SOURCE: Sabine, Maureen. “No Marriage in Heaven: John Donne, Anne Donne, and the Kingdom Come.” In John Donne's “Desire of More”: The Subject of Anne More Donne in His Poetry, edited by M. Thomas Hester, pp. 228-55. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1996.

[In the following essay, Sabine discusses the importance of Donne's wife to his love poetry.]

“In the last hour of his last day, as [Donne's] body melted away and vapored into spirit,”¹ Izaak Walton depicted the poet facing death with remarkable composure. However, Donne's own tormented poetry invites me to imagine another death-bed scenario. His “sad friends” open his shirt to see if his “breath goes now” (“A Valediction forbidding mourning,” ll.3-4), and bring an ear to the Dean of St. Paul's chest, only to discover there the letter ‘A’ that scored the flesh of another minister of God and transgressive lover, Arthur Dimmesdale.² For marriage to Anne More was “the remarkable error of his life” that eluded Walton's understanding and narrative control (263) as he struggled to disentangle “the many labyrinths and perplexities” of Donne's personal history and lead his biographical subject to the safety of a holy death (269). Anne More was “the remarkable error” that runs like the thread of female fatality through the strong life and love lines of Donne's poetry, making him fear even six years after his wife's death and seven years before his own “that when I' have spunne / my last thred” he will not expire with Walton's edifying words “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done” on his lips (270), but the defiant marital pun “when thou hast done, thou hast not done, / For, I have more” (“A Hymne to God the Father,” ll.5-6).

In this commemorative essay on Anne Donne, I propose that the letter ‘A’ is the mark of Anne and her figurative but problematic importance to Donne. I would like to explore what the letter ‘A’ might stand for by looking at five poems, “The Relique,” “The Canonization,” “The Anniversarie,” “A Valediction of my name, in the window,” and “A nocturnall upon S. Lucies day,” and so begin to consider that most private and impossible of questions—what a wife might have meant to her husband.³ I commence with “The Relique,” which spells out the name I see, in answer to Christopher Ricks,⁴ responsible for blighting the beauty, the grace, and the spiritual-corporeal depth of Donne's love poetry, the name that blots Anne's letter ‘A’, the unclean and unclear name of adulteress. It would have been unpardonable for either Donne or Walton to make Anne's resemblance to an adulteress clear when she was the faithful companion and wife to him in adversity and died as a result of her twelfth childbirth in 1617. However, the early Church father St. Jerome is explicit in his condemnation of the man who is so passionately in love with his wife as to become an adulterer and make his wife a harlot.⁵ After Anne was dead, Donne would cite Jerome in a marriage sermon addressed to the bridegroom who might be tempted “to love a Wife like a Mistresse” (Sermons 2, 345). Walton had no desire to resurrect the public scandal that Donne's secret, illicit, and, by Elizabethan patriarchal standards, seditious marriage in 1601 to the minor Anne More caused.⁶ But he hints that Donne might have loved Anne like a mistress before making her his wife by suggesting that their union was one of headlong passion, blind to all obstacles (252). For Jerome, such fatal sexual attraction was a lascivious sin. For the critic Ilona Bell, who speculates not only that John Donne and Anne More burned with desire for one another, but became lovers as long as two summers before their winter marriage in 1601, their love affair anticipates our more frank and sexually liberated era where women as well as men can boldly proposition one another.⁷ Donne's own defiant comments in a letter of apology to Anne's irate father rival those in “The Canonization” for bluntness: that they “adventurd equally” and “yt is irremediably donne.”⁸ For the lovers have found each other simply irresistible. Perhaps the repeated proof that they gave of “love['s] new heate” (“Love's Growth,” l.25) “saved” their marriage from annulment and Donne from a long spell in prison. Yet Donne also implies that his attachment to Anne is not simply one of physical urgency but an existential choice for better for worse; that sexuality gives expression to his identity as “donne.” Finally, there is the Calvinist-like admission that his behavior to Anne and her father is inexcusable, that he cannot justify, remedy, or make good what he has “donne.” He has committed a sin that is close to irredeemable. It would cause Donne unspeakable anguish to examine his own “highly passionate” nature in the Holy Sonnets, which Walton had recognized as a key to his character (271), and admit that in loving Anne or those who were a “dreame” and promise of her (“The good-morrow,” “Aire and Angels”) so prodigally, he had not only neglected his duty to his Elizabethan superiors but failed his God. Renaissance moral theologians still followed Jerome in the insistence that an impassioned marriage alive and aglow with sex was not only adulterous but idolatrous.⁹

The deep sense of shame, fear, and grief that pervades the Holy Sonnets and especially “A Hymne to God the Father,” the obsession there with the idolatrous and profane loves of the past, and the strong, erotic imagery that is sublimated with only partial success into a diatribe directed at God, suggest that the sexual passion of Anne and John's “first strange and fatall interview” (“Elegie: ‘On his Mistris,’” l.1) lasted as long as their marriage. Indeed both Theresa M. DiPasquale and Achsah Guibbory suggest that even after Anne's death, Donne's desire to have her in the flesh did not die.¹⁰ In fact, the memorable Westmoreland sonnet that Donne wrote after Anne's death, “Since she whome I lovd,” employs the vocabulary of delirious young love, used circumspectly by Walton in his biography (252), such as “melts” (l.8), “ravished” (l.3), “thirst” (l.7), “begg” (l.9), “woe” (l.10) and “tender jealosy” (l.13). This erotic textuality points to the pleasure of an ardent and active sexual relationship in which husband and wife generously honored their conjugal debt, giving their bodies freely to one another until Anne's “last debt [was] payd” (l.1) in death. It also points to the warm memory of the pleasure that keeps Anne alive for Donne in the poetic lines that are a punning substitute for having her in his loins.¹¹ Yet this beautiful tribute to Anne and to a sexual lifetime together ends in “feare” (l.11):

But why should I begg more Love, when as thou
Dost woe my soule, for hers offring all thine:
And dost not only feare least I allow
My Love to Saints and Angels, things divine,
But in thy tender jealosy dost doubt
Least the World, fleshe, yea Devill putt thee out.

(ll.9-14)

This is the neurotic fear attributed to God but instilled in the speaker by the superegos of Christianity, that sexuality cannot be a dynamic force “wholy” (l.4) and purely channeled for good through love.¹²

By contrast, in “The Relique” Donne does not show “feare” or “doubt” about the sexual current that runs from love human to the divine but lets passion wash over and pour out of his verse.¹³ Rather than deny that the letter ‘A’ of Anne's name might be read as the sign of adultery and the letter ‘J’ or ‘I’ of his name as the mark of idolatry, the poet exults in these joint sins of profligate lovers. For through them he now imagines a macabre likeness between “a loving couple” (l.8) who are corrupting in a single grave and those lovers who have been purified, perfected, and glorified for all “time” and every “age”—Mary Magdalene and Christ.

Thou shalt be'a Mary Magdalene, and I
                    A something else thereby;
All women shall adore us, and some men.

(ll.17-19)

In absolving the reputed prostitute, Mary Magdalene, of her sins, Christ challenged male purists, who may have little to forgive but have shown little love, to abandon the conviction that the woman had committed a grave sin. Instead, they must contemplate the truth that through sexuality as well as through her female sex, she had opened her whole being to the grave mystery of divine love. She is christened as a return for her extravagant outpouring of self in the tears, kisses, and perfume that she showers on Christ's feet. “Her sins, which are many, are forgiven, for she loved much” (Luke 7.47). The generous message embedded in these words encouraged Donne to rewrite “the remarkable error” of his improvident marriage to Anne, and here in “The Relique” to absolve his couple playfully of “grave sin” by speculating on their grave love, which is to say, the love that endures in and beyond the grave. This subject was no joking matter for Donne, as DiPasquale also observes,¹⁴ and in later sermons he obsessively worried over the Christian resurrection of the body and the soul's attachment to its prior human existence even when in heaven.¹⁵ In “The Relique,” it amused but perhaps also comforted the poet to see human lovers with Christ's eyes, by depicting his speaker as “something else,”¹⁶ and look through the flesh into the soul as Christ tenderly looked upon Mary Magdalene, not searching for sins of sex but reading the signs of salvation. Indeed, this was the loving way in which Walton scanned Donne's life, wondering at that “highly passionate” nature that yearned for “something else,” something “more” to life. That something was both his wife and Christ.¹⁷ Donne's youthful motto, “Sooner dead than changed”¹⁸ captures the noncompliant spirit not only of “The Relique” but of many of his other and later love poems; and it illustrates his reluctance to sacrifice one love experience for another, however much Walton may insist that “all his earthly affections were changed into divine love” (259). The relationship between Mary Magdalene and Christ gave him cause to hope that earthly affections were not simply changed into but by divine love.

