A similar kind of spatial logic is to be found throughout the sequence, particularly the “Original Sequence”, which is framed by God’s Creation of man in his own image and the place of that creation in the world.
1 “Original Sequence”, Stringer et al. eds., Variorum 7.1: Holy Sonnets, pp. 5–10. Alongside this insistence on the language of craft and visual art in the sonnets, the sense of sight is recurrently called into question. The “Revised Sequence”, despite containing many of the same sonnets, shifts the emphasis considerably, from visual to verbal, from sight to interpretation. Although the anticipated meeting between the speaker and God in the moment of Judgement remains, arguably, the “core” of both the Original and the Revised Sequences, the nature of that relationship and the terms of that judgement alter significantly.
The first sonnet in the Original Sequence opens with the line “Thou hast made me, and shall thy worke decay?” (HSMade, l. 1) and the final sonnet of that sequence ends “’Twas much that man was made like God before, / But that God should be made like man, much more” (HSWilt, ll. 13–14), neatly moving from the imago Dei to the related notion of Christ as “image of the invisible God” (Col. 1:15). Man as God’s masterpiece, made by his hand, opens and closes the sequence, and the idea is reinforced by the recurrent references to images, made and decaying, throughout. In the second sonnet the “made / decay’de” rhyme in the first quatrain emphasises the point: “first I was made / By thee […] and when I was decay’de…” (HSDue, ll. 2–3); in the seventh sonnet the speaker states that he, “a little World, made cunningly” “must be burnt” (HSLittle, ll. 1; 10). Sinful man has tarnished God’s image within him, which is why, like the speaker of “Good friday”, the speaker of the Holy Sonnets must beg for the restoration of the imago Dei, so that it will be recognisable to and acceptable to God.
The first sonnet in the sequence is the speaker’s plea for God to pay attention to him. But the speaker himself finds his vision paralysed:
I dare not moue my dimme eyes any way,
Despaire behind, and Death before doth cast
Such terrour, and my feebled flesh doth wast
By sinne in it, which it t’wards Hell doth weigh;
Only thou art aboue, and when t’wards thee
By thy leaue I can looke, I rise againe … (HSMade, ll. 5–10)
The paralysed spectator who opens the sequence announces that the Holy Sonnets are an attempt to see God, to picture God, a negotiation between the earthly space in which the persona finds himself and the divine image he aspires to. But, surrounded by images of despair and death, he does not dare to look. He maps out his location in relation to his fears: “Despaire
behind, Death
before …
towards Hell … only thou art
above”, a succession of prepositions that recalls the more profane spatial orientation “Behind, before, above, betweene, below” of “Elegy 8: On his mistris going to bed”.
2 “Elegy 8. To his Mistress going to bed”, l. 26. Stringer et al. eds., Variorum 2: Elegies, pp. 163–164 (p. 163). “Between” is the missing term in the first Holy Sonnet, but that is exactly where the speaker finds himself, between despair and death, heaven and hell. There is only one direction in which it would be safe to look, which is up, but the speaker doubts his ability to do so. This is far removed from the reassuring reciprocal gaze that Donne describes in the sermons when he appropriates Nicholas of Cusa’s “omnivoyant image” and reiterates the message that “God upon whom thou keepest thine eye, will keep his Eye upon thee” (4: 130).
3 Donne, Sermons, 2: 237; 4: 130; 5: 299; 9: 368. See Chapter 2, pp. 52–56.In the Holy Sonnets, looking up towards God seems to depend on some kind of permission: “when t’wards thee / By thy leave I can looke …” (HSMade, ll. 9–10), and the speaker’s eyes are often obscured, usually by tears. The “dimme eyes” of the first sonnet are reinforced by the “shoures of rayne / [that] Mine eyes did wast” in the “Idolatry” of the third sonnet (HSSighs, ll. 5–6), and the reiteration of “Idolatrous Lovers” who “weepe and mourne” in sonnet ten (HSSouls, l. 9). The tears can also serve to cleanse the eyes, as in the seventh sonnet: “Pour new seas in mine eyes” (HSLittle, l. 7) and the ninth: “teares make a heav’nly Lethean floud / And drowne in it my sinnes blacke memory …” (HSMin, ll. 11–12), but even in these cases the cleansing does not seem to lead directly to vision.
