La Corona"
sonnets helps us to understand.
Together with the "Satires" (1593-1597), "La Corona" (1607?) constitutes another
example of verse predating Donne's prose writings at stake in this thesis in which he explores
ideas he was later to develop more fully in his prose. "La Corona" is a méditative exercise
constituted of seven sonnets depicting the mind's journey through the events that hâve
punctuated the life of Christ, from the Annunciation to the Ascension. Throughout this short
sonnet séquence, a poet-priest persona reflects first on the "corona", a crown of poems he is
writing, in the first poem and then on the six divine mysteries that hâve marked the life of his
Saviour. His purpose is to corne to better grasp the significance for himself of Christ's birth, life,
death on the cross, and résurrection. Through his méditation in the seven poems, the poet-priest
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thus dérives a meaning that will later guide his steps during his passage on earth. As such, the
"La Corona" sonnets constitute a perfect example protracted over several poems of how Donne
could conceive of an individual as related to a whole segment of Christian history. Thèse sonnets
in fact reflect the manner in which Donne describes in prose how a man's relationship with the
divine order ought to guide him in his dealings with other men and with the political and
religious institutions that govern his society. In "La Corona" as in Donne's later prose, the
Scriptures are employed as a model upon which one may rely to assess the realities of the
temporal universe, be it the life of a single individual or the hierarchy that governs a nation. As
the speaker of "La Corona" reaches a higher degree of understanding, one may thus sensé Donne
only one step away from the formulation of the breath-taking vision of interrelatedness which
defines each and every human being as part of a nation governed by a king and of the greater
body of mankind with Christ as its head.
In "La Corona", Donne probes the ties that relate a poet-priest persona to the life-history
of Christ by using the méditative techniques devised in the Spiritual Exercises by Ignatius
Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits in the sixteenth century. In each sonnet, the poet-speaker
contemplâtes a Christian mystery in order to feel its significance sensuously. In "Sonnet 1",
which serves as an introduction for the whole séquence, the poet prays for Christ to reward his
'muse's white sincerity" with "A crown of glory, which doth flower always" (11.6, 8). He thus
expresses his intent and sets the mood for the entire six méditations on Christian Mysteries that
follow, saying:
The end crowns our works, but thou crown'st our ends,
For, at our end begins our endless rest,
This first last end, now zealously possessed,
With a strong sober thirst, my soûl attends. (11. 9-12)
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Thèse Unes reveal the motivating force that lies behind "La Corona". The poet-priest persona
will indeed attempt to understand the meaning of the life of Christ culminating in the
résurrection, which our own résurrection after death in a sensé will replicate, by allowing his
mind to expérience it sensuously. His soûl, "zealously possessed" (1. 11) with the object of his
méditation, will thus attend the mysteries that hâve punctuated the life of Christ with a "strong
sober thirst" (1. 12). Donne's choice of imagery hère highlights the sensuousness of the
meditator's expérience, who is almost made to feel its significance in his flesh. The poet-priest's
manner of experiencing a whole segment of Christian history is therefore reminiscent of the third
part of an exercise in the Spiritual Exercises, the applicatio sensuum, which consists in "the
inward application of the sensés to the picture in the imagination" so as to move the will to
embrace the meaning derived from the méditation (Raspa, Dévotions, xxxiii, xxxviii). The poetspeaker will thus attempt to participate in the events that hâve punctuated the life of Christ in
order to understand how this segment of Christian history may influence his own existence in the
temporal world as well as his enrolment in the Book of the Elect. In this way, "La Corona"
focuses on the relationship between a meditator and the object of his méditation in his effort to
unravel the meaning of events recorded in the New Testament describing Christ's life and thus
give meaning to human life.
The poet-speaker's mind hence probes the object of his méditation sensuously in a
decidedly Catholic fashion. For instance, in the third sonnet that treats of Christ's Nativity, the
poet-speaker turns inward and shifts his attention from the divine mystery of the Incarnation upon
which he méditâtes to his soul's expérience of it: "See'st thou, my soûl, with thy faith's eyes,
how he/ Which fills ail place, yet none holds him, doth lie? (...)/ Kiss him, and with him into
Egypt go" (11. 11-13). In his sensuous appréhension of the object of his méditation, the poetspeaker is made to participate in the expérience he is describing. Through the applicatio sensuum
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of the Ignatian Exercises, Donne therefore reinforces the connection of the individual with the
Christian mystery upon which he méditâtes by making him an intégral part of it.
