5—
Duelling Death in the Lyrics of Love:
John Donne's Poetics of Immortality
Salomon, whose disposition was amorous, and excessive in the love of women, when he turn'd to God, he departed not utterly from his old phrase and language, but having put a new, and a spiritual tincture, and form and habit into all his thoughts, and words, he conveyes all his loving approaches to God, and all God's answers to his amorous soul, into Songs, and Epithalamions.
(Sermons, I, 237)
Donne argues that the holy Song of Songs retains a superficial residue of Solomon's sensualist youth; this chapter argues that Donne's erotic Songs and Sonets deeply anticipate the immortal longings of his pious maturity. Donne's secular lyrics construct an elaborate mythology of personal immortality. When Donne talks about love (especially sexual love), he is also talking about death. When he yearns for enduring spiritual love, he is dreaming, at one remove, about immortality. When he laments an imminent separation from a lover, he is also lamenting the separation of his soul from his body at death; so
when he imagines a reunion, he is consolingly imagining resurrection, and when he fears forgetfulness or betrayal, he is afraid that death will annihilate the desiring experiential self to which he is so devoted. Throughout his richly varied writings, Donne consistently expresses anxiety about the prospective fragmentation or nullification of his oneness—his uniqueness, his unity. His intense brittle egotism can never quite replace the infantile narcissism that protects most people from recognizing their individual ephemerality. In searching for a perfectly reciprocating lover, Donne searches for his own immortality: his misogyny reflects disgust at the idea that his body will die, and terror that body will take soul with it, into oblivion. His writings embody a hope that his consciousness can be perpetually reborn.
Donne's fundamental concern about Last Judgment is not whether God will forgive our sins, but instead whether He will restore our existence:
First Erimus, We shall Bee , we shall have a Beeing. There is nothing more contrary to God, and his proceedings, then annihilation, to Bee nothing, Do Nothing, Think nothing. . . . Whatsoever God hath made thee since, yet his greatest work upon thee, was, that he made thee; and howsoever he extend his bounty in preferring thee, yet his greatest largenesse, is, in preserving thee in thy Beeing. (Sermons , IV, 85; cf. III, 97)
For Donne, the important hierarchy is not political or even moral, but ontological: "If we bee compar'd with God , our Being with his Being , we have no Being at all, wee are Nothing . For Being is the peculiar and proper name of God " (Sermons , VIII, 76; cf. VI, 227). If we fail of "future glory," we would "sinke into nothing" (Sermons , VII, 54), not into some more vivid damnation. This resembles the Existentialist adage that hell is other people: for Donne, hell is the absence of the self.
Even when he strives toward a more orthodox view, Donne cannot quite relinquish his equation of damnation with negation: "aske this sinner to morrow , and he hath sold himselfe for nothing ; for debility in his limnes, for darknesse in his understanding, for emptinesse in his purse, for absence of grace in his Soule," an absence resulting in a forfeiture of "the Face of God hereafter; a privation so much worse than nothing , as that they upon whom it falls, would faine be nothing , and cannot."[1] The great incentive to Christian devotion in Donne's preachings is the possibility of seizing the Day of Judgment, returning to a full pleasurable experience of the individual body. No wonder the dying Donne had himself depicted in his shroud, not supine as he would be buried, but
upright, as he would emerge at the final trumpet. The distant sound of that trumpet, playing somewhere beyond the deafness of the grave, is the Muse enticing Donne throughout his poetry.[2]
Donne occasionally acknowledged the orthodox position that death is divine justice, and that escape from this fallen world through death is actually desirable.[3] Yet his sermons undergo remarkable contortions to justify theologically his emotional sense that "Death is . . . the worst enemy"; "We have other Enemies; Satan about us, sin within us . . . but when they are destroyed, [death] shall retaine a hostile, and triumphant dominion over us."[4] Donne's theological prose exhibits the distinct residue of a carpe diem assumption that the greatest evil is neither worldly dishonor nor mortal sin, but death itself, as the thief of memory and sensation. He wonders why anyone would want the use of eyes in the grave, "where there is nothing to be seen but loathsomnesse; or a nose there, where there is nothing to be smelt, but putrefaction; or an ear, where in the grave they doe not praise God?" (Sermons , III, 105). Presumably the question is rhetorical, but we still may wonder what compels him to ask it.
Donne's secular lyrics persistently and vividly fantasize about returning from death, or achieving perpetual life. Ghosts, relics, and posthumous initiatives are everywhere, pointing back to his Roman Catholic upbringing, and ahead to the fascination with resurrection that would dominate his thinking as an Anglican. What Donne hates about his sickbed is not only the ominous occlusion of sensation it imposes, but also that he "must practice my lying in the grave , by lying still, and not practise my Resurrection , by rising any more" (Devotions , pp. 11, 16). So in "The Canonization" he reconceives the consumption of the body in the bedroom as a joyful rebirth within the cycle of sexual desire:
The Phoenix ridle hath more wit
By us, we two being one, are it.
So, to one neutrall thing both sexes fit.
Wee dye and rise the same, and prove
Mysterious by this love.
(lines 23–27)
The poem ends by envisioning a posthumous summons back to this world as a teacher of love. In other poems, such as "The Apparition" and "The Dampe," the speaker returns with less positive messages about love—but he always returns, reborn precisely because he died for love. What he seeks from the love of women thus resembles what he seeks
from the love of God; and both are introjected in Donne's remarkable narcissism, where the desirous body and the subjective intellect unite, where the female validates the perfect identity of the male, and the primary desire (as in Hobbes) is to desire anew.
This chapter seeks to articulate a broadly consistent mythology Donne assembled in order to reassure himself that the embrace of his body and mind was unbreakable. It also attempts to explain what may have necessitated and shaped this mythology. From the standpoint of object-relations psychology, the shared characteristics of Donne's amorous and pious personae suggest a psyche that, in its earliest formative moments, lacked the careful handling and the reassuring gaze of recognition that assures the infantile self of its acceptance and its coherence. All the most prominent characteristics of Donne's subsequent biography—his agonizing religious apostasy, his dangerous sexual choices, and his resulting career frustrations—build on this infantile anxiety, so that his lifelong terror of preterition and annihilation becomes overdetermined. Though Arthur Marotti is surely correct that Donne suffered from "the pain of being a sociopolitical nonentity," surely that anguish should not be separated from the fears of non-being that tormented Donne in less pragmatic categories.[5] The helplessness of infancy and the terror of annihilation frame the frustration of mid-life ambition; the uncertain favors of an omnipotent and inscrutable mother or Calvinist God magnify the uncertainties of courtiership into more than a practical problem.
Many of the peculiarities of Donne's writing thus become overdetermined as well: the chronic fragile egoism, the compulsion to reconceive the world from its foundations, and the compulsion to reconcile material and spiritual realms. Though inevitably speculative in both its foundations and its superstructure, this theory offers a generative coherence to Donne's life-work. "Character-traits are secret psyochoses," declared Sandor Ferenczi, a visionary among Freud's early disciples (Becker, p. 27). So are literary styles. In its determination to fuse the mental with the tangible, Donne's Metaphysical art bespeaks an obsession with keeping soul and body together. And in its fundamental reconception of the given universe, Donne's Metaphysical wit provides a defense against the extreme forms of self-alienation and hyperreceptivity now known as schizophrenia: "Thinking patterns in these patients are far from normal. There are dramatic leaps of logic, and absurd, unrealistic beliefs are common."[6] From the corrosive early satires, through the uneasy dependency on erotic exchange, to the
anguished religious verse, Donne struggles with precisely the tendencies another of Freud's great early disciples, Alfred Adler, identifies with the classic schizoid personality:
He mistrusts not only himself but also the knowledge and ability of others; nothing seems to him to be able to overcome the inevitable horrors of life and death—except perhaps the fantastic ideational system that he fabricates for his own salvation. His feelings of magical omnipotence and immortality are a reaction to the terror of death by a person who is totally incapable of opposing this terror with his own secure powers.[7]
Poetry represents Donne's auxiliary power, enabling his mind to define and defend itself. Within that magic circle, he can toy with his demons.
My readers may be forgiven for feeling their hearts sink at the prospect of watching yet another canonical author mapped onto yet another psychoanalytic model. The only reassurance I can offer immediately is that my goal is neither a clinical diagnosis of Donne as schizophrenic, nor a claim that his art and faith can be thoroughly explained by such a diagnosis. But it does seem worthwhile to notice how closely Donne's anxieties fit D. W. Winnicott's developmental categories, and how helpful a bridge those categories provide between infant psychology and Reformation theology:
Unthinkable anxiety has only a few varieties, each being the clue to one aspect of normal growth.
1. Going to pieces.
2. Falling forever.
3. Having no relation to the body.
4. Having no orientation.
It will be recognized that [these fears] belong, clinically, to schizophrenia, or to the emergence of a schizoid element in an otherwise non-psychotic personality.
The point is not that Donne is psychotic, but that his writing comprises a release of schizoid pressures through the channels available at the time. "Commonly," Winnicott argues, there is "a schizoid element hidden in a personality that is otherwise sane," and this element—often found in those who "show brilliance of intellect"—"can hide in a pattern of schizoid disorder that is accepted in a person's local culture."[8]
Reading Donne from psychoanalytic and Existential perspectives may seem hopelessly anachronistic, and yet in another sense it is both biographically and historically valid. The peculiarities of Donne's inner
life may have sensitized him to the nascent cultural crisis that psychoanalysis and Existentialism eventually rose to answer. Perhaps Donne's writing embodies an intense early confrontation with a contradiction at the heart of modern Western culture, between the narcissistic attachment to individual human interiority and the perception of a merely material universe infinite in time and space. If Donne expresses the first sharp pang of a mortally wounded culture, then it is not surprising that he re-emerged as an important figure amid the more explicit and systematic disillusionments of Modernism.
Donne provides an unusually clear glimpse of modern mortality, perhaps because no cultural tactics adequate to disguise it (from so needy and penetrating a gaze) had yet been invented:
We can say that the schizophrenic is deprived precisely of this neurologicalcultural security against death and of programming into life. He relies instead on a hypermagnification of mental processes to try to secure his death-transcendence; he has to try to be a hero almost entirely ideationally, from within a bad body-seating, and in a very personal way. Hence the contrived nature of his efforts. (Becker, p. 219)
John Dryden's and Samuel Johnson's famous critiques of Metaphysical poetic contrivance anticipate this analysis of schizophrenia. The eccentricities of Donne's art suggest a compelling anxiety barely under control. "The schizophrenic . . . cannot marshal an ego response, a directive control of his experiences. His own erupting meanings cannot be given any creative form" (Becker, p. 221). Art is Donne's way out of this psychological trap; but it is not an entirely comfortable way, because speech moves always toward silence, and in silence, chaos is come again, and so is oblivion.
To escape the pressure that closure commonly exerts on dreams of immortality, Donne explicitly identified death as merely a "parenthesis" in the unbroken syntax of the soul.[9] He fears annihilation so intensely that he cannot quite conceive it except in subordination to some continuous inscription of the ego. That—not a wholehearted desire for death itself—is why he could enjoy an exaggerated rumor of his demise: "A man would almost be content to dye, (if there were no other benefit in death) to hear of so much sorrow, and so much good testimony from good men, as I, (God be blessed for it) did upon the report of my death" (Letters , p. 209; cf. Drummond, p. 50). He would almost be glad to get death over with—if he could still preserve his narcissistic self, the loving attention that affirms it, and its ability to partake of language. So he
preaches Death's Duell as "his own funeral sermon," arranges to die while gazing on a statue of his own corpse, and in several poems imagines people studying that corpse. As Freud argues, "It is indeed impossible to imagine our own death, and whenever we attempt to do so we can perceive that we are in fact still present as spectators."[10]
From the beginning of his poetic career, Donne used his Metaphysical imagination as a weapon against the closural force of death. When he undertakes to "sing the progresse of a deathlesse soule" in the early "Metempsychosis," he is certainly being playful, but play is often a means of approaching problems too serious to confront directly. "Metempsychosis" suggests that Donne would rather be a pagan, a believer in the transmigration of souls, than a mortalist, a Christian who believes that souls are susceptible to death.[11] Donne's strategies of perpetuation are no less ingenious than his strategies of renewal. Most of his canonical love-verse seeks immortality through a perfect reciprocity with his beloved. When that reciprocity fails, Donne reflexively turns to a version of the misogynistic commonplace that locates the source of human mortality in the female body. He insults the woman who has proved insufficient so that he can justify seeking in another woman the ideal she has compromised; he acknowledges the body's mortal frailty only so that he can isolate it in the female agent. In this sense, his misogynist outbursts have less to do with a judgment against living women than with projected bitterness at the failure of a formula for immortality. Perhaps the compulsive pursuit of new seductions suggested by Donne's love-lyrics reflects an effort to confirm that corrupt objects, not an inevitably decaying subject, explain all the previous failures of that formula. His notorious abstractions of love would then reflect less a neglect of the female Other who shares his bed than an evasion of the mortal Self destined for a grave. This is not to deny that Donne's lyrics are often clever exercises for casual occasions, written in persona; but (as psychoanalysis has demonstrated) the self can express itself most deeply outside of direct discourse, and (as Renaissance meditative practices emphasized) the dark business of mortality finds ways to manifest itself in even the lightest instances of life.[12]
Nor is it to deny that Donne was fundamentally a Christian believer, though there are grounds for supposing him susceptible to profound doubts. R. C. Bald's biography contains considerable (if circumstantial) evidence for Donne's flirtations with atheism, but swerves from acknowledging it as such. For example, Bald speculates that Donne probably gained his acquaintance with his chief patron, Sir Robert
Drury, through the recommendation of William Lyly, who already enjoyed Drury's patronage. The most substantial surviving report about Lyly suggests that Donne was hardly entering a hermetically sealed atmosphere of Christian confidence; indeed, it seems questionable whether a fervent Christian could have gained access to Drury through these channels. Joseph Hall reports that, upon taking office as rector at Hawstead,
I found there a dangerous Opposite to the Success of my Ministry, a witty and bold Atheist, one Mr. Lilly , who by reason of his Travails, and Abilities of Discourse and Behaviour, had so deeply insinuated himself into my Patron, Sir Robert Drury , that there was small hopes (during his entireness) for me to work any good upon that Noble Patron of mine. . . .[13]
Bald finds several reasons to believe that, in his thirties, Donne had substantial contact with Thomas Hariot; then professes surprise that "in spite of" such intellectual companionship, Donne became "deeply despondent at the lack of direction in his life."[14] If we recall contemporary testimony "that one Herryott of St Walter Rawleigh his howse hath brought the godhedd in question,"[15] we may suspect that these contacts instead nurtured Donne's despondency at the direction of his life toward oblivion.
If Donne's violently conflicted early religious experience brought him to "a period of unsettlement during which neither Catholicism nor Protestantism could wholly satisfy him," we should recall Bacon's warning that "discordant and contrary opinions in religion" nurture atheism—particularly since Donne's satires also register Bacon's other main culprits: scandalous priests, intellectual idleness, and a custom of scoffing.[16] Donne himself would preach that "the conniving at severall Religions , (as dangerous as it is) is not so dishonourable to God , as the suffering of Iesters at Religion : That may induce heresie ; but this doe's establish Atheisme " (Sermons , VIII, 65). Unlike many of his contemporaries, Donne recognized the specific threat of atheism as distinct from, and indeed worse than, mere heresy within the Christian faith. For what it is worth, we might also note that Donne's only surviving sister married the aforementioned "bold Atheist" Lyly, and Donne's eldest son and namesake was eventually accused of being "an atheistical buffoon, a banterer, and a person of over free thoughts."[17] What ran in this family was hardly an untroubled stream of Christian piety.
Donne's literary critics, like his biographers, have generally been too quick to isolate the supposed sexual adventurism of Donne's cynical
young manhood from his adult religiosity.[18] From my perspective, both forms of passion radiate from Donne's frantic quest for personal immortality; so do his melancholy, his egoism, and his passion for writing. Particularly Metaphysical writing: as the work of Soren Kierkegaard and Otto Rank suggests, "sin and neurosis are two ways of talking about the same thing—the complete isolation of the individual, his disharmony with the rest of nature, his hyperindividualism, his attempt to create his own world from within himself."[19] My goal in pointing out the correspondences is not to belittle the importance of religion in Donne; on the contrary, I am arguing that many of the impulses underlying his secular lyrics find more direct expression in his explicitly religious writing. My argument relies on the work of Winnicott, who argues that "there is no id before ego" and that life "is more nearly about BEING than about sex."[20] It therefore diametrically opposes the many critics who—noting the correspondences between secular lyrics that construe seduction as religion, and sacred poems that construe religion as seduction—have attempted to characterize Donne's adult zeal as largely a sublimation of his adolescent eroticism, the distorted return of repressed erotic drives.[21] Such critics resemble the bad companions Donne warns his congregation against, those who
think thy present fear of God, but a childishness and pusilanimity, and thy present zeal to his service but an infatuation and a melancholy, and thy present application of thy self to God in prayer, but an argument of thy Courtdespaire, and of thy falling from former hopes there. (Sermons , VIII, 182)
Donne thus seems to have anticipated not only psychoanalytic commentaries, but New Historicist ones as well. John Carey's biography may be correct in asserting that Donne's unsatisfied ambition for "worldly success," along with the work-ethic of his Protestant culture, explains the sermons' horror at inactivity, typified by an insistence that idle persons "should be sent to the colonies and forced to work."[22] But the same horror may reflect Donne's characteristic fear of falling utterly and endlessly passive at death, as if insisting on physical activity in the New World could assure it in the next world.
Placing annihilationist anxiety at the psychological core of Donne's writings effectively inverts many of the commonplaces of Donne criticism. Julia J. Smith proposes that Donne's need for instant fulfillment of his sexual desires, as a stay against worldly inconstancy, "lie[s] behind his desire to possess heaven for the soul even at the moment of death."[23] Perhaps, conversely, his need to believe in an infallible Savior underlies
his need for a perfectly responsive lover. My inclination is similarly to reverse Smith's claim that Donne "was perhaps attracted to mortalism because it enabled him to stress the unique drama of the General Resurrection, by which, as we shall see, he was much fascinated."[24] I suspect Donne persistently staged versions of that resurrection because it enabled him to disarm the mortalism—the prospect of soul dying with body—by which he was much terrified. Experimenting with losing and recovering his essential being, Donne plays a version of Freud's "fortda" game, in which a child masters the experience of abandonment, throwing away and then retrieving an object symbolizing the mother.[25]
Donne's appetite for martyrdom is easily misread as a desire to die, whereas it may instead reflect a willingness to suffer even the most extreme agonies in order to make death somehow meaningful. Donald Ramsay Roberts asserts that "there is no utterance in the whole canon of [Donne's] works that can legitimately be interpreted as evidence of a personal fear of or aversion to death."[26] I would not quite venture to the opposite extreme (and one may suspect exaggeration from a critic who declares that Donne "never became anti-Catholic"), but it is important to notice the distinction between Roberts's large claim and the wording of his subsequent analyses: when in "the last months of Donne's life . . . he was clearly determined to see [his demise] as a 'mortem raptus , a death of rapture and ecstasy' . . . do we not clearly discern the actions of a man playing out a drama to signalize to the world that death holds no terrors for him . . . ?"[27] If Donne was "determined" to perceive his death this way and to signal it theatrically to the world, then one can hardly call it an unalloyed, instinctive response. Surely this self-presentation could indicate a struggle to resist and disguise a fearsome aversion, to project orthodox comforts that he found difficult to take to heart.
D.W. Harding sees in Donne's writings on death a "constant effort . . . to convert the fear to longing."[28] But, like the pious commentators cited in my Introduction, Donne can only assert this longing in the evasive form of a rhetorical question: "if thou now feare death inordinately, I shoulde feare that thine eyes have not seen thy salvation to day; who can feare the darknesse of death, that hath the light of this world, and of the next too?" (Sermons , VII, 298). The conventional preacherly question—"shall I be loath to come to that?"—refuses to remain merely rhetorical (Sermons , V, 210; cf. Devotions , p. 78). A perpetual interrogative contemplation of death indicates a struggle with the associated fears, not an easy mastery. Donne lies in the dark thinking pious thoughts, but he does so primarily to scare away the demons of annihilationism hiding
under the bed: "There is nothing so neare Immortality, as to die daily; for not to feele death, is Immortality; and onely hee shall never feele death, that is exercised in the continuall Meditation thereof; Continuall Mortification is Immortality" (Sermons , VIII, 168).
Critics such as John Stachniewski who find hints of despair in Donne's religious verse commonly attribute that despair to a Calvinist theology (reinforced by a lack of reliable patronage) that emphasized "the helplessness of man and the uselessness of human effort before vastly powerful, indiscriminate, and often merciless forces. . . ."[29] The same feelings would of course be evoked by a latent atheism informed by "new Philosophy," with its materialist reading of a Copernican universe.[30] In 1613 Thomas Fitzherbert, answering the Pseudo-Martyr , interpreted Donne's "malignity towards Catholickes" in much the same way I am portraying Donne's malignity toward female frailty: as "a Simptome to discover another more malignant, and dangerous disease bred in his hart, from whence he hath belched out so many Lucianicall, impious, blasphemous, and Atheisticall jests against Gods Saints and Servants, that he may well be thought to be one of those [who have] set theyr mouth against heaven ."[31] Donne himself reports that, in his efforts to disperse his fits of melancholy, "I am like an exorcist, which had long laboured about one, which at last appears to have the Mother, that I still mistake my disease" (Letters , p. 62). Perhaps the comparison is more than casual; perhaps, like that exorcist, Donne could deal more easily with the invigorating threat of damnation than with the melancholy possibility that there are no authentic supernatural manifestations in his personal universe, only the facts of mortal decay. Perhaps critics and biographers, too, have long mistaken (as lust and, later, zeal) the disease of annihilationist doubt that ate away at Donne's heart, and spoke at one remove through his secular lyrics. If Donne himself could declare that "our mortality, and our immortality . . . are the two reall Texts, and subjects of all our Sermons" (Sermons , II, 361), then perhaps those are the real subjects of the poems as well.
Love As Death: Exercises in Substitution
The warning of George Herbert's "Jordan (I)" against "Catching the sense at two removes" is bracing for the ingenious modern critic. I hope my search for the referred pain of mortality in Donne's erotic lyrics can be justified by noting his obsession with
personal immortality, which often seems to be their only unifying characteristic. Such inferences will always be uncertain, if only because the degree of Donne's serious personal investment in his lyric speakers is uncertain. But imperfect evidence is not worthless evidence, and—as a disturbed wave pattern may delineate a submerged wreck—consistent and peculiar characteristics of poetic speech may help to reveal characteristics of the poet's mind.
The love-lyrics pursue immortality by an inventive system of substitution: not a scapegoat villain replacing the dead person in the transaction of revenge, or a child replacing a parent in the mortal cycle, or Christ replacing humankind in the economy of condemnation, but instead love replacing death in the manageable universe of poetic creation. Long before the Death's Duell sermon, where Walton acknowledges the morbid tendency, Donne's writings served "to discharge his memory of his preconceived meditations, which were of dying."[32] Like standard mortification exercises, Donne's poetic practice requires recognizing the figured presence of death in all the businesses of life. Donne's idiosyncracy is his insistence that his passion and his poetry can reverse the transaction, vivifying mortality by containing and transmuting it within his omnipresent experience of sexual love. It is not surprising that Donne would write that he and his wife lie "in two beds, or graves" during an illness (Letters , p. 145); but even the heartily sexual undressing in the "Elegy: Going to Bed" echoes common Reformation metaphors for dying.[33]
Love and death make a familiar pairing, and a simple code of substitution or inversion is a familiar mode of psychological evasion. Undoing this reaction-formation, replacing the references to love in Donne's poems with parallel references to death, often does surprisingly little violence to their colloquialism, their internal coherence, or their continuity with Donne's other writings. In "Loves Growth," for instance, a series of conventional proverbs about death are transformed into—or thinly disguised as—Metaphysical pronouncements about love.[34] If these delicate lyric entities can survive so crudely performed a transplant, then the theory underlying the operation will be partly vindicated. The fact that the poems accommodate thanatos precisely where they manifest eros does not preempt more straightforward readings, but it does indicate the psychological associations subliminally active in their creator.
