Project-Donne

In this chapter I wish to examine how Donne used his Holy Sonnets to negotiate the complications of reputation and fortune he faced in the first decade and a half of the seventeenth century. Donne was clearly trying to find the right sort of employment, the right way of belonging. I will consider how he constructs the religious selfhood of his Holy Sonnets’ speakers as “objects” to be seen and thought about by those who knew him well. Donne’s rhetorical style asks readers to objectify his speaker(s) in ways that were useful for his own self-representation. While the sonnets do seem to express Donne’s sense of discontent, he also used them to negotiate lingering compromises to the kind of honorable public selfhood he wanted to establish for himself. I do not wish to take anything away from the poems’ status as engaging religious poetry. Nevertheless, I shall argue that the Holy Sonnets proper help Donne to reshape his problematic public persona, one that developed partly as a result of his marriage to Anne in 1601. The extent to which a compromised reputation plagued Donne’s efforts to find the right employment concerned him for a long time—at least until 1614. Across both the original and revised sequences of twelve Holy Sonnets, sequences that the variorum edition has identified, Donne develops a reshaping of his public persona that moves from the expression of irritated incoherence and request for help toward a more active attempt at confirming his public value.^[1] This inter-sequence shift responds both to the ongoing problem of public reputation and to Donne’s growing confidence and resolution to enter the ministry.

Such a relatively biographical approach to the sonnets opens up significant critical problems. For a long time it has been argued that Donne’s writing in the first decade and a half of the seventeenth century stems from his desperate ambition to find government employment at all costs and, concomitantly, that when he finally did enter the ministry in 1615 it was a reluctant decision born of helplessness and poverty once all else had failed. Bald’s biography, for example, exemplifies that view.^[2] The Holy Sonnets, too, have been read in this way. For Marotti, the sonnets express both Donne’s secular ambitions and his “sociopolitical frustration.”^[3] For Brownlow, Donne’s ordination seems to stem from the fact that by 1615, Donne “had no other option if he was to support his family”: the use of religious sonnets in new Jacobean court taste to entertain his friends had clearly not enabled Donne to find an honorable civil career.^[4] Recent scholarship on Donne’s actual situation between 1601 and 1615, however, paints a slightly more nuanced picture. Shami has recently made the point that, while Donne was certainly not rich in this period, he had resources enough to travel, build a library and an art collection, and maintain the pursuit of a number of employment options.^[5] Furthermore, when Donne finally did resolve to enter the ministry around 1613, Somerset, whom he had approached for help and ecclesiastical preferment, offered him money and support for various civil employment opportunities, which recomplicated what had been a strong decision.^[6] Donne was perhaps not so desperate as has been made out. If the Holy Sonnets, and the harrowing “desperation” their speakers present, do not necessarily relate to the “desperate” situation of their author, in what sense are the poems still “political,” doing more than simply exploring religious experience publicly? Are they, indeed, still coterie verse?

In saying yes to that question I would like to explore in more detail a suggestive connection drawn by both Marotti and Brownlow, among others, between the Holy Sonnets on the one hand, and, on the other, the public compromise of Donne’s honorable reputation in the eyes of many of his coterie on account of his “hasty” marriage.^[7] Of course, the sonnets also reflect Donne’s sense of exclusion and drive to belong. To that extent, they involve a rhetorical style of self-inclusion similar to the Verse Letters. The sonnets may not be an act of desperate ambition for civil employment. But even so, I shall argue that they are an act of careful self-representation aiming to smooth the way toward the right kind of employment, whether sacred or secular, which Donne was still in the dark about until at least 1613.

In 1608, a secretarial office in Ireland became vacant. Alongside other irons in the fire, Donne made an effort to get it. In a letter to his friend Henry Goodere he admits that he has “made some offer for the place,” by asking Lord Hay to approach the king about it.^[8] Shortly thereafter we learn from another very careful letter to Lord Hay what happened when it was presented. Donne thanks Hay for the “extream favour” of presenting his suit and says that he [Donne] has found out that, when it was presented, “his Majestie remembered me, by the worst part of my historie, which was my disorderlie proceedings, seven years since, in my nonage.”^[9] Given what follows, he cannot but mean his marriage in 1601 to Anne More. Concerned both with Hay’s opinion of him, and for the king’s apparent distrust, Donne is very careful to encourage Hay

The only thing interrupting his fortunes, Donne suggests, is the mistaken impression, shared by the king, that what happened ought to interrupt his fortunes.

A related anxiety seems to arise again five years later in 1613 when Donne approached Robert Carr, the new royal favorite, again through Lord Hay, for unspecific help, this time in his new ambition to “make my Profession Divinitie.”^[11] Donne beseeches Carr (Rochester):

In asking for “just interpretations” of his “History” and “endeavours” in light of the “envie of others” that he predicts will derive from the decision to take orders, Donne shows continued concern with his history and people’s potential for interpreting it in ways that would compromise his interests, even as late as 1613.

The Holy Sonnets belong to this period and engage with the problems of that compromised public persona. Dating the Holy Sonnets, though, is a problem in the absence of direct and unequivocal evidence. The best estimates continue to range, however, between about 1609 and 1615 for the main two sequences of Holy Sonnets and a post-ordination date (after 1615) for the three sonnets unique to the Westmoreland Manuscript (NY₃).^[13] Given that the poems, on this dating range, coincide with the period of gradual and complicated change in Donne’s career aspirations and the difficulty he had in procuring the right kind of career support, it is important to consider how Donne’s representation of religious selfhood in the Holy Sonnets both connects and does not connect, intentionally, with his own. How was his particular representation of religious selfhood useful for reshaping his public selfhood and trying to erase the sense of dishonor?

In saying that the religious discourses Donne employs have resonances with his own personal problems, I do not seek to abrogate the useful work done on the meditative and theological ends of the sonnets nor to suggest that Donne is not treating his topics—sin, death, God, and judgment—with complete seriousness. While it is likely that Donne’s serious interest in such things grew over time in proportion to his commitment to the church, there is no reason why it was not possible for Donne to “use” aspects of religious selfhood that could relate meaningfully to his own wider selfhood. The will to salvation, one might put it, winds itself into the will to prosper in honorable earthly pursuits, and perhaps the other way around too. As Adlington and Nelson have recently shown, the very idea of “ambition” was neither a “secular” nor a “sacred” category per se and could be legitimately displayed in both arenas: it was “inordinate ambition” that was sinful, more than the direction of ambition.^[14] Donne himself, then, would not necessarily have made a division between taking religious selfhood seriously and using particular discourses of religious selfhood to remake his public image. This is particularly the case in light of his growing ambition toward a clerical public career, for in that career, worldly and spiritual ambition would coincide. While I agree with Margaret Fetzer that there is a “play of self” in these sonnets, I disagree with her claim that “the religious self has to be his own theatre and audience at the same time,” merely because the sonnets are “divine” as opposed to “erotic” poetry and thus have no coterie audience, as Fetzer seems to claim.^[15] As Helen Wilcox makes clear, “It would be wrong to suggest that they [early modern religious poems] are unmotivated by a concern for the reader, the indirect recipient.”^[16] Instead I seek to position these sonnets within their wider additional “theatre” of unsuccessful courtiership, compromised public identity, and their “audience” of patronal readers.

Calvinist discourse, in particular, offered Donne some useful resources for self-representation. Donne was certainly interested in the extent to which Calvinist discourse made sense of one’s actual religious experience, but that takes nothing away from its use or his reason to employ it for other ends alongside theological ones. Many scholars have explored the way Calvinist theological discourse is at work in the sonnets, including Grant, Stachniewski, Strier, and Cefalu in particular, whose work I shall draw on.^[17] Aspects of Calvinism, these scholars suggest, significantly define the tone of the sonnets, but that tone is balanced against the presence of nonreformed theological ideas. Calvinist discourse was a resource at Donne’s disposal.

For one thing, it gave him regal resonances with which to draw attention to the relationship between himself and King James, both in the king’s eyes and those of the people who were approaching the king on his behalf, such as Hay and Carr. The language of God and king has biblical precedents, but Calvin also brought together the languages of monarchy and Godhead.^[18] There is a significant exchange in Donne’s sonnets between the language of God and heaven and the language of ling and court. HSWilt offers an explicit example when it paints the picture of “God the Spirit, by Angels waited on / In heaven” (2–3). Marotti suggests that this image draws on “the language of courtly suitorship” familiar in James’s court.^[19] Donne’s speaker in the sonnets is troubled over just how well he is positioned in relation to the “God-king” of heaven, both directly in addressing the God-king and indirectly in asking poignant rhetorical questions. How much is his troubled position a matter of Donne’s self-display? What enargetic, thetical, and tropical resources does Donne draw on to get the king’s and the court’s attention, and turn it toward objectifying the speaker and remaking a “Donne” to go with it? How is Donne’s own “sinnes blacke memory” (HSMin, 12) actually handled?

