Rather like Donne’s simile of “Painters that doe take / Delight, not in made worke, but whiles they make”,
1 “The Expostulation”, ll. 57–58. “La Corona” highlights the method and process of the poet’s craft, making it a work perpetually in process rather than a finished artefact to be contemplated. It opens with a crown that is in process, a crown “Weau’d in … lowe deuoute Melancholye” (1, 2). But by the end of the octave, the speaker envisages “a Crowne of Glory which doth flowre alwayes” (1, 8), an endless circle, a crown that comes from God. Donne puns insistently on “end” and “endless” in the sonnet’s sestet: “The Ends crowne our workes, but Thou crounst our Ends, / For at our End, beginns our Endles rest” (1, 9–10). His wordplay draws attention to the fact that the very crown he is weaving is itself a kind of pun, its different meanings co-existing simultaneously, an appropriately polyvalent symbol for the sequence’s meditation on the mystery of the Incarnation.
2 As Maurer observes in her detailed discussion of the circularity of Donne’s sequence, “The circle as shape and motion is an emblem of the paradoxes of Christianity [and] thus especially appropriate to the story on which ‘La Corona’ is based: the matter of the poem admits the full wealth of the circle’s symbolic potential”. Maurer, “Circular Argument”, p. 54.The potential of the circle to signify more than one thing at once clearly attracts Donne. His famous conceit of the compass in “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” illustrates how the lovers’ souls may be “one” and “two” at the same time, and the action of the compass generates two reassuring yet incompatible images: the feet of the compass which will be brought together again, and the circle that will be completed only if the roaming foot remains separate:
And though it in the Center sitt,
Yet when the other farr doth rome,
It leanes, and hearkens after it,
And growes erect as it comes home.
Such wilt thou bee to mee, whoe must,
Like th’other foot obliquelie runn
Thy firmness makes my circle Iust,
And makes mee end, where I begun. (ll. 29–36)
3 Johnson et al., eds., Variorum 4.2: Songs and Sonnets, p. 51. The conceit in the Valediction poem depends on the logic of the circle working in two ways at once, and a similar logic is at work in the circles Donne uses in his divine poems. In “La Corona”, the potential of the circle to signify more than one thing simultaneously is another kind of visual and spatial logic working alongside the paradoxes of containment. The geometrical conceit reimagines and rearticulates the circumscription of Christ, and the relationship between human and divine. Donne is aware of its history, making oblique references, once again, to the work of Nicholas of Cusa as he elaborates his idea of the doubled circle in other divine poems and in his sermons.
In a sermon preached on Easter Day 1619, “when the king was seriously ill”, Donne uses the double circle to describe the deaths of the martyrs and their rebirth into God’s glory:
Their death was a birth to them into another life, into the glory of God; It ended one circle, and created another; for immortality, and eternity is a Circle too; not a Circle where two points meet, but a Circle made at once; This life is a Circle, made with a Compasse, that passes from point to point; That life is a Circle stamped with a print, an endlesse, and perfect Circle, as soone as it begins. Of this Circle, the Mathematician is our great and good God; The other Circle we make up ourselves; we bring the Cradle, and Grave together by a course of nature … (2: 200)
These two circles, drawn on paper, recall the compass conceit of “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning”, as well as the textual crowns of “La Corona”. The “thorny crowne” of Christ’s Passion and Crucifixion in the first sonnet of the sequence corresponds to the circle “that passes from point to point”, the circle of human life, while the “crown of glory that doth flower always”, matches the “Circle stamped with a print, [the] endlesse, and perfect Circle” of eternity.
Donne explicitly invokes this double meaning of the circle in his other extended poem on the Annunciation, “Upon the Annunciation, when Good-friday fell uppon the same daye”, a liturgical coincidence that functions as another pun of sorts:
Tamely fraile body, abstaine to daye; to daye
My soule eats twice, Christ hether and away.
Shee sees him man, soe like God made in this,
That of them both a Circle Embleme is
Whose first, and last concurre … (ll. 1–5)
4 Johnson et al. eds., Variorum 7.2: Divine Poems, pp. 133–134 (p. 133).This poem combines reference to
seeing and the visual tradition with the geometrical conceit of the circle. Here again is the “circle where two points meet”, this time functioning as a kind of shorthand for the liturgical conjunction of the beginning and the end of Christ’s human life. In more detail, those events are then described in visual terms that recall paintings of both Annunciation and Crucifixion. There is an insistent “appeal to visualisation” at work here that is comparable to “La Corona”, and once again it is “my soule” who sees Christ made man:
5 Cf. Patterson, “Re-formed”, pp. 82–83.My soule eates twice …
Shee sees at once the Virgin Mother staye
Reclus’d at home, publique at Golgotha.