In "The Sunne Rising," the lovers bear some odd resemblances to corpses. If they were dead rather than impassioned, it would indeed be
irrelevant for the sun to intrude announcing morning, and absurd to imagine them undertaking any of the tasks of life—study, work, harvest. Death, as least as much as love, "all alike, no season knowes, nor clyme, / Nor houres, dayes, moneths, which are the rags of time" (9–10). In the oblivion of death, climate is changeless, and time a seamless shroud. The timelessness that love grants him is precisely what he elsewhere fears death will impose on him. Indeed, Donne eventually revives these same words to emphasize the supreme imperative of salvation: one sermon declares that there are "no seasons, no moneths, no yeares, no dayes" in the eternal hereafter,[35] and another asserts that "first and last are but the ragges of time, and his mercy hath no relation to time."[36] The only cure for eternal death is Resurrection: a Son rising, the limitless love of a personal savior. Donne's mate is indeed "all States, and all Princes, I" (21), if his terror of death is leading him (here as in lines 17–18 of "The Relique") into a characteristically megalomaniacal identification with that King of Kings. But, of course, not even that exalted identity confers a full immunity from death.
Donne's boast in the second stanza that he can eliminate the light of the sun merely "with a winke" (13) is the egotistical facet of solipsism; to assert that eclipsing one's own perception of the sun is indistinguishable from eliminating the sun itself is to risk recognizing that an entire universe disappears with the extinction of any individual consciousness. Donne was not alone in trying to handle this dangerously two-edged sword, which the Reformation emphasis on interiority would surely have sharpened. Thomas Traherne argues that "The sun in your eye is as much to you as the sun in the heavens. For by this the other is enjoyed. It would shine on all rivers, trees, and beasts in vain to you could you not think upon it."[37] And Thomas Browne characteristically puts the sword of ratiocination back into the sheath of faith: "Nor need we fear this term 'annihilation'. . . . For the eyes of God, and perhaps also of our glorified selves, shall as really behold and contemplate the world in its Epitome of contracted essence, as now it doth at large and in its dilated substance" (p. 124).
"Nothing else is," Donne announces. Perhaps—but all else is therefore nothing. Donne's religious prose again provides an analogue that reveals not only the theological implications of this poetic bravado, but also the specific fear—of closing his eyes into a perpetual darkness of death—that the poem displaces: "Only be thou present to me, O my God, and this bedchamber shall be all one room, and the closing of these bodily eyes here, and the opening of the eyes of my soul there, all one
act" (Devotions , p. 70; Sermons , II, 182, seeks the same kind of instant transfer for his hearing). He cannot look away from the beloved object because their exchange of gazes seems to verify his fantasy of immortal and omnipotent consciousness:
the incapacity of the ego to accept separation results in . . . a mental force which separates the ego from reality, denies reality, represses reality. And the effect is to burden the narcissistic project of loving union with the world with the unreal project of becoming oneself one's whole world (the solipsism to which the philosophers regress).[38]
Taken together, Donne's Metaphysical conceitedness and his erotic fixations constitute predictable responses to annihilationist terror.
The ending of the second stanza echoes proverbial wisdom about the levelling functions of the house of death: "Aske for those Kings whom thou saw'st yesterday, / And thou shalt heare, All here in one bed lay" (19–20). Donne himself would preach that "All lie alike" in the earth, because the grave holds no special place for "dust Royall" (Sermons , IX, 64; cf. X, 238). Again what profess to be statements about the joys of unique love seem equally germane to the terrors of indifferent death. "Everything In One Place" is the current advertising slogan of the famous Forest Lawn cemetery. The fixing of the sun is a carpe diem motif designed to forestall the ubi sunt motif. A man who would later warn in a sermon "that yesterday is dead" (Sermons , IV, 52) must be perpetually afraid of allowing tomorrow to occur. The patronizing address to the aging sun arouses our common-sense awareness that the sun ages us long before we can weary it. Donne is not merely the aubade lover who refuses to accept that the rising sun must part him from his beloved; he also refuses to accept the parting of soul from body that time imposes on all mortals. In resisting, on behalf of his sexual relationship, social pressures toward ordinary daytime duties, Donne also resists, on behalf of his grandiose self-love, a standard Jacobean argument for accepting mortality: "Shall the heavens stay their ever-rolling wheels . . . and hold still Time, to prolong thy miserable days, as if the highest of their working were to do homage unto thee? Thy death is a piece of the order of this All " (Drummond, pp. 24–25). This is precisely the "all" that Donne tries to appropriate five times in lines 20–24.
"The Sunne Rising" does of course describe lovers defying the universe, rather than corpses submitting to it. But if Murray Roston is right, the poem is also an act of defiance against the Copernican universe that subordinates anthrocentrism to heliocentrism.[39] "The Sunne Ris-
ing" enlists the richness of insular experience and the egoistical potential of subjectivity as a defense against a bewilderingly unsympathetic cosmos. Donne's deep attachment to this mistress, and his unrealistic worship of her, serve much the same function that Rank and Becker perceive in psychoanalytic transference:
Realistically the universe contains overwhelming power. Beyond ourselves we sense chaos. We can't really do much about this unbelievable power, except for one thing: we can endow certain persons with it. The child takes natural awe and terror and focusses them on individual beings, which allows him to find the power and the horror all in one place instead of diffused throughout a chaotic universe. Mirabile ! The transference object, being endowed with the transcendent powers of the universe, now has in himself the power to control, order, and combat them.[40]
"The Sunne Rising" asserts the power of human love, but in that assertion we can see the outlines of the threat love must serve to neutralize. The poem presents one side—ostentatiously, one side only—in the human argument with the universe, an argument over which one can effectively declare the other irrelevant.
When Donne needs to retreat from hints of his cosmic insignificance, he uses an idealized lover and a significant setting to re-enslave the sun to human purposes. This battle against the implications of Copernicanism continues—this time in the depressive rather than the grandiose mode of narcissistic crisis—when he courts Lucy, Countess of Bedford, in Twickenham garden, part of which was laid out as a detailed model of the Ptolemaic universe.[41] "Twicknam Garden" ostensibly describes a pastoral retreat in which Donne's speaker laments an erotic rejection. Yet the diction of the poem suggests an unsuccessful struggle to retreat to a self-centered universe, and what he most laments is his own mortality. The speaker explains that he cannot appreciate the beauty of this refuge because he has become infected with an unlawful and unrequited sexual desire. But in Donne's lyrics, sexual desire for a woman is often a displacement of the narcissistic desire for an immortal self. Beneath the conventional sexual moral of "Twicknam Garden" lies a moral like that of Herbert's "The Flower": that the craving for individual immortality prevents us from accepting our place in a providential flow of nature.[42]
Throughout Renaissance literature, gardens are both womb and tomb, reflecting both the Edenic immortality we have forfeited and the figurative, cyclical immortality we must learn to accept in its place. In
mourning the passing seasons, as Gerard Manley Hopkins suggests in "Spring and Fall," we mourn ourselves. In the opening lines of "Twicknam Garden," the speaker accuses himself of converting the winds and rains of the season into expressions of his personal sadness:
Blasted with sighs, and surrounded with teares,
Hither I come to seeke the spring,
And at mine eyes, and at mine eares,
Receive such balmes, as else cure every thing. . . .
The prescription is conventional: some fresh air in the garden on an April day to purge the heart of sadness. But, as the weather indicates (and as his amorousness may too), the calendar spring has already arrived; the problem is accepting it as itself, rather than through an egoistical literary convention.
The medicine of seeing life renewed around him will surely fail if he is interested only in finding a cure for his entrapment in the cycle of life. The lovelorn Donne in Twickenham garden is like the childless Macbeth in Dunsinane castle, a "yellow leaf" who feels "aweary of the sun" as young trees spring up around him; the women who seemed to promise transcendence have betrayed him back into his mortal destiny. The poem has been characterized as a broad satire on the complaining Petrarchan lover,[43] but one of his letters shows Donne responding to a spring garden in very much the manner of the "Twicknam Garden" persona: "Because I am in a place and season where I see everything bud forth, I must do so too," he wrote to Goodyer in 1608, yet "the pleasantnesse of the season displeases me. Every thing refreshes, and I wither, and I grow older, and not better, my strength diminishes, and my load growes" (Letters , p. 68). And on his sickbed he would remark, "what a Minute is Mans life in respect of the Sunnes, or of a tree" (Devotions , p. 72).
The second stanza begins with a wish (like the rash wish of an angry child in a fairy tale) "that winter did / Benight the glory of this place, / And that a grave frost did forbid / These trees to laugh and mocke mee to my face" (10–13). In other words, he wishes for some reflex in nature to help conceal the fact that he creates his own misplaced misery. The emphases on winter, night, and that "grave frost" suggest death itself much more emphatically than they do sexual mortification. Clearly this speaker is haunted not only by a failure of transcendence, but also—like the speaker of Marvell's "Mower" poems, where again the grim reaper is thinly disguised as an unrequiting mistress—by a failure of the pathetic
fallacy. The stubborn infantile conviction that the entire world is a harmonious extension of one's desiring faculty is gradually compromised by the good mother, briefly renewed by an ideal lover, and finally shattered by the specter of death.
Freud's famous meditation on "The Theme of the Three Caskets" ends by speculating about "the three inevitable relations that a man has with a woman—the woman who bears him, the woman who is his mate and the woman who destroys him . . . they are the three forms taken by the figure of the mother in the course of a man's life—the mother herself, the beloved one who is chosen after her pattern, and lastly the Mother Earth who receives him once more."[44] B assanio's choice of the beautiful silent third casket in The Merchant of Venice , and Lear's reconciliation with the beautiful silent third daughter in King Lear , reflect men's efforts to reconceive their inevitable mortality as a chosen fulfillment. The device of this denial "in which the Goddess of Death was replaced by the Goddess of Love"—and the mother by wife and daughter—clearly resembles the code of substitution by which Donne seeks to control mortality.
But rituals can save only those who believe in their efficacy, and the infant learns resentfully that the nurturing entity is not really an eternal extension of the self. Spring may be like a priest administering extreme unction in "Twicknam Garden," as one critic has suggested,[45] but it cannot redeem the creature to whom mortality tastes as bitter as ashes, whose "spider love . . . transubstantiatcs all, / And can convert Manna to gall," a Host into a corpse, pure food into wormwood (6–7). Unable to imitate the self-sacrificing Christ, he instead replicates Satan's destructive egoism: "And that this place may thoroughly be thought / True Paradise, I have the serpent brought" (8–9). This is precisely the version of the Fall that the Renaissance mystic Jacob Boehme warned against: "This was that true paradise in which Thou didst place our first parents," warning them "not to becloud this holy Sabbath of Thy indwelling Vitality with ego-centric desire, and not to lead the serpent's cunning and falsity therein. . . ."[46] In Lucy's garden as in Adam's, the sin of pride and the craving for personal immortality are the most dangerous temptations.
The speaker then begs to be transformed into "Some senslesse peece of this place" (16); but (as the author of Biathanatos was well aware)[47] oblivion is always within the reach of those who truly want it. This ostensible request for extinction is really a quest for immortality: "Make me a mandrake, so I may groane [or "grow"] here, / Or a stone
fountaine weeping out my yeare" (17–18). These are imitations of life, extensions of the very passive and mournful aspects of life he supposedly wishes to escape. The mandrake (as "Song: Goe, and catche a falling starre" indicates) was a plant superstitiously supposed to hold a human soul. What the speaker of "Twicknam Garden" seeks is a local habitation for his soul that will continue to express his emotional experience beyond the extinction of consciousness. The weeping stone fountain—again, tears to match the sighs—would serve that purpose; like Herbert's "Altar," it is a defense-mechanism against terminal silence. Furthermore, the fountain is "weeping out its yeare" rather than bewailing the unkindness of a mistress. The emotion that the speaker projects onto the fountain—presumably the one he is evading in himself—is this sorrow at the transience of his own subjective existence.
As he weeps and drinks the beloved's tears, he must fight the recognition that the creature he desires to love eternally is himself. Burial, mourning, and immortality are all more vivid and prominent in "Twicknam Garden" than is the woman who supposedly inspires the poem. So when the speaker reaches the standard Petrarchan conclusion that his mistress's rejection "kills mee" (27), the literary convention makes explicit the psychological agenda. Exclusion from the bed of a woman he desires is merely one manifestation of a more profound fear that haunts Donne's lyrics, both sacred and profane: the fear of exclusion from the immortality that might be conferred by the absolute devotion of an omnipotent Other. When nature will not violate her principles to save him, then his death is precisely "her truth" (27).
In "The Sunne Rising," reciprocated love offers immortality; in "Twicknam Garden," unreciprocated love imposes death. "The Extasie" defines what Donne desires from love, and thereby hints what he fears from death. Without the full sensual experience of the body, love and immortality alike become meaningless abstractions. "The Extasie" begins with the lovers seemingly lying atop their own graves, resembling the spousal monuments that remained common throughout late Medieval Europe: "Wee like sepulchrall statues lay; / All day, the same our postures were, / And wee said nothing, all the day" (18–20). Even before this explicit comparison, the suggestion of corpses permeates what is ostensibly a scene of pastoral love. Where the swelling of the ground pushes up violets (which were commonly supposed to spring from graves, cf. Hamlet , 5.1.240), this motionless couple lie with their hands "cimented" and their eyes fixed, while their "soules . . . to advance
their state, / Were gone out" (5, 15–16). Though their bodies remain separate, they meet on a higher plane, following a geometric model of enduring love that "Aire and Angels" and "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" will spell out more clearly.
Because it prepares souls and bodies to retie "That subtile knot, which makes us man" (64), this model looks ahead to resurrection. To attain the immediate goal of earthly seduction, as to attain the eventual goal of heavenly salvation, the speaker of "The Extasie" must temporarily abjure his body. Then he must recover it, because unless the loving soul involves the body in its joys, this passion resembles only a failed resurrection: "A man is not saved, a sinner is not redeemed, I am not received into heaven, if my body be left out; The soule and the body concurred to the making of a sinner, and body and soule must concur to the making of a Saint" (Sermons , VII, 103). In another sermon Donne insists,
I must have this body with me to heaven, or else salvation it self is not perfect; And yet I cannot have this body thither, except as S. Paul did his, I beat down this body , attenuate this body by mortification; Wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from this body of death? (Sermons , II, 63; cf. IV, 47)
In the sermons the answer will be Christ; in the erotic verse the answer is a woman, the same kind of creature who delivered him into that body. Donne's craving to unify the divided self permeates his writings, and he uses sexual conjunction much as Browne used experiments on flowers: to provide "not only an ocular demonstration of our resurrection, but a notable illustration of that Psychopanny" which we endure in the grave.[48]
Donne's experiment appears to be no less successful. By refusing to admit a distinction between the two lovers (even in the pronouns), "The Extasie" constructs a mirror that captures their souls,
And makes both one, each this and that.
A single violet transplant,
The strength, the colour, and the size,
(All which before was poore, and scant,)
Redoubles still, and multiplies.
When love, with one another so
Interinanimates two soules,
That abler soule, which thence doth flow,
Defects of lonelinesse controules.
(36–44)
This is a narcissistic transcription of the usual promises of procreation. By rescuing each of their essences from the vulnerability of residing in a single transient being, this dual soul is able to control the human defect known as mortality. Their physical and spiritual mating allows them to revivify, like violets, in the very face of death. By the peculiar way he advocates and articulates this embrace, Donne manages to make ecstasy—the going of the soul out of the self, as in death—compatible with the interiority he cherishes.
It would be misleading to read this seduction poem as pure philosophical speculation; its first reference, as well as its last resort, is to desiring bodies. Yet in seizing the body, Donne seizes the only form of timelessness he can stand to imagine. What Donne has really discovered is a new way into the old motifs of carpe diem poetry: instead of warning that death will end physical love, Donne presents spiritual love as a foreshadowing of death which can be dispelled by letting the moribund bodies rise to the occasion. This is sexual extortion of an unusually sophisticated sort. The ambiguity of the closing assurance—that any enlightened spectator "shall see / Small change, when we'are to bodies gone" (74–75)—effectively conflates two assurances: that physical lovemaking will simply fulfill their spiritual love, and that the love will persist even when its physical vehicles have expired. The resorting to bodies, and the escape from bodies, are intertwined defenses against the threat of "sepulchrall" mortality that haunts the early lines of the poem. Death will prove to be nothing other than love; bodies and souls will somehow eventually converge in unlimited delight. Those are the Christian rumors that Donne repeatedly seeks to confirm in his secular lyrics by making the conjugal bed a flattering mirror of the tomb.
Reciprocity As Immortality: "Lovers Houres Be Full Eternity"
From a Freudian perspective, sexual desire and religious belief share a foundation in a child's hopes and fears concerning its parents.[49] The vacillation in Christian theology between the traditional notion that damnation consists of punishment by God, and the Augustinian notion that damnation consists of isolation from God, corresponds to a basic dilemma of early childhood: demanding attention and
remaining silent each carry dangers. As the Father's bad children, we may sometimes imagine that even annihilation is preferable to judgment. That is the reluctant conclusion of one Holy Sonnet: "That thou remember them, some claime as debt, / I thinke it mercy, if thou wilt forget" ("If Poysonous Mineralls," 13–14; cf. Sermons , III, 97, IX, 64). And at moments, like many Christians, Donne wonders whether it is fair that "I had a Punishment , before I had a being " (Sermons , VII, 78).
More often, however, Donne craves the punishment that will demonstrate divine attentiveness, as in "Batter my Heart" and "Goodfriday, 1613. Riding Westward." In his sermons he asserts that all the vivid tortures of hell are far easier to bear than "the privation of the sight of God, the banishment from the presence of God" (Sermons , IV, 86; see similarly I, 186, II, 129, and III, 51). He describes God as "like us, that he takes it worse to be slighted, to be neglected, to be left out, then to be actually injur'd" (Sermons , I, 195). That is the miserable story of abused children, and Donne the desperate sinner always retains traces of Donne the sick child, badly in need of a relational meaning for his body, badly in need of his creator's attentive handling:
I am abundantly rich in this, that I lie here possest with that feare, which is thy feare , both that this sickhesse is thy immediate correction, and not meerely a naturall accident . . . and that this feare preserves me from all inordinate feare, arising out of the infirmitie of Nature, because thy hand being upon me, thou wilt never let me fall out of thy hand. (Devotions , p. 33)
As my Introduction has argued, even a terrifying God is preferable to a universe that provides no limits, no narrative or cognitive structures to regulate experience.
An infant lives in terror of being carelessly dropped, into the abyss. So does Donne the preacher, whose desire for divine punishment again comports the infant's craving for maternal care:
. . . when Gods hand is bent to strike, it is a fearefull thing, to fall into the hands of the living God ; but to fall out of the hands of the living God, is a horror beyond our expression, beyond imagination . . . that that God, who looked upon me, when I was nothing, and called me when I was not, as though I had been, out of the womb and depth of darknesse, will not looke upon me now . . . that that God, who hath often looked upon me in my foulest uncleannesse, and when I had shut out the eye of the day, the Sunne . . . with curtaines and windowes and doores, did yet see me, and see me in mercy, by making me see that he saw me. . . .(Sermons , V, 266; cf. III, 98 and VI, 124)
I were miserable . . . if before I had done well or ill actually in this world, God had not wrapped me up, in his good purpose upon me. And I were miserable
againe, if . . . after my sinne had cast me into the grave, there were not . . . a gracious countenance to looke upon me, when I were risen. (Sermons , III, 107)
In these rhapsodies about God, Donne anticipates object-relations theories about the role of maternal responses in the formation of the infant self.[50] Donne's reciprocating mistresses are (among other things) a sublimation of this ancestry. The "Busie old foole" whose gaze invades Donne's bedroom "Through windowes, and through curtaines" in "The Sunne Rising" is a residue of the same parental figure, and the speaker resembles an adolescent boy establishing sexual independence by barring his mother from his room (1–3). But Donne's long terrifying evocations of abandonment make that gesture look like psychological bravado. His compulsive fear of isolation from the face and the care of the Almighty[51] culminates a lifelong fear of separation from the gaze of the beloved Other, who will not come in response to crying (Sermons , IX, 389). His terror of the dark resembles the "nameless dread" that "overwhelms an infant whose mother fails to contain his terrors and make them meaningful: 'The patient feels surrounded not so much by real objects, things-in-themselves, but by bizarre objects that are real only in that they are the residue of thoughts and conceptions. . . ."'[52] There is a cognitive as well as an emotive component to the need for the attentive consciousness of a caretaker—a matrix —and Donne cannot sustain perpetually his ostentatious intellectual control of the universe. Who will watch over his special reality while he sleeps?
A careless nursing mother, an indifferent Mother Nature, and the deus absconditus all coalesce in the ailing Donne's perplexity
that our Nourse should overlay us, and Ayre , that nourishes us, should destroy us, but that it is a halfe Atheisme to murmure against Nature , who is Gods immediate Commissioner , who would not think himselfe miserable to bee put into the hands of Nature , who . . . delights her selfe to blow him up like a glasse , till shee see him breake, even with her owne breath? (Devotions , p. 62)
It has become a psychoanalytic commonplace that "The child who has good maternal experiences will develop a sense of basic security and will not be subject to morbid fears of losing support, of being annihilated, or the like" (Becker, p. 13). Winnicott suggests that a compulsive interest in death reflects an early death of the self that was not acknowledged as such, leaving the adult to search continuously for some objective correlative to that repressed experience of personal erasure: "Death, looked at in this way as something that happened to the patient but which the patient was not mature enough to experience, has the
meaning of annihilation."[53] However conjectural any specific application may be, this modern formula is probably applicable to an Elizabethan psyche. As a distinguished anthropologist observes, across a wide variety of cultures, "The threatening event of object loss suffered by the infant in a series of separation traumas from the mother forms the basis of our fears regarding the final farewell."[54]
The fact that Donne appears markedly less trustful than Herbert of both women and providence may be more than a casual coincidence: it suggests that Donne's experience of his mother (or perhaps his wetnurse) was much less reliably successful than Herbert's, that her attentions were perceived as less consistently benign. This difference would also help to explain the contrast between Donne's egoistical erotic aggression and Herbert's pleasure in submitting the self quietly to a providential power. It is certainly difficult to imagine Herbert preaching, as Donne preaches, that "in the tendernesse of our childhood, we suffer, and yet are whipt if we cry" (Sermons , VII, 54).[55]
Since we lack extensive testimony about the privy-training techniques of Donne's mother, Elizabeth, it would be easy to credit the vague praise of her tender care offered by Walton and Gosse.[56] But Donne's sense of his mother's stability, purity and self-sacrificing protectiveness cannot have been helped by the fact that she remarried twice before he left his teens; nor indeed by the fact that five of the six siblings he knew died before he was twenty-one (Elizabeth outlived even that one survivor, and nearly outlived Donne himself). The point is certainly not that she was to blame for these losses, only that her child might easily have blamed her, however subliminally and irrationally. Her failures would surely have offered a contrast with the woman this chapter will propose as Donne's idealized mother-figure: Magdalen Herbert, whom he described as excellent in "ministring to the sicke " (Sermons , VIII, 89), who gave him shelter from the plague that had killed so many in Elizabeth's family, and whose ten children (including the poet George) all lived to adulthood. Nor would it have been entirely unreasonable for Donne to blame some of his family's losses—including the death of his close brother Henry, in prison for recusancy—on his mother's insistence on loyalty to the forbidden Roman church.
