II
The remainder of this essay is devoted to a "close reading" of Donne's third Satire. This kind of sequential, nearly line-by-line reading, bearing as it does the taint of formalism, is no longer in fashion. Yet if one is interested in the "inside" perspective at all, it is the only way to enter into the emotional and intellectual tensions and eddies of a text, indeed, of the mind of a nonliving person.[30] Generalizations about a text are rarely helpful about that text, though they may be so for other purposes. With regard to individual texts, tracking their movements from beginning to end is our only hope for real engagement. To pick out bits and pieces of a text, and then to contextualize those bits and pieces as imaginatively as possible, can be exciting and extraordinarily illuminating. It creates the wonderful collage effects of New Historicism. But if you wish to see the mind of a particular historical individual at work (or play), there is no substitute for relatively thorough "close reading." It is only in the tiny details of a text—especially (but not exclusively) in a poem, where an extraordinary number of meaning-bearing elements are at work—that we can hope to capture the real complexity of lived experience and thought in the past.[31] To do "close reading" with as
[29] For a good sense of the potential and actual radicalism of Erasmus's religious views, see Marcel Bataillon, Erasme et l'Espagne (1937; rev. ed., 3 vols., Geneva: Droz, 1991); Lucien Febvre, The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century (1942), trans. Beatrice Gottlieb (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), chap. 8; Roland H. Bainton, Erasmus of Christendom (New York: Scribner's, 1969); E. G. Rupp, Patterns of Reformation (London: Epworth, 1969); and Carlos M. Eire, War against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship from Erasmus to Calvin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
[30] On the importance of the "inside" perspective, see Essay 4 above.
[31] I would defend the "close reading" of historical "documents" as well as poems. I have attempted such a defense, and such an activity, in "Describing and Curing a National Disaster: The Roots and Branches Petition and the Grand Remonstrance," in David L. Smith, Richard Strier, and David Bevington, eds., The Theatrical City: Culture, Theatre, and Literature in London, 1576–1649 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
much knowledge but as few preconceptions as possible is, as I have suggested, the only way in which we will ever be able to come close to recreating the thought and lifeworlds of particular individuals. Ultimately we may well be interested in something larger than individuals, but we cannot properly get to the "something larger" without attending to what we can reconstruct of the intimate emotional and intellectual lives of individuals and of represented individuals. Even if we are prepared to dismiss much of what we find as "false consciousness" of one sort or another, it is historical data of immense importance nonetheless.
Donne is a great opener of poems. Where the first two Satires immediately establish a dialogical frame (their opening words are "Away thou" and "Sir, though" respectively), the third opens with the speaker in a state of puzzled yet highly stylized self-contemplation.[32] There is no clear interlocutor.[33] The speaker stresses both his emotionality and his bafflement as he watches his passions interfere with one another: "Kinde pitty chokes my spleene." This is strange and striking. We are thrown suddenly and uncomfortably not just into the speaker's mind but into his internal bodily processes, into (as Eliot hauntingly said) "the cerebral cortex, the nervous system, the digestive tract."[34] "Spleen" was a term with a range of reference simultaneously and ambiguously psychological and physiological. "Chokes" dominates the half line, making the kindness of pity seem purely ascriptive. The speaker seems splenetic toward pity.
The rest of the line is more stable and controlled: "brave scorn forbids." We are now in a world where the epithet and the verb cor-
[32] In referring to "the speaker" of the poem, I do not mean to imply that I think that the poem is spoken by a "persona." I believe "the speaker" of Satire III to be a direct projection of the historical John Donne. I use the term only in a rhetorical sense. For the non-inevitability of the notion of a persona in lyric poetry, see the discussion of George Herbert's "The Church-porch" in Essay 5 above, especially pp. 96–101.
[33] While N. J. C. Andreasen, "Theme and Structure in Donne's Satyres," Studies in English Literature 3 (1963): 59–75, sees Satire III as a soliloquy, Thomas O. Sloan, "The Persona as Rhetor: An Interpretation of Donne's Satyre III," Quarterly Journal of Speech 51 (1965): 14–27, sees the mode of the poem as that of deliberative oratory. I think that both scholars are right. I do not believe that persuading oneself and persuading others were seen as distinct activities by Renaissance persons.
