his death. Twentieth-century critics were struck especially by such love poems as
‘The Sun Rising’, ‘The Anniversary’ and ‘The Good Morrow’. Just as fine are his Holy
Sonnets,Hymns and ‘Good Friday, 1613: Riding Westward’, and his translation ‘The
Lamentations of Jeremy’.
Donne argues aloud to define, dramatize and project a moment’s mood.
Theatrical improvisation is the basic impulse, giving his writing compression and
bravura. His most sustained paradoxes come in ‘Good Friday, 1613: Riding
Westward’: ‘I am carried towards the west / This day, when my soul’s form bends
towards the east.’
Yet dare I almost be glad, I do not see
That spectacle of too much weight for me.
Who sees God’s face, that is self life, must die; Life itself
What a death were it then to see God die? ...
If on these things I durst not look, durst I
Upon his miserable mother cast mine eye,
Who was God’s partner here, and furnished thus
Half of that sacrifice, which ransomed us?
Though these things, as I ride, be from mine eye invisible
They are present yet unto my memory,
For that looks towards them; and thou look’st towards me,
O Saviour, as thou hang’st upon the tree;
I turn my back to thee, but to receive
Corrections ...Although religious and metaphysical categories are central to his thinking,
Donne’s love poems are not truly metaphysical. They use logic to justify claims such
as:‘She is all states,and all princes, I, / Nothing else is!’ (‘The Sun Rising’) – not a
philosophical proposition but a dramatic gesture. Donne is not a sceptic nor a
romantic egotist of the emotions. It is rather that he forced the language of 1590s
drama into lyr ic.His love poems are Jacobean in style: although a master of verse,
he avoided Elizabethan melody, natural imagery and classicized beauty. Idea domi-
nates word; and the words have what he called ‘masculine persuasive force’.
Donne had a ‘Hydroptique immoderate desire of human learning and languages’
(Izaak Walton, in his Life ofDonne). He often took images from the new discoveries
in anatomy and geography. He hails a very literary naked mistress with: ‘O my
America, my new found land!’ The physicians who examine him in bed ‘are grown
/ Cosmographers, and I their map’. Despite such contemporary reference, he never
escaped from the soul/body problem of medieval scholasticism, nor from the Four
Last Things on which Christians were to meditate: Heaven, Hell, Death and
Judgement. Even his love-poems are concerned with the resurrection of the body. If
his unease was new, its cause was not. In ‘A Hymn to God the Father’, he wrote: ‘I
have a sin of fear, that when I have spun / My last thread, I shall perish on the shore;
/ But swear by thy self, that at my death thy son / Shall shine as he shines now ....’
The theologian who knew that the promise of redemption is universal asks the
Father to repeat it for him personally.
Eternal destiny, general and personal, is never far from Donne’s Sermons and
Divine Meditations. ‘No man is an Iland, intire of itselfe; every man is a peece of the
Continent,a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea,Europeis the
lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends,or ofthine
owne were; Any Mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde;And
THE STUART CENTURY 145