John Donne’s Adulteries:Spiritual Uncertainty and the Westmoreland Sonnets (review)

Alas, some two or three Poor heretics in love there be, Which think to establish dangerous constancy.

– John Donne, “The Indifferent”

In these lines from the Songs and Sonnets, John Donne archly ventriloquizes Venus as she laments on the perils of romantic fidelity. Pronouncing “love’s sweetest part” to be “variety,” the poem makes its satiric case for the sacrilege of keeping troth, and neatly overturns the love lyric’s customary protestations of earnest faith. Years later, Donne revisits in a devotional context the conceit that orthodoxy and erotic inconstancy constitute coincident states, and does so with a persistence that suggests the notion holds for the mature poet a special urgency. The three “Holy Sonnets” exclusive to the Westmoreland manuscript record inconstancy as a spiritual condition, and propose in aggregate that the ideal state of the soul is not unwavering devotion, but rather faithlessness. In their treatment of devotional infidelity as a form of sexual inconstancy, the Westmoreland sonnets build upon a trope familiar from scripture, in which the human propensity for spiritual deviance is encoded as adultery. But in his appropriation of canonical infidelity metaphors to represent the relational dynamic between the soul and God, Donne transposes the spiritual value of adultery, rewriting the terms of the trope so that the adulteress becomes, paradoxically, a figure for piety. Donne’s prolonged engagement with the adultery trope in the Westmoreland sequence reveals his tremendous spiritual stake in the role of the adulteress, whose faithlessness holds out, for Donne, the promise of faith.

The biblical adultery trope fuels the drama of the sonnet that begins “Since she whome I lovd,” which registers its speaker’s wandering affection as simultaneous with devotional intention. Following the death of his wife, Donne claims, “Wholy in heavenly things my mind is sett” (l. 4), a declaration that recognizes the saintly example of his deceased beloved as well as the God she inspires him to follow.¹ This gesture is made more overt in the following lines, but in language that hints at the coming shift of erotic attention: “Here the admiring her my mind did whett / To seeke thee God” (ll. 5–6). In this announcement, the speaker’s urge to piety and his tendency toward amorous substitution are inseparable, as the transfer of affections from earthly love to divine Love anticipates the sonnet’s first rivalry, which pits God against the dead beloved. As a “heavenly thing,” she typifies the “saints and Angels, things divine” (l. 12) whose competition God comes, over the course of the poem, to “feare” (l. 11).

And rightly so, since Donne everywhere gives cause for jealous concern, and even admits to a lurking erotic dissatisfaction in God’s courtship:

But though I have found thee, and thou my thirst hast fed, A holy thirsty dropsy melts mee yett. But why should I begg more love, when as thou Dost wooe my soule, for hers offering all thine? (ll. 7–10)

Even God’s heavenly wooing, it appears, does not slake the speaker’s yen for “heavenly things.” Just as thirst immoderately compounds the waterlogged bloat of “dropsy,” so does the speaker immoderately “begg more” than God’s “all.” The insatiable character implied by such superfluity would seem to justify God’s erotic anxiety at the poem’s conclusion, where the divine suitor

dost not only feare least I allow My love to saints and Angels, things divine, But in thy tender jealosy dost doubt Least the World, fleshe, yea Devill putt thee out. (ll. 11–14)

Given the speaker’s brief but inconstant romantic history in the poem, God’s “feare” has some merit. After all, over the course of the sonnet the soul already has decided to “allow / My love” to the preeminent thing divine, entertaining God in place of the departed earthly beloved – a pattern of substitution that continues into the poem’s last line, where the speaker generates a rapidly compounding cohort of potential rivals for God. Their very proliferation seems to confirm the soul’s wandering eye, the accumulation suggesting that God is right, in his...