Yet the closing sonnet of the Original Sequence reiterates the opening sonnet’s insistence on making. Its opening lines seem designed as a conclusion: “Wilt thou loue God, as he thee? then digest, / My soule, this wholesome meditation” (HSWilt, ll. 1–2). And if the sequence opened with a question – “Thou hast made me, and shall thy work decay?” (HSMade, l. 1) – the closing couplet of the final sonnet seems to provide an answer to it: “’Twas much that man was made like God before / But that God should be made like man, much more” (HSWilt, ll. 13–14). The Original Sequence is thus framed with ideas we have observed Donne developing elsewhere, the idea of making, the idea of God as craftsman and man as the imago Dei. Despite the paralysis that overcomes the speaker and the tears and doubts that he endures, the logic of making that frames the sequence reinforces the symmetry of man being made in God’s image; Christ assuming man’s image. It is part of a reassuring pattern of the possibility of salvation in that moment when man will find himself “face-to-face” with God, when he will “know, as [he] is known”.
But the logic of making and craftsmanship that frames the original version of the sequence is less dominant when the sequence is revised. The revision foregrounds the written legal document rather than the made object. In the revised group of twelve sonnets, four of the original sonnets are omitted and four new ones are introduced, and there is also some reordering of the sequence. The sonnet that opened the Original Sequence, “Thou hast made me”, is one of those omitted, so the sonnet that was previously second in the sequence, “As due by many titles”, takes its place in the initial position. With its “made / decay’de” (ll. 2;3) rhyme in the first quatrain, this sonnet echoes many of the concerns of “Thou hast made me”, and the speaker does describe himself as God’s image in the seventh line. The opening conceit of the sonnet, though, is one of legal entitlement: “As due by many titles I resigne myself to thee” (l. 1) – and this idea is picked up again in the sestet with the line “Why does hee [the devil] steale, nay ravish that’s thy
right” (l. 10, my emphasis). And this legal language of ownership, of titles and rights, at the opening of the sequence, is picked up in “Father, part of his double interest”, which moves from fourth place in the Original Sequence to become the closing sonnet of the revised one.
4 See Stringer et al., Variorum 7.1: Holy Sonnets, p. lxii.Donne uses the line about “many titles” to describe man’s relationship to God in an early sermon preached on April 30, 1615, and the passage in which it appears brings together the legal and the creative language that permeates the Holy Sonnets:
before God, in whose jurisdiction we were by many titles, had forsaken us, or done any thing to make us forsake him. So that our action in selling our selves for nothing, hath this latitude, That man whom God hath dignified so much, as that in the Creation he imprinted his Image in him, and in the Redemption he assumed not the Image, but the very nature of man … (Sermons 1: 153)
As in this sermon, in both versions of the sequence of Holy Sonnets the language of artistic creation and of legal documents meet and overlap. Since eight sonnets are common to both sequences, there is of course a continuity of themes and imagery. Yet the changes made to the order mean that there is a significant reframing of the concerns of the sequence. There is a clear shift from the original sequence, which is framed by God as maker, with man linked to God by the image of God within him, and God’s
interest in man tied to the fact that man is His work of art; to the Revised Sequence, which is framed by a far more legalistic conception of God and of man’s links to God – man is linked to God by titles, legacies and by laws. As Theresa DiPasquale has observed, the idea of man as an artwork
made by God shifts to the idea of man being
owned by God.
5 Theresa DiPasquale, “A Tale of Two Sequences: Reading the Variorum Edition of the Holy Sonnets”, Presidential address, Twenty-Second Annual John Donne Society Conference, Baton Rouge, February 17, 2007. Unpublished.“Father, part of his double interest”, which closes the Revised Sequence, is perhaps the least visual of all the Holy Sonnets. It does not start with one of Martz’s “vividly dramatized, firmly established, graphically imaged openings”.
6 Martz, The Poetry of Meditation, p. 31. The “titles” of the first sonnet of the Revised Sequence are multiplied in this closing sonnet in an accumulation of legal terminology that gives an impression of piles of written documents. The legal language of the octave is for the most part related to ownership or inheritance: the Father’s “double interest”; the Son’s “jointure” in the Trinity, the “wills” and “legacy” with which the Son “invests” his legatees. In the sestet the language is more that of legislation, evoking “laws”, “statutes” to be “fulfilled”, and one “last command”. Greg Kneidel points out that the sonnet “invokes four different jurisprudences or forms of law” in its fourteen lines, two with a basis in scripture and two firmly based in English law.
7 Gregory Kneidel, “The Death of Christ in and as Secular Law”, in Political Theology and Early Modernity, ed. by Graham Hamill and Julia Reinhard Lupton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), p. 273. It is tempting to read the Revised Sequence, with its insistence on the written word, as a “Reformed” sequence, accommodating visual aids to devotion but ultimately privileging the word as the proper means of access to knowledge of God, rather as Donne often seems to do in his sermons. Yet the relationship between words and images – and between words and the representation of the divine – proves more complex than that. As Kneidel observes, the multiple forms of jurisdiction evoked in “Father, part of his double interest” mean that within the sonnet Christ occupies opposing, apparently incompatible roles as “legal actor”: conqueror and yet sacrificial victim, but also joint-holder and testator.
