Returning to John Donne

Achsah Guibbory

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780367879105
• eBook ISBN: 9781317063810
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Collected in this volume are Achsah Guibbory's most important and frequently cited essays on Donne, which, taken together, present her distinctive and evolving vision of the poet. The book includes an original, substantive introduction as well as new essays on the Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, the Songs and Sonnets, and the subject of Donne and toleration. Over the course of her career, Guibbory has asked different questions about Donne but has always been concerned with recovering multiple historical and cultural contexts and locating Donne's writing in relation to them. In the essays here, she reads Donne within various contexts: the early modern thinking about time and history; religious attitudes towards sexuality; the politics of early modern England; religious conflicts within the church. While her approach has always been historicist, she has also foregrounded Donne's distinctiveness, showing how (and why) he continues to speak powerfully to us now. Presented together here, with reflections on the trajectory of her engagement with Donne, Achsah Guibbory illuminates Donne's understanding that erotic, spiritual, and political issues are often intertwined, and reveals how this understanding resonates in our own times.

Chapter 1
Figuring Things Out: Donne’s Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions

The Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions is one of my favorite texts, though I have written about it only in passing. It is a liminal text, not just because Donne imagines himself inhabiting a space somewhere between earth and heaven, life and death, but also because the text straddles private and public. It echoes preoccupations of his earlier erotic lyrics (which were private, kept from the public) while articulating notions of community and the body’s role in worship voiced in his public sermons. My concern here is not with the politics of Donne’s religion—except insofar as it reflects Donne’s sense of what it is to be human—but with the imaginative work of The Devotions, which is spiritual work. The text bursts with hard-won insights as Donne confronts not the joys and frustrations of love but mortality, the vulnerability of the body that we take for granted so long as it is working well, so long as we are not sick.

At the heart of the Devotions stands Donne’s need to understand his sickness, and thereby to gain some control, some sense of agency in a situation that strips one of it. Figures and metaphors are what allow him to make sense of his condition. In virtually all Donne’s writing, we witness his intense search for a sense of significance to experience, not just a grasping towards faith—that there is something more than the physical and transient (a faith the speaker of “Love’s Alchymie” lacks)—but a hope that something transcendent actually inheres in the body, the physical.¹ Such an impulse drives the celebration of sexual love in “The Extasie” but also the bitterness of “Love’s Alchymie” and “Farewell to love.” And it fuels the Devotions.

It is easy to believe in some transcendent (and positive) meaning in moments of joy such as those celebrated in “The good-morrow” or “The Sunne Rising,” but it is harder to believe that when one is sick or miserable. This is the task Donne gives himself in the Devotions: to discover meaning and significance, something positive and transcendent, in sickness.²

Twenty-three devotions chart the course of Donne’s sickness, from “The first alteration, The first grudging of the sicknesse”—when he is “surpriz’d with a sodaine change,” his health “overthrow[n]” (17)—through his “stormie voyage” (67) and anticipation of death, to his recovery, which is tentative and precarious, since the doctors warn him of “the fearefull danger of relapsing” (121). This is a difficult book, facing mortality and sickness and the anxiety and despair, the sense of vulnerability that illness provokes. Donne captures that experience in compelling, vivid terms that strike anyone who has been weakened by serious illness, or watched someone else struggle with a terminal disease. Donne focuses, relentlessly, on the body and the emotions and thoughts prompted by the body’s suffering. He captures as well as anyone ever has the interdependence of body, mind, and emotion. Above all, however, he wants to make sense of illness, which is (he says) the human condition. We might compare our current recognition that “disability” is a state we all will at some time experience, that being able-bodied is only a temporary, precarious state.

Each of the twenty-three devotions marking the progress of his disease has three parts: the Meditation considers Donne’s condition at a particular moment as it reveals the condition of “natural man”—that is, as it is universal. The sections of Expostulation and Prayer that follow are, I would say, less universal, for they interpret the present moment in terms of the Bible (New Testament as well as Old) and man’s relation to God. With the rare exception of Meditation 5, the Meditations are “secular” and universal and do not presume a distinctly Christian perspective. I find these sections most moving, most appealing. The Expostulations are filled with references to the Bible, and here Donne asks questions of God, struggling with God as Jacob, David, and Job did in the Old Testament, and as Jesus did in the New. It is no accident that each Expostulation begins, “My God, my God,” echoing Jesus’s address and question to God as he was undergoing the Crucifixion (“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Mark 15:34, Matthew 27:46), which actually echoes the opening of Psalm 22. In the Prayer that concludes each devotion, Donne prays rather than questions, submitting his will and his reason, as he embraces both God and Christ, convincing himself that God has not, in fact, forsaken him.³ Indeed, this is what the whole set of Devotions works towards; it is arduous work—must be repeated again each time. Each devotion, and the book as a whole, labors to transform suffering into assurance.

