If the sonnets traditionally titled “Annunciation” and “Nativitie” are particularly focused on the spatial paradoxes of the Incarnation, as the sequence continues successive events from the story permit different kinds of reflection on representing the divine, each contributing to the overall framing metaphor of the encircling corona. A sermon preached on the evening of Christmas Day, 1624, provides a particularly illuminating companion text for Donne’s practice in his sequence. He takes as his text the verse from Isaiah which predicts the Annunciation: “Therefore the Lord shall give you a signe; Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and beare a son, and shall call his name Immanuel” (Isa. 7: 14). As the text and the occasion suggest, the mystery of the Incarnation is central to the sermon; and in many ways its language and its concerns echo those of “La Corona”. In this Christmas sermon Donne juxtaposes the Old Testament theophany of the Ancient of Days with the Nativity, in language that strongly recalls his sonnet sequence. He cites Bernard of Clairvaux on the mystery of the Incarnation: “
Immanuel est verbum infans, saies the Father; He is the ancient of daies, and yet in minority; he is the Word it selfe, and yet speechlesse; he that is All, that all the Prophets spoke of, cannot speake […] He is
Puer sapiens, but a child, and yet wiser than the elders, wiser in the Cradle, than they are in the Chaire” (184).
1 Potter and Simpson, eds., Sermons , vol. 6, p. 184. It is worth noting that this sermon was preached just six months before the sermon on the death of James I which Patterson identifies as a “commentary on La Corona and everything it drew on”, containing as it does a “riff on all the possible kinds of crowns, marked with the marginal note: ‘Corona.’” Patterson, “Re-formed”, p. 87; p. 71 n. 5. Here the “Antient of Dayes” from the first sonnet is placed beside the paradox of the incarnate Word who “but lately could not speake” (4, 5) of the fourth sonnet, on Christ in the Temple.
The articulation of this particular paradox, of the
verbum infans, and the development of the gospel account of the first act of Christ’s ministry,
2 Luke 2: 42–52. make the fourth sonnet central to the sequence. As Patterson observes, this sonnet is literally as close to the centre of the seven-sonnet sequence as it can be,
3 Patterson, “Re-formed”, p. 84. and as A. B Chambers claims, even if the event it describes may at first sight seem relatively insignificant, its concentration on Christ’s nature make it “a précis of the whole” sequence.
4 A. B. Chambers, “The meaning of the Temple in Donne’s ‘La Corona’”, JEGP: Journal of English and Germanic Philology 59 (1960): 212–217 (p. 217). The fourth sonnet most explicitly expresses the conundrum of Christ’s dual nature, particularly in the opening line of the sestet, “Hys Godhead was not Soule to hys Manhood” (4, 9). After the sonnets centred on the Annunciation and Nativity with their imagery of enclosure, the fourth sonnet begins to meditate on other ways of comprehending the divine, both verbal and mathematical. Opening with another “appeal to visualisation” – “Ioseph turne backe; See where your Child doth sitt / Blowing, yea blowing out those Sparkes of witt” (4, 2–3) – the scene of Jesus’s teaching of the doctors in the temple demonstrates both his human qualities (he listens humbly, he returns home with his parents) and his divine attributes (both teaching and referring to his Father’s business).
5 Chambers, “Meaning of the Temple”, p. 213. How can the two be rationally reconciled? The sonnet proposes that these are “Miracles exceeding Power of Man” (4, 14; 5, 1), a line which, as well as being duplicated as the last line of the fourth sonnet and the first line of the fifth, can be read in two ways: the miracles that Christ performs show that he is something more than human, and, at the same time, these miracles are incomprehensible to man; they are beyond our power to understand or represent. As Donne puts it in his 1624 Christmas sermon, introducing the words of Bernard of Clairvaux: “onely God, can comprehend God” (6: 184). And earlier in the same sermon he expresses the same thought explicitly in the language of measurement and space:
for things created, we have instruments to measure them; we know the compasse of a Meridian, and the depth of a Diameter of the Earth, and we know this, even of the uppermost spheare in the heavens: But when we come to the Throne of God himselfe, […] and the vertues, and powers that flow from thence, we have no balance to weigh them, no instruments to measure them, no hearts to conceive them… (6: 174)
The human measures enumerated in this passage include not only the balancing scales and the measuring stick but also the calculations of navigation and mathematical geography and cosmography. Man is at the root of all these forms of measurement: the measure of all things. The language of measurement slips easily into the language of comprehension and perception (“no hearts to conceive them”) since here measure and comprehension are practically the same thing.
In becoming man, Christ became measurable. In the Incarnation, the divine is enclosed in the dimensions of the human body, and nowhere is this clearer than in the fifth sonnet of “La Corona” where the Crucifixion is described as “Measuring Selfe-lifes Infinitye to a span / Nay to an Inch” (5, 8–9). The sequence’s emphasis on enclosure becomes even more claustrophobic here, as the spatial metaphors of the Incarnation are developed to their logical conclusion. While “Immensity” was “cloysterd” in the second sonnet, here it seems as if the walls of the cloister contract, as the hand-span that encompasses Christ’s human life is reduced to an inch in the space of a line.
6 According to the OED the first meaning of “span” is that of the space between thumb and little finger, particularly used as a unit of measurement; this is figuratively transferred to “a short space of time, esp. as the duration of human life; the (short) time during which a person lives”. Cf. the Holy Sonnet “This is my Playes last scene”, l. 4: “My spans last inch, my minutes latest point”. The very description of this contraction, however, spills over into the sestet of the sonnet, thus reproducing formally, yet again, the simultaneous containment and impossibility of containment of the Incarnation. The unrepresentable divine both “fills all Place” yet cannot be held (3, 10).