SOURCE: DiPasquale, Theresa M. “The Cunning Elements of ‘I am a little world’” and “The Three Sonnets of ‘Goodfriday, 1613.’” In Literature and Sacrament: The Sacred and the Secular in John Donne, pp. 101-19, 119-29. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1999.

[In the following excerpt, DiPasquale explores the spiritual anxiety that she perceives in Donne's religious poetry, using La Corona, “I am a little world,” and “Goodfriday, 1613” as a basis for the discussion.]

The sonnet is a problematic form for post-Reformation English poets because of the idolatrous implications of its history as the Petrarchan poets' verse-form of choice. As Ernest Gilman points out, Sidney uses the “the language of Protestant iconoclastic polemics” to define Astrophil's folly in Sonnet 5: “What we call Cupid's dart, / An image is, which for our selves we carve; / And fooles, adore in temple of our hart” (Gilman, 12-13, quoting Astrophil and Stella 5:5-7). As suggested in Sidney's phrase “which for our selves we carve,” the problem with poetry is not simply that sonnets are put to work in the service of idolatrous desire. Rather, the peril lies in the making of the iconic, highly wrought artifact itself, in the carving of verbal images, regardless of the sort of love or desire those images express.¹

In La Corona, therefore, Donne takes care to dissociate the art of sonnet-making from the sin of presumptuous self-reliance; the delayed appearance of the word “I” in the work is one safeguard against the futile subjectivity and idolatrous self-absorption that are a sonneteer's Petrarchan birthright.²La Corona's liturgical language also helps deflect the danger attending the sonnet form, distinguishing Donne's work as that of a poet whose words proceed from a sense of spiritual community and rely upon the Spirit of God for inspiration; the poet of La Corona thus carefully avoids claiming to effect his own salvation through “the worke wrought.”³

Many of Donne's Holy Sonnets, however, step dangerously closer to the Petrarchan edge: in “O Might those sighes,” the speaker feels that he has “spent” (2) all of his eloquence—troped as the “sighes and teares” (1) of Petrarchan love poetry—on the worldly “griefs” (6) of his “Idolatry” (5), and that he has no poetic resources left to express the “holy discontent” (3) of repentance; in “Oh, to vex me,” he parallels his “humorous … contritione” (5)—which is “ridlingly distemperd, cold and hott” (7)—with the oxymoronic “contraryes” (1) of Petrarchan poetry; and in “What if this present were the worlds last night?” he imagines Christ as the mistress whose “picture” he holds in his heart (3), relying—rashly, if Petrarch's experience is any guide—on the argument that his beloved's “beauteous forme assures a pitious minde” (14).⁴

In most of the Holy Sonnets, moreover, and in “Goodfriday, 1613,” the poet/speaker is a man alone. His voice—like that of Petrarch in the Rime sparse—rings out in a desolate space inhabited only by himself and the projected image of his Beloved; and, like Petrarch, he often speaks as much to himself as to the object of his devotion. He is cut off from that sense of shared liturgical experience that affords La Corona its sacramental power; he must therefore rely upon his own invention, his own concetti, his own skill as a sonneteer.

In a sermon on the Apostles' Creed, Donne draws a sharp contrast between private and communal prayer that illuminates the differences between the Holy Sonnets and La Corona:

I lock my doore to my selfe, and I throw my selfe downe in the presence of my God, … and I bend all my powers, and faculties upon God, as I think, and suddenly I finde my selfe scattered, melted, fallen into vaine thoughts, into no thoughts; I am upon my knees, and I talke, and I think nothing; I deprehend my selfe in it, and I goe about to mend it, I gather new forces, new purposes to try againe, and doe better, and I doe the same thing againe. I beleeve in the Holy Ghost, but doe not finde him, if I seeke him onely in private prayer; But in Ecclesia, when I goe to meet him in the Church, when I seeke him where hee hath promised to bee found … in his Ordinances, and meanes of salvation in his Church, instantly … not a dew, but a shower is powred out upon me, and presently followes … The Communion of Saints, the assistance of the Militant and Triumphant Church in my behalfe; And presently followes … The remission of sins, the purifying of my conscience, in that water, which is his blood, Baptisme, and in that wine, which is his blood, the other Sacrament; and presently followes … A resurrection of my body … and … Life everlasting …

(Sermons 5:249-50)

In the phrases from the creed, the expression of communal belief recited in the first person singular by the whole congregation at Morning and Evening Prayer, Donne finds the words that bring peace to the human soul. As in La Corona, refreshment and hope spring from the established forms and patterns of the Faith. Indeed, in another sermon, Donne portrays the avoidance of raw spontaneity as a bid for the very highest kind of creative achievement: “Of God himselfe, it is safely resolved in the Schoole, that he never did any thing in any part of time, of which he had not an eternall pre-conception, an eternall Idea, in himselfe before. … And therefore let him be our patterne for that, to worke after patternes …” (Sermons 7:60-61). In La Corona, Donne takes the liturgy and ordinances of the Church as his pattern—and the creative achievement of the work cannot be separated from its status as a formal prayer.

In sharp contrast to such efficacious language is the meaningless succession of half-distracted, idiosyncratic prayers which, in Donne's sermon on the Creed, dissolve into “vaine thoughts, into no thoughts.” These failed private devotions are strongly reminiscent of the Holy Sonnets, works filled with spurious arguments, false starts, unresolved questions, and sudden reversals. We are faced, then, with Donne's own doubts concerning the kind of prayer represented in the Holy Sonnets; and yet the impact of those works—their success as art—is no doubt partly a function of the degree to which they express the experience of personal insufficiency, of tortured subjectivity, of divine absence rather than Eucharistic presence, of an ongoing frustration reminiscent of Astrophil's Petrarchan anguish rather than joyful fruition of the sort that characterizes love lyrics like “The Good Morrow” and “The Sunne Rising.” As Gardner puts it, “The flaws” in the Holy Sonnets' “spiritual temper are a part of their peculiar power” (xxxi).

It is still useful, however, to discuss the Holy Sonnets in terms of sacramental function; for Donne's desire to write sacramentally efficacious poetry, as demonstrated in “The Crosse” and La Corona, also bears upon the inward turn of his Divine Meditations.⁵ In “Wilt thou love God,” one of the sonnets that Martz links to a specific Ignatian meditation, Donne's speaker interiorizes the Eucharistic meal, playing upon the idea of mental communion familiar to Protestants and Catholics alike. He presents the subject matter of the poem as spiritual food that effects his likeness to the deity: “Wilt thou love God, as he thee! then digest, / My Soule, this wholsome meditation” (1-2). As in La Corona, the thoughts that feed the poet/speaker of this sonnet are characterized by his sense of wonder at the interwoven mysteries of Incarnation and Passion, and even his vocabulary recalls the Eucharistic sonnet cycle; a reference to man's gaining, through Christ, the “endlesse rest” of the heavenly Sabbath (8) echoes line 10 of La Corona's first sonnet. Although the piece begins as a solitary meditation in which the poet/speaker addresses his own soul, it moves in line 12 from the second person to the first person plural “Us,” effectively confirming the speaker's status as a part of redeemed humanity, of the “man” (13, 14) Christ died to save.

The speakers of Donne's divine poems do not always feel so peacefully capable of mental communion, however; in “Since she whome I lovd, hath payd her last debt,” as I have argued elsewhere, Donne portrays himself as prone to idolize the sacramental woman who has been his Eucharistic conduit of grace (“Ambivalent Mourning,” 184-91). In other poems, the poet/speaker feels himself altogether cut off from the sacramental, denied the purgative waters of baptism and unable to look upon the visible signs of Christ's Body and Blood. This is the case in the Holy Sonnet “I am a little world” and in “Goodfriday, 1613,” which is a highly compressed sequence of three sonnets that leads, as most Petrarchan sonnet sequences do, only to ongoing desire and irresolution.⁶

In “I am a little world,” Donne resolves the problem of spiritual sickness and wrests a sacramental conclusion from the poem's fire imagery; but in the Goodfriday poem, one too many “turns” make for a conclusion that recalls the last-minute reversals in many of the sonnets of Astrophil and Stella and that leaves the poet/speaker alone with his conceit, a conceit that does far more to win the human reader's admiration than to effect the poet's or reader's sacramental union with Christ crucified.