The Meditations consider his body, his bodily symptoms and conditions. The Expostulations draw the analogy between the physical condition and a spiritual condition. As in his love poems (“The good-morrow” or “The Extasie”), the body and soul are presumed to be connected, interconnected. But even more significant, the body becomes the necessary means for understanding the soul, and the spiritual condition of the speaker and of human beings. As in “The Extasie,” the body is the book, the only text we have that tells us about the soul. And thus Donne closely analyzes the progress of this physical illness in order to understand the state and possibilities of his soul.

So much attention to the body. One of the most powerful things about Donne’s Devotions is the obsessive concern with all physical symptoms, the sensitivity to everything bodily that characterizes illness. I think of a similar preoccupation in Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. The body we take for granted is suddenly something to worry about, and Donne captures that worry so exactly. In Meditation 2 (“The strength, and the function of the Senses, & other faculties, change and faile” (11)), Donne describes the loss of appetite: “instantly the tast is insipid, and fatuous; instantly the appetite is dull and desirelesse. … I sweat againe, & againe, from the brow, to the sole of the foot, but I eat no bread, I tast no sustenance” (11–12). With a sense of irony, he recalls Adam’s punishment (to get his bread from the sweat of his brow), as Donne marks the paradox of his condition, but simply marking the biblical connection is insufficient, does not put him at ease. He is intent to precisely note his bodily sensations. Meditation 3 (“The Patient takes his bed”) describes the unbearable weakness of the sick body, unable to move, fixed in bed: “Strange fetters to the feete, strange Manacles to the hands, when the feete and handes are bound so much the faster, by how much the coards are slacker; So much the lesse able to doe their Offices, by how much more the Sinnewes and Ligaments are the looser” (15). The looseness that binds, immobilizing the sick body. Understanding the body matters. The body is no more to be discarded or left behind here (even as he prepares for the possibility of dying) than the bodies of the lovers in “The Extasie.”

But Donne’s meticulous attention to the body in his Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions is something more: it comes from his sense that studying the body tells us about the soul, about spiritual matters. It is not only that “divine purpose is inscribed on the surfaces and in the recesses of the sick body,” in Stephen Pender’s lovely phrasing.⁴ Donne’s loss of taste for food leads him to conclude, in his Prayer in the second Devotion, that “My stomach is not gone, but gone up, so far upwards toward the Supper of the Lamb” (14). In Devotion 3, his meditation about his immobilized weak body leads him to ask in the Expostulation, “How shall they come to thee whom thou has nayled to their bed?” (16), and then to the Prayer that, “As thou hast made this bed thine Altar, make me thy Sacrifice,” letting Donne “come unto thee” by “imbracing thy comming to me” in sickness (18). What we see here is powerful. It epitomizes the double project of the Devotions as a whole: Donne’s intense effort to see bodily experience as signifying (and inseparable from) the spiritual, and his labor to transform a terrible suffering into something positive—not just to see it differently but to turn it into something different.

In the second Prayer, he asks God to “Interpret” his sickness: “call” it “correction, and not anger” (14). But it is Donne himself who interprets it. His body is a text to interpret. As we read through the sequence of Devotions, we witness Donne interpreting and reinterpreting, shifting and growing as he seeks not only meaning in the details of his suffering (nothing is insignificant), but positive meaning. To find meaning requires transforming the experience, treating it metaphorically, symbolically.

As early as the end of the third Devotion, where he seeks to interpret the experience of feeling weak, weighed down in his bed, Donne is able to transmute the experience of enervation into a belief that what he really feels is the weight of God on his body: “I feel thy hand upon all my body” (18). He asks God to make the “feathers” of his bed, which now pain his sensitive body, the “feathers of thy Dove” (18), a transformation or transfiguration that would assure him of salvation. In Expostulation 5, he takes the “solitude” of his quarantine, which he fears, and transforms it into an opportunity, indeed a necessity for God’s visiting him: “God came not to Jacob, till he found him alone” (27). The thirteenth Devotion analyzes the “spots” that appear on his body, the manifestation of the “infection and malignity” of his illness (67). But by the end of the Expostulation, he has transformed the spots. “Even my spotts belong to thy Sonnes body” (69). The “spots” which were signs of sin, once he has confessed them, not only become taken on by Christ, but Donne imagines that the spots, which now physically appear “upon my Breast” and spiritually “upon my Soule,” in the future “shall appear to me as the Constellations of the Firmament, to direct my Contemplation to that place, where thy Son is” (70). A similar transformation happens to insomnia, which becomes a preparation for waking “continually” after death and seeing God (Devotion 15, “I sleepe not day nor night” (77)). Analysis in these devotions is transformative; interpretation alters the thing being analyzed.

