In “At the round Earths imagin’d corners”, the representation of the last day is sustained for the entire octave of the sonnet, including many iconographic details that correspond to the visual tradition. The two-tier structure of most Last Judgements mimics the presumed vertical relation of heaven and earth. The figure of Christ as Judge, flanked by the intercessors and cohorts of apostles and saints, generally occupies the upper deck of the picture, while the numberless bodies of the Resurrected clambering out of the earth are on the lower level, as in Joos van Cleve’s Last Judgement (fig. 6). While the bodies of the Resurrected occupying the narrative, temporal, horizontal axis are placed in a horizontal relationship with each other, they are all individually in a vertical relationship with the Judge. The transition from the temporal sphere to the eternal sphere is thus represented spatially and vertically; the moment of Judgement occurs on the vertical, divine axis.
1 The terms vertical and horizontal to describe the Last Judgement are used by John Collins in his “Apocalyptic Eschatology as the Transcendence of Death”, Catholic Biblical Quarterly xxxvi (1974), pp. 21–43 (p. 37). Collins’ use of the terms is taken up by Bernard McGinn in Visions of the End: Apocalyptic Traditions in the Middle Ages (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), p. 9. In Donne’s sonnet, the angels blowing their trumpets in the opening lines belong to the heavenly, vertical axis, and this vertical movement is emphasised semantically by the repetition of “arise, arise” at the end of line two, and also aurally by the string of marked enjambments in the first three lines, which generate a rising tone, rather than the falling tone of an end-stopped line.
Visually, the Last Judgement functions through a moral mapping, a spatial system which conveys, and at the same time simplifies, the eschatological drama. While heaven and earth are established as up and down, the fixed ordering of space in Last Judgement paintings also attaches iconographic significance to right and left, based on the biblical text “And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left” (Matt. 25:33). This dictates the second dimension of the basic layout of almost all Last Judgement paintings, which is particularly accommodated by the form of the triptych: heaven is on the left (our left as we look at the painting, and therefore Christ’s right) while hell is on the right. It is within this strict moral spatial mapping that the chaos of the numberless bodies of the Resurrected multiplies. Although the act of judgement occurs on the vertical axis – the vertical relationship between Christ as judge and the individual Resurrected – it overlaps with the multiple bodies of the Resurrected, who are still emerging from the earth, and therefore still part of the horizontal and temporal axis.
The spatial mapping of the octave of “At the round Earths imagin’d corners” echoes this temporal and spatial logic, with the first quatrain functioning vertically and the second horizontally. In the first quatrain the speaker of the sonnet seems to be hastening the moment of Judgement. His use of imperatives in the opening lines – “blowe / Your Trumpets, Angells, and arise, arise from death” (1–3) – seems to urge the inevitable to happen more quickly, and the repeated enjambments give the impression of time’s inexorable rush towards its end. In another sermon preached at St Paul’s, Donne asks whether, “if […] the great and generall Judgement should begin now at this his house, and that the first should be taken up in the clouds, to meet the Lord Jesus, should be we, that are met now in this his house, would we be glad of that acceleration, or would we thank him for that haste? Men of little faith, I feare we would not” (10: 106). Here, as in the sonnet, temporal “acceleration” and “haste” are associated with vertical transition (“up in the clouds”). And just as this sermon articulates man’s fear of the Last Judgement, so the second quatrain of the sonnet puts a brake on this rapid vertical acceleration with its list of paralleled ways of dying which emphasises the horizontal relationship between the bodies of the Resurrected: the democracy of death in the last moment. Each of those resurrected bodies has an individual story, but now all narratives are converging and coming to an end, because time will cease to exist. The form of the list with its many heavy stresses, enumerating the many ways to die, slows down the reading of the poem, and, rather as in “This is my Playes last Scene”, postpones the inevitable transition to another kind of existence.
All these thematic and structural similarities to painted Last Judgements, making the octave of the sonnet almost a Last Judgement in miniature, may distract from the surprising absence of what should be central: the figure of the Judge. Despite the iconographic detail, corresponding indeed to Martz’s “graphically imaged openings”, it is only at the end of the octave that the eye of the beholder is introduced, with the promise of the inevitable vision of God in judgement. But the eye is thwarted at the last minute and the sonnet’s sestet reveals another moment. Here we are placed firmly on the horizontal, temporal plane, “here on this lowly ground”, at a remove from the final and terrifying vertical transition, a spatial opposition made clear by the “there; here” caesura in line 12. Having contemplated the terrifying last moment, Donne rejects the scene of Judgement and prays for the continuation of narrative time: “let them sleepe, Lord, and me mourne a space”. This need for time is marked by the very temporal “Tis late to ask abundance of thy grace / When we are there” (ll. 10–11, my emphasis). Time must continue, because time is what he needs in order to make amends.
But the speaker has a very different relationship to God in the sestet. The “God” whose face is not seen in line 8 is vertically juxtaposed with the “Lord” addressed so familiarly in line 9. Rather than being addressed within the vertical logic of the Last Judgement of the octave, here God is confronted and addressed more intimately. The personal relationship of the individual to God in the sestet, contrasted with the crowded octave, and the emphasis placed on individual repentance, set up a very different form of Judgement. By reproducing the overall logic of the Last Judgement but omitting the Judge, Donne’s octave highlights problems with this fixed and static version of Judgement. In the horizontal paradigm established in the sestet of the sonnet this is replaced by a much closer, and oral, face-to-face relationship to God. And the shift from vertical to horizontal means that Judgement is no longer something which occurs at one moment out of time, but which is continuous throughout narrative time. The sestet, rather than being a meditation on (and therefore, implicitly, a reinforcement of) the octave’s “composition of place”, works against it by proposing an alternative version of Judgement. It swerves away from the vision of Judgement as iconic, limited and rigidly mapped and replaces it with a personal judgement of the individual.