Still, it is in the sixth and seventh sonnets that the relationship between the poet-priest
persona and Christ's life is most detailed and its meaning most significant. In "Sonnet 6", the
speaker asks his Saviour to "Moist with one drop of thy blood, my dry soûl" (1. 1). Once more,
through the use of imagery that highlights the sensuousness of the exercitant's expérience, he
illustrâtes the ties that connect the speaking-persona to his Saviour's self-sacrifice for the good of
mankind. The speaker's soûl shall be saved as a resuit of the Son's incarnation and life, and by
the shedding of his blood on the cross, "Freed by that drop, from being starved, hard, or foui"
(1.4). The poet-speaker is thus made to feel his own salvation sensuously. In "Sonnet 7", his
address to Christ as "Mild lamb, which with thy blood, hast marked the path;/ Bright torch, which
shin'st, that I the way may see" (11. 10-11) suggests the manner in which the expérience described
in "La Corona" has changed him by moving his will to action. The poet-speaker now sees in the
life and death of the Son the path leading to heaven - a path he is now resolved to take in this
world so as to ascend to the next. Hence, Donne's application of methods derived from the
Ignatian Exercises makes it possible for him to describe a human's sensory expérience of the
significance of a whole segment of Christian history in order to highlight the relationship that ties
him to the object of his méditation. As such, "La Corona" constitutes a perfect example of a
work in which Donne also conceives of an individual as relatée! to a whole segment of Christian
history.
Therefore, through the bond that connects him to the Christian Mysteries upon which he
méditâtes, the poet-priest persona of "La Corona" cornes to an understanding that moves his will
and induces him to follow the path traced by Christ for him to ascend to heaven by salvation.
Donne sees a comparable understanding developing in the human being as in Pseudo-Martyr, and
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Essayes in Divinity as he considers the ties that relate each individual to the secular state, and the
state to the divine order that rules both heaven and earth. That is, he uses the Scriptures as a
source of insight and guidance to investigate the relationships that connect together the members
of a nation and the institutions that govern them. In his argument on behalf of the secular state in
Pseudo-Martyr for instance (130-134), Donne's heavy reliance on passages of the Bible hence
recalls the method of "La Corona" of understanding the présent by understanding the divine
order. He perceives the divine order as grouping ail men under Christ's jurisdiction and thereby
as justifying the hierarchy that places a monarch at the head of a nation. In his analysis of
Donne's politics, Cain indeed observes that his vision of the monarchy was conditioned by the
vision of "God as king and father" presiding "over a patriarchal structure which was by définition
hiérarchie" (84). A supporter of the notion of the Divine Right of Kings, Donne explains in
Essayes in Divinity that ail members of a Christian state who aspire to a peaceful and religious
life ought to submit to their divinely appointed king as they would submit to Christ and should
follow his rule, and he justifies the rule of an earthly king as founded on the Ten Commandments
God bestowed upon the Israélites in Exodus (98). Less than a few décades before the outbreak of
the civil war that would oppose the Puritans to King Charles I - and at a time when the balance of
power between the monarchy, the parliament, and the différent religious factions stood on the
edge of a knife - Donne thus made a strong statement in support of King James I.
In Pseudo-Martyr of 1610, an intricate manifesto in which Donne attempts to convince
the Catholics of England to take the Oath of Allegiance to their Protestant king, his argument on
behalf of the established order may also be seen as reflecting some of the ideas he had explored
through the metaphysical conceit in his poetry. His vision of the monarch, of the ties that unité
him to his people, and of the manner in which his subjects ought to conceive of his authority
seems consistent with the search for relatedness that had characterized both his devotional poetry
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and love lyrics. Written "at a moment of extrême political and religious tension between Rome
and London", Pseudo-Martyr promûtes the notion of "loyalty to one's uni versai God, to one's
Protestant king, and to one's interior self (Raspa, Pseudo-Martyr, xi-xii).
In Pseudo-Martyr, Donne's conception of the monarchy reflects that of the Stuart
administration, which advocated the Divine Right of kings. To him, the power wielded by the
king over his subjects springs directly from the Lord, "For God inanimates every State with one
power, as every man with one soûle" {Pseudo-Martyr, 133). In his investigation of the ties that
unité the sovereign to his people, the human compound of body and soûl once more serves to
illustrate the manner in which two éléments under Donne's scrutiny interact with one another.
To him, the prince's authority over his people may indeed be compared to the power the soûl
exerts over the body, and attempting to hinder or impose limitations upon him is as pointless as
trying to "preclude or withdraw any facultie from that Soûle, which God had infused into the
body" (133) of a human being. This Une from Pseudo-Martyr as such echoes the passage in the
book of Romans from which European monarchies may hâve derived the notion of the Divine
Right of Kings: "Let every soûl be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of
God: the powers that be are ordained of God. Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth
the ordinance of God" (13:1-2). Moreover, Cain observes that "the founding myths of
Christianity", be it Lucifer's challenge of God's authority or Adam and Eve's fall from Paradise,
were almost invariably "about the disastrous conséquences of disobedience" (84). The notion of
total submission to the king's rule as reflected by the body's obédience to the soûl's, which is
paramount in Donne's vision of the relationship uniting a monarch to his people, is rooted in the
Holy Scriptures. In addition, in Pseudo-Martyr, not only does Donne justify the authority of the
king as head of state, but through his comparison of the relationship uniting a monarch to his
people to the ties that bind the soûl to the body, he also attempts to define this subtle knot that
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makes a nation. The king acts therefore as the soûl of the state and, in order for the nation to live
peaceably and religiously, he ought to guide his people as the immortal part of man must rule
over the impulses the body for him to entertain any hope of salvation {Pseudo-Martyr, 132).