Mary Magdalene touched Christ's life at three moments of critical importance to Donne—after lovemaking, at the hour of his death, and after the resurrection. She was depicted as the impure sinner who became the saint of pure, mystic love.¹⁹ However, the odor of female sexuality as well as sanctity clung to her, not only when she first threw herself in abandonment at Christ's feet, but in her concern to touch Christ's body one last time with burial spices, and to embrace him in the flesh when he appeared to her in his glorified body.

Ostensibly, Donne represents the Mary Magdalene and the Christ figures of “The Relique” as paradigms of the spiritual and asexual love that profane couples must be satisfied with “at the last busie day” (l.10), when they are resurrected and reunited in the body. “Difference of sex no more wee knew, / Then our Guardian Angells doe” (ll.25-26). Donne was alluding to Christ's avowal to his disciples in Matthew 22.30: “in the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven.”²⁰ He was also reiterating Augustine's theological qualification “ubi sexus nullus est” that the human resemblance to God is one in spirit and does not extend to sexual difference.²¹ But the profane wit of “The Relique” subverts the official effort of Christianity to detach the body from its lurid history of sexuality and clothe it in the brilliant spiritual raiment worn by the angels who announced the risen Christ. The title of the poem directs our special attention to the “bracelet of bright haire about the bone” in line 6 that is the primary relic of the sainted lovers. The decomposition process has left little more of them than a bleached bone and some hair to prefigure the dazzling spiritual transformation that the material body will undergo after the final resurrection. Yet the devout women who come to venerate this relic will do so with a fervor unequalled by men (“all women shall adore us, and some men,” l.19), kissing and embracing the braceleted bone and so suggesting the lovemaking that the saints themselves disavow. Even if in life they avoided sex, unbelievable as it may seem, in death their bodies dissolve into one and become sexually indistinguishable. “Difference of sex no more wee knew” (l.25). This was not the merciful release from sexuality that Augustine envisaged but a fusion fitfully found in the “comming and going” (l.27) of sexual climax, a fusion that Heathcliff hoped to seal with Cathy Linton in the grave.²² If the lovers assume a missionary position in the grave as they would have, had they as Christians engaged in sex, then it becomes impossible to say whether the bone is the phallus encircled by pubic hair or the bone behind the uterus, which the phallus touches as the male body collapses and dissolves deep into the female interior. In these last stages of corruption, the phallic body, in fact, encounters the os crucis, or holy bone (as the bone behind the uterus was known),²³ which reminds us that hidden deep in lovemaking is that other redeeming Passion of the Cross, while hidden in the neurotic shadows of Christianity, at the foot of the Cross, lies a passionate history of human redemption through lovemaking. Also hidden in the corpus of this poem between the first resurrection, when Mary Magdalene met the risen Christ, and the final resurrection, when the indistinguishable lovers of “The Relique” will be reunited with their bodies and with each other, lies the resurrection of priapus, “the upright one,” who is a travesty of Isaiah's suffering servant of God who “made his grave with the wicked” (53.9-11) and a reminder that Christ and “Crosses” are to be found even “in small things” (“The Crosse,” l.21). Grave sin through sexuality comes and goes in importance like the phallus itself, and ultimately falls away before love's grave mystery.

Donne performs “miracles” in his love poems that have dazzled successive generations of readers. In “The Relique,” these were miracles in which he salvaged material from his damaging marriage to Anne and reanimated it, as though “at the last busie day,” in his verse. The vehement desire that drove Anne More and John Donne together and put them on a collision course with Elizabethan patriarchy is allowed full play in Donne's poetry. As we have seen, sexual feelings find a way even into the pure, arid realm of metaphysical speculation and eschatology. This libidinous energy empowered the poet to find life where there was death; to seek reassurance when he contemplated sex as the beginning of the end in “The Canonization,” “A Valediction of my name, in the window” and “The Anniversarie” that Anne and he would not die to one another; and to look for signs of life after Anne's death in “A nocturnall upon S. Lucies day.”

Christopher Ricks has, however, deplored the way in which Donne recoils from the libidinal force that he unlooses in his love poetry—as though absolving sex of sin—only to turn against the passion that stirs deep and true in his verse.²⁴ Yet even when Donne's lines crackle with desire, he was heavy burdened by the Augustinian legacy of Christian morality that saw sexual pleasure not only as an evil in itself but as the “virus” that transmitted original sin from one generation to another, “that sinne where I begunne, / which is my sin, though it were done before” (“A Hymne to God the Father”).²⁵ Yet the “remarkable error” of his marriage also stiffened his resistance to this sexual pessimism and made him acutely aware of the fact, which Peter Brown has traced to early Christianity, that the body is “deeply implicated in the transformation of the soul”;²⁶ in other words, that sexuality can arouse immortal longings. To repudiate sexuality as a sin would be not only to sin against something that was bedrock donne in his own nature but to do evil to the good, the honor, and later the memory of Anne. “When thou hast done, thou hast not done, For, I have more.”

In “The Canonization,” his speaker rails against the joyless austerity of a protocapitalist society that indefinitely postpones pleasure for the sake of enrichment and promotion. Is a world that does not value, honor, celebrate, or sanctify lovemaking but drives it underground into cult practice, subversive poetry, and destructive suicide pacts a world we really want to live in, for godsake, this speaker asks? Donne's secret courtship, marriage, and life with his wife at Mitcham, which make Anne so difficult to locate in his poetry, gave credence to the view that is articulated in “The Canonization:” that a couple's sex life is nobody's business and should be kept private. However, the hidden and unmentionable nature of the act does inevitably provoke voyeuristic speculation: What exactly do they do? and a semi-religious wonderment: Do they still love one another and make love with such constancy? Even before the Reformation struck matrimony off as a sacrament, prurient clerical regulation of the married couple's sex life made it difficult for lovers to engage in uninhibited marital relations or to glimpse the blessings of sexuality in the conjugal vow, “with my body I thee worship.” Prior to the Reformation, intercourse was banned during a draconian number of designated “holy days.” Couples had to refrain from sex on all Sundays and feast days, during Advent and Lent; and if they wished to receive communion they were obliged to undergo a passionless passion altogether unlike the ecstasy of “The Canonization” and practice sexual abstinence three days before. Such restrictions made it almost impossible for couples to regard their lovemaking as a holy activity that made them whole before God. It was equally hard for either partner to regard the fertile female body as a sacred and mysterious proof of love when husbands were forbidden sex and wives communion during such periods as menstruation, after childbirth, and during lactation.²⁷ The phenomenal fecundity of Anne—she was pregnant twelve times, or nine full years out of her sixteen-year marriage to Donne—is a matter of public record. The unflagging sex drive that must have engendered this record is a matter for the pornographic minds of Liaisons Dangereuses or the court scandalmongers of “John Donne, Anne Donne, Undone”;²⁸ yet it is a matter that is left wide open to the imagination by the wild claims of the speaker in “The Canonization.”

Call us what you will, wee'are made such by love;
                    Call her one, mee another flye,
We'are Tapers too, and at our owne coste die,
                    And wee in us finde the'Eagle and the dove.
                              The Phoenix ridle hath more wit
                              By us, we two being one, are it.
So, to one neutrall thing both sexes fit.
                    Wee dye and rise the same, and prove
                    Mysterious by this love.