There are moments of striking indecorum in the sonnets, which have troubled critics and which take Calvinist approaches to religious experience to comic limits. HSBatter’s request for divine rape on account of the speaker’s helplessness is perhaps the most notorious example. However, Donne’s early religious verse must be situated in the new hierarchy of poetic genres that emerged following James’s accession to the throne—a James, that is, whose religious interests could not be ignored by aspiring courtiers. In this context, Brownlow suggests that the sonnets speak humorously to Donne’s witty coterie of friends, including “E of D,” whom Gardiner identified as the earl of Dorset.^[20] The idea helpfully explains a great deal of the striking indecorum of HSWhat and HSBatter. For Brownlow, the violent blend of sexual and religious impulses was largely blasphemous and must have been designed to entertain his “less-than-pure” friends. Identifying “E of D” as the earl of Dorset has been seriously called into question, however, by the variorum editors. A wider readership than just a handful of other naughty courtiers cannot be discounted by Donne’s borderline blasphemous humor. The king may not actually have read Donne’s sonnets. Indeed, Donne may only have dreamed that James would have the time and inclination. However, like the self-making power of Pseudo-Martyr, published in 1610, the carefully drawn political and personal resonances between Donne and the speaker in the Holy Sonnets suggest that he wanted the king to hear about the poems at least. The borderline blasphemous humor is part of that wider negotiation. Donne knows the king would have found some of the speaker’s statements unseemly. Yet comic irony is precisely what upholds Donne’s value as a witty language manager and entertainer and what distinguishes him sharply from the speaker’s problems, at the same time allowing him to critique the exclusions that he, like the speaker but less fairly, has suffered. Donne’s indecorum is part of his means of putting “sin” on display in order to mitigate the extent of personal guilt and undo the rationality of the self’s (and his) exclusion from the court-heaven.

Calvinist discourse offers Donne a way of talking about guilt too. The speaker gives the impression of being confused about why he is guilty. On one level the speaker’s questions are a serious attempt to understand how God could irrevocably damn him (and many others) before he or they had any freedom to act wrongly. But a tension is set up here, I would suggest, between agential guilt and material excuse, that is, between the free will that is subject to judgment and the material constraint that excuses sin. The speaker’s rhetorical questioning often erases his own “guiltiness” within the situations he imagines by focusing on constraints and thus implicitly questions his sense of exclusion from the court-heaven. Alluding to this theological tension meant alluding to a familiar criticism of Calvinism concerning the fairness of God’s judgment of the agentially challenged reprobate. That gave Donne a theological problem familiar to his readers within which to associate and break down what he must have seen as exaggerated guilt (and punishment) in his own case.

Donne puts his speaker in lamentable situations that ask to be objectified within a mental image. His enargetic rhetoric evokes mental images that serve comparisons both between the speaker and other participants and between the speaker and Donne. Those comparisons direct a more precise way for the object (the speaker) to be viewed by a reader. This way of viewing the speaker invites the passion of “pity,” both at the direct level in relation to the speaker and at a level more like comic irony in relation to Donne. Skouen has given close attention to the “rhetoric of passion” in the sonnets and concludes that the sonnets simulate and play with the early modern concern for balancing passion and reason. But the very pathos, and ethos, of what Skouen describes as the sonnets’ “internal struggle between passion and reason,” is something Donne can use for self-representation by setting up a complex set of connections and disconnections between himself and the speaker.^[21]

Before considering the sonnets in detail I would like to explore the significant problem of the two sequences of Holy Sonnets. If Donne was using his Holy Sonnets to deal with personal issues, why did he go about revising them into a new sequence? Twelve sonnets appeared in an original sequence, probably around 1609. Four more “replacement sonnets” (HSSpit, HSWhy, HSWhat, and HSBatter) were circulated some time after. Then, it appears, Donne made a revision, which included those four newer “replacement” sonnets. He dropped four from the original sequence (HSMade, HSSighs, HSLittle, and HSSouls) and reorganized others (HSWilt, for example).^[22] What does this revision mean? The difficulty of dating the revision itself makes that a difficult question. The revision’s meaning must be decided either with reference to internal issues of literary coherence or with reference to larger ongoing issues that Donne faced during the broad span of time over which the revision would have been completed: 1609–1615. R. V. Young has argued recently that the revised sequence “seems designed to enhance continuity and eliminate some repetition”: the revision is Donne’s attempt to make “a more coherent poetic argument.”^[23] While HSMade, the first sonnet in the original sequence, evokes similar concerns as HSDue, the second one, HSMade was cut, Young argues, because it veers off into the language of “spiritual terror.” The “more measured” HSDue, he says, is a better candidate for the opening poem of the revised sequence. Likewise, HSPart was fourth in the original sequence. Donne places it last in the revised one. The last line of HSPart and thus of the revised sequence becomes “Oh let that last will stand,” making a much more clearly articulated structural move from spiritual crisis to divine intervention. Young’s argument is a valuable explanation of what gets changed in Donne’s revision, but if the revision cannot also be explained in terms of a larger set of shifting intentions, why would Donne not have striven to make the first sequence properly coherent from the beginning? Surely he did not set out to make a relatively incoherent original sequence. I will suggest that the revision responds to Donne’s ongoing concern with shaping an honorable public image, and that the changes relate to his growing confidence about joining the church.

The first task then will be to consider the objectification of selfhood in the poems of the revised sequence: HSDue, HSBlack, HSScene, HSRound, HSMin, HSDeath, HSSpit, HSWhy, HSWhat, HSBatter, HSWilt, and HSPart. I will then look retrospectively on the poems that were cut out of the original (HSMade, HSSighs, HSLittle, and HSSouls) in order to try to grasp what is distinctive about the revised sequence. With some sense of what the revision means in terms of Donne’s public negotiations, I will then show how the remaining Holy Sonnets unique to the Westmoreland manuscript (NY₃), HSShe, HSShow, and HSVex, which were probably written much later, after Donne’s ordination, have a very different style, one that reflects his altered social position. Donne was then fully included in the establishment.

Rewriting the (Religious) Self in the Revised Sequence

HSDue opens the revised sequence. It presents a religious self who oscillates uneasily between coherence and incoherence. Donne offers a multiplicity of enargetic possibilities for objectifying the speaker’s selfhood, none of which are directed into mental images because he gives no other constraining details. Donne puts the incoherence itself on display for objectification.

A self of sorts emerges out of the darkness as the speaker expounds upon the “I resigne” of the first line:

The speaker is made but decayed, as well as a purchased object. In the rest of the octave Donne’s enargetic rhetoric displays further possibilities for imaginatively objectifying the religious “self”: a son, a servant, a sheep, a reflection, and a compromised temple.

Yet none of them connect up with anything else. More importantly, the location of these religious selfhood tropes is left totally to the reader’s imagination. No script at all is offered for how they might cohere into more detailed mental images. Donne keeps a variety of half-developed images of selfhood in play. The only thing approaching a coherent self is an ideal. The speaker, as a son (in the revised sequence, “Sun”) of the God/king, ought to “shine” (l.5), but that is a mere hint at how selfhood might be achieved—since he is not in fact shining.

The religious “self” now asks two intense rhetorical questions, the most vexed of which is the volta’s “why doth the Deuill thus vsurp in me?” Brownlow suggests that the answer to that is clear because of the concession of betrayal in line 7: “And till I betray’d.” Indeed, any personal guilt felt by the speaker in respect to his lamentable condition is far from obvious, a point I want to come back to in a moment. The “I resigne” (l.1), for Brownlow, implies a mere “hypothetically emergent, but in fact absent, self,” because any willpower it has in itself is either not acknowledged or consistently compromised by the devil’s usurpation.^[24] The “I resigne,” on that view, can only be comic or a mere abjection.

However, there is one means by which a semi-coherent self emerges—one not so abject that it is worthless and unpitiable. Donne does not spell it out, but his contemporary readers could have recognized the speaker’s situation in the context of the common distinction between justification and sanctification. It was an important concept in Protestant theology and is indeed likely to have occurred to those whose attention Donne wanted to secure. Once a soul or religious selfhood is justified by Christ, it “inherits” some coherence despite the ups and downs of the sanctification process. Cefalu has emphasized the importance of this “Calvinist” distinction between the processes of justification and sanctification for understanding Donne’s Holy Sonnets more generally.^[25] The distinction developed from St. Paul’s remark (apparently about the longer process of sanctification) in Philippians 2:12: “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.” From that point of view, the “I resigne” of line 1 is not an absent or false self, despite its faltering coherence, if it has at least been justified by God. The purchase of blood (l.4), which deals with both the religious self’s decay (l.3) and his betrayal (l.7), thus refers to the act of “justification,” in which the sinner is simply given righteousness by God. The usurpation (l.9) therefore describes rather the up-and-down state of sanctification, in which the saved person tries to become better. To that extent, the “I resigne” (l.1) still implies a sense of agency and selfhood, one which is simply conferred on it by justification, since the willful ability to resign oneself depends on having the kind of partial free will implied in a justified selfhood. It is this perfectly legitimate emergent (but not absent) “self” who is still trying to resign himself to God even in the face of the usurpation.

To that extent his rhetorical questions, too, seem more legitimate. Why does the devil still “vsurp in mee” (l.9)—that is, why does the process of sanctification falter so often? “Why doth hee steale, nay ravish that’s thy right?” (l.10) The “self” asking these questions is clearly a divided one. Its sense of compromised coherence is familiar from chapter 7 of Paul’s letter to the Romans.^[26] The speaker presents his contradictory experience of religious selfhood as a form of frustration over the continual power of the devil to usurp any attempt at sanctification. That nuances his plea for help. The religious self’s agency is compromised, but there is enough of it there to stand up and disagree with the devil’s usurpation, and, crucially, enough for that self to be objectified as something of value worth being helped, not a hopeless reprobate. Marotti feels that the speaker’s sentiment when asking those rhetorical questions is somehow arrogant: a petulant and accusing delivery of “moral ultimatum.”^[27] Yet if Donne is not just venting his raging sense of exclusion but actively planning the engagement of powerful people, it is difficult to imagine why he would want to display petulance and arrogance through the rhetorical questions. Perhaps the point of the rhetorical questions (ll.9–10) is rather to perform the self’s weakness and value in order to construct an objectifiable image of a valuable being that is in trouble, instead of simply enacting the “conflict between assertion and submission.”^[28]

The contradiction between the coherence of salvation (justification) and sense of compromise (abortive sanctification) comes out in a theologically familiar way. The desired selfhood is in contradiction with the fragmented and unpolished bits of a not fully sanctified/coherent religious self, usurped by the devil/situation. That sense of contradiction is resolvable because a barely justified selfhood still asserts its will to resign and to be saved, despite being capable only, for the time being, of critically appraising and opposing its own disfunctionality. Objectified in this way, the speaker is pitiable rather than pathetic because there is still something worth saving: a small bundle of justified selfhood well gathered enough to want to fight, yet not gathered enough to do anything much but rail, resign, and implore. The speaker’s religious selfhood is not so abjectly pathetic that he becomes a comic distortion of Donne’s own self-image. Objectified in this way through the distinction between justification and sanctification, a tragic tone balances the comic, one that asks for genuine commiseration at the same time as laughter. It is not as if the religious self were an absolute nothing violently stabbing out in anger. Rather, he is a broken thing of value calling out for extra help, which is therefore capable of developing reserved pity as an appropriate emotional response.