Absolute obédience to the monarch is therefore necessary for the well-being of those living under
him.
By once more reverting to the ties that unité the spiritual to the material in man to
illustrate his vision of the relationship between a monarch and his people, Donne highlights the
supremacy of the king as the divinely appointed soûl of the state. Yet simultaneously, his
reliance upon the human compound of body and soûl also contributes to delineate the monarch's
duty to his people. For example in Pseudo-Martyr, in a référence to the relationship between the
Church and the secular powers that rule his society, Donne explains that although the "Soûle can
contemplate God herself, yet she can produce no exterior act without the body" (46). The king is
"Soûle" and can contemplate God but unless he serves well the political entities below him that
constitute his body, his contemplation is frustrated: that is, he reflects badly the divine order he is
supposed to image. Such a relationship between body and soûl is indeed central to Donne's
epistemology. He employs his idea of it with such consistency that some of its occurrences in
both his poetry and prose when considered as a group may contribute to a better understanding of
his référence to the king as the soûl of the state.
Donne's allusion to the soul's reliance upon the body in Pseudo-Martyr in fact refers us
back to the dialogue of the soûls in "The Ecstasy". The dialogue of thèse soûls explains to us by
analogy what goes on between a king and his state. In this poem, the soûls of two lovers are
united in a perfect state of communion, thus forming one soûl or "abler soûl" (1.43) that hovers
above their two bodies. Still, as the lovers celebrate their spiritual union, their communion is
broken by their sudden awareness of their bodies lying on the hard earth:
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But, O alas ! so long, so far,
Our bodies why do we forbear?
They are ours, though not we ; we are
Th' intelligences, they the sphères.
We owe them thanks, because they thus
Did us, to us, at first convey,
Yielded their sensés' force to us,
Nor are dross to us, but allay.
On man heaven's influence works not so,
But that it first imprints the air ;
For soûl into the soûl may flow,
Though it to body first repair. (...)
To our bodies turn we then, that so
Weak men on love reveal'd may look ;
Love's mysteries in soûls do grow,
But yet the body is his book. ("The Ecstasy", 11. 49-60, 69-72)
The body is hère as essential to the soûl as the soûl is to the body, for it is through the body that
the lovers will live out their spiritual union, and they must corne out of their ecstasy and return to
it. This allusion to the relationship of interdependency that unités body and soûl has several
logical implications. The lovers' bodies are necessary for them to convey the love they feel for
each other, for the soûl is deprived of means to influence the outside world without the body.
Similarly, the body of a virtuous man is essential to the accomplishment of his good works on
earth for, as Donne points out in Essayes in Divinity, men were instructed by Christ himself to
influence those surrounding them for the best - to bestow love and charity upon others (72). If
the body is lost without a soûl to guide it, certainly the soûl is left with no occasion of good
works without the body.
Donne's use of the image of the compound of body and soûl in "The Ecstasy" may serve
to put in perspective his vision of the monarch's duty to his people in the later Pseudo-Martyr.
Indeed, in the light of its earlier appearance in "The Ecstasy", the récurrence of the analogy
between body and soûl in Pseudo-Martyr reinforces the sensé of interdependency Donne wishes
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to convey as existing between a king and his state. If the king must be obeyed as absolutely and
as flawlessly as the body must obey the soûl, then the monarch's good works must be conveyed
through his people who, as a resuit of his just rule, will live in a state of peace and happiness. In
fact, Donne's view of the ties uniting a king to his subjects also reminds his reader not only of the
relationship between body and soûl in "The Ecstasy", but also of the amorous microcosm
described in "The Sun Rising". In the last lines of "The Sun Rising", the lady is described as a
state and her lover as a prince ruling over her (1. 21). If Donne may be accused of machismo in
this passage, the reader must remember that a monarch is nothing without the state he governs.
Similarly, the maie lover in "The Sun Rising" could not describe himself as "ail princes" had he
not been involved in a love relationship with the beloved who is "ail states" (1. 21). The king
therefore dérives his kingship from his people as well as from divine decree. Moreover, as
Donne explains in the eighth "Expostulation" of Dévotions, it is the king's duty to "incorporate
himself in his people" (43) as the lovers of the poems of mutuality merge with one another
perfectly. In other words, to Donne, the relationship uniting a monarch to his people is one of
mutuality.