(ll.19-27)

If, as Bald believes, “The Canonization” alludes to the early years of Donne's marriage to Anne,²⁹ when they had nothing much to live on or for except sex, then the speaker's wild claims for lovemaking appear a noble attempt by the poet to look beyond his marital miseries and hold fast to “the kingdom, the power, and the glory” that is revealed to men and women in their bodies. St. Paul had assured the Romans that “God has imprisoned all human beings in their own disobedience only to show mercy to them all” (11:32). The chief mercy that God shows to the rebellious lovers of “The Canonization”—and perhaps to Donne himself after his own release from prison—is the sexuality where they can offer their “bodies as a living sacrifice, dedicated and acceptable to God” (Rom. 12.1). When Donne wrote “The Canonization,” the “living sacrifice” that constituted the heart of the Eucharistic service was provoking passionate debate, dissent, and recusancy among Catholics and Anglicans.³⁰ The worship that Christians could safely conduct in private, without need of a priest, the communion that remained freely available to all despite “difference of sex” or creed was the lovemaking, the living sacrifice of highly sexed bodies, that is given both sacrilegious and sacramental importance in “The Canonization.” The speaker of this poem has at once the worst opinion and the highest regard for sexual love. His “palsie,” “gout,” and “five gray haires” (ll.2-3) are symptoms of an unrepentant fornicator; for frequent intercourse was commonly regarded as a petit mort that led to premature aging, baldness, and death.³¹ Yet these same infirmities and the aroused sexual state that they presume are given startling new meaning by Christ's assurance that: “every hair on your head has been counted” and is precious in the sight of a God of love (Luke 12.7). Likewise, as has been often noted, the speaker and his mistress give a sensational new angle to Christ's death on the Cross and Mary Magdalene's witness to his Resurrection from the tomb when they “dye and rise the same, and prove / Mysterious by this love.” Their sexual climax is an idolatrous parody of Christ's deliverance of man from sin but also exults in the revolutionary vision that the sexual consummation of a love match like Anne and John's helps to complete the work of redemption, the work of redeeming men and women not from, but in the flesh. The poet's own plea for mercy to his estranged patron, the Lord Keeper Sir Thomas Egerton, “that redemtion was no less worke than creation,”³² is similar in spirit to “The Canonization” and suggests how he tried to do in art, what he failed to do in life, which was to defend and glorify “the remarkable error” of his marriage and the sexual abandon that was regarded as such undignified behavior. To Egerton and the other keepers of Elizabethan law, a lover's presumption that there is a divine meaning to his sexual misadventure would have seemed the height of arrogance and absurdity. Yet it is hard not to cry mercy for that frail, fool-hearty, but brave hope that Donne formulated in “The Canonization” and perhaps composed in the social exile of Mitcham.

                              You whom reverend love
                    Made one anothers hermitage;
You, to whom love was peace, that now is rage,
                    Who did the whole worlds soule extract, and drove
                              Into the glasses of your eyes
                              So made such mirrors, and such spies,
That they did all to you epitomize,
                    Countries, Townes, Courts: Beg from above
                    A patterne of your love!

(ll.37-45)

The hope is that if the Body of Christ was breaking up as an institutional power and a sacramental force in the world, indeed if marriage was no longer a sacrament,³³ the corpus mysticum survived, concealed in lovers' bedrooms, sexed bodies, and amorous sonnets. The lovers themselves are held up in place of the sacred host, which was once elevated. It is they who provide “Countries, Townes, Courts” with that eye-glass, or round, mirrored window, that opens like the Eucharistic monstrance of old on the mystery of Christ died, risen, and come again. But what a momentous change Donne has wrought in this poem. For the pornographer's visual images—the hole and the prick, the unspeakable sexual acts and aids—have become “something else,” something sacred and mysterious. In this moment of revelation, Christianity seems to implode as it is driven in on itself and forced to see its own unedifying history through lovers' eyes. Yet extraordinary claims are made for such an unprepossessing pair of lovers! Like Jane Eyre, they have not been gifted with any beauty or wealth. They are no longer young and do not appear to possess the fit, attractive physique of youth. Indeed, they suffer from complaints that are a definite sexual turn-off—weepy eyes, runny noses, chills, and fever. They have the same undependable bodies as you and me, or John and Anne Donne. They are consumed by worry, fatigue, and ill-health and not only by desire. Yet they insist that it is lovemaking—not marriage or sex but the intimacy that lies somewhere between the two³⁴—that unites and braces them to face life's vicissitudes.

“If this be error and upon me proved, / I never writ, nor no man ever loved,” swore the speaker of the Shakespearean marriage sonnet (116). We may assume but can never be certain that “The Canonization” was Donne's private sonnet on his own marriage. What I have argued is that he was writing about “something” more intimate—the “remarkable error” of passion that occasioned his secret marriage to Anne. His speaker never really silences the wagging tongues that gossip that this passion is a disgrace. But he looks beyond the sin, idolatrous and preposterous though it may be, and as Christ studied the heart of Magdalene, discerns that lovemaking can be a channel of grace. If lovemaking is consecrated in “The Canonization” and given the spiritual importance that formerly belonged to the sacraments, the death of the beloved, whether real or imagined, threatens to close down one of the few remaining channels of grace “open to most men” (H.S. 179, l.14) and spawns “a sinne of feare” (“A Hymne to God the Father,” l.13), which Donne resists in “The Anniversarie,” panders to in “A Valediction of my name,” and surrenders to in “A nocturnall upon S. Lucies Day.”

In “The Anniversarie,” it is not perfect love but young love that casteth out fear. Couples who meet and fall in love in youth must be pardoned if they naively imagine themselves to be immortal. Even the weary, pained speaker of “The Canonization,” who should know better, feels a godlike flame flickering in the passionate love of later life, the love that gathers intensity from the melancholy presentiment of death. But the speaker of “The Anniversarie” has not yet been battered about the heart and glories in the fact that he has loved one whole year and not just “one whole day” (“Womans constancy,” l.1). Like the young Paul McCartney singing “When I'm sixty-four,”³⁵ he cannot really imagine getting old nor can he imagine that his longstanding relationship will be subject to time or their love subject to temporal authority. He has a lot to learn and he learns fast.

                    All Kings, and all their favorites,
                    All glory'of honors, beauties, wits,
The Sun it selfe, which makes times, as they passe,
Is elder by a yeare, now, then it was
When thou and I first one another saw:
                    All other things, to their destruction draw,
                              Only our love hath no decay;
This, no to morrow hath, nor yesterday,
Running it never runs from us away,
But truly keepes his first, last, everlasting day.

(ll.1-10)

By the second stanza, the speaker has become wise to the fact that their love is mortal and because mortal, corruptible. In “A Valediction of my name” Donne's speaker would pursue a similar line of reasoning. But it will generate a different and more malignant fear: that his mistress might be corrupted by lust and so deal a mortal blow to the enduring spirit of their union. The speaker of “The Anniversarie” contemplates mortality more philosophically, but only because he deadens the pain of love and softens the unbearable truth with which he opens the second stanza. “Two graves must hide thine and my coarse, / If one might, death were no divorce” (ll.11-12). The stronger the attachment, the more grievous will be the sorrow of separation. Death does us part. Some critics have maintained that “The Anniversarie” can have no bearing on Donne's marriage to Anne but must be alluding either to their premarital relationship or another love affair because the couple in the poem occupy two different graves.³⁶ But I think they miss the point that is being tacitly reiterated—that “true deaths, true maryages untie” (“Womans constancy,” l.8). Whether their union is officially recognized or not, long or short-term, this couple enjoy a “true maryage” because they have dramatically touched, altered, and interanimated each other's lives. Yet, however much this love has shaped their very souls, they have come together, as Augustine put it, through a “corruptible and mortal conjugal connection”³⁷ that will be dissolved by death and corruption in the grave. God sunders what he has joined.³⁸

Donne's speaker promises his mistress more than the sun and the moon. He promises her a love that “hath no decay” (l.7), that will make life eternal. He then gently disabuses her of these high hopes and shows her the two graves, which are brutal proof of the fact that death is a divorce, however much either the poet himself or his critics or any of us might wish otherwise.³⁹ As John Carey has shown,⁴⁰ Donne had great difficulty in accepting the orthodox Christian belief that the soul could endure separation from the body at death, could enjoy heavenly life in the interim without this body, or suffer the long wait until the physical resurrection. For Donne conceived of the relationship of the soul and the body in terms of the marital union. “God married the Body and Soule in the Creation,” he preached and “as farre as man is immortall, man is a married man still, still in possession of a soule, and a body too; and man is for ever immortall in both. … For, though they be separated … they are not divorced” (Sermons 7, 257). In a sermon on the Last Day (3, 112-13), Donne later compared the “gladnesse” that soul would experience when it was reunited with its flesh to the joyous reunion of a man with his friend, companion, and wife, in other words with “a real companion” through life like Anne Donne.⁴¹ Yet one of the reasons, I propose, why the thought of death and resurrection steals like a thief in the night into his love poems is because he was haunted by Christ's admonition to his disciples: “in the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven” (Matt. 22.30). The death of the body was therefore the death of love in human form and flesh, which is the only love we know. For as Donne himself would conclude in “Aire and Angels,” when he likened the afterlife of angels in heaven to the human sense of preexistence, “Love must not be, but take a body too” (l.10).⁴²

Therefore, the speaker's closing declaration in the second stanza, “when bodies to their graves, soules from their graves remove” (l.20), has sombre implications, though it is unclear from the third and final stanza of the poem whether the speaker is anticipating an existence in heaven before or after the physical resurrection.