[34] T. S. Eliot, "The Metaphysical Poets," Selected Essays (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1950), 250.
respond ("brave . . . forbids") rather than conflict ("kind . . . chokes"). We are far from physiology and have entered the realm of will and lordly control ("forbids"). The second line, however, brings us back to uncomfortable physical proximity. What "brave scorn forbids" is "Those teares to issue which swell my eye-lids" (line 2). We are awfully close to the speaker's face, and there is something (from the staunchly male point of view of "brave scorn") embarrassingly "feminine" and physiological in "swell my eye-lids." The image of a full pregnancy not allowed to "issue" into a birth is as uncomfortable as the image of choking.[35] The speaker (Donne?) really does seem mired in conflicting emotions. The spleen and scorn of the first line are convincing, but no more so than the extraordinary delicacy of the second.
It is a relief to encounter an ethical rather than a physiological subject at the beginning of the third line. We encounter an "I" with some moral distance from physiology: "I must not laugh, nor weepe sinnes" (line 3a). Why this speaker "must not laugh" [at] sins is easily apprehended, but why not "weepe sinnes"? Jesus, after all, wept for Jerusalem.[36] The rest of the line explains why this speaker cannot allow himself either of his contradictory responses. He cannot do so "and be wise" (line 3b). The desire to be "wise" in a strongly classical, distinctively Stoic sense is more important to this speaker than sorting out, tempering, or expressing his emotions.[37] The disconcertingly wet and physiological emotionality of the opening is perhaps meant to have the effect of leading us (presumed male) as well as the speaker to value the "dry light" and unemotionality of Stoic wisdom.[38]
The opening sentence ends with the speaker considering a response different from both laughing and weeping, an option that is presumably (but not assuredly) compatible with "wisdom": "Can railing then cure these worne maladies?" (line 4). "Railing" is a technical term. Donne
[35] On pregnant tears, see "A valediction of weeping."
[36] Here and in the rest of this paragraph, I am deeply indebted to Gregory Vlastos's remarkable comparison of Jesus and Socrates in "Introduction: The Paradox of Socrates," in Gregory Vlastos, ed., The Philosophy of Socrates (New York: Doubleday, 1971), 15–17.
[37] Joshua Scodel in "The Medium is the Message: Donne's 'Satire 3,' 'To Sir Henry Wotton ("Sir, more then kisses"),' and the Ideologies of the Mean," Modern Philology 91 (1993): 482, asserts that Donne's speaker "does not seek Stoic impassivity." Scodel is committed to seeing the poem as embracing a consistent, if idiosyncratic, Aristotelian position (see n. 56 below).
[38] For "dry light" (lumen siccum ), see Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, in Selected Writings , ed. Hugh G. Dick (New York: Random House, Modern Library, 1955), 165 (citing Heraclitus).
is contemplating Juvenalian satire conceived, as Sidney conceived it, in semimedical terms, with sins redescribed as "maladies." This is tentatively approached, and we can understand why. Even accepting the equation of sins with diseases, it seems a lot to ask from "railing" that it cure established maladies. This is more than Sidney credited to "bold but wholesome Iambic."[39] Donne's complex and conflicted proem to the Satire seems to end (fitly) by questioning the efficacy of a mode that it was about to adopt. Neither we nor the poet are sure that any satiric mode will be able to "cure these worne maladies" and enable the speaker to "be wise." It is not clear that "railing" should even be tried. Perhaps the moral essay would be the better genre. Already, within four lines, the poem is deeply self-conscious and self-questioning.
The second sentence is another question. Meant to be sarcastic, perhaps a form of "railing," it emerges as more baffled than biting. Donne reveals that the sins or "maladies" with which he is concerned are failures in spiritual commitment. Since his conception of wisdom is deeply classical, it is natural for this speaker to view "our" degree of spiritual commitment and its object against that of the pagans of the classical period and theirs, asking
Is not our Mistresse faire Religion,
As worthy'of all our Soules devotion,
As vertue was to the first blinded age? (5–7)
Donne is saying (or at least implying) something remarkable in his presentation of "the first blinded age." The highest goal of pagan practical life, "vertue," is presented as having been an object of "Soules devotion," a term that normally designates a specifically Christian or at least biblical activity. The speaker is genuinely puzzled at the inefficacy of "faire Religion" to inspire an (at least) equivalent intensity. "Devotion," here, is a matter of commitment, not of religiosity. The "Soules devotion" of "the first blinded age" is unquestioned; it is the premise of the comparison. The sense in which this age was "blinded" is obvious—it was not privy to the sight of "faire Religion" (Christianity)—but this blindness seems merely technical. The point is the superiority, not the inferiority of the pagans. Donne tries the comparison again in the next sentence, explicitly measuring "our" failures (and their success) by the extent of our advantages: "Are not heavens joyes as valiant to
[39] Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry , ed. Geoffrey Shepherd(London: Nelson, 1965), 116.
asswage / Lusts as earths honour was to them?" (8–9). The test of "devotion" is, apparently, moral: its ability, as the enjambment insists, to "asswage / Lusts," to lead persons to suppress or (better) to redirect their appetites and passions.
