ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

IRREMEDIABLY DONNE
To readers approaching the later poetry, it is also that story, in several
versions, that Donne kept remaking in verse. In the three great hymns, the face
has turned and all that seems to remain is the fine tuning, the turning of phrases
to celebrate a choice as having been made and as having been the right one.
Although Donne wrote very little poetry after being ordained, these poems, in
their assured seriousness, lend support from a different quarter to the idea that
he did not want to be known as a “pleasant poetical” dean. 36 The tuning here is
of a canonical kind. The poems have a public, ritualized dimension that is not
present in the Holy Sonnets, but they are not so communal as to erase all traces
of the speaker’s identity from the text. If anything, one feels that the effort in
these hymns is to define and place the personal in a wide, divinely determined,
arena. In “A Hymne to Christ, at the Authors last going into Germany,” the
Protestant divine and possible martyr sets forth, but not before re-presenting
himself in the final stanza as the fully converted, former love poet:
Seale then this bill of my Divorce to All,
On whom those fainter beames of love did fall;
Marry those loves, which in youth scattered bee
On Fame, Wit, Hopes (false mistresses) to thee.
Churches are best for Prayer, that have least light:
To see God only, I goe out of sight:
And to scape stormy dayes, I chuse
An Everlasting night.
In the “Hymne to God my God, in my sicknesse,” the elected preacher gives
himself the opportunity for one final divertissement before joining “thy Quire of
Saints for evermore.” The poem concludes by producing a text from a sermon
to underscore the Augustinian turn in his life, which he now turns
authoritatively, climactically, into an emblem for others: “Be this my Text, my
Sermon to mine owne,/Therefore that he may raise the Lord throws down.” And
in “A Hymne to God the Father,” the pun on his name comes dizzyingly and,
initially at least, arrogantly to the fore as a sign of his own egocentricity and
mortality until the final stanza when the friction between God and Donne,
represented in the first two stanzas in the conflicting senses of “done,” is
imagined as being erased by a heavenly sign that helps to stabilize the referents
through a careful subordination of meaning:
I have a sinne of feare, that when I have spunne
My last thred, I shall perish on the shore;
Sweare by thy selfe, that at my death thy Sunne
Shall shine as it shines now, and heretofore;
And, having done that, Thou hast done,
I have no more.
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