It is significant that the speaker downplays his own guilt too, as an explanation of why the devil thus usurps on the enterprises of his religious selfhood. The “betrayal” of line 7 is a potential answer to the vexed question, but not one the speaker chooses to explore. Instead the last lines “Oh I shall soone despaire, when I doe see / That thou lou’st Mankind well, yet wilt not chuse mee” (ll.12–13) carefully imply both the limits of his own agency and thus the fact that the God-king is the only one who can fix things. The contradiction involved in the line “thou lou’st Mankind well, yet wilt not chuse mee” will necessarily be resolved, that is, when the God-king realigns again with his own nature (of loving acceptance). It is far from the speaker’s fault. Instead, the implication is that only the God-king has not gone far enough to help.

The limited guilty conscience perhaps encourages critics to interpret the outcry of rhetorical questions as somehow arrogant, but given the contexts discussed above, they are also a means for Donne to mitigate the sense of personal fault tied up with his own public self-image. The rhetorical questions actually legitimate the speaker’s confusion about his ineffectual efforts toward sanctification. More recognition of a guilty conscience would make the confusion seem ridiculous, because the faltering sanctification would be seen as his own fault. Instead of representing arrogance, Donne is exploiting a clever gap here in the speaker’s sense of selfhood between a determined and guiltless nonagency, on the one hand, and a guilty agency on the other: in the middle is a religious self that is agential and responsible but also determined by outside constraints. That makes him something of value, both guiltless and helpless. It makes him doubly worthy of intervention as a valued but undeservingly constrained entity.

HSBlack, however, the second sonnet of the revised sequence, now narrows the enargetic focus, directing an objectification of the speaker’s religious selfhood in two specific ways: as a treasonous pilgrim far from his country and a thief in prison not wanting to go to the block. These are deeply compromising but not abject mental images. The speaker, addressing himself rather than the God-king, is confident that grace will come from somewhere but is not sure where. His rhetorical questions at the end of the poem reveal his own inability to reason his way out of his “black soul.” They emphasize his entrapment in order to reduce the guilt implied by thievery and treason.

To begin with, the speaker describes himself ambiguously as a “black Soule” in “Sickness.”]

Clarifying that ambiguity, he offers two situations with more locative and narrative information than the tropes of HSDue. It is an invitation to build more developed mental images.

What is similar about those situations—of the pilgrim and the thief—is that they illuminate the meaning of line 2’s “Sickness.” Both are impossible situations of longing for a place that is itself compromised. Just as a pilgrim longs for home even with the threat of treason and just as a thief is led to the block and wishes to be back in prison, the speaker also longs to escape from “Sickness” even if only back to a “black soule.” “Sickness” is a sort of impossible desire; the pilgrim’s home, the thief’s prison, and the speaker’s “black soule” are desired but compromised places. These tropical connections concede guilt by likening the religious self to a traitor and thief but also foreground the impossibility of the speaker’s escape without outside help. While guilt is conceded here, the mental images of thief and pilgrim—however they develop precisely in the minds of Donne’s readers—contextualize their actions and longings within a location and a narrative that can be pitied. We should recall that for Aristotle, people do not feel pity unless it is for something (or someone) of value. Honorable citizens attract more pity than criminals when things go wrong for them. Donne encourages an objectification that deemphasizes the guilt implied in treason and theft by emphasizing the pathos of impossible desire. The thief and the pilgrim desire something relatively good. Thus they can be pitied because the objects of those desires—life and home—are legitimate. Indeed the speaker, who is like the thief and the pilgrim, actually expects to be set free by someone else: “Yet grace, if thou repent, thou canst not lack” (l.9).

When in the third quatrain and final couplet the speaker does turn to his options, they look like dead ends. That is, Donne asks his readers to objectify the speaker’s very reasoning as heroic failure. The confidence of line 9’s “grace, if thou repent, thou canst not lack” collapses into line 10’s question: “But whoe shall giue thee that grace to beginne?” The self-doubtful dependence on the God-king and the language of “grace to beginne” in those lines gives them sharply Calvinist overtones.^[29] On the surface the lines display the reasoning of an amateur theologian exposing familiar difficulties in Calvinist discourse: the difficulty of knowing whether grace has been offered and thus whether God has in fact chosen you. If an unregenerate sinner needs “grace to beginne,” then he is incapable of choosing to begin the work of salvation himself. Where could that help come from if the God-king does not choose to offer it? The speaker is confused. However, Donne invites readers to infer that the reasoning difficulties the speaker is having are not just a property of his own lack of ingenuity. The awkwardness of the reasoning is associated both with the compromised spiritual situation of the speaker and with problems that were seen to be part of the Calvinist discourse the speaker is compelled to use in making sense of his situation.

In line 11 another response option is identified. The religious self could make himself “with holy mourning black.” This seems singularly pointless given that he has already identified his soul as black (l.1)—black, that is, with sin, given the association in HSMin: “sinnes blacke memory” (l.12). In line 12, another option is given. He could start blushing and make his soul red with the same “red” of his sin. There is no suggestion of why. Perhaps there is, however, a tacit suggestion here that the “redness” of the sin is actually little more than blushing, or something to blush at. If so, the suggestion confuses any sense of the seriousness of his crime. By implication, that would make the argument about the usefulness of black mourning even more dysfunctional. Donne is constructing a speaker here who cannot—for different reasons—reason his way out of trouble, and yet one whose crime is not all that serious.

The last option for what to do in this precarious situation is to wash himself in the royal red of Christ’s blood in order to move from black through red to white (ll.13–14). Dyeing black in red makes some sense if it refers to repentance and forgiveness, but the possibility of repentance, let alone forgiveness, is compromised by the speaker’s confusion in line 10 about the “grace to beginne.” Literally, the idea of dyeing black in red to get white is absurd, though of course, the “red” has strong regal resonances, given the link between Christ and king. Perhaps the idea that Christ’s sacrificial blood can turn something from a black bad into a white good also suggested that a gift of the king would too.

The Calvinist language of “grace to beginne” and the resonances of God and king give Donne some useful resources in HSBlack. The speaker’s ineffective reasoning is on display in this poem and thus is an object to be pitied. Yet he is not emptied of all value because the theological problems he is dealing with are made out to be familiar problems within Calvinism. One might sympathize with him, so to speak. This gives Donne a way of qualifying the—partially acknowledged—guilt implied in the actions of thief and treasonous pilgrim. The speaker’s reason, though ineffective, is trapped in a familiar and understandable discourse. The speaker has little room to move and should be pitied. His efforts are, within those constraints, comically heroic. He has the courage to ask difficult questions of the discourse he is enveloped in. Lack of freedom takes away his wider responsibility. Coupled with the suggestions of limited agency, his entrapment preserves both his value and his ability to be pitied. But the Calvinist language of “grace to beginne” is also, of course, an explicit request to the God-king for a fresh start—the grace of not imputing blame. Donne manages to balance pitiable inability against valuable heroism even while mitigating the very guilt that he has acknowledged in both his speaker’s ethos and, by implication, his own past reputation.

The following two sonnets in the revised sequence, HSScene and HSRound, narrow the enargetic focus further into single mental images. Both tie the speaker’s imaginative experience to the end of life and of time respectively.

HSScene picks up the pilgrim metaphor from the previous poem (HSBlack). Like an actor’s last scene in a play, the religious self initiates his own imaginative narrative with his “Pilgrimages last mile” (l.2). “Gluttonous Death” then “instantly vnioynt[s]” his body and soul (ll.5–6), while his “euer wakeing part shall see that face / Whose feare already shakes my euery ioynt” (ll.7–8). Brownlow reads this unjointing as “a violent, shocking image” for the play on “vnioynt/ioynt” seems to link the horror of death with the very terror of heaven’s God-king.^[30] But it is not the face of God who shakes the religious self’s joints. It is the fear of meeting him. If it were not for such a fear, the mental image of the religious soul’s journey to the heaven-court would simply be like coming home.

There’s a delicate balance of assurance and possibility achieved through the speaker’s assertions and the enargetic style. Donne has located the mental image in the air rather than on the ground, which makes the speaker’s journey a liminal experience without the assurances built into a “grounded” situation. Donne’s enargeia, however, leaves no space for the idea that the speaker might be on his way to an undeserved place. It is a totally matter-of-fact description: “as my soule, to Heav’n . . . / Soe fall my sinnes” (ll. 9–11). Those sins, bred in hell and not in the speaker, would press him there if they had the power but they do not, and he is on his way to the heaven-court, where the only thing now in doubt is whether he will receive his rightful acceptance.