Sad, and Rejoyc’d; shees seene at once, and seene
At almost fifty, and at scarce fifteene. (ll. 2; 11–14; my emphasis)
The fact that it is the soul that sees suggests that the act of seeing here goes beyond the “illusory realism of physical sight”, to use Cunnar’s term.
6 Cunnar, “Illusion and Spiritual Perception”, p. 325. Nonetheless, the insistence on the physical image of Mary “at scarce fifteen” and at the foot of the cross “at almost fifty”, cannot help but recall the painted tradition. The Virgin Annunciata is described as “reclus’d”, echoing the sequence’s themes of interiority and enclosure. The focus here, though, is on the two faces of Mary, which are superimposed upon each other, “seene at once” (13) in a technique similar to that which Donne employs with the faces of Christ Judge and Christ crucified in the Holy Sonnet “What if this present were the world’s last night”.
7 See Richard Strier, “John Donne Awry and Squint: The ‘Holy Sonnets,’ 1608–1610”, Modern Philology 86 (1989): 357–384 (p. 380); see also Chapter 4 of this book, pp. 128–130. The face of the young Mary marks the moment of “th’Angells
Ave” of the Annunciation, as the older face witnesses his death on the cross, Mary once more performing her enclosing and containing role, “abridging” Christ’s human life to its beginning and its end. But the “Abbridgement of Christs storie” (l. 20) is also verbal: circumscribed in this poem not only by the two faces of Mary but also by the words spoken at his conception and his death, “th’Angells Ave, and Consummatum est” (l. 22). Although the immediate impression here is of a simpler and more conventional iconography than that presented in “La Corona”, the reflection Donne constructs around the liturgical coincidence of the two dates and the insistence on the circle as emblem of both man and God highlights the same Christological paradoxes as the sequence.
In the 1624 Christmas Day sermon that echoes so much of the language and imagery of “La Corona”, Donne again develops the symbolic potential of the circle, describing it thus: “One of the most convenient Hieroglyphicks of God, is a Circle; and a Circle is endlesse; whom God loves, hee loves to the end” (6: 173). He opens the sermon by quoting St Bernard on the “remarkable conjunctions [of] this Day” (6: 168). If Donne’s poem on the Annunciation and the Passion seems to approve the Church’s symbolism in “letting those days join” (l. 33), in the sermon he follows Bernard in describing Christmas Day as a day that holds many conjunctions within itself: of God and man; of maid and mother; of faith and reason, a day that joins God’s anger and His mercy (6: 168). The circle, that “convenient Hieroglyphick”, is part of the conjunctive force of the day, and again Donne evokes its simultaneously divine and human meaning:
God is a circle himselfe, and he will make thee one; Goe not thou about to square eyther circle, to bring that which is equall in it selfe, to Angles, and Corners, into dark and sad suspicions of God, or of thy selfe, that God can give, or that thou canst receive no more Mercy, than thou hast had already.
This then is the course of Gods mercy. He proceeds as he begun … It is alwayes in motion, and alwayes moving towards All, alwaies perpendicular, right over every one of us, and alwayes circular, alwayes communicable to all … (6: 175)
In constructing this image of the geometry of God’s mercy Donne makes a passing reference to another geometrical metaphor for the divine and human understanding of it, the squaring of the circle. He uses the same idea in another of his occasional divine poems, “Upon the translation of the Psalms by Sir Philip Sydney, and the Countesse of Pembroke his Sister”.
Eternall God, (For whome who ever dare
Seeke new expressions, doe the circle square,
And thrust into strayt Corners of poore witt
Thee who art cornerlesse and infinite)
I would but blesse thy name, not name thee now. (ll. 1–5)
8 Johnson et al. eds., Variorum 7.2: Divine Poems, pp. 201–202 (p. 201). Robin Robbins cites the parallel between the 1624 sermon and the squaring of the circle in the Sidney poem, The Poems of John Donne. Longman Annotated English Poets (Harlow: Pearson, 2008), 2: p. 120. See also Donne’s sermon preached to the King at Whitehall, April 1, 1627: “God hath wrapped up all things in Circles, and then a Circle hath no Angles; there are no Corners in a Circle” (7: 396–397).The idea of squaring the circle – or rather, of the impossibility of squaring the circle – is drawn from the thinking of Nicholas Cusanus. It is outlined in detail in his
De docta ignorantia. Cusanus’s proof of the mathematical impossibility of a polygon ever covering exactly the same area as a circle is claimed as a significant advance in the development of modern mathematics.