THE CUNNING ELEMENTS OF “I AM A LITTLE WORLD”

In “I am a little world,” the speaker combats a nearly desperate fear of damnation with a desire to be purged, either by water or by fire. He declares himself “a little world made cunningly / Of Elements, and an Angelike spright” (1-2), but he feels certain that his microcosm is doomed:

But black sinne hath betraid to endlesse night
My worlds both parts, and (oh) both parts must die.
You which beyond that heaven which was most high
Have found new sphears, and of new lands can write,
Powre new seas in mine eyes, that so I might
Drowne my world with my weeping earnestly,
Or wash it if it must be drown'd no more:
But oh it must be burnt; …

(3-10)

Gardner (76) has explained that the sonnet's movement from flood to fire is based upon two scriptural passages. Recalling God's rainbow covenant with Noah—that there shall never again be “a flood to destroy the earth” (Genesis 9:11)—the speaker reasons that his microcosm, too, “must be drown'd no more.” A watery apocalypse thus ruled out, he concludes with St. Peter that the end will be a conflagration, “the day of God, wherein the heavens being on fire, shall be dissolved, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat” (2 Peter 3:12). These biblical glosses clarify the reasoning behind the sonnet's turn at line ten, but they do not sufficiently explain either the psychological dynamics or the sacramental poetics at work in the poem.

In order to appreciate the emotional force—and, ultimately, the metapoetic implications—of the parallel Donne is making, we must recognize the typological relation between the Flood and baptism: the water of the Deluge is a “figure” of baptism (1 Peter 3:20-21). In a sermon preached at a christening, Donne stresses that the sacrament does for individual Christians what the Flood did for the earth: “it destroyes all that was sinfull in us” (Sermons 5:110). Thus, the speaker's “little world” has, like Creation itself, been drowned once already; and the connection between the macrocosmic and microcosmic events is made clearer by the fact that baptism, like the Flood, is never to be repeated. There is, as the Nicene Creed declares, “one baptism, for the remission of sins” (BCP, 251).⁷

According to Christian teaching, God has made ample provision for sins committed after baptism, but Roman Catholics and Protestants disagree sharply about the nature of that provision. Catholics find the remedy for such sin in the sacrament of Penance; repentance thus includes “not only … a contrite and humble heart [Psalm 51:17], but also the sacramental confession of those sins, … sacerdotal absolution, as well as satisfaction by fasts, alms, prayers and other devout exercises of the spiritual life” (Council of Trent, “Decree Concerning Justification,” chapter 14). But for Protestants, who recognize only two sacraments (Baptism and the Eucharist) and who reject the idea that penitents must confess to a priest, the contrite sinner is to find assurance of forgiveness in the memory of his or her baptism. Thus, in a christening sermon, Donne stresses that “all the actuall sinnes [in the infant's] future life, shall be drowned in this baptisme, as often, as he doth religiously, and repentantly consider, that in Baptisme … he received an Antidote against all poyson, against all sinne” (Sermons 5:110).⁸

Such assurances notwithstanding, however, Donne's sermons often betray the fact that—having lost access to the Catholic sacrament of Penance—he was preoccupied with the desire for a second baptism. He speaks of martyrs as having “found a lawfull way of Re-baptizing, even in bloud” (Sermons 5:66) and—in one early sermon—goes so far as to define tears of repentance as the “souls rebaptization” (Sermons 1:245). In “I am a little world,” the speaker wishes to weep such sacramentally potent tears; but he has set up his typological analogy between baptism and the Great Deluge, and having done so, he feels that his “little world,” like the earth itself, “must be drown'd no more” (9). Seeking to solve the problem he has thus posed for himself, he first considers what seems to be a valid alternative to drowning, suggesting that his world may be “wash[ed]” in tears even if it can no longer be drowned. Such a cleansing would seem to be the perfect completion of the typological comparison he has drawn: the earth, though it is never again to be utterly destroyed by water, is refreshed by gentler rains; and Christ provides not only baptism, but “another Water,” as Donne explains punningly in a sermon: the “Ablution … [of] Absolution from actuall sins, the water of contrite teares, and repentance” (Sermons 9:329).

In the poem, however, the speaker's state is one of near, if not complete, despair. In declaring from the start of his analogy that his “worlds both parts … must die” (4), the speaker has testified to a horrifying conviction: he will suffer, not only the physical death of his “Elements,” but also “the second death” (Revelation 21:8)—that of the “Angelike spright” itself.⁹ And the poem's form reflects his spiritual state. The line in which he considers washing as the alternative to drowning is the sonnet's ninth line; in a conventional Italian sonnet, it would be the turn. But here, it extends the water imagery of the octave into what ought to be the sestet, disrupting the relation between the sonnet's “both parts,” only to make a far more decisive turn by resorting to fire imagery in line 10: “But oh it must be burnt.”¹⁰ In his dark state of mind and soul, the speaker cannot rest with the thought of cleansing tears, and the poet cannot rest with a neatly shaped Italian sonnet. The poem's desperate logic is clear; since the macrocosm “must be drown'd no more” after Noah's flood, it will instead be destroyed by fire. 2 Peter 3:7 declares that, just as the world was once destroyed by water, so “the heavens and the earth, which are now, … are kept in store unto fire against the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men.” And if the fate of the macrocosm is thus fixed, must not the microcosm, too, be destined for a fiery end?

It would seem that the speaker—who, as the self-destructive inventor of the sonnet's ruling conceit, cannot be neatly distinguished from Donne, the maker of the distorted sonnet itself—has analogized himself into a furnace. He is trapped by the parallels that his own wit has generated; as we have seen, “The Crosse” warns against just such a danger: “when thy braine workes, ere thou utter it, / Crosse and correct concupiscence of witt” (57-58). But here, even the crossings and corrections—as in the careful substitution of washing for drowning—help to seal the speaker/sonneteer's fate. According to the artful parallel he has established, both parts of his “little world” are “reserved unto fire” (2 Peter 3:7) just as are the earth and sky of the macrocosm. He finds himself hedged by the flames he himself has fanned. Playing out the apocalyptic implications of his own trope, he finds that he must remain faithful to the poetic correspondence between sinful world and sinful self.

The irony of this suicidal commitment to analogy is that it springs from the poet/speaker's near-despairing sense that he has been unfaithful to the commitment he made in baptism. For it is just such apostasy which—on the microcosmic level—may lead to the fires of spiritual destruction. The Novatian heretics of the third century considered any breach in the baptismal covenant to be completely irreparable; they “denied that any man could have [grace] again, after he had once lost it, by any deadly sin committed after Baptisme” (Sermons 5:86). Many of Donne's sermons argue against such harsh doctrines and the despair they inspire.¹¹ But those pastoral efforts reflect the Dean's own preoccupations; he was haunted by the specter of an unforgivable sin, a transgression that would wipe out the effects of his baptism once and for all.¹²

Several passages in the scriptures fed Donne's fears. As he points out in a sermon on Christ's declaration that “the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven unto men” (Matthew 12:31), the concept of unforgivable sin is “grounded in evident places of Scriptures” (Sermons 5:91). One of these is Hebrews 6:4-6, a passage that sheds significant light on the emotional logic of “I am a little world”:

[I]t is impossible for those who were once enlightened, and have tasted … the good word of God, … [i]f they shall fall away, to renew them again unto repentance: … For the earth which drinketh in the rain that cometh oft upon it, and bringeth forth herbs meet for them by whom it is dressed, receiveth blessing from God: But that which beareth thorns and briers is rejected, and is nigh unto cursing; whose end is to be burned.