The mentally imaged scene reveals the speaker’s confidence about the rightness of his destination in spite of his fear of the God-king’s face, since no admission of guilt has been made throughout the poem except what may be implied in the fact of his horrible fear. Given the denial of responsibility for the “sins” (bred in Hell), the fear starts to look less reasonable to readers. Fears, after all, may be unfounded. Thus, Donne implies, the speaker is going to a place he deserves to go. It will be a natural return to his “first seat” (l.9), the court-heaven of the God-king. The tone of his final request in line 13 shows a virtual expectation of fulfillment: “Impute mee righteous thus purg’d of evill.” What is in doubt is what the God-king will do when the speaker turns up.

HSRound, however, locates the pilgrim in a scene of incipient resurrection and judgment. The octave builds a picture of the immense crowd of sinful dead waking to resurrection or damnation.

Donne’s enargeia is filtered through the religious self’s own “imagin’d” cognition. That is to say, the religious self is the director of his own mental image, and readers are to objectify the speaker’s own mental image making. The pattern will continue in the next five sonnets.

Donne’s enargetic and tropical styles work hand in hand here, so that the mental image he tries to evoke in effect amplifies the coming comparisons. In the volta, the fantasizing religious self, addressing God and confident of his own control (over God), halts the imagined proceedings as if pausing a film: “But lett them sleepe Lord, and mee mourne a space” (l.9). That abrupt stop just before God’s judgment initiates a shift in location, from the end of the age back to the religious self’s present situation. Still within the end-of-the-age moment, the speaker hyperbolically compares the sins of the numberless enormity of all people in the history of the world (from the mental image) with his own sins.

Donne’s speaker reasons with God about the relative size of his sins. The enormity of people and sins amplified by the octave’s mental image makes the religious speaker’s sins small by comparison and thus the very idea that his sins could “abound” (l.10) above them absurd. The implication is that it is not, actually, too late “to aske aboundance of thy grace” (l.11).

Yet, a more nuanced comparison now begins as Donne’s speaker turns from what would happen “there,” in the judgment, to what must happen “here” and now in his own world.

That further comparison between personal sin up to the present and all his sin up to his own death in the future parallels the first comparison between all the speaker’s sins committed up to his death and those of all human people. Here “on this lowly ground” (l.12), Donne’s speaker is not even at his own life’s end, so the “my sinnes” of line 10, when viewed in the present light, is made even smaller. The speaker’s sinfulness, and any sinfulness connected with Donne’s public image, is doubly reduced by the two time frames. Accordingly, the relative ease of kingly “Pardon” and help is doubly magnified: forgiveness is easy when the transgression is light.

Across the first four sonnets of the revised sequence, Donne has provided the reader with an enargetic range for objectifying his speaker, which moves from incoherence to coherence and from a sense of possibility to a sense of confidence. The following five sonnets, from HSMin to HSWhat—three of which are “replacement” sonnets and not part of the original sequence—do not locate the speaker in an external situation so much as become located in the speaker’s mind. That is, they focus intently on the speaker’s own rational and imaginative cognition. In doing so, they put his vexed thoughts on display but in a mode that preserves his dignity, for the rhetorical questions the speaker asks are both reasonable and unreasonable, legitimate yet ineffective. Each of the next five sonnets do not address the God-king directly. This means Donne can give his speaker more freedom to confess his sins openly without making the speaker seem abject. Coming in the middle of the revised sequence, a more coherent self now pointedly asks why no one seems to help him in his impossible situations. His questions are made more pressing precisely because the first four sonnets of the sequence have constructed a relatively positive public ethos through the sidelining of personal guilt. Putting the religious self’s reasoning on display, Donne now balances the speaker’s (and his own) valuable capabilities against the speaker’s (and his own) needs.

HSMin is a series of self-righteously vexed rhetorical questions, followed by an appeal to God’s generosity.

This is not a God who gives mercy away freely. This God seems to decide arbitrarily whether people like the speaker shall receive mercy and seems, arbitrarily, not to bother condemning serpents and goats for the same sins, merely because they have no “intent or reason.”

Does humanity’s possession of “intent or reason” make it more justly punishable than the “Envious” and “Leacherous” animals? What does “intent” mean? Some critics have felt that HSMin’s assertive questioning is problematic, unfair, and/or unjustified. Martz, Lewalski, and Low described it, respectively, as “evasive,” “specious,” and “raving.”^[31] Others feel that these are legitimate questions and exemplify the growing critique of Calvinism across Donne’s lifetime.^[32] The speaker, for those critics, has a point. Perhaps the spectrum of critical responses stems from the ambiguity of “intent or reason” (l.5), “intent” especially. Does “intent” mean punishable free will or something less agential? If “intent and reason” (that which supposedly makes humans more guilty than the animals) means, for all practical purposes, free will—a conspicuously problematic category in the Calvinist discourses Donne is appropriating—then the speaker is hardly justified in objecting to condemnation because free will implies responsibility. In that case, God’s “sterne wrath” (l.8) makes sense as just deserts, regardless of whether mercy is easy. If, on the other hand, “intent or reason” is altogether too ambiguous for such a logical conclusion, then the speaker’s frustration might be seen as justified.

The idea that human free will justifies God’s condemnation of human sinfulness is, of course, an Augustinian commonplace. But Donne puts the speaker’s confusion on display. By objectifying the speaker’s own reasoning about this recognizable thetical commonplace, Donne encourages his readers to do so too. Readers are asked to consider whether the speaker’s remarks are justified. Strier calls the speaker’s reasoning here “deliberate sophistry.”^[33] Skulsky calls the questions “bogus difficulties.”^[34]

In any case, the questions are able to evoke pity and admiration both for the speaker and his author. If, for instance, the speaker’s reasoning is seen as justified, his ethos derives pity from its being trapped in the inadequacies of his culture’s theological discourse. Readers thinking that might ask how much agency a human being really has and whether he or she really should be condemned on account of it. On the other hand, if the speaker’s reasoning is seen as unjustified and read entirely through the orthodox commonplace, his ethos still derives comic pity either because of his unseemly inability to see how things really work, or because he is being facetious. If and when readers can see both those options at the same time, Donne’s brilliance in balancing them is on display. Donne’s own ethos derives a public value from his being a comic entertainer and pity both from the extent to which his personal difficulties resonate with the speaker’s and from the fact that prejudice seems to stand in the way of his talents.

The assertiveness of the speaker’s questions now collapses into the volta’s admission of impotence: “But whoe am I, that dares dispute with thee?” That collapse shifts the tone toward a plea in the rest of the poem, where Donne now draws stronger links between the difficult liminal position of his own life and that of the speaker. The speaker now locates himself in a Lethean mental image of “Heauenly” soul washing, asking that this “sinnes black memory” be forgotten.

“Mercy,” the potentially “easie and glorious” solution in line 7, is still a potential solution in line 14. Having the association of “sinnes” with a (mere) “memory” and the ambiguity of “intent and reason” to support him, the speaker, and through him Donne, downplays the gravity of the “sinnes” and implies that they are easily forgotten. If God in heaven derives honor from mercy, surely too, he implies cheekily and comically, the princely figures of Donne’s world would.

HSDeath follows. It asks its readers to objectify a speaker struggling to overcome his horror of death from the position of a thetical commonplace. The sentiment of “Death, thou shalt dye” (l.14) echoes the biblical commonplace about death—that, in the resurrection, it will pass away because of God’s power and promise.^[35] The speaker adopts this commonplace ineffectually, making it vie with another powerful idea—that death is indeed “Mighty and Dreadfull” (l.2). The scripted failure of the speaker’s argument constructs a comically pitiful religious (and public) selfhood.

The argument against death’s mighty and dreadful nature proceeds with the following structure. In the first quatrain the speaker tells death that “he” is unjustly proud and an ineffectual agent, almost worthy of pity!

If not outrageous, this address to death is at least extremely amusing, not least because the unseemly idea of “Mighty and Dreadfull” death having a consciousness and being amenable to new convictions through the potshots of some random human is absurd. Telling death that it has an overblown sense of self-importance and that the resurrection will undo its effects will, obviously, take nothing away from its “Mighty and Dreadfull” nature in the here and now, nor prevent it from killing the speaker at some point. The second quatrain follows with similarly limp reasons for death to tone down its pride.

Death, the speaker says, should not be proud because we derive much pleasure from rest and sleep, and rest and sleep are merely the pictures or derivatives of death. Who looks for “pleasure” from death anyway? What sort of comparison is this? Death should not be proud because the “best men” (l.7) derive rest and delivery from its stroke? What cares death of differences in honor among men? In line 9 death is made into the “slave” of “Fate, Chance, Kings, and desperate men.” Line 10 delivers a lame ad hominem argument against death’s pride with a dig about the disreputable company it keeps “with poyson, war, and sicknes.” Lines 11–12 reiterate the useless comparison of death with sleep to bring out, again, death’s “impotence.” To finish, the speaker simply asserts the commonplace belief about death’s end in the resurrection that he wishes to take comfort in.

The argument fails and for a number of reasons. None of Donne’s wider coterie is likely to disagree with the speaker’s ascription of “Mighty and Dreadfull” to death in spite of the speaker’s evidence against it. Nor would they think the evidence the speaker adduces for the baselessness of death’s pride very convincing. Is death really just like going to sleep? According to the honor code, the vanquisher receives glory from the destruction of other beings with honor. Thus, if death had a personality shaped by the honor code, he would be right to be proud of his achievements. In that case, when “our best men with thee doe goe” (l.7), it should give death confidence, contrary to the speaker’s assertions. In suggesting that “Death bee not proude” for the reasons he does, the speaker is waging an unwinnable battle, an impossible argument. Even to the extent that people believe in the commonplace teaching that in the resurrection death will be no more, it will not be because of some extra evidence the speaker has adduced, and even that orthodox belief does not take away from the horror of death in the meantime. To this extent, Donne shapes the speaker’s objectifiable selfhood into something like an ineffectual reasoner. While the unseemly pointlessness of this unwinnable argument makes it comic, its supportability makes it pitiful. That is, while it is an impossible task, the desire to overcome death is hardly a stupid sentiment. The speaker avoids looking stupid by looking brave. The balance makes for good comedy. Donne makes the speaker a courageous hero with just enough ineptness to evoke a comic form of pity.