Donne's sole extant letter to his mother promises "to look to you, and provide for your relief," and concludes with a plea that she "for God's sake, pardon those negligences which I have heretofore used towards you." This may be merely conventional filial apologetic, yet it is also possible to read, in the implied role reversal, the traces of an
unhappy family history, in which Donne himself endured (and perhaps reciprocated) the negligences of the woman who ought to have looked to him and provided relief. The evidence of this strain must admittedly remain highly speculative; but if Donne experienced some primal disappointment in his mother's nurturance (beyond what Heinz Kohut calls the "optimal frustration" that allows the child individuation without any sacrifice of maternal empathy), that would help to explain his seeming overreactions to the subsequent failures of women, and perhaps of God, to give him absolute assurance of his worthiness and their devotion.[57] To a system sensitized by a comparable early trauma, such renewed disappointments would have provoked the psychological equivalent of anaphylactic shock.
The displacement of these infant terrors into worship of God, predictable enough by the Freudian model of religion, makes all the more sense in the case of Donne, who wrenched himself so violently away from the Roman church that continued to command his mother's full devotion. In one sermon, Donne promises to spare his congregation what Catholicism imposes on its spiritual children: either "dry breasts " or milk so impure that they will "cast it up" (VI, 92; cf. 96). In another, Donne warns of "a withdrawing of Gods spirit from that Church , to whose breasts hee hath applied you," and later in the same sermon describes the breasts of the Roman church as swollen "into tumors, and ulcers, and blisters" (VII, 75, 83; cf. VI, 184). Heresy thus becomes figured as mastiffs. One of his letters similarly describes that church, along with its Puritan counterpart, as "sister teats of [God's] graces, yet both diseased and infected" (Letters , p. 88)—a striking contrast to the sustaining purity of the "deare Mother" Herbert finds in "The British Church." Evidently Donne was not breast-fed by his mother: he reports (suggestively, in his funeral sermon for Magdalen Herbert) that he "suck'd Christian bloud, in my Mothers wombe, and Christian milke at my Nurses breast" (Sermons , VIII, 77; cf. VI, 96). George Herbert was more likely to have had the same woman play both roles: Magdalen Herbert was clearly a devoted mother, and upper-class Protestant women were often instructed to undertake this "duty."[58] In any case, where Herbert seems to have acquired his positive religious assurance directly from his mother, Donne reported acquiring his much later, primarily through his wife—and partly through Magdalen Herbert as a spiritual foster-mother.
As a child first achieves the status of individual person by its reflections in the mother's responsive face, as a lover feels discovered and
fulfilled in the exchange with a romantic partner, so the soul (according to Reformation theology) can achieve its fulfillment and salvation only in intimate dialogue with God. In a midnight colloquy with the soul of the late Lord Harrington, Donne claims to
discerne by favour of this light,
My selfe, the hardest object of the sight.
God is the glasse; as thou when thou dost see
Him who sees all, seest all concerning thee. . . .[59]
These mirrorings are indispensable to the conclusion (itself seemingly indispensable in modern Western culture) that we are each uniquely valuable. The punishment Cain cannot endure, Donne argues, "is not that GOD would not looke graciously upon him, but that GOD would not looke at all upon him. Infinite, and infinitely desperate, are the effects. . . ." (Sermons , VII, 83).
Donne's search for a perpetually affirming confrontation with a lover, an ideal exchange of gazes, therefore takes on the obsessiveness and piety of a grail quest. If, as Debora Shuger argues, "The language of spiritual politics in Donne is . . . suffused by an erotic and infantile affectivity,"[60] then it is not surprising that the erotic diction conflates infantile and religious forms of worship. If, as a young man, Donne lost confidence in religion, and instead "sought distraction in activity of other kinds,"[61] then it is valid to look for the displaced religious function of those other activities. The devout preacher himself, at about age fifty, would look back and condemn "those false waies, in which we sought our comforts in our looser daies" (Letters , p. 116). According to a contemporary observer, Donne was then "a great visiter of Ladies" and "great writer of conceited Verses"[62] —corresponding to the erotic and artistic evasions of mortality that (Becker argues) are the chief alternatives to religious consolation in modern Western culture. His youthful devotion to sexual conquest and poetic creation are, from this perspective, foreshocks of his eventual Christian zeal. During his adolescence, John Donne began to play Don Juan, an apostate to chastity as well as to Catholicism; perhaps—having surrendered his faith in Virgin Mothers—he felt compelled to construct a perverse and radically willful myth of sexual salvation to sustain him until his Protestant faith solidified. Perhaps, too, any Arminian reflexes dormant in the aftermath of Donne's conversion to Protestantism found expression in a mythology suggesting that immortality—"Canonization"—was achievable through the works of earthly love and art.
Donne's letters reflect this effort to remove his immortality from dependence on an inscrutable Calvinist God, and reinvest it in a scheme that depends on the manipulable loving attention of a woman:
Madam,
I am not come out of England , if I remain in the Noblest part of it, your minde. . . . No Prince would be loth to die, that were assured of so faire a tombe to preserve his memory: but I have a greater vantage then so; for since there is a Religion in friendship, and a death in absence, to make up an intire frame there must be a heaven too: and there can be no heaven so proportionall to that Religion, and that death, as your favour. (Letters , p. 211)
Donne's lyrics, too, participate in a Platonic myth that is a major incentive to romantic love: the hope of remaining ageless in the heart, eyes, mind, and soul of the beloved.[63] He is on the side of Humpty Dumpty who, when Alice insists that "one can't help growing older," replies, "One can't perhaps, but two can."
In "The Primrose," for example, Donne suggests that his mysterious numerical balance with a beloved woman will allow him to tame the overwhelming universe. She must be neither too spiritual nor too physical ("a sixe, or foure," [12]) to draw him entirely into the loving exchange; she must instead be the "five" (22) that provides men with their other half, the number that Ben Jonson's "Masque of Hymen" cites as "The binding force of unity" in married love.[64] According to the early manuscript titles, the setting of "The Primrose" is Montgomery Castle, where in 1613 Donne was a guest of the Herbert family. Like Twickenham garden—where Donne similarly played both lover and dependent—this second home allows Donne to fantasize a second Eden. The terrifying "infinitie" of the Copernican universe is safely reduced to a "terrestriall Galaxie" of flowers through which he can stroll in search of a second Eve (5–6). By devoting themselves fully and faithfully to their bond of absolute spiritual and physical faithfulness this pair can—like the lovers in "The Extasie"—convert the infinite graveyard back into a garden of life.
If the only reality is the beloved's perception, then achieving a privileged status within that perception precludes death. If lovers are truly "one anothers All," as in the last line of "Loves Infinitehesse," then they have nothing else to lose. Becker's model of psychoanalytic transference illuminates Donne's model of romantic intimacy:
How wonderful and how facile to be able to take our whole immortalitystriving and make it part of a dialogue with a single human being . . . to take
this unspeakable mystery and dispel it straightaway by addressing our performance of heroics to another human being, knowing thus daily whether this performance is good enough to earn us eternity. (pp. 155–56)
The redemptive "dialogue of one" Donne seeks in "The Extasie" makes possible what Rankian psychology describes as the "cosmology of two" that confers the illusion of immortality in romantic love.[65] The ideal of romantic marriage proposes that an individual becomes irreplaceable, and a lifetime together becomes a sufficient eternity: the fact that mortality is shared effectively undoes it.[66]
"The Good-Morrow" provides a canonical example of the perfect romantic exchange through which Donne pursues immortality, as "The Sunne Rising" exemplified the encoding of death in love. "The GoodMorrow" traces a progression from oblivious biological existence toward a timeless mystical yoking of the spiritual and the physical. In the opening stanza the speaker compares his former self to a suckling infant in an undifferentiated merger with its universe, and compares his previous condition to a prodigious sleep from which love has awakened him, as Christianity did the seven sleepers of Ephesus, into the fulfillment of his best dreams. Romantic love thus takes the place of both infantile megalomania and Christian redemption simultaneously: instead of being pre- or post-mortal, the truly beloved lover can be immortal within a fully conscious condition of life. The allusion to the sleepers makes theological salvation and erotic transcendence alike dependent on an awakening. As the Ephesians would have slept forever if not for the Incarnation, so would we all remain dead forever if not for the Second Coming; this spiritualized love-affair saves the speaker from a comparable stupor.[67]
In the second stanza the soul reawakens, as if this were a psychopannychist Last Judgement. The infant's ability to control the universe by focusing on the nurse's sustaining breast gives way to the lover's version of that pleasure—a superior version, Donne suggests, and one which sustains life on a more meaningful and lasting level than nursing. The solipsistic shrinking of "every where" into the "one little roome" the lovers share not only disarms the fear that entombment entails surrender of the world; it also prepares us for a radically intellectual solution to mortality. Consciousness may exist only in life, but life exists only in consciousness. Deciding that the only existence that matters is the one shared with the beloved shrinks the devastating scope of eternity to the manageable scale of a human lifetime; finding the
whole world in the beloved offers the infinite in the present. Donne preached that the "best help" against the vertiginous expanse of eternal time "is, to use well Aeternum vestrum , your owne Eternity; as S. Gregory calls our whole course of this life, Aeternum nostrum , our eternity."[68] He also asserted that "if there were any one minute in a mans life, in which he were safe from death, a man might in some sort be said to be immortal, for that minute; but Man is never so" (Sermons , V, 210). The last clause belongs to Dr. Donne; lack Donne clung to the hope of achieving such a moment through earthly passion, as "The GoodMorrow" clearly demonstrates.
When Petrarchan lovers warn that rejection will prove fatal, they are practicing literary convention on one level, sexual blackmail on another. But on a third level the warning can serve to verify this imagined correspondence between consummated love and immortality. It is an indirect way of claiming the contrapositive: that fulfillment will preclude death. Tragic playwrights and pastoral poets of the Renaissance were often willing to kill off their protagonists in defense of this binaristic scheme. The death-impulse of bereaved lovers (in life as well as in literature) results partly from the need to sustain this myth of symmetry and synchronicity.[69] The third and final stanza of "The Good-Morrow" translates into an instantaneous metaphysical tableau the common sentimental vision of lovers whose lasting fondness and memories preserve each other's value: "My face in thine eye, thine in mine appeares" (15), joining two "hemispheres" into a traditional figure of immortal perfection (as mythologized, for example, in Plato's Symposium ).[70] It not only recalls the reflexive maternal gaze that creates the self, it also anticipates the reflexive divine regard that immortalizes the self: "he will make thee see, that he is with thee; and never goe out of thy sight, till he have brought thee, where thou canst never goe out of his" (Sermons , VI, 185).
The poem concludes, not with pleasure in the loving or praise of the beloved, but with an abstract recipe for immortality:
What ever dyes, was not mixt equally;
If our two loves be one, or, thou and I
Love so alike, that none doe slacken, none can die.
(19–21)
A poem about rebirth has become a poem about stasis. The aubade that emphatically rejects parting becomes an elegy that provisionally rejects dying. In this tug-of-love, a tie is a victory for both sides. The tension
produces and preserves a redemptive sympathetic reflex in the economy of consciousness, as pathetic fallacy does in the economy of biological nature.
When these reflexes fail—as "Twicknam Garden" acknowledges—the consequences are mortal. In stanza 21 of his "Metempsychosis," Donne warns that men died young in the primal horde because free love "slackneth so the soules, and bodies knot." This warning anticipates the closing line of "The Good-Morrow," and makes post-coital depression an anticipation of deadness itself. But as long as man and woman, soul and body, can sustain their enlivening embrace, they are immortal, never collapsing back into the stupor that preceded this fulfilled life. One need not ignore the technical references to alchemical health here to notice also a psychoanalytic model of mental health, in which the infantile oral desire (for the breast before sleep) has been reconstructed into adult genital sexuality. Nor need one focus on Renaissance theories of deferred orgasm to recognize something odd about this unslackening embrace, which resists both the figurative death of sexual climax and the actual death that sexual climax was supposed to accelerate.[71] This Tantric suspension is the logical heaven of Donne's scenario of erotic salvation. What he wants is omnipresent desire, not eventual progeny; he wants to perpetuate his unique bodily experience, not to participate in the common cycle of human life.[72]
What makes "Aire and Angels" so delightful, as well as so difficult, is the combination of theoretical abstraction and human tenderness in its exploration of the saving power of mutual love. The texture thus matches the argument, which seeks a truly metaphysical status for love, somewhere between the spiritual idea and the physical object. In the mctaphysicality of his verse, Donne generally seeks to invent a new category of reality that rescues the inner will from its enslavement to the material universe, and returns abstraction to its home in sensual experience. In "Aire and Angels," he attempts to rescue love, and thereby mortal human experience, the same way: he exempts physical experience from the decay that normally follows its alienation from the soul, and exempts the soul from the threat of evaporation at the extinction of its physical vessel.
"Twice or thrice had I loved thee, / Before I knew thy face or name." From the collapse of time and identity in these opening lines to the closing assertion about what men and women "will ever bee," the poem is an escape from the time-boundedness of human bodies and the
individual identities they carry, as much as from the limiting physical aspects of love-making. When the speaker allows his instinctive worship of angels to "fixe it selfe in thy lip, eye, and brow" (14), he performs an action resembling the romantic denial of death described by Rank and Becker: "Spirituality, which once referred to another dimension of things, is now brought down to this earth and given form in another individual human being."[73] At the same time he implicitly proposes to his lover that they perform for each other a version of the Incarnation by which Christ (according to the New Testament) purchased our redemption.[74] If they are willing to "die" (in either sense) for each other—to mingle their immortal souls with mortal bodies—then (and only then) will they be able to save each other. Their passion reproduces the central paradox of Christ's Passion. Each must submit the ethereal impulses of love to the taint of mortal flesh, so that the other will have a viable place to love eternally.
The poem's double-sonnet form reinforces the notion that expressions of love must be exchanged to achieve a better kind of closure. Its ending evokes not coy misogyny (as commonly supposed),[75] but a miraculous reciprocity. The lovers each offer and each receive a platform halfway between earth and heaven on which to stage their love—and thereby to stage, for an indefinite run, their mixed status as human beings. Neither one could offer it without receiving; otherwise they would either sink like corpses or fly away like the souls of the dead. Outside of love, there is only preterition—that is, mortality.[76] As in Donne's fiery sermons, the poise above the abyss of eternal darkness is a precarious one indeed, like the suspension of cartoon characters who can remain in the air only so long as they have faith that the ground is still solidly beneath them. As in many aspects of Reformation theology, emotional conviction functions as fact.
The peculiarity of "Aire and Angels" is that each lover can sustain the suspension as long as the other believes in it. There is something teasingly Lacanian in the idea that the only valid desire is to be desired, but there is something very Donnean as well. The only valid object of love is somewhere between the two poles of the human dualism, body and spirit; so the self who is loved is generated by the self who loves that way, at the crossing point of the "X" drawn by two spirits looking to each other's bodies, and two bodies looking to each other's spirits. In that sense, these ideal lovers are without differentiation. They know difference of sex no more than angels do, and the seemingly misogynistic distinction between "womens love, and mens" (28) merely reflects the
speaker's perspective as a heterosexual man: it is finally only the distinction between the beloved and the lover. The separation of soul from body is for Donne the essential fact of death; the separation of male from female is his usual emblem for it. In "Aire and Angels" he posits a kind of mixed mutual desire that permits a pair of lovers to forestall any such separations. In seeking to love as angels love, the speaker seeks to live as angels do: forever.
Donne can admit only the slightest taint of mortal flesh, lest it sink rather than ballast his love. The beloved's illness in "A Feaver" threatens Donne's theory that lovers exempt each other from mortal frailty, and so he struggles to find a new position of comfort:
To leave this world behinde, is death,
But when thou from this world wilt goe,
The whole world vapors with thy breath.
Or if, when thou, the worlds soule, goest,
It stay, tis but thy carkasse then,
The fairest woman, but thy ghost,
But corrupt wormes, the worthyest men.
(6–12)
This attempted subversion of death's kingdom finally serves only to reinscribe its sovereignty. The conceit evokes, in the effort to invert them, some of the harshest adages of the memento mori tradition, which portray the world as a delusive vapor and all men as already corrupted by the worms that will eventually consume their bodies entirely. Indeed, if his love has so badly failed to protect her from decay, then he must reconceive men's sexual penetration of women as a preliminary vermiculation of corpses rather than a premonition of spiritual immortality.
The speaker must therefore identify with the illness instead of the cure; if he cannot feed on her immortality forever, he will (like the fever in stanzas five and six) feed on her mortal frailties until they are consumed:
Yet t'was of my minde, seising thee,
Though it in thee cannot persever.
For I had rather owner bee
Of thee one houre, then all else ever.
(25–28)
In this final stanza, the get-well card turns into a seductive love letter, by turning the life-destroying fever back into a precious heat of sexual
intercourse. The temporal, temporary fulfillment of romantic love may resemble and provoke death, but if pursued with sufficient passion, it becomes an adequate prepayment for an eternal loss. Donne has thus moved from the admonitory image of Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress" in which "worms will try / That long-preserved virginity," to that poem's exhortatory conclusion: "Though we cannot make our sun / Stand still, yet we will make him run." If he cannot transcend time and fleshly frailty through his lover, Donne will plunge into the flesh so devoutly that eternity will seem irrelevant.[77]
Donne brings the conventions of Petrarchan love-poetry to life by bringing them to death. A failure of reciprocity is fatal, deflating the metaphors of love until they reveal the grim facts of the body; losing one's heart without receiving another in exchange means the end of life as well as of love. "The Legacie" begins as a morbid compliment:
When I dyed last, and, Deare, I dye
As often as from thee I goe,
Though it be but an houre agoe,
And Lovers houres be full eternity,
I can remember yet, that I
Something did say, and something did bestow;
Though I be dead, which sent mee, I should be
Mine owne executor and Legacie.
(1–8)
Donne's love-affairs always involve subliminal negotiations with death, and parting from this beloved arouses classic annihilationist anxieties: the concern that the Hour of Death will become eternity, that it will eventuate in mere forgetfulness, and that the world will uncannily continue without his consciousness of it.
The second stanza describes a near-death, out-of-body experience:
I heard mee say, Tell her anon,
That my selfe, that is you, not I,
Did kill me,'and when I felt mee dye,
I bid mee send my heart, when I was gone,
But I alas could there finde none. . . .
(9–13)
Like a prospective organ donor seeking the consolation of partial survival, he had hoped to retain some posthumous life by placing his heart within her. The loss of heart and even of life did not seem too great
a price to pay for proving that love could mitigate the ordinary harsh rules of mortality. In the third and final stanza, however, he discovers what has actually killed him: she has given him only a faulty, incomplete heart in exchange for his own. This conceit literalizes, as a medical fact, the fear that haunts so many of Donne's love-lyrics: that imperfect requital will expose him to mortality.
Donne typically fears that parting from his lover will mean parting from an essential part of himself forever. "Song: Sweetest love, I do not goe" therefore changes very quickly (in the first stanza) into a meditation on death: "But since that I / Must dye at last, 'tis best, / To use my selfe in jest / Thus by fain'd deaths to dye" (5–8). The speaker proposes this deliberate rehearsal for death because, on this stage, he has the power to enact his own resurrection. His imminent sea voyage, and the love he carries through it, will demonstrate the possibility of keeping his interiority alive through the journey to Hamlet's undiscovered country of death, from which this traveller hopes to return with his selfhood intact: "the best of mee" (32), which he locates in his love of her. As (in the second stanza) he uses the diurnal solar cycle to reassure her that he will return from his sea voyage to resume their love, so he uses the sea voyage to reassure himself that he can return from death with an uninterrupted consciousness.
If she mourns his temporary absence, she will hasten or even cause his death, presumably by compromising the strategy of mutual denial, the assertion of total faith against total annihilation. The song concludes by suggesting that she "thinke that wee / Are but turn'd aside to sleepe; / They who one another keepe / Alive, ne'r parted bee" (37–40). This is a reciprocal of the formula of reciprocity: since they have not died, they must not actually have broken the bond of mutual affection that (in Donne's scheme) prevents death. By introducing the idea of sleep as a model of separation, Donne evokes the commonest Renaissance comparison for death. Clearly more is at issue here than a few days of earthly loneliness. Though the argument to his lover is playful and occasional, it continues the argument with death that runs all through his lyrics.
Walton's biography of Donne associates both "Sweetest Love" and "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" with Donne's efforts to console his wife about his departure to France with the Drury family. I believe they are further connected by an underlying allegory in which this separation represents the separation of soul from body at death. It seems only natural that the man who frequently compared the union of soul
and body to a marriage (e.g., Devotions , p. 109; Sermons , VII, 257) would have been inclined to compare his marriage to that union. The "divorce" of body and soul appears to be the very essence of death for Donne, throughout his sermons, as their reunion is the essence of resurrection (e.g., VI, 71,291; VII, 103, 108, 258). His terror of this estrangement may be intimately linked to a separation-anxiety rooted in his earliest experiences, and it may have helped to produce a poetic style in which "The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together," in Samuel Johnson's famous phrase.[78] Donne seeks to create an unbreakable bond, not only between male lover and female lover, but also between the spiritual and the physical. Perhaps Donne's characteristic fusing of intellectual and emotional events comes less from his situation prior to the seventeenth-century "dissociation of sensibility" (as T. S. Eliot suggests, in the second most famous phrase about the Metaphysicals) than from a personal psychology that craved an indissoluble union of soul and body, and that feared schizophrenic tendencies whereby "the relationship between thought and feeling is gradually disrupted."[79] The "direct sensual apprehension of thought" Eliot perceived in Donne may be the work of a man unwilling to allow even the ordinary gaps to open between his living senses and his abstracted consciousness. Destructively divided selves, according to current psychoanalytic theory, are often produced by parents who either ignore the fact that the child has a psychic identity or express disgust toward it as a physical entity. The fear of personal disintegration, Winnicott argues, is usually founded in this kind of partial or transient acceptance of the infant's formative self; and "Little alteration is needed to transfer the general thesis of fear of breakdown to a specific fear of death."[80] What Donne anticipates most eagerly about the general resurrection is the unity of self that eludes him in life: "I cannot say, you cannot say, so entirely now, as at the Resurrection, Ego , I am here; I, body and soul" (Sermons , III, 110).
Perhaps what Donne failed to receive from his mother, he sought from his mistresses—a starkly Freudian hypothesis, except that what Donne craved was less sexual gratification for its own sake than the implied affirmation of his whole self. The redemptive geometry of "Aire and Angels" requires the lovers not only to see the other as simultaneously body and soul, but also to love the miraculously mixed selfhood thereby reflected back to them. Donne pursued immortality through his deepest human relationships—the psychic and alimentary absorption of the woman who nurses him, the sexual absorption of his lovers through
coitus , the intellectual absorption of his friends through letters—and when those connections prove physically variable and vulnerable, he immediately thinks of his own dissolution: "And though thou divide man and wife, mother and child, friend and friend, by the hand of Death , yet stay them that stay, and send them away that goe, with this consolation, that though we part at divers daies, and by divers waies, here, yet wee shall all meet at one place, and at one day, a day that no night shall determine, the day of the glorious Resurrection " (Sermons , VIII, 62). Donne yearned above all for a permanent reunion with his own body, and he used separation from the bodies of beloved women to prepare himself to endure the radical separation of self in the grave.