In fact, as Donne explains in Dévotions, the divine nature of monarchs "is better
expressed in their humility, then in their heighlh", when they consent to "descend, as God, to a
communication of their abundances with men" (41). In his delineation of the king's duties to his
people, Donne therefore perceives of him as a type of Christ. Christ manifested his divinity when
he suffered the humiliation of being incarnated as a common man in order to expérience his
humanity's sorrows, and the king must do likewise when his subjects grieve. To Donne, the
monarch is thus never so divine as when he calls his people "his brethren, his boues, hisflesh"
(Dévotions, 43). As Christ made himself flesh and blood to save mankind, so must the king
descend from his supposed height enough to feel the pains that afflict his people and to take them
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upon himself, saying: "/ hâve sinned, but thèse sheepe what hâve they done? let thine handIpray
thee be against me and my fathers house" {Dévotions, 43). In Donne's mind, the king is united to
his people as the soûl is related to the body and, by a further analogy, as God is bound to his
children through his only son, Christ. There is a subtle knot that joins the eternal realm to the
temporal constituting the universe and the links Connecting a king to his subjects is a microcosm
of that knot. Without référence to a king and state, Donne had already explored the rôle of Christ
as having to suffer like humanity to save it in the fifth sonnet "Crucifying" of La Corona, and his
description of this rôle in the poem enlightens us as to how he treats Christ in an analogy with a
king in Pseudo-Martyr. Christ, he writes, bearing "his own cross, with pain, yet by and by/
When it bears him, he must bear more and die" (11. 9-10). Hence, his vision of the relationship of
this subtle knot which ties a king to his people so as to form a nation echoes some of the ideas he
had explores in both his love lyrics and his devotional poetry, and is consistent with the search
for relatedness that pervades most of his works.
As the poet-speaker of "La Corona" finds in the life of Christ a model to guide his steps in
the temporal universe, Donne thus sees in the divine order a justification for the temporal order
that rules the secular state and that places the monarch above his people. In his discussion of the
laws that govern the state in both Pseudo-Martyr and Essayes, he establishes a similar analogy
between the Scriptures and the temporal universe so as to justify the laws that regulate the lives
of his contemporaries. Donne in fact perceives a replica of God's divine Law - that is, of the Ten
Commandments - in the rules and policies of the state and again as in his argument on behalf of
the established order, he uses the image of body and soûl to illustrate how secular and divine Law
bind earth to heaven and how civil obédience binds each individual to his nation.
In Essayes in Divinity, Donne thus discusses the relationship between secular and divine
Law at length. Essayes is a theological, philosophical and moral work containing two main
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sections recording respectively his careful considération ofthe significance oftwo segments of
Christian history, namely those described by the first two books ofthe Bible, Genesis and
Exodus, for the modem man. His reflection on divine and secular law predictably takes place in
his spéculation on the meaning ofthe events recorded in Exodus - on the punishments inflicted
upon the Egyptians and the Israélites, on the significance ofGod's mercy towards them, and on
his gift ofthe Ten Commandments to the Israélites. His considération ofGod's justice in the Old
Testament hence leads him to reflect upon the notion of justice in seventeenth-century England.
Donne hère adopts his own terminology, and désignâtes ail manifestations of divine justice in the
temporal universe as "Gods Judgements", which he defines as "ail those laws and directions by
which he hath informed the Judgements of his children, and by which he governes his
Judgements with or against them" (Essayes, 97). In other words, Donne's définition ofthe notion
of divine judgement in his society désignâtes both secular and divine rule, for God's influence
manifests itself both in the realm ofthe "profane" and that ofthe "Divine" (97), although under
différent guises.
In both secular and religious matters, Donne's définition ofthe term "judgement" is
threefold. He explains that the word "judgement" in secular matters may refer first to a faculty of
the intellect or "the last act of our understanding, and a conclusive resolution"; second, to the
type of practical considération men apply on a daily basis so as to make the right décisions; and
third, to an act ofthe mind that "serves not only présent practice, but enlightens and almost
governs posterity; and thèse are Decrees and Sentences, and judgements in courts" (97-98).
Following upon his considération ofthe notion of judgement in the secular world, Donne
proceeds with an enumeration of its différent meanings in divine matters. "Judgement" may hère
refer, first, to God's "severe and mère justice, (...) deep and unsearchable" that éludes man's
understanding; second, to the divine act ofthe mind that "signifies not mère Justice, but as it is
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attempered and sweetened with Mercy", and thirdly to "the Judicial part of the law" or the
Covenant and Commandments the Lord gave to his children, and upon which the "Talmudists"
still rely to regulate their daily lives (98-99). Profane and divine judgements thus rest on a
common ground that finds its source in the promulgation of God's Law in the Ten
Commandments on Mount Sinai in Exodus. To this first law God bestowed upon his children in
the désert, "ail Laws aspire" (100) - and the edicts governing the secular state are no exception.
Hence, to Donne, the wall separating the divine from the secular in légal matters is paper-thin if it
exists at ail.
Furthermore, Donne explains that the effect of the Ten Commandments upon the children
of Israël clarifies for contemporary humans the correct nature of secular laws for the members of
any given society. He indeed observes that "one benefit of the Law" for the Jews, "was that it did
in some measure restore them towards the first law of Nature: For if man had kept that, he had
needed no outward law" (100). Donne hère refers to this capacity man was thought to hâve at a
time - in Eden - when he "was to himself a law" (100). It was indeed believed that prior to the
appearance of sin on earth, man had the capacity to regulate his own behaviour according to a set
of ingrained moral standards. By giving them His Law, from which ail other laws eventually
grew, God provided his children once fallen with a set of external parameters upon which they
could rely so as to regulate their dealings with each other. To Donne, the laws, decrees, and
policies of the state serve a similar purpose as they often "avert men from doing many things,
which may, in their fear, be drawn within the compass that [divine] Law" (101). In other words,
state régulations constitute a set of external parameters comparable to God's divine Law upon
which men may rely to order their lives and monitor their behaviour. In addition, thèse laws are
intended to redress faults that fall within the scope of the Ten Commandments, and thus may at
times, solely by virtue of their existence, prevent men from transgressing God's divine Decree.