                    And then wee shall be throughly blest,
                    But wee no more, then all the rest.
Here upon earth, we'are Kings, and none but wee
Can be such Kings, nor of such subjects bee.

(ll.21-24)

Donne's lovers will recognize one another in heaven but will no longer enjoy the singular blessing of an exclusive or lasting claim to each other through ties of flesh and blood. They will “be throughly blest” but no longer blest in intimately discovering or knowing each other's bodies. Love will be “increased there above” (l.19), which is to say they will love everyone equally but no one in particular.⁴³ What this meant personally for Donne was that he might hope to have “more Love,” but with it went the lamentable realization of the Westmoreland sonnet that commemorates Anne's death and analyzes its psychological impact on the poet, that “more Love” meant “no more.” The poet takes us as readers to the saddest of reunions in the next life, where we will no longer commemorate the “anniversaries” that give our individual lives meaning. These are the birthdays, first meetings, wedding anniversaries, and anniversaries of death that remind us of the psychic necessity of personalized love relations from birth through to the grave. Then, matter-of-factly, Donne brings us back down to earth. “Let us love nobly; and live” (l.28). If there will be no kings or favorites in the “new heaven, new earth,” then we should count our blessings, even if they are mortal, and be content that “we'are Kings,” the most important figure on earth to at least one other person.

The “true maryages” that flourish in Donne's love poetry are those that defy time; yet despite their bravado and their bluster, they advance relentlessly toward death. As Philippe Ariès has noted and as I shall now show in “A Valediction of my name, in the window,” it is at the breaking point when the finality of death is psychologically absorbed that “there can be an almost neurotic reinforcement of the marriage bond”⁴⁴ as the partner tries to build a bridge to the beloved across the great and silent divide. Like Donne's other valedictions, “A Valediction of my name” ends where it begins. So we discover in the final stanza that the poem is a sexual daydream concocted by a speaker who languidly goes through the motions of lovemaking while his mind flirts with death.⁴⁵

                              But glasse, and lines must bee,
No meanes our firme substantiall love to keepe;
                    Neere death inflicts this lethargie,
                    And this I murmure in my sleepe;
Impute this idle talke, to that I goe,
                              For dying men talke often so.

(ll.61-66)

In Scripture, Christ warned his followers that they must be ever on the alert for the sudden arrival of death, for they know not the hour or the day. While a lover who lies in the arms of his mistress prays for the hour of his death, the sudden loss of his sexual powers when they are at their full strength perhaps explains why this particular speaker talks in the closing line of the poem as though he is a doomed man. The fear, however, that Donne allows to filter into the no-man's land of sleep and dream, fantasy and imagination is not his own death as a conscious identity or the death of the author⁴⁶ but the death of the lover. In imagining the worst, Donne could recall the Catholic witnesses “who by nature had a power and superiority ouer my will,”⁴⁷ and who gave consummate proof of love in their public emasculation and dismemberment.⁴⁸ The legends of these martyrs who went like bridegrooms to their hanging and mutilation may have interplayed with the popular myth that hung men experienced the sexual excitement of an erection.⁴⁹ For the “ruinous Anatomie” (l.24) and “scatter'd body” (l.32) of the speaker certainly suggest that he daydreamed not only that he died but was torn apart for love. How many readers would be as honest as this speaker and admit that they indulged in melodramatic fabrication of their own death as a perverse torment to themselves and their loved ones? Yet this is the serious make-believe that we employ as an apotropaism to protect ourselves against the knowledge of death, which is first consciously understood when life and other people become precious, “when love and griefe their exaltation had” (l.38). In childhood, we imagine how sorry our family and friends will be when we die and cry in secret at our own sad reflection in the mirror, as the speaker of “A Valediction” hopes his mistress will weep at the sight of his name engraved in glass. Later, we luxuriate in the more adult and erotic torture of wondering if our partner will find another lover after we are dead. Perhaps “A Valediction” was also occasioned by Donne's private memories of his life at Mitcham between 1605-9, when he often lay sick and sometimes wondered if he was dying.⁵⁰ Thus, the anguish of acknowledging in retrospect that Anne could have married someone else, someone at least as witty and a lot more wealthy, someone who did not keep her pregnant and impoverished, may account for this poem's disturbing psychological undercurrents. This was, however, an anxiety that in general seventeenth-century couples kept to themselves, along with the secrets of their sex life; for it was common practice to remarry with all due dispatch after the loss of a husband or wife. Donne was unusual in promising his children that he would never marry again after Anne's death, though there were many practical advantages to a second and more prudent alliance in middle age.⁵¹ Not only in this, but in his abnormal grief and express desire to join Anne in the grave with the same haste of their scandalous marriage, Donne withstood the vulgar thinking of Claudius that death was a common theme. His poem is also uncommon in its neurotic insistence that death is the only certain test of the beloved's fidelity and love's lasting power. In this respect, “A Valediction” anticipates that romantic revolution in affectivity that the Brontës articulate.⁵² Individuals like Heathcliff and Cathy Linton or Rochester and Jane Eyre cannot accept the fact that the grave will keep them apart even if they have been fatally separated in life.

The morbid affectivity of the Brontës' lovers can begin to be felt in Donne's “Valediction of my name.” Indeed, rather than wait for death to claim him as “time's fool,” the speaker employs his erotic imagination to trespass into the world of shadows. Thus, as he is lying in bed, perhaps dreaming of dying in flagrante delicto, his thoughts stray from the upright flesh to Paul's exhortation to the Ephesians: “the things which are done in secret are shameful even to speak of,” and finally to Paul's command that they must become pure and upright: “Wake up sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you” (5.12-14). I have argued that “A Valediction” is occasioned by a sexually exciting but also pathological reverie on death in which the speaker envisages his spirit rising up from the bed on which his body lies prostrate. In a remarkable prefiguration of the parapsychological experience that Mr. Lockwood will have in the paneled bedcloset of Heathcliff, Donne depicts the speaker as coming like a ghost to the window of his bedchamber and standing behind his name engraved in the glass.⁵³ Lockwood saw the letters of star-crossed love, “Catherine Earnshaw—Heathcliff—Linton,” glare luminously from the dark wood on which they were carved as he lay fitfully asleep.⁵⁴ In like manner, the speaker prophesies that the name engraved on glass will glow supernaturally in the dark, perhaps from his own spectral aura, and so remind his mistress that she is joined to him, not only as Jane Eyre stated, “bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh” (476) but in spirit for eternity. In the later half of the poem, the speaker depicts his mistress as trying with as little success as Lockwood to shut out the name that haunts her waking and sleeping thoughts, and look out for another lover. Of course, Donne did not carve the letters of any old name into the window of his poem. His speaker is no John Doe but “Jo: Donne,” as he frequently signed himself. And if the sexual anxiety that surfaces in the second half of the poem suggests that he was half expecting a Dear John letter, it came from a woman and an emotional tender spot deep within himself. For Donne was simultaneously comparing his name before he met Anne and his life without her to that existential connection of letters that spelled out both their marriage and his second and more spiritual name, “Johannes Donne.” Spirit communication, telepathy, prophetic dreams, and ghostly sightings appear regularly in Donne's poetry as metaphors for uncannily close lovers.⁵⁵ Walton would later remark on the “sympathy of souls” between John and Anne Donne and recount with some discomfort the psychic experience that the poet had while abroad with the Drurys in early 1612, when he discovers in “a dreadful vision” that leaves him speechless with shock and ecstasy that Anne has been delivered for the eighth time—of a still-born child.⁵⁶

“A Valediction of my name” is obsessed not only with jittery subjects like lovers' partings and death but with clairvoyance and spiritualism, as we can see from stanza II:

                              'Tis much that Glasse should bee
As all confessing, and through-shine as I,
                    'Tis more, that it shewes thee to thee,
                    And cleare reflects thee to thine eye.
But all such rules, loves magique can undoe,
                              Here you see mee, and I am you.