Death As Separation: Valedictions for the Soul's Voyage out
Donne's search for a perfect bond with a mistress often reflects his desire for a permanent union of soul with body—in other words, for immortality. His devotion to heterosexual love gains supplementary energy from the way it can be mapped onto the dialectic of soul and body in Christian eschatology. Donne told his congregation, "Death is the Divorce of body and soule; Resurrection is the Re-union of body and soule"; he wrote to the bereaved Lady Kingsmel that "those things, which he takes in pieces, as he doth man, and wife, in these divorces by death, and in single persons, by the divorce of body and soul, God hath another purpose to make them up again."[81] Donne's valediction poems confirm the power, the purpose, and the persistence of this association between erotic and eschatological reunions. The fear in "A Valediction: Of Weeping" that both lovers will be obliterated by their parting—"thou and I are nothing then, when on a divers shore" (9)—seems hyperbolic, unless one recognizes that the situation taps Donne's fear that death will extinguish body and soul alike, simply by dividing them, that (as one Holy Sonnet expresses it) "black sinne hath betraid to endlesse night / My worlds both parts, and (oh) both parts must die" ("I Am a Little World Made Cunningly," 3–4). My intention is not to deny that the poems were written about actual partings from actual lovers, but instead to demonstrate that Donne consistently converted those sentimental occasions into opportunities to practice the dreaded farewell between his spiritual and physical aspects.
Donne looks at the English Channel he is about to cross, and seems to see the River Styx.[82] Commentators have been mystified that Donne would portray these crossings as so threatening, especially after surviving considerably more dangerous sea voyages, such as the Cadiz and Azores expeditions.[83] Perhaps, however, those earlier expeditions provided Donne with less metaphoric provocation to ponder his mortal dissolution, since he was not then leaving behind a wife, with whom he was one flesh—merely a metaphor, of course, but Donne's imagination is always remarkably eager to construe latent metaphors as if they were material facts. Abetted by his pregnant wife's anxieties, he may thus have cathected his mortality-anxiety onto these relatively safe voyages, much as Freud projected his mortality-anxiety onto rail travel.[84] Donne wrote to his best friend Henry Goodyer, "I am near the execution of that purpose for France . . . . I speake to you at this time of departing, as I should do at my last upon my death-bed; and I desire to deliver into your hands a heart and affections, as innocent towards you, as I shall to deliver my soul into Gods hands then" (Letters , p. 81).
The evidence runs through all the forms of Donne's writing. "He that sees every Church-yard swells with the waves and billows of graves," writes Donne in a sermon, "can think it no extraordinary thing to dye, when he knows he set out in a storm" (I, 266). In the Devotions Donne compares the prospect of a cure as "a discovering of land from Sea , after a long, and a tempestuous voyage ," and in the final paragraph begs God to preserve him (like St. Paul) from shipwreck, "Though the rockes , and the sands , the heights and the shallowes . . . do diversly threaten mee, though mine own leakes endanger mee" (pp. 100, 127). Donne's letters show him imagining death as a "shipwrack"—an image made particularly ominous by his tendency elsewhere to describe heaven as a safe harbor.[85]
The letters also help to reveal what precious cargo Donne feared this shipwreck might spill: "Out of this variety of mindes it proceeds, that though all our souls would goe to one end, Heaven, and all our bodies must goe to one end, the earth: yet our third part the minde, which is our naturall guide here, chooses to every man a severall way" (Letters , p. 63). The uniqueness of Donne's individual mind provides his only possible exemption from the binary determinism of his destiny, and therefore the essential redundancy of his identity—in other words, his only exemption from the anonymity of death that his narcissism resists so bitterly. Finally, the letters confirm Donne's tendency to make erotic separation a test case for the mortal separation he hoped the general resurrection
would cure, even when the extended metaphor threatens to turn his flirtation with a young woman into a flirtation with blasphemy:
Madame,
I could make some guesse whether souls that go to heaven, retain any memory of us that stay behinde, if I knew whether you ever thought of us, since you enjoyed your heaven, which is your self, at home. Your going away hath made London a dead carkasse. A Tearm and a Court do a little spice and embalme it, and keep it from putrefaction, but the soul went away in you. . . . When you have a desire to work a miracle, you will return hither, and raise the place from the dead. . . . (Letters , pp. 1–2)
The hope that reciprocity is immortality has its dark converse in the suspicion that separation is death itself. Throughout the valediction poems, Donne rehearses for the interval between death and Last Judgment—rehearsals in which he must overcome the terror of forgetting all his lines, of losing the expressive power of his unique consciousness.[86]
The sibilant evaporation of a final breath, which marks death itself in the opening lines of "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning," refers to the lovers' parting embrace in "A Valediction: the Expiration":
So, so, breake off this last lamenting kisse,
Which sucks two soules, and vapors Both away,
Turne thou ghost that way, and let mee turne this,
And let our selves benight our happiest day.
(1–4)
Death is a breathless night that leaves no prospect for a happier day to follow.[87] If any redemption can be achieved under these circumstances, it will have to be done with mirrors. If their perfect love enforces a simultaneous annihilation, each will have remained eternally present within the span of the other's consciousness:
Goe; and if that word have not quite kil'd thee,
Ease mee with death, by bidding mee goe too.
Oh, if it have, let my word worke on mee,
And a just office on a murderer doe.
Except it be too late, to kill me so,
Being double dead, going, and bidding, goe.
(7–12)
Donne rarely surrenders to death without simultaneously plotting to subvert its power, and this suicide pact is a good example. A double-
negative becomes a positive: two deaths—as in the mytheme of revenge-tragedy—cancel each other out. They each kill the self that killed the other, and the other that killed the self.
Donne's tender mission in "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" is to redefine the separation between lovers so that it will not seem a mournable separation at all. In doing so, he allows himself to experiment with different strategies for imagining the survival of his unitary selfhood through the voyage of death.[88] Once again Donne seems to be anticipating an admonition from his sermons: "Murmur not to admit the dissolution of body, and soul, upon your death-beds . . . till God be pleased to repaire all, in a full consummation, and reuniting of body and soule in a blessed Resurrection" (Sermons , V, 212–13). Certainly it seems remarkable that a love poem—particularly one intended to suppress the mourning response—begins with a simile to a deathbed scene. This would be less remarkable if the lovers were compared to those whose mourning is mitigated by the recognition that the dying man's virtues foretell his salvation. But the lovers are compared to the dying man himself, and all they can aspire to is his silence:
As virtuous men passe mildly'away,
And whisper to their soules, to goe,
Whilst some of their sad friends doe say,
The breath goes now, and some say, no.
So let us melt, and make no noise,
No teare-floods, nor sigh-tempests move,
T'were prophanation of our joyes
To tell the layetie our love.
(1–8)
This is a love song in a Calvinist key: no deathbed ablutions or conversions can overrule their faith in determining their prospects for eternity.
Fortunately, they are not among the preterite:
Dull sublunary lovers love
(Whose soule is sense) cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
Those things which elemented it.
(13–16)
This prepares a conventional boast about the nobility of a more-than-sexual devotion, but it also echoes a conventional argument about the
immortality of the soul. Renaissance attacks on the annihilationist heresy regularly and fiercely reject the idea that the soul is in any way physical, since that implies it would evaporate upon departure from its bodily habitation. Donne's boast of Platonic love allows him to distance himself from the fear that his soul might die when its sensory vehicle does.[89] The persistence of perfectly reciprocated love relieves the symptoms of physical mortality as well as of physical separation:
But we by'a love, so much refin'd,
That our selves know not what it is,
Inter-assured of the mind,
Care lesse, eyes, lips, and hands to misse.
(17–20)
Even while oblivious to the nature of their bond, they can somehow survive an interval of obliterated senses by relying on a higher consciousness that knows they belong together; romantic love is their provident God.[90] To the extent that this is a love poem, he is talking about missing each other's bodies; to the extent that it is a theological allegory, he is talking about missing his own.
In the fourth stanza the speaker assures his beloved that, like the confident dying man, they have already established a connection at the incorruptible super-lunary level.[91] But, either because his audience seems unconvinced by the goldsmith comparison, or because his own faith seems threatened by its atomistic implications,[92] the speaker of "Forbidding Mourning" next resorts to the notoriously hyperin-tellectual compass comparison. This comparison implies that while the earthly bodies appear to be isolated (from the other they love, or from their own souls), they remain connected at a higher level, like continents linked by a communication satellite. To legitimize sexual love in "The Extasie," Donne sketches for the woman a "V" shape, the souls descending to meet as bodies; to legitimize spiritual love in "Forbidding Mourning," Donne inverts that model (the combination generates the "X" I described in "Aire and Angels"). The simile helps him imagine that his buried body will somehow remain connected to its fugitive soul:
And though it in the center sit,
Yet when the other far doth rome,
It leanes, and hearkens after it,
And growes erect, as that comes home.
(29–32)
This is the Day of Judgment reconceived as second honeymoon.[93]
In the final stanza Donne completes the metaphor by addressing the beloved in terms that might well appear in a standard Renaissance dialogue of Soul and Body:
Such wilt thou be to mee, who must
Like th'other foot, obliquely runne.
Thy firmnes makes my circle just,
And makes me end, where I begunne.
(33–36)
At this moment the poem itself comes to an end, with its anti-closural mission complete: in consoling his lover about separation, Donne has consoled himself about mortality.[94] In fact, the compass metaphor suits the latter consolation better than the former. He can hardly perfect the circle by returning to his wife if she is the fixed foot. But if she comes to represent, through her unwavering love, the God of resurrection, then the metaphor has a fairly precise explication in Donne's sermons:
Christ establishes a Resurrection, A Resurrection there shall be , for, that makes up Gods circle . The Body of Man was the first point that the foot of Gods Compasse was upon: First, he created the body of Adam : and then he carries his Compasse round, and shuts up where he began, he ends with the Body of man againe in the glorification thereof in the Resurrection.[95]
If he doubts the resurrection, if he doubts that love can perpetuate his existence, if he cannot recover the immortal intimations of pre-oedipal omnipotence, then the arc of his life will sketch only a zero. If we "consider man's life aright to be a Circle. . . . In this, the circle, the two points meet, the womb and the grave are but one point."[96] Donne's dual consolatory metaphors come together in the alchemical symbol for gold, the ultimate earthly desideratum and the key element in any serum of immortality:
The correspondence I have been eliciting from these poems—between the husband on a sea voyage from his wife, and the soul on its expedition from the body between death and Last Judgment—would have been available to Donne in the works of Saint Ambrose, and was probably decipherable to his original readers. This is Zacharie Boyd, a
Jacobean preacher, speaking in the voice of a soul addressing its dying body:
As thy love is great toward mee, so is mine also great toward thee, my Bodie. But seeing it is the will of him who married us together, that now wee bee put asunder, wee must submit ourselves unto his good pleasure.
This separation shall be but for a little space, and that for the well of us both . The husband will saile the seas and goe farre from home, in hope to returne with advantage. The same hope encourageth his wife to live like a widow for a space. At last the husband's returne with expected profite, is welcomed with greater joyes than was his former presence.
It shall be so with us, my dear Bodie. At my returne in the day of the Resurrection there shall enter such a joye into thee, as eye never saw, ear never heard, yea, and which never could enter into the heart of man. As the long dark night maketh the morning seeme sweete to the wearied watch, who hath long looked for it, so shall our little absence bee a certaine commendation of that presence, which after the great day shall bee forever.[98]
It would be an exaggeration to call Boyd's rhapsody a perfect paraphrase of "Forbidding Mourning," but to read the poem without sensing this resonance is surely inadequate.
This same extended metaphor resurfaces in the religious hymns Donne wrote when he thought his body might indeed be on the brink of giving up the ghost. "A Hymne to Christ, at the Author's Last Going into Germany" begins by making his departure from England in a "torne ship" an "embleme" (1, 2) for his departure from this earthly life:
Seale then this bill of my Divorce to All,
On whom those fainter beames of love did fall;
Marry those loves, which in youth scattered bee
On Fame, Wit, Hopes (false mistresses) to thee.
Churches are best for Prayer, that have least light:
To see God only, I goe out of sight:
And to scape stormy dayes, I chuse an Everlasting night.
(22–28)
The poem thus concludes by acknowledging that Donne's earlier obsessions had been misguided quests for the immortality, the "All," he now seeks through Reformation Christianity. Faith in the vision of a loving God now allows him to confront and overcome the terror of an uncertain voyage—that is, the terror of the annihilationist grave and its perpetual darkness.
The third stanza of the "Hymne to God My God, in My Sicknesse" conceives death as a voyage into the sunset and away from his dying body:
I joy, that in these straits, I see my West;
For, though theire currants yeeld returne to none,
What shall my West hurt me? As West and East
In all flatt Maps (and I am one) are one,
So death doth touch the Resurrection.
(11–15)
If the promise of resurrection answers Donne's fear of sailing, then he must have been anxiously associating such voyages with the separation of soul from body.[99]
Most editions of Donne's poetry place the "Hymne to God the Father" alongside the "Hymne to God My God, in My Sicknesse" as products of the same dire illness, but they have imagistic connections as well. The "Hymne to God the Father" figures salvation as rescue from a shipwreck, and (through the familiar pun on "sun" and "Son") represents immortality as a persistence of sunlight against the darkness of death that jeopardizes his continuous consciousness:
I have a sinne of feare, that when I'have spunne
My last thred, I shall perish on the shore;
Sweare by thy selfe, that at my death thy Sunne
Shall shine as it shines now, and heretofore;
And having done that, Thou haste done,
I have no more.
(13–18)
The word "more" works here as a pun on mort , so that (as the endings of the previous stanzas warn) Donne cannot fully trust God until it is clear that God will keep "Donne" safe from death.
Such a reading might seem overly ingenious, except that Donne often puts great weight on his name as a locus of lasting individual identity. The aspiration to an immortal name, in the common classical sense of fame, yields gradually during the Renaissance to the idea that a personal name conveys, contains, and protects the inward uniqueness of each human being.[100] Personal names became increasingly prominent on tombstones, apparently reflecting a heightened concern with defending the individual against obliteration by death—a vain effort, in one sense
or another.[101] What's in a name is an assertion of selfhood, and Donne—contrary to recent claims that Renaissance minds could not think in terms of continuous selfhood—asserted his individuality as brilliantly and passionately as any voice recorded in our history.[102]
In "A Valediction: Of My Name in the Window," Donne characteristically strives to make a romantic connection immortal, and then to reconfigure that connection as immortality itself. The speaker begins by imagining that his name "engrav'd" on the glass has rendered that seemingly fragile sheet immortal, and that his gravure in the woman's heart will make him immortal there: "So shall all times finde mee the same" (16). His beloved resembles a tomb holding his bodily remains, while some essence of himself roams far away. Donne's dual fears—that the engraved glass might shatter and that his lover might embrace another body—correspond to his peculiar fascination in the prose works with the problems God might confront in resurrecting bodies that have been either scattered in pieces around the globe, or consumed into the bodies of other people who will also need resurrecting.[103]
In the third stanza the stability of this inscribed name is adduced, ostensibly as proof of Donne's fidelity, but it is primarily a fidelity to himself. In this monarchy of wit, the doctrine of the king's two bodies is active: the written self can survive despite the transience of its fleshly manifestations. In modern terms, the name serves as a kind of chromosome schematic by which his body can be cloned back into existence if necessary.[104] Donne would propose a strikingly similar technique for rebirth as an immortal child of God: "Jehovah is his essentiall name ; and in communicating . . . any letter of that Name, we become semen Dei , the seed of God; and filii Dei , the Sonnes of God" (Sermons , VI, 194; cf. III, 128). Again Donne's quest for erotic fidelity partakes of a quest for personal immortality.
This renewal of the body will systematically reverse the annihilationist ravages of silence, oblivion, decay, and blindness, by restoring speech, understanding, growth, and sight:[105]
It, as a given deaths head keepe,
Lovers mortalitie to preach,
Or thinke this ragged bony name to bee
My ruinous Anatomie.
Then, as all my soules bee,
Emparadis'd in you, (in whom alone
I understand, and grow and see,)
The rafters of my body, bone
Being still with you, the Muscle, Sinew,'and Veine,
Which tile this house, will come againe.
(21–30)
The general resurrection serves as a metaphor for the prospect of a physical reunion with his lover, but that metaphor flows in the other direction as well, until we feel that he desires the reunion as proof that resurrection is feasible, more than for love's own sake. Indeed, Donne's tactic for defending against erotic neglect looks remarkably like a common late Medieval tactic for defending the individual soul from neglect after death:
A simple way to link the perpetual memory of one's own name with the worship of the community was to give to the church . . . a chalice with one's name on lip or foot, so that as the priest raised it at the sacring he would read it. . . . A wider audience would be achieved with altar frontals and even Mass vestments 'with a scriptur on the back'. . . . the magnificent Missale . . . had a printed inscription asking for prayers for Morton, turning every church where the book was used into an informal chantry.[106]
In this poem as in revenge-tragedy, English Renaissance literature displays the imprint of a Protestant struggle to find equivalents of the forfeited Catholic means for assuring personal immortality.
Donne relies on the name in the window, the magic word of this immortalizing spell, to keep this woman's love, and also to keep some essence of his individuality alive until the resurrection of the body restores it to a viable autonomous environment:
Till my returne, repaire
And recompact my scatter'd body so.
As all the vertuous powers which are
Fix'd in the starres, are said to flow
Into such characters, as grayed bee
When these starres have supremacie:
So since this name was cut
When love and griefe their exaltation had,
No doore 'gainst this names influence shut,
As much more loving, as more sad,
'Twill make thee; and thou shouldst, till I returne,
Since I die daily, daily mourne.
(31–42)
The speaker of "My Name in the Window" (like the speaker of "The Apparition") is an ineradicable ghostly presence, jealous of any life that goes on without him. His name shines down effacing that of any new lover (stanzas 9 and 10), as if indeed he were a demonic as well as a romantic possessor. But perhaps it is his own body that he finally aims to possess, or repossess.
Writing the self may be a futile tactic against mortality; certainly Donne's peers considered it inadequate to the task. Drummond (p. 26) warns that "This earth is as a table-book, and men are the notes; the first are washen out, that new may be written in." Browne (p. 309) is even more directly relevant to Donne's plan, and no more optimistic: "To be read by bare Inscriptions like many in Gruter , to hope for Eternity by Aenigmaticall Epithetes, or first letters of our names, to be studied by Antiquaries, who we were . . . are cold consolations unto the Students of perpetuity, even by everlasting Languages." Donne is too advanced a student of perpetuity to overlook the problem, and at the end the speaker of "My Name in the Window" throws wearily aside his collection of witty strategies for perpetuating himself in her heart, dismissing them as merely symptoms of encroaching physical mortality. Neither the etched lines nor the verse lines can preserve his love, or himself:
But glasse, and lines must bee,
No meanes our firme substantiall love to keepe;
Neere death inflicts this lethargie,
And this I murmure in my sleepe;
Impute this idle talke, to that I goe,
For dying men talke often so.
(61–66)
Many editors suppose this statement pertains to an actual illness; and during a convalescence Donne once wrote to Goodyer, "I may die yet, if talking idly be an ill sign" (Letters , p. 50; cf. "Obsequies," line 138). If Donne indeed wrote this "Valediction" from a sickbed, then its closing has a bitter autobiographical twist. Even if Donne was merely continuing to play on the idea of his departure as a death, however, the concession about the inadequacy of these reflections and writings remains the same: "As Man has an eternall not beeing before the Creation; so he would have another eternall not-being after his dissolution by death, in soule, as well as in body, if God did not preserve that beeing, which he hath imprinted in both, in both" (Sermons , VIII, 144–45). This printing of his name in the window is Donne's stay, not only
against romantic betrayal, but also against the annihilation that accompanies decomposition.
"A Valediction: Of the Book" begins by announcing another plan for resisting the forces determined to dissolve a departing young man and his love in the seas of time. Though it repeats the twist that "Of My Name in the Window" puts on St. Paul's formula—these letters give eternal life—this new plan has as much in common with "The Canonization" as with the other valedictions: through their exchange of letters, these lovers will become immortal, even sacred, as a pattern of love. Donne asserts that this kind of bookish immortality will prove "as long-liv'd as the elements, / Or as the worlds forme, this all-graved tome" (19–20). The puns on "grave" as inscription and as burial surely provoke recognition of the word "tomb" behind "tome."[107] Once again Donne seeks a form of burial that both ensures resurrection and guards his aspiringly immortal words against death. The volume of love letters that Donne extols as a repository for civilization against barbarity (24–27) is also a repository for his own language against the silence of the grave. And to the considerable extent that Donne's language can truly represent passionate personal experience, that experience will survive fully in his writings, at least until some version of physical reunion or resurrection renders it superfluous. If "The Extasie" taught that "the body is [the soul's] booke" (72), this "Valediction" indulges the suspicion that a book can be the body, can lend the displaced soul a local habitation and a name. Donne becomes immortal as a man of letters. Writing—which Jacques Derrida claims is always an epitaph—here becomes an alternative form of personal afterlife, a prosthesis for Donne's prospectively crippled consciousness.
Donne's letters repeatedly claim this status, and this function: "I know what dead carkasses things written are, in respect of things spoken. But in things of this kinde, that soul that inanimates them, never departs from them" (Letters , p. 22). Another letter makes clear how much this kind of correspondence has in common with the exalted and redemptive correspondences of parted souls in "Forbidding Mourning":
I make account that this writing of letters, when it is with any seriousness, is a kind of exstasie, and a departure and secession of the soul, wch doth then communicate itself to two bodies: And, as I would every day provide for my souls last convoy, though I know not when I shall die, and perhaps I shall never die, so for these exstasies in letters, I oftentimes deliver my self over in
writing when I know not when those letters shall be sent. . . . (Letters , p. 10; cf. p. 207)
Much virtue—and much denial—in "perhaps." With a pen in his hands, Donne feels emboldened to answer the annihilationist question he raises in the Devotions (p. 21 ): "what's become of [man's] soaring thoughts, his compassing thoughts, when himself brings himself to the ignorance, to the thoughtlessness, of the grave?" Within the limits of his technology, Donne is proposing an answer much like that of futurists who now propose to render their consciousness infinite by broadcasting digital schematics of their complete brain-structures out into space.[108]
The idea that an author's selfhood could be fully and permanently present in his book is suggested in Erasmus's Ciceronianus , stated in Bacon's Advancement of Learning , and fully articulated in Milton's Areopagitica .[109] Erasmus's spokesman particularly values literature that allows the reader "to discover from the language the feelings, the characteristics . . . of the writer as well as if one had known him for years." Bacon asserts that "the images of men's wits and knowledges remain in books, exempted from the wrong of time and capable of perpetual renovation." Milton claims that
books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. . . . a good book is the precious lifeblood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life. . . . We should be wary therefore . . . how we spill that seasoned life of man preserved and stored up in books.
Surely this notion of an immortality of wit would have caught the attention of Donne, who felt so sharply his lack of immortality, and had so clearly a surplus of wit.[110]
The second and fourth stanzas of "Of the Book" characterize this epistolary love as a new and better religion, one not susceptible to the "schismatiques" who compromised Donne's society's confidence in a single true path to immortality. But it is markedly a Reformation scripture, at once a public testament of love and a private conversation with his savior. Through a volume of their letters, "Love this grace to us affords, / To make, to keep, to use, to be these his Records" (17–18): the savior is the flesh made words, enabling him to endure "the darke eclipses" (63) without compromising his passion.[111]
The roots of Donne's anxious association of sea voyages with the separation of body and soul are traceable in the early autobiographical verse-narratives "The Storme" and "The Calme," which look ahead uneasily to death and afterlife. "The Storme," like Donne's sickness poems, was apparently composed under the threat of imminent death; Donne therefore promptly casts one of his defensive spells, establishing his addressee, in the first line, as an alter ego for the self that hovers on the brink of utter negation: "Thou which art I, ('tis nothing to be soe)." Like an engineer designing redundancy into a critical system, Donne pairs his unitary consciousness with another that is isolated from his immediate dangers.
