Donne's "dialogue of one"

New Criterion, Jan, 2007 by Paul Dean

Donne became a priest reluctantly in 1615, realizing there was no other way out of his poverty and the need to provide for his family (his wife had twelve children, the birth of the last effectively killing her with exhaustion). His rise was rapid; after only six years he was Dean of St. Paul's--the old patchwork medieval cathedral, not the current monstrosity by Wren. He may have obtained the post through the influence of King James's favorite, the Duke of Buckingham, whose patronage he assiduously courted. Stubbs beautifully evokes the atmosphere of the crumbling old St. Paul's, and Donne's labors to govern and maintain it. Donne did not find it easy being a clergyman, although Stubbs is misleading to contrast him with George Herbert, who he airily assures us "could genuinely get on with God" and "was reconciled to all the things that Donne found temperamentally difficult." In fact Herbert was every bit as proud as Donne, and found it no easer to submit to the Divine will. (Carey, more usefully, contrasts Donne with Traherne.) Many of Donne's religious poems, including the "Holy Sonnets," which express a strain of sometimes hysterical doubt and fear which anticipates the worst of Hopkins, seem to pre-date his ordination. R. C. Bald contended plausibly that the death of Donne's wife deepened his sense of vocation, and of the emotional as distinct from the cerebral element in religion. One has to acknowledge a frigid quality in much of his devotional poetry, which thaws in the three late poems he called hymns: "To Christ, at the Author's Last Going into Germany," "To God the Father," and "To God my God in my Sickness." I would also single out "Good Friday 1613, Riding Westward" as a fine achievement. It begins from the point at which "The Ecstasy" left off--"Let Man's soul be a Sphere, and then, in this,/The Intelligence that moves, Devotion is"--but finds the human soul's coherence in worship rather than physical love. Going westward (away from the Resurrection, symbolically), Donne turns his back on Christ, but only "to receive/Corrections." There's a flicker of masochism there, sometimes glimpsed in Donne's religious poems. The "Hymn to God the Father," as Stubbs says, "stands out for its calmness," though there's still a tickling vanity about the puns on his own name ("When thou hast done, thou hast not done,/For, I have more").

The best of Donne's religious writing is safely buried where nobody nowadays will read it: in the ten volumes of his collected sermons. These were mammoth affairs, the longest two and a half hours but many not much shorter; they were preached extempore or from skeletal notes only, the versions we have being written up afterwards. The only one generally printed in full in modern anthologies is the last, "Death's Duel," which he rose from his deathbed to deliver. The sermons are seductively easy to excerpt, shot through as they are with epigrams and startling images, but really they need to be read as wholes. The fragmentariness of Stubbs's treatment, weaving quotations in with scant regard for the circumstances of the sermon (calendar feast, text, congregation), is clear when we read Peter McCullough's essay in a recent collection which valuably complements Stubbs's book, The Cambridge Companion to John Donne, edited by Aschah Guibbory (2006). McCullough takes us sensitively through a complete sermon to show how the rules of construction and rhetoric work.