This passage specifically invokes the image of earth that takes no benefit from having been watered. Those who bear no fruit when they are blessed by God's rain of grace will meet a fiery doom. No wonder, then, that the speaker of the sonnet should feel the threat of flaming death for “both parts” of his microcosm. Having acknowledged that his “little world,” though it was once covered by the waters of baptism “must be drowned no more,” he must fear that his wrongdoing has ruled out the possibility of being “renew[ed] … again” (Hebrews 6:6) and that, by sinning willfully after he has “received the knowledge of the truth,” to quote another verse from Hebrews chapter 10, he has doomed himself to “the violent fire which shal devoure the adversaries” (Hebrews 10:26-27).¹³

Donne's anxiety about the impossibility of repeating one's baptism must surely have been fed by his status as a convert from Catholicism to Protestantism—which is to say, from the Catholic perspective, as an apostate. Even in a sermon in which he affirms the ecumenical belief that “we must be … far, from straitning salvation, to any particular Christian Church, of any subdivided name, Papist or Protestant” (Sermons 10:169-70), Donne stresses that it is a grave matter to depart from the Church into which one was baptized. “[T]he Ego te baptizo I can heare but once,” he says, consciously or unconsciously recalling his own recusant roots through the use of Latin rather than the English of the Book of Common Prayer:

and to depart from that Church, in which I have received my baptism, and in which I have made my Contracts and my stipulations with God, and pledged and engaged my sureties there, deserves a mature consideration; for I may mistake the reasons upon which I goe, and I may finde after, that there are more true errours in the Church I goe to, then there were imaginary in that that I left.

(Sermons 10:161)¹⁴

As the sermon continues, however, it becomes clear that this disconcerting passage introduces the possibility of a negative biographical interpretation only to reinforce Dean Donne's “mature consideration” that he and his auditory ought to cling to the Church of England and her sacraments. He recounts a satirical anecdote about a French Protestant who converted to Catholicism for monetary gain and then, in a far more serious tone, tells two stories of English Protestants who gave themselves “leave, to thinke irreverently, slightly, negligently of the Sacraments, as of things … indifferent” or even “impertinent” (Sermons 10:161). His bowels, he says, “earn'd and melted” at the story of a woman who thought it unimportant to have her dying child christened; and he was moved with “sorrow” and “holy indignation” at the attitude of a man who refused the Eucharist when Donne brought it to him on his deathbed because he felt he had “not lived so in the sight of [his] God, as that [he] need[ed] a Sacrament” (Sermons 10:161, 162).¹⁵

Donne's own feelings were the exact opposite of those expressed by the dying man. In an Easter sermon, he tells his congregation that the Church has provided an ongoing source of hope and renewal: just as “from the losse of our Spikenard, our naturall faculties in originall sin, we have a resurrection in baptisme,” Donne explains, so “from the losse of the oyntment of the Lord … and the falling into some actuall sins, … we have a resurrection in the other Sacrament” (Sermons 7:112). In “I am a little world,” then, the speaker leaves behind the fears inspired by his meditation on one sacrament—Baptism—to find hope in the thought of another—the Lord's Supper. He seeks a Eucharistic renewal in the very flames with which, according to his typological analogy, he “must be burnt” (10). Having acknowledged the fiery guilt of his sins, the speaker prays: “Let their flames retire, / And burne me ô Lord, with a fiery zeale / Of thee' and thy house, which doth in eating heale” (12-14). The lines refer not only to the purgative fires which—as in “Goodfriday, 1613”—may restore God's image in the poet, but also to the Eucharist, through which the zealous believer is healed and strengthened “in eating.” As Docherty points out, “The ambiguity here concerns who is eating what. The fire of the zeal consumes the poet certainly; but more importantly the poet also eats the Lord, and it is this eating which heals him” (226).¹⁶

As long as one does not reject the Eucharist, Donne feels, one has a means of being restored to God; for the Epistle to the Hebrews characterizes the relapsed sinner as one who “hath trodden under foot the Son of God, and hath counted the blood of the covenant, wherewith he was sanctified, an unholy thing” (Hebrews 10:29). In a sermon, Donne interprets this passage from Hebrews as applying only to “a falling away … from Christ in all his Ordinances”; for, he explains, “as it is impossible to live, if a man refuse to eat, Impossible to recover, if a man refuse Physick, so it is Impossible for him to be renewed” if he rejects the “conveyance of [Christ's] merits” through preaching and the sacraments (Sermons 7:112). The sonneteer is at pains to demonstrate that he is no such man. Begging to be burnt by the fire “which doth in eating heale” (14), he declares that, far from rejecting nourishment and restorative medicine, he embraces both.

In the Devotions, Donne associates the ninth verse of Psalm 69, “For the zeal of thine house hathe eaten me,” with his feverish desire to be recalled from the “excommunication” of bodily sickness which forbids him to go to Church: “Lord, the zeale of thy House, eats me up, as fast as my fever; It is not a Recusancie, for I would come, but it is an Excommunication, I must not” (Devotions, 17; Expostulation 3).¹⁷ He is unable to worship in God's temple not only because he is physically sick in his bed, but also because he is himself no longer a holy place, having been—as he puts it in another Holy Sonnet—only “till I betray'd / My selfe, a temple of [the] Spirit divine” (HSDue, 7-8). In “I am a little world,” his adaptation of the psalmist's cry serves a similar purpose; for here, too, he is praying to be healed. He hopes that, “in eating” the sacrament of Holy Communion, he will be restored to the house of God. Moreover, by partaking of the Eucharist and thus receiving Christ into his own body, he himself can become God's temple once again; for, when Christ enters into him, he will drive out all evil as he did the merchants and moneychangers from the Temple. As the passage from the Gospel of John recounts it, Jesus “made a scourge of small cords, [and] he drove them all out of the temple … And his disciples remembered that it was written, The zeal of thine house hath eaten me up” (John 2:15, 17).

The allusion to this Gospel passage is particularly significant in light of Donne's conversion from Catholicism to Protestantism, for his hope in the sonnet is to be restored to a cleansed temple, a reformed Church, and to be characterized by that hallmark of reformed piety, zeal.¹⁸ Young argues that “what is always sought but always doubtful” in Donne's Divine Poems “is the confident assurance of the Real Presence of Christ in the Sacrament of the Altar” and that “the ambiguity of Eucharistic doctrine in the Church of England must have been a source of anxiety for Donne” (“Donne, Herbert,” 173). In this poem, however, as in La Corona, Donne is comforted precisely by the doctrine of the Eucharist as he found it expressed in the English Church, with its insistence upon the experience of divine Presence not in the transubstantiated elements but in the act of receiving, “in eating.”

But how can the essentially excommunicate sinner, bed-ridden in his sins, participate in the eating that heals? The English Church's service for “The Communion of the Sick” provides an answer. According to the rubrics in the Book of Common Prayer, the rite exists so that, “if the sick person be not able to come to the church, and yet is desirous to receive the communion in his house,” he may do so (BCP, 307). The Epistle read during this service, taken from Hebrews 12, reminds the ailing communicant of sickness's purgative function: “My son, despise not the correction of the Lord. … For whom the Lord loveth, him he correcteth, yea, and he scourgeth every son whom he receiveth” (BCP, 308). The same book of the Bible that fuels Donne's burning fear thus provides as well for Christ's restorative, Eucharistic entry into His defiled temple.