HSSpit, however, number seven in the revised sequence, now takes a break from pointed rhetorical questions and makes thoughtful assertions instead. Donne allows his speaker to take more responsibility for his sins here. However, the kingly pardon that Donne wishes for, while not elaborated on, is compared to Christly pardon in a way that suggests the kingly pardon is easy, natural, and almost taken for granted.

The octave sets up an identification with Christ by asking “the Jewes” to treat him like Christ and then dissolves that identification with the realization that such treatment would avail him nothing, for only the death of Christ will heal his own contradictions. But instead of begging for forgiveness or asking pardon explicitly, in the volta the speaker makes it his self-appointed task simply to admire always the strange love of Christ, with the assumption that Christ’s loving forgiveness is already a given. The speaker does not seem to have to struggle for it.

The kingly pardon may be an effort, but it is common enough. Yet, God in human flesh bore our punishment. The disparity makes the Christly pardon a “strange loue” that is “still admyre[d]” (l.9). Christ’s pardon is strange but beautiful. The Christly pardon is then given further contrastive definition by comparison with Jacob’s deceit of Esau.^[36] Jacob’s vile attiring was with “gainfull intent” (l.12). Thus it makes more sense to us. Christ’s vile attiring was with intent to “suffer woe” (l.14) out of love. That makes it “strange” because that kind of “intent” is difficult and unusually selfless. The familiarity of human selfishness makes Christ’s pardon strange in comparison. By implication, a kingly pardon is like neither of those vile attirings. It is not strange, nor self-interested, nor does it require any vile attiring.

The kingly pardon was linked to Christ’s pardon in line 10, so the kingly pardon is more like Christ’s generosity than Jacob’s “gainfull intent.” The figures of Christ and king are thus both connected and separated decorously. The implication is that a kingly pardon is more normal than “strange” (like Christ’s), yet it is similarly good in generosity. At the same time it is much less difficult and complicated a maneuver than either of the vile attirings of Christ or Jacob. In that way, the kingly pardon becomes even more compelling and necessary to do: when a good thing is easy to do there is less incentive to hesitate than when it is extremely difficult. Pardoning Donne would associate James and the coterie with the virtues of the Son of God without the need for anything self-demeaning.

The anxiety of the octave in HSSpit gives way to an unmistakable sense of self-confidence in the final six lines of the poem. Donne’s construction of the speaker here creates the tone of polite demand rather than an act of begging. An honorable self-in-need emerges, confident of the inevitability of being heard and of being put to rights. Exactly the same process can be detected at the level of the whole revised sequence.

Something similar happens in HSWhy, the next in the revised sequence. The speaker acknowledges sinfulness in the context of asking why nature is subservient to faltering human beings. Yet the acknowledgment is subsumed in the larger “wonder” of the creator’s generosity. That generosity is a given. Its positive effects are not in doubt.

HSWhat, the last of the middle five, brings to a close the series of sonnets with pointed rhetorical questions in which the speaker can be objectified in the process of reasoning and imagining. Just as in HSDeath before and in HSBatter to follow, Donne constructs the speaker here as an unsuccessful reasoner, in order to evoke the passion of amused or comic pity. The comedy pushes limits here by staying just on the positive side of offensive indecorousness.

The speaker first scripts his own mental image. Seeing his script, readers too build the mental image and are thus asked to objectify the speaker caught in an imaginative act.

The “Picture of Christ crucified” offers a number of enargeia signals. It has a definite location, and highly visible details, such as tears, light, and blood. And, of course, it announces itself as a “Picture.” The mental image evokes questions for the speaker, which are set up in at the end of each quatrain. Should this mental image of love—Christ on the cross—as horrible as it is in itself, inspire fear in the speaker? The rest of the poem is the speaker’s answer. The enargeia signals direct readers to create the speaker’s mental image too, as well as to objectify the speaker in the act of imagining and reasoning about it. To that extent Donne asks readers not just to judge what the answer should be for themselves but to judge the speaker’s answer.

His answer to the question of whether the mental image should inspire fear is hardly a strong one.

The argument can be summarized as follows. “Beauty” commonly goes with other good attitudes or passions like pity. A good example, says the speaker, searching through his memory fragments, is his “Profane Mistresses” (l.10). By recognizing their own “beauty” (l.11) such mistresses are moved to “pity” the speaker-lover and fulfill his desires. Since pity, therefore, is found alongside beauty, the “beauteous forme” of Christ’s torn and bleeding body, just like the beautiful mistress, “assures a piteous minde” (l.14).

Marotti and Brownlow have both called attention to the striking indecorum of the way the argument comes together. Marotti calls the argument “basically indecorous” and “shocking by design”; Brownlow calls it “outrageous.”^[37] Brownlow goes as far as to say that using the same argument “once used to get into bed with pretty girls” in order now to “get him into heaven with a beautiful God . . . would have offended Christians of all sects.”^[38] The argument certainly borders on outrageous. However, Donne’s speaker is not suggesting that God can be worked on as if he were a narcissistic teenage girl—though that possibility is certainly there for members of the coterie who are happy to see it. He is rather comparing two instances of the adopted commonplace about pity going alongside beauty. The speaker’s assumption that pity goes alongside beauty is simply asserted as if it were a commonplace that everyone believed in. So the argument is almost offensive but not quite, since it suggests merely that beauty goes with pity in different contexts that would not otherwise be linked. The result is borderline blasphemous comedy.

Strier calls the argument “platonic sophistry,” yet it hovers just within the zone of validity, even as it is glaringly weak.^[39] It is weak for two reasons: the commonplace principle of beauty-pity and the speaker’s choice of example for demonstrating it, to begin with, and, second, the obviously confused reference to “beauty.”

“Profane Mistresses” as an example of the commonplace is certainly shocking, since, as Brownlow says, the “Idolatrie” Donne speaks of in line 9 is typically associated with adorations of the cross.^[40] The shift between lines 8 and 9, from the discussion of the cross to the adoration of girls, is thus particularly sharp. Yet the example does work to the extent that those reading it can recognize the commonplace principle functioning there. The principle, though, is weak and easily broken down. Doesn’t pity, not to mention other examples of good, also pop up in less than beautiful situations?

The second main weakness derives from the speaker’s concept of “beauty.” For the argument to work, the destroyed Christ in the mental image must be seen as something beautiful. It certainly does work at one level. Contemporary divines would not have had trouble describing the divine act of love that stood behind the symbol of the cross as, in some way, beautiful, given its meaningful connection to forgiveness and transformation. Yet at the level of the mental image and its aesthetics, the argument clearly does not work, since the “forme” (l.14) of the tortured and broken divine lover, when pointedly compared to beautiful human lovers, is one of the ugliest things imaginable. As Strier also remarks, the “beauteous forme” of Christ “is not present enough in the poem to bear the weight it must have.”^[41] The poem is an opportunity for Donne to draw attention to his own need for pity in regard to his reputation, at the same time as differentiating himself from the speaker’s constructed limits in a way that enhances the very rightness of expected pity.

HSBatter, likewise, puts a problematic argument on display after a strong display of enargetic rhetoric. HSBatter also brings the revised sequence’s honorable request for pity, pardon, and help to a climax before the last two sonnets round the sequence off with assumed confidence.

A strong sense of location and easily conceivable narratives are developed in the octave so that a well-defined mental image of the usurped town results.

First Donne puts together an accumulatio of locomotive verbs in the imperative and connects them to an easily imagined physical location: the “vsurp’d towne.” The town is unhappily under the control of God’s enemy and the speaker is trapped because his “reason” (l.7) has turned out to be either “weake” or “vntrue” (l.8). He is trapped in a lamentable situation worthy of pity. Yet he is worthy of intervention too. The situation is neither simply a matter of “untrue” reason or “weak” reason. Strier points out the two respective doctrinal implications of “weak” and “untrue,” Roman and Reformed. If the speaker’s reason is “weak,” Strier argues, he needs only to be “mended” on the Roman model. Conversely, if reason proves “untrue,” Strier suggests, “some more violent and drastic strategy is required,” on the Reformed model.^[42] Keeping both possibilities in play adds to the sense of the speaker’s frustration, for he is unable to diagnose his own condition properly. But it also maintains the sense of his value because it obscures any responsibility for the situation. Donne, meanwhile, is the clever manager of these possibilities.

Instead of the octave giving way to rhetorical questions, as in HSWhat, HSBatter’s octave gives way to pleas in its final lines. Critics have had trouble making sense of the notoriously striking indecorum of this famous sonnet’s ending.

As Cousins points out, contexts of indecorum and the conventions of erotic spirituality do “not clarify why he [Donne] chooses in particular to close his meditation with a request for rape.”^[43] How can we understand the role that these confronting lines play in the poem, the sequence, and in Donne’s project of objectifying a religious speaker in order to draw attention to the problems of his own public persona?

