Conclusion

Patterson coins this phrase in her discussion of “La Corona” due to the many imperatives to “look!”: “Seest thou, my Soule, with thy faiths eyes …”; “See where your child doth sit”.4 “La Corona”, 3, l. 9; 4, l. 2. Johnson et al., eds., Variorum 7.2: The Divine Poems, pp. 5–7 (p. 6). Patterson, “Re-formed”, p. 85. See Chapter 3, p. 80. Her observation could be extended to Donne’s references to pictures more generally. Virtually every time he uses the word “picture” there is a pointed – one might say provocative – appeal to visualisation. Whether this is in the context of a secular portrait – “Here, take my picture… / ’Tis like me”; an internal devotional image – “Looke in my Hart … the picture of Christ crucifyde”; or an external one – “Who from the Picture would avert his eye”; each time the picture seems to be tantalisingly held out towards us.5 “Elegy 12. His Picture”, ll. 1; 3, Stringer et al., eds., Variorum 2: Elegies, p. 264; “What yf this present” (Westmoreland Sequence), ll. 2–3, Stringer et al., Variorum 7.1: Holy Sonnets, p. 18; “Of the Crosse”, l. 7, Johnson et al., eds., Variorum 7.2; The Divine Poems, pp. 147–148 (p. 148). Ernest Gilman observes acutely that “although Donne is typically not regarded as a ‘visual’ poet, his poems are nearly obsessed with the eye”.6 Gilman, Iconoclasm, p. 124. It is not surprising that every mention of a picture is accompanied by a mention of the eye or the act of looking. What is remarkable is that each time we accept the invitation to engage with it, the picture resists, frustrates, confounds and turns out to offer something much more problematic than visualisation.

I have appropriated from Gilman the notion of “swerv[ing] away … evoking but then effacing the picture behind his text”, which seems to me to have a much wider application than the interpretation of Satyre 3 from which it is taken.7 Gilman, Iconoclasm, p. 117; p. 213n. 2. The mechanism that Gilman identifies marks the limits of the pictures Donne does not describe, making us aware of the empty space that resists mimetic representation. We are repeatedly prompted to ask to what extent a picture can be “like me” or “like thee”.8 “Elegy 12. His Picture”, l. 3, Stringer et al., eds., Variorum 2: Elegies, p. 264; “Phrine”, l. 1., Stringer et al., eds. Variorum 8: Epigrams, p. 11. In “La Corona”, even though there is no reference to a physical picture as such, the fleeting resemblances to visual art, inviting but resisting translation into image, underscore the elusive quality of what is being represented.

This mechanism of swerving away comes close to the apophatic moves of mystical theology, where the material and describable are evoked only to be surpassed. The importance of Donne’s debt to the mystical theology of Pseudo-Dionysius, and by extension to Nicholas of Cusa’s De Visione Dei, goes beyond the identification of the uncited sources. Without overstating the influence of mystical theology on his own theological position, it does seem that both Pseudo-Dionysius’s sculptor image and the omnivoyant icon from De Visione Dei are crucial to understanding Donne’s simultaneous reticence about and great interest in representational art. Donne highlights his own method when he refers, in both the sermons and in “Of the Crosse”, to Pseudo-Dionysius’s sculptor image, “tak[ing] away, par[ing] off some parts of that stone, or that timber, which they work upon” to illustrate the via negativa.9 Sermons, 8: 54 ; cf. “Of the Crosse”, l. 33, Johnson et al., eds. Variorum 7.2: The Divine Poems, pp. 147–148 (p. 147). Donne too uses material metaphors to represent the path to the contemplation of the immaterial divine. But more to the point, time after time he evokes the possibility representing the self, or representing God, only to then take it away.

The recurrent references in the Sermons to Nicholas of Cusa’s “omnivoyant icon” speaks to Donne’s interest in the seeing of pictures as well as the making of them. It is, in the phrase he uses repeatedly, “a well made, and well placed picture” that “looks alwayes upon him that looks upon it”.10 Sermons, 2: 237, my emphasis. This phrase does not come from the Latin of De Visione Dei – I still hope to identify a source, but perhaps it originates with Donne himself. Donne’s phrasing here insists on the painterly craft required to make the effect of the icon’s reciprocal gaze to work, to make the eyes appear to follow you round the room. This reciprocity is crucial for the metaphor in De Visione Dei, and in Donne’s extraction of it in his Sermons; it is also crucial when we apply it, as I think we can, to Donne’s treatment of pictures more generally. As in the poetry, the act of looking at a “picture” is emphasised, but it is a picture that actively solicits the spectator’s involvement, as all Donne’s verbal pictures do.

I have suggested that Donne’s problematising of visual art ultimately reflects on all representation and so, necessarily, on his own verbal art. Every time his poems swerve away from a picture, they draw attention to their own failure to represent. This is the paradox of all Christian art. As Joseph Koerner puts it, icons are “meant to train our eyes to see beyond the image, to cross it out”,11 Koerner, Reformation of the Image, p. 12. and in his poetry Donne finds many ways to convey this paradox. As his poems swerve away from pictorialism or ekphrastic description they create other kinds of visual, or at least formal patterns, and this is particularly the case with his divine poems. The title and form of “La Corona” insist on the circle that encloses and circumscribes at the same time as representing infinity. The crosses of “Good Friday”, “The Crosse” and some of the Holy Sonnets similarly function as formal paradoxes, creating meaning at the same time as they cross it out. Donne does not propose a word/image paragone that privileges the word, but rather suggests that all human production – all human perception – is necessarily circumscribed.

Donne’s version of ut pictura poesis is that neither poetry nor visual art can hope to represent the divine. The human vehicles of text and image are circumscribed by the limits of human knowledge and ability. He explores this idea in the secular poetry too. In the concluding lines of “The Relique” the speaker states “All measure, and all language I should passe, / Should I tell what a Miracle shee was” (ll. 32–33). The “Paper” (l. 21) on which the poem is written can only go so far in using language to instruct a misbelieving age in miracles. Of course, in a certain sense, “The Relique” is a kind of Last Judgement poem. Its imagining of the lovers’ souls meeting “at the last busie Daye”, united by their provident “Bracelet of bright haire about the bone”, gestures towards the incomprehensible and unrepresentable moment of Judgement that Donne explores in the Holy Sonnets.12 “The Relique”, Jeffrey S. Johnson et al., eds., Variorum 4.3: Songs and Sonnets, p. 186. The Last Judgement sonnets are perhaps the most explicit of all Donne’s poems in acknowledging that their subject matter is impossible to describe, and in the way that they bring together visual and verbal attempts to convey it. Beyond time, beyond human understanding, and yet endlessly imagined and re-imagined in both word and image, the Last Judgement sums up the paradox of human imagination of the divine.

One of Donne’s Judgement sonnets was the spark that set me off on this project, so it is appropriate that the Holy Sonnets also conclude the book. The apophatic conclusion to the “Hymne to Christ”, quoted as the epigraph to this chapter, provides one answer to the paradox: “To see God only, I goe out of sight”. This is not the reciprocal gaze of Nicholas of Cusa’s omnivoyant icon; rather, it suggests that God can only be properly seen when the human has been eclipsed. The speaking self of Donne’s poem has to write himself out of the poem in order to approach God. This is a sleight of hand, because it is a resounding conclusion to the poem; by pretending not to represent the poem represents much more. But as in so many of Donne’s image/texts it is in this moment poised between representation and the impossibility of representation that the work of art is generated.