As the closing line of the sonnet suggests, it is not so much the body of the believer, as his soul—moved by devout zeal—that consumes the sacrament. This idea, too, is supported by the prayer book rubrics, which explain that a Christian may communicate spiritually if “by reason of extremity of sickness” he cannot physically consume the consecrated elements: “[T]he curate shall instruct him, that if he do truly repent him of his sins, and steadfastly believe …, he doth eat and drink the Body and Blood of our Savior Christ, profitably to his soul's health, although he do not receive the Sacrament with his mouth” (BCP, 308).¹⁹

Relying upon the doctrines articulated in the rite for the “Communion of the Sick,” “I am a little world” remedies private desperation with liturgically informed belief. The poet does not stop, despairingly, at the seventh verse of 2 Peter 3, which prophesies the fiery end of the world, but proceeds to the consoling words found in verse 13 of the same chapter: “Nevertheless we, according to his promise, look for new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness” (2 Peter 3:13). This verse looks forward to the perfecting of the macrocosm, not to the renewal of an individual's body and soul. But because the logic of Donne's sonnet is built upon the microcosm/macrocosm analogy, Donne can hope that the heavens and the earth of his microcosm—his spirit and his body—will also be transformed by purgative flame.

It is important to note that the sonnet's world analogy is complete only when Donne, realizing that no lesser power can help him, looks to the “new heavens and new earth,” burnt into being by God himself.²⁰ Invoking other powers only helps to advance the self-destructive course of the analogy he has set up:

You which beyond that heaven which was most high
Have found new sphears, and of new lands can write,
Powre new seas in mine eyes, that so I might
Drowne my world with my weeping earnestly …

(5-8)

These lines address not only heroic Renaissance scientists and explorers, but also the saints, the heroes of the Church Triumphant.²¹ The speaker is, however, following a false lead when he asks those who have traveled beyond the old world to supply him with waters drawn from the oceans they have discovered; for the saints have not yet seen the “new heavens and new earth” that will be fired into being at the end of time. On that day, their “Angelike sprights” will be reunited with the perfected elements of their own little worlds, their resurrected bodies. But until then, Donne stresses in a sermon on 2 Peter 3: 13, no one really knows the nature of the “new heavens and new earth” which are to be. In the sermon, Donne compares charts of New World discoveries to the works of various commentators explicating that verse:

[I]n these discoveries of these new Heavens, and this new Earth, our Maps will bee unperfect. … [W]hen wee have travell'd as farre as wee can, with safetie, that is, as farre as Ancient, or Moderne Expositors lead us, … wee must say at last … that wee can looke no farther into it, with these eyes. … We limit, and determine our consideration with that Horizon, with which the Holy Ghost hath limited us.

(Sermons 8:81-82)²²

God, then, is the only author who “of new lands can write” in such a way that the text becomes an aid to salvation; and with Donne's concluding prayer for the zeal “which doth in eating heal,” it becomes clear that only the words of the divine Author can provide an escape from the typological cul-de-sac that the human sonneteer has constructed for himself.

Yet the poet cannot throw down his pen. Even as he calls upon the Lord to burn him, he phrases his prayer in terms that, on every level, maintain a delicate tension between divine action and human response.²³ In evoking the Eucharistic encounter, the petition for the “fiery zeale … which doth in eating heale” involves the penitent's willingness to “take and eat” even as it implies that he is a helpless object of the Lord's corrosive flames, a man “now zealously possest”—to cite the expression in La Corona (Cor1, 11)—by a God who is zeal.²⁴ The phrase “zeale / Of thee' and thy house” is, moreover, ambiguous with regard to possession; the zeal with which Donne wishes to be burned is, in one sense, of God and his house in that it is a characteristic of Christ and his Church, an expression of their great love for each man. From that perspective, the allusion to Christ's furious assault on the temple merchants supports the poet's view of himself as a temple awaiting the zealous savior's whip of knotted cords. Yet the prayer is also a request that he himself be imbued with zeal of—that is, for—the Lord and his house; and zeal is the hallmark of the embattled Christian, himself active and eloquent on behalf of God and his Church.²⁵

Human response remains a factor in the process of redemption as “I am a little world” portrays it; and for Donne as the maker of this highly wrought conceit, human response takes the form of poetic act. The artist must exert himself to heal his work—the poem—if he is to call upon God to heal and redeem him, the divine artist's own “cunningly” made work.²⁶ Though Donne crafts the first ten lines of the poem to reflect in deliberately dangerous trope the precarious state of his soul, it is also through a poetic act that he finds the way to make his final prayer. He can ask for the “fiery zeale … which doth in eating heale” only insofar as he can reinterpret the fire which threatens him with destruction; and doing so means enacting a Eucharistic change. The element's function is redefined—flames are interpreted as instruments, not of annihilation, but of medicinal nourishment—in an enactment of the moral choice by which the afflicted man turns from despair to repentance.

As I have stressed in my reading of La Corona, the English Protestant definition of Eucharistic transformation involves a change in the use of the elements: in the sacrament, the bread and wine ordinarily used to nourish the body are appropriated for a sacred function and become nourishment for the soul. Here, threatened by hellfire and in danger of utter despair, the poet/speaker must avail himself of the Eucharistic flexibility of poetic language and transform the element of fire. He must rework the image of burning, relying on the fact that flames—like the bread and wine of the Lord's Supper—have more than one use. Fire may destroy, or it may be an agent of purgation and digestion.²⁷

The poet's Eucharistic consecration of the fire imagery redefines and transforms the sonnet itself. As we have seen, its turn may be said to occur in line 10's desperate shift away from water imagery to that of fire; but from another perspective, the real turn does not take place until line 12, when the poet/speaker rejects the fevered fires of lust and envy, and addresses God directly, praying for restorative fire. While this twice-turned shape dramatizes the speaker's tormented fluctuation between hope and despair, the resonant confidence of the final couplet—with its strong masculine rhyme—bears witness to the resolution of that conflict.²⁸

The resolution is anticipated, moreover, in the sonnet's own testimony that it is no spontaneous effusion, poured—unpremeditated—from the heart. “I am a little world made cunningly,” it says in its opening line, testifying to its status as a completed artifact, carefully crafted and revised, already “made” even as it begins.²⁹ Here, no less than in La Corona, the poet has taken seriously the belief that human beings should, like God, “worke after patternes” (Sermons 7:61), that a maker's art must be based upon a fore-conceit.

“I am a little world” demonstrates, moreover, that the peril and the efficacy of such making are inseparable. For according to the sacramental poetics that underlies the sonnet, conceits are either truly deadly or truly redemptive, like the sacrament of Eucharist itself. A man who receives the Eucharist unworthily is damned (1 Corinthians 11:29) or, as Donne puts it, he “makes Christ Jesus … his damnation” (Sermons 7:321; emphasis added). Similarly, to doubt one's salvation is, as Donne sees it, to weave a kind of dark Faustian conceit:

[T]o doubt of the mercy of God … goes so neare making thy sinne greater then Gods mercy, as that it makes thy sinne greater then daily adulteries, daily murthers, daily blasphemies … could have done, and though thou canst never make that true in this life that thy sinnes are greater then God can forgive, yet this is a way to make them greater, then God will forgive.

(Sermons 2:333; emphasis added)

In the sonnet, too, the poet makes a metaphor that threatens its inventor with perdition.

But he also finds his way out of the deadly trope, consecrating the elements of his analogy, making active use of the multivalence with which God invests language, and giving sacramental form to the fire of tribulation:

[I]f we can say … [t]hat all our fiery tribulations fall under the nature, and definition of Sacraments, That they are so many visible signes of invisible Grace, … If I can bring this fire to … conforme it selfe to mee, and doe as I would have it; that is, concoct, and purge, and purifie, and prepare mee for God … [then] I shall finde, that … [t]hough we can doe nothing of our selves, yet as we are in Christ, wee can doe all things.

(Sermons 8:71-72)

Guided by the Spirit, the poet makes what he will of the element of fire, saying such things as to put it to a new and spiritually profitable use. In “I am a little world,” the healing flames of a Eucharistic fire save Donne from a burning fear that he has lost the grace of Baptism: the response to fire is fire, the answer to fears about sacramentality is sacrament, and poetic utterance remedies the despair that was spoken into being through poetry.

