At the same time as drawing attention to the painting’s material construction, Donne parallels the portrait gift with another poetic trope: that of the picture in the lover’s heart, in the second line of the elegy: “Here, take my picture”, the speaker urges: “Thyne in my hart, wher my Soule dwells shall dwell” (ll. 1–2). This, perhaps, is a truer “other picture” than that identified by Tuve and Docherty in the later lines describing the weather-beaten, powder-stained veteran. And while the poem proceeds to peel back the layers of his material portrait, the immaterial picture of her in his heart, once mentioned, is left untouched. I cited “Witchcraft by a picture” in the Introduction as one of the best examples of Donne’s doubling and ambivalent attitude to images. In that poem, the speaker’s reflection in his lover’s eyes conjures up the fear that through “wicked skill” (l. 5), the “pictures made, and marrd” (l. 6) might be used, like an effigy, to hurt or kill the speaker. But the mimetic power of the initial “picture” is called into question. In James Knapp’s words, the representation is “true in that it resembles [the speaker’s] appearance but false in that it fails to capture the truth of his dynamic self”. There is thus a similar undermining of the picture’s “ability to tell the truth” as in “His Picture”.
1 James A. Knapp, “Looking At and Through Pictures in Donne’s Lyrics”, in The Art of Picturing in Early Modern English Literature, ed. by Camilla Caporicci and Armelle Sabatier (New York and London: Routledge, 2019), pp. 33–49 (p. 41). Knapp reads these two poems, and “The Crosse”, in the light of the legal paradox of veritas falsa. But the destructive potential of the visual representation is countered by the stability and safety of the poem’s final “Picture”: “One Picture more, yet that will bee, / Beeing in thyne owne hart, from all mallice free” (ll. 12–13).
2 Quotations from the Songs and Sonnets: “Witchcraft by a picture” and “The Dampe” are from Johnson et al., eds., Variorum 4.3: Songs and Sonnets, p. 227; p. 194; “Image of her, whom I loue” and “The Elegie” (known as “The Legacie” in some other editions) are taken from Johnson et al., eds., Variorum 4.2: Songs and Sonnets, p. 88, p. 156. The idea that the internal image is the truer picture, untarnished by time and not subject to the imperfections and inaccuracies of a painter’s reproduction, already casts some doubt on material paintings’ ability to represent. Yet although the poetic convention is that the image in the heart will last longer than the physical work of art,
3 See Pace, “Delineated Lives”, pp. 3–4. when Donne uses it, the internal image often seems to be preserved at the expense of the lover’s physical self.
While the trope of the lover’s heart that may be given as a gift, returned, or broken, is a conventional one, I am interested here in what happens when this is combined with the idea of the immortalising image. The closest verbal parallel to the second line of “His Picture” is to be found in his Holy Sonnet “What if this present were the world’s last night”: “Mark in my hart, Ô Soule where thou dost dwell / The Picture of Christ crucified” (ll. 2–3), which will be discussed at length in Chapter 4, concerning the Crucifixion.
4 Quoted from Stringer et al., eds., Variorum 7.1: Holy Sonnets, p. 25. (Revised Sequence). The trope of the image in the heart recurs several times in the
Songs and Sonnets and it is notable that each time the image is paralleled by a damaged or physically disintegrating body. In “Image of her, whom I loue”, the lover’s “fayre Impression, in my faythfull heart / Makes me her Medall” (2–3). Once the image is imprinted, though, stamped and coined (another material image to which Donne returns more than once), the speaker is not convinced that he can physically continue to bear it. It becomes “ominously powerful”,
5 David K. Anderson, “Internal Images: John Donne and the English Iconoclast Controversy”, Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme, 26.2 (2002): 23–42 (p. 36). “growne too Greate, and good for mee” (6), and he wonders if it might be easier to live without his heart and its burden: “take my hart from hence” (5). The contemplated removal of the heart in “Image of her” seems relatively painless and rhetorical, but in other poems the idea of the extraction of the image from the heart is expanded to a much more visceral opening up of the body. In “His Picture”, as we have seen, the “shadow” was associated with the disintegrating body of the speaker. In “The Dampe” the speaker is already dead, and the “Picture” proven to be the cause. Whereas in the elegy, the body is “torne” and reduced to “a sack of bones”, in “The Dampe” it is cut open with the precision of a post-mortem:
When I am Dead, and Doctors knowe not why,
And my friends curiositie
Will have mee cutt vp, to survey each part,
When they shall finde your Picture in my heart … (ll. 1–4)
In both of these cases, as in “His Picture”, the image in the heart seems to be in conflict with the physical integrity of the speaker, as if they cannot co-exist in the same space. David Anderson, in an article on Donne’s “internal images” in the light of the iconoclastic controversy, argues that his use of the trope in his secular poetry “parallels [his] argument about holy images, stressing the benefits and dangers of a picture’s transcendent power”.
