ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

IRREMEDIABLY DONNE
Donne’s language here remains richly polysemous, but the several puns now
point toward a single, overarching reading: overcoming death. “I have no more,”
with the pun for death in Latin (mors) helping to cinch the note of closure.
In all three poems, too, one feels their force as hymns, poems that, if actually
problematic to sing, nonetheless invite the reader into their stanzaic folds by
virtue of the simple imperatives or ritualized acts of interrogation performed by
the speaker: “In what torne ship soever I embarke,/That ship shall be my
embleme of thy Arke.” The wit remains, but its intricacies are directed more
toward revealing a dominant register of worship than toward displaying a self
only vexed by contraries, a register whose tonal range is controlled by the
significant preposition in the title of each: “to.” For all their purported
immediacy, the Holy Sonnets are rarely intimate; but in the hymns, the
modulations of speech develop out of a seasoned colloquy with God:
Since I am comming to that Holy roome,
Where, with thy Quire of Saints for evermore,
I shall be made thy Musique; As I come
I tune the Instrument here at the dore,
And what I must doe then, thinke now before.
Part of what pleases here is our sense of the chatty love poet returning to his
work on a more consciously respectful, elevated plane. Although we can only
speculate about the trafficking that went on between Donne and the Herberts,
perhaps the note was also heard by the future author of The Temple, George
Herbert, who was getting ready to “step foot” into divinity shortly after this last
hymn was written, probably in December, 1623. In the context of the
unprecedented public celebration of English poets as authors in the early
seventeenth century, a celebration that began with the publication of the 1616
Jonson Folio and continued with the 1617 Spenser Folio, and the 1623
Shakespeare and Daniel Folios, Donne’s hymns, themselves perhaps a partial
response to this situation, as well as Donne’s example made it possible for both
a culture and an individual to conceive of not just the traditional Spenserian
poet-priest but the priest who could also be a serious poet. Herbert, of course, is
only the most brilliant instance in the seventeenth century of an author whose
achievement is not possible to comprehend without also understanding the poet
whose verse was transcribed more often than that of “any other British poet of
the 16th and 17th centuries.” 37
* * *
In this chapter, I have been attempting to read Donne in large part from the
perspective of his best contemporary interpreter, Thomas Carew, who, borrowing
from the language of political discourse in his elegy on Donne, elevated him to
“The universall Monarchy of Wit” and then, for good measure, placed him in
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