9 On Cusanus and mathematics see, Jean-Michel Counet, Mathématiques et dialectique chez Nicolas de Cuse (Paris: Vrin, 2000). But the mathematical proof is only one step in his argument – a metaphor to express the inability of the human intellect to grasp the divine.
The finite intellect, therefore, cannot know the truth of things with any exactitude by means of similarity, no matter how great. For the truth is neither more or less, since it is something indivisible… The intellect is to truth as the polygon is to the circle: just as the polygon, the more sides and angles it has, approximates but never becomes a circle, even if one lets the sides and angles multiply infinitely, so we know of the truth no more than that we cannot grasp it as it is with any true precision.
10 De docta ignorantia i. 3. fol. 2f. Translation taken from Ernst Cassirer, The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, trans. Mario Domandi. (New York and Evanston: Harper Torchbooks, 1963), p. 22. Donne’s parenthesis in “Upon the translation” closely follows Cusanus’s logic. His repeated reference to the squaring of the circle is just one of his oblique allusions to the German thinker’s metaphors, which will be discussed in more detail in the next chapters.
11 Cf. the discussion of Cusanus’ De Visione Dei in Chapter 2, pp. 54–57. The uses Donne makes of Cusanus’s ideas will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 4. For Ernst Cassirer, what makes Nicholas Cusanus “the first modern thinker” is that, in developing his theological reflection, “his first step consists in asking not about God, but about the possibility of knowledge about God”.
12 Cassirer, Individual and the Cosmos, p. 10. Donne’s nod at Cusanus’s metaphor, though, asks more about the possibility of
representing God. The “Strayt Corners of poore witt” in his poem on the psalms corresponds neatly to Nicholas of Cusa’s polygon metaphor for the “finite intellect”, but also points to the specifically verbal sense of
wit, the “new expressions” that might attempt to contain the “cornerlesse and infinite” divine.
In the 1624 sermon, too, Donne’s reference to Cusanus’s squaring of the circle is oblique. By alluding, even in passing, to Cusanus’s thought, he establishes the context of using geometrical metaphors to describe the divine, but he is much more interested in developing his own metaphor of the “convenient Hieroglyphick of God” (6: 173) which brings two circles together. Man is “made like God” in “Vppon the Annunciation”, and God will make man into a circle like Himself, in the 1624 Christmas sermon (6: 175). Where Cusanus’s analogy is based on incommensurability, Donne’s is concerned with conjunction. The point of his “convenient hieroglyphic” is that it can represent God and man. In contrast to the squaring of the circle, Donne’s two circles can be superimposed, allowing the human to approach the infinite. In “La Corona” this happens through the “thorny crowne” of Christ’s Crucifixion, which allows the speaker to hope he too might aspire to “a Crowne of Glory which doth flowre alwayes” (1,8).
John of Damascus and the Byzantine iconodules held that the Incarnation legitimated religious art and the representation of the divine; indeed that the visual representation of Christ was essential to fully acknowledge and honour the mystery of the Incarnation. “La Corona” seems to reflect the complexities of this position. Its figures and forms of enclosure, combined with its insistent spatial paradoxes, are what make the Incarnation present. To quote O’Connell, “the paradox of the Incarnation, God in human flesh, undergirds the paradox of religious poetry, the Word in human words. Because the Almighty humbled himself to such an extent as to become human, he can be brought within the confines of human words and art”.
13 O’Connell, “La Corona”, p. 124. Donne’s sequence meditates on the
possibility of circumscribing the divine in human words, and confronts the anxiety expressed by the speaker of “Upon the Translation of the Psalms” at the enormity of representing the “Eternal God”. The echoes of religious painting which so many readers and critics have picked up on are not random or inconsequential, because those fleeting resemblances to visual art, nearly able to be pictured but not quite, underscore the elusive quality of what is being represented. But the comparisons to be made between Donne’s Corona and Christian visual art prove to be far more complex than any superficial analogy to a specific artwork, as its recurrent “appeals to visualisation” are continually thwarted. The paradoxes and the conjunctions Donne sets before our “faith’s eyes” meditate on the very possibility of representation in sacred art, and foreground the task of the divine poet or artist. His poems on the mystery of the Incarnation reflect the very essence of that mystery, representing the nature of Christ while simultaneously keeping it hidden. The circles woven by his poet-speaker encompass multiple ways in which religious art, verbal and visual, simultaneously holds out and withholds the possibility of ever comprehending the divine.