Chapter 3
Annunciation: Representing the Unrepresentable
How to behold what cannot be held?
Richard Howard
1 Richard Howard, “Giovanni da Fiesole on the Sublime, or Fra Angelico’s Last Judgement”. Poetry (October 1970). ’Twas much that man was made like God before,
But that God should be made like man, much more.
John Donne, Holy Sonnet 12 (Original Sequence)
Perhaps unsurprisingly, in Donne’s divine poetry there is no direct staging of a material visual representation of religious subject matter comparable to “Here, take my picture.” But as in his secular poetry and his sermons, he continues to use words like “picture” and a vocabulary of visual appreciation that evokes devotional art, even when the images he stages seem to be internal or imagined. Explicit references like the “Picture of Christ crucified” inscribed in the heart in the Holy Sonnet “What if this present was the worlds last night?”, or the mental image of the Crucifixion suspended in the East in “Good friday, Made as I was Rideing westward, that daye”, to take just two examples, draw attention to Donne’s reflection on the limits of representation. His interlinked sonnet sequence “La Corona” provides his most extensive reflection on the representation of the divine. Given its subject matter and visual vocabulary, it has often been read in the light of Christian iconography. But though, at first glance, it may appear to be a rather conventional meditation on the life of Christ, it proves strangely resistant to any translation into visual form, despite the best efforts of many readers. Patrick O’Connell describes “La Corona” as the “paradigm and interpretative key for the entire body of Donne’s religious poetry”, in the way it dramatises the difficulties and dangers facing all writers of religious verse.
2 Patrick F. O’Connell, “‘La Corona’: Donne’s Ars Poetica Sacra”, in The Eagle and the Dove: Reassessing John Donne, ed. by Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1986), pp. 119–130 (p. 130). I suggest that Donne addresses the risk of idolatry by encouraging comparison of his sequence with Christian visual art, only to make that comparison extremely problematic, if not impossible. Far from providing an easy companion text to visual representations of Christ, “La Corona” reflects on what it means to represent the divine, visually or verbally. Its circular form provides Donne with a structural conceit with which to explore the circumscription of the divine, using geometrical metaphors as a device to reconcile the paradoxes of the Incarnation. The sequence may frustrate the desire to find direct pictorial parallels for it but it proposes an alternative visual and spatial approach to the issue of representation.
The seven sonnets of “La Corona” have inevitably invited comparisons with other formal sequences and cycles, both verbal and visual, such as the mysteries of the rosary or medieval mystery plays. Most influentially, Louis Martz pointed out in the 1950s that “corona” might reference not only the Italian sequence of linked sonnets, the “
corona di sonnetti”, but also a type of rosary popular in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
3 Martz, Poetry of Meditation, pp. 107–110. Martz points to the “The Corone or Crowne of Our Ladie”, mentioned in the preface of Thomas Worthington’s “The rosarie of our Ladie”, containing 63 “Aves” for the years of Our Lady’s life and divided into seven parts. He also mentions a “Corone of our Lord” consisting of thirty-three Pater nosters. Thomas Worthington, The rosarie of our Ladie. Otherwise called our Ladies psalter With other godlie exercises mentioned in the preface. Antwerp, 1600. Preface, n.p. STC (second ed.): 17546. The sonnets, focused on moments from the life of Christ, are taken to refer to the mysteries of the rosary, and the presence of the Virgin Mary in the first sonnets of the sequence reinforces the association. Such parallels have often led to “La Corona” being categorised as a more “Catholic” work.
4 Ernest Gilman describes the sequence as “highly Anglo-Catholic in nature”, “‘To adore or scorne”: 63–100 (p. 89). While George Klawitter finds in this a reflection of Donne’s “recusant background”, he also observes that the two sonnets in “La Corona” are “gentle meditations on Mary’s motherhood … conventional in their Marian imagery”. As with the description of Mary in “Upon the Annunciation and the Passion”, these would be inoffensive to Protestant and Catholic alike, as Mary’s divine motherhood was uncontroversial. George Klawitter, “John Donne’s Attitude toward the Virgin Mary: The Public versus the Private Voice” in Frontain and Malpezzi, John Donne’s Religious, pp. 122–140 (p. 126). As Klawitter points out, Marian references in Donne’s poetry are very scarce: only six of Donne’s poems mention Mary at all. The others he cites are “Good Friday 1613. Riding Westward”, “To Mr Tilman after he had taken orders”, “A Litanie” and the “Second Anniversarie”. This may contribute to the frequent assumption that the sequence makes direct reference to serial representations of the life of Christ from the Catholic iconographic tradition, whether the mysteries of the rosary or series of stained-glass windows.