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Hence, in Essayes in Divinity Donne entertains the notions of personal judgement and secular law
and of divine order governing mankind. Through his analysis of the significance of law recorded
in Exodus, he demonstrates how a modem individual and a nation may be integrated into a whole
segment of Christian history in which heaven and earth are involved.
That Donne in both Pseudo-Martyr and Essayes in Divinity saw the divine law revealed
by the Scriptures as a justification for the established order governing his society in seventeenthcentury England is évident in his discussion of the monarchy and the secular state. This is true
even if in Pseudo-Martyr he expresses a few réservations as to the power of the political
institutions that govern the state. Donne explains that human laws and edicts cannot be
substituted for divine Law as they are issued by men who hâve natural limitations, but monarchs
nevertheless are positioned to the state as the soûl is to the body. In order to illustrate his
reasoning, he once more relies on the image of man as a microcosm reflecting a far greater
reality. Donne states that "in every particular man considered alone, there is found a double
Jurisdiction of the soûle over the body, and of the reason over the appetite" {Pseudo-Martyr,
132) and, in such a créature, the nature of each human being is a microcosm of the relations of a
state to its monarch. Moreover, both the human being and his monarch are in turn together
microcosms to the yet greater macrocosm of the created uni verse, even if there are things that
will always remain beyond their reach within God's province. In this multitude of analogies
between microcosm and macrocosm, Donne sees the influence of the monarch on the members of
any given society comparable to reason operating within the human individual and, as he aptly
puts it: "the power of our reason upon our appetite, is (... ) Regale Imperium; and Kings rule
subjects as reason rules that" (132). In this passage, one may discern echoes of "Holy Sonnet 14"
("Batter my heart"), in which Donne's conceit of the battered town establishes a similar
comparison. The poet-speaker in the sonnet tells of his fight against sin which has taken hold of
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his heart, and begs the Lord to intervene and help him surrender to His grâce. He compares the
ties uniting the poet-speaker to his Maker with the relationship that binds a usurped town and its
rightful lord, and it is this lord who must overthrow the city's defences to free it from the clutch
of his enemy (11. 1-6). Reason, which the poet-speaker describes as the Lord's "viceroy" (1. 7) in
himself, "proves weak or untrue" (1. 8) and fails to provide him with proper guidance. Looked at
in the light of the conceit of the battered town, Donne's statement in Pseudo-Martyr comparing
the government of the secular state to human reason suggests that the laws and edicts of the king
can in no way be substituted for the divine wisdom of the Scriptures or to God's agency upon the
hearts of men. He therefore recognizes that either within an individual or in the state, reason
must be aided by révélation, and that even a king must not be "too indulgent to his own
Prérogative" {Pseudo-Martyr, 102). As Cain most aptly states, Donne defines "the distance
between a tyrant and a monarch in terms of law" (93). lnterestingly, faint echoes of Donne's
vision of political institutions and of their limitations are reverberated through King James'
address to the parliament (1609) in which he declared that "ail kings that are not tyrants, or
perjured, will be glad to bound themselves within the limits of their laws" (King James I, "Kings
are justly called Gods"). A firm supporter of the Divine Right of Kings and opponent of any
form of behaviour that could lead to civil unrest, Donne hence found in the Scriptures the means
to défend and support his king, while reminding him of his human vesture and limitations.
Donne's vision of a Christian's duties to the Church is therefore in several respects
analogous to his conception of the duty of obédience that binds an individual to the state. In both
cases, he indeed stresses the sensé of interrelatedness that ties each constituent to the whole. He
conceives both of the nation and of the mass of worshippers as an organic body, presided over
simultaneously by a king in this world and by Christ in the next. Furthermore, in his treatment of
both relationships, Donne adopts essentially the same approach of scriptural exposition, and thus
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relies on passages from the Bible in his reflection on both earthly and heavenly matters. Yet in
his discussion of the ties that unité a Christian to the Church, Donne's choice of imagery and
examples brings his reflection to a more universal level. That is, in his treatment of an
individual's relationship with religious institutions, he is not solely concerned with the Church of
England of which he became a minister in his mature years, but with the entire Communion of
Saints, who include ail Christians living or dead in ail eras of history regardless of their origins or
chosen creed. His prose writings in question in fact reveal that, in a society torn apart by quarrels
raging among and between religious factions, Donne dreamed of a universal Church in which ail
conflicts over theological considérations would simply dissolve in the face of the Lord's message
of love and charity. In both Essayes in Divinity and Dévotions npon Emergent Occasions, Donne
shows how an individual's relationship with the divine order of this universal Church presided
over by Christ ought to inform his dealings with his fellow human beings. Indeed, by stressing
the universality of the Christianity and the duty of love and charity incumbent upon every
Christian, Donne shows how religion succeeds in moving men to good works while the secular
state often appears mined in the task of preventing them from doing wrong.