THE THREE SONNETS OF “GOODFRIDAY, 1613”

“Goodfriday, 1613,” like “I am a little world,” ends with a prayer for burning purgation; in the longer poem, however, the fires remain corrosive, and the poet/speaker discovers no sacramental trope that can unite his own work with that of the savior.³⁰ The poem's powerfully irresolute conclusion arises, I would argue, from its ominously Petrarchan form: 42 lines in length, “Goodfriday, 1613” is a highly compressed sequence of three sonnets in which the speaker can never quite bring himself to surrender entirely to grace or to rely on God instead of the “opus operatum” of his own poetic work.³¹ Like Astrophil in Sidney's Astrophil and Stella, he becomes less and less capable of restraining either himself or his art.

Indeed, in order to understand the spiritual and artistic implications of the final “turne” in “Goodfriday, 1613,” I would first turn briefly to Sidney's sonnet sequence, a work that offered a biting critique of Petrarchan poetics even as it provided Donne and his contemporaries with the definitive example of English Petrarchism. In Astrophil and Stella, of course, Astrophil thinks that his problem is the competition between virtuous love of Stella and the base promptings of carnal desire; and up to a point, he is quite right. But an even more dangerous problem is posed by the nature of his medium, by the Petrarchan sonnet itself in all its self-defeating, self-referential self-sufficiency.

Early in the sequence, Astrophil tries very hard to dissociate his poetry from the slick beauty and rich, aureate artificiality of conventional Petrarchan sonnets that, he insists, show their authors' lack of sincerity: they “bewray a want of inward touch” (Astrophil and Stella 15:10).³² He claims that he has no desire to load his verse with the “living deaths, dear wounds, fair storms, and freezing fires” that burden the imitators of Petrarch (A & S 6:4). He is a plain-spoken fellow: “I can speak what I feel, and feel as much as they, / But think that all the map of my state I display, / When trembling voice brings forth, that I do Stella love” (A & S 6:12-14).

But as the sequence continues, both the reader and Astrophil discover that Astrophil's simple declaration of love does not map his state quite so perfectly as he intends. For the shaky-voiced conclusion of Sonnet 6 sounds rather euphemistic and insincere when compared with the raw imperative at the end of Sonnet 71: “Give me some food” (14). This expression of unvarnished physical need is a metaphor (food = sexual satisfaction) couched in a personification (it is “desire” that “still cries: ‘Give me some food’”), but it taps a deeper level of honest self-expression than does the literal assertion “I do Stella love.” Lust will have its say.

The sonnet that ends with desire's cry is, however, a nearly successful attempt to keep it silent. Until desire bursts into the poem in the fourteenth line, Sonnet 71 presents a morally edifying definition of Stella that resembles the Horatian definition of poetry in Sidney's Defense. She is a “fairest book” that both delights and teaches (A & S 71:1). In Stella, as in a good poem, there is no conflict between beautiful form and ethical content; the two work together. Her “fair lines … true goodness show”; indeed, “while [her] beauty draws the heart to love, / As fast [her] virtue bends that love to good” (A & S 71:4, 12-13). And if Stella is an ideal poem, Astrophil's sonnet through line 13 is a work dedicated to her Horatian aesthetic. This dedication falls apart, however, in an abrupt volta or turn between lines 13 and 14. The “desire” that speaks up in line 14, shattering the good intentions of the previous 13 lines, may thus be understood not only as the untamed force of Astrophil's lust, but as the unruly desire of the sonnet itself: as a 14-line poem in a Petrarchan sequence, it does not want to serve the purposes of an “erected wit” (Defense of Poesy, 217) but to be itself, a sonnet, a self-contained ball of witty self-consciousness and unfulfilled erotic longing.

In the first line of the next sonnet, Astrophil confronts this rogue aesthetic directly by punning on the second person form of the verb to be: “Desire, … thou my old companion art” he says, addressing “Desire” as art (A & S 72:1). Like Petrarch himself, who cannot separate his art from his love, his pursuit of Laura from his pursuit of the Laurel, Astrophil finds that he cannot keep the artless sincerity of pure love separated from the artful designs of lust. He begins by telling his desire that “though thou … oft so clings to my pure love, that I / One from the other scarcely can descry,” yet “Now from thy fellowship I needs must part” (A & S 72:1-3, 5); he maintains this stance for 13 and one-half lines, making it almost to the end of the sonnet: “thou desire, because thou would'st have all, / Now banished art,” he says (A & S 72:13-14); but his effort collapses in the last half line with a plaintive rhetorical question: “Now banished art—but yet, alas, how shall?” (14). Desire—both for sexual satisfaction and for an artful wit that serves itself rather than “virtue”—intrudes itself at the last, turning the poem from ethical declaration to Petrarchan sigh at what is nearly the last possible point in its structure, with only three metrical stresses to go. Astrophil's entrapment in Petrarchan poetics is, I would argue, an object-lesson in the dangers of sonneteering, a demonstration of the sonnet's persistent tendency to part company with any ethically or spiritually “erected” poetics and to turn inward on itself.

In “Goodfriday, 1613,” Donne does not forget Sidney's lesson. Though his speaker, like Astrophil, thinks that his problem is the competition between true “devotion” (2) and more carnal impulses (the “Pleasure or businesse” [7] by which his soul is “whirld” [8]), the most dangerous kinds of turn are for him—as for Astrophil—the cunningly-delayed turns of his own sonnets. And there are exactly three sonnets—14 lines + 14 lines + 14 lines—in the 42 lines of the poem.³³

The first 14 lines of “Goodfriday, 1613. Riding Westward” are both an attempt to explain away the speaker's impious motion and a piece of material evidence that he remains intent on secular “Pleasure or businesse” (7), including the pleasure and business of poetic composition. It is the definitively artificial form of his strained analogy, no less than his worldly journey to the West, that continues to divide him from artless “devotion”—which he calls man's “naturall forme” (6).³⁴ For eight lines, he develops his complex analogy between the tendencies of the human soul and the whirlings of the planets; and at that traditional turning point or volta, he reaches his first period. Then, in what amounts to the sestet of the poem's first sonnet-like section, he “bends” (10) away from his analogy even as he completes it: “Hence is't,” he says “that I am carryed towards the West / This day” (9-10) when the greatest of celestial and spiritual motions takes place in the “East” (10): there, the “Sunne” rises (11) and the Son is raised on the cross. What may be termed the first “sonnet” of the work ends as he reaches another period, asserting the central truth of Redemption with ringing certainty: “But that Christ on this Crosse, did rise and fall, / Sinne had eternally benighted all” (13-14). The art of the speaker, so strongly evident in the octave's long, complex analogy between planetary and spiritual motion, is thus made supernumerary in the sestet, subsumed in the supernatural creativity of the savior who—himself “begotten, not made” (Nicene Creed; BCP, 250)—“beget[s]” rather than makes the “endlesse day” that is man's salvation (12).

The half-hidden sexual innuendo in these lines, which present Christ as the hanged God whose erection or “rising” spills life onto the parched dryness of a sin-blasted world, is carried forward in the second sonnet-like section of the poem, lines 15-28.³⁵ In this section, the poet/speaker meditates on the Atonement, which he depicts as the Christian equivalent of the primal scene, the moment of his own begetting as a redeemed soul: “Yet dare I'almost be glad,” he says, “I do not see / That spectacle of too much weight for mee” (15-16). It is unthinkable to “see God dye” (19), to watch him in the act of pouring out his vital fluids, mingling “that blood which is / The seat of all our Soules” (25-26) with the “dust” of the ground in order to “Make durt” (27) and remake the creature first “formed … of the dust of the ground” (Genesis 2:7).³⁶ This remaking of man is no art, the sexual analogy suggests, but a super-natural version of natural reproduction.

