The cloister of the Annunciation and the contraction of the Crucifixion both enact the circumscription of the divine. And just as Donne uses the limits of the sonnet form to play with ideas of containment and measure, he uses the circular form of the whole sequence of linked sonnets to do the same on a larger scale. As the last line of each sonnet is taken up again as the first line of the next, a sense of inevitability is built into the structure of the sequence. It emphasises the impression of the sequence being “weav’d” and contributes to its momentum. It becomes increasingly evident that Donne’s use of the corona format is not random but that both the circular shape and the doubled lines have a particular meaning in the process of representing the life of Christ. In the transition from one sonnet to another, as we have already seen, the repeated lines change slightly in emphasis – a noun may be used in a different sense or in a different place in a sentence, for example, subtly changing its meaning. The line that closes the fifth sonnet undergoes the biggest change in meaning when it is repeated as the opening of the sixth. In the fifth sonnet, “moyst” is a verb, the speaker’s request for God’s action: “Moyst with one drop of thy blood, my dry Soule” (5, 14). But repeated as the first word of the sixth sonnet, it becomes an adjective: “Moyst, with one drop of thy blood, my dry Soule / Shall… bee freed…” (6, 1–3). This is the most significant change in grammatical function occurring in any of the repeated lines, and it reflects how the momentum of the sequence is moving towards change and renewal. As various critics have noted, the same words that were a prayer at the end of the fifth sonnet show in the sixth that the prayer has been answered.
1 O’Connell, “La Corona”, p. 127. See also Judah Stampfer, John Donne and the Metaphysical Gesture (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1971), p. 238. This extends the potential for punning and double meaning that has been at work throughout the sequence, and in some way prepares for the last two sonnets, both of which have a double function. They fulfil their place in concluding the sequence of scenes from Christ’s life, representing, as the traditionally assigned titles tell us, the “Resurrection” and the “Ascension”, but both are equally concerned with the end of the speaker’s – or mankind’s – earthly life, contemplating the resurrection of the flesh and the day of the Last Judgement almost more than they do Christ’s own resurrection and ascension. The paradox of Christ’s death killing death itself is worked out in a dense repetition of the word “death” in the sixth sonnet, as the speaker contemplates his own death and looks forward to the time when he “agayne risen maye, / Salute the last, and Euerlasting Day” (6, 13–14).
Either the Ascension or the Last Judgement, the twin subjects of the seventh sonnet, may be found occupying the final place in series of scenes from the New Testament. This may account for Gardner’s comparison of the sequence to a series of stained-glass windows, or to the mystery plays. Yet it is this final sonnet that reinforces the formal circular structure of “La Corona”. Indeed to describe it as “final” rather works against the logic of the sequence. It is the “final” sonnet if we read the sequence as linear and teleological – as indeed it appears on the page. But the seventh sonnet is in many ways, as Margaret Maurer has put it, “no end at all but a prelude to the articulation of the problem in the opening sonnet”.
2 Margaret Maurer, “The Circular Argument of Donne’s ‘La Corona’”, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 22 (1982): 51–68 (p. 68). It manages to occupy a place that is both first and last, and it draws, once again, on a very visual vocabulary in order to achieve this effect.
The “Ascension” sonnet is built upon expectation, beginning with the anticipatory imperative of its opening line: “Salute the last and Euerlasting Day” (7, 1). It is full of vocabulary of upward and forward movement: “th’vprising of thys Sunne, and Sonne;” “parting hence away” and “Ascending” to “first enter the way”. The promise of “Light in darke” (2, 13) evoked in the second sonnet is here fulfilled in the image of the “Highest… lighten[ing] the darke Clouds” (7, 5). This detail, reminiscent of the visual tradition, is what prompts Patterson to identify Donne’s sonnet as “a virtual ekphrasis” of Worthington’s “The rosarie of our Ladie”.
3 Patterson, “Re-formed”, p. 85. The language of light and dark does seem to invite visualisation, and the sestet develops this sense of invitation. The path to heaven is “mark’d” with Christ’s blood, and seems to shine in welcome: “Bright Torche, which shinst, that I the way may see” (7, 11). This final “appeal to visualisation” beckons the reader onward, but at the last minute, as the upward and forward momentum of the poem prepares us for the final step – “if thy holy Spirritt, my Muse did rayse” (7, 13) – the last line of the poem is the first line of the sequence, so we come full circle, and the face of Christ in glory is kept from us. It is the frustration of the forward momentum of the poem that seems to generate the closing line and the return to the opening sonnet. Specifically, it is the anticipation of the “appeal to visualisation” that is thwarted, as in the earlier sonnets, and it is precisely this movement that takes us back to the beginning again.
Thus the corona shape of the sequence is created not only by the formal requirement of its repeated lines, but also by this motion away from the visual. The movement is similar to what Gilman describes in “Satyre 3”, where the speaker “approaches, but then swerves away from, [the] idolatrous prospect, evoking but then effacing the picture behind his text”.
