THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

outclassed by love. The universe is contracted to the lovers’ bed, the epicentre beyond which, in a line of abrupt and
triumphant arrogance, we are told that ‘Nothing else is’.
Throughout Donne’s work, however, the real triumphs are those of Death and Resurrection. Some of the ‘Songs
and Sonets’ (‘The Apparition’, ‘The Will’, and ‘The Funerall’ for example) make an easy, even jesting, play with
mortality. Others suggest a far greater earnestness. Potential observers of the rapt lovers in ‘The Extasie’ might note
‘small change’ in the two when they will
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have ‘to bodies gone’. ‘A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning’ opens with reference to the ‘mild’ death-beds of
‘virtuous men’ and proceeds by means of complex illustration to justify the idea of the enduring power of a rarefied
love. In the two funeral elegies known as the ‘Anniversaries’, Donne contemplates the survival not of love but of
virtue, or rather he contrasts an ideal of womanhood spiritualized in his ‘Immortal mayd’, Elizabeth Drury, against an
‘anatomie’ of a corrupted, incoherent and untidy world. It is with the darkness of the human condition in this world
that the most vivid of Donne’s Holy Sonnets are concerned. Most enact a double drama; they evoke a picture - of the
end of the world (sonnets 7 and 13), of Death itself (sonnet 10), or of a distressed sinner fearful of his damnation
(sonnets 5, 11, and 14) - but they also project the personality of a responsive speaker, one who seems to stand as a
vulnerable representative of sinful humanity. Like the love-poems, Donne’s religious verse insistently suggests an
emotional relationship, that of the sinner to a loving but severe God. The narrator stands defiantly against Death
(sonnet 10), but quakes before the prospect of judgement (sonnets 4, 7, and 9). In the extraordinary sonnet 14 (‘Batter
my heart, three person’d God’) he balances a plea for a violent physical stirring of his passion against an evident
intellectual pleasure in the display of theologically resolved paradoxes (‘Take mee to you, imprison mee, for I | Except
you’enthrall mee, never shall be free, | Nor ever chast, except you ravish mee’). A similar drama, matched by an
equally energetic pursuit of analogues, is evident in two poems modelled on journeys, ‘Goodfriday 1613. Riding
Westward’ and ‘A Hymne to Christ, at the Authors last going into Germany’. The first contrasts the idea of a westerly
ride away from a Christ who is crucified in the east with a vivid imaginative recall of Calvary, the site of the
humiliation of God’s greatness (‘Could I behold those hands which span the Poles, | And tune all the spheares at once,
peirc’d with those holes?’). The second meditates on the dangers of diplomatic mission in 1619 (the same that had
provoked the ‘Sermon of Valediction’) by seeking parallels to, or ‘emblems’ for, his sea-voyage, his separation from
friends and family, and the relationship between human and divine love. The argument culminates in the
juxtaposition of three complementary ideas: ‘Churches are best for Prayer, that have least light: | To see God only, I
go out of sight: | And to scape stormy dayes, I chuse | An Everlasting night.’
Donne’s last poem, ‘A Hymne to God the Father’, which almost mockingly puns on his name in the penultimate
line of each stanza, was, like the sermon ‘Death’s Duell’, to serve its author as a part of the ceremonial acting out of
his final drama of self projection and self abnegation. This final, seemingly incongruous drama, which included the
performance of a musical setting of the hymn by the choristers of St Paul’s, centred on the contemplation of a picture
of himself dressed in his winding sheet, emerging from a funerary urn as if summoned by the Last Trump. Donne had
risen from his sick-bed to pose for the picture, standing, shrouded, on a wooden urn and facing towards the east from
whence he expected his ultimate redemption to come. Such intertwining
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of humility with glory, of theatre with devotion, of the mortal body with its representation in art, of playfulness and
seriousness, of rules and the bending of rules, are characteristic of the kind of international baroque art of which
Donne’s life and work form part. The suspicion of flamboyance which periodically surfaces in English art can be seen
as emanating from the strains of puritanism and pragmatism, conservatism and compromise, which run through the
national culture. Despite the contraries of Catholicism and Calvinism which meet in his life and work, such insular
strains were largely alien to Donne.
‘Metaphysical’ Religious Poetry: Herbert, Crashaw, and Vaughan
The picturesque emotionalism of continental baroque art was a central feature of the Counter-Reformation crusade to
win back the hearts and souls of those lost to the Roman Church by the fissures of the Reformation. Protestant
England remained largely untouched by the more heady pictorial and architectural styles sponsored by the Pope’s
main agents in the campaign, the Jesuits, but, despite gestures of resistance and disapproval, a degree of Jesuit
spirituality left its mark on English literature. The martyred missionary priest, Robert Southwell (?1561-95, canonized