THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

copy when he died (published in 1640), Donne seems to have taken care to limit obviously rhetorical gestures.
Nevertheless, his delight in verbal and stylistic flourish is real enough. In the ‘Sermon of Valediction’ preached at
Lincoln’s Inn before his departure for Germany in 1619 he tailored his multiple extrapolations from the text
‘Remember now thy Creator in the daies of thy youth’ to an audience likely to have been familiar with his own
dissolute youth as a member of the Inn. His illustrative metaphors are always striking. In the same sermon he
demanded of his audience: ‘No man would present a lame horse, a disordered clock, a torn book to the king? ... thy
body is thy beast; and wilt thou present that to God, when it is lam’d and tir’d with excesse of wantonness? when thy
clock, (the whole course of thy time) is disordered with passions, and perturbations; when thy book (the history of thy
life,) is torn, a thousand sins of thine own torn out of thy memory, wilt thou then present thy self thus defac’d and
mangled to almighty God?’ In the sermon preached in St Paul’s Cathedral in January 1626 he fancifully and
rhythmically develops the idea suggested by his text (Psalm 53, verse 7) of the sheltering, brooding power of the
wings of God: ‘Particular mercies are feathers of his wings, and that prayer, Lord let thy mercy lighten upon us, as
our trust is in thee, is our birdlime; particular mercies are that cloud of quails which hovered over the host of Israel,
and that prayer, Lord let thy mercy lighten upon us, is our net to catch, our Gomer [container] to fill of those quails.’
The final section of the St Paul’s sermon is shaped around a modern metaphor, an extraordinary analogy between a
flat map of the earth, divided into two hemispheres, and a visionary map of heaven divided into a hemisphere of joy
and a hemisphere of glory. The joy of heaven can be known in this life, Donne asserts, much as the limits of the Old
World were known before the discovery of America; just as God reserved the treasure of America ‘for later
discoveries’, so, by extension, ‘that hemisphere of heaven, which is the glory thereof’ will be opened to human eyes by
death and resurrection.
In common with most preachers of his time, both Catholic and Protestant, Donne seems to be fired more by a
contemplation of sin, death, and judgement than by a prospect of a rejoicing earth imbued with the joys of heaven. His
last
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sermon, ‘Death’s Duell, or A Consolation to the Soule, against the Dying Life, and Living Death of the Body’ (1631,
published 1632), stresses the interconnection of life and death throughout human existence. ‘Wee have a winding
sheet in our Mothers wombe’, he insisted to his courtly audience, ‘which growes with us from our conception, and
wee come into the world, bound up in that winding sheet, for wee come to seeke a grave.’ Death, as all of Donne’s
contemporaries readily recognized, was not simply inevitable and all-pervasive, it was a familiar presence in an
unstable, unhygienic, and disease-ridden world. The tolling of the passing bell for a dying parishioner was to Donne
not simply a stimulus to pray for a troubled soul but a personal memento mori. His passionate calls to repentance in
his last sermon emerge not simply from an awareness of the imminence of his own demise, but from a pressing sense
of shared mortality: ‘Our criticall day is not the very day of our death: but the whole course of our life. I thanke him
that prayes for me when the Bell tolles, but I thank him much more that Catechises mee, or preaches mee, or
instructs mee how to live.’ The Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, which Donne had written during a serious
illness in 1623, had also dwelt upon the interconnection of the dying and those meditating upon death: ‘who bends
not his eare to any bell, which upon any occasion rings? but who can remove it from that bell, which is passing a
peece of himselfe out of this world?’ The meditation moves him to the now famous geographical metaphor of cooperant
sympathy: ‘No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; ...
any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde.’
In 1621, six years after he had been ordained to the priesthood, Donne had been offered the prestigious deanship
of St Paul’s. All avenues to his civil promotion had been blocked since the time of his secret marriage to the niece of
his patron, Sir Thomas Egerton, and his dismissal from Egerton’s service in 1601, but in no sense should his priestly
vocation be viewed cynically. The intervening years were spent in a professional wilderness, watered by close study,
an active involvement in religious controversy, and the composition of much of his devotional poetry. Nothing in
Donne’s intellectual and religious development can, however, be easily categorized. ‘My first breeding and
conversation', he remarked of himself in Biathanatos (his experimental apology for suicide, published posthumously
in 1646), was ‘with men of supressed and afflicted Religion, accustomed to the despite of death, and hungry of an
imagin’d Martyrdome’. The enforced secrecy and introspection and the dangerous temptation to martyrdom in this
Roman Catholic recusant background was probably accentuated in 1593 by the death in prison of his younger brother
Henry, arrested for illegally harbouring a priest. Precisely how, when, and why he broke his allegiance to Rome
cannot be determined, but though his decision to conform outwardly to the Church of England in the mid-1590s may
have been influenced by a desire for an official career, his later Anglican apologetics suggest that his religious
affiliation was also shaped by wide reading, by a deep fascination with religious controversy, and by a
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