6 Anderson, p. 36. More tenuously, perhaps, Philip Ayres has suggested that the “Picture in my heart” of “The Dampe” resembles the Passion scene reportedly inscribed physically in the heart of St Clare of Montefalco. “Donne’s ‘The Dampe’, Engraved Hearts, and the ‘Passion of St. Clare of Montefalco”, English Language Notes 13 (1976): pp. 171–173.The most extreme example of this kind of opening up of the body to reveal an image is the poem “Elegie” (known as “The Legacie” in most modern editions), a poem whose staging of a shifting, unrepresentable self recalls the shifting subject positions of “His Picture” as well as the anatomical excavation of “The Dampe”. Like the love elegy, “Elegie” is a valediction poem of sorts, involving a gift or bequest, a poem in which death and the self are both treated highly ambiguously and become fluid concepts. As in “The Dampe”, Donne’s speaker in “Elegie” is already dead for love, and as in “Image of Her”, he plays with the convention of the lover who sends his heart. But in this poem the speaker has difficulty locating his heart. After he has “search’d where hearts should lye” (14), all he can find is:
… something like a hart,
But collours it, and Corners had;
It was not good, it was not bad,
It was intire to none, and fewe had part,
As good, as could bee made by Arte
It seem’d … (17–22)
With the notable exception of Ilona Bell, critics of “Elegie” have tended to read “corners” as implying that the object is not perfect, not true, because not a perfect circle, while “collours” is often read as suggesting something artificial, cosmetic and therefore negatively connoted: “a painted [heart], not a ‘true plain’ one”; “a painted heart, i.e. a hypocritical one”.
7 Theodore Redpath, ed., The Songs and Sonnets of John Donne, second edition (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1983), p. 116; Arthur L. Clements, John Donne’s Poetry (New York and London: Norton, 1966), p. 10. Ilona Bell identifies “colours” and “corners” in the poem as legal terminology: “Women in the Lyric Dialogue of Courtship: Whitney’s Admonition to al yong Gentilwomen and Donne’s ‘The Legacie’”, in Representing Women in Renaissance England, ed. by Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1997), pp. 76–92. Although it has been read as an “ingeniously simulated” heart,
8 Smith, ed., Complete English Poems, p. 382n. the focus on form and colour does not seem to have been extended to the idea that the coloured, painted object is indeed a painting, or at least the idea of a painting, occupying the same space in the heart as the picture in “The Dampe”.
9 I am grateful to Kader Hegedüs for first suggesting this interpretation to me. Hegedüs. “Maps, Spheres and Places in Donnean Love. Donne’s spatial representations in the ‘Songs and Sonnets.’” MA (University of Lausanne), 2012, p. 17. In the last line of “Elegie”, the object like a heart proves to belong not to the speaker but to his lover: “no man could hold it, for ’twas thine” (24). The shifting ownership of the heart is part of the exchange-of-hearts trope, but here there seems to be an insistence on the interpretation of this represented heart. No one can fully grasp it; only very few people can begin to understand the multiple, shifting, fluid self through this representation of it. What is notable here, and comparable to “His Picture” and “The Dampe”, is the violence done to the body of the speaker in the search for the representational object. The body of the lover is “ripped” and “killed … again” (15) in the attempt to access its “true” heart, but all that is to be found is the picture, the counterfeit, which can only ever be an imperfect copy of the self it represents: “it was not good, it was not bad … As good, as could bee made by Arte / It seem’d” (19; 21–22).
In parallel with this, the poem stages a self that is grammatically fractured, in a bewildering confusion of pronouns that begins in the opening stanza and becomes even more pronounced in the second: “I heard mee say, tell her anone, / That my selfe (that’s you not I) / Did kill mee…” (ll. 9–11). The speaker (if it’s possible to use the term in this poem) is simultaneously “mine owne executor, and Legacie” (l. 8). Carey describes this as “an exasperating poem, of course”, a key example of Donne’s interest in what he calls the “fluidity of the self”.
10 Carey, John Donne, p. 175. The confusion of subject and object here echoes that in “His Picture”, where, similarly, the self slips between multiple possible roles. Once more a painting – this time an internal image – is paralleled with an unreadable and ungraspable self. The colours and corners of paintings seem to generate reflection on the impossibility of pinning down the self and the unreliability of representation. Donne’s doubt in the epistle to Metempsychosis as to whether “any colours can deliver a minde …” seems to be at work again here. Something
like a heart will not give access to the speaker’s inner self.