In the midst of these questionings, the speaker stops to reflect. The tone shifts from scorn to sorrow as Donne contemplates the difference between "heavens joyes" and "earths honour": "Alas, / As wee do them in meanes, shall they surpasse / Us in the end" (10–11). This is elegantly compact and precise. The contrast blends the philosophical one between ends and means and the religious one between other ends and "the end." The mention of "heavens joyes" in line 8 generates a transcendental, even apocalyptic context. It follows from the speaker's argument that the pagans who gave "Soules devotion" to virtue will attain the transcendental "end." The idea of heaven seems regularly to have stirred the thought of fathers in Donne's mind. In the sonnet beginning "If faithfull soules," Donne fantasizes that his glorified father can behold Donne's spiritual athleticism ("valiantly I hels wide mouth o'rstride"). Here, Donne contemplates the possibility that "thy fathers spirit" shall
Meete blinde Philosophers in heaven, whose merit
Of strict life may be'imputed faith, and heare
Thee, whom hee taught so easie wayes and neare
To follow, damn'd? (12–15)
This is tricky, although its general outlines are clear: Donne is continuing his radically humanist line of thought. The "blind Philosophers" are unequivocally "in heaven," not in limbo or Purgatory.[40] They seem, in fact, more solidly and substantially there than does "thy fathers spirit."[41] We must stop and ask some questions here lest we take all of this too casually. One puzzle is how the philosophers got to heaven. They did so, it seems, on a strictly Catholic conception, through, as the line break suggests, "merit." The explication of "merit" as "strict life"
[40] On the salvation of the virtuous pagans in humanist thought, see George Huntson Williams, "Erasmus and the Reformers on Non-Christian Religions and Salus Extra Ecclesiam, " in Theodore K. Rabb and Jerrold E. Seigel, eds., Action and Conviction in Early Modern Europe: Essays in Memory of E. H. Harbison (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 319–70.
[41] Carey's suggestion (Donne: Life, Mind, and Art , 28) that Donne is echoing Hamlet is fanciful and probably impossible (unless we accept the existence of a pre-Shakespearean ur-Hamlet with this phrase in it), but Carey is right about the strangeness and wraithlike quality of "thy fathers spirit," especially in comparison to the substantiality of the "blinde Philosophers."
is fully intelligible and fully in keeping with the stress in the poem on the capacity of devotion to "asswage / Lusts." But the situation is not so straightforward. As the enjambed sentence continues, it turns out that salvation is by faith, after all, and that Donne is speculating or postulating that "merit . . . may be'imputed faith." "Imputation" is a technical and loaded theological term central to Luther's theology. Donne is making startlingly un-Lutheran use of the key Lutheran terms of "imputation" and faith, since the force of the notion of imputed righteousness was precisely to oppose the philosophical, classical, and commonsense idea of achieved or actual righteousness.[42] Milgate sees Donne using the terms impudently here.[43] This is plausible and may be correct, but I wonder whether we ought to consider taking Donne at his word. Perhaps he is being boldly syncretic, trying to find a formula for the salvation of the philosophers that would include the key notions of both theologies. Donne is certainly playing, speculating ("may be imputed") but this may be serious play.
Other puzzles are how the father got to heaven and what the "easie wayes" are. It is unlikely that Donne is expressing the view (historically well-founded though it may be) that salvation by faith was meant to be an easy way.[44] It is also unlikely that Donne would present his father as having been saved by "faith alone." Biography works against this, as does the overall context of the poem, which is strongly moralistic. So the father must have gotten to heaven through some combination of "merit / Of strict life" and faith. But in that case where are the "easie wayes"? They are a chimera.[45] I would argue that the writing itself attests
[42] On imputed versus actual or "philosophical" righteousness, see Luther's Preface to [his] Latin Writings; Preface to Romans; and 1531 Commentary on Galatians. The first two of these can be found complete, along with selections from the Galatians commentary, in Martin Luther: Selections from his Writings, ed. John Dillenberger (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1961). Donne uses "imputed grace" in the "Going to Bed" elegy (line 42) in a way that relies on the Lutheran view.