The speaker’s vexation and frustration about the difficulty of finding a way out of the compromised situation is captured in his comic paradoxes: the overthrowing to create standing (l.3), the enthralling to create freedom (l.13) and the ravishing in aid of chastity (l.14). These are amusing and indecorous at the level of the reader’s objectification. At the level of the speaker’s consciousness, they provide a sense of just how bad things really are. Enthralling and ravishing are pointedly inappropriate things for God to do to his created agential beings, and so the request for them signifies desperation. Yet, if done for the sake of freedom and chastity, enthralling and ravishing are merely paradoxical and not obscene. Moreover, the goals of freedom and chastity, if not the requests for enthralling and ravishing they give rise to, are actually appropriate things for God to want for his creatures. The speaker clearly wants freedom and chastity too. For Stachniewski, the speaker requests the Calvinist God’s “simultaneous and irresistible seizure of all the faculties.”^[44] Seizure is not necessarily a violation if a vision of good stands beyond it. Thus the request does not ask God to do something that violates his very nature.

For all their provocation, the speaker’s paradoxes and requests in HSBatter do not collapse into total irrationality. It is not merely a perverse joke. Donne gives the speaker enough seriousness for readers to be able to pity the unhappy speaker even while laughing at his indecorous frustrations. That is to say, the speaker’s argument in the last lines—that he will never be free without a divine enthralling nor chaste without a divine ravishing—still, more or less, works. If the freedom desired both by the speaker and by God is by nature a freedom that involves some level of thralldom or constraint, then it is hardly irrational for the speaker to ask God to place him in a constraining thralldom giving rise to new freedoms. Likewise with chastity: if chastity means a pure relationship with another, brooking no interference, rather than simply virginity, then it is certainly reasonable for the speaker to beg the rightful ravishment that would preserve such a chastity. Ravishment contradicts chastity only to the extent that chastity involves no sexual relationship whatsoever, with anyone. Looking at it from that point of view, the situation of the religious self—as horrible as he feels it to be—is simply that he has a spouse he does not want and wants a spouse he is happy to have solely. The argument borders on rational collapse but does not quite fall into incoherence. Donne makes the speaker pitiful both by giving him very limited resources for negotiating a coherent and pious prayer for help, and by showing that the speaker does a clever job of using them. All the while Donne keeps the speaker from taking responsibility for his sins and reconstructs his own public role as entertainer and careful manager of different ways to read a problem by means of the comic-ironic gap he creates between the speaker’s sense of the situation and the reader’s. A coterie reader who sees those gaps sees that Donne is clever enough to create them, clever enough to question unpalatable commonplaces and thus competent enough to ask that the black memory around him be revised.

HSWilt and HSPart bring the sequence to a confident close, refocusing the speaker’s attention away from his rhetorical questions and onto God’s reliable actions instead, and resharpening the resonances of God and king. In HSWilt the speaker instructs his soul to meditate on “Howe God the Spirit by Angells wayted on / In heauen, doth make his Temple in thy breast” (ll.3–4). Confidently, the speaker tells his soul that God “Hath daign’d to chuse thee by adoption” (l.7). Given that Donne has the speaker despairing over why God “wilt not chuse mee” in the first sonnet of the sequence, HSDue, the relative confidence here at the end is a significant change. In HSPart, the speaker directly addresses the “Father” who has a “kingdome” (ll.2,8), a will, a “Legacie” (l.7), and who, in familiar biblical language, enacts laws like a king. The activities of this God-king though are indisputably efficacious, as Donne’s present perfect and simple tenses suggest: the son “hath made twoe wills” (l.7), and “all healing grace, and spiritt / Revive againe” (ll.11–12). Only in the final line does the grammatical mood shift from the indicative, but even then it is toward an imperative confident that God will do what he is asked: “lett that last will stand” (l.14). Donne therefore closes his revised sequence with a request for pity and “all healing grace,” which will be an “abridgment” of the “letter of law” standing against both the speaker and himself. It is made in a tone of gentle confidence befitting the sense of the honorable public self he is trying to construct and wants the coterie to adopt.

Sonnets Cut from Original Sequence:
HSMade, HSSighs, HSLittle, HSSouls

In making the revised sequence, Donne cut four sonnets from the original one: HSMade, HSSighs, HSLittle, HSSouls. These four poems share three significant features in distinction from the ones he retained in the revised sequence, which I have already discussed. First, their potential for evoking vivid mental images and their related pathos is relatively limited. Second, they address other beings much less forcefully and dramatically, making addresses to ambiguous figures or speaking in dramatic monologue. Third, and more significant, they construct a much more abject speaker. The sense of desperation in the speaker’s voice is greater in the cut poems and the possibilities he creates for himself are much more limited.

HSMade, for example, has a very ambiguous address to a God-like being, “Thou,” and depicts a speaker in desperate abjection. “Thou” is a being who “hast made” the speaker (l.1), who gives leave for some things (l.10), can give wings (l.13), and draw like a magnet (l.14). The speaker sees this being in terms of possibility (l.13), but instead of confidence, he is completely unassured of help from “Thou.” Coupled with that is the abjection. For example, in lines 5–8 he states, “I dare not moue my dimme eyes any way, / Despaire behind, and Death before doth cast / Such terrour, and my feebled flesh doth wast / By sinne in it, which it t’wards Hell doth weigh.” Moreover, in line 12, he despairs of the fact that “not one houre I can my selfe sustaine.” The poem’s speaker is acutely aware of his feelings but gives us absolutely no clue to his surroundings except that he is on the earth somewhere between heaven and hell.

The other three excised sonnets are similar. HSSighs is a dramatic monologue. The speaker elaborates on his “holy discontent” (l.3), but no enargeia signals offer us any way of objectifying the speaker through a location. To the extent that his attitude can be generalized into a character type, line 12’s “poore me” gives a strong sense of the tone of the poem. The speaker’s “World” in HSLittle is utterly compromised: “betrayd to endless night” (l.3). He betrays little confidence in the confused succession of options for recovery. The very metaphor of fire runs together the problem and the solution: the world of his soul “must be burnt” (l.10), but sins of “lust and envy” (l.11) have already burnt it, and now he asks for a fresh “firy zeale” to consume him (l.13). Another dramatic monologue, HSSouls depicts a speaker concerned with the extent to which his “white truth” (l.8) is visible to “glorify’d” (l.1) faithful souls like his own father, and with the extent to which he possesses the qualities that make such angelic knowledge possible to be “descry’d” (l.5). “White truth” is pure angelic knowledge, which his glorified father may or may not have.^[45] Fish calls the angelic knowledge of “white truth” a “truth without colour, without coverings, without commentary,” and suggests that the real anxiety is that colouring, covering, and commentary may be the only “signes” (l.6) by which the apparent “white truth” may be seen, which turns it into a possible illusion.^[46] Thus, just like the “Idolatrous Lovers,” “vile blasphemous coniurers” who “call / On Iesus name,” and “Pharisaicall / Dissemblers” who “faine devotion” (ll.9–12), the speaker’s outward actions too may betray an inner worthlessness within, a lack of white truth. That totally undercuts the false confidence of line 4 “That valiantly I Hells wide mouth ore-stride.” These four poems are expressions of desperation and/or anxiety, with little sense of a script for moving somewhere positive.

Why were they cut from the original sequence when Donne made his revision? It might be argued that the features mentioned above make the four excised poems less useful to Donne for constructing a sequence that moves well from incoherence and despair to coherence and confident hope. That may certainly be so. However, without asking why these apparently less favorable features of the original sequence’s poems existed in the first place, we arrive at the same limits of any internal explanation. That is, we can legitimately ask why Donne could not have aimed at better coherence in the first place.

The Meaning of Donne’s Revision

If we are to explain the revised sequence in respect to external factors, it will be important first to consider the original sequence too, in terms of external factors. Why did Donne put a religious selfhood that remains in relative incoherence on display in the original sequence? The original sequence shares two-thirds of its material with the revised sequence, so it is perhaps possible to overstate the differences between them and the differences of context in which Donne produced them. However, the excision of four sonnets and the integration of four replacements make the revised sequence a substantially altered artifact. That legitimately prompts questions about how the sonnets relate to Donne’s changing contexts and growing concern with public reputation, between around 1608 and 1615, in which the two sequences can, to the best of our ability so far, be dated.

The original sequence puts a form (or forms) of religious selfhood on display that, when turned into “objects” in the mind, are less coherent and confident and do not move toward it as the revised sequence does. This resonates well with the context signified in the 1608 letter to Lord Hay, mentioned above, in which Donne acknowledges that the king has kept the unseemliness of the marriage in mind and tells Hay that his father-in-law holds no grudges and that he has not, in fact, derived any dishonor from his family.^[47] The context of the letter includes Donne’s desire to bid for the vacant secretarial office in Ireland. If the original sequence of sonnets was composed in 1609, it is understandable that Donne would want to use the first incarnation of Holy Sonnets to draw attention to the incoherence born of exclusion in his own career and to his own sense of contrition through the speaker’s relative abjection. The original sequence also involves some of the same comic irony that avoids associating the speaker with the author too closely. The comic argumentative play of the shared poem HSDeath is an example. In any case, the speaker’s abject contrition, in the original sequence, balanced against a sense of unjust punishment, is a self-representation that makes sense in 1609 because it captures a number of things: Donne’s sense of exclusion, the injustice of being punished disproportionately to his “crime,” and the incoherent shape of his own future. In another letter to Goodere in 1608, on the difficulty of gaining the resolution to “do something,” Donne says in reference to his public value, “For to this hour I am nothing, or so little, that I am scarce subject and argument good enough for one of my own letters.”^[48] It was not just exclusion and obstruction on his mind but the lack of any kind of desire for one particular or coherent course.