The fear of personal destruction Donne presumably felt during the storm permeates his description of the ship in crisis, controlling the metaphors of the poem as if the storm were a metaphor for fatal illness, and not vice versa:
Some coffin'd in their cabbins lye,'equally
Griev'd that they are not dead, and yet must dye.
And as sin-burd'ned soules from graves will creepe,
At the last day, some forth their cabbins peepe:
And tremblingly'aske what newes, and doe heare so,
Like jealous husbands, what they would not know.
Some sitting on the hatches, would seeme there,
With hideous gazing to feare away feare.
Then note they the ships sicknesses, the Mast
Shak'd with this ague, and the Hold and Wast
With a salt dropsie clog'd, and all our tacklings
Snapping, like too-high-stretched treble strings.
And from our totterd sailes, ragges drop downe so,
As from one hang'd in chaines, a yeare agoe.
(45–58)
The only part of this symptomology that strays from human disease is the over-taut strings, and even that recalls the opening of Donne's "Hymne to God My God, in My Sicknesse," in which he "tune[s] the Instrument here at the dore" of death (4). The desperate work of the sailors sounds like the death-throes of a cardio-pulmonary system in congestive failure: "Pumping hath tir'd our men, and what's the gaine? / Seas into seas throwne, we suck in againe" (61–62). The result is deafness and blindness, annihilationist symptoms that so often insinuate Donne's confrontations with mortality.[112]
Renaissance homilists commonly assuaged the fear of death by comparing death to a recuperative sleep; the nightmare, here as in Macbeth , is the impossibility of awakening. In "Obsequies to the Lord Harrington" Donne speaks of "the condemned man, / (Who when hee opes his eyes, must shut them than / Againe by death,) although sad watch hee keepe, / Doth practice dying by a little sleep" (21–24). In "The Storme" he endures a similar sentence, rising on a dark morning to confront the terror of mere oblivion in an undifferentiated universe:
Sleepe is paines easiest salve, and doth fulfill
All offices of death, except to kill.
But when I wakt, I saw, that I saw not.
I, and the Sunne, which should teach mee'had forgot
East, West, day, night, and I could onely say,
If'the world had lasted, now it had beene day.
(35–40)
This may remind modern readers of "I Heard a Fly Buzz," Emily Dickinson's terrifying narration of a death "Between the heaves of storm" when "the windows failed, and then / I could not see to see." In "The Storme," as in the "Hymne to God My God in My Sicknesse," death renders all earthly maps obsolete. The solipsistic bravado that allowed Donne to overcome geography in "The Sunne Rising" and the valediction poems comes back to haunt him. With the failure of the perceiving mind, all of creation returns to its indistinct primal condition, or might as well. So the poem ends with a vision of the loss of vision, an indistinction that is finally nullification, and a grand mythological allusion suggesting that resurrection would require rebuilding the entire universe:
Darknesse, lights elder brother, his birth-right
Claims o'r this world, and to heaven hath chas'd light.
All things are one, and that one none can be,
Since all formes, uniforme deformity
Doth cover, so that wee, except God say
Another Fiat , shall have no more day.
So violent, yet long these furies bee,
That though thine absence sterve me,'I wish not thee.
(67–74)
This final line of the poem matches the first in emphasizing Donne's reliance on his correspondent for survival. No wonder he inverts the
usual formula of a shipboard postcard by celebrating the fact that the missed friend is not along for this dark journey.
Critically surveying "The Calme" that follows this "Storme," the reader may wonder whether Donne has been saved or been killed. If "The Storme" explores the violent terror of dying, "The Calme" explores the eerier terror of being dead, the terrible stillness of the annihilationist grave; divine indifference, as in Donne's sermons, proves even more terrifying than divine anger. The biographical context provides some plausible explanations for the submerged metaphor. An ambitious young man, newly reminded of death, finds his aggressive voyage toward glory stalled indefinitely by the indifferent forces of nature. No wonder the ruined ship looks like a courtier gone threadbare.[113] Donne would surely have remembered the voice of Despaire that lured Spenser's exhausted gallant toward death:
Is not short paine well borne, that brings long ease,
And layes the soule to sleepe in quiet grave?
Sleepe after toyle, port after stormie seas,
Ease after warre, death after life does greatly please.
(Faerie Queene , I, ix, 40)
As the reference to Aesop that opens "The Calme" suggests, the commonplace Christian desire to rest in peace fits the foolish-wish motif of folklore. Having eloquently wished (in the companion poem) for a storm to calm, Donne must have felt this irony keenly. The aftermath is a cruel joke on human desires: "Heaven laughs to see us languish thus" (6).
Donne's characteristic system of inter-reflective minds now adumbrates lifelessness instead of promising immortality. As life drains out (compare lines 5–8 of the "Nocturnall upon St. Lucies Day"), as faith melts away (in the form of a burning church), all that remains is blankness, passivity, pointlessness, and breathlessness:
Smooth as thy mistresse glasse, or what shines there,
The sea is now. And, as the Iles which wee
Seeke, when wee can move, our ships rooted bee.
As water did in stormes, now pitch runs out
As lead, when a fir'd Church becomes one spout.
And all our beauty, and our trimme, decayes,
Like courts removing, or like ended playes.
The fighting place now seamens ragges supply;
And all the tackling is a frippery.
No use of lanthornes; and in one place lay
Feathers and dust, to day and yesterday.
Earths hollownesses, which the worlds lungs are,
Have no more winde then the'upper valt of aire.
(8–20)
Death seems to have retaken precisely the territory Donne liberated in "The Sunne Rising" on behalf of love, which "all alike, no season knowes, nor clyme, / Nor houres, dayes, moneths, which are the rags of time" (9–10). His scheme to suspend the sun motionless where "All . . . in one bed lay" is exposed as yet another foolish wish, now that it is a bed of dust and not of lust (20).
Donne is gazing ahead into his grave, and indeed he sounds like the soul pitifully regarding its decaying body in several homiletic Renaissance dialogues.[114] But this soul seems trapped in limbo. In a grim twist on the extended metaphor established by the valediction poems, the sea-voyager sits timelessly becalmed, helpless to revive the deteriorating body by any return voyage. Nor, for all the inviting illusions, can it escape that body anywhere but into death:
We can nor lost friends, nor sought foes recover,
But meteorlike, save that wee move not, hover.
Onely the Calenture together drawes
Deare friends, which meet dead in great fishes jawes:
And on the hatches as on Altars lyes
Each one, his owne Priest, and owne sacrifice.
(21–26)
The Jonah allusion of "The Storme" (33) here plays itself out without a matching promise of redemption. Religious sacrifice (in fire) and delirious suicide (in water) have the same ultimate outcome; whether one dies in high ritual or in primitive predation, one cannot escape stagnation and reconsumption by a carelessly enveloping biological nature.
At the end of the poem the dead calm causes Donne to live out his worst masochistic fantasy about death, imagining non-being as experienced by his vivid and yearning sensibility:
What are wee then? How little more alas
Is man now, then before he was? he was
Nothing; for us, wee are for nothing fit;
Chance, or our selves still disproportion it.
Wee have no power, no will, no sense; I lye,
I should not then thus feele this miserie.
(51–56)
This is the annihilationist irony: the only thing worse than oblivion is an awareness of oblivion.
Woman As Mortality: "Who Will Redeem Me from This Body of Death?"
Donne's fear of separation from a beloved woman is a phenomenon far beyond my ability to reconstruct reliably; but his anxiety about the stability of his love-affairs seems to link the problems of constructing the self at the beginning of life with the problems of relinquishing it at the end. Donne resorts frequently to the maxim (evoked in the gravedigger scene of Hamlet ) that we begin dying at the moment of our birth: "I was borne dead , and from the first laying of these mud-walls in my conception , they have moldred away" (Devotions , p. 96). Perhaps (as in Oedipus's struggle against destiny) a desire to undo his mortality thus lends an additional incentive to his yearning to return to a woman's body through sexual intercourse. Perhaps that fierce yearning reflects, also, Donne's obsession with the prospect of returning at the general resurrection to his own body, which he so often casts as a beloved woman. Resurrection enacts theologically the psychological roots of regression, as well as of narcissism.
Donne's characteristic problem in engaging the world around him resembles the typical problem of the infant ego: how to accept a continuous connection with the nurturing forces that keep the self alive without erasing that self as an independent entity. Instead of outgrowing his original conflict between separation and individuation, Donne seems to have expanded it to the scale of his adult experience. The likeliest solution is a grandiose assertion of his masculinity to differentiate himself from the mother, whom he can identify with the vulnerable body, leaving his own spiritual interiority independent and immortal. This is castration-anxiety on a grander scale, but also perhaps in a more plausible form: what is at stake in the genital difference may be an imaginary exemption from bodily mortality.[115]
The persistent connections between Donne's misogyny and his annihilationism demand interrogation, for reasons of sexual politics as well as literary interpretation. From a feminist perspective there is no appealing choice between the Donne who sees women as objects of sexual appetite and the Donne who sees women as incubators of his
personal immortality. If he has any defense against the familiar charges of misogyny, it may lie in his extraordinary egoism, which means that his representations of Man and Woman are largely metaphors for Soul and Body, and Self and Other. Unless his body clings to his soul, unless his beloved reciprocates his love, the result is annihilation, for which body and beloved must bear the blame. In "The Dreame," Donne insists that, if the beloved were truly herself, she would consummate his sexual dream about her; body must obey the desiring imagination. Donne's poetic will to power over reality thus reveals its connection with his erotic will to power over women. Even at Donne's most harmonious moments, the anxiety remains that everything around the self—everything confining it, everything apart from it—is necessarily irrelevant or even inimical to his immortality, which resides in a gorgeous, fragile narcissism. It was only too easy for him to conflate the patristic commonplace that the body is the corrupting prison of the soul with the patristic commonplace that women are the source of human mortality. The sexual mistrust thereby generated is aggravated by Donne's symbolic and egoistical reading of his universe: woman is the Other, and the Other is the death of the Self.
Freud identifies the narcissist as "a person who treats his own body in the same way in which the body of a sexual object is ordinarily treated."[116] Certainly Donne's tendency to imagine the world enchanted by his corpse long after his death (as in "The Dampe" and "The Relique") suggests a projection of his needy fascination with the promise of bodily resurrection. And from a Freudian viewpoint, Donne's narcissism might indicate a homosexual inversion that his valediction poems disguise as heterosexual love by displacing his body into the bodies of women, to the extent that he can perceive them as mirrors of his own. But any crisis of sexual orientation in Donne is secondary to a mortality-crisis. The nature of Donne's masculinist investment in the extended metaphor of the valediction poems becomes clear when he is forced to invert it, and allow the beloved woman rather than himself to represent the soul on its temporary journey away from the body.
The premise of "The Dissolution" is the death of the speaker's mistress; he is now the one left behind with the body, and his scramble to assert that body's continuing masculinity suggests how closely Donne associates his virility with his immortality. The transience of the sexual act closely parallels the transience of human life: "For though we have the Spirit of life in us, we have a body of death upon us. How loving
soever the Spirit of life be, it will not stay in a diseased soul" (Sermons , IX, 349). At the end of "The Good-Morrow," Donne's speaker sought to overcome this aspect of mortality by perpetually deferring his orgasm. Though "The Dissolution" again presents the mistress as part of an immortalizing alchemical formula, her role here is to elicit the seminal excess, the elemental selfhood, that otherwise threatens to smother him from within:
Shee'is dead; And all which die
To their first Elements resolve;
And wee were mutuall Elements to us,
And made of one another.
My body then doth hers involve,
And those things whereof I consist, hereby
In me abundant grow, and burdenous,
And nourish not, but smother.
(1–8)
Clearly this is a man less concerned about the woman's lost interiority than about his own lost outlet; indeed, he attributes to her no qualities whatsoever but her absorption of his.
My intention is not to score feminist points against Donne, but instead to highlight the way his craving for symbolic affirmations of his immortality constantly disrupts any authentic contact he might otherwise achieve with the women he desires; I read this pattern more in sorrow than in anger. Beneath the mourning of the poem and its extended alchemical metaphor is an extraordinarily petty kind of sexual selfishness; beneath that pettiness, however, is selfishness on a truly magnificent scale. Most men who believe that their wives hold the key to their immortality are thinking in terms of progeny, but Donne is interested only in the endless reproduction of himself. "The Dissolution" is yet another refraction of Donne's fundamental myth of secular salvation, in which women are the agents of grace, the saviors who take into their own bodies the burden of his mortality.
Since his beloved has died before him, has fled like a fugitive soul, Donne's persona in "The Dissolution" finds himself awkwardly cast in the role of the body, which his private mythology, as well as Christian orthodoxy, has generally construed as female: "the body . . . should be a wife to the soule."[117] The possibility "That women might not be objects but subjects, not the other but the self" was, according to Stephen Orgel, the "greatest anxiety" of this period. By dying, Donne's mistress appropriates the role of psyche, leaving him to confront that anxiety in
an intense symbolic form. As Stanley Fish notes in his reading of Donne's elegies, "The fear is not of one woman, or even of women in general, but of the condition that women seem particularly to embody, the condition of being open to interpretation, and therefore to change." Using terms that evoke a boy's struggle to establish his masculinity in differentiation from his mother, Fish describes Donne's fear that his phallic authorial power might "turn back and claim him for its own by revealing itself to be the very source of his identity (which would then no longer be his) . . . he would be like a woman and become the object rather than the origin of his own performance, worked on, ploughed, appropriated, violated."[118]
"The Dissolution" thus unites two kinds of castration-anxiety: the Freudian threat to the genitals and the existential threat to male independence from the creaturely identity the mother represents. Even its complex rhyme scheme reflects a heightened struggle with intertwining and separation. The fear of a phallic woman—evident in Donne's complaint about "Woamen in Menns Apparrell " in his "Essay of Valour"[119] —haunts "The Dissolution." Donne's masculine pride keeps him focused on his burgeoning seminal supplies rather than on her depleted personal qualities. He therefore refuses to undertake precisely the task he assigned to the beloved woman in "Of My Name in the Window": the task of preserving inside oneself (by a loyal celibacy) some schematic memory of the beloved's essential identity, whether for reproduction or resurrection. The obligation he bemoans—to "nourish" and "grow abundant" with the "burdenous" surrogate life of his sexual partner—is certainly suggestive of pregnancy (a fetus was commonly called a "burthen," as at 4.4.264 of The Winter's Tale ). Everything he has resisted by locating it in the female Other, he now becomes: the body subject to biological process, the identity subjugated to the making of another identity, the passive object offering a locus of immortality in which it retains no share.
Against this threat Donne pits not only his obsession with his own accruing virility, but also the image of its eventual release in a massive orgasm, a violent "dying" that will allow him to reclaim the role as the (sexually validated male) soul who has left the (beloved female) body behind:
This death, hath with my store
My use encreas'd.
And so my soule more earnestly releas'd,
Will outstrip hers; As bullets flowen before
A latter bullet may o'rtake, the pouder being more.
(20–24)
In context, the grandiose ejaculatory character of this closing metaphor is surely significant; if "the distribution of libido in a life not at war with death is polymorphous perversity,"[120] then Donne's phallic obsession reflects instead ferocious combat. "The Dissolution" displays a necrophilia occluding mourning. Like those who earnestly, selfishly hope to die before their spouses, Donne would much rather she were the one left with the body; but again the surface selfishness covers a deeper one. As the "Anniversaries" demonstrate on a much grander scale, Donne will appropriate everything about a woman, even her death, to protect his position as the immortal masculine soul in the extended metaphor the valediction poems develop.
If Donne locates his prospective immortality in women, then it is hardly surprising that he hates them when their infidelities shatter the saving reciprocity—or when reminders of his undiminished mortality compel him to find a scapegoat. He needs to blame the failure of his formula on the insufficiencies of his love-objects, to discredit the variable rather than the function itself.[121] Donne's misogynistic tirades thus draw some of their fervor from the same mechanism as his vitriolic attacks from the pulpit of St. Paul's on his former co-religionists, the Jesuits. If you are not part of the solution to death, then you are part of the problem. When Donne feels obliged to choose a different path to salvation, he will typically conclude that you were leading him direly astray, whether that means calling you a whore of London or of Babylon.
Furthermore, if Donne believed that "the sexual union of man and woman on earth is the temporal and secular image which prefigures . . . the hypostatical union in body and soul of man and the Godhead in heaven,"[122] then the transience of that sexual union would have undermined his greatest hope. Conflating these two types of union would have focused Donne's attention on the common belief that Original Sin attaches to the human soul at the moment of conception, generated by the concupiscence of the proximate sexual act: "In the generation of our parents , we were conceiv'd in sin ; that is, they sinn'd in that action . . . the union of this soul and body is so accompanied with Gods malediction . . ." (Sermons , II, 58). Spirit and flesh conjoin at the moment man and
woman do, and the transient conjunctions instantly summon up the primal and permanent curse of mortality.
Exegeses of the Book of Genesis often identified the primal crime as scxuality, with Eve as evil temptress—a tradition with strong resonances of oedipal anxiety and important ramifications for sexual politics. Death becomes a punishment for sexuality, both in the individual and in the species. Donne's marriage would likely have confirmed this idea, since his desire for Ann More led to dire exclusionary punishment by patriarchal authorities (her powerful father and uncle), a punishment Donne repeatedly described as a death: "I dyed at a blow then when my courses were diverted, yet it wil please me a little to have had a long funerall, and to have kept my self so long above ground without putrefaction" (Letters , p. 105). Donne's echoes of the Renaissance belief that orgasm accelerates mortality may therefore express a truth symbolically present across the range of his beliefs and experiences.
To Donne the seducer, sexual consummation is indispensable; to Donne the preacher, physical resurrection is equally so. But while he insists on being in the body, he refuses to be of it, since his essential selfhood would then be at the mercy of biological death. So he must isolate the weaknesses of the body in women, and the ecstasy of sexual intercourse allows him a supreme occasion to do so, to experience his own body through another's experience of it. As the inconsistent compass metaphor in "Forbidding Mourning" suggests, his mistress is partly a navigational device in a quest for reunion with his own redeemed corpse. He will love women, die in them, then withdraw from them to contemplate the experience, having in effect returned to them the contagion of mortality they bequeathed him. But when he finds himself back in his own body, still subject to his own mortality, post-coital depression quickly turns into misogyny. Instead of affirming his transcendent interior self, women have pushed him further into an animal identity, and closer to the hour of death.
The body's sexuality and its transience are inextricably linked. Sexual consummation may offer a glimpse of freedom and immortality, but one so fleeting as to provoke more bitterness at what we lack than joy in what we have had. As Measure for Measure makes only too clear, erotic desire is an equivocal assertion of individuality. The moment of greatest liberty is also the greatest voluntary surrender to our creaturely determinism: "Sex is an inevitable component of man's confusion over the meaning of
his life, a meaning split hopelessly into two realms—symbols (freedom) and body (fate). . . . We try to get metaphysical answers out of the body that the body—as a material thing—cannot possibly give. . . . This is why the mystique of sex is so widely practiced . . . and at the same time is so disillusioning" (Becker, pp. 44–45). Any hope for transcendence of the physical level, whether through erotic love or spiritual redemption, remains something of a metaphysical conceit, perpetually in need of sustaining metaphors to forestall a collapse into mere biology. The reductionist fallacy—that the least elaborate or exalted explanation is necessarily the truest one—thus leads directly to the annihilationist heresy. The skepticism of "Loves Alchymie" centers on the fear that the obvious physical facts are the only true facts—which would be as discouraging a notion about death as it is about love.
The speaker begins the poem digging for love, and through love, for meaning; he ends possessing, and possessed by, the bitterness of "Mummy ." The first line compares love to a mine, which can be taken as a brutally reductive figuration of sexual intercourse, since the comparison of a woman's body to a rich landscape was conventional in Jacobean erotic verse. This collapse of metaphor to a dispiriting literal level is not surprising,[123] because what worries the persona is precisely the possibility that the act of love will prove to be no more significant than its physical motion, resulting in some incidental fetishistic pleasures and perhaps a pregnancy along the way, but nothing centrally or transcendently meaningful:
Some that have deeper digg'd loves Myne then I,
Say, where his centrique happinesse doth lie:
I'have lov'd, and got, and told,
But should I love, get, tell, till I were old,
I should not finde that hidden mysterie;
Oh, 'tis imposture all:
And as no chymique yet th'Elixar got,
But glorifies his pregnant pot,
If by the way to him befall
Some odoriferous thing, or medicinall,
So, lovers dreame a rich and long delight,
But get a winter-seeming summers night.
(1–12)
This mining expedition fails to harrow his erotic hell; the epic voyage to the underworld yields no testimonials to afterglow, or afterlife. The search
for the gold-based "Elixar" was more commonly a search for an immortality serum than for an aphrodisiac (even for Jonson's Epicure Mammon), and here it meets a dead end. The rich and long delight promised in heaven threatens to become a winter night to us after all, cold and (to the annihilated consciousness) seemingly an instantaneous passage.[124]
Women are "Mummy , possest" (24) because they finally preserve death, not life.[125] Donne's misogynistic flailing reflects a common male tendency to blame women not only for the failures of love (as in Petrarchan complaint) but also for the loss of immortality (as in the Genesis story). As "Aire and Angels" demonstrates, only a meta physical connection can overcome death; when mistresses fail in their spiritual responses, when men may not "Hope . . . for minde in women," sexual intercourse loses its ability to reinforce the union of mind and body that is life itself for Donne (23). Women are—their very wombs are—a treasure-mine of fool's gold in which men bury themselves with no real hope of rebirth.
"Farewell to Love" may be the most difficult lyric in Donne's entire knotty canon, but some sense can be made of it by recognizing its kinship with "Loves Alchymie." Both poems express doubts about spiritual immortality by questioning the ability of love to transcend the physical act. Post-coital depression again casts an uneasy eye on the promises of afterlife, the afterglow of a more literal kind of "dying." Donne links orgasm with actual death by observing parenthetically that "each such Act, they say, / Diminisheth the length of life a day" (24–25). The religious implications of this analogy are clear from the opening lines. His concern about disillusionment in romantic love immediately (and characteristically) focuses on religious uncertainty about death:
Whilst yet to prove,
I thought there was some Deitie in love
So did I reverence, and gave
Worship, as Atheists at their dying houre
Call, what they cannot name, an unknowne power,
As ignorantly did I crave.
(1–6)
So Donne's youthful impulse to believe in the transcendent power of erotic desire (a belief doomed to disappointment) resembles a dying atheist's desperate need to believe in some transcendent Being. Perhaps the analogy to death, as at the start of "Forbidding Mourning," is more
than an analogy; perhaps Donne the seducer is an atheist seeking an alternative path beyond time- and body-boundedness.
Furthermore, the analogy suggests that the atheist was right the first time: it is natural to wish for a deity, but mistaken to believe that one is truly present behind the uncaring machinery of biological nature. Indeed, this speaker's suspicion about sexual intercourse closely resembles the suspicion Donne attributes to atheists about intercourse with God.[126] Religious faith is thus associated with ignorance, however blissful. Wishful thinking can carry a person from atheism to agnosticism; but revelation and incarnation destroy rather than fulfill such hopes (lines 7–10). From all its living and appetizing glory, the erotic object decays (like a gingerbread man)[127] into a silly and disgusting construction:
But, from late faire
His highnesse sitting in a golden Chaire,
Is not lesse cared for after three dayes
By children, then the thing which lovers so
Blindly admire, and with such worship wooe;
Being had, enjoying it decayes:
And thence,
What before pleas'd them all, takes but one sense,
And that so lamely, as it leaves behinde
A kinde of sorrowing dulnesse to the minde.
(11–20)
Fearing mere stupor, Donne sounds rather like Keats in the "Ode on Melancholy," where "shade to shade will come too drowsily, / And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul."
