Jesse Sharpe PhD thesis - Research@StAndrews:FullText ...

Donne’s Incarnating Words 73
ramifications as described by Donne in arguing for salvation can be seen in the ‘La
Corona’ cycle, when in the first poem of the cycle Donne says
But do not with a vile crown of frail bays
Reward my Muse’s white sincerity,
But what thy thorny crown gained, that give me,
A crown of glory, which doth flower always. (5-8)
Donne does not want the reward of his poems to be the laurel, instead he demands from
God that, in return for these poems, God should give him a ‘crown of Glory’. The reward
for the poems is found not in the headdress of the poet, but in the headdress of the tortured
and crucified Jesus. The reward sought for the poems in ‘La Corona’ is that these words,
this sacred text, should unite Donne with the divine and bring forth his salvation. As in the
Songs and Sonnets, there is a part of Donne that seeks to find some way to guarantee that
he will receive what he desires. He is motivated in his quest for God by doubt, doubt that
the bodily resurrection he believes in and desires will not take place, and so he constructs
words and arguments in ways which he hopes can bring about his desired end.
In looking at the ‘La Corona’ cycle in which the ending line of each sonnet is the
opening line of the next, the reader sees a poet ruminating on the Incarnation and salvation.
The cycle consists of seven sonnets that move through the life of Christ from his birth to
ascension. While this devotional work has been placed in the Roman Catholic period of
Donne’s life, 62 it is worth noting here that the reader can witness how a writer whose focus
is on one of the core tenets of Christianity can be of devotional value to either Protestants
or Catholics, as is evident by how well this piece sits alongside the other poems in The
62 R. V. Young, Doctrine and Devotion in Seventeenth-Century Poetry (Woodbridge, 2000), p. 89.