The very form of the sonnet provides an apt vehicle for the limitations of fallen man’s knowledge. In “At the round earth’s imagined corners” the metre strains to accommodate the description of the innumerable bodies of the resurrected. In “La Corona”, the containment of both individual sonnet and cycle manage to provide a somewhat reassuring justification of the representation of Christ’s life, but in the Holy Sonnets the form of the sonnet seems to strain at the seams under the pressure of the speaker’s awareness of what lies beyond human comprehension. And the sequence as a whole not only frames but also structures the speaker’s anxiety and speculation as it acts out the opposition between “now” and “then” of 1 Corinthians 13.12: “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known”. The most condensed reiteration of the structure comes in the sestet of “At the round earth’s imagined corners”, where the “there; here” caesura of line 12 – “’Tis late to aske abundance of thy grace, / When we are there; here on this lowly ground / Teach me howe to repent…” (ll. 11–13) – encapsulates the opposition between the imagined future confrontation and the present fear and doubt.
This moment of anxiety, where looking becomes problematic, seems to lie behind other kinds of shift in the sequence. The whole sequence, particularly in its original version, can be seen as opposing the “now” designating all time from the Creation to the incomprehensible “then” of the dissolution of the world. But tracking the changes Donne made to these sonnets as he revised the whole sequence is also revealing. His anxiety is expressed, particularly in the “original” sequence, in visual terms which are reminiscent of his painterly and visual analogies for the relationship between man and God in the sermons. Yet this foregrounding of the speaker’s visual anxieties undergoes a significant shift with the revision of the sequence. Not only does the reordering of the overall sequence cast individual sonnets in a different perspective, but the substantive changes at the level of vocabulary and syntax frequently occur at points where the dynamic of looking at / looking away is at work.
One of these revisions occurs in “What if this present”, at the very moment that the speaker seeks to replace the image of the scene of Judgement with the face of Christ on the cross. In an earlier version of the sonnet, recorded in the “Westmoreland Sequence”,
1 See Stringer et al. eds., Variorum 7.1: Holy Sonnets, pp. lxvii–lxx for discussion of the place of the Westmoreland Sequence (NY3) in the evolution of the sequence. the speaker invites his soul to “
Looke in my heart, the picture of Christ crucified” (l. 2, my emphasis). In the version that makes it into the Revised Sequence, this has become “
Mark in my hart the picture …”.
2 Stringer et al. eds., Variorum 7.1: Holy Sonnets, pp. 18 and 25. This change, as previously observed, brings the act of looking closer to the act of physically producing images while reinforcing the idea that looking is somehow problematic.
Another substantial revision in the sonnet sequence compounds this impression. “This is my plays last Scene” contains the most notable substantive change in any one sonnet, and once more this occurs in the context of seeing the face of Christ. The crux occurs near the end of the octave, in line 7. In the Original Sequence, the speaker desires the moment of “face to face” encounter with God, but that moment remains shrouded in doubt:
This is my Playes last scene, here heav’ns appoint
My Pilgrimages last mile, and my race
Idly, yet quickly runne, hath this last pace,
My spans last inch, my minuts latest point,
And gluttonous Death will instantly vnjoynt
My body and my soule, and I shall sleepe a space,
Or presently, (I knowe not) see that face,
Whose feare already shakes me euery ioynt. (HSScene, Original Sequence, ll. 1–8)
The uncertainty and fear attached to the anticipated sight of God’s face are made explicit in both the “Or” and the parenthesis “(I knowe not)” of line 7.
3 “Or presently (I knowe not) see that face …” (l. 7) has been read as expressing the “mortalist heresy” that between the death of the body and the Last Judgement the soul is uncomprehending or asleep. See discussion in Stringer et al. eds., Variorum 7.1: Holy Sonnets, pp. xcviii–xcix. . When the sequence is revised, this is the line that comes in for significant alteration. Lines 6–8 in the Revised Sequence version of the sonnet assert, much more confidently: “And I shall sleepe a space / But
my ever wakeing part shall see that face / Whose feare already shakes my every joynt” (my emphasis). The editors of the
Donne Variorum identify the revision as authorial,
4 Stringer et al. eds., Variorum 7.1: Holy Sonnets, p. 67. as does Gardner in her 1952
Divine Poems. On one hand, the chronology of revision seems to chart a progression from doubt to confidence. But the very co-existence of these variants has the effect of reinforcing the hesitation around seeing “that face”.
Gardner’s own editorial commentary captures that hesitation. She privileges the later variant, but acknowledges that the “I knowe not” of the first variant “must be the original reading” and finds its “deliberate expression of doubt [to be] the more impressive, in that the sestet assumes that the second alternative [seeing the face] is the true one, and makes the soul receive its final judgement at death”.
5 Gardner, ed., Divine Poems, p. xlv. The original variant, as Thomas Hester puts it, “evokes so well the limitations of the speaker’s view of the afterlife… the essential liminations of fallen man who, as sinner, actually ‘knows’ only ‘not’ – whose vision in this case is capable of ‘seeing’ the eternal only as the absence of the physical”.
6 M. Thomas Hester, “‘Impute this idle talke’: the ‘leaven’ body of Donne’s ‘Holy Sonnet III’”, in Praise Disjoined: Changing Patterns of Salvation in 17th-Century English Literature, ed. by William P. Shaw (New York: Peter Lang, 1991), pp. 175–190 (p. 178 n. 5). The brisk confidence of the revised version is somehow less convincing than the way the possibility of face-to-face confrontation with God is deferred in the original. The (paradoxically) long-drawn-out syllables of “presently”, combined with the parenthesis “(I knowe not)” have the effect of slowing down the metre and suspending the moment, so that overall the line helps to delay even mentioning the sight of God’s face.
In marked contrast with this drawing out of the final moment, the octave begins by imagining the end of life as a rapid contraction of space and time. The space within which the speaker is contained narrows towards the point where the contemplation of Judgement will be inevitable. The list of “last things” – the last scene of the play, last mile of a pilgrimage, last step of a race – are established metaphors for the end of life, but it is their concatenation that creates the impression of constriction in this sonnet, as the relatively wide expanse of the “last scene” or “last mile” becomes a “pace”, an “inch”, a “point”. The octave’s rather awkward A-rhymes emphasise this sense of contraction. Each initial word rhymes with a reduced version of itself, as “appointe” (l. 1) is reduced to “point” (l. 4) and “unjoynt”(l. 5) to “joint” (l. 8). If the opening line of the sonnet recalls the theatrical metaphor of God’s Creation that structures Donne’s Easter 1628 sermon, that expansive vision of now is contracted into the unknowable perspective of an imminent then.