In lines 21-22 of the poem, which form the midpoint of “Goodfriday, 1613” as a whole and lines 7-8 of the work's second sonnet-like section, the poet/speaker concludes that sonnet's octave with a definitive volta, an image of the crucified Christ as the primum mobile whose hands “turne” not the little world of a sonnet, but the entire cosmos:

Could I behold those hands which span the Poles,
And turne all spheares at once peirc'd with those holes?

In these lines, positioned at the center of “Goodfriday, 1613,” Donne marks the crucifixion as the turning point in Christ's work of redemption and implicitly contrasts that mighty undertaking with his own artistic effort as he crafts the “turne” of his work's second 14-line section.³⁷

As he moves from the octave to the sestet of the poem's central sonnet, he does not speak of his own conversion or turning; rather, he forges on in a series of rhetorical questions that mingle spiritual awe with theological reflection:

Could I behold that endlesse height which is
Zenith to us and to'our Antipodes,
Humbled below us? or that blood which is
The seat of all our Soules, if not of his,
Make durt of dust, or that flesh which was worne
By God, for his apparell, rag'd, and torne?

(23-28)

These lines reflect upon an essentially sacramental mystery, pondering not only the hypostatic union of God and Man in Christ, but the substance of Eucharist, Jesus's Blood and Body, which is the point of sacramental contact between the human and the divine. The poet/speaker's rhetorical questions invite a negative answer but do not pronounce a definitive “No, I cannot behold his Body and Blood.”³⁸ McNees comments on his perplexity:

… Donne still appears reluctant to assert a eucharistic Real Presence. … Intellectually, his questions echo the Puritan difficulty of realizing Christ simultaneously on earth and in heaven. Yet the emotional vividness with which Donne catalogues the crucified Christ's physical traits is … reminiscent of the first step of the Ignatian meditational method—composition of place. The carnal imagery suggests that Donne is conjuring up Christ's physical presence … to identify himself with Christ's sacrifice and thereby become worthy of partaking in the eucharistic meal. Yet this process is backward. To achieve true conformity with the crucified Christ, the speaker must first suffer his own internal crucifixion through penance.

(Eucharistic Poetry, 57-58)

The speaker's problem, considered from this perspective, is that he has not prepared himself or—rather—that he has not been prepared (with an emphasis on the verb's passivity) by the gift of sacramental tribulation that Donne celebrates in “The Crosse.” He cannot experience Christ's sacramental presence without receiving that gift.

It is with a prayer for purgative punishment, then, that Donne will end “Goodfriday, 1613”; but before he reaches that petition, he asks a fifth rhetorical question focusing on the Blessed Virgin rather than on Christ. This query, which begins the poem's third 14-line section, introduces the subject of the final “sonnet” of “Goodfriday, 1613”: the challenge that the crucifixion poses to the human poet as maker.

If on these things I durst not looke, durst I
Upon his miserable mother cast mine eye,
Who was Gods partner here, and furnish'd thus
Halfe of that Sacrifice, which ransom'd us?

(29-32)

These lines present the Blessed Virgin as a grief-stricken maker who now beholds the destruction of her beloved work. Mary as she is described here no longer provides the poet with a precedent for devout making and divinely sanctioned poesis (as she does in La Corona, where her womb is a model for the “little roome” of a sonnet). Instead, the “miserable mother” at the foot of the cross models a maker's willingness to submit to the will of God and to stand by meekly while the perfect fruit of her labor is immolated by her divine collaborator. The Virgin “furnish'd … / Halfe of that Sacrifice, which ransom'd us” (31-32) but can be a “partner” to God—both sexually and artistically—only by allowing him to destroy the work they have made together.³⁹

The poet/speaker of the last “sonnet” in “Goodfriday” thus does not want to look on the human “mother” of the sacrificed Christ; he knows that her example would call him to sacrifice his own work. He goes on to acknowledge that both she and her dying Son “are present yet unto my memory, / For that looks towards them” (34-35) in an act of anamnesis that might, if further developed, involve the poet/speaker in a Eucharistic meditation like the one Donne carries out in La Corona. But he does not develop that brief allusion to memory; instead, he concludes that what matters most is not his vision, but that of Christ: “and thou look'st towards mee, / O Saviour, as thou hang'st upon the tree” (35-36). Unlike the fearful yet desiring gaze of the subject that, in a Petrarchan sonnet, merely reflects back from the “murderous mirrors”⁴⁰ of his love-object's unpitying eyes, the gaze of the “Goodfriday” speaker is met with an answering look that redeems rather than kills.

Having acknowledged Christ's gaze, the speaker believes himself ready to surrender to grace; and at the traditional turning point (that is, at line 37 of “Goodfriday, 1613” which is line 9 of the work's third sonnet) he tries to do just that, to make an artful turn in his poem that reflects a spiritual turn toward submission: “I turne my backe to thee, but to receive”—that is, but to take what you will give to me, to eschew attempts at offering worthy works of my own. Indeed, this “turne” will—the ensuing lines imply—be a turn to utter receptivity, passivity, and submission; Christ, he insists, must do all:

I turne my backe to thee, but to receive
Corrections, till thy mercies bid thee leave.
O thinke mee worth thine anger, punish mee,
Burne off my rusts, and my deformity,
Restore thine Image, so much, by thy grace,
That thou may'st know mee …

(37-42)

Whether the action is intellectual (“thinke” and “knowe”), corrosive (“punish” and “Burne”), or constructive (“Restore”), only Christ and his grace can perform it. The speaker (“mee”) and his qualities (“my rusts, and my deformity”) can only be objects of these verbs. Indeed, if “mans Soule be a Spheare” (1), only the “hands” of Christ—which, in lines 21-22, “span the Poles / And turne all spheares at once”—can “turne” him. Only the redemptive force of Christ's sacrifice as evoked in that “turne” can “Restore [Christ's] Image” (41) in the poet/speaker; he can rely on no other “turne.” Or so it seems, at any rate, until the last three feet of the poem's final line: “… and I'll turne my face.”

In the last three stresses of “Goodfriday, 1613,” the redemptive movement of the third sonnet and of the entire three-sonnet sequence is called into question; for there the poet inserts another kind of “turne.” With the phrase “and I'll turne my face,” he reasserts his own presence as subject and doer of action; and though his action is deferred to a future when Christ's “mercies” will “bid [him] leave” or cease the scourging that the poet has begged for in the preceding 5 and 2/5 lines, it nevertheless makes the final outcome of the redemption process dependent upon his own action, upon a final (and perhaps too artful) “turne” that is the work of the poet rather than of Christ. Lacking the ambiguity of “I am a little world”'s conclusion, in which “eating” is an action both performed by the speaker and done to him by the divine fire for which he prays, the conclusion of “Goodfriday, 1613” proposes a contractual sequence: first, you do this for me; then, I will “turne.” First, grant my prayer; then I will undertake the process of conversion.⁴¹

If one compares the language of “The Crosse,” in which the speaker urges himself and others to “Let Crosses … take what hid Christ in thee” so that one may “be his image, or not his, but hee” (35-36), one can see the distinction between a freely chosen act of surrender to the shaping force of God's corrections and a human “turne” that is definitive and final. One must not, as Sherwood rightly complains that some critics do, “minimize [Donne's] regard for human powers” (“Conversion Psychology,” 110). “Goodfriday, 1613” certainly does not proceed from those versions of Protestant doctrine that, as Sherwood puts it “denied human initiative” (111). Indeed, Sherwood rightly emphasizes the difference between “Donne's initiative in turning his back” in line 37 as a “free spiritual movement” and the “turne” of line 42, which is projected into the future (111, 110). But it does not follow that Donne's work maps “free human movement towards the boundaries of man's limits, then a clear recognition of those boundaries, then a willing request for God's aid” in which “Donne looks for the will to be turned after his free request for God's necessary correction” (Sherwood, “Conversion Psychology,” 111; emphasis added). The poet/speaker does not look for his will “to be turned” but promises—on certain conditions—to “turne” it himself.