Shami has emphasized not only the incoherent shape of Donne’s career plans prior to his stated ambition in 1613 to make divinity his profession but also the complications of holy ambition that Donne encountered through his connection with Robert Carr, the Earl of Somerset.^[49] Donne approached Carr in 1613 through Lord Hay, telling Carr of his strong intention to join the church and asking for support and preferment there.^[50] He asked for protection from the “envie of others,” presumably expecting from various people a reaction to the divinity decision based on problematic perceptions of his suitability for ministry. A painful example was his one-time patron Lady Bedford’s reaction. Reflecting, in a letter to Goodere, on her reaction to his new hope of a church career, he says that “she had more suspicion of my calling, a better memory of my past life, then [than] I had thought her nobility could have admitted.”^[51] The earl seems to have been relatively unwilling to help in the way that Donne wanted him to: in terms of church preferment. Instead, Donne had to accept money on the condition that he would be of help to Carr somehow eventually. The earl of Somerset (Carr) then became connected with Frances Howard. King James annulled her marriage to Robert Devereux in 1613, leaving her free to marry Carr. This embroiled Donne in his patron’s scandalous situation and added more pressure to protect an already ailing public reputation.^[52] Further complications to his resolution to take orders came in the form of pressure from his wife’s family, the Mores, even as late as 1614, to seek court preferment still.^[53] All of this seems to have confirmed for Donne by 1614 his determination to make an honorable career in the church.

One way to answer the question of why Donne chose to revise the sonnet sequence he began with—presumably before his ordination—and turn it into a sequence that moves from confusion to confidence and from incoherent selfhood to greater self-definition is to say that his growing confidence about entering the ministry brought even more compulsion to shape an honorable public selfhood than was in operation before. Donne draws attention to his own need for the misgivings of the past to be forgotten and encourages members of his coterie to do this by becoming aligned with the speaker’s confidence in forgiveness and positive development. Intensified comic irony, especially in HSBatter, at the same time creates distance between the Donne that his readers know well and whatever is still left of the speaker’s inadequacies by the end of the sequence. Growing confidence about entering the ministry, as well as the growing complications to his achieving it with honor and status, create the need to revise the sequence along lines that reconstruct the speaker into an objectifiable embodiment of Donne’s new goals, expectations, determination, needs, and especially, public self-value.

The three sonnets unique to the Westmoreland Manuscript (NY₃)—HSShe, HSShow, and HSVex—are usually considered to have been written later in Donne’s life and thus offer a constrastive perspective on the revised sequence.^[54] HSShe, given its likely reference to Donne’s recently passed wife, who died in 1617, at least postdates that event. The three sonnets unique to the Westmoreland manuscript (NY₃) are written in Donne’s friend Woodward’s hand; they round out the full collection of nineteen Holy Sonnets there.^[55] They were clearly acquired by Woodward from Donne over the years, but they were kept out of the printed editions. These poems have concerns and a style that differs markedly from those in the two sequences. I have been arguing that Donne used the two sequences to draw different kinds of attention to his own public selfhood in the first decade and a half of the new century. If the poems unique to NY₃ were written later, after ordination, when Donne had actually found a coherent sense of place within the establishment, then we would expect them to be less concerned with the same problems.

HSShe is not really concerned with the excluded incoherent self but with the thirsty, overdesirous self. Most critics accept that it was written about Anne after her death in 1617.^[56] The problems of the self on display here are the conflicting desires of the speaker on different levels of the ladder of love. Moving from love of Anne to love of God, Donne suggests: “Here the admiring her my Mind did whett / To seeke thee God; so streames do shew the head” (ll.5–6). But he admits that while he has found love of God now (the “head” of the stream of desire), he is still “thirsty” (l.8). Ambiguously, the speaker then asks rhetorically why he should “begg more Love, when as thou / Dost woe my Soule, for hers offring all thine” (ll.9–10). As Gill suggests, God’s wooing of the poet’s soul can be read either as “God offering his love to the poet instead of that of the dead beloved,” or as “God cast in the role of a father who supplies a handsome dowry (offering all thine) in exchange for the heavenly marriage of the poet and his dead beloved.”^[57] While God is potentially both the father of the heavenly bride or the rival lover here, God is certainly not a kingly figure who must be placated because of past offenses. The general sense of space in the poem, too, is much more domestic.

HSShow and HSVex are also imbued with very different concerns. HSShow is a return to the topic of Donne’s third satire: how to know what the true church is, whether at the extremes of Rome and Geneva or somewhere in between. The writing of it is commonly linked to the circumstances of the beginning of the Thirty Years War (1618–1648).^[58] Furthermore, it is unconcerned with selfhood. HSVex offers a speaker who is deep in pious self-abjection. However, he is candid about the problems of his religious selfhood. It is not a concern with the compromised past that vexes the speaker here, but the contraries in the self that still exist in his soul after many years of spiritual effort. The poet does not “shake with feare” (l.14) because of ongoing and impending punishment for a past sin that is still in his way, but because of the abiding spiritual uncertainty of his mature present.

Holy Sonnet Style: Mixing the Enargetic, Thetical,
and Tropical Resources

In this chapter, I have analyzed the role of the Holy Sonnet sequences in Donne’s difficult project of reshaping his public persona within the larger context of trying to belong satisfactorily. In the previous chapter, I argued that Bacon’s project of promoting interpretatio naturae defined his writing stance in Novum Organum against things that were all too familiar: the idols of hasty syllogizing and overemotion. In the same way, Donne’s project, too, involves a writing stance defined against the all-too-familiar problem of his compromised public selfhood. Donne’s rhetorical choices suggest that he sought to facilitate that agonistic stance by developing a specific enargetic, thetical, and tropical style for the construction of a religious self who could be objectified in useful ways. Donne puts a form of public (religious) selfhood on display that moves from incoherence to coherent confidence. With it he drew attention to both the similarities and differences between his speaker and himself. The speaker’s weaknesses of reasoning, power, and situation expose Donne’s own through the comic irony of his being the creator of the speaker’s exaggeration and indecorous vexation. Objectifying the speaker points to the appropriate passion of pity (albeit comic) for the speaker’s situation and compassionate appreciation for a Donne who is similarly entrapped—and yet, less fairly entrapped on account of his overexaggerated guilt and his visible cleverness as entertainer and manager of a public ethos.

The qualities of Donne’s enargetic style in the Holy Sonnets include a narrowing range of options for objectifying the speaker, a highly self-conscious element of spectatorship in the revised sequence, and vague but complex localities—again, like those of the Verse Letters. Narrowing the range of directed mental images, in the revised sequence, Donne moves from the vague possibilities of HSDue to the narrower foci of pilgrim, thief, and prisoner in HSBlack, through the speaker’s rhetorical questions in the middle of the sequence, to the much more highly focused mental image of a “usurped town” in HSBatter at the climax of the sequence. This, in itself, is an example of Donne’s highly self-conscious spectatorship signals. Other examples are the speaker’s own explicit sense of looking at things—“mark in my hart Ô Soule” (HSWhat, l.2)—and the larger levels of observation that implies: readers mentally imaging the speaker making mental images. That extent of self-conscious spectatorship similarly exists in Bacon’s New Atlantis. There it is important for Bacon that readers objectify the processes he depicts and observe the role of natural philosophy within them. For Donne in the sonnets it is important that people objectify the speaker and compare him to the Donne they know. Yet the localities in which Donne positions his speaker—the pilgrim abroad, the thief in prison, the round earth’s imagined corners, and the usurped town—are nothing if not vague and complex. Bacon’s choice of location in the directed mental images of New Atlantis, such as the ocean and the room, are, by contrast, bare and simple. That makes the narrative order of the crucial processes he depicts stand out all the more sharply. In Donne’s Holy Sonnets, though, as in the Verse Letters, he implicates the object being observed more fully within its locations. The ambiguity of those locations is useful. The treasonous pilgrim abroad and thief in prison, in HSBlack, are tightly bound up with their locations; in fact, their locations are part of the reason for their distress. Their faults are diminished to the extent that they are absorbed into the ambiguous explicatory contexts. In the example from HSBatter, the metaphor of the usurped town indeed turns the speaker into the very location of the mental image, completely erasing any agential fault. In distinction from the sharp focus of Bacon’s bare and simple locations, Donne’s enargetic style emphasizes the complex circumstances the speaker is embedded in so that he can implicitly deemphasize within them the speaker’s punishable free will. Choice of location in a mental image, a variable of enargetic style, can blur or focus the object in relation to the background.

Donne’s allusions to familiar aspects of Calvinist thought are a part of his thetical style in the sonnets. Donne does not name and mobilize explicitly identified Calvinist propositions in order to stimulate more or less predicted syllogistic reasoning. Yet, the allusions to Calvinist thought—the God-king metaphor, God’s arbitrary selections, the disabling depravity of unregenerate human beings, and the doubtful “grace to beginne”—are part of the thought-world of the speaker who is to be objectified. As the speaker comes up against challenges in Calvinist thought, readers can mentally see him as a person trying to negotiate that particular theological discourse. Almost irrespective of whether Donne, King James, or other envisaged readers of the sonnets felt that Calvinist thought was somehow limiting, the speaker is limited by it because his thought is framed by questions within it. His questions are not always resolved even when the speaker feels they are. Watching the speaker being challenged by questions familiar from Calvinist discourse is one more means by which Donne implicates the speaker’s weaknesses in contexts that are not of his own guilty making. That is, it is not obviously the speaker’s fault that he only has at his disposal the particular ideas he does when trying to understand his relationship with the God-king.