But Donne's subsequent lines do not imply (as do Keats's Odes) that love and life are all the more fervently desirable because they are fleeting. The most difficult crux in this most difficult poem makes the most sense as a proto-Darwinian assertion that biology encourages intercourse frequent enough to preserve the species, but not so frequent as to exhaust individuals prematurely:
Nature decreed (since each such Act, they say,
Diminisheth the length of life a day)
This; as shee would man should despise
The sport,
Because that other curse of being short,
And onely for a minute made to be
Eager, desires to raise posterity.
(24–30)
The point becomes clearer if one accepts H. J. C. Grierson's emendation, in his 1912 edition, to "Eagers desire." The curse of brevity imposed on human love also haunts human life, and (as in Measure for Measure ) one cannot renew love-making without aggravating mortality—unless one associates sexual renewal with procreative renewal, and neglects the fate of the individual. We could mate as often as cocks, or as seldom as lions (22), but we would still suffer the post-coital depression that corresponds to an exclusively human awareness of the oblivion that follows our little exertions of life. We may generously choose to perceive some high purpose in the making of progeny, but (from this viewpoint) the act itself proves depressing, disgusting, a bad joke we play on ourselves and each other.
If Donne is indeed comparing love-objects to gingerbread kings, his comparison implies a bitter religious parody that further undermines the hope for any immortality other than genetic approximation. The image suggests Christ on his golden throne, aptly transformed into an edible body of bread; the fact that, after three days, this Incarnation does not rise miraculously, but rots in the most ordinary way, offers a skeptical and even disgusted perspective on the Resurrection.[128] Even if Donne is referring to some other kind of toy king, the implications are scarcely less corrosive. As children with trinkets, as adolescents with erotic desire, so older people impose ridiculously high value on religious ideas; whereas in fact all these things are merely distractions designed to get us through the brief business of life without reproductive inefficiencies—including the disruptive recognition that we are mundane instruments of biology.
From virginal youth, a man falls into experience; from sexual pleasure, he falls into torpor. In both instances the movement is from good, warm, immediate desire to dull regret. Provoked by the religious references throughout the poem, we may extrapolate a third analogous transaction, in which our cursedly short lives lead only to an anticlimactic death. Donne's speaker therefore vows,
I'll no more dote and runne
To pursue things which had indammag'd me.
And when I come where moving beauties be,
As men doe when the summers Sunne
Growes great,
Though I admire their greatnesse, shun their heat.
(33–38)
As in many instances of Petrarchan misogyny, the speaker subliminally associates the damage done to his heart by women who fail to requite his
desires with the damage done to all mankind by Eve. In a cynical version of Gnostic withdrawal from the corrupt world of procreation, he concludes by abjuring the allure of these radiant natural beauties: "Each place can afford shadowes. If all faile, / 'Tis but applying worme-seed to the Taile" (39–40). If he cannot hide from this provocative female radiance, he can resort to anaphrodisiacs, and if those measures fail, he can recognize his seduction as mere biology, not a transcendent disaster like the Fall.[129] There is neither salvation nor damnation, and conception is close kin to vermiculation: from sperm our bodies come, to worms they return, with a horrifying indifference. The ultimate cure for lust, as many Renaissance moralists suggested, is a contemplation of the transi figure, the flesh in its final decay. The morbid and sexually cynical voice behind Donne's shadowy "Farewell to Love" may therefore be Shakespeare's Hamlet, who also gives his frailty the name of woman.[130] Both the play and the poem are tales that end in wormwood.
"The Funerall" appears to reflect more respect for the rites of love and of death than does "Farewell to Love." Even here, however, the funeral baked meats make an uneasy accompaniment to an ostensibly romantic occasion. Donne begins with a characteristically elaborate and morbid revision of the Petrarchan convention that unrequited love will cause the speaker's demise:
Who ever comes to shroud me, do not harme
Nor question much
That subtile wreath of haire, which crowns my arme;
The mystery, the signe you must not touch,
For 'tis my outward Soule,
Viceroy to that, which then to heaven being gone,
Will leave this to controule,
And keepe these limbes, her Provinces, from dissolution.
(1–8)
The uncertain methods for surviving abandonment by a beloved here become equivalent to the body's uncertain prospects for surviving its abandonment by the soul at death. This "subtile wreath" recalls "That subtile knot, which makes us man" in "The Extasie" (64), but the comparison of the autonomic spinal nexus to a bracelet of dead hair is ominous:[131]
For if the sinewie thread my braine lets fall
Through every part,
Can tye those parts, and make mee one of all;
These haires which upward grew, and strength and art
Have from a better braine,
Can better do'it; Except she meant that I
By this should know my pain,
As prisoners then are manacled, when they'are condemn'd to die.
(9–16)
This penitentiary love is death row rather than protective custody for the speaker.
The fact that the original affectionate intent of this gift no longer accompanies the material token is both cause and metaphor for the speaker's demise. The physical component means nothing without its spiritual counterpart. The speaker justifies his determination to bury this bracelet by warning that "it might breed idolatrie, / If into others hands these Reliques came" (19–20). Taking what seems to be a solid Protestant perspective, Donne dismisses as heretical the supposition that any spiritual power persists in bodily remains. But precisely that idolatrous supposition—surrendered along with the childhood religion his mother inculcated—seems necessary to sustain Donne's narcissistic fantasies of complete personal immortality. With their transient gifts of body and love, women—as mothers, as lovers, as Otherness—have robbed him of any secure belief in the permanence and exaltation of his own body.
The same transaction emerges if we switch from a theological to a psychological vocabulary, and call the "wreath of haire" a fetish rather than an idol. In Freudian theory, the fetish-object serves to displace (in subsequent sexual situations) an early sexual attachment to an unreliably responsive mother. In Becker's revision of that theory, the fetish-object serves to disguise the mortal physicality of the mother and subsequent lovers. In Kohut's version, the fetish-object is an externalized locus for a dangerously unstable selfhood. All three functions are profoundly relevant to Donne, in his uneasy quest for a perfectly responsive lover to mirror and thereby affirm his personal immortality. When the beloved woman fails to do so, he can punish her only by subjecting the fetish-object to the same mortality he is now suffering: "since you would save none of mee, I bury some of you" (24). He can reject the object's power over him only by draining away its imputed meaning, making the fetish back into a mere physical artifact, even at the cost of confirming that he is merely physical as well.
The speaker's relationship to this wreath of hair bespeaks a classic psychological strategy for coping with an overwhelming universe. A child needs to contain, within limited transference objects,
the whole problem of terror and power, making them the center of it in order to cut down and naturalize the world around them. Now we see why the transference object poses so many problems. The child does partly control his larger fate by it, but it becomes his new fate. He binds himself to one person to automatically control terror, to mediate wonder, and to defeat death by that person's strength. But then he experiences "transference terror"; the terror of losing the object, of displeasing it, of not being able to live without it. (Becker, p. 146)
This is very much how love-relationships function throughout Donne's lyrics. He invests women with such grandiose value in the defense of his own immortality that he is necessarily enslaved to them, and terrified and embittered by the prospect of separation or infidelity.[132]
It would hardly be surprising if the women in Donne's life—at least, in his verse—generally failed to meet this extraordinary standard, or declined to assume this gigantic task. Adequate explanations or compensations for mortality are hard to provide, in the absence of strong religious faith. Married couples may settle into blaming each other for the disappointments of life, and for the ordinary injuries to secondary narcissism, which romantic love is assigned to protect. Adventurers may attempt to minimize the sense of human mortality by gestures of courageous denial, and to minimize the costs of human transience by seizing each day and packing it with as broad or intense an experience of this world as possible. Blaming the Other for our mortal losses and limitations—the mytheme of revenge-tragedy—is usually an act of bad faith in real life. Expanding the Self is more heroic, but therefore also more poignant: when the multiplied experiential self is divided by an infinite oblivion, the quotient still looks pitifully small. Becker observes that "basic narcissism is increased when one's childhood experiences have been securely life-supporting and warmly enhancing to the sense of self, to the feeling of being really special, truly Number One in creation" (Becker, p. 22). But if that fantasy is disrupted, the self must choose between an unstable multiplicity and an implacable nullification.
"The Computation," like "The Primrose," shows Donne attempting to employ mathematics against mortality. Carey argues that this lyric seeks "to show how inadequate quantity is to 1ove's intensities,"[133] but as the ostensible topic of love gives way to the submerged topic of death, the numbers Donne uses to regulate the experience of separation from a beloved necessarily give way to anxieties about infinity:
For the first twenty yeares, since yesterday,
I scarce beleev'd, thou could'st be gone away,
For forty more, I fed on favours past,
And forty'on hopes, that thou would'st, they might last.
Teares drown'd one hundred, and sighes blew out two,
A thousand, I did neither thinke, nor doe,
Or not divide, all being one thought of you;
Or in a thousand more, forgot that too.
Yet call not this long life; But thinke that I
Am, by being dead, Immortall; Can ghosts die?
The complaint that hours of separation seem remarkably long is standard in Renaissance love-poetry—echoed passionately by Shakespeare's Juliet and ironically by his Rosalind. Donne, with a typically Metaphysical desire to expand violently (and thereby defamiliarize) the object of analysis, multiplies each hour into a hundred years. But no multiple of his emotional desires can match the power of his religious terror, as the sermons make clear: "if 60. if 80. yeeres, yet, few and evill have his daies beene . . . . if every minute of [humankind's] 6000. yeeres, were multipli'd by so many millions of Ages , all would amount to nothing, meerly nothing, in respect of that Eternity , which hee is to dwell in" (Sermons , VIII, 76; cf. VI, 331). Marvell uses this sort of exaggeration parodically (in "To His Coy Mistress") to warn that death delimits the time for earthly praises and pleasures; Donne uses it subliminally to warn that death extends time immeasurably for the separated soul and body hereafter. This allegorical aspect of "The Computation"—like the "winter-seeming summers night" of "Loves Alchymie"—anticipates Emily Dickinson's "Because I Could Not Stop for Death," which concludes,
Since then—'tis Centuries—and yet
Feels shorter than the Day
I first surmised the Horses' Heads
Were toward Eternity—
In Donne as in Dickinson, behind the distortions of time lies a terror of eternity, and the homely familiarity of the metaphor only intensifies the incomparable estrangement of oblivion.
Numbers are futile weapons in the battle against mortality. Donne tries to answer death with the oneness of his solipsism, the twoness of his passionate exchanges with women, and with a variety of schemes of multiplication. If a mortal being is not somehow made infinite, however, its value approaches zero in the functions of eternity.[134] In his funeral sermon for Magdalen Herbert, Donne feels compelled to promise an
afterlife lasting "for ever , and ever , and ever , and infinite , and superinfinite evers " (Sermons , VIII, 92). Clearly Donne's rhetoric and imagination are here straining their limits, yet anything less feels inadequate. For Donne to defy death with numbers is an act of bravado. For him as for Hamlet, just beyond the consolation of measurable human time is the terror of eternity, and just ahead of the one—the self—is the nothing: "that which was not made of Nothing is not threatened with this annihilation. All other things are, even Angels, even our soules . . . and if they were not made immortall by preservation , their Nature could not keepe them from sinking to this center, Annihilation " (Devotions , p. 51). Ex nihilo we come, as conscious living beings, and to nothing we may return.
Death As Negation: Levelling the Monarchy of Wit
Paradox serves to disturb the linear quality of the reality we ordinarily represent to ourselves; it is a crystallized form of deconstruction. The appetite of Metaphysical poetry for paradox reflects a malcontented resistance toward the commonly accepted hierarchies and ethos of the Renaissance universe, just as the formalities of Cavalier poetry reflect complacency. By isolating language from "common sense," by authorizing it to reshape the material universe, Donne can begin to challenge aspects of cultural consensus otherwise unavailable to interrogation. This is one of the significant correspondences between two radical movements in Jacobean culture: Puritan theology and Metaphysical poetry. Though Donne was certainly not a Puritan,[135] he radically empowered the word, enabling it to overthrow convention by exposing as corrupt illusions the familiar figurations and decorations of the physical universe. His iconoclasm was directed toward customary poetic forms and images as well as idolatrous churches; he resisted the mediation of poetic as well as patristic traditions; and though he did not participate in turning the world upside down, he certainly turned it inside out.
The human situation—as articulated in Hamlet's "What a piece of work is a man" speech (2.2.295–308)—is a painful paradox. Struggling to reconcile his narcissistic self-valuation with his future as a quintessence of dust, Donne responds with some paradoxes of his own—a homeo-
pathic cure for the absurdity of human life. Donne's eroticism and the poetry it generates become tools for negating the huge negation known as death. The difficult lyric "Negative Love" dismisses sublunary lovers who feed on some particular attribute of their mistresses as little better than coffin-worms:
I never stoop'd so low, as they
Which on an eye, cheeke, lip, can prey,
Seldome to them, which soare no higher
Then vertue or the minde to'admire,
For sense, and understanding may
Know, what gives fuell to their fire.
(1–6)
If love is comprehensible in mind, it might be comprehensible in time as well, and therefore subordinate to eternity. The blason burns itself out far too quickly for this speaker's comfort. He must avoid not only attachment to the body, but even attachment to consciousness and self-consciousness, which are urgently at risk in their mortal vessel. To prevent the deadly disillusionments of "Loves Alchymie," he must avoid resolving either his beloved or his poem into a definable object.
Indeterminacy is thus a step toward immortality. The faculty of desire must be kept alive by keeping it aloof from any commodity that might die or be denied him. The reiterated determination of "The Sunne Rising" to make the beloved "all" is here retracted:
To All, which all love, I say no.
If any who deciphers best,
What we know not, our selves, can know,
Let him teach mee that nothing; This
As yet my ease, and comfort is,
Though I speed not, I cannot misse.
(13–18)
Instead of the urgent and focused desire that characterizes most carpe diem lyrics, Donne's speaker proposes a philosophy of love that resembles the theology of Eastern Christianity, which claims superiority over positive Western models because its negative descriptions avoid limiting the illimitable. By relinquishing object-desire, he deprives death of its most feared power. By embracing, exalting, and identifying with this negation, by immersing himself in the destructive element, he renders himself figuratively immune to its dissolving effects.
In Donne's highly paradoxical "The Will," failed love is a god overseeing death, and death becomes an overdetermined act of undoing. The superficial hope for partial survival as an organ donor yields to a deeper hope of perpetuating individual consciousness through the residue that is the poem itself. "The Will" presents itself as a last testament in which the speaker ironically bequeaths various aspects of himself to heirs. At first he stresses the superfluousness of what he leaves behind: Argus does not need his eyes, Fame his tongue, women or the sea his tears. These gestures toward survival are swallowed up by the pointless reduplications in the universe. Characteristically, Donne associates this notion that his mortal senses could prove superfluous with the possibility that he is similarly dispensable as a lover: "Thou, Love, hast taught mee heretofore / By making mee serve her who'had twenty more, / That I should give to none, but such, as had too much before" (7–9). Again Donne makes infidelity a cause of death in his plot so that he can manipulate it as a figure of death in his symbolism.
After several more stanzas of self-undoing, Donne's speaker concludes with a typically solipsistic threat to nullify the entire world as love (or death) has nullified him:
But I'll undoe
The world by dying; because love dies too.
Then all your beauties will bee no more worth
Than gold in Mines, where none doth draw it forth;
And all your graces no more use shall have
Then a Sun dyall in a grave.
Thou Love taughtst mee, by making mee
Love her, who doth neglect both mee and thee,
To'invent, and practise this one way, to'annihilate all three.
(46–54)
Underlying his parting threat is a threat of unredeemed burial (unmined gold) and a timeless oblivion: in the symbol of the buried sundial, darkness, irrelevance, and eternity eerily coincide. "I have no houre-glasse in my grave to see how my time passes," Donne once declared (Sermons , III, 110; cf. Devotions , p. 9).
Yet, after all this undoing, something remains Donne. By unburdening and dispossessing himself in these Metaphysical paradoxes, he paradoxically immortalizes his indelible poetic signature. In this sense, "The Will" is a playful extension of the Biathanatos , a symbolic suicide that restores the mastery of individual will over mortal dissolution. In
mourning as in heartbreak, "Griefe brought to numbers cannot be so fierce, / For, he tames it, that fetters it in verse" ("The Triple Foole," 10–11). Where no other numbers provide an insulation against infinity, poetic meter lends a meaningful shape to Donne's interior universe.
An abstract solution that satisfies the poetic mind may not, however, answer the needs of the deteriorating body, any more than abstract love could satisfy the desiring body in "The Extasie." When someone he cares about actually dies, Donne—like most clever theorists of death—finds no easy solution to the problems of the mourner. The geometrical and mathematical formulas by which Donne elsewhere evades mortal decay here become either terrifying or irrelevant, because geometry cannot plot a course out of the abyss, nor can numbers contain an infinite negation: "How barren a thing is Arithmetique . . . to expresse this Eternity?" (Sermons , IV, 87). When Donne attempts to measure what the actual eternal death of his beloved does to his formula of immortality, his instruments stubbornly read zero, and lead him nowhere.
In his "Elegie on Mris. Boulstred " Donne sounds like the Cowardly Lion of Oz; instead of the lion's propitiary "I do believe in ghosts," Donne insists that he does believe in death, now that he has seen such a frightening demonstration. The apostate Donne—not a person to play carelessly with the idea of recantation—begins,
Death I recant, and say, unsaid by mee
What ere hath slip'd, that might diminish thee.
Spirituall treason, atheisme 'tis, to say
That any can thy Summons disobey.
Th'earths face is but thy Table; there are set
Plants, cattell, men, dishes for Death to eate.
(1–6)
This anticipates the disturbingly dismissive list in Yeats's "Sailing to Byzantium": "Fish, flesh, and fowl." Human beings become merely another entree on the menu, and Death the Devourer becomes the one true God. "How could I think thee nothing," Donne asks death twenty lines later, "that see now / In all this All, nothing else is, but thou." The "Nothing else is" bravado of "The Sunne Rising" (22) echoes in the abyss, and the answer proves even more disturbing than the question. He could never have allowed Death to be that proud without in turn judging human life to be worthless.
In this elegy Donne climbs back out of that abyss by clinging to standard Christian consolations and his own valedictory formula:
Death gets 'twixt soules and bodies such a place
As sinne insinuates 'twixt just men and grace,
Both worke a separation, no divorce.
Her Soule is gone to usher up her corse.
(43–46)
But the demeaning facts of material existence are always in pursuit, threatening to impose a literal reading of death itself.
The grandiose and depressive tendencies of the unstable narcissist are opposing manifestations of a single problem:
Sin and neurosis have another side: not only their unreal self-inflation in the refusal to admit creatureliness but also a penalty for intensified self-consciousness: the failure to be consoled by shared illusions. The result is that the sinner (neurotic) is hyperconscious of the very thing he tries to deny: his creatureliness, his miserableness and unworthiness. . . . He tried to build a glorified private inner world because of his deeper anxieties, but life takes its revenge. The more he separates and inflates himself, the more anxious he becomes. The more he artificially idealizes himself, the more exaggeratedly he criticizes himself. He alternates between the extremes of "I am everything" and "I am nothing." (Becker, p. 197)
These polar conclusions match Donne's two opposite uses of the declaration that "nothing else is" in "The Sunne Rising" and the Boulstred elegy. Donne the Petrarchan lover again proves almost indistinguishable from Donne the penitent Calvinist. In the "Nocturnall upon St. Lucies Day," the two become one, and together they stare into nothingness. The "Nocturnall" systematically recants the love lyrics, as the death of his beloved (probably his wife) fulfills the bitter syllogism Donne reportedly composed when the exposure of their secret marriage badly damaged his courtly career: "John Donne, Anne Donne, Undone ."[136] The mutuality that was supposed to ensure his immortality now causes his death. Indeed, the only way he could reaffirm that reciprocity was by dying himself; and Walton reports the widespread fear that "sadness for his wives death, would, as Jacob said, make his days few . . . and of this there were many visible signs."[137]
The fact that he attempts to nullify himself completely to permit a communion with St. Lucy—and thus with his deceased wife—suggests a suspicion that death is merely the absence of life. Though his wife may
have died on the anniversary of the Virgin's Assumption, he betrays no hope that she is anything but annihilated, and this anniversary of the patron saint of light brings him only darkness. The grim opening lines closely echo one of Donne's flattering verse-letters,[138] but what was there the foil to a compliment, here has nothing to set against the blackness. The year and the day are at their lowest point, and at this moment the entire world seems to be a corpse sinking toward burial:
The worlds whole sap is sunke:
The generall balme th'hydroptique earth hath drunk,
Whither, as to the beds-feet, life is shrunke,
Dead and enterr'd; yet all these seeme to laugh,
Compar'd with mee, who am their Epitaph.
(5–9)
The bed, once a place of apotheosis—as in the contrary solar example of "The Sunne Rising"—serves here as a drain for the life that ceases to flow through its vital pathways, seeping instead into the ground. When the beloved woman dies before him, Donne is trapped in the blindness and passivity of the abandoned corpse. It is only appropriate, therefore, that he sounds like the plaintive Body in Vaughan's "Death: A Dialogue."[139] Imitation is the sincerest form of mourning, and Donne does his best to identify with the corpse sharing his darkness.
Whereas "The Canonization" proposes the impolitic lovers as saints on whom future lovers may model their own immortalizing exchanges, the "Nocturnall" dismisses rebirth through love as a transient effect, and urges lovers to recognize themselves in his destruction rather than his preservation:
Study me then, you who shall lovers bee
At the next world, that is, at the next Spring:
For I am every dead thing,
In whom love wrought new Alchimie.
For his art did expresse
A quintessence even from nothingnesse,
From dull privations, and leane emptinesse:
He ruin'd mee, and I am re-begot
Of absence, darknesse, death; things which are not.
(10–18)
The "next world," a phrase commonly associated with the eternal afterlife, is here subjugated to the biological cycle of the seasons, as if
there were no heaven beyond the renewal of earthly life. Again there is a clear transposition from Donne's theology: "God found me nothing, and of that nothing made me; Adam left me worse then God found me, worse then nothing . . . corrupted with the leaven of Originall sin" (Sermons , VII, 136). His love for her had been his redemptive God, their marriage his Eden; but now he has fallen into mortality.
Once he had felt that life was not truly life unless love provided an intimation of immortality. Now, with that intimation discredited, his continued existence is merely a premonition of death, a regression toward non-being. According to Thomas Browne (p. 307), "The most tedious being is that which can unwish it self, content to be nothing"; and the speaker of the "Nocturnall" describes himself as a distillation of emptiness, "the grave / Of all, that's nothing" (21–22). In this darkness of his lover's lost sight, the window that held Donne's name has become a mere transparency. According to Donne the preacher, "The name of the Creator is, I am, but of every other creature rather I am not, I am nothing" (Sermons VIII, 144). From a comfortable distance, as for example in a flattering comparison of a lord's favor to divine providence, Donne can perceive the creation ex nihilo as a promise of resurrection, rather than a threat of annihilation.[140] But in the "Nocturnall"—as in King Lear —the wonderful Christian faith in the creation ex nihilo recoils in horror, as the world of human meaning is systematically undone. Universal ontology recapitulates mortal ontogeny.
Like a dying tragic hero, Donne reverts briefly to the solipsistic hyperboles of his great earlier works, which suggested that the struggles of love pushed the world backward to the start of creation and anticipated the emptiness of death:
Oft a flood
Have wee two wept, and so
Drownd the whole world, us two; oft did we grow
To be two Chaosses when we did show
Care to ought else; and often absences
Withdrew our soules, and made us carcasses.