Sherwood glosses the conclusion of “Goodfriday, 1613” with a number of Old Testament penitential texts that evoke “turning as an activity assimilating human and divine motions” (119). But in a passage like Zechariah 1:3—“Thus saith the Lord of hosts; Turn ye unto me, … and I will turn unto you”—the order is exactly the opposite of that described in Donne's poem, where the speaker/poet reserves his “turn” for last. The most relevant scriptural gloss on the conclusion of “Goodfriday, 1613” is, I would argue, the refrain line that occurs three times in Psalm 80: “Turn us again, O God, and cause thy face to shine; and we shall be saved” (verse 3).⁴² The prayer at the conclusion of “Goodfriday, 1613” revises the psalmist's prayer, inverting its emphasis: the Psalm speaks of God's act of turning man, presenting a sequence in which salvation follows from that turning and from the shining of the divine face;⁴³ the poet/speaker of “Goodfriday, 1613” speaks of his own face and his own act of turning.

The power of “Goodfriday, 1613”—and particularly of its conclusion—thus arises from the work's status as the sacrament of its author's perilous spiritual state. It—no less than Astrophil and Stella—is the outward and visible sign of a poet's unsuccessful struggle to turn away from Petrarchan subjectivity, self-referentiality, and ambition. He who made me, the poem declares, cannot cease to craft his own turns.

Notes

1. Even in Petrarch's Rime sparse, as Freccero has shown, the poet's idolatrous love for Laura is elided with his equally idolatrous desire for the laurel crown. The solipsistic self-referentiality of his poetics, the detachment of his art from any end or purpose outside itself, makes Petrarch's verse “a poetry whose real subject matter is its own act” (“The Fig Tree,” 34).

2. Compare the prominence of the word “I” in Marvell's “The Coronet,” which may be read as a more strictly Calvinist counter-argument to the sacramental poetics of Donne's La Corona; and see Walker's discussion (“The Religious Lyric as a Genre”) of La Corona, “The Coronet,” and Herbert's “A Wreath.”

3. This is the translation of the phrase ex opere operato in Norton's English translation of Calvin's Institutes 4.14.26; see above, introduction, (n. 11).

4. See also Young, “Donne's Holy Sonnets” (35-36).

5. On the title “Divine Meditations,” which is found in Group III manuscripts, see Gardner (65); see also McNees, Eucharistic Poetry (56): “The language of ‘Goodfriday,’ ‘Hymne to God my God, in my Sicknesse,’ and the Holy Sonnets internalizes the public eucharist … of the previous poems to depict the persona's own private spiritual struggle.”

6. See also McNees, Eucharistic Poetry (61-65), on those “Holy Sonnets” in which penitence and communion “seem to offer separate routes toward redemption” (63).

7. See also the Trent Catechism (189-90), Article 16 of the Thirty-Nine Articles, and Homilies (261).

8. For the English Church's assertion that there are only “two Sacramentes ordeyned of Christe,” see Article 25 of the Thirty-Nine Articles; against the Catholic requirement of “auricular confession,” see Homilies (266-67). For Calvin on the idea that the penitent need only devoutly recall the forgiveness of his sins in baptism, see Inst. 4.15.3-4. The Council of Trent specifically anathematizes anyone promulgating this doctrine; see the Seventh Session, “Canons on Baptism,” Canon 10.

9. Line 4 thus contrasts sharply with Cor6, where the speaker feels himself released from “Feare of first or last death” (7).

10. The delayed turn is noted by Martz (53) and Empson (75). McNees also notes that this sonnet “deviates from the octet-sestet” structure (Eucharistic Poetry, 65).

11. See Sermons 8:280-81: “When I have had … true Absolution … still to suspect my state in Gods favour, … still to call my repentance imperfect, and the Sacramentall seales ineffectual, still to accuse myselfe of sinnes, thus devested, thus repented, … this is to blaspheme mine owne soule.” See also Sermons 5:85-86, 102-03; 7:110-17, 9:329, and 10:118.

12. See the vivid evocations of a despairing sinner's state of mind in Donne's Sermons 7:413 and 2:84.

13. This is the Geneva Bible translation. The King James renders the phrase “fiery indignation, which shall devour the adversaries.” See also 2 Peter 2:20-21.

14. The sermon, which was preached at Whitehall, is undated; but Potter and Simpson (Sermons 10:15) conjecture that it was delivered during the reign of King Charles. The thrust of the sermon is to defend the godliness of those who remained within a largely corrupt Roman Catholic Church prior to the Reformation and, as Potter and Simpson explain, to defend “the English Church against those Puritans who wished to secede from it, or to despoil it of all the ceremonies derived from the primitive and the medieval Church” (Sermons 10:19).

15. See also Sermons 1:189 for Donne's account of “purified puritans” as those that “think they … need ask no forgiveness.”

16. See also Clark (77) and McNees, Eucharistic Poetry (66).

17. From the third Devotion, “The Patient takes his bed.” Interestingly, Donne mentions recusancy here only to deny any inclination toward it and to confirm his desire to be restored to communal worship in the Church of England.

18. In one sermon, Donne associates “zeale / Of … [God's] house” with accusations of crypto-Catholicism: “Let a man be zealous, and fervent in reprehension of sin, and there flies out an arrow, that gives him the wound of a Puritan. Let a man be zealous of the house of God, and say any thing by way of moderation, for the repairing of the ruines of that house, and making up the differences of the Church of God, and there flies out an arrow, that gives him the wound of a Papist” (Sermons 2:58). But as this passage itself suggests, the word “zeal” was more commonly associated with Christians of a Puritan bent, as is the case with the character of Zeal-of-the-land Busy in Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fayre. See also Donne, Sermons 1:188: “let me live the life of a Puritan, let the zeal of the house of God consume me.”

19. Of course, the Roman Catholic Church also provides both for Communion of the Sick (the reservation of the consecrated Host making a separate Communion liturgy in the sick person's room unnecessary) and for the act of mental communion (see the quotations from Ignatius Loyola and Francis de Sales in Martz [90, 288]). See also page 92 above for a quotation from the Trent Catechism on the distinction between spiritual and sacramental reception of the Eucharist.

20. See Belette, who notes that the sonnet's “resolution, the harmonizing, of its separate parts lies not in argument and debate but in recognition and acceptance: specifically recognition and acceptance of Christ's sacrifice. When this occurs, the sonnet form regularizes itself and is seen once again to embody within itself an orderly movement towards a reconciling conclusion” (334).

21. Gardner's gloss identifies them as “discoverers generally: astronomers who find new spheres and explorers who find new lands” (76). Smith's note on the lines includes not only those mentioned by Gardner, but also “the blessed who have ascended to a heaven beyond our comprehension” (627). He does not, however, link the lines to 2 Peter 3:13. Shawcross glosses the “you” as “Christ” himself (Complete Poetry, 347).

22. This passage is quoted from Donne's memorial sermon on Magdalen Herbert Danvers, preached about one month after her death.

23. For a different emphasis, see McNees, Eucharistic Poetry (65-66): “Here Donne transfigures the word ‘burne’ from its secular to sacred use by imploring God's intervention as opposed to that of secular explorers. With this transformation he surrenders his temporal control over language to God's sacred control.”

24. “God was … zeale in Paul” (Sermons 8:233).

25. See Sermons 3:214, where Donne recalls the coming of the Holy Ghost at Pentecost “in Tongues, and fiery Tongues. Christ was not, a Christian is not justified in silence, but in declarations and open professions; … and not in dark and ambiguous speeches, nor in faint and retractable speeches, but in fiery tongues; fiery, that is, fervent; fiery, that is, clear.” See also the discussion of human speech in relation to the divine Word in Asals, “John Donne and the Grammar of Redemption.”