(ll.7-12)

It is just possible then, as John Shawcross has cautiously noted, that the poem was written after Donne's traumatic separation from Anne in 1612, when he seems to have had some extrasensory perception that she had lost their child. But while such an event is consistent with the ethereal character of the poem, the mystic and magical properties of their joint name, and the telepathy between the speaker and his mistress, it does not explain why Anne lies hidden at the heart of both his name, “Johannes Donne,” and the poem he wrote on his name. In order to get at that, I suggest we turn again to Paul's Letter to the Ephesians. I have already proposed that the poetic drama is set in motion by Paul's command in chapter 5: “Wake up, sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.” I do not think the allusion to this passage was simply the result of random or associative thinking. For it comes in the middle of a homily Paul delivered on sex and marriage that is pertinent to Donne's love poetry and his life with Anne. Paul's exalted vision of marriage as a great mystery that bodies forth Christ's love, sacrifice, and communion with the Universal Church was one that Donne struggled imperfectly to realize in “The Canonization.” Paul's precept that “husbands must love their wives as they love their own bodies; for a man to love his wife is for him to love himself” (28-29) clearly reflects the nobler sentiments expressed in the first half of “A Valediction.” The implicit supremacy in Pauline thought of the husband as head over the wife even though each is equally subject and attached to the other when “the two become one flesh” (32) also touches directly on Donne's relationship to Anne as it is expressed in the name “Johannes Donne.” On the one hand, she is doubly trapped not only within her married name and Donne's surname but within his Christian name Johannes as well. She is completely possessed by him; he is completely obsessed by her. His poetic warning that his spirit will continue to possess her and his later outburst of sexual jealousy in stanza VIII, where he fears that she may become the trophy wife of another man, show the consuming nature of his love. Paul himself was well aware of the “sexual immorality or impurity or greed” (5) to which Donne's speaker descends in the latter half of this poem; and in later life, Donne would express “shame” for the licentious wit of his love poetry and his early reputation as a womanizer.⁵⁷ In Paul's view, what made sex something other than an omnivorous screwing instinct, what made marriage something other than male pride of ownership, privilege, and possession, was love. Only the love of Christ could correct the evil tendency in human nature to divinize sexuality: “sexual immorality … is worshipping a false god” (5-6) or to divinize the loved one and so commit another and more infernally clever form of idolatry.⁵⁸ Both in his life and in his art, Donne felt prone to these dual idolatries; “Valediction of my name” is no exception. Often, his speakers would turn in disgust on one craving—whether for sex or for a particular woman—and savagely embrace the other, leaving a critic like Christopher Ricks with the understandable impression that Donne was “corrosively unfaithful” to the finer spirit of his love poems.⁵⁹ Stanza III suggests that the ballast to his treacherous changes of heart or to the inner disarray that Paul had seen in the Ephesians lay with Anne.

                              As no one point, nor dash,
Which are but accessaries to this name,
                    The showers and tempests can outwash,
                    So shall all times finde mee the same;
You this intirenesse better may fulfill,
                              Who have the patterne with you still.

(ll. 13-18)

The art of discerning Donne's character from his signature involves not only graphology but cryptography, for his writing is secret, intelligible only to those with a key to his heart. Many are the readers who have thus tried to do a cardiograph on this poet, goaded on by the hearts that he lays open for anatomy in his love poetry but that remain foolproof to analysis. In the above stanza, Donne suggests that it is Anne who has the key, “the pattern,” or the code that can decipher the tempestuous points, dashes, scrawl, and scratches of his character. This is because Anne is present inside his name—Johannes—not only as his sole possession but as his stable inner self, his soul. The naming of her within his name—the identification of Anne at last—is crucial to the self-representation that develops in “Valediction of my name.” For as he said in another “Song” of leave-taking, which is also thought to have been written at the time of his continental journey with the Drurys, she is his “sweetest love,” “the best of mee,” his “divining heart.” These compliments of almost mystical sweetness redeem the vicious streak that runs through Donne's poetry. William Empson was close to the truth when he suggested that the mistress is made a Christ in Donne's love poetry.⁶⁰ It is a truth that also shows how strong is the human temptation to idolatry. But Donne could narrowly avoid this temptation in stanza III by bearing in mind the qualifier of Paul: “As God's dear children, then, take him as your pattern, and follow Christ by loving as he loved you, giving himself up for us as an offering and a sweet-smelling sacrifice to God” (Eph. 5.1-3). The pattern of love for both man and woman, husband and wife, lies in Christ. Each can see, if he or she wishes, the face of Christ in the other. Sexual love need not be the enemy of Christian love but a means of following Christ, especially when there is the blessing of a “true maryage,” as in the poems I have already examined. If Donne is absent from this poem either because he stands condemned by contemporary theory as an author or because he imagines himself a ghost, Anne is the “firm substantiall” presence of stanza V, bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh, soul of his soul:

                              Then, as all my soules bee,
Emparadis'd in you (in whom alone
                    I understand, and grow and see,)
                    The rafters of my body, bone
Being still with you, the Muscle, Sinew', and Veine,
                              Which tile this house, will come againe.

(ll.25-30)

As the mother is often the earliest love object that the child magnifies into a figure of numinous importance, so Anne provides psychic mirroring for Donne, reassuring him that he is seen, understood, known by name, and loved. Psychoanalysis now realizes that self-integration, psychological development, and religious maturity all depend upon the growth in affirmative personal relations that can sustain us from birth to death.⁶¹ In the second stanza of “A Valediction,” Donne may claim that he is a godlike artist whose poem creates Anne (“it shewes thee to thee,” l.9) and makes her over in his image (“here you see mee, and I am you,” l.12). However, by the fifth stanza he also concedes that she reconstitutes him through her love; and without her, he cannot “grow” either reproductively or spiritually in likeness to Christ. As John and Anne create each other anew in this poem, so we have in Christ the mystery of a God who humbles himself to the life cycle; who could not be incarnate without the consent of Mary to be his mother; who allows us to find him reflected in the faces of those we love the most; and who consequently feels “tender jealosy” towards the poet's idolatry, for it is only human of Donne to see in Anne God's image.⁶²

To bring my argument to its close, I turn to “A nocturnall upon S. Lucies day.” I am prepared to run the risk of being labeled “naive”⁶³ by presuming that this charnel house of a poem was inspired by Anne's death on 15 August 1617; and that it might well have been written as that terrible year drew to an end, when, Walton suggests, Donne sank deeper into depression, “his very soul … elemented of nothing but sadness” (260). The complicated Latin epitaph that Donne composed for Anne's funeral monument afforded him one last opportunity to sign his name as “Johannes Donne.” We have seen in “A Valediction of my name” that Anne gave his signature her depth, substance, and stability. After her death, he was indeed existentially diminished to “Jo: Donne,” that “ragged bony name” that preached Anne's mortality and his “ruinous” grief. The portrait that depicts Donne in the Deanery of St. Paul's in 1620 shows a grave figure with hollow, sunken eyes, much altered from the neat, dapper face in the Issac Oliver miniature made a year before Anne's death. By the time Donne posed for his own funeral monument in 1631, he had become a “deaths head,” the living embodiment of his skeletal name, as the emaciated face in the Droeshout engraving shows.⁶⁴ He was not altogether exaggerating when he described himself in “A nocturnall” as a “dead thing” (l.12) or a “carcasse” (l.27), more inhuman than a “beast” (l.32), more unfeeling than “plants,” and more cold than “stones” (l.33) when Anne More, the soul of his named identity, was dead. As he said in another elegy, “sickly, alas, short-liv'd, aborted bee / Those Carkas verses, whose soule is not shee” (“A Funerall Elegie,” ll.13-14).