Despite the récent debates that hâve divided the critical world as to Donne's "sectarian
affiliations" and true religious convictions (Roston, "Medidative Tradition", 48), his three prose
works examined hère testify to the authenticity of his faith in the reformed Church of England.
Certainly, the very existence of works such as Pseudo-Martyr suggests that, despite the strong
influence of his Catholic upbringing, from his conversion to the Anglican creed and until his
death , the Dean of St-Paul's, somehow sought to support "the Protestant cause" (48). Still,
despite his apostasy from Catholicism and his commitment to his adopted Church, Donne did not
uphold the debates that were tearing Christianity apart in the 1620s, and he quite purposefully
seems to hâve refused to take sides in "the polemical wars of his day" (Levy-Navarro, 274). As
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Roston writes, Donne in fact tried to avoid controversial issues during his ministry and "Where
his personal beliefs differed from those of his adopted Church, he was careful to situate himself at
the borderline of the new creed without actually crossing it" ("Méditative Tradition", 47). Hence,
Donne seems to hâve been mindful of King James' admonition to the priests of the Church of
England not to stir up controversy (47).
However, Donne's observance of the king's wish to avoid religious récriminations seems
to hâve sprung not only from his respectful attitude towards royal authority, but also from the
conviction that any single Christian would better heed Christ's message of love and charity by
avoiding conflicts that could disrupt the social fabric. As most of thèse disputes revolved around
diverging interprétations of the Scriptures, Donne in Essayes voices his discontent against the
polemicists who, "for ostentation and magnifying of their wits, excerpt and tear shapeless and
insignificant rags of a word or two[from the Bible], from whole sentences, and make them obey
their purpose in discoursing" (46). Thèse unscrupulous controversialists, who, through
"unsincere translations", would justify their "préjudices and foreconceived opinions", and turn
the Scriptures, "which are strong toyles, to catch and destroy the bore and bear which devast our
Lords vineyard" into "fine cobwebs to catch tlies; And of strong gables, by which we might
anker in ail storms of Disputation and Persécution" make "threads of silkworms" (46). Those
who manipulate the word of God to force it into arguments serving no other ends but their own
do not contribute to the enlightenment of ail Christians, but rather weaken Christianity by turning
an instrument of peace into one of destruction. The word of God ought not to be used for the
self-gratification of polemicists, for such uses of the Holy Scriptures distort their purpose. Donne
compares thèse polemicists to a General who, "having at last conveyed a town, yet not nearly by
force, but upon this article, That in sign of subjection they should admit him to take away one
row of stones round about their wall, chose to take the undermost row, by which the whole wall
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ruined" (47). To him, dissemblers who indulge in futile wars over a word or a comma in the
exposition of the Scriptures threaten the very foundations of Christianity - the Word of God.
They are to the Church as the gênerai of the taie he talks about and, as a resuit of their ruthless
manipulation of the written divine word, they may cause "the building of this great patriarchal
Catholick [i.e. universal] Church, of which every one of us is a little chapel" (47), to collapse.
Clearly, to Donne, the Scriptures ought to remain unpolluted by religious quarrels, and those
interested in their study ought to avoid those topics that may cause dissent, for such disputes run
contrary to Christ's message of love and charity, and contradict the very nature of the Church,
which unités ail worshippers under one head, Christ.
To the poet who, in "Show me dear Christ, thy spouse so bright and clear", describes the
Church as a woman "Who is most true, and pleasing to thee [Christ] then/ When she is embraced
and open to most men" (11. 13-14), Christ's dominion in the temporal universe spreads far beyond
the frontiers set up by the différent religious factions of Europe. As Donne himself explains in a
letter written to Henry Goodyer well before he took the ministry: "You know 1 never fettered nor
imprisoned the word Religion (...) in a Rome, or a Wittemberg, or a Genevcf {Letters to Severall
Persons ofHonour, 29). To him, the différent branches of Christianity "are ail virtual beams of
one Sun" (29). To Cain, religious tolérance is the very "cornerstone of Donne's politics" and
reinforces another constant in him, which is "his passionate belief in the unity of humanity" (86).
Under this one sun, ail Christians, Protestants and Catholics alike, are brothers and sisters and
form "One flock" under the guidance of "one shepherd" (Essayes, 56). Nevertheless, in Essayes,
Donne recognizes that Christ's flock, although being one under him, is subdivided, as his sheep
are "not in one place, nor form" (56). Yet even "that which was strayed and alone, was his
sheep", and ought therefore to be considered his children as "any flock which hearken to his
voice" (56).
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To Donne, both Christians and non-Christians are part of the greater body of mankind
governed by Christ regardless of their religious beliefs. Indeed, in Essayes, his considération of
the plurality of names in the Bible to refer to a single individual leads him to reflect on the
diversity existing within this body of humanity governed by Christ. He explains that "if Esau,
Edom, and Seir were but one man (...) so Synagogue and Church is the same thing and of the
Church, Roman and Reformed and ail other distinctions of place, Discipline, or Person, but one
Church, journeying to one Hierusalem, and directed by one guide, Christ Jésus" (58). Donne's
inclusion hère of the Jews as part of this Church presided over by Christ is significant. His ail
encompassing vision of the universal Church leaves no one in the Judeo-Christian world out, and
brings ail forms of worship under one banner. The members of this Church ought therefore to
seek unity rather than disparity and to envision themselves as brothers and sisters seeking a
common goal. Certainly, Donne's views with regard to the religious institutions of his time set
him apart from the polemicists whose discourses were not only a threat to the Church of England,
but also to ail the other branches of Christianity, new and old across the face of Europe.