(22–27; cf. Sermons , VII, 104)
But he evokes these old formulas only to dismiss them as now empty themselves, because the simple implacable fact of his beloved's death admits of no metaphorical conversion: mourning cannot now be forbidden. He cannot find any language adequate to euphemize her death, nor any analogy to describe his own consequent condition:
But I am by her death, (which word wrongs her)
Of the first nothing, the Elixer grown;
Were I a man, that I were one,
I needs must know; I should preferre,
If I were any beast,
Some ends, some means; Yea plants, yea stones detest,
And love; all, all some properties invest;
If I an ordinary nothing were,
As shadow,'a light, and body must be here.
(28–36)
Donnez thus anticipates the Cartesian cogito : if he were truly an existent soul, he would have some consciousness of himself. Instead, he is conscious only of lacking even the appetitive desires of a beast, even the motivation that will make a plant reach toward the sun or an iron stone reach toward a magnet.[141] None of his three souls survive. This sounds like acute clinical depression, the loss of any basis for outward desire and hence movement; if she is truly, purely, eternally annihilated, then no direction is toward her. He cannot even be the shadow he plays at becoming in earlier poems, since that would require a direction of light and a body to block it—a hopeless project for a nobody at midnight (cf. Devotions , p. 76). There is no signifier available to mitigate his utter insignificance in the face of death, no language adequate to the situation, no vindicating representation to be made.
Any reader waiting for a redemptive morning, now faces a rebuff. The "Nothing else is" of "The Sunne Rising" becomes: "But I am None; nor will my sun renew" (37). The speaker has lost his faith in the immortalizing power of metaphor (which, analogous to a shadow, would have required a partly occluded meaning to leave its residue). Left alone with the most intractable of mortal facts, he cannot assure relief at daybreak simply by associating his depression figuratively with the night. In the sermons and "The Second Anniversarie," Donne repeatedly deploys the hope of an eternal morning against the fear of a terminal darkness.[142] This is a standard corollary to the common Jacobean comparison of death to sleep: "for the night comes and goes, and comes againe: the Sunne doth set and risc againe: but when our life is gone, when our death is come, we returne no more to a life with men on earth: our night endes not, our Sunne riseth not, until that determined time of the Resurrection."[143] The long night of the "Nocturnall" never arrives at that "until." Donne's usual faith in the rising of a son or sun or Son, in the erotic or Christian solutions to mortality, is markedly absent.
Moreover, any reader waiting for "the next Spring" (11), the longerterm cyclical renewal of life, to renew the speaker's spirits, will again be rebuffed: "Enjoy your summer all" (41). This is spoken enviously, but also dismissively, because the speaker associates that season and its loves only with goatish lust (37, 41). Eroticism appears in its darker aspect, as an erasure rather than an affirmation of the human soul. In the "Nocturnall" as in "Twicknam Garden," the spectacle of cyclical nature is at best an irrelevancy to the speaker's depression, which is founded in the tragic fate of individuals, not the comic project of the species. From the pulpit, Donne may comfortably ask, "will the earth, that gives a new life to all Creatures, faile in us, and hold us in an everlasting winter, without a spring, and a Resurrection?" (Sermons , V, 215; cf. III, 97). Coming from a bereaved lover, however, the question is less clearly rhetorical. For Donne as for Macbeth, the loss of his wife makes life resemble annihilationist death: an absence of light, and an endless winter. So the "Nocturnall" ends precisely, explicitly, where it began, in stasis, despite the remarkable determination of critics (as with King Lear ) to read redemption into this exhausted closure.[144] The words and thoughts of the poem have passed, but (as in death) we are still and always at the center of a dark night; the speaker is to us, as his beloved is to him, an endless absence in an endless presence, "since this / Both the yeares, and the dayes deep midnight is." That is the last word. In a mortal world, being is a property of time, and nothingness is what time bequeaths to us.
Poem As Savior: Immortal Lines and Mortal Lineage
For a Renaissance poet—particularly one dependent on flattering powerful families and assuaging his own anxieties about death—Donne displays remarkably little interest in the traditional notion that procreation offers a version of immortality. Even in an epithalamion for a royal family—almost always an occasion for celebrating fecundity—Donne refuses to let the biological hope of progeny overshadow the symbolic miracle of romantic pair-bonding.[145] He compares King James's daughter Elizabeth and her husband Frederick to
Two Phoenixes, whose joyned breasts
Are unto one another mutuall nests,
Where motion kindles such fires, as shall give
Yong Phoenixes, and yet the old shall live.
Whose love and courage never shall decline,
But make the whole year through, thy day, O Valentine.
("An Epithalamion . . . on the Lady Elizabeth," 23–28)
Only by suspending or compressing time (on behalf of the patron saint of love) can the intensely inward experience of love be reconciled with its role in the perpetuation of the species. Children are merely the happy by-product precipitated from a mutually affirming, mutually preserving embrace:
To an unseparable union growe,
Since separation
Falls not on such things as are infinite,
Nor things which are but one, can disunite.
(46–49)
Unity is infinity, and copulation is immortality: Iago's "beast with two backs" functions almost like a two-personed God.
In fact, Donne usually portrays offspring as worse than an irrelevance. Procreation proves dangerous to the parents' survival, and not only in instances of malicious children like those depicted by King Lear . "Farewell to Love" shows Donne's sensitivity to the Renaissance warning that orgasms shorten a man's life in creating a new one, and the death of his wife in childbirth would have confirmed that procreation was at least as dangerous for the mother as for the father. Even in life, the children proved as much a burden as a consolation. During the Mitcham years, Donne's letters complain vividly about the burdens of sharing his small house and income with so many children and their dangerous illnesses.[146]
Donne is by no means untender toward his children, and these complaints should not be adduced in support of claims that, because of high mortality rates, parents did not much care about their children until adolescence or the nineteenth century, whichever came first.[147] After barely surviving an illness that struck his household, Donne feels compelled to express his grief, even in a letter to a powerful man by no means his intimate, for even such a supposedly unworthy commodity as a baby daughter: "I am fallen from fair hopes of ending all; yet I have scaped no better cheap, then that I have paid death one of my Children for my Ransome. Because I loved it well, I make account that I dignifie the memory of it, by mentioning of it to you, else I should not be so
homely."[148] These wincing remarks suggest, however indirectly, that he values his children nearly as much as he values himself. But this attachment does not depend on the consoling myth—familiar from Shakespearean sonnets, Jacobean tragicomedy, and funeral sermons—that generations can redeem each other from death. Donne's ransom metaphor suggests rather the contrary: that one must die to spare the other.
Donne's "Elegie on the L. C." implies that a parent's mortality may in turn be contagious to the children:
His children are his pictures, Oh they bee
Pictures of him dead, senselesse, cold as he.
Here needs no marble Tombe, since hee is gone,
He, and about him, his, are turn'd to stone.
(23–26)
The poem thus ends with an image reminiscent of the penultimate moments of Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale , when Hermione's statue appears lifeless, and threatens to draw her offspring ("more stone than it . . . standing like stone with thee") into the lifelessness of art or death as well. The same danger is writ large in the plot of Hamlet .
It is interesting, in this regard, that one of Donne's repeated arguments against the adequacy of classical religion is that the gods had genealogies, and therefore lacked the property of eternity necessary in a savior (Sermons , II, 201; VIII, 57–58; and X, 53). Reproduction again comports mortality. On a more particular level of Christian doctrine, Donne's resistance to the procreative solution to mortality may reflect his belief that the soul arises independent of the act of generation, since to acknowledge it the product of a physical act would render it susceptible to "dissolution with the body" at death. Donne wrote to Thomas Lucey that, in the dispute over whether new souls are made by parents or infused by God, "whosoever will adhere to the way of propagation can never evict necessarily and certainly a naturall immortality in the soul, if the soul result out of matter."[149] As Donne argues in "The Second Anniversarie," it is illogical to expect a "permanent effect / Of transitory causes" ( 388–89).
On a more personal, earthly level, Donne's intense subjectivity may help to explain his neglect of the consoling idea that our offspring undo our mortality. He was fiercely devoted to his unique consciousness and its experiential history—precisely what (short of some Lamarckian model of psychological evolution) no genetic simulation could reason-
ably hope to reproduce. Indeed, his role as a father only interferes with his reading, his writing, his inwardness:
Sir,
I write not to you out of my poor Library, where to cast mine eye upon good Authors kindles or refreshes sometimes meditation . . . nor from the high way, where I am contracted, and inverted into my self; which are my two ordinary forges of Letters to you. But I write from the fire side in my Parler, and in the noise of three gamesome children; and by the side of her, whom because I have transplanted into a wretched fortune, I must labor to disguise that from her by all such honest devices, as giving her my company, and discourse, therefore I steal from her, all the time which I give this Letter. (Letters , pp. 118–19)
Biological and intellectual life are competitors. As the valedictions "Of the Book" and "Of My Name in the Window" demonstrate, when Donne needs to invest himself beyond the entropic economy of the flesh, he invests himself in written language. Lines of verse take the place of family lineage in plotting a course into the future. When he announces, "I am thy Creator, thou my Saviour" ("To Mr. T.W.," Complete Poetry , no. 115, line 6), Donne is not addressing his children; in this case he is not even addressing a lover or the Christian God. He is speaking to his own poetry; that one talent which is death to hide. So while he may slight the idea that offspring will remain to immortalize the progenitor, Donne makes extensive and ingenious use of its usual counterpart, the idea that the author will survive through his writings; in terms of the classical pun, libri take precedence over liberi , and perhaps even appropriate some of their functions.
Admittedly, Donne showed more concern with the theory of such salvation than with the practice: he seems to have made little effort to preserve the poems that profess to preserve him. Yet his discussions of this issue are thick with displaced anxieties about his own prospects for procreative survival or irredeemable erasure:
In a Latin letter to Goodyer written in 1611 before his departure for the Continent, Donne indicated that some works existed in "copies . . . the originals having been destroyed by fire . . . condemned by me to Hell." Others . . . were kept to himself, "so unhappily sterile that no copies of them have been begotten." These last he foresaw as destined for "utter annihilation (a fate with which God does not threaten even the wickedest of sinners)."[150]
His ambivalence about the literary solution to mortality surfaces again, fittingly, concerning Biathanatos , which describes and justifies the
suicidal tendency to which he never quite surrendered. He writes to Robert Carre that he has "always gone so near suppressing" this book "that it is onely not burnt." But Donne cannot bear to let go of himself, either as consciousness or as the transcription of that consciousness. On his departure for Germany—another apt occasion for mortality-anxiety—Donne sends the manuscript to Carre with the fervent but perplexing insistence that it "is a Book written by Jack Donne , and not by D[r]. Donne : Reserve it for me, if I live, and if I die, I only forbid it the Presse, and the Fire: publish it not, but yet burn it not; and betweene those, do what you will with it" (Letters , p. 19). These binarisms may be set roughly in parallel: as worldly life contrasts with death, body with soul, and the sensualist Donne with the pious Donne, so the unacceptably visible and vulnerable printed text contrasts with the unacceptably ephemeral burnt one. The work must neither accept a violent and premature death, nor participate fully in physical and social being.
This seemingly paradoxical request is actually quite consistent with Donne's other tactics in the battle for permanence. He is again seeking to put his intellectual legacy into the hands of an Other for safekeeping; and it is up to Carre, as it had been up to Donne's mistresses, somehow to lift him beyond the merely physical without quite causing him to go up in smoke. In preserving only manuscript versions of his writing, Donne reinscribes their essential personality; and in clinging to the middle ground of coterie publication, Donne seeks for his written legacy the paradoxical status that makes love immortal in works such as "Aire and Angels." Metaphysical poems must sustain some form of material being beyond what Donne's sermons call "processio Metaphysica , when thoughts proceed out of the minde; but those thoughts remain still in the mind within, and have no separate subsistence in themselves" (Sermons , V, 64).
Donne had earlier sent Carre "the Poems, of which you took a promise" (Letters , p. 18). Presumably this cache included lyrics—such as "The Canonization"—that, in unconventional ways, echo the conventional prediction that sonnets will both preserve and transcend the mortal lives of their subjects and authors. Such prophecies have a self-fulfilling quality, since the very act of reading them revives some trace of the poet's voice and mind (and those that have failed are never known to have failed). And even if they were to fail, Donne's dramatically occasional poems—by professing to care only about their immediate audi-
ence—may claim the same kind of relative immortality he hoped to share with his mistresses; as Freud argues in "On Transience," works of art may "crumble to dust, or a race of men may follow us who no longer understand the works of our poets . . . but since the value of all this beauty and perfection is determined only by its significance for our own emotional lives, it has no need to survive us and is therefore independent of absolute duration."[151]
"The Canonization" may be Donne's best-known tribute to true love; yet what the poem primarily attributes to love is its power to overcome death, a power that works only to the extent that love can be converted into poetry. The first stanza lists the various dangers more serious than love awaiting the speaker: why rescue me from love, he asks, when illness, age, or penury are likely to kill me sooner (2–3)? The second stanza compares love to the fatalities awaiting others: drowning, freezing, plague, and war (11–16). The third stanza turns from what might kill him to what might save him, relying on the topos of the phoenix (here a strategically exalted metaphor for sexual consummation) to suggest that love may be a demonstrable, palpable form of resurrection ("Wee dye and rise the same," 26).
And even if this love is death of a sort—the phoenix replaced by an urn, the fire by ashes[152] —the fourth stanza declares this kind of death gloriously "unfit for tombes and hearse" (29). It fits instead in the "pretty roomes" of "sonnets" (32). Love becomes a path to the immortality conventionally offered by art, the neat closure of which may serve to exclude rather than evoke death (28–34). As in "The Sunne Rising," the strategic self-deprecation of the opening becomes by the end a grandiose boast, as if to prove that his poetic conceits could transform the most extreme forms of subjugation and time-boundedness into the most lasting forms of triumph. The canonized lovers become not merely irrelevant to death; they become saints who receive and dispense immortality. God will preserve them as a model for lovers; the poem will preserve them as a self-sufficient work of romantic art that may be read outside of time (40–43). That atemporal reading—another exchange of love and meaning suspended between heaven and earth—will save author and reader alike. The "Canonization" becomes a reliquary designed to hold the self that exists in love, perpetually exempting it from putrefaction.
Donne's poetry takes on a more extensive reliquary function in his memorials to Elizabeth Drury, where he seeks to renew his own
immortality as well as hers. His quest for short-term survival, by thus wooing Robert Drury as a patron, elides into a symbolic conquest of death. This quest encounters two obstacles familiar from Shakespeare's uneasy exploration of immortality topoi in his sonnets.[153] One is the suspicion that verse will prove an inadequate container for the full human being that death threatens to obliterate. The other is the recognition that eternity is as much the enemy of this mode of immortality as it is friend of Christian immortality. Poems, the paper they are written on, the language they are written in, are in constant danger of falling away into the same vasts of time that supposedly bring the general resurrection ever closer:[154]
Can these memorials, ragges of paper, give
Life to that name, by which name they must live?
Sickly, alas, short-liv'd, aborted bee
Those Carkas verses, whose soule is not shee.
And can shee, who no longer would be shee,
Being such a Tabernacle, stoope to bee
In paper wrap't; Or, when she would not lie
In such a house, dwell in an Elegie?
("A Funerall Elegie," 11–18)
In this first response to Elizabeth Drury's death, Donne turns the obstacles to advantage by displacing all the aspects of mortality from the eulogized corpse to the eulogy itself.
This elegy disguises the disastrous closure of her life story at age fourteen as a failure of closure in the narration of that story. Instead of conceding that Elizabeth Drury has fallen into oblivion, Donne can attribute the blank space to a lacuna in the narration of her potential biography:
He which not knowing her sad History,
Should come to reade the booke of destiny,
How faire, and chast, humble, and high shee'ad beene,
Much promis'd, much perform'd, at not fifteene,
And measuring future things, by things before,
Should turne the leafe to reade, and reade no more,
Would thinke that eyther destiny mistooke,
Or that some leafes were torne out of the booke.
(83–90)[155]
"Future things," however, are measureless. As in "The Will" and the Harrington "Obsequies" (131–54), a disabled clock insinuates Donne's
pious meditations on death, threatening to dissolve human chronology in endless waves of time:
But must we say shee's dead? May't not be said
That as a sundred Clocke is peece-meale laid,
Not to be lost, but by the makers hand
Repolish'd, without error then to stand. . . .
(37–40)
The resurrection will be a reassembly, and it will allow human measure to recapture the terrifying prospect of eternity: "for how so long a day soever thou make that day in the grave , yet there is no day between that, and the Resurrection " (Devotions , p. 76; cf. Sermons , VI, 273). But how can this disabled temporal creature know when its moment will come? Even if the Christian promise is fulfilled, how can the expired consciousness endure an interim that it will experience as identical to eternal annihilation? The question continues to haunt eschatology: Nietzsche writes that "Between your last moment of consciousness and the first ray of the dawn of your new life no time will elapse—as a flash of lightning will space go by, even though living creatures think it a billion of years and are not even able to reckon it."[156]
In "The First Anniversarie," Donne tries to escape this vertiginous temporal perspective by swerving to a safely general topic: the historical decay of human longevity. Despite this swerve, however, and despite the conventional moralizing it permits, Donne quickly becomes disoriented by the infinitesimal scope of an individual life in the incalculable span of eternity:
Alas, we scarse live long enough to trie
Whether a new made clocke runne right, or lie.
Old Grandsires talke of yesterday with sorrow,
And for our children we reserve to morrow.
("First Anniversarie," 129–32)
Any single stroke in the cycle is—like a phoneme—meaningless. Except for the evanescent present moment, nothing but vague sorrow for the past and vague hope for the future gives us any temporal hold—a depressed version of Augustinian chronology. No wonder Donne is so eager for poetry to make an instant's passion an eternity, to stop the sun in the sky.[157]
"The First Anniversarie" concludes by making itself a model of the redemptive grave, one that will save Donne as well as Elizabeth Drury from oblivion:
Nor could incomprehensiblenesse deterre
Me, from thus trying to emprison her.
Which when I saw that a strict grave could do,
I saw not why verse might not doe so too.
Verse hath a middle nature: heaven keepes soules,
The grave keeps bodies, verse the fame enroules.
(469–74)
So Donne's poems are not merely about the desire to keep soul and body together; they are the only way to keep that "subtile knot" neatly tied. His Metaphysical mode strives to sustain a perpetual metaphysical suspension—above the fate toward which gravity steadily pulls the physical body, but below the ethereal abstractions of heaven. Only in that middle region is the individual meaningfully preserved.
"The Second Anniversarie," as the title indicates, reflects Donne's continuing need to control the overwhelming fact of death by parcelling time into installments.[158] Again Donne proposes that Elizabeth Drury and his memorial verse immortalize each other, and this time he explicitly subordinates the generational model of salvation to the authorial one:
my life shalbe,
To bee hereafter prais'd, for praysing thee,
Immortal Mayd, who though thou wouldst refuse
The name of Mother, be unto my Muse,
A Father since her chast Ambition is,
Yearely to bring forth such a child as this.
These Hymes may worke on future wits, and so
May great Grand-children of thy praises grow.
And so, though not Revive, embalme, and spice
The world, which else would putrify with vice.
(31–40)
This matches the conclusion of "The Canonization," except that the prospect of literary progeny replaces Donne's personal erotic investment. The closing couplet of "The Second Anniversarie" associates itself with the trumpet of First Corinthians, promising to raise the dead
from corruption through the dictation of the risen Elizabeth Drury: "Thou art the Proclamation; and I ame / The Trumpet, at whose voice the people came."
Since she is clearly presented as the soul of the world, a female soul that has fled at death and left Donne trapped in the entropic realm of the physical, the death of Elizabeth Drury would seem to present Donne with the same problems as "The Dissolution." Yet the hyperbole and reiteration with which Donne endorses this metaphor suggests the release of massive psychological tensions, perhaps because he can now envision an escape from the trap of his sexual identity. Donne lavished on this virgin daughter a kind of worship that (Ben Jonson complained) seems apt only for the Virgin Mother. As Freud has demonstrated, the extreme admiration parents lavish on their children's attributes and achievements is largely a displacement of their own long-suppressed narcissistic needs, now safely disguised and socially endorsed as parental love. Among the many things going on in the Anniversaries, one is surely this kind of displacement; in paternally worshiping this "idea of a woman" (as Donne called it in response to criticisms like Jonson's),[159] Donne recovers his anima, a version of his soul prior to its corruption by apostasy, sexuality, and their accompanying cynicisms. The poems carry clear markings of Donne's characteristic efforts to preserve his unique inner self, only slightly displaced.[160] His praise of the dead girl's virginity may constitute a form of penitence for his own youthful indulgences, as if she were a patron saint of sexual purity who could bequeath a cure for his submissions to the frail flesh and the mortal consequences they comport.
In this sense, Jonson was right: Elizabeth Drury fills the place of the Virgin whose faith Donne abandoned along with his birth-mother. The morbid embrace of a magical daughter[161] brings this chapter back to the Freudian "Theme of the Three Caskets." While the prospects of patronage doubtless drew Donne to this example of mortality, that allure would have been augmented by the opportunity to elegize a human female who seemed as yet innocent of precisely the categories that linked women to death for him: physical mother, impure lover, the body in inevitable decay. Lacan and Kristeva postulate that language, particularly written language, serves as an escape from these same categories. In preserving Elizabeth Drury—whom he never met in body—as an incorruptible soul, in bringing her elaborately back to life in the annual rhythm of these anniversary poems, Donne could sublimate into piety all the self-(pre)serving functions of his erotic verse. This new symbolic way
of investing his immortality in women—where formerly he projected his mortality—permitted Donne at last to cease repressing the recognition that his adult male self was trapped in a world of decay. Donne thus composed his own funeral elegies, as he would later compose (according to Walton) "his own funeral sermon."
Magdalen As Mother: "Perchance Her Cabinet May Harbour Thee"
For Donne to make any meaningful progress against his own mortality, he must confront the "body of death" bequeathed to him by his mother, and by Eve, the mother of us all. He does so by finding alternative maternal figures who—precisely by their protectiveness, their Reformation theology, and their interest in poetry—represent a saving alternative to his birth-mother. These women provide a kind of appeals court in which he can challenge the conviction of mortal sin derived from his biological origins, by allowing him to live in the word, not merely in the flesh. Long before Freud offered his tripartite division of biological mother, chosen spouse, and the earth of burial, Donne's religion encouraged him to believe that he had "three births; one . . . we are borne of our naturall mother; one . . . we are borne of our spirituall Mother . . . and a third . . . we are borne of the generall Mother . . . in the Resurrection" (Sermons , VI, 135).
Lucy Harrington (Countess of Bedford) and Magdalen Herbert (mother of George Herbert) were powerful women, both firmly anti-Catholic, who fed Donne and took him into their houses. They evidently praised his accomplishments and used their disfavor to steer him back into good behavior when he began to stray. "Twicknam Garden" certainly suggests some oedipal tensions in his attraction toward Lucy, and his poems to Magdalen balance uneasily on the border between respectful filial admiration and courtly erotic desire. Of course these were metaphorical rather than literal mothers to Donne, but he seems to have preferred metaphorical to literal parentage; he desires to live as the sum of his interior being, not as the slave of his external form. Thomas Browne concedes that "in the midst of all my endeavours there is but one thought that dejects me, that my acquired parts must perish with my selfe, nor can bee Legacyed among my honoured Friends" (p. 138). Donne evidently feels the same regret, and therefore transmutes the
procreative solution to mortality into a kind of apostolic succession, in which some aspect of the dead person's inward being, rather than merely the outward form, may be passed on.[162] Donne's verse letters appear to give this sort of moral re-incarnation—with poetry mediating the metempsychosis—more weight than the promises of Christ, the Incarnated Savior.