I propose that we approach this poem by standing with Donne at the foot of the bed in which Anne died five days after giving birth to a stillborn daughter.⁶⁵ In all likelihood, this was the marital bed where Anne made love with John, conceived their children, and endured twelve confinements and where he, in turn, imagined and even conceived some of his most evocative love poems. Given the centrality of the household bed to the great passages of life in the seventeenth century—labor and birthing, marriage and sex, the death throes and passing—it would have been almost impossible for the speaker who grieves, “shrunke” (l.7) in upon himself, in the shadows of the bed, to think of “her death, (which word wrongs her)” (l.28) without recalling the other vital human activities that were performed in this bed and keep her so vividly and painfully alive for him. Anne herself died in the middle of the night, and Donne's “nocturnall” not only commemorates this fact, but in its express allusion to St. Lucies feast day on 13 December, the poem also canonizes the month of their marriage in 1601.⁶⁶ The legality of their union, contracted after a whirlwind courtship that may have begun in the summer of 1600, was not clearly established until the spring of 1602.⁶⁷ Neither Anne nor John seems to have been psychologically prepared for the cold condemnation or rebuff to which they would be subjected. Their marriage, a major occasion for social celebration, propelled them instead into a world of outer darkness where they were all but dead to the society that had sustained them. The dramatic contrasts and surprising reversals contained within their own marital narrative is remembered in the nostalgic close of the “nocturnall,” where the speaker advises a new round of green, young lovers to cherish what little time and happiness they have together before they too pass into oblivion.

But I am None; nor will my Sunne renew.
You lovers, for whose sake, the lesser Sunne
                    At this time to the Goat is runne
                    To fetch new lust, and give it you,
                              Enjoy your summer all;
Since shee enjoyes her long nights festivall,
Let mee prepare towards her, and let mee call
This houre her Vigill, and her Eve, since this
Both the yeares, and the dayes deep midnight is.

(ll.36-45)

The cyclic pain in this poem, where the blackest of nights recalls the sweetest of days, where the dead of winter awakens thoughts of hot summer love, and where Anne's last rites renew the memory of the Donnes' marital rites, derives, in part, from the woman's body that is laid out on the bed before the speaker. In his memorial tribute to Anne,⁶⁸ Donne would record the “Immani febre correptæ” or savage, immense, ravishing fever that killed her and that points to the puerperal fever that claimed many women in childbed. Yet the history of Anne's childbearing years suggests the remarkable resilience of her body and the regularity of both their marital relations and her female cycle. Rough calculation of the birthdates of the Donne's twelve children indicates that Anne must have been pregnant during some period of almost every year of their marriage. Three of her children were conceived around the time of their wedding anniversary in December and five of their children were born in the winter months. Two children were conceived near the time of Anne's death in August, while three children were born in August, the last being the direct cause of her death. There were five spring conceptions and four spring births. The spring conceptions resulted in winter births; the summer conceptions in spring births; and the autumn conceptions in August births. The power of this female cycle—so abruptly stopped—continues to throb in the seasonal rhythms, solar rotations, and emotional revolutions of a “nocturnall.” The speaker's outrageous complaint that “I am every dead thing” (l.12), when his mistress lies cold and still before him, indicates not only the self-centered nature of grief as we go over and over our own pain of loss, but the psychological difficulty of living with the death of those who have been such a vibrant center of our lives. However, the circular thinking in this poem where death greets life and life embraces death is a deep mindset rooted in the ancient association between the nuptial bed and the deathbed. Long before marriage was regulated by those laws that proved an impediment for Anne More and John Donne, it was customary for the nuptial blessing to be bestowed on the couple at night, in bed, prior to sexual consummation of their union. The marital “festivall” followed with the coming of the light and lasted for three days. But this could be a “long night” for the newly joined couple because sexual abstinence was sometimes required of them.⁶⁹ Donne's speaker honors this venerable ritual in his generous impulse to give young lovers his blessing, to invoke the blessed memory of his beloved partner, and to hope that his sorrow may be a tenebrae, or three-day passion of darkness that prefigures resurrection and new marriage.

In the closing lines of his Latin epitaph in memoriam of Anne, Donne prayed for “Nouo matrimonio (annuat Deus) hoc loco sociandos, a new marriage (may God assent) in this place joining together.” We have returned full circle to the longing of “The Relique,” where the speaker hopes that he and his mistress may “make their soules, at the last busie day, / meet at this grave” (ll.10-11). But though Anne and John were a devoted couple, Donne would survive his wife by fourteen years, another lifetime, almost as long as their marriage. Anne, meanwhile, would share a grave with her stillborn daughter,⁷⁰ not the husband whom she loved and who had pledged to mingle his ashes with hers. From her grave, she posed the fear that lies buried in his most profound love poetry—the fear that we are alone in death, that what remains of him will be “Jo: Donne,” not “Johannes Donne,” for there are no marriages in heaven.

The clichés of romance speak of undying love and point to the enduring strength of our human attachments. The pain of death and bereavement is bearable for many Christians because they behold in the credo of the resurrection the promise of reunion with those whom they loved on this earth in the flesh. In the love poems that I have examined, Donne celebrated our love in human flesh as a thing divine. But in the Westmoreland sonnet, which he wrote after his wife's death, he depicted God as competing with Anne for his love and exclusive claim to his soul. Other Holy Sonnets and religious poems such as “A Hymne to Christ” or “A Hymne to God the Father” strengthen the impression of a God who is a possessive monster.⁷¹ “As thou / art jealous, Lord, so I am jealous now, / Thou lov'st not, till from loving more, thou free / my soule” (“Hymne to Christ,” ll.17-20). This God does not hesitate to batter and break the human heart in order to subjugate the soul. Smoking ruins are all that is left of the ties and troths that weave our human existence and that strike delight to the inmost heart of his love poems.⁷² Yet, however distorted Donne's representation of divine love in his religious verse may appear, his views are perfectly consistent with the orthodox thinking of male religious celibates even today that, sad as it may first seem, “man and woman are not made for one another but for God.”⁷³ Walton's hagiography of Donne's metamorphosis from a lover and poet into a preacher is predicated on such a premise. Though Donne loved and died, hungered and raved in his poetry like a Heathcliff, his holy death is that of a “high master-spirit” like Brontë's St John Rivers, who wants no human lover and who gasps to his divine betrothed, “Surely I come quickly.”⁷⁴ What I have tried to show in this tribute to Anne More is that Donne's most exalted ideas of love do not arise out of a detachment from personal intimacy but out of a dogged devotion to human attachments “even to the edge of doom.” As he admits in the Westmoreland sonnet, Anne drew him towards God. “Here the admyring her my mind did whett / To seeke thee God” (ll.5-6). In “A nocturnall,” he ponders the psychological truth that the death of “she whome I lovd,” and with her of primary intimacy, makes the world seem unreal, the self seem insubstantial, “all others” (l.19) insensible, and life godforsaken. If death brings our personal loving to an end, with all its adulterous excess and idolatrous intensity, it may mean the death of God as well. If there is no marriage in heaven, there will be no “new marriage” of divine love either; since it is the lifelong family romance of parents and siblings, mother or father figures, and mature lovers and friends that give rise to belief in God. Cut this love-knot, “divorce mee, ‘untie, or breake that knot againe” (“Batter my heart,” l.11), cut Donne free from More, extract Anne from the core of John, and you leave the shell of a man, the shadow of a God; for you have plucked out the heart of their mystery.

What ending can we rearrange for Donne that acknowledges the primacy of Anne in his poetic communication of love for others or for God? To the poet has been destined the arduous task of resurrecting his love from the grave, indeed from the very ashes of the crypt. To feminist literary critics has recently been bequeathed the work of making the dead, the silent, and women speak again. We only have Donne's word—the subject of endless speculation—for what Anne might say. I suggest, then, that we turn to another woman figure to supply Anne's closing remarks, a woman who brought nobility to the stigma of adultery, Nathaniel Hawthorne's Hester Prynne. At the beginning of this study, I imagined the dying Donne's secret alliance with the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale in his transgressive love for his wife. Both Walton and Hawthorne give the man, not the woman, the final word. Both Donne and Dimmesdale imagine the end of life with fear. “I fear! I fear!” cries Dimmesdale, “that, when we forgot our God,—when we violated our reverence each for the other's soul,—it was thenceforth vain to hope that we could meet hereafter, in an everlasting and pure reunion.” Let us close, however, with the prior questions that Hester Prynne puts to Arthur Dimmesdale: “‘Shall we not meet again?’ whispered she, bending her face down close to his. ‘Shall we not spend our immortal life together’?”⁷⁵ Let us hope the answer is yes.

