If Donne’s occasional poem on the Resurrection remains “imperfect”, his “Resurrection” sonnet in “La Corona” sidesteps the representation of Christ’s Resurrection almost entirely. Apart from the oblique reference in the phrase “Death, whom thy death slue” (6, 6), the speaker is much more concerned with imagining his own resurrection on “the last, and everlasting day” (Corona 6: 14), rather as Donne’s Easter 1628 sermon on 1 Corinthians 13:12 describes “this Day in which we celebrate all Resurrections in the roote” (8: 219). The moment of the Last Judgement, just as much as that of the Resurrection, poses problems of imagination and visualisation, but, unlike the Resurrection, it is a moment that Donne revisits again and again, in his sequence of “Holy Sonnets”. As discussed in the Introduction, the speaker of the Holy Sonnets appears to desire the moment of face-to-face encounter with God, the
Then of 1 Corinthians 13:12, but also works to maintain a distance, spatially and temporally, between
Now and
Then. The moment of Judgement is repeatedly summoned up only to be somehow circumvented. John Carey provides a biographical interpretation of this ambivalent fascination with Judgement: “Dead, he will at last know whether or not he is saved. Though terrified by the Last Judgement, he is also impatient for it”.
1 Carey, Donne, p. 202. Yet Donne’s ambivalence concerning Judgement need not be read only in the light of his anxiety about his own personal salvation. It also illuminates his persistent anxiety about representation. The question of salvation becomes inextricably linked with the questions of sight and representation that continue to preoccupy him. As already discussed in the context of “La Corona”, the Last Judgement was often the last in a series of scenes from the New Testament, marking the final scene in the life of Christ just as it is the inevitable end of all human existence.
2 Cf. Chapter 3, p. 91. It is also the inevitable end-site of all Donne’s mixed metaphors, arguments and equivocations surrounding the representation of the divine.
The simultaneous fascination with Judgement and refusal to contemplate it head on run through the whole sequence of Holy Sonnets, as Gardner recognises when she identifies “the core of the two sets [of sonnet sequences]” as “the six sonnets on the Last Things (1–6 of
1633)”, adding that “these appear in the same order in each set…”.
3 Gardner, ed., Divine Poems, p. xlii. The six sonnets in question are: HSDue, HSBlack, HSScene, HSRound, HSMin and HSDeath. HSWhat is not included in this group, presumably because it is one of the sonnets added in the Revised Sequence and thus not included in the original. Her mention of the two different “sets” of the sonnet sequence foreshadows the importance of the revision of the Holy Sonnets – a revision that significantly changes the speaker’s attitude to Judgement and to the (endlessly deferred) sight of the face of God. Gardner and earlier editors were of course aware that there existed two different orderings of the Holy Sonnets, and that the variation was not only between 1633 and 1635 editions of Donne’s
Poems but was also to be found in the manuscript tradition. The bibliographical work of the Variorum edition of the Holy Sonnets in 2005 provides the first comprehensive theory of the relationship between the two sets of sonnets, identifying an “original sequence” of twelve and a “revised” sequence (corresponding to the twelve published in the 1633
Poems), and substantial authorial corrections of individual sonnets.
4 Stringer et al. eds., Variorum 7.1: Holy Sonnets, pp. lx–lxxi. The editors’ identification of the revision as authorial means that the reordering of the sequence itself feeds into the interpretation of the sonnets. Charting the two sequences’ differing perspectives on Judgement and the anticipation of the sight of God involves observing the very different ways they treat visual perception.
Of Gardner’s six “core” Holy Sonnets on the last things, only three project the moment of Judgement as such: “This is my Playes last Scene”, “At the round Earths imagin’d corners”, and “What if this present were the worlds last night?” All of these establish the scene of Judgement as a spectacle, a site defined in specifically spatial and visual terms, yet in all three the speaker’s vision is limited and problematic. In the previous chapter we saw how the the speaker of “What if this present” turns away from the scene of Judgement to find another devotional image, seeking to obscure the visual details of the face of Christ the Judge with the merciful face of Christ crucified.
5 Cf. Chapter 4, pp. 128–130. The two other Judgement sonnets similarly insist on the vision of Judgement, while in various ways interrupting or disrupting that vision. Just as in “What if this present”, it is the sight of Christ’s face that is incomplete,
imperfect or otherwise disrupted, and this is highlighted in different ways. In the Introduction to this book I discussed the “swerving away” that, I argue, characterises Donne’s engagement with images.
6 Cf. Introduction, p. 17. “At the round Earths imagin’d corners” is a key text in establishing this pattern, with its abrupt turn away from the scene of Judgement in the sonnet’s sestet, prompted, it seems, by the very mention of “God’s face”.