When Lucy's brother died, Donne composed an elegy that flirts with a cannibal theology in order to insist that this moral transmigration can overcome Heraclitan mutability:
As bodies change, and as I do not weare
Those Spirits, humors, blood I did last yeare,
And, as if on a streame I fixe mine eye,
That drop, which I looked on, is presently
Pusht with more waters from my sight, and gone,
So in this sea of vertues, can no one
Bee'insisted on; vertues, as rivers, passe,
Yet still remaines that vertuous man there was;
And as if man feed on mans flesh, and so
Part of his body to another owe,
Yet at the last two perfect bodies rise,
Because God knowes where every Atome lyes.
("Obsequies to the Lord Harrington," 45–56)
The macabre vehicle of this comparison seems more important than its ostensible tenor, and it seems clear that Donne is more concerned with vindicating his own hopes of perfect resurrection than with soothing the sensibilities of a bereaved sister.
Donne's "Elegie to the Lady Bedford" associates her separation from her recently deceased friend Lady Markham with the separation between soul and body preceding the general resurrection: "She like the Soule is gone, and you here stay / Not a live friend; but th'other halfe of clay" (13–14). In suggesting that the material which "elemented" this unity becomes "spread in infinite" and then redeemed by the completion of a perfect circle (24–25), the poem is close kin to "Forbidding Mourning." In suggesting that their conjunction put "both rich Indies" of "spices" and "metalls" in one place (34, 33), it echoes "The Sunne Rising," which located "both the'India's of spice and Myne" (17) in the bedroom Donne shares with his perfectly beloved lover. The way the friends are "Pair'd like two eyes" (9) recalls "The Good-morrow." By deploying these metaphors against the losses of death, this "Elegie" makes explicit
what I read as implicit in the poems ostensibly concerned with earthly heterosexual love. As Donne hopes his personal virtues will somehow transcend death in the consciousness of his lover, so he promises that Markham's virtues will survive undiminished in Bedford:
So, to your selfe you may additions take,
But nothing can you lesse, or changed make,
Seeke not in seeking new, to seeme to doubt,
That you can match her, or not be without;
But let some faithfull booke in her roome be,
Yet but of Judith no such booke as shee.
(39–44)
An immortal book takes the place of the dead friend, preserving her unique merits, and perhaps her name as well. Donne's own scripture seems to be the permanent residence of that immortal being.
In the closing lines of Donne's "Epitaph on Himselfe," he proposes to Lucy yet another complicated contract whereby his reciprocity with a woman will allow some essence of his character to survive:
Heare this, and mend thy selfe, and thou mendst me,
By making me being dead, doe good to thee,
And thinke me well compos'd, that I could now
A last-sicke houre to syllables allow.
(21–24)
The pun on "compos'd" suggests that this immortal aspect of Donne's virtue is reflected in his verse as well as his character. By achieving a neat closure in the poem, he can preclude too definitive a closure of his mortal existence.
The speaker of "The Relique" imagines that a very personal kind of artifact—"A bracelet of bright haire about the bone" (6)—will mark him for affectionate recognition after death, sparing him the cruel anonymity that the transi figure threatens. Despite the decay of the corpse, something generated within mortal life still speaks eloquently of the self and its relationships; the poem, like the bracelet, preserves him from mortality. Literary history has uncannily endorsed this project: critics such as T.S. Eliot (in his seminal essay on "The Metaphysical Poets") have seized on this image of a skeleton still embraced by still-bright hair to characterize Donne's indelible individuality.[163] Such poetic conceits
and images have kept the soul of his wit and the body of his work together.
"The Relique" begins with the dead rising, but it is a false alarm:
When my grave is broke up againe
Some second ghest to entertaine,
(For graves have learn'd that woman-head
To be to more than one a Bed). . . .
(1–4)
This cynical parenthesis may suggest reciprocally that women, when they break the bonds of loving mutuality by infidelity, become the graves that swallow men into mortality. Again, what appears to be a gratuitous interjection of misogyny or morbidity in a Donne love-lyric proves deeply integral: it reflects his perpetual anxiety that, instead of assisting his immortality, women will prove the agency of his decay and annihilation. And if lines 17–18 imply that he will resemble Jesus, at whose tomb Mary Magdalen lingered ardently, then the fact that he is still rotting in his grave becomes (like the moldering gingerbread king of the "Farewell to Love") a very ominous bulletin about the prospects for resurrection:[164]
If this fall in a time, or land,
Where mis-devotion doth command,
Then, he that digges us up, will bring
Us, to the Bishop, and the King,
To make us Reliques; then
Thou shalt be'a Mary Magdalen, and I
A something else thereby.
(12–18)
In this self-aggrandizing way, Donne lends her his own consoling notion that "in the Grave we are bedded with" Christ (Sermons , VI, 358).
To avoid tainting his hopes for full immortality with the idolatrous Roman worship of relics practiced by his mother, however, Donne must exalt this relationship as spiritual rather than physical.[165] Though "A bracelet of bright haire about the bone" is sexually suggestive, it clings to its innocence as a symbol. The key revelation is that he has kept her at an erotic distance, as Jesus (unlike other men) did Mary Magdalen: "Difference of sex no more wee knew, / Then our Guardian Angells doe" (25–26). This resembles not only the relationship Donne claimed to have had with Magdalen Herbert, but also a suggestive passage in
another sermon, in which God "is expressed in both sexes, man and woman; and all that can be ill in the love of either sex, is purged away, for the man is no other man then Christ Jesus, and the woman no other woman, then wisdom her self" (I, 239). Ordinarily a chaste relationship would seem an inadequate avatar of immortality for Donne, who is so concerned with bodily resurrection. But through his own Magdalen, Donne can be his own savior, because he has reconceived his immortality within the intelligence she admired in him, and the scripture she inspired in him.
Donne repeatedly converts Magdalen Herbert into a sort of maternal muse who carries both his verse and his soul toward eternal salvation. When he lauds her posthumously as "best wife ," "best mother " and "best Friend " (Sermons , VIII, 85), we may recall that he variously addressed her as a Platonic lover (in "The Relique"), a womb nurturing his poetry (in the verse letters), and a pious exemplar of the friendship that was his "second religion" (in a sermon). Donne could participate in the matrimonial and filial relationships only figuratively, but he often treated his figurations as a superior reality. At the close of this hagiographic sermon on her death, having described the way she transmitted her pious virtues to her actual children, Donne urges his congregation to inherit her virtues by the sort of re-incarnation I have been describing: "But if you wil wake her, wake her, and keepe her awake with an active imitation, of her Morall , and her Holy vertues " (Sermons , VIII, 93).
Read in retrospect from this sermon, Donne's earlier writings reflect various efforts to make himself Magdalen Herbert's spiritual offspring. What may have been an ongoing dialogue with this alternative mother, a plea for adoption, is still at moments legible as a sort of palimpsest of her morals on the pages of Donne's own writings. The sermon portrays her as the sworn enemy of exactly the sort of "scoffers, jesters in divine things" (Sermons , VIII, 86) that (we have seen) he himself had notoriously been prior to her influence. He describes her as "loving facetiousness, and sharpnesse of wit," but asks, "who ever heard her countenance a prophane speech , how sharpe soever, or take part with wit, to the prejudice of Godlinesse ?" (Sermons , VIII, 86). When Donne writes of his poetry to his best friend, Henry Goodyer, he applies much the same standard: "I doe not condemn in my self, that I have given my wit such evaporations, as those, if they be free from prophaneness, or obscene provocations" (Letters , pp. 31–32).
The poet whose "Of the Book" had concluded with his depressive fear of "the darke eclipses" of mortality becomes the preacher who remarks that Magdalen Herbert's "Occasionall Melancholy . . . never Ecclipst, never interrupted her cheerfull confidence, and assurance in God" (Sermons , VIII, 87). The poet whose "Extasie" compares the soul uniting him with his lover to "A single violet transplant" that "Redoubles still, and multiplies" (37, 40), becomes a preacher comparing her, in marriage, to "a flower that doubles and multiplies by transplantation." He even praises this older woman for marrying a younger man, because the couple are somehow "twins of one hour" (Sermons , VIII, 88); in other words, he insists on discovering in her December-May marriage a version of the miraculous mirroring he insisted on finding in his own love-affairs.
In that same sermon, Donne lauds Magdalen Herbert for being so attentive to her children, "proposing to her selfe, as her principall care, the education of her children , to advance that, shee came with them, and dwelt with them, in the Universitie ; and recompenc't to them, the losse of a Father , in giving them two mothers ; her owne personall care, and the advantage of that place" (Sermons , VIII, 87). Here again, Donne finds an indirect way to claim her as his own mother, at least as the mother of his intellectual being, by construing her as part of the alma mater that he shared with her offspring.[166] Unable to pursue his full potential at Oxford because of the recusancy inculcated by his biological mother, the ambitious young man submitted himself to a powerful woman who was a pillar of the proto-Anglican establishment. Probably the clearest evidence that Magdalen Herbert might have served as this sort of symbolic foster mother comes not from Donne's lyrics or sermons, but from George Herbert's Greek poems commemorating her death:
I mourn my mother, as well as other men
Who do not make her now my clan's
Especial guardian, but, since she was virtuous,
Want her for their own mother.[167]
This from a poet who had watched his mother take John Donne under her wing, and eventually into their household.
Donne's adoption of this other, Reformed mother may have been eased by her association with a religion that believed in spiritual rebirth, that favored revelations of the Word over legacies of the flesh. "In Reformed theology [the Catholic] preference for the body over the text
is reversed," and the Reformed woman was typically pictured carrying a book.[168] Whatever nostalgia Donne felt for a more palpable connection evidently found expression in several safe forms, such as the painting of Mary Magdalen that apparently hung in his room, and the figuration of Magdalen Herbert as a version of the English Church, which Donne imagined as a mother who gives body to the words of Scripture, and breast-feeds its children when they are baptized in its faith.[169] In eulogizing Magdalen Herbert, Donne cannot resist contrasting her solid Anglicanism with the errors of those (such as his own mother) who "diverted towards the Papist , in undervaluing the Scripture " (Sermons , VIII, 89; see similarly VII, 120). Because Donne's verse letters to Magdalen Herbert thank her especially for valuing his writings, and depict her as their surrogate mother, that remark acquires some powerful resonances. Magdalen's valuing of his manuscript poetry seems intimately bound up with the Reformation valorization of the Scripture which his natural mother presumably opposed.[170] He once wrote to Magdalen that "I to my letters am rigid as a Puritan" (Letters , pp. 291–92), and she helped him reconceive himself as at once a man of letters and a man of the Word.
A painting of Mary Magdalene may have been "unusual decor . . . for a Protestant minister,"[171] but it makes perfect psycho-biographical sense if she was the figure authorizing his otherwise guilt-ridden shift from Catholicism to Protestantism. She provides a sort of maternal bridge between two incarnations, one as the bodily child of the Catholic Elizabeth Donne, the other as the piously born-again progeny of a Reformed Magdalene. Having left his own sins of the flesh behind, he could nonetheless continue loving the sight of this beautiful woman, if only as an image of the sublimation he had achieved: "For in the Book of Life, the name of Mary Magdalen was as soon recorded, for all her incontinency, as the name of the blessed Virgin, for all her integrity" (Sermons , VII, 153). A patron of Leonardo da Vinci's was obliged to evict a painting because he could neither overcome his erotic attraction to the figure it portrayed nor bring himself to erase her religious markings;[172] perhaps Donne retained his painting for the same reason. Unlike the women who had betrayed him in the past, her gaze offered a divine constancy; "As a well made, and well plac'd picture, lookes alwayes upon him that looks upon it; so shall thy God look upon thee. . . ." (Sermons , II, 237). Through this figure—the creature of words as Martha was of works, the creature whose passionate love mattered more
than her failings of faith—he could construct a unified narrative of the self. Under her watchful, loving eyes, he could write himself at last into immortality.
Mary Magdalene was the only female saint to survive the first Anglican purge of Catholic idolatry, probably because her transition from loving Christ in the flesh to loving him in the Word supported a Protestant reading of theological progress.[173] As Donne himself asserts, physical contact is "that which Christ diverted Mary from, when after his Resurrection manifesting himself to her . . . Christ said to her, Touch mee not . . . that is, Dwell not upon this passionate consideration of my bodily, and personall presence, but send thy thoughts [to heaven] and contemplate mee there" (Sermons , VII, 267). Her miserable longing for the body of her beloved made the Magdalene a perfect figure for a sensual religion of transubstantiation and penance. But her conversion from this misguided search for the lost body of Jesus (like those in Protestant search-narratives such as Herbert's "Redemption" and Milton's "Lycidas")—conveniently parallel to her conversion from prostitution—made her an apt heroine for Reformation propaganda. It also would have made her an apt counterpart for Donne, who so often in the poems imagines eager autopsies and exhumations of his corpse, and so often in the sermons laments the prospective loss of his own body, and yearns for its return. Through the Magdalene figure he can sublimate and exalt his narcissistic impulses. "The Relique" safely displaces his fixation on his own erotic body, his need to be loved beyond reason and beyond death, onto the timeless pious embrace of Magdalen Herbert, or at least of her hair; and, in fact, Mary Magdalene was sometimes depicted as wrapping the deposed body of Christ "gently in her hair, which was of surpassing beauty."[174]
Donne's sermon suggests that the reason Magdalen Herbert "continued twelve yeeres " as a widow before remarrying was her determination to devote herself fully to her growing sons (Sermons , VIII, 88). The contrast to the alacrity with which Donne's mother twice remarried during his youth is unhappily suggestive; having extra fathers was probably poor recompense for the resulting distraction of his mother. Walton's report that Donne solemnly promised his children "never to bring them under the subjection of a step-mother"[175] suggests that Donne's own experience of step-parents was an unhappy one. Donne's poetic tribute to Magdalen Herbert when she eventually did prepare to remarry begins with fierce, oedipally-tinged ambivalence. The poem
must choose between cremation and deterioration in a grave, as if the diversion of Magdalen's attention threatened Donne's poetic self—the "sonnes" she helped him make—with death:
Mad paper stay, and grudge not here to burne
With all those sonnes whom my braine did create,
At lest lye hid with mee, till thou returne
To rags againe, which is thy native state.
("To Mrs. M. H.," 1–4)
Anxiety about returning to his former state of social disadvantage resounds strongly in that last line.
A few lines later, the poem resounds with another regressive anxiety, seeking the maternal gaze that redeems life from the senseless oblivion of death:[176]
But when thou com'st to that perplexing eye
Which equally claims love and reverence ,
Thou wilt not long dispute it, thou wilt die;
And, having little now, have then no sense.
(13–16)
The pun on "sense" (as either meaning or sensation) links a loss of intellectual significance to a loss of phenomenological experience. Writing again becomes a surrogate for Donne's soul in its confrontation with mortality, and a woman's love—her receptivity to the visits of his extended soul—determines the prospects for eternal salvation. That Donne sounds more like George Herbert as the poem continues than in any other sustained piece of his verse is far from a mere coincidence:
Yet when her warme redeeming hand, which is
A miracle; and made such to worke more,
Doth touch thee (saples leafe) thou grow'st by this
Her creature; glorify'd more then before.
Then as a mother which delights to heare
Her early child mis-speake halfe utter'd words,
Or, because majesty doth never feare
Ill or bold speech, she Audience affords.
(17–24)
In an indulgent Last Judgment, this maternal audience will afford his poems a kind of resurrection, figured here as nurturance in her private space: "Who knowes thy destiny? when thou hast done, / Perchance her Cabinet may harbour thee" (33–34).[177]
From such womb-like enclosures, an immortalized self can emerge. His poems to her may read like ordinary epistles of praise, but they take on the functions of Annunciation. As in "Of My Name in the Window," the woman's role is to make the words into human flesh; the "saples leafe" that was merely a written page must flow with life again. As Donne writes elsewhere, "Rhymes which never had / Mother, want matter" ("To Mr. B. B.," 23–24). The man who imagined that God "puts all the graines of thy dust into his Cabinet" to prepare for the general resurrection,[178] awaits a potentially eternal rebirth in the harboring "cabinet" of the woman who was (the next chapter will argue) both mother and God to George Herbert. In the love-lyrics, Donne construes women as body and himself as soul; in the sermons, he describes the body as "the Cabinet of thy soule" (Sermons , VII, 322). In another sermon Donne focuses on the promise that
where mans buried flesh hath brought forth grasse, and that grasse fed beasts, and those beasts fed men, and those men fed other men, God that knowes in which Boxe of his Cabinet all this seed Pearle lies . . . shall recollect that dust, and then recompact that body, and then re-inanimate that man, and that is the accomplishment of all. (Sermons , VII, 115)
The fact that Magdalen Herbert's attentions can cure precisely the fears of atomized selfhood Winnicott attributes to inattentive motherhood helps to confirm the psychoanalytic conjectures of this chapter, including the proposed link between Donne's experience of mother-love and his fears of divine judgment.
In his other verse letter to Magdalen Herbert, Donne again makes her into an agency of "The Resurrection ," a creature who will (among the other goodness "Deliver'd of her") nurture his poetic immortality inside herself: "That they did harbour Christ himselfe, a Guest, / Harbour these Hymns , to his dear name addrest" (5–6, 13–14). Is Donne also, here as in "The Relique," addressing the implications of Magdalen's "dear name," and the miracles she supposedly worked against mortality? In the absence of such a good second mother, a symbolic rather than material mother, the self appears impossible to resurrect, and chaos is come again:
such a Mother in Law is the Earth , in respect of our naturall Mother ; in her wombe we grew ; and when she was delivered of us, wee were planted in some place , in some calling in the world ; In the wombe of the Earth, wee diminish , and when shee is delivered of us, our grave opened for another, wee are not
transplanted but transported , our dust blowne away with prophane dust, with every wind. (Devotions , p. 93)
As in the classic Freudian "family romance," a child fantasizes a more exalted legacy and dismisses its biological parents as mere step-parents.
Grierson has proposed that "La Corona," as well as "The Relique," was directed in tribute to Magdalen Herbert, and the close of the "Annunciation" sonnet of that sequence echoes Donne's hopes that he and this ideal woman can grant each other apotheosis:
Ere by the spheares time was created, thou
Wast in his minde, who is thy Sonne, and Brother,
Whom thou conceiv'st, conceiv'd; yea thou art now
Thy Makers maker, and thy Fathers mother,
Thou'hast light in darke; and shutst in little roome,
Immensity cloysterd in thy deare wombe .
(23–28)
Magdalen becomes both Marys here, and in her cabinet—her casket, her womb—Donne again breeds some Metaphysical version of his immortal self immune to the vasts of time and space. Donne's earlier search for an immortalizing exchange of identities with his beloved subsumes the classic formula that closes Shakespeare's sonnet 18: "So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, / So long lives this, and this gives life to thee" (13–14). Now that promise outlasts earthly life: the Resurrection sonnet in "La Corona" boasts that "Feare of first or last death" shall not "bring miserie, / If in thy little booke my name thou'enroule, / Flesh in that long sleep is not putrifled . . ." (77–79). Donne's "Of My Name in the Window" thus receives its explicit Christian translation.
Donne's salvational theology becomes more comfortable, and his erotic demands more benign, precisely when he manages to conflate the agency of immortality with a maternal love-object.[179] This conflation might also help to explain the uncharacteristic acceptance of aging and mortal time in Donne's "The Autumnall," which Walton (among others) plausibly associates with Magdalen Herbert. The sequence of italicized words in each stanza promises an escape from death and burial and decay, into the pious rebirth of resurrection. The poem is devoted less to praising a woman than to envisioning a process of bodily decay that does not finally kill the ability of the soul to love.
Donne's craving for romantic love—and he may not be alone in this—can be read as an effort to invent, confer, sustain, some metaphor of immortality within the span of human life. In seduction, he seeks not only physical pleasure, but also an object he can desire as limitlessly as he wishes to be desired, a consciousness that he can deem perfect so that its perception of his perfection can be trusted. When familiarity breeds contempt for a lover, when sexual boredom exposes the limits of the physical connection, Donne has little choice but to seek a new object, even though the change itself seems to invalidate his claim against mutability. Perhaps that is why the lyrics addressed to extraordinary women to whom Donne's attachment was probably not primarily or actively sexual are spared the manic-depressive swings between bravado and embitterment that mark the other love-poems. Donne's Metaphysical style reshapes the world, and in the process it invents for him an acceptable self, one with access to the experience of the body, but immune to its entropic destiny. A patroness such as Magdalen Herbert can help him create and inhabit that better universe without threatening its delicate narcissism, as erotic lovers threatened the fragile solipsism he paradoxically asked them to confirm. To live fully within the deathless metaphors he made, he needed someone to nurture them patiently into a fleshly form, and the Reformation provided metaphors that allowed him to imagine that possible; he could feed on "the milke of the word" (Sermons , II, 152).
Donne's changing strategies for combatting mortality follow the arc most biographers describe in his spiritual career as a whole. The changes also follow the course of oedipal development sketched by Freud, in which paternal prohibitions become internalized as guilt. In replacing his erotic fixation with a religious one, Donne ceases to seek immortality from the mutual affirmations of seduction, and turns instead to a merger with women's creative power. But in the process he submits himself to a judgmental patriarchal deity who threatens to nullify his powers of life. Donne's vengefulness, directed in the misogynistic lyrics against the women whose failures of reciprocity mirrored his fallible mortality, turns against heretics and his own sinfulness in the sermons and Holy Sonnets. Whatever anger he felt at whatever abandonment he had experienced, he turned first against women and against the men who guarded them; finally he turned it inward, identifying with the punitive godhead to whom his surrogate mother had already pledged her love.
In his love-lyrics, Donne battles the recognition I discern in Shakespeare's Measure for Measure , where sexuality, so commonly
sublimated and mystified, is exposed as itself a sublimation and mystification of an even more brutal evolutionary fact. Donne needs sexuality to represent transcendence (of common mortality) rather than degradation (of the individual spirit); defiance, rather than capitulation, to mortality. In his holy profession and holy writings, Donne battles the suggestion I discern in Shakespeare's Hamlet , where fatal illusions fill the human need to believe that life has ulterior meaning and a destination beyond the grave. By sublimating the ghostly father one level deeper than Hamlet does, into a purely religious category, Donne can imagine that following such a figure worshipfully into death is an affirmation, not a cancellation, of his innermost being.
Christianity still offered the best hope for personal salvation—if people could still be thoroughly faithful Christians, and if they could imagine some prelapsarian version of themselves (as Donne perhaps imagined in Elizabeth Drury) that God might choose to retrieve. But, if I am correct, and if literature is any indicator of cultural pressures, then Londoners at the turn of the seventeenth century were feeling increasingly obliged to fall back on secular methods of denying death, and becoming increasingly dissatisfied with those methods—perhaps because revenge and procreation are essentially systems of substitution that neglect the inwardness of individuals, a commodity of growing value in that society.
Donne typically tells others how to feel and behave, primarily so he can regulate his own unacknowledged anxieties. George Herbert typically does the opposite, wrestling with his own soul so that he can console and reform his readers. Herbert recognized that part of his duty as a Christian evangelist and apologist would be to trick the half-materialized genie of Jacobean annihilationism back into its bottle. With an air of effortlessness—perhaps enabled by a mother who successfully nurtured both his mortal body and his immortal soul—Herbert wove the frayed strands of denial back into good cable. What poets such as Donne admired and desired in their mistresses, Herbert could find in his God: not only the beauty, but also the power of salvation. The representation of God and sinner primarily as good parent and wayward child in Herbert offers an alternative to Donne's supposition that dialogue must be symmetrical and gendered to be redemptive. The patriarchal heroics and erotics described in Hamlet and the Songs and Sonets give way, in Herbert, to what might be called a matriarcha l alternative of nurturance. Refusing to exalt violent closure over continuation, either in form or in content, Herbert also refuses the tendency of
Hamlet and Donne to consider self-abnegating worship a last resort in a world otherwise terrifyingly empty of meaning. In The Temple , such worship is instead a first home that perpetually welcomes our return from the fallen world of mortality.