ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

IRREMEDIABLY DONNE
interpreted often as religious meditations, have also been read in the context of
Donne’s other occasional verse as appeals for patronage. “A Nocturnall upon S.
Lucies Day” helps to make the point: clearly a vigil, it is often read as an
occasional poem but almost always appears in editions of the Songs and Sonnets.
But the idea of a “devotional” Donne certainly has validity so long as the
devotional in Donne is not made to exclude the effects we have so far
encountered: the disturbing particularity of a scene (“Oh my blacke Soule! now
thou art summoned/By sicknesse”), the sudden extension of the concentrated
moment into the universe (“What if this present were the worlds last night”),
the tortured exhibitionism (“Spit in my face yee Jewes, and pierce my side”),
intellectual complexity (“Oh, to vex me, contaryes meete in one”), and an
idiom characterized by passionate exhortation, though now turned against the
self (“Batter my heart, three person’d God”). But there is another reason not to
overvalue the pious in Donne, since it is precisely the problem of impiety—the
problem of subordinating the “I” in all of its materiality to the “eye” of God—
that determines the kind of response we most often find in the devotional
poetry: the fear of being forgotten, of failing in the ultimate sense of not getting
to the other shore. Whether the source of such anxiety lies in the deeper
reaches of Donne’s religious biography as an isolated Catholic who ultimately
accepted the creeds and codes of Protestantism, or whether it resides in more
immediate worries of employment, or whether the answer is in the
heterodoxical nature of Donne’s mind—its refusal ever to be at rest—or even in
his guilt over his earlier “idolatries,” the disturbance was sufficiently seismic not
only to be explicitly realized in the most private of his divine poems, the Holy
Sonnets; it was also to be given a kind of public exorcism in “A Hymne to God,
the Father,” that extraordinary poem filled with puns on the poet’s name, which
Donne reportedly caused “to be set to a most grave and solemn tune, and to be
often sung to the organ by the Choristers of St. Paul’s Church, in his own
hearing.” 32
After generally refusing to write formal sonnets during the decade of the
sonnet, Donne’s decision to reanimate the form in his Holy Sonnets might be
explained as another instance of his working against the grain. The religious
sonnet, while receiving some attention in the 1590s from the likes of Henry Lok
(Sundry Christian Passions Contained in Two Hundred Sonnets, 1593, 1597) and
Barnabe Barnes (A Divine Centurie of Spirituall Sonnets, 1595) went underground
in the early years of James’s reign. But it was still the form most suitable to a
poet who might imagine himself now in the position of unrequited lover,
suffering in his alienation spiritually as well as vocationally, and seeking some
sign of recognition from a God frequently and hopefully figured as a jealous,
sometimes violent, lover. This posture is only barely developed in the “La
Corona” sequence, a series of linked sonnets on the principal events of Jesus’s
life in which the last line of one becomes the first in the next until finally
completing a circle or “crowne of prayer and praise.” In this most ritualized of
poems, second only to “A Litanie” in this regard, Donne’s speaker begins in a
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