“In little roome”: the circumscription of the divine

More recently, Kimberly Johnson has convincingly argued that the oppositions inherent in linear perspective find a parallel in the tension between form and content in vernacular lyric poetry which “sprung up” around the same time. If perspective highlights an essential tension between artificial and natural, surface and depth, figurative and literal, lyric poetry too is built on a fundamental tension between formal technique and narrative content, between “the sign for its own self and the signified it gestures toward”. 3 Kimberly Johnson, “Linear Perspective and the Renaissance Lyric”, PMLA 134:2 (2019): 280–297 (p. 228). Thank you to Greg Kneidel for bringing this article to my attention. Johnson proposes the English sonnet, in particular, as a “provocative point of entry” into the way in which “the competing signficative systems of the lyric repeat the challenges of perspectival art”, and reads Shakespeare’s sonnet 24 (“Mine eye hath played the painter…”) and selected sonnets from Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella to demonstrate how the sonnet may foreground the tension between, as she puts it, “narrative depth and aesthetic surface”.4 Johnson, “Linear Perspective”, p. 293. The sonnets Johnson reads, which thematise artificial representation, demonstrate well that on the level of meaning as well as of form the tension between truth and artifice is never resolved, and her conclusions chime with many of my own in the chapter that discusses Donne’s questioning of the possibility of achieving a human likeness in portrait representations.

His exploration of the much more fraught question of representing the divine follows logically from his problematising of verisimilitude in portraits, but in his divine poems, particularly “La Corona”, the parallels with the formal tensions of linear perspective painting are particularly pronounced. The formal qualities of the individual sonnets and the careful construction of the full sonnet crown foreground the mechanism, the aesthetic surface of the poem. The poem thematises the formal construction of its circle, the opening sonnet immediately referencing the textual “Croune of Prayer and Prayse, / Weau’d” by the human hand of the poet “in [his] lowe deuoute Melancholye” (1, 1–2). At the same time the theological paradoxes that crowd the sequence comment on the unrepresentability of the divine in a particularly spatial way.

While paradoxical wordplay is to be found throughout “La Corona”, there is a particular concentration of examples in the second and third sonnets, traditionally titled “Annunciation” and “Nativity”. In both sonnets Mary’s body becomes the focus for a network of contradictory metaphors of enclosure that are key to understanding how the whole sequence works. In the Annunciation sonnet standard theological paradoxes are used to describe Mary’s divine motherhood and relationship to Christ: “Whom thou conceiust, Conceiud; yea thou art now / Thy Makers Maker, and thy fathers Mother” (2, 11–12).5 Grierson cites Augustine’s De sancta virginitate (I, 5) as the source of the paradox in line 12: “Maria ergo faciens voluntatem Dei, corporaliter Christi tantummodo mater est, spiritualiter autem et soror et mater”, in Poems, vol. 2, p. 230. Echoing the iconography of the painted tradition, the whole sonnet is framed with metaphors of enclosure, of prison and cloister, describing the incomprehensible moment of the Incarnation of the divine in human flesh. The opening lines introduce

The Annunciation provides a particular example of the ways linear perspective can draw attention to representational problems, and Donne’s spatial contortions find parallels in some of the techniques used by painters of Annunciation scenes. In the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries, Renaissance painters sought ways to represent both the visible event narrated in the Gospel of Luke and its underlying meaning which is beyond the visible and cannot be plainly represented. The interiority essential to the iconography of the Annunciation, enclosing Mary and the divine messenger in a domestic space, or sometimes a church – echoing the enclosure of Christ within her womb – provides an opportunity for artists to exploit their mastery of linear perspective.7 In Iconographie de l’art chrétien vol. 2 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1957), p. 186, Louis Réau discusses the different traditions of enclosing the Virgin. Italian art tends to have palaces; the Netherlandish tradition goes for domestic interiors; while the French often situate the scene inside a church. The gospel account of the Annunciation (Luke 1: 28–38) gives no details regarding where the event takes place, but the spatial conventions of Annunciation paintings develop out of the verbs of entering and departing that frame the angel’s address to Mary: the angel came in; the angel departed. This framing is reinforced by the way the conversation itself is neatly enclosed, with a marked beginning and end, effectively circumscribing the unrepresentable moment of Christ’s conception, and dramatising the mystery of his simultaneously divine and human natures. But the relatively new technique of linear perspective could also be manipulated in order to express the paradox of the Incarnation. The illusion of three-dimensional, enclosing space can at the same time be used to indicate how the incommensurable divine escapes from human comprehension and human reality.

In her comparison of the development of linear perspective and lyric poetry Johnson claims that both “stage the interaction of incommensurabilities”.8 Johnson, “Linear Perspective”, p. 22; p. 228. It may be for this reason that Daniel Arasse claims that there is a “particular affinity” between the Annunciation and the use of perspective.9 Daniel Arasse, L’Annonciation italienne: une histoire de perspective (Paris: Hazan, 1999), p. 9. In his in-depth study of L’Annonciation Italienne and linear perspective, Arasse demonstrates how often the scene takes place in an elaborate architectural space that is subtly disproportionate or somehow fails to fully contain the figures of Mary and Gabriel.

