Resurrection. Imperfect
“Resurrection. Imperfect”, the title given to Donne’s resurrection poem, has generally been understood to indicate that the poem is unfinished, an impression reinforced by the Latin tag “Desunt Cætera” (the rest is lacking) appended to it in the 1633
Poems.
1 Only one manuscript witness (WN1) includes the subscription “Desunt Cætera”, and this is reproduced in the 1633 Poems and throughout the early print tradition. Johnson et al. eds., Variorum 7.2: Divine Poems, p. 166. More recent critics have cast doubt on this assumption though, and in various ways have suggested that the “imperfection” of the poem may be thematic and not simply textual.
2 Ruth Falk has suggested that the additions of “imperfect” and “Desunt cætera” were Donne’s own, and a commentary on the fact that the work begun by the Resurrection remains “incomplete, unfinished” until the end of the world and the general resurrection. “Donne’s ‘Resurrection, Imperfect’”, Explicator 17 (1958), item 24. More recently, Kate Frost has persuasively argued that the poem is complete, and provided a numerological interpretation of it which can only work if “Desunt cætera” is counted as a numbered line of the poem as written by Donne. Kate Frost, “Magnus Pan Mortuus Est: A Subtextual and Contextual Reading of Donne’s ‘Resurrection, imperfect’”, in John Donne’s Religious Imagination: Essays in Honour of John T. Shawcross, ed. by Raymond-Jean Frontain and Frances M. Malpezzi (Conway: UCA Press, 1995), pp. 231–261 (pp. 250–251). Lara Crowley has argued that “Desunt cætera” is highly unlikely to be authorial, since it does not appear in all the manuscript versions of the poem. Lara M. Crowley, “A Text of ‘Resurrection. Imperfect’”, John Donne Journal 9 (2010): 185–198 (p. 196). My purpose here is not to determine whether the poem is unfinished, but rather to argue that, finished or not, there is an “imperfection” in Donne’s Resurrection poem that is a deliberate artistic decision, reflecting an inability to come to terms with the poem’s theme. This imperfection is to be found less in the poem’s unfinished appearance, than in the way that its metaphors fail to hit home. Rather as in “Sappho to Philaenis” we saw a breakdown of poetic language as simile turned into tautology,
3 See Chapter 1, pp. 46–48. the successive metaphors of “Resurrection. Imperfect” seem similarly unfit for purpose.
Ut pictura poesis: as in painting, the poem’s figurative language enacts the impossibility of “giving perfect expression” to what is implicit in the Resurrection of Christ.
It is not quite clear who the speaker of Donne’s poem is, but he is a potential witness of Christ’s empty tomb on the morning of Easter Sunday.
Sleep sleep old Sunne, thou canst not have repast
As yett the wound, thou took’st on Frydaie last.
Sleepe then and rest: the world may beare thy staie
A better Sun rose before thee to daie. (ll. 1–4)
The advice to the sun to remain asleep irresistably recalls “The Sun Rising”, as well as the sun/son pun in “Good friday”. But besides the figurative significance of the sun highlighted by the pun, it is also a literal presence in most of the gospel versions: the holy women enter the sepulchre at “the rising of the sun” (Mark 16:2); “as it began to dawn” (Matthew 28:1); “very early in the morning” (Luke 24:1); cf. “when it was yet dark” (John 20:1). Donne’s speaker may identify himself with the holy women as they discover the empty tomb, or may even pre-empt them, since his “old Svnne” (l. 1) is still sleeping. Yet unlike the holy women he approaches the tomb with some knowledge: he knows that “a better Sun” (l. 4) has risen, whereas in the gospel accounts the absence is not immediately translated into a sign of a presence. Donne’s speaker then goes one step further, to attempt to imagine what the moment of Resurrection might have been like.