4 Gilman, Iconoclasm, p. 117; p. 213n.2. Discussed in Introduction, pp. 16–18. I have suggested that this is a particularly apt description of Donne’s attitude to images in his poems generally, where he frequently seems to simultaneously propose and withhold the possibility of putting a picture to his words. This dynamic of encouraging visualisation yet at the same time making it difficult has been at work throughout “La Corona”, and in the seventh sonnet the “swerve away” from any kind of ekphrasis or pictorial description in the final sonnet is part of the pattern that allows the circle to be completed – a “first last End” (1, 11) that seals the circle of the “Croune of Prayer and Prayse”.
Of the many crowns mentioned in the opening sonnet of “La Corona”, the first to be evoked is this textual “Croune of Prayer and Prayse” of the sequence itself. The poetic crown is vile, fraile and unworthy, yet it aspires to represent both the infinite divine and its circumscription, and it is the very process of verbal weaving that allows it to do to. The speaker who performs the delicate action of weaving the sequence is foregrounded by the poetic prize of the laurel wreath, even though this is rejected as a “Vile Crowne of frayle Bayes” (1, 5) in favour of the two crowns of Christ. The speaker, who, as we have seen, shifts his address from the Virgin to his soul, to Joseph, to Christ himself, is also, at the same time, speaking to the poem’s readers, and this results in a very self-conscious and dramatised poet-persona.
The identification of “La Corona” with the iconography of devotional art has led different critics to seek visual parallels for its speaker. Martin Elsky compares him to the “interlocuter” or “
Sprecher”
figure of mannerist art. This figure looks out of the painting while pointing at a person or event within it, inviting the spectator to participate in the space of the artwork.
5 Martin Elsky, “Donne’s La Corona”, pp. 5–6. Elsky reads the poem as being as strongly influenced by the meditative practice of Ignatius of Loyola’s
Spiritual Exercises, equating the third sonnet’s “fayths Eyes” with Ignatius’s recommendation to “see … with the
mind’s eye the physical place where the object that we wish to contemplate is present”.
6 Quoted in Elsky, “Donne’s La Corona”, p. 3, my emphasis; The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, tr. Anthony Mottola (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1964), p. 54. For him the “meditator” of the poem, as he terms the speaker, like the mannerist interlocuter, functions as a bridge between the past space and time occupied by the biblical figures and the present moment of meditation, particularly in the final sonnet where, according to him, the “meditator [changes] position from a spectator to an interlocutor inside the represented sacred scene, inviting others to see, as he has done, with ‘faiths eyes.’ He has, so to speak, passed over to the other side of the painting”.
7 Elsky, “Donne’s La Corona”, p. 9. Cf. Murray Roston who makes a similar comparison in The Soul of Wit, pp. 167–168, though discussing the Holy Sonnets rather than “La Corona”: “[In HSSpit] the scene, in fact, just as in the religious paintings we have examined, is being viewed through the eyes of a speaker (or Sprecher) writhing in the foreground of the picture as he visualizes upon his own flesh the agony of the martyr … Within one quatrain, Donne has brilliantly constructed the literary parallel to that mannerist scene. There is the initial shock of revelation with its inversion of traditional values, the sudden dematerialization of actuality as the figure of Jesus merges into that of the speaker, and finally the establishment of a powerful bond between persona and reader to create a mood of brooding yet urgent introspection” (p. 168). Despite the limitations of the kind of interart comparison proposed by Wylie Sypher,
8 Sypher, Four Stages of Renaissance Style. See discussion in the introduction to this book, pp. 4–7. Elsky’s analysis here touches on something essential to the way “La Corona” works. His insight that “the events of
La Corona do not occupy an unambiguous, rationally constructed space but instead take place in a space of transcendence” bears developed comparison with the mannerist paintings by Pontormo and Parmigianino that he cites, and echoes the claims made by Arasse regarding the space of painted Annunications.
9 Elsky, “Donne’s La Corona”, p. 6.Patterson, on the other hand, suggests that the speaking voice in Donne’s Annunciation sonnet “could be either the poet or the archangel”.
10 Patterson, “Re-formed”, p. 83. Placing the sonnet side by side with traditional Annunciation paintings certainly highlights the absence of one of the event’s principal actors: the angel, the divine messenger. If the voice that announces and then enacts the circumscription of Christ has taken the place of the angel of the Annunciation, he is encroaching on divine territory. The first sonnet, though, makes quite clear that the poet who shapes the sonnet sequence in his “lowe deuoute Melancholye” (1, 2) is human, unlike the angel of the Annunciation, who represents the direct link to the divine. What Patterson’s and Elsky’s identifications of the poet-speaker both highlight is that he is somehow both inside and outside the crown that he weaves. The poem presents both his meditation on the divine and his craft in creating it. The intermedial comparisons that it sparks highlight the sequence’s own place as a created work of art, and the fact that the comparisons often do not quite work has the effect, as we have seen, of driving the poem onwards.