8 Kneidel, “Death of Christ”, pp. 273–274. These oppositions recall the very visual oscillation between the two faces of Christ Judge and Christ Saviour in “What if this present were the world’s last night” – itself one of the sonnets that was added to the Revised Sequence. The legal documents thus provide another version of the doctrinal and Christological conflict represented in visual terms several sonnets previously.
The titles, laws and statutes highlighted in the Revised Sequence also recast the visual and spatial logic of earlier sonnets in other ways. The proliferation of legal documents and legal systems in the final sonnet of the sequence are reduced, in the closing couplet, to one: “Thy Lawes Abridgement, and thy last command / Is all but Loue, Oh lett that last will stand” (HSPart, ll. 13–14). As so often, we find an echo of the same idea in a sermon, preached in 1626 on Psalm 32:6. Like the sonnet, this sermon opens with legal vocabulary, and towards the end Donne, praising Christianity for being a “Verbum abbreviatum, a contracted religion”, observes that God’s law, already abridged into the ten commandments, is even further compressed:
our blessed Saviour, though he would take away none of the burden … was pleased to binde it in a less roome, and in a more portable forme, when he re-abridged that Abridgement, and recontracts that contracted doctrine in these two: Love God and Love thy Neighbour. (Sermons, 9. 323–324)
Donne seems to like this metaphor of a “more portable form”, and employs it in his visually inspired imagery as well as in this legal, documentary context. He uses a very similar device in his much more visually-oriented valediction sermon preached in April 1619, where he refers to Nicholas of Cusa’s metaphor of the omnivoyant image on the wall but allows that “every man hath a pocket picture about him, a manuall, a bosome book” to remind him of God’s goodness (2: 237–238). Within the Holy Sonnets such an “abridgement” also recalls the way the end of life is imagined as contracting to a mile, a span, a point, in the earlier Holy Sonnet “This is my playes last scene.” In all of these examples, visual, spatial and textual, Donne imagines a collapsing of space and knowledge down to one point – the point that represents the unimaginable end of what is humanly knowable, the moment of face-to-face confrontation with God.
The conflicting versions of Christ in “Father, part” and the contraction of the sonnet’s closing couplet thus repeat patterns of imagery that were previously expressed through visual metaphor. The shift of focus to legal vocabulary and an emphasis on the written word do not replace the metaphors of making and seeing, but rather reframe the sequence using terms drawn from another mode of representation. Whenever Donne engages with the production and appreciation of visual art, whether in his sermons, his secular poetry or his divine poetry, his recurrent theme is that the painting or sculpture can never adequately represent what it is supposed to signify. Portrait representations were already problematised and deconstructed in the love poetry; “La Corona” and other divine poems transferred the same anxieties to the representation of the incarnate Christ. The poems concerned with imagining the unrepresentable God take the same problem to its extreme. By shifting the source of the metaphor from visual art to the written word in the revision of the Holy Sonnets, Donne makes clear something that has been implicit in his treatment of visual representation all along: that his concern is with all forms of representation; that his recurrent problematisation of visual representation reflects back on his own verbal representation. Words prove just as inadequate to represent the divine, subject to the same distortions and contradictions.
It is perhaps appropriate that Donne’s equation of visual with verbal representation is brought to the fore by the revision of the sequence of the Holy Sonnets. Not only does the restructuring foreground written texts as objects, from the “titles” of the first sonnet to the “abridgement” of the last couplet, but the authorial revision of the sequence also highlights the materiality of the sonnets themselves, combined and recombined to provide subtly different angles on the speaker’s fear of death and judgement. If the circular form of
La Corona holds out the possibility of representing the incarnate Christ, circumscribed in human form, the form of the Holy Sonnets – in both sequences – is fragmented and fraught. Each sonnet is an attempt to see and understand but they all point in different directions. In the sequence overall, vision is scattered, like the apostles’ eye-beams in Donne’s sermon on the Transfiguration. The Holy Sonnets provide a partial, fragmented, kaleidoscopic vision of the divine and of the moment of Judgement.
9 The term “kaleidoscopic” is taken from Deborah Shuger in The Renaissance Bible: Scholarship, Sacrifice, and Subjectivity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994) where she describes the “kaleidoscopic sequence of images used to portray the chimerical Christ” in Calvinist passion narratives (p. 113). Like the imperfect and incompatible metaphors for the Resurrection of Christ in “Resurrection, imperfect” the
Holy Sonnets can do no more than acknowledge the space that should be filled with the body or face of Christ, drawing attention to our inability to fill that space. They highlight the fact that any attempt – visual or verbal – to represent the divine is simply “look[ing] through a glass darkly”: the text, like the image, is an imperfect, and human, vehicle.