[43] See Satires , 141.
[44] C. S. Lewis repeatedly explained that when Protestantism first emerged, it seemed not too grim but too glad to be true. See "Donne and Love Poetry in the Seventeenth Century," in Seventeenth-Century Studies Presented to Sir Herbert Grierson , preface by J. Dover Wilson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938), 75; English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), 33–35, 187–92. See also Strier, "John Donne Awry and Squint," 361–64.
[45] Carey, Donne: Life, Mind and Art , has some shrewd comments on the oddness of "easie wayes" in the poem (28). We agree on the contradictions that this conception generates in the poem, but Carey sees "easie wayes" as playing a more important psychological role in the poem than I do.
to this. Donne's elaboration on "easie wayes" produces the weak enjambment and redundancy of "and neare / To follow." What this signifies, I think, is that in the poem there is really no alternative to "merit/ Of strict life." But if that is the case, a central problem in Renaissance religious thought emerges here: where is the superiority—and distinctiveness—of Christianity?[46] Deconstruction can help us here. In the poem, the difference disappears. Donne does not want this to surface; he wants to pretend to maintain the difference, but the poetry and the argument are working, perhaps semiconsciously, in the other direction. A subtle sign of this is that, functionally, within the imagined narrative, the father's spirit could in fact be just as blind as the philosophers, since this spirit does not get to see but only to "heare" the special (bad) news. The privileging of sight that underwrites the denigration of the philosophers is never imagistically activated. "Close reading" here reveals ambivalence and potential heterodoxy. The distinction between Christian and philosophical salvation deconstructs itself.
With the reference to damnation, a new section begins. Courage becomes central (a theme, it should be noted, that further undermines the praise of "easie wayes"). In good Aristotelian fashion, the true courage is seen as involving proper fear: "O if thou dar'st, feare this, / This feare great courage and high valour is."[47] Nonetheless, despite the redefinition of courage as Christian fear, Donne admires the military and navigational daring, even the foolhardiness, of his generation.[48] The voice takes on Donne's characteristic wit (ships as "wooden sepulchres"), love of catalogues ("To leaders rage, to stormes, to shot, to dearth"), and range of reference ("limbecks"). The passage describes secular activities but, again taking a cue from deconstruction, we can see that the
[46] On this problem in Renaissance religious thought, see the remarkable essay by Roland H. Bainton, "Man, God, and the Church in the Age of the Renaissance," in The Renaissance: Six Essays (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 77–96.
[47] On courage as a mean involving the appropriate amount of fear, with foolhardiness as an extreme, see Nicomachean Ethics, 1115b, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Loeb Classical Library, 1934), 153–73. For a thoughtful exposition and analysis, see David Pears, "Courage as a Mean," in Amélie Oksenberg Rorty, ed., Essays on Aristotle's Ethics (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University, of Calfornia Press, 1980), 171–87.
[48] I think Hester is wrong to see the sailors, etc. merely as negative exempla. Hallett Smith seems to me more accurate in seeing the poem as basically admiring of Elizabethan courage (Elizabethan Poetry [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1952], 224). Empson, "Donne the Spaceman," said the same (342; Donne and the New Philosophy, 82). Hester (Kinde Pitty and Brave Scorn , 148) quotes Smith without acknowledgment that their views are different. Scodel ("The Medium is the Message," 484) also sees the explorers, etc. merely as negative exemplars.
realms refuse to stay apart. In considering his countrymen's relation to heat and cold, Donne's mind leaps with characteristic nimbleness and characteristic inability (or refusal) to keep the secular and the sacred distinct. In a dizzying flurry, he sees his contemporaries "for gain" bringing "couragious fire" to the cold north, and enduring equatorial heat and the "fires of Spain" better than "Salamanders" and "like divine / Children in th' oven" (21–24). "Fires of Spain" sounds Inquisitorial as well as geographical, and Milgate reminds us that in the Book of Daniel, the story of the "children" in the fire is an emblem of resistance to state-commanded idolatry.[49] So for a moment, the mercenary English sea-dogs are "divine" in resisting idolatrous tyranny. The poem seems to be proceeding on two different levels, with the associations established by the imagery not entirely consonant with the distinctions established by the discourse.