Certainly, there is something in “La Corona” that seems to inspire direct comparison with visual art – even if critics tend to quickly double back on any such identification. Helen Gardner describes the sonnet sequence’s “emphasis on the beginning and close of the life of Christ” as “characteristic of medieval art, whether we think of a series of windows like those at Fairford, or of the medieval dramatic cycles” although she is quick to acknowledge that there is in fact very little visual detail in these sonnets.
5 Gardner, ed., Divine Poems, pp. xxii–xxiii. The addition of titles to the individual sonnets of the sequence may reinforce the impression of a series of key iconographic moments in the Christian story, but these titles are probably not authorial, appearing as they do in only one manuscript group.
6 The titles to individual sonnets appear in the first edition of the Divine Poems in 1633, and in one manuscript group. The Donne Variorum does not rule out the possibility that the titles of individual sonnets in “La Corona” could be part of a “last, minor authorial revision”, but states that there is not sufficient evidence to identify them as indisputably authorial, and does not print them as part of the text. Jeffrey S. Johnson et al., eds., Variorum 7.2: Divine Poems, p. 13. Gardner judges the titles to be inauthentic (Divine Poems, 57), and observes that “the essential unity of the poem is obscured by the titles given to sonnets 2–7, which also make ‘La Corona’ appear to be the title of the first alone, instead of the title to the set”, and the Variorum editors observe that “the subheadings strike us as helpful, but neither necessary nor inspired; they are thematic glosses, but do little to complicate or enhance the poem’s meaning, and, as has been pointed out, they actually frustrate the poem’s repetitive structure” (p. 13). Yet other details within the sonnets have also sparked associations with visual art. Ernest Gilman finds the treatment of Christ’s life and death reminscent of two of the paintings Donne owned, described in his will as “the Picture of the B: Virgin and Joseph” and “Picture of layinge Christe in his Toombe”.
7 Ernest B. Gilman, Iconoclasm and Poetry in the English Reformation: Down Went Dagon (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 122. “Donne’s Will”, Bald, Donne: A Life, Appendix D.II; p. 563, p. 565. What Wesley Milgate called Donne’s “art gallery”, may provide, Gilman suggests, “the perfect imaginative setting” for “La Corona”. Developing the “echo of womb and tomb” that he finds particularly in the enclosed spaces of the “Annunciation” and “Crucifying” sonnets, Gilman reads the line “Thou hast Light in darke” (2, 13) as a “chiaroscuro detail”.
8 Gilman, Iconoclasm, p. 122. All quotations from “La Corona” are taken from Johnson et al., eds., Variorum 7.2: Divine Poems, pp. 5–7. This attribution of painterly terminology to the sonnet’s themes of light and dark reinforces the parallels he is attempting to establish with the visual tradition. Albert Labriola similarly reads the same sonnet with reference to the iconography of painted Annunciations, finding parallels with the motif of the extinguished candle in, for example, the Annunciation triptych known as the Merode Altarpiece (fig. 3).
9 Albert C. Labriola, “Iconographic Perspectives on Seventeenth-century Religious Poetry”, in Approaches to Teaching the Metaphysical Poets, ed. by Sidney Gottlieb (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1990), p. 63.The scenes from the life of Christ that make up the sonnets of “La Corona” are all popular subjects for paintings, and Donne clearly does make reference to details also found in the iconographic tradition. But although the sequence seems to invite verbal-visual parallels, it also frustrates any desire for direct and simple ekphrasis, as most critics acknowledge. As Gardner remarks in
The Divine Poems, despite her fleeting identification of the sequence with stained-glass windows, there is no attempt in “La Corona” to picture events in any detail: “Instead of the scene of the maiden alone in her room at Nazareth, there is a theological paradox … The scandal of the Cross is presented not by a vivid picture … but by the thought that here the Lord of Fate suffered a fate at the hand of his creatures”.
