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.