Notes

1. Izaak Walton, “Life of Dr. John Donne” (1675), in Seventeenth-Century Prose and Poetry, ed. Alexander M. Witherspoon and Frank J. Warnke, 2nd ed. (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1963), 270. (Subsequent references will be parenthetically indicated by page number in the text.)

2. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter and Selected Tales (Penguin Books, 1986), 270-71.

3. Critics have traditionally regarded Donne's love for his wife as sacrosanct and have avoided any unseemly suggestion that he could have been actively thinking of his wife when he wrote his most shocking or profane love poems by suggesting that he wrote them before his marriage or that his mind was on other things. John Carey has claimed most recently in his edition of John Donne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 88, that most of the Songs and Sonets were written after 1603, while John T. Shawcross dates them before 1601 in “Poetry, Personal and Impersonal,” The Eagle and The Dove: Reassessing John Donne, ed. Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1986), 56. Rather than conclude that Donne is a hypocrite or a cold-hearted bastard, I think we should pursue the thought that Anne inspired not only Donne's love but his love poetry, even if Shawcross warns us of the intentional fallacy and the danger of reading her too directly or personally into his poems as the actual subject (54, 62). Good reasons have been put forward for not relegating Anne More to the shadowy background of Donne's biography, but for bringing her forward as a vital issue for his love poetry by John Haffenden in his edition of William Empson: Essays on Renaissance Literature, Vol. 1, “Donne and the new philosophy” (Cambridge University Press, 1993), 21-25. Haffenden follows Empson in refusing to leave Anne out of the speculative discussion of Donne's love poems, “Donne in the new edition,” 146-53. Two of the contributors in this volume, Camille Slights, “A Pattern of Love: Representations of Anne,” and Achsah Guibbory, “Fear of ‘loving more’: Death and the Loss of Sacramental Love,” argue that Anne cannot be found as an historical presence but only as a figure with representational power in his work.

4. Christopher Ricks, “Donne After Love,” in Literature and the body: essays on populations and persons, ed. Elaine Scarry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1988), 34-35.

5. See Guibbory, “Fear of ‘loving more’,” 16-29, for a fine discussion of Christianity's tangled history of sexuality, esp. pp. 213-17 for her remarks on Jerome.

6. Dayton Haskin, “On Trying to Make the Record Speak More,” in this volume, also suggests that Walton tried to downplay the notorious history of Donne's marriage to Anne More, at the same time that he indicated this was “not done” conduct.

7. “‘Under Ye Rage of A Hott Sun and Yr Eyes’: John Donne's Love Letters to Ann More” in The Eagle and The Dove, 31-33. See further related comments in Bell's essay in this volume, “‘if it be a shee’: The Riddle of Donne's ‘Curse’.”

8. See R. C. Bald's account of this debacle in John Donne: A Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), 134.

9. Theresa M. DiPasquale, “Ambivalent Mourning in ‘Since she whome I lovd’,” and Guibbory, “Fear of ‘loving more’,” both in this volume, also emphasize Donne's fear of idolatrous attachment to Anne.

10. Ibid., 1-8, 13-14, respectively.

11. Ricks, “Donne After Love,” 62.

12. Empson, “Donne in the new edition,” 152, believes that Donne only paid cynical lip-service to Jerome on marital love “because he could not otherwise feed his wife and children.” However, a recent reviewer of Haffenden's edition of Empson's essays on Donne, Eric Griffiths, argues in the TLS, “One Double string: Donne, Empson and the perplexities of love,” 30 July 1993, 7, that the poet was more seriously oppressed by Christianity's sexual pessimism than Empson imagined. DiPasquale, “Ambivalent Mourning,” and Guibbory, “Fear of ‘loving more’,” make related points.

13. See Frances M. Malpezzi's essay “Love's Liquidity in ‘Since she whome I lovd,” in this volume, for a discussion of water imagery in Donne's verse and the representation of Anne as a sacred stream.

14. DiPasquale, “Ambivalent Mourning,” p. 183.

15. See John Carey's discussion of Donne's anxieties about death and resurrection, especially as they relate to the severance of the body and soul in John Donne: Life, Mind and Art (London: Faber paperback, 1981), 222-24. See, for example, Sermons 4, 358 where Donne argues: “naturally the soule and body are united, when they are separated by Death, it is contrary to nature, which nature still affects this union; and consequently the soule is the lesse perfect, for this separation” and his review of both orthodox and heretical views as to whether the resurrection was one of soul and/or body in 3, 115-116 and 4, 74-75.

16. Thomas Docherty, John Donne, Undone (London: Methuen, 1986), 175-76, summarizes the body of critical opinion that holds that “a something else” is a daring euphemism for “A Jesus Christ.” See, for example, Theodore Redpath's 2nd ed. of The Songs and Sonets of John Donne (London: Methuen, 1987), 286-87 or William Empson, “Donne the space man,” 87.

17. Malpezzi, “Love's Liquidity,” sees a steady movement higher in love from Anne to Donne. I do not.

18. From the earliest extant portrait of Donne, which dates back to 1591 and was made into an engraving by William Marshall for the Poems of 1635.

19. Patrick Grant, Images and Ideas in the Literature of the English Renaissance (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1979), 114. See Susan Haskins' splendid cultural history Mary Magdalene: Myth and Metaphor (London: Harper Collins, 1993), esp. 177-91, though, alas, she does not discuss this poem.

20. DiPasquale, “Ambivalent Mourning,” and Guibbory, “Fear of ‘loving more’,” also believe this passage was disturbing for Donne.

21. Uta Ranke-Heinemann, Eunuchs for The Kingdom of God: Women, Sexuality and The Catholic Church, trans. Peter Heinegg (Penguin Books, 1991), 53, refers to Augustine's De trinitate 12, 12. See Edmund Hill's trans., The Trinity, Vol. 5 of The Works of St. Augustine, ed. John E. Rotelle O.S.A. (Brooklyn: New City Press, 1991), 329. Augustine fittingly quotes St. Paul's famous promise to baptized Christians in Gal. 3.26 that “there is no male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus” and concludes that “because they are being renewed to the image of God where there is no sex [my italics], it is there where there is no sex that man was made to the image of God, that is in the spirit of his mind.”

22. Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (Penguin Books, 1985), 319-21. Heathcliff bribes the sexton to bury him beside Cathy in the grave. “By the time Linton gets to us, he'll not know which is which.”

23. Alan W. Watts, Myth and Ritual in Christianity (London: Thames & Hudson, 1954), 108.

24. “Donne After Love,” 64-65.

25. See Ranke-Heinemann's discussion of Augustine's theological efforts to link original sin not only to intercourse but sexual pleasure in Eunuchs for The Kingdom of God, 76-77, 92-93 and 259, as well as Donne's own echoes of Augustine's sexual anxiety in Sermons 7, 361-62. See also Guibbory's related points in “Fear of ‘loving more’.”

26. Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (London: Faber paperback, 1989), 235-36. Marina Warner in Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary (London: Quartet Books, 1978), 97, discusses the later legacy of Aquinas, that “the soul's personality is expressed by and through the body.”

27. Ranke-Heinemann, Eunuchs for The Kingdom of God, 138.

28. Bald, John Donne, 139.

29. Ibid., 146-47. See Haskin's discussion of the history of interpreting “The Canonization” as it relates to Donne's secret marriage, above, pp. 39-65.

30. See Malcolm Mackenzie Ross, Poetry and Dogma: The Transfiguration of Eucharistic Symbols in Seventeenth-Century English Poetry (New York: Octagon Books, 1969), 1-48, and James S. Baumlin's modern theoretical restatement of the problem in his chapter “Sacramental Theology and the Poetics of Absence,” John Donne and The Rhetorics of Renaissance Discourse (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991), 159-90.

