1608 The Feast of the Annunciation has always been fixed on 25 March. Until 1752, England and its colonies used to mark the new year from that date too. Easter, on the other hand, is a moveable feast – it falls on the first Sunday after the full moon following the spring equinox – so Good Friday slides back and forth on the calendar, forever yoked to Easter.
Every once in a while the two dates coincide. It doesn’t happen all that often – it last occurred in 2005 and will again in 2016 – and when it does, it sets people to thinking. Beginnings, endings; conception, death; God become man (and suffering and dying as a man) – and all reconciled within the overarching divine narrative working itself out in time on earth. What a theme for metaphysical poets, ‘catching the sense at two removes’, as George Herbert (who was one himself) chided the school of Donne in his poem ‘Jordan (I)’.
Donne himself rose to the witty prompt when the two occasions coincided, when he wrote ‘Upon the Annunciation and Passion falling upon one day, 1608’. ‘My soule eats twice’, he marvels, ‘Christ hither and away’. On ‘this doubtfull day / Of feast or fast, Christ came, and went away’. For Mary, this ‘abridgement of Christ’s story’ is beyond comprehension: ‘At once a Sonne is promised her, and gone; / Gabriell gives Christ to her, He her to John; / Not fully a mother, Shee’s in Orbitie [mourning]’.
The poem is a meditation, leading Donne (or his devout voice) to the conclusion that ‘Death and conception in mankinde is one’. It’s a lesson he will lay up in his ‘Soule’, ‘And in my life retaile it every day’.