While Donne expounds his conception of Christianity in Essayes at length, it is in
Dévalions upon Emergent Occasions that he expresses his vision of interrelatedness among men,
both Christian and non-Christian, most powerfully. In this highly méditative work, he explains
why and how each and every individual's dealings with his fellow human beings ought to be
informed by his relationship to the divine order of Christ's universal Church. In the seventeenth
'Méditation", the speaker of Donne's Dévalions hears the sound of the tolling bell that was rung
in English parishes when a parishioner was gravely ill, and the sound of the bells at his own
illness inspires him to the following thoughts:
Perchance hee for whom this Bell tolls, may be so ill, as that he knows not it lalls
for him; And perchance 1 may thinke my selfe so much better then 1 am, as that
they who are about mee, and see my state, may hâve caused it to toll for mee, and 1
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know not that. The Church is Catholike, universall, so are ail her Actions; AU that
she does, belongs to ail. When she baptizes a child, that action concernes mee; for
that child is thereby connected to that Head which is my Head, and engraffed into
that body, whereof I am a member. And when she buries &Man, that action
concernes me; Ail mankinde is of one Author and is one volume; when one Man
dies, one Chapter is not (orne out of the booke, but translated into a better
language; and every Chapter must be so translated (Dévotions, 86)
It is by virtue of this sensé of belonging to the wholly divine order of the great body of Christ's
universal Church which Donne describes hère that an individual may conceive of himself as
closely related to the rest of mankind, for ail men share in God through their common origin. In
the tolling bell, which "calls not upon the preacher onely, but upon the congrégation" (86),
Donne sees a symbol of the intangible ties Connecting a man simultaneously to God and
mankind. The sound of the bell thus reminds the sick man Donne of his frail human nature and
yet of his inclusion in the divine order presided over by Christ to which ail human beings belong.
To Donne, it is in fact the whole of humanity which hearkens to the sound of the tolling
bell. In their dealings with one another, human beings ought therefore to be ever mindful of this
relationship which connects every one of them to the whole, for
No Man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent a part
of the maine; if a C/odbee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as
if a Promontorie were, as well as if aMannor ofihyfriends, or oîthine owne
were; Any Mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And
therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee. (Dévotions,
87)
Ail men are related, and in the fate of one individual, in the tolling bell that tells of one man's
passing, is a message that ail of them must heed. To Donne therefore, "communities are Bodies
like human bodies" (Sherwood, 17), which together form one great body under Christ.
Donne's description of the relationship that binds ail human beings to the rest of mankind
in thèse passages echoes the link that he sees existing between the onlooker to the lovers in "The
Ecstasie". In "The Ecstasie" there are the two lovers at the heart of the poem's emotional and
spiritual message, but there is also a "third party", a passerby onlooker, who is hypnotically
transported by his sight of the lovers. Presti-Russel in fact sees in the relationship uniting the
lovers to each other and to the onlooker a symbol of "the idéal of communion so often dramatized
by Donne, with its manifest dissolution of dualities", which "frequently entails the dissolution of
individual différence, the absorption of the self into a larger whole" (283). As the boundaries
circumscribing the lovers' selves disappear, making it possible for their soûls to merge with each
other in a state of perfect communion, the onlooker too reaches beyond the limitations of his own
individuality and, by witnessing the lovers' "dialogue of one" (1. 74), parts from them "far purer
than he came" (1. 28). As the lovers and the onlooker are connected by intangible ties which
enable them to share in a common expérience, so does the speaker of Dévotions feel his own
inclusion in the greater body of mankind. Through the bond that relates him to the rest of
humanity, the speaker hence apprehends the joys and sorrows of other men in the same way that
the onlooker in "The Ecstasie" responds to the union of the lovers.
As ail members of mankind are so closely related, it is therefore no wonder that Donne
urged compassion and kindness towards ail men regardless of their origin or faith. In The
Melaphysics o/Love, Smith indeed reports a few lines from one of Donne's Sermons delivered in
1622, in which he reacted to the massacre of Natives by men of the British Virginia Company
established in the colonies that became the United-States. In this sermon, Smith writes, Donne
reportedly "disregarded the clamour [by the English imperialists] for the Indians to be put down
like beasts, and urged our duty to our fellow men in whatever condition we find them" (212).
Certainly, in his message to the members of the Virginia Company, Donne was only being
consistent both with his vision of interrelatedness among men and with Christ's message of love
and charity in poems like "The Ecstasy" and in his later prose works. Thus, by advocating this
vision of a universal Church presided over by Christ, of a Church where ail conflicts over
theological issues or individual différences would ultimately dissolve tor ail to enjoy a state of
perfect communion with each other and with Christ, the idéal of dissolution conveyed throughout
the whole body of Donne's writings culminâtes in a unified vision of création.