31. Ranke-Heinemann, Eunuchs for The Kingdom of God, 182.

32. Bald, John Donne, 138.

33. The arguments of DiPasquale in “Ambivalent Mourning,” Malpezzi in “Love's Liquidity,” and Guibbory in “Fear of ‘loving more’,” esp. 5-6, all rightly suggest that Donne's verse gives sacred and sacramental importance to Anne but none note this crucial historical closure.

34. Eric Griffiths argues in his TLS review of Empson on Donne's love poetry, “One Double string,” 7, that “Donne lived in the between of two lives, not in their union; this is why he loved to make up words beginning with ‘inter’.” However, psychoanalytic feminists like Jessica Benjamin have described a psychic state of intersubjectivity that “refers to what happens between individuals and within the individual-with-others, rather than within the individual psyche.” See “A Desire of One's Own: Psychoanalytic Feminism and Intersubjective Space” in Feminist Studies/Critical Studies: Issues, Terms and Contexts, ed. Teresa de Lauretis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 78-101, esp. 92. Without this sense of intersubjectivity, Benjamin argues that there can be no profound sense of subjectivity and I would argue that Donne's habitation of a ‘between’ state in his love poems points to this intersubjectivity. The Holy Sonnets, on the other hand, may point to that intrapsychic and phallic mode of representation that “does not distinguish between real and imagined, inside and outside, introjective-projective processes and interaction.”

35. See Julia Walker's intriguing discussion of the numerical importance of 64 to Donne, and the Beatles to some of his critics in “Anne More: A Name Not Written,” in this volume.

36. See Carey, Life, Mind and Art, 92, who believes that these lines could not possibly have been addressed to Donne's wife but that the question of the woman's identity is beside the point. Ilona Bell argues, in contrast to the critics who read an unmarried love affair in these lives, that “John Donne wrote ‘The Anniversarie’ for Ann More when her name was More,” “Donne's Love Letters to Ann More,” The Eagle and The Dove, 46.

37. See Rosemary Radford Ruether, “Misogynism and Virginal Feminism in the Fathers of the Church,” in Religion and Sexism: Images of Woman in the Jewish and Christian Traditions, ed. Rosemary Radford Ruether (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1974), 161.

38. Donne touches uneasily on this issue in an Easter sermon of 1627 (7, 376-78). He notes Aquinas' familiarity with a body of Catholic opinion that “Death it selfe does not dissolve the band of Marriage.” Donne did not share this Roman disapproval of second marriages and felt that Christians should not be stopped from marrying again if their spouses died. Nonetheless, he counsels continence—the course he himself chose after Anne's death—as more consistent with the monogamous ideal of having one partner through life and perhaps beyond.

39. See the Shawcross ed., n. 19, 109.

40. Life, Mind and Art, 162-63, 200-1, 222-23. Carey argues on 162 and 223 that at the time in his theological studies when he wrote the Holy Sonnets, Donne flirted with the heretical theory that the soul must die or sleep with the body until the Last Judgment. Helen Gardner firmly held that as a preacher Donne insisted that the soul is immortal and does not die with the body. See Appendix A, “Donne's views on the State of the Soul after Death,” in The Divine Poems of John Donne (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 114-17.

41. Bald, John Donne, 326.

42. “We shall be like the Angels, sayes Christ; In that wherein we can be like them, we shall be like them, in the exalting and refining of the faculties of our soules; But they shall never attaine to be like us in our glorified bodies,” Donne argued in Sermons 6, 297. But in 3, 117, he added that “flesh and bloud … preserved by propagation and generation … cannot inherit heaven, where there is no marying, nor giving in marriage, … we shall be as the Angels.”

43. Obviously, I disagree with Helen Gardner that “it is a lover and his mistress, not a husband and wife, who prefer to be blest ‘here on earth’ rather than to share with others the full bliss of heaven,” quoted by Haffenden in his “Introduction” to William Empson: Essays on Renaissance Literature, 23. DiPasquale argues in “Ambivalent Mourning,” that Donne longed for what he could not hope to have, “a heavenly continuation of his marriage to Anne.”

44. “Love in married life,” Western Sexuality: Practice and Precept in Past and Present Times, ed. Philippe Ariès and André Bejin, trans. Anthony Forster (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985), 138.

45. Walker, “Anne More,” also suggests the poem is spoken in bed after lovemaking.

46. See Baumlin's deconstructive reading of this poem, “Sacramental Theology,” John Donne, 176-84, esp. 180.

47. Bald, John Donne, 39.

48. John Carey in his Oxford ed. of John Donne, xxi.

49. Philippe Ariès, The Hour of Our Death, trans. Helen Weaver (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981), 609.

50. See Shawcross's discussion of the possible biographical circumstances that evoked this poem in The Eagle and The Dove, 56, 61-62, and Carey's discussion as Oxford editor of the autobiographical allusions in the poems and puns on Anne More's name, John Donne, xxvi, 88. Shawcross thinks most of the Songs and Sonets were written before 1601; Carey thinks after 1603.

51. Walton, 259-60 and Bald, John Donne, 326-27, note these practical advantages.

52. See Ariès, The Hour of Our Death, 442, 455, 581-82.

53. My reading differs “materially” from the fine analysis of Elaine Scarry, “Donne: ‘But yet the Body is His Booke’” in Literature and the body, 82-83, in that she presumes that Donne stands in flesh and blood on the other side of the window, while I think he comes as an apparition to haunt his wife and frighten her into lifelong fidelity.

54. Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights, 61-67.

55. See “Elegie: On his Mistris,” l.47; “Elegie: His parting from her,” ll.69-72; “The good-morrow,” l.6; and “The Dreame,” ll.15-18.

56. Walton, 256. See Bald's account of these strange events in John Donne, 251-53.

57. Bald, John Donne, 121, 135.

58. DiPasquale, “Ambivalent Mourning,” 6-7, 13 and Guibbory, “Fear of ‘loving more’,” 10, discuss Donne's all-too-human temptation.

59. “Donne After Love,” 64.

60. “Donne in the new edition,” 141. Malpezzi in “Love's Liquidity” concludes that “Donne's love—in his role as poet—has been patterned on Christ-in-Anne.”

61. See Ana-Maria Rizzuto, The Birth of the Living God: A Psychoanalytic Study (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979).

62. See Catherine Keller's feminist revisioning of God as related to all persons and as feeling the experiences of the world in From a Broken Web: Separation, Sexism and Self (Boston: Beacon Press, 1988), 214.

63. Carey, Life, Mind and Art, 92 and Judith Scherer Herz, “Donne and the Poetics of Concealment,” The Eagle and The Dove, 11, argue that it would be “naive” to read the “real grief or real loss” of Anne's death into this poem.

64. See the relevant plates of Donne in Bald, John Donne, 382, 312, 529 respectively.

65. Ibid., 324.

66. See Kate Gartner Frost, “Contexts of ‘A nocturnall upon S. Lucies Day’,” in this volume, who argues that this date had strong private meaning for Donne and that he may even have married Anne on this day.

67. Bald, John Donne, 139, says 27 April, to be exact.

68. I am indebted to M. Thomas Hester's translation and critique of the Latin epitaph in this volume.

69. Philippe Ariès, “The indissoluble marriage,” in Western Sexuality, 142-43.

70. Bald, John Donne, 325.

71. See Empson's damning verdict on Donne's “disgusting God” in “Donne in the new edition,” 152, although Malpezzi, “Love's Liquidity,” believes Donne followed scriptural and Christian tradition in seeing jealousy as a mark of God's goodness.

72. I echo Rochester's beautiful tribute to Jane Eyre on 182 of the Penguin ed., 1985: “I knew … you would do me good in some way, at some time: I saw it in your eyes when I first beheld you: their expression and smile did not … strike delight to my very inmost heart so for nothing.” Like Guibbory, “Fear of ‘loving more’,” I agree that Donne's God ultimately “requires what seems humanly impossible—the renunciation of the closest, deepest ties to those who seem virtually a part of our selves.”

73. William Johnston, S. J., The Mirror Mind: Spirituality and Transformation (London: Collins, 1983), 168.

74. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, 477.

75. Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, 269.