Imagery and discursive content are again at odds in the final instance of improper courage: "must every hee / Which cryes not, Goddesse, to thy Mistresse, draw . . . ?" (27–28). This is obviously meant to be an image of spurious, misapplied valor, but the imagistic context complicates this intention. The only mistress previously mentioned in the poem is "our Mistresse faire Religion." This connection suggests that perhaps violent defense of this Mistress against every other is "courage of straw" as well. Perhaps "faire Religion" is not to be defended by the sword, and perhaps other "mistresses" are fair—like virtue, for instance, or other, non-Christian religions. The poem does not, at this point, develop these suggestions, but they seem to be pressing on the surface of the argument. Despite some lively writing, the poem seems not yet to have found its thematic center.
At the end of the section, the imagery supports a distinction. In a strongly enjambed phrase, the divinely appointed duty "to stand" (30) contrasts sharply with all the frenzied motion that Donne has just evoked. The necessity to "stand / Sentinell" in this world and not desert one's post is familiar from the classical debate over suicide; it fits in nicely with the hint of Erasmian pacifism in "for forbidden warres, leave th' appointed field" (32) since from the perspective of spiritual combat, all material wars would be forbidden.[50] In treating the traditional spiritual
[49] Satires , 142. On Daniel as a patron of resistance theory, see Essay 7, p. 194 below.
[50] On the sentinel image in the argument against suicide, see Phaedo, 62b, The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), 45; and Cicero, De Senectute, 20, text with a trans. by W. A. Falconer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Loeb Classical Library, 1923), 47. Redcrosse attempts to use this argument against Despair in The Faerie Queene , 1.9.41. For Erasmus's loathing of war, see (intra alia ) "The Complaint of Peace," in The Essential Erasmus , ed. and trans. John P. Dolan (New York: New American Library, 1964), 177–204, and see Essay 2, n. 22 above. For the assertion that "une guerre spirituelle doit etre menée par armes spirituelles" ("a spiritual war should be conducted [only] by spiritual weapons"), see Sebastien Castellion [Castellio], De l'impunité des hérétiques (De Haereticis non puniendis), Latin text ed. Bruno Becker, French text ed. M. Valkhoff (Geneva: Droz, 1971), 289. English translation my own.
foes, the writing comes alive only at the mention of the last of them, in Donne's order, the flesh.[51] The poetry gets more interesting as its topic recedes (or returns) from the specifically Christian ("the foule Devill") to the philosophical. Donne attempts a complex argument: to show his contemporaries that their behavior contradicts exactly the values they think it embodies, that they are unwittingly enacting a deep ontological and philosophical contradiction. The image of the second foe, the world, as a "worne strumpet" leads to the thought of sensual pleasure—which leads to linguistic and conceptual refinement:
Flesh (it selfes death) and joyes which flesh can taste,
Thou lov'st; and thy faire goodly soule, which doth
Give this flesh power to taste joy, thou dost loath. (40–42.)
Again we must recognize the unconventional. This is not a traditional argument against "the flesh," a phrase which Donne does not use. Despite the interjected parenthesis, it is not, in fact, an argument against "flesh" at all. "Joyes which flesh can taste" are never rejected or even devalued. They cannot be, since the argument for the amiability of the soul is precisely that it is what enables flesh to "taste" joy. The plea is not to renounce "joyes which flesh can taste" but to have a proper philosophical understanding of them, to see them, in Aristotelian fashion, as ontologically dependent on the "fair goodly soule." The soul should get credit for the body's joys. This is an argument not for asceticism but for holism. The conception of "tasting" joy, closely associated with the idea of nakedness, always led Donne in this holistic direction.[52] The
[51] It was the conventionality of this section, I believe, that misled Empson into underestimating the interest of the poem as a whole: "the poem apparently is using the courage of the maritime adventurers simply to argue that we should be as brave in fighting the Devil" ("Donne the Spaceman," 342; Donne and the New Philosophy, 82).
[52] For the holistic emphasis, see the parallel between the ways in which souls and bodies must both be "naked" to "taste whole joyes " in lines 33–35 of the "Going to Bed" elegy. The strange lines on the spiritual potential of nakedness in Satire I (lines 37–45) show the power of the conceptions of nakedness and joy to elevate rather than to degrade the flesh in Donne's view. In those lines, the reference to a "plumpe muddy whore, or prostitute boy" leads Donne to contemplate Edenic innocence.
argument is radically humanist and philosophical. The point is to love the soul, not to loathe the body. The status of the "faire goodly soule," however, has not been worked out in the poem. The relation between this "faire goodly" one and "our Mistresse faire Religion" has not been explicated. Is "Soules devotion" devotion to the beauty of the soul? O sancte Socrate, ora pro nobis .[53]