10 Gardner, ed., Divine Poems, pp. xxii–xxiii. Gardner’s shift from visualisation to theological paradox mirrors what happens in the reading of the sequence. Martz, too, identifies a progression in the reading of the sonnets that he connects with Donne’s “mastery of the whole art of Catholic meditation on the life of Christ”. If the Nativity sonnet begins with the meditative technique of “visualizing the scene with ‘thy faiths eyes,’” this soon leads into “the intellectual development of paradoxes from the visual scene”.
11 Martz, Poetry of Meditation, p. 109. The sequence’s surface resemblance to a series of illustrations or stained-glass windows is the first step in enabling its spatial and visual paradoxes to point to the mystery of what cannot be seen: the mystery of the Incarnation.
The desire to find painterly parallels for the scenes in the sonnets is to some extent inspired by the language of the sequence itself, or what Annabel Patterson has described as the “frequent appeals to the visualization of these scenes”.
12 Patterson, “Re-formed”, p. 85. A line like “Ioseph turne backe;
See where your Child doth sitt” (4, 2, my emphasis) addresses the figure of Joseph within the fourth sonnet, but it also invites the poem’s readers to visually construct the scene that is evoked. In her article “Donne’s Re-formed
La Corona”, Patterson responds to this invitation to “see” by combining the search for visual art parallels with Martz’s rosary reading. Developing Martz’s identification of Worthington’s
The Rosarie of our Ladie as a potential source for Donne’s sequence, she identifies close correspondences between the episodes from Christ’s life that both Worthington and Donne choose to focus on. More than this, she proposes that the engraved illustrations to Worthington’s
Rosarie were a direct source of visual inspiration for Donne, who might, Patterson suggests, have “had Worthington’s book and its engravings before him as he wrote”. She finds various parallels between a number of the engravings and their corresponding poems in “La Corona”, going so far as to describe the central image of the closing sonnet (“Ascension”) – “Behold the Highest, parting hence away, / Lightens the darke Clouds, which he treads vpon” (7, 5–6) – as “a virtual ekphrasis of Worthington’s illustration”.
13 Patterson, “Re-formed”, p. 85.Patterson’s article is a detailed analysis of the ways in which Donne is “salvaging” the devotional form of the rosary to make it acceptable in the hostile environment of early seventeenth-century England, rather as he did with his “Litany”. The direct parallels that she makes with the illustrations to Worthington’s book, however, are the least convincing part of her argument. Like Gardner’s comparison of the sequence to a series of stained-glass windows, such parallels tend to fix “La Corona” in a superficial verbal-visual relationship that does not do justice either to Donne’s “re-forming” practice or to the ambiguity of his verse. A good example of this is Patterson’s take on the third sonnet, on the Nativity, where the reflexive nature of the “appeal to visualisation” is made explicit, as the speaker invites his soul to contemplate the scene: “Seest thou my Soule, with thy fayths Eyes, how Hee / Which fills all Place, yett none holds him, doth lye?” (3, 9–10). For Patterson the invitation to “see” in Donne’s sonnet points literally and unproblematically to the parallel illustration in Worthington’s
Rosarie: “there, indeed the child does lie in his little basket, instead of being ‘held’ on his mother’s lap…”
14 Patterson, “Re-formed”, p. 85. Yet such a literal and representational understanding of the line does not fully take into account the
unrepresentability suggested in both “Hee / Which fills all Place” and “none holds him”. The paradox of the Incarnation is that the infant Jesus both can and cannot be held, that he “fills all Place” yet has been incarnated in this particular place and time. Donne’s “appeal to visualisation” is thus much more complex, in that it invites readers of the sequence to “see” something that cannot be seen, and thus reflects on the role of divine poetry more generally, which must attempt to capture something that cannot be comprehended.