26. Belette notes that the “sonnet, too, is ‘a little world made cunningly’” (334).

27. Galenist physiology defines digestion as a process in which the body's heat breaks down and transmutes food. See Milton, who describes digestion as “concoctive heat / To transubstantiate” (Paradise Lost 5:437-38).

28. On the issues at work in the conclusions of Donne's devotional lyrics, see Linville.

29. The adverb “cunningly” evokes a connection between the poetic activity of the poet's “Angelike” spirit and the divinely inspired and commissioned work of the craftsmen chosen to make the cloth of the tabernacle, which is to be adorned with “broidered” cherubim (Exodus 26:1), “That is,” as the 1560 Geneva Bible's marginal gloss indicates, “of moste conning or fine worke.” In the King James translation, the language is even closer to that of the sonnet: “with cherubim of cunning work shalt thou make them.” On the speakers of some of Donne's “Holy Sonnets” as self-conscious poets exploring the nature of poetic sincerity, see Ferry, The ‘Inward’ Language (226-46).

30. See O'Connell, who argues that “Goodfriday, 1613” “could almost be subtitled ‘I am a little world (expanded)’: structural, verbal and thematic parallels would seem to indicate that Donne had this sonnet in mind, if not in hand, as he composed the later couplet poem. Both begin with a microcosm-macrocosm analogy, proceed to the speaker's recognition of his own sinfulness, and conclude by addressing the Lord directly, in each case to ask for the purifying action of fire” (“‘Restore Thine Image,’” 13).

31. The structure of “Goodfriday, 1613” has frequently been discussed; Martz divides the poem into a three-part mediation in which the first 10 lines are the “composition” (the part of meditation in which the faculty of memory is engaged), lines 11-32 are the “analysis” (the part of the meditation in which the faculty of the reason or understanding is engaged), and the final 10 lines—perfectly symmetrical to the first 10—are the “colloquy,” in which the faculty of the will is engaged (54-56). This schema is disrupted somewhat by the fact that the composition of place is completed only in lines 11-32 and by Donne's reference to the faculty of memory in lines 33-35 rather than in lines 1-10. For alternative accounts of the structure of Donne's work, see Bellette and Severance, who builds on the analysis of the poem proposed by Bellette and sees “Goodfriday, 1613” as dividing into sections of symmetrically proportioned groups of lines—8, 2, 4, 6, 2, 6, 4, 2, 8—where lines 1-8 correspond to lines 35-42, lines 9-10 to lines 33-34, etc., with the couplet describing Christ's “hands which span the Poles, / And turne all spheres at once” (21-22) at the poem's center. Severance's argument that this symmetrical pattern indicates the work's status as a “circle” (24) seems to me to be undercut by Bellette's accurate observation that, “The poem is not totally symmetrical. The last eight lines are in many ways greatly opposed to the first eight. They are full of anguish, far from the intellectually controlled sureties of the opening. We have not returned to the same emotional and spiritual place” (345).

32. Subsequent quotations from Sidney's sonnet sequence are cited parenthetically as A & S by sonnet and line number.

33. The work is, of course, composed of rhyming couplets rather than quatrains, but the poem's grammatical and semantic dividing lines repeatedly echo the 8/6 proportions of the Italian sonnet so important in Sidney's Astrophil and Stella.

34. See McNees on Donne's presentation of the speaker's “out-dated Ptolemaic analogy as a superficial (and incorrect) rationalization” (Eucharistic Poetry, 56-57).

35. See Steinberg's landmark study, which explores the “sexual Christology” articulated through the representation of Christ's genitalia in Renaissance painting and sculpture. Steinberg stresses that the works he analyzes “set forth what perhaps had never been uttered” and “are themselves primary texts” rather than illustrations of a “preformed” doctrine. For Steinberg, the paintings and sculptures of Jesus' circumcision imply a contrast between Christ and the phallic fertility gods of the Greeks (“The sexual member exhibited by the Christ child … concedes … God's assumption of human weakness; it is an affirmation not of superior prowess but of condescension to kinship … And instead of symbolizing, like the phallus of Dionysus, the generative powers of nature, Christ's sexual organ—pruned by circumcision in sign of corrupted nature's correction—is offered to immolation. The erstwhile symbol of the life force yields not seed, but redeeming blood” [47-48]). Donne, I am arguing, takes a step beyond these circumcision images in portraying the erection of the crucified Christ as supernaturally and spiritually procreative. Though Steinberg—taking great care to refute the “fallacy of naturalism”—finds “the folklore of hanged men's erections … irrelevant” to his inquiry (82, n. 82), Donne seems to be contrasting that supposed natural tumescence with the supernatural phallic potency that, in the paintings Steinberg discusses, is figured by billowing loincloths that “convert the ostentatio genitalium decently into a fanfare of cosmic triumph” (93). See especially figure 101, a Crucifixion (1503) by Lucas Cranach in which the loincloth of Christ contrasts with that of the hanged thief facing the viewer.

36. See O'Connell, who also links line 27 to the creation of Adam (“‘Restore Thine Image,’” 23).

37. The question of whether the verb in line 22 is “tune” (as in the seventeenth century print editions of the poem and many manuscripts) or “turne” (as in the Group II manuscripts and the Dobell manuscript) is decided in favor of “turne” by Shawcross (see his explanation in the “Index of Textual Differences,” Complete Poetry, 497-98). The appropriateness of “turne” seems all the clearer in light of a reading that underscores the contrast between the poet/speaker's artful sonnet-turns and Christ's super-Natural actions as primum mobile and begetter of redemption. On lines 21-22 as “the exact midpoint of the poem,” see Bellette (344); Severance (37-38); Stanwood (114-15); and Brooks (295).

38. See O'Connell: “the logic of the question points to the impossibility of not seeing” (“‘Restore Thine Image,’” 22). I would stress that the ambiguity of the rhetorical questions in “Goodfriday, 1613” contrasts markedly with the ringing imperatives and less equivocal rhetorical questions in “The Crosse,” in which the poet/speaker and the reader must not refuse to see the cross of Christ in all its myriad manifestations.

39. Compare the conclusion of Marvell's “Coronet.” Unlike the author of Genesis, who excludes any mention of Sarah from his account of the Sacrifice of Isaac, Donne identifies with the mother whose husband—Abraham obeying God in Genesis, and God the Father himself in the Gospels—is willing to sacrifice their only Son. This sympathy is not subversive, for it presupposes the rightness of the mother's submission to the Father's will; but it points up the analogy paralleling the bond of flesh and blood between the female parent and her child with the bond of ink and inspiration between the poet and his work. See also Astrophil and Stella 1, where Sidney's speaker goes through labor pains in an effort to give birth to his poetry.

40. Petrarch's phrase is “micidiali specchi” (Rime sparse 46:7). See also Petrarch on “that lovely clear gaze where the rays of love are so hot that they kill me before my time” (Rime sparse 37:83-85) and on the “assault” of Laura's eyes (Rime sparse 39:1).

41. See Brooks's discussion of the word “turne” (297); she argues that the “residual tension within the poem's future-oriented closing lines attests to … the recognition of the [human soul's] lifelong dependency on Christ's saving Grace, a dependency that Protestant thinking had greatly intensified” (298). I would argue that the conclusion does precisely what Brooks contends that it does up until the concluding half-line, which breaks away from reception of grace to assert the independent action of the “I.”

42. The refrain is repeated with a slight variation in the mode of address in verse 7 (“Turn us again, O God of hosts …”) and in verse 19 (“Turn us again, O Lord God of hosts, cause thy face to shine; and we shall be saved”), which concludes the psalm.

43. Donne follows a similar sequence in his “Hymn to God the Father,” where he begs that “at my death thy Sunne / Shall shine” (15-16), concluding by surrendering all to God: “And, having done that, Thou hast done, / I have no more” (17-18).

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