ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

IRREMEDIABLY DONNE
measure fail, to define the experience of absolute emptiness, of Donne as the
nadir of nothingness. Whether appearing, as he does above, in the last line of
the stanza—but then only as the epitome of death, a speaking epitaph—or
emphatically admitting that, in his grief, he cannot even be an “ordinary
nothing,” a shadow (for to be a shadow is to have a body), Donne turns the
upwardly spiraling wit of amatory mutuality into a sharply delineated descent
into deprivation: “Of absence, darknesse, death; things which are not.” “All
others, from all things, draw all that’s good,” but not Donne, the exception who
proves the rule; and in the moving final stanza, he invites us to listen to a voice
on the brink of extinction:
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.
The plain admission that “my Sunne” will not “renew” allows a bittersweet
salute for others to “Enjoy your summer all,” while Donne will “prepare towards
her,” the deceased and sometimes thought to be his wife. And though the
imagery of the concluding line recollects the beginning of the poem, it does so
with a difference. The final trail of stressed words (“dayes deep midnight is”)
leads us only deeper into the surrounding darkness and leaves us perhaps a little
short of breath as well.
Donne, the divine
The problems and effects analyzed so far reappear, though sometimes in a more
concentrated light, in the “religious” poetry. I use the quotation marks to signal
the difficulty in making an absolutely clear distinction, as Walton tried to do,
between the “Jack Donne” who wrote amorous poetry and the Dr. Donne who,
having taken orders in 1615, reportedly wrote “many divine Sonnets, and other
high, holy, and harmonious composures.” 31 In so far as dates can be determined
with any degree of certainty, a good many of the “Holy Sonnets” are thought to
have been written before Donne took orders, and at least one hymn,
“Goodfriday, 1613: Riding Westward,” clearly preceded that event. There are
also questions about how narrowly we should construe the notion of “religious”
verse. The Third “Satire” is concerned with the vexing problem of determining
the “true” church, although we hardly think of it as especially pious. The First
and Second Anniversaries, published in 1611 and 1612 respectively and
16