Thus, the influence of the Metaphysical conceit that Donne so heartily used in his poems
as a young man about town, with its quest for establishing relationships, may be felt in Donne's
investigation of the ties that unité the members of a nation to their political and religious
institutions. In Pseudo-Martyr, Essayes in Divinity and Dévotions upon Emergent Occasions,
one may indeed catch a glimpse of some of the ideas he had expressed through the Metaphysical
conceit in a period as early as his so-called 'secular' poems. The idéal of the loss of the self in a
greater whole depicted in Donne's prose works dealt with in this thesis may hence be seen as an
extension of the imagery of the microcosm and macrocosm of the "Songs and Sonnets" and of
course of the Holy Sonnets and "La Corona". The relationship between the lovers of the poems
of mutuality, and the yet other relationship between the poet-priest persona of the Holy Sonnets
and Dévotions and his little world of grâce, are microcosms of the wider universe in which
somehow they try to lose themselves. If, as Williamson suggests, the lover in Donne's poetry is
in the priest as the priest may be discerned in the lover (51), certainly, both of them may be
perceived in the humanism of his prose writings. There, Donne formulâtes a vision of mankind
as closely related to a divine order of which the nation is but a reflection; mankind is as an
organic body through which the fate of each and every individual may be felt by the whole.
Based on this idéal, he urges civil obédience, respect for the written divine word, and the duty of
love and charity incumbent upon every Christian. Through thèse writings, Donne in fact seems
to hâve been trying only to convey to his contemporaries the message that underlies the entire
New Testament, which may be summed up by thèse words uttered by the Lord Jésus: "That ye
love one another, as I hâve loved you, that ye also love one another" (John 13:34). By proposing
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the Christian idéal of love and charity, Donne was only being consistent with the vision of
interrelatedness that had pervaded most of his poetry from the 1590s onwards. In Pseudo-Martyr,
Essays in Divinily and Dévotions upon Emergent Occasions, he thus extends his hand outward in
an ultimate gesture of love to reconcile his nation with itself and set his contemporaries on the
path traced by their Saviour.
Conclusion
"That subtle knot, which mnkes us man"
Throughout this thesis, we hâve sought to delineate the rôle played by the Metaphysical
conceit in the formulation of Donne's vision of a unified cosmos. The conceit as an élément of
style that probes into the nature of the relationships that unité two sets of éléments is central to
his epistemological approach to human expérience. Indeed, Donne envisions the human
individual as caught in an intricate web of relationships that confer meaning and purpose to his
own existence. In fact, to Donne, the individual self is defined almost exclusively in terms of the
manner in which it relates to other human beings, to the divine, or to the political and religious
institutions that regulate his society. This focus on relationships throughout the works discussed
in the présent thesis thus reinforces Donne's unwavering belief in humanity as forming an
indivisible whole.
Whether as the lover of the "Songs and Sonnets", as the repentant persona of the "Holy
Sonnets", or as the humanist of his later prose works, Donne seems to be constantly reaching out
towards something lying outside the boundaries that circumscribe the self. In the vast majority of
the works analyzed in the présent thesis, Donne îs in fact almost invariably concerned with the
représentation of an idéal state of communion with an outside reality that involves the dissolution
of the individual self into a greater whole and the resolution of dualities. This idéal of
interrelatedness is articulated in terms of the relationship that relates the soûl to the body - in
itself a reflection of the manner in which the spiritual and the material interact in the macrocosm
of the created universe. Through the Metaphysical conceit, Donne addresses this "subtle knot" the intangible bond - that ties together the différent constituents of the cosmos which he sees
reflected in the invisible ties that link a lover to his beloved, the worshipper to his God, or the
human individual to the rest of mankind.
As Donne probes the ties that unité the human individual to other human beings, to the
divine, or even to the macrocosm of the created universe, the Metaphysical conceit is vital to the
formulation of his thought. In the "Songs and Sonnets" and the "Holy Sonnets", the conceit
constitutes the backbone of Donne's argument, for it is through his handling of this literary
device that he brings together the sensuous and the spiritual in an image that renders an often
abstract and intangible reality apprehensible to the human mind. As Donne départs from the
realm of poetry in his later years to dévote himself to the writing of highly philosophiçal treatises
and religious exegesis, the influence of the conceit is felt more in the ideas he expresses than in
the structure of his argument. That is, Donne in Pseudo-Martyr, Essayes in Divinity, or even
Dévotions upon Emergent Occasions invests the entire wealth of insight and wisdom he has
gained through the writing of his love lyrics and devotional works into the formulation of his
vision of the relationship that relates an individual to the institutions that regulate his society and
to the rest of mankind. Like the "three-personed God" (1.1) in "Batter my heart", the lover, the
priest, and the humanist in Donne therefore émerge in his prose as both a tripartite and a single
107
entity, and each part contributes to a better understanding of the whole - a reality that reflects his
unified vision of the cosmos.
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