ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

IRREMEDIABLY DONNE
mood of “low devout melancholie” and gradually, over the course of the seven
meditations, weaves himself out of this condition, sustained by the larger—and
one is tempted to say residual Catholic—claim that “Salvation to all that will is
nigh.”
For the Holy Sonnets, however, we might also be tempted to rewrite that
claim as “salvation to me is well-nigh denied.” At least, that is the perspective
from which many of these poems are conceived, a perspective that has
encouraged some critics to view the sonnets as substantially informed by
Protestant worries over individual election. 33 As in the moving lament, “O might
those sighes and teares returne againe,” devout melancholy now borders on
despair. The desire to be touched can be imagined in only the most sexually
paradoxical and violent of terms: “Take mee to you, imprison mee, for I/Except
you’enthrall mee, never shall be free,/Nor ever chast, except you ravish mee.”
Even when Donne writes of receiving a sign of election, as in the curiously
poignant sonnet on his wife’s death (“Since she whome I lovd, hath payd her
last debt”), it fails to satisfy him. “Why should I begg more love,” is the note of
insecurity frequently and sometimes feverishly sounded in these sonnets, one
that can become irritating in its self-pity—“Weaker I am, woe is mee, and worse
then you”—and threaten the formal integrity of the poem with a facile turn after
the octave. A discourse of ingratiation never came easily to Donne. One
sometimes feels that, as with his own prolonged delays in joining the Church,
he needed more room than that provided by the sonnet to work out the turn in
a convincing fashion.
We might find evidence to support this view in two great, though greatly
differing, places: “Goodfriday, 1613: Riding Westward,” written two years before
his ordination, and the three hymns, all written well after that event, two
perhaps as late as or later than 1623. In “Goodfriday,” the religious “turn” is
everything: the center and circumference of the universe as well as the poem,
with its vision of the sacrificed Christ, either tuning or turning the spheres,
placed at the exact center of the poem: “Could I behold those hands which span
the Poles,/And tune [turne] all spheares at once, peirc’d with those holes?” (The
editorial dispute surrounding the choice here has been resolved only in so far as
“tune” has been offered as including “turne.”) 34 That feared but desired vision
also provides a focal point for the meditation, the gravity of which requires the
full forty-two lines for Donne to sort through the many conflicting layers of his
devotion on this day of sacrifices: “Hence is’t, that I am carryed towards the
West/This day, when my Soules forme bends toward the East.” To read
“Goodfriday” is to witness an imagination deepening, in successive stages, its
devotional potential, drawn inevitably to the thing it initially attempted to
resist, as if the very notion of setting out westward instigated a counteracting,
greater plot from the East, one that gradually inhabits the speaker’s entire being
and all his thinking. 35
The climax begins in line 33, perhaps as numerologically significant as the
number of lines in the poem, forty-two. (Donne was in his forty-second year in
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