Donne’s tropical style in the sonnets is intimately tied to his enargetic and thetical style because they create the focal points around which Donne develops the comparisons necessary for activating emotional response. Donne builds metaphorical connections in the revised sequence between the speaker and the following things: a pilgrim, a prisoner, a thief, and a town. Each of these marks the speaker with some kind of weakness. Yet a discrepancy develops between his characterization as weak and compromised and the extent to which the speaker vindicates his religious selfhood and mitigates his own sinfulness. Within that discrepancy comes the potential for pity. Recalling Aristotle’s definition of pity, that it is “a certain pain at an apparently destructive or painful event happening to one who does not deserve it,” helps in understanding why.^[59] Through the growing discrepancy between the speaker’s weakness and value, Donne creates the possibility that the speaker has not caused his own vexation and that his punishment (the destructive or painful event) is undeserved. To the extent that Donne suffers similarly vexing entrapments as the speaker, pity also becomes a relevant feeling for his readers to adopt toward him. A larger discrepancy, or to use Agricola’s language, dissidentia, eventually opens up between Donne himself and the speaker because of Donne’s comic exaggerations. Examples are the tongue-in-cheek playfulness of HSDeath’s schoolboy arguments and HSBatter’s indecorous and near-incoherent paradoxes of enthralled freedom and chaste rape.

The poems suggest that Donne is worthy of pity too in a related yet not exactly similar way. He too is entrapped in problems not of his own making, as well as punished disproportionately to his crime. But it is even less fair. As a witty creator of fictional and public selfhood, Donne suggests that he is much more intelligent and worthy to be recast in honorable terms than even the speaker is.

Notes

^{1. For references to Donne’s Holy Sonnets I quote from the texts of the variorum edition: The Holy Sonnets: The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne, ed. Gary A. Stringer, vol. 7, part I (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University
Press, 2005).}

^{2. R. C. Bald, John Donne: A Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), 300–301.}

^{3. Arthur Marotti, John Donne, Coterie Poet (1986; repr. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2008), 247.}

^{4. F. W. Brownlow, “The Holy Sonnets,” in Donne and the Resources of Kind, ed. A. D. Cousins and Damian Grace (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University
Press, 2002), 87–88.}

^{5. Jeanne Shami, “Donne’s Decision to Take Orders,” in The Oxford Handbook of John Donne, ed. Jeanne Shami, Dennis Flynn, and M. Thomas Hester (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2011), 525–26.}

^{6. Ibid., 530–31.}

^{7. Marotti, “Coterie Poet,” 248–49; Brownlow, “Holy Sonnets,” 87.}

^{8. Letters, 145.}

^{9. TMC, 330.}

^{10. Ibid., 331.}

^{11. Ibid., 320.}

^{12. Ibid., 320.}

^{13. Brownlow, “Holy Sonnets,” 92–93, defers to Gardiner’s “generally accepted” dating
of the contents of both sequences between 1609 and 1611. The variorum editors, “Introduction,”
c–ci, call Gardiner’s overall dating arguments into question but also suggest a starting
point for the first sonnet sequence of some time near the summer of 1609.}

^{14. Hugh Adlington, “Do Donne’s Writings Express His Desperate Ambition?” in The Oxford Handbook of John Donne, ed. Jeanne Shami, Dennis Flynn, and M. Thomas Hester (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2011), 728. Brent Nelson, Holy Ambition: Rhetoric, Courtship, and Devotion in the Sermons of John Donne (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2005), 135.}

^{15. Margaret Fetzer, “Plays of Self: Theatrical Performativity in Donne,” in Solo Performances: Staging the Early Modern Self in England, ed. Ute Berns (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2010), 198.}

^{16. Helen Wilcox, “Sacred Desire, Forms of Belief: The Religious Sonnet in Early Modern
Britain,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Sonnets, ed. A. D. Cousins and Peter Howarth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011),
148–49.}

^{17. Patrick Grant, “Augustinian Spirituality and the Holy Sonnets of John Donne,” English Literary History 38, no. 4 (1971): 542–61; John Stachniewski, “John Donne: The Despair of the “Holy
Sonnets,’” English Literary History 48, no. 4 (1981): 677–705; Richard Strier, “John Donne Awry and Squint: The ‘Holy
Sonnets,’ 1608–1610,” Modern Philology 86, no. 4 (1989): 357–84; and Paul Cefalu, “Godly Fear, Sanctification, and Calvinist
Theology in the Sermons and ‘Holy Sonnets’ of John Donne,” Studies in Philology 100, no. 1 (2003): 71–86.}

^{18. For example, when discussing creation, Calvin says God has “implanted in all men a
certain understanding of his divine majesty” (I.III.1). In coming to the fifth commandment,
to honor one’s parents, Calvin makes the association between God and kings so strong
that the titles of “Father,” “God,” and “Lord” (shared by princes and fathers), invariably
make us “struck with an awareness of his majesty.” Accordingly, “he who is a ‘prince’
or a ‘lord’ has some share in God’s honor” (II.VIII.35). In another example, we ought
to be grateful, says Calvin, for this life, to the extent that it is a “preparation,
so to speak, for the glory of the Heavenly Kingdom” (III.IX.3). See Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles, 2 vols. (1960; repr., Louisville,
KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006).}

^{19. Marotti, Coterie Poet, 254.}

^{20. Brownlow, “Holy Sonnets,” 93–94.}

^{21. Tina Skouen, “The Rhetoric of Passion in Donne’s Holy Sonnets,” Rhetorica 27, no. 2 (2009): 167.}

^{22. For discussion, see the variorum edition; Stringer, “Introduction,” lx–lxxi.}

^{23. R. V. Young, “The Religious Sonnet,” in The Oxford Handbook of John Donne, ed. Jeanne Shami, Dennis Flynn, and M. Thomas Hester (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2011), 225–26.}

^{24. Brownlow, “The Holy Sonnets,” 95.}

^{25. Cefalu, “Godly Fear,” 73. For Cefalu, 84, keeping the distinction in mind helps to
see how “godly fear,” as opposed to the terror of the reprobate, functions for the
sonnets’ speaker, as he seeks sanctification in a comparable manner to the “moral
habituation” emphasized by less Reformed thinkers like Richard Hooker and Joseph Hall.}

^{26. There Paul describes the self-contradicting experience of not being able to do what
he truly approves of: “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I
want, but I do the very thing I hate” (Romans 7:15).}

^{27. Marotti, Coterie Poet, 255.}

^{28. Ibid.}

^{29. Both Stachniewski, “The Despair,” 699, and Strier, “Awry and Squint,” 370–71, discuss
these lines in terms of Catholic and Reformed Calvinist teaching.}

^{30. Brownlow, “The Holy Sonnets,” 97.}

^{31. See Louis Martz, The Poetry of Meditation: A Study of English Religious Literature of the Seventeenth Century (1954; repr., New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1965), 52; Barbara Lewalski,
Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), 269; and Anthony Low, Love’s Architecture: Devotional Modes in Seventeenth-Century English Poetry (New York: New York University Press, 1978), 65.}

^{32. The questioning is a “protest” mounting “to a blasphemous climax” for Stachniewski,
“The Despair,” 694; a “prideful assertion” for Marotti, Coterie Poet, 256; an unanswerable and deserving question for Brownlow, “The Holy Sonnets,” 98;
and “an attack on the whole divine plan” for P. M. Oliver, Donne’s Religious Writing: A Discourse of Feigned Devotion (New York: Longman, 1997), 125.}

^{33. Strier, “Awry and Squint,” 382.}

^{34. Harold Skulsky, Language Recreated: Seventeenth-Century Metaphorists and the Act of Metaphor (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992), 115.}

^{35. Revelation 21:4.}

^{36. The story is recounted in Genesis 27.}

^{37. Marotti, Coterie Poet, 259; Brownlow, “The Holy Sonnets,” 99.}

^{38. Brownlow, “The Holy Sonnets,” 99.}

^{39. Strier, “Awry and Squint,” 380.}

^{40. Brownlow, “The Holy Sonnets,” 99.}

^{41. Strier, “Awry and Squint,” 381.}

^{42. Ibid., 376.}

^{43. A. D. Cousins and Damian Grace, Donne and the Resources of Kind (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002), 15.}

^{44. Stachniewski, “The Despair,” 689.}

^{45. Thomas O. Sloan, Donne, Milton, and the End of Humanist Rhetoric (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 199.}

^{46. Stanley Fish, “Masculine Persuasive Force: Donne and Verbal Power,” in Soliciting Interpretation: Literary Theory and Seventeenth-Century English Poetry, ed. Elizabeth D. Harvey and Katharine Eisaman Maus (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1990), 243–44.}

^{47. TMC, 331.}

^{48. Letters, 51.}

^{49. Shami, “Donne’s Decision,” 531.}

^{50. TMC, 320.}

^{51. Letters, 218.}

^{52. For commentary, see Shami, “Donne’s Decision,” 528–34.}

^{53. Ibid., 534.}

^{54. The variorum editors, also, suggest that these three are “late poems,” see “Introduction,”
C.}

^{55. On the processes by which NY₃ came into being see the variorum commentary, “Introduction,” lxviii–lxxi.c dddduction,nne
over the years, commentary, deal with the problems constraining Donnered by Woodward
from Donne over the years,}

^{56. See the variorum’s commentary collection, 431–42.}

^{57. Richard Gill, ed., John Donne: Selected Poems (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 107.}

^{58. See the variorum’s commentary collection, 453–58.}

^{59. Rhetoric, 1385^b11–16, 139.}

Project-Donne

Rewriting the (Religious) Self in the Revised Sequence

Sonnets Cut from Original Sequence: HSMade, HSSighs, HSLittle, HSSouls

The Meaning of Donne’s Revision

Holy Sonnet Style: Mixing the Enargetic, Thetical, and Tropical Resources

Notes

Sonnets Cut from Original Sequence:
HSMade, HSSighs, HSLittle, HSSouls

Holy Sonnet Style: Mixing the Enargetic, Thetical,
and Tropical Resources