The right way to interpret his bodily experience or an event in his illness is to interpret it figuratively, metaphorically, symbolically. In Donne’s lyric poetry, which argues through images, the vehicle of the metaphor is important. It is never discarded or diminished but leads to and is in turn illuminated by the tenor of the figure. I think of the comparison of women’s and men’s love to air and angels, or the comparison of the lovers to clergy, or the lover’s journey and return to the circle drawn by a compass. So in the Devotions, the bodily experience is not left behind in the process of seeking spiritual meaning. Rather, it is the indispensable vehicle. Bodily experience is transformed, given a new and different value—made sacramental, we might say, as a kind of divine significance inheres in it. Donne justifies his figurative approach by thinking about God in Expostulation 19 as a figurative God, in more than one sense.

“My God, my God, thou art a direct God, may I not say, a literall God, a God that wouldest be understood literally, and according to the plaine sense of all that thou saiest? But thou art also … a figurative, a metaphorical God too.” In God’s words are “a height of figures, such voyages, such peregrinations to fetch remote and precious metaphors” (99). Readers have often noted that Donne seems to be describing his own style—the predilection for “far-fetched” comparisons that Samuel Johnson derided. But what I wish to emphasize is that Donne here is justifying his method of writing and thinking as sanctioned by God, as indeed sacred—and justifying the method of his Devotions specifically. If “the stile of [God’s] works, the phrase of thine Actions, is Metaphorical” (100), then Donne’s labor in understanding this illness (which is an action or work of God, as he insists from the first Devotion on) is to decipher the metaphors, to understand the figures.

God has created a world that is figurative, and it is meant to be figured out—both in the sense of discovering the figures God has already written and in the sense of metaphorically describing a reality that is inherently metaphorically, in the hope that Donne’s metaphors will actually match and mirror God’s.

In Meditation 9, his physicians “read” his body: “I have cut up mine own Anatomy, dissected myself [in describing his ailments], and they are gon to read upon me” (45–46). The image recalls the opening of Donne’s “Hymne to God, my God in my sicknesse.” In that poem and in this Devotion, where the physicians think only of the body, of the material causes, symptoms, and cures, Donne performs a doubled act of reading that combines the literal and figurative, the bodily and the spiritual. He reads his physicians reading his body, and he offers a spiritual reading of his body and soul, feeling hopeful that he will receive God’s “seasonable mercy” (Expostulation 9, 49). In contrast to the approach of the physicians (who only read the literal text), Donne’s reading of his body yields him spiritual insight that enables the submission of his will to God: “at more poores then this slack body sweates teares, this sad soule weeps blood. … Take me, then, O blessed & glorious Trinitie, into a Reconsultation, and prescribe me any phisick,” which he will willingly take so long as it is from God’s “hand,” even if it be physic that effects “a speedy departing of this Soule” (Prayer 9, 56).

Everything that happens—including illness—is a text written by God, something for Donne to interpret. “Let me think no degree of this thy correction, casuall, or without signification; but yet when I have read it in that language, as a correction, let me translate it into another, and read it as a mercy” (Prayer 7, 40). Donne discerns the figurative meanings. But he also creates them, his creative figuring and creation of metaphors being a reflection of God’s power, the sign that he is truly made in God’s image, maybe more so than some others. Nailed to his bed of pain, now exhibiting spots that are like stigmata, repeating Christ’s words at the crucifixion (“My God, my God”) in his Expostulations, Donne is not afraid to represent Christ in his body, and in describing his experience. How different this is from the Protestant iconophobia, the fear of “human invention” in worship that makes even a George Herbert anxious that his imaginations might be idolatrous.

Still, there is a dark side to Donne’s creative imagination. The thinking mind is double-edged. It is what makes Donne anxious—he can imagine the frightening possibilities. We see this in the holy sonnets, where he tends towards despair, helpless to save himself and uncertain that God will actually “choose” him and save him (“As due by many titles,” l. 13). Throughout the Devotions, Donne struggles against anxiety. In the first Meditation, he observes, from his own experience, how we are tormented, “pre-afflicted, super-afflicted with these … apprehensions of Sicknes, before we can cal it a sicknes” (7). He prays, “Deliver me therefore, O my God, from these vaine imaginations” (10). The fifth Devotion asks that God “preserve this soule … from all such distempers, as might shake the assurance … that because thou hast loved me, thou wouldst love me to my end” (28). No sooner does he reach some peace at the end of this prayer than he again is filled with fear. Now that he sees “The Phisician is afraid” (Devotion 6), “I fear with him: I overtake him, I overrun him, in his feare” (29). “Feare insinuate[es] it self in every action, or passion of the Mind” (29). The thinking mind can be “an overcurious thing, a dangerous thing” (Prayer 1, 10). Meditation 12 (“They apply Pidgeons, to draw the vapors from the Head”) complains of the “vapors” in him that threaten to kill him (62). “They tell me it is my Melancholy; … It is my thoughtfulnesse; was I not made to thinke?” (63...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Time and History
• Part II Love
• Part III Religion
• Index