In a 1470 Annunciation by Piero della Francesca, for example, archangel and virgin confront each other within an elaborate structure of columns and arches; it is only by reconstructing the geometry of the scene with the “intellectual eye” that the viewer realises that in three dimensions one column would logically be placed directly between Gabriel and Mary, obscuring their view of each other. This play with the visible and the invisible points towards the essential and unrepresentable object of every Annunciation – the figure of Christ.10 Arasse, Annonciation, pp. 41–45; citing Thomas Martone, “Piero della Francesca e la prospettiva dell’intelletto”, in Piero, teorico dell’arte, ed. by Omar Calabrese (Rome: Gangemi, 1985), pp. 173–186. Arasse indeed proposes that the painting identified by Erwin Panofsky as the first to employ a single vanishing point – an Annunciation by Ambrogio Lorenzetti (1344) – is already using perspective in order to establish a “real”, human, space in contrast to an “unreal” divine space representing the arrival of the angel.11 Arasse, Annonciation, p. 59 ff. Erwin Panofsky, “Die Perspektive als ‘symbolische Form’”, Vorträge der Bibliothek Warburg 1924–1925 (1927), pp. 258–330. Such a paradoxal geometry, Arasse argues, is fundamental to the painterly representation of the meeting of two incompatible, incongruous spaces in one.

Donne’s impossible “appeals to visualisation” in “La Corona” function in a similar way, inviting the reader to construct an imagined space, or picture, but at the same time using paradox to complicate any kind of visualisation. In the second sonnet of “La Corona”, the phrase described by Gilman as a “chiaroscuro detail” is part of Donne’s central spatial description of the fundamental paradox of the Incarnation: “Thou hast Light in darke; and shuttst in little roome, / Immensitye cloystred in thy deare wombe” (2, 13–14). Mary herself is enclosed in her “little roome” by the play of shadow and light and at the same time her body is the cloister that encloses the divine in a human space. The abstract “Immensitye” of the Annunciation sonnet’s final line takes grammatical human form when it becomes the subject of the verb in the opening of the Nativity sonnet: “Immensitye cloystred in thy deare wombe / Now leaves hys welbeloued Imprisonment” (3, 1–2, my emphasis). The abstraction “immensity” is corralled in a cloister and a prison and simultaneously becomes a grammatical agent, expressible as a pronoun. This transformation functions as a very neat verbal acting out of the mystery of the Incarnation in verbal form: God takes on human shape and human function in the visible body of the Christ child, and in the very grammar of the sonnet.

The particular rhyme scheme of the corona sequence is also employed to demonstrate the process of enclosure. Between the second and third sonnets, the same rhyming words are repeated in such a way as to develop and expand the sense of enclosure. The room-womb rhyme creates the compact closing couplet of the second sonnet, on the Annunciation. But when the rhyme is picked up again as part of the A-rhyme of the third sonnet, womb and room are separated by three lines. The embraced rhyme scheme dilates the original couplet and delays “roome” until line 5: “But oh, for Thee, for Him, hath the Inn no roome?” (3, 5). The rhymes open up the space occupied by the Christ child, and the detail of the inn having no room, from the gospel account of Christ’s birth (Luke 2: 7), is incorporated into the pattern of paradoxes of containment.

The “little roome” of the second sonnet and the “no roome” of the third highlight the way that the textual space acts to enclose the event it describes. “Little roome”, in particular, is a phrase that Donne uses elsewhere to indicate the space of his poems themselves. In “The Good Morrow”, openness and enclosure collapse into one another as “love … makes one little roome, an euery where” (ll. 10–11). And in “The Canonization” he makes his metaliterary pun on stanza (the Italian for room) explicit, when his speaker muses: “if no Peece of Chronicle wee prove, / Weele build in Sonnetts pretty roomes” (ll. 31–2).12 Cf. Patterson, “Re-formed”, p. 83. In “La Corona”, Donne builds his “little roome” in the Annunciation sonnet; the little room enclosing Christ is also the sonnet itself. The poem, which is so concerned with enclosing, itself acts to enclose “That all, which allwayes is all euery where” (2, 2), the temporally and spatially infinite divine, into one line of iambic pentameter. If the virgin’s body is a “prison of flesh”, so too is the sonnet. The word “flesh” is as near the centre of the sonnet as possible, in the middle of the eighth line. The rather awkward syntax (“yett he will weare / Taken from thence, flesh which Deaths force may trye”), places “flesh” in this central position, and also serves to highlight it. Flesh, enclosed by words, thus represents the divine Word enclosed by human flesh. As in many painted Annunciations, the very composition of Donne’s Incarnation sonnet serves both to enclose Christ’s body and to draw attention to its containment.