The earliest visual representations of the Resurrection highlight the problem that the gospel descriptions narrate only an absence: the discovery of the empty tomb. The simplest image of Christ’s Resurrection is the symbolic Resurrection – the empty cross (
crux nuda), and early Resurrection paintings, like medieval mystery plays, stay close to the gospels by showing the moment of the holy women’s discovery of the tomb. The depiction of the Resurrection becomes more interesting – but more problematic – when painters begin to represent the actual moment of Christ’s Resurrection. The problem is double-edged. On the one hand, representing Christ as an “individual man”, to return to Hegel’s term, is no longer adequate since Christ’s figure demands a “higher expression of divinity”. On the other hand, the version of the tradition that shows a transfigured Christ, floating above the tomb, is problematic in the other direction. Christ is still wholly man and wholly God, and a representation that departs too far from the human is not acceptable either. A further detail that contradicts the gospel descriptions and poses an additional visual problem is the tradition that one of the soldiers guarding the tomb witnesses the risen Christ departing from the tomb.
4 In his Iconographie de l’art chrétien, Louis Réau gives a list painterly solutions to the Christological conundrum of how to represent Christ leaving the tomb: 1) Christ in the tomb (“Christus in sepulcrum”); 2) Christ with one foot on the edge of the tomb; 3) Christ in the act of stepping out, with one foot in and one out of the tomb (“Christus uno pede extra sepulcrum”); 4) Christ standing in front of the tomb (“Christus extra sepulcrum”) and finally 5) Christ standing on the flat stone lid of the tomb (“Christus supra sepulcrum”). Réau, Iconographie, p. 545. A more nuanced version of this floating resurrected Christ which goes some way towards resolving these problems is to be found in Fra Angelico’s “Resurrection” in the Convento di San Marco in Florence (1440–1441) (fig. 5). This fresco illustrates the gospel moment of the holy women finding the empty tomb, yet shows Christ floating above their heads (unseen by them) on another plane of existence, surrounded by a luminous mandorla, showing by his invisible presence what the absence of the empty tomb signifies.
Sketching out the various solutions found in visual art for the representation of the Resurrection – none of them fully satisfactory – provides a context for Donne’s verbal attempt to convey the same scene. His Resurrection poem begins with the moment of discovery, but attempts to fill the empty space of the tomb with words to illustrate what that absence means. As Donne’s speaker approaches the empty tomb, he turns to figurative language to illustrate that absent presence, but ultimately all of his attempts fail.
He works through three figures. The first is the opening invocation of the sun, with its inherent associations with the Son of God. In the sermon where Donne describes the Transfiguration he points out that in Matthew’s gospel, the face of the transfigured Christ is described as shining like the sun (Matt 17:2), and he connects this with the General Resurrection, as Matthew’s gospel also says “then shall the righteous shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of their father” (Matt 13:43) (
Sermons 2:120). In the poem the “better Sun” (Christ) is superior to the “old Svnne”, and a direct simile is established in line 8 with the contrast between the light of the sun and fire/candlelight: “As att thy presence here our fires grow pale”(l. 8). This detail is something of a commonplace in visual art,
5 See Maille S. Hutterer, “Illuminating the Sunbeam through Glass Motif”, Word & Image, 38:4 (2022): 407–434 (pp. 424–425). The source for this imagery is probably the Revelations of St Bridget of Sweden. transliterated here into a somewhat flat simile, but even this flatness reinforces the impossibility of seeing, never mind representing the glorified Christ. The inadequacy of human vision, and human language, is made plain.
And so he passes to a second figure, in which the risen Christ is described using the language of alchemy. Christ becomes the philosopher’s stone, the tincture which can transmute other metals to gold.
6 The alchemical context is explained in great detail in Frost, “Magnus Pan”, pp. 239–242. In Donne’s poem we are told that after his entombment Christ would “for these three daies become A Mynerall” (l. 12); this seems to reference the philosophers’ stone, and the following lines about gold and tincture provide a gloss of the word “Mynerall”: “Hee was all Gould, when hee lay downe, but rose / All tincture” (ll. 13–14).
7 The first definition of “mineral” in the OED, now obsolete, is “1. Alchemy. According to certain writers: that variety of the philosophers’ stone which was responsible for the purification of metals”. These lines can be read, as Kate Frost has read them, as a clear reference to the different stages of the alchemical process:
In the threefold transmutative process the base matter was gradually albified by heating, dissolution, and coction. From the fire emerged the tincture, a white powder, often called the Philosopher’s Gold, which imparts its whiteness to everything it is mixed with, purifying and transmuting. In spiritual alchemy, the stage of spiritual gold was achieved by union with Christ, the white tincture.
8 Frost, “Magnus Pan”, p. 242. The comparison between the alchemical process and redemption through Christ is not Donne’s conceit; the most in-depth introduction to “spiritual alchemy” remains Evelyn Underhill’s
Mysticism (1911).
9 Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism (London: Methuen, 1911), pp. 140 ff. Quoting Jacob Boehme, she states: “… the indwelling Christ, the ‘Corner Stone’, the Sun of Righteousness, became, for many of the Christian alchemists, identified with the Lapis Philosophorum and with Sol … His spirit was the ‘noble tincture’ which ‘can bring that which is lowest in the death to its highest ornament or glory’” (p. 144). Yet Donne’s description of Christ lying down “all Gould” and rising “
all tincture” poses certain problems. The metaphor marks the difference between Christ’s resurrected body and all other bodies. But through this figure the body becomes almost
not a body. To be all tincture is a move towards the spiritual and ethereal, away from the physical. And a similar problem haunts the poem’s third metaphor, which compares the body of the resurrected Christ to the soul leaving the dying body. In order to do so, Donne’s speaker posits a hypothetical witness to the Resurrection, which reminds us of the absence of witnesses in the gospel accounts and raises the question of the potential visualising of the Resurrection. The speaker speculates:
Had one of those whose credulous Pietie
Thought, that A Soule, one might discerne, and see
Go from a Bodie, att this Sepulcher benn,
Hee would haue Iustly thought his bodie a Soule
If not of any Man, yett of the whole. (ll. 17–22; my emphasis)
This hypothetical witness is distanced from us by being described as “one of those”, further distanced by his “credulous Pietie” (l. 17) and by the conditional framing of what he might have seen and might have believed. On one level this hypothetical witness must be wrong. If he interprets the sight of Christ’s resurrected body as a soul, he misses the point of the bodily Resurrection of Christ, who remained wholly man. Like the tincture metaphor, it risks representing Christ as too ethereal. Such metaphors resemble the choice made by painters of the Resurrection to show Christ ethereally floating in the air, rather than with feet solidly on the ground.
On some level though, the poem suggests, Christ’s body can be “Iustly thought … a Soule” (my emphasis), because it is the only way to express the difference of Christ’s glorified body from the whole body of mankind. Like the mandorla in paintings of the Resurrection and the Transfiguration, it marks the attempt to articulate that difference. This attempt to contemplate, to conceive of, Christ’s resurrected body governs the three metaphors of “Resurrection, imperfect”, and ultimately ends in the poem’s failure (rhetorical or otherwise). The body-soul metaphor is somehow both adequate and inadequate, right and wrong, and a similar doubleness applies to all of the poem’s figurative language. Metaphor is essential, because it seems we can only see or imagine Christ’s body if we describe it as something else. And yet metaphor is always inadequate, because like the “eye-beames” of the apostles at the Transfiguration in Donne’s sermon, the full picture is “scatterd … dissipated”, always at one remove from what we want to see.
The sun-son pun recalls that of “Good friday”, where the speaker “should see a Sun by ryseing set, / And by that setting endless day begett” (ll. 11–12). Yet the eye-beams in “Resurrection. Imperfect” are going in very different directions from Donne’s Crucifixion poem. In “Good friday”, the speaker knows where he
should be looking, but is unable to do so. In the Resurrection poem, he looks in the right direction, but cannot see. With the holy women, or before them, Donne’s speaker approaches the empty sepulchre, and attempts to fill it with words turning absence into the sign of a living presence. At the centre of the poem, as Frost points out, are the words “fill all” (l. 11).
10 Frost, “Magnus Pan”, p. 244. Donne does not try to fill in the empty space with a picture of the resurrected Christ; rather, he acknowledges that it is a space, which can only be filled with attempts to imagine the resurrected Christ. But how to imagine, how to put words to, that glorified body? The space, of the sepulchre, and of the poem, is filled with three imperfect images for the body of the resurrected Christ.