ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

IRREMEDIABLY DONNE
1613.) But these mathematical nuances would matter little if the felt logic of
the poem were less strong, if our sense of Donne’s earlier reluctance to be a
witness of the sacrifice beginning as far back as line 11 were not so thoroughly
turned and eventually trumped by the functioning memory; functioning, that is,
by finally remembering the spiritual significance of Christ’s sacrifice, the act of
God turning into man to save mankind, to save even the guilt-ridden speaker
riding westward in 1613:
Though these things, as I ride, be from mine eye,
They’are present yet unto my memory,
For that looks towards them; and thou look’st towards mee,
O Saviour, as thou hang’st upon the tree.
On their own, these lines are almost disturbingly casual, at least until the
emerging trinity of memory and “things” is suddenly completed in the
second half of line 35 and the speaker sees himself at the center of Christ’s
gaze. In the turn (or is it a leap?) to the apostrophe beginning the next line,
moreover, if we sense another voice taking over, that voice is made to
sound all the more resonant to the reader who has come to this poem from
the Holy Sonnets. Christ goes by many titles there but is never called
“Saviour,” let alone “O Saviour.” Eyed by this Jesus, Donne can now make a
concluding, though not ultimately final, turn as he offers up his back in a
purposeful act of penance:
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, and I’ll turne my face.
“Goodfriday” is a fully persuasive poem, a powerful dramatization of the
irresistibility of divine grace operating on the will of the speaker. It might even
be tempting to think of it as a “conversion” poem; but if we resist the pleasantly
Walton-like desire to assign it a pivotal place in Donne’s career story, it is
because we know Donne still had a few cards left to play in his quest for secular
preferment. (As late as 1614, Donne was seeking the ambassadorship to Venice.)
But “Goodfriday” does suggest, as the sonnets do not, how the turn could be
both imagined and enacted, how a deferral of choice (riding westward) could be
fashioned into a desire for the East, a desire made stronger by the very nature of
its delay. And that dimension of the poem does accord with what we know of
Donne’s career as a divine. Once ordained, he was a fully committed servant of
the Church, rising quickly to become Dean of St. Paul’